Orphans - Kevin Killiany [9]
Young Terant the eldest had married her when she was of age. She had been head and shoulders taller and half again as broad as the brawniest champion, beautiful despite patches of skin left bare by the fever, and he had loved her. As their son Terant had been devoted to her and as he—who remembered his grandmother as a great, looming gentleness—had adored her.
No one breathed it aloud, but in their hearts the People believed the Giants were descendants of the Builders. And on the strength of her blood in his veins, the Doctors had conspired to keep from him a tragedy that scourged his people.
Journey!Had they thought to find the cure in his children?
“Dispatch riders,” he said. “Dawnward and duskward, upwater and down. Under my marque inform them of our plight—”
He caught himself.
“Do not reveal its totality, but hold back no medical detail. Inquire of their Doctors for any theory of cause or program of cure.” He raised a finger. “Make clear to them that there will be a reward commensurate with the usefulness of their information.”
“At once, Baron.”
Terant did not acknowledge the parting salute. His eyes, narrowed in calculation, were fixed on the sepulchres of the Giants.
CHAPTER
6
Three fours of days and three before the Quest
Conlon wrestled the two-meter section of power transfer conduit around in the much-reduced free space of the engine room. There really was no other place for the assembly. Her staff had rerouted everything that could be rerouted to auxiliary panels and were keeping as much out of the way as possible. When completed, the plan allowed sixty centimeters of sidle space along either side, but for now the entire central floor area was occupied.
The PTC looked deceptively light, but it was constructed of six phase-transition welded layers of tritanium and transparent aluminum; the mass was considerable. She wished there was room for a nullgrav grapple as she muscled the conduit into its coupling. Bracing it in place with her shoulder, she triple-checked the fit before engaging the molecular seal.
The assembly was low-tech but complex. Not a combination that inspired confidence, but it was the best they could do outside of a shipyard.
A transfer shunt directed the plasma that would have gone to the nacelles into the rotating secondary attenuation chamber. The rotating chamber matched up with each of three constrictor segments, which magnetically narrowed—and intensified—the plasma stream. The constrictor segments each connected sequentially with one of four lengths of PTC, rotating like the barrels of a Gatling gun. At the far end was a collection chamber that split the flickering energy into two fixed PTCs—or would when she got them in place. These two longer bypass conduits carried the twin streams back to the nacelle channels.
With gross mechanical rotation, exact alignment was always a problem—nearly an impossibility when tolerances were measured in microns. Tev had earned them an extra margin of error by devising ablative stents for the floating couplings. Any flash would vaporize the sleeves harmlessly without refracting back into the peristaltic field. Their elegant practicality almost made her take back her remark about his not being a ship’s engineer.
Almost.
At the moment Tev was checking her work on the constrictor assembly. She heard his surprised grunt at the first readings and listened as he recalibrated his tricorder and tried again. This time his grunt was approving.
Conlon smiled grimly as she tightened the duranium collar around her latest connection. In operation the system would be surrounded by a containment field running off the impulse drive. At this level of energy—and risk—she was going for every scrap of protection she could.
Turning, she was surprised to find the first section of bypass conduit at her elbow. Actually, it was only one end of the conduit; the other, some three and a half meters away,