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battleship, but that begged another question. Why not send armored ships. I mean the cruisers hull can withstand a typical conventional 30 mm hit, but not the hypervelocity depleted uranium armor piercing rounds that Jake had in the rail guns. To defend against these would require significantly thickened hardened steel alloy plating.”
    “Again we were informed by our Treaty partners, faster than light won’t work with a ferrous metal hull. Turns out that if your ship is made of steel, the FTL field generators, those round cylinders on the outer edge of the cruisers, can’t create the necessary field to make it work. That’s why all the races the NeHaw consider modern, use energy weapons. Anything requiring ferrous metal prevents you from leaving your solar system.”
    “OH,” Patti exclaimed as if just remembering something “the stasis fields we use as shields, the NeHaw have nothing like them because we invented them here on Earth. Turns out, they are a derivative of the containment fields used in the exploration ship power generators. The passive nuclear reduction converters every ALICE facility uses as its main power source, works by placing a highly unstable radioactive core inside a containment field. As the material decays, it’s absorbed in the containment field and converted into oscillating electromagnetic energy. This energy in turn, is converted into electrical power. The more unstable the radioactive material is the better the power generation. Our scientists figured out that the reason this works is the containment field actually creates the stasis effect, greatly reducing the rate of decay. This in turn provides a self-sustaining power source that lasts for as long as the core.
    For example , U234 naturally has a half-life of 245,500 years. Contained in stasis it would last almost forever. The stasis field doesn’t stop time, it just slows it way down. We altered the field generation systems and Voila , Stasis Field!”
    To Jake, that explained ALICE-1s laissez faire attitude way back when, when he had asked her about a failing power source. It was also the best news he had heard so far. The realization that we didn’t know where the NeHaw lived, we can’t take the rail-guns outside the solar system, and none of the ships they were building in Hawaii would ever be capable of travel faster than light was not encouraging. The one positive piece was, if the NeHaw didn’t know why the first ship crashed, their status, as a “death planet” was still intact.
    ----*----
     
    HeBak sat at the Communications Supervisor station he had operated for a very long time. Having reached the pinnacle of his career here, he had seen others come and go as they received promotions he was never destine to receive. Most of those promotions were due to family ties or treachery and guile. In a few cases, he was just happy to have survived their passing through his department.
    He had been witness to every report from every sector in NeHaw space, processing each as required and forwarding them to the appropriate departments. That is every report but the ones from a newly discovered little planet in Nu Tau Beta. He alone knew the real story surrounding the loss of the exploration vessel, crashed so many megacycles ago.
    His receipt of that first report, like so many others, was uneventful. He was preparing to process it as required when the geology data came up on his display. The world was a treasure trove of precious metals, not seen in NeHaw space in a very long time. They had drained so many of the occupied planets of resources, so long ago, as required by NeHaw expansion. It was only the remote location of this planet, which had left the world undiscovered for so long. He stripped the geology data from the analysis and buried the crash report in the archives as “lost in space”. His intent in altering the information was to return in his retirement and quietly siphon the undiscovered metals from under the