The Santana Nexus (Junkyard Dogs Book 3) (10 page)

Chapter
16.

UTFN Reclamation Center, January 3, 2599.

It was
early in the morning of the next day when the utility sled
Rover I
brought the first members of the hastily assembled battleship resurrection crew ever closer to a row of battleship wrecks located in outer fringes of the Military section of the Scrapyard. Harris, who was piloting the sled, along with Carlisle and Raghib made up the advanced team. On the deck of the sled, which was open to the vacuum of space, the two men wore standard issue military spacesuits while Carlisle, feeling very much at home, was back in her special prototype command suit. The
Perseus
was about ten minutes behind the sled because, as a full-sized ship, it was taking her considerably longer to maneuver safely through the scrap cloud to her destination.

"
I read somewhere that most Navies don’t operate battleships anymore," said Rahgib, "and the ones that do only have one or two of them."

"Yeah,
I think I heard that too," replied Harris.

"
Any idea why?" asked Rahgib.

"
...huge cost...large crew...logistics nightmare...I do," said Carlisle, "They're so damned expensive to build that only the wealthiest governments can afford them. After you've got one built, you have to man it and keep it fueled and keep it provisioned. Space travel has never been easy and space warfare is even tougher. The sheer cost to run the ships and the logistics nightmares just continue to spiral upwards exponentially as the ships get bigger. If there isn't an active war of some kind going on, it doesn't make sense to operate anything that big, that complicated and that expensive. Hell, even operating a heavy cruiser is a pretty expensive proposition these days!"

Carlisle noted, with some relief, that her energy levels
had perked up considerably as she had been up and around over the last day and a half or so. She knew she still wasn't at one hundred percent but it felt really good to be able to at least make a minor contribution towards the defense of the Scrapyard. Because of her proven expertise with her wrist computer, her presence was declared to be vital to this defense mission and she had been allowed to go along in spite of the fact that she had just gotten out of the infirmary and was still considered to be recovering. As a precaution, Harris was supposed to be keeping a close eye on her for any signs that she was overdoing it.

"I imagine that's why we never see
battleships very far from some kind of base either," ventured Harris.

"That's one of the reasons," said Carlisle.

"They certainly do capture the imagination though, don't they," said Raghib, as they drew closer to the line of wrecks. By the time they got up within a few meters of the ship on the end of the row, the wreck had grown impossibly large.

"As some of the most powerful weapons ever developed by mankind, they certainly do," responded Harris. "Heads up, everyone, we're
here."

The trio
ended their discussion and got back to contemplating the problem at hand.

"
Do you know how many of these ships made to the Scrapyard under their own power, Dr. Carlisle?" asked Rahgib.

Carlisle
interfaced with her wrist computer using the link provided by her cranial net.

"Just about every one of them," she said after a short consultation
.

"
Okay, how many of them with working weapons?" asked Harris.

Carlisle spent a considerably longer time consulting her wrist computer before replying
, "There were only three of them that had more than one main battery that was operational by the end of the final battle. I say we identify the ships that look to be in the best condition and see what we can do about getting one of them up and partially running."

She continued to consult her wrist computer display.

"Actually, this first ship in line here looks to be in as good a condition as any of them."

They had come upon the ship almost directly from the bow end. Harris took them on an observational tour down the starboard side of the wreck.

The ship in question, the
FWS Gibraltar
, was one of the very last to enter service during the War of Succession. Completed during the war, she was armed with some of the most powerful main batteries ever developed, along with some of the most effective shielding available at the time. With these advantages having worked in her favor, she appeared to have escaped much of the catastrophic damage suffered by some of her sister ships. She was still a somewhat sorry sight in spite of that, holed in many places with several of her secondary batteries obviously damaged and several others outright missing. As the survey team passed alongside them, the massive turrets of her front batteries appeared to taken some pretty heavy damage as well.

As they continued their tour towards the stern, however, the condition of the ship improved dramatically.
The huge, twin projector main battery turret mounted on the stern of the ship and the unconventional "belly turret" in the center of her 'ventral' or bottom surface, which was one of the hallmarks of the ship class, were still intact, both visually and according to Carlisle's inventory information. The position of the ship at the end of a row of similar wrecks located in the very outer portions of the scrap cloud, meant that they might only have to clear a few items out of the firing line of the big projectors to have a clear shot at enemy ships coming in from the direction of the hyperlink point. This was a huge advantage as it meant that they would not have to move the big wreck at all before they could put it to use.

