Ghost Station (The Wandering Engineer) (8 page)

“I'm
Barry by the way. Barry Stent. I'm the well, I guess you could say I'm the
shuttle mechanic, chief pilot, and, um... chief of the boat bay,” Barry rubbed
at the back of his head self consciously. Irons snorted.

“Boat
bay or flight engineer?” Irons asked. Barry shrugged. He had broad shoulders,
big callused hands and a goatee. He had a steady hand and was holding in there
pretty well. Irons nodded again.

“Well
Barry, once we get this mess sorted I'll see if I can lend you a hand with your
birds. If that is you don't mind,” he said with a smile.

Barry
blinked and then grinned. Irons snorted. The guy had a snaggle tooth grin; a
few teeth on his right side were missing. Either he was fond of sweets or he'd
been in one hell of a bar fight.

“Admiral
any word on the parts?” The chief's voice echoed in the bay. Work around them
slowed or stopped. Barry grimaced.

Irons
looked up. Sprite had opened a channel for him immediately. “I've sent one pair
off now Chief.”

“So
that's where my work crew is? All of them?”

“Actually
no, I, or should I say
Barry
has most of them organized into teams and
they are sorting material to feed to the replicators. I've borrowed a couple of
the ladies to run small parts to you as well.”

“Oh.”
He heard sounds on the other end and then snorted. “So I see,” she said.
“Martha just came in with a bag full of stuff. Plastic? Why are you doing that?
It's not a priority Irons, we need the replicator focused on the emitters!”

“The
industrial one is chief. I'm using my
food
replicator to make plastic
and electronics for you. They don't have a long life expectancy but they should
do in a pinch until we can get better ones going,” he replied.

There
was a long pause and he felt like she was looking the parts over. After a
moment she grunted. “Huh. Okay then,” she said.

“We'll
have the next pair of emitters off to you in a...” he paused. Proteus put a
clock up on his HUD. “About fifty minutes. Expect a pair to be finished every
hour or so.”

“Thank
you,” she said surprised.

“The
biggest pain in the ass is getting the parts in and out of the shuttle. We're
working on it Chief. We'll get it done,” he said.

“Carry
on,” she said gruffly cutting the link.

After
two hours he had the food replicator make a platter of sandwiches and drinks
then pulled out the shuttle's little house keeping robot and carried it out to
the airlock of the shuttle. He released it into the air, and watched it start
up and then get to work. The work crew were almost finished so he handed the
woman named Martha a sandwich and then turned to the crew. They finished moving
the last part and he warned them he was turning the gravity field back on.

Hastily
the crew finished up what they were doing and then got down to the deck and
reoriented properly. He nodded as Barry gave him a thumbs up. He accessed his
link and turned the field back on at low power.  It took a minute for the
emitters to spin up. He deliberately kept the field strength down; they
couldn't afford to use too much power. It would be about a third of a G, enough
to work in but saving in power which was critical right now.

“Sprite
send a memo to ops to...”

“Cut
power to gravity. Got it,” she said. She sounded harried. He grimaced. Sprite
was using the shuttle's communications to access the ship so she could do what
she could from here. Proteus and Defender where trying to piggy back on her
signal but she didn't leave a lot of bandwidth free for them.

Dust
and small debris kicked up by the crew and robots pitter patter to the floor
like rain drops as the field spun up. Shaking his head, the engineer sat down
in the airlock and called the crew over.
He handed out drinks and
sandwiches and they eat. He thanked them for the hard work, and they nodded in
response. The woman feeding the ingots reported another pair of emitters were ready
and he had a pair of crew members carry them to engineering. A pair of workers
paused near the door with a load of material as the emitters were muscled out
one by one onto a waiting hover pallet.

“Admiral
any eta on the other parts?” O'Mallory asked from the overhead. Irons and just
about everyone in the bay looked up. The others however turned their attention
on him after a second.

“About
two more hours. Did you get anywhere finding additional robots?”

“I've
scared up a couple. One is a pencil bot though,” she reported dryly.

He
grimaced. A pencil bot was good for fine motor work, light weight fetch and
carry jobs, but was unstable and was a pain in the ass to operate because of
its high center of gravity. It probably had a thin graphite layer mixed into
its paint but the paint didn't cover every surface so it would fail quickly.

Basically
the robot was a yellow cylinder with a flattened dinner plate sized sensor pod
on top and four force emitters on the bottom in small spheres. These allowed
the little bot to float.

They
ranged in size from a half meter to over a dozen meters. The standard size on a
ship was usually a meter tall. The center section had six small manipulator
arms. Each arm was about a centimeter or two thick, with interchangeable tips
on some of them. The gripper arms could only hold about a kilogram of weight.

“It's
a civilian model of course. I don't know its radiation rating but it's been out
on the hull without problems,” she said before he could ask.

Pencil
bots, hell, just about all civilian bots weren't milspec. Therefore they
weren't really designed to handle hard jobs in high levels of radiation. Pencil
bots weren't really designed to work out of atmosphere so if this one did it
was either a mod or a series S. He'd find out later.

“Okay...”
He shrugged. He'd sick Proteus on the little bot. That would allow the AI to do
a lot of the fine fiddly bits and keep up with the balancing act. Since Proteus
was nanite based it shouldn't be too much of a stretch for the AI to handle. It
still didn't help pick and carry the large loads though.

“Yvonne
dug up our old Hideyoshi Mantobot nine thousand. I know it's a pain but it's
the biggest we've got.”

