Chapter 21: 021 Warped

The first order of business after setting up the orbit was to do something he had no choice but to put off for a long time.

Acclimating the dog to Zero Gravity.

She had peed immediately upon being released from the cockpit, so that was not an issue. Neither was the presence of food in her gut, it was getting close to feeding time.

This in mind, he followed the manual's instruction and started throwing a ball for her to chase.

Five minutes in, he ordered ARC to start lowering the gravity. This rate was slower than recommended, but for his first time doing this he wanted as little trouble as possible.

Time was aplenty.

Mercedes' attention was so focused on the ball that she only noticed something was off at about a third of normal gravity, almost ten minutes of steady lightening. Stumbling had been growing more frequent throughout this period of time

She obviously wasn't fully aware of what was happening, but her ears were alert and she was looking around frantically for a perceived threat. A quiet 'halt' from Don signaled to ARC that the current level of gravity should be held.

"What's wrong Mercedes?"

Don's plan was, to put it shortly, gaslight Mercedes into thinking nothing was off.

"Come here girl! Ball!" He kept up the pitch of his voice so as to better attract her attention.

Upon her nervous return to him, marked by shaky legs and a hidden tail, he started giving her pets and hugging her tight.

ARC continued to decrease the gravity load.

Eventually, Don was only maintaining a façade of being affected by gravity. His toes were hooked in a notch in the bottom of his bed, with the rest of him dedicated to pushing down the dog.

She was still nervous at this point, but she did not begin to panic until she took note of some of her toys 'flying'. A stream of panicked barks, almost screams, at the sudden realization marked the end of the relatively calm period.

Don just let go of her and let her float. He was keeping a close eye on her physical state, and ARC was monitoring her heart rate, so there was little danger. Probably.

He chose to float alongside her as she panicked, cooing to her to calm down. Thankfully, Mercedes was already very tired from chasing the ball around. In spite of her desire to express her stress through vocal means, her breathing was growing ragged.

With some foam at the edges of her mouth, Don bounced his way around into a position right above her back and ever so slightly to the side. Letting out a long 'Shhhhh' he hugged her, applying light pressure around her hips to hold her legs in and pulling her neck to his chest. This was explained to be have a calming effect.

Mercedes let out a light whimper, but she did not resist. For a while, they just stayed where they were. Don was not entirely sure how long he was supposed to hold her like this.

At ARC's mark, he slowly released his hold on her, careful to keep her within an arm's breadth in case she did something less than smart.

Instinctually, she tried to balance herself. However, without the force of gravity to balance against she assumed a rather weird position.

Her neck was extended and her head tilted slightly downward, forelegs extending upwards and outwards. It looked similar to when Don picker her up by her armpits. Her rear quarter was gyrating slightly, her tail desperately attempting to orient herself to a downward direcion that simply didn't exist.

The only word to describe her current appearance was pathetic.

Keeping his hands just behind her ribcage, he kept some pressure on her to keep her calm. Her heart was beating, fast, but it was starting to slow down. Presumably, Mercedes' levels of stress and adrenaline were also decreasing.

Once Mercedes calmed down enough to realize she was not in danger, she turned a pleading gaze towards Donovan, correctly assuming that this unnatural phenomena was his doing.

He would not be swayed to stop now.

Don let go of her entirely, pulling back his hands slowly so as to not alarm the dog. She started to whine and shake while she remained suspended in air, but Don's calm demeanor kept her from panic.

According to the videos, being calm was an important aspect of training a dog. They explained that when dogs are puppies, they act very much the same as babies in how they learn. Emotionally they are also very similar, largely being mirrors. They reflect the condition that their parent, the trainer, is exuding.

If he showed worry or stress then Mercedes, not knowing what was going on, would also become stressed assuming there was something wrong.

Obviously, this was by no means an ironclad law. If the dog was subjected to a wave of jumbled information such as loud noises and flashing lights then confusion and panic would set in regardless.

Don had actually expected getting Mercedes to this point to take a few attempts, but the first try turned out to be enough. Now he just had to stay there with her for three hours before he was off to bed.

Three hours he would spend reading, suspended midair.

Trench warfare, artillery rain, gas attacks, despite never having seen any of these things he could envision them very well. Visual aides helped, the first world war being the first real war recorded in real time with actual photos.

Unfortunately, Donovan was becoming uninterested in the conflict.

Certainly there were interesting and exciting bits about it, but there were very few variations in tactic and technology. The deciding factor in Imperial Germany's surrender ultimately not being the capture of strategic objectives or persons vital to the war's continuation, but the Imperial Army's realization that they would not be able to keep up the war effort against the material and manpower added by the introduction of the United States.

Ultimately, he deemed there was little more he could learn in the realms of tactics or strategic methodology from the conflict.

ARC's suggestion wasn't to move on to the second World War, something he would have considered to be the logical progression, but instead start to work backward.

