The next portion of our gear issue comes with a NATO secret tablet that is not to leave the building. Apparently a good portion of the engine room has some sensitive info. Not sure how that works with Russia knowing about all of this, but there’s probably some convoluted garbage going on.
Beats toting around a ton of books though. Can you imagine the encyclopedic tome it would take to cover all the systems on a space ship? Oof. Lucky for me I only have to deep dive the engineering spaces with a smattering of ships safety systems around the rest of the ship. It’s still a lot of info to cram in my head.
Pressure builds behind my eyes for a moment while I’m reminded that I have to go through an accelerated prototype for a reactor I’ll likely never use. Fun fun. That, however, is not the allegator closest to the boat and I should focus on passing Friday’s test. I really want to dive into the data to see what progress they made with my baby.
Before that, to medical! YN1 Tucker continues to chatter about the Pentagon and all the amenities it has as I made the mistake of saying I’ve never been inside before. What gets me is how far you have to walk to get places. You could get your steps in depending on where your meetings were.
A female Hospital corpsman (HM) greets us and briefs me that they’re going to draw blood, hook me up to a halter monitor, then do perform a full physical on Thursday. Great, a busy day before test day. Good thing I haven’t eaten yet today, I wonder why they wouldn’t tell me I needed to fast before my check-in. Maybe they would have told me today for Monday? Who knows.
HM1 Gardin asks YN1 to wait outside then tells me to take my blouse and undershirt off so that she can attach the monitor pickups. She lays out a small wallet-sized box connected to a wire that splits off into five toward the end. Huh, if they’re doing this now, what am I going to be doing during the physical?
“Not a regular bra huh? You’re going to have to take the sports bra off so I can get the central pickup on.”
Off comes the top and I’m standing there with uniform pants and boots on with my boobs hanging out. I don’t think I have ever been in this state of dress before. And I apparently say that outloud.
HM1 smirks, “No jokes about buying you dinner first?”
I snort, “Do people really do that? I mean with women doing breast exams and pap smears, I figure getting naked in front of a doctor is pretty common.”
“People, especially servicemembers, say stupid things when they’re uncomfortable.” She says while swabbing parts of my chest with alcohol. “Speaking of those exams, you’ll go through those again on Thursday.” I nod at that. Can’t have any signs of cancer for space travel: no where to treat you up there. And from what I’m told an increase in background radiation does not treat cancer. Lame.
Gardin pulls the back off a sticky pad with a metal plate on one side and a snap-button connector on the other and places one above each boob closer to my sternum, one between my breasts, and two below towards the bottom of my ribcage. She then presses them hard in place by snapping the wires onto the connectors on the pad then clipping the little box to my belt.
“You’ll want to press this button before and after any planned stress moments such as exercising. You’ll also be getting a note-pad to log your activities for the day so if we find any irregularities we can reference them to your schedule and then try to replicate it on Thursday. Any questions?”
“Can I put my clothes back on?” Tucker rolls her eyes at that while she pushes some buttons on her display.
“Looks like all the points are reading correctly. As soon as you get dressed, you can head on out.” I nod at that and maneuver the bra so that it doesn’t catch on any of the snaps and then notice the awkward wire that doesn’t let me tuck in my shirt all the way unless I push the wire down my pants too and make it double back. On goes my uniform top and I’m ready to get back to following YN1 around.
“Last stop on the tour is a small classroom where you and other applicants will be studying for the exam. This bank of lockers is where you will stow your tablet at the end of the day, and any electronic devices if you need to go into a more secure area. As I don’t think anything is Classified above NATO secret, it shouldn’t be an issue.”
“Is this where we muster on Monday before meeting with the Admiral?”
“Yes, his aid will brief you ten minutes before the meeting.”
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Martin and I nod at that and walk into the room. The room is practically full of people, about 25 sitting at long tables like the rows in Charleston, but these have chairs on both sides. To collaborate maybe? There doesn’t seem to be a podium or anything for general instruction, which makes sense as Sailors from varying rates must be collected here. Nearly everyone looks up at us as we walk in, a few linger, assessing the late arrivals and one set of eyes are a familiar green.
“So, do we sit just anywhere?” Martin whispers.
“I don’t see that it matters, unless you try to sit in someone’s lap.” I whisper back then move to sit across from my roommate. She’s sitting with horrendous posture like everyone else, her feet nearly sticking out the other side of the table while casually flicking the screen of her propped-up tablet. She must read incredibly fast.
