“You see anyone who is going to complain?” Freeman asked.
I went back to the entrance, selected a laser torch, and returned. I once owned a self-broadcasting ship, a commuter craft called a Johnston Starliner. The broadcast engine on that ship looked like a crate filled with mortar shells. It had eighteen brass cylinders, each about three feet tall. The broadcast engine for the discs had the same basic design—eighteen brass cylinders shaped like bullets. In this case, each cylinder was fifteen feet tall and so specking wide that I could only reach two-thirds of the way around them.
With Freeman looking over my shoulder, I cut every cable and wire that connected the engine to the broadcast station. Before climbing under the cylinders to cut the outer shell of the satellite, I returned to the atmospheric controls and purged any remaining oxygen from inside the station. If there was any oxygen in the station when I cut through the fuselage, it could cause havoc the moment I cut a hole in the wall.
Next, I turned off the gravity. Back on Earth, those eighteen brass cylinders would weigh several tons each. With the gravity off, their weight meant nothing, but their mass still posed a problem. Moving them from the station to the transport would not be easy.
With Freeman directing me, I cut through the outer wall of the station. Once the incision was done, I braced myself against a rail and kicked one of the cylinders. The entire engine, outer wall and all, dropped out of the station as a unit.
I would have needed a crane to move the broadcast engine back on Earth. Out here in space, I conveyed it using a cargo rig—a couple of synchronized jetpacks that I attached to the outermost cylinders using canvas cords. I stood on top of the broadcast engine holding the reins in my hands and rode it like a Roman riding a war chariot.
Up to that point things had gone pretty well. After this it all went to shit.
CHAPTER TWO
I rode the engine between the discs and out to the transport. The ride went smoothly. The problems did not start until I reached the kettle.
The broadcast engine was still attached to the portion of the wall that I cut out of the station. Before I could fit the engine into the transport, I would need to cut the engine free. With the small section of outer wall attached, the engine would not fit up the ramp of the kettle.
“It’s too wide to fit through the hatch,” I said as I used the cargo rig’s reverse thrusters to put on the brakes.
“Cut the outer wall away,” Freeman said.
We did not have torches on the transport, and I had left the torch I used to extract the engine back in the broadcast station. I had to fly back to retrieve it. The trip took twenty minutes. Then, with Freeman inspecting my every move to make sure I did not damage the cylinders, I used the laser torch to cut the brackets that attached the broadcast engine to the outer wall.
I did not damage the cylinders, nor did I cut any hidden cables, but something still went wrong. We should have seen it coming. With the brackets cut away, there was nothing holding the cylinders together. It was like placing a dozen eggs on a table, then peeling away the carton holding them. With the wall and brackets gone, the only thing binding those giant cylinders together was the canvas straps from my cargo rig.
As Newton observed, “An object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by the force of a cargo rig.” Too distracted to notice that without that section of wall binding the bases of the cylinders, the canvas strap would no longer hold the various components of the broadcast engine together, I started up the cargo rig. The cylinders slipped out of the rig and floated in eighteen different directions. It looked like slow-motion footage of bowling pins struck by a ball.
Anyone else would have said, “You better go get them,” or “Be careful.” Sitting in the sealed atmosphere of the cockpit, Ray Freeman did not waste oxygen telling me the obvious. He sat and watched silently as I made trip after trip gathering each of the cylinders and bringing it to the transport.
Now that they had separated, I found I could move the individual cylinders using my jetpack. I would wrap my arms around the cylinder, use the rockets in my jetpack, and drift toward the transport at approximately the same speed as a ninety-year-old woman walking uphill. Once I got the cylinders into the transport, I stacked them on their sides like lumber. Freeman sealed the rear hatch as I brought in the last of them. The doors ground together slowly and sealed with a clank.
As those cylinders weighed several tons each, Freeman left the gravity off while I tried to use the internal cargo arm to stand them and arrange them. That was when we ran into the next problem. Transports like this were meant for hauling soldiers, not cargo. The average soldier stood just under six feet tall; the cylinders were fifteen feet tall. The kettle, which had plenty of headroom for transporting Marines, had a twelve-foot clearance. Ray said that he needed to come out for a closer look. He flooded the kettle with air and came out to inspect the problem. “It’s too tall,” was all he said.
I looked from the tops of the cylinders to their bases. “Speck!” I said. “Can we leave them on their sides?”
Freeman shook his head. “The bottoms are insulated. Everything else is made to conduct electricity. If we left them lying there, the brass would conduct the wrong charge into the hull of the ship.”
Freeman solved the problem. There were storage compartments under the floor of the kettle. Using my laser torch, Freeman cut away a thirty-foot section of floor, giving us access to the storage compartments below. The compartments were four feet deep, creating one foot of clearance between the tops of the cylinders and the roof of the ship.
With the problem solved, Freeman went back to the cockpit and purged the oxygen out of the kettle. Then I used the cargo arm to drag those massive cylinders out of the kettle horizontally, bring them in diagonally, and drop them into place vertically.
Once they were in place, Freeman sent me back to the broadcast station a third time. This time he needed insulation blankets to prevent the electricity running through the cylinders from juicing the entire ship. When I returned, I had yards of rubberized blanket. I also brought every morsel from the vending machine.
Freeman sealed the doors, pumped some O2 back in the kettle, and came to join me.
I showed him the blanket, and he nodded. “We’re going to wrap this around the engine?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Won’t that affect the way they conduct electricity?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“So is this going to work?” I asked.
He glared at me. That look might have meant, “What do you think?” or it might have meant, “Of course it won’t work.” Most likely Freeman’s glare meant, “You knew you were committing suicide when we left Little Man.”
“You hungry?” I asked.
“What do you have?” Freeman asked. I showed Freeman the stash I had stolen from the vending machine. He chose some meat sticks. I ate a candy bar.
Freeman had no trouble reassembling the various components of the broadcast engine. The design was modular. Once the cylinders were in place, he ran cables between them, then he spliced the cables into the generator that powered the shields for our transport. The operation took hours. He worked nonstop, never speaking a word.
By the time Freeman finished, there were so many cables snaking in and out around the cylinders that we could no longer walk across the kettle without tripping.
“Think the generator has enough juice for that monster?” I asked.
“There’s plenty of power,” Freeman said as he inspected his work.
“Should we boot it up?” I asked.
My life was coming to a close. The broadcast engines on self-broadcasting ships were attached to computers. The pilot used the computer to calculate a destination, then the engine broadcasted the ship to that exact spot. Without a computer controlling it, there was no telling what the broadcast engine might do. It might simply disintegrate us. It might send us into a star. I was reminded again that coming out to this satellite had never been anything more than a passive form of suicide. We could tell ourselves we were trying to get back into the war, but we were really just killing ourselves either way.