While everyone gathered were discussing ways to reach that manhole sized cover on the sphere, ways to break out of the tube, ways to open the cover and many other pressing problems that the Marines had, Lt. Rohit Sharma was completely transfixed with the massive beams and trusses extending from the sphere that attached themselves to various parts of the ship, supporting the massive sphere and holding it in place right at the center of the compartment, and also the center of this massive goliath ship.
He could have killed for access to his suit computer at that moment, but was forced to mentally note the rough width of each beam and its angle. Then he had to make approximate load bearing calculations the way a sophomore engineering student would. He kept doing those calculations in his head repeatedly, because the results were so outrageous that they couldn’t be right. When he was convinced that he hadn’t screwed up on basic engineering calculations, the realization dawned upon him that they had all been looking at those structures and the sphere in an inverted way! The reality of the sphere’s support may be the other way around!
“I am not sure whether that sphere is a power reactor or not, but I am fairly certain about the function of those massive beams and trusses supporting the sphere. Those beams and trusses betray the fact that the sphere may have a very different function.” Lt. Rohit Sharma announced.
Everyone turned and looked at him bewildered. It was the look that said – “Duh! We may not be engineers, but we understand the function of beams and trusses. That massive sphere had to be supported by massive beams. It is so obvious! So, what different function are you talking about?”
Before anyone had a chance to ask him that question, Lt. Sharma continued hastily to explain. “Look, I know that sphere looks massive, but in all likelihood, it is a shell. If the sphere had to do anything meaningful, then it cannot be a solid lump of metal. If as we think there is a reactor in there that emits radiation, then the most logical way to design the shell would be to leave a lot of empty space inside. It is basic physics. Radiation tapers off at the square of distance, so if I double the diameter, I need only quarter the thickness of shielding than I would otherwise need. That is the way we humans have constructed all our nuclear reactors – make a very large dome with lots of empty space inside, so that we can keep the thickness of the dome walls within practical limits.
“If my guess is right, then that spherical shell is not more than a few hundred thousand tons. I know that it looks visually imposing, but right now the sphere is practically weightless needing little or no support. It is right at the center of a spinning ship, pull on all sides cancel each other, so the sphere is not exerting any meaningful force on those beams and trusses at all to support itself. It is almost floating in the center of the ship, just like we are! That doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t need support. When this ship accelerates, and I am told that this ship has been observed to have a crazy rate of acceleration and deceleration.
“When this ship is accelerating, then the sphere would need support. To provide that support though, one wouldn’t need so many massive beams. The main beams are almost 40 meters of solid iron if not steel pillars. That is crazy amount of load bearing capacity, beyond one’s comprehension. Just one of them would be more than sufficient to support the weight of the sphere even a very high G acceleration. They didn’t have to build so many such massive beams to support the weight of the sphere. That is where we have gotten our thinking upside down. Those massive beams are not there for the ship to support the weight of the sphere, they are actually there for the sphere to support the weight of the ship!”
The rest of the Marines gave a weird look at that last statement. “What do you mean – support the weight of the ship? It doesn’t even sound logical!”
“Ok! I know it sounds weird at first, but we all know that this ship runs on some form of reactionless drive. No engine emissions have been seen from this ship, and yet it has incredible acceleration. There is no feature on the outside of this ship, so logically the ship’s drive had to be inside the ship. A reactionless drive that is inside the ship would have to push the entire weight of the ship from the inside for it to accelerate, right?
“When a ship this massive, easily over a few million tons needs to be pushed at high G, one can only imagine the incredible stress it would put on the supporting structure that connects the drive to the inside of the ship. Such a drive cannot be simply connected to the inside hull of the ship because the stress it might put on a single point on the hull of the ship might cause the drive to rupture the hull and burst out of the ship. It would have to be connected to multiple points on the ship’s hull on the inside with a structure designed out of massive beams and trusses – exactly what you see out in front of us.” Lt. Sharma waved his arms in a flourish to point at the beams.
“So, you are saying that this is not a power reactor, but their ship’s main drive?” Desmond asked bluntly.
“I didn’t say that the sphere couldn’t be a power reactor. It could well be a power reactor as well. All I am saying is that basic engineering points to the fact that this sphere had to be their main propulsion system. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is both. That would be a very efficient system, where you do not have to feed power externally to a drive and lose efficiency.” Lt. Sharma replied.
“If what you say turns out to be right, then this sphere is the beating heart of their ship without which this entire ship would be lost.” Desmond said to no one in particular.
“I am sure that the demon engineers were well aware of that fact when they built this ship, sir.” Lt. Sharma replied. “They have hermetically sealed it in possibly meters thick metal shell with no access except that small bolted cover. Getting to that cover is next to impossible. It is well over a kilometer away from the surface right on the axis of the ship. We have no clue how to open the cover with only the power of our muscles. Even if we could by some miracle access it and open it, I am sure sabotaging it wouldn’t be easy. There is likely to be some very robust technology inside. Technology that is so far ahead of us, that I am not even sure that we would be able to recognize the machinery when we see it.
