The Abyss of Time

Chapter Forty Three

"This panel here controls the Electronic Warfare systems," said Andrew Nabb excitedly, gesturing to a touch screen to one side of the combat console. "Touch that icon there to activate the anti-lock system. No guided missile will be able to lock onto you."

Nabb was showing off his creation with all the enthusiasm of a lifetime hobbyist who'd been perfecting his art for decades and who had just finished work on his magnum opus. Miller tried to hide a smile as he, Frank Buford and Yonel Dorelis crowded beside him in the cockpit of his home-made armoured personnel carrier. It was hard not to be infected by his passion and delight, but if he saw Miller's amusement, he was likely to take it as mockery and his enthusiasm would instantly turn to hurt and resentment.

Buford wasn't amused, though, and made no attempt to hide the frown of concern he was sharing with Dorelis. Nabb hadn't noticed yet because he was directing most of his attention on Miller, and Miller tried to keep it there by asking pertinent questions. This time, though, Buford beat him to it, and his question was rather less diplomatic than Miller's would have been.

"Why does it have an Electronic Warfare system when it's basically a toy?" he asked. "Was your friend Bert from accounting going to be shooting FireHornets at it?"

Miller tensed up apprehensively, but Nabb was so wrapped up in his fervour that he missed the other man's tone of voice. "The missile Jenny Wragg shot at Brian Crumley's tank last year had a guidance system that was fully the equal of a Mark IV FireHornet," he said. "She told me straight up that she intended to have another one ready this year to blow up our Crawler, so I wanted to be ready for her." A shadow of regret suddenly fell across his face. "Then Seth McCoy came down with Rell Syndrome and had to pull out of the Cardea mission. They came to me to replace him with an offer too good to refuse, so I never got to find out whether it would have worked."

"I'm sure it would have," said Miller quickly. "You've got a real talent for this. No-one else I know could have designed something like this."

"Well, it wasn't just me," Nabb replied modestly, although he was grinning with boyish delight. "It was me, Ying Jinguo and Sandy Goldberg. The Three Engiteers, we called ourselves. We were going to enter this baby into the Gauntlet event. One team has to get a custom designed vehicle from A to B across a bunch of obstacles while the other team tries to stop them. No rules. Anything goes. The only requirement was that everything be custom built. Nothing off the shelf."

"I'd like to have watched an event like that," said Miller regretfully. "Sounds like a lot of fun."

"We thought so. Anyway, over here we have the targeting systems for the pulsed plasma cannon." He swivelled around in his seat to indicate another panel to the right of the situation awareness monitors. "Of course, none of this was actually on board the vehicle in the original design. We didn't want people inside when it might get blown to pieces by the other guys. The cockpit was located in a truck parked outside the arena." He grinned again. "The only thing inside the vehicle was a pumpkin. If it was damaged, scorched or something, the team was deemed to have failed."

"A pumpkin," said Buford, his frown deepening. "Just how big was this vehicle originally?"

"About two metres long," said Nabb happily. He seemed to have missed the frown completely.

"And now it's..." Buford looked out through the cockpit door into the crew lounge, with its comfy looking padded chairs lining the walls and the stairs up to the dormitories and bathroom. At the rear of the room was another door leading to the laboratory. The whole thing was the size of a mobile home.

"Four times larger in every dimension," said the engineer, still oblivious to the other man's sceptical tone. "That was the largest engineering challenge; adapting the various weight bearing structures to bear the greater mass, because if the size increases by four, the mass increases..."