RE: [Story]The difference is, a Lightbulb stops working...
06-10-2024, 02:42 PM (This post was last modified: 06-10-2024, 02:57 PM by Dartz.)
06-10-2024, 02:42 PM (This post was last modified: 06-10-2024, 02:57 PM by Dartz.)
===Sidestory - - Preperation H ===
Jet knew it was serious, when the mechanics insisted on wearing sets of coveralls stolen from the reactor department. They had full-face masks and air-tanks borrowed from the fire brigade. It gave them a look of faceless menace. Or chemical weaponsmiths.
All three of them stood a safe distance from a plastic container labelled 'fuel'. Inside it was nitromethane and a dozen other things that'd been mixed up into a chemist's nightmare. Another beside it was labelled with a cartoonish skull and crossbones. If only to hide its true contents from the folks watching on the internet.
It was an oxygen scavenging agent borrowed from the turbine engineers and was normally used to keep the corrosion in the reactors down. It could do interesting things when mixed with Nitro.
Sitting beside both containers was a motorcycle, stretched and enlarged to almost comical portions with a rear tyre fat enough to spin the world backwards. The engine had been printed as a solid billet of metal, with an oversized supercharger and a set of straight pipes that ran under the rider's saddle and exited out the top above the rear wheel. A wheelie-bar stretched behind the bike. The bike's frame had been hand-welded from heavy steel beams, more like a cage to contain an explosion than anything structural
A thin front wheel reached far ahead with a brake that seemed more a token effort than an actual method of stopping the thing. Some carbon bodywork provided scant protection from any wind pressure.
One of the masked mechanics looked at her. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
Jet took a breath, feeling a little tingle of unease. " Let's just fuel it up,"
All three suits shard a glance. Jet could sense their unease – like she'd asked them to arm a bomb. In a way, she had.
The crew added the Nitro mix to the bike's fuel tank. Jet herself added a carefully measured amount of the special sauce. She couldn't help but notice how everyone had stood back from her as she did. A vague ammonia-like scent that reminded of a recently cleaned hospital encouraged her to close her visor.
The mix in the fuel tank began to steam white. A fuse had been lit. Everyone had to hurry.
Jet sealed the tank.
She sat herself on the bike, locking herself into place in the saddle. She motioned for the crew to start the engine. The fuse in the tank continued to burn. It occurred to her that she had no real idea how long the fuse would actually be, or how fast it actually burned.
One mechanic held a bottle of petrol to the intake. The other had an electric starter to the crank of the engine. The third had an optimistic fire-extinguisher. A crowd that'd gathered on the gantry crane above began to cheer.
Jet flicked the switches for both magnetos. The starter was offered to the engine, spinning it up to a high rate. A squirt of fuel through the intake caused it to catch with a bark, sending a shudder up through her body. She could feel each of the engines four cylinders firing beneath her.
After a few seconds to heat the cylinders, she switched to the nitro pumps.
The motor settled down to a shuddering cackle, puffballs of white smoke spitting for the four pipes behind her, mixed with the occasional lick of green flame. The air around her grew thick with the scent of shoe-polish and disinfectant.
A tickle of the throttle sent a shockwave along the launch-bay. Those on the gantry dived for cover. Green lightning shot from the exhausts. Jet cycled the bike through its gears, testing the clutch, brakes and throttle.
She heard the whine of the superchargers. She felt the cackle of the nitro detonating. The whole frame of the bike shuddered in fear of the power it contained.
She felt the thrill run through her that'd been absent for so long. A sense of being alive and whole again.
Frigga's landing bay stretched before her, with the hard stop of the main landing bay door a kilometer away.
She checked around her. The mechanics had retired to a safe distance. Jet suddenly felt herself keenly aware that the blue touch paper had been well and truly lit and she was straddling it.
She paddled the bike backwards to the starting line. Heat rose up from the engine block, soaking through her. Her eyes had begun to water.
Jet took a breath and braced herself.
