There was one bit of good news, though. In the process of getting the elevators and the hangar deck back into operation, Sparks was able to pass on the report that many of the Kilrathi planes in the starboard side hangar deck were useable. Each flight deck had its own hangar area, so the starboard side represented roughly half of the complement of aerospace craft on board. Out of sixty-four fighters, bombers, and support craft allocated to the starboard side, thirty-seven were arrayed in their storage bays and appeared undamaged. There were also seven Darket light fighters and four Strakha stealth fighters on the surface of Nargrast, bringing the total up to forty-eight. The port side hangar hadn’t produced these had taken greater losses during the raid on Landreich, and less than twenty were reported as spaceworthy. But other damaged craft would be useful sources of parts when they had to start getting the flight wing into active service.
Bondarevsky was less sanguine when he considered the problems of training Landreich and ex-ConFleet pilots to use Kilrathi planes, and bumped a request for simulator programming and hardware repair up on the Flight Wing’s priority list.
Sparks was happy, at least, at the prospect of getting her hands dirty tearing down Kilrathi planes and then putting them back together so they could start flying. But Bondarevsky had to hold her back. By this time the starboard flight deck was starting to cycle regular flights on and off the carrier, and even the refueling and repair equipment was starting to come back into play. But with all this accomplished, they had to turn their attention to the port side and start all over again.
In the meantime, work was proceeding in other parts of the ship. The flag bridge, which had never been seriously damaged, was back in operation on a limited basis early on, and as more and more of the shipwide systems came back on-line the role of the crew manning it expanded. This was the domain of Admiral Richards, who spent most of his time poring over the intelligence files extracted from the computer during the reprogramming process. With the addition of Murragh’s experts he was no longer needed to explain every bit of Kilrathi technology to the salvage team or the carrier’s crew, which meant he was under much less strain now. But he continued to drive himself to become as familiar as possible with the ship, and to keep himself fully updated on the strategic situation that faced the Landreich.
Tolwyn, meanwhile, started in on CIC, cheerfully working side-by-side with the lowest-ranking technicians to tear down control systems and put them to rights. The Combat Information Center had been damaged by the same hit that had crippled Primary Flight Control, but there wasn’t as much destruction here as on the navigation bridge four levels up and all the way forward on the carrier’s superstructure. That section was given a few rough patches and then given up as a bad business, to be repaired later as time and resources allowed. A working CIC would allow Karga to maneuver and fight, and that was all Tolwyn wanted of her. Each day, Bondarevsky was impressed with the change in Tolwyn’s bearing and attitude. The demands of making the repairs work had narrowed the admiral’s world so that he no longer spent so much time worrying about conspiracies and the interplay of politics and war across the whole of human space. Instead he had a job to do, something that he could measure day by day, and the way he threw himself into it was a positive inspiration for the rest of the officers, crew, and outside specialists.
Most of the other officers were up to the challenge, too. Diaz and his people performed miracle after miracle despite the technological difficulties of working with Kilrathi gear. Contrary to popular belief, the Cats were by no means backward or primitive; they had been in space longer than Mankind, though their technology wasn’t far ahead of the Confederation’s in any major respect. Nor was their equipment simpler or more rugged despite the common conception back home of the Kilrathi as brutal and violent. Many of their systems were surprisingly fine and delicate, though of course there were differences in the size of components that reflected the larger bodies and hands of the builders. But it was differences in basic design philosophy that gave the specialists most of their headaches. Kilrathi naval architects believed in redundant and diversified systems, and not just for computers. They frequently designed subsystems that could back up not one but several radically different primary functions, which made it hard for Diaz or his people to point to one single place and say “There is the backup for the system we’re working on.” It made it difficult to know when backups were on-line, and almost impossible to discard any components, no matter how little they seemed to have to do with any particular ship’s function, without extensive testing, physical tracing of connections, and heated discussions among the experts. Sometimes the Kilrathi Cadre could help out, but not always. Fifty specialists covered a number of critical fields of expertise, but they were not ship-builders, and their specialties were often in areas removed from the nuts-and-bolts design process.
By the time Bondarevsky was getting ready to tackle the port side flight deck, the carrier was close to functioning as a ship again. She had computers, sensors, environmental systems, and communications up and running. Of her eight laser turrets, six were back online thanks to the heroic efforts of Lieutenant Commander Dmitri Deniken, the Tactics and Gunnery Officer. The other two probably wouldn’t function again this side of a keel-up repair at a major spaceyard, but Deniken had managed to come up with arcs of fire that covered the entire ship. He also had hopes of getting the numerous point-defense turrets working again once they managed to track down a computer glitch that made the automatic intercept function useless.
The one area where repair work lagged behind was Engineering. Commander Kent, the chief engineer recruited by Kruger for the project, was another ex-ConFleet man, but turned out to be something of a plodder. The wild leaps of imagination and creativity needed to come up with improvised solutions to unexpected problems simply weren’t for him. His by-the-book overhaul of the fusion power plants fell further and further behind schedule as he ran into trouble balancing the magnetic containment fields badly stressed by the final battle and the effects of long neglect and interaction with the brown dwarf’s radiation. Finally Tolwyn, furious at the continued delays, had relieved him of duty after a blazing row. His choice to replace Kent was little short of brilliant. Donald Scott Graham, late of TCS Juneau, became Karga’s new chief engineer. It was highly irregular-technically the man was still on active duty with the ConFleet, though they didn’t know he was even alive. But Tolwyn himself retained his admiral’s authority, and as ranking Confederation officer in the star system accepted Grahams resignation from the service, placed him in the inactive reserve, and then swore him in as a Landreich officer. Hopefully they would be able to sort out the paperwork later. In the meantime, though, Karga acquired a Chief Engineer who knew exactly how to go about the recommissioning job. Many of his solutions to problems skirted the regs in more ways than one, but they got the job done. Slowly, the engineering department began to catch up with the others as Graham took hold of his new responsibilities.
The end of the year was fast approaching, with two months of work behind them, and the Goliath Project crew could look back at solid progress. But the work ahead remained daunting. They had the second flight deck to put back into service, and all of the Kilrathi planes to check, overhaul, and put into action-if and when they could get pilots trained on the craft. Graham had the fusion plants back on-line and was working on the shield generators, but these were in particularly bad shape and were likely to be slow. In the interim they continued to rely on Sindri for anti-radiation shielding, but the tender’s extended shields couldn’t handle combat conditions, and until they could put up a reliable combat-rated force field the carrier wasn’t anything more than a particularly large and unwieldy dock floating in space. And as yet nothing had been done about her engines, maneuver drives and the hyperspaee jump system.