Chapter 59: Finding Hornet’s Nests to Poke with Sticks |
Deploying a nuclear warhead should not be this simple, Dere reflected as he helped Mimi leverage the third and final metal cylinder out through the cargo hatch, leaving it to drift away, then suddenly seem to zoom away, though in reality, that was actually just Atticus starting to accelerate away from the weapon, retreating to a safe distance.
Of course, the “real” safe distance was a hell of a lot shorter than one would have thought out here, due to a lack of atmosphere to carry a shockwave, and the radiation shielding built into the Dragonfly, but none of them actually felt comfortable sitting within a few kilometers of even a “weak” nuclear detonation, so distance it was.
Once back on the bridge, Derek sat in his chair while Mimi took a bit longer to settle in, mostly because she had to change a few settings on her console before it could connect to the weapons innocently drifting out there.
“Alright,” she announced, beaming, practically bouncing in her chair, far more exuberant than Derek thought he’d ever seen her. “Now, the first weapon is your basic nuclear warhead. Enriched Uranium, wrapped in a shell of chemical explosive, the latter adapted to work in the airless environment it is meant to operate in. The concept has been proven, if it fails, it’ll … it’ll be embarrassing.”
Mimi raised a single hand dramatically, index finger out, and stabbed the big red button on the side of the console with exaggerated slowness and unnecessary force and outside the Dragonfly, for a brief moment, a newborn sun bloomed, the explosion oddly spherical in the absence of gravity and air, eye-searingly bright if it hadn’t been for the screen automatically dialling down its luminosity.
Also …
“Those things couldn’t have gone off on the ship, right?” Atticus asked after a long moment.
“We might actually have survived if it had,” Mimi announced proudly. “But no, it couldn’t. Modern explosives are safe.”
“… Assuming they’re made well,” Derek pointed out. “But I don’t think we have to worry about that on this ship.”
Mimi briefly flashed him a small smile and an unspoken “thanks,” then turned back to her console.
“The next one is basically the same but magical. Instead of explosives to superheat and compress the fissionable material, I’ve created an enchantment to replicate the effect.”
Once again, Mimi mashed down the button with a massive grin on her face, and the second metal cylinder exploded. Just the cylinder, turning into a smear of radiation on the main viewscreen, quickly vanishing from the visible spectrum but nevertheless remaining highlighted as a potential navigation hazard.
After all, rather than being blown to atoms, as was wont to happen when a nuclear weapon exploded, it had been torn to pieces by the force of the “conventional” explosive that had been supposed to kickstart the nuclear chain reaction.
So when those had failed, the end result had instead been a “simple” dirty bomb, a regular explosive meant to spread radioactive material and irradiate the surroundings. Terrorist shit, basically.
Mimi hissed at the screen in annoyance.
“And the third one?” Derek asked after a long moment of silence.
“Needs some changes,” Mimi replied, getting out of her chair and heading towards the door, throwing a look back at them in the moment before it closed behind her. “If I get some help, this won’t take long.”
Derek blinked at the now-closed wall of metal for a long moment, then got up and hurried after her, catching up at the Dragonfly’s port airlock.
“It’s safe to bring aboard, right?” he asked. The idea of having an armed and potentially misfired nuclear warhead aboard their ship wasn’t exactly giving him the warm and fuzzies, after all.
“It’s not active,” Mimi explained. “I used the same trigger as on number 2, and I clearly made a mistake somewhere. So …”
She gestured at the outside door, then leaned over and punched the “cycle” button on the wall panel, closing the inside door and causing the air to start getting sucked back into the ship’s reserves.
While that went on, they each retrieved a pair of earbuds from next to the panel and put them in. They worked via bone induction, sending the vibrations along the skull to allow for the transmission of something they could “hear” in the absence of air to carry sound, while also scanning their mouths and throats to perceive what they would have said, had they been able to, and then sending that to any other earpieces in range.
The damn things were uncomfortable as hell, which was Derek typically preferred to use just use his phone, set to vibrate and kept in a pocket that was sufficiently close to his body that it wouldn’t float so far from him that he wouldn’t feel the vibration, but in a situation where constant conversations were likely to be required, these things were just too good to go without.
