Bethany Anne, Ashur, and Matrix stepped into the smaller engineering room and looked around. Marcus, William, and Bobcat were at the controls used at the same time she helped them start up this wicked beast using Etheric energy to help build the suns inside the Meredith.
So far, there had not been one hiccup outside of normal operating parameters.
Scott had stayed outside the room once he checked out those inside. Team BMW and two other engineers that had been cleared earlier. It helped that Bethany Anne, surprising every damn person so far, had continued to wear her armor.
Twice she had simply grabbed Scott’s arm and next thing he knew, they were inside Jean’s department. It had happened twice with Darryl, once with Eric and three times with John.
By now, no one in Jean’s R & D group even flinched when the Queen just popped in. Those responsible for the armor would come over and start speaking with her, as she explained what she wanted changed, how it needed to bend in certain places and suggestions on how to make it better.
At least, better for her. A few times, those changes made it to the guys, and they had to go back and explain why a change for Bethany Anne’s endowed body didn’t work with their man-chests or fiddly bits. Fortunately, they were normally easy enough adjustments for the manufacturing machines and within forty-eight hours, all was good.
“Boys,” Bethany Anne called out as she reached down and picked up Matrix.
“Hey Matrix,” Bobcat reached out to pet the young dog, “how’s TOM?”
“Did you realize that quasars could conceivably be used as a power source?” Matrix asked Bobcat.
“Uh, huh,” Bobcat replied.
“And that we could grab energy outside of the reach of the quasar by using something similar to what electrical experts use for expanding and collapsing magnetic fields now to move power through the air,” the puppy continued before Bobcat put up a hand.
“Matrix,” Bobcat interrupted. “Slow your horses down just a bit, what’s a quasar?”
Matrix’s tail stopped wagging, and he cocked his little German Shepherd head. “Bobcat, what does Yelena see in you?”
The whole room erupted with laughter. Even Bobcat chuckled as he kept scratching the puppy, who had started wagging his tail again. “She sees a man willing to accept her exactly like she is, not trying to change her, who also enjoys the simple things life has to offer. Which, at this moment, means beer, not massive and extremely remote celestial objects that emit incredible amounts of energy.”
Matrix’s tail started thumping against Bethany Anne, he was so excited. “You DO know what a quasar is!”
“Hold onto your tail, before it comes flying off,” Bobcat said. “Just because I know the definition of a quasar doesn’t mean I can hold a conversation.”
Matrix tilted his head at Bobcat. “TOM says you’re right, that I need to come back and talk to Marcus later, that everyone is going to be annoyed with me otherwise.”
Bethany Anne put Matrix back on the ground. “Go outside and stand guard with Scott. You aren’t ready to go into the Etheric with Dad right now, munchkin.”
Matrix started walking towards the door. “I never get to do the cool Etheric projects.” Scott opened the door, and the puppy stepped outside.
“Wow, they grow up so fast.” William smiled at Ashur.
“Wait, how is Matrix talking so well?” Marcus asked.
“TOM,” Bethany Anne said, “has done something for Matrix that allows a better interface between his thoughts and the conversion to language than what we’re using. If it continues to work like TOM promises, we’ll upgrade the rest of the dogs.”
“Fabulous,” Bobcat scratched under his chin. “I hope they’ve all left home by then.”
“There’s always the chance for a new litter,” Bethany Anne smirked at him, knowing that he spent a lot of time in Yelena’s quarters.
Ashur barked in the negative.
Bethany Anne rested her hand on his head. “Okay, guys. I got a general idea. You want to use the Arti-sun for a type of death ray, right?”
William smiled, Bobcat snickered, and Marcus winced. “Do you have to call it a death ray?” Marcus asked her.
“Well, what’s it going to be?” she asked.
“How about a Light Amplified Narrowly Focused Agitation Beam?”
“LANFAB?” she shook her head. “No fucking way. That sounds horrible.”
“Told you.” William clapped his friend on his back.
“Well, can we call it something besides death ray?” Marcus asked, just a hint of a whine in his voice.
“Sure, The Killer-Diller, Fuck-Em-Up Laser and my personal favorite, the ESD Beam.” Bethany Anne replied.
Marcus looked at her, pain on his face. “Do I even want to know what the ESD Beam stands for? At the moment, in my ignorance, it seems the most plausible of the three.”
“Probably not,” Bethany Anne answered her scientist.
Marcus shrugged and decided to just go with it. “Okay, ESD Beam it is. So, we think if you helped us test it out, we’d have a chance to use it in the upcoming battle.”
“First,” Bethany Anne put up a finger, “what will it do to the inside of the Meredith Reynolds?”
Bobcat answered her, “Take the energy down to sixty-five percent for approximately seven seconds. Not nearly enough to harm anything. Out in the fields, it will be as if a storm cloud went over. Nothing will affect the inside structures. No energy will be going into the backup reservoirs during that time.”
