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that you represent close to a billion creds, a little air is cheap insurance.
. . ."
Trystin listened as duValya repeated, so close to word for word that she might
have written them, the preflight manual's instructions. Maybe she had. All the
instructors seemed to be experts on something-and everything. ". . . is that
clear?" "Yes, ser."
"Fine. It's all yours. I'll watch. You can ask questions without penalty, this
time, but if you forget something or have to ask a question later, I won't let
you forget it. Now . . . you go out first."
Trystin sealed his suit, triggering his implant. "Comm check, Commander?"
"Check, Lieutenant."
The training corvettes essentially floated in heavy reinforced composite docks
off the spiderweb of access tubes and locks. Since Chevel Beta was a largish
chunk of rock with minimal gravity, providing artificial gravity outside the
station proper would have been a waste of power.
Remembering all the briefings, after he exited through the narrow lock,
Trystin immediately clipped the retractable tether line to the recessed ring
by the corvette's hatch.
Seemingly slumping in the ship cradle, the BCT-1O looked more like a partly
deflated oval bladder made of metal than a ship.
"Good. Don't ever forget that tether clip. You can make a real mess of
yourself if you have to use attitude jets. Here they have enough power for
escape velocity." The commander's voice rang hollowly in the armor's speakers.
Slowly Trystin pulled himself across the corvette's hull, noting replacement
plates, and the many signs of repairs, such as the scratches around the sensor
bulges and the heavy layers of heatshield. As he had been instructed, he only
did a visual inspection of the orientation jets and the mass thruster nozzles.
He avoided even floating/bouncing behind the nozzles.
"Is there anytime you actually physically inspect the exterior of the
thrusters?" he asked.
"Not unless you're an engineer and you've locked the ship and frozen the
internal comm nets so that no one can play with the power. Even then, I
wouldn't do it. The ECR of even stray boosted ions is enough to scatter you
and your armor across a very large system. Besides, what would it tell you?"
Trystin nodded inside the helmet. Dumb question, but sometimes he did ask dumb
questions, no matter how hard he tried.
After the preflight, they used the lock back into the access tube and then the
ship's lock, still in full armor. Trystin released the mechanical holdtights,
leaving the ship only held in place by the magnetic holdtights.
Once he confirmed that the ship's pressure was sound, he flicked on the heater
switch and cracked his helmet. His breath steamed in the cold air, and he
could hear the whine of the ventilators as they forced slowly warming air
through the ship.
He unsuited and racked the armor. The commander racked hers in the second
rack, the one used by the tech noncom in a standard corvette.
Trystin began the interior preflight by walking to the rear of the corvette
and sliding open the lower-deck access panel.
"What happens if the panel jams?" asked the commander.
Trystin looked blank. He hadn't read or heard anything about jammed access
panels. Then he looked at the half-open panel. There were four heavy recessed
hex sockets around the door. He peered underneath. "I don't know, ser. It
looks as though you could lift the whole assembly if the hex nuts were
removed."
DuValya smiled. "You get one for quick thinking, but that's about it. This
isn't something that's on exams, but it happened to me once. Very
embarrassing. I did just what you suggested. I even carry a hex socket." She
pulled the socket wrench from her thigh pouch. "I suggest you get one. Not for
this, though. If you have any gravity, the assembly will fall straight down on
the converter. If you don't, it masses too much to move quickly and has a
tendency to slide aft under pressure, where it will crimp or slice the
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supercon cables." Trystin winced.
"The best thing to do is call for overhaul, because any ship where the hatches
are jamming is a mess. Of course, you can't do that in real life. So, what do
you do?" Trystin waited.
"You leave it alone and use your handy hex socket to undo the vent-duct access
cover here. It comes out right between the translation engine and the
converter for the accumulators." She pointed to a plate on the deck forward of
the access hatch. "Then you slice through the duct tubing-it's just
plastic-and remove the access cover from the back on the other side. An old
tech showed me that." She paused. "Go ahead. Lieutenant."
Trystin slid the access plate back and down into the grooves, then pulled
himself down into the space below. The BCT-10 felt tired, even more tired than
the worn simulators. Tired, and bigger, more real. The odor of heated and
cooled plastic, of ozone cooked into walls and equipment, and the faintest
odor of once-hot machinery and oil seeped into his nostrils. Although the main
systems had virtually no moving parts, lots of the subsidiary systems did,
like heating and ventilation, or the loaders for the single torp tube.
Trystin glanced around the power center, then began by inspecting the supercon
lines, especially noting the line from the accumulator was dust-free.
The commander said nothing, just watched as he methodically went through all
the steps of the internal preflight beginning with the aft power section and
heading forward until they reached the cockpit.
"Go ahead. Strap in." Commander duValya stood beside the noncom's couch,
rigged in the training corvettes to combine both override controls and
technical boards. Trystin didn't see how the instructors managed the
instructing, the overseeing, and the tech inputs. He'd been having enough
trouble just piloting a simulator, and now he had to do it for real.
As Trystin strapped into the pilot's seat, the commander pulled out a data
cube. "This is a typical mission cube, with all the information you'll need.
It's the same information that you found in the simulator system, and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]