Its eleven thirty at night and Jarvick is sitting at the controls of his newly finished, untested space ship that is sitting in one of the JPL’s largest hangars. It took three months to build, having salvaged the computers and some of the propulsion system from his old, nearly destroyed ship. The most difficult part was talking his brother into taking a leave of absence from his job to help him engineer the project. Jim has been helping out his brother during the week and shuttling back home on weekends; Sylvia insisted on keeping her teaching job, but both of them wanted to do whatever they could to help Jarvick return home.
After retrieving what was left of the cargo ship; a group of five people, which consisted of Jarvick, Jim, Ben and two other engineers designed and put together this one. It is a hybrid cruiser that combines the technology of Earth, Gavilon, and wherever that asteroid came from. The computers that control navigation, life support and propulsion are strictly from Gavilon. The ship’s frame and exterior shell; the rigid structure of the cruiser, is made from the same materials as the ORCA. It has a high strength characteristic yet lightweight enough for this purpose. The rest of the design took some imagination and has never been tested, which is why Jarvick insisted on being the only pilot to put it through test flight.
The ship needed a durable power source; partly to supply energy for the internal systems and computers, and the rest needed for propulsion. The Team, as they called themselves, was able to remove the hyperlight component from his old cargo ship, but they had to make some modifications in order to adapt it to the new power source. Ben and Jarvick had performed a number of experiments on the blue crystal in Hangar 2 and learned what could be done safely with the mineral. They even gave it a name; with azure being a shade of blue, the Team named it Azurite. They also discovered that if they used a blue laser to cut the crystal into the shape they needed, it didn’t trigger a violent reaction. Ben suggested that in order to get the most out of the Azurite, it needed to be in cut into cubes. The blue laser cutters were able to make six cubes out of the biggest crystal extracted from the meteorite. Jim engineered an ingenious system to mount the Azurite in that was able to safely contain and control the power produced by these cubes. It consists of six ceramic clamps that do not conduct electricity, and they are able to exert a precisely controlled amount of pressure on the Azurite to produce the desired amount of power, which is channeled into the ships main power circuit. A separate and much larger dedicated circuit is used to transfer power to the hyperlight propulsion system. Jarvick also wanted a circuit installed that enabled him to supply Alternating Current to the Azurite so he could experiment with its kinetic energy characteristics. He remembered Ben describing them in the lab, where some objects moved away from it, but they didn’t have time to explore them yet.
The ship, which was 75 feet long and 35 feet around, looked like a big cigar and sported a greenish tint. This was due to the thin coating on the exterior using refined particles from the green crystal extracted from the meteorite. Jarvick had obviously named it Kalderite, after its namesake from Rylos, and its purpose is the same as the original; to propel the ship by gravitational reflection and attraction. The speeds that can be achieved with it are relatively slow inside a planet’s atmosphere and increase in the vacuum of space; but never approach that of the hyperlight drive. Incredible speed can be reached using this Gavilonian technology and Jarvick was anxious to find out if it still worked; the only way to test it is in space. He was able to test out the onboard computers successfully, he even programmed one of the two jump belts he still had; but the biggest test was tomorrow. A few minor functional tests were done here in the hangar, but tomorrow the ship will be moved out onto a launch pad and he will begin flight testing the Team’s creation. Climbing down from the ship, Jarvick wondered if he will be able to sleep.