Ring Around the Sky - Allyn Gibson [14]
Pattie refused hers, using her top left limb to point to her head. “This is harder than the helmet—besides, it won’t fit.”
Looking down at the helmet in his hand, Gringa saw that the helmet was too small to fit over the Nasat’s exoskeleton. He shrugged and replaced it on the shelf.
They stepped from the entrance alcove into the warehouse. The interior was cavernous. Kharzh’ullans operated machinery and metal presses, and a forklift passed them as it drove down an aisle. “This is where we’re fashioning the replacement shell,” said Gringa. “These workers are taking processed ore and molding it into panels.” He pointed to an area far to the left. “Over there, we take the panels and bolt them together into a ‘sandwich’—the outer casing, a reinforced skeleton, an electromagnetic sheath, and then the inner shell.”
Gomez looked up as she heard something above her. A large panel, three meters square, passed overhead on the end of a crane arm. Gringa noticed her attention. “Those panels will form the inner shell.”
“The outer tiles are the same size?” Pattie asked.
“No,” said Eevraith. “They’re much smaller, half a meter across.”
“Why the difference in size?” asked Gomez.
“Different materials and repairability,” said Gringa. “On the inside of the elevator shaft we use a frictionless ceramic tile to facilitate the transports up and down the elevator, while on the outside of the shaft we use a shielded metal panel to withstand and reflect the solar radiation to protect the delicate electromagnetic sheath within. More importantly, the smaller panels on the outside will enable us to access the interior of the elevator shell should we need to effect repairs in the future.”
He then led them further into the warehouse. They stepped through an open doorway, and in the room stood hundreds of the replacement panels on their ends, which showed the different construction materials—black on the metal side, beige on the ceramic side. As they walked down the central aisle, one or two might stop and examine a panel before continuing on.
“How will these be installed, Supervisor?” said Tev.
Gringa stopped, turned, and looked down on Tev. He took a deep breath, and Gomez thought he might have even frowned. “We will bolt them onto the elevator shaft, beginning from the edges of the phaser gashes and then working inward.”
Tev flared his nostrils in annoyance. “The phaser gashes are not even. I presume that special panels are built to match exactly with the damage done.”
Eevraith nodded. “We will cut out more of the elevator shaft, if the special panels do not work.”
“Could we examine one of the custom panels?” asked Tev.
Neither Gringa nor Eevraith answered.
“They don’t exist,” said Gomez.
“Not yet, no,” said Eevraith quietly, confirming Gomez’s sudden suspicion.
“How do you know these will work?” said Gomez, gesturing at the panels around them.
“They will,” said Eevraith. “While the Furies left no instructions on how to work the elevators or how to repair them, they left us the elevators to study and reverse engineer. That is what we have done—studied the work they left us and replicated it. We know what the Furies did. We know how they did it. Rebuilding the elevator shaft poses no great difficulties if we follow their example.”
Gomez looked to Tev. His expression seemed neutral to her, but when he caught her gaze he nodded sharply.
They inspected the panels for an hour, with Pattie and Tev taking extensive tricorder readings for analysis aboard the da Vinci to compare them to the earlier scans of the elevator shaft. Gomez performed a quick tally of the number of panels in the warehouse, and to her it seemed as though there weren’t enough. The phaser gashes were kilometers long in some cases and many meters wide, yet the panels here might have been enough to stretch only half a kilometer if set end on end. What were the Kharzh’ullans hoping for? she wondered.
Gomez