There was also the more practical reason of not building higher towards the center of the ship. The gravity tapered off dramatically as one went closer to the axis of rotation near the center of the ship. It would be far less comfortable to live in those higher quarters, with low or zero gravity, especially for the demons who so loved their water pools and being able to soak in them on a regular basis. Water and zero G do not get along well together.
Lt. Simon Northrop may have understood the engineering reasons, but he sure wasn’t happy about it. He would somehow have to figure out a way to climb up to the very center of the ship many hundreds of meters high up. While the gravity kept decreasing as one climbed higher, but that would not help if someone fell. As they fell below towards the skin of the ship, the gravity would keep increasing and kill the person just as surely as a human falling many hundreds of meters on Earth, because when the person reached the bottom with a thud, the gravity there was one G. Already one of his boys had been badly injured trying something that initially seemed like a brilliant idea, which with hindsight was a dumb idea. Something that he should never have allowed.
It was zero G at the tapered point of the ship near the airlock, and the theory went that if one could push themselves off from that point straight towards the wall and the center of the wall, they would travel through the zero G portion of the ship all the way through and hence be able to literally fly into that broken tube structure. The practicality of performing such a maneuver however turned out to be very different and dangerous. The window of zero G space was so narrow, and the distance to the wall almost a kilometer away was so far that it was impossible to make a straight jump through such a narrow and invisible window.
Even with the retro thrusters of the suit, one couldn’t manage to keep oneself in that window. In fact, the thrusters made things worse. One small mistake, and moving out of that zero G window made Marines spiral uncontrollably out and down to the skin of the space craft, accelerating all the time and landing on the surface with a thud. The further out one managed to get, the more dangerous it got as one landed at higher and potentially more dangerous velocities. This is exactly what happened to the last Marine who managed to get several hundred meters, only to tumble out and land with such a force that he broke both his reinforced thigh and shin bones.
Lt. Northrop would try something the old-fashioned way, and this time he would not risk the lives of one of his boys, but do it himself. He just hoped that he had gotten his mental calculations right. He would know it soon enough. The first part of the climb was the most dangerous and it was during those initial moments that his jury-rigged equipment had to hold because the gravity was the highest at the beginning of the climb. If he could go past the first fifteen to twenty meters, he should be able to get all the way up to the center.
The Marine’s boots all had magnetic soles to help them anchor to metallic surfaces in zero G situations. The trouble was that those metallic soles were not permanent magnets. They were electromagnets, which were activated with current supplied from the Marine’s suit. That way the Marines could switch the electromagnets on and off with a thought click of their neural interface. Without the ability to switch the magnets on and off, a Marine could not easily walk, or take off from a metallic surface. It would also make walking on the insides of a ship with the suit very cumbersome.
The other problem was that the magnets were just powerful enough to anchor the Marine to a metallic surface such that they did not inadvertently fly off due to minor body movements. It was not powerful enough to hold the weight of a suited Marine weighing close to 250 Kg in one G. At the point where Lt. Northrop was to begin his climb, even after losing all his weapons, he still weighed half of that. His boots’ magnetic soles were still not powerful enough to hold that weight. Not even close.
So, while others had tried other methods, Lt. Northrop had spent the last forty minutes rigging up something that he thought had the best chance of getting him up there. The hardest part had been taking the suits off his fallen brother Marines. Intellectually he knew that they were dead and wouldn’t feel a thing, but it still felt wrong taking off the suit of his brother Marines, and watching their bodies harden and freeze. The problem was that he couldn’t just take off the shoes. Marine suits didn’t work that way. The suits were modular in design, so that one could get one’s shoe size fitted to a suit with one’s body proportions, but the suit could only be disassembled from the inside, when it wasn’t being worn.
Once the shoes were off, then came the tricky part of wiring them with gloved fingers designed for combat rather than to perform delicate and unconventional wiring. The shoes interfaced with the trouser part of the suit using standard ports that supplied it with both power as well as access to the information bus used to interface with the suit computer and the neural interface of the wearer. It is with this information bus that one switched the magnets of the shoes on and off.
The shoes’ port had to be wired to interface with his suit’s external buddy ports and interface. These buddy ports and interface on a Marine’s suit is meant to supply power and oxygen to a buddy Marine to tide over the other Marine in case of suit failure. Lt. Northrop hoped that his Engineering team had taped those interfaces well enough that they wouldn’t come off due to the load and strain of his climb. If they did, he was going to land with a fatal thud.
Shoes had been cut and strapped to his knees, two were strapped on to his chest, two on his elbows and the last two covered his gloved hand. The ones on his hands were the trickiest, because he might need to lose them at a certain point in his climb if he needed to free his hands to grab on to something. Those two shoes had wires hanging off them which he could jerk and break off when he wanted, but once he did that, he wouldn’t be able to use them again. He hoped to use his own boots as well in the climb, but he wasn’t sure how he would be able to stick his sole on to the wall that he was climbing vertically, while also having his knees anchored to the wall. At best he might be able to expose the toe part of his boots to the wall.
