Ghost Station (The Wandering Engineer) (49 page)

“I
heard you said something about that before. Scuttlebutt,” a tech said
cautiously.

Irons
snorted. “It's true.” He shrugged at their looks. He was in for it now. “I can
have Sprite show you, but I'd rather keep hard data on the yard under wraps.
Security concerns.”

“Sure.”

“Whatever.”

“It
doesn't matter anyway. We're too far away. So the next best thing is a thorough
scan and then either replacement or a nanite field repair,” the admiral
replied, ignoring their skepticism.

“Nanite??”
Quinna stared in disbelief.

“Right.
A nanite repair. We call it a molecular weld too for simplicities sake. It's
well, we scan the fracture then program nanites to go in and knit the two sides
together on the molecular level. It'll be as good as new.” He laced his fingers
together. “A weld so strong it's on the molecular level, even better than
before.” They kept staring. “Good as new,” he said knowing the signs.

“Nanites??”
a tech said, shrinking back, eyes wide.
He tried hard not to roll his eyes. They had come along way, accepted
replicators, but still the idea of nanites gave them the heebie jeebies.
“Seriously nanites. Not a problem. I'll handle it if you're nervous. They are
only alive and active inside the field matrix the welder projects. Outside they
explode like molecular fire crackers. They don't reproduce so once they are
gone they are gone.”

“Ookay...”

He
waved a dismissive hand. “Don't worry about it. The real concern is the crack
itself. Something caused it. It's also thrown the structure and skin out of
alignment. Remember what I said about that? A leads to B leads to C, D, and E?
That has to be attended to as well.”

“The
buckled skin around that section of hull you mean? On one side it's buckling,
and on the other side it's cracking,” O'Mallory mused thoughtfully.

“I
always thought there was something strange there. Like the metal was brittle in
that spot,” a tech said.

Irons
shook his head. “No, from the sound of it the crack has shifted some of the
hull plating. Over time the shift has put a strain on the hull plates it's
pulling against while relaxing the ones it's not. The relaxed load is odd
though, it shouldn't buckle like that. It's metal,” he explained.

“We
might have other issues admiral. That area was plated over a while ago,”
O'Mallory said frowning.

Irons
turned his attention to her. “Define a while ago?” Irons asked.

“Um...”
Quinna looked at her notes. She tapped a query. Sprite fed him the data the
chief engineer was looking at but he ignored it.

“I'd
say about a century ago. It's iron plate,” she said looking up after a moment.

“Seriously?
Iron? Not even steel? Iron? Pig iron?” he asked in disbelief.

She
grimaced. “Plate iron. Not that much carbon in it.”

“Which
explains why it's buckling,” he said shaking his head. He gave her another
disbelieving look. “Seriously though Iron? On a starship hull?”

“You
can accept nanites but can't accept that admiral?” Quinna asked, eyebrow
raised.

“Touché',”
Sprite muttered. He snorted and shook his head.

“It's
just...”

“We
have to make do with what you've got admiral,” O'Mallory said gruffly.

“Nature
of the times,” a tech said with a sigh and grimace.

The
admiral shook his head. “Well, times are changing. It's time we did something
about that. We can't do hull work while in hyper, but we can see if we have the
supplies on hand for a proper replacement job.”

“I'll
check with the purser and stores,” Quinna said nodding. “He'll squeal though.”

“He'll
squeal louder if we get a hull breach and we lose his precious cargo,” the tech
muttered.

“True.”

The
replicator techs were interested in the tray system. When Gwen the Tauren teen
asked about the wiring being able to fit, he told them absently it's coiled. He
had more important things on his mind, namely the spar and how it affected the
ship's superstructure. So far he hadn't been able to model it successfully. Or
at least Proteus hadn't. He'd have to switch to the ship's mainframe when they
translated down to sublight. If he tried now he might addle something important
and that was a big no no.

“Oh!”

“See?”
he uncoiled a loop from a wiring harness. It's got plug and play adapters on
the ends. It has optical fibers for data transfer as well as super conductor
fibers for power transmission. He had to replicate it since repairing the spar
hadn't been as straightforward as they had thought. When they had pulled sections
of the deck up to get at the micro fracture they had found torn wiring to
repair.

Most
of the other replicator techs knew about that. They knew to maximize the tray
to make things quicker and more efficient. To get more parts out at a time. The
Tauren was just starting out. He nodded politely to her and then left them to
work it out amongst themselves. Sometimes dropping them in the deep end had its
advantages he thought. Nothing taught someone better than a puzzle to figure
out on your own. If someone just handed you the answers then you frequently
lost the information later.

Right
now though it didn't matter. He had work to do and a project to finish. They
were a day out from translating to real space.

Act II

One
hour prior to break out Sprite gave the admiral a briefing as he laid on his
rack. He watched it play out.

Most
of it he already knew, Sprite was highlighting the things she had picked up
from the crew over the course of the trip. Of course being an AI, and being
thorough she started from the beginning with confirmed background material. He
didn't care; it was something to do to pass the time.

The
industry was mostly orbital prior to Xeno war. That was normal; no one really
wanted to dirty the air they breathed on a planet. They apparently had quite a
lot of orbital industry at one time, including full factory cities at the
Lagrange points. The largest Antigua Prime had been over four hundred
kilometers in diameter before it had been lost.

