Motherload | Page 9

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 never be able to put this sphere back into the unit in exactly, precisely the way it was installed. The scratches would be off from where they were before, which would deform the field immediately. It would fail simply because of the unbalance there. I mean, it should have failed some time ago."
"Okay, um...what about shielding the laze for EM leakage? I mean, we could use it if gave off no detectable energy signature, right? There's all that trash EM wrapping that the dock crew left aboard, back at Deegman -- remember, I had to find a place to stow it all, and I was honked-off? We could wrap the laze with that stuff and..."
"The laze isn't the only problem, Ejoq. Even if you shield it all over, the batteries emit an EM field when they're used. The wiring in the bulkheads do too