The Teragoid Incident

Chapter 4 – Pain and Presents

CPO Randall Perez was deep in the focus zone with the grow process, that nano-shielding process had real potential, he thought, it looked like it might be able to produce anti-protons in real quantity if you …

Perez’s PIM chimed at him with a message to get to sick bay to collect his charge. He’d been in the Fusion One shop reviewing plans to grow nano-shielding around the most radiant modules of the station, as well as some horsing around with the EVA donkeys he had dreamed up in case the crap got so deep that they needed some quick interdiction muscle.

First thing he noticed when he reported to the Medical section was the AI Med unit hovering over Reagan, direct injection pad on his shoulder. Second thing he noticed was the Ship’s Doc, HMCS Cynthia Tunney, glaring. At Perez.

“I didn’t do it,” said Perez, hands up in surrender pose.

“ That’s bullshit. I’ve known you forty years, Randy, somehow this must be your fault. Forty years! Every time you have a problem with someone, they end up on my table!” said Tunney

Perez thought, “I’m betting this isn’t the time to be a smartass, here...”

“Cindy,  I didn’t do it.. Honestly. I’m sure you heard about that stunt he pulled, putting me on report. He used that emergency article in the Legal manual and Joe showed him why that wasn’t a good idea,” Perez said.

“It’s still your fault, I don’t care about the particulars. If you are involved someone always gets hurt. You’re a damned bloody magnet. I hate having you at the same duty station!”

Perez switched to Japanese, “I am very sorry, Senior Chief, I guess the COB agrees with you. He’s put the little guy in my charge, to try and turn him around. How bad was he hurt?” Perez asked with a formal bow. She was full Japanese, and formal apologies and bows always diminished her anger.

“He has contusions over 90% of his body! Did you run him over with a truck?” she asked.

“Nope, Skipper put him in the ring with Muschvik.”

“Jesus Christ, why didn’t you just hit him with an EVA module!”

“I am very sorry, Senior Chief,” said Perez, bowing again.

She took several deep breaths, “EEMU is waking him up now, he’s been given some meds to help with the blood loss for bruising, but I need to keep him under observation for 24 hours or so. He might need a unit or so once the bruising starts to fully develop. He‘ll be conscious in a couple of minutes. I don’t want to start any meds to counteract the bruising, they slow overall healing.”

“Will he be rational?”

“That depends on how hard you knocked his head!”

“I am very sorry, Senior Chief,” said Perez, bowing again.

“STOP THAT. I don’t want to calm down, I want to have you for breakfast!”

“It’s dinner time, Senior Chief,” said Perez.

“Medical: Notice, patient is regaining consciousness,” interrupted EEMU, in Standard English.

Tunney turned and stepped over to the table and said the same thing every doctor says when you look like crap,” How are you feeling?”

Reagan looked up at her and wheezed, ”You should see the other guy. Were you speaking Japanese?”

“Medical: Humor. Excellent. Prognosis is good. Recommend 24 hours rest under observation.”

“EEMU, you’re just saying that because you heard me say it, you copycat!” said Tunney, “Mr. Reagan, you should be more careful. I think the next time you want to fall off a building, perhaps you should find a real one. The damage would probably be less. Perez speaks Japanese, Spanish, English and Idiot.”

“Medical: Idiot as a language is not in my data. Query: Who speaks this?”

“Perez does."

“I should have rejected Muschivk and fought Perez. He’s smaller,” said Reagon.

“God NO, “ Tumney said, “Joe sends me victims. Perez here only sends me corpses. Joe is a softy compared to this guy. There was this one time out by Sirus that we...”

“Ummm, I think that’s still classified,” interrupted Perez, “I didn’t think you’d still be mad about that.”

“They were our friends!”

“Friends don’t shoot at you.  Anywaaaaaay, ” said Perez, “it looks like you are going to be keeping the Senior Chief and the EEMU company for today. Take it easy and we’ll pick it up tomorrow. The COB basically told me to take you under my wing for the duration, so that’s what we’ll do. I’ll come by at 1600 tomorrow, and we’ll go talk to The Warrior together. By then we (the ship) should have a better idea of who’s out there and what’s going on.”

“I think I’ll just lie here and enjoy the nice soft bed. I really can’t move. Who’s the Warrior,” asked Reagan.

“Master Chief Wamamere, that’s what Master Chief Muschivk calls him. Always has,” said Perez.

“EEMU, you might have overdone the muscle relaxants. He’s not supposed to be a limp dishrag,” said Tunney.

