Battleship Destroyer (55 page)

"
Already talking to her Chief engineer. One of her engines took the blast full on and is gone. Just a big hole up her stern. The problem is that half her engineers are casualties from the beam blooming sir. She is still checking the other engine for just how much damage. We will know more in a couple hours after we dock with them but I doubt if the other engine is going to be reparable any time soon. The slag from the destroyed engine probably burned most of the Engine coils out. There is not that much armor around the engines and core."

Jack brought the ship up to the crippled Shichimi while marvelin
g at the damage. The deep valley gouged out of one side of the bow of the ship continued half way down along the ship getting deeper with every deck until it disappeared into the ship's holds. Jack could visualize the damage it wrought inside crew’s quarters with the empty cargo compartments coming off light and then the aft living and working spaces.  He could not see where it had hit on the solid engine at the stern but he could see the damage from the beam that mushroomed, blowing holes out the side of the aft section in half a dozen places before the beam shot on up through the ship. He could not believe the ship was going to be salvageable as he matched rotation and docked onto the opposite side of the hulk from all the damage. A dozen tubes where shot across to hatches, sealed and opened to allow fast and easy access after mooring lines were attached and snugged up to hold the two ships securely together.

The
Captain studied a ship pulling up a couple thousand yards off their bow. The other ship launched its half dozen gigs along with some 30 life boats. The gigs quickly gathered up the life boats attaching groups of 5 life boats nose to stern to each other using the bow and stern hatches in each lifeboat and then to the nose of one of the gigs forming one long boat able to hold several hundred tons of supplies or hundreds of casualties. Six long cargo, casualty barges where soon shuttling back and forth between ships. "Good thinking Harry, when you don’t' have the pilots for the dozens of shuttles in your hangers. Comm, pass that recommendation on to the other ships." Jack used his thrusters to slow and then stop both ships rotation. The Captain turned to Jack. "Mr. Turner that was a damn good docking. I don't think I could have done any better."  

"Thanks sir. All the practice assaulting ships in the Game sir. I never dreamed I would ever actually have a chance to do it in real life. Having the two ships carbon copies helped tremendously
though sir.  Ah. Permission to join the Engine recovery teams sir?"

"No Mr. Turner. We have plenty of people to do that. You are going to gather your crew of misfit scientists and engineers and get busy figuring out how to make our main guns and torpedoes better weapons. I don't want to have to
throw spit wads at the enemy again."

Jack walked up to a view port in the
2nd crews mess and sat down at a table.  The Officers mess as well as the main crews mess was deep inside the ship and he wanted to see what was going on outside the ship with his own eyes and the 2nd crews mess was the only place on the whole ship that you could without climbing into a gun turret. It was placed along the leading edge root of the number One landing wing/cooling fin, with large windows allowing almost a complete view around the ship. Four ships sat scattered around the pair of docked ships with some 30 of the long cargo barges shuttling between them with more shuttle and transfer boats joining every hour as more pilots were found from the depths of The Game and passed their qualification Sim ride. The Captain / Vice Admiral had decided to abandon the hulk and the ships were in the process of stripping the crew and everything useful off of it. With empty holds, they had plenty of room to put even the largest pieces of equipment including the one remaining engine (what was left of it) inside to transport. Someone had figured they would finish stripping the hulk about the same time they finished getting the other two damaged ships ready to run and just in time to start slowing down to rendezvous with the cloud before making their way to The Rock. It added a week to the trip but finally killing one of those monsters was worth it. They were using that time to make sure only a junk shell was left with not even the weapons just in case it missed the cloud and was not burned up. After all, it was headed for the enemy fleet.

As Jack
ate, the last thing he wanted to be doing was sitting on his ass at a terminal as everyone else stripped the hulk. He wanted to get his hands dirty, do something, anything but sit. Even if he was working on the newest weapons possible for the fleet. That is, his teams were hard at work designing new weapons for the fleet. With the Ensign's coaching, he had been leaving most of the work to the teams and just offering helpful suggestions when he had some. Going from team to team keeping track of their progress was a full time job. Still he wanted to get more involved with something he could bury himself into instead of just taking dips here and there. Even if it was just tearing out a piece of equipment.

The Ensign sat down beside him. "Here you are. I hear you guys are planning on doubling up the Capacitors on the guns to increase their power. Sounds like a good idea to me."

"Ya except that it will just burn out the barrels, maybe after only a few shots." Jack stuffed a fork full of tuna stroganoff into his mouth, not even tasting it.

"Well a few good shots are better than a lot of crappy shots."

"Ya that is a point. A few good shots is all we would have needed
to get through that damn shield plate in front. How is the salvage business going?"

"Pretty good. We have taken most of the guns off already and now we are trying to figure out how to get the Capacitors out.
Whoever designed this ship needs shot. The Turret rings were evidentially built around the Capacitors. Looks like we are going to have to cut half the deck apart just to cut them loose, let alone out of the ship as big as they are." She dug into her dinner. "The ship could crash and they would not go anywhere as well as they are mounted.

"At least you are doing something." Jack pouted.

"I will trade you. Salvaging is a pain in the butt. At least once we get them out, all we have to do is push them up to one of the holds and chain them down."

"Push them up to a hold?" Jack sat back from the table holding a spoon full of stroganoff in
midair halfway to his mouth. Finally he finished the bite and smiled. "I think it will work." Jack got up from the table and bent down and kissed her on the cheek with a brief hug then left the mess as a baffled Ensign watched him leave. His plate still on the table forgotten.

"Hey. They don't have busboys here." She said as he disappeared out the hatch.

