Excerpt from Preparing The Ground

The view inside a time-jammer bubble is pretty.

Not that the Imperials built ships with windows. It almost defeated the purpose of having a hull, to leave a hole in it where radiation could get in or some random piece of debris could punch a hole and let your air out. If anything, time-jammers were more vulnerable to that than most Imperial vessels. Unlike Vector Drive, time-jammers actually had to travel the entire distance, and so time-jammers weren't used for anything over a few hundred light-years. But they didn't require operant mindlords to pilot them, something Earth was in short supply of at the moment. Nor could most transparent materials accept hull charge, which meant they were, comparatively speaking, fragile as ancient glass.

If you wanted to look out of an Imperial vessel, you did it electronically. The sensors weren't cameras, technically speaking, but that's what everyone called them. In a time-jammer under drive, you couldn't really see anything but the lights of the capture buffer, accretion disk, or whatever you wanted to call it. Photons got caught in the buffer, and took anywhere from about forty seconds on up to work their way clear. The capture buffer provided heavy lensing as well as drastically slowing the photons within. The upshot was the entire leading hemisphere of the bubble glowed soft, shifting pastel colors like the auroras of Earth. Traveling faster than light, the entire front hemisphere captured photons that struck the field surface. The ones that were eventually emitted inwards were spread out over the entire inner surface of the field. Photons that weren't absorbed by sensors or the dark gray hull of Golden Hind went through the whole process again.

Piloting a time-jammer was a lot like an old song from one of the rock stars my parents liked - "Driving With Your Eyes Closed." I remember it being a fun little song, but the reality not so much. The piloting sensors used direct detection of mass akin to the operant discipline of farza, which allowed the computers to extrapolate mass from natural bodies from their effects on the metric of space - in other words, gravity. Imperial gear was crazy good. Anything shields or hull charge couldn't handle would get detected in time for a good pilot who was on the ball to avoid it, even at a couple hundred thousand times the speed of light. The problem was the potential for other ships. Gravity only propagated at light speed. It's all very well and good for natural bodies which are on the course God last set for them billions of years ago. Their gravity propagation was a thing of long standing. Not so much other ships traveling faster than light. As far as any such ships were concerned, we were driving with our eyes closed.

We didn't think there were any such ships around, but we didn't know. Difficult as it was to believe, we were actually going where no humans we knew of had ever been before. When the Imperial military had come to Earth, they'd done a fast survey looking for signs of advanced civilization, but signs of anything advanced enough to worry the Empire could be seen at interstellar distances. Nobody had actually visited Barnard's Star, our first destination, or any of the other nearby star systems we were planning to visit.