“Could you go over that for me again, sir?” the COB asked.
He got that they’d encountered another alien race. He got that they were friendly. He even got that their ship needed to be repaired and, hey, you did that for friends. He was just having a hard time with…
“We gotta go pick up the wing of a C-17 that’s floating around in space?”
“Forget the C-17,” Spectre said patiently. “We’re warping back to the scene of the space battle. We’re hoping to find a part that sort of looks like a part of a C-17 wing that got cut off and cut short. We need to pick it up and bring it back here so the aliens can fix their ship and get out of here before the Dreen catch them. Are we clear on all of that?”
“Yes, sir,” the COB said, taking another sip of coffee. “How big is this thing? How are we going to bring it back, sir?”
“That, COB, is up to you,” the CO replied. “I’ll send Commander Weaver out with the party. He will be in nominal charge. But as we both know—”
“The commander don’t know his butt from a hole in the water about anything nautical, sir,” the COB said, sighing. “I been trying—”
“We’re all trying, COB,” the CO said. “On the other hand, what he doesn’t know about space hasn’t been learned, yet.”
“Got it, sir,” the COB replied. “I’ll need a couple of machinists, three bosuns and we’d probably better get a couple of the Marines. They’re the only ones in armor. If this thing is dangerous…”
“Understood,” the CO said. “Get to it.”
“And a lot of space tape…” the COB muttered as he left the conn.
“Have we gotten our passengers in touch with the ship?” the CO asked. “I don’t suppose they can be of any help?”
“They’re talking,” Miriam said, leaning into her earbud. “I’m listening. The high frequency compression is making some of it hard to understand, but I’m getting most of it. But the ‘passengers’ don’t appear to be of much use to us in this. If I’m getting it right, one of them is something like a cook, there might be a supply person and I think the third is something to do with navigation.”
“So no lost princesses?” Weaver asked. “Captain of the destroyed ship? Their chief engineer?”
“No engineers at all,” Miriam said.
“Do they know you’re listening in?” the CO asked.
“Yes, sir,” Miriam replied. “Doing otherwise wouldn’t be… nice.”
“That was actually my point,” the CO said. “Okay, then it’s up to us. Commander Weaver, you’re going to be in charge of the recovery detail. Ideas?”
“Move to about a hundred thousand meters from center,” Bill said. “Do a visual and radar sweep for the shape we’re looking for. Close to it. Determine if it’s attached to something or not. Connect to it, probably by using suits carrying lines to the piece, pull it onto the hull, secure it and then we head back.”
“On the sweep,” Miriam said, still looking at the deck. “I can write some code to do automatic shape matching. It might speed things up.”
“Thank you, Miss Moon,” Bill said. “But, we already have auto-target recognition code for targeting and navigation based on matched filtering, FFTs, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms that work just fine and can be used just as readily. After all, how do you think the navigation computer recognizes the star patterns or the targeting systems recognize, uh, targets?”
“Oh.” Miriam wasn’t sure if Weaver was being flippant or arrogant, so she dropped it.
“I suspect the genius is going to be in the details,” the CO said.
“So do I, sir,” Bill admitted. “So do I. But it can’t be worse than catching a comet.”
“Commander, let me give you a piece of advice from my many years in the Navy,” the CO said. “Never ever say: It couldn’t be worse.”
By integrating the lidar system and the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems on the Blade to get a range, they could determine roughly how big the debris field was. But at a light-second out the size and a shape of the individual pieces were beyond the limits of even the big twelve-meter aperture of the main sparse array telescope system. Running SAR and lidar image enhancement codes they were able to increase their resolution a few percent and started picking up potential large pieces of more than fifteen meters in length while still a light-second out. Smaller pieces were still unresolvable. They were approaching under normal space drive so they had nearly thirty minutes until they reached their pause point.
“Too bent,” Bill said, looking at the first match. “I think it’s one of the things we’re looking for but it’s bent. You can see it.”
“I see it,” Miriam said, declicking the first match. “There’s another.”
“I think that’s a section of hull,” Bill replied. “It’s not the thing Kond was pointing at.”
“Might work,” Miriam pointed out.
“Better than a wing from a C-17,” Spectre said dryly. The matches were displaying on the main conn screens for size and resolution, so he didn’t even have to look over their shoulders. “Highlight it as a possible, though.”
“Broken,” Bill said on the next. “Bent again…”
“We’re scavengers,” Spectre interjected sadly. “Scavengers of a battle fought not so long ago. And… Tactical?”
“Conn, Tactical.”
“Don’t get caught up in this search,” the CO said. “The Dreen are probably going to be checking out this battle site, too.”
“Aye, aye, Conn.”
“Be a bit ugly if they showed up while we’re doing this, sir,” Bill said. “Not a wing. Something else.”
“Hull?”
“I think it’s part of a passageway. What’s that, though?”
The system was highlighting the piece as a low-priority. That was because the “wing” was still attached to one of the pods on the end.
“I forgot to add the pods,” Miriam admitted. “Sorry. But that looks—”
“Good,” Bill said, zooming the camera in. The “wing” had what looked like a bit of the hull still attached and still had its pod. He very much wanted to get his hands on one of the pods. The aliens had as much as said that they were part of their FTL system, one that humans might be able to replicate. “That looks very good. CO, I think we have a winner.”
“The COB has assembled a recovery crew,” Spectre replied. “Best go get your armor on. Pilot, bring us in close to that piece of debris.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“More alien space junk,” Smith muttered, thrusting over to the tumbling “wing.”
“Just get it stabilized, relative to the ship,” Berg replied. “I’ll take left, you take right. Just stand by to stabilize, I’m going to try something.”
“Is that anything like, ‘Hey, y’all, watch this?’ ” Himes asked.
“Probably,” Berg said, flying “over” the spinning wing. It was mostly tumbling end to end, pretty fast all things considered, with a slight skew and “down” being towards the boat. And it was moving “away” from the site of the battle very fast, having apparently been imparted with quite a bit of velocity from an internal explosion. But the ship was matching that to within a few meters per minute. He could “follow” it with his thrusters easily enough. But they had to stop the tumbling.
He hovered over the left end of the piece until it headed back “up” then engaged his shoulder thrusters, heading “down” towards the pod on the end. He realized at the last moment that the pod might be fragile, in which case this was going to be one stupid thing to do. And depending on its mass…