A couple hours later the Ensign finally stood back as the last steel was cut, freeing the huge pair of Capacitors needed for the twin barreled turret. The turret ring that held the base of the gun turret mount was built around the Capacitors simply to get them as close to the gun as possible. All the steel and supports were for resisting the recoil forces of the gun and not to keep the Capacitor from moving or ever being replaced even though it had that effect. After all, Capacitor's never needed replaced.

Then Jack walked up to the Ensign to the Ensigns surprise. "Hi Jack. You here to shut down th
e grav coils so we can move these monsters?"

Jack smiled at her. "Sorry, n
o. I need you to move this pair of Capacitors into the engine head deck so we can hook them up to one of the gun turrets. All the others will follow. Hopefully we can get at least one pair hooked up in time to test it on this hulk when we leave. The other ships will have to cross connect the capacitors in the turrets to fire one gun at a time if this works. The Captain won’t let me cross connect the coils to one gun tube in the turrets until we test doubling up the capacitors with one of these. She doesn't want her guns screwed with incase the enemy shows up.  But that is working out great. Once I run the tests, we will be the only ship able to fire both turret guns at a reasonable temperature at the same time, thanks to you guys."

"What? How did you get around all the problems of putting such massive power
through the feed modulator and beam generators? They were not designed to handle that much raw power."

"We are working on that now
but I am banking mostly on the fact that they designed the guns never to wear out by over building everything on them like the mount you have been tearing apart. You just get them into the engine head deck and pray I am not completely crazy."

The Ensign walked up to the hole in the hull with Jack and then jetted out into space
for a few feet before jetting to a stop, leaving Jack standing on the edge looking at her.  She looked around and across to the ship docked to the hulk and saw a big hole in its side just below and between two of the turrets. The big cut out hull plate floating not far away tethered to the ship. "Ok, Mr. Turner, we will get them there for you." Turning, she looked over to the other gun mount basses and checked the growing holes in them. "You should get another pair in about 6 hours. The rest not long after as we get more crews released from other work."

She floated back down
to land next to Jack. As she entered the gravity field and her feet touched the deck she continued. "I hear you are doubling up on the debris shield coils in the bow with the ones taken from the hulk. What's that about?" She took off headed toward the back of the large compartment with the pair of capacitors in the center at a good clip.

"That and adding
spare engine and grav coils to them. One of my teams is trying to produce a few billion very small artificial black holes spread out across the front of the ship to absorb the beams and anything else the ship runs into but we are running into problems getting enough power up forward that far from the engines. But then that is the problem with adding the power from the extra capacitors to the guns. It is one thing running a couple of foot thick heavy bus bars up a deck or between gun tubes but running a mega power cable up 1500 feet to the bow shields is another thing. Especially when you don't have it and stripping it out of the hulk would take too much time."

Jack
slowed his rapid walk as they approached an arm thick cable cut off and laying across the deck and kicked it without moving it much before catching up to the Ensign. "No. Luckily one of the other nerds has figured out how to use the plasma the fusion generators produce. All we need to do is run a ridiculously small plasma pipe up to the bow to supply the massive amounts of power from the engine to the grave coils we are going to need to create the new shields. If that works we could lighten up every ship in the Navy by thousands of tons while reducing the work needed to lay all the heavy cable and replace them with a few small light plasma pipes, not to mention eliminating all the power lost in transmission through the solid cables even for the short distances on the ship. I just wish the bread board power supplies the team is assembling did not look so much like a Rude Goldberg hundred step mouse trap or a perpetual motion machine impersonation."

Jack
was walking with the Ensign as she returned to the back work area of the Capacitor when the gravity was cut off and it finally floated free from its supports. "My problem now is what happens to all that power and energy the artificial black holes absorb. Will it blow up the ship when the black hole is turned off? Someone brought up the theory that if the black hole absorbs enough energy (since energy is just another form of mass), it could turn in to a real black hole and swallow up the ship. I am trying to figure out some way to bleed off all the energy slowly so it does no harm but I keep running into walls." Jack was looking at the Ensign as they walked up to the capacitor and slammed his head into a sharp ended support that had been cut off waste high but was now head high, knocking him spinning across the deck cracking his crystal clear crew helmet while knocking a small hole in it.

As air started to blow out the crack
, with Jack tumbling above the deck unable to reach or help himself, the Ensign grabbed Jack by the arm and dragged him down then took off in a bent legged run before adding her thruster pack on full power, (keeping at least one foot on the deck, dragging it behind her) as she pulled an emergency patch out of a thigh pouch flinging several others across the compartment in the process. Slapping it onto his helmet's bubble. Finally she threw him into the nearest lock and followed. "Medic to lock 42, deck 196. Cracked helmet. Stat." Hitting the big red emergency repressurize button. Her suit started to deflate but her helmet popped off flying across the compartment before the air stopped shrieking into the lock. Carefully she slipped Jack's helmet off his head and used her hand to pinch the bridge of his nose to stop his nose from bleeding until she could drag out a bandage from her medical kit.

The shrieking stopped and the medics ran in pushing the Ensign aside
before she could slap the expanding foam bandages up his nose. As they slapped Jack onto the stretcher the medic that had pushed her away grabbing the standard bandages out of her hand and bent over him blocking her view. They whisked Jack away. The Ensign sat back against the bulkhead of the lock. After they disappeared around the first intersection she buried her head in her hands. "I can’t take my eyes off you for one frigging second can I you stupid moron." Breathing hard after the airlock had stolen the air from her lungs she finally stopped feeling light headed and climbed to her feet and started after Jack. Stopping at the inner hatch and grabbing one of the hand rails for support, she realized that they were not about to let her see him for quite a while. Turning she started back into the airlock picking up her helmet again using the hand rails to keep from falling and then stopped with her helmet half on. "Screw the damn Capacitor!" Hitting her comm. "Control, I am reporting to Sickbay."