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>A few of you guessed very well during this last voting cycle, so no dice rolling this time.
"Of the properties that MERRYGATE mentioned, one of the most unusual was the weapon's dependence on local gravity. The probe had actually warned about it months ago, when the weapon was still enmeshing itself into the RAIN's prow.
The machine-entity had been characteristically terse about the details. The internal workings of the weapon were supposedly "incompatible" with "severe or sudden" distortions in the local metric. Steep gravitational gradients would complicate targeting calculations and introduce deviation into calibrated firing solutions. In areas of particularly heavy flux - near the surface of stars or next to rapidly-orbiting objects - the hypometric weapon would fail to work altogether.
The constraint had seemed reasonable at first, but it was much more baffling when we revisited it a few days ago. If our hypothesis about the weapon was correct, there should be nothing prohibiting its operation within a gravity well. Even the RAIN's experimental, single-shot jump coils could compensate for the gentle pull of planetary gravity. To suggest that the advanced FTL machinery inside the alien weapon lacked this capability seemed unreasonable.
Unfortunately, peering inside the weapon was far more difficult than testing it. Suspended between its whirling blades was a smooth, reflective sphere the size of a human torso: the true heart of the weapon, I suspected. We didn't have tools capable of breaching it. And even if we did, I doubted that the weapon would tolerate casual examination.
But we came to a workaround eventually.
By tempering the reactions inside the RAIN's reactor, it was possible to briefly spike the neutrino flux traveling through our ship. The wave of particles would be harmless, interacting with normal matter at a rate low enough to be negligible. But with enough of them - and a sufficiently capable detector - it was possible to generate a vague impression of the objects they were ghosting through. Faint, grey-on-black images with a striking resemblance to the earliest X-ray films.
That was precisely what we were doing now. Forty minutes ago, MERRYGATE sent one of the RAIN's probes for "routine" sensor trials, its passive detection array pointed conveniently back at the RAIN. In the reactor room, I heard the reactor spin down for ten seconds as MERRYGATE adjusted magnetic compression to modulate the rate of plasma burn. I couldn't feel the neutrino surge as it passed through me, but I knew it happened.
The display in front of me powered on a few moments later, showing an shadowed impression of the hypometric weapon's heart - most of it incomprehensible machinery, feathering down to the nanoscale. But there was on obvious exception. A point of blackness at the weapon's center: a tiny - perhaps subatomic - defect where absolutely no particles had managed to cross through to the other side:
>WHAT IS IT???
