Read Online Portal-eARC by Eric Flint, Ryk E Spoor - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Eric Flint, Ryk E Spoor
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two on the comm.”
“Understood.”
“Dan,” she said, knowing the comm system would recognize and perform the switchover even as she spoke, “how are you coming with the Odin ?”
“Slowly,” Dan answered. He hastened to add, “There’s progress, and I’m sure we’ll get it all set soon enough, but right now things are going at a snail’s pace.”
“What’s the hangup? A.J., is it the Faerie Dust?”
“Not as such, no. Or maybe yes, I guess. Between Mia and Horst—and me, of course—we were able to get their nodes to talk to my Dust well enough, and we’re getting a lot of good data. But it takes time to get the stuff from one point to another, and that’s one huge ship. I have to figure out how much to move, and where, and then it has to work its way, millimeter by millimeter, to the target. And the dust doesn’t move all that fast on its own, even in zero-G.”
“Aren’t there key locations to focus on first, rather than trying to distribute it everywhere? And I thought you had distributed it through the systems before.”
“Again, yes and no. When we first compromised Odin ’s systems we entered through known points on the neo-NERVA drive, and after that I was able to pinpoint other entry locations. But even then, I was focused on one specific set of systems, the drive controls. I wasn’t touching their environmentals, for a lot of reasons. So there’s at least three places that I really could use a bunch of Faerie Dust in so it could disperse from there, but I never had anything all that close. So it has to go there, at about a hundred microns a second. And the routes aren’t always very direct.”
“Well, you concentrated most of it in Engineering,” Maddie said after a moment. “Why not have it just go into a cup or a bag and let the General carry it to the main dispersal points?”
There was dead silence for a moment, and then the transmitted sound of a glove smacking the faceplate of a helmet. “ DUH! DUH! Adric Jamie Baker…SOOOOOOOOper-Genius!”
Dan was laughing, but he said, “Don’t beat yourself up too much there. None of the rest of us engineers thought of that, either.”
“Sometimes you just need someone on the outside of the problem to show you the solution,” Maddie said, trying not to let herself giggle; A.J. would get over it, of course, but there was no need to rub it in, as he was doing a more than adequate job of it himself. “Taking this into account—”
“—if I have the highly-trained commander of Odin act as pack mule for my ultra-advanced sensors, yes, we can speed things up a lot. Duh, again. Brett, can you model the dispersion if we have the General move some to the main areas in question?”
“Just a minute.” In very little more than the named time, Brett Tamahori’s voice came back on. “That cuts a lot of time out. We’ll have most of the environmental and integrity monitoring network up within the next day and a half, especially if I assume the General isn’t averse to actually dispersing what he carries in smaller packets to specific areas.”
“I’m sure he won’t be; after all, your initial tests did help already.”
“True enough. We found two seals that had subtle leaks and one filter that had failed without tripping its built-in indicators. His air quality went up significantly after that.”
“Brett, on another subject, how long will it take to fill Munin ’s tanks?”
“That’s an easy one. Assuming no breakdowns—and I think we pretty much have to assume no actual breakdowns, just occasional snags— Athena can manage about half a meter an hour at this temperature. As we go deeper the temperature may—has to, I guess—rise significantly, until you reach the water layer. It’s got a melting cross-section a little bigger than I’d originally thought, just about exactly one and a half square meters, so you get about a ton and a half of water every meter. So…a month from the time we start melt, and she’ll
“Understood.”
“Dan,” she said, knowing the comm system would recognize and perform the switchover even as she spoke, “how are you coming with the Odin ?”
“Slowly,” Dan answered. He hastened to add, “There’s progress, and I’m sure we’ll get it all set soon enough, but right now things are going at a snail’s pace.”
“What’s the hangup? A.J., is it the Faerie Dust?”
“Not as such, no. Or maybe yes, I guess. Between Mia and Horst—and me, of course—we were able to get their nodes to talk to my Dust well enough, and we’re getting a lot of good data. But it takes time to get the stuff from one point to another, and that’s one huge ship. I have to figure out how much to move, and where, and then it has to work its way, millimeter by millimeter, to the target. And the dust doesn’t move all that fast on its own, even in zero-G.”
“Aren’t there key locations to focus on first, rather than trying to distribute it everywhere? And I thought you had distributed it through the systems before.”
“Again, yes and no. When we first compromised Odin ’s systems we entered through known points on the neo-NERVA drive, and after that I was able to pinpoint other entry locations. But even then, I was focused on one specific set of systems, the drive controls. I wasn’t touching their environmentals, for a lot of reasons. So there’s at least three places that I really could use a bunch of Faerie Dust in so it could disperse from there, but I never had anything all that close. So it has to go there, at about a hundred microns a second. And the routes aren’t always very direct.”
“Well, you concentrated most of it in Engineering,” Maddie said after a moment. “Why not have it just go into a cup or a bag and let the General carry it to the main dispersal points?”
There was dead silence for a moment, and then the transmitted sound of a glove smacking the faceplate of a helmet. “ DUH! DUH! Adric Jamie Baker…SOOOOOOOOper-Genius!”
Dan was laughing, but he said, “Don’t beat yourself up too much there. None of the rest of us engineers thought of that, either.”
“Sometimes you just need someone on the outside of the problem to show you the solution,” Maddie said, trying not to let herself giggle; A.J. would get over it, of course, but there was no need to rub it in, as he was doing a more than adequate job of it himself. “Taking this into account—”
“—if I have the highly-trained commander of Odin act as pack mule for my ultra-advanced sensors, yes, we can speed things up a lot. Duh, again. Brett, can you model the dispersion if we have the General move some to the main areas in question?”
“Just a minute.” In very little more than the named time, Brett Tamahori’s voice came back on. “That cuts a lot of time out. We’ll have most of the environmental and integrity monitoring network up within the next day and a half, especially if I assume the General isn’t averse to actually dispersing what he carries in smaller packets to specific areas.”
“I’m sure he won’t be; after all, your initial tests did help already.”
“True enough. We found two seals that had subtle leaks and one filter that had failed without tripping its built-in indicators. His air quality went up significantly after that.”
“Brett, on another subject, how long will it take to fill Munin ’s tanks?”
“That’s an easy one. Assuming no breakdowns—and I think we pretty much have to assume no actual breakdowns, just occasional snags— Athena can manage about half a meter an hour at this temperature. As we go deeper the temperature may—has to, I guess—rise significantly, until you reach the water layer. It’s got a melting cross-section a little bigger than I’d originally thought, just about exactly one and a half square meters, so you get about a ton and a half of water every meter. So…a month from the time we start melt, and she’ll
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