<<<>>> SecTech Chief Anthony Adams witnessed, more than experienced, the destruction of the Ventura and the death of the crew. He watched missile after missile detonate its nuclear payload and never felt so much as a vibration from inside the Black Pod. The pod was designed to survive anything, even a direct strike from a nuclear bomb. It had to survive. It held the story of the demise of the Ventura. That was the Black Pod’s purpose. The hull was Polycarbon, and made of a fiber more than a meter thick. The internal power system was comprised of dual dark matter reactors, and would last 200 years without additional fuel. The internal inertial dampeners were so powerful, Adams never felt the initial blast. There was no sense of the three axis spin that the Black Pod was in, as its orbit decayed. It housed the Ventura’s main data store and Central Artificial Intelligence SYstem, CAISY. The Chief’s eyes welled with tears as he watched via the external camera array, as the plasma cannons hammered the life pods and shuttles.