“Medical: Statement. Dosage of anti-inflammatories and analgesic are reacting synergistically. Malicious wetware removal and nano-reprogramming complete. I was under the impression that he was confined to Medical for 24 hours. Query: this is not correct?” said Eemu.

“Sarcasm is not becoming in an AI,” said Tunney, looking at the Medical robot.

“Pretty soon he’ll start calling us ‘Meatbags’,” said Perez.

“Hey, I played that game,” said Reagan.

“There might be some hope for you yet. Just hang out here for a day and get better. I’m sure the Skipper will want to talk to you, and so will Joe. You did pretty good for a complete amateur,” said Perez.

“What game!” said Tunney, “What are you guys talking about?”

“Old game from late 20th century. Knights of the …" said Reagan, and then he fell asleep.

“Get the hell out of my Sickbay, Perez!” said Tunney.

Perez nodded, bowed a full formal bow from the waist and left Sickbay and headed off to Fusion One. He tapped out a message to both the COB and the SEEA, to the effect that he had been to medical and the outcome. Sally beeped with the tone that she used when communicating with other PIMS.

“Randy,” said the PIM in her smooth, very sultry human voice, “Joe’s PIM said there is a meeting at 2000 in the wardroom and he’d like you to be there with that collection of evil tricks you’ve cooked up over the last 6 months. He says things are coming together faster than we planned and the Lieutenant has caused us a problem with the transmission schedule because of that stupid ploy. Joe says he wants you to put that Ph.d to good use and think us a way out.”

“Tell Joe’s PIM that I’m working on it, and he’s got a Ph.d as well, so I don’t want to hear it. I got some new ideas from that shielding experiment. I wish Dr. Ching was here. I need his advice.”

“Okay, Randy,“ said the PIM, ”Sending. Do you want the request for Dr. Ching sent?”

“Yes. It’ll be denied, but what the heck. Let’s try it.”

Perez used the elevator to get to the Engineering Module, and waved his PIM at the door. The PIM’s key unlocked the door and it slid aside. “Sally, it’s 1630 or so now, don’t let me miss dinner, please,” said Perez.

“Okay, Randy,” said Sally the PIM.

The entered Fusion One and went into the lab space. Perez came on watch at midnight, but he’d gotten 6 or so hours in the morning before the hearing. He sat down and started to work on the ‘Stormfire’ mod to the HKW mining cannon, with the hour until dinner, it was a sure thing he could clean up that exit angle problem. He slotted Sally in the workstation and smiled as he got to work. The current disaster allowed him free reign to be as nasty as he wanted. This is his first time being out-system and having the luxury to create toys without some meddlesome busybody interfering. When the dinner bell rang he cleaned up the diagrams and slotted the Stormfire mod as ‘ready for test’, and went up for chow.  Next was the anti-proton beam, after chow. The division techs and engineers had modeled all the parts he requested, he only hoped he’d have time to put all the pieces together before the meeting at 2000.  He’d been working on this stuff for 5 years and they were giving him a chance in this godforsaken hole to test it all out.

At 2000 Perez was standing outside the Wardroom conference room. The Wardroom area contained the junior officers ‘staterooms’, the dining room, conference room, showers and toilets, laundry. On OutSystem installations there was only one galley serving the crew and the officers. The nine plus 2 officer complement was standard on pretty much all smaller Naval Ships. Extra officers got stashed in a smaller bunkroom for visitors and observers just beyond the wardroom in the main ring section. The crew's quarters were generally in the ring as well, along with their workshops and labs.

Muschivk stuck his head out and motioned Perez in. “Your PIM let me know you were out here. Why didn’t you just come in?” he asked.

“Not my place to do that. Did you ask your PIM to contact her or did she do it on her own,” Perez asked.

“She did it on her own.” he said, “listen, you need to get over this thing you got. You are not a second-class citizen. You got stuck in that... ah... later, come on in.” said Muschivk, rapping him on the head.

He pushed Perez through the door and motioned toward a seat up by the head. The entire officer complement was there, plus the COB, the SEEA and the Aux Con supervisor. In addition, HMCS Tunney was there. The room was crowded. Perez sat.

“Chief, welcome.” said the Captain, “The Master Chief here said you had a bunch of toys we need to know about before we plan anything. Some stuff you and Dr. Ching’s team cooked up last year?”

“Yessir,” said Perez. He pulled the PIM off his belt and held it.

“Got a presentation?”

“Yessir, I do. With your permission we’ll get started. Listen, folks, some of this stuff is pretty cool, so bear with me. I am sending you all copies of the presentation and full specs, so you can follow along, and I have 3D display and flat screen slides. After I go, I understand that I’ll be back up to go over some of the projected strategies to help us with our current difficulties.”

