“Wait, one, sir,” Miller replied. “Oh… grapp. Sir, forget the extra zip-tie for the safety lever and I doubt we’ll need those Marines. Uh, sir, is there a way you could send down some picks or some antifreeze or something?” Miller looking up over the elevator that the semi-frozen ice spray had filled and buried and almost immediately refroze to the comet. That elevator was going nowhere soon.
“Well, the problem, sir,” Weaver said calmly, “is that the chipper was designed by guys who had been thinking of building a mass-driver propulsion system to steer comets off of collision courses. In essence, it’s a rocket engine and spits out a hell of a lot more ice spray than I’d ever thought it would’ve. We just modified the idea for our use.”
The computer had to be given complete control of the navigation in order to exactly, or as close to exactly as possible, match the comet’s rotations. Otherwise, the momentum of the small city-sized comet would rip the elevator right out of the belly of the Blade. And, Weaver could tell by the look on Spectre’s face, that he didn’t like that not one grapping bit.
“Didn’t you do some calculations on this to figure it out, Astro?” the CO said, just as calmly. But it was clearly the calm before the storm.
“Uh, no sir, the comet water extraction didn’t fall under astrogation or propulsion or fighting the Dreen so I, uh, delegated it, sir,” Weaver said sheepishly.
“Understood. To whom was it delegated?”
“Tchar.”
“Tchar,” the CO said, nodding. Calmly. “Tchar. Right. We’ll discuss that decision of yours later, Astro. Right now, do you have any suggestions for getting my elevator unstuck?”
“I’m thinking on it, sir. Maybe Tchar has something in his junk pile. I’d better get down there sir.”
“Sir,” the COB said, sticking his head in the wardroom. “This reminds me of a boat I was on a few years ago—”
“COB, much as I enjoy your reminiscences—” the CO said tightly.
“Yes, sir,” the COB interrupted. “I know you enjoy them all, sir. But there’s a point to this one, sir. Are you willing to gain the benefit of my nearly thirty years in this country’s Navy, sir? Or are you going to tell your senior enlisted man to mind his own business, sir?”
Spectre opened his mouth, then shut it.
“Go ahead, COB.”
“The point, sir, is that we were in the arctic,” the COB continued. “Machinist Mate Gants happened to be on the same cruise. He wasn’t a mate back then and I wasn’t COB but we were on the same boat, Lord help me. Anyway, he used a welder to melt a statue of a naked woman out of some glacier ice. See, we did a crack through on the ice and…”
“Weaver?”
“Great idea, COB,” Weaver said. He hit the com keys on his console. “Eng? I need Machinist Mate Gants on the double.”
“Yeah, I did this once for a Christmas Party a few years ago when we were poking up through the ice in the Arctic. We were camping up there for Christmas with these SEALS that were waiting on a damned Chinese polar orbiting satellite to crash… uh, forget I said that part… so I decided to lighten the mood.” Gants tossed several extra long welding rods, a roll of space tape, and a few tungsten rods into a cart alongside the portable welding generator and welder transformer. “We’d better hurry though.”
“How we getting this down to them?” Miriam asked.
“Somebody’s gotta carry it to ’em out the forward or top airlock or maybe out one of the torp tubes,” Gants said. “I saw Deep Impact and I have no desire to be walking on a damned comet in the middle of freakin’ space.”
“Uh, yeah.” Miriam tried not to grin. The movie had been so incorrect in the nature of comets it was a catastrophe in and of itself. But she decided not to say anything. Besides, the voice in her head was telling her something interesting about “…the entropy due to quantum fluctuations around the event horizon being proportional to the surface area of the artificial singularity…” So she was only half listening to Gants. Being an interpreter for years had trained her to half listen to multiple conversations at once. Maybe that is why the voice likes me?
“Well, Chief, you really managed to grapp this one up, huh? No comments about whose idea this was.” Weaver was chagrined at himself, not the crew.
“Not gonna say a word about it, sir,” Miller said with a snort.
“Two-Gun, start setting this up. Get me the welding transformer plugged into the generator and get it right here by this elevator strut. The welder only has about eight feet of cable.”
“Yes sir! Himes, Lurch give me a hand.” Two-Gun shot another harpoon into the comet just forward of the elevator and winched himself to the welder that the commander had brought them. Himes and Lurch followed suit.
“Now I just stretch this tungsten rod between these two welder clips and that should do it. I see the other rods and space tape now.” He laid the other two welding rods across the back of the insulated parts of the welder clips and then space taped them to each clip so he could use the welding rods as a handle. Those damned machinists in engineering were nothing if not clever.
“Ready over there Two-Gun?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Turn me on.”
“On, sir.”
“Wheeee!” Weaver could see the tungsten rod glowing red hot. He set to work on the first ice sculpture in space, on a comet, in orbit around a distant star. Say what you wanted to about the casualty rates, but sometimes Weaver felt he had the best job in the galaxy. He felt like the heroes in those science fiction books he grew up reading. The only things missing were scantily clad super vixen heroines.
“So the t/psi interacts with the psi muon density modularity vector…” Miriam muttered. “I can see that…”
“Try it now, Mike,” Weaver told Gants over the com.
“Yes, sir,” Gants depressed the elevator controls and sluggishly the hydraulics pulled the box filled with about twenty-five tons of ice free from the comet.
“Hot damn!”
“The elevator is here, sir.” Gants replied. “It’ll, uh, take us a few minutes to unload it.”
“Copy that.”
Gants and several of the submarine’s tech crew set to work emplacing the smaller chipper and melter system in the elevator and connecting it to the flex hose that ran down the corridor around two corners and up one deck to the water reservoir inlet near what used to be ballast tanks. In space they were water reservoirs.
The smaller chipper made quick work of the ice, and the fact that it was about sixty-eight degrees in the ship helped also. The ice melted as it was chipped and was sucked away through the flex hose.
“How we doing, XO?” the CO asked.
“Uhm… About that bet with Commander Weaver, sir?”
“Tell me.”
“It’s taking four minutes to unload the elevator and drop it back to the surface. It takes about two minutes to refill it and unstick it. Total time, six minutes.”
“Not bad,” the CO said, nodding. “Not bad!”
“Yes, sir,” the XO said. “The interior volume of the elevator is thirty-six cubic meters. We need twenty-six thousand cubic meters of water. Actually, that’s just to fill the reserve tanks. It doesn’t take into account the amount of O2 we need to crack out of it.”
“Oh,” the CO said. “Timeframe?”
“Seventy-two hours just to fill the reserve tanks,” the XO said. “Another thirty-four to create enough water to refill the O2 tanks. Actually, that’s not exactly right, since we’re using it even as we’re gathering it. Total estimated time? One hundred and twenty hours to have everything topped off.”