Hyperspace.

Particles crashed into the invisible extradimensional folds of space, re-entering 3-space at speeds faster than light would normally propagate, resulting in beautiful blue-ish streaks around the edge of the corridor. The normal laws of physics and relativity didn't apply, meaning there was a miniscule (but measurable) temporal distortion between the bow and stern of the ship.

You could (theoretically) see someone throw a ball before they'd actually thrown it, if you got lucky with the subspatial folding and were sufficiently far away from the other person. The effect was too small and too random to exploit, but if you could....

Dr. Ishpetyr turned away from the window and went back to the proposal he was studying. One of the often-debated questions that had been raised in relation to this trip was fairly simple: what would happen if you activated the stargate in hyperspace? Obviously to maintain a stable connection, you would have to constantly re-dial the point-of-origin coordinate, or find a way to update the dialling address of the gate attempting to connect with the Tempest. But that was an advantage of the Pegasus gate: no spinning. No manual dialling, of course (at least, not without some supercomputers on hand), but no spinning. Theoretically, as long as you could interface sufficeintly quickly with the gate's dialling crystals, it would be possible to maintain a stable connection. That would, of course, require overriding several gate safety protocols, and some other horribly complicated programming that Abel didn't really understand, himself. But there were other researchers on the ship who did, apparently. The proposal was just that - a request to simulate the problem using the Asgard core, and determine if their coded solution was viable.

What that connection would actually [i]do[/i] was the heart of the debate. Creating a subspace wormhole in a hyperspace corridor while one of the ends was constantly travelling (or rather, creating a very rapid series of intersecting wormholes with a moving point of origin) made things very, very complicated. One of the theories stated that the hyperspace corridor would rupture, scattering [i]Tempest[/i] quarks across half the known universe. Another stated that the process would create an energy feedback loop, severing the corridor off from the known universe, in effect creating a new, tunnel-shaped parallel one.

Personally, Ishpetyr held the unpopular belief that nothing would happen - oh, sure, the event horizon of the wormhole would get redshifted, making a theoretically beautiful purple color - but the ship and hyperspace corridor would remain intact. The energy feedback loop would theoretically be shunted into the wormhole, making the wormhole unusually noisy on any of the subspace bands used for communication.

If you tried stepping through the gate, however....

Maybe you'd travel through time. Maybe you'd be duplicated on the other end. Or maybe you'd get shunted off to a paralell dimension.

It was, one way or another, a fantastic problem to contemplate. Perhaps he'd devote some time to programming a few scenarios into the Asgard core. Regardless, the code seemed robust and well-researched. He was about to grant access to the core when he paused.

He checked the man's file again.

There it was - former assignment to project Icarus.

He flagged the request, scheduling a followup meeting. Followup meetings were rare - generally Dr. Ishpetyr either okay'd or denied access to the core and that was the end of it. Hopefully that would make Bob Bishop nervous. Nervous people were manipulatable. He could - carefully - throw a series of compliments Bob's way, each designed to dredge up more information about Project Icarus. Each designed to entrap Bob.

Dr. Ishpetyr stared out the window again. Particles crashed beautifully back into 4-space.

The ship exploded out into 4-space. Debris was nerve-wrackingly close to the ship. What the hell was Captain West doing?