Pursue the Past: Samair in Argos: Book 1 (9 page)

              “But Chief,” one of the women spoke up.  “Like you say, we’ve had to live with it for a long time.  How can we fix it now?”

              “We’re going to replace broken components where things have either burned out or ruptured…” Tamara began.

              “But
how
?” the other woman demanded.  “We don’t have replacements.”

              “Well, Sirra, you’re only half right,” Quesh told her.  “We
didn’t
have any replacement EPS conduits and junctions until this morning.  But thanks to Tamara here,” he gestured with two of his hands, “we now do.  Cargo bay three is being loaded up with replacements straight from the replicator and we’re getting rid of a lot of the excess junk we’ve accumulated in there for the last decade.”  There were looks exchanged.  Apparently, not everyone had heard that the replicators were on line and running.  Which was odd, really, since this was such a small population.

              “So,” Quesh went on.  “We’re going to start tearing out ruptured conduits, recycle them into the replicator, and then plug in new ones.  I don’t care if there are pinhole leaks or full-blown ruptures.  I’d like to start getting a handle on this.  Now, we’re not going to interrupt the current power flow.  We’re going to replace parts that are close to max impedance, by rerouting power, pulling parts, putting in new parts and then restoring flow.  When we’re done, I want the power distribution system to be just… thrumming!”  That got smiles from everyone, some of which were more of the long-suffering variety.  “The old girl has had leaky pipes and a busted up circulatory system for far too long.  I want her to feel young again.  Let’s get to it.”  And with that, the meeting was over.

              Ka’Xarian moved over to them, Tamara and Quesh, while everyone else was getting together into their proper companies.  “Do you think this we can actually do this?” he asked, tentatively.

              Tamara clapped him gently on the shoulder.  “Xar, you and I put together a
Perdition
fighter in a matter of a few days,” she reminded him, smiling.  “We’re not rebuilding the whole ship, but we’ve got forty technicians, well, forty-one with me.  You don’t think we can rebuild the life support and power control systems?”

              The zheen made a buzzing noise, the equivalent of a deep sigh.  “You’re an optimist.”

              She nudged him with one elbow.  “If you and the Chief here can keep people moving, I think we can get both systems overhauled and even make some decent progress on the hull.”

              “All right, Tamara.  I’ve been won over by your optimism.  If anyone can save this old ship, I believe it’s us.”  Tamara smiled at his words.  A truculent team she could deal with, it wouldn’t be the first time an “impossible” project had been laid out before her with instructions to “get on with it”.  But doing it with
no
backup, not even a single ally simply wouldn’t do.  She couldn’t fight the crew and get the overhauls completed.  But it seemed she had a good portion of the techs on her side, as well as the two most important, Quesh and Xar.  Having the captain giving her his support couldn’t hurt either.  Though back in the day, she’d had Captain Horace Bythe’s support as well.  He hated her and he used her as a patsy for his own smuggling and embezzlement schemes, but he wanted her to run the shipyards smoothly and efficiently.

              As the other two headed off to Cargo bay three, Tamara followed along behind, thinking about the command structure in her former job.  Her former life, really.  Bythe was a bastard, but she hadn’t really known that until the fix was in.  He had backed her up all the way, making sure that the resources she needed were made available, throwing in his support with captains of various ships under construction or repair.  As she had begun to investigate the shortages and missing supplies and funds, he had still remained helpful, but upon reflection now (and during the eleven months of incarceration) she remembered times when he seemed more upset about the findings of her investigation than he should have.  Oh, certainly, a commanding officer
should
be angry and upset if he heard that someone was skimming funds and stealing equipment from his base.  However, the captain seemed a bit more rankled than he should be.  Obviously, the man sat back and secretly conspired with Islington while simultaneously promising Tamara all the support she would need. 

              Tamara found her hands clenching and unclenching as they walked.  Now was not the time to deal with this.  She had a great deal of work to do and not a lot of time to do it, working with an untried crew of freighter techs.  On the plus side, she had a good supply of raw materials and a working industrial replicator.  Irritated, she stamped down on the demons threatening to bubble to the surface and returned to work.

              The crew turned out to be a little greener at their jobs than Tamara would have liked, though Quesh and Xar managed to keep them all moving in the right direction.  They began with the most damaged power conduits first, the ones that had been cut out of the loop completely and routed around.  That way, once they got those working, they could reroute around the active ones and replace those.  As Quesh had said, they wanted to completely restore the
Grania Estelle
’s power distribution system and repair all the leaks.  It wouldn’t actually give
more
power to the ship, but it would prevent her from losing any and help keep more systems on line. 

              There were the usual bumps, scrapes and cuts, thankfully minor, until the public address system came on.  There was a noise like a strangled duck and everyone stopped what they were doing for a moment and listened.  Quesh gently tapped one of the welders on the shoulder, who shut off the welding torch and popped up her face shield.  Tamara stopped her work as well, listening intently as everyone else.

              “All hands, this is the Captain.  We are one minute from the hyper limit.  Secure all loose items and hang on to something.  Prepare for hyperspace jump, people.”  Everyone sighed and grabbed hold of the welders’ fuel tanks.

              “What’s happening?” Tamara asked.

              One of the techs shrugged.  “Just a little turbulence.  No big deal.  Just make sure you grab something.”  He followed his own advice and took hold of a pipe inside of an open bulkhead.

              A fine tremor began building in the hull, as well as the whine of machinery.  Within thirty seconds it had changed from a fine tremor to real shaking.  Tools on the deck began to tremble and then bounce as the shaking grew steadily worse.  She grabbed the edge of the open bulkhead next to him as the captain’s voice came back on.  “Ten seconds to jump.” 

