Raising Caine - eARC (37 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Close orbit; BD +02 4076 Two (“Disparity”)

Bannor Rulaine ate the last bite of his cold tilapia burger
sans
bun and wished they could heat food whenever they wanted to. But life on the stricken UCS
Puller
made unscheduled cooking a death sentence.

“Enjoying every last bit of
faux
beef, eh?” “Tygg” Robin asked as he entered their shared compartment.

“Am I ever.” Bannor chewed and decided several things: that raw fish was arguably better than cold cooked fish; that the beef stock in which they marinated the tilapia really didn’t work worth a damn as a flavoring agent; and that although none of them were going to starve to death as they tumbled ass-over-elbow around Disparity, gustatory boredom might do them in just as well. “Any news?”

“Yeh. Morgan’s ready to give the damage assessment.”

“Good. I’m coming.” What Bannor did not add is that he was not sure why, after yesterday’s eight man-hours of EVA hull survey, it had taken design whiz Morgan Lymbery a whole day to decide he was ready to report the obvious. Rulaine followed Tygg to the bridge.

When Bannor entered, there were respectful nods, but no salutes or stands to attention. Rulaine had followed Riordan’s example when maintaining discipline amongst this mixed crew: respect for the rank, yes, but no formalities. Hell, as it was, there were more officers—Bannor, Tygg, Wu, and ostensibly Karam—than there were enlisted personnel. And both of the enlisted men were high-ranked NCOs, one of whom had served longer than everyone but Bannor.

Rulaine turned to Morgan. “Mr. Lymbery, I hear you have the final word for us.”

“I do,” said the bantam Englishman. Following their current precaution of minimizing power use, Lymbery brought out hardcopy blue-prints of the Wolfe-class corvette. “We took two significant hits on the starboard side, both from rail gun submunitions. We took another hit from a laser on our stern, and another on our dorsal surface.

“The dorsal laser hit was at a wide angle of incidence and therefore, did nothing beyond leaving some heat-scoring on the hull. The second one seemed like it was going to be harmless at first: the beam itself did not breach the hull, but did generate internal heat spalling. The fragments narrowly missed the portside MAP thruster’s reactor.”

“Okay, but I worry when I hear about hits that ‘seem’ harmless,” Karam grumbled.

“I’ll come back to it,” Morgan promised glumly. “Moving on. One of the two penetrator hits was a non-event; it clipped off a secondary sensor mast. The other penetrator did the damage that Mssrs. Rulaine and Robin spent most of yesterday surveying. The submunition impacted us on a trajectory that was almost parallel with our keel, so it cut a short trough along our ventral hull before it penetrated and skewered all our portside fuel baffles. As it exited the hull, it sent some high speed debris forward into our ladar masts and our secondary avionics suite. We can trim the remaining stubs of the masts to normalize airflow, but those systems are now heavily compromised, meaning significant reductions in both range and acuity. And obviously, we’re going to have to make some hull repairs before this craft can conduct atmospheric reentry or flight.”

“Mr. Lymbery,” Peter Wu intruded.

“Yes?”

“We are very far from any repair facility, sir.”

“I didn’t say we needed a repair facility; I said we needed to make repairs. Not the same thing. I’ll explain later. Now, about that harmless-looking laser hit on our stern. The larger fragments from the spalling took out a control board and a coolant conduit. The former was redundant and we had spares to replace the latter. Even so, we had to shut down, and Mr. Friel would be dead if he hadn’t been wearing a duty suit with both a hazardous environment shell and armored liner: he was right on the edge of the spalling’s ejecta pattern.”

Phil Friel, leaning against the portside observation window, turned a little more pale than usual. “Damn it all, that’s twice now. Hardly fair, I’d say.”

“‘Twice now’?” Melissa Sleeman echoed.

Phil shrugged. “I was in the first echelon under Halifax at the Battle of Earth. I was on a corvette like this one, playing bait-the-battlewagon with the Arat Kur when one of their UV lasers opened us up like a rusty sardine can. Lost two friends that day because they were standing half a meter closer to the pre-heating cores that got vented. And the plasma that half-vaporized them gave me a good scare and a lasting scar.”

Lymbery waited to be sure that the exchange was over. “We were lucky in terms of our crew—Mr. Friel missed being hit by mere centimeters—but not in terms of the effects on our machinery. We did not initially detect the damage done by the smaller, needle-sized fragments. They riddled the coolant supply distributor adjacent to the conduit. Makeshift repairs are possible. It’s a simple job for the hand-welder in the ship’s locker, but since we do not dare bring the engines back on line, we have no way to test if the repairs will hold. Which I rather doubt.”

