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anything, I guess, but that still leaves us with a big stripdown and
reassembly."
"Where do we start?" I asked, finishing up my dinner.
"I want to do a full service test on the entire battery bank, so we don't
have any nasty surprises when we shut down the plant," she answered,

leading the way.
"Each battery? Can't you just run diagnostics? It'd be a lot faster."
"Oh, I already did that, and they look fine. But the battery monitor
sub-routine is some homegrown thing one of the previous owners wrote,
and I just don't want to trust some yo-yo's tollhouse cookie program on
something this vital. Don't know what they did with the factory-issued
routine, anyway -- it comes with the package."
I didn't have any answer to that, of course.
"Those god-fisting, mother-mating shysters!! What the flyin'
fornication are we supposed to do now...?!"
I didn't have any answer to that either.
One battery at 57%, another at 31%, a third at 18%, and the remaining
seven all flatlined. Meanwhile, the diagnostics said there wasn't one
battery in the entire bank under 94%. At least now we knew why they'd
installed their own routine: to sell an old Bechel to a bunch of rubes
without having to replace the emergency standby batteries. Replacing
an entire bank would've taken a deep bite out of any profits, while a
fake diag program might not have cost anything.
Sally seemed madder at herself than anyone else. "I should've done this
check before we left Deegman, but I was going crazy getting the main
drive ready." She cursed steadily for several minutes, before
tapering-off to a mutter.
"Can we still do the repairs if we work fast?" I asked her. "How long
will the power from those three last?"
"Not long enough. If we shut down now, we'd normally have a week or
more with this much juice. But these batteries'll drain out a lot faster
than normal -- they've been undercharged for so long they won't be able
to hold what little they've got. Hell, I'll be needing to use heavy tools
too: the bench drill and the laze on the emitters that we take out of the

power plant -- that'll eat a lot of juice right there. Then we have to
reinstall, run a diag of the whole magnetics system with the installed
package for the power plant -- which I hope to crawling saviour we can
trust -- and then take them out again and fine-tune the work. And we'll
probably have to do all this several times over to get it right."
"Then we'll just have to be extra careful the first time, right?"
She shook her head as if I were vexing her on purpose. "No, Ejoq. We
don't have precision tools onboard. IF this works at all, it'll be a process
of elimination. Nip and tuck here, check it; nip and tuck there, check it;
until we get it exactly, precisely right. This old tub isn't much, but it's
still a far cry from some broken-down aircar you could tinker with in
your back yard. The fusion reactor won't work at all if the mag bottle
isn't right, and the bottle won't form until the emitters are right."
"In other words, it'll take as long as it takes, no matter what our battery
problems are," I translated for myself. She just grunted, and turned
back to the bank.
After a moment, she said, "If we cut the dead units out of the system,
we'll probably gain a few kilowatt hours from the resistance we'll save.
That's better than nothing."
"That doesn't solve the problem, Sal."
"I know what the fornicating problem is, Ejoq! Don't ride me like some
low-rent Bayern, all right? I need your help in this, and right now you
can help me most of all by shutting up. I have to think..."
She went to her desk and began to check some numbers, adding and
subtracting on a calculator program to one side of the screen, while she
studied a schematic of the power plant. She mumbled, swore to herself,
and even punched the flat screen at one point and spat, "Oh, you
son-of-a-mutt!" I went and got coffee for us both, but she let hers get
cold by her elbow as she worked. Finally, after nearly an hour of
concentration she turned back, a little calmer than before.

"Okay, here's what we do...we shut everything off -- and I mean
everything -- except heat, air, and the main computer's core functions.
We rewire a few of the backup power packs for specific systems into
the main trunk line, to help feed that crappy battery bank. We work
without break until the job is done, you and I, and we just might do it."
"Now,