"
Wow!" exclaimed Carlisle, as she continued to consult with her wrist computer while Harris secured the utility sled to a spot near the extreme stern of the wreck. "These were some of the most powerful pulse beam projectors ever developed, they were rated at 50,000 gigajoules apiece! Even the most modern ships don't pack that much power."

"
With that kind of power, they must have some pretty impressive range," observed Harris.

Carlisle
again consulted her wrist computer. "A fifty thousand gigajoule projector bolt still packs more than fifty percent of its punch at a range of over 10,000 kilometers. No ship known to be in this quadrant has a main battery that's lethal at over 5,000 kilometers. These guns should be able to provide protection for the Scrapyard from just about anything the enemy can throw at us from a range where they shouldn't be able to hurt us at all."

"
Provided we can get them to work!" said Harris.

"
Time to get to work on that," said Carlisle, as they prepared to leave the
Rover
for some early reconnaissance of the battleship wreck.

"Right behind you," said Harris.
"Hang on a minute.
Perseus?
This is Harris. We're near the stern on the starboard side of the first ship in the line of battleship wrecks. You should be able to see the sled without any trouble."

"Roger, Lieutenant, we have you in our sights already. Be there in about five, over?"

"Roger that," said Harris, "see you in five."

Chapter
17.

UTFN Reclamation Center, onboard the wreck of the
FWS
Gibraltar
, January 3, 2599.

After the
Perseus
arrived, Harris, Hawkins, Talbot and Raghib immediately headed for the engineering section of the wreck to start working on getting the power restored. While they performed their initial inspection of the engineering area, the crew of the
Perseus
went to work on their part of the operation. She was to be connected to the old battleship to provide power to selected portions of the wreck during the beginning stages of the resurrection attempt. The Junkyard Dogs wanted some portions of the wreck to be habitable before they attempted to restart the battleship's reactors.

It took almost two hours
to get the damaged
Perseus
moved over close enough to the wreck of the
Gibraltar
to run some cables into the huge hulk of the battleship wreck. The
Perseus
had received major damage to the front turret of her main battery during the skirmish in the Scrapyard just a week or so earlier and would be down to only half of her normal firepower until the unit could be replaced. That couldn't be helped, there simply wasn't the time or the personnel to get her repaired in time for the imminent battle. After some minor repairs and some recalibration, however, her power plant and the rest of the ship's systems seemed to be operating just fine.

In the meantime Carlisle, in her special suit, along with Caleb Jordan and Orville Steuben went to inspect the two intact turrets that housed the huge projectors that made up half of the old ship's incomprehensibly powerful main batteries. There was no need to go much further with this project if the weapons systems themselves were too badly damaged to function.

The small team gained access to the interior of the wreck the same way they had entered so many wrecks before, by entering through a hull breach that was a consequence of the battle that had been fought so many years earlier. Once inside the hulk, they made their way to the aft or "Y" turret first. This turret was in a conventional topside-mounted centerline position.

Until some kind of power was restored
, everyone working on the battleship wreck was going to have to deal with zero gravity and would have to be using either suit lights or supplemental lighting. As a Spacer, Carlisle had more experience with zero G than practically every other officer at the Scrapyard which was another of the reasons that she was considered to be vital to this mission. As she examined the huge enclosed space in the illumination provided by her suit lights, Carlisle was amazed at the sheer size and bulk of the components in the main battery turret. The turret itself, at a full twenty five meters wide and some thirty meters long, was largest she had ever been in by a wide margin. One look at the mechanisms that elevated the projectors and rotated the turret told her that they had better get the automated, motorized systems for the guns to work or they would have a devil of time aiming the projectors. There were actually some provisions made to allow manual operation of the gun emplacement but it looked to her like these systems required a team of twenty men or more to operate and any attempt to actuate the guns using these manual systems would be slow, tedious work.

The turret was divided into two distinct compartments by a
stout center bulkhead that ran down the length of the turret from bow end to stern end. This compartmentalization practice had been adopted centuries ago by the wet navies of Old Earth, to keep the weapons separate from one another and allow continued operation of one of them should the other receive severe enough damage to take it out of commission. An airtight hatch, currently secured in the open position, connected the two chambers.

Located in the rear of the large compartment wa
s a fire control computer console equipped with two operator's chairs. The team inspected it carefully and couldn't see that there was anything obviously wrong with the computer or console. Carlisle, who had only recently discovered her fascination with the workings of the big naval guns, found that this monster gun emplacement almost seemed to be calling to her. In the weightless environment of the unpowered wreck, she shoved upwards from the floor of the projector chamber and caught ahold of the emergency gunner's chair for the starboard weapon. The muscle combination that she used to halt her momentum caused a stitch from her still healing ribs and she instinctively recoiled from the brief stab of pain. She rotated her shoulder experimentally and flexed her abdominal muscles but didn't suffer a repeat episode of the pain so she decided she hadn't re-aggravated any of her injuries. She made a mental note to try to be more careful in the future.