"You are unlikely to find anything interesting in the areas you seem to be eager to learn about. I would suggest going as far back as the medieval period."

"The age of the melee? I suppose swords and all that are kind of cool, but I don't see how the tactics and strategies involved would be in any way applicable to the modern day."

"And those of the World Wars are? Need I remind you that a terrestrial war has not occurred since the Venus catastrophe nearly eight centuries ago? A departure from the tactics you are familiar with is likely to stimulate you more."

Donovan was expecting a sharp wakeup call, but he was operating under the assumption that electricity would not be involved. Ill prepared mentally for the sharp pain and popping sounds inherent in such consciousness inducing measures, he spasmed himself out of his bed onto the floor.

Collateral damage took the form of a bewildered and groggy German Shepherd who found itself suddenly kicked off of the bed.

His dreams of sieges and organized battle lines were not destined to continue.

"We are on course to pass through a dust field in 5 minutes. It is unusually dense and appears to be expanding, the scanners cannot make out if there is an asteroid within it. Immediate evasive action is needed."

"And you couldn't wake me up normally?"

"I made several attempts. I suspect this mission is taking a greater toll on you than we initially expected. The oddity of the cloud may shed a light on enemy capabilities."

The disgruntled Mercedes glared daggers at the now fully clothed pilot from her previous spot on the bed. The sheets may have been in a state of disarray, but her body heat and indent in the mattress remained.

Sliding into the pilot's seat, the right side of his screen flared with all sorts of analysis and warning messages. The total cloud mass looked to be around that of heavy cruiser, and it's volume was expanding at an ever increasing rate.

"Position the Noah around ten to fifty kilometers from it while maintaining an identical velocity. There is no record of any celestial event that would describe what is currently happening, remain vigilant should danger arise. Your eyes will receive the information on screen faster than if I were to say it to you."

"Just give me a vector." Now a veteran of controlling the overly responsive and quite jerky rate of turn the Noah boasted, he got on his way to a parallel running course with a minimum of wasted time. "Do you have an idea of where the center of this field is yet?"

"Yes, but that comes later. I will put a side-by-side of thermal and electro magnetic scans of the cloud on screen. You may be more capable of inferring the truth of the mystery of this phenomena than myself."

Two windows came up, both showing what would usually be nothing more than a dull blob. Asteroids and dust clouds aren't exactly known to generate radio waves and heat, block them maybe, but never generate.

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That 'knowledge' was being turned on its head in front of them. The readings that were being given off were more akin to that of a civilian ship experiencing a total system meltdown than a lifeless hunk of minerals.

"The cloud appears to be made primarily of iron, nickel, and copper, and if the scanners are operating correctly then it has all been atomized."

"Is there something else in there? Like some potassium touching some other reactive substance?"

"No. There should be nothing in that cloud that would react chemically at the temperature it is at."

Don resorted to brainstorming and keeping an eye on the suspiciously energetic lump of matter. In most cases he would converse with ARC and try to come to a conclusion with it, but whatever was happening here was so far outside of what his field of study was it may as well have been witchcraft.

Overwatch was starting to get boring until something strange happened.

"Curious. It would appear that whatever object is undergoing this spontaneous reaction has split into two." If ARC's previous behavior was anything to go off of, then Don believed that it was starting to get an idea of what exactly was happening. "With any luck, the smaller half should escape the outer bound of the cloud within the next 15 minutes. Do you have a hypothesis as to what is occurring?"

"No, but I think I might know the cause."

"Continue."

"Split radiation. That's the only oddity about the situation that I can even think to believe is a 'cause'. It would justify the naming scheme as well, what with it literally splitting the object into atoms."

"I had come to the same conclusion but for different reasons. Instead of your connection with the name of the radiation to the incident that is occurring, I noted that there is a very minor drop in the intensity of split radiation in the direction of the cloud corresponding with a burst in one of the other forms of energy."

"Why can't I see it on my screen?"

"Much like the change in energy consumption for the shield, this drop in intensity is similarly insignificant to your eyes. More importantly, it has better clarified to me exactly how split radiation operates as a measuring device."

"You didn't know before? How has that changed now?"

"Previously, I was operating under the assumption that Split Radiation was something more like the intensity of other waves like the light spectrum. Instead it appears to be more of a measure of concentration in a given direction."

"How is that different?"

"I wonder how to explain... Let me try this to see if it makes sense for you. Have you ever been on a boat on a calm lake or at the top of a mountain and looked down at the ground?"

"Is a airplane good enough?"

"It will suffice. Do you perhaps remember how objects further away from the aircraft appeared to be more pale and blue compared to those far closer?"

"Yes, the Rayleigh Shuffling effect or something like that right?"