The
planet had been settled by steamer punk art colonists who wanted to recreate
their own version of a Victorian era. He mused over the thought of that, not
really paying attention to any of it. When Sprite had informed him that the
orbitals were occupied by a pair of small moons and a ring of debris he'd tuned
most of it out.
With all the industry taken out there wasn't a whole lot
there that interested him now.

The
planet had been lightly terraformed and served as a tourist resort planet for a
century before the beginning of the Xeno war. Liners traveled to it and made
turnarounds. A couple mega corporations had run the orbital industry and
subsidized the planet's tourist attractions. Half of the population of the
orbital factories had made weekly commutes to and from the planet.

“The
planet has an extensive ground based defensive energy weapon system. That
surprised him. From the sound of it they were class three or four energy
systems, mountain top sized energy weapons. It took some major power to punch
through an atmosphere to orbit. That spoke of power to spare when it wasn't
needed. At one point they were working on installing a planetary shield but
when the orbital industry was taken out that seems to have been abandoned.
“With no industry on the planet all the resources the population had was
devoted to keeping the defense grid up. Fortunately the system protected the
planet from Xeno AI nanite and rock bombing runs.”

“Someone
did their homework,” Irons said nodding.

“Yes
well, there is no such thing as being too paranoid for you organics apparently.
The system created an effective quarantine of the planet for forty years after
the Xeno war. It was even used in the dark times to destroy refugee ships
thought to be infected with nano weapons.”

The
admiral winced. “Were there really nanites?” Irons asked.

Sprite
spread her virtual hands. “Who knows?” she said. “It could have been or it
could have been someone not taking any chances. The people on the ships were
desperate and the people on the planet were as well. Organics do some
terrifying things when they are cornered and desperate.”

“Touché',”
Irons murmured.

“That
wasn't a fault, just an observation. I have seen both the dark side and the
heroic side in desperate action admiral,” Sprite said.

“As
have I,” he replied with a nod. “Continue.”

“The
apparent lack of ground side industrial investment came back to haunt them over
time. Recently they have invested in technology to bootstrap their tech from
steam level to early industrial. They don't seem eager to go all the way, but
they do want to regain some of what they lost.”

“Cling
to their roots and culture?” Irons asked.

“Organics?”
she asked with a sniff. “What can I say?”

“It
takes all kinds. Okay. They don't want to disassociate their society with too
many changes too fast apparently.”

Sprite
nodded. “Apparently. When the Xeno war ended there were quite a few marooned
workers on the planet. However without full medical support many died off over
time due to age or accident. Some left the planet when the people there made it
clear in a referendum that they were not interested in returning to a space age
society. The loss of skilled trade’s people added to the backsliding problem in
the beginning. For the past several centuries they have slowly up climbed up
the tech level back to steam power.”

“Let
me here a bit about this planetary defense system. I'm curious.”

“The
planetary defense system is a class 21, the highest ever conceived,” Sprite
replied. Irons whistled. He'd heard of the system, a real monster. It wasn't so
much a mountain top weapon as it was an entire mountain! Massive, four
kilometer long barrel on the thing, massive motors and gimbles... turning the
thing must be a nightmare! Insane really to park it on a vulnerable planet with
a limited firing arch.

It
was a hybrid energy weapon, a real monster if he remembered correctly. Gravity
and Graser all rolled into one. He didn't involve himself in army ground side
affairs normally so he didn't have the data on hand.

Sprite
projected a map with the locations of each battery. There were three on each of
the four continents and two more on polar island mountains. Each energy weapon
was a combined gravity and Graser weapon, able to first tear through a ship's
shield and then rip its hull apart. At full setting the Graser could break
atomic
bindings inducing fission. The power sources needed for each were insane.

He
wondered where they got them and the funding until Sprite informed him that the
planet had really been backed by the Grant mega corporation and the SCA, mostly
by their richest eccentric members. “They had thought the planet would serve as
a redoubt in the Federation's darkest hour. Apparently they never made it to
the planet, their liner had been destroyed,” she said.

“Ouch.”

The
defense system sat on top of mountains. Each was on a turret. During the war
and its aftermath the planet was bombarded many times. After a while any ship
or object in the system was taken out. The weapon system was so powerful it
caused massive atmospheric disturbances on par with hurricanes. It could cut
through any capital ship's screens like butter, peeling the energy fields back
to get at the armored hull underneath. Not even a super dreadnaught could
handle a shot from these monsters. One shot was all it took to annihilate a
ship of that class. A monitor or larger vessel might take two shots but even he
wouldn't throw away vessels of that size against those batteries.

After
the war the planet was ringed with debris. Most of the large pieces were cut up
by the defenses but that left the little pieces. “When they were certain the
threat of nanites was over they lifted the quarantine and started letting
visitors return,” Sprite said. He grunted.

“The
first century they had visitors clean up their orbitals in exchange for fuel.
But that sucked their fuel reserves in the process.”

“Didn't
they have... wait, Victorian,” he said, nodding in understanding.

Sprite
nodded in return. “Right. They were quite selective in their hardware. They
tried to cling to that mindset even after the Xeno war ended. Apparently they
only had one deuterium processing plant on the coast to serve the entire planet
but it was destroyed in a quake three hundred and forty years ago.”

“Ouch.”

“Yes.
So they have been trying to bootstrap their technology after that. They have a
hydrogen processing station now which they use for their defense grid and use
to fuel ships,” she said. “It's crude but it works.”

“Wait,
you said that they
had
tech. Industry. They couldn't of lost all of it.
Could they?” he asked dubiously.