"You wanted to see me, Captain?" Jaeger asked, standing to attention as he stepped through the automatic door into the briefing room. Before him, Captain Fielding of the Rorke and several other high-ranking personnel were sat around a circular table, a hologram of the asteroid field projecting from its center. Fielding gestured for the pilot to be at ease, his hand gloved in the same pristine white as his uniform, Jaeger relaxing as he waited for further instructions. A few of the other attendants were also dressed in white, indicating that they were the captains of some of the support ships. Others were wearing the standard Navy blue, or the yellow of the engineering corps.
"We've read your report concerning the incident in the Oort cloud, Lieutenant Jaeger," Fielding began. "I wondered if you might give us a more ... personal account of what you saw."
"Of course Captain," he replied. He proceeded to go over the details of everything that he had seen in the asteroid field, the glittering green laser that had burned through the Bug vessel, the flashing colors in hues of blue and purple. When he was done, he glanced nervously around the table, hoping that they weren't about to ground him for a psych evaluation.
The Captain tapped at a touchpad that was embedded in the table, and then the hologram shifted, showing a three-dimensional image of one of the Bug ships.
"Fortunately, your railgun's targeting optics were tracking the enemy vessel when the laser hit it," Fielding said. "Watch closely." He advanced the recording frame by frame, everyone leaning in as they concentrated on the flickering video. They gasped and muttered as the feed suddenly warped, corruption and digital artifacts tearing up the recording. "The green beam that you claim to have seen isn't visible on the camera. However, the light that it emitted seems to have damaged the recording. If we advance the footage, we can clearly see where it impacts the dorsal armor of the Betelgeusian fighter and begins to melt through it ... here."
He paused the video again, then zoomed in on a spot on the metallic armor. It was blurry and pixelated. The target had been far away, and the resolution wasn't great, but Jaeger could clearly make out an orange glow. The Captain advanced the video by another few frames, the armor slagging and becoming molten as the laser burned through it. A murmur passed around the table, a few of them glancing at Jaeger. They had probably been doubting his field report.
"Chief Engineer Campbell, what can you tell us about this weapon?" the Captain asked as he gestured to a man wearing yellow overalls. The engineer stood, scrutinizing the still picture for a few more moments.
"You said that the beam was green?" he asked, directing the question towards Jaeger who nodded in response. "In that case, my guess would be a very high wattage neodymium laser, continuous rather than pulsed it looks like. We use these lasers ourselves, mostly for medical purposes and for laser targeting equipment, but nothing this powerful."
"So we have this technology?" a man wearing blue who was sitting across from him asked.
"Yes," Campbell continued, "but it's not very effective as a weapon. Lasers have some value for point defense applications, but generally speaking, the range at which most fleet engagements take place renders them next to useless for offensive purposes. The problem with lasers is that they tend to scatter, the beam is dispersed as it passes through a medium and encounters microscopic particles. Let's say you fire a laser beam in an atmosphere, every droplet of water and mote of dust that it encounters is going to refract the light, which dramatically reduces the amount of photons that actually reach their target. That results in a huge damage falloff, and even in the vacuum of space, there's plenty of gas and dust particles that can interrupt the beam. That's the only reason that a laser beam is ever visible, because of scattered light that's being flung out of the beam by collisions. One solution is to increase the power of the laser so that even with scattering, the light that reaches the target is still enough to be lethal. But as the range and the density of the medium increases, so too do the power requirements. It's just not an efficient weapon."
"This one seems to be working pretty well," the man added.
"It's probably wasting an enormous amount of energy," the engineer shot back.
"If I could have your attention again, gentlemen?" Fielding asked. He moved his hand back to the touch screen, the display shifting once more. Jaeger recognized this new recording as the view from his helmet, looking back over his shoulder as he zoomed in on the area of space where he had picked up the heat signature. He waited with bated breath for the flash of purple light, hoping against hope that it had been in a spectrum that the cameras could capture, unlike the laser beam.
It was faint, barely larger than a fingernail at such extreme range, but the flurry of colored lights was clearly visible.
"What the hell is that?" Campbell asked. "Can you enhance it, Captain?"
Fielding blew up the picture, and again the low resolution meant that the resulting image was blurry and pixelated, then he paused the footage as the blue light appeared. It was illuminating the hull of the ship around it, not by much, but enough to make out a vague shape. He played the video in slow motion, a light like a strobe moving from left to right in a wave, passing through different hues of azure and magenta.
"Captain, if I may?" Campbell asked. Fielding nodded, stepping away from the touchpad as the engineer took his place. "If we can take snapshots of the footage and overlay them," he began, "then we should be able to..."
Jaeger watched as Campbell manipulated the footage, taking screenshots and overlaying them one on top of the other as the wave of light passed along the side of the vessel. What resulted was a single view with the entire band illuminated, along with the rough outline of the ship itself, the light reflecting off the hull.
"What kind of ship is that?" one of the other captains mused, leaning across the table to get a closer look.