Star Force: Resolution (SF89) (Star Force Origin Series) Read online

  Working off of past mistakes and charting what part of the reactions were predictable, Tennisonne tried yet another approach in order to isolate what would and wouldn’t work, but this time the collisions of 13 solari and three other exotic particles were holding together. In the past when the bombardment saturation escalated beyond short chain reactions there was randomized bleed over that interfered rather than enabled the full process to take shape and really amp up the power generation. The weaker reactions were capable of producing power beyond what Star Force was currently capable of yielding, but they were just tantalizing distractions while the real prize lay so close before them.

  Tennisonne hadn’t taken the bait and kept his research on track for the big toys as far as power generation was concerned. The V’kit’no’sat had many methods, and collection and storage was not what he was going for here. He needed a reactor to provide continuous power that could then be stored for release later, much like the jumpships did to charge their drives to get enough push off of stars to attain the speeds necessary for decent interstellar travel. If one went off of reactor power alone they’d be limping along because reactors just couldn’t put out the juice necessary to achieve a standard jump in the short timespan they had before diminishing gravity made the endeavor useless.

  The reaction before him was extremely complicated, but to sum it up it was a ‘Mouse Trap’ series of very small interactions between subatomic particles whose end result basically bled them of all potential energy like a person taking a wet sponge and squeezing hard, then taking that sponge and throwing it into a compactor to get every last drop out. The resultant waste material was useless, power wise, and so inert that it bonded easily to other particles rather than fighting with them for dominance in the invisible subatomic realm.

  That waste material was corovon, which was a very valuable substance that Star Force mined with an aggressive appetite, but for this reactor that was just the icing on the cake. It was the sheer power production potential that was key here, and in order to attain a full reaction and start having the reactor puffing out corovon dust, Tennisonne had to get his tiny bouncing particles choreographed just right.

  Today was the day he accidentally stumbled onto the solution…or rather a solution. It was crude but functional, and that was all he was going for in this prototype. The reactor surged up to 21 terawatts for a brief .372 seconds then fell off again, with Tennisonne immediately reviewing what alterations he’d made to trigger it and trying to guess as to how all the subatomic particles were bouncing around, for with such things they were too small to fully track. A lot of imagination and guess work were needed in experimentation like this, equivalent to someone on the other side of a wall with vision of the subject matter answering his questions with only a ‘yes’ or a ‘no.’

  Even when he succeeded Tennisonne could only guess as to why, but so long as the machine worked he had something. In the past, sometimes his successes weren’t for the reasons he thought and that stalled further progress, forcing him to go back and try to find a way around his theoretical dead end, but for today he had a solution that gave him a hugely oversized Nash’ti reactor that was producing power at rate far superior to anything Star Force had in production at present.

  The next step was to repeat his good fortune, and within a few hours he had a good grip on the basics of a new idea as to what was happening and got the machine into alignment again and held it for six hours straight before manually shutting it down.

  This was working, meaning they’d finally done it. Now was time to kick back, turn this over to the lesser techs for analysis, and take a few days off to clear his head and get back into theoretical mode. As reports would flow into him he’d digest the little bits of data they provided, hopefully gaining a few more insights as he sought a way to build the same reactor in a smaller form…then a smaller one, and smaller and smaller until it was actually useable.

  And to do that he was going to have to truly master this complex reaction. Right now he was just beginning to learn, and there was no one else to turn this over to. He was the trailblazer amongst the experimental physics teams, and while he could let the others do a lot of the analysis work that now had to be done, no one else had the knowledge and experience to be able to brainstorm into the unknown…at least not as fast as he did. And even though they had V’kit’no’sat blueprints for everything, they were constructed in a way that assumed prior knowledge and Tennisonne had learned that he had to ignore them a lot of the time and build his equipment his way.

  And that’s what this monstrosity was. It didn’t even look like a V’kit’no’sat design, for it wasn’t, but that wasn’t to say their blueprints hadn’t been crucial in teaching him what he needed to know, even if they were extremely and frustratingly vague in some respects.

  As he logged today’s results he sent a message off to Davis concerning the breakthrough then checked himself out of techland to give his head a chance to recover from the semi-brain fried state he usually operated in. They’d made the next step, a big one, but to continue on he was going to need all the inspiration and ingenuity he had…and that meant getting some rest and resetting.

  Davis was in his office when Tennisonne’s message came in. He had a priority router on everything that came from the Master Tech and read it immediately, understanding the gravity in the very prim and succinct message.

  Star Force now had a Nash’ti reactor.

  He stood up from his desk and began to pace the perimeter of his office as the evening light was just beginning to dim in the west. This breakthrough wasn’t useable yet other than in large constructs or on the surface, but he knew that Tennisonne would be able to refine and miniaturize it given time, as he always did. That didn’t concern him, though he knew he couldn’t expect any timetable in such work.

  But Star Force now had the capability, even in prototype stage, and that was monumental. A few weapon systems, the comm equipment, and some lesser techs Star Force had already caught up to the V’kit’no’sat on. It wasn’t their top model stuff, but it was all currently used by them as of the fall of Earth. While they could have surpassed it since then, it was functional and useable tech at the time rather than mothballed or recorded designs relegated to history files within the pyramid databanks.

  Davis knew from an industrial and military perspective how valuable this was as the ramifications ran through his head as he began redesigning all the infrastructure on Earth and the Solar System in a flash. Everything would have to be reworked, ships would have to be brought into dock for overhauls, city infrastructure would have to be tore out and replaced…and that would not be a cheap or fast process. He couldn’t rely simply on new designs, Star Force tech lasted so long that there wasn’t much turnover and the bulk of his empire rested on ‘old’ models. For a power upgrade such as this he’d have to rework existing equipment while fielding a trickle of new production models.

  Eventually he stopped and rested an elbow against the clear floor to ceiling window as he looked out across Atlantis, but with his mind being in a thousand other places. All this time they’d been so far behind the V’kit’no’sat it would have been like going up against tanks with two sticks and a rock, but now…

  “Now we have a fighting chance,” he whispered to himself and the galaxy.

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