And so there it was again: more problems arising from the possibility that they were still being observed. In this case, because
Puller
had to keep her reactors and drives dark, there was no way to assess the durability of the repairs. “So let’s assume the repairs don’t hold. What happens?”

Lymbery held up one bird-thin hand. “That depends upon how and when the failure occurs. If the distributor goes completely pear-shaped, the thruster will shut down automatically. You could override, but in that case, you shall blow out the drive in minutes, perhaps seconds. It depends entirely upon your operating temperature and the amount of residual coolant in the system at the time. Luck of the draw, I’m afraid.

“If the line is compromised but still functioning, one might extend the operating time by pumping smaller amounts of coolant through it at lower pressure. The engine heat will build, but the decreased coolant flow reduces stress on the distributor and also reduces the rate of leakage, since the contents are not under as much pressure. You get a drip, not a spray, if you take my meaning. Finally, I have had a few ideas about how to best repair the hull damage.”

Bannor crossed his arms, leaned back. This was going to be very good, very insane, or both. Having spent a few weeks around Lymbery, he was willing to wager on “both.”

The Englishman steepled his fingers and began emitting a stream of non-grammatical phrases: he sounded more like a victim of adult aphasia than a genius. “We scout around for rusty bits throughout the hull. Or rig a catalyzer. To create ferrous oxide, of course. The hand grinder should work. And also Ms. Sleeman’s biosample centrifuge. But how much aluminum do we have on hand?”

Eight of the other nine persons aboard
Puller
stared blankly at each other. But Melissa Sleeman’s face was curving to accommodate a slow, crafty smile. “Thermite,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” Lymbery replied, looking about the group in as much confusion as they were looking at him. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

Bannor unfolded his arms, putting the pieces together now, but saw that most of the others were no closer to seeing where the mad genius Englishman was trying to lead them. “Maybe it’s not quite as obvious as it seems, Mr. Lymbery. Why don’t you break it down for us?”

While Lymbery was still frowning and blinking in consternation—Rulaine could almost see a thought bubble above his head that read, “surely I made it all perfectly clear”—Melissa launched into the explanation. “Thermite burns at twenty-five-hundred degrees centigrade and is a welding compound that doesn’t require an oxidizer. If we can rig a work cover over the damaged section of
Puller
’s belly, we can use thermite to repair the hull. It won’t be pretty or precise, but it will get the job done.”

“Yes—but where do we
get
the thermite?” asked Trent Howarth, who had to bend at the waist to fit into the hatchway where he was floating.

“Oh. Yes. Sorry. Thermite is just a mixture of rust and aluminum. So we scavenge rust from around the hull, or make it by reverse-catalyzing iron into ferrous oxide. Then we collect aluminum parts from around the hull.”

“Plenty in the kitchen,” Wu offered. His culinary skills had elevated him to lord of the galley for those thirty minutes per orbit when they could risk enough power output for him to cook.

“Right,” Sleeman picked up. “So you grind down the rust and the aluminum into powders. Then you use the mini-centrifuge in my bio sampling kit to separate the grain size of the powders into the tolerances you need, and then you make the final mix.”

“Um, can’t we just use the hand-welder in the ship’s locker for this job?” Howarth looked hopefully around the group.

“Impossible,” Lymbery pronounced. “Working temperature insufficient. Fuel too limited. Unsuitable for vacuum operations.”

Peter Wu put up a finger. “What about an arc-welder? We certainly have enough electricity.”

Sleeman shook her head. “We’d have to fashion an arc-welder that will hold up in hard, EVA conditions. Also, the job would take much longer and we can’t afford to run the welder for more than thirty minutes per orbit. Not if we want to be sure we stay hidden.”

Which brought them all back face-to-face with the single most crucial uncertainty in their day-to-day existence; after a moment’s silence, Tina Melah wondered aloud, “Are we really so sure that we
are
being watched?”

Rulaine shrugged. “Ms. Melah, we could get a definitive answer to that question quickly enough: we could power up our drives, charge our capacitors, illuminate our active arrays, and wait to see what happens. If nothing, great. But if there’s still someone out there to see it, their ship will also be the last thing we ever see—as they come charging in to polish us off. That’s why we’re using only solar cells to recharge our batteries, and that’s why we keep our power generation to a few hundred watts during the thirty minutes we spend in the safe zone of our orbit.”

