Chapter 16: 016 A Present

After his mile long hike to the center of the carrier, guided by the abundant crewmembers both on and off duty, Donovan was just a bit out of breath. He wasn't really out of shape, it was just that he hadn't really done any endurance exercises in the past few months.

He couldn't really blame himself for it, there was no place to run in his cabin, but it made him just a little self conscious nonetheless. Seeing as he wanted to give a good impression (he was being given a gift) he stopped to catch his breath a bit before heading through the airlock.

In all honesty, the airlock was more of a redundancy measure than anything else thanks to the existence of an atmospheric containment field enclosing the entirety of the hangar, but these doors would keep the main cabin pressurized in the event of a failure.

Before the discovery of this field, the hangars of carriers were actually vacuums, the same as space. That isn't to say they were open to space, but it would be a tragic waste to lose precious air every time the bay doors were opened.

This also meant there was a time when engineers were forced to do maintenance in thick-skinned spacesuits without being able to hear what was going on around them.

It should come as no surprise that fatal accidents were very common back then, there were three carriers that Don could remember that were destroyed not by enemy fire, but because of some fuck-up in the handling of ammunition inside the ship.

In all but one, the exact causes are not known owing to the propensity of thermonuclear warheads to destroy evidence and send what little remains in the aftermath flying into the void of space at a significant clip.

Ever since the introduction of these fields, there has only been one such accident. Oddly enough, it wasn't the result of ordinance detonating, but a corvette that was admitted for emergency repairs that had it's reactor go supercritical as a result of a Skinnik hack. It was lucky that ship cores are not meant to detonate, and was therefore a weaker explosion in comparison, but it did little to ameliorate the fact that a carrier was almost lost to it. Since then, all craft stored inside of carriers have used conventional fuel and batteries to function.

Taking this into mind, Don was going to have to ask ARC to be careful with their own reactor. Its output far outstrips that of a mere corvette's, more on the level of a light cruiser if he had to take a guess. The potential damage of a reactor with that output blowing up was not something he wanted to think about.

Which is why when he thought about it, he got pissed off at something.

"Those fuckers put me at the front for a reason! If that thing goes off inside the main hangar not even the blowout plates won't be enough to save the carrier!"

In all honesty, even the block of concrete probably wouldn't be enough to save the carrier from annihilation, but Don was too far gone in his righteous indignation to consider that. It remained a fact that this was also a decision on the part of the reason he wasn't posted in the comfort of the primary hangar.

A whole fifteen minutes later, he regained his cool. Only doing so as a result of remembering his purpose for being here, he calmed himself and pushed the button to open the airlock doors.

He was greeted not by the humdrum of working men and the whirring, banging, and buzzing of tools, but by the relative silence of a dimly-lit cavern. It was anticlimactic in comparison to the hissing and beeping of the airlock, but completely expected.

This was no longer the time of the air-patrol rotations of terrestrial wars.

Rarely were deployable craft let outside the safety of the hangar, these ships themselves being functionally little more than missiles that required a human to operate. Outside of combat preparations and damage assessments, there was little need to perform maintenance, countless automated programs both in the carrier and the craft would be able to give a warning if something fell into decay.

Hell, if it weren't for the threat of Skinnik, the task of operating these ships would no doubt fall to the hands of computers. Oh what a different way to fight war that would be.

That is, if there would be war anyway. If everything could be relegated to the efficiency of drones, most of the outstanding issues between the inner and outer ring would be solved.

The outer ring would no longer have to worry quite as much about food, especially if there was nobody required to grow it.

The inner ring would no longer have as much to worry about in terms of mineral production, though they might still have to trade for some of the rarer stuff.

Oh if only some programmer hadn't made the catastrophic mistake of allowing an AI to hate humans. Don was certain there was more to it than that, but he couldn't be asked to care at this point, the damage was already done. As a result, he stood here staring at the craft colored in the rainbow theme this carrier followed, stacked on the walls and hung from the ceiling.

All of this space wasted to guarantee human operability. It really was something he could only scoff at.

"Yo Don!" A familiar voice from the relative darkness. "What took you so long?" Blue Squadron leader, Captain Thompson. His duty uniform was the same bright blue as his strike craft. It was tradition that pilots wore something related to the theme of their wing name, but usually it just amounted to something painted on their flight suit or a charm attached to their helmet.

For reference, the instructor wing at the academy, the "Continents", had memorabilia from each continent's culture in their cockpits.

