Pitak scowled; Esmay recognized thought in progress. “There’s already so much damage forward—we’re going to have to replace most of the structure anyway. On the other hand, it’s stretching our resources, especially if we expect an attack. Do you think it’s an aimed charge, or just a straightforward blow-em-up?”
He shook his head. “If they went to the trouble of hand-placing this thing, I’d bet on a directed charge, probably with substantial penetrating power. It’s definitely a hull-cracker.”
Someone down the table stirred. “But if they wanted to disable the DSR, wouldn’t the charge be directed outwards?”
“Not necessarily,” Pitak said. “An explosion of that magnitude, in the repair bay, could be expected to damage sensitive equipment—certainly enough to keep us from withdrawing Wraith and closing the bay.” She paused, and no one interrupted. “Sorry, but I think you’d better foambed the interior, at least these compartments—” She called up a display, and highlighted some of the forward compartments. “If we can possibly save these: seventeen A, eighteen A and B, and twenty-three A, it’ll save us considerable time on the repairs.”
“Then—with the precautions we need to protect personnel—we’re talking 96 hours to foambed those compartments and the exterior—”
“Why the exterior?” asked someone else.
“Because we don’t want pieces flying around hitting us,” Pitak said. “Or the rest of Wraith.”
“And I’ll need additional squads,” he said. “The more people, the faster it’ll go. As long as they’re not working in close, it should be safe enough.”
“Unless it has a fixed delay of some kind—”
“Unless stars sprout horns . . . sure, that’d kill us all, but there’s no way to know but go.”
“Very well, commander,” the captain said. “I presume damage control would have personnel trained to spray a foam bed?”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Hakin turned to his exec. “Make sure he gets what he needs. Major Pitak, can H&A do anything to expedite this?”
Pitak nodded. “Yes, sir. With the captain’s permission, I have construction crews standing by to widen access to the compartments that must be foamed; they’ve been clearing debris already—”
“I thought we pulled everyone out,” the captain said.
“We did, sir, but when tactical analysis concluded that the mine had its programming set for our internal bay, I sent them back over.”
“Very well. Keep me informed.” With that, the captain rose; everyone stood as he left. Pitak beckoned to Esmay.
“Lieutenant, you’re not ready to direct a crew in this kind of situation; I want you to hold down the office—be my communications link. I’m going over myself.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pitak started down the passage; Esmay followed.
“You’ll be in charge of expediting the transfer of materials and tools as we need them. I’ve set up a model in my office, but it’ll need modification—they always do. Keep in mind the limited staging area on Wraith. We don’t want things backing up there.”
The model lasted only about an hour, then Pitak was calling in changes, and Esmay thought of nothing but her assignment. She relayed requests for tools, for materials, for personnel. Several glitches required intervention from above; she sicced Commander Seveche’s office on the stubborn senior chief in the Technical Schools who didn’t see why an instructor in weapons systems should dismiss a class and go help deal with the mine. He’d argued that the 14th was supposed to have its own bomb disposal squad . . . but polite requests through appropriate channels soon produced a cheerful woman with one prosthetic hand and her custom EVA suit slung on her back. Esmay directed her to the right EVA hatch, and went back to work.
She would like to have watched the work on Wraith; she knew only vaguely what a “foam bed” was, and what it was supposed to accomplish. But Pitak’s construction teams had found more casualties in the forward compartments, most dead and the rest unconscious.
“The artificial gravity failed up here, along with the communications lines—some shrapnel, probably, sliced them like a hot knife. It’s a wonder any of ’em are alive, and I don’t know how many will survive—they look pretty bad. But they’re all out now, so you can send over the next load of stuff as soon as they’re logged clear of the lanes.”
Esmay looked at the cluttered screen that now represented everything between Koskiusko and Wraith. A query to the scan supervisor tagged the medical evac pod on her screen; when it was out of the way, she put a priority tag on the shipment Pitak had asked for, and talked to the sergeant minor in T-3 responsible for sending it off.
She was concentrating so hard on keeping up with Pitak’s requests that she jumped when the sergeant at the other console said “Wow!” and then “Good thing they foamed it . . .”
“The mine?” she asked, when she got her breath back.
“Yeah. Want a replay?”
She couldn’t resist; he transferred the replay to her console. Wraith’s hull breach no longer faced Koskiusko; she could just see the edge of it. That meant the mine was out of line of sight; the viewpoint shifted. Now, where she remembered the mine should be, an irregular grayish blob strongly side-lit by Koskiusko’s floods.
“They took this from a pod,” the sergeant said. “Relayed on tightbeam . . . they had several out there watching.”
This view closed in, until she could see that the blob looked like whipped cream or icing piped into a slumpy cylinder. As she watched, another blob of foam appeared, rising then slipping sideways to seal off the end of the cylinder.
“They foamed all the compartments inboard,” the sergeant said. “And foamed a cylinder around it, aiming it away from us . . . then finally put a lobe over the top. That’s when . . .”
It blew; the blob of the foam bed burst apart, and something shot out the top, away from Wraith.
“All the ejecta went the right way,” the sergeant said. “Good design. Reports are that very little blew in the interior. All they have to do now is get all that foam back out, and we can do that in the big bay.”
“I don’t understand how it works,” Esmay said. “I thought if you confined an explosion, that only made it worse.”
The sergeant shrugged. “I don’t really understand it either, but I had a buddy back in Sector 10 who was in their bomb squad. He said you had a choice—you could try to aim it somewhere, and let all that energy escape in a direction that didn’t bother you, or you could put enough padding around it to absorb the force.”
“But the foam bed blew apart—”
“Well, maybe it needed to be thicker . . . but it was thick enough to aim the ejecta in a direction that doesn’t bother us. Notice where it’s going?”
“Away from Kos is all I know or care,” Esmay said.
“Toward the jump point exit,” the sergeant said, grinning. “We can always hope some fool Bloodhorde ship comes roaring in here and gets a mouthful of its own bullet.”
“Suiza!” That was Pitak, wanting to know if she could find someone to go into inventory and get the lights and limbs of the idiot who insisted they didn’t have any more temporary hull curtains in stock and would have to wait until more were fabricated. “I know what I’ve used,” Pitak said. “And I know what I put into stock, and what was on the inventory when we left Sierra Station. There ought to be sixteen more of ’em, and I want ’em two hours ago.”
“Lots of blood,” said the nanny at the forward triage station.
“At least they’re breathing.” The extrication team rolled the slack shape in blood-soaked uniform off the board and onto a gurney with practiced skill, then reached for the next. “They’re all unconscious; we did a quick-scan of the first two and found blood levels of slow-oxy . . . probably someone popped the emergency supply when the hull blew.”