"Indeed. It would seem that Split radiation is not a measure of some wavelength, but instead a measure of the volume and concentration of some substance in a certain direction. The more of the 'air', if you will, in one direction, the higher the value of Split radiation will be. Given the choice of name, I suspect that the substance being measured is something called Split."

"If that's the case then why did the sun give off readings?"

"The sun gives off large readings for practically everything. It would be more interesting if there was something it didn't give off. But enough of that, the smaller half is about to emerge."

'Anomalous', failed to properly describe whatever process was occurring at the moment. The implication of an 'Anomaly' being a deviation from the standard or expected, but not completely without an explanation. Anomalies can and often do occur in pretty much every field one can imagine, and usually are caused by some unforeseen variable or outside intervention.

The reaction that this lump of metal was undergoing could only be called impossible, something that only became more clear to ARC as it collected more detailed and accurate reports from the scanning equipment. But the most shocking revelation was yet to come.

To Don's eyes, the process of separation appeared to be visually comparable to how cells undergo mitosis, the 'blobs' of heat slowly separating from each other. The outer shell of the asteroid, now more accurately referred to as space dust, seemed to part to allow this small chunk to depart.

The readings spiked in accordance with the lack of interfering metals, revealing the rock to be under a colossal amount of . . . something.

Don was tempted to refer to it as 'stress', but he cold really only 'see' the rock in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. There was a little visible spectrum light being released, sure, but it didn't even shine as bright as the (what would normally be) star covered stellar background.

"It appears to be deforming." ARC tried explaining what it could see to the less sensorally gifted pilot. "The points I have highlighted have closer to each other by about ten centimeters since it left the cloud. There also seems to be some twisting occurring, but the axis is not consistent."

They continued to watch on in silence for a few more minutes, utterly baffled at the unfolding chaos.

"I believe I understand how the atomization is coming to be. Would you like an explanation?"

Don simply nodded, fist on his chin.

"After analyzing a section of the asteroid's surface, I took note of how particles would occasionally jump from the bindings of the asteroid, increasing in frequency when the torsion axis roughly aligns with their position. I have taken this to mean that the forces acting during the period of time it is in that region are strong enough to cause the particles to physically detach in order to disperse the surface forces."

"What unholy magnitude of force would be required to do that to metallic bonds?"

"Uncertain, but not something I would suggest subjecting the Noah to."

"No shit. Increase the capacity buffer for the split shield, I don't care if it bites into mobility."

"Even at risk of other threats?"

"Mobility has proved itself to not be our primary method of defense. I would rather not take the risk of disintegration should we stumble into some hyper-anomaly, unless you can guarantee you could identify such an event before we are inside of it?" His tone wasn't hostile, though it was not friendly.

Don could not shake the feeling of danger, fear of something other than this occurrence, slowly seeping into his psyche. Alone and isolated from any support, he would have to deal with emergent threats by himself.

But he had to figure out what exactly the threat was before he could work around defeating or avoiding it.

The summation of his capability to defend against Split was that the Split Shield repelled it in exchange for drawing on power. Even this card in his hand was still largely an unknown. Does the energy draw to repulsion efficacy scale linearly? Does it have acclimating or diminishing returns? Is there an upper limit to a concentration that can be dealt with? He didn't have the statistics on these, and ARC's lack of clarity only furthered his suspicions that the system had not been stress tested to its fullest.

Not that he could have expected them to collect that data. They couldn't exactly risk losing an extremely expensive piece of equipment in order to test its practical limits, especially when they couldn't guarantee anything of that magnitude would ever be encountered.

Considering the fact that this project had to be kept under wraps, there was more incentive to not perform such a flashy test.

Twenty minutes into the observation, both chunks had visibly warped from their initial geometries. A visible pulsation of the vaguely spherical masses could be seen.

Where before atoms would be ejected from the main body individually, they now appeared to shed in layers.

In cycles of thirty seconds, a slowly decreasing period, the outside layer of atoms would slowly expand the radius by a few centimeters before simultaneously detaching themselves from each other. ARC determined that the nuclei of the atoms were expanding, causing the attached electrons to go nuts, before suddenly reaching some sort of critical volume and instantly shrinking back to their normal size.

This was the process which permitted the atoms to detach themselves from other atoms.

"I think it is about time we returned to our initial objective, ARC. This is interesting, don't get me wrong, but I can see no benefit to a continued observation. The longer we are out here, the higher our chance of falling into danger."

"I must reluctantly agree. The process appears to have reached a state of balance, and watching it through to completion would take two days at the current rate. Most certainly an unacceptable length of time."

A vector popped up on screen in the direction of where they were last stopped, they had to backtrack to where they began in order to guarantee that the vector ARC had calculated was correctly calibrated.

Mercedes, now properly awake, lay on the bed with her head between her paws. She was intently watching Donovan as he worked. By now she was aware that he was not to be distracted while in that seat, but that didn't mean that she didn't want to. Her current priority was coaxing him into feeding her.

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