Ghost Station (The Wandering Engineer) (96 page)

The
Kiev returned a week and a half later loaded with 4,000 passengers from the
planet. For the first time the ship docks with the station. It's a tense moment
for all concerned, one wrong move and it could be bad, very bad for station and
ship alike. Fortunately a pair of automated tugs were on hand to help ease the
ship into its docking port.

When
they docked people streamed out in rapid order, eager to see the new station.
Guides, both people and electronic, were there on hand to meet and greet them
and guide them on their way. It was a chaotic situation that fortunately the AI
and cybers had in hand after the first half hour. Sid and Emily may be a little
rusty but they had experienced this situation many times before.

Kiev
spent a few hours taking on stores and was ready to undock in less than a
shift. Cora delayed the action by making a couple of visits to her friends on
the station and sight seeing. Eventually the captain dragged her back to the
ship. She admitted to O'Mallory later that she had been tired and footsore.

They
made regular runs between the station and the planet, shorter each time. Each
run added 4,000 people to the station's population and allowed them to pick up
a load of material and equipment for the ship to install.

Irons
looked up as a green light on his HUD lit. “Yes?” he asked, not pausing as he
finished his shower. Two months since the station had come online and Kiev
should have left some time ago for her next destination but hadn't. The captain
had delayed to make more inner system runs and to get as much as he could out
of the situation. Irons couldn't blame him.

“Admiral,
I thought you'd want to know we've got a transponder echo. DB 1701E formerly
the Golden Dew Drop. She's at the edge of tug nine's range,” Sprite informed
him, diplomatically not placing her avatar on his HUD.

“Incoming?”
he asked, shutting off the shower and reaching for his Towel. He scowled at the
rattle in the pipes. Something was obviously loose. Either it had worked itself
loose from the straps or someone had been lax when they had done the plumbing.
It only took a moment to strap a pipe down to keep it from rattling.
Unfortunately some people were too lazy to go through with that step. And of
course some inspectors overlooked it. He'd heard scuttlebutt that some of the
crews had run into similar issues.

“Derelict
admiral,” Sprite responded. “She's out on the edge of the heliopause about nine
AU east from us.”

Irons
paused as he dried off. “We have a tug out that far?”

“No,
tug nine is only two AU out. She just barely caught the transponder. It's
intermittent so the tug unfortunately didn't get a second fix to triangulate a
location properly.”

“Great,”
Irons said. To hell with it, he thought, activating his shields. Water beaded
and shed off him as the force field spun up. He felt like shaking like a dog
anyway.

“Feel
better?” Sprite asked amused.

“A
little,” he admitted as he toweled his hair. His shields spun back down on
their own. “Why the E? The Echo part I mean.”

“Apparently
there have been a great deal of ships with the 1701 designation. Echo is the
fifth in the line.”

“For
a dispatch boat it has a lot of pretensions,” he muttered.

Sprite
chuckled. “It's a former yacht turned courier, of course it has pretensions.
After all why name her the Golden Dew Drop?”

“True,”
Irons said, getting dressed. He had heard of the Honey Dew Drop, ships named
after people places and things, even events. The name really didn't matter to
him. “Do we have anything out that way?”

“No,
unfortunately not. I already checked. We've got another tug en route to the
sector though,” she said.

“Automated
or piloted?” Irons asked. Tugs were out in force now. He'd spent a lot of the
past couple of weeks making them and training their crews. Now they were out on
their maiden flights.

“Manned
but she's pushing three unmanned tugs. The plan was to deploy them and have the
pilot telepresence through the other tugs. I take it you want to detour?”

Irons
puckered his lips, thinking. Eventually he blew out a raspberry. “Not unless we
get another signal and they get a location. Send supplementary orders to the
pilot. If they get a signal from DB 1701E they are to deploy a minimum of one
tug to it. Stick a rider bot in the supplementary orders just in case.”

“Understood
admiral. Anything else?”

“No,
that's about it. Unless you have something?” he asked.

“The
usual report so far. Myers wanted to do more digging in the science wing; Fu
wants more processors for the cybers...”

“In
other words situation normal, everyone's being a pain in the ass,” he said
dryly.

“Pretty
much,” Sprite responded amused.

“Thought
so,” Irons said going over to the food replicator just as she finished sending
a signal to it to start his morning coffee. “Thanks,” he said, taking the cup
out as the replicator finished with it. “What's on the agenda for today?”

“Well,
if we're going to follow through with your plan we need to overhaul the
shields. But I did some digging in the specs of the station and I didn't like
what I found...”

Sprite
had done a thorough look at the station's specs. She had discovered and passed
on to admiral Irons that the station has no defenses beyond a low rated energy
shield. That explained why the station had been battered when the shields
failed he realized immediately. Energy shields were energy intensive, something
most engineers knew. They looked pretty but the massive energy draw and the
equipment needed to keep them functional was a logistics nightmare. Equipment
constantly wore down, overheated, or went out of synch for various reasons.
When that happened or if the power was interrupted then poof! No shield. Which
meant
no
defense.

Throw
in a large surface area and the equipment and power draw went up exponentially.
When you threw a lot of resources into something, making it horribly complex
you made it easy for it to break down and hard to diagnose and repair easily.

Oh
sure you could build redundancy into a system. Back up after back up. That was
normal for any engineer. You didn't design a system without some level of back
up, and preferably more than one tier! But there was a point where you got
diminished returns on investment so to speak. Too many subsystems tended to
trip things up and slow them down or cause their own failures.

