Chapter Forty-Three - Buying the Gate to Nowhere

"Strange earth movement? Nah man, you don't gotta worry. Yellowstone won't blow."

--Yellowstone Park Ranger, 2024

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New Point Total: 21,124

I sucked in a breath as I saw that number. It was... lower than I'd like it to be. I mean, I still had a fuckload of points, I couldn't complain, but a big part of me really hated spending money and points or whatever. It felt wrong to spend anything like that on stuff that wasn't immediately necessary.

... Fuck, I really wasn't a good capitalist, was I? I was sure there were like, therapies or something offered to help people become more used to spending what they had. Not that I really cared to go through that kind of shit.

"Careful. Careful, dammit," Major Tinwhistle snapped.

The thing I'd bought was being winched up by a crane that looked like it was three sizes bigger than what was necessary. It was the portal component of the railgun, a large boxy device with several attachments on the sides and a complex layered set of heatsinks on the back.

The business-end, which faced the inside of the railgun's barrel, was a large circular disk, slightly concave and very reflective. There wasn't a portal on it yet. Myalis said that portals weren't energy efficient at the best of times, so this one would act like something of a camera aperture. It would flick open and close the moment the projectile was to pass.

The heatsinks and shit were to regulate the temperature. Both from the projectile, which was passing real close, and from the shift caused by both the portal itself and the vacuum of space doing space vacuum shit.

"Careful," Major Tinwhistle said.

She'd been spending most of her time this last day or so in the command tents and structure. But this bit was important enough that she was out here herself. I think it was to make sure that her engineers knew that any fuckups would be done right in front of their boss.

Their boss who had a short staff, like a small batton riot cops used. She was using it to point to things, but it looked like it wouldn't take much effort for that bat to be turned into some good old-fashioned encouragement for anyone that fucked up. I was sure that if she caught someone fooling around, that person would be earning themselves some bruising. Tinwhistle was a tight bundle of nerves at the moment.

"She's tense," I muttered to the samurai nearest to me. That meant Princess, Knight, Hedgehog, and Gomorrah.

"That component is one of the most important parts of this project," Gomorrah said without looking up from a tablet. "It's valuable."

"Yeah, ten-thousand points valuable," I said.

She glanced up. "I meant credit-wise," she said.

"How much could it be worth?" I asked.

Princess hummed. "It's a portal to space, but like, it's still a portal. We don't have commercial portal technology, right?"

"Not as far as I know," Knight said. "She's right. Give a logistics corporation a portal like this and they'll be making billions from it by the end of the month. If they can reverse engineer it and build their own, then that's hundreds of billions of credits. Trillions, even."

"Wait, what?" I asked.

Gomorrah glanced up. "One of the major production bottlenecks is transportation logistics," she said. "Portal technology would neatly side-step that. Trillions is probably an understatement."

"Oh... why the fuck hasn't a samurai sold this then?" Sure, it was expensive as fuck. I could have bought another mech for the same price, but still....

If I may... the main reason is that human technology is still several centuries away from being able to create even the simplest of portals like this one. Not only does humanity's grasp of mathematics and physics need to improve by several orders of magnitude, humanity at the moment currently lacks the sciences required to build the devices that are required to build the devices that you would need to build the simplest of parts required on a functional portal.

"We'll get there," Gomorrah said. So I assumed that Myalis was sending that to everyone.

Kinda weird, actually. Myalis liked to get in on the conversation whereas I hadn't heard a word from Princess' AI and Atyacus, Gomorrah's AI, was pretty darned reserved at the best of times.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

We paused our discussion as the portal was lowered into place. There were about six times more engineers stopping to stare than was necessary, but I didn't blame them. This wasn't the last step in creating the Big Gun, but it was the last important one.

All that would remain after this was replacing some of the top plating over the end section of the gun and piping in some things.

There were three large cistern container things being installed already. Huge off-white cylinders wide enough to park a semi-trailer in the centre with room to spare. They were going to hold the water for the cooling system, because apparently railguns ran hot.

I was pretty sure they weren't done piping those in, and the tanks weren't filled up yet. Even now a truck pulling a massive chrome trailer was being connected to fill up one of the cylinders with deionized water.

The pipework looked good, though. Tinwhistle's engineers were doing the whole colour-coded pipe thing, and while it looked like overcomplicated spaghetti, it was well-organised overcomplicated spaghetti. Shit looked professional, which was how anyone sane would want things to look around a gun this big.

The portal clunked into place, and four guys climbed down with wrenches and huge bolts to pin it in place while others undid the chains from the crane.

Tinwhistle stared for a moment longer, then nodded and made her way over to us. "It's going well," she said. "We should have everything in place and ready to go within the next three hours."

"Are we on schedule, then?" I asked.

"God no," she said. "Water deliveries will be stretched out another three days. We haven't even started doing all of the checks that I want to. I won't be willing to put my seal on this project for another week, at least."

"You know we'll all be dead by then, yeah?" I asked.

She shrugged. "That's why, on paper, every shot you take between now and then is a calibration shot or a system test. As far as the engineering board is concerned, this project will only be ready to go long after it's either accomplished its job or we're all dead."

"Cool," I said with a nod. That made plenty of sense to me. There had to be ways to get around stupid paperwork-based restrictions. "Is the lack of water going to be a problem?"

She shook her head. "I looked at the amount of cooling we needed to be barely functional, then multiplied it tenfold, then I did it again, because it's one of the easier areas to have redundancies in."

"Oh," I said. "Isn't that overengineering?"

She stared at me. "Yes. And?"

"Uh. Okay."

"Look, this is a big deal for my career," the Major said. "I'm not going to have it fuck up because we cut corners. Anything that can have redundancies will have redundancies. Those redundancies will have redundancies of their own. The first thing to fuck up will be investigated and those responsible will be taken out back and shot. And because we're working with redundancies, they'll be shot a second time to be sure."

"Alright, I get it," I said as I raised my arms in surrender. Chick was nuts. I didn't know if it was an engineering thing or not, but I wasn't sure I wanted to find out. "So, how soon can we shoot?"

The major looked at her tablet. "Three hours. Give us five, to be sure. Since this is a railgun, we'll be doing a dryfire test first to see if all the capacitors are working as they should. I don't expect any actual issues there. They're all ET-tech and that shit has QC like nothing made on Earth."

"ET-tech?" I asked.

"Extra-terrestrial."

"Ah." She meant protector-grade shit, which... yeah, I'd never heard of anything samurai purchased breaking because of poor quality. "Well okay then. I guess we'll go watch our German pals for a bit, then come back and check up on you. Let us know as soon as the gun's ready to fire."

"That I can do," she said with a serious nod. "This... this is going to look so good on my record."

I bet it would, but I wasn't sure I wanted to be around the engineer. I might knock something over, and then she'd wail at me with that stick of hers.

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