Cleaning Up After The Ancients - Chapter 42

Chapter 42 - Cascading Damage

“She can't explain it because she doesn't know.” Eventus offered to McKay as they walked down the tomblike corridors of the Aurora, the ship now safely within the repair bay of the Taranis drydock. “Phasic particle beams were still in the development phase when the Aurora was lost.”

Looking left and right as they came to an intersection, Eventus frowned as he wracked his mind for a moment to try and recall which direction would lead to the tertiary transmission array for this particular generation of ship.

“The schematics say left.” McKay offered as he looked at his tablet.

“Thanks.” Eventus said as he turned left and continued walking. “Even once it moved into general production though it was kind of classified. I only know about the technology myself because the original handheld versions of the weapons were designed by the maintenance corps for use against certain types of extra dimensional creatures.”

That the extreme beam coherence of the weapon had made it equally useful in punching through both shields and armor was, at least according to officially submitted records, a complete accident. Less official records however showed generations of tweaks and adjustments to the weapons design that suggested increased lethality had been a consistent end goal.

“You have handheld versions of those?” McKay inquired in a tone that suggested a distinct interest in the idea.

“Technically our side arms are capable of firing phasic beams.” Eventus admitted with a shrug. “It would just drain the energy cell in about four shots. We also had a heavier version, but those were all disassembled in preparation for the evacuation.”

Even if they hadn't been however, he doubted the Phasic beams projectors would be much use against Ori Priors, though he had a weapon of his own design that hopefully would. He'd been planning to try and squirrel away a few copies in Avalon where humans from Earth would be likely to find about them, however that like many ideas had fallen through due to act of Janus.

“On that subject.” He continued as they came to an area of the ship that looked like it had been fried by uncontrolled ionic discharges. “Why does your ship use magnetic accelerator weapons when Kinetic weapons are the worst thing you can use against energy shields?”

Shield hardness meant a significant portion of the energy from kinetic impacts tended to be deflected away from the impact, so as useful as he supposed they could be against certain very specific things like the Replicators, they suffered heavily against everything else.

“Darpa already had the designs ready.” McKay groused, stepping around a hole in the deck plate. “They were just missing a few materials to make them workable, and once the stargate program provided those the US military didn't want to let their billion dollar toys go to waste.”

“And a dollar is worth how much?” Eventus asked as they came to the heavy door that led to the tertiary array.

“Sixteen dollars will get you a large pizza.” McKay said, glancing at the dark crystal controls for a moment before shaking his head. “Doors not getting power, give me a minute and I'll see if I can restore it.”

Rolling his eyes, Eventus walked over and pulled off a panel on the opposite wall to the control. “Bulkhead doors have manual overrides for use in the case of power outages.”

“I know that.” McKay snapped as he removed the cover over the door crystals. “But restoring the door's power now will save us time later.”

It probably wouldn't, but they weren’t in a rush anymore so Eventus didn’t see a problem with at least letting him try.

Five minutes later he was reconsidering his original opinion on the subject as he watched McKay try to bypass several crystals that had clearly been on the wrong end of an arc discharge of some kind. So with a sigh he rolled his eyes and began pumping the pneumatic lever to open the bulkhead door.

“I almost had it you know.” McKay groused as the door opened.

“Yes, but we don't…” Eventus stopped dead as he entered the room and took in the damage. “This may not actually be fixable without at least a couple days of work.”

“I’m sure it’s not that…” McKay began as he followed, only to pause mid sentence when he saw the blackened husks that had hours ago been at least somewhat working control units. “Okay, maybe it is that bad.”

“It’ll take me about seven hours to fabricate a high capacity data cable and run it to the ship so the crew can access the facilities systems that way.” Eventus said as he turned around and began heading back the way they came. “Do you think your team will want to perform an inspection of the anti-gravity systems while I do that to see if they can figure out what caused the ionic discharges?”

“They shouldn’t need to.” McKay returned as he tossed the room a final look before following along. “This ship won’t be going anywhere till after the Aurora’s crew conducts their own repairs, so it would really just be a waste of time when they have more important things to get done on the Enterprise.”

Eventus wasn’t exactly sure what those more important things might be given the Enterprise only had a few secondary systems that were off factory spec, but he hadn’t paying particular attention to just what they were doing outside of making sure they didn’t accidentally damage something, so he supposed they might have brought important work along with them from Atlantis.

“On the subject of equipment though.” McKay continued in a reluctant tone. “I’ve been going over the damage reports from the Navis that you brought along, and I don’t think our hazmat suits will be able to handle that level of radiation.”

That wasn’t particularly surprising, the radiation had been bad enough that the ship's crew had decided to abandon ship instead of leaving behind a skeleton crew to fly it back to a drydock. Which meant they hadn’t thought any of their at hand methods would be able to compensate long enough to actually do so.

“I figured as much.” Eventus admitted. “But I fabricated a dozen mark sixty hazardous exoskeletons for the Enterprise when I was fixing the ship up, and they should be able to handle the reported radiation levels.”

The mark sixty was pretty much the limit that the molecular synthesizers could put together without a ready supply of naquada/neutronium, or hitting a point of mind boggling energy costs that the facility hadn’t been able to supply after he’d bricked the accelerator system.

“You mean the Iron Man suits!?” McKay inquired in thinly veiled excitement.

“Don’t know who that is.” Eventus returned simply, moderately surprised that McKay did himself given it was still several years before the movies would propel the character into being a generally known existence.

“The power armor you wore to Taranis.” McKay corrected with a sigh.

Eventus shook his head. “No, that’s a modified mark one forty two. The mark sixty is made mainly of a yervult alloy and lacks the shield system, anti-gravity generators, ionic propulsors, and neural interface.”

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Author’s Notes: Woops, probably should have investigated that hologram flicker, but to be fair to Evan/McKay it would be kind of hard to see the problem without going over there given the state of the Aurora’s internal sensors.

Well, after a day down I’m slowly getting back to writing. I can't guarantee tomorrow or Friday's chapter, but I’m going to try.