The Veritian Derelict (Junkyard Dogs) (27 page)

Chapter 40.

Catskill-Soroyan star system, near the Piedmont asteroid mining facility, December 11, 2598.

Strike Leader Sarkis, in command of two of the Sheik of Barsoom's destroyers and an additional four support vessels,
paced the bridge of the
Minotaur
impatiently as his flagship docked near the Piedmont Mining Station. Sarkis and his destroyer group had fully expected to find that the invasion force that the Sheik had been forced to leave behind had taken over the remote mining colony and had met little resistance while doing so.

After transfer to the station via the
Minotaur's
small cutter, the Strike Leader was ushered through several corridors towards the former Security command center of the facility. All around him was the aftermath of some hellacious fighting. There were burn marks on the walls and hatch doors hanging askew. The loyal troops of the abandoned force give him the group's special salute as he passed them but all of them seemed somewhat subdued. Finally the Strike Leader and his small entourage arrived in the command center. The acting leader of the abandoned force came to attention and greeted him as he came into the compartment.

"
Strike Leader Sarkis," said Corporal Tahan, the highest ranking of the terrorists that had managed to remain alive and uncaptured on the Piedmont Station, "Words cannot express how happy we are to see you! We have been confined to the airlock area of this confounded station for the last several days."

Sarkis looked around. "Is
this area secure?"

"
I think so, Strike Leader, as soon as your ships came into the system all of the security forces disappeared. I expect that they fear the weapons on your ships with good reason. We presume that they have retreated into the interior of the asteroid below. If that is so, they will be very difficult to find and all but impossible to root out."

"It appears that these enemy soldiers put up a good resistance."

"I respectfully point out that these were not soldiers, Strike Leader, but merely civilian security. As hard as these people fight, I would hate to go up against their soldiers!"

"I had heard rumors of how formidable Spacers could be,"
said Sarkis.

"They are true
, Strike Leader."

"Tell me more about
the battle for this facility," said the Strike Leader.

"The plan to
, ah...liberate the Tunisian destroyer went well until some of her crew managed to scuttle the weapons. While we were boarding the station, there was a standoff between the destroyer and two of the mining ships. With the destroyer disarmed, the mining ships had no trouble driving her off. Then with no warning and no mercy they demonstrated the power of their mining lasers by destroying our other shuttle, killing everyone on board. These Spacers are ruthless, cold-hearted killers, Strike Leader!"

"Easy, Tahan. Where are those ships now?"

"The mining ships departed a couple of days ago along with a NITrans cargo ship but we do not know where they were headed."

"So you and your men were stranded, what happened then?"

"The security forces met us as we came through the airlock and they fought like demons. After the Sheik destroyed the communications suite, they locked the entire facility down and did everything they could to resist us. Then they began to pick our numbers off one by one. After Touma was captured, we decided to stay together and defend rather than try to continue our attack."

"
Is there anything of value here?"

"
I confess that I do not know," replied Tahan. "There is supposed to be a secure storeroom down inside the asteroid stocked with all sorts of treasures, if you believe the information we got. It was to be one of our objectives. We simply could not get anywhere near that storeroom; the station residents have total control of that area."

"
That is unfortunate, Tahan. How are they equipped for weapons?"

"As you would expect,
Strike Leader, they were not heavily armed but they seem to have enough pulse weapons so that each of the security people had at least one. I have no idea what awaits us down inside the asteroid."

"Why would they have had such weapon
s here?"

"I couldn't say, Strike Leader, but
I am not surprised. These are a very warlike people. I think a better question is why they did not have more of them. I think perhaps we were fortunate to catch them by surprise but how can you know anything about these Spacers? They are the spawn of Satan!"

"
I was told your group had a portable assault cannon?" said the Strike Leader.

"Yes, Strike Leader, we used it in the
initial battle to gain a foothold on the station. We might still be in the cursed airlock itself if we hadn't used it. We had to use extreme caution because the weapon is powerful enough to punch holes in the outer walls of the station."

"
Thank you, Corporal," said Sarkis. "I think I am beginning to understand the situation here."