He tapped Sally and she blinked twice. He slotted the PIM into the conference table receiver and made a pointer gesture. Sally blinked twice and started the presentation. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have bothered but the amount of data made him nervous about sending it over wireless. He began.

“The new nano-foam shielding, although that’s not really what it is, allows a 3 percent increase in power output from a type one fusion plant with a magnetic bottle, and everyone here has seen the results of that. It was kind of a surprise how effective the nano dividers were so it allowed us to redirect lost energy back into the magnetic bottle.

The really fun part was when we tried it with a cold fusion battery. The way that works is by contracting a nickel-hydrate L-type lattice using piezo-electric current, causing bonded hydogen to cause fusing under pressures of a million atmospheres or so, but it turned out that we could line the lattice with the divider tubes and catch and redirect all of the lost energy. Gave us an eighty percent increase in the smaller batteries maximum output. That’s a whole new level of power available in a 2x2x4 meter battery array. I tested it at 2 GW while we were waiting for the main shielding to complete. “

He stopped and looked around. The display was showing an artist's conception of the heavy metal entangled nanotubes wrapped around the fusion lattice. The faces of most of the attendees were open-mouthed in shock. Perez realized that he’d gone too fast and overloaded most of them.

“We, meaning my doctoral research group, had been working on this stuff for a couple of years, and what allowed us to finish is my advisor’s application of quantum level nano-entanglement finally worked out. This gave us the tools to apply a whole new level of system management for the molecular systems. Our group believed we could funnel the fusion products into specific channels with entanglement and finally had a way to prove it out. About a year ago, we built a lab mock up, and then they sent us out here to try it out full scale. There was about a .05 percent possibility that the shield would work too well, and that could lead to very bad consequences for the fusion plant under test. I worked out a method to prevent that by building ports in the shield and closing those last. So, we got permission to complete the modifications to the power plants two weeks ago and finished those last night. That's the lightning recap of 10 years of solid work, interrupted by missions now and then. Okay, enough buzzword bingo... ”

“Okay. Sally, next view,” Perez waved at the the AI.

The view switched to a standard EVA module. A box. With windows, and cameras and arms. Perez looked around at the audience, and they were still floored. “Master Chief, I think they are in shock,” he said.

Lt. Commander Barbara Sevrinofsky raised a lovely coffee colored hand with red nails and said, “This isn’t really my field, Randy, but are you saying that you have two quantum nano-tubes, and are really transmitting the energy that hits them back into the incoming direction by transferring one to the other?”

“Yep. Pico-tubes would probably be better. It’s kind of a matrix of quarks that resonate through subspace.”

“That’s... amazing. Amazing enough that I’m reconsidering your offer from 25 years ago.”

Cohen looked at the XO and grinned, “Is there a tale here?”

“Yessir,” said the XO primly and she crossed her legs.

Perez blushed and coughed, “Hmmmm, uh, yes well, anyway. That’s just for starters. Do you like laser cannons? Well, nobody’s ever figured out a laser cannon, but based on some of the data we got from the fusion plant experiments...”

“Randy, “ said the COB, “Your presentation is out of sync. Did the XO fluster you?”

“Sorry, COB,” Perez said, paused and cleared his throat, “Ahem, Sally where am I supposed to be.”

Sally flashed twice and changed the 3D display and the screen repeater to a picture of a rotating EVA module, a flat black cube with flashing lights.

“Oh, right,” Perez said, “Sorry ‘bout that. Okay. EVA Modules, we print them using the big composite printer in the dock as needed... pretty much. There are 10 active right now. They have drives, basic controls, navigation and manipulation. Does everybody here agree they are miniature spaceships? Yes? So, the station has, in one of the research modules a 40x30 meter composite printer. I have the plans for the EVA module... and I’ve made a couple of changes. The original plan was to print out new hulls and install test equipment and the new power sources and engines, but we’ve run out of time. Master Chief Muschivk asked me to see if we could make the changes to a standard EVA module. Well, I couldn’t, for various reasons, the biggest reason is that we print them in one piece, but we can print them out differently, and what we ended up doing is putting two and three together, relocating the engine and power mounts and we get these. Sally show Recon Mark 1.”

What appeared on the rotating on 3Display was two angled rhomboids, a truncated double pyramid with the large ends glued together with a wing. On the wing was two pods.

“This is a short-range recon craft, seats two, two engines and powerplants in the back modules, instruments in the pods. It’s not armed yet, though we could do something...  ahem... Right. The beauty of all of this is the nano-shielding wraps around the outside as well, and the thing is practically invisible, and since the shielding is really one big molecule, it’s very tough. I haven’t tried anything with gravity generators yet, but I’ve got some ideas to compensate for acceleration using them and the new power budget...” Muschivk chopped his hand, to move them along.

