A Planned Improvisation (16 page)

“Ugh!” Ronnie shuddered.

“I’ll have to see that for myself,” Velvet admitted. “
Rescue
there is ready for her maiden flight once we clean her up, that is.”

“I’ll have to check the star drive,” Ronnie told her. “I made a few last-minute adjustments on
Independent
. Maybe they made the difference.”

“First we have to get this port operational again,” Park told them as breakfast arrived, “and the shipyard working again too.”

Breakfast was simple fare; hot cereal and scraps of spiced meat, but it was filling and tasted better than Park expected. They ate for a few minutes before Velvet returned to her description of the attack on Questo.

“The ship came in from out of the sun,” she explained. “That should have made us suspicious, but they beamed the proper security codes to the control tower.”

“They did?” Park asked. “How did they get those?”

“It hasn’t been as big a secret as it might have been,” Iris commented. “We haven’t changed the codes in over a year and we’ve had a lot of off-planet visitors. It only takes one, you know.”

“We’ve been lax since we won provisional acceptance,” Park admitted. “Now, I think we’ve been a little too eager to please our friends in the Diet.”

“True enough,” Iris agreed. “They need to accept us as we are, you know.”

“And we have to stop making exceptions in the fear that we’ll lose an ally,” Park nodded. “That was Arn’s and Terius’ doing but I didn’t exactly stand against it either. Well, by now I’m sure they’ll all be for tightening up security and once we rebuild some of our lost ships I think all visitors should be cleared in space before being allowed to approach Earth. Martian orbit should be about the right distance. Plenty of time to react if they don’t respond.”

“Not a bad idea,” Velvet told him, “but no one saw those enemy ships coming in. I think they were cloaked somehow.”

“I’ve been assured such technology doesn’t exist,” Park shook his head, “but ships can be built for stealth; radar-absorbing paint, and carefully designed shapes and materials can make them nearly impossible to detect.”

“We should be able to pick up drive signatures,” Ronnie told him, “Certain wavelengths of photons, infrared, ions and so forth. I’ll look into that.”

“Have you given up sleeping?” Park countered. “Ronnie, you’re good, but you can’t do everything. Farm it out to other engineers. We need you for this and the new shipyard. Those are our top priorities.”

“What new shipyard?” Velvet asked.

They told her of the plans to build a secret experimental ship yard under the old Van Winkle Base and Velvet and Ronnie immediately started
 
chattering about new ideas for the ship designs and computer programming for them. Park let them go on for a while, but eventually decided it was time to get to work on the port.

“We’ve already started cleaning up,” Harro Farmist, the Questo Shipyard Foreman, told them. None of the old buildings are intact, but we have tents. Most of the people here who were not close enough to
Rescue
scattered into the nearby woods. We lost thirty-one people and have sixty-four with various wounds, mostly minor, I’m glad to say, but after we buried our dead
 
we started clearing an area for ship building. You’ll find there isn’t a man or woman here who is not committed to getting back to work and showing those bastards what for.”

“Glad to hear it,” Park told him. “Do we have the materials for patching the runway?”

“Not much,” Harro admitted, “but if we can build a new transmitter, we plan to ask for some to be shipped in.”

“
Phoenix Child
has a radio,” Park replied. “We also have all the tinker-toy parts to build a new antenna in the hold.”

“I’ll put a team on that then,” Harro nodded. “I should be able to pull a few off salvage duty.”

“Salvage?” Park asked.

“Most of the buildings in the shipyard and port were prefabricated,” Harro explained, “so we’re finding a few wall and floor modules that are still useable.”

“What about the city around us?” Park asked.

“This is not so much a city as it is a mill town,” Harro shrugged. “By that, I mean that this is not a normal city. The only reason Questo exists at all is to build and repair space ships. Any buildings that are neither the port nor the shipyard are here for the express purpose of giving us a place to sleep when not working.”

“You have markets and shops, don’t you?” Park asked.

“Enough to keep us fed and amused,” Harro replied. “They are run by spouses of men and women working in the port and shipyard.”

