“What will come first?” Esmay asked, since Pitak didn’t seem in a hurry to get back to the floor model.
“After assessment and evacuation, we have to clear away the old damage—there’s always something you can’t see until you get the skin off and expose at least ten meters you think is undamaged. I don’t care what they say about diagnostic equipment, nothing beats cutting into a carcass to find out what the bones look like. Anything this badly damaged requires rebuilding from the main structure on out, just as if it were new. It’s harder, because we do try to save some of the old . . . we save time and material, but it’s not as efficient as building it whole. My guess is that the first things we’ll want out of SpecMat are much longer crystals, grown in clusters and resin-bonded in the zero-G compartment. These will be stabilizing scaffolds for the real repair later. Then we’ll want the big framing members . . . and it can take weeks to do those. No one’s yet figured out how to grow the long ones and the ring ones in the same batch. Meanwhile, the die—and-mold sections can be working on little stuff like hatch frames and hatches. But the communications linear crystals come much later.”
“I . . . see.” Esmay felt she understood much better why Pitak had her doing this apparently unimportant job. She knew a lot more about hulls than she had, but this matter of sequencing repairs had never occurred to her. It made sense, now she thought of it.
“How’d you like a little adventure?” Pitak asked.
“Adventure?”
“I need someone to do a visual survey of the hull breach, and everyone I’ve got is busy. You’d need EVA gear—go over with the first teams, carry a vidcam and transmitter, and record everything for me.”
“Yes, sir.” Esmay wasn’t sure if she was more excited or scared.
“It’ll be about six hours, they think, when they’re in position.
Esmay had never done EVA since the Academy—and that was from a training shuttle hanging just a kilometer from a large station, in sight of a habitable planet. Out here, even the local star was far away, hardly a disk at all and giving minimal light. Koskiusko’s brilliant lights flooded the near flank of the Wraith, casting sharp black shadows. Esmay tried not to think of the nothing around her, and the way her stomach wanted to crawl out her ears, and looked instead at the damaged ship. She hadn’t seen the outside of a ship with her own eyes, rather than vidscan . . . and it was instructive.
Like most Familias warships, Wraith had a long rounded profile that could have been confused with airstreaming—but was instead the result of a compromise of engineering constraints. Shield technology dictated the smooth curves: the most efficient hull shape for maximum shield efficiency was spherical. But spherical ships had not proven themselves in battle; it had been impossible to mount drives—either insystem or FTL—to provide the kind of reliable maneuverability needed. The only spherical ships now in service were large commercial freight haulers, where the gain in interior volume and ease of shielding from normal space debris was worth the decreased maneuverability.
So a patrol craft like Wraith had a more ovoid shape, giving it a distinct longitudinal axis. Forward, its bow should have been a blunt rounded end, only slightly pointier than the stern. What Esmay saw instead was a crumpled mess, the shiny glint of fused and melted skin where it should have been (as the undamaged hull was) matte black. Aft, the smooth curves of the drive pods appeared to have suffered no damage, though she’d heard that Drives and Maneuver were worried about the effect of jumping with an unbalanced hull.
She dared a look over her shoulder, even though that twist made her swivel around the safety line like a child’s toy. Koskiusko’s vast bulk blocked out the stars well beyond the banks of searchlights that held the patrol craft in their gaze. She wasn’t even sure where the working lights on its exterior became stars against the dark.
Someone punched her shoulder. Right. Get on with the job. She pulled herself along, taking no more sight-seeing looks. Wraith’s damaged hull inched closer. Now she could see the pale tracks of fragments—of the weapons or the hull itself she didn’t know—against the dark normal hull coating beyond. The entry gaped, jagged and unwelcoming. Something whispered against her suit helmet, and she jerked to a halt. A firm tap on her shoulder sent her on. In a moment her brain caught up and she realized it must be minute ejecta from the breached hulclass="underline" probably ice crystals from the continuing air leak the crew had not been able to seal completely.
She hit the red section of line: only ten meters from the attachment. Ahead of her, someone had already clipped on the first of the branch lines that would frame the working web. But this was Esmay’s station for now. She locked the slide on her safety line, clipped on the secondary stabilizing line that would confine her rotation to one plane, and waved the others past.
With the vidscan recorder aimed at the hole and the work going on, she could avoid thinking about where she was. Major Pitak wanted details—more details—even more details. “Don’t rush,” she’d said. “Take your time—stay at the ten-meter line until you’re sure you’ve shown me everything you can from there. You won’t be in the way of the scaffolding crews, but you will be able to see a lot. Every detail can help us. Everything.”
So Esmay hung in her harness and worked the recorder’s eye along the edge of the hull breach. Everything? Fine, she would spend a few minutes on those pale tracks, on the way the hull peeled back there to expose a twisted truss, on the odd bulge forward of the breach. By the time she’d filled half a cube from that location, the scaffolding crew had placed the major grid lines that would define the location of specific damage sites. Esmay signaled her intention to the chief, received permission, and clipped on to one of the cross-lines.
Really, she thought, it wasn’t that bad out here. Once the stomach adapted to zero gravity, it was kind of fun, scooting along the line with only an occasional tug . . . a red tie bumped her hand, and she grabbed. Her arm yanked at her shoulder, and she spun dizzily, cursing herself for forgetting that she was supposed to move slowly. When she got herself straightened out again, someone’s helmet visor was turned her way; she could imagine what they thought. Another dumbass lieutenant learns about inertia. She would have apologized, except that they weren’t supposed to use the suit radios unless it was a real emergency.
She was now on the opposite side of the hull breach, nearer the bow. From this angle, she could see into the hole better—or the searchlights had found a better angle. She forced herself to look in . . . but she didn’t recognize any bodies. The mess inside all looked mechanical, like a child’s toy that had been stepped on. Twisted, broken, shattered . . . all the words she knew for destruction. Slowly, recording, she made sense of it. The forward bulge came from a separation of the forward framing members—they had sprung, like an old-fashioned barrel-ring, under concussive force, and the shattered truss had gone with them.
Pitak would want to know how far forward the bulge extended. It could be mapped from Koskiusko, if no one was using the near-scan . . . but someone would be. Esmay looked at the bulge and wished she could ask the major. If she could get on the other side of it with the recorder . . . but there was no scaffolding line there. She thought of asking the scaffolding chief to string one for her, and thought again. They were far too busy to do favors for one curious lieutenant. No, she would either string one herself, or not. Not didn’t sound like a good option. She had four additional lines slung to her own suit, just as all the scaffolding crew had . . . so it was only a matter of setting the hooks.