The Calibration's wing was called the "Colors" and was painted to match. Seven flights of craft, seven colors making up ROYGBIV with brown being the backup eighth. When he had initially heard of this, he had serious questions as to stealth, but Thompson had simply replied, 'If we are close enough that they can see us with their eyes, we are close enough to be seen on infrared.' Which was honestly underestimated the issue presented by the ships being too small to have the luxury of directed heat disposal.

"I got lost on my way down." Not a lie, but not the whole truth either.

"That so? Well, let's get to it then! Me and the boys have been waiting a while for this one."

"What is it?"

"A handful."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"You'll see~."

As they walked to the maintenance area, a space in the center of the hangar left empty for the sole purpose of repair, everything in the vicinity started to light up.

The surrounding area could only be described as a mess. Evidently the engineers were not too worried about the state of their tools.

"Watch your step. Engies didn't clean up their mess after polishing the paint. Left to get drunk."

"And they're just okay with leaving their tools around this way?"

"Apparently, that's exactly where they want them, only the tubes and wires are out of place. First one to collapse from drinking gets to clean it up, or so I've been told. I'm fine with it as long as it doesn't get me killed." While saying that, he kicked aside a cord that Don undoubtedly would have tripped over.

Even with the lights, some of the cords were the same shade of gray as the floor. And while Don could enjoy finer meals, he was not eager to taste the composite metal that made up the hangar floor. More than just tasting like various metallic elements, Don was concerned there may be some undertones of various volatile chemicals based off of the general state of the maintenance tools and the distinct scent making up the room.

The fact that there was any scent at all was impressive given the intense ventilation and vapor containment protocols.

In contrast with his first impressions, Don was starting to think the crew of this particular carrier were not as professional as he had initially thought. A little bit of drinking could be excused as a way to stave off boredom and depression, but they seemed to take it a bit far.

Granted he considered it might also be that this is normal, a case of what is taught in the academy not matching up to conditions in the field. He could overlook it to a degree, the crew was still experiencing the afterglow of an absolutely devastating victory. He would be an idiot to not expect celebration.

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As they continued on, that stench only go worse. "God, would it kill them to get rid of this smell? Did they piss on the floor or something?"

To that, Thompson gave only a laugh. Bending down, he grabbed a handle flush with the floor and opened a door. If the lights weren't off Don would have seen many such handles on the floor, all attached to openings in the floor. They served many different purposes, some were openings for the ammunition and parts transportation systems, others had connections to the fueling and charging systems, a few had interfaces for controling various systems like the opening of the hangar door.

However, the one function they all had in common was that they could act as an impromptu airlock in the case of a hull breach. It would not be comfortable, nor safe, but all of these utility doors could hangar crew alive in the worst case scenario.

A grand total of five of these hundred or so panels had nothing to do with utility and were in fact doors to vertical corridors. Unlike the rest of the ship, these corridors were not subject to artificial gravity. This was because they lead to the other hangar, where gravity is directed in the opposite direction. There was no regulation requiring these to lack gravity, however many found it off-putting to go from being pulled one way to being pulled the other.

There were also concerns of what might happen to the more delicate parts of organic matter, like the brain, were it to be put into a situation where two parts of it were being pulled in different directions simultaneously for an extended period of time.

This isn't to say tests hadn't been done, but it remained fact that both the designers and the deployed had concerns over the ramifications. The sailors in particular were a suspicious bunch, you tended to become that way after living in a metal box where one mistake might have you enjoying a swim in the sea of space.

After jumping into the corridor and rapidly acclimating to the lack of pull on his person, Don took note that this corridor was not actually empty. Certainly, there was nothing floating freely in the air, but there was a door halfway through.

He was never told that you could put other rooms in this space during his design classes, but he supposed there would be no reason not to either. This would just be empty space if it didn't go to use. Unused space wasn't strictly a bad thing, it provided some benefits in regard to weight reduction and potential structural issues, but ship designers were generally of the opinion that if there was space that was not being used then it was an unnecessary expenditure in terms of both weight and energy.

As Captain Thompson opened the door, Don immediately discovered that this was probably the most effective used of this space he could imagine.

Zero-Gravity was actually extremely difficult to work with when robotics and artificial intelligence were mostly out of the question.

It was a generally inadequate environment for large quantities of liquid, It would slosh around when the ship moved and would have little incentive to actually go through a tube into something like a fuel tank as there would be no field of force acting on it.

It was hard to store massive objects, such as missiles and spare ship parts, as when somebody would attempt to move them, their small bodies would be moved a much greater distance in turn. Even with the assistance of magnetic locking boots, shifting such large objects around would be difficult as wheels and sleds not being tools at their disposal.

