“We build it up little by little,” said Ereth, assembling some interesting looking equipment by the small wave generator they had adapted from other uses. Sebastian sat down beside him in the alcove.
“I figure we can put at most two percent of the energy needed into the wave each time it makes the trip up and down the shaft,” continued Ereth. “Then there’s the loss of energy to friction. It will heat the shaft up marginally but that energy will drain away into the surrounding rock.”
Sebastian nodded. He raised one eyebrow as a question, and Ereth caught his look.
“It will take maybe 70 cycles, no more than 100, before we can release the energy as a comms squawk,” said the old engineer. “And we’ll have to mechanically supply some of the momentum with each cycle.”
Sebastian and his team fixed the small wave generator to the underneath of the floor, and the Mersa team arrived back at the top of the shaft as they were finishing. Once he had explained to the rest of the group what was going to happen, Ereth set the system running.
It took just under four seconds for the pulse to travel down the shaft, bounce off the isolation doors at the bottom and return to the top of the shaft. Each time it did so they added more energy to the wave, some from the powerpaks they had with them, and some was a mechanical input from an oversize drum mechanism Ereth had set up. Their timing had to be prefect, and it was going to be tiring work.
CHAPTER 13
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“Pulse at fifty percent of the minimum required,” said Ereth after a few minutes. They all knew the first part would be easy, but now the percentage would climb more slowly.
The pulse was soon strong enough to give the patchwork floor a good shaking each time it reversed at the top of the cycle. When it got too uncomfortable, Ereth halved the length of the wave.
“Standing by, training pulse sent – now,” he told them, and immediately the frequency doubled, a pulse of half the size hitting the underneath of the floor every two seconds.
He repeated the process when the energy in the system was at eighty percent of the minimum required, and held it there as the energy level approached a hundred percent of minimum. The floor was getting hit by a good-sized thump every second now.
“You build this thing strong, boy?” asked one of the older engineers, fixing Sebastian with a grin.
“Built it stronger than a containment chamber on a starship,” said Sebastian proudly. “Damn thing can take anything you throw at it!”
Amused faces replaced worried ones around the circle.
“Running at 102 percent,” said Ereth. The busy figures around the drum generator sent several tired looks his way as they struggled to keep the output steady.
“Have to make sure it works the first time,” said Ereth, noticing the strain on their faces. “You wouldn’t want to have to do this again, would you?”
The drumbeat of the pulse against the underneath of the floor grew steadily louder.
“Getting ready to collapse the wave,” said Ereth, shifting his hand to the wave generator so he could send a counter pulse down the shaft. “Coming up to 105 percent, on 105 percent, collapsing the wave . . . now!”
The beat of the pulse jumped to many times a second, then leaped off the scale in a continuous roar. Something hit the underneath of the floor and buckled it upward, throwing Human and Mersa alike off their feet. The gases in the shaft were forced to absorb the energy previously in the wave, and emitted it a moment later as a burst of energy in the ultra high radio spectrum. In the booster station alcove, Serostrina ripped the headphones off her head as an audible squeal came through.
“Comms squawk produced!” she shouted down to the others. There was the tortured rasp of metal far below, as the lower isolation doors buckled in turn, and then everything went silent.
“Everybody all right?” said Sebastian, as he turned one of the powerpaks at his feet to a broad beam and lit up the chaotic scene. The powerpak dimmed, then held. There was very little left in it after the drain that had produced the standing wave.
There were groans of pain, and the more able of the group rushed to tend those who had come off worst. Sebastian found Ereth, and swore as he noticed the old man’s pale color through his face plate.
He called up Ereth’s medical stats on the small screen below the name tag on his suit. His pulse was weak, and unsteady, and his breathing was very shallow. “Dammit!” swore Sebastian, as he realized that could mean internal bleeding. There was nothing the others could for him while he remained in a suit.
The Javelins were Ereth’s only hope now – and the only hope of a number of others, he realized, as he looked around the shaft and saw the number of injuries. The only hope of them all, in the end, was that the Javelins were still above the planet, and had somehow heard the comms signal.
“Something tore deep in the shaft as the wave collapsed, what do you think it was?” said Serostrina, coming to help Sebastian with Ereth.
“The isolation doors,” said Sebastian, “pretty certain of it. We can only hope they didn’t give way until the comms signal was strong enough to be picked up by the Javelins.”
“It sounded like a good, strong signal to me,” said Serostrina. She was beside Sebastian now, monitoring Ereth’s medical stats. Sebastian had leaned against the wall and lifted Ereth against him. He was doing his best to cradle him gently. The others who were injured received similar treatment.
The little group turned off all the powerpaks but one, and huddled in the darkness on the buckled floor.
“All we can do now is wait, and hope for rescue,” said Sebastian philosophically. Serostrina smiled, and took his hand. She patted it in a very Human gesture. High above them, on the edge of the atmosphere about the ice planet, the fate of the little group was being decided.
Air Marshall Cagill watched the captain of his command ship finish the pre-flight routines. The captain confirmed readiness to depart a few moments later. The rest of the 30 Javelins in the flight group began to report in, one by one.