“And you have a seaport, I could not help but notice,” Park went on.

“For deliveries,” Harro explained. “All right, perhaps I did not speak with precision, but any business or facility in the city is here to satisfy the needs of the shipyard and port workers and their families. Spaceships are our only main industry. Everything else is a subsidiary.”

“Sorry,” Park apologized. “I did not mean to put you on the spot. I more curious than anything else, and yes I see your point, except for the fact that the shipyard does not actually own everything in the city, this is like an old mill town. How many buildings do you expect to get out of those reusable modules?”

“Maybe a dozen,” Harro admitted. “To tell the truth, the project is as much to keep us busy doing something constructive as it is to give some of us places to live. But we have to do something until help comes from the other cities. Help is coming isn’t it?” He asked that last almost plaintively.

“Of course,” Park told him, “but Questo wasn’t their only target.” He described the destruction of Van Winkle Town and the other Mer cities. “I think you got the worst of it, but you’re hardly alone. We have to get you back into operation though. Of all the ships here, only
Rescue
survived and most of our other ships got caught on the ground. Anyway, don’t worry about setting up the new receiver. My people should have already started putting the dish together and we ought to have communications re-established by dusk. More important, tell me what you need in the way of medical supplies. We have a bunch of general purpose meds, but if something specific is needed, we’ll call for that from
Phoenix Child
.”

They spent over a month at Questo, until the spaceport was open and everyone had a solid home again, even if those homes were in hastily constructed, pre-fabricated buildings that arrived the second week on a Mer ship. There was still a lot of work needed to get the shipyard fully functional, but one assembly line had been cleared out and the shell of the first new ship had been started. Iris and Ronnie removed some of
Phoenix Child’s
weaponry and had it mounted in
Rescue
so that ship could stand as a protector to the shipyard against future attacks.

“We won’t bother with a star drive for that one,” Ronnie decided one evening in a private conversation with Park, Iris and Velvet.. “She’s going to stay in Questo anyway, so instead we’ll take the parts that would have been her drive and bring them back to Van Winkle. The official story will be that we’re going to install it in
Phoenix Child.
Everyone knows how fond of that ship you are, Park.”

“I thought it would take too much work to be worth the bother,” Park replied. “Or has that changed now that we’re down to eight working ships?”

“Nine,” Velvet corrected him. “
Rescue
is fully functional now, but no, that makes it all the worse as a decision. We cannot afford to take any of our ships off-line at this time. But I have some ideas for a new ship type to try out when we get back to Van Winkle.”

“We don’t know that you have a place to build it yet,” Iris pointed out. “We could hardly ask Arn over open communications.”

“Then my first project will be to build a shipyard,” Ronnie replied. “By now the lower levels of Van Winkle should be available. The tunnels down there may not be large enough to get a ship out, but we can start building while expanding one of the exhaust vents we cut in in preparation for launching the satellites with that old rocket we had.”

“A new design?” Park asked.

“Well, not so very new,” Ronnie laughed. “In fact, very old in quite a few ways. Remember we did have spaceships back in the late Twenty-first Century.”

“Nothing like the ones the Mer were building when we got here and now,” Park pointed out.

“True,” Ronnie agreed, “but we had a small single-man ship that would make a nice fighter.”

“The old mining ships?” Iris asked.

“No,” Ronnie laughed. “Those were delicate spidery things that had no more defensive capability than the old Lunar Landers. No, what I have in mind was something I saw being prototyped out in Nevada.”

“Area 51?” Velvet asked.

Ronnie laughed, “Nobody there really called it Area 51. That was for the conspiracy theorists and the occasional CIA document. The place had dozens of other names; Groom Lake, Paradise Ranch, Dreamland, Homebase, Watertown Strip, The Funco Factory – the list goes on. Every government agency had a different name for the place, but actually it was just a detached section of Edwards Air Force Base. Actually, by the time I got there, the place had been officially decommissioned, but there were two private companies doing government-funded experimental contract work out there.