              “How bad does this get?” she demanded over the din of the hyperdrive spinning up.

              The man shrugged again.  “A little bit worse than this,” he said nonchalantly.  It didn’t look as though he was being macho to try and impress a lady.  His attitude and his posture signaled that this was a regular occurrence.  If the hyperdrive was this far out of tune that it would cause vibrations this bad, then Tamara knew what was quickly rising up the priority listing in the repair queue.

              There was a mechanical roar from deep within the ship and as the
Grania Estelle
leaped forward into hyperspace, everyone was jerked backward.  The inertial compensators groaned, trying to handle the stress, but Tamara lost her grip on the bulkhead and hit the far wall, hard.  She was pinned against the wall, as the g-forces seemed to increase.  Everyone else seemed to be holding on for dear life as well as the shaking grew so bad it felt like the ship might rattle itself apart.  After a few moments, though, the shaking decreased in intensity, slowly moving back down to the initial fine tremor.  When it got there, the crew released their handholds and picked up any dropped equipment. 

              “Back to work, people,” Quesh ordered.  “Quit your whining, Sev.  It’s nothing you haven’t felt before.”  He looked over at Tamara, who was slumped down against the wall.  “You all right?”

              “That is some serious shear,” Tamara groaned, pulling herself up off the deck.  “Do you know how bad a hyperdrive needs to be tortured to vibrate like that?”  She rubbed her lower back where it had hit the wall.

              Quesh waved his left hands dismissively.  “It’s a little out of alignment.  We’ll take a look after these jobs are done.”

              “Damn right we will.”  She waved off his offer of assistance and moved back to working on removing the section of broken conduit.

              The work started slowly.  Apparently, Quesh had exaggerated the ability of his workers.  While they weren’t entire greenhorns, it was clear that they didn’t have the skills of her former teams on Hudora Station.  They were good welders and the removal of the electro-plasma conduits proceeded apace.  Tamara continued to marvel at the decay that had crept into the
Grania Estelle
.  That and the amount of acceptance the crew had toward that decay disturbed her.  How could they have let things get so bad?  Even without the replicators to help them, there were ways to get the parts that were needed.  She had talked with Xar about the ship, and he had told her that aside from the parts they got from replicator two, they had a machine shop on deck two, so they could make some components they needed. 

              After five hours of work, they had removed and replaced the conduits through half of deck two.  They were taking a short break, seated in the corridor where they were working, eating a tray of sandwiches delivered up from the galley.  It had been a long hard slog so far, but a lot of the easiest replacements had been taken care of.  No one was speaking, they all just sat around and chewed, sipped water from cups or tea from thermoses.  It had been an exhausting five hours, a few of the people were napping against the bulkheads while the others ate.  The conduits were heavy, even though they had been replicated in meter long sections.  Thankfully, they hadn’t needed to carry the parts very far, hover pallets had been brought forth to ferry the broken parts for recycling and the new parts for installation.  The cargo workers, who otherwise were standing around bored during the journey in hyperspace, now had jobs to do getting things around the ship. 

              Quesh had to lay down the law with a few of his workers.  Apparently over the years, engineers and technicians had done little more than put bandages on the worst of problems and ignore anything lesser until it became a serious problem.  That of course kept things going but it only set the ship up for a catastrophic crash at some point in the future.  Depending on how well the patches and quick fixes were done, that might push that crash far down the line, or it might not.  Judging by the state of the EPS conduits, it was clear that the ship didn’t have too many years left using this style of maintenance.  The captain was either complicit in this mode of thinking or else the profit margins were so low that there was very little that could be done. 

              Bulk freighters got the worst of it in maintenance cycles.  Cargo companies didn’t want to spend money on extensive maintenance; ships the size of the
Grania Estelle
didn’t earn money by sitting around in a docking slip.  So they would get minimum amounts of repair and parts and then were sent on their way.  It was worse when the ship wasn’t owned by a cargo company, but was owned by an individual, when cargo runs might only barely break even if it was a good run.  Maintenance might be pushed back as far as it could be just to keep the tanks fueled up and the lights on. 

              But it wasn’t as though this overhaul they were doing now was free.  The parts were being supplied by the replicator and the raw materials were being used by recycling junk and other things from inside the ship, but the replicator couldn’t work for nothing.  It cost energy from the ship’s power reserves to run and unfortunately it was a power hog.  They wouldn’t be able to use the replicator forever.  The repairs and overhauls Tamara and the others were doing now would allow the ship to function better, but it wouldn’t increase the amount of power they had to use.  The myriad other systems on the ship also used power and there was only so much to go around.  They could work on systems until power ran out, but then they’d be forced to stop until they could refuel.  Which also cost money.  The ship was running off an Aschente Series 226 fusion reactor, reconfigured to run on seawater.  Which meant that refueling was easy, but it wasn’t cheap.  There weren’t any oceans just floating around in space, so any water to be had came from planetary bodies.  Which meant that anyone living on those planets could charge for the water that the ship would need.  Which meant if the
Grania Estelle
didn’t have enough money to pay for the fuel needed to fully tank up, it would just cause a cascade of problems down the line.  Less money meant less fuel.  Less fuel meant less power.  Less power meant fewer systems could be on at any one time, which meant they couldn’t use the replicator, which meant that fewer upgrades and repairs could be done, which meant that eventually the ship would fail. 

              Which meant that they needed to start thinking about alternate means of income, be that cash or other resources.  But that was a problem for another day.  They couldn’t do anything about the fuel situation while they were in hyperspace.  She had a few ideas about that, but it would depend on what the situation in the next star system was like, whether they had a thriving space economy. 
For our sake, I hope they don’t.