Cagill’s thoughts turned inward. This had been such an incredible victory for the Alliance – once the Valkrethi had arrived – but it rankled that he had lost the accelerator staff at the depot. He felt responsible for that loss. His squadron had been too busy to keep track of everything.
He sighed. Such were the fortunes of war.
Then the open channel for the Javelins burst into life above the comms officer’s console.
“Case to Air Marshall, comms signal from depot, repeat, intelligent signal from depot!”
At first Cagill wondered what had possessed Ayman to omit the proper call sign, ‘Ayman Case of Javelin two niner four to command ship,’ but he sat up in his chair as the full meaning of the message sunk home. He held up one finger to indicate he would take the call, and his comms officer patched him through.
“There’s nothing left of the depot,” he said sharply, wondering what Ayman meant by his call.
“Signal’s coming from under the depot, Sir,” said Ayman briskly.
“A natural cavern in the rock?” queried Cagill, trying to make sense of it all.
“We think it’s the heat exchanger shaft, Sir,” said Case.
“Request permission to return to the surface,” he added, though strictly it was the Air Marshall’s call.
“Of course, Squadron Leader,” said Cagill, a smile growing on his face. He shook his head in wonderment. How in all the hells thought up by classical writers had the staff in the depot managed it?
His face fell. A comms signal didn’t tell him how many of the accelerator staff were still alive. Cagill wanted to go down to the surface with Ayman’s ground party, but his role was to remain here on his command ship. However the accelerator staff had survived, he mused, it was going to be an extraordinary story.
He roused himself from his reverie, and opened a sub-space connection to Earth. Cordez’ staff got their boss to the other end of the call.
“Some of
the nuclear accelerator staff are still alive, maybe all of them,” said Cagill, without preamble.
“That is good news,” answered Cordez. It had struck him the same way, that the loss of the people at the depot marred an otherwise outstanding action against the Reaper ships.
“Your last report described the depot as nothing but a puddle of slag, how did they survive?”
“Heat exchanger shaft, apparently,” said Cagill. “Ground party are on their way to the site now. I’ll let you know as soon as more information comes in.”
“Thank you, Neuman,” said Cordez, putting a personal note in the exchange. “I think we’ll all feel a lot better when we know how they are.”
“Cagill out,” said the Air Marshall gently, his feelings the same.
The rescue shuttle came in low over the bombed out remains of the accelerator complex, and Ayman could see it was already being reclaimed by the savage weather of the ice planet. The open top of the complex sported strangely colored icefalls, and deep drifts of snow.
It was a short trip from the complex to the depot, and the shuttle landed on a flat field of ice nearby. The rescue party clambered over the uneven slag of what was left of the depot, and set up sonic sounders to probe the rock. It wasn’t long before they’d worked out where the heat exchanger shaft was.
The next step was to clear away the rubble that was covering it. That didn’t take long, but then things moved more slowly. A little caution was required as the diggers got closer to the shaft itself.
“We’ve cut away the top end of the shaft,” said MacEnroy some time later, reporting by comms to Cagill. He was the most experienced mining engineer among the Javelin crews.
“It looks fairly clean in the shaft itself, as if limited amounts of debris broke through the top of the shaft when the place was bombed. I’ll let you know when we get signs of life.”
MacEnroy picked up a compound delaminator and scooped out more of the crumbling steel and slag, before peering down into the blackness. The work wasn’t easy in the bulky suits, but it didn’t take long for the rescue team to widen the hole and follow the rungs down. Then they came to a plug of melted steel and rock that sealed off the rest of the shaft.
“Ingenious,” muttered MacEnroy to himself. “Heat cutters on top of the isolation doors. It looks like it worked, too.
“This will take time,” he said to Ayman, as they examined the uneven surface. The Squadron leader had insisted on joining the shuttle on its rescue mission.
“Because you don’t want to drop bits of the plug on top of the accelerator staff?” said Ayman, and MacEnroy nodded.
“We’ll go round it,” he said. “That way we can enter the shaft from the sides, which is safer for them. It will be quicker too.”
Ayman asked him what he meant.
“The rock around the sides is a lot softer than the isolation doors,” said MacEnroy, and turned back to supervise his team. Several of them had begun to move in with more of the delaminators.
“These will break up the crystalline structure of the rock and reduce it to a soft gravel,” he said to Ayman, as soon as the team was underway.
“Once we’ve tunneled past the doors we’ll let them know we’ve arrived, and then we’ll enter the shaft from the sides. Very slowly!”
Ayman nodded his approval.
MacEnroy didn’t have to let the accelerator staff know the rescue team had arrived. The Mersa, with their keen hearing, had already picked up faint noises from above them.
“They’re here!” squeaked Serostrina, her voice going too high for the ears of most of the Humans in her excitement.
Another of the Mersa pressed a recorder to the wall, and it, too, picked up vibrations coming through the rock. Sebastian cradled Ereth and motioned to Serostrina to read the engineers medical stats. She shook her head.
“Barely registering,” she said sadly.
There had been enough sadness already that day. One of the Mersa had died, flung against the wall as the standing wave collapsed, and sustaining lethal head injuries.