“It is very hard to sabotage something when you don’t even know how it works! Then there is the issue of radiation. If that is a power reactor, and that thick shell is a shielding, then it is likely to be extremely unsafe to go inside to explore and sabotage. By the size of the hatch of the sphere, it is apparent that it was not meant for a demon to go inside. Most likely they send in maintenance drones to inspect and remotely repair. I don’t see how we could do any damage inside, even if we were able to open that cover.”
Desmond took a few moments to review the situation. There were no easy answers. Eventually he seemed to have come to a decision, and gave his orders with a somber tone of finality. “We have lingered here in this tube long enough. We need a plan of attack, an objective towards which we can work and fight for. We can try to go down to the surface and fight the demons man to man with nothing but our blades, but that would be a futile effort.
“There is a veritable city down there with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of those demons fully armed waiting for us. Even if we managed to destroy a few buildings down there, it would make no difference to this ship. Even if there is a central control building down there, from where we could take over this ship, how do we find it and how likely is it that we would succeed?
“Our chances down there are next to zero. Our best bet is to try and disable that sphere from up here. That sphere is the best target we have, and it is unguarded for the moment. Since we haven’t found any better way to get out of this tube, we will break the tube at this point closest to that cover on the sphere. From there on we will figure out a way to reach the cover and open it and hopefully find a way to disable it.”
Breaking the tube was easier said than done. It wasn’t made of glass or crystal that could be shattered. The best description of the material that the Marines could guess was that it was some s
ort of plastic, close to the hardness of soft metal. The material clanged and vibrated like chinaware when banged upon by metal. Fortunately, the tube had many tennis ball sized holes drilled into it every square meter to circulate air. These holes were covered with some material that most likely acted as air filters. The air filters were easily broken, and using the holes as purchase, metal shafts aided by hand powered drills that the engineers carried, could induce stress cracks in the material.
Physically enhanced e-Marines had to put in every bit of their strength to lengthen the cracks. The biggest impediment the Marines faced was the lack of gravity, which meant that they couldn’t simply bear their weights on the shafts to wedge and crack those holes, as one would have done on Earth. Instead they had to go under the metal shafts and raise their body, thus pushing it up with the strength of their thigh muscles to get the required leverage. Eventually a large squarish section of the tube broke. Unlike the cracks which were relatively quiet, when the section broke, it broke with such a loud noise that it startled all the Marines.
After the initial wariness, the Marines had started relaxing when they had realized that the demons hadn’t noticed their break into the second compartment. They were further comforted by the fact that from their perch inside the axis tube, it was not possible to see individual demons milling around far below on the surface, and by the same logic, it was very unlikely that they would be visually noticed easily. The humans were more like a few flies inside a tube light, maybe even smaller than a fly in a tube light analogy given the massive scale of the ship. If there had been automated sensors inside the tube, it would have been a different story. But then who puts sensors inside their lighting equipment?
The unholy racket that the breaking of the tube created might change that situation though. To make matters worse, the sound flanged through the tube from one end of the compartment to the other, bounced back and rang a few times before it quietened. Every Marine froze, then warily looked around the tube below to the surface. There was no apparent alarm raised below, no change in pattern. Even if there was any alarm below, it was unlikely that the Marines would be able to notice it from this far away. Being aware of that fact brought a renewed sense of urgency to the group.
Their plan was simple. A tethered engineer would jump out of hole they had just created in the tube. He would have to jump about fifteen meters in almost zero G and grab hold of those odd shaped hand rails. If their suit had been working, it would have been a piece of cake. The suit would have guided itself to the spot with very little effort on part of the Marine. Unfortunately, their suits were nonfunctional. The engineer had to push off and float over the chasm and grab the hand rails. The aim and the speed had to be exacting. Push too hard, and it would be hard to grab the rails. Push too slow, and there is a chance of drifting away from course, because it wasn’t the perfect zero G of space, there was still some amount of micro gravity and Coriolis effect owing to the spinning ship.
Chapter 14
Stabbing a Dragon’s Heart
Second Compartment, Hunting Shell ‘Ravenous’
2205
Marine engineer Rama Songathorn PFC missed the first time and had to reeled back in. He got it right on the second try. Within seconds of being able to inspect the hatch cover of the sphere he raised an excited thumb up. The cover was secured with a nut-and-bolt mechanism! Something one would find in almost any standard human construction. The nuts were hexagonal in shape, again exactly how humans made their nuts-and-bolts mechanism. It shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise. Basic engineering and physics is the same anywhere in the universe, and hence the most optimal engineering design also had to be similar.
The hatch may not have had a door for frequent opening, but the demon designers hadn’t made it too difficult to open it either. It was in such an inaccessible place, that the demon designers hadn’t had to worry too much about security. They had simply secured it with robust nuts and bolts, which did the job just fine and at the same time didn’t present too much difficulty to any maintenance crew who might need to open it.
