As soon as the door closed, she turned to the admiral. “Either he’s playing me, or he really thinks Tomlinson is guilty. I don’t care which it is, but he’s right.”
Nakamiru nodded pulling out his comlink and connecting to operations control. “I am ordering the Armstrong into a wide halo orbit. That will put you close enough to work with your staff here, but you can move your personal offices there.”
She nodded. “I think it’s time for me to have a better office anyway.”
Jakob Waltz: Neptune L-4 Trojan Cluster:
Jeph floated in main engineering watching Cori prepare to demonstrate his handgun. There was no place inside the ship safe to test the weapon, so he suited up and took his gear into one of the repair cages outside the lower egress module. The gun itself consumed a lot of energy and he carried a small power supply in one hand. It wasn’t pretty, but he promised he’d get it into an easily deployed weapon by the end of the day. For now, he wanted to prove the idea had legs.
“Is creative, yes?” Rocky said, floating up beside him to watch the test on the screen.
“As long as it’s effective.” He nodded.
“If aperture control stands up to power levels, should work well,” she said. “I am concerned will not survive continuous use.”
“Looks like it was a plasma torch before he went Frankenstein on it,” Jeph said.
“Da,” she nodded. “He wished to use a proton cutter, but I only have two. He would not have been able to fabricate enough for whole crew to have one.”
“How many of these can you build?” Jeph asked.
“Twelve, if they work.”
“I’m ready to test,” Cori said, turning to face the optic and waving a hullplas-patch he intended to use as a target. “I’ll toss this and when it gets to ten meters, I’ll try to hit it.”
“Copy,” Jeph said. “We’re recording.”
Cori tossed the patch through the open door of the repair cage and took aim. “I’ve got the power set on the lowest level,” he said as he pulled the trigger. A blinding flash knocked the optic in the cage offline. The other image showed the bolt of plasma from a distance incinerating the target instantly.
“Are you alright out there?” Jeph asked. It looked like it exploded in his hand. Rocky dove for the airlock.
“Affirm. I’m seeing spots, but my visor polarized and … holy frack.” he said. His voice sounded like he would need to clean his suit liner. “I think I might have overdone the power levels on this beast.”
“Nojo,” Chei said. He’d appeared in time to see the flash, carrying a thinpad which he held out to Jeph.
Jeph glanced over at Rocky who was nodding vigorously. “We concur in here. Come on back inside and get it sorted. I’d say that was effective, but I don’t think we want to vaporize the hull behind anybody we might be shooting.”
“Roger that,” he said. “On my way.”
Jeph turned, took the thinpad from Chei, and looked at the diagram on the screen. “Is this it?”
“That is the simplest configuration I can come up with,” he said. “What I’m up against is that the plutonium pile in the TICS is supposed to be failsafe. In the event that the pile overheats, it self-limits. I have to take two of them and mash them together to get enough in a single lump to create a detonation.”
“How long will it take you to get one working?” Jeph handed the thinpad to Rocky to review the design.
“A day or two,” he said, shrugging.
“How big a blast will one produce?”
“About forty-five terajoules,” he said. “Give or take.”
“Give that to me in destructive energy,” Jeph said.
“The old standard unit of measure would make it ten to twelve kilotons. But that’s based on an arcane explosive compound that isn’t in use anymore,” Chei explained. “Probably enough to destroy a station like Galileo.”
Jeph gasped. “Galileo is over thirty kilometers long.” He couldn’t imagine a single explosion that big.
“The blast radius would only be five kilometers, so the damage would be mostly collateral. Of course, these things will be dirty as hell and even if the blast doesn’t take out the whole facility, it’ll kill everything by radioactive contamination.”
“Dirty?” Jeph asked.
“Yah, it would scatter enough radiation via particulate to kill anything that wasn’t incinerated in the detonation,” he said. “They wouldn’t die quick though. It might take a couple weeks and it would be ugly.”
“Is foobed,” Rocky said.
“There’s a reason we quit building weapons like this,” Chei said, nodding.
“If we have to detonate one of these things, what’s the minimum safe distance?” he asked.
“In open space, I’d want to be twenty klick away,” Chei said. “The radiation shielding in the hull would protect us at that range, but I’m assuming we’d be using it against a target so there might be serious debris moving very fast. More distance would be better.”
“How reliable is design?” Rocky asked.
“Very,” he said. “The thermonuclear heater in the TICS is a loosely stacked pile of plutonium with damping rods that keep the reaction from speeding up and overheating. Each core is below critical mass, so they can’t go into a runaway spontaneously. What I have to do is pull the core from one unit and mount it to a second one. Then I’ll rig the rods to pull out of one core and once it melts, I ram it into the second core, giving the two enough plutonium to blow.”
“How long will this process take?” Jeph asked.
“Under two minutes from activation to boom,” Chei said.
“And you can do this safely?” he asked.
Chei shrugged. “There’s a little more to it I have to work out yet, but since the piles are shielded, I can remove them without risk. Once I rig the mount for the dual core assembly, they’ve got as much shelf life as we want.”