“Sorry Master Chief... Sally, show the 3 module version,“ said Perez.

Sally blinked twice and switched to a very similar craft, but with a center module.

“This guy is the same thing only the center is a living section. My estimate that it would support two people for a week or so, as long as they were very friendly,” said Perez, “Something like this would allow us to go find out what’s going on in the space around us, and the high powers they can generate would allow them to bring that info back.”

Perez looked at the crowd of shocked sailors. He had them completely stunned. He felt like yelling out, “April Fool!!!” then the impulse passed... thankfully without him making a fool of himself. This was great. He’d spent years working on some of this stuff and had never been allowed to implement it. Perez looked around and grinned like the Cheshire Cat,  “Do you guys want to see something really cool?”

“Knock it off, Perez.” said Muschivk.

“Sorry, Master Chief, couldn’t resist. Sally, show the Cobra Mk I,” said Perez.

Sally blinked twice and showed a picture of a coiled snake ready to strike.

“Sally,” said Perez.

The cobra changed shape slowly into a craft that looked like it was made out of dark triangles, and was hard to visually resolve. The front was relatively small and consisted of an arrowhead with the point clipped and two large holes in the flat part, which sloped back into an angled rhomboid. The back of the triangle was flat and held obvious drive ports for some kind of reaction drive. The ship was dead black, though it seemed to have a striking cobra emblazoned on the triangle sides. It looked evil, dangerous, deadly and nearly invisible.

“This is a 4 Module Craft I designed for interdiction. It has some really cool shit on it we really need, and... the 4 EVA Modules allowed me to generate an EM shield. There was enough power in the power budget to; well, build a two-layer surface entanglement that works like the Fusion plant shields, but in reverse. It has a small gravity generator that can compensate for acceleration, living quarters for 1 pilot, and can accept small loads of cargo up to 15 metric tons, and equivalent volume displacement. Essentially this is a space going interdiction fighter.  I found the idea in an old video game.

Umm, I can’t accept credit for all of this. I designed and did layouts for most of the stuff, but while we were alternating fusion plants for the last couple of weeks, I sort of hijacked the Engineering Department and we all spit this stuff out. I’m really proud of their work on the drive. They came up with some tricks I never thought of. Originally, I figured we’d have 20 tons of cargo space, but Jason said, hey why not store some H2 in there and set up to dump it into the EM drive thrusters. It worked. He calls it afterburners after the Cold War Fighter jet nacelles injection. The injection hardware and tanks weigh about a ton, but the injection itself triples the top accel,” said Perez, “Any questions so far?"

“I feel like a battleship commander in WWII. Everything I’ve learned about tactics and strategy just became irrelevant,” said Cohen.

“That’s a very good analogy, sir,” said LCDR Matthew Koznar, the Engineer. “How come I didn’t know about any of this, Perez!”

Perez cleared his throat, “I’m not sure, sir, we’ve all been so busy and Master Chief Muschivk was informed, I don’t know how that ball got dropped. We were giving you the daily reports on the shield and busting out to work on this new stuff. I am sorry.”

“I’m not mad, you goober, I want to help!”  said the ENG.

“You were completely tied up with meetings about the shipalt, sir and none of the EVA mods seemed pressing, so we sort of, well, forgot.”

“Don’t forget me again, you jerk! This stuff is great!” said Koznar.

“All right; Matt, I think you have suitably chastised our resident evil genius. Chief Perez, don’t leave the department head out of the loop again, you got it?” said the Captain.

“Sorry, sir,” said Perez, nodding.

“So, Chief, any other surprises? Not that I’m complaining, mind you, I mean asking for miracles is rude,” said the Captain.

Perez looked at  Muschivk. The Master Chief  nodded and said, “Sure, why not, let’s see if they can keep their composure.”

Perez looked back at the PIM on the table and said, “Sally, show special presentation 1. Add mood music.”

Long slow strains of music began playing from the speakers, evoking a huge dark form looming over the meeting, as an image of what looked like a high-tech cannon appeared on the screen. It started to spin.

“This is a prototype anti-proton cannon that we’ve been trying to perfect. It generates about a mole of anti-protons, which is similar (the same as) to a gram of anti-hydrogen and then using laser quantum entanglement transmits it to a target. Range limit is around 10 Kilometers. It takes several giga joules of energy to fire, though. So right now, with 1Emod source we can get a fire rate of 2 a second.”

