Starfury came to a stop nearly halfway over the pool with her stern still extending out over the roiling strand, kicking up a hail of rocks from the shallow bottom.
Abruptly Tissaurd rose and stood with hands on hips, surveying the situation for nearly half a cycle, before appearing to reach some decision. "Send the bow beam over," she commanded. Instantly a powerful shaft of greenish-yellow light shimmered out from Starfury's bow and contacted a great optical bollard centered in the inland wall of the pool. "Send over the forward bow springs, too," she ordered after a further moment of study, "port and starboard." Instantly the forward springs crackled to matching bollards on the side walls.
Brim nodded in approval. Tissaurd was playing it safe. Starfury could winch herself onto the old gravity pool. With the primitive docking devices available, it was an intelligent course to follow. Even at their lowest power settings, the ship's gravity generators were clearly too powerful for this kind of maneuvering without high-precision tracking devices these ancient pools clearly lacked.
"Take the bow and forward springs to the warping head and heave 'round," Tissaurd continued in terms that considerably predated star flight itself. The first three mooring beams flashed brilliantly as they took the strain and began to draw the big ship forward onto the pool. A moment later the diminutive officer ordered both aft bow springs sent over and followed these with the two sets of quarter springs as the optical cleats came in range of their particular bollards on the pool walls. Only when Starfury's stern approached the seaward wall did she give the order to avast heaving on the three beams forward. The cruiser now had sufficient headway to coast the rest of the way into the pool on her own.
At last, with the stern just inboard of the wall, Tissaurd projected the stein beam to the seaward wall and immediately called for a "check," holding heavy tension on the blazing shaft of light, but letting it slip as necessary to prevent it from overloading the projector circuits and possibly blowing a fuse.
Moments later, Starfury snubbed to a gentle halt—amid a round of applause on the bridge. The ship was almost perfectly centered over the six generators beneath her hull. "Double up all beams," the grinning Tissaurd ordered as she secured her helm and joined hands above her head in a little sign of victory.
Brim smiled to himself as a rust-mottled brow squeaked and squealed out from the ancient control shack. Tissaurd richly deserved the applause. She had done a magnificent job.
During the next week, Brim's worst concerns proved far too conservative. Had the base been only "somewhat deteriorated," as advertised, things might have been reasonably manageable.
Unfortunately, "nonexistent'' did a better job of describing many of the critical services necessary for sustaining a fleet of up-to-date starships like Starfury.
He had been reasonably prepared, for example, to deal with the remote area's dearth of up-to-date medical facilities, and had made certain that Starfury's sickbay was crowded with medical supplies. In addition, the first ED-4 was already on its lumbering way with much of its cargo hold dedicated to healing machines and life-support systems. But he still had to find somewhere to house the whole medical complex. Good as they might be, starship sickbays could offer temporary care at best.
Unfortunately, he had few choices outside the ruined castle itself.
At least housing and administrative spaces posed no problem to operations. Nor did sustenance for the crews. Ships that could operate for extended periods in deep space simply provided these amenities as part and parcel of their essential operations. Repair and maintenance facilities were, however, totally lacking, and those constituted another matter completely. He'd dispatched his other three ED-4s to Bromwich for spare parts the day he'd lifted Starfury for Fluvanna. But maintenance parts were not the same as maintenance facilities, and both would be necessary if there were any chance at all of keeping the IVG ships spaceworthy— especially under combat conditions.
He'd first attempted to find help in Fluvanna itself. However, shortly after the Leaguers found out about Starfury's affiliation with the Fluvannian Fleet, all attempts to procure heavy equipment from local sources fell on deaf ears. Beyazh had used his considerable influence to change the situation, but Nergol Triannic's minions had a powerful presence in Magor, and they were now exerting every scrap of influence they could muster to insure failure of the new "Imperial base" so close to the capital they coveted.
Likewise, procurement efforts from home produced little in the way of results—except that these refusals were at least sent with sympathy. Even Drummond's best efforts had been stopped cold by the enraged Puvis Amherst and his CIGAs, whose anti-Fleet efforts had been further galvanized when the Emperor's IVG offer became public. Some of their demonstrations had even become violent, including one in Courtland Plaza on the Admiralty stairs that left seven Fleet officers and fifteen riot police injured—along with fifty-nine hospitalized CIGAs.
Brim had just returned from a hike to the ruined manor and was sitting disconsolately in the wardroom nursing a short meem when Tissaurd slid into a chair beside him and signaled the Steward for a goblet of her own. "You don't look happy, Skipper," she said with a serious mien. "And you haven't since we got here. Want to talk?"
Brim grimaced. "I guess I'm not very good at hiding my feelings, am I?" he said.
"Not from somebody who's gotten to know you as well as I have," she chuckled. "And that doesn't even count my little verbal indiscretion at the Mustafa's party a while back."
"I wish it were as easy as admiring your décolleté, Number One," he replied with a grin,
"Unfortunately, this problem has to do with heavy maintenance equipment."
"I kind of thought that might be it," she said, lifting her goblet from the Steward's tray. "Especially since the manor's old meem cellars will serve nicely as our base hospital. So what's the problem?
Barbousse's work crews have already repaired five gravity pools. And except for Starfury herself, you'll be starting off with brand-new starships and all the spares you can use for a while."
"What's the problem?" Brim demanded in a harried voice. "Tissaurd: an easier question might be what isn't a problem. Gravity pools are only the beginning of starship maintenance— especially in combat situations. What we need are machine shops, gantry cranes big enough to change Drive crystals, gravity pads." He thought for a moment. "You know," he said presently, "the kind of heavy equipment Refit Enterprise provided at Gimmas Haefdon. They couldn't have changed our space radiators without that kind of support."
Tissaurd shrugged and sipped her meem. "Sorry, Skipper," she said gently. "I guess I knew all that. I simply wasn't ready to start tackling those problems yet. They're too far in the future."
"Problems are never too far in the future," Brim said didactically.
"They are if there's nothing you can do about them," Tissaurd countered firmly. "I've found that when I've reached a brick wait about a problem that's still off in the future, it's a good idea to simply step back and wait for something to change. It usually does, and then I can go at the problem again using a different set of parameters—with perhaps a better chance of doing something about it."
Brim nodded. "Tell me about brick walls," he grumbled. "I've done everything I could think of today and achieved no perceptible results at all."
"Oh, you may have gotten more results than you imagine," Tissaurd said with a little nod. "Maybe you started that very something that will eventually make everything work out the way you want. Of course, you may not have, either. The only thing you know for certain right now is that nothing is for certain. And that's good, because if nothing changes, then you're still at your brick wall. Right?"