Chronicles of Sol: The Fall-Chapter 248 Two Zero Six The Dregari

February 28th, 008 SDE:

Countryman surveyed the lab for a moment, then turned to Ruri, "So what did the team find out about our new friends?"

"Quite a bit actually. They call themselves the Dregari, and from what we have learned they are an aggressive militaristic species with strong military traditions. Apparently that one ship was part of a larger invasion fleet that was swallowed by the storm a decade ago."

"Invasion Fleet!? That..."

"I know Jac, and based on their records they don't negotiate. They will kill us or enslave us given the chance. Thankfully the Storm hasn't been kind to them, they only have two capital ships, and most of their fleet is made up of aging transports and frigates. I did locate their base however, they didn't think to wipe their computers. Seems they are as new to the deep storm as us, their base is located out on the rim."

"Proximity to Anchorage?"

"It would take six months at our best speed to reach them from Anchorage. Possibly longer without a charted route, and we'd have to cross Raider territory."

Countryman took that in, given that much distance they weren't likely to have many run-ins with these Dregari. "That makes me feel a little better, and their technology?"

"Comparable to ours, more or less. Their armor is less advanced but effective, they use laminated polycarbonate plates protected by polarized structural fields. Basically first generation power armor, their foot soldiers don't even get that much. They can't miniaturize the components to fit into an armored suit, but the laminated polycarbonate they use is good stuff."

"You're impressed by it?"

"The team put it through the wringer, and then Materials got involved. We aren't just impressed, we can use it ourselves. They took the alien polycarbonate, and fused it with our thermal polymers, mixed in a little Erudite and Tungari, along with some Rydium powder to produce a Polycarbonate alloy that puts our own Titan Alloy to shame. We are talking about a material about half the weight and three times stronger while retaining the favorable responsiveness to structural fields. Once an AIF is applied the resulting plate is more than four times stronger than Titan Alloy under the same field charge."

"Neat, how much can we produce?"

She sighed, "Not enough for the whole ship, and some of the materials are hard to come by. Though I think we can upgrade the armor in key areas to use the alien material. We can use the recovered Titan Alloy as an additional reserve for hull repairs. Factoring what we've recovered from this system and the last, plus salvage from the alien ship..." she paused for a moment doing the math, "I think we've got enough to replace the armored bulkheads and internal belts around the bridge, both engine rooms and the reactor housings. Unfortunately, that leaves a lot of other critical systems without the improved protection."

"Hmm, that would help, it's nice to have progress somewhere. Anything else of interest?"

"I'm studying their engines now, we are calling them Gravimetric Impulse drives, they are reactionless using controlled gravimetric distortions to move the ship. Unlike our pulse wave engines, these are pure gravimetric drives, which comes with its own set of pros and cons."

"Interesting, we don't see many reactionless drives out here. What about their weaponry?"

"They use Flux Wave Disruptors and Gravitic Flux Torpedoes. The latter fires a warhead, which when detonated creates intense gravity sheers. They'd rip a ship apart, even our armor would be severely tested by such a weapon. As for the disruptors? Each bolt, or well energy wave, is a highly contained energy burst when it comes into contact with matter, the containment fails and the energy destabilizes the bonds. Our AIF will counter this interaction, so as long as our armor is charged we don't have to worry. Dregari ground troops are armed with smaller versions of the weapon, and take advantage of the containment fields to prevent the wave bolts from interacting with the air."

"Both weapons sound rather nasty."

"Quite, what a flux wave disruptor does to a person? Well it ain't pretty, we tested a couple on their corpses, and ran simulations based on the results. Very painful way to die."

"Right, now about their torpedoes?"

"The Energy Webs should be fairly effective, they'll need to detonate basically right next to the hull to do any real damage to us. Inertial compensators can be programmed to protect against any gravitic penetrations, and if a torpedo gets hit, it's useless. In addition, their warheads are significantly slower than ours, our targeting computers should easily be able to hit them with our secondary turrets."

"That's nice to know, but I'd still like to know everything about them."

"I'll get a team on them, but I feel our main priority should be the sensors. Afterall, that Cloaking device..."

"I'm aware, maybe we should get a team on it about now. Who knows when it might come in handy."

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Ruri grinned, "I'd love to look at that thing myself. I mean seriously wouldn't you? The thing is supposed to make ships invisible, real active cloaking, can you imagine?"

Countryman sat down in an available chair, "It would be a game changer for us, but honestly it's kind of funny how our fortunes have shifted. We were given a chance to acquire a real game changer for us, and we ended up here. Now, after years of trying to make a better material, the universe just hands us the secret when we don't have the luxury of being able to mass produce it."

She giggled, "I see what you mean"

Countryman leaned forward, "Now, for the more interesting things, did you notice how much Erudite and Tungari we are bringing back?"