“Excuse me, you’ve built an antimatter cannon?” said Barbara.

“Yep, me and the propulsion techs, and Bindini and Grahame the Nav techs.” said Perez

“I don’t believe it. You rock!” she said.

“Yep,” said Perez.

“Wait, you don’t get to agree with me on that!” said the XO.

“Nope,” said Perez.

“All right, that’s enough, you two can play later,” said Cohen.

“Sally, run special presentation 2.” Sally blinked twice and brought up a regular space to space missile, then broke the display out into a completely non-standard internal design.

“This is a ship subspace interdiction missile, it kills the ships power-plant and drive. It essentially (theoretically) takes the contents of a magnetic bottle and does a 1 ms warp at which time the bottle is released back into normal space, with all constraints removed. This isn’t bad except that whatever reactions that are underway are uncontained. It’s not really that powerful, but it will kill the powerplant unless it’s super tough and a full restart is performed. Powerplants aren’t hardened from the inside. It will probably kill the propulsion crew though, with hard radiation and overpressure. There’s not much explosive pressure inside a fusion mag bottle, because there’s not enough mass in there,” said Perez, “The general result is that it will pull a ship out of subspace into normal space, and kill the acceleration of a ship in normal space. So... it nukes the reaction that maintains the warp field, and space flattens.“

“Sally, run special presentation 3,” Sally blinked twice and brought up another gun looking thing. This one had vanes and fins and stuff sticking out all over it.

Perez drank a bit of water from the bottle he put down next to Sally on the table and said,” This is an anti-particle accelerator cannon. It generates little tiny 277pm bearings, the size and weight of an Uranium atom then whips them around in a circle till they are moving very fast (about .9c), using gravitic and EM fields. It then launches them through the same quantum entanglement field as the proton cannon, up to the same range, 10000 meters. I’m pretty sure we can do better, but we don’t have enough experience with this stuff yet. I’m pretty sure that in a couple months I can launch 2 or 3 and have them hit the same spot at the same instant... Anyway, we haven’t tried this one either. We’ve modeled it, but... can't really test it onboard.”

The audience universally had their mouths open and eyes wide. He felt like a stage magician in front of a kid's birthday party. Perez looked around. “Joe, do we have any whisky? You were right, it was too much all at once. I think we’ve put them into shock. You all have to remember this is 7 years of R&D, which we are testing all at once. Nobody would let me do this stuff in an occupied system.”

“They’re tough,” said Muschivk, “Hit them again.”

“Okay, “ said Perez, “Everybody in this room with the exception of the Engineer is attached to Special Operations, and the ENG has the special EOD wetware. The multimodule EVA has the ability to slot PIMs and also to direct neural interface with the battle suit, or in the Engineer’s case the lower capability repair suit. This means we can overlay the outside territory directly into the optical nerves and set up virtual control systems with virtually no lag whatsoever. Anybody with the advanced nano control software can fly these with a few weeks training program, and if you can fly an EVA they are identical in control systems. Just faster.”

"Sally, run special presentation 4, " said Perez, turning back to the screen, a display of a small longish tube came up, hard to see without the highlighting, the front end was a small sphere and the back end trailed a wire structure, "... This is a shielded ceramic tube with magnetic bottle that can be filled from the 'anti-matter' cannon. It has a small drive, similar to the one that powers the EVA remotes, reactionless (so it takes a bit to come up) so it is virtually invisible, has a small inertial compensator, and it has a basic guidance system. It can lock on to a target up to 60,000 meters (or so, depends on the local noise level) and will release it's energy on contact. It does not have a subspace capability. The previously mentioned interdiction fighter can carry about 1000 of them, with the sacrifice of a few tons of capacity. It's about the size of a big pencil. The generator/warhead filler thingie takes up most of the space."

"Missiles?" said the ENG, "You built anti-matter missiles?"

"Not just me, like I said," said Perez, "This one isn't me at all. I just built the thing. This particular toy was Jason's idea."

"P.O. Bindini? That Jason?" said the CO, "He's not part of your special projects group. He's part of the original crew."

"Yeah," said Perez, "He's an electrical engineer. He got attached to the group and started making suggestions. We need to do something for him... To launch them, we decided to use a fusion launcher, with a simple thermonuclear detonation, sort of like the way they used to launch torpedoes on submarines. It blows out a whole bunch of gas out a tube and takes it with it. Any messing about with EM launch and gravitic stuff made the bottle slightly unstable and seemed like a terrible idea."

The whole room had stopped breathing, attention riveted to the display.

“Randy, “ said Barbara, looking at him, “You haven’t told me any of this before. You are in SO much trouble.”