Extra chapter
By nightfall, all nine pilots had cycled through the platform. Each of the three triplet sets had taken multiple turns. The test ran until Storm's fuel tanks were empty.
The neural load tolerance across the nine pilots was consistent. All of them peaked around fifty units of cognitive load before symptoms of pressure overload began appearing. That ceiling was expected and was projected to expand with training. The pilots' neural systems would adapt to the increased load the way muscles adapted to weight training, given progressive exposure.
"That's it for today," Ryan said as the last pilot was helped off the platform. The technical crew was already removing the helmet and armor. He gathered the test data into a portable drive and headed for the control room door. "I'm heading back."
"Good work today."
"See you tomorrow."
The two labs' members waved him out.
Ryan stepped out of Dome Base into the cool coastal evening. The moon was bright overhead. He stretched and considered the cafeteria for dinner.
He opened his system panel out of habit.
Project Three: 0%.
He stopped walking.
Zero percent. That wasn't right.
The progress bar had been hovering around ninety percent the last time he'd checked, days ago. It should be approaching completion, not at zero.
Then his brain processed what he was actually seeing. The progress wasn't at zero. There was a new project showing zero percent.
Which meant the previous project was complete.
He opened the completed projects list. Two entries now, where previously there had been one. Scrapper at the top. And beneath it:
Crimson Typhoon. 100%.
Ryan exhaled.
The Triton-1 launch had pushed the final Summon Points across the finish line. Eight hundred million people heard the words "Triton-1" or "Mercer" during the launch cycle. The cumulative attention had unlocked the remaining Crimson Typhoon technology.
He opened the completed project's technology tree and scanned the contents.
Every system. Every subsystem. Every component. Liquid neural connection. The Midnight-9 toroidal power core. The Trinity Horizon operating system. The underwater seal system. The damper architecture. Plasma cannon (already in production). Spinal clamp (already prototyped). The drift system. The hull structure. The control surfaces. The exterior armor specifications.
All of it. Available to read. Available to build.
The most demanding technologies remaining were the toroidal power core and the operating system. Everything else was either already understood or close enough that Ryan could absorb it in days.
Crimson Typhoon was now technologically possible.
Ryan walked to the cafeteria, picked up takeout, and headed back to his quarters. He had a month of intensive study ahead of him.
The Midnight-9 toroidal power core was the heart of Crimson Typhoon's energy system.
The core's design challenge could be summarized in one sentence: how do you burn diesel as efficiently as physically possible?
Crimson Typhoon used diesel propulsion. Compared to the nuclear-powered variants in the source material's later generations, diesel had a major endurance disadvantage. Crimson Typhoon couldn't carry enough fuel to operate indefinitely. Every gram of efficiency gained in the combustion process translated directly into additional combat time.
The Midnight-9 was the engineering answer to that problem. A toroidal combustion chamber designed for maximum thermodynamic efficiency. Multi-stage fuel atomization. Plasma-assisted ignition (using the same plasma generation technology that powered the cannon). Active waste-heat recovery feeding back into auxiliary systems.
The combat endurance specification was eight hours of sustained operation on a full fuel load. For a Kaiju engagement, eight hours was more than sufficient. No Jaeger pilot would last eight continuous combat hours under any circumstances. The mech could keep going long after the pilots couldn't.
Ryan dove into the specifications.
The operating system was next. He'd already started this work through the elite labs. The system architecture was, to him, the most directly interpretable of all the Crimson Typhoon technologies. Software was about logic and data flow. With complete reference documents, software was, in Ryan's framing, like solving a maze with the map provided.
What had taken the elite labs months to begin to implement, Ryan could understand in days.
He ate dinner while reading. He didn't notice that the kitchen had used sugar in the tomato scramble.
Time accelerated.
Ryan disappeared into the technology tree. He stopped going to Storm Bay. He took meals delivered to his quarters. He slept when his body demanded it and worked the rest of the time. His occasional phone calls home were his only social interaction.
The elite labs, which had been briefly delighted to have Ryan's daily presence accelerating their work, found themselves abandoned again. Cabrera's team and Morales's team went back to their previous mode of independent work, supervised by Reeves, continuing the research mandates they'd been operating under. They also worked with the pilot trio on neural-load training, building up the pilots' tolerance for higher cognitive demands.
The cycle of unsupervised work was, by this point, familiar to the labs.
When focused, Ryan worked with the efficiency of a tunneling machine. A month passed before he came up for air.
He stretched, blinked at the calendar on his laptop screen, and registered the date.
A month. He'd been studying for a month.
The pace was insane. The fact that he'd absorbed the entire Crimson Typhoon technology tree in a single month wasn't a feat anyone outside his head could properly evaluate. The technology tree contained thousands of distinct subsystems. Engineers working in normal conditions would have spent careers understanding any one of them in depth.
But the system documentation was structured for fast comprehension. The pieces were designed to fit together. The interdependencies were mapped and indexed. The work was less "research" and more "memorization with comprehension."
Still: a month.
He looked at the documentation he'd organized on his hard drive.
The original Crimson Typhoon proposal he'd submitted to the chairman months ago had been a high-level technical outline. The version he had now was full construction documentation. Every component dimensioned. Every fastener specified. Every welding tolerance documented. Every alloy composition characterized.
Construction-ready blueprints. The kind of documentation that a manufacturing organization could read and start fabricating from immediately. No interpretive work needed. No engineering judgment calls.
He packaged the documentation onto secure drives, sealed them in a transport case, and walked to Patricia's office.
Patricia was at her computer when Ryan knocked.
She looked up. Her expression said multiple things simultaneously: relief, exasperation, and the resigned acceptance of someone whose job had grown beyond her original contract.
"You've finally come out of your room."
Ryan rolled his eyes. "I followed proper sleep schedules. The probability of sudden death from overwork was statistically minimal."
Patricia laughed without much humor. The point landed because it was true and also because she'd spent the past month worried about exactly that probability.
She'd started her career as a finance manager at Aegis Industrial. A modest portfolio, low-eight-figure budget oversight, occasional administrative duties. Six months ago, she'd been assigned to Ryan's project as the financial controller for a junior research program.
Six months later, she was operating a multi-hundred-person research base, managing budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and was effectively the senior caretaker for a teenager who, depending on the day, was either changing the future of humanity or skipping meals to read documents.
She wasn't sure how she'd ended up in this role.
She also wasn't sure she could leave it. The work was too important and the trust she'd built was too valuable. Replacing her with someone new would cost the operation months of stability.
She accepted the situation. She also kept a discreet medical team on twenty-four-hour standby for Ryan, just in case.
Ryan placed the case on her desk.
"The documents inside are ready for delivery. Civilian applications go to me, defense applications go to your organization, as usual."
Patricia heard the rattle of hard drives. She lifted the case lid and looked at the contents. Multiple sealed drives. The case was heavier than usual.
"That much?"
"That much."
"Anything you want me to tell them?"
Ryan shook his head.
"They'll understand when they see what's in there."
The case rode in a secure courier vehicle to Aegis Industrial's main facility the following morning.
The documents reached the chairman's office before lunch.
By that evening, the chairman had reviewed the executive summary of the documentation. By the next morning, he'd seen enough of the technical drawings to confirm that Ryan had delivered construction-ready blueprints for the most ambitious engineering project in history.
The chairman picked up his red phone.