Time seemed to breeze by as the Ingenuus crew began to look around and get acclimated to the room. Callahan merely stood back, observing and idly flipping through files on a datapad.
Eventually, the booming noise of the production bay outside once again assaulted the ears of everyone present; the hatch opening and a quartet of figures worked their way in before sealing the door again. At their front was a woman, clad in what appeared to be a gray dress uniform, with silver hair framing her face and tied behind her head. Upon entry, she nodded to Callahan who, and along with the entourage that followed, made their way to the back of the lab.
Callahan gestured for the IRG personnel to follow the group as they made their way into a briefing room with a single large table in the center; it's surface printed with a hexagonal pattern that began to light up and hum as the embedded projector activated. He stood beside Jennifer, whispering to her while the staff that entered the room filed in, some holding datapads and listening intently - others merely standing guard by the door with hands on the holsters at their hips.
" That, is High Inquisitor Espinosa. " He said, pointing to the silver-haired figure scribbling a signature into a datapad at the front of the room and talking briefly with one of the others who came in with her, likely an aide. Finally, she turned to address Jennifer directly.
"Mrs. Byrne, welcome to Maltese space and Ibiza proper. I would offer you the full tour and maybe a quick run by the giftshop but sadly I'm on a schedule today. So, since we're short on time, lets begin shall we? As you can imagine, everything said here is to remain confidential in absolutely every way possible. Nothing I'm about to say or show you is to go beyond this room except to your fellows aboard the Ingenuus. Failure to keep this confidential would be an... unfortunate choice, to put it frankly.
Now, with that unpleasantness out of the way lets get started! Today's topic of discussion: the Primrose-Design Heavy Artillery Charged Gamma-Ray Burst Lance Cannon - or for the sake of everyone's vocal cords: 'Project Lightspear' "
Before anyone could get a word in, the projector whirred to life and began displaying a number of icons at the front of the table before the Inquisitor who casually flipped through a number of them as she spoke. " Conceived by some of Malta's greatest minds of their time, and altered and made reality by the weapon-crafting genius at the back of the room--" she proclaimed, gesturing to Callahan -- " Lightspear is a phased Gamma-Ray Singularity generator and accelerator setup that relies on the principals of the miniaturized black-hole reactor systems put into practice with Malta's own RM-2A Storta, and one planned to be implemented the rest of Malta's capital designs in the coming years. All of the fun stuff involving the weapon itself will come later- for now we'll stick to basics. Now, Lightspear relies on the presence of two of these contained and miniaturized singularities within the same frame and interlinked in a shielded environment, however the first problem we began running into and the first one we'll address here; was a basic problem with our containment. "
She paused for a moment, flipping through a series of holograms before arriving at one depicting a cross-sectioned singularity core resembling the one the team saw on their way in.
" Containment of a quantum singularity requires an enormous amount of power, structural integrity and near constant maintenance of dedicated engineering staff in order to prevent the singularity from "flashing out" - which does exactly what you'd expect: the singularity bursting outward slightly before collapsing in on itself and blinking out of existence, leaving it's parent ship without a primary power source. This is obviously not something we want, so specifically trained techs are brought aboard every vessel that has one of these reactors installed with the sole purpose of maintaining cyclonic shielding levels. Said shielding is not too dissimilar from your average Graviton shield generators used in most Sirian ships; which more or less generates a spherical 'bubble' around said ship - or in our case - coating the interior of the containment unit. The shield itself is Layer 1 of containment. Layer 2 is the containment housing itself; essentially a titanium-osmium shell interlocked with another series of graviton emitters that hold the whole thing together and prevent it from imploding. The Layer 2 emitters also act as a pushing force to counteract the singularity's natural desire to want to drift towards other gravity wells by essentially drenching it an equilibrium of gravitons. With the same force applied in all directions, the singularity itself has nowhere to go except stay in the absolute center of the shell. "
She paused again, swiping one of the holograms above the table briefly to switch to a view of a series of rotating gyroscopic rings.
" Layer 3 is the tricky part. What you're seeing here a conceptualization of the rotating rings that hold the core in place. These use a third series of both graviton emitters and high-power magnets to suspend the core in a fixed location at the center of the ship. The rings all operate at different speeds of rotation and power of their emitters. A complex chain of interlinked computers monitor the gravitational field output by the rings and observe any signs of weakness in the fields the rings are projecting. Bear in mind, that even the slightest amount of irregularity in the field can send the core hurtling in one direction so a constant of force needs to be in place and maintained to keep the whole core operating.
Layer 3 is also where power transfer comes into play. Matter, in this case an inert gas are injected into the central chamber of the core to be subjected to the intense effects of spaghettification inherent in exposure to intense gravitic forces. Once subjected they form a miniature accretion disk around the singularity and are excited and irradiated heavily until they are eventually jetted out at the north and south poles of the singularity. They are then recollected by a series of Bussard ramscoops aligned with the poles of the singularity that then re-cycle what survived of the gas, and absorbing the energy imparted by the singularity. This charge is then run along the exterior hull of the shell where it arcs in a wireless power transfer to the inner-most grav-ring. It continues like this until it reaches the outer-ring, which physically connects to the hull whereupon it can be harvested for use around the rest of the ship. "
Another pause, Espinosa placed down the datapad and recollected herself for a moment, nodding to Callahan and stepping aside. The man took her place at the front of the table flicking through some of the controls while simultaneously removing his coat-jacket and beginning.
" That was more or less the functioning capacity of all of our singularity cores. Some parts were omitted and others altered slightly not only for confidentiality, but also for your own safety, Mrs Byrne. Trust me when I say: the less you know about how one of these cores are made to begin with, the better. We'll get to the crux of the problem here in a moment but before we go on, do you have any questions?
[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/
A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.
![[Image: oNYdO1X.jpg?1]](http://i.imgur.com/oNYdO1X.jpg?1)
