Bypass Gemini

Chapter 10

The inventor and the pilot stood in the hangar. It wasn’t one of the cavernous aircraft storage facilities people tend to envision when you use the word hangar. At least, not currently. It had a massive, towering roof that lead all the way from the subbasement to the ground level where the bay doors were, but thin, temporary walls were dividing the full hangar up into a few dozen spaces just large enough to house a single ship and various pieces of repair and diagnostic equipment. It gave the place the overall atmosphere of the intensive care unit at a hospital, each bed separated off with curtains. In a way that’s what it was. Right now the patient was a mangled pile that the automated rovers had hauled in. It took a trained eye to even recognize it as a ship, let alone the one Lex had been piloting. Karter let out a low whistle.

“That’s a CA double I revision... 34D, right?” he asked.

“Uh... yeah, actually.”

“Ni-i-i-ice. They don’t make them like this anymore. Well, they NEVER made them like this. Too many engine mounts. You got the schematics?”

“No, there aren’t any. I sort of just grafted stuff on, you know?”

“Free form. Nice. But a bitch to repair. I’ll just pull up the schematics on file, then. Ma! Get the diagnostic cart out here and draw up the schematics.”

“I don’t know how useful the official schematics are going to-”

“I’m not putting it back together the way you had it. Obviously the way you had it sucked. It needed fixing before it even crashed.”

“Look, it might not have been top of the line, but it did what I needed it to do.”

A small, motorized cart appeared from an access tunnel on the far side of the hanger. It was heavily hung with tools, both from its sides and from a gantry that was supported over its work surface. As it puttered along the floor, a roll of paper that jutted from one edge dispensed a sheet, which was clamped down and cut to length. A pen plotter descended from the gantry and danced quickly across the poster-sized sheet, so that by the time the cart jerked to a halt in front of Karter, a full structural schematic was completed. He pulled it free, grabbed a pen from the rack on the cart, and started awkwardly folding and notating the plans.

“Paper? Seriously?” Lex asked doubtfully.

“The problem with engineers today is that they don’t think on paper. So you had, what, four engines?”

“Six. Double the usual complement of Cantrell engines, plus-”

“Yeah, I see. Two of those little ones. Any steering considerations?”

For a few minutes, the pair worked through the various changes Lex had made. When they were through, Karter scribbled down some calculations.

“Those specs look about right?” he asked.

Lex looked over the numbers.

“Well, it’s been a while since I benchmarked it, but yeah, that’s close.”

“Okay, meet or beat,” he said, “What sort of direction were you thinking for upgrades?”

“Speed. I need this thing fast. And a little more maneuverability would help.”

“Weapons?”

“Absolutely not. If I get caught, the last thing I need is them being able to claim I opened fire on them.”

“Nothing obvious, then. Plausible deniability and all that. Defenses?”

Lex glanced at the twisted metal that had been the cockpit.