Lt. Northrop said a silent prayer and started his climb. Immediately it became obvious that he may have gotten his math right, but he had severely underestimated the complexity of having to control so many magnets stuck to various parts of his anatomy in a synchronous fashion. He had to have three pairs of boots on the iron wall at any given point of time to be able to support his weight. This meant that he had to first stretch and magnetize his hand, elbow and chest. Then bring up the lower part of his body and magnetize his boots, knees.
Then he had to demagnetize only his chest and elbow while keeping his gloved hand magnetized and move his upper part of the body up. Then magnetize only his chest. That allowed him to demagnetize his gloved hand. Now he could move his hands up, magnetize his hands and elbow again and then repeat the cycle over again. Any mistake that left only two pairs of boots magnetized would mean a fatal fall and a certain death.
The first twenty-five to thirty meters were the hardest. There were times when Lt. Northrop felt as the Magnets were about to giveaway. He had to climb very gingerly to minimize any unnecessary movement of his body. As he went higher, the magnets felt sturdier in their adhesion because of the steadily decreasing weight of his body. By the time he was half way through, he no longer needed to keep three pairs of magnets attached to support his weight. He could move a lot more freely and his progress sped up significantly. By the time he reached the protruding tube at the center of the ship, Lt. Northrop felt relieved and almost home. His inner celebration turned out to be premature. The most dangerous part of the climb was yet to come.
The scans from below had shown the tube protruding out of the center of the partition wall to be a few meters long and most likely hollow. That was all the information Lt. Northrop had had when he had started the climb. Now that he had reached the tube, he got to know much more about it. For starters it was not magnetic! It wasn’t even made from metal, that much Lt. Northrop was certain by banging his fist on
to the tube.
The real surprise was revealed when he shone his light on the tube, it was transparent! He could see mangled metal and assorted debris inside the tube. Lt. Northrop’s HUD displayed the exact dimensions of the tube. It was well over five meters in diameter on the outside. The tube was sticking out over eight meters out of the partition wall, and its open end was jagged and possibly sharp at the edges. It was clear that this tube was much longer in length originally. The nuclear blast had blown up most of the tube, leaving only these eight meters of stub sticking out of the partition wall.
The broken edge of the tube was both shattered and molten at the same time, like high strength quartz or crystal that had been subject to both heat and shockwave at the same time. If Lt. Northrop managed to reach that end of the tube, he would have to be careful with those jagged edges. His armored suit was hard in most places, but it was not impossible to tear at the joints and certain soft spots. There was no option, he had to enter the tube from the broken end. It was the only ingress into the tube. There seemed no reasonable way for Lt. Northrop to bridge the eight meters of chasm to reach the broken end of the tube from the partition wall, where he was stuck to the wall with magnets.
The tube wasn’t magnetic, so he couldn’t move across the outer surface of the tube using his jury rigged magnetic climbing gear. The outer surface was perfectly smooth and offered no purchase or handhold for the lieutenant to grab and slide across the surface of the tube. It was almost zero G at the spot where he was perched, being almost at the center of the ship, and Lt. Northrop had initially entertained the notion of making a jump from the wall to float those eight meters to the edge of the broken tube.
However, he nixed the thought the moment he got it. There was nothing at the other end to hold on to or to slow his flight if he pushed himself from the wall in the near zero G environment. He would simply keep on floating beyond the opening of the broken tube, eventually moving out of the zero G window and falling with a splat. His comrades would have to scrape him off the floor of the demon ship. Lt. Northrop’s eyes kept on deceiving him by urging him to climb on top of the tube and make his way to the edge from up there. He had to keep telling himself that there was no “top” of the tube. If he went to the other side of the tube from where he was, it would also be “down”, falling towards the edge of the ship in that direction.
For space boarding missions like this one, Marines’ suits came equipped for the last hundred years with adhesive foam. It had been used to great effect during the invasion of the core worlds of Shaitans by boarding Marines many decades ago. The foam could be dispensed from the palm of the gloves and certain other soft spots of the suit anatomy. The foam only worked in the cold of space where there was no air to react with the foam, and the temperatures were frigid cold. The foam degraded rapidly at room temperature or exposure to oxygen. That was fine because the foam was meant to help Marines hold on to a hostile ship’s outer surfaces while boarding. It was meant to operate in space. The Marines could command the secretion of the foam from the outer dermis of their suit. The moment the foam experienced pressure, it instantaneously changed its molecular structure, hardening and rearranging its molecular structure into a crystalline form.
The thing that did the trick was the way the foam hardened. The instant before the foam hardened, it shot out microscopic tendrils of its foamy material out towards the surface with which it had to achieve adhesion. Those tendrils kept branching into ever thinner microscopic tendrils of their own very similar to the microscopic hair on the feet of a gecko.
Just like the gecko hair, the foamy hair thinned to such a level that they were able to reach molecular levels, where they could form Van-Der-Waal bonds with almost any surface. Unless the surface had super non-stick properties like Teflon, the foam could stick to it. The rougher the surface, the better the bond. Like a Gecko’s feet, the foam could grip even slippery surfaces like glass and polished metal strongly enough to support the weight of a Marine in most circumstances.