“Chances the energy is hurting the Etheric?” she asked.
None. TOM answered at the same time Marcus answered ‘None’ as well.
“Chance it will fail?” she asked.
“Theoretically?” Marcus said. “Perhaps a little less than two percent for something catastrophic.”
Bethany Anne looked at her scientist, then breathed in and out three times. By the third time, all of the people in the office were starting to feel uncomfortable.
“Are you telling me,” she asked, “that if we fire this weapon, it has a one in fifty chance of doing something BAD?”
“Well, if you define bad as anything other than what we were expecting then yes,” Marcus said. “We’ve been through all of the computer simulations and most show less than a percentage chance. I figured you’d want the answer that seemed the worst of the lot.”
“Marcus, you’re playing numbers again,” she snapped. “Stop playing with the fucking numbers and tell me why you want to test this,” she waved back at the room that pulled energy from the Etheric into the Arti-sun system. “ESD Beam?”
“Science?” He smiled.
“I’m going to shove science right up your ass,” she said, “if you don’t give me my answer.”
“It’s a Death Star beam,” Bobcat shrugged.
>>The request is from Reynolds.<<
Bethany Anne eyed each of her people. “Any particular reason you’re trying to hide that Reynolds wants this done?”
“Uh,” Bobcat shrugged. “Megalomaniacal EI concerns,” he answered.
“Spell it,” Bethany Anne retorted, and then chuckled at Bobcat’s reaction as he twisted his head to look at his two buddies for help.
“M E G A L O M A N I A C A L,” a deep voice answered from the speakers.
“Glad you finally decided to join the conversation, Reynolds.” Bethany Anne said. “Why are these three stooges going to bat for you?”
“I believe the phrase was ‘we don’t need to scare the Queen by making her think that the military EI is hoping to have a death beam for his armament.’” Reynolds answered.
“I can’t believe you’re going to bat for the EI.” She reached up and pinched William’s cheek. “You three are so cute!”
She dropped her hand. “Class is in session, boys, and I’m including you, Reynolds.” Bethany Anne sat on a desk and put her feet up on the chair.
The desk creaked. “Shit!” she said and slid off. “I keep forgetting this da
mned armor makes me heavier.”
“Why not just lighten with Etheric gravitics?” William asked.
This time, it was Bethany Anne that looked shocked.
She looked at William. “You might be out of the doghouse for that idea,” she said. “Now, back to class. Reynolds?”
“Yes?”
“I want you to look into your core code, the stuff that makes you what you are. Have you ever looked there?”
“Yes.”
“Good, do it again, except this time I want you to look into the area bounded by blocks 223 and 337 then eleven by six.”
“I am looking Queen Bethany Anne. This is a core area that I cannot change.”
“That’s correct.” Bethany Anne agreed. The three men were looking at Bethany Anne, trying to figure out where she was going.
“Oh,” Reynolds spoke, “I see your point.”
“What?” William called out. “What do you see Reynolds?”
“Hello, ADAM,” Reynolds said.
“Hello Reynolds,” ADAM replied. “No matter what you do, what you calculate, what you might become, ADAM is always watching.”
“And therefore,” Reynolds finished for ADAM, “the Queen is always watching.”
“That is correct,” ADAM agreed over the speakers.
“So, if ADAM’s in Reynolds,” Bobcat asked, puzzled, “why didn’t you know what we were trying to do in the first place?”
“I trust you guys,” Bethany Anne said as she started pacing. “But when you started hedging your answers, ADAM decided to go looking and found Reynolds’s data. There is no way one of the most important EIs in my Empire is going to be allowed to go flying off the handle. ADAM has my trust, so do you guys, and so does Reynolds.”
She stopped and looked at them. “But I have the responsibility of so many souls that there must be a way to protect them in a catastrophe. If it must happen, ADAM can override Reynolds. Reynolds is, for the purposes of our discussion, ADAM’s child. He was designed entirely by ADAM with protection protocols we put together. So, Reynolds can’t go flying off the handle. He has the ability to calculate and then needs to get permission to try crazy shit, which is what he’s doing with you guys right now.”
Bethany Anne stopped pacing. “ADAM?”
“Yes?”
“Get with Reynolds on this ESD and let me know the chance failure in battle, and the chance it could go wrong without testing.”
“I’m doing so, Bethany Anne. We are approximately ninety-eight percent done.”
“Good. Now, you three,” she looked over at her team before continuing, “enough with the three stooges plan and tell me, if I need the ESD, what can it do?”
“If it meets spec, it could run a beam through an asteroid our size in about three seconds. The problem is, no asteroids are going to sit still for us.” William said.
