Chapter 70

(Abi)

While cargo ships had been coming and going to hangar 11A almost constantly for days, people had to be wondering what was going on, though no one knew, exactly. Even those aboard Abi didn’t know that there was an entire factory that was cranking out many different items and components. That was including millions of rounds of ammunition for the mass drivers and the ball turrets.

There were a few different types of rounds, but all of them had the same crystal that made up Abi and the Grasshoppers incorporated into them somehow. Some rounds were almost entirely crystalline with the only metal being the ferrous core, while others only had a crystalline tip for better penetrating power and were otherwise made out of a dense ferrous metal.

Though there was about one mass driver round and several hundred ball turret rounds being produced and stored every second, that operation only took up a miniscule amount of space that she had to work with. A section was dedicated to building the generators that would greatly increase the amount of power that the flight crews of the Grasshoppers had to work with. Since she was already building the generators, she saw no reason why she couldn’t build more Grasshoppers as well.

They would be different--they had to be--because they wouldn’t have a small piece of Abi’s mana core built into it like the other six had. That also required some alterations to the design, as the mana core was incredibly small for the amount of power it allowed the crews to access. The generators would take up much more space in comparison, they also wouldn’t come close in terms of power generation.

She had a way around that, however, as the rear of each of the new ships would be widened by about forty percent to fit two of the generators side by side. Each of the ships would also come equipped with the same system that she was currently working on for the six Grasshoppers. If the shit hit the fan, then up to two additional generators could be removed from the ships’ dimensional storage, making the relatively small ships greatly overpowered.

None of the aforementioned projects were what she was focused on, as the machines were basically on autopilot. What she was working on was more hands on, as she needed to test and tinker before testing again. While she didn’t have hands of her own in the usual sense, she did have dozens of different mechanical arms that were all positioned around a large table in the center of a room. A room which didn’t have a single door or vent, but was brightly lit up.

On the table that the mechanical arms were crowded around were many different pieces, but they were positioned in a specific order. There were two feet that were detached from the lower part of the legs, which were each separated into three pieces, the lower leg, the knee area and then the upper part of the leg. Above that was a torso with arms laid out beside it, also in pieces and with the fingers not even being attached yet. It wasn’t the new suits that she was working on for Jonathan and his friends and sisters--those were nearly done already--but was instead something else entirely.

There was no head to top off the crystalline and Warvynium construct, though that was what Abi was working on now. One of the arms reached towards the table, and as it did, a rounded piece of Warvynium appeared on it. It was clearly part of a skull, but it didn’t have teeth, a lower jaw, or any holes for the eyes, ears or nose. It was just a rough shape, but one she immediately went to work on.

As the arm it appeared on held it securely, two of the other arms were moved, both of which had lasers attached to their ends. With incredible precision, they began carving away at the skull, shaping it as some metal was removed, while also creating the openings needed to see, hear and smell. It didn’t take long at all, and soon the skull was placed above the shoulders. With it in place, the beginnings for a body were complete. A body of her own.

When I had awoken in the morning, it was to an alarm that started off quietly and slowly got louder. I knew it wouldn’t stop until I actually got out of bed, and one look at Vixa made me do exactly that. The moment the alarm turned back off, Vixa tucked her head back under her tails and went right back to sleep.

Just after I was done showering, Abi asked that I join her down in the factory after I was done eating, stating that she had some things to show me. I had no idea what she had in store, but it would give me a good opportunity to tell her about another idea I came up with, it would just be up to her to tell me if it was feasible.

Though Vixa probably would have liked to continue sleeping, there was no way that she was going to avoid some really good food. We made our way there and while there were people present, there were nowhere near as many people there as there usually was. The result was that there wasn’t really a line to get breakfast, but instead people just took what they wanted and moved on.

We didn’t see my sisters or my friends while we ate, and I knew the dragons and my parents were off the ship, so as soon as we were done, we headed down. While I knew the layout of the ship pretty well thanks to the information being downloaded directly to my brain, everything was new to me. It was also completely empty, as the area was only accessible via teleporters located around the ship, and very few people actually had access.

The factory was extremely loud when we arrived, but thankfully Abi had anticipated that fact. Two pairs of earmuffs were waiting on a table just inside the door, so I put them on and she took us on a tour. She couldn’t really lead us in the usual sense, so instead the floor lit up directing us where to go.

While I knew it was massive, hearing length and width and square or cubic meters just didn’t do it justice. The ceiling wasn’t terribly high, but it was so long that I couldn’t even see the other side of the room. Part of that was because there was machinery in the way, but also because it was just that big.

The machinery looked pretty normal, too. I had expected it all to be made out of crystal, and while much of the housing was, the majority of it was all made out of metal. New, shiny metal, so it seemed as though much of the machinery had been built and installed recently, though they were all churning out various things. I couldn’t recognize the vast majority of the things that were being made, but there were some that stood out.

In particular, the barrels for some sort of gauss cannons were easily identifiable as they were being installed in a four barrel gatling-style set up. They were quite a bit bigger than the ones on the Grasshoppers, and they looked as if they would be installed as they were, rather than be installed in a ball turret. When I asked what they were for, Abi said that she would be making some changes to the layout of the ship so she could incorporate them before we headed back to Earth. With the limited amount of people onboard for the return trip, the least amount of power draws, the better.