The Strike Leader came to a decision
just a few moments later. "We have wasted enough time on this worthless enterprise," he said. "Get your men rounded up. We are leaving immediately! This system is no longer suitable to be our master rendezvous point."

"
At once Strike Leader!" Tahan gave his leader a stiff salute and, unable to disguise the relief he felt, turned on his heel and left the room.

Strike Leader
Sarkis strode over to the view port and surveyed the motley assortment of mining craft and other battered machinery that the stranded group of invaders had inherited when they had finally been given possession of the station. His expression, reflected in the transparent material of the viewport, was troubled. Matters were going fairly well in most ways, he thought, though it nagged him that the fighting over this all but insignificant facility had been so costly and that several ships had escaped. The escapees could be a nuisance by warning other potential targets. He shrugged it off; things were going well enough. Nearly time to move on to the next phase of their plans. Unfortunately, according to the latest reports, that accursed Ambassador Saladin had escaped another attempt to capture or kill him.

Information from
their informant on board the
Istanbul
had allowed them to organize an attack on the Santana Nexus. No, they hadn't been able to get the confounded ambassador, yet, but the latest news from his informant had let Sarkis know where Saladin was likely to be for the near future: New Ceylon. The Strike Leader and the Sheik and ever growing forces would find him there. The Strike Leader's reflection smiled back at him grimly. This time the Ambassador would not escape!

Chapter
41.

Onboard UTFN Auxiliary Ship
Greyhound
, somewhere in the Heard's World star system, December 11, 2598.

For the umpteenth time, F.C. Talbot
inspected the capacitor system on the Bofors pulse beam weapons system that he and his companions had installed on the
Greyhound
. As he did so his brow furrowed in thought; there was something about the capacitor system, something basic, that was nagging at him though whatever it was remained tantalizingly just beyond his mental grasp. His fellow engineer, Angus Hawkins, was inspecting the other end of the capacitor stack. Hawkins looked to be every bit as frustrated.

T
heir ship was in a dangerous situation and the beam weapons they had installed were sorely needed. Why they were having so much trouble with something as basic as getting the capacitor system for the weapon to charge up was baffling. Though the power demands were near the upper limits of what their powerplant could deliver, their calculations indicated that they should have adequate power to charge the capacitors. Alarmingly, however, their single attempt to charge the capacitor banks had succeeding in doing nothing but cutting power to the entire ship. If the crew hadn't responded in time, the emergency overrides, designed to protect the power systems of the ship, would have shut down main power completely. Indeed, the full shutdown sequence had actually been initiated. Another thirty seconds or so and they would have had to allow the power plant and several other key components to cool down completely before initiating a restart, a process that could have taken several hours. If they were, in fact, likely to face an enemy, they could not afford a similar occurrence.

"
Dr. Carlisle?" Hawkins called out to Carlisle, "Could you be comin' down with your schematics again, lass? We be needin' another look."

Carlisle came
down from the turret control room into the capacitor chamber on the lowest level of the beam weapon emplacement. Talbot joined her and Hawkins in the narrow space between the two capacitor banks. Dressed in a working coverall, Harris squeezed down into the lower confines of the turret as well. Carlisle brought up a holo schematic in the air between the entire group. They all scrutinized it intently yet again. Carlisle frowned in thought while she stared at the display.

"
Secondary battery...rapid capacitor recharge...major power demand..." she spoke out loud as she studied the schematic, "these were designed to be charged by the power plant of a heavy cruiser. Granted, we don't have that much power, yet our information indicates we should be able get these systems charged up with this power plant. What in the hell are we missing?" she asked.

"
Might there be some way to be reducin' the power demand?" asked Hawkins.

"
Reduce the power demand!" exclaimed Talbot, excitedly. "That's it Hawk! That's what I've been trying to figure out. Here look at this," he said as he pointed out a detail on the schematic. "Each of these banks is actually made of four individual capacitor sub-modules. Our calculations are fine, but they're based on the power required to charge a single sub-module. Now that I look over the schematics again, the problem is obvious."

"Whatever you've got, we'd like to hear it," said Harris.

