>>6135387

"Hey, SHODAN? You there?" You ask.

You know she's particularly busy managing the other hunting squads right now, on top of everything else.
But she hasn't been saying much lately regardless.

["I am, Captain."]

"You see this crack, right? Did you know this was here?"

["I see it. I was unaware, Captain."]

"...And?"

You wait a good few seconds, but SHODAN doesn't reply.

"...You good, SHODAN?"

["...Yes, Captain."]

Something feels off, but who the fuck knows what it is.
AIs are weird to begin with, you don't really know what she's thinking.

Rather, she's usually the one who knows what you're thinking.

Whatever.

"So what do you think, then? Is this fresh? Is it dangerous? What are we looking at?"

["Please take a closer look at the edge of the crack."]

"Alright..."

Leaning down over the edge of the chasm, you point your helmet cam at the line where the surface separated.
The edge looks sharp to you. If you fell on it, you'd probably slice yourself open.

["Crystal growth patterns indicate the asteroid was entirely molten at one point, and cooled extremely slowly. This formed large cystals of mixed metal, creating brittle laminate layers."]

...So it was a big glob of metal that probably cooled out in space over the course of... who knows? thousands? millions of years?
Some of these metal crystals are bigger than your whole body. But all of this, you'd already more or less guessed.

["The lack of oxidation indicates the crack occurred fairly recently, at least within the past year. The most likely cause is probably the rapid cooling of the station after losing power."]

"Ah, shit... that makes sense."

The air in the station cooled pretty rapidly, along with most of the surfaces in contact with it.
But the itself asteroid is huge, basically a gigantic nickel-iron heatsink with enormous thermal mass.

And iron actually sucks at conducting heat, so the inside is probably still pretty warm.

You can kind of feel it. The deeper you go in these tunnels, the warmer it seems to get.
Just slightly. It's still cold, but less so.

So what happens when something cools off or heats up too quickly and unevenly?
Thermal shock. The material expands or contracts at different rates, and in brittle materials like glass or, in this case asteroid iron, it can crack.

The same thing is happening here that happens to a hot coffee pot when rinsed under cold water.
Just on a much larger scale.

"Jesus, it pulled apart this far from just that?" You whisper to yourself.

["I currently see no other suitable explanation, Captain."]

"Do you think it'll keep getting worse?"

["So long as the station continues to cool, cracks like these are likely to continue forming, and possibly worsen over time."]

...That's bad. That's real bad.

A big enough crack could cause a ward to collapse, or worse, depressurize the station if it formed in the outer shell.
Shit. You gotta heat things back up in here, fast.

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Humanity - Fuck Yeah! #32