Getting the Smart MetalTM up to Skull Mountain involved gliding it down. It landed several kilometers away so as not to risk shaking the mountain more. Getting a programmer in looked to take an entire day until a young woman volunteered.
“I’ve been sky diving.”
“How many times?”
“Once.”
There was no choice but to take the risk. Everything went fine, until she landed on a rock and turned her ankle. A big Marine lugged her the five kilometers to her Smart MetalTM. She quickly programmed it into a walker and it walked both of them back to the tunnel.
There, relays of experienced diggers gently extracted rocks, helped by Marine engineers or just eager trigger pullers. They had used wood to shore up the opening to the tunnels. Now, Smart MetalTM began to squeeze in and help them.
Eagerness would build up the speed of the diggers, then sliding rock would remind people there was an entire mountain above them. Progress was nail-bitingly slow.
While the digging went on, engineers and archeologists studied their problem. They called for the air dropping of grouting and sprayers. They both agreed that fixing the walls in place was a good place to start. The Smart MetalTM should be used as a support of last resort, and, if the mountain came down, the programmer would have it ready to retract into an umbilical cord to the outside world that people could crawl out through.
Two more tons of Smart MetalTM were drop-glided to them. That about exhausted the supply of spare metal the nine battlecruisers in orbit had brought to handle the breakdown of the ships’ Smart MetalTM. If they had to have more, it would have to come out of the battlecruiser’s armor.
Sandy ordered a study done. How much Smart MetalTM could they take out of Admiral’s Country on the Victory? Two tons would make for cozier work and living space for her staff, but the tunnel could get the extra metal it needed without degrading the fighting strength of one of her ships.
While work below continued at a feverish pace that all too often couldn’t match a snail’s, the watch at the threatened jump went on. Six alien battleships failed to maintain the necessary deceleration. The question for the betting pool was would the speeding battleships sheer away and go around the jump, or would they crash through, blasting away with their lasers at anything human, in range or not?
The problem with the betting pool was that no one would take a bet on the alien sheering away. Everything they’d seen before warned them to prepare for a suicidal crashing of the jump.
The Broadsword and the Claymore had been stationed on the far side of the jump. There, they kept a cautious eye on the approaching fleet. They studied the ships and took signatures off them. The alien reactors were all very similar, and well within the usual parameters they had come to expect of large alien warships. Twenty reactors aft to feed super-heated plasma to the rocket motors. Another twenty spaced along the length of the hull to feed an amazing number of lasers. No two ships were the same. The lowest count for capacitors to feed the lasers was one hundred and ninety-eight. The highest number was two hundred thirty-one. The others ranged along between them.
The human scouts knew some aliens had developed newer lasers with longer range. They could make out no difference between these capacitors, one ship to the next. If the lasers they fed were different, we humans would not know that until they fired on us.
As the first battleship approached the jump, the Broadsword and Claymore slipped their moorings and cautiously made the jump back to the waiting task force. All of their data was transmitted to the Victory, and Penny disappeared into her cabin with Mimzy to study it.
When she emerged for supper in the wardroom, she shook her head. “All the reactors in the fleet are within a hair of each other. This is one wolf pack and not one we’ve fought before. All the capacitors are cut from the same cookie cutter. If they’ve got more powerful lasers, maybe they’ll fire in shorter bursts.”
“Could they be planning on feeding juice from three capacitors to a single laser?” Sandy asked. “We used two capacitors now, but in the early days, weaker lasers had used one.”
Penny did a face palm. “The battleship Kris Longknife brought back used two capacitors per laser, just like we do. I was assuming two capacitors meant one laser. Until the laser actually fires, we can’t get any data off them. Those extra capacitors could very well be there so three could feed one larger laser, or maybe five will feed two lasers. Who knows?”
The Intel Chief shook her head. “Damn, once again, we let what we knew get in the way of learning what we need to know.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Sandy said. “We’ll know what the lasers are good for when they use them.”
“Assuming we don’t blow them out of space before they can,” Van pointed out.
Sandy nodded, along with everyone else. That was the way the battles went with the aliens. They came at us. They died. We went on living.
It would be that way until it wasn’t.
We got better, but they were also getting better. What kind of different game was this bunch of aliens playing?
Sandy checked with Skull Mountain that night. They’d dug out almost all of the rock fall. In the morning, they expected to get enough of a hole to slip a small grouting device into the tunnel to start the stiffening up of the passageway. Once the grouting dried, they’d slide the Smart MetalTM in to cover all sides of the tunnel. The floor, however, would be a false floor, fifteen centimeters above the tunnel floor with flexible honeycomb to dampen the impact of each step.
There was talk that they might go barefoot in the tunnel.
Meanwhile, the Smart MetalTM programmer had been busy.
“Has anyone else here ever been hot air ballooning?” she asked around. No one had.
That didn’t slow her down. She busily constructed a hydrogen extraction machine, got it going, and began storing the hydrogen in large bottles. That did cause several engineers to stop by her work area. Sandy got pictures of the work group and decided that there was more than intellectual curiosity involved. The woman did have luscious breasts and the three guys were really cute.
“You know you don’t want a large supply of free hydrogen near a flame, don’t you?” one engineer asked, showing an amazing bit of intelligence for a male whose eyes were fixed on female mammaries.
“Yep,” she admitted, keeping her eyes on the device extracting hydrogen. “However, you do know that we’ll get out of here a lot faster if we fly, don’t you?”
The four then put their heads together and came up with a design for one huge Smart MetalTM dirigible. In two days, she would have enough hydrogen to fill the gigantic thing. She was also writing a program to have the Smart MetalTM extract itself from the tunnel, then reform itself into a massive gas bag.
She had also intended to design hydrogen burning engines to propel the airship. However, the engineers put a call in for several electric fuel cells to be dropped to them when time was available. So, she added eight electric engines to the design and had a fast exit ready for all of them and their prize.
As soon as the remains were out of the mountain, their ride would form and they’d be airlifting themselves over the trees and back to the air strip!
“Two hours after we finish here, you can start airlifting us out of the lovely alpine meadow and boogie for home!” she told Jacques.
Sandy called in Professor LaBao and instructed him to start pulling his teams out now. No need to panic, but Sandy wanted to devote every longboat in the fleet to pulling Jacques’ team out when the time came. When he was aboard the Galileo, she wanted to head for Jump Point Alpha and a fast run home.
Then life got more complicated.