by David Smith
He began by summarising their position: “Good morning, team. As my old granny used to say, we’re up to our necks in the brown-and-sticky stuff: Tiger is due at the Arcturus Test Ranges in thirteen weeks and it’ll take us ten weeks to get there at our best cruising speed. Obviously, that would be considerably less of a problem if the warp-drive actually worked. And the deflectors. Oh, and I really mustn’t forget the navigation system”
Dave tried to be tactful, mindful of the Engineering Officer’s recent spectacular melt-down. “We must have the warp-drive on-line soon. Phasers, shields, replicators……. everything else we can fix on our way, but if we don’t have warp-drive in the next two or three weeks the only place Tiger will be going is to the breaker’s yard.”
He paused. “The million dollar question is: How can we achieve that?”
Around the room, shoulders slumped and faces fell. Like all of them, Olga Romanov looked dead tired. Her eyes were lined and blood-shoot and her uniform was as crumpled and untidy as her hair. Dave knew that if they failed, it wouldn’t be for lack of effort.
She answered for her team. “The drive system is still a complete heap of свинья дерьмо,” she growled irritably, “we’ve tried every trick in the book and then some, but we still haven’t found a way of producing a stable dilithium crystal matrix. We ordered replacements months ago, but they still haven’t arrived and aren’t likely arriving in the timescale we need them to. We tried borrowing some off the other Third Fleet ships before they left, but Admiral O’Connor had left specific instructions that they weren’t to assist us in any way. Our only other source has been from Lieutenant L’Amour’s complimentary therapy supplies and we had the last of them at Joran Dal….”
“Not all of them” said Lieutenant Jonsen.
Every eye in the room instantly swivelled towards the young Lieutenant and he visibly blushed.
“Do tell…” growled Romanov.
Jonsen blushed brighter, and seemed to wish he’d said nothing. “She has …. that is …… I’ve seen …… I mean I’ve heard ….. well …. er ….”
“Please continue” insisted Dave.
Jonsen gulped seeming to blush brighter still, and his voice got noticeably higher as his face flushed more and more: “Skye …. I mean Lieutenant L’Amour has one very large and polished crystal left. It’s a part of her favourite piece of jewellery.”
Dave thought about it. “I don’t recall seeing her wearing any crystals or gems?”
“Oh you wouldn’t see it, not unless….” Jonsen was absolutely scarlet by now.
“Oh just spit it out man!” insisted Dave.
“It’s …… well …..intimate?”
There was an awkward silence, only broken when Jane Doe couldn’t resist asking “And how did you find that out???”
Jonsen seemed to go even brighter red and Dave was worried he might actually burst, so he intervened, “I guess Lieutenant L’Amour isn’t exactly protective of her “intimate areas”. Frankly, I don’t care if she wants to sell season tickets for spectators. We need that crystal.”
Jonsen calmed down a little “I already asked sir, and she flatly refused. She’s very attached to it.”
Dave sighed. “I’ll speak to her and appeal to her better nature. Olga if we can get a crystal, how long will it take to get the drive on line?”
She wrinkled her brow and exhaled deeply “Assuming the crystal is of usable quality and size, probably a day to install it and a week or two to fine tune the warp-field. We still won’t be able to achieve maximum warp as the warp-core containment is cracked and we don’t have any way to repair it. That will severely limit our speed.”
“But we’ll be underway, and we can work on everything else while we’re en route to Arcturus?” Dave asked, beginning to hope.
“I guess so. We may even be able to pick up a few extra spare parts on our way if I call in some favours” the tiny engineer suggested.
Dave breathed a sigh of relief. They were still in with a chance. “Ok team. We’re not out of the woods yet. There’s a still load to do and not enough time to do it all. I trust in you to make it all happen.”
“We’re not bloody miracle workers .….” grumbled Romanov.
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“No. I’m sorry, but that crystal means too much to me.” Skye L’Amour paced up and down in her quarters, clearly agitated by the thought of parting with her beloved crystal.
“I know and I hate to have to ask, but without it we’ll miss our target date at the ranges, Tiger will be scrapped and the whole crew will be scattered to the four winds” pleaded Dave “After all we’ve been through …. together …. I figured the ship and the crew deserve a chance to stay in one piece.”
“I understand that, and I’m sorry, but when I was at the Cloud Head Monastery on Duwari, I was the only Terran honoured with chance to meet the Abbott. He was incredibly old and venerable, but boy could he hump! I was really sore after the first two days, but…..”
“Lieutenant ……. Skye …… “ Dave interrupted “I understand the gem might be deeply …. and graphically ….. personal. But that’s you’re old life. You joined the fleet for the right reasons, and I feel sure the Abbott would understand why I’m asking you to do this.”
The tiny Kiwi seemed to shrink still further and in a quiet voice she said “Yeah, you’re right. When the Abbott had finished he looked me in the eye and told me I was special, that he’d never met anyone, not even a Cafani who had pleasured him like I had. From around his neck he took the crystal that he’d been given on the day he was made Abbott nearly a hundred years previously, and he gave it to me. To me! I will never, ever, ever receive such an honour again. He told me then that I’d bring joy and relief to so many people in ways that I didn’t yet understand, but that I’d be delivering his message of life, love and joy.”