A twist of her wrist unleashed hell, putting her for one insistent at the centre of one continuous explosion. The machine beneath her launched forward, ripping its tyre along the deckplates laying down a thick black streak of hot rubber.
Nobody dared to help her wheel the bike back to the start line. Nobody wanted to get close to the bomb. She paddled it back herself, taking an agonizingly long time to do so.
One solitary brave soul guided her to the timing lights, making sure the bike was properly lined up for the run. Jet gave the bike one last check, before switching the engine controls over to full power.
Jet guessed it might've been generating somewhere north of two megawatts of power, but lacked any sort of ability to test it. Even the Highway Star at its most aggressive, had barely touched half of that with more than twice the capacity.
Jet took a breath and braced herself.
The mechanic shied back away in fear.
She waited. The engine cackled through its pipes behind her. Beneath her, the supercharger whined, gulping air into the engine's cylinders. Adrenaline surged through her muscles, sending shivers through her body. The ground itself shook in sympathy. All of Frigga rang like a bell in resonance.
She locked it into gear.
The last mechanic raised his hand.
Time stopped. She had long enough to wonder if the devil's venom in the tank would blow from the sock of it when she opened the throttle. Would her armour withstand a bomb going off while she straddled it?
Jet concluded that she wouldn't have to worry about it, no matter what happened.
God help her if anyone found out what she was actually riding. They'd call her mad. Lighting it off in the enclosed environment of a space station would probably be called a crime.
The mechanic dropped his hand, and she launched to bike.
It felt to her like she'd been shot from the barrel of a cannon, or a suicide bomber traspped eternally in the instant of hot acceleration between flicking the switch and meeting god, her insides threatening to leave themselves behind as her body pushed forward. Every single muscle clenched in response, force blood to her brain.
Hot flame warmed her back and hips, unburned fuel flash-igniting a bright witch's green as it met cold oxygen.
Her heart stopped.
She felt the machine slew beneath her, threatening to cartwheel out of control. One quick shift of weight brought it back into line. Her fingers covered the brake. He hand held the throttle pinned to the stop.
Within a second, she'd exceeded 160kph.
She kept accelerating.
Dataloggers in the bike reported its running conditions to her. Exhaust temperature. Fuel pressure. Oil pressure. Manifold pressure. Manifold temperature. Anything that could possibly indicate an incipient explosion before it happened.
Jet had time to wonder if she'd be able to eject herself in time. She'd have maybe a microsecond to think about it as the machine began to destroy itself. Would a cyber's accelerated reflexes save her from an explosive death.
A cylinder might misfire, once, maybe twice and then hydrolock on unburned nitromethane. If the fuel didn't diesel itself, the engine would shatter. Then detonate.
Jet found the idea thrilling.
Three and a half seconds saw her moving well over three hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, having covered just under two hundred meters of distance.
The shockwave from the exhaust had already hit the bay door at the end of the hangar. Dust raised up from the floor. Glass showered from blown lights on the ceiling above.
The engine continued to run, revolution after revolution.
One button push shifted the engine into high gear. It burped a moment as the clutch slipped and picked up once more, propelling her forward with even greater fury, each cylinder lighting off like its own miniature shot of Hiroshima – swallowing Nitromethane and an evil mix chemicals at war with themselves from the moment they had been mixed through the engine at a rate well north of a gallon every second.
The line at the end of the track flashed past in a heartbeat. Four hundred metres travelled in five and a half seconds and still accelerating.
Jet closed the throttle and popped the parachutes. Silence followed, filled with only the howl of the supercharger and the whine of the gearbox still coasting down. For a moment, her body tried to keep moving, even as the bike beneath her hit an aerodynamic brick wall.
Jet hauled on the brakes with all the force she could muster, skipping and skidding as it struggled to slow. A hard metal wall raced up to meet, far faster than she'd expected
The machine stopped twenty metres from the door at the end of the launch bay, engine cackling at idle, laughing at her for not going even faster.
For a moment, she almost forgot about the chemical timebomb still ticking in the fuel tank. She paddled the bike around, and idled it back to the other end of the launchbay, trying to burn off as much fuel as she could.
