“Right. You want to guess that a loose torp ramming into a bulkhead in null grav won’t explode? Predetonator could anyway.”
“Nope.” I eased the dolly back into position under the second torp in the bay.
By nine hundred we’d gotten all the torps into the transport tubes.
“Make sure everything’s secured. Everything!” The chief pointed at a stylus on the edge of the bench. “Even that, Bond.”
“Yes, chief.” I grabbed the stylus and slipped it into the toolkit.
Ciorio grinned from the other side of the compartment He didn’t say anything until the chief was away. “He’s still got a scar on his shoulder from when he was a tech third on the Collins. The first left one of those loose. Just a null-grav high-speed drill, but it went right through his shoulder. Says he almost bled to death ‘cause the first didn’t believe a stylus could do that.”
I could see that, but I wouldn’t have if Ciorio hadn’t pointed it out “Lots of things you don’t see until something happens.”
“Especially here.” He tilted his head to me side. “Chief said the Sunnis were after us. Thought the Sunnis only went after Covenanters. Why us? Got any ideas?”
“No more ‘n you. Maybe we’re headed into systems they’re claiming.”
“Can’t be that One of the nav techs was saying that no one’s been where we’re going.”
“You got me.”
“Never could figure out the business between them,” Ciorio mused. “They both think there’s a big Juju that created everything. Most of the Galaxy doesn’t. But they fight each other when they got more in common than other systems. Go figure.”
I understood. It was simple enough. The unbelievers were damned to Hell or limbo for eternity, and nothing would change that. They couldn’t see, and wouldn’t. The Sunnis understood that God had been, was, is, and would be—but not truly what He was. They were worth fighting because they were so close that they just might see. They might even feel the same way about us because Covenanters also believed in the Word of God. I wasn’t about to explain. I only said, “The Galaxy’s a strange place.”
“You can say that again.”
“All hands to stations. Stations! This is not a drill. All hands to stations.”
“See you later!” Ciorio headed for his station. Mine was the restraint couch in the armory’s aft bay. I’d been briefed on the harnesses, but my fingers still felt like thumbs.
For a standard hour, outside of twice—once when the lights flickered, and once when we had a minute or so of null grav—nothing seemed to happen.
As I sat there in harness waiting, I couldn’t help but think. How had the Sunnis found out so quickly what the Magellan was doing? The CIS objective was to obtain the technology, but we couldn’t obtain it if the Magellan didn’t get where it was headed. From a personal point of view, destruction of the Magellan would be a double disaster. Not only would I get turned to energy and small chunks of matter, but the worlds of the Covenant would lose the chance to get the location of that world. At the same time, I had to question some aspects of my mission. If the technology represented the Morning Star, did we really want to see that loosed again?
“Stand down from stations. Stand down. Class one stand-down. Class one stand-down.”
From up the passageway, I heard Chief Stuval. “Cio-rio, you and Bond take the slider up to the bays. The boat techs will already be there. Don’t get in their way, but you clean and service the launchers, then unload any torps they didn’t fire. Bring them back on the sliders.”
I hurried out to join Ciorio. He was sweating.
“I hate waiting. You never know what’s going on.”
“The boat techs will tell us,” I pointed out.
“After it’s all over.”
He had a point, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it We had to take the aft maintenance lift, and that meant guiding the sliders a good hundred meters aft, then up—just for one deck. On most combat ships, according to my briefings, the armory was practically beside the launch bays, but that wasn’t so for the Magellan. I’d guessed that was because she’d been designed as a colony ship first.
We got the slider through the shipside equipment locks and into the bay. A maintenance chief appeared. “About time you guys got here. There’s one torp on two, and one on five.”
“None on the other one?”
“Not here. After you’re done here, you’ll have to go over to bay four. Needle Four was a recovery job. It still has two torps on board. Only fired one. My crews aren’t working on it until you’ve got the torps out.”
“We’ll take care of it, chief, after we finish here.” Ciorio smiled.
I could tell he didn’t mean it.
Once the chief stepped back, we eased the slider across the bay and up in front of the full tube on Needle Two.
Ciorio glanced back at the chief, then mumbled, “Shit! Friggin’ recovery job. Just hope the tubes aren’t bent. Have to go back down for metal benders and who knows what else.”
That didn’t bother me. What else was I going to do? “What about the predetonator?”
“We’ll read that first. If it’s bad, and the tubes are bent, they’ll have to jettison the boat. If the tubes are straight, then we pull it and they put a jetpak on it and jettison the torp.”
Ciorio did the readouts. “Predetonator’s fine on this one.” He took a deep breath. “Let’s get this one out first. Least they left the tube ports open for us. Got the stick-tights?”
I handed him the twin batons. He placed one on each side of the torp nose. I tightened the tension on the slider’s winch.
“Begin reeling,” Ciorio said.
I eased the winch into retraction. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the torp began to ease forward out of the tube.
“That’s it Keep it slow. Now, bring up the cradle…”
The other torp was salvageable as well. We got both torps out and stowed in the slider. Then we had to turn the slider, without scraping the needleboats or running over the maintenance carts that were everywhere, and guide it back to the shipside maintenance lock, up along the maintenance passageway, then through the shipside lock for bay four.
Needle Four had gouges down the hull, and a section of the fuselage on the aft port section was crumpled in. Someone had cut through the access hatch locks. They’d probably been jammed. The aft drive section was bent down more than ten degrees.
“Looks like the pilot ran through a comet head,” Ciorio said. “At least the tubes are clear. Better take readings, though.” He stood next to the port tube. “Hand me the probes.”
I handed him the probes.
“This one reads all right.”
Both torps came up green. We extracted them and loaded them onto the slider. Going back down to the armory took longer. The slider massed a lot more, and neither one of us wanted to slam it into a bulkhead or hatch.
24
Barna
When the ship announced “General Quarters! All personnel to stations!” I was already in my studio. It was midmorning, and I’d been trying to re-create an image of the three pilots—blonde, red-haired,, and dark brown—mostly from memory.
I made sure that lightbrushes and the matrix-easel were secure in one of the equipment bins. Then I fastened myself into the seat before the board and tried to get more information. All the systems would tell me was that suspected enemy vessels were on an intercept course and that I was to remain strapped into my station. The heavy seat before the board locked itself into a forward-facing position. It took me a while to discover the screen controls on the armrest. After that, I settled into shifting views on the center screen, awkwardly.