Output

Anyway, I bring up the “Scientific Instrumentation” panel on the main screen. It’s the same panel I spent a lot of quality time with earlier—the one that currently shows an image of Tau Ceti. It has the word “Helioscope” in the upper-left corner. I hadn’t noticed that before. The left side of the screen has a bunch of icons. Other equipment, I assume. I press one at random.

Tau Ceti disappears. The top-left corner changes to read “External Collection Unit.” The screen shows a diagram of a featureless rectangle. There are some controls here and there to change the angle and to “open bow side” and “open stern side.” Okay. Noted. Not sure what to do with that information. I press another icon at random.

This time it changes to “Petrovascope.” Beyond that, there’s just a black screen with an error message: petrovascope cannot be used while spin drive is active.

“Hmph,” I say.

Okay, what’s a Petrovascope? Best guess: a telescope and/or camera that looks specifically for the IR light that Astrophage emit. It looks for the Petrova line via the Petrova wavelength so it’s a Petrovascope and we really need to stop putting “Petrova” in front of everything.

Why can’t I use it when the spin drive is active?

I don’t how a spin drive works, or why it’s called a spin drive, but I do know I have one in the back of the ship and it’s consuming Astrophage as fuel. So it’s my engine. It probably activates enriched Astrophage to use them as thrust.

Ah…that would mean there’s a ridiculous amount of IR light coming out the back of the ship right now. Like…enough to vaporize a battleship or something. I’d have to do the math to know for sure but—I can’t help it, I want to do the math right now.

The engines consume 6 grams of Astrophage per second. Astrophage stores energy as mass. So basically, the spin drive converts 6 grams of mass into pure energy every second and spits it out the back. Well, it’s the Astrophage doing the work, but whatever.

I bring up the “Utility” panel on a smaller screen to my right. It has a bunch of familiar applications, all ready to go. One of them is a calculator. I use it to calculate the mass-conversion energy of that 6 grams…good Lord. It’s 540 trillion Joules. And the ship is emitting that much energy every second. So it’s 540 trillion watts. I can’t even fathom that amount of energy. It’s considerably more than the surface of the sun. Literally. Like…you would get hit by less energy if you were on the surface of the sun than if you were standing behind the Hail Mary at full thrust.

***

Chapter 6