She
levered herself into the seat and strapped herself in. She took a few extra moments to adjust the seat to a position suitable for her small frame. That done, she reached up and pulled down the periscope that was used for manual targeting and was pleased to find that it also seemed to be undamaged. She wondered what good the ability to manually aim the projectors would be when attempting to hit a target that was well over 5000 kilometers away but realized that any accurate fire would require that they get the ship's automated targeting systems operating. If they could get the emplacement to work, they would most likely be operating the guns from the fire control computer in the rear of the compartment.

On the other hand,
even if they were forced to use totally manual control, the sheer intimidation factor engendered by these weapons could mean that actually hitting a target might only be secondary. If the enemy got close enough for accurate manual fire, the defenders would not only be able to hit some of the enemy ships, any shot that hit home would no doubt utterly destroy the target and demoralize any other enemy ships in the vicinity!

Such was her hope anyway.
..

A foray into the capacitor chambers beneath the projectors revealed that the
obligatory but still unbelievably huge capacitor banks that powered the projectors appeared to be undamaged as well. Finally, they inspected the motors that drove the rotation of the turret. These were located in a compartment about two meters high that was situated between the projector and the capacitor chambers. Their inspection revealed no apparent damage to the huge, nearly flat motors that rotated the gigantic emplacement. As had been the situation with the Bofors turret that the Junkyard Dogs had mounted on the
Greyhound
, the capacitors below were stationary, mounted securely to the deck and were not required to rotate with the turret containing the projectors.

Encouraged by what they had found so far, t
he weapons survey team emerged from the wreck, went back to the
Rover
and headed down towards the ship's bottom and the unique belly turret. They entered the wreck as they had before, through some battle damage conveniently located right nearby, and descended into the turret. This time they went through the capacitor chamber first and proceeded downward through the actuation motor compartment before entering the projector chamber. Upon first glance, everything was arranged in a radically different fashion. Rather than going upward and outward from the interior of the ship to access the turret, this time they had been heading downward and outward. The position of the gunner's chair was upside down compared to the topside turret.

"Why do you suppose they designed this turret
like this?" asked Steuben.

"It has to do with the artificial gravity," replied Caleb. "It's just too difficult to create a gravity field that
pulls opposite to the other fields on the ship. The only way to make this system work is for the belly turret to be orientated upside down compared to the main field."

"Is it any more difficult to operate?"
asked Carlisle.

"Not once you get used to it," said Caleb.
"One thing you'll notice is that this emplacement has a full three hundred and sixty-degree circle of unobstructed fire. Anything in the entire hemisphere beneath the ship from any direction can be targeted by this emplacement."

"Easy to see why they included it," said
Steuben.

"Why don't you go down
there and get into that chair, Tamara" said Caleb, "You know, just to get the feel of it."

Carlisle
had been about to do exactly as he suggested anyway and she pushed herself down to the manual controls for the belly projectors and strapped herself into the gunner's chair. Again she tinkered with the adjustments until she felt comfortable at the controls of the gun. Lastly, she pulled the periscope upwards from the floor of the turret, rotated the targeting sub assembly ninety degrees to the left to bring the eyepieces into alignment with her eyes and had a look. The view was much the same as that from the conventional periscope.

"Come on up,
Tamara," said Caleb, "We need to inspect the rest of the workings for this emplacement."

The trio performed inspections
of all the emplacement's systems and decided that as near as they could determine, everything ought to work. At that point they concluded that they had gathered all the information that they could until they had power. It was time to check in with the other workers on the resurrection team.

Carlisle
called Harris on his suit radio.

"Lieutenant Harris?
This is Ensign Carlisle."

"What is it, Dr. Carlisle?"

"Both the aft projector systems and the belly gun systems appear to be in pretty good shape. We're about to start tracing the power cables back towards the reactor to see if there are any breaks."

"
Sounds like a good idea if you're up to it, Tamara. Just don't push yourself too hard."

"I think I'll be okay," she replied, "the exercise actually seems to be helping."

"Roger,"
replied Harris.
"We're almost ready to hook up to the
Perseus
and get some power down here. Your information on the condition of the guns means that we'll definitely go ahead with the plan. The compartments aft of section 20B are the ones we've been sealing off. If you open any hatches between here and there make sure you secure them again before going any further. We'll be trying to pressurize that area. See you in a few minutes?"

"Roger, Lieutenant."