Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 71

Chapter 71 - Space Gun Testing

Even though Evan had mentioned doing so, Jack had still been moderately surprised to see the actual inclusion of user manuals in the crates of advanced space weaponry. More surprising though, was the fact he had apparently decided to put them together with the expected standard of reader being the average US military grunt.

“Do you think he added the stick figures specifically with us in mind?” Jack asked idly as he paged through the odd plastic like pages of the small booklet.

Sam glanced away from the firing brace she was securing one of the very sci-fi looking rifles to. “Given the induction plate design looks like it was pieced together from scans of equipment we sent to Atlantis, I’m going to guess everything here was written specifically with us in mind.” 

Given the Ancient had only found out about the Ori a couple days ago that was an impressive amount of work. And it went a long way to explain why the man had looked like he probably hadn't gotten more then a handful of hours of sleep in the past week.

“So what do you think? Usable? Or likely to end up in the same bin as all those sets of Kull armor we recovered?”

It still annoyed him that Anubis had rigged the super material on those to begin decaying after a few months without whatever treatment he had rigged up to preserve it. But he had to give it to the old bastard since it at least meant that all the other groups that had captured suits of the stuff weren’t using it against them.

Pursing her lips in thought for a moment, Sam finally gave him a tentative nod. “The ergonomics look good compared to most of the stuff we usually see, the crystal power cells for everything but the big gun are rechargeable by us, and he included enough extra of those that we could swap out in the middle of a firefight if needed. So assuming the fire tests confirm the minimum level of combat effectiveness I’d give an okay for at least the rifles.”

Which was pretty much what Jack himself had been thinking, since as cool as the other two looked on paper, the overpenetration issues made them giant liabilities in an actual fight. Though he did kind of want to see Teal’c try and use the big one to shoot down an Al’kesh at least once.

Giving the weapon a light shake Sam nodded to herself when it didn’t dislodge from the brace and then walked over to join Jack behind the observation room's ballistic glass.

Sitting down in the chair next to him, Sam took a moment to type something into her laptop and a yellow force field shimmered into existence in front of the ballistic dummy at the end of the test range.

“Ancient rifle, test one.” She narrated out loud for the test range's recorders to pick up. “Single shot, standard target dummy protected by Goa'uld force shield.”

Hitting a key on her laptop, the remote trigger on the brace activated and with a loud crack a small hemispheral chunk of the ballistic dummy disappeared from existence.

“Looks like we're going to need the high speed replay.” Sam muttered as she brought up the video on her laptop's screen.

The corner of the video showed a nice clear 32,000fps watermark, the same standard Jack knew that they'd used for testing various penetrator rounds for use against Jaffa armor. Thankfully that seemed to be enough, as the slower speed showed them a small bead of purple energy exiting the weapons barrel equivalent and passing through the force shield without even the slightest bit of notice before impacting the dummy with the exact same vanishing effect they'd seen with their own eyes.

“Muzzle velocity of twenty-one hundred feet per second.” Sam went on. “Complete penetration of the force shield, and the projectile seems to have destroyed a small spherical portion of the test dummy with any effect that occurred too quickly for the cameras to catch.”

Jack held little doubt that Sam would figure out the whats of the weapon given some time to work at it. Which would have put her on the list of need to know officers even if he fully bought into Evan's fear that the Ori's people could yank information from people's minds.

“Evan said it was a microsingularity.”

Sam shot him an odd look. “Sir, if that had been a microsingularity every radiation detector in the room would be going off.”

“He also mentioned something about compressed galvatron packets.” Jack offered with a shrug, pretty sure he got at least a part of the technobabble wrong.

“Did you mean compressed graviton packets?” Sam inquired after of a moment

That sounded right to Jack, so he nodded and pointed a finger at her. “Yes, that.”

“That's…” Sam began, her features pinching in a way long experience had taught Jack was a sure fire sign that she was trying to work out a particularly difficult technical problem. “I mean, I guess it would be theoretically possible to create a monetary zone of extreme gravity by compressing partially stabilized artificial gravitons. But you can't–”

“Carter.” Jack interrupted, knowing the start of a lengthy digression when he heard it. “Weapon tests first, figuring out how the Ancients broke science later.”

“Right.” Sam said, ducking her head to hide the blush on her cheeks “Sorry sir.”

Stepping out from behind the ballistic glass, she flipped the fire mode slider next to the trigger before returning to her laptop.

“Ancient rifle, test two.” She announced. “Burst fire, standard target dummy protected by Goa'uld force shield.”

Tapping the return key, three more cracks sounded out, and Jack could now see what was functionally a tube of missing material from the ballistic dummy extending nearly all the way through the structure.

“Huh.” Sam muttered as she brought up the high speed replay, focusing on the video in a way that suggested she had noticed something he had missed.

“Carter?” Jack prompted as he watched the trio of purple beads impact the target and basically bore a hole into the structure of the dummy.

“There’s no deviation.” Sam said, rewinding the video to the point where the first impact occurred. “Look.” She traced the path of the disappearing spheres of material with a finger. “Each of the projectiles hit in an exact straight line from where the barrel was pointed at the exact same velocity.”

“And that matters?” Jack asked with a frown.

Sam nodded. “It suggests that the energy sphere’s might not interact with the environment until they hit a target.”

She pursed her lips for a moment before looking over to him. “Do you mind if I try something a bit unorthodox?”

Knowing Sam wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t have a good reason for it, Jack gave a permissive wave. “Go ahead.”

“Right.” Sam muttered in the tone of someone who knew they might get in trouble for what they were about to do as she began typing something into her laptop.

Jack nearly jumped out of his chair as the test range’s fire alarm went off, followed moments later by the ceiling sprinklers they’d installed after one too many staff blast induced fires.

“Test three.” Sam mumbled half to herself, no doubt well aware her voice would be drowned out on the recording by the fire alarm. “Seeing what happens when the energy spheres hit slightly more solid atmospheric conditions.”

For a third time Sam triggered the weapon, and this time Jack could just barely make out the trio of cracking sounds through everything else going on.

Quickly bringing up the newly recorded video on her laptop, the pair watched it silently, and by the end even Jack could tell that something weird was going on.

“Look at that.” Sam muttered in clear interest as she backtracked and paused the video. “The energy spheres pull the water droplets towards them as they pass but otherwise don’t seem to interact at all.”

“Sciency.” Jack offered with a grin before glancing over to the test room. “But can we turn off the alarm now?”

Sam cringed slightly. “Right, I’ll get on that.”

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Author’s Notes: I’m not entirely sure I needed a scene of Jack and Sam going through weapon testing, but it fit the larger narrative of them not just blindly trusting everything Eventus said so here we go. Also, it was a little funny.