Howarth scratched his head. “So, if someone might still be out there”—he waved widely at space in general—“what makes any spot of our orbit ‘safe’?”

Karam took up the explanation; his experience had led them to adopt their near-absolute doggo running conditions. “Reason one: the attackers came out of the rocks in the leading trojan point. Probably retreated back there as well. And no, the Slaasriithi shift carrier didn’t eliminate them, because if Yiithrii’ah’aash had accomplished that, his first order of business would have been to rescue us and then go looking for the shuttle, and the other half of the legation, on Disparity.

“But instead, he high-tailed it out of the battlespace, pushing straight into preacceleration. We can still see him burning for shift as hard as he can, every time we come around to that part of our orbit that has us directly opposed to the sun. Which is why I suspect that area of space is clear: if our attackers followed Yiithrii’ah’aash, we’d have seen their exhausts. And there’s no cover for them to exploit out in that direction; no moon, no trojan asteroids, nothing.

“Reason two: that part of our orbit also takes us through latitudes where there are a lot of auroras. If we have to give off any electromagnetic emissions at all, I want us to be back-dropped, or better yet foregrounded, by those pretty shimmering ribbons of charged particles. I’ll take any interference I can get, right now.”

Phil Friel nodded. “So, that’s when we’ll do our welding: in intervals, whenever we pass through the safe zone.”

Rulaine nodded. “Yes.”

“How soon do we start? Mr. Tsaami mentioned that we’ll begin to deorbit in two weeks. Maybe less.”

Bannor didn’t stop nodding. “The sooner we start the repairs, the better. Because if our attackers are still out there, they’ll need to move pretty soon themselves.”

Karam nodded. “Yeah, because when Yiithrii’ah’aash eventually shifts outsystem and his tail-lights wink out, it will be less than two weeks before they wink back in. Along with a whole lot of friends from Beta Aquilae.”

“It makes me wonder what our enemies are waiting for.” Wu’s mutter was as dark as it was low.

Rulaine shrugged. “They may be repairing damage to their own ship. And they have to figure out their next move.”

“Such as, coming in and wiping us out?” O’Garran proposed sardonically.

“If it was that easy for them, they’d have already done it,” Karam retorted.

Bannor nodded. “The game has changed. They’ve lost the element of surprise and have a lot more unknowns to deal with. Like this ship: we look to be dead in space, no one left alive, but they can’t be sure. Same with the shuttle: it could have been lost with all hands, but it’s just as likely that some survivors made it to the ground and are looking for help while hiding as best they can. And the attackers probably didn’t destroy all the Slaasriithi defense spheres .

“So the bad guys have got a lot of work left to do and not a lot of time in which to do it. They have the same operational countdown on Yiithrii’ah’aash’s ship that we do. Except for us, when that clock runs out, the cavalry comes over the hill and we’re saved. For them, it means ‘game over.’”

Tina Melah rose. “So we’d better get on the repairs right away.”

“You just can’t wait to get your hands on some thermite,” Phil murmured at her with a small smile.

She returned a wide grin.

Rulaine leaned forward, holding himself in place with three fingers he had hooked under the rim of the sensor console. “Before we get to work, you should be aware of the different tactical scenarios we might face and our planned responses to each one.”

The growing buzz of side conversations stilled.

“The happiest scenario is the one in which it turns out that the attackers are gone, the Slaasriithi come back, the rest of the legation is rescued, and we go on as before. A variant of that scenario is that the Slaasriithi come back, which is what triggers our hidden attackers into action again. In that scenario, we have to be ready to help fight them, or to run like hell.”

“Or to help retrieve the rest of the legation,” Trent added.

“No,” Rulaine countered immediately. “That’s not an option for this ship.” He held up a hand in response to the suddenly erect spines and opening mouths. “I’ll come back to that point. The next scenario is that nothing happens until we are about to deorbit. In that event, we wait until we’re in our safe window and boost outward from the planet.” He rode over the top of the growing frowns. “But the last scenario is the one that’s most likely and that I’m most worried about: that our attackers resume their operations. Now, if they come in supported by whatever shift carrier brought them here, we have no choice but to run. Again. Captain’s orders, actually. But if the attackers only bring the same small ship they used the first time, and if they bypass us to search the planet, that will force us to descend and try to help the rest of the legation.”