Quote:
sachmo said:
Well, while waiting for inspiration as to the identity of the rescuers, you have a whole lot to fill in with the crew trying to save the ship. You've left yourself many trails to follow.
My initial thought as to the rescue would be an enemy force, taking the crippled hulk back to base for study and analysis.
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Speaking of which, here's the crew trying to save the ship. Regarding my above post, I've got the plot lines figured out for whether they're rescued by fellow humans or the Ancients. An enemy force isn't an option since they wouldn't even consider anything other than annihilating an enemy cripple. Not friendly folks, these fellas.
Anyway, the way I've got it figured, if they Ancients save them, you're looking at a quick end to the story with a marvelous battle near the end, but if fellow humans save them, you're looking at a longer story with a massive fleet engagement at the end. Any preferences?
Oh, and Starhawk, if you could add to that list of Navy ranks by including Army and Air Force, that'd really help me out with the upcomming scenes...
Seamus Aolo slowed his stride, then stopped as he passed in front of one of the security fields, and gazed out at the twisted ruin that had once been the aft section of a mighty warship. The ship’s entire drive assembly was simply gone, blown apart by inconceivable force. The engineering section too, had been completely obliterated. Aolo’s lower lip quivered at that thought, and he move his eyes swiftly away from that achingly large hole in space. The entire reactor unit was gone, too, and he marvelled at how they’d survived its destruction. Nothing less than a miracle from a doomed engineering department, he supposed. Finally, the ship began to have form again, just aft of the secondary magazines, which had been emptied during the battle. Support girders and hull plating were twisted grotesquely out of shape by the force of the bLast, but slowly, as he moved his eyes along, Aolo began to make out the true lines of the once proud warship. Eventually, her armoured hull regained it’s shape although it was a good hundred meters before she was anything but empty shell, everything that once occupied that space had been vaporized by the bLast.
As he turned to continue on his way, Aolo caught sight of a familiar shape heading towards him. With a most undignified whoop, he raced towards her, caught her in his arms and spun her around. The young spaceman twisted in his fierce grasp, exclaiming, “Sir!” several times before switching tasks and muttering a half-contemptuous, “Dad.”
With that, Aolo released his only daughter and took a dignified step back.
“I thought I’d lost you,” he said softly. “When they said aft section had blown…”
Crishyen Aolo shook her head. “Lieutenant Edwards had sent me and Spaceman Ford up to the EVA bay so we could have a look at that missile as soon as we-”
“Missile?” Aolo interrupted. “What missile?”
“Haven’t you been briefed,” the younger Aolo enquired.
“No.”
“You should have been briefed,” she informed him disapprovingly. “Why weren’t you briefed?”
“I’m on my way now.”
“Then go!” she said, giving him a good-natured shove on his way. “Honestly! Senility is a terrible thing.”
Aolo chuckled heartily as he jogged away, but the smile soon left his face as he thought of the conversation he would soon be having with his daughter. She couldn’t have known of Marie Kellet’s death, or her face wouldn’t have shown such exuberant joy at being alive. His own faced lacked it utterly, he knew, but his daughter quite likely chalked it up to the burden of command. Still, he knew in his heart that it wasn’t likely his daughter would be able to summon much grief for a woman she had never met. Crishyen’s mother had been killed in an ambush a year after giving birth, leaving Crishyen’s to be raised by her father, then her grandmother, when Seamus Aolo had been called back to active duty.
Aolo’s musings were interrupted as he arrived in the briefing room and took his seat beside Kellet. Also at the table was Ramsey, now a lieutenant and Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Murphy the comm. officer who was sitting in for Tactical as well, since Jansen had taken a rather sizeable piece of shrapnel to the cranium, and Ensign Andrews, sitting in for one Commander Sarah Matthews. Aolo glanced from Andrews to Kellet and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. Kellet shrugged slightly, indicating he didn’t know, or didn’t want to think about it. Or both.
“Well,” Kellet said wearily. “What do we know? Engineering?”
“I’ve accessed Lieutenant Edwards’ logs, as well as the sensor data from the battle, and I know what happened now,” Ramsey began. He laid his data pad on the table and tapped a button. A still frame shot taken from one of the Ardent’s external camera arrays sprang into existence. The three-dimensional hologram ensured that everyone at the table was able to see the same thing.
