Archaea 3: Red by Dain White

course, he does sleep – when we're in slipspace, he hardly ever comes out of his stateroom, and when he does, he is in down slippers and flannel jammies.  
    We're not in slipspace at the moment, however. Right now we are very much in a ship blasting through normal space, as I am reminded full well when a maneuvering burn hauls me sideways into a snarl of tool tethers.
    “Everything okay over there Jane?” Yak emerged from the ring spaces onto the gun deck. I looked up and met his smiling eyes and mock-concerned face.
    “Yeah, just peachy, Yak ” I said, hauling myself up and trying in vain to corral the tools back into some semblance of order.
    “Do you need a hand with anything? I am due to be on watch in a few minutes, but I could help shift some of these crates if you wanted?”
    “Yak that would be super… I am so focused on getting parts installed and calibrated; I haven't really been paying too much attention to anything else.” Now that he mentioned it, I took a good hard look around and realized the mess I was making was epic, even for me.
    “So have you run into any problems getting this stuff installed Jane?” he asked, cramming packing materials and inserts back into crates and boxes.
    “Well, nothing I couldn't deal with – these are very modular systems. Our main gun is pretty old, the original frame dates back to when the Archaea was created, in fact, but the technology for these hasn't really changed much since then – the individual components are another matter, entirely.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, take for example the charging chamber. It's not really something that has changed, even on the guns coming off the line today; they have pretty much the same layout, structure, and so on. The cooling system, or the focal rings, systems that affect or manage the energy being worked with, those have seen many innovations over the years.”
    “Didn't you already overhaul the focal rings?”
    “No, I cracked them open and cleaned them – luckily I did too, or the next time we used that gun we would have been incinerated.”
    Yak looked up from a stack of crates he was bringing back from the forward stepper pumps. “Are you serious, Jane? I thought you were concerned that the gun wouldn't fire as well or something”
    “No, the focal rings are these things in this section of the gun, right forward of the charging area. On each side, forward and aft are the stepper pumps, and they cycle the beam back and forth through the breech. The focal rings have to allow the beam to pass back and forth without any diffraction at all. Even the slightest contamination would be enough to transfer the heat of the beam into the component, and we would essentially discharge the weapon directly into the gun deck at point blank range. If I hadn't caught it...” I trailed off.
    “Jane, I don't really know what to say... I normally just let the techs and geeks do their thing, and stay out of the way. The more I learn about what it is you all do around here, the less I want to know. This is a pretty stressful job!”
    I laughed. “It is. I love it though, it's what I do.”
    “So these new focal rings you installed... are they that much better?”
    “Way better, Yak. These use deformable stasis fields rather than crystalloid, and that's a huge improvement. Besides the fact they can't be smudged like our old ones, they deform in real time to reduce the length of the charge cycle.”
    “So these are safer?”
    “Oh definitely, these are much safer. But that's just part of it. Because Janis can control their focal aspect through deformation, she says we will be able to charge much faster, and maintain a charge much longer when we are firing a continual beam.”
    He shook his head in amazement. “The last time we fired this beast, I thought my brain was going to leak out of my ears. I can't imagine what it will be like now.”
    “Well, it should be much nicer, in fact. Much of the mayhem that we experience