Deserter Read Free

“Skipper, I know you don’t much like the idea of nonstandard software roaming around the innards of your ship. Can’t say I like it much either, but rather than look the gift horse we got in the mouth, why don’t we tell BuShips that we need a computer like she’s got. Hell, if she transferred off the ship tomorrow, I swear I’d go out and buy one for myself. What would a gadget like yours set a guy back?”
    Kris told him the cost of Nelly’s last upgrade, minus the surgery to get the jack into her head. He let out a low whistle. “Guess we keep you around for a while.”
    The Skipper’s scowl got even deeper. “Dale, what exactly went wrong from a systems point of view?”
    “This is just an old Engineer’s personal guess, but I’d say the calculations the metal is supposed to do automatically as to what this or that part of the ship needs for high g’s was off a bit for our rocket motors that are farthest from the center of the ship. Engine one and six got whipped around by the jinking the most. Number one failed. I think we’ll find six wasn’t that long for the world.”
    “So we need to adjust the automatic algorithm for redistributing metal,” the Captain said.
    “Could do that,” the Engineer agreed, his face going sour. “But I stand by my last recommendation. Take Engineering off the smart-metal regime. Set the specs for our reactor, machinery, and plasma containment fields, then freeze it in place.”
    “You’d freeze Engineering in the tight combat structure?” Kris asked.
    “No can do,” the Engineer said, shaking his head. “Right now, I can’t get to half of my gear to maintain it. Whoever designed the combat format for my spaces was either a midget or expected us to expand back out if we needed to repair or maintain anything. We’ll need a middle ground, something small enough to fight but big enough to work in.”
    “How much bigger?” the Captain asked.
    The Engineer slaved the skipper’s table to one of his readers. A schematic of the Firebolt ’s engineering spaces now took up most of the tabletop. It quickly sequenced through the change from large and comfortable to combat-ready and cramped. As it expanded back out, Dale froze it. “That’s about what I think we’ll need.
    “Computer, calculate the metal requirements to armor that area. Post it to the schematic.” A second later, Nelly added a list of weights to the graphic. Again, the Engineer whistled.
    “A hundred tons of smart metal. You’d need that much to cover fifteen extra meters of Engineering space?”
    “After the damage the Chinook took,” Kris said, damage she had done the targeting for, “BuShips wants the Engineering spaces well protected.”
    “How much does a hundred tons of smart metal cost?” Dale asked.
    Kris told him. He didn’t bother whistling at that one; he just looked at the Captain and groaned. “I guess I know why we’re out here trying to solve this problem.” The Engineer leaned back in his chair, stared at the lowered combat ceiling of the Firebolt, and took in several slow breaths. “Could we replace some of the smart metal with regular old metal? I mean, if I’m not going to go around rejiggering my engine rooms, we don’t need that fancy stuff.”
    Captain Hayworth raised an eyebrow in Kris’s direction. She shook her head. “Nuu Enterprises has done some testing. Mixing regular and smart metal together on the same ship only seems to confuse the smart metal. They can’t recommend it.”
    “Why am I not surprised?” Dale snorted. “When they can charge us an arm and a leg for smart metal, why figure out a way to do something on the cheap?” Both officers carefully avoided looking at Kris. That her grandfather Al was the CEO of Nuu Enterprises and that her own portfolio was centered on several hundred million of Nuu Enterprises’ preferred stock did not prevent them from holding the usual low opinion fleet officers held of corporate practices. The Skipper was