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 ship, or make it by reverse-catalyzing iron into ferrous oxide. Then we collect whatever aluminum we can find.”
“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 hightailed 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 backdropped, 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 thermite 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, they’ve got their own countdown clock ticking. Specifically, when Yiithrii’ah’aash eventually shifts out-system and his taillights wink out, it will be less than two weeks before they wink back in. Along with a whole lot of his 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 final scenario is the one that’s most likely and that I’m most worried about: that our attackers resume their operations before either of those conditions are met. 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.”