Star Wars_ Death Star - Michael Reaves [79]
Triggering a monster like this wasn’t like pressing the firing stud on a blaster. At optimum it would take fifteen or twenty seconds from the given command to fire until the main beam was ready to be unleashed, and they hadn’t gotten close to that yet. Half the time during firing simulations they couldn’t balance the phase harmonics enough to shoot the primary beam at all. And even if the magnetic ring was precisely stabilized, all it would take was one of the tributaries warbling so much as a microhertz out of phase, and the others would desynchronize as well. The result would be a feedback explosion along the beam shaft and back to the main reactor that would turn the battle station into an incandescent plasma cloud in less than a single heartbeat, and the Empire thanks your family very much for your sacrifice.
That wasn’t going to happen on his watch, Tenn vowed. By the time the actual battery was operational, Tenn expected his crew to be running the program smooth as lube on polished densecris plate. But they weren’t there yet. Not even within a parsec of close.
Fortunately, they had plenty of time to practice. The crew, half of whom Tenn had swiped from his old unit with help from his new commander, were sharp enough, but it took twelve people working the battery to properly light the big gun and make it go bang, and every one of them had to nail his or her part dead-on. There was no margin for error. So far, in the first dozen run-throughs, they had been able to fire the primary beam five times within a minute of the order. Once they’d taken two minutes, and four times they hadn’t been able to focus the tributaries properly at all, resulting in complete failures to fire. One time the computer had registered a late minor beam-warble that would have resulted in an automatic shutdown of the primary power feed to avoid damage, which meant it would have taken an hour to get back up for ignition sequencing. And wouldn’t that be a delightful job, recalibrating everything with the land batteries of a Rebel base spewing hard energy at you?
In addition to the real problems, there had been a simulated major run malfunction with multiple beam-warbles and disharmonic phasing. The computer, in theory, could have shut that one down in time, but Tenn thought that report was optimistic. In a real situation, with a fully powered weapon, that one would more than likely have turned a whole lot of beings, equipment, and everything else into sizzling ions racing toward the edges of the galaxy.
“All right, boys, let’s see if we can get it right this time. I want everything by the numbers and clean. Throw the wrong switch, you are on kitchen patrol for a week. Too slow on the phase-balance, better get some nose plugs, because you will be scrubbing the trash compactors until they sparkle. Drop a reading on the inducers, and you’ll find yourself shoveling out the animal pens until you smell like the south end of a northbound reek. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Chief!” came the chorus of replies.
“Say again, I didn’t hear you!”
“Yes, Chief!”
He smiled under the blast helmet, then grimaced as a rivulet of sweat ran into one eye. The milking headgear would be less than useless if the gun backfired, but it would make a dandy torture device for interrogating real spies. True, it was navy policy that gunners wear them, but whoever’d designed these black buckets hadn’t had to leave one on for a whole shift. They just made the job harder by restricting peripheral vision and essentially guaranteeing that you spent most of your shift clonking your head on pipes, struts, bulkheads, and the like. They were also hot and stuffy. Tenn was pretty sure some boot-head had designed them for looks and not function. When nobody was around, he let the men take the helmets off and breathe a bit, but given the nature of this sim battery, some by-the-book officer was always dropping by to gawk.
“We have an order to commence primary ignition,