Jet parked right where she'd set off, opposite her own black tyre tracks. She killed the fuel pumps for the engine, letting it wind down.
Silence deafened. For a few heartbeats she felt herself at a level of peace she hadn't experience in a long time.
The real race began, to get the tank drained and defuse the bomb they'd created. She unhooked the fuel lines. One of the mechanics, finding a shot of bravery, offered her a container filled with absorbent.
It took moments to drain the dregs from the tank and seal them off. She opened the cap to check for any solid residue, only relaxing when she saw it clean. One of the mechanics peeled back the hood covering their face, before unhooking their facemask.
Dary Haur shook her head to release her hair, carrying the mask under her arm. Jet popped her visor, the scent of ammonia, boot polish and sweet nitro tingling her nostrils and watering her eyes.
"That was crazy," Daryl announced, still shaking herself.
Jet felt herself smile for the first time in what seemed like forever. She felt the blood running in her veins and her heart beating in her chest. She felt her mind running clear and the weight of the universe lift from her shoulders.
Nothing at all mattered beyond the moment, beyond being alive in that instant.
"I'm alive," she said
And fit to giggle. Her body shook and she found herself longing to do it all over again, to wheel the machine around and launch it one more time. The whole engine would need to be rebuilt first
"The timing gate blew over," said Daryl. "That thing was like a bomb going off"
Jet found it hard to care. She knew how fast she'd gone.
"At least we got it on video," she said.
A dozen or more people on the gantry above cheered. Already the videos were making their way out to the wider interwave where people began to take notice.
In the end, that's what mattered. There'd be followup videos, explaining the technology of the engine and how it'd been put together using a combination of 3-d printing, forging and classic machining.
Enough to win some mindshare for herself and the Asagiri brand, to broaden their reputations for speed and engineering and doing things 'real' rather than with the 'wave. Maybe they'd get to run it at the next convention - and then to feed into another series of videos about their spacecraft that might actually start making money by selling them.
Everything according to plan and all that.
Jet took a breath.
Already the excitement had drained, leaving her feeling oddly empty all over again. All the buildup, and it'd already ended.
---
Jet knew it was serious, when the mechanics insisted on wearing sets of coveralls stolen from the reactor department. They had full-face masks and air-tanks borrowed from the fire brigade. It gave them a look of faceless menace. Or chemical weaponsmiths.
All three of them stood a safe distance from a plastic container labelled 'fuel'. Inside it was nitromethane and a dozen other things that'd been mixed up into a chemist's nightmare. Another beside it was labelled with a cartoonish skull and crossbones. If only to hide its true contents from the folks watching on the internet.
It was an oxygen scavenging agent borrowed from the turbine engineers and was normally used to keep the corrosion in the reactors down. It could do interesting things when mixed with Nitro.
Sitting beside both containers was a motorcycle, stretched and enlarged to almost comical portions with a rear tyre fat enough to spin the world backwards. The engine had been printed as a solid billet of metal, with an oversized supercharger and a set of straight pipes that ran under the rider's saddle and exited out the top above the rear wheel. A wheelie-bar stretched behind the bike. The bike's frame had been hand-welded from heavy steel beams, more like a cage to contain an explosion than anything structural
A thin front wheel reached far ahead with a brake that seemed more a token effort than an actual method of stopping the thing. Some carbon bodywork provided scant protection from any wind pressure.
One of the masked mechanics looked at her. "Are you sure you want to do this?"
Jet took a breath, feeling a little tingle of unease. " Let's just fuel it up,"
All three suits shard a glance. Jet could sense their unease – like she'd asked them to arm a bomb. In a way, she had.
The crew added the Nitro mix to the bike's fuel tank. Jet herself added a carefully measured amount of the special sauce. She couldn't help but notice how everyone had stood back from her as she did. A vague ammonia-like scent that reminded of a recently cleaned hospital encouraged her to close her visor.
The mix in the fuel tank began to steam white. A fuse had been lit. Everyone had to hurry.
Jet sealed the tank.
