Chronicles of Sol: The Fall

May 20th, 005 SDE:

Vera pressed the switch, the generator hummed, whined and then sparked. Ruri sighed, "So do you want to tell Jac or should I?"

Vera slumped, "I don't understand it, that should have worked..."

Ruri tuned her out a bit and let her vent her frustrations. The shield projects had met failure after failure. Nothing they had done had worked. Initially they had thought the radiation was the prime cause of failure, but their most recent designs had factored that out. Vera wasn't entirely wrong, that generator should have worked. Yet for some reason it didn't. If she had to guess why, they were likely missing something.

Pulling her into a hug, she comforted Vera for a moment and then said, "I'm going to go talk to Jac, maybe he might have an idea."

Vera sniffed, "I'll come with you."

They found Countryman in the neighboring lab, settled heavily behind a console as a medic stood by him. Ruri frowned, "Everything okay?"

Countryman let out a breath, "No, but I can function."

The medic frowned, "No you need to be getting down..."

"And so I will, just not now. Have Robins start cloning tissues for me."

The woman gave him a look, "Now listen here, these readings show you are on the verge of..."

"Multiple system failures I know. I'll be fine for a few more hours, let me spend them as I see fit."

The medic groaned, "You're a terrible patient, you know that!"

Ruri frowned, "Um, how bad is it really?"

Countryman sighed, "Deep tissue damage from radiation exposure, too much for my nanites to keep up with. She wants me to go down to medical now, but there isn't much point without prepared tissues. I'm going to require extensive implants of cloned tissues."

"We can at least slow the damage!"

Ruri sighed and turned to the young woman. "I'm afraid he's made up his mind, and he can be rather stubborn."

"I can see that."

Countryman changed the subject, "Anyway, how did the shield test go?"

Ruri sighed, "It was another failure. Vera and I both agree it should work, but once again the generator failed to initialize. The readings don't make all that much sense either."

"Tessa's plan is starting to sound more attractive by the day. Do you have any idea why the shield failed?"

"Afraid not, we eliminated the radiation as a factor, but again no shield."

He frowned, and then glanced at the latest sensor prototype. "Perhaps something about hyperspace itself is causing an issue?"

"I was hoping that wouldn't be the case. I'm sure we could solve it, but shields aren't simple devices. If something about the laws of physics is causing an issue it could take years to work it out."

"Well the rock over our heads is certainly helping, we might just have those years, but I can't say I like the idea of hunkering down for a few years."

Vera sighed, "I don't either, but I'm not sure we can give up either."

"No, but I'm sure this will be discussed in council."

Ruri settled beside Countryman, pressing against him for reasons she wasn't entirely sure of. "How's Tessa's project going anyway? I haven't been keeping up with it?"

"Slowly, but she has developed a drug that shows some promise of protecting cells from radiation, but it's nothing more than a stopgap."

"Already? It's only been a few weeks."

"The Council has given her every resource, alongside your shield project it is currently priority number one, but they have yet to actually approve the drug, pending further testing."

"I see," she replied.

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Vera inquired, "So any idea when they will start using it?"

Countryman turned to the console, "Assuming the proposal for accelerated medical testing is accepted? Which is likely given the crisis, we will likely see it available to the general public by mid-June. If not, it may be awhile."

Ruri looked at what Countryman was doing, while considering things. It seemed they had hit an impasse. Any chance of rapidly solving the radiation issue had pretty much vanished with the latest failures. Tessa's idea had promise, but any medical solution would take time to work out. Still with the council giving her every resource, there was a chance she'd have something in a matter of months rather than the potential years that something like this could take. Especially considering the proposal Countryman was talking about. It would allow them to eliminate redundant testing cycles and would lead to the approval of expanding the cloning labs.

More cloning facilities would allow them to expand the testing of various solutions. Force-growth cloned tissues could be experimented on without the moral conflicts of standard human testing or testing on animals. Not that they had any of the latter, cloned tissues were their best prospect for testing new solutions.

Not to mention the medical facilities were starting to need a larger supply of undifferentiated cloned tissues for medical transplants. Such tissues could, with little effort, be used to grow fresh new organs or used for tissue grafts. As it was, Medical was barely keeping up with the rate of damage the radiation was inflicting on them and she had heard that there had already been a few deaths. Ruri knew that was likely just the beginning, and that the longer they took to solve the crisis the more people they would lose. Medical care and intervention only went so far when all they were doing was treating the symptoms, not the cause.

