The Sisterhood of Dreams - Encrypted Archives

[Enkidu]

Sender ID: Nishi Adeline Darche.
Sender Location: New Tokyo, Open Space, CENSORED
Subject: CENSORED


Friday is an aptly named day - the day of frying, the day of the fried. Well, one irksomely competent Samura pilot had enough extension surgery to his testicular organs to consider this a mighty fine plan - he had the ingenuity to pop his head out right next to Leiden. For some bizarre incongruity, the Lane Hackers native to the area didn't vaporize the cooperate shill as soon as he hit the defense grid, as he doubtless did, a situation that honestly raises more questions than it ever could answer. Well, that's when Eta wing smacked right into him en-route to the Kepler wing after the usual Hot Sauce with the Kay' 'En 'Eff back in Shi'. We ran like a bats out of Yomi, and outran the Republican dogs without too much trouble - the really sticky stuff came in when we, hey hey, smacked into the same Samura a few moments later out in Kepler, which, of course, is too much of a coincidence to be convenient in the infinite blackness of space.

Ending the bounty hunter took as disturbingly long to execute, even with the combined willpower of two sisters, whilst young mother Munen coordinated the whole like a matador in a chinashop. This in itself raises queries about who hired the stiff - the man was far too good to be regular run-of-the-mill private security, even from one of the better contractors - perhaps ex-military, but we've seen those types before. Odd beans. Luckily, the grotesquely illogical aerofoil widening his eagle's midriff to the absolute zenith of obesity meant that he sucked up one plasma bolt too many - we took no casualties, but darn' did we trade paint and if not for the conveniently apolitical inhabitants of Ames, we would have been sucking space.

Shipping was moderate - we harassed and bullied what we could. One matter to note is the overall effectiveness of the Maltese Conquistador line that Eta wing gave some unexpectedly rigorous inflight testing during the encounter. Eta wing returned to escort detail post-ordeal and we managed to hoover up a few shipments of sweet Detroit gold in return for our drug money. Damn, the bridge crew of the 'Shizukesa' can get over-enthusiastic, girl.



Credit for that shy lil' moment of satisfaction goes to the one and only, yours truly. Be glad you have me around.




Right above you is the evidence of the Detroit gold. Whilst its functional value in a state of construction isn't much more than pure, unadulterated firepower (which, honestly, we're in the state-deposing business, firepower is a fun thing to have), in a stripped down state the guns gave me enough spare field effectors to take a crack at generating some kinda' cloaking field, if only as a demonstrator that such an exaggerated marvel can be replicated using fairly blunt-edge tech. Here goes:




Here ya' go chaps; your bog standard EM diffraction shield, known to man and the Goddess as a cloaking device - a device long sought after for over a thousand years, but only recently borne fruit. You see, diffraction devices tend to suffer weaknesses as to their ability to conceal anything at all, as you can see usually where something is not. If there's a big hole in space, conventional wisdom dictates there's a cloaked ship snooping there, and you'd be wise to tip a turret at it. In addition, simply diffracting the light is not the answer, as any a-hole with a twelve credit sensor chip or even a glass prism if you're close enough can see when light is inexplicably bouncing off a sphere. Then you have the problem of propellant gas coming along and sending the whole thing jubblies up. Yeah, with cloaking devices, you're usually better off not to have one.

Then the century rolled over and Sirius decided to plunge itself into a sector-wide war. The trick to avoiding detection is not to deflect waves, but to wrap them around yourself to the closest possible imitation of not being there. Effectively, you are imitating vacuum - a wave approaching the ship's center of mass by one point should ideally exit by the same point, if we are to make the pretense the ship doesn't exist at all. Problem is, you can't fight fire with fire, EM with EM. You can with active point defense shields, but damn, are those things loud; spewing emissives all over space, except for one type of shielding, the graviton shield.

Using gravity to retard light is a relatively new tech, vintage a few centuries. Using gravity to cloak, however, is not. Think of it this way; our ships run off EM, converting EM to G creates all sorts of inefficiencies too complex for you or I. Grav shields get around this problem by only being active in the few milliseconds it needs to intercept the aggressive beam, and don't usually care where they disperse the beam so long as it's not directly at the hull. Cloaks are passive - they need to run for extremely long duration and thus burn a Yomi-load of fusion juice, to the point where the main reactor can't cope with that sort of demand. They also suck at working as actual shields, since they can't cope with anything much more powerful than cosmic background radiation and whatever a star or a nebula can throw at it.

The diagram given used a projector from a kinetic impactor weapon to simulate the data in a real-world test enviroment - god knows why Kishiro makes Grav pistols, but they do. The good news; I've succeeded in building a cloaking device which remains nominal for over six seconds average. The bad news? It's only potent enough to cloak something a few molecules thick, depending on how you arrange them.

Back to the proverbial board, that is, if the Kay' 'En 'Eff don't prang my corpse first.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's outlawed trade unions, determined to take the underworld for themselves.)

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