One by one, though, the major patches were welded into place. Other spacesuited crewmen worked their way painstakingly along the outside of the hull, using a liquid patching compound to fill in the smallest holes and marking those too large for their attention but too small for the major pieces. These were dealt with by follow-up crews armed with small plates that could be sealed over an opening and then spot-welded. By the time they were through Karga’s hull was a bizarre patchwork quilt, but she would hold atmosphere without the assistance of Sindri’s force fields.
Bondarevsky’s role in the exterior work was limited to getting the flight decks repaired. Early on Richards gave him priority in the waiting list for patches and parts, since the faster the flight deck could be restored the more easily personnel and supplies could be transferred aboard. For the first two weeks, until the bulk of the patches were in place and the testing of hull integrity was well in hand, the salvage team and the crewmen working with them had to be shuttled back and forth each day from the City of Cashel. It was only after they could be reasonably confident the ship wasn’t going to suddenly lose atmosphere that crew members could begin moving in to quarters on board on a more or less permanent basis.
All these considerations meant that work on the starboard flight deck was first on the list of things to be done, with Bondarevsky in personal charge of the details assigned there. The physical problems of repairing the wrecked hull and deck plating didn’t take long to finish, but once that was over there were myriad details to deal with. The force field airlocks at each end of the flight deck had to be repaired and tested, and the massive clamshell doors that sealed off the deck when flight operations were not in train had to be put in order so that the crews working inside didn’t have to rely entirely on the force fields while they were performing tasks too delicate to be done in space suits. Bondarevsky left most of the actual flight deck work to the supervision of Sparks McCullough, who knew more about the cycle of flight deck operations than most of the Landreicher crew was ever likely to learn. He concentrated on a related section of the ship, the Flight Control Center, located on the deck below the CIC where Admiral Tolwyn was hard at work attempting to restore some semblance of order to the carrier’s most vital command and control systems.
The FCC was actually a whole suite of related compartments, each individual chamber responsible for one aspect of the supercarrier’s flight ops. Central to all was Primary Flight Control, the nerve center which oversaw all of the fighters, bombers, and support craft operating off the carrier at any given time. Primary Flight Control was relegated to a fairly low position order, however, since it would still be a long time before regular flight ops were conducted off Karga. Instead, Bondarevsky focused on CSTCC-the Carrier Space Traffic Control Center-located directly forward of the Primary Flight Control compartment. CSTCC governed the operations of craft in space within five kilometers of the carrier, and oversaw launching and recovery of all craft. The compartment had received only light collateral damage from the hit that had blasted CIC, but this structural damage had to be made good before anything else could be done. Banks of instrumentation had to be removed in order to install bulkhead patches and deck plating in CIC, using lighter versions of the hull patches that had been applied to the ship’s exterior. Then the instrumentation had to be returned, with each system being thorough checked and tested before being installed to ensure that everything was at least potentially in working order. Two of the most vital systems in CSTCC relied on repair work being performed elsewhere on Karga: the sensor arrays located near the top of the carrier’s towering superstructure, and the communications system. Fortunately these were high on everyone’s priority list, and Diaz had specialists tackling these systems almost from the very beginning. Still, it was over a week from the time the CSTCC was physically restored until the first tests of ship’s sensors and communications, and two more days went by after that tracking down a series of small but disabling glitches.
In fact, the computers came on-line before the sensors were fully working, and that was accounted a minor miracle by anyone with more than a smattering of computer knowledge. Given the vast differences in design philosophy between human and Kilrathi technicians, it had been touch and go for a time. In fact, it wouldn’t have been possible to get the computer systems up and running at all without the active assistance of Hrothark, the Kilrathi Cadre Computer Officer who worked with Diaz’s experts to modify their code to something the Kilrathi computers would recognize as usable. Fortunately the computer network was designed not only for redundancy and flexibility, but for a high degree of self-programming. Once Diaz and Hrothark introduced the basic directives into the system the computer net itself did most of the work of developing operating systems. Still, the sheer number of different jobs the computer had to oversee in order for the ship to work required a great deal of programming time, and even after the computer system was on-line and functioning programmers were continuing to introduce new routines as they became necessary. Computer control for environmental systems was introduced first, followed by sensors, communications, and the ship’s power grid. But minor errors continued to be almost constant reminders of how much they had to do, from the periodic shutdown of gravity and light in the crew quarters on Deck Six to the fault that caused the entire computer system to crash every time someone tried to send a passenger lift to the ship’s recreation section.
When at length the CSTCC came on-line, Bondarevsky was ready to turn control of the section over to Commander Juliette Marchand, who had been designated as the carrier’s Space Officer, more often referred to as “the Boss.” Marchand, like Bondarevsky, came from the Confederation Navy. She had previously served aboard the TCS Ticonderoga, but had drawn a court-martial and dismissal from the service for willfully assaulting a superior-the Confederation Secretary of Defense, no less-after the man had interfered with her disciplinary decision with regard to a subordinate during an inspection of her carrier soon after the Battle of Earth. A small, dark-haired woman who tended to wear coveralls emblazoned with the motto “Boss,” Marchand was nothing short of brilliant when it came to handling CSTCC operations, but she had a short fuse and a habit of regarding “her” bailiwick as a private fiefdom, not to be interfered with by anyone, even the Wing Commander who rated as her nominal superior. Under Marchand’s iron hand, the starboard flight deck entered normal operation three weeks after the repair job began. But Bondarevsky’s job had only just begun. Traffic Control could control the launch and recovery of small craft from the flight deck, but there was still plenty of work to be done. The three massive elevators that raised and lowered planes from the cavernous hangar deck beneath the starboard flight deck had to be overhauled before the carrier could pretend to be more than a platform for outside craft to land on. Unfortunately two of them had been seriously damaged, one by the hit that had crippled the approach deck, the other by Graham’s scavenging missions, who had adapted some of the equipment that operated the aft elevator for use in repairing their planetside shuttles. By ruthlessly scrounging for parts from Graham’s gear and the remains of the aft elevator they were able to make a start at fixing the forward one, but it was slow going at best and would leave them with just two working elevators on the starboard side. Bondarevsky knew from long experience that this would severely handicap flight operations in a combat situation, when a fast turn-around of planes was essential to maintaining the carrier’s battle capabilities. He tried not to think too much about what they had deduced about Karga’s last battle, since confirmed by Murragh. Limited flight operations had left the supercarrier unable to stand against a pair of cruisers which otherwise would never have been able to approach close enough to be so much as a nuisance.