War Angel: part seven

Jack crawled out of a ventilation grate and began dusting himself off before realizing that it was pointless. There was at least one more journey into the ship’s duct system ahead of him today, and he was only going to gather more dirt on his work uniform.

Reaching behind him, Jack slid his toolkit into the hallway where he was now standing and plopped down next to it. Minutes passed as he reviewed what he had seen and done in the ship’s guts. “I’ve tripled the network’s capacity for power flow,” he smiled grimly. “On any other day, I’d do a cartwheel. But it isn’t enough. We need another magnitude of at least 25%, or this crate’s going to burn through biogel packs in a big damned hurry the minute they start test firing on us. And when that happens, we’re doomed.” He massaged his neck and stared at the floor. “I wonder what Sarah will do first. Crow about the fact that she was right all along, or shoot me for destroying her chance to graduate with honors?”

It had been a massive risk from the very moment he had conceptualized the project. The War Angel had been built in 2030; one of Earth’s first attempts at creating a space-worthy ship that could hold its ground against the Omegans. It relied on a combination of stolen technology and the best that Earth’s own minds could produce from their hiding places on an occupied planet. But even more than that, it was a tangible reminder of his family’s own past. His great grandfather had been there, behind the scenes, as the Revenge-class ships were first designed. For Jack, the opportunity to link to his ancestor by retro-fitting the old ship with modern technology was almost overwhelming in an emotional sense. Didn’t he owe it to the old man to give it a try?

Now that attempt was apparently going to be ending in spectacular failure. The old heap’s structure required too many workarounds to truly function how it needed to in a battle, and those workarounds wouldn’t fare much better in modern EAD equipment, either. Innovation was wonderful; but useless innovation… well, all that was left now was to figure out how to insulate Sarah from his folly and try and protect her from the fallout.

His comm. chirped. “Supersonic to Desperado, do you read?”

Of course it was Sarah. “Oh well,” he figured, “no time like the present to break it to her.” He held the responder button down on the comm. “This is Desperado, go ahead.”

Her voice rang out crystal clear through the empty hallway where Jack was sitting. “I have news. The mini-craft is coming up from the surface and they’re in a quarantine situation. Don’t approach medical for the next three hours unless you have E.V.A. gear on.” She paused. “So do you have any news to share with me, Desperado?”

Jack paused to ponder his options, and then decided to lead with his best pitch before breaking her heart. “I managed to triple the network’s capacity for power flow and dispersal.” The comm. went silent for over a minute.

“That’s pretty good, Desperado.” She paused for a moment, and Jack stared at the comm., wondering what her face looked like at that moment. “Of course, we still need about 25% more than that or the system won’t meet our standards.” He started to say something, to apologize, but the words caught in his throat.

“Guess it’s a good thing,” she said with a laugh, “that I found us another 50%.” Jack’s jaw went slack. “Perhaps you could join Mr. Pa… Clover… and myself down by the engines?”

Park held the biogel pack in his hand and marveled once again at the warm, pulsing sensation that it sent up his arm. “It really is remarkable Sarah. You know, if I had tried to create something like this network, I’d have probably created an unstoppable supervirus instead and killed us all.”

She reached out and took the biogel from his hand. “I’d try and reassure you that isn’t true, Richard, but you know what?” Sarah paused to grin at him. “You’re probably right!” The two shared a good laugh, but it subsided as Jack slid down a ladder and found the pair huddled around one of the biogel conduits.

“Congrats on the capacity enhancement, Jack,” Richard offered. “Good work.” Jack gave Park a nod of thanks and turned his attention to Sarah. “Richard. Sarah, I’m a bit anxious here.” The young woman winked at her two shipmates and then stood up, holding a biogel pack.

“As you know,” she began, “the biogel packs work on a cellular network, distributing absorbed power equally across a grid throughout the ship. It powers the running shields, and in case of a battle, it should disperse any energy impact absorbed by the quantum armor.”

Jack interrupted. “Which, as of this morning, we know doesn’t work, because it overloads the biogel packs.”

Sarah cocked an eyebrow at him. “Right. The dead pack. I went through the ship and found three others, which was more than a bit problematic. Our tests were performed using an energy device that gives off about one-tenth of something like an Omegan laser cannon. Something like that would likely cause a catastrophic collapse of the network.” Jack and Richard nodded.<P>

“I looked at the problem from every engineering angle I could think of, and frankly, I was close to giving up. Then something interesting happened.”

Richard shrugged gently. “What was that, Sarah?”

Her face lit up with a wicked grin. “I sneezed.”

Jack was bewildered. “So what does an allergy attack have to do with power distribution?”

Sarah looked a little smug. “It has everything to do with it, actually. I spent most of the day trying to solve the power problem, when what I really needed to do was solve the bio problem. The power overload was damaging and killing cells…”

“…So stopping cellular death became the issue. God, Sarah,” Jack said with no small amount of admiration, “that’s really good. How did you do it? You said you’d done it…”

She knelt down into her toolkit and pulled out the dead biogel pack Richard had handed her at the beginning of the morning. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out a fresh syringe taken from medical earlier in the day, and she slowly slid the needle into the dead biogel pack. With a steady hand, she reversed the plunger, drawing a small quantity of the dead cells out of the pack. After placing the dead pack on the ground, she picked up the live one that she and Richard had been handling earlier. Once again, she steadily slipped the needle into the biogel, this time slow squeezing out the dead cells into the midst of the live ones. Sarah dropped the needle to the ground and held out the bag for Richard and Jack to see clearly. The cells in the bag began to move and jostle, their green glow dimming for a moment. Then, with sudden spasm, the bag writhed for a moment, and the cells began to pour out a powerful glow that enveloped the entire area. After a few moments, the writhing stopped, and the glow dimmed somewhat, though it was still stronger than it had been before the needle had pierced the bag.

“I sneezed because I haven’t gotten my allergy shot this week, Jack.”

He nodded in awed admiration. “You inoculated the biogel packs. Absolutely brilliant.” Richard nodded along with him. “Absolutely brilliant.”