2950-10-04 – Tales from the Service: Excising the Scars
Chief Logan shook Ruby Nichols awake, startling her into dropping her slate. As she dove to pick up the wayward device, she hurriedly glanced around the spartan wardroom assigned to her work team as a break room aboard the battleship Marseille to see if anyone else was around. The ship, its innards splayed out within the sheltering arc of the orbital dock, had been so badly battered at Håkøya that only the sheer stubbornness of its nearly eighty-year-old systems had brought it home in one piece.
Perhaps a yard team at Vorkuta or among the sprawling service stations above Tranquility, the wounded battleship might have been back in service in a month. In Maribel, however, the biggest yard job ever attempted outside the Core Worlds was taking somewhat longer.
“Break’s over, Nichols.” Logan hooked a thumb toward the hatchway on one side of the compartment which led to the officer’s cabin being used as a suit-up room, and to the collapsible airlock barrier beyond. “Let’s get back in there.”
“Aye, Chief.” Securing her slate, Ruby stood, glad that only Logan had caught her dozing off. Their team of six had been working long hours for nearly a month, most of those hours in the confines of bulky hazardous-environment vacsuits, but showing the strain to the rest of the team, especially Vipond and Yuan, would result in a week of endless ridicule.
After a quick cup of coffee from a recently-replaced food-fab machine in the wardroom, Ruby exchanged nods with Yuan and Maddison, returning bleary-eyed from another shift, then followed Chief Logan into the suit room, where she grabbed a fresh rad-meter from the crate before starting to assemble her suit. The meter beeped and showed a friendly green light before synching with her helmet computer and providing a more detailed data breakdown.
“Yuan said he thinks he saw sparticks down near the conduit.” Chief Logan, suited except for his helmet, hooked a holstered coilgun into his suit’s webbing and held another out to Ruby.
“Yuan is-” Ruby stopped short of calling the other technician an idiot in front of their mutual superior. “He’s wrong. Sparticks are air breathers.” The aggravating xenoinsects had hitched rides on ships fleeing the Sagittarius Frontier in the early phases of the war, and now seemed to have made colonies on most ships in Fifth Fleet as well. Small sparticks were a nuisance, but they grew nearly as quickly as they bred, and big ones, though skittish, could chew holes in a vacsuit.
“Still.” Logan shook the gun. “We go in armed or not at all.”
Sighing, Ruby took the gun and hooked it to the back of her toolbelt.
Chief Logan pressed his helmet into its seals, then waited as the suit built up internal pressure to check for leaks. Ruby hurriedly finished assembling her suit, then did the same.
Logan went into the translucent clamshell dome of the temporary airlock first. As it suddenly went slack in depressurization on the other side, he stepped out. Ruby waited for the indicator panel to go green before following, and soon they were clumping down a depressurized corridor.
As they approached the heart of the damage, the sweeping, branching scars left by high-density phased-matter when it passed began to encircle them on all sides. Where other high-energy particles might scorch or discolor metal, phased matter left the material shimmering in all colors under the harsh glare of the work lights, as if splashed with an oil slick. Only one particle in ten million had collided directly with an atom of metal, but the energy dumped there was still sufficient to crystallize durable alloy into brittle, radioactive slag.
When the pair reached the ovoid cavity carved around the damaged section of conduit, Ruby played her suit lights over the place where all these trails converged, on a blackened tube running through the heart of the olf battleship big enough to park an interceptor in. When the ship had been hit by Incarnation plasma cannons in the skies over Håkøya, one of the shots had damaged a magnetic phased-matter containment conduit between the main condenser near the bow and the main cluster of reactor cells amidships. Sprays of phased-matter particles had gushed out of the magnetic field, scything through flesh and metal and leaving both irrevocably contaminated. Officer’s Country, through which her team had been burrowing for several days, had been all but deserted during the battle, but huge swaths of the framing of the pressure-decks had to be cut away along the paths of the escaping phased matter. A follow-on team would cut away more and replace the damaged area once most of the damaged metal had been safely removed.
“Where did Yuan say he saw bugs?” Ruby turned her lights on the jagged fringes of the cut-open space, where their work had carved at odd angles through the bulkheads of dozens of compartments and machinery interstices beyond the pressure decks. If Marseille did have an infestation of sparticks, the only ones that would be in their work area would be dead or dormant due to the cold and vaccuum that made their work easier.
“He was working over there.” Chief Logan gestured with his hand and suit light toward a maintenance access tunnel that lay open along nearly ten meters of its length. “Maddison was with him, but she didn’t see it.”
Ruby checked her rad-meter, then pulled a material probe and arc cutter from her toolbelt. Most likely, Yuan had claimed his sighting only for a reason to stop working and talk for a few minutes. The man was intelligent, but his work ethic and attitude were somewhat less than inspiring. “I’ll start there, then.”
This account, though posted now, is at least two months old, and probably more like four; Marseille has left the service dock and has returned to limited duty with Fifth Fleet with some work on her remaining issues still ongoing. The limitations remaining to the ship’s capabilities are, however, not to be revealed. Naval Intelligence was most clear in this matter.
I have verified the identity of our submitter in this case and exchanged messages with her to ask questions and clarify this account. I even tried to look into the science of phased matter emissions and their interaction with null-phase matter (that is, with ordinary matter) to try to check her brief explanation, and found nothing but a tangle of strident scientific bickering on the mechanism of interaction. The effect on structural alloys which she describes is well known to many spacers, of course.