“Anyway, both those companies were still doing pretty much what the Air Force had been doing before them, developing top secret planes and spacecraft for the government. The research wing of the Air Force had been privatized, but business went on as usual,” Ronnie continued. “I was called in as part of an official audit of one of the two companies. Most of the team members were accountants, naturally, but they needed an engineer good enough to explain what was going on, but with a government clearance rating to be allowed to see it in the first place. They had some sweet designs and some of them even worked. While I was waiting for you guys back at Van Winkle, I took a look into the computer archives and many of those designs are in there. None of them are perfect, but I think I can cull them for great ideas and put together some ships that will turn the Alliance’s notion of how to build on its ear.”

“We’re already up against designs that do that,” Park muttered.

“I’ve been thinking about that too,” Ronnie admitted, “and I think I understand how that materializing wing works. I doubt I can duplicate it, but I have a few ideas to try.”

“Such as?” Iris asked.

“I’m not ready to say yet,” Ronnie replied, “but give me some time to play with the remains of that ship we shot down over Van Winkle and I may have a few little surprises.”

On their return to Van Winkle, Park and his crew were nearly blinded by the sparkling reflections of sunlight off the walls of dozens of new buildings. On asking they learned that while Arn had authorized the construction of private safe rooms, the owners of the new homes and offices pointed out that it would take little actual effort to use the stasis foil to warp an entire building as it would to cover an interior room and that in case of attack it would cost less to reface a building with stucco than it would to rebuild from scratch. Arn had remained firm that he would only give away enough for a room, arguing that the power consumption to keep a larger volume in stasis went up geometrically, but allowed anyone who wanted to buy the foil.

The foil, for that matter was nothing special. Van Winkle had long since run out of the supplies they had brought with them in stasis and had been using Mer-made aluminum foil, since anything that could carry a current would do the trick. Very few of those new buildings were completed, but as they went up, so did the foil.

“The wet season is on us,” Park remarked to Arn that afternoon. “They’re going to have to hold off on the stucco until afterward.”

“True enough,” Arn agreed. “Most of those buildings are just shells, but they are now water-resistant shells. People are using the wet season as a time to work on the interiors and about half are camping out in their new homes now.”

“We’ll have to warn incoming ships and planes about the glare though,” Park pointed out.

“Then we will,” Arn nodded. “While you were gone, we did a bit of work toward the new shipyard. Both Embassies are in the old base and I’ve moved town hall’s offices there too.”

“How does that prepare for the shipyard?” Iris asked.

Arn grinned. “Remember the idea we had for putting it on the lower levels? Well, more people in the base will mask any heat signatures coming from the shipyard below. Dannet tells me Alliance deep radar might penetrate to see it, but first someone would have to think to look.”

“But ship building is hardly quiet,” Park pointed out, “It won’t be much of a secret if everyone in the base hears noise coming from there.”

“Not from five hundred feet down,” Arn shook his head. “It will be below the old missile silo where the jets and choppers used to be stored. We tested a bit and while you can hear and feel it, it’s no worse than the forced air ventilation in the base. And we’re enlarging one of the launch ventilation tunnels to serve as access. It should not be noticeable from space.”

“Good,” Park agreed. “We want Questo to remain the main shipyard for Earth so far as anyone knows. This is going to be Ronnie’s toy shop.”

“My what?” Veronica Sheetz asked, coming up behind them.

Arn grinned, “Better yet, let’s show you.”

They all got into Arn’s Humvee and he started driving back toward the old base. “Where’s my car?” Park wondered. “I could have sworn I left it
 
at the port when we flew to Questo.”

“I saw Marisea driving it around the other day,” Arn replied. “If you didn’t want her to use the thing you shouldn’t have commandeered one of those Mer-built models. Their flukes can’t work the pedals of a Humvee, you know.”

“But the Mer-built cars float,” Park pointed out. “It’s a much smoother ride.”

“We still have one of the all-terrain vehicles at the house,” Iris put in, “but they only hold two and like a Humvee, Marisea cannot work the foot controls. I use it more often than Park does.”