“What’s the flight time?” Geary demanded, scanning his controls for the right ones to give him the information.
Commander Lommand answered immediately. “Thirty-one minutes if we launch now.”
Colonel Carabali was checking something herself. “We can’t risk having critical equipment down here while the Syndic systems are still operating and capable of executing some Trojan horse action. Carrying out a safe shutdown of the Syndic gear will take approximately … twenty minutes.”
Geary nodded. “What about everything else needed to use the Syndic gear? Should we employ these, uh, MMUs instead?”
“Sir, it’d take at least a couple of hours to go through the Syndic systems and scrub them clean, then maybe another half a day or more to bring them up in a controlled fashion—”
“How quickly can the MMUs start operating once they’re on the surface?” Geary asked the engineers.
“Immediately, sir,” Commander Lommand responded. “Start-up is carried out on board the shuttles. Once the shuttles land, the Moo-Moos roll off the ramp and start grazing.”
Nice. One more little thing that Geary had to depend upon hearing about from his subordinates. Fortunately, one of those subordinates was Commander Lommand. Geary was about to order Lommand to launch his shuttles from Titan when he caught himself and faced Captain Tyrosian, Lommand’s immediate superior. Commander Lommand had jumped the chain of command again, but this time at least he’d done it in a way that looked legitimate by pretending he was updating Tyrosian. “Captain Tyrosian, have Titan launch those shuttles, and get them to that facility. I want them working when they hit the surface. Commander Lommand, thank you for the status update. Colonel Carabali, have your system geeks shut down everything the Syndics left working. I want it all off when Titan’s shuttles get there.”
“Yes, sir,” Carabali replied, smiling thinly. “Do you want us to proceed with scrubbing the systems for sabotage?”
“Not unless it’s needed for the safety of your troops. I don’t intend powering up those systems while we’re there, and as soon as we leave, we’re going to flatten every piece of equipment in the facility.”
Carabali’s smile widened. “Yes, sir.”
As the Marine’s image vanished, Captain Tyrosian gave Geary a confident look, as if this was a plan she’d developed. “I’ve ordered Titan to launch her shuttles, sir.”
“Thank you.” At least Tyrosian had thought on her feet and reacted properly when Lommand broke into the conference. “Good work. Let’s get those rocks and get out of here.”
The windows vanished, leaving just the system display floating in front of Geary. He watched the symbols marking his fleet racing past the moon holding the Syndic mining facility, looping around the gas giant to come past the moon again, then ran some quick calculations to see if he would have to slow the fleet even more due to the delays on the surface.
It looked okay at this point. Not great, and with way too small a margin of error left, but if the mobile mining gear could do the job quickly, he wouldn’t have to burn off further fuel cells braking the fleet’s velocity more.
Geary leaned back, noticing Captain Desjani trying not to look curious. “The Syndics left the equipment running at the mining facility,” he explained to her.
“Bastards,” Desjani replied with a frown. “They knew we’d have to assume it was laced with soft and hard booby traps.”
“Yeah. But Titan has a couple of portable mining things they’re sending down to take care of getting the stockpiles.” Geary looked back to include Rione in the conversation. “The Marines are shutting down the Syndic gear.”
Rione shook her head. “Odds are the Syndics didn’t have time to plant elaborate booby traps in the systems, but we have no choice but to act as if they did.”
“They’ve laid traps everywhere we’ve encountered Syndics.” Geary watched the shuttles from Titan arcing down toward the moon, wishing the enemy was a little less devious and his own fleet’s situation a lot less perilous.
The voice of the chief petty officer supervising Titan’s Mobile Mining Units seemed startled and awed when he heard Geary. “Sir. It’s an honor to speak with you, sir.”
Geary tried not to let his unhappiness at the hero worship show in his voice. The sailors in the fleet were more likely than the officers to believe that Geary had been sent by the living stars themselves to save the Alliance, and this fleet in particular. They were also more likely to believe that Geary really was the mythical hero of the past. But he owed them respect for their faith even as he tried his best not to believe in it himself. “Do you have a moment, Chief? To talk about your gear?” Nothing was happening elsewhere, but Geary felt that he had to stay on the bridge until this mess was over, and anyway Geary was curious about the MMUs.
The view from the chief’s helmet showed one side of the Syndic facility. Big doors giving access to stockpiles of mined and refined minerals had been blown off their hinges by Marines happy to get a head start on wrecking the Syndic installation. The hulking shapes of the two MMUs had crawled on treads across the surface of the moon, crushing or shouldering aside some Syndic safety barriers, and now crouched in front of the accesses.
“Yes, sir,” the chief replied. “The crews on the Moo-Moos are operating their own cows, and I’m just here if needed.”
Cows. The nickname made as much sense as any other for a piece of equipment with the official designation of MMU. “I’m not familiar with your gear, Chief. What can you tell me about it?” He’d already tried looking up information in the online library on Dauntless, only to be submerged by a huge mass of documents, none of which seemed to have a single simple, clear diagram or discussion about the capabilities of the MMUs. After unsuccessfully trying to wade through a mass of complex data, Geary had decided to follow his training as a junior officer; when you needed to know something, ask a chief petty officer.
This particular chief sounded disbelieving that the great Black Jack Geary would really need to be told anything. “The technology hasn’t changed much since … uh … since…”
“In the last century?” Geary asked dryly. “I didn’t know much about it then, Chief. No need arose in those days for me to worry about it.”
“Oh, uh, yes, sir. Well, like I said, the tech hasn’t changed much. It’s simple and robust. Everything that’s been tried as a replacement is more complicated, more expensive, breaks more and, uh, you know.”
“I certainly do, Chief,” Geary agreed, recalling many of the “improvements” to ship systems that had bedeviled him a hundred years ago by creating new problems with equipment that had worked perfectly well before being upgraded into temperamental, buggy pieces of junk. “I’m glad they’ve let you stick with something that works well. What are your cows doing now? Waiting for clearance to enter the facility?”
“No, sir! They won’t have to go any farther in. The cows are sending in worms, sir. Once the worms—”
“Worms?”
“Uh, yes, sir.” The view from the chief’s helmet changed, focusing on the front of one of the Moo-Moos and zooming in. What looked like a nest of very fine wires extended out, the wires leading into the storage buildings. “Do you see the leashes, sir? Every one connects to a worm. We call them that because they’re about the size of worms and work the same way. They eat dirt. Or rock.”
“How do they get through rock?” Geary asked.
“What amounts to really tiny shock cannon mounted around the front mouth. The worm analyzes the rock structure and sends out vibration pulses that shatter the rock right in front of it. Of course, in this case this stuff has already been mined, so they’re going through stocks of solid metal. The worms eat the dust and move on, constantly doing the same thing. As the dust runs through the inside of the worms, molecular-level sensors analyze the content. Then it goes out the back. Just like a worm, like I said, sir.”