"I did, the amount caught my attention. I see you are curious about it too."

"Both materials are rare, we don't see much of them in normal space, they didn't even exist on Earth. Yet here we are finding dense veins with so much metal in them that we can fill the cargo bays and there would still be more of it left for another trip. It makes one wonder, could the materials have originated in hyperspace?"

Ruri settled in another chair looking thoughtful, "It's possible, most of the materials we know are forged in stars, but we are finding hyperspace to be full of new phenomena, but I have no idea what process would create these metals."

"Nor I, I'd like you to get materials on the subject. I can't think of a better project for them. I'm sure they would enjoy the process.

Smith watched the conveyors coming out of the fabs. Each fab was spitting out perfect bricks of refined ore, while workers were conducting quality scans on each brick, making sure that everything was to spec. It was quite the sight, and she was reassured that they would be able to produce parts and consumer goods for months to come.

Down the line, workers were sorting the bricks based on what they were made of and packing them into storage crates for packing. Crates that were specially shaped to maximize use of available volume. To quote old naval terminology, the Enterprise was about to be packed to the gunwales with cargo, not that she had gunwales, she wasn't a boat she was a starship.

By every metric she considered this trip to the deep storm to be profitable, even if there had been a moment where she was afraid they'd take another hit from a Hyperspatial Eddy. Those things weren't a joke, but it looked like they'd get out of here with nary a scrape. She didn't feel comfortable staying in the deep storm. The weather here was certainly more dangerous.

Footsteps drew near and she turned to see another member of the council drawing close. "Richards? Come to check on my department?"

"Actually I wanted to discuss some new orders. I just had an interesting conversation with Ruri and the captain."

"Oh? What do you need?"

Richards produced a pad, "Two main items, construction of turrets and torpedo projectors for our Vulcan fleet. While for the other item, they want us to refine a new alloy mix and make armored plates and bulkheads out of it. The mix in question uses that new polycarbonate we took from the aliens who shot at us, along with several polymers we developed in the lab, there is also Tungari, Erudite, Rydium and a smattering of base metals present in this mix. Lab testing shows this mix has incredible thermal and kinetic resilience and impressive responsiveness to structural fields. They want to use it to replace the Titan Alloy plating around the bridge, both engine rooms, and all eight fusion reactors."

"That's quite the project, I'd imagine we'll start after we get back to Anchorage, but I think I can get a headstart on making the plates and bulkheads you will need. We've got plenty of material and that captured alien ship is made of the very polycarbonate we need. That will save a lot of man-hours in refining said polycarbonate, but I should point out that we didn't find a lot of carbon."

Richards nodded, "That's why we aren't rearmoring the whole ship. Not only is that a much bigger project, it's also more expensive. I was looking at the initial plan and I'm wondering if between the two of us we can't work out a way to get a little more."

"Oh? You've got an idea for something?"

She grinned, "We've got eight fusion reactors."

Smith blinked, then gave the other woman a look, "Eight fusion reactors... what the fuck does that have to do with anything?"

Richards sighed, "Fusion, fusing of atoms, same process that makes elements."

Her eyes widened as she drew the dots, "Right, right, we can just make the carbon, but I need to remind you that isn't exactly cheap. Energy production goes down drastically... Wait, we don't really need the energy, just the minerals. Would take some modifications and some changes to software, we'd be down some power generation."

"Right, and making heavier elements like Titanium gets rather complicated, but carbon? Well that's pretty common in stars, we can do it here. We can use the particulate heavy gasses in the storm, not very good as fuel but that's not what we are going for."

Smith nodded, "Let me get on it, and we can see what we can do."

"I'll modify the reactors, you build me a collector for our fuel source. Then we can see if it works."

The two chattered excitedly as they considered a new engineering project. They'd tested the storm gasses for use as fuel before, but since they weren't composed of lighter hydrogen or any of its isotypes they hadn't provided the most encouraging energy yields. In fact, the storm was draining more energy from the hull than those gasses would yield in a fusion chamber. The more recent armor modifications however were ingenious, since they let them use the storm's own energy to power their defenses and the ship. It had only taken a few modifications to the original layout and the addition of a few more energy absorber modules per plate.

Yet with this project they weren't trying to power the ship, they were actually after the materials produced. Now they just had to figure out the optimal fusion pattern. The real problem was they wanted carbon, but the gases in the storm were primarily argon which was much heavier than carbon, there was also a fair concentration of neon in the storm, which was again heavier than carbon. However the storm did have some helium in the mix, it had just been deemed too low for acceptable harvesting.

Then Smith thought of something, "You know, we might have better luck mining Beryllium, there were decently sized deposits back near Anchorage, hell Anchorage had some decent concentrations in some spots."

"We could harvest some of that directly from the storm, although the concentrations aren't much better than the helium."

Smith nodded, "Try worse, but I do see your point."