AN/DISCLAIMER I had a plot bunny rumpling arround my head and just had to get rid of it. Feel free to use this concept if you like it, just mail me should you decided to do so and send me a link to your story. To the best of my knowledge everything except Eric is cannon material and technology, just taken to it's logical conclusion. I don't own anything beyond my own writing, so don't sue me. Enjoy, review, hell even flame if you feel you can be constructive.
AN2: figures my first reviewer would poking as a guest. By your own logic ME rounds would be either incapable of damage or capable of destroying the world. Also if spaceships had negative mass in ME FTL they'd detonate as if they'd become antimater. mass is created by weak nuclear force holding energy in place, thus E=MC^2. ME affects gravity, which is the same as strong and weak nuclear force, simply on a different scale. Since ME FTL hasn't anilated the universe I feel safe writing this. Next please.
MJOLNIR
Eric Olafson whistled as he piloted the CX-1 Mjonlir away from the Charon mass relay and ran up the sensor net. Earth was being invaded by the reapers and the galaxy was scrambling desperately for something to do, but he wasn't concerned. This was almost certainly going to be his last flight and he had made his peace with that; he just hoped that his last hurrah would be worth something.
It had all started six years ago.
Eric relatively respected researcher in the minor ship builders firm Prometheus Limited. He had just arrived in the docking bay at Zakera ward and was standing in line for customs when he heard a group of soldiers taking a lecture form their gunny. The conversation had been mildly interesting, but one line had stuck with him that day. "That, men, means that Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!"
He had wondered about that pronouncement as he had made his way to the wreckage of the recent space battle. Not even two weeks ago the Geth, an intelligent machine race had attacked the citadel with a juggernaut class vessel. He and his team were one of probably thousands sent from across the galaxy to try and salvage what remained. The new heatsink technology introduced to the citadel by these invaders had already revolutionized the way the citadel races looked at warfare, there was really no telling what else could be learned from examining the wreckage.
Over the next few weeks Eric had been one of nearly two million scavengers who had greedily combed over the debris, scanning, probing and loading alien hardware onto cargo ships for later dissection, but those words had stuck in his head, rattling around inscessantly and seeking release.
And release they had found.
A normal mass effect round from a capital ship had a mass of 60KG and traveled at 1% the speed of light. 300,000 meters per second multiplied by 60KG rounded out to about 18 million newton's, a force equivalent to a tactical nuclear bomb. Any single round would be enough to pulp a frigate, only two or three more for a cruiser. And yet… And yet this juggernaut had taken hundreds of rounds similar to this before finally disintegrating. What could they hope to accomplish if the Geth came back with a fleet of such ships? Eric had pondered. One had taken out the Asari's Destiny Ascension and half of the alliance fifth fleet with only a small escort cadre. Something needed to be done.
Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space.
He grinned. The answer that came to him was so simple, so elegant it was almost prothean. If the Geth juggernaut could take hundreds of strikes from an 18 million newton force, then the only real option was to escalate. One path led with a razor, study the wreckage and find a weakness that could be exploited. That was what he and two million others were doing now. The other led with a hammer. If you couldn't flatten it with one blow, you found something harder and heavier to hit it with.
The standard hyper drive on a cruiser class ship was capable of moving a ship twelve light years in a day. Higher end models could go as high as 14, but that was largely irrelevant. Where C was 300000 meters per second and A was a Cruisers speed in FTL, found by multiplying by 365 and 12 for the twelve light years in a day came out to 4300C or 1,260,000,000 meters per second. Reducing that engine to fit in a single passenger civilian craft would cut out roughly half of the speed, so 650million meters per second on a craft that weighed around two tons. 1.3 trillion newton's without armor.
He'd like to see anything try to survive that.
Over the course of the next four years he'd built the craft, more out of idle amusement than anything else. He'd presented the idea to his bosses and they'd handled it fairly well he'd thought. They hadn't fired him at least. During the meeting his boss, Fiona Stark, had stopped him in the middle of his presentation and stated that while she could see the direct and profitable military applications of such a vessel, there was no way in hell the citadel council wouldn't send their specters to shut down the idea as soon as it went on a server and any company who was involved with it. Afterwards she had visited him at his apartment with a retinue of guards. He had been quite nervous, that is to say terrified, as they secured the area and made sure everything was private. Then Fiona had told him that she was here to give him approval to go ahead with his project, so long as he kept everything on a private, unconnected terminal and only worked on it in his downtime.
For two years the ship had stayed strictly on the drawing board as he worked to reduce the bulk of dozens of different systems while maintaining their utility. The scans and fragments of the Geth ships from the battle of the citadel and his team had made great strides in that direction, netting his company a sizable sum of credits in the interim; easily justifying the purchase of the super purified Eezo he needed to his superiors. Advances in tachyon LADAR systems, antimatter generators, dense molecule armor and targeting and navigation software were also made, profited from and hybridized into his innovation.
By the time Humanities icon, Commander Jane Sheppard, had reappeared on the galactic scene to deal with the quandary of the disappearing colonies Eric had taken to calling his hobby the Mjolnir. It was roughly twice the size of a gunship and boxy in the extreme, but that was the point. Now theoretically capable of making one light minute jumps at three thousand times the speed of light, the six ton vessel was supposed to smite its target from space with extreme prejudice. The ship could be built in a matter of months now, save that it had to be done discretely. They were a ship building company though, so it wasn't precisely difficult to 'overestimate' materials and equipment needed for any of the dozens of ships they made a year.
Now, three years later, The Mjolnir had been done for 11 months. He'd taken a month vacation to test the craft shortly after its completion and had fun fine tuning the systems against a deserted asteroid field out in Hades Gama, but it had been sitting in mothballs since then.
Then the real proof of concept had taken the galaxy by storm. Commander Jane Sheppard had blazed out of the citadel relay proclaiming the invasion of the REAPERS. Titanic machines who had led the Geth against the Citadel six years ago were not only legion as had been feared, but they weren't even Geth, and what's worse, they had targeted Earth. Over the next week hundreds of planets had reported similar invasions, but nothing quite on the scale of what had come to besiege Terra.
So Eric had left.
He had taken his craft out of the shipyards basement and taken the relays directly to Earth.
Now would be the moment of truth. Six years of his life for the survival of the homeworld.
"Lo there do I see my father." He said to no one as he started scanning for his first target.
"Lo there do I see my mother, my sisters and my brothers." He said as the flight computer processed the Tachyon LADAR data, projecting a variety of potential target vectors.
"Lo there do I see the line of my people, back to the beginning." He intoned, choosing the largest of Lovecraftian behemoths.
"Lo they do call me." The computer finalized calculation for the jump and began flashing ready in his face.
"They bid me take my place among them in the Halls of Valhalla." He grinned and pushed the button, as the feeling of TransLight travel overtook him.
"Where the brave, may live forever!"