Further along, we came across the three machines that were pumping out mass driver rounds at a pretty impressive pace. One of the machines was encapsulated in a forcefield since it was dealing with depleted uranium, and while most of the radiation was gone, there was still some remaining.

It seemed that there would be three different rounds, for both the mass driver and the considerably smaller gauss cannons used on the Grasshoppers, as well as the new ones being built for Abi herself. The first type was a pretty standard round and was made out of a solid chunk of depleted uranium, formed into a cylinder. There wasn’t even a point on it as both ends were perfectly flat, so it would be like lobbing a heavy brick at incredible speeds, allowing the mass and velocity of the round to do all the damage.

The other two looked pretty similar to one another as both had crystalline tips, but one of them was made almost entirely out of crystal, while the other was primarily tungsten, purely to add more mass to the round. Both needed to have a core of iron inserted so they could be fired, and we watched that part for a few minutes before continuing on. True for all three of the rounds was that an electromagnetically shielded explosive was inserted as well. If a round from the mass driver was fired but didn’t connect with the target, then the explosive could be detonated manually, or automatically once it had traveled a certain distance away. That distance was apparently one million kilometers by default, but it could be changed on the fly, if necessary.

There was another shielded area that we walked through, and that was the foundry and forge that took up a good portion of the available space. On one side, raw metal was melted down in massive crucibles and then poured into castings of all manners, while the other side is where some of the metal was worked when it was cooled.

Most of the metal produced by the foundry was simply cast into bars to be used later on, while a smaller amount was moved over to different machines to be worked. Not being familiar with working metal at the slightest, I had no idea what was being made. I recognised industrial hydraulic presses and lathes, but not much else.

Towards the end of the tour, she stopped me in front of what a large rectangle that seemed to be made out of crystal. The edges were rounded and it was featureless but for the screen and keyboard embedded in the front of it. As I looked it over, I realized that the dimensions were pretty exact for both the lounge area and the area where the Watchdogs would await deployment.

“The reactors you were talking about?” I asked.

“That’s right. This is the first one, capable of generating more power than a Grasshopper should ever need for most situations. If a Grasshopper has two of these installed, then they’ll be even more capable, and could even take a few shots from my own mass drivers. That should make Suna quite happy.”

I nodded. “This is a perfect time to bring up that idea I had then. So last night, the six Grasshoppers spread out in a formation around the stadium to keep an eye out so the events from Ercan’s house couldn’t be repeated. With the Grasshoppers spread out like that, would it be possible to sort of link them together and act as shield generators to create a massive dome-like shield? It would be sort of like the heavy transports, but each ship would be able to lend its power to the shield, increasing the size and strength of it.”

“It could, but not in the way you want it to. Not yet, at least. Until the method of what is essentially beaming power from one location to another is discovered by another species, the only way to do it would be to connect the ships together. At that point, all the power generated would be directed to a central ship, and then that ship could use that massive increase in power to form and sustain a much bigger shield. I’ve got something like that in mind, but I didn’t think about it for the Grasshoppers.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Well, as well as carrying a large amount of troops or vehicles, the biggest plus for the heavy transports was the possibility of landing them on a planet to act as mobile bases. With the shield being active, it would create a large safe zone that could be a kilometer in diameter, if not a little bit bigger. Now with the majority of the troops or vehicles off the ship, that would open up a lot of space to have more of these reactors installed to power the shield.”

“Say you add one hundred of them, with each of them being able to increase the diameter of the shield by about ten meters, on average, while maintaining the same level of strength. That would double the diameter of the safezone, but give you over four times the amount of space to work with. With how small these reactors are, I would estimate that several hundred of them could be installed on a heavy transport, but you end up running into diminishing returns pretty quickly. It would be more efficient to just drop off a reactor or two here and hook them up to a shield generator at that point. Instead of having one massive shield, you could have dozens of smaller, but equally powerful ones.”

“So how many reactors would you be willing to install on one of the heavy transports before adding more wouldn’t be worth it?”

“I’m not entirely sure, and I won’t know until I run some simulations, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near the one hundred in my example. It might only be two or three dozen, which would still increase the diameter of the shield by a lot. Talking about this does give me an idea of my own though,” she said.

A beam of light shot from the ceiling, which quickly formed a hologram that floated in front of me. On it, was what looked like a five ton military truck from Earth, though this one was a little bit longer and had one of the reactors in front of me installed on it. That’s not all it had, however, as there was a smaller square device that was sandwiched between it and the cab.

“So Oya could probably work up a better design, but something like this would probably be very effective. It would essentially be a mobile forcefield and would allow friendly troops and vehicles to advance and hold a position much more safely and easily. Enemy fire could be pretty much ignored at that point and spells wouldn’t be very useful either. Unless the shield was overtaxed and the shield generator was fried, a shield could stay up indefinitely with one of these reactors hooked up to it. Provided there is a steady supply of fuel, of course.”