She sat herself on the bike, locking herself into place in the saddle. She motioned for the crew to start the engine. The fuse in the tank continued to burn. It occurred to her that she had no real idea how long the fuse would actually be, or how fast it actually burned.
One mechanic held a bottle of petrol to the intake. The other had an electric starter to the crank of the engine. The third had an optimistic fire-extinguisher. A crowd that'd gathered on the gantry crane above began to cheer.
Jet flicked the switches for both magnetos. The starter was offered to the engine, spinning it up to a high rate. A squirt of fuel through the intake caused it to catch with a bark, sending a shudder up through her body. She could feel each of the engines four cylinders firing beneath her.
After a few seconds to heat the cylinders, she switched to the nitro pumps.
The motor settled down to a shuddering cackle, puffballs of white smoke spitting for the four pipes behind her, mixed with the occasional lick of green flame. The air around her grew thick with the scent of shoe-polish and disinfectant.
A tickle of the throttle sent a shockwave along the launch-bay. Those on the gantry dived for cover. Green lightning shot from the exhausts. Jet cycled the bike through its gears, testing the clutch, brakes and throttle.
She heard the whine of the superchargers. She felt the cackle of the nitro detonating. The whole frame of the bike shuddered in fear of the power it contained.
She felt the thrill run through her that'd been absent for so long. A sense of being alive and whole again.
Frigga's landing bay stretched before her, with the hard stop of the main landing bay door a kilometer away.
She checked around her. The mechanics had retired to a safe distance. Jet suddenly felt herself keenly aware that the blue touch paper had been well and truly lit and she was straddling it.
She paddled the bike backwards to the starting line. Heat rose up from the engine block, soaking through her. Her eyes had begun to water.
Jet took a breath and braced herself.
A twist of her wrist unleashed hell, putting her for one insistent at the centre of one continuous explosion. The machine beneath her launched forward, ripping its tyre along the deckplates laying down a thick black streak of hot rubber.
Nobody dared to help her wheel the bike back to the start line. Nobody wanted to get close to the bomb. She paddled it back herself, taking an agonizingly long time to do so.
One solitary brave soul guided her to the timing lights, making sure the bike was properly lined up for the run. Jet gave the bike one last check, before switching the engine controls over to full power.
Jet guessed it might've been generating somewhere north of two megawatts of power, but lacked any sort of ability to test it. Even the Highway Star at its most aggressive, had barely touched half of that with more than twice the capacity.
Jet took a breath and braced herself.
The mechanic shied back away in fear.
She waited. The engine cackled through its pipes behind her. Beneath her, the supercharger whined, gulping air into the engine's cylinders. Adrenaline surged through her muscles, sending shivers through her body. The ground itself shook in sympathy. All of Frigga rang like a bell in resonance.
She locked it into gear.
The last mechanic raised his hand.
Time stopped. She had long enough to wonder if the devil's venom in the tank would blow from the sock of it when she opened the throttle. Would her armour withstand a bomb going off while she straddled it?
Jet concluded that she wouldn't have to worry about it, no matter what happened.
God help her if anyone found out what she was actually riding. They'd call her mad. Lighting it off in the enclosed environment of a space station would probably be called a crime.
The mechanic dropped his hand, and she launched to bike.
It felt to her like she'd been shot from the barrel of a cannon, or a suicide bomber traspped eternally in the instant of hot acceleration between flicking the switch and meeting god, her insides threatening to leave themselves behind as her body pushed forward. Every single muscle clenched in response, force blood to her brain.
Hot flame warmed her back and hips, unburned fuel flash-igniting a bright witch's green as it met cold oxygen.
Her heart stopped.
She felt the machine slew beneath her, threatening to cartwheel out of control. One quick shift of weight brought it back into line. Her fingers covered the brake. He hand held the throttle pinned to the stop.
Within a second, she'd exceeded 160kph.
She kept accelerating.
Dataloggers in the bike reported its running conditions to her. Exhaust temperature. Fuel pressure. Oil pressure. Manifold pressure. Manifold temperature. Anything that could possibly indicate an incipient explosion before it happened.
