DISPLACEMENT ENGINE
I don't know how the Displacement Engine worked, and that's a good thing. It's a wormhole weapon so powerful that the Ancients had laws against its creation. I guess that makes my pal Jack a criminal for building it, but, since he believed that building it was the only way to protect his people — and the rest of the known universe — from a Scarran invasion, I don't think there's a jury in the Uncharted Territories that would convict him.
All I know about the device's construction is that it was a heavily modified version of Furlow's Phase Stabilizer. The Phase Stabilizer permitted safe wormhole travel by influencing the wormhole structure itself. Jack juiced the thing up with some finely aligned emitters and a nuclear reactor containing partanium isotope. Once the reactor was activated, it couldn't be shut off. And to keep anyone from ever duplicating the device, Jack designed it to be self-destructing: one-point-four arns after activation, the entire Displacement Engine melted down into slag.
What did it do, you ask? To put it mildly, it altered wormhole structure. To put it less mildly, it caused a wormhole to dip its tail into a sun and suck up solar plasma. The plasma then blasted out of the wormhole's mouth, engulfed a Scarran Dreadnought and blasted it into dissociated atoms.
A Displacement Engine could easily fry a planet using this same tactic. That's why I'm glad it was built to self-destruct. That's why I'd just as soon not learn how it worked. And that's just one more reason I can never let the secrets of wormhole science fall into the wrong hands, even if I have to die to prevent it.
JOURNEY LOG REFERENCES
Infinite Possibilities, Part 1: Daedalus Demands
Infinite Possibilities, Part 2: Icarus Abides
STARBURST TO ANY NOTE
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