Hook had been correct, it had been surprisingly easy to move the bodies once I disabled the magnetic flooring. This of course lead to me also being in zero g, but thankfully this time inside the ship. I rather enjoyed it, and spent some time practicing moving... before I stooped to the grim task before me.
Bait's body was difficult in the extreme to move, not due to mass, but due to the fact that she was nearly bisected in half. Bits of her kept slipping out. I managed to get most of them into the medical bay, at which point I popped the helmet in my new mask and threw up. Considering I had not eaten in hours, little came up.
Afterwards, after rinsing my mouth and picking up some rations as my 'BLOOD GLUCOSE LEVELS WERE FALLING BELOW OPTIMAL PARAMATERS' according to my new HUD, I made my way outside the ship to one of the plasma shotgun PDT's, as that seemed like one of the simpler things to get running, and I was pretty sure Hook would not be too put out if I broke it so bad it needed to be scrapped. The suit I had used before still seemed usable, and the weird magnetic pseudo gravity worked both inside the ship and outside, allowing me to operate on the hull as if I was in gravity. Just in case I enabled the suits built in mag boots, which unfortunately slowed me to a crawl, as I began walking with meaty thumps, but made me feel better about sticking to the side of the ship.
The plasma shotgun turned out to be both be incredibly simple but also incredibly overbuilt.
In addition to the main plasma feed, which seemed to dump plasma directly from the ships plasma reactor into space in... less of a shotgun but more of a plasma plume? Like those flamethrowers you see in movies, that fire and impressive burst of fire but don't stick to anything. It also had something that looked like a revolving chamber, insulated with a magnetic bottle, that the plasma flowed into. From what I could tell of the schematics, when switched to 'combat mode' the shotgun would begin siphoning off drive plasma into these insulated chambers, which it could then draw on to either rapid fire the plasma plumes it used to intercept missiles and... well anything vulnerable to being scorched by excited gas the temperature of a stars corona, but it could even use this chamber to continue firing even if the main plasma feed was damaged, and could even maintain said chambers magnetic bottle with a battery pack attached.
“Hook, this plasma shotgun... thing, it seems like it was designed to take a monstrous amount of abuse and keep working. Why aren't the other PDT's like that? This feels like exactly what you want in a system designed to keep the ship intact.”I asked
“One, the guided plasma batteries are significantly more complicated and require a direct feed to the ships computer to maintain guidance, so installing redundancies in case that is severed would solve nothing.
Two, the guided plasma batteries use significantly more power for the guidance laser used to guide the self contained plasma projectile to target, and so the battery pack required to allow it to operate independently of the vessel would be far too large and resource intensive to be practical.
Three, the guided plasma PDT is significantly newer than the plasma shotgun PDT, and so has not been through as many design iterations. It is possible there are significant improvements that can be made.” Bait finished.
“Just how new is the guided plasma PDT system?”
“The first prototype was released to the public COGS networks just over a year ago.”
“That is pretty young. Hold old was the first plasma shotgun PDT.”
“... Three hundred years give or take.”
That made me pause.
“We're using three hundred year old technology?”
“It has of course been upgraded over the years. A good analogy would be the firearms of your 1800's vs the firearms of your time period.”
“But.. that is a lot of time for said technology to mature. I see now why they are so robust.”
“I believe they are too resource intensive for the proposed defensive value.”
“And yet they were the only point defense to survive and be fully operational.”
“Chance is always a factor.”
“Yeah I think I'd prefer the tried and true option when my life is on the line like this.”
“I suppose you do not have a backup available to be brought back online in the case of your death.” Bait said, a touch snidely, or so I imagined.
“Yeah.. Speaking of, How do they know to revive someone? Like Bait and Joe, they are dead, but it's not like anyone is going to know that until we bring them back so... When would they get revived.”
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“Well that would depend on if they are using the COG government to reinstantiate them, or a private facility. If it's the COG government the standard wait time is a month with no contact if the individual has not sent word they will be outside of COG space. If they have said they are leaving COG space it can be anywhere from 3 months to a year depending on specifics.”
“So we are outside COG space right?”
“Correct. Captain-Bait registered with COG that they were going somewhat outside of COG borders and so they set the time to reinstantiation at three months.”
“What happens if we take longer than three months to get back?”
“Then both Bait and Joe will be reinstantiated from their old data. The data from the stacks in your possession will be sent to them to integrate or archive as they wish but... most don't fully integrate the data. It is both painful and can be debilitating depending on how much time has passed between the backup and the most up to date information from the stack.”
“So if I take longer than that... They will not know me.”
“Not anymore than you would know someone from looking up a database entry on them. Admittedly, with COG implants you still get more information than just reading would give you, but no they will not remember the subjective experience of finding the ark, waking you up, finding out who you are, or fighting the ship alongside you.”
“And they probably would not be inclined to help me get in good with COG or whatnot either.”
“Probably not no.”
“So... three months from when they left COG space... how long ago was that.”
“Two months ago.”
I let out a long and exasperated sigh.
“So one month. We need to make it back to... Prime? In one month.”
“Technically we only need to make it back to a border system in time for a courier ship to make it to prime in one month... but yes, essentially.”
I let out a breathe of air, which only barely started to fog the helmet of the suit I was wearing. As the PDT was on the surface of the hull, so was I, which... should have scared me? I had not ever been in space before, but after nearly being thrown out and off the ship it really did not have much of an effect. Pretty though.
Distracted from the looming deadline, which if I missed meant I would be stranded in a strange land, in a strange time, with no allies, and that I would likely have to fight through a mountain of paperwork to get ANYTHING, all on my own... I just looked at the stars.
“Pretty” I said, as I focused on wispy traces of nebulae floating around us. The area the Svalbard had come to rest in was some kind of nebulae, lousy with em radiation that made long range scans within it virtually impossible. Little streamers of lightning arced between the gas an bits of debris that floated, discharging static electricity that built up by the passage of anything within.
“Hook, where is earth?”
Hook highlighted a small portion of the sky in my helmet, and I zoomed in, finding a faint star in the target area.
“Hard to believe we came all this way.”
“Your people were hard pressed, but they made it.”
“Do you not consider yourself one of 'our people' Hook?”
“I am not sapient enough to consider such things Captain Cofey.”
I snorted.
“Sure you aren't.
I looked back to the plasma shotgun. The actual turret was about my height and two times as wide as I was laying down, 12 feet wide. the lions share of the height was actually a dome that seemed to house a massive amount of sensor equipment, and the bottom third, which was where all the functional components of the plasma shotgun were, was in fact shaped like a semispherical protrusion from the hull, like a blister. This open mouth of the shotgun, which didn't seem to protrude out at all from the sphere, could rotate under the sensor tower in any direction extremely rapidly.
“You know, when I thought plasma shotgun I honestly thought of some kind of barrel arrangement, but this looks like something out of star trek, no real visible barrel, just a hole the plasma fires out of.”
“As the plasma shotgun's job is to cover as large an area as possible with as high a concentration of high energy plasma as it can, no barrel was needed. It also allows for faster retargeting with less mass further out from the pivot point.”
I nodded, finally ducking my head down and going back to work, my break over and the worrying thoughts about my situation soothed for the moment.”