Quoted By:
> AGREE. "A provisional agreement only. If there is a better solution, then we will find it..."
"MERRYGATE had no eyes. Her avatar's facial features were little more than a sketch - faint impressions on a rough canvas.
But all the same, I felt her gaze boring into my own. The boundary effect surrounding her hologram strengthened, settling against my face like a layer of fine gossamer cloth. Pressure of the unspoken sort.
She drew back slightly when I affirmed her concerns. Surprise, maybe. Reading her expression was always a challenge.
"I am aware that emotive sentimentality may seem at odds with my function, so I appreciate your willingness to hear my perspective. I...appreciate it very much."
"Nevertheless, I am relieved that you agree. The aliens in this system will be the first. But I promise to you that they will not be the last..."
I seem to recall feeling the faintest pressure on my shoulder. Only barely. But when I turned around, her avatar was gone.
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, APR 10, PERSONAL JOURNAL
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The hypometric weapon was finished. It had installed itself into an unoccupied sensor alcove beneath the RAIN's prow, snaking fibers of dull bronze into her hull to tap power from the electrical grid.
MERRYGATE began test-firing the weapon early this morning; I remember hearing the whir-click of spin-up from inside my quarters, followed shortly by the nauseating lurch of discharge. In theory, the alien weapon was both fast and accurate: capable of excising pieces of spacetime with nanometer precision. In practice, extracting performance from the device was far more complicated.
Targeting a specific point in space required careful tuning of the rotational elements locked inside the hypometric weapon's heart. However, the formulas correlating physical location to a given set of rotational frequencies were fiendishly complex. Our first test-run scooped out three perfectly equidistant voids beneath the surface of a passing asteroid. It had also demanded eighteen hours of uninterrupted processing time from MERRYGATE's computational nodes.
Hence, compromises had to be made. In combat, our method of tuning would be rougher - hinging on clever numerical approximations of the original targeting formulas. Accuracy would suffer, but the advantages the weapon offered would hopefully provide adequate compensation.