Jeph glanced at the chrono. “You’ve got forty hours before we get to L-4 Prime. I want three by then. Cando?”
“Probably,” he said. “We will still need to work out a delivery system for them. You can’t drop them like bombs.”
“Get on it and we’ll come up with something,” the captain said.
“The hardware is too big to bring inside so I’ll have to work EVA on them. I’ll need priority use of the repair cages,” Chei said, looking at Rocky.
She nodded. “I will not need them to complete my work. Ice cutting lasers disassemble easily and can be modified inside.”
“Do you need help?” Jeph asked as Chei pushed off toward the fabrication shop.
“In a couple hours, it would be handy to have Seva in a pod,” he said, looking grateful for the offer. “With only one manipulator arm working, it will be tough to grab the TICS without taking them all from one side of the racks. If we need to maneuver in a fight, off-balancing the load would not be a good idea.”
“I’ll assign her to you at 1400,” the captain said, waving a hand to send Chei off to his task. As he disappeared over the railing, Jeph let out a slow sigh.
“I understand your difficulty,” Rocky said, lowering her voice. “Will be long time before I trust him fully. Same with doctor.”
He nodded. “We’ve got no choice. We’re a long way from home and we’ve all got to hang together.”
“As I said, I understand, but am not happy.” She picked up her own thinpad and handed it to him.
“Is design for modifying cutting lasers to function as weapons.”
“Excellent,” he said, looking over her specifications.
“We have three heavy cutting lasers for pods and three portable units. I will connect larger units to main trunk that fed HDA before was destroyed. Can mount on hard points of bow superstructure. Will provide direct access to half megawatt power each. With motor driven gimbals and optic sights, Dutch could hit moving target with minimum of two beams across 180 degrees of travel.”
“A half megawatt?”
“That’s over 100 times their normal output,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “The aperture lenses will slag at that level.”
“Will bring lines direct from HCF reactor cooling system to provide adequate thermal management,” she said. “Was Cori’s suggestion.”
“How much range would these have?” Jeph asked.
“Lasers are designed to cut up ice and have limited collimation control. Goal with delivering overpower is to minimize time beam has to hold target at range.”
“Would two thousand meters be a safe guess,” he asked.
“At least ten times that range, probably more assuming tracking can hold target accurately for several seconds,” she said. “Intensity of beam decreases by inverse square, so in close combat, should penetrate ship hull in milliseconds.”
“That’s good, as long as they are in front of us,” he said.
“Da. Will also mount portable units to side positions in repair cages,” she said. “Will not have cooling available so will be limited to under five kilowatts, but can be kept concealed until cage doors open. Will be ideal for close range work, like repelling boarding parties.”
“So the big guns will cover the upper EVA airlocks and the small ones will cover the lower hatches,” he said, nodding. “That only leaves us with one weakness. The hull.”
“Is nothing we can do about that. Best case, fighting in space is no win game.”
Executive Reception Hall: Galileo Station: Lunar Lagrange One:
Katryna felt trapped at the formal reception that followed the official memorial service for Arun Markhas. She sat at the huge table staring at the food, afraid even to touch her glass of water. Two vacant seats sat to each side of the Prime Minister and the Union Steward. A moat of empty space meant to honor their missing and dead companions.
She could feel Derek Tomlinson glaring at her from across the room while she tried to ignore him and make small talk with Tana Drake. She wanted nothing more than to confront him, and perhaps to do to him what he’d done to Arun, but she knew if she was ever to get that chance it would have to be later. At a time when they were away from the media and the other chancellors and where she could get a confession out of him before she threw his deceitful ass out an airlock. She almost smiled at the thought.
The Executive Council had extended another four weeks onto their recess so that the members of DevCartel could also elect a new chancellor.
SourceCartel had reluctantly chosen to hold an election, but the Chancellery had not yet invested their new chancellor elect. In the meantime, the Source deputy sat in on meetings, but he had no official vote on any business of the Union. It crippled Source, leaving them with a lack of representation. It also meant she had one less problem to worry about for the moment because he had no voice in their meetings and couldn’t follow through with the sealed docket action.
During the recess, she planned to announce her own investigation into what was going on.
“You aren’t planning to stay here at Galileo during the recess?” Tana asked.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t see the Armstrong?”
“You mean that thing eclipsing all the solar collectors on Galileo?” she said, grinning. “Nope, I didn’t see it. I had to fly around it on the way in, but I didn’t bother to gawk.”
“Ah, it’s a little—”
“Imposing is the word you’re looking for,” Tana said, grinning. “Or maybe intimidating.”
“Obvious was what I was thinking,” she said, winking. “Nakamiru insisted I move my official office to the ship for the duration.”
“I like him,” Tana said.
“So what are you doing for the recess?”
“Buying a summer home in the Martian outback,” she said, her eyes looking like she meant it. “Actually, I’ll be in New Hope City. Wentworth has me on another research project and the hospital there is the best place for me to take care of it.”
“Research?” Katryna asked.
Tana shot her a don’t ask stupid questions look. She turned and smiled across the room at Tomlinson. He blinked in surprise and then confusion flashed across his features as he realized that his intimidating glare wasn’t working on either of them.
