“Grapping maulk, here he goes again!” Drago rolled his eyes.
“Let us guess… Commander Weaver is one of them?” Lovelace added.
“And Mimi is the other…” Berg finished.
“Damn, I know you’ve got a jones for the commander, Two-Gun, but the kid too? That’s serious jailbait.”
“And as I was saying,” Two-Gun ignored the comment. “Then there’s photons…”
“Photons! Hey, I’ve heard of that. Like a photon torpedo?” Drago said excitedly.
“Uh, yeah, Drago,” Berg said. “Like a photon torpedo.”
“I got one right!”
“Light’s a particle and a wave. Sort of.”
“What’s a tachyon?” Lovelace asked. “I heard something about tachyons.”
“It’s what you get when you let rednecks play with particle physics,” Berg said, grinning again. “Seriously, what it is is a theoretical particle that travels faster than light only and would take infinite energy to slow it down to light speed. Most of these particles only exist when you have some sort of weird reaction, and decay in less time than I’m going to bother to explain. Some of them, though, hang around and we get to detect them.”
“I don’t get why the sensors don’t just say ‘hey, bosons!’ ” Sergeant Lovelace said.
“Because there are different aspects to particular mesons and bosons,” Berg said. “The real kicker is fermions and pentaquarks. So far, we’ve never seen pentaquarks in nature. If you’re getting a reading that indicates pentaquarks or other high-multiple quark formations, then something strange is going on. Fermions do occur from some natural processes. After all, electrons, muons, and tau particles are fermions and we are pounded by electrons and muons all the time. The higher energy ones are the key to things we are interested in. Usually, you get them as the result of a recent quarkium explosion or a Higgs boson nearby. Pentaquarks, too. So if you see a bunch of high energy fermion or pentaquark signatures, fermions that are nonstandard fermions, there’s probably been a big boom.”
“Which means there might be another,” Sergeant Lovelace said, nodding. “I’m starting to see some point to this.”
“Go, Brain,” Lujan said, grinning. “I think it’s a much better handle than Two-Gun.”
“Can it, Drago.”
“And baryons, more specifically mesons, can indicate there’s a gate around,” Berg said.
“Wait!” Drago interrupted. “I thought it was muons that said there was a gate around?”
“Well, yes. Muons are a fermion that is a fundamental particle like an electron and they do indicate a boson or a gate.”
“This is confusing as hell.”
“It is that,” Berg continued. “According to something I read on the declass science system notes, there was baryon presence after we did that dimensional shift. So baryons might indicate something is dimensionally shifting. Or, and this is sort of science fiction, it might mean there’s something out of phase. It might be invisible, in other words. It might even be able to see you, but you not see it. Possibly. Maybe sorta.”
“Wait,” Drago said again, frowning. “I got some pentaquark readings from my Wyvern the last time we did maintenance.”
“Ship gives off pentaquarks,” Berg said, nodding. “We’ve got a quarkium drive. That’s another indicator. But we don’t give off baryons unless we’re doing a dimensional jump. Maybe.”
“Dude, I did not join the Corps to study quantum physics,” Crowley moaned.
“Welcome to the Space Marines.” Berg shrugged. “Learning this is nearly as important as learning how to field strip your M-675.”
“Everybody’s to fall in to the missile room,” Staff Sergeant Summerlin ordered. “Some sort of announcement.”
“Shiny,” Crowley said, standing up. “Anything has to be better than this maulk.”
The XO arrived late to the command meeting and set a stack of paper in front of the captain before sitting down.
“That’s not only the consumables report but the data backing it.” The XO sighed. “We’ve only got two more days of air and we’ve already cut the water ration to one quarter. Unless we find some water to process we’re going to be breathing pure CO2 in another three days.”
Standard submarines have very limited fresh water and oxygen storage. Both could be extracted from seawater so large storage areas were a waste of space. The Vorpal Blade had been designed with much more extensive storage of both, mostly by cutting down on its ballasting system, but it was still limited.
Since the surprising find in the E Eridani system the ship had been cruising for three weeks without finding another even semi-habitable planet. And things were getting a bit grim.
“Commander Weaver,” the CO said, looking over at the astrogator. “Suggestions?”
“Well, it’s a bit tricky, sir,” Bill replied. “We haven’t found any planets with an Earth type atmosphere, which was what I’d been hoping for. But we can get all the air we need from gas giants. Water, too, but that’s trickier.”
“I thought their atmosphere was hydrogen,” the XO said, puzzled.
“Mostly hydrogen,” the CO replied. “But it’s got a lot of other stuff in it.”
“That’s the point, sir,” Bill said, nodding. “Oxygen, after hydrogen, is about the most common atom in the universe. Stars pump it out constantly by first fusing their hydrogen into helium then continuing fuse down to iron in what is known as the CNO cycle…”
“Chief of Naval Operations?” the XO asked, confused.
“Carbon-Nitrogen-Oxygen,” Bill said, trying not to sigh. “Oxygen’s a common fusion point and is put out in quantity as a by-product of stellar evolution. Most of it ends up locked up with hydrogen, water in other words, but a good bit gets into the atmosphere of gas giants. But gas giant atmospheres are layered. We’re going to have to drop actually into the atmosphere and hover while we extract O2. There’s going to be water there, too, but it’s going to be disperse, and extracting it is going to be harder. We’ll pick up some from the oxygen extraction process, but I think we’re going to have to find the rest of it in ice.”
“Land on a moon?” the CO asked.
“That or get it from a ring,” Bill replied, thinking hard. “An ice moon landing has problems we’ve encountered before. The pads tend to melt the ice and if it refreezes getting out is a bitch, pardon my language, sir. But if we pull up next to a ring and grab some ice out of those… We’ve never really been close enough to a ring to see how stable the orbits of the individual chunks are, sir. And, admittedly, our people are not as extensively trained in EVA as we might like for something like this. But if the rings don’t work, we can always land on a moon. Every gas giant we’ve surveyed has had multiple ice moons.”
“Well, that’s one for the manuals,” the XO said, making a note. “Life support consumables, lack of. Gather from gas giants and rings.”
“Do we have the equipment to extract O2?” the CO asked. “I don’t recall it as part of our package.”
“Nothing in the SSM,” the XO said, referring to the Bible of Submarine Operations. “Or the mission specialist’s manifests, the Flight Readiness Manifest or the Payload Requirements Document. Checked them all.”
“You extract it with electrostatic systems,” Weaver replied. “At least preliminary extraction. Then you have to separate it with pumps. I’m pretty sure engineering can blage something…”