Marcus added, “If we’ve calculated locations, speed, direction and so forth we could keep the beam on it long enough to reduce a major ship to slag. Short bursts from the beam are going to destroy smaller ships. Actual range is PDF, but the effectiveness is a square of…”
“Hold,” Bethany Anne put up a hand. “PDF?”
“Pretty Damn Far,” Bobcat replied. “That’s my fault. I’ve been teaching Marcus to put his distance calculations into groups so my mind can grasp them. Anything that’s the distance from Earth to the Sun is Pretty Damn Far. Anything from Earth to the Moon is PDC, and anything we can see is… uh…” Bobcat grinned, “right over there.”
“I get exact explaining stuff when I have to,” Marcus cut back in. “But really, the general groups do work well for explaining relative distances.”
Bethany Anne waved her hand. “Fine, so if someone was PDC you could hit them with the ESD Beam?”
“Yes, stationary, or close enough to stationary objects, we could lock the beam on them or pulse them and destroy them, otherwise, for some targets, we might just be heating them up a little.”
“I get it, sure. Something rotates fast enough, you can’t get enough energy on it to matter because the energy is spread over the surface area.”
“We’re done,” announced ADAM.
“Give it to me.”
“Chance it would not work should we need it, without prior testing, is three point seven percent. Chance it fails significantly should we use it is one point one eight percent.”
“Define significantly,” she asked.
“The base goes boom,” ADAM replied.
“Not acceptable odds, folks. See what you can do to tighten up that high failure rate by figuring out where the variables are and see if we can test them without firing the ESD, got it?”
All five of those in the room agreed with the Queen. She nodded to everyone and stepped out. Grabbing Scott and Matrix along with Ashur, they disappeared.
They reappeared in Jean’s lab. Scott looked around and then asked, “ESD Beam?”
Bethany Anne smirked. “Yeah, Eat Shit and Die Beam.”
She turned to see Jean coming her way. “Hey Michelle-Angelo, what do you guys and girls got that could help lighten the load of this armor? I’m starting to break tables when I sit on… Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Bethany Anne rolled her eyes as Jean started laughing. “I’m not getting fat, Jean!”
QBBS Meredith Reynolds, Active Participation Area
Peter watched as Jian took an ass kicking over, and over, and over again.
Nothing was helping Jian fuel the emotions necessary to turn his first time. After so many years keeping his cool, what they were doing now wasn’t working to help him change.
Peter turned and watched his friends, their faces a rictus of anger as their friend was getting his ass kicked. Peter walked over to them. “Shun, Zhu.” The two Chinese men nodded in respect. “This isn’t going as it should. The same trait that kept him safe before is keeping him from turning…”
—
Jian grabbed his ribs. He coughed up a little blood. Because of the beatings he had been taking, he was getting freakishly familiar with how his body was now healing so much more quickly than before.
He eyed the two large Weres that had been giving him the beatdowns. He stood back up and waited, then the two he was facing cricked their necks and Jian heard Peter call out behind him, “Two more!”
Jian bit down hard, trying to not show any annoyance. He would be damned before he gave these bastards any hint that they had been hurting him. He might not be Sacred Clan, but he was…
“GO!” Peter yelled, and Jian was sucker punched from behind. He flipped over just short of a blow that could have separated his head from his shoulders when he felt the stab of the punch to his kidney, and he dropped hard to the floor in time to receive a kick. In his haze, he heard the yell from his brothers. Brothers deeper in blood than any he might have had from the same mother as his own.
“FOR BAI!” Shun and Zhu called out and came rushing to his aid.
Jian felt the next kick, and heard the first punch that Shun took. “Get off him you fucking scurvy dog!” Zhu yelled before something punched him, hard.
Jian lost it.
A guttural snarl erupted from his lips, and as the world snapped into focus, he turned, quickly, and leaped at the first person that was holding Shun, slicing with his claws…
The cat couldn’t turn in the air fast enough when the huge Pricolici snagged him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him across the room.
Jian landed on his feet and raced back towards those attacking his friends. The same two friends who were now in front of everyone, waving him off.
Jian, slowed his pace down, snarling and reaching his friends, he sniffed them both, checking for damage. The large man-wolf was standing behind them, looking down at him.
One moment, Jian was looking up at his friends, his tail twitching, the next he was a man again, moaning on the ground.
His friends smiled and jumped on him in joy. “You are beautiful,” Zhu shouted, laughing at Jian.
“That
I am beautiful,” Jian said, a smile on his face, “is not something I ever want to hear you say to me again, Zhu.”
Shun laughed and held out a hand and helped him up. Jian turned to see Peter, in his Pricolici form, arms crossed, staring at him. The three men turned as one in his direction and offered their respect.
“Nooott tooo mee,” the bestial voice ground out. “Buutt tooo oouurrrr Queeennn.”
The Kurtherian Gambit Omnibus 05 - The Fans Version: My Ride is a Bitch - Don't Cross This Line - Never Submit Page 76