David Weber - Torch of Freedom

"Yes, Sir," Edie Habib replied in a rather more formal than usual tone. "A lot of this is going to come straight out of the playbook we've been working on," she continued, "so I think we can probably set up the exercise pretty quickly. We can probably be ready to go by . . . what?" She arched an eyebrow at Kamstra as she spoke. "Tomorrow morning, Dirk-Steven?"

"Better make it afternoon," Kamstra advised after a moment's thought. "I've noticed Murphy tends to turn up during the planning process, as well."

"A cogent thought," Habib agreed, and turned back to Rozsak. "Make that tomorrow afternoon, Sir. Right after lunch."

"Good," Rozsak said. "In that case, I think we can adjourn."

"So how bad is it?" Ganny El leaned over, peering into the space uncovered by a removed cover plate. The inside of that space was filled with a lot of equipment whose precise purpose she understood only vaguely.

Andrew Artlett straightened up from the piece of machinery he'd been working on, squatted on his heels, and started wiping his hands with a rag. That was rather silly, really. The interior of a hyper generator—even one for a ship as small as a mere million tons—needed to be kept clean at all times. In fact, Andrew had washed his hands before starting to work on it as thoroughly as a surgeon washes his hands before undertaking an operation.

But old habits died hard. Andrew always thought of himself as what he called a "jackleg mechanic," and such stalwart and doughty souls by definition always had dirty hands that needed to be wiped clean.

"Pretty damn bad, Ganny. It could go out at any time."

"Why?" Ganny glared at the housing. "Those damned things are supposed to be the next best thing to indestructible!"

"Well, they are . . . mostly," Andrew acknowledged. "Unfortunately, even a hyper generator has some moving parts, and this one"—he tapped a badly worn-looking rotor-like device longer than his arm—"is one of them. Worse, it's an important one of them. In fact, it's the stabilizer for the primary stage. If it goes down, you've got no hyper control at all, Ganny. Zip. And this sucker ought to have been changed out in a routine overhaul at least a hundred thousand hours ago. We really need to replace it, before we try to make another jump."

"It can't just be fixed?"

"Fixed? How?" He pointed a finger at the rotor's shaft. Even Ganny, whose many fields of expertise and knowledge did not include matters mechanical, could see that it was badly worn.

"I'd have to remove it, first. That could be done, although it'd take a while. That's the easy part. Then I'd have to add metal to it, using welding equipment we don't have, so I'd have to design and build the welding equipment which I could probably do with the odds and ends we have on this rustbucket of a so-called starship but you're looking at weeks of work, Ganny. Might be as much as two or three months. Then I'd have to turn it back down to specs using metal-shaping equipment which we also don't have. The so-called 'machine shop' on this piece of crap is a joke and you can tell that cheapskate Walter Imbesi I said so. There's no way in God's green earth I could possibly build a modern computerized machining center. And even if I could, who'd design the program? You're probably the closest we've got to a real programmer and . . ."

He cocked an inquisitive eye up at her. Ganny shook her head. "I'm not really that good a programmer and what little skill I do have runs entirely toward financial stuff. There's no way I could design a program to do what you want, Andrew."

He nodded. "What I figured. So that means I'd have to build an old-style lathe."

"A . . . what? "

He grinned. "And you claim to be the old-timer here! A 'lathe' is an antique piece of equipment, Ganny, used to cut metal. More or less contemporaneous, I think, to ox-drawn plows. Still, it'd do the trick although it'd take a lot longer than modern equipment. Fortunately, we've got a pretty good suite of measuring instruments so I could probably manage to get the shaft back to specs using a micrometer."

"A . . . what? "

"A micrometer's an ancient type of measuring tool, Ganny. Definitely contemporaneous to ox-drawn plows. Well, yardsticks anyway."

"What's a 'yardstick'?" piped up Ed Hartman. He and his two buddies had been watching the process with great interest from close up. As close up as Andrew would let them come, anyway. He was deeply suspicious of their claims to being crispy clean.

"A stick to measure a yard, what d'you think?"

"So what's a 'yard'?" asked Brice Miller.

Artlett scowled. "Ganny, is this a consultation over critical repair issues or a remedial history class?"

She smiled, and made shooing motions at the three teenagers. "Give your uncle some breathing room, kids. I'll explain to you what a yard is later."

She looked back down at Andrew. "And how long would it take to make this . . . 'lathe,' you called it?"

"At least as long as it took me to make the welding equipment. Even though it'll have to be a primitive as they come, since I've got no way to make a lead screw. Fortunately I can probably jury-rig an electromagnetic actuator of some kind."

"What's a 'lead'—never mind. Again, in other words, you're talking about weeks."

"Might even be months. There's really no way to know ahead of time. The bottom line is this, Ganny. Unless we replace the worn out parts now, this equipment is likely to go out completely once we put any real stress on it. At that point, we're dead in the water. We'd still have power, so it wouldn't be immediately life-threatening. We could probably survive for at least a year. But we'd just be drifting in space until I could fix it. And, like I said, that could take anywhere up to half a year."

She nodded. "All right, then. I'll just have to tap into what funds we've got. Write up what you need, Andrew, and I'll transmit it down to the surface as soon as we've been given customs clearance. That shouldn't take long. This is our third visit. The Mesans are being downright gracious now that they figure we're repeat business."

Yana came into the kitchen, brushing a light sprinkling of snow off her shoulders. "I hope your plans for a fast getaway don't include antique wheeled ground vehicles squealing around corners. It's pretty slick out there. And the people who are out don't seem to know a damned thing about how to get around in it."

She shook her head in disgust, and Victor and Anton grinned. Despite the fact that Yana had spent most of her adult life in one city or another, she'd spent her girlhood on the planet of Kilimanjaro. Winters there weren't quite as long as on the Star Kingdom's Sphinx, but they were definitely in the same league. She was inclined to look down her nose at the weather complaints voice by effete scions of milder planets, and her opinion of Torch's tropilca and sub-tropical climate was normally summed up with a snort of magnificent contempt.

Her special scorn, however, was reserved for watching people who obviously had no idea what to do with snow trying to cope with it, and it was obvious her morning stroll had given her ample fuel for that response. Mesans, it would appear, were even more clueless than most—in her humble opinion, of course—when it came to dealing with frozen atmospheric water vapor.

Perhaps that was because the planet enjoyed mild and pleasant climatic conditions. Even the dead of winter, except in the polar regions, was no worse than a mild winter day on Haven. It didn't even begin to compare with the ferocious winter conditions of Zilwicki's native Gryphon, andthe hypothermia of a Sphinxian winter would have clear-cut the planetary population like one of Old Earth's Final War bio-weapons.