“Noted,” Edmund said. “I’ll make sure you get what you ask for. Don’t just ask for what you need, okay?”
“Got it,” Herzer said, grimacing. “Boss, can you try to get me a real command some day? Not this harum-scarum, thrown into the breach bullshit? I’m getting really tired of being the forlorn hope, you know?”
“I know,” Edmund said, sitting down wearily. “I’d intended to move you to Second Legion pretty soon. There are a dozen places I’d like to put you, but I figured you deserved a real command for a while. Not exactly a vacation, but better than this shit. Hell, why am I abusing you about all work and no play? I’m the one here when I should be safe in the arms of Morpheus.”
“Rack out here,” Herzer suggested. “Or, maybe not. The facilities suck. The food sucks. The training is going to really suck. Morale is going to be a bitch to maintain, especially since everybody thinks they’re going to die.”
“Do you think it’s that bad?” Edmund asked.
“No,” Herzer admitted. “Unless New Destiny has the same plan. I’m going to try to avoid direct conflict as much as possible and build forces as much as possible. At the same time, I don’t want more people up there than we can evac if we have to. Twenty-five at a time is the max, if we don’t lose a pilot. Sixteen to twenty-hour turn time. If we take heavy casualties, I’m pulling back to two ships and riding it out.”
“Oh, how fascinating,” Geo said, looking at the hand-printed schematic. “They use Tammen field sequencers!”
The various teams had broken out into their specialties for a week and having completed the first block of training on shuttle-board systems the engineers were looking over the shipboard systems. And finding various quaint equipment that had them chuckling at all hours.
“I don’t even know what a Tammen field sequencer is,” Linda admitted, leaning over his shoulder to read the specifications of the system. “Oh, my, it’s only rated to one gigawatt! I’m not sure that could even turn the ship except in geologic time.”
The engineering team had been given the ground floor of one of the wooden buildings and that was now scattered with various bits and pieces of equipment. Some of the material was original equipment used in the Excelsior that had been found around Norau, but most of it was plastic and wood mock-ups created by the previous team. The walls were covered in blackboards that had diagrams and equations on them, and down the middle were several tables. The entire engineering team was gathered around, watching Geo cluck over the ship’s antiquated systems.
“The Tammen didn’t use intermediate field generators,” Evan said, chuckling. “It was a late addition to the ship, anyway, used for reactionless vector control. They were additional thrusters, in other words, for fine attitude control. They’ve got a fraction of the output of the ion drive or the lat thrusters.”
“They don’t have to, though,” Geo said, shaking his head. “I always liked the Tammen design; it was very robust. And with some tinkering it’s capable of much higher output. I wrote a paper about it that I don’t think I ever published.”
“How?” Evan asked. The Tammen field generators were a secondary system whose primary control node actually ran through Engineering. Assuming they captured Engineering, that would give them latitude control. Especially if Geo could “soup them up.”
“The reason Tammens didn’t use intermediate generators was that the theory didn’t work for them in the twenty-fourth century,” Geo said, looking over at Linda. “Why?”
“I’m not…” Linda said, then frowned. “Ah, the tertiary chaos equations of field junctions weren’t worked out until… 2679 by… by…”
“Izakaiah Romanov,” Evan said, grinning. Geo was always playing the “professor” game with the two.
“You’re so far beyond me,” Paul Satyat said, shaking his head. Satyat was the designated engineering tech for Team Van Krief, a short, stocky brunet with burly hands and shoulders. He had studied various forms of engineering throughout history but only brushed on quantum engineering practices. He was more than capable of doing the nuts and bolts work, but the theoretical side left him cold.
“Same here,” Nicole Howard admitted. Nicole was, arguably, the prettiest of the several females on the mission. She was medium height with long blonde hair, dark tanned skin, greenish blue eyes and long, shapely legs. But most guys didn’t look much beyond a truly phenomenal chest. For all that, she was smart as a whip and, if anything, better at the nuts and bolts work than anyone but Evan. She actively enjoyed tinkering with equipment and her hands showed it, being rather overdeveloped and strong for the rest of her looks, with broken fingernails and heavy calluses. “And I don’t see how you can rebuild one to generate intermediate fields,” she added, leaning over Geo from the other side and running a finger over one part of the schematic. “They collapse without an Izakaiah transform module. And I don’t know about you, but off the top of my head I don’t know where I can scrounge one.”
Linda looked across Geo and gave her a cool look that Nicole either didn’t notice or pretended not to.
“Oh, we’ll have to build a module from scratch,” Geo admitted, leafing through the ship’s documents, oblivious to the two gorgeous women pressed on either side of him. “But it’s mostly a matter of setting up a transform equation for generation and the materials. There’s a xatanium injector that’s used for the latitudinal thrusters and… hmm…”
“Geo?” Linda said, gently, after the pause had stretched out. “We’re still looking over the ship systems, here. Maybe we should worry about third-form equations later?”
“Oh, very well,” Geo said, smiling at her sunnily. “But it’s all very fascinating! Much better than building walls!”
Evan looked up at the door on the end as there was a tap, then walked over. There was an L shaped curtain around the door so no one could see in, and he entered the small alcove to undo the bolts and locks.
“Yes?” he asked the Blood Lord guard on the stoop.
“Message from the dwarves,” the Blood Lord said, trying not to grin. “Time for Miss Howard to get fitted.”
“Aaaaah!” Nicole yelled from inside. “Not me!”
“Time to face it, Nicole,” Evan said, trying not to grin back at the guard.
“Ow!” he heard behind him and a slap. Then a moment later Nicole came to the door, her face set.
“One damned word…” she said, tightly.
“What was the slap?” Evan asked, trying very hard not to grin.
“Paul,” was all she said, striding out the door.
Herzer cleared his throat and tapped on the door cautiously.
“Yes?” Megan said as he stuck his head around the edge of the door.
The computer techs had a room in the team headquarters building, since there were only a limited number of interfaces in the ship. Megan and Courtney were bent over one of the shuttle interfaces, puzzling over a list of icons.
“Time,” Mike said, nodding at her.
“Oh, crap,” Megan said in her most unladylike tone. “I guess I’ve got to get it over with, don’t I?”
“Yep,” Herzer said, surreptitiously scratching at his crotch, keeping the movement out of sight behind the door. “Especially since they’re working on a full armor suit for you. You’re scheduled right after Nicole. So…”
“I’d better go get… ready,” Megan said, frowning.
“It’s not that bad,” Herzer assured her. “If I could do it…”