Motherload | Page 9

as she looked around at the
gutted mess that Engineering had become.
"How far off?"
"Not far enough. Maybe two light seconds it looked like --
spinward/thirty degrees off-plane. Tell me you can work magic,
Sally..."

"In my cabin, maybe! If they catch wind of us now, we're
stool-out-of-luck, Ejoq, and no mistake!"
A graceless bump and an umph at the open hatch behind me announced
Bayern, who'd followed me down.
"We need power, Sally!"
"I know, Bayern..."
"No, I'm not kidding around! We've got a hostile out there, and we need
power right now!"
"Get him out of here, Ejoq."
"Didn't you hear what I said?! It's a pirate!"
"Now, Ejoq, or I'll kill him!"
"We need weapons! We need engines! We're sitting ducks here!"
Sally snatched up a chem torch and began to go around the ducts and
draping cables with a scary sort of blankness on her face. I was closer
though, so I brachiated my way through the intervening space, and
hustled Bayern back out into the companionway.
"If you ruin Sally's concentration now," I told him with a hard grip on
his earlobe, "I'll glue your hands and feet together and dump you in
your cabin. Get out and stay out...or better yet, do something useful,
like running vector sims: use the realtime data from Genness' passives,
and you'll be ready for trouble."
He slapped away my hands, and canted backwards out of my
immediate reach, anchoring himself to one of the handholds -- a look of
stark terror and fury written plainly on his broad face.
"Who...who do you think you are?! I'm the captain of this boat..!"
"Then you better bleeding act like it from now on, or there's a field

demotion by popular demand in your future."
"That's mutiny, Ejoq -- don't you dare threaten me!"
I grabbed his shirt and drew him close again, eye to eye. He must have
seen something there he didn't like, because his own eyes bulged in
sudden apprehension.
"I'm not going to die out here because of your stupid crap, Captain
Bayern, sir. Stay calm. Sally knows what needs to be done; and if it
can be done, she'll do it. But, if you continue to be a liability on this
cruise, I'll throw you at the pirate...savvy?"
"You...you're crazy, Ejoq," he whispered in horror, "you're absolutely
crazy."
He turned too quickly to escape my insane clutches, and did an
impressive pirouette until he got himself under control. He flailed his
way forward, muttering that we (presumably Sally and I) were going to
get everyone killed. I remember hanging there, musing that if he kept
on thinking like that, and especially, if he'd finally developed a strong
opinion as to who we were going to start with, then he might just give
us the space we needed to work.
Not that I had any idea what work there was to do at this point, with no
engines, no weapons, no communications, restricted sensor systems,
and what would probably have been an impossible repair job even if we
didn't have a raider on our doorstep.
"I better not see him again," was all Sally had to say when I came back
in. She was already back at the work bench, hovering over the sphere. I
came up beside her and said nothing for a long time, but my thoughts
must have been loud, because she looked over at me at length, and said,
simply, "What?"
"We can't fix it. Am I right?"
"Yup. It's plain impossible here -- especially without the laze. Maybe

even with it. I was gonna to try electroplating it with superconductive
nanotubes: did that by hand once, back in school -- works decently for
magnetic propagation, too. I just don't know what to do now..."
"What about rearranging the order of the emitters, leaving the bad one
out? We could overlap the field influences so that the entire reaction
area is covered. Then we run it underpowered, maybe, and..."
She shook her head, and pointed to the casing that held all the other
emitter spheres in place. "That was computer designed, computer
constructed, and computer installed. If we're off by so much as a
millimeter -- which would be an impossibly good error factor -- the
magnetic bottle will fail. Besides, firing up the reactor, whether to bring
it online, or just to test the work, will light us up like a spotlight to the
sensors of any nearby ships."
She looked up with a bleak stare that convinced me at last, and that's
when I really got scared.
"Well, can't we just put this one back in, then, and run the power plant
until it fails?"
She had a sour face as she replied. "The flaws in the magnetic coating
are direction-specific -- we'd