The Drive Unit has been inserted into the vessel’s rearward cargo storage for conversion into a machine space. Vulkan assures us that the application of primary power through the drive will not harm operational use of the rest of the vessel.
I do not share his confidence. I embrace the distraction the drive unit offers the crew, shakedown runs of the now batteryless drive core presents a commander with a certain degree of unease. The drive may be compatible with Unioner design methodology, but this is not a conventional Unioner vessel. Any negative behaviour ascribed to the drive will be uncontroversially presented given as proof of malcontentious intelligence, as if the ship itself was willing the experiment to fail. We need luck - like men tossing gold into a well. A billion credits worth of it.
Perhaps a bargain for such a device. A gambler’s bargain.
Is it any wonder why I am nervous? It is a practiced risk, but one that I cannot prevent. I am a spectator, simply signing my authorisation to the command.
Below decks, the crew are conducting the final installation process for securing the drive to the ship - attaching the great primary power cables, each as thick as three men, to the antimass accumulator. The device sits ill at ease with the rest of the ship. It is clean, hard-angled, too feng shui for its own good. By far it is is the most functional piece of equipment aboard - Tordai's men are ingenious.
A clunk through the plates. Eight decks due stern-wards, they will be cheering - the final fitter lock is in place, and the drive is truly part of the ship. Part of my command.
Five wires more and the Sirene can disembark from spacetime itself.
Still, I sweat. I feel it it in my fingers, down the lining of my cuffs.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Lattke has boarded the vessel from the Hamburg system. He's graver than usual - the young man spends most of his time in his cabin. He hopes to make a deal for the undoing of history. I might doubt him but I wish him the best, just as I would hope someone else would wish for the salvation of my father, a quarter century ago, now. He is a contradiction - cold and callous, yet appears to show genuine compassion for his comrades. I would have thought that a twenty seven year old would have squandered time by exhibiting creative interest in a warship, considering that he has never, to my knowledge, been on one before, but his approach to his duties was immediate - he is under the direktorate's command, and Pacifica is not under his jurisdiction or his ability to influence events.
A design brief has reached the chief engineer from Vulkan, although it is less of any conventional blueprint that he has ever seen than a list of speculative instructions: Project BIFROST; a Union backronym for Baryonic Interdimensional l-Factor Resistant for Omnigenous Superluminal Travel. If the name appears meaningless it's because it simply describes the function of a jump drive: conveying conventional particles into an environment where thermodynamic assertions such as mass and time in our dimension no longer apply, before reconvening the vessel into level spacetime upon instantaneous quantum transit. In effect, the rest of the commission hasn't yet decided which elements they desire out of the drive. Vulkan is possibly the most competent shipwright in Sirius, but he assumes peacetime resources. Abendroth is conservative yet also optimises for tactics, not logistics. Frei simply wants resource dexterity - if he has his way, the ship will serve as a jump tender. Coming with the Backronym is a list of test rotas that steadily augment the drive using resources that we currently do not have yet aboard; I will place logistics an assignment to requestion the desired components.
The one device we do have aboard is the Hotloader for the hyperspatial batteries. It's a loose replica of the module installed on the Lorentz Von Rohe jump drive test vessel. Since the drive is physically indistinguishable from the Lorentz's own drive except for its mounting position, the amount of mass it has to jump and all other functional variables, it should, in theory, load and discharge spent ten tonne thermal packs in exactly the same way. Except the last hotloader the Union commissioned was assembled over four months. This unit was sliced together in forty eight hours aboard wedel mining station.
Here we go.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
The hotloader behaved exactly as expected during the first cycle test - it jammed.
a fifty tonne cylindrical coolant battery tube made only partial contact with the magnetic bolts that were to affix it the drive. Energy to Antimass is as inefficient a cycle as physics allows - the air in the compartment vaporized under thermal shock as the containment latch collapses through a partition bulkhead and crushed Arbeiters Lewilyn Goethe and Yann Keller. I will preside over the funeral ceremonies. It appears hullbreach was prevented only due to the drive discharge unit making contact with the outer hull, blowing out every external camera and sending arcs of radient ball lightning out into the void and collapsing the hyperspace breech before half the hull emerged inside the centre of a star. We were, and are, under the circumstances, exceptionally lucky.
I have broached to my superiors that I have no faith in these modifications. No response until the command: continue as requested, on the third go.
Perhaps I should have been less enthusiastic at the design meeting - It was, afer all, my suggestion that the vessel be put to such use. I had assumed a comfortble development program crash program in a controlled region of the Alsterfeld, not a rolling preparation for a ship-endangering mission whose assumptions depend on the most positive assumptions of presently underdeveloped technologies yielding truth. For not the first time in recent memory I find myself envying the junior officers - their confident swagger as they exchange with the men; the competent sympathy for their stations. I realise that, surrounded by men capable of rebuilding the equipment they operate blindly, that the military lineations that I once understood and operated under cannot ever fully exist here - not when one crewman knows the status of another crewman's strengths and weaknesses in their own profession.