Jet had time to wonder if she'd be able to eject herself in time. She'd have maybe a microsecond to think about it as the machine began to destroy itself. Would a cyber's accelerated reflexes save her from an explosive death.
A cylinder might misfire, once, maybe twice and then hydrolock on unburned nitromethane. If the fuel didn't diesel itself, the engine would shatter. Then detonate.
Jet found the idea thrilling.
Three and a half seconds saw her moving well over three hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, having covered just under two hundred meters of distance.
The shockwave from the exhaust had already hit the bay door at the end of the hangar. Dust raised up from the floor. Glass showered from blown lights on the ceiling above.
The engine continued to run, revolution after revolution.
One button push shifted the engine into high gear. It burped a moment as the clutch slipped and picked up once more, propelling her forward with even greater fury, each cylinder lighting off like its own miniature shot of Hiroshima – swallowing Nitromethane and an evil mix chemicals at war with themselves from the moment they had been mixed through the engine at a rate well north of a gallon every second.
The line at the end of the track flashed past in a heartbeat. Four hundred metres travelled in five and a half seconds and still accelerating.
Jet closed the throttle and popped the parachutes. Silence followed, filled with only the howl of the supercharger and the whine of the gearbox still coasting down. For a moment, her body tried to keep moving, even as the bike beneath her hit an aerodynamic brick wall.
Jet hauled on the brakes with all the force she could muster, skipping and skidding as it struggled to slow. A hard metal wall raced up to meet, far faster than she'd expected
The machine stopped twenty metres from the door at the end of the launch bay, engine cackling at idle, laughing at her for not going even faster.
For a moment, she almost forgot about the chemical timebomb still ticking in the fuel tank. She paddled the bike around, and idled it back to the other end of the launchbay, trying to burn off as much fuel as she could.
Jet parked right where she'd set off, opposite her own black tyre tracks. She killed the fuel pumps for the engine, letting it wind down.
Silence deafened. For a few heartbeats she felt herself at a level of peace she hadn't experience in a long time.
The real race began, to get the tank drained and defuse the bomb they'd created. She unhooked the fuel lines. One of the mechanics, finding a shot of bravery, offered her a container filled with absorbent.
It took moments to drain the dregs from the tank and seal them off. She opened the cap to check for any solid residue, only relaxing when she saw it clean. One of the mechanics peeled back the hood covering their face, before unhooking their facemask.
Dary Haur shook her head to release her hair, carrying the mask under her arm. Jet popped her visor, the scent of ammonia, boot polish and sweet nitro tingling her nostrils and watering her eyes.
"That was crazy," Daryl announced, still shaking herself.
Jet felt herself smile for the first time in what seemed like forever. She felt the blood running in her veins and her heart beating in her chest. She felt her mind running clear and the weight of the universe lift from her shoulders.
Nothing at all mattered beyond the moment, beyond being alive in that instant.
"I'm alive," she said
And fit to giggle. Her body shook and she found herself longing to do it all over again, to wheel the machine around and launch it one more time. The whole engine would need to be rebuilt first
"The timing gate blew over," said Daryl. "That thing was like a bomb going off"
Jet found it hard to care. She knew how fast she'd gone.
"At least we got it on video," she said.
A dozen or more people on the gantry above cheered. Already the videos were making their way out to the wider interwave where people began to take notice.
In the end, that's what mattered. There'd be followup videos, explaining the technology of the engine and how it'd been put together using a combination of 3-d printing, forging and classic machining.
Enough to win some mindshare for herself and the Asagiri brand, to broaden their reputations for speed and engineering and doing things 'real' rather than with the 'wave. Maybe they'd get to run it at the next convention - and then to feed into another series of videos about their spacecraft that might actually start making money by selling them.
Everything according to plan and all that.
Jet took a breath.
Already the excitement had drained, leaving her feeling oddly empty all over again. All the buildup, and it'd already ended.
---
![[+]](/images/collapse_collapsed.png "[+]")
SpoilerI love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.