Opening the nuts presented the same problem of purchase in zero G to the Marines as had been presented while trying to crack open the tube. In the end, they had to insert their feet into those weird shaped hand rails designed for alien hands to get some purchase floating in zero G, and then use all their might to turn the nuts. The nuts were tightly secured but not jammed, the Marines had them open in minutes. A tether had been secured to one of the hand rails, and Lt. Sharma was the first to arrive at the hatch holding on to it.
The hatch had been opened, and it was dark inside. It wasn’t pitch black inside though. There seemed to be a faint bluish glow emanating from inside, and it seemed to Lt. Sharma that he could detect occasional blue and orange sparkle which could have been a trick played on the eyes because they were too faint and fast to register properly. Lt. Sharma switched on the lights, perhaps the only analog equipment and the only thing still functional on his suit. A quick glance inside confirmed what Lt. Sharma had been expecting. The sphere was hollow, and the thickness of the sphere’s wall couldn’t have been more than two meters.
Lt. Sharma inspected the texture of the metal that made up the sphere at the point where the hatch had been opened, and then lightly banged on it with a metal tool. It sounded like the ring of steel, not plain iron like the external hull of the ship. This sphere was precision engineered unlike the outer hull. Lt. Sharma bet that it was not just any run-of-the-mill steel, his guess was that it was some variant of carbon-tungsten steel or something even harder that alien technology could come up with. This thing was made for strength. He had been half expecting the sphere to be made of lead, which being denser would have made a better shield. Still two-meter-thick steel could shield a lot of radiation, and one couldn’t count out that function either.
Lt. Sharma wished he had an old style analog Geiger counter, like the ones humans have been using to measure radiation for hundreds of years. If he had one, it would still be functional. Unfortunately, the Marines didn’t carry such primitive bulky equipment. Their suits were equipped with sophisticated radiation detection equipment, which fed directly into the suit’s computer. Now that the suit’s computer was fried, the suits radiation detection ability was nonfunctional. Lt. Rohit Sharma had another trick up his sleeve, literally. “Help me take my suit off.” Lt. Sharma asked Pvt. Rama Songathorn.
The private looked at his immediate superior officer bewildered. “You want me to take off your suit, sir?” Rama asked incredulously. “Sir, this place is likely to be full of hard radiation!”
“That is exactly why I want to know for sure, private! So, are you going to waste more time, or help me figure it out?” Lt. Sharma replied impatiently to Rama. Then as the private started helping, Lt. Sharma realized that he had unnecessarily been harsh to the young private. “I need to take out the rad inspection strip from the inner lining of the arm of the suit.” Pvt. Rama understood what the lieutenant was planning, and his efforts turned less reluctant in helping Lt. Sharma take off his suit.
It was a clumsy affair, floating next to the sphere kilometers away from the surface in zero G with no purchase other than locking one’s feet to the hand rails and grabbing the tethers that had been secured. It would be particularly dangerous for Lt. Sharma, now that he had taken off his suit and was untethered. If he drifted away from the hand rails and the tether, he would float away and eventually fall to the surface kilometers below. Pvt. Rama reminded him of that fact more than once as he helped the lieutenant. Once out of his suit, Lt. Sharma inserted his arm into the suit and felt his way to a point in the suit’s arm. Once he had found what he was searching for, he peeled off a strip from the inside, which had been secured with Velcro. It was the rad inspection strip.
Ordinarily the rad inspection strip was part of the long list of debriefing bureaucracy a Marine had to endure after a mission. It was part of a routine that had changed little in over a century in the Marines
Corps. Military has always been conservative in their process and procedures, often holding on to traditions and procedures long past their due date. The rad inspection strip was considered such a redundant traditional procedure by the Marines. It was designed in the early days of the USC Marine Corps, when suit technology was primitive.
As part of the overall health checkup of a Marine after a space mission, the medics needed to assess the amount of radiation that the Marine had absorbed cumulatively over the period of the mission. The current generation of suits could give that information through its suit computer to an extremely high degree of accuracy. That wasn’t the case in the first generation of suits that the Marine Corps donned. The radiation sensors were primitive, as were the computers in the suits which had limited capability partly due to the limited amount of battery power available to the suits. A simple fool proof protocol had been designed in those days, which may not have been highly accurate, but reliably gave a fair idea of the amount of radiation that the Marine had been exposed while wearing the suit during the mission.
The protocol entailed insertion of a hard radiation sensitive strip on the insides of suit, usually secured by Velcro at the commencement of a Mission by each Marine. This strip changed color and turned dark as it was exposed to hard radiation. Over the mission duration, the strip would change color from white to tan or dark brown depending on the amount of radiation that the strip, and by proxy the Marine was exposed to.
At the end of the mission, along with other medical inspection samples like urine, blood, etc. that a Marine had to submit to the medics as part of their routine debrief and health checkup would be the radiation strip. The strip gave a quick idea to the medics about the amount of exposure for any Marine, which helped the medics decide if any Marine needed any special attention. As is the case with many things about the military forces, this procedure had endured for over a century, even though it was redundant with the current technology.
Game Reserve: Earth (Shaitan Wars Book 5) Page 28