Ravens of Eternity

142 The Flow of Coin, Pt Admiral Chase’s secret prison lab was brimming with activity, though anyone who looked at it would never have been able to tell. On the outside, it looked just like any other large warehouse – boring.

People sometimes walked in and out with various sealed crates, but that was pretty much it.

The inside was a completely different story.

Numerous Federation engineers were busy all over the manufacturing floor as their printers cranked out shield after shield after shield. Each one was just slightly different in one way or another, be it shape, size, weight, materials, or overall cost.

After the shields were completed and set aside, various drones would carry bundles of them over to the fully enclosed shooting range on the other side of the lab. There, more engineers propped them up on testing beams downrange.

Once they were clear, an apparatus made of different caliber barrels on the other end of the range was loaded with numerous kinds of ammunition. Because the apparatus wasn’t a gun designed for the field of battle, it was completely unhoused, and all of its parts were easily seen and accessed.

Some technicians were still tightening down many of its parts, even as its systems were prepping to fire another set of rounds downrange.

Only moments later, an all-warning sounded out, which caused some engineers and technicians to run far out of range even if they weren’t in direct danger, or in the line of fire.

Then, the apparatus shot each of the different shields with the same caliber bullet, which resounded in multiple continuous BOOMS in a row. Slugs slammed into each shield with great force.

.....

But thanks to their different material composition, shape, and size, the amount of damage they received was just as varied. Most were dented or bent slightly out of shape, some shrugged off the bullet and left only scars and scratches, while few were penetrated handily.

When all shots were fired, and all shields were struck, the apparatus was placed into an upright non-firing position and reloaded. At the same time, engineers replaced the test shields with a fresh batch.

The test shields were then handed over to the next set of engineers around the corner. They were responsible for all the data gathering for their tests. It was their duty to scan the damage, assess the shield’s viability, and logged all of the data they pulled.

While the apparatus down the hall fired another volley into a new set of shields, the freshly-scanned data was transferred over to the wall covered with various servers and databases.

Their lights blinked furiously as data passed through each and every one of them. Multiple drive arrays synced up as they stored all that precious field data. Data which was openly available to a number of terminals inside of the lab itself.

Up above in the enclosed design platform overlooking the lab floor, Admiral Chase, Miko, and Szereth stood around the design table and pored over their current shield iteration. Next to the new shield design were a number of statistics, all directly tied to the rapidly filling database below.

The Admiral swapped out materials on the shield face with different metals and compounds. As she did so, the statistics field changed and adjusted accordingly. They revealed the different materials’ tensile strength, hardness values, penetration resistance, force absorption, and most critically, material cost.

She frowned as she flipped through all of them. They all found it difficult to find a happy balance between strength, resilience, and affordability.

For example, some compounds had incredibly favorable hardness values, but were incredibly low in force absorption. This meant they were prone to shatter after repeated attacks. Others had incredibly high force absorption, but their tensile strength was low. This meant they took any bullets with grace, but were easily deformed with each hit.

Some compound meshes performed highly in all of the categories, but were incredibly expensive to manufacture. Just one of them would have been worth a hundred shields that used a more standard material composition.

“Complex and compound materials aren’t enough,” said the Admiral. “At least, nowhere near close enough to be next-gen tech.”

“Perhaps they do not have to be groundbreaking,” said Miko. “Perhaps all they need to do is work.”

Over the past couple of weeks, Miko stopped sightseeing or even watching Eva’s duels. She felt compelled to help the Admiral with her task.

Not that she wanted to stop doing either, it was simply because she felt most alive while creating something. The greatest joys she had ever felt in her life was when she was putting things together with her own fingers.

So she always jumped at every opportunity to do just that.

“Having them work isn’t enough,” countered Szereth.

He too was here, but mostly to provide materials as well as his own production expertise into the mix, pro bono. Well, sort of. He also had ownership of the Admiral’s designs through the agreement approved by Retholis.

Considering the Ferreshii Clan’s propensity to work with humans, and Szereth’s current military armor contracts, it was easy to appoint him as the project owner. Miko’s recommendation to the Admiral helped, too.

Not only did he provide materials and knowledge, he also had some of his own production lines converted for shields. With every shipment of raw components, he would also bring in a few hundred shields, in whatever revision they were currently in.

On paper they were for “testing”, but truthfully, they were secretly being distributed to every Federation prisoner under cover of night. Though they had technological and material differences between batches, it meant that everyone would have their own shield eventually.

That was their shared hope, anyway.

“They need to be outstanding,” continued Szereth. “A few reasons why. The biggest one is that we three are incredibly potent designers. How could we not build something truly amazing? Or would you prefer to have a subpar design under your belt?”

“Agreed,” said the Admiral. “Plus, we need to prove to the Drogar that human minds can be just as brilliant.”

Miko nodded. As she absorbed their words, she looked at the design under a new light.

