The Starholder didn’t go anywhere for a week. Anything organic on board had been consumed. The ship’s stores were completely empty of anything edible, hauled off to make more Brood, which had been birthed and then promptly put into hibernation in some skin-tingling sleep chambers, organic systems evolved out of the dead and their own waste taking over adaptive life support functions from the quiet technology they couldn’t manipulate without destroying all of them.
The intrusion of someone like Primus would indeed have been a dire enough situation for the power core to destabilize itself and blast itself apart, but the detonation would only have been a thousand miles across or so, not enough to threaten the planet below with more than an EMP... which would have been deadly enough in its own way, but it wouldn’t have burned away a hemisphere.
It took a solid week of sterilizing, burning, freezing, fixing, and rerouting or reattaching tons of cables that had been severed or eaten through to get the maintenance systems online, everything else secondary save freeing up the feeds from the Core itself.
The maintenance systems fixed themselves up first, then began to execute preprogrammed priorities in restoring the self-repair tech and going after the organic infection after the internal defenses were rebuilt and brought back online.
Yeah, that egg room full of partially-grown Brood was quite the horrid thing to see, and the assault on our noses was worse. In the end, Cyclops flamed the whole thing to ash, and vivus took it away.
So, it took two weeks to restore power to the whole ship, and to really start work on the major problems alongside the maintenance bots and nanotech.
There was indeed plenty of room to use as quarters, impromptu labs, and recreational areas. We had to bring in supplies through LaGrange Station. Ben and McCoy zipped out for a supply run, and not incidentally brought back Wrench and Doc Bronze in their own shuttle to look the whole thing over with great interest.
In the end, they agreed with the discoveries of the rest of us. The Xandaran technology was very high-end, high QL stuff, built on some paradigms we still didn’t know, but for its QL wasn’t very efficient. The main reason was that they generated so much bloody power that wasting it didn’t really hurt anything, so the tech was built more to withstand huge power surges than to really modulate and finely control the power they had.
They used field stress convergences for point defenses. Sure, it let them zap everything that passed the field, or fire point defenses from literally any point of the field around the ship, but bled massive amounts of power while it was active.
It didn’t stress the power core a whit. Even powering up the main gun wasn’t that big a load on the thing; it could recharge faster than it could cool down between shots.
What that meant to us was that it didn’t have enough things to spend juice on, and definitely didn’t have enough secondary and tertiary systems. Superconcentrating the stress field could actually generate secondary beams, but it also destabilized the field with the release, and it was impossible to do more than one such beam at a time, especially from the same set of field emitters. It was a lousy secondary battery.
I guess when you have a superhuman crew, you aren’t as inventive about the potential of your other weapons?
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Once the main drives were online, Ben and McCoy took the massive ship up and out of orbit, and over to LaGrange Station, parking it outside Wrench’s town-sized workshop.
LaGrange Station proper was often overshadowed by the ships that came to dock there. After all, it was made with Terran tech, and the massive amount of resources needed to make it a truly impressive interstellar station simply weren’t available to us.
Well, they hadn’t been, until the High Guard started really running into aliens, and millions of tons of shattered starships were scattered all over the place, just begging to be put to use.
Thus, the modern LaGrange Station was, to a great degree, synthesized out of the remains of invading starships. Sure, they didn’t paint over much of the metal, and you could easily identify Kree, Skrull, Aakon, Tzin, and Badoon hulls from the meshing job, among others.
LaGrange had expanded to great size with the additions over the decades, and if alien cruise liners and carriers coming in could still dwarf it, it had power outstripping its size, particularly when considering the High Guard who used it as their base of operations.
Wrench was already tearing up the Shi’ar cruiser and adding parts of it onto a different section of the station, and another power core never hurt anything on a non-mobile extraplanetary station.
Since they had a lot of Shi’ar battle lances just sitting around over there, Wrench was happy to help us install them, and the High Guard entertained themselves lifting hundreds of tons of Shi’ar tech off that cruiser and installing them onto the equally massive Starholder.
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The Starholder’s shields were already pretty good. We doubled up on ‘em for the heck of it. Plenty of room on the ship not being used, right?
Primus had followed the cloaked ship that had been following us out to a warp point, where it had jumped into hyperspace and he’d declined to follow it.
It was a bit harder to hide Starholder’s presence at LaGrange, with the cloaking field being extremely obvious at close range like that. Finding out what was being worked on would be rather hostile, and the only ones who needed to know what it was were the ones who already knew about it. Even if people peeked under the field, and I was absolutely certain a bunch of them did, they didn’t know exactly what the ship was or what we were doing to it.
In the meantime, Peggy Carter collected all the stories about the Brood that she could. She was not at all pleased to learn that elements of the species had made planetfall before, and the Eternals and mystics of the planet had been killing them off for literally millennia. There were plenty of extraterrestrial vids of them, too.
