Dreadnought (Nemesis, #1)

by April Daniels

The place is wall-to-wall hypertech, the superscience that brings us wonders from a thousand possible futures, devices that are decades or centuries beyond what baseline tech can manage. Nobody really knows what makes hypertech possible. What’s obvious is that some people, most of whom don’t show any indication whatsoever of being metahuman, seem to have a knack for the development and manufacture of technology far in advance of what’s normally considered the state of the art. The only reason we’re not all living in space stations orbiting a neutron star or something like that is because hypertech has—well, it has problems. The biggest is probably that it’s amazingly hard to replicate, to the point where the government has officially given up trying to get mass production working. (Nobody believes them when they say that, though. The Pentagon uses as much hypertech as they can get their hands on, but it’s all custom-made gear that’s hard to replace.) At first, some hypertech developers tried to explain their work, but it never clicked with the mainstream. Experiments failed when universities tried to replicate them, functioning devices sometimes contradicted known laws of physics, et cetera, et cetera, and so now they’re mainly a community unto themselves, studiously ignored by mainstream science, which tends to mutter and grumble every time the “speculative technology” is mentioned. Every hypertech artifact has to be more or less handcrafted, often out of components which...