Dey Tink Der Brains So Big (Sasha Santhe)

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Sasha Santhe"]

Selka blinked. "Just like that?" Even with Velok's memories of Sasha and of mechu-deru -- in the vaguest sense; it was not among her skills -- the process was startling to witness. In part because of the deftness of Sasha's Force control, and in part because there was something unprofessional about it. Two CEOs didn't just volunteer to be the very first test pilots for an unknown component mod.

Except in Sasha Santhe's world.

Interesting place.

"All right," she said, "I'll fly. I've got snubfighter hours, and I'd rather have you analyzing our little bundle of joy in realtime." She slipped into a flight suit from a nearby rack and took the pilot's seat.

 

[Sasha Santhe]

[member="Selka Ventus"]

Sasha let out a smile and nodded walking over to the new Aleph Fighter. It was fresh off the assembly line with new parts courtesy of their little experiment here and an expanded cockpit to allow for both a pilot and copilot. “Alright,” she said reluctantly. She really wanted to take up the fighter and see what it could do.

She climbed up the ladder and into the cockpit hopping into the jump seat. All of the light came to life as the fighter started powering up. “Life support check,” Sasha said look at the systems. “Shields, check, engines check, generator acting at full capacity.” A smile formed over her face and she laughed a little. “Variable speed lasers, check. And of course we are running with a full load of concussion missiles.”

Punching buttons in her seat she outlined the path for their trial. Sienar had space cleared in space around Lianna. There was a debris field a short jump away with obstacles and targets ready for the two to shoot. “Whats the point of having all this money if we can’t have a little fun…” Sasha said with a smile as the ship took off into the air.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Sasha Santhe"]

She caught the edge of regret, but Selka wasn't in the business of regretting others' lost wishes. The Aleph roared into the air and aimed straight up, for open space. The manual controls were state-of-the art, and she found herself comparing them mentally with the time she'd used a neural link. Now there was a technology that needed to happen, at least in a greater capacity than it had.

"I've flown an Aleph before, as it happens," she said over her shoulder. "The original, anyway, a few times. Silk acquired one at auction, and I spent some time in another one before that. Santhe/Sienar's finest work, so far as I'm concerned. I'm glad to see you're still making them. I assume you are, anyway -- this ship smells newer and has some subtle differences from the original. All improvements, so far as I'm concerned."

A short hyperjump, just a couple of seconds, put them in the outer system with the obstacle course. Selka lined up to enter.

"How's our payload doing back there?"

 

[Sasha Santhe]

“We’ve recently opened up a few more factories dedicated to the Aleph, or at least to components within it,” Sasha replied as they entered and exited hyperspace in good order. “Hold,” she said pressing down on the communications array. “Aleph X-1,” she said to the control tower of the monitoring station. “We are enabling the ECM suit and switching on the WhisperDrive.”

Her hands found the control and clicked them all on in good order. “Payload looks good Miss Ventus.” The status lights all read green as Sasha examined the telemetry from both her own board and the information being relayed to her console from the monitoring station. “Lets see what this can do…” she said bracing herself.

[member="Selka Ventus"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Sasha Santhe"]

"All right. Prototype one...engaged."

She threw the switch, wishing for a direct link -- something with the speed of thought, something more precise than fingers. With a shudder and a thump, the Aleph leaped forward, like a hyperjump but less violent. Not unlike the crackling blue-white of hyperspace, this new frame of reference was overlaid on star-flecked space like a jagged skein of translucent grays and indigos. The Aleph trembled like Tyrin Ardik's hair in the throes of condescension.

The jump, if it was a jump, ended of its own accord after a handful of seconds. Heart pounding, she checked the starfield scanners.

"We just went...quite a ways. Faster than even an Aleph can go, but not as fast as a hyperdrive. Our comms, our subspace comms, are going ballistic. Not with transmissions. That was a subspace event." She bit back her stream of commentary with effort.

 

[Sasha Santhe]

“Subspace Wormhole?” Sasha asked immediately suspecting some trickery. She didn’t know a ton, but she had a few vague memories from entering Velok’s mind and could remember a sith skill that summoned such an event. Her mind was made of metal and circuits and conductivity and she hated dealing with these sort of cosmicl events. She let out a groan and started to look around. “Get the nav computer calculating our current location,” she said grimacing.

Buttons were pressed rapidly as she started to do a diagnosis of all the systems. “A few non essential systems are showing yellow. Targeting computer is down, lasers are only drawing a fraction of the power they should, but life support, engines, and sensors are operational.” That was good. “Lets see if we can figure out what just happened.”

[member="Selka Ventus"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Sasha Santhe"]

The sensors weren't rigged for this kind of thing; without a neural link, she had to engage directly with multiple feeds and correlate their data as best she could. "Starfield is reading a...two to four hundred AU jump outsystem. Roughly equivalent to a class twenty hyperdrive. That's total ballpark -- the Aleph's navicomputer isn't set up to estimate that. Could be anywhere from class thirty equivalent to class ten equivalent. If I'm reading this right, it was a wormhole in the same sense as a normal hyperjump is a hyperspace wormhole, or close enough. Subspace comms punch millimeter-wide tunnels from A to B; what we just went through was similar, just...bigger than a millimetre across."

