IUSD8

==Chapter 8 - I used to Dream==
Snark IV moonlet
Snark orbit
Deep in the outiers
Kowloon System
Lyran Commonwealth
December, 3085
[point of view shift-Patrick]
"...field strength is steady."  The apparatus was ****** huge, and probably cost as much as a Destroyer.  everyone has their own definition of 'huge', but a cyclotron built around the rotational equator of a moon-even one that is more of a moonlet than an actual moon, is still finagled huge.  The project was begun right after mom took over from Stonecipher in the fifties.
Why, you ask??
My mother has this reputation in the Commonwealth, and with the Clans, and even with the Republic. She was known of being about half mad and a warmonger. When they're not condemning her for heading a huge corporation that makes industrial tooling. But she's got another side.  It's why she had to be hospitalized after we got word of Amanda's...well, after the incident.
"We've forgotten so much we don't even have words for what we've lost."
Mom put it on a bronze plaque when she decided to turn the original Ducal Palace into a university devoted to civilian affairs and science.
Nha Tranh University doesn't get a centime from the National Government.  She could easily get Commonwealth Funding...all she'd have to do, is turn it into another Military Academy.
I know she's gotten into shouting fights with Archon Adam Steiner about that. I saw it when I was a kid and the Jihad was burning the known galaxy.
"This is the place, Penny." we seal up our suits and get off the shuttle.  "Project Window.  My sister wanted to restart it...and now, thanks to you, we're going to do it."
"What is it for?" My girlfriend, genius lab-partner and occasional tormentor asks.
"It's a facility to create exotic matter states." I told her, "Your latest equations suggest either needing antimatter or a quantum singularity, and they were doing both of those in the twentieth century at a place called 'CERN'...one of mom's history books, and one of her wacky ideas when she was doping out Crowbar and planning the annihilation of the Word of Blake...or earlier.  She stopped work when things got too crazy and resources had to be shifted to naval building.  Amanda suggested a couple times finishing the site and pursuing pure science work.  Dad insisted that nobody would respect a Kowloonese duchess who didn't have a uniform she could trot out, so Amanda went Coast Guard."
"She was...what, sixteen?"<br>
"About that." I agree.  "My sister was doing differential calculus in her head by age eleven. she was a ****** prodigy...but you should've seen her attempts at assembling model kits-all thumbs.  even managed to screw up a one-ninetieth scale Slayer when she was twelve-she somehow managed to get the hull plates misaligned when she was gluing."
"What do we need?" she asks.
"See those crates over there? the cargo containers you can fit a shuttle in?  All of that stuff.  We'll have help because it's good practice for the trainee crewmen, and there are professional contractors  helping out, but we're going to have to finish building and tuning it before we can run the first experiments you outlined."
She let out an EEEEEEHHHH!!! and it sounded like feedback, and today my Trueborn girlfriend is being outright girly with glee.
Hey, you tell me now-a promise ring the size of a small planetlike body?  beats platinum diamonds every time with the right woman.
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