There were actually [Skills] for talking in a vacuum, but no one on the Dragonfly knew them; they tended to be surprisingly demanding in terms of at what Evolution they unlocked, and the only individual known to be able to teach them was the executive officer of the Flying Dutchman, and who the hell knew where that thing was?
… There was actually a pretty high chance Isaac did, Derek admitted. His brother seemed to have fingers in every pie, including several that the general public didn’t even know existed. But hunting down a legendary ghostship and begging to be taught it still felt like an exercise in futility.
“So, what do you need me to do?” Derek asked as they neared the nuke, Mimi flying on cold gas thrusters strapped to her wrists, retrieved from her storage ring, while he’d used the usual Tarzan method, albeit clambering along the underlying fabric of space-time rather than trees and vines.
“Just hold it steady,” she instructed, which he promptly did, grabbing ahold of the metal cylinder while simultaneously grasping the dimensional fabric that shared the same exact spot, making it the next best thing to immovable … at least unless something hit him hard enough to wreck his hands.
Mimi swiftly began to tear into the machine, sending metal pieces, some glowing with enchantments, flying, leaving Derek hoping that they wouldn’t wind up having to chase after them later, only to see that the bits were vanishing before they could get too far, drawn back into her storage.
Then, once a sphere of metal that set his teeth on edge the instant he recognized it as being made of enriched uranium, the fact that it was wrapped in radiation-blocking wards making it only slightly less nerve-wracking.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
Casting [Geiger Counter] to reassure himself that there was nothing leaking was nice, but the hurt look he got from Mimi when she noticed was decidedly not.
But she was almost done, wrapping what looked like a hell of a lot like a simple shell of plastique around the orb of fissionable material, then returning the assembly into the original container, taking up a surprisingly small portion of the whole.
Suddenly, Atticus’ voice came in over the radio.
“Hey, Mimi, what’s special about this one?”
“It’s a hydrogen bomb,” she mumbled, the tip of her tongue sticking out of the side of her mouth in concentration as she slid the final piece back into place. “Fission warhead goes off, unleashes a wave of heat and radiation, hits a supply of heavy hydrogen isotopes, puts them in a state where they can fuse the way they do in the heart of stars for a split-second, then, boom.”
Derek flinched. Holding onto one of those things was not a good feeling, even if it was literally as safe as it could possibly be.
“There, done,” Mimi announced. “Thank you.”
She kicked off the weapon, then briefly engaged the thrusters to hurl herself towards the open airlock, with Derek swiftly following and even overtaking her, waiting within the entrance, until they re-entered the bridge together a minute later.
“Alright, let’s hope this works,” he heard Mimi mutter, followed by Ye-in chiming in with an “I believe in you” before, once again, the button was pressed.
For a brief moment, nothing happened. Then an alarm began to blare for a brief instant as the newborn star outside blotted out everything else, Atticus reaching out for the mute button and missing, palm loudly slapping against the metal next to his console, his eyes too focused on the main viewscreen to locate his intended target.
Derek wound up doing it instead a second later, not by actually looking down, but rather using his [Aura] to locate the damn button, which was quite inconvenietly placed, deliberately so, to prevent it from being hit by accident.
Atticus sighed with relief as the noise cut out, while Ye-in rose from her seat to pat Mimi on her back.
“I just have one more question: how do you feel about building a couple of missiles to actually use?”
“Missiles are more than just a warhead. I can’t build those to a military standard. Or a workable one,” Mimi replied, matter-of-factly. “Also, we don’t have a way to launch them, even external, single-use racks would interfere with our other weapons.”
Also, waltzing back into an inhabited system carrying nukes would land them in a world of trouble.
“Hey, does anyone have a reason to not leave this star system?” Atticus interjected, calling over his shoulder.
When no one answered, he just shrugged.
“‘Kay, I’m putting us on the least-time course into somewhere we can warp out from.”
Which left Derek with the perfect opportunity to have a conversation he’d been both looking forward to and dreading.
He rose from his captain’s chair, hit the button to unfold the bridge’s central table, and sat back down at said table instead.
“Actually, there’s something we need to talk about,” he said, already cringing internally as he did so. It wasn’t quite as bad as “we need to talk,” but still uncomfortably close.
“I just got a new [Skill] for finding ‘adventure’ that I could use to navigate really well out here … but it’s also going to throw us straight into every lion’s den that comes across our path.”