“Watch him,” Katryna said, reaching out to Tana and squeezing her hand. “He’s thinking really hard right now about whether he can risk it again and you don’t look good wearing a target. Please be careful.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been wearing one just like yours, almost as long as you have.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jakob Waltz: L-4 Prime:
The thunder of the Jakob Waltz’s engine echoed down to silence.
“That’s it, we’re here,” Shona said. “We should be in orbit.”
“Rocky, power up the lasers and Kiro bring us around, so we can see where we are,” Jeph said.
Four hours and twelve minutes since they flipped away from their destination to begin deceleration. During that time, Jeph knew they were vulnerable because they couldn’t see anything coming at them from L-4 Prime. If someone was going to attack, it would be then. The engine gave them some protection, but if anything had launched in their direction, they wouldn’t have seen it coming until it was on top of them.
Cori pointed out that if the TICS were a target, it wasn’t likely they’d face an explosive missile. The enemy would use a precision strike to incapacitate and not risk damaging their asset value. Their only vulnerability to a surgical attack was to the sides. Jeph had ordered Seva and Chei to stand watch with Cori inside the lower egress airlocks, in case they faced a boarding party.
For them the quarter-g deceleration was negligible, so they stood around wearing exosuits, plus full EVA gear and carrying their gun packs, while they stared at each other. More than once Chei commented over the com about feeling useless.
“We’re clear to two kiloklick all the way around,” Kiro said as he pushed the nose of the Jakob Waltz around and brought L-4 Prime into their forward arc.
“Are we there yet?” Seva asked, beating Chei to the com.
“Yes, we’re there,” Jeph said. “Kiro says nothing shows on proximity scans, so you can stand down and report to the ConDeck once you get out of your EVA gear.”
“If that’s what a black hole looks like, I have to say I am a bit disappointed,” Danel said, drifting over to look at the main screen.
“Optical scans also show no signs of moving vessels in the local region and I detect no radio signals from the surface,” Dutch reported.
“Is it possible they’re hiding?” Shona asked.
“Is difficult to know much without sensors,” Rocky said. “I would, however, anticipate some local radio traffic. Even within base.”
“I also expected an approach control ping,” Kiro said. “Standard outer threshold taps in at one-megaklick.”
“They’re not following standard procedures,” Shona said. “That’s a surprise, why?”
“The object appears to be a hydrostatically spherical ice mass, 106 kilometers in diameter,” Dutch said.
“Is it actually spherical?” Danel asked. “That’s awfully small to make hydrostasis.”
“It appears to be,” it said. “There is an upthrust ridge along the equator on the sunward side, but it is a minor structure of less than one percent perturbation. Additionally, there are no apparent impact craters on the visible side.”
“New ice?” Jeph asked.
“Unless there’s an internal thermal process, that’s unlikely,” Danel said.
“Could it be an artificial shell of some sort?” Shona asked.
“That’s possible,” he said, “but it would be one hell of an engineering project. It’s orders of magnitude larger than Galileo.”
“That’s disconcerting to think about, isn’t it?” Jeph said.
“I have located the rad
io beacon,” Dutch said. “It is at 406 kilometers above the surface and appears to be in a circular orbit.”
“What did you say the orbital period was?” Shona asked.
“Thirty-six minutes and twelve seconds,” Rocky said.
Leaning forward she tapped in a quick calculation. Shaking her head she said, “It’s not in orbit. It’s traveling way too fast.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Chei said. He anchored his feet to the deck and walked over to look at her screen. Still wearing an exosuit, he looked more like a soldier, than a scientist. He had a power pack on his back and one of the plasma-guns in a makeshift holster. “It’s the gradient effect of the quantum quicksand. The beacon’s stuck just like we are.”
Cori appeared behind him also dressed for a fight. “I guess that would mean we’re not leaving here unless we can figure out how to turn it off.”
Armstrong: Halo Orbit: Galileo Station:
The chancellor’s com chirped. “Roja here,” she said, turning and staring down the hall in what she thought was the direction of her quarters. The Armstrong was bigger on the inside than on the outside. At least that was how it felt to Katryna.
“Chancellor, can you report to the ConDeck?” asked Captain Jeffers. Her voice sounded tense.
“If I can find it,” she said. “A problem?”
“Not specifically ma’am. We have a shuttle approaching and they’re asking for permission to berth.”
“Why does this require my attention?” she asked, feeling a surge of annoyance. Shuttles came and went around the clock on a ship this size.
“Because this one is carrying Chancellor Tomlinson,” she said. “The admiral told me to ask you how you wanted to respond.”
“Nojo? He’s got steel eggs doesn’t he?” she said, sighing and looking around for a display that might tell her where she was. “Send someone to find my lost ass and tell him I’ll meet him in the situation room.”
“Yes ma’am,” she said. “Just follow the lights in the bulkheads and they’ll lead you to the ConDeck.” She paused for several seconds and added, “Should I assign the chancellor a security detail?”
Shan Takhu Legacy Box Set - With an Extra Bonus Story Page 20