DISEMBARKATION
Alexander and Fae*Dra emerged from a conveyance tube and entered the hangar in the Ronin’s flagship carrier. They stared thoughtfully at The Red Destiny as engineering bots scurried around making adjustments and final touches for flight readiness. Alexander was decked head to toe in red battle armor and wore a short cape that was dark red on the outside contrasted by a brighter red on the interior side. The cape was merely for show. Red was Alexander’s color and the enemy knew that any red battle piece was in some way directly associated with Alexander Holmes. Beside Alexander stood Fae*Dra clad in black armor. She also starred forward at the commotion surrounding The Red Destiny and seemed to be in a trance. Fae*Dra was the pilot of The Red Destiny and an Androsynth.
Alexander gave a protected glance toward Fae*Dra. She was his most important strategic asset and his new best friend. The second strategic asset and previous best friend was currently being arrested and humiliated by Mudd. Alexander activated a vid feed and saw Pete being dragged into Mudd’s flagship under protection of guard with Mudd making a great show of how the Ronin’s fleet Tactical Engineering team was now impotent. There seemed to be a little acid in the presentation because of the public knowledge that Pete and Alexander were best of friends (were best friends, but the public didn’t know much about Fae*Dra). Alexander turned off the vid feed angrily. “Just wait Pete. I will not forget you”
The flotilla conveyance delivered a massive apparatus to the hangar. It was a large unwieldy glob of technology that seemed shoddily put together. Pipes, drooping cables and various components ran all over its exterior like ill-considered greeble. It seemed to have two large main components that shared all kinds of temporary interconnections.
The Engineering bots tending to the Red Destiny shuffled into an orderly formation greeting the apparatus like a guest of honor. The apparatus came to a rest beside The Red Destiny.
A large panel that covered the bulk of the center portion of the Red Destiny was detached by a few quick moving bots and a giant mechanical arm that was a permanent fixture of the hanger lifted the panel away from the workspace. The fresh opening revealed a large cavity right where one would expect to see a main component.
Bots rapidly swarmed over the apparatus detaching pipes and cables. After a good deal of loose parts had been removed one of the larger components began to open like a clam-shell to reveal the payload: It was the core reactor for the Red Destiny. Unlike the apparatus which seemed in every way to be temporary and hastily built, the core was very clean looking with very few fiddly bits adorning its exterior. It looked as if it had been solidly engineered to the highest degree. The apparatus had supplied the core with all the plumbing required to operate as if it was in an actual ship. It also fed the core its ignition energy building to a point where the reactor could sustain itself. The core seemed to hum with power even though it was at that time operating at a mere fraction of its total capable output.
More bots joined the effort and began transferring connections from the apparatus to the internals of The Red Destiny. And then a large fixed robot arm lowered the fresh core into the ship. The Bots bolted the reactor in place. Finally, the panel was reattached completing The Red Destiny’s maintenance. The Red Destiny came to life now that power was flowing through it. All over the ship various lights activated and actuation surfaces started going through range-of-motion diagnostics.
Fae*Dra seemed to spring to life too. A focused posture rippled through her body. It was not a coincidence–her mind was directly linked to The Red Destiny and a tremendous flow of telemetry was now being exchanged.
"Asymptote in 2 hours then 5 minutes till critical", She said. Alexander glanced as if to say "message received."
They approached the ship which was suspended several meters above their heads. The ventral portal opened and a light from the ship pulled them up into the air and into the ship.
The Red Destiny was a Companion class ship. The Companion class was designed by the Ronin engineering team with technology that had no rival in the entire human fleet. Its role was penetration of enemy lines by virtue of superior agility and sheering attacks in order to deliver a main cannon blast right where the opposition was most vulnerable.
The two assumed their positions in the cramped bridge of The Red Destiny. They were the only ones to board this time.
Fae*Dra sat in a chair positioned towards the forward area of the bridge where two pilots normally sat. The unique configuration of the Red Destiny had only one piloting station centered along the width of the ship. Fae*Dra’s custom setup featured an uncharacteristically minimalist console.
Alexander took the captain’s chair directly behind Fae*Dra yet elevated a bit. The entire floor of the bridge was raked at a minor angle in order to give aftward crew positions a view that wasn’t partially blocked by their more forwardly located colleagues. Four additional stations flanked the captain’s center aisle with consoles that surrounded the occupants almost completely–for this mission those stations would be unmanned.
The Bridge was enveloped in a holo projecting screen that conformed to the walls and ceiling and in some cases the floor. When the ship was underway the holo-projector screen provided total situational immersion – it was as if the majority of the bridge’s surfaces was completely invisible giving the occupants a 360 degree situational view.
The vessel gave off a growing symphony of unique hums as Fae*Dra began to supply power to various ship systems. Several systems produced a sort of wind up sound as they drew increasing amounts of power; finally reaching a stable hum when operational parameters were achieved.
The reactor’s power output was quite lean at the moment which necessitated Fae*Dra to adopt an extremely strategic boot up procedure favoring only the essential components needed at the moment and supplying those components with just enough power for them to be to initialize.
A Companion class ship was typically fitted with a Fusion Core Reactor and sometimes a more powerful Anti-Matter Core reactor… but this time The Red Destiny’s source was something that had never been attempted before in such a small ship – A Tzo Crystal reactor core.