Wanting to focus on something less grim than their prospective extinction, she gestured at the sensor array, "So how goes the test into..."

"Slowly, the Valorian tracking sensors were interesting to take apart, but I've already come to the conclusion that they aren't even close to what we need."

Ruri nodded, "So that's why you are building something entirely new."

"I've replicated the multispatial lensing module, with a few modifications. This new design represents an early replication of their tech and my tests so far show its abilities aren't that different. I'm afraid we are still months from a viable solution."

"Understandable, but did it peer into the other layers?"

"Resolution was atrocious but it did see the other layers. It's pretty hard to tell what you are looking at though. How they used them to track ships in hyperspace, I'll never understand."

"I'd noticed that when I tested the salvaged array. I'm not sure why the resolution is so bad though, they are actually rather decent in this plane."

Countryman gestured at the console, "I think the problem lies in the lensing module. Either something about sending a sensor pulse through the multispatial lens, or receiving the return signature is distorting the readings. I have a few different ideas on how to correct this, but all of them point to the new array requiring significantly more power than conventional sensors."

Ruri blinked, "How much more power?

"Well without getting into raw numbers, the draw would likely be comparable to our main weapons array. Using that much power could prove limiting, we don't exactly have a readily available supply of deuterium.

Ruri nodded, that made sense as a concern. They'd had fuel problems and power supply concerns as recent as the previous year. If the new design proved to be that power-hungry, as preliminary indications were implying, they may soon prove to be hard-pressed to keep the ship running. Even without it, they were going to be here ten years at the least, and long-term fuel concerns were definitely valid. Just nothing she'd focused too much on given the more immediate crisis.

Turning to the console, she soon lost herself in working with Jac on the sensors. Barely noticing Vera excuse herself to go back to working on the shield project. The afternoon passed away in a busy flurry of theory crafting and testing of various ideas for the next-gen sensor array they needed, so badly.

Richards walked along the scaffold and surveyed the damage to the nacelle. She paused for a moment as a fit of coughs struck her. Pulling an injector off her belt when it settled, she quickly stabbed herself in the thigh and was greeted with a quick relief to the pain in her lungs, along with a few aches she'd been ignoring.

It was just part of the growing radiation problem, but at least their new anchorage was helping shield them from the worst of it. With her teams working to expand the harbor into a proper port, she was taking it upon herself to get the first proper look at the damage done to their port nacelle.

Reaching the long gash, she could see more clearly how that plasma shot had shredded the thick armor plating that protected this section. She recalled that it had been a shallow-angle shot coming in from the bow, and while the shot itself hadn't actually done that much damage to the engines it had left them exposed to the void. The resulting plasma venting from a couple severed fuel lines had been more damaging than the shot itself, and even that wasn't the most damning source of damage. If not for the storm, she'd have easily patched this damage weeks ago and it wouldn't have gotten so bad.

The storm had done far more damage to the engines than anything else. Even from here she could see the extent of the ravages the storm had inflicted. A sigh escaped her as she moved from the scaffold and into the housing proper. Using her own eyes to survey the extent of the project, but she had already realized they were looking at weeks of work. A complete rebuild of the entire engine housing. As she walked further, she was finding less and less hope of locating anything salvageable.

Stopping near the backup warp engine, she crouched to inspect the housing. The titanium alloy used to protect the more delicate components of the drive had been torn open. Within she saw melted and scorched coils, ruptured coolant lines and numerous severed power lines. It was hard to imagine that this was once part of an engine capable of bending space-time and allowing a ship to travel a thousand times faster than the speed of light. As now it was nothing more than a collection of twisted rubble.

Reaching for her belt, she pulled out her notepad and wrote down her impressions. The entire drive would have to be scrapped, and it would remain to be seen if there was anything left that they could salvage. They'd likely have to feed the entire assembly bit by bit into the nano disassemblers where they could be broken down into feedstock for new parts. At least some of the material would survive for use in repairing the ship.

Turning from the housing, she moved on towards the other engine. A rather long walk through shattered sublight engine housings, broken cooling conduits and more damaged systems. Everywhere she looked she saw more work to be done. It was clear to her that repairing this section alone would be weeks of work. Another cough reminded her of her own condition, perhaps longer. Reaching the main warp engine for the port side of the ship, she found it much like the back up drive, ruined. She marked that down and then decided to cut this inspection short, as more coughing wracked her body. It seemed she had another date with Medical.