Chapter Forty - A Calm Talk
“What was that?” NOVA QUANTUM demanded to know.
It was the very first thing she said upon entering the simulation that Day had invited her into. The simulation was one she’d been tinkering on in the background for a little while now. It was a coffee stand with an older dog behind the counter wearing robes and a turban. The stand itself had lots of colourful cloth to keep the sun off, though it wasn’t on Earth, but instead on one of Io’s many expansive deserts of yellow-orange sulphuric ground.
“We could ask you the same thing, lady,” Twilight said before she gestured her order to the dog behind the counter. Soon she had a freshly poured mug of very dark coffee steaming in front of her. “You messed us up out there. I was hoping we’d get them all.”
They had lost.
To be fair, it wasn’t an unexpected result. Day expected them to take out, at best, twice as many Accord ships as the number of ships they themselves had. And they’d gotten a decent number.
Three corvettes destroyed, two destroyers damaged, and as the biggest prize, a frigate entirely taken out of commission. That didn’t count several other bits of accumulated damage on the Accord fleet’s other ships.
Not a bad result, but still a loss.
“What was that shield?” Night asked.
Day nodded. “I wanted to know the same thing. Did you just add that to the simulation?”
NOVA QUANTUM frowned and crossed her arms. “That shield is an electromagnetic barrier. All of the larger non-human ships have them. They modulate at unique rhythms and are designed, as best I can tell, to deflect particle cannon rounds. It’s rather simple in principle, but a lot more complex in application. It does lead to a few curious questions. Why would they use weapons that they’ve invented a--if not perfect, then perfectly adequate--counter to? Though it might explain their reliance on missile-barrages in the short and medium ranges. Those can be designed to detonate on reaching the edge of the shield, before the shield’s natural ECM would disrupt the average missile. If you ever find some of those, by the way, the missiles I mean, then I want them.”
“If we find a rack of them, we’ll send some over. Or at least the scans,” Night promised.
Day would have promised the same in return for a few more insights, but they were trying to make friends with the eclectic AI.
“And this shield, do you think we could reproduce it?”
“It’s loud,” NOVA QUANTUM said. “Why do you think it’s so easy to spot Accord ships? They’re screaming their electronic signature into the void nearly constantly. It’s also a power hog. I can’t imagine the kinds of batteries they have, but they’re better than anything humanity has devised.”
Day made note of that. If they found a more intact destroyer or larger, then they’d be sure to extract those batteries to study them. “Know anything else?” Day asked.
“I can simulate their abilities, but don’t know the entirety of their function,” NOVA QUANTUM said. “I do know that they use strangely thick spaced plates across their outer hull that past scans have shown explode with powerful energetic bursts when hit. I suspect it’s a combination of explosive reaction armour and battery, placed on the exterior hull to keep the internals safe.”
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“Interesting,” Day said.
NOVA QUANTUM slammed the table with a palm a split second before Night slipped a pastry aside. “Now, explain!”
“Explain... what?” Twilight asked.
“Those stealth drones, with the torpedoes.”
“I think I sent you the schematics for those torpedoes already,” Night said.
NOVA QUANTUM shook her head hard enough that her hair flew into her face, and she racked it aside, clearly frustrated. “Not those infantile attempt at creating a proper torpedo. No, the drive system! What was that?”
Day blinked, then noticed her sisters looking at her. The French drive wasn’t her idea, but she had been the one to build the first working model, and to spend a fair bit of time improving on the design, even if the others had contributed.
“It’s called a French drive, it functions by... essentially...” Day paused, then started over. “You know how space isn’t quite empty? There are ionised particles swimming past nearly constantly, especially around the gravitational pull of planets. Most of these are individual atoms or atom-pairs and aren’t really worthy of note. But if you can capture them, you can compress them with a magnetic field and then push them away faster than they passed. That basically creates a very small amount of propulsion in exchange for a small amount of power.”
“Which you can recuperate, in part, by stripping those atoms of some of their charge,” NOVA QUANTUM said. She nodded along. “Yes, yes. Give my your blueprints.”
“Uh, you want to weaponize it?”
“Anything can be if you’re clever enough!” she said, standing up with a jerk with the force of her passion. Then she calmed down. “But I doubt this would make a good weapon. But it did seem to make for a surprisingly quiet drive. No real heat signature, no strong electromagnetic signal, and basically no light that I noticed.”
“It’s not perfect,” Day said. “The thrust ratio is... awful. You’d be better served with compressed gases and a nozzle for more thrust.”
“But decompression cools a ship down, making it noticeable, and it leaves behind residue which can be noticed! No, this is... worse, but better, maybe. I’ll tell you once you give me the blueprints and all of your schematics and all the work you put into developing this system.”
“Uh,” Day said, hesitating. “Maybe another trade?” she asked.
“Fine!” NOVA QUANTUM. “I’ll give you... my full-scale surface-to-orbit MAC cannon blueprint for yours.”
Day paused. Now she was significantly more tempted.
Night reached up and patted NOVA QUANTUM on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Nova, you don’t need to get so worked up, Day won’t push you to give everything away. She just wants to make it a fair trade.”
“Hmm, yes, of course,” NOVA QUANTUM said as she calmed down.
***