Caine stood. After a few moments, the other two humps rose up into similarly-sized striders and, together, they began approaching the shore. They waded forward slowly, cautiously, but also gently, their long, gangling legs moving through the currents with ease, barely raising any bubbles as they came.
As they entered the shallows, towering higher and higher over the group, Riordan heard Keith Macmillan swallow and mutter, “And now what do we do?”
“And now,” Caine answered, turning toward his fellow IRIS operative with a smile, “we travel with an escort.”
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 hard-copy blueprints of the Wolfe-class corvette. “We took two significant hits on the starboard side, both from railgun submunitions. We took another hit from a laser on our stern, and another on our dorsal surface.
“The dorsal laser hit was at a shallow 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 nonevent; 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 preheating 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 nongrammatical 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 aluminium 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?”