To remove the bond and get one’s gloves unstuck, the Marine simply had to slide the hand back at a certain angle like a Gecko’s feet does, while applying electric current at the surface to heat and dissolve the hardened foam. Unlike a Gecko’s feet though, the Marine could not use the foam in rapid succession to ‘walk’ on a slippery surface. One had to wait a few minutes for the previously used hardened foam to dissolve before new foam would secrete from the suit surface for another use. There was also the fact that there was a limited supply of the foam in a suit, so it had to be used judiciously.
Lt. Northrop decided to take a risk. The Beta brigade was running out of time. It had already been over an hour since they had entered this ruined part of the demon ship. It was amazing that the remaining demons hadn’t somehow attacked them, but that attack may be forthcoming at any time. The Marines had no time to lose, and no time to play safe. Lt. Northrop fed a certain point on the tube surface to his suit computer. The point was about a meter from the jagged edge of the broken tube. It was hopefully enough margin of error that the suit guidance system would not overshoot and plunge him to his death, and yet close enough that he could reach out and try to grasp the edge of the tube.
With his heart in his mouth and a silent prayer, he released his boot magnets and simultaneous engaged his suit retro jets. Lt. Northrop’s fears turned out to be unjustified, the suit jets guided him slowly and steadily towards the target, and once there he engaged his adhesive foam from his left-hand glove and stuck himself to that point in the broken tube, while simultaneously switching off his suit retro jets.
For one irrational moment, Lt. Northrop’s eyes fooled him into panicking that he was about to fall off a great height. It took some effort on his part to reassure himself that he was almost weightless, stuck to the tube with his left glove that could take many times his weight. Once the initial panic had passed, Lt. Northrop used his helmet light to quickly survey and find a point in the broken tube that didn’t appear too jagged or sharp. There he stretched his right hand while his left was still stuck to the external surface of the tube. He managed to find a spot inside the tube where he could place his right hand and command it to release the adhesive foam. Once his right hand was firmly stuck into position, he commanded his left-hand glove to release and gently slid it out of position. Then using his right hand as anchor, he gently glided and guided himself into the tube.
At first sight, the view inside the tube was disappointing. The entire tube seemed to be filled with debris and mangled metal, no doubt from the nuclear explosion inside the compartment. Once Lt. Northrop has cleared a bit of the debris and cast away a few of the sharp metal bars protruding out in the debris, he was able to get a better picture. The tube was close to five meters in diameter, and at the very center along the axis ran a metallic or ceramic solid rod almost half a meter thick.
A similar stub had been found on the other end of the compartment, so it was likely that this tube ran through the entire axis of this compartment, and most likely provided lighting to the entire compartment, simulating the sunlight from the alien sun of the demon home world. In addition, Lt. Northrop found a pattern of regular perforations along the tube, suggesting that the tube may also have acted as an air filtration system.
The most promising thing was the fact that behind all the debris Lt. Northrop could discern a reddish glow, suggesting something with an active electrical input lay beyond the debris. This piece of good news came along with an ominous piece of data. Whatever was beyond the debris was emitting copious amount of radiation. Thankfully the radiation was not hard radiation of the X-Rays, Gamma Rays or UV range. It was more in the range starting from visible red, through to infrared, down to microwave and all the way down to radio waves.
The intensity of the radiation however was such that it was likely to feel something like the insides of an electric oven, combined with that of the insides of a microwave oven, combined with radiation right next to an old style cellular tower. Lt. N
orthrop’s computer persistently kept giving him warnings not to go any near to the source of those radiations risking both equipment damage as well as body overheating.
Lt. Northrop needed help in clearing debris, and let the engineers and commanders see for themselves before any further assessment of the situation could be made, so he busied himself with the task of providing easy access to the tube. He secured his standard issue Marine rappelling line to the solid central core of the tube, and tied the other end to a metallic piece picked from the debris, which he flung in the direction of his comrades “below”. When you are standing at the axis of a spinning ship, every direction is “below”.
Lt. Northrop had aimed visually, hadn’t taken the Coriolis effect such a spinning ship entails into account. His piece of debris travelled “down” in a spiral, missing his aim by over a hundred meters. It was no big deal, but it was the first of many lessons that Lt. Northrop and his Marines would learn about the physics and dynamics inside a spinning ship. While human ships also spun to provide artificial gravity, it never spun so fast as the demon ship, neither did any human ship have as vast an open space for such effects to be this perceptible.
Once a few more marines had climbed up the rappelling lines and added a few more lines of their own, the task of clearing the debris proceeded quickly enough, and very soon after that Desmond was standing next to Lt. Rohit Sharma. “It is likely to be a ceramic barrier at the other end as well sir, like the one that stood at this end. While the barrier on this end has conveniently been shattered by the heat of the blast and the impact of all the debris, the barrier on the other end is likely to be intact. I am not being able to approach the mangled barrier on this side to be able to analyze how strong it is, so I am afraid I can give you no idea as to how hard it would be to break it, or what would be the best tool to do so.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 25