"
Okay," Talbot began, "These Bofors units were one of the first variable-power beam weapons ever developed. The designers figured out that they could regulate the amount of energy in each pulse by altering the number of sub-modules they channeled in to power the individual pulses.

"I think I'm following you,
Frank," said Harris. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but for each weapon you could fire four pulses from single sub-modules or two more powerful pulses by combining the output of two modules. Or you could do three modules for a very strong pulse and one weaker pulse from the remaining module. Most powerful of all would be all four modules channeled at one time. Is that about right?"

"Essentially, yes," replied Talbot.
"Now, what if the computer for this emplacement reverted to the system default settings of the battlecruiser we removed it from when we powered it back up."

"That makes sense," said Harris.
"We never told it to do anything differently."

"Th
e donor ship would have been part of the group that engaged the Opposition battlecruisers," Talbot continued. "Against another battlecruiser, they would have almost certainly been operating these beam weapons at full power."

"
That means they would have been discharging all four capacitors for every pulse they fired," said Carlisle.

"Exactly," said Talbot
, "And, if that is indeed what happened, the computer will have reset to charge all four of these depleted sub-modules simultaneously, and would have attempted to do so for both weapons!"

"You mean we were trying to charge all eight of these sub-modules at once?" asked Harris.

"That would appear to be the case," replied Talbot. "I
will guarantee you that the power interface for the railguns, which we have the emplacement connected to, is simply not up to handling that kind of power demand!" He frowned in thought, before continuing. "Since we haven't been able to fully power the turret's operating systems, we aren't going to be able to reprogram the computer. There might be a way, however... Ah! Do you suppose we could figure out a way to manually isolate the individual sub-modules and charge them up separately?

The
group looked at the projection for a bit longer but no one could find fault with Talbot's reasoning. The excitement level in the crowded capacitor chamber began to ramp up considerably as a solution to their problem began to jell.

"I believe you might be on t'somethin',
Frank," said Hawkins, still looking at the projection.

"
...battle damage...partial function...I'll see if I have anything under emergency procedures," said Carlisle as she cut the holo display and consulted another of the vast number of files stored on her wrist computer. The three men watched as she did her computer magic yet another time while talking out loud. "Bofors twin... emergency procedures... capacitor charging... Hmmm..." She actually stopped thinking out loud as she got more engrossed in the subject.

Finally
she turned again to the three men. "There is a procedure to operate the system with disabled sub-modules. You just have to bypass the bad ones by routing power around them. We might be able to do something similar. We should be able to isolate single sub-modules for charging. Only..."

"Only what, Ensign?" asked Harris.

"Only we'd have to do it manually every time we want to charge up one of the sub-modules."

"Show me," said Harris.

Carlisle led the three men over to one end of the port capacitor stack. The individual capacitor sub-modules themselves were shaped rather like large, long-necked bottles with the neck of each bottle about half the thickness of the base and roughly half the length of the entire module. Each capacitor stack was made up of four of these "bottles" stacked horizontally into a compact cluster. Within the cluster, one of the two lower sub-modules was mounted with the base pointed forward and the other with the base pointed aft. The two upper modules were stacked similarly, with the neck of one alongside base of the other but were arranged just the opposite, with the neck end of the upper module over the base end of the module below and vice versa. The narrower necks of two sub-modules alternating with the swollen bodies of the other two made the stack as compact as possible. There were two racks made up of four capacitor -sub-modules each, one rack for each of the beam projectors, separated from each other by a walkway about a meter wide.

"If you think of
each sub-module as an oversized bottle," Carlisle said, "then the manual overrides are on the bottom ends of the bottles, under a protective cover. That means that there are four overrides for each projector, two on the opposite ends of each stack. See if you can get the cover off from the end of that capacitor you're standing next to, would you Hawk?"

Hawkins unscrewed two knurled knobs on the end of the capacitor module
nearest him and removed a shallow cover, revealing the controls for manually isolating the individual sub-modules from one another.

"
In order to perform the manual switching operation, a single worker would have to run from one end of the stack to the other," said Carlisle. "Alternatively, the operation would require two people, one on either end of the stack."