When I pull the seat in front of me back, Katie looks up at me, but doesn’t move her legs to accommodate my desire to sit across from her. I pause a second to make sure she really wanted to play it this way before I take a seat and scoot up between her feet and the outside of my legs lightly rest against the inside of hers.
The slight downturn of her lips and the raise of her brows convey “huh, unexpected” without issuing a noise. Then, like nothing happened, she reengages with her tablet and starts flicking her tablet again. If she doesn’t mind, then neither to I.
I slip my ID into a card reader and plug that into my tablet to begin the studying, which I wish would go faster so I can read about the engine design. When they gave them to us, the IT said that there would be a Copernicus prep module and a series of folders by department if I wanted a simplified list of documents. The prep module has an initializing bar before displaying a wire mock-up of a ship. With a golf-tee shaped front with two counter rotating spoke-and-wheel berthing and habitat spaces just behind the hyperbolic sensor array. Followed by a long shaft that is configured to dock multiple modules, and behind that is a square-ish section that brackets two in-line collider loops. The collider loops are framed by port and starboard passage-way runners that lead to the reactor compartment in the rear and the Annihilation Propulsor and conventional thrusters behind that.
Not seeing a dropdown to select from, I poke at the reactor compartment and engine room. The full ship drops away and ‘Engineering’ compartments fill the screen showing me an expected Molten Salt Reactor using Thorium as it’s primary fuel source with the noted amount of ‘startup’ material to get the Thorium breeding properly. They spent the extra money on induction pumps for the highly radioactive coolant—good choice—and have the coolant processing and separation facilities present to remove poisons and to replenish fuel as needed.
The biggest part that surprises me is that they are not using actinides to make the plasma needed for the propulsor to create anti-matter, they’re degassing the coolant and using one of the primary fission products, Xenon, to form the plasma. I wouldn’t have thought it would be dense enough to facilitate the reaction, but hey, they must have found a way because I’m looking at a ten trillion-dollar space ship design using it. The behemoth is powered by four massive steam turbine generators with battery and capacitor banks in the front and the rear of the collider loops. The battery capacity listed is much larger than the major modules listed, must be some others stored in the superstructure or something.
Before I can get brain deep into engineering specs and setpoints, Katie nudges my leg and shows me a pad of paper with “Lunch?” written on it. I look at my watch and find that I’ve been poking at the engine room wireframe for more than half an hour. Cool. I nod at her and we both get up. Martin looks at me funny, surprised I’m taking a break so early, but I can come back and study for six hours afterward so I’m not worried. They allow us to stay here until 2200 anyway, but I’ll have to remember to check the metro times before I leave. We put our study materials in our assigned lockers and make our way to the courtyard.
“Okay chatterbox, what do you recommend for lunch? Seeing as you’ve been here for three weeks.”
“Sushi, barbeque, or any of the salad places.” She replies quietly.
“Well, I think I want to keep it light. Lets go with sushi?” Question mark?
She grunts and nods, looks at her phone for directions and then leads us across the Pentagon.
“Is it always quiet as a cemetery in there?”
“It’s quieter than usual today. There’s usually a discussion or two going on, nothing too loud though. Has it hit you how much you have to cram in your head yet?”
“I haven’t checked the engineering test requirements yet, but I checked to see how they changed the reactor and propulsor installations since I last worked with the technology and it isn’t that different. I mean, they can’t expect us to know all the setpoints and special concerns before we actually get into the program, can they?” It seems pretty stupid to expect someone to be able to operate a thing without being taught how.
“Mm. No. At least that’s not what I heard. The test is supposed to appraise you’re ability to think through issues in an isolated environment where resupply may be years away.”
“Or that you don’t need sound dampening in engineering because it doesn’t travel through space. But also vibrations aren’t dampened by gravity anymore. The whole feedback loop gets weird.”
“That sounds like what they would recommend, yes.”
Ugh. Why don’t they tell us more about the test if they need to fill quotas so badly!? Then again, I haven’t looked over any of the other files on my tablet, or any of the UNCLASS general information that Katie implied was available. I don’t really want to talk about it more until my briefing on Monday, so I have a better idea of what I’m expected to do in a week. A bloody week. I know a good chunk of info about the powerplants, how is Martin going to fare? That poor bastard might have just bet his future on a game he doesn’t know how to play.