Chapter 626 Brute Forcing It

Chapter 626 Brute Forcing It

Three months later.

Ayaka and Captain Marinakis were in the captain’s ready room on the Farsight, attending a virtual meeting with the task force’s leadership. Things had settled into a routine, and the meetings had gone from daily, to weekly, and now this was the second monthly meeting they were holding. Nothing of any note had yet been accomplished; the situation remained unchanged.

“We’re still functioning on skeleton crews to reduce resource consumption. Even though we have the replicators, our problem with the algae in the feedstock tanks remains unsolved, but we’re still working on it and should have a solution soon,” the fleet’s head of logistics reported.

For the past six weeks, the crews of the ships had been rotating in and out of VR training simulations, with only skeleton crews maintaining the ships in reality. The initial mission planning had called for restocking their algae tanks and supplementing them with organic compounds from asteroids in Proxima Centauri and on the surface of Proxima Centauri b, but they had yet to discover any asteroids rich in organics and the surface was unreachable. Thus, their dilemma.

The stopgap solution the leadership had decided on was to step down the crews of the ships and put them in long-term training, rotating skeleton crews in to stand physical watches in case disaster struck. They had plenty of nutrient mash stock for the VR pods, but they hadn’t counted on the mana-triggered mutations in their algae tanks making them completely unusable in the food replicators. It only took three deaths and a wave of illness before they tracked down the problem and decided on a solution.

Efficiency was the hallmark of the empire, after all.

“Confidence level?” Admiral Bianchi asked.

“About 75%, Sir.”

“Not the best, but acceptable. Keep working on it.” The admiral turned to the fleet’s head engineer. “Anything to report, Scotty?” he asked.

“We’ve completed the protostellar forge and are working on the construction queue, Admiral,” Commander Gail “Scotty” Coleman reported. All head engineers were, by longstanding tradition, given the nickname Scotty when they took over the engineering department of their ships, or even task forces. It was only engineers that weren’t assigned to shipboard positions that had other nicknames.

“No shortcuts, Commander.”

“Yes, Sir.”

The meeting continued until everyone in attendance had a chance to report on the progress of their departments, but it was still a case of stagnation. Things hadn’t become so hopeless that they would abandon the mission to Proxima Centauri and move on to the binary Alpha Centauri system, but they were still edging toward that level with every day that passed. If the planet remained inaccessible and they failed to discover organics in the asteroid belt, the entire mission might have to be scrubbed and Task Force Proxima would be forced into an early return to Earth with a failed exploration mission under their belts.

......

Two days later.

A constellation of upgraded Henry’s Eyes satellites had been completed at the protostellar forge and moved into position around Proxima Centauri b. Powered by fusion reactors with many times the output of the standard recon satellites, their sensors matched the performance of those on the TFS Proxima, but without the risk of burnout. After all, they had been designed to be used to brute force their sensors through the jamming effect of the mana shield and the increased atmospheric mana density under it, while the cityship herself could only do that in a pinch, and only as long as the spares in her cavernous holds could last before they ran out.

Aboard the bridge of the Proxima, a soft chime sounded at the sensor station as the cityship’s AI alerted the watch of a change in status.

{Henry’s Eye sensors have detected something,} the AI reported.

“Captain!” the watchstander said with some anticipation in his voice.

“Yes, Lieutenant Commander?”

“We’ve got something, Sir!”