Keying in the ignition sequence, Hammerhead
softly whispered a quick prayer. For a few glorious seconds the Oscillator
Capacitor Unit hummed to life.
It all went downhill from there.
Suddenly a groaning sound struck his eardrums. Sighing, he moved closer
to the generator in search of the sound's origin.
"Damn this infernal machine!" he growled. Apparently the generator was
producing the sound. Probably not getting enough power. Then, a high
pitched whine followed by a grinding sound which came to a crescendo
and stopped abruptly. With all these faults, he thought to himself,
the Secure Commerce Commission will never approve of this as a trade
commodity. The scene vanished as he turned off the simulation and reached
for his pack of smokes.
Hammerhead gazed over at his ever-growing inbox while he sparked up.
"Star gates offline in Pator, Faulty sentry gun code through Arida,
Camera Drones flaking out... it never ends," he mused as the smoke from
his cigarette drifted into the air.
Trying to get back on track, he brought up the simulation once more.
As he was again running his investigation into why the component constantly
broke down at 2500 GHz he thought to himself, "I wonder if I can fit
one of these on my Heron... sure would make traveling in less scrupulous
areas safer." Focusing on his diagnostic read-outs, he just couldn't
understand why the component wasn't receiving enough power. All previous
tests had looked promising.
He decided to call it a day on the analysis - after all, there were
plenty of other projects to be getting on with. For one, he still had
to finish the new neural connector user interface along with his colleague
Tom.
Hammerhead dealt with many branches of CONCORD in his day-to-day duties.
The Secure Commerce Commission, like many other CONCORD branches, was
rife with red tape and bureaucracy, and extremely stringent when it
came to authorizing new products as official trade commodities. With
such restrictions on the way products were released, he had to stick
to a strict timeline that told him when such products could be out on
the street.
He opened a sub-space comms channel with Traveler and waited for the
transmission to go through.
"What's the word, Hammer? Do we have a winner?" Traveler was a Research
and Development agent at Ishukone who was doing work on various projects
for pilots. Hammerhead liked working with the R&D agents. They always
had new toys for him to play with and they were never in much of a hurry
due to the fact they got paid by the hour.
"Sorry, Traveler. I've been running some more simulations and the results
just aren't coming back like I hoped. I expect this project to take
at least another three solar cycles. The parameters are just wrong and
the power supplement is fluctuating continuously instead of streaming
smoothly," Hammerhead replied with a sigh.
"While I've got you on the line, I think I've figured out a way to enhance
Particle Accelerator efficiency by 20%, but I'm going to need your help
getting the SCC to categorize them as marketable."
Hammer sighed to himself and lit another cigarette. It was Monday morning,
the start of what looked to be another very long week.
