Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) Mark Wandrey (e novels to read .TXT) 📖

three crew berths into one, checked all the seals, and turned it over to Dakkar. “Your new home.”

The Wrogul looked around dispassionately. “Oily,” he said eventually.

“Cleaning supplies are in a locker one deck down. You can help out by starting cleaning.”

He left the Wrogul to either clean his own environment, or deal with it. He didn’t have time to argue with the cephalopod. He did, however, take the time to program the main airlocks to only work for Rick and himself. He didn’t want Dakkar going on a little adventure. He planned to be in the black within 24 hours.

Rick took the initiative and began cleaning junk out of the ship. Half the waste compressors were stuffed, and the parts bins in engineering had been used by some vermin Sato hoped were now deceased. While Rick worked, Sato found a functional computer interface and set about the job of making the ship functional.

If he’d found a single major system offline, he would have immediately returned to Tsukuyomi Brokers and shot the pompous prick between the eyes. He was already in a foul mood because of the general condition of the ship. However, everything was working, including the computer itself. In fact, the main computer was new—bonus. Life support, main reactor, secondary reactor, avionics, lift motors, control surface motors, and hyperdrive all reported as operational. He’d find out how operational later.

The reactor’s operations logs showed between 84 and 89 percent efficiency, which for a fusion powerplant was pathetic. The main torch reaction nozzle was 192 hours past its rated lifespan. Swell. But the best part was, the F11 reserves were empty, and the currently bunkered F11 was showing 77 percent saturation. These numbers were all based on logs he didn’t trust. Luckily the powerplant was on standby, so he brought it to life—and almost blew them to hell.

The automatic system stopped the power up sequence a millisecond before primary containment would have failed, turning the ship into a little mushroom cloud.

“Fucking hell, what was that?” Rick yelled through the intercom in engineering.

“I was just running a test,” he said, unwilling to tell Rick he’d almost been the first of many to die.

“Well, every alarm in the world went off, and a bunch of relays popped. What should I do?”

Sato set the reactor controls back to standby. “Reset the breakers and go back to what you were doing. It’s good.”

“Okay,” Rick replied. He didn’t sound convinced.

Sato returned to basics.

Two hours later, Rick had finished cleaning out the parts storage in engineering. He found the sole surviving pest, a strange reptile that tried to bite him on the neck. It got a mouthful of shattered teeth, and Rick crushed its head with his powered fist. A sweep with sensors showed nothing else bigger than a cockroach. Considering how dangerous cockroaches could be in the galaxy, Sato made a note to depressurize the entire ship once they got it into space.

Rick had done a good job in the parts room. Good enough that Sato could tell there wasn’t much to work with. He used his pinplants to access the computer manuals and note normal parts stores levels, confirming there was less than 10 percent nominal stores. He wrote a subroutine and turned it loose, ordering whatever was available on Earth, while going back to work.

He started by cannibalizing the backup fusion reactor for parts. He knew both models as they were installed on several Hussars ships. Of the 52 fusion core buffers, 6 of them were out. It was no wonder it had almost gone pop when Sato dumped reaction mass into the core. As luck would have it, no two malfunctioning buffers were next to each other. He was able to power down the backup and use six of its buffers to replace the main reactor’s damaged ones. After checking a few other minor issues, he returned to the bridge.

This time, the reactor powered up smoothly. One problem down, a hundred to go. By the end of the day, the ship was in much better shape. Another 1.3 million credits were paid by the mysterious account, and the ship’s stores were now at a healthier 52 percent of nominal. They’d even managed to find four extra compatible fusion buffers, so Sato brought the backup back online only missing three (one of its was also damaged). Crosslinking the two reactors, he used plasma from the main to bring the backup into standby. Now they had full power available.

The last thing he did before getting some sleep was to put in an order for F11. When he woke in the morning with only a few hours before their planned departure, his bot had yet to find any F11 for sale.

“The damned war,” he said. Rick had been checking every nook and cranny in the bridge looking for more of the nasty little lizards that had tried to eat him.

“What do we do if you can’t get more F11?”

“Leave and hope we find some soon.”

“How far can we get with what we have?”

“Possibly dozens of jumps.”

“Possibly?” Rick asked, looking up from an open panel. “What if it’s less?”

“F11 can be finicky, especially with an old reactor like this one. If it passes a saturation threshold, the heat or the radiation could be uncontrolled.” He made an exploding gesture with his hands.

“Okay, I get the point.”

“A few more hours, and we’ll get out of here.”

Sato set an alarm and watched as the time wound down. He spent the remaining hours checking all the systems he could, then going over them again. Rick confirmed the port lateral CID, close-in-defense, laser emitter was missing. The Tokyo Starport might have some repair parts available, but there wasn’t so much as a single bullet for sale. The war had seen to that. Still, he tried chasing every possible lead to get F11. Even