Read Online Ghost Station (The Wandering Engineer) by Chris Hechtl - Free Book Online

then snorted. “So I see,” she said.
“Martha just came in with a bag full of stuff. Plastic? Why are you doing that?
It's not a priority Irons, we need the replicator focused on the emitters!”
    “The
industrial one is chief. I'm using my food replicator to make plastic
and electronics for you. They don't have a long life expectancy but they should
do in a pinch until we can get better ones going,” he replied.
    There
was a long pause and he felt like she was looking the parts over. After a
moment she grunted. “Huh. Okay then,” she said.
    “We'll
have the next pair of emitters off to you in a...” he paused. Proteus put a
clock up on his HUD. “About fifty minutes. Expect a pair to be finished every
hour or so.”
    “Thank
you,” she said surprised.
    “The
biggest pain in the ass is getting the parts in and out of the shuttle. We're
working on it Chief. We'll get it done,” he said.
    “Carry
on,” she said gruffly cutting the link.
     

ñ Chapter 3
     
    After
two hours he had the food replicator make a platter of sandwiches and drinks
then pulled out the shuttle's little house keeping robot and carried it out to
the airlock of the shuttle. He released it into the air, and watched it start
up and then get to work. The work crew were almost finished so he handed the
woman named Martha a sandwich and then turned to the crew. They finished moving
the last part and he warned them he was turning the gravity field back on.
    Hastily
the crew finished up what they were doing and then got down to the deck and
reoriented properly. He nodded as Barry gave him a thumbs up. He accessed his
link and turned the field back on at low power.  It took a minute for the
emitters to spin up. He deliberately kept the field strength down; they
couldn't afford to use too much power. It would be about a third of a G, enough
to work in but saving in power which was critical right now.
    “Sprite
send a memo to ops to...”
    “Cut
power to gravity. Got it,” she said. She sounded harried. He grimaced. Sprite
was using the shuttle's communications to access the ship so she could do what
she could from here. Proteus and Defender where trying to piggy back on her
signal but she didn't leave a lot of bandwidth free for them.
    Dust
and small debris kicked up by the crew and robots pitter patter to the floor
like rain drops as the field spun up. Shaking his head, the engineer sat down
in the airlock and called the crew over.He handed out drinks and
sandwiches and they eat. He thanked them for the hard work, and they nodded in
response. The woman feeding the ingots reported another pair of emitters were ready
and he had a pair of crew members carry them to engineering. A pair of workers
paused near the door with a load of material as the emitters were muscled out
one by one onto a waiting hover pallet.
     
    “Admiral
any eta on the other parts?” O'Mallory asked from the overhead. Irons and just
about everyone in the bay looked up. The others however turned their attention
on him after a second.
    “About
two more hours. Did you get anywhere finding additional robots?”
    “I've
scared up a couple. One is a pencil bot though,” she reported dryly.
    He
grimaced. A pencil bot was good for fine motor work, light weight fetch and
carry jobs, but was unstable and was a pain in the ass to operate because of
its high center of gravity. It probably had a thin graphite layer mixed into
its paint but the paint didn't cover every surface so it would fail quickly.
    Basically
the robot was a yellow cylinder with a flattened dinner plate sized sensor pod
on top and four force emitters on the bottom in small spheres. These allowed
the little bot to float.
    They
ranged in size from a half meter to over a dozen meters. The standard size on a
ship was usually a meter tall. The center section had six small manipulator
arms. Each arm was about a centimeter or two thick, with interchangeable tips
on some of them. The gripper arms could only hold about a