"
Let's get the rest of these covers off," said Harris as he began working on the covers from the forward end of the Portside capacitor stack. The others pitched in and soon the ends of all eight sub-modules were exposed.

There was a single large
, double-bladed manual switch on the bottom of each 'bottle.' In one position the power was routed to the individual capacitor sub-module. In the other, the unit was bypassed. The four of them played around with the switches to get the feel of them and then, with careful attention to Carlisle's schematics, took the time to determine the sequence of activation and deactivation of each switch that they would have to follow to manually charge each sub-module. Finally, the group reported to Murdock on the bridge to describe to her what they'd found out.

"We think we
may have found a solution to the beam weapon problem, Captain," said Harris.

"Tell me," replied
Murdock. She looked doubtful.

"
Here's what we've got," said the Lieutenant, "the capacitor bank for each of the two projectors is made up of four individual sub-modules. We have the capacitors connected to the power plant using the outputs that were originally used for the
Terrier's
projectile weapons."

"That would seem to make the most sense," said
Murdock, who was herself a pretty competent engineer.

"That's what we thought," said Harris. "Trouble is, when we attempted to feed power to the capacitor bank, it
tried to draw enough power to charge all eight sub-modules at the same time. Our power plant and the outputs for the weapons were never designed to flow that much power and an overload breaker in the weapons interface kicked the ship's power off to protect all systems."

"Is there any way we can bypass th
at breaker," asked Murdock.

"Nay, C
aptain," said Hawkins. "It be incorporated into the weapons outputs. We might could replace it with somethin' stouter if we was still bein' in the Scrapyard, but out here, we've nay got the right parts."

"So, what do you suggest?"

After a quick consultation with her wrist computer, Carlisle brought up a holographic schematic in the air in front of them. "There are a series of manual overrides on each of the individual sub-modules, Captain." She pointed to the corresponding areas on the schematic. "We think it's possible to isolate each of the individual sub-modules from the other seven and charge them up one at a time."

"You think?" asked
Murdock, her skepticism obvious.

"Well," said Harris. "We won't know until we test it. And there are some other problems."

"Like what?"

"If it works, the power demand will
still be substantial. According to what we can piece together from the information in Carlisle's wristcomp and the electrical ratings of the components in the gun emplacement, we figure that even charging one capacitor sub-module at a time will be very close to the limit of the circuit breaker. That and we'll probably need at least six people to operate the projectors."

"How so?"

"Well, we'll need at least one person at each end of the capacitor stacks to run the manual switches, one person at the fire control console to monitor power inputs and capacitor charges and then someone to aim and fire the guns."

"It may not be as bad as you think, C
aptain Murdock," said Carlisle. "If we have some advanced warning, we think it will be possible to charge all eight of the capacitor sub-modules before we go into any kind of action. If we did that, we'd have eight shots, at the lowest pulse output, before we'd need to charge again."

"If you get them working, it'll be more than worth the effort," said
Murdock, rubbing her chin. "How long do you figure it'll take to charge up one of the sub-modules?"

"These capacitors aren't nearly as big as the ones
that were on those two pirate cargo ships, Captain," said Harris, "and this power plant is quite a bit more powerful. We think maybe fifteen or twenty seconds per module. Give us another, ah... ten seconds to manually activate the necessary switches and we're talking about a half a minute per module. Given a little leeway for the unknown, if we do everything right, we could be fully armed in around five minutes, give or take."

"When can we be ready for another test?" asked
Murdock.

"We could be ready to charge up one of the
sub-modules in just a few minutes," said Harris.

Murdock,
looked at the four of them, Harris, Carlisle, Hawkins and the much older Talbot. "Now would be a good time for a test; that moon and those two ships will be behind the planet for at least a couple of hours yet and, while they are, they shouldn't be able to detect a beam discharge, if we should be so lucky. I hope to hell you guys know what you're doin'. Let me remind you that we are alone in a system with at least one armed hostile ship and possibly more. If we lose power, we also lose shields. I say go ahead and give it a test, the sooner the better, so we don't get any nasty surprises if we do need to run or fight or use our shields."