Archaea Read Free Page B

frigate, about 100 meters long with top-mounted kinetic railers, which was pretty standard repeater turret armament. There are nova-class repeaters, but this ship clearly didn't have them.
    Once I stepped inside, however, I saw my reason for being. My heart double skipped, I gasped, I heard tweeting birds, hell, I nearly swooned and almost wept - I was in love. The Archaea was built around one of the biggest and most powerful nova-class beam weapons ever made. I'm not talking about a giga or even a tera, but a petawatt emitter – the kind you could use to slice a moon into itty-bitty pieces.
    I couldn't wait to light it up.
    The Archaea is laid out in rings that rotate around a central core. When she was built, pseudomass technology hadn't matured to the point where artificial gravity would be feasible. For a ship her size, it wouldn't make much sense, in any case.
    On the surface or in drydock, you enter the ship through the main cargo bay via a belly loading ramp. At the top of the ramp is a reasonably large hold, set up well for modular containers, with an internal track-mounted crane hoist. Along a catwalk at the forward end of the hold is an internal lock that leads into the gun deck that is all null gravity when we're underway. Aft of the hold are the access hatches to the engineering space where the valve twisters and wrench monkeys live.
    Moving forward through the core, there are three hatched openings in the deck that lead down to our ring spaces. Each ring of the ship is self-supporting, and can be isolated from ship systems for some time, in the event of catastrophic systems failure or hull-breach.
    Ring 3 holds the gallery, wardroom, and recreation area. Ring 2 has a medical bay, a reasonably well stocked lab that is mostly used to store various parts and other contraband, and a very well equipped machine shop. Ring 1 is crew quarters and officer country, though we don't really live by rank on this ship. The captain is the Captain, and everyone else isn't - that's pretty much the way of it.
    I live in ring 1 forward, in a nice little stateroom with all the amenities. I have a loft bunk with a desk and clothes locker underneath, a holoview panel with a cabin enviro unit opposite, and a tiny wall-mount sink for brushing my teeth (one tooth at a time, it's pretty small) and even a mirror for getting angry at – if I stand on a stool.
    No short jokes, please.
    Moving forward in the central companionway, a hatch leads up to my gunnery station and beyond, to the top-mounted repeater turret compartment which houses the mechanicals and ammo ovens. Forward of my station, is the hatch leading to the bridge deck of the ship. In a firefight, which we have only simulated so far, the core of the ship is probably the safest place to be, though it might not be very comfortable. In our ramp-up tests for the main gun, the temperature jumped pretty high, and I can't imagine what a prolonged battle might be like in there.

Chapter 2
     
    My heart was in my throat as I stepped through the debugger for the bootstrap module I've been developing for so many years. The core of the Archaea is like an infinite pool of power, nothing I've built into it has even scratched the surface of what it is capable of - not that I haven't tried!
    I can't say for sure how fast it really is, it may be faster than I could calculate to be honest. The speed of the core has enabled me to write some pretty interesting predictive modeling algorithms that utilize sheer speed and processing power of the core, to bend the response curve beyond real-time, making use of quantum mechanics to provide results literally faster than they're requested, and then to fold those requests back into itself faster than they can be generated.
    I have lost sleep wondering what might happen if this becomes self-aware.
    Shorty was chomping at the bit for this predictive modeling and analysis engine. She was really excited for it to be extended to the fire-control and tracking