You yawned. Everything took so long around gas giants, the scale was simply incomprehensible. You were perched 'just' above the rings, so close you'd need a decimal point to relay the difference in your inclination, and they were still so far away that on the camera it looked like a solid object, instead of billions of clumps of ice and dust.
Coffee helped.
"Ariadna, prep another probe like the first, put it on an elliptical trajectory similar to the one Holdfast was on. We'll try restarting it ourselves when it gets out of the death zone."
You were trying to make an effort to use given names, when you could remember them. Forty-two people mean that you were still struggling with not just calling people by their job titles, and honestly you just found it a bit uncomfortable generally. You struggled with being familiar, the casual way Monty could be everyone's friend; it'd taken you months on Mendel-5, but you'd get better at it.
"See if it's universal, or if they did something to piss it off?" she asked.
"That's the idea." You squinted at the screen. "Alright, well, we're not fusion powered, but I'm not in the risk-taking mood. I think we prep the telemat, and find space for some guests. Computer, calculate how long that'll take with the power load."
"Calculating," the computer intoned, whirring and clacking.
Teleporting the crew off wasn't going to be without cost. The telemat was the single most power-hungry device on the ship, and conservation of energy meant you still had to pay to pull people up the gravity well. The load was so enormous that the power had to be drawn from the ship's capacitor banks, the ones that powered the defensive screens; every person pulled into the ship by the telemat was the rough equivalent of a spread of nuclear warheads detonating in close. This was a
big well.
"Captain?" Specialist Kroshtnyr asked, "Permission to take control of the conn for a full scan of the gas giant?"
"Good idea, ship's yours," you replied. The planet shifted on the screen as the ship turned to bring the main scanner array to bear. The computer's ready light started flashing insistently, and you tapped it.
"Results. And summarise, with rough estimations," you instructed. Computers would be overly specific unless you told them otherwise.
"
It will take roughly eight hours to teleport everyone off of Holdfast," the computer replied. Was it… annoyed with you for preempting it, or was that your imagination? "
If we expend ballast, that time will be cut in half. Additionally, if we mass-teleported crew until the capacitors were drained instead of playing it safe, an hour would be saved."
"Would that be safe?" you asked.
"
Results of that question beyond the parameters of current calculations," the computer replied. Yes, it was definitely annoyed.
"Thank you," you replied stupidly. Too long watching nothing happen, your brain was starting to shut down. You glanced at your watch; how had you been in this chair for
nine hours? "Right, everyone who's been here since this morning, get your tasks queued and then brief your relief, take it easy, get a nap in if you can. You're still the A-team on this, so I want you well rested when things start moving again."
"Good call. People were starting to flag," Paz whispered. You'd given her some time earlier when it clear it was just going to be a lot of watching dots move slowly.
"Thanks. Let me know if anything fun happens, send somebody if I'm not back in an hour-" She glared. "Two? Two hours."
---
You didn't actually fall asleep; you just lay in your bed for that two hours and had that sort of hazy, indistinct mental exchange you and I have about nothing. Outside your window, the rings of the gas giant stretched out into eternity, the shimmering stars and light flickering off the constellations of moons as the ship shifted for the scans. If nothing else, it was a blessed relief to be back in normal gravity after a shift at nearly a G. You'd gone soft in the last month home.
Your watch chimed, and you stepped out, smoothed your uniform out, and stepped back onto the bridge. The relief team was still there, Paz already standing up from the captain's chair, and Specialist Kroshtnyr was just sitting down.
"Torpedo's outside the death zone and still won't restart. It's just the torpedo," Paz reported. "We asked
Holdfast's crew to scan their fuel, and double-checked. Fuel's normal, the effect is, uh, more fundamental."
"Metric," you deadpanned. She nodded.
"Whatever it is, it has turned off the part of physics that makes fusion happen," she summarized. Cool, that was just great. It was hardly unprecedented; that's what metric technologies
did. The teleporter you were considering using worked by somehow convincing the quantum field underlying reality to exchange the energy states between two completely unconnected areas, merely preventing atoms from fusing wasn't that special.
"Satkol?" you asked.
"Preliminary results just computed," she responded, looking over her screens. Scanning something this big, you were surprised it only took that long. "Maybe we'll find… Oh."
"Oh?" you asked, taking your seat. "Good oh, bad oh, what are we looking at?"
"Well," she said stiffly, clearly a bit overwhelmed. "I thought I'd have to do more investigation, but this seems pretty obvious. Did… was there a proper scan of this world when the last group went through?"
"No, they just declared it a boring system and moved on," you said. "Why?"
"There are fairly obvious structures in the lower levels of the gas giant," she said, clicking something on her console. An image showed up on your screen, but it just looked like a swirling blue kaleidoscope to you, pulsing with electricity.
"Structures, do you mean, like, buildings?" you asked, squinting.
"No. Patterns of electrically conductive gas, linked in a web. Not buildings… Neurons," she said, sitting back in her chair. "It's a brain. The planet is a brain."
---
Current Insight: 5
Current Determination: 4
Threads:
"Vehicle Fuel Interfaces"
"Structural analysis of Holdfast"
"Beamed Power Operations"
"Remass scanning"
"Metric technology bullshit"
"Hostage negotiation"
"Drone warfare"
Speeding up the teleporting process will cost 26 supply.
What's the plan, folks? This is probably a good time for a bunch of insight questions too.
