Star Force: Resolution (SF89) (Star Force Origin Series) (11 page)

The next step was to repeat his good fortune, and
within a few hours he had a good grip on the basics of a new idea as to what
was happening and got the machine into alignment again and held it for six
hours straight before manually shutting it down.

This was working, meaning they’d finally done it. Now
was time to kick back, turn this over to the lesser techs for analysis, and
take a few days off to clear his head and get back into theoretical mode. As
reports would flow into him he’d digest the little bits of data they provided,
hopefully gaining a few more insights as he sought a way to build the same
reactor in a smaller form…then a smaller one, and smaller and smaller until it
was actually useable.

And to do that he was going to have to truly master
this complex reaction. Right now he was just beginning to learn, and there was no
one else to turn this over to. He was the trailblazer amongst the experimental
physics teams, and while he could let the others do a lot of the analysis work
that now had to be done, no one else had the knowledge and experience to be
able to brainstorm into the unknown…at least not as fast as he did. And even
though they had V’kit’no’sat blueprints for everything, they were constructed
in a way that assumed prior knowledge and Tennisonne had learned that he had to
ignore them a lot of the time and build his equipment his way.

And that’s what this monstrosity was. It didn’t even
look like a V’kit’no’sat design, for it wasn’t, but that wasn’t to say their
blueprints hadn’t been crucial in teaching him what he needed to know, even if
they were extremely and frustratingly vague in some respects.

As he logged today’s results he sent a message off to
Davis concerning the breakthrough then checked himself out of
techland
to give his head a chance to recover from the
semi-brain fried state he usually operated in. They’d made the next step, a big
one, but to continue on he was going to need all the inspiration and ingenuity
he had…and that meant getting some rest and resetting.

Davis was in his office when Tennisonne’s message came
in. He had a priority router on everything that came from the Master Tech and
read it immediately, understanding the gravity in the very prim and succinct
message.

Star Force now had a
Nash’ti
reactor.

He stood up from his desk and began to pace the
perimeter of his office as the evening light was just beginning to dim in the
west. This breakthrough wasn’t useable yet other than in large constructs or on
the surface, but he knew that Tennisonne would be able to refine and
miniaturize it given time, as he always did. That didn’t concern him, though he
knew he couldn’t expect any timetable in such work.

But Star Force now had the capability, even in prototype
stage, and that was monumental. A few weapon systems, the
comm
equipment, and some lesser techs Star Force had already caught up to the V’kit’no’sat
on. It wasn’t their top model stuff, but it was all currently used by them as
of the fall of Earth. While they could have surpassed it since then, it was
functional and useable tech at the time rather than mothballed or recorded
designs relegated to history files within the pyramid databanks.

Davis knew from an industrial and military perspective
how valuable this was as the ramifications ran through his head as he began
redesigning all the infrastructure on Earth and the Solar System in a flash.
Everything would have to be reworked, ships would have to be brought into dock
for overhauls, city infrastructure would have to be tore out and replaced…and
that would not be a cheap or fast process. He couldn’t rely simply on new
designs, Star Force tech lasted so long that there wasn’t much turnover and the
bulk of his empire rested on ‘old’ models. For a power upgrade such as this
he’d have to rework existing equipment while fielding a trickle of new
production models.

Eventually he stopped and rested an elbow against the
clear floor to ceiling window as he looked out across Atlantis, but with his
mind being in a thousand other places. All this time they’d been so far behind
the V’kit’no’sat it would have been like going up against tanks with two sticks
and a rock, but now…

“Now we have a fighting chance,” he whispered to
himself and the galaxy.

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