Big Shiny

Just because you can see something doesn't mean that you can tell how big it is.

It took astronomers hundreds of years to develop equipment and theories that could handle the minute details of the sky, and even then it took some careful measurements of celestial coincidences to tell how far away the sun is.

That is now I feel sometimes. I used to be a tech in a small Merc much company. Sandstorms, bullets, Hell and high water didn't phase those guys. Build it small, build it tough, build it fast. They didn't have room, time, or money for the fancy stuff, but when they hit the field the job got done as quick and clean as you can imagine. We were a tight crew. Anybody could sit down with the boss and get coached on everything from Merc ops to manual combat to drinking, and when I had questions I just glanced over my shoulder and asked the guy who knew.

We ran lean, but we didn't run stupid. Whenever the techs or the grunts needed something to do their job, the boss was the first to point out that each of us was more than worth tending our small demands. We built small, tough mechs that were simple and good. Sure, I was growing tired of greasing bearings and patching up the holes that autocannon put in duralloy plate, but getting to bring a new mech from sketches to a sleek, dancing mountain of metal was a thrill.

Then the Corporation came. The pay was good, and it came with a change of pace that I really needed. Keeping men alive is good, wholesome work, but I wanted to focus on my trade and wear fewer hats at once… and, well, let's be honest, the missus didn't like living in the desert so much.

I've told you my merc company was small. I didn't really grasp this until I got to the Corporation. After about two weeks of shuffling through windowless warrens of equipment, books, approvals, sign-offs, clearances, technical trials, and minor bouts of insanity, I found myself on an enclosed balcony with a view of my division's operations.

The Corporation specializes in space hardware. Not much of a specialization, you might say, and I'd agree. They do  everything. Their flagship product was literally that: a flagship. It'd seen the movies, same as everyone else, and I recognized the basic outline of their latest model moored at the far side of the space.

It was this space that got me. I couldn't see the walls around me, but I could see the outlines of the various facilities on the far wall. Drydocks, dynamic firing harnesses, hyperspatial frenellation constituators, pressure chambers, wind tunnels. In my time with  the Merc company, I'd seen the exact same facilities before, and I could even tell the same companies had built them, but these were all a little more intricate. The proportions were off, too.

About then I felt a tremor run through the floor and saw another flagship coming up from behind me and to my right. I looked closely, taking in the prototype micrometeorite repulsion pylons and the random missing hull plates. A small flash caught my eye, and I realized that there was a small cloud of EVA-suited guys working inside one of the gaps.

They were tiny.

The ship was huge.

The movies really don’t so these behemoths justice. The engine wash of one of these landing on New York would slag Manhattan. You don't really get it until you've worked with a lean, powerful group that stays small and then transition to something of this scale. Well, the ship kept going, and pretty soon I figured out just how flipping' enormous the space really was: the ship that had flown past me approached one of the pressure chambers, it opened, and the ship floated inside. Just like that. This Company had barychambers big enough to fit entire dreadnought. The only reason I could see that far was that the bay was hard vacuum.

"What's next, a wind tunnel big enough for atmospheric formation flight testing of these things?" I muttered to myself, and the walls seemed to smirk back at me.