Richards didn’t answer right away, and Bondarevsky could see that he was wavering between the paranoia that went with his training and the hope that he might obtain precious help.
“I think you should consider it seriously, Admiral,” Bondarevsky said quietly. “Let’s face it, these folks could make all the difference in actually making this harebrained scheme work. Let’s sign them up.”
After a moment, Richards nodded. “I think you’re right, Jason. Very well, Lord Murragh. Commander Graham. Welcome to the Goliath Project.”
CHAPTER 11
“Wo Warrior should fear honest labor, as no Warrior should shirk onerous duty.”
FRLS Karga
Orbiting Vaku VII, Vaku System
2670.321-355
They had plenty of volunteers from amongst the Nargrast survivors, both human and Kilrathi. All of Murragh’s Cadre officers were eager to follow their prince’s lead. That, Bondarevsky decided, was only to be expected. They were loyal to the hrai of his uncle, the late Admiral dai Nokhtak, and Murragh was now the last living representative of that clan in addition to being heir presumptive to the throne. Their branch of the hrai had long been rivals of Thrakhaths, so they had no great feelings of loss regarding their erstwhile war leader. As for Ragark, he was considered something of an upstart, and evidently wasn’t thought of as a proper Kilrathi warrior at all. So the collection of Kilrathi experts were willing to mobilize at Murragh’s word to aid the humans in restoring the ship. Their comrades, crewmen from the crashed escort and a number of surviving fighter pilots off the carrier, were more suspicious. A few, taking their cue from the embittered Kuraq and others like him, refused to have anything to do with the hated “apes.” They remained in open confinement aboard the City of Cashel while their comrades got down to work.
The Goliath Project staff needed all the help they could muster, and inside of a few days the assistance of Murragh’s people was already proving invaluable.
Time after time it seemed as if they would not be able to get the job done, but time after time the men, women, and kili working on the Karga rose to the challenge and somehow made things work. Bondarevsky was continually amazed at the adaptability humans and Kilrathi could bring to bear when they tried. Slowly, painfully, it began to look as if the Karga would one day sail the void once again.
With the tender docked and the bodies rounded up and cleared, the first job was to repair Karga’s shattered hull. The ship had suffered major penetration damage in a score of places, and minor holes in countless other compartments. The tender’s force fields allowed the carrier to retain an atmosphere, but the hull needed to be patched as soon as possible so that the energy expended on keeping the atmosphere from leaking away could be used for more productive purposes.
So the first order of business was brute-force space construction on a massive scale. It started with survey crews swarming over the hull, measuring, recording, locating the major breaks in the hull and transmitting detailed images of each to computer records aboard the dozens of shuttles detailed to support their work. The computers analyzed these records and produced detailed specifications for the sections of hull plating needed to fill the gaps. A pair of naval architects attached to Diaz’s team pored over each of the computer models as they were completed, double-checking the work. Humans were far slower than computers, but it still sometimes took an organic mind to make sense of engineering designed for organic life, and despite the bottleneck created by these reviews Admiral Richards overruled Tolwyn and ordered the process to go on.
The factory ship Andrew Carnegie had settled into orbit close by the Karga. Swarms of smaller carried craft had been dispatched to Nargrast loaded with automated vehicles and small supervisory crews. They set up camp near the site where Graham and Murragh had settled with their castaways, the vehicles ranging outwards in search of needed raw materials according to a list provided by the computer analysis of the needed components and modified by Diaz’s team where the computer parameters couldn’t be easily met. Unfortunately Nargrast was poor in many of the elements that would nave been best suited for the job, but there was plenty of iron ore, and that was still the basis of the most basic parts of the hull that needed repair.
The vehicles excavated and extracted ores where they were discovered, carried them back to base, and loaded them aboard the ships waiting there. A constant string of vessels operated back and forth between Nargrast and the Andrew Carnegie, endlessly feeding the insatiable demands of the factory vessel for the raw materials necessary for fabricating Karga’s hull plating and other requisite components. A landing party from Tohvyn’s crew also worked over the remains of the escort Frawqirg, following up on the initial survey work Bondarevsky had done while rescuing the survivors. Though badly damaged in the crash and far too small to provide all the needs of the damaged carrier, the escort was a useful source of parts and materials that otherwise wouldn’t have been available.
Aboard the factory ship, the iron ore was smelted and processed, refined and re-refined to produce the durasteel alloy needed for hull plating. The computer designs obtained from the first surveys controlled the pouring, shaping, and cutting of the individual patches or replacement hull sections, and as quickly as they came off the line they were released into space, picked up by the one-man work pods carried aboard Sindri, and maneuvered into the proper places. The pods-essentially egg-shaped capsules with thrusters and manipulating arms, barely larger than a man-were supported by work gangs of spacesuited crewmen who wrestled the hull plating into position and then brought their plasma welders to bear to seal the new segments of the hull in place.
Space construction work was difficult and dangerous, especially on the scale required for Project Goliath. With so many crew members operating in spacesuits, there were bound to be accidents. A few inevitably forgot that weightless hull patches retained all of their mass and inertia in zero-g, and as a result there were casualties. Commander Katherine Manning, Karga’s Medical Officer, was kept busy handling fractures and decompression sickness in the carrier’s sick bay complex buried deep on the fifth deck of the superstructure. Fortunately little damage had occurred there, and the sick bay area was even air-tight, so she had less work to do to get her part of the ship up and running and could concentrate on taking care of the injured. But with power still limited and the unfamiliar Kilrathi medical equipment mostly off-line, Manning complained bitterly of having to perform surgery under primitive conditions, using a field surgery package normally used by marines planetside to fill in for the usual amenities that weren’t yet available aboard Karga.
There were, of course, fatalities. The first major replacement to the buckled hull plating around the entrance to the starboard side flight deck proved particularly awkward, and when Crewman Chan misapplied thrust to his work pod at a crucial moment the result was three men dead, crushed between the new plating and the hull, and five other injuries. Chan was one of the dead, and his pod was ruined in the accident.
Bondarevsky, who had been supervising the work, wondered if Geoff Tolwyn wasn’t more concerned at the loss of the pod than at Chan’s death. It wasn’t that the admiral was callous…he was merely consumed by the need to finish the job, a man so obsessed as to seem unable to perceive reality.