She was now putting a screenplay called The Brood together. It would take a while to get to the screen, but when it did, it would be lauded as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, spawning an entire new genre of modern horror... and the fact that it was actually real certainly didn’t hurt anything, if you were in the know.
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Given the size of the ship, Peggy actually brought in some SHIELD volunteers to run around and help us with stuff. They were all stoked about the chance to work on an actual starship and accompany us on the voyage home of the ship... and also maybe shoot some aliens on the way, once we told them what we were expecting.
I was not going to make redshirts out of the volunteers, so one of the things I was doing was playing around with some of the armory goodies, as well as the tech the Brood had left behind.
Among other things, that included Nova Core-punching weapons that could really do a number on their energy resistance and invulnerability, even mangling their armor a bunch, given what Centurion Rhey’s logs were showing us.
Rich, it turned out, wasn’t quite so vulnerable. The very non-standard empowering of his Nova Core had brought with it a whole bunch of exotic energies not normally included in Nova Core upgrades. It didn’t mean he could ignore the blasts, which were definitely playing havoc with his armor, and he couldn’t absorb them on the fly at all, but they couldn’t tear through him like they could a normal Corpsman.
As he wasn’t a techno and could just relay orders while Mentor did a lot of the heavy lifting, he took the opportunity to pull juice right out of the White Hole Core... and the systems of those Nova-killing weapons.
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“Rich, have a seat.” I gestured him down opposite me.
He had his helmet off, Mentor sitting on the chair upstairs helping run things.
“Shouldn’t that be Captain Ryder to you?” he smiled without force, setting his tray down on the other side of the table.
“Not right now.” He caught my serious eyes, and adjusted his response accordingly.
“What’s up, Dyna?” he asked softly, frowning.
“Do not take up the standard Nova Corps Core empowerment process,” I told him firmly.
He blinked at me, and how seriously I said that. To his credit, he didn’t respond immediately, thinking that over.
“Okay, you know their system is optimized to speed development with minimal pain.” I nodded at his slow words. “Is this some martial arts thing, more pain, more gain?”
“Yes and no. We already did the test. The Nova Corps has been using the same advancement paradigm for a very long time, and are so locked into it that someone has actually developed weapons to counter the particular blend of energies they use. They are pretty damn exotic, and not cheap to make or use, but they are Nova-killers. Your non-standard Nova Core is not as vulnerable, and if we stay off-paradigm, that should only increase.
“You need to keep your exposure broader and more intense. I already sent the data down to Fixer for your sessions on the bandwidths and energy types we’ll be exposing you to, and that’s going to include low-grade exposure to Nova-killer power cores.”
He winced despite himself. “Pain and gain. That’s gonna hurt like it did at the start, I bet...” he sighed, but there was no fear in his voice. He’d tolerated it once, he could do it again.
“The second thing is that it will make it nigh-impossible for them to completely remove your Nova Core.”
His brown eyes widened. “What?” he asked, barely keeping his voice down.
Jewel was getting her meal from the mess line, and I waved her over, always making it plain I wasn’t hitting on her man. She came over with a smile and sat down next to Rich, giving him a peck on the temple and bringing a smile to his face.
“We’re discussing a radical shift away from standard Nova Corps empowerment and why,” I told Jewel calmly. “First reason, Nova-killing weapons. Second reason, potential removal of his Nova Core by the Nova Corps.”
She gasped, her mashed potatoes halfway to her mouth. “What?” she blurted out, drawing attention from the rest of those eating lunch. I frowned, she got flustered. “Sorry. What?” she asked in a lower voice, staring.
I pointed at Rich. “I don’t have the whole history of the Corps, but I’m pretty damn sure that non-Xandaran members of their Nova Corps are fantastically rare. I know you were picked according to their standards, and by most measures you’ve done a fantastic job.
“But you have to realize that you are not wearing a superhero outfit, Richard. You are wearing the uniform of a soldier and law enforcement officer of an alien civilization. Your Nova Core and that uniform are tools and equipment given to those who agree to serve in that peacekeeping and fighting force for Xandar.
“Given the nobility and honor they’ve shown the whole galaxy, I find it difficult to believe you would be given a handshake, stripped of your Nova Core and uniform, and sent on your way with a reward of some kind... but it could happen.” Both of their faces twisted a moment, then Richard shook his head slowly.
“No, I don’t think they’d do that... but you’re right. I’m an alien wearing the uniform of their beloved Corps... and they do love their Nova Corps, Dyna. I’d also be the only alien, probably, in the whole Corps. I’d have quite a spotlight on me, wouldn’t I?”
“More to the point, do you want to serve a lifetime in an alien military force, literally half the galaxy away from home? Nova Corpsmen don’t retire, Richard. They live a damn long time if they can, but what happens to just about all of them?”
“They die in battle,” he confirmed softly, thinking about that.
Jewel leaned into him. “I’ll stay with you,” she said quietly. “Alien world, my aunt...” she made a juggling motion, and we all grinned wryly.