She shrugged “I just thought he meant I’d shag a lot of people. I guess giving up the crystal will bring joy and relief. Of a sort.”
She moved closer to Dave and he could see tears welling in her eyes as she wrapped her arms around him and hugged him.
“I really, truly appreciate this Skye.” Dave whispered.
“I might need a hand to take it out” she said. Stepping back, she reached for the bottom of the kaftan she was wearing and in a single, smooth and undoubtedly well-practiced motion, pulled it up over her head and discarded it.
With her hands on her hips and her feet slightly apart, she stood naked except for her exotic tattoos and jewellery, small but absolutely perfectly formed.
Dave was taken aback, but despite her undoubted sex-appeal his attention was instantly drawn to the large and beautifully polished dilithium crystal that her nakedness revealed.
“I promise I’ll make this up to you Skye….” he muttered.
She smiled and moved towards him, wrapping her arms back around him and pressing her naked body hard against him: “Yes. Yes you will. Starting now.”
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A day later Dave was back on the Engineering Deck. Every muscle in his body was painfully stiff, which seemed ironic considering only one part of him had been stiff yesterday.
Romanov and Jonsen had got the crystal, although the Commander had insisted on spending several hours having it cleaned before placing it in the focusing chamber. It had needed remarkably little work to get it to integrate with the focusing system, and all of the engineers had commented that they’d never come across such a perfect crystal. Even the carefully prepared units supplied through the Fleet Logistics system had microscopic flaws that required any drive system to be carefully tuned to a specific crystal. This naturally occurring crystal was totally perfect. Romanov had been so stunned that she’d adjusted the cradle it was to rest in to accommodate its shape, rather than cut the crystal to fit in the cradle.
It seemed odd to fit such a piece of perfection into an absolute nightmare of repaired, patched, re-patched and generally bodged systems. The coolant
pipes were a maze of different sections welded together after a series of failures, and the core itself had been completely obscured by hundreds of layers of duct-tape and cable-ties in an effort to stop it exploding as the pressure within built up.
Dave crossed his fingers as they started up the core, but was horrified to see that both Jonsen and Deng had crossed theirs too. Romanov barked instructions to the junior engineering staff and they brought the coolant systems, power transfer couplings, and matter and anti-matter injectors on-line. Deng and Jonsen reported back on energy flows, pressures and temperatures as the system powered up.
Normally the compartment would be flooded with the eerie glow of the annihilation process, but here it was cocooned within a sticky aluminium and plastic shroud. If anything was going wrong the engineers would have to spot it via their instrumentation, as the core itself looked curiously inert despite the maelstrom of energy being unleashed inside it.
He waited nervously as the engineers swapped data, until finally Romanov said "I think we've cracked it!" The audible buzz of the warp-core burbled away to itself and power transfer conduits hummed, carrying high-energy plasma from the core to the plasma manifolds. Dave allowed himself the broadest of smiles, knowing they'd unlocked the first and biggest of his many intractable problems. Hopefully, the rest would topple like dominoes.
"Congratulations Team!! You may have just saved the Tiger from the scrap-yard!" There were broad-smiles and back-slaps all-round and Dave decided to broach the next topic with his Engineering Officer.
"Well done, Commander, I see this as another triumph in the face of adversity. Our next step is to find some way to strengthen the warp-core containment so we can generate maximum warp. What's your thinking on that score?"
"I think we may already have a solution for that problem, sir. Chief Deng had a brain-wave. Now the transporter is working, she reckons we can use a variation of Commander Cassini's hull-shaving programme to cut a chunk out of the core containment of the Tana battleship and get it to fit our system with a few tweaks" she replied with what was very nearly a smile.
"Do you think that will work?? The Tana ship’s systems must be vastly different to our own?" said Dave nervously.
"Their systems are significantly different, but they use a transparent aluminium containment, same as we do. Theirs is wider and longer, but also much thicker, and Deng and Carstairs are confident they can remove a section that will fit our support structure down to the nearest tenth of a millimetre."
"Will it be strong enough?"
Romanov scratched her head “Actually, it’s stronger than our own core. What the Tana lacked in sophistication of drive technology they made up for with brute force. To get more speed, we tune the drive and tweak the fields: The Tana just upped the power output. Deng reckons that at full tilt, the total power output of their core would have been nearly ten times that of ours”
“Phew. All to the good I suppose?” Dave asked.
“Absolutely! And the best of it is that every other system on their ship seems to be as heavily over-engineered. Kandampully is working with PO Halifa and crewman DuVall to see if we can reconfigure our systems to accept Tana power relays”
“Christ, if that works we’re home and dry!! Do you think they can make it work?”
Romanov looked confident “I’m pretty certain they can. Deng and I reviewed the performance and physical specs of a range of Tana relays and they’re all a reasonable facsimile of our equivalent units. They won’t fit physically as they’re much larger but we can construct a cradle to hold them, so it’s just down to Omar Halifa to rig the electronics to configure the relay outputs to match our systems. They’ll be far more resilient than the repaired relays we’ve been using. Actually, they’ll probably be more resilient than the A1 quality factory units we’ve ordered too. It just won’t look pretty as we’ll have to have relays fitted in passageways around the ship. They won’t fit into the same recesses that our existing relays do.”