“I understand, thank you,” she said. “What if, perhaps, we add a few nonmaterial components? Such as a power source, and a nanorepair module. Or a magnetic repulsor?”

As she talked, she tweaked the design and added various electrical components to the shield’s frame. Then she swapped the shield face out for something more ferrous and magnetic, but still held moderate degrees of strength and resilience.

“Intriguing,” said the Admiral. “Lemme do some crunching.”

She pulled up her datapad, and tapped all over its surface. She entered multiple formulas and tied them together with a logic circuit. Then she passed her fresh code over to the design table and performed simulated tests using the data gathered by her engineers below.

The holographic shield was bombarded with various holographic projectiles, and the accompanying statistics changed with each impact.

All three noted the readouts, but only Miko and the Admiral made any tweaks to the design. Szereth’s role was simply to guide. For this to work properly, the design had to be driven by the two in front of him.

He was, after all, just the money. At least, in this scenario.

“Very promising,” noted Szereth. “When I was in the beginning stages of designing my nanomesh armor plates, this was a very similar path I came across. But ultimately didn’t use it.”

“Why is that?” asked Miko. “Is this technology inferior, then?”

“No, not at all. I needed flexibility in my design since it was meant for power armor, and a shield has far different needs from that. In fact, this line of thought might be optimal for this project. You both should keep going.”

Both Admiral Chase and Miko were able to get their magnetic shield design to basically repel most rifle projectiles. But they were both utterly dismayed by some of its other stats.

“Ugh, Too heavy. Too costly,” groaned the Admiral. “Drogar could carry it, but no way humans could. At least, not for long. Ferrous alloys are just too dense and too malleable to be worth it. But maybe just the frame could be magnetic...”

This time the Admiral went into the design and swapped out the frame for a heavy ferrous alloy, then replaced the shield face with a wide wire weave, like a steel fence. She cranked the emitter to the maximum, then simulated a number of attacks yet again.

The bullets were definitely getting slowed by the magnetic field, but they were far from stopping. A great amount of their velocity had been sheared off and dropped off sharply after they passed through the weave.

An idea suddenly struck Miko, and she went into the design and stripped it down completely. She restored the frame to a lightweight material, then added a large-capacity power source to it. Afterwards, she lined it with small antigrav modules all around facing outwards.

When they performed the tests, the antigrav shield worked wondrously. Most of the ammunition fired at it would immediately be caught in its antigrav field. At least, depending on its velocity. If it didn’t use a matching frequency, the bullet could pass right through.

“This is genius!” said the Admiral. “It works perfectly! If we cranked it up, we could resist practically any small arms fire in existence!”

“It is rather expensive,” said Miko. “Each of those antigrav modules is costly. We could perhaps reduce their numbers. And it is very energy-intensive. It can perhaps only run at full power for one hour at the maximum.”

“We can potentially mitigate those costs,” said Szereth. “Those antigrav modules are made for drones, and for a different purpose altogether. We could fabricate some that are more optimized for what we want them to do.”

“I agree,” said the Admiral. “I think this should be our final design, then work on optimizing afterwards.”

The Admiral added a few more tweaks to it, along with a network circuit and a handful of intelligences.

“Let’s get this printed out downstairs asap,” she continued. “You’re such a genius, Miko.”

“You are as well,” Miko replied.

She noted how happy the Admiral was at that moment. It was, for the most part, the same happiness she felt herself. Designing, building, iterating. It brought both of them boundless joy. Miko recalled how only a few weeks ago, the Admiral looked haggard and overworked and seemingly on the verge of collapse. And yet now she was invigorated despite her lack of sleep.

“You do not actually wish to go back, do you?” asked Miko.

The Admiral stumbled slightly as Miko’s words echoed through her mind.

“What?” she said. “Of course I do! My lab – my work – the whole thing is my entire life! Every cycle, I dream of finally getting back, of finishing my projects! And Prometheus! Holy hells, Prometheus... We were so close to finalizing the trials, did you know that?”

As she spoke, she seemed to lose bits of her composure. Like she frayed at the ends just slightly.

“I understand that,” said Miko. “But you do not need to be in the Federation to complete your projects, right? You could surely do all of that here.”

Admiral Chase frowned as Miko revealed that truth about her. She didn’t particularly care about who she was working for, only that she was working. However, her family and friends were all in the Federation. She couldn’t just abandon all of them to chase her own ambitions.

That was too selfish an act. Right?

“I can’t just start up here,” she said. “Even if Retholis figured out some way to give me the same amount of power and independence here in the Empire as I did in the Federation, I’d still choose to go back. Even if I wanted to stay here.”

The Admiral sighed deeply.

“Honestly, I’ve got people to take care of,” she continued. “You and Freya and Redstar. And all of the people I employ who work at my lab. Or the contractors who were just delivering the groceries that cycle. It’s my duty to get them all back home, no matter the cost.”