Take
for instance large shields. The station's shield was one example. It wasn't
quite as large as a Bernal Spheroid’s shield, or a battle moon, but it was
pretty close.

He'd
been on the board to design shields for planets and even one of the Dyson
spheres. Great in theory, pretty for the public image to soak up during the
first days of the Xeno war, but he had tried to squash the idea every chance he
got. They were wasteful in the extreme.

Sometimes
the best things were the simplest in nature. Fewer chances for something to go
wrong. Obviously the designers of this station had been thinking pretty and not
practical.

“Well!
That's got to change,” he said looking around. He'd just laid out what he found
to Gwen and the others. The cybers didn't look happy when he met with them an
hour later.

“We
can do without your weapons thank you,” Fu said coldly. He had bluffed the
pirates centuries ago and was certain he could do it again. All he had to do
was threaten to blow up the station if they attempted to board. It had worked
then and it would work now he was certain of it.

Irons
raised an inquiring eyebrow. He didn't want a fight but he'd give as good as he
got if he needed to do so. “Oh? You can do without defensive weapons?”

“Since
when is a weapon a defense?”

“You
obviously haven't practiced martial arts much. Since someone used a rail gun to
deflect an incoming projectile from damaging a station or ship,” Irons
riposted, turning and glaring. “Kung fu of a different variety someone said. It
doesn't have to be built exclusively to shoot enemy ships out of the sky you
know, though that is a thought as well.”

“The
shield will be fine. There is no need for this,” Fu said dismissively.

“Sometimes
the threat of a weapon is more of a deterrent than ever using it,” Sid
murmured. Irons nodded.

“There
is that. It would make a casual pirate or thief think twice and be on their
best behavior right?” the admiral asked.

Fu
turned away feigning disinterest. “The shield is all we need.”

“You
do realize the work involved in rebuilding the thing right? In not only
rebuilding it but powering it and maintaining it? I did see all that plate
welded over the inner shield right?” Gwen asked. She and the bears were on
hand. Fu hadn't been happy about adding Gwen to the council but she'd made it
clear if things didn't change she and a lot of like minded individuals would
leave.

The
Stewards were now paying more attention after they had found out about Fu's
little stunt with the dome. One or the other or both now attended meetings and
whichever one was not present handed their proxy to their partner.

Sid
and some of the others winced or shifted uncomfortably as the Tauren glared at
them. She looked around to each of them. Finally the bears looked at each other
and then Rachael turned to Fu.

“The
shield? You mean the one that did such a good job holding off the pirates the
last time they were here?” Rachael Steward demanded. She wasn't about ready to
forgive him for the dome Fu realized. She turned to address Irons and the
others. “I agree with you admiral. Do what needs to be done.”

“The
burnt hand teaches best,” Irons said with a nod. “And they are just tools.
Doctor Myers I'll show you a trick I learned when I was a shave tail. You can
calibrate an energy weapon as either a lidar mount or a primitive spectrometer.
It's cool,” he said.

“And
energy intensive?” Myers said. Irons grinned. Myers smiled suddenly. “I like
it,” he said.

“A
weapon is just a tool. It's the intent of the user that matters,” Irons said.
“And yes, you can use it to bore into a rock and use a separate camera system
to view the ejecta and scan it for material concentrations and type,” he
explained.

“Cool,”
Myers said with a nod. Fu saw that the argument was lost so wisely withheld any
more objections.

After
several weeks had passed the station was firming up nicely. The planetary mayors
had sent representatives to inspect the station and others to join the station
council. Some of the new representatives were invalids recently injured or in
the last stages of a disease. A few were elderly patrons of one or more
influential people who for their own reasons gave them one last chance at life.

Doctor's
Trask and Kraft had their work cut out for them augmenting the people.
Fortunately the medics had laid the groundwork with their training and repaired
equipment. The facilities were there but they were concerned about the people,
they still lacked the necessary fine skills to perform such invasive
procedures.

Each
of the patients had to pass a rigorous exam. Two were rejected; they had
terminal illnesses that would kill them anyway. One other was cured of her
illness. She gratefully returned to her family on the planet.

The
doctors talked the situation over as their staffs worked on building their
skills through various simulations and by working with the various injuries
common in repairing the station.

Of
course they also began second stage implant procedures which helped raise their
proficiency. There were thousands of volunteers. Many of the volunteers had
level one implants so they started with those in critical positions.

The
downtime each experienced was both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that
they needed the downtime, many had been working flat out for weeks, working
from the moment they got up until the moment they crashed from sheer
exhaustion.

It
was a curse in that it threw the schedule the council had set all to hell. It
also made for some holes and confusion in the chain of command.

Gwen
would have been there to fix and plug things but she was one of the first to
get second level implants. Her surgery had run a little long so her recovery
had taken a bit longer as well. With her in sickbay Riff would normally take up
the slack but he was next to his mate. In their absence the admiral had pitched
in.

At
the beginning of the second month the medical staff formed an assembly line on
Fridays and augmented over a hundred people including several of their own
medical staff. This helped to give them the necessary confidence to take the
next step beyond that. They set out a firm number though, no more than two
dozen fully augmented cybers per year since the procedures involved were so
tedious and risky. They also set up a strict mental screening process to go
along with the physical one. More than one person was filtered out, causing
some problems with their patrons.