Unknown to the Alliance Alexander had acquired a Tzo crystal. It was small – about the size of a grain of sand – and it had an imperfect yellow coloring. It was a wimp compared to the Tzo crystals in the Arks which were about 4-6 Carrots in size.
Although the Ronin engineers had worked towards creating a fold drive for The Red Destiny they fell short of the goal and landed upon a simpler core reactor solution for the interim.
A Tzo crystal can be coaxed into accessing a second dimension where the laws of physics differed from our own. In this second dimension vacuums produced energy instead of stars. A Tzo crystal could pull the natural abundant energy through a portal. The portal apertures for our dimension and the second dimension did not have to be the same size. The reactor worked by creating a tiny aperture in our dimension while expanding the aperture of the energy universe dimension to many hundreds of thousands of kilometers in order to harvest the dilute power produced by the vacuum. The energy would concentrate as it traveled through a narrowing portal and exit into the reactor chamber via the microscopic aperture that existed in our dimension.
The majority of the power outflow was used to grow the second aperture increasing the total reactor yield. The second-largest quantity of power was consumed by the core’s containment mechanism which basically prevented the reactor from exploding. A small fraction of the total power energized the main bus which fed various components throughout the ship.
The core’s output would grow to an over-abundance of available energy in the next half hour. Alexander meant to deliberately push the Tzo Crystal reaction to “The Asymptote” – which was the point at which the power would scale at an exponential rate. Once the Asymptote is reached the core cannot be shut down. From that moment the core containment mechanisms will have five minutes before they are overwhelmed resulting in a catastrophic explosion that would consume the ship and anything else within five-thousand kilometers… that is unless the reactor core could be vented in some way.
Alexander carefully observed a news feed that was playing on one of his screens. The feed played background video of Pete exiting his ship in the hangar of Mudd’s flagship while some talking pundits effortlessly came to agreement that the Ronin fleet was more or less impotent now that it was stripped of its Chief Tactical Engineer.
“Ready, Fae?” Alexander asked.
“Affirm, Alex!”, Fae responded.
Alexander hit a switch that opened a Ronin communication channel. Several holographic images appeared suddenly in front of him including the visage of Slyther. “Commence.” Alexander said and a chorus of “Rogers” rang out from the virtual gathering. He turned the channel off and the holographic personages faded away.
The hangar hatch started to open exposing its contents to the vacuum of space.
“Disembark.” Alexander commanded.
“Roger, Dis-bark.” responded Fae while simultaneously putting the ship into a gentle motion exiting the hangar.
Alexander activated a political feed. Vid screens everywhere there were humans broadcasting the impending unification. Pundits showered Admiral Mudd and Politicians alike with unanimous praise and relished Alexander’s satisfying downfall. Alexander snickered.
Ronin escorts began to join The Red Destiny in its procession to Mudd’s flagship.
Alexander switched on the comm channel, "Fly more like it's a funeral dirge." Fae fluttered and The Red Destiny suddenly lost its confidence.
"How fly a dirge?" Fae panicked.
"Yikes! Not you, Fae." The ship and pilot's confidence was restored.
The Red Destiny was a companion class fighter. Companion class had three stand out features: unrivaled agility, razon shields that could pierce through the toughest of materials and a main beam cannon that was exceptionally powerful for the size of the ship. Outmaneuvering the enemy, slicing through his defences and dealing a deathblow to his vulnerable spot was the role that made the companion class a winner in astro battle.
Superior Agility was achieved via the Exceed engine which allowed the ship to temporarily break the laws of physics. It allowed near instant displacement of a short distance with no apparent acceleration or deceleration. The exceed engine aboard the Companion's had a maximum range of 500 meters, it could be used several times a second though the engine had an overall constraint that was a complicated product of jump size and frequency over time.
One other weakness: a ship that was using exceed could not come into contact with any matter or energy during its short journey. If it did so the exceed jump would be cancelled and the object would return to its previous velocity most likely destroying it in the process.
The genius of the companion class was in its innovative use of a single reactor that produced energy directly compatible with the main engines and cannon. Predecessors required a conversion matrix for one or both resulting in considerable loss of efficiency.
The design choice to link the main cannon and propulsion was also the companion’s greatest weakness: For every drop of power that was supplied to the cannon, the propulsion would be underpowered proportionally and vice versa.
The Companion class sported a sleek design. It was actually aerodynamic and capable of flight through atmospheres. The forward portion housed the bridge and flared like a spearhead. A long neck connected the forward bridge to the main body of the ship. The Base flared into modestly protruding diamond shaped winglets. The propulsion mechanism consisted of one large main thruster sandwiched by four auxiliary thrusters each about one fourth the size of the main thruster. The neck housed the cannon barrel enclosed inside the hull. Before firing the cannon, the hull plating of the neck and parts of the bridge would separate along a ventral seam and the cannon would be lowered beneath the bridge.
The Ronin fleet contained no more than twelve companion class ships in its retinue. They were especially expensive to produce due to the exotic materials and layered construction required to support the exceed engine the razon shield and the main cannon.
Alexander spared no expense in the construction, maintenance and modernization of The Red Destiny. Support staff joked that every molecule of the ship was slightly better and more expensive than the companion ships of the rank and file.
The small Ronin detachment chugged along as if in morbid resignation.
The power of the Tzo Crystal doubled again.
"Asymptote in 2 hours", Fae*Dra updated.