"And there's the shielding around the singularity generator. If we're running silent, we'll be shutting the hole down, so we could move it forward. A little extra hullalloy between us and the Rix couldn't hurt."
"Put a team together," Zai ordered. "Start disassembling the shielding now. Get it moving the moment we cease acceleration."
First Engineer Frick spoke up, "How long do we have in freefall, sir?" "A hundred seconds," Hobbes said. "No more."
The man shook his head. It wasn't enough time to move the massive shielding through the corridors of the battle-configured ship.
The captain nodded. "All right, we'll cut our engines earlier. I'll give you three minutes of zero-gee before we come under fire."
Engineer Frick smiled at ExO Hobbes in triumph.
Hobbes shrugged her shoulders. If the captain's largesse kept the man happy, she was glad to play scrooge. But it was still precious little time for an operation of that complexity. The engineers would still be putting the makeshift armor in place when the Rix started hunting them. But at least the crew would be occupied; better busy than hunkering down in the dark, waiting for a lance of gravitons to tear into them.
Even the hardest work was better than doing nothing.
First Engineer
First Engineer Watson Frick watched a universe disappear.
The pocket cosmos behind the hullalloy shielding stuttered for a moment as its bonds were cut. The black hole at its core, which had strained since its creation against the fields that held it in the real universe, convulsed for an instant, then collapsed.
Away it goes, Frick thought, off to Somewhere Else--a different reality, now utterly unreachable. What a strange way to generate power, the First Engineer wondered: Making pocket universes, the false (?) realms formed whenever a starship bigbanged its drive. How many other realities had humanity created with this process?
And would there one day be other thinking beings inside them, in the small realities born of humanity's hubris? Then those, making pocket universes of their own . . .
Frick shook his head. There was no time for philosophical digression. In 500 seconds, the Lynx would come under fire. The singularity generator's shielding was needed at the front of the warship.
"Two minutes until freefall," Frick shouted. "Let's get this metal broken down." The crew--his best men and women--worked quickly, disassem 79 bling the huge armored plates as easily as if this process were among the standard drills, which it most certainly was not. Frick put his own hands in, running a controller down the starboard seam of the shielding. The controller sent out focused FM waves, a tight field that activated nanos buried throughout the armor. The nanos sprang to life and began breaking down the shielding into movable sections.
Sweat slid into Frick's eyes as he moved the heavy controller in a careful line. Normally, the device would be lightened by its own easy gravity generator, but with the Lynx still running flat out, spot sources of gravitons were too dangerous. At eighteen gees acceleration, the random fluxes coursing through the ship were already deadly. Frick remembered the arduous trip out to intercept the Rix ship, a week under ten gees. A few days in, he'd seen a line of bad gravity go through a rating's legs, one of the man's kneecaps shattering like a dropped saucer.
Frick tried to keep the cut steady.
Taking the shielding apart was easy, of course. But doing it the right way was tricky. The Lynx would need the singularity generator quickly back in one piece again on the other side of danger. The black hole powered the ship's photon cannon, artificial gravity, even life support. With the generator offline, the captain was running the batteries down just to give Frick these minutes for disassembly.
The heavy plates across from Frick shifted as they were cut apart.
"Slow it up over there!" he shouted. "You wanna be crushed? Save your final cuts until we hit freefall." The largest of the sections massed five tons.
As the words left his mouth, a shudder went through the ship. A gravity ghost, reminding them all that the ship's artificial gee was a very shaky proposition. For a moment, there was a nervous silence as the ghost passed.
Heat was building in the cramped space around the singularity generator. The nanos' furious activity within the shielding walls had turned them red-hot.
"Environmental, environmental," Frick said.
"We're on it, sir," came the response in his second hearing.
A tepid wind blew across his face, hardly sufficient.
"A little more?" he inquired.
"We're on it, sir," the woman repeated with maddening calm. Frick scowled and lowered his cutter. He had cut as far as he safely could in one gee. The heat was unbearable.
He walked around the generator's perimeter, checking his crew's work. The giant sections loomed over him, seeming to hang by threads.
"Fine. Fine. Stop there!" he rasped. "Wait for f reef a 11."
Suddenly, a panicked cry came from just behind him.
"Sir!"
He spun on one heel to face the cry.
"It's cracking, sir!"
Frick's eyes scanned the wall of shielding next to the yelping crewman. A spiderweb of fissures appeared, spreading even as he watched.
For a moment, he couldn't believe it. The specs for singularity shielding were the most demanding in the Navy. No captain wanted a black hole coming loose in the middle of battle. And they'd calculated these cuts to the micrometer.
But something had gone wrong.
Then Frick's eyes spotted the epicenter of the cracking. There was a small hole in the shielding, a centimeter across.
"Godspite!" he shouted. "One of the flockers hit the generator!"
Fissures spread from the tiny hole, like too-thin lake ice cracking underfoot. The hullalloy cried out, a screaming sound to wake the dead as it began to collapse.
"Priority, priority!" the engineer yelled, his hand whipping through the priority icon even as he invoked it. "Cut the engines and the gravity, Hobbes! I need zero-gee!"
But the shielding was already falling, coming down on them. The metal howled as its own weight tore it from the generator. Frick grabbed the crewman who'd spotted the fissures by the collar and pulled, planting his feet against the grabby surface of the deck. For a moment, he merely yanked the man and himself off-balance, but then the sudden bowel-clenching feel of freefall descended around them.