My mind went blank. With my suspicions about Orlandis, I'd been fighting to avoid even thinking about the Angelwing in his presence, lest he pick up something odd in my attitude. To have him ask such a point-blank question was the last thing I'd expected... and with no plausible story prepared I had only one recourse. "Well, I'm not sure. But my computer expert thinks it may have been a field generator feedback..."
I spun out Pascal's whole theory for him, working hard to make it sound plausible. I must have succeeded, because when I finished he nodded. "I see. Interesting. Would a blast of that sort actually be enough to disable a ship that big?"
I shrugged. "The exploding Autotorque, probably not. But remember that the field generator would also have been ruined, and if the damage was extensive enough it might be beyond repair."
"Leaving the ship helpless somewhere out in deep space," he nodded.
"Exactly nine point two light-years out, if they were on Cunard Lines standard Baroja/Lorraine run," I said, obscurely glad I could quote him the exact number. "And of course they would have blown out a cloud of highspeed distress buoys as soon as they knew they were in trouble, so the rescue ships won't have to get closer than maybe five light-hours to find them."
"Sounds like you've worked all of this through quite well," Orlandis said. "I trust the patrol rescue squads will be equally astute. How long now before we land?"
"Uh-" I tried to remember how long it usually took from Shlomo Pass to Earth. "Should take three more cascade maneuvers, unless conditions have changed drastically in the past year or so. Which it may have-the Barnard's Star system can be a pain. Say, ten or eleven more days.
"I see. Thank you, Captain; I'll let you get on with your business now."
"Thank you," I said automatically as he turned and walked away. Scowling to myself, I headed the other way and escaped to the solitude of my cabin. There I threw myself down on my bed and roundly cursed Orlandis and the power he had to make me feel like one of his menials. For a long moment I seriously considered going to the man and telling him that we were headed for Baroja, and that if he wanted to go to Earth he could jolly well put together his fancy yacht, load his two Autotorques aboard, and leave.
Orlandis and the power he had to make me feel like one of his menials. For a long moment I seriously considered going to the man and telling him that we were headed for Baroja, and that if he wanted to go to Earth he could jolly well put together his fancy yacht, load his two Autotorques aboard, and leave.
I stared at the ceiling for a long, chilling moment. Then I got back up and left, forcing myself not to run.
Matope was lounging in front of the main engine room status board when I got there a few minutes later with the canvas duffel bag I'd brought up from One Hold. "Everything under control and quiet, Captain," he reported, eying the bag.
"Good," I told him, "because I've got work for you. Come here."
He followed me back to the work table; and even with my peripheral vision I clearly saw his mouth fall open as I carefully withdrew the first of the two Aker-Ming Autotorques. "Captain! Where'd that come from?"
"Same place this one did," I said as calmly as I could. "A box marked Harmax Industries in our Ming-metal shield."
He looked at me with the kind of expression he usually reserved for sudden, unexpected problems with the Dancers engines. "Captain-"
"I want you to take them apart," I interrupted him brusquely. "I think one of them might be rigged to destroy a Colloton generator."
He stared at me for a long minute, gradually getting his face back together. Then, without a word, he picked up the two Autotorques and carried them over to the scale. One, it turned out, weighed nearly a hundred grams more than the other. Taking the heavier one back to the bench, he spread out his tools and got to work.
I'd never seen the inside of an Autotorque before, and it was only as Matope slowly moved down the table, leaving a neat line of components and fasteners in his path, that I began to understand exactly why the things were so damned expensive. About halfway into the disassembly it suddenly occurred to me that we would probably have to take both Autotorques apart in order to find out why the first was heavier, because whatever the extra component was it could probably crawl out and bite either of us without our recognizing it as spurious. The thought added one more twist to the wringer around my stomach: we were in plenty of trouble right now without having two Autotorques belonging to someone else that we couldn't put back together again.
But that worry, at least, turned out to be unnecessary. Five minutes later, Matope carefully slid out the delicate global lattice and there, wedged in where it obviously didn't belong, was our culprit: a tiny mechanical timer and a heavy-duty sodium-bromine battery with attached capacitor.
"Well?" I asked after Matope had spent a few minutes poking around the battery and its environs. "What does it do?"
He fingered his screwdriver thoughtfully. "Hard to say exactly, Captain, but it looks like it's supposed to feed extra current into the lattice. Contact points here and here-see?"
I thought about Pascal's theory. "Which would vaporize it and make it explode?"
My eyes drifted to the timer. "Mid-maneuver. And what happens if the lattice melts?"
He ran some numbers on his calculator. "Hard to say. If the voltage peak is strong enough, it could discharge across the safeties into the Colloton generator control cable here. No, wait a minute-there must surely be a surge protector to ground out dangerous pulses like that."
"Show me."
He poked around for another half hour before finally giving up. If there'd ever been a surge ground line, it wasn't there now. And at that point there didn't seem to be any conclusion available except the one I'd already come to: this Autotorque had been designed to kill its ship.
If the control circuitry gets hit with that kind of voltage spike, you'll probably lose at least a couple of the major coils before it can be drained off to ground," Matope explained. His voice was as calm and dry as always, but the hand gripping his screwdriver showed white knuckles. "There's a feedback line that would kick in the emergency braking system for the flywheel, though, and even with the generator ruined there's enough hysteresis to hold the ship in Colloton space for at least a few seconds."
"Long enough for the ship to stop?"
He hesitated, then shook his head. "Not if the flywheel and ship were already rotating at top speed. A
liner just has too much inertia to stop that fast."
And an instant later, both it and the device that had killed it would be disassociated atoms. I thought about that for a long minute, until I suddenly realized Matope was looking at me with an air of expectation. "All right," I said slowly. "Let's take the batteries and timer out and put the rest back together."
"And after that?"
"I'll put them back in their box in the shield and... figure out then what to do."
It took longer to reassemble the Autotorque than it had taken to pull it apart, and I was feeling extremely nervous by the time I headed back to the hold. But my temporary theft had apparently gone unnoticed, and within a few minutes everything was back to normal. Five minutes after that, I was flat on my back on my bed, staring at the cabin ceiling and wondering what the hell I was going to do.
Because suddenly the whole game had changed. Again. It'd started out as a freak event, moved on to become a logical puzzle, and then to a question of financial risk versus Good Samaritanship and the need to back Alana up in her fears about the Angelwing. But now the stakes had abruptly gone up... because there was only one reason I could think of for that gimmicked Autotorque to be aboard.
Orlandis was planning the same fate for the Dancer as he'd planned for the Angelwing.
And I was out of my depth. Completely. Logical problems I could tackle; equipment problems I could turn Matope and Tobbar loose on... but this was a situation of human invention, and I didn't have a handle on any of it. What did Orlandis ultimately hope to gain, for starters? Had the Dancer been doomed from the start, or was that decision still open?-and if so, what action of mine was likely to push it the wrong way? Orlandis thought we were going to Earth... or had he seen through my simple stratagem?