Vulkan report has arrived, somehow more rapidly than my own damage control teams despite him not being aboard the vessel itself. Unsettling how he achieves this. Now at least we have answers to why the ship did not experiance structural failure. Oddly, I find myself taking hope that someone further along the chain than myself concludes present events to be positive results.
As was observed during the surge, the Sirene's Lorenz projectors, being vastly more powerful than any physiological necessity would tolerate, projected the energy into the surrounding jumpspace, beyond the Antimass threshold of the jump aperture. The introduction of electrons, which possess mass, into jumpspace collapsed the peacetime around the projected arc, trapping them in exo-dimensional space and thus as far away from the Sirene's hull as can be visualized.
It took only thirty minutes before they ordered the experiment repeated and but four days before the materials for a fifteen mile wiring harness arred in hanagar two. The orders were the expected: repeat the experiment, under controlled conditions, with the drive connected directly to the Lorentz projectors. Repeat until causation is confirmed or equipment faliure.
May God help us all.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Vulkan's techs are scampering around the underside of the hull, which has slowed patrol avoidance manuveres to a crawl. I would have ordered outside facing compartments tint-dimmed but the EVA teams apparently require them for navigation over shaded parts of the stern. It's the ninth century and still nobody can get anything done without a flashlight.
The great arch that will contain the jump module - another hideous acronym, although this one is more humble (and unpronouncible) than its predecessor. They're calling it the MMJM - Multi-Mission Jump Module. Self-explanatory enough, I suppose. The chief engineer nearly blew an heart valve when he heard the name - I assume he thought I was going to order him to cut the drive unit out of the decks - although nothing so unfortunate has come about. Gunnery's primary concern is that the module may interfere with the targeting systems for the rearward secondary batteries - they may have to be shifted - another arduous task that will take a man's hours and possibly his life.
The ship is still atrociously few on fittings, although, according to Vulkan, we're sallying towards the final installations. At least the new insulation polymer is doing what it's designed to do. I have expressed my concerns - that appears to be all that I do any-more - about the status of the installation in lieu of a shipyard that is not presently under risk of bombardment, yet Vulkan appears to believe in his EVA teams more than I believe in myself. If only the Union wasn't so dammably self-assured - or, at least, were offering classes.
Positive news. Positive news. Ah. The reports of headaches have subsided - it appears the new hull coating is reducing the electromagnetic exposure of the crew. Perhaps Frei truely is the man of compassion he claims to be.
THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)
Vulkan would have us believe that we are on the cusp of a breakthrough. Despite the man’s excessive engineer’s optimism, I find myself almost agreeing with him. Within my own soul. I suppose it is the way the universe would have with me; Cursed to be the last of the line of Schutsky and yet carrying none of our finest qualities. None of the optimisn that would have rang familiar to my father.
I am dimly aware that I am in command of one of the most powerful warships within the Sirius Sector – at least, as far as I know of. There’s almost certainly some design study tucked away in a naval shipyard left over from the dimmable Nomad purge, draining taxpayers pockets in the small margins. Father would have never approved, yet again, father's approval was only egalitarian when it came to people. He would have shook this ship to the bolts had he been in command of the program, probably kept her running on schedule, too.
It's odd how you never associate being late to the job with death. Yet if the surgeons did not move from their bunks to the bunks of the dying on schedule, the dying would be dead. This entire knife of a ship is a surgeon, and we've sat here, grinding the edge, over and over, watching wounds fester, as if waiting for amputation to be unavoidable, as though only the most grievous of challenge is worthy of the dearest of tools. I see my fellow Unioners almost never bring the subject up amongst one another; machines are as precious to them as lives, but no more so. Recycling remains optional.
I find myself drawing myself against him even in my middle years. Always running back to the comparison. Shultzky senior, Shultzky junior, though we do not share the same names, I have always found myself to be his reflection – if a distorted one. My father remained a good man who was stabbed in the side by history. I am not, yet I must re-enact the Exodus. Perhaps I owe it to these people, often filthy and criminal, who took me in, during the height of the scare, and pinned me with medals that I have not earned. Another Shultzky, they orate. Champion of the poor, I must be. The few that know of how I cut and ran like the rest of the survivors from what should have been our resting place in Sigma Twenty One seem to honour me all the more for it, as if I am a classical statue rather than a man. I ran from the exodus that should have been my own grave, only to lead another. Desperation can make a Moses out of anyone, I suppose.
I should abandon my indefinites, and my suppositions. In the context of the needs of the ship, we find ourselves requiring neither. With the exchanger itself attached to the hull, mission requirements have become one of input, output. The first is crew and a refreshment of relief supplies. The second, the Sirene’s triage facillites, for they are exhausted and inappropriate for further relief. The times have made for strange teachers – I find myself a drilled expert on hospital (and, grimly, hospice) management as much as I am a commander. By all technical requirements, I could insert mine and representative Marza’s keycards into the drivenet, drive one lever forward, and jump the vessel to anywhere in the universe. The process would immediately reduce the entire ship to gaseous slag and I would have to overpower twelve espatiers that answer to the Direktor, not to me, and five hundred and thirty six autonomous safety features, but the thought lingers.
"Though the past is scarred and the future untold"
" Be the boot heavy, the vacuum cold."
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