“This is ten seconds after we were rammed,” he informed them. As he spoke, he tapped his pad again and the image began to creep forward slowly. Those seated at the table could make out point-defence fire as it leapt from the Ardent’s guns and tore into enemy missiles. The entire viewing area was alive with flowering explosions as missiles detonated in slow motion.
“Keep an eye on this one here,” said Ramsey, pointing out one heavy missile. “Now, it’s coming in on a normal approach vector, heading right for the hole in our shields, just like any good missile will do, and watch… right… there!” A point defence round glanced off the missile, deflecting its course to almost parallel the Ardent’s.
“When it took that hit, it was already inside our shields,” the engineer explained. “So it travelled along the length of the ship, all the way down, until it found somewhere convenient to hide, namely the gap between Engine’s One and Two.” As he completed his sentence, the display showed the huge missile slam into the superdreadnought’s main drive assembly. Aolo and Kellet flinched unconsciously, expecting an eye-searing explosion that never came.
“And that,” continued Ramsey. “Was not only the cause of the explosion, but also caused the damage that caused the drive instability. From Lieutenant Edward’s logs, it seems he had a crew standing by to go EVA as soon as we dropped out of hyperspace, since obviously the hyperspace eddies would have made such an operation impossible while we were in transit. But what really saved us was that he also neutralized the anti-matter in the reactor as soon as we jumped in. Saved us all.”
“Pardon, Lieutenant,” Kellet interjected. “What exactly do you mean neutralized the anti-matter.”
“Well, sir, as you know, most of the fleet is powered by fission reactors because the Bureau of Ship Design determined, quite rightly, that anti-matter was a bit too volatile to use in a warship. Blow your fission reactor and you’ll lose your ship, blow an AM reactor and you’ll take out a sizeable portion of the fleet around you too. However, a couple years ago, some of the R&D boys came up with something they called Differential State Anti-Matter. Basically, this stuff behaves like anti-matter most of the time, but when subjected to a certain type of quantum field, it becomes inert, no more volatile than a piece of ceramopLast. Any fissure in the reactor’s primary casing causes this quantum field to activate, making a catastrophic reactor breach virtually impossible.”
“So regardless, that missile wasn’t going to do any more damage than it did?” Kellet asked.
“Well, no,” Ramsey admitted ruefully. “See, the quantum field generator was actually located just under where the missile impacted, so it would have been destroyed a fraction of a second before the reactor had breached, so if Edwards hadn’t activated it already…”
“Hmm…” Kellet made a mental note to send a recommendation to the BSD to have that quantum field generator device moved to a safer location. “Now, what can we do about repair?”
Ramsey let out a short, hysterical laugh before catching a hold of himself and continuing on with the slightest look of apology. “Pretty much nothing, sir,” he admitted. “Most of the spare parts stored in or around the engineering section, which means they’re space debris now, and even if the guys in the Forge were able to come up with replacement parts, we’ve got nothing to attach them to. All the supporting structure is gone, all the linkages, power couplings, wiring…”
“And if we had the Forge jury rig something to attach the drives to, how long would that take?”
“To rig up a support truss, power couplings, and drive mountings, not to mention the drives themselves and a new hyperdrive?” Ramsey exhaled thoughtfully as he ran the calculations through his head. “Well, with the tools they’ve got, and if we had enough raw material, which we could get from the planets in this system… You’d be looking at three years, minimum.” He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, sir, but the Forge just wasn’t designed with this kind of reconstruction in mind. Biggest thing their equipped to replace is one of the primary guns, and that’s about half the size and hundreds of times less complex than a drive field generator.”
“Very well,” Kellet said reluctantly. “What’s our supply situation looking like?”
“Considering how long we’d need it to hold out to get the ship repaired?” Lieutenant Murphy asked rhetorically. “Lousy. We’ve got just about a year at normal rations. Even if we cut it to half-rations we wouldn’t be fixed up in time. And if we cut it to quarter-rations-”
“We’d have starved before we got the ship Online,” Ramsey finished for her.
Re: OT: War to End All Worlds
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