Selka sat back in the pilot's couch, thinking. "Something else," she added slowly. "Our sensors didn't fully lose contact with realspace, or maybe they were working from some kind of cross-dimensional relativistic shadow -- not a mass shadow, but an afterimage of sorts. It's still blind luck that we didn't run into anything, but something this slow paired with the potential for precision...we might be looking at the means to cross a system in minutes. Possibly without tripping over mass shadows."

 

[Sasha Santhe]

Looking at the panels in front of her Sasha thought for a moment. She wasn’t the greatest astronavigation specialist, but with distance traveled and duration of the phenomenon she could calculate a quick speed class. “About class-twenty two.,” she said.Sasha stopped and thought for a moment, mind racing through the possibilities. Not the possibilities of the future development, but rather possibilities of how it happened to begin with. “If you’re hypothesis is correct, and I believe it is, generator and the subspace communications array must have interacted in some unknown way.” That was really the only explanation. “Or else this was a natural phenomenon which I doubt.”

Biting her thumb she thought about it for a moment. “That’s the only way this could have happened. The generator is the only component that hadn’t been tested before.”

Closing her eyes she focused with the force. Circuit, wire, charge, and housing. She could feel it all. “Unknown Regions technology…”

She could feel energy leaking from the engine. They hadn’t operated it at full capacity. Sasha stopped for a moment. “Turn us around, slowly and then lets try to replicate conditions and go back.” Then a thought occured. “Or point us to deep space… we can always signal for a pickup or return using auxiliary power.”

[member="Selka Ventus"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Sasha Santhe"]

"This would be a lot easier...a lot cleaner with a Lucid Retribution-style neural link," she said offhand as she sorted through systems readouts. "Not that Tirdarius would ever come up for air long enough to get it examined, but there were other prototypes. If I remember right, Santhe even put it into limited production maybe...ten years back? Fascinating concept. Did it get anywhere?"

She was talking to talk. Her hands blurred over the controls, correlating data and component status feedback. The unknown module was sending bizarre data, but there were recognizable patterns, especially in the timestamps leading up to the subspace jump. "Your guess looks solid. Constructive interference between the module and the subspace comm." Her brow furrowed, then cleared as it started to make sense. "Actually, hold on, Sasha... I think I can replicate it. Working on it now."

 

[Sasha Santhe]

“We aren’t a cybernetics company,” Sasha said with a little sigh. “We dabble, but at the end of the day I don’t see the need to get involved with everything. Simply stated the profit to gains ratio isn’t there. That being said yeah we had a little run at integrating ships and pilot,” she said nothing of her experiments with Kaine at Styx. The horrors there…. well they really did lead to some amazing breakthroughs.

“Alright,” she said to Selka, “Let’s do this…”

[member="Selka Ventus"] turned the ship and with all the conditions similar to what they experienced before they jumped. It was a strange experience being halfway between both hyperspace and subspace. “Now,” Sasha said with a sigh. “Lets start taking systems offline to isolate which of these anomalies is creating the event.” Although she has some idea of what was causing it, there was never any harm in experimentation.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Sasha Santhe"]

"You know, I've got my eye on retirement. From Silk and Akure, once the transition period's complete. My job is interim CEO -- I come in and fix what went wrong. Next time, though, I've got my eye on a cybernetics startup out of Manaan. Their current name is Glory to the Progenitor Mechanical Brain Implants -- I'm about two drinks away from convincing them to re-brand as 'iBorg' and make me their advertising guru. No business sense, but the product and the people are solid. It's mainly neural implants, hence my interest in the Retribution." She wasn't entirely talking to talk, but she was still operating, turning off systems one by one and charting anomalies manually.

Sublight engines...nothing. Shield generators...nothing. Weapons...nothing. Life support...nothing but the dark. Comms...

"There we go, just like you guessed." Selka shook her head. "Subspace comm interference with the new module. Looks like the anterior transducer split a hair."

 

[Sasha Santhe]

“A competent cybornetics firm?” Sasha said with some interest. “Now that is something I’d like to see in the galaxy.” she let out a laugh at [member="Jared Ovmar"]’s expense. “If that goes through, we should talk.” Already gears were working in Sasha’s head. Yes, this was good. Heil Tion.

And then they confirmed that the com unit was clearly the reason for the disruption. “Great,” Sasha said licking her lips. “Lets get back to the lab. We can isolate the module from the communications gear and then work on doing the opposite of isolating the communications gear and anterior transducer.”

She rubbed her hands together as the ship turned around and made a hyperspace jump. It was only a short trip back to the surface of the planet.

[member="Selka Ventus"]

 

[Ashin Varanin]

[member="Sasha Santhe"]

"It's a matter of when, not just if," said Selka with a grin. "And we'll definitely talk."

***​

​

The Aleph-II testbed settled down, and Selka peeled her hands away from the controls. "Flying this is an experience," she said, clambering out. "I'd forgotten how much I loved working with an Aleph. As good as a Rassilon any day." She reconsidered. "Well, maybe not any day -- there was the time I took down a StealthX assault. Good times."

She found her knees didn't really want to keep her up, and took a seat in the lab. "Just let me know when or if you need a hand -- I don't want to mess anything up under the hood."