Similarly, large quantities of small objects would be difficult, though for completely different reasons. In this case, unless properly secured, small objects would invariably find themselves scattered and bouncing around at the slightest jostle. It would be bearable in the presence of gravity, the extent of the mess would be them piled on the floor. Without gravity this mess would be three dimensional, and mobile.

Experience had shown that these situations were extremely undesirable. Unfortunately, experience had also shown that these things were exactly what you would put in these empty spaces, they were left empty because everything else that was vital was already taken care of.

That made what was stored here a stroke of genius.

This was a pilot's lounge. It didn't store materiel, it stored people!

Unfortunately, alongside the increased enlightenment he felt, there was an increased scent of urine. Without the background of chemical scents like bleach and oil, Don could very clearly tell that the smell was urine. Apparently, his quip about somebody pissing was closer to the truth than he had thought.

"Haaaaaa," the captain let out an exhausted sigh, "Damn thing's leaking again."

"What's leaking?"

"Your gift. Ah fuck! Its all over the wall!" He looked like he might cry.

Indeed, if Don followed Thompson's gaze he would find a dotted line of yellow along the otherwise pristinely white walls. Walls being the appropriate term for all faces, there not being a way to distinguish down.

This led to a fairly unique set-up to the room. Chairs, screens, and even tables were not limited to a conventional layout. That being said, there was veeeery little open space, this being on purpose so that nobody would find themselves 'stranded' out of reach of an object they could use to move themselves around.

Concurrent with his exclamation over the state of the room, a soft yet high pitched yapping found its way out of one of the six corners of the room.

"Stay here, let me go get it." As he turned and launched himself towards the source of the sound, Don caught him mutter something about a box under his breath.

Don took this time to admire gravity, both is presence and absence. He found it incredible that the simple matter of something being heavy, albeit colossally so, was enough to draw things toward it. At the same time, being anywhere in the middle of an evenly distributed hollow sphere would result in there being no gravitational pull.

That meant that, theoretically, it was possible to go from experiencing tremendous amounts of gravitational force to absolutely none at all in an instant!

Currently, being vaguely around the center of mass of the ship, he was experiencing a similar phenomena.

Granted, this was completely irrelevant. Despite how massive this carrier was, it was nowhere close to being able to compete with a true celestial body in terms of gravitational pull.

Even if someone were to 'stand' in the spot of a dreadnought's exterior that would grant the highest value of gravity in the direction of it's center of mass, the gravitational acceleration they would experience would be closer to a billionth of Earth's surface gravity than a millionth. Keep in mind this was a dreadnought, the most dense ship of the line.

Even if someone where to stand over a mass of solid steel of a similar radius, for calculation's sake 250 meters, they would find themselves only experiencing a whopping 0.00002 percent of Earth's surface gravity.

Keeping in mind that volume (and therefore mass) increases cubically with relationship to the radius of a sphere whereas the gravitational force induced by an object only atrophied quadratically with distance, increasing the size of a sphere would increase gravitational pull. It was only because of this relationship, the square-cube law he was so familiar with, that massive natural bodies floating through space were allowed to form.

There were other places where this law reared its head in less beautiful ways, the acceleration potential of a ship being previously discussed and the fact that terrestrial lifeforms could not exceed a certain volume because their bone structure would not be able to take it.

He remembered horses being used as a microcosm of this effect. Their leg bones, uncharacteristically thin for an animal of their size, were prone to breaking more often should they ever become overweight.

However the animal, yes, animal, that Captain Thompson emerged from behind the sterile white sofa with was not a horse.

It was a puppy! A cute little bundle of of brown and black fur that radiated a pungent musk of urine and shit. Even Thompson, a man Don considered to have considerable grit (even if he was a bit kooky in the head) was holding it by the scruff and covering his nose.

"Heer zhe iz." He sounded ridiculous with his nose covered. "Dake id."

Suddenly faced with a panicking sack of fur headed his way, Don seized up, and the dog 'fell' into his chest.

The situation was only made worse when he caught it. In immediate hindsight, not the best idea. Just as it smelled, it was drenched in it's own piss. He could immediately tell he was going to share the its fate of smelling horrendous for the immediate future. A future which Thompson was laughing at on his way back to an area where he could clean himself and his new pet.

He probably could have put the poor thing down to walk, but for expediency's sake he decided to transport it to the decontamination center while pulling it tight to his chest.

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