“And?” Atticus asked, likewise having switched from the seat in front of the pilot’s console to one located at the table.
“And I think we should have a conversation before I drag us into situations I know are going to be crazy,” Derek replied flatly.
“I mean, let’s look at the options,” Ye-in suggested, ticking them off on her fingers one by one. “We could head away from Earth in the straightest line possible and hope we find something. We could also just throw a dart at the map. Or … or we could take full advantage of the fact that we have information about what’s going on out here, even though no one’s ever really explored.”
Mimi tapped her chin thoughtfully for a couple of seconds, then shrugged and jerked her thumb in Ye-in’s direction. “What she said.”
Then, it was Atticus’ turn again.
“Derek, I love ya’, but you’re a dumbass. We’re out here to do exciting stuff, and that’s where we’re going. If any of us thought you were being reckless, we’d make sure you knew, by giving you a swift kick up the arse if that’s what it takes. Or a cuff to the back of the head. Or …”
Ye-in lightly smacked the back of Atticus’ head.
“Why?” the young man sighed.
“Just felt like it,” she told him with a shrug. “Call it a proof of concept.”
“Heh,” Atticus let out a soft chuckle, which immediately set off Derek, then Mimi joined in, until they were all howling with laughter.
“So, captain, where are we going?” Atticus asked.
“That is a very good question,” Derek said. “Give me an hour?”
***
Sitting in his quarters, a holographic starmap hovering in front of him, [Call of Adventure] as active as it was ever going to get, was a surreal experience.
The scale was currently set to showing himself a sphere six hundred light-years in diameter, centered on Barcode. Anything within a month’s flight time certainly did feel like an appropriate category to search through. Though even that would have been an absurdly long list to dig through without [Skill]-based guidance, seeing as there were approximately a quarter of a million stars in that area.
A quarter million of the four hundred billion in the entire galaxy, which was, in turn, one of something like two trillion galaxies in the universe.
Once upon a time, Derek had heard that there were more stars in the sky than there were grains of sand on every beach of the Earth combined. Seeing just the tiny fraction of a fragment of an infinitessimal splinter of the entire universe, this populated … he wholeheartedly believed it.
Granted, some of those were highly unlikely to have habitable planets, or fully inhabited ones, for that matter, but most had at least the potential to be interesting.
“So, what do you have for me?” Derek muttered to himself as he leaned forward, staring at the pinpricks of light that covered the space before him so densely he could barely make out individual stars. Then, he dragged his hand through it.
The subtle stench of boredom that had seemed to waft up from entire sections of the display vanished, erased by his touch, as he swiped the stars away, quickly dimming the mess in the center of his room, until he was left several sizable clusters of stellar bodies, dispersed widely across the room.
Derek briefly turned around and began to type a few commands into the console, zooming in on each of the clusters in turn, letting him swipe away individual ones until he was left with just over a hundred that he was getting some vibes from.
Good, bad, everything in between, but mostly just “odd.”
This star seemed to have something he would find interesting, that one had potential for chaos, and over here, he might be able to figure out a mystery of some kind.
Oh, and there was a blue giant that would likely get them all stuck for a year while some kind of thing with scientific value was logged, understood, and finally applied, or something like that. Not very adventurous on the face of it, but there was probably a reason why the [Skill] highlighted it. Or so he hoped.
It was a strange thing, getting such informative “gut feelings.” Also, trusting his gut on such an abstract topic was going to take some getting used to.
Yet where should they …
Derek froze. There was something new here, now. Somewhere deeper into the hologram. He turned around, briefly, tapping a new control so that he would no longer blink stars out of existence upon contact, then went hunting.
He walked past the ones that had felt the most interesting.
All the lower-priority stars he’d pushed to the back vanished behind him.
The random clutter he hadn’t been able to bother deleting, so he’d left them behind the rest.
And then he stepped out the other side of the hologram, finding that, apparently, the most “adventurous” thing in the room was the tablet sitting on his bedside table, presently flashing with a “new message” alert.
Huh.
He picked it up, and unlocked the device, finding himself greeted not by a regular email or text message using the ship’s systems but something rather more official.
Apparently, the whole “sponsor people to head out to unexplored space” project had gathered enough information to send out an update, and, if [Call of Adventure] was to be believed, the greatest adventure he could possibly reach was to be found somewhere within.
Now, whatever could that be?