“That’s a small price to pay for a little reliability. Those damn relays have been the bane of our lives as long as I’ve been on board Tiger. What sort of time scale are we talking about?”
“Kandampully is trialling the alterations now. If they work we can have the reaction drive systems and navigational deflector back on line in a week. We could definitely replace all the rest within a month, and there are so many on that Tana ship we’ll have dozens or even hundreds of spares if we need them.”
“Brilliant!! That’s the best news I’ve had in months!” enthused Dave.
“Who knows, sir, maybe our luck is changing?”
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With some good news to take the weight off his shoulders, Dave decided to devote a little time and effort to the rest of the crew. The engineers had been flat out, working every hour they could and Dave had reassigned everyone with engineering experience to Romanov’s department to help out. The Science Team were having a whale of a time poring over the hulk of the Tana battleship that had been recovered to Hole as well. Dave would have preferred it if his engineers could cast a more practical eye over the vessel, but he couldn’t spare them with so many repairs still needed.
While the science and engineering teams were all fully occupied, most of the rest of the crew were kicking their heels. Dave had seen the disastrous effects boredom could have on Tiger’s crew first hand, and the number of disciplinary lapses was already increasing noticeably after three months in orbit over Hole. Security Chief Belle was having to keep a couple of personnel permanently assigned to the Ship’s Brig, and she was complaining that this was jeopardising her training schedule.
That problem had been temporarily resolved by two measures. ASBeau had volunteered some of his staff to assist the Chief with guard duties, and between the three of them they’d also found an alternative to incarceration in the Brig.
For the lesser misdemeanours, they’d begun sentencing the crew to “haggis-bashing”.
In a desperate situation a few months previously, they’d covered much of the outer hull with a layer of haggis. Most of this had been cleaned off using the transporter, but many small nooks and crannies on the hull were still full of haggis that had been freeze dried by the vacuum of space and then deep fried by Tana microwave lasers.
It was a matter of some concern as many of the ships sensors were fitted in the outer skin of the hull and clearly didn’t work at full efficiency through a layer of mutton-offal. Any miscreant sentenced to a day of “haggis-bashing” found themselves walking around the outside of the hull of the ship in a pressure suit and magnetic boots, clearing the barbecued haggis with a tooth-pick. There were surprisingly few repeat offenders.
All of this was well and good, but it was treating the symptoms and not the cause of the problem. Dave knew he needed advice from the only person who’d managed this sort of situation before.
Bizarrely, the person he had in mind was his Supply Chief, Reuben Money.
At the Stores Complex on Deck 10, he sat down in the Chief’s Office and voiced his concerns. “Chief, I think trouble is brewing. Most of the Operations Department have been idle for three months now and it’s starting to show.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it too, and I’ve had a few thoughts….”
Dave was surprised, but then realised that the Chief was always a step ahead of everyone else, and had probably already identified a business opportunity. The Chief removed his small round spectacles and polished them reflectively before continuing.
“…. I figure there’s scope for a close-season ice-hockey tournament, possibly a knock-out cup of some kind. I’ve also got a great idea for a cage-fighting event, and I’ve expanded the mud-wrestling and quiz nights to include the civilians on Hole. More immediately, I’ve already brought the ship’s annual chess championship and shooting competition forward two months.”
“Wow. You have been busy,” said Dave, surprised again, “Do you think you can get the crew interested in those events?”
“Ice-hockey, mud-wrestling, cage-fighting, shooting …… and you think the Chess Championship will grab the crew’s attention??” queried Dave.
“OH YES!!” the Chief enthused. “You may not know this, but the tournament has been won by Commander Romanov for the last three consecutive years. Last year, I was taking bets on who’d lose to her in the final. With Commander Romanov being too busy to take part this year, it’s an open book! I’ve got Selassie from A&A installed as favourite at six to one, I think Lieutenant Chen is the dark horse at fourteen to one and ASBeau as rank outsider, hundred to one.”
The Chief seemed really excited at having a decent spread of betting, but Dave was more surprised by the fact Romanov had won the chess tournament three times on the bounce: “Is the Commander really that good??”
Chief Money scratched his balding head thoughtfully “Actually no-one’s really sure, sir. She doesn’t get the chance to really demonstrate any great skills on the board; she’s just awesome at mind games.”
“Mind games? In Chess?” Dave was stunned.
The Chief smiled “You need to see her at work. The final in her first Championship year was a classic. She was up against Crewman Phillips from the Bo’s’uns crew. She’d only just joined the ship and nobody really knew her. She rocked up for the match with a bottle of vodka in one hand and a five kilo hammer in the other. Sat there staring straight at him, tapping the hammer on the desk. He conceded after twenty moves. Other players have been known to concede without even sitting down. Truly a master of her art.”
The Chief continued happily “The shooting competition is also an open field, and the betting is really spread.”