Collective Hindsight (Book 2) - Aaron Rosenberg [9]
“So, what have we learned?” Sonya asked.
“Well, we know the ship’s based on solar energy,” Fabian said. “Not just propulsion but lighting, heating, circulation, everything. Its sensors actually operate mostly in the infrared spectrum, picking up heat signatures and translating those into three-dimensional image maps.”
“Its shielding is mostly absorption,” Pattie added. “The Dancing Star didn’t have any weapons when we first encountered it, or any shielding against energy weapons. Instead it had a strong hull and a collection array to protect it from solar energy and then absorb that energy for its own purposes. That’s why it could dive into a sun without harm, because the energy around it was siphoned off for the ship’s use.”
“The computer systems are efficient,” Soloman said. “Not overly complicated, but very solid. Particularly resistant to heat and to vibration, even more than in most starships. The coding is not the most sophisticated, but it’s very clean.”
“The ship routinely used stars for both energy and acceleration,” Tev said. “And the capacitors are built to handle exactly that type of massive input.”
“It also went into a sun—all the way into one—and came out unscathed,” Carol commented. She didn’t get all of the technical details the others were sharing, but that fact had impressed itself on her.
Sonya nodded at her. “Good point. We also know that Pattie and Kieran disconnected the collector arrays after Salek’s death and before launching the ship into the sun. Yet it has power now, and is approaching overload levels again.” She tapped the table. “What does that tell us?”
“Was the array reconnected?”
Tev shook his head. “No, it is still isolated.”
“So the ship was drawing power in some other way.”
“Right. But what?”
Carol watched them all thinking. She wished that she could contribute more, sometimes. Then something occurred to her. “Um, Pattie said most of the ship’s protection when it entered a sun was in its collection array, right?”
The others looked up at her, and Pattie wiggled her antennae in agreement. “Yes. There’s some shielding material between the hull and the interior walls, to keep the energy from leaking through fully, but mostly it was the array that siphoned off energy before it could prove dangerous.”
“But, with the array disconnected, how did the ship survive being inside Randall V’s sun?” She leaned forward. “I mean, never mind its powering back up—why wasn’t it incinerated?”
The engineers all looked at each other. Then Bart, her fellow nonengineer, spoke up.
“I’ve got a question, too. Pattie, did you just say that the ship has shielding between the hull and the inner walls?”
The Nasat nodded. “Yes. The hull is unusually conductive, and the shielding keeps energy from penetrating into the ship proper.”
“But why make a hull conductive at all?” Fabian wondered out loud. “I mean, why not just put the shielding on the outside and be done with it?”
Sonya gasped, and everyone turned toward her. “That’s it! Carol, you’re a genius! The hull’s an energy conductor! The entire ship is one giant absorption array!”
Everyone stared, then started nodding. It always amazed Carol that, even at times like this, they didn’t just all start talking over each other. Instead, someone spoke and the others listened, with occasional interjections. This time it was Pattie who commented first.
“It all makes sense,” she said. “The collection array was a supplemental power source, not the primary. So when we disconnected it, we thought we’d prevented the ship from powering up but all we’d done was slow the process down.”
“And, with the entire hull absorbing energy,” Fabian cut in, “the ship can easily withstand diving into a sun. It’s absorbing power from all sides, and all that energy gets sent through the capacitors and into the collection plates. The shielding makes sure none of it goes into the rest of the ship instead, and funnels it all toward the engine room.”
“So when it was sent into the sun,” Sonya finished, “it just used that to power up again.”
“That still leaves one problem,”