Ereth moved weakly, and then collapsed against Sebastian. Sebastian looked up sharply, and Serostrina looked at the medical stats once more. The look on her face told him that Ereth had died at that precise moment.
“Dammit” he exploded. “If he could have held on just a little longer!”
Serostrina placed both her hands over his. One of Sebastian’s friends came over and went to lift Ereth away and seat him against the wall, but Sebastian motioned him away.
The old man had given up his life trying to save the rest of them – at least he had that as a crowning achievement to a full life, he thought fiercely. He wanted to hold the old man, and grieve.
Serostrina moved away to check on the injuries of several others in the shaft, and Sebastian was left with his own thoughts, thoughts of someone who had made a difference to a lot of people during his long life.
CHAPTER 14
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The Human and Mersa refugees in the shaft waited patiently to be rescued. Then the Humans could hear the sounds of progress outside the shaft, as well as the Mersa. Finally the sounds were level with the make-shift floor. Then a series of warning taps came from Sebastian’s left.
The accelerator staff near that area moved back. There wasn’t much room in the shaft, with half of them sitting on the rough hammocks along one side. Now there was standing room only.
Then a small section of the shaft collapsed, crumbling away to minute particles as it did so. There was a grating hum, and the Mersa, with their more sensitive hearing, put their hands over their ears. Once the rescue team had verified the area was clear, they reduced the rest of the wall to gravel, and stepped through into the shaft.
“Am I glad to see you folks!” said Ayman Case. Then he noticed the subdued moods of Human and Mersa alike, and stopped what he was about to say. One of the engineers took him aside and told him they had lost the accelerator team supervisor, and one of the Mersa. He also detailed the injuries of the others.
It was a somber party that entered the shuttle once they had exited the shaft. Ayman knew that the news of their survival would be tinged with sadness.
Later that day Cagill relayed the news to Cordez.
“There’s never a win without losses,” said Cordez distractedly, lost in his own thoughts about the attrition of war.
Cagill stayed silent. He was used to his boss’ absent-minded ruminations. But he understood what Cordez meant. Even if a cause was morally right, there was always going to be a cost to carry the day.
The Valkrethi pilots had a stand-down period after their activities at the ice planet. The psychologists were keeping a close eye on them, especially Celia and her research team. They were waiting for them to acclimatize once again to a ‘normal’ life.
Celia stood and stretched. She had been reading material from the Rothii archive on Ba’H’Roth for most of the morning. She thought about the page she was on for a moment, and entered a few brief notes into her pocket recorder.
Life on Prometheus was dull after the excitement she had felt taking the Valkrethi out against the Reaper ships. The others in the research team were saying the same thing. Putting your life on the line for something you believed in was addictive – it was an addiction they would all have to watch carefully.
“You-all are invited to a barn dance Saturdee night,” said a voice over the Prometheus comms system. Someone was trying to impersonate a mid-western accent. Celia smiled. That was probably Millie, the North Am girl who was secretary for MacEwart. She was always looking for a reason to get everyone together, and it hadn’t been long before she was made ‘social events organizer’.
“Melda at recyclables has a print and texture pattern for farm overalls, just bring an old one-piece worksuit along and she’ll put it through the machine for you. Ladies, you can have tassels and trimmings, there’s quite a selection of options.
“You will probably need to wear something under t
he overalls,” she continued mischievously, “though a perfectly straight back at all times could see decorum preserved. Just remember not to lean forward, unless you want the guys on either side to take a much more enthusiastic interest in you!”
She broke off into peels of laughter.
Celia shook her head. Anyone else wouldn’t be able to get away with it, but the whole base seemed to accept Millie’s antics. Celia had to admit it was a welcome relief from the long days and intense work at Prometheus.
“So, make a note somewhere to come along this Saturday night,” continued Millie, “and don’t leave your overalls to the last minute. Melda’s busy enough without you all turning up at once. This is your sa-oh-oh-oh-shul sec-rah-tery over and out!”
Celia paused for a moment. She remembered the way Sallyanne had talked about the need for someone special in her life, and the way she had pushed her to make more of an effort. This was an ideal time for Sallyanne to do just that.
Further down the hall, behind the partitions that gave each of the research team a little work privacy at Prometheus, Sallyanne was thinking the same thing.
“Preliminary investigations suggest the Druanii have an archetypal memory, indicating extensive dream sequences. . .” said the audio report on her desk. It was from a psychologist in another department. She reached over and switched it off.
Barn dance . . . Saturday . . . she thought. But she couldn’t, she was snowed under with work!
Then some part of her rebelled. Dammit, wasn’t Finch always telling them to put aside some regular time for themselves? He was right, too.
She made a decision – she would go to the dance.
Her mind threw up pictures of some of the Prometheus staff that she had fancied over recent months. Sometimes she couldn’t see the connection herself, but her body definitely tingled around some of the men. Oddly, she felt uncomfortable around others. It was all rather strange, and always confusing.
One of the starship technicians came to mind. He was a dark, brooding Lothario who seemed to be attractive to most of the women. Unfortunately he was also obsessed with his work, and talked mostly in grunts.
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