“Big
is a relative term,” Irons replied. He and just about every Terran engineer
hated Hideyoshi Mantobots. They were built for aliens with eyes and senses
different than the standard Terran norm. He'd had to pilot one once and it had
given him a headache.

For
one thing the bots were designed after insects. Even a Veraxin would have
trouble handling the vision system. The nine thousand series had a mantis style
body, with a big broad head and widely spaced eyes. It's arms were long and
spindly, with a large claw in place of a hand. The claw bent back along the
forearm. Small finger claws were arranged along the sides of some for easier
gripping and manipulating of objects.

The
legs were spindly things; the feet were bare spring levers. The robot really
didn't so much walk as it did bounce. To stay upright it would shift back and
forth, side to side, usually making it's operator sea sick after a short time.

“Okay.”
Right now any help would work. He was going to task the robots from the shuttle
too.

“I
know it's a pain in the ass admiral...” she said.

“We'll
get it done. I've used one before. Briefly.”

“
Very
briefly I would bet,” she replied dryly.

“True,”
he chuckled. Apparently the opinion of the bot hadn't changed in the centuries
he had slumbered.

“I'll
use it to pitch and carry. That should limit exposure with the damn thing.”

“We're
installing the parts you've been sending over now.”

“Good.”

“I'm
surprised you sent over so many electronic parts.”

“Milspec
I think,” Irons said absently. “I've got my secondary replicator making them. I
think Sprite slipped them into the list to help with the reactor controls.
You've got a lot of banks of memory that need to be replaced. Entire registers
I believe.”

“So
I see. I've got a note here with directions,” she said dryly.

“I
didn't do it,” he said spreading his hands and snorting softly.

“Admiral
how are we going to reignite this? There is only one functional laser. The last
time this happened I think it was a fluke that we even got it restarted. Since
we've drained off the plasma we don't have anything to use...”

“Seed,”
he replied before she lost all her self control. “I'll seed it. I'm also
replicating replacement laser emitters chief,” Irons replied.

“Seed?”

“Same
trick we used on Anvil. Or
in
I should say. One of the engineers
suggested it. We tapped one reactor and fed hot plasma from it to the reactor we
were initializing.”

“Oh.”

“We'll
tap my reactor for some of it and any residual plasma in your systems.”

“If
we don't get this started soon we're going to have serious maneuvering
problems.”

“I
know. We're working on it, chief” he said with a nod to the crew. The channel
clicked closed.

“You
heard the lady, let's get back to work,” he said. He went over to the
replicator and jacked in. He felt Sprite immediately lunge through the open
bandwidth of the jack and into the shuttle's communications systems and sighed.
He was now stuck here for a little while.

“Um...”
Irons turned at the tap on his arm. “Can you um... tell me how it works?” a
girl asked. The youngest crew member asked shyly how the replicator can make
parts. She was about thirteen he judged. Human female, Asian phenotype with an
overbite and dimples. The patched overalls and pig tails made her cute. He
looked over to a pack of adults and kids who were trying not to look curious.
He was pretty sure they had more important things to do, but then again, maybe
they didn't. He snorted.

“Hang
on a second,” he informed them and then entered the ship and pulled out a holo
projector. Setting it up in the bay, he used his implants to tap it and project
the replicator. He explained how it worked to an avid audience, and felt his
mental processes going into full teacher mode. He mentally snorted when he
noticed the guards had even gotten into it. When he's finished with the brief
overview they peppered him with questions.

Over
the next several hours the final pairs of emitters and the parts for the lasers
were replicated. He lectured them with an overview of many different pieces of
technology, even touching into basics of flight mechanics.

He
noticed the pairs carrying the parts have been returning rather quickly and
nodded. They also seemed to be spreading the word, others were streaming in
now. He had to mentally laugh at that. There were now about a hundred people in
the bay. He wondered if anything was getting done.

The
captain paced in his wardroom, trying to keep from feeling so damn helpless.
His ship, his whole world was crumbling around him. Right now their entire
future rested on this one man, this admiral. Hir'ruk and some of the senior
staff were with him. From the expressions some of them shared they too were
feeling completely helpless. His finger stabbed down on the intercom button.
“Where are we on repairs? Can you get the reactor restarted?” he called.

“It
looks good. If we can finish the repairs we should be able to do a start up in
about three hours,” Chief O'Mallory reported over the intercom link.

His
face worked. Decisions were laid out before him; they were increasingly looking
bleak and ugly. He didn't like the path they were on but didn't see a means to
get off of it. “Ah. Chief we need that power.”

“I
know. We're working as fast as we can captain. That Admiral guy is a life
saver,” O'Mallory replied with a hint of relief and awe in her voice.

The
captain grunted. He didn't like owing the man so much.  He wasn't sure what the
man's angle was, why he was helping them like this after what they had tried to
do. “I want him off my ship. As soon as we get the reactor up and running I'm
putting him off.”

O'Mallory
took a deep breath. She'd feared as much. “Captain, he's been an asset. He's
more than paid for his transit to Antigua.”

The
Veraxin Ops officer Hir'ruk bobbed a nod. “We have taken the opportunity to
repair some of the critical systems now that power is offline. This Admiral has
helped repair the ship's computer and has slipped us some parts to aide in
that.”

“I've
managed to finally plug that slow plasma leak we've been putting up with for
over a century captain. Now that we don't have plasma running through the lines
it was simple.”

“Oh?”
The Veraxin asked, moving his mandibles. “The one on deck ten?”

“No,
not that one. Deck four, right outside the reactor. We've lost about four
percent per hour there remember?”