Motherload | Page 7

few flaws. Seems he had a taste for Slicker -- you know, that nasty rotgut from Barlow they distill from used cooking oil -- and he was a mean drunk. It might surprise you to hear it, but I wasn't always the kind of person I am now. He bounced me off the bulkheads for three solid years. His family owned the ship we were on --the Haster -- and he was being groomed to take the center chair someday. Naturally, then, it had to be his lazy groundpounder of a wife's fault every night, right? Even I believed it. I wanted to be a spacer so bad, Ejoq, you can't imagine. I wised-up eventually, but it took cultured bone grafts in my jaw and right cheek to do it. Each time Bayern says something stupid, I just want to lay Binn's head open with a tube bender."
"Sounds like unfinished business," I said quietly.
She turned back to me at that, now with a sad grin. "I jumped ship at Sandlewood, over in Manas Sector, and showed my purple face to a local magistrate. She annulled the marriage on the spot. She tried to have him arrested too, but under the Alliance treaty, a free-trader is considered a sovereign nation, and no reason short of direct military or commercial threat from said can justify violating sovereign territory...etc., etc. They couldn't go in after him. She was so pissed-off she pulled some strings and had Haster's contract with the local trade commission pulled. A minor thing, on the surface of it, but Sandlewood was part of their annual route back then. I figure the loss adds up to a couple of million by now, so maybe there's some justice in space after all."
"If there was," I replied, "you wouldn't still want to beat the guy to the floor, via Bayern. Looks aside, don't let our current boss get to you, Sally -- he's pretty close to useless and he knows it, so he asks a lot of questions and gets under our feet so he can pretend he's contributing something. If you just tell him to shut-up and leave it at that, we won't have to mutiny. I don't want to lose my bonus."
She laughed and gave me a quick hug. "I'll do my best, Ejoq. Just do your best, and keep him out of here. And pass me that microspec over there. I need a close look at this crap."
She spent the next hour or two examining the surface of the fist-sized emitter spheres, cursing twice on the third one, which she put aside before continuing on. None of the other fifteen seemed to offend her, though, so she put them back inside the housing carefully. She then held up the flawed sphere as if I could see what was wrong from two meters away.
"They sure don't make 'em like they used to...especially at Value Power! What a piece of copulating diarrhea! Look at this thing: instead of a composite shell of iron-carbide and titanium-tungsteel crystal -- which is the very minimum that Alliance construction regs allow for, by the way -- we have what looks like a hollow aluminum shell coated with a thin layer of iron in a polymer base. There are two scratches in this paint job: here, and here. I figure a couple of specks of this cheap paint must have come off under the magnetic field, and they, in turn, gouged away more of it. Doesn't seem like much damage, does it? If the paint kept eroding, which'd be inevitable in my view, the mag field would have deformed and been unable to maintain the fusion reaction. No reaction, no power. And worse yet, in the milliseconds between the drop of the mag field and the end of the controlled reaction, the hot plasma would have flashed out to the inner edge of the frame holding the spheres."
"And...?"
"Well, in a quality power plant, nothing: the magnetics fail, there's a flash inside the casing that nobody sees, and the system switches to standby batteries with maybe, at most, a flicker of the lights to show that it happened. Nothing inside a good unit could be hurt, and whoever services it after that finds everything fine and dandy -- except for the original problem, of course, whatever it was. In this piece of bowel business, though, we'd have a flash, and the distinct smell of burning plastic, and maybe even some visible smoke. Open it up, and you find sixteen blackened and stinking spheres, good for absolutely nothing now that their polymer coatings have been charred off by the plasma flash."
"In other words," I commented, "there'd be no way to fix them at that stage. I suppose I can take it as a given that there isn't a