Star Wars_ X-Wing 05_ Wraith Squadron - Aaron Allston [61]
“Good point.” Kell sighed. “Well, our intruder will just have to wear a standard pilot’s suit. This compartment is supposed to be airtight, that’ll help.”
“Airtight enough to fool mechanical sniffers, true, but it’s only rated for pressurized environments. The seals aren’t strong enough to hold in atmosphere against hard vacuum. Also, we’re going to be drilling holes in it to mount the thrusters, to cable the battery to the countermeasures, to get the data feed from the R2 …”
“So we don’t put the intruder into our fake debris field until the last possible moment.”
Cubber shook his head. “And if they just take a few extra minutes to creep up on the site, our intruder freezes to death. It’s not going to work, kid.”
A new voice cut in, a strong and harshly mechanical one. “It can work.”
Kell smiled. “Piggy! They got your voice working again.”
“Grinder and his datapad got it started. I feel much better. And I should be the intruder.”
“Why is that?”
“Physical structure, Kell. My body is swathed in heavy layers of fat. Humans find it unappealing, and it is a detriment in hot environments, but my fat will sustain me against starvation and will insulate me from cold temperatures. In an ordinary pilot’s suit, I’m rated at half an hour’s survival after ejection into space, rather than a few minutes. Too, my suit is intact.”
Kell whistled. “Well, unless we get a better idea, Piggy, I think you’re our man.”
“Your Gamorrean.”
While Cubber and Kell assembled the jury-rigged vehicle, which they nicknamed the Lunatic, Grinder and Piggy worked out the programming of the R2 unit and control datapad. Occasionally Kell listened in on the conversation—Grinder and Piggy had to work from within their cockpits and communicate via comm.
“What sort of targeting model do we use?” That was Piggy.
“Visual pattern recognition, I think. With the starfield as the primary element—it will be static. Perhaps we can limit it to stars of a certain brightness; that will reduce the amount of data to be processed. If the ship is a recognizable type, the R2 can add a detailed map of its configuration to the pattern; otherwise you’ll just have to aim at what you think is a cargo hatch and pray.”
“What if imbalances or faulty thrusters throw me off course?”
“Well, we have to have some sort of correction built in to the R2’s programming. The crudest way is to have it evaluate its visual input and correct—overcorrect, really, with the time involved—if the visual image traverses too far.”
“Very crude. Prone to error. And to overcorrecting, as you say.”
“Yes. Hey, Kell?”
“I read you, Grinder.”
“Is there any way to put some sort of mass sensor in our insertion vehicle? Something to calculate load balance, center of gravity, that sort of thing, to improve flight accuracy?”
Kell thought about it. The X-wings had such a system, of course, which used pulses from the inertial compensator to calculate the snubfighters’ mass characteristics several times per second. “No. Not a chance. I’d have to have exact data on all the components going into this cobbled-together rig, I’d have to have a precise graphical model of it, Piggy would have to remain as still as if he were in a pilot’s seat, and you’d have to have even more time to do all the physics-heavy programming.”
“Forget it, then. Thanks.”
Within an hour the Lunatic took shape. The storage compartment, roughly the size of a large coffin, was the main element. At one end, Phanan’s R2 unit, Gadget, was mounted by way of crude brackets—metal strips cut from some of the cargo crates on the Narra, attached to the compartment’s hull through simple bolts. At the other end were mounted the fuel pods and some of the thrust nozzles from Phanan’s ejection seat; other nozzles were attached near the R2, pointed in four directions horizontal to the plane on which Gadget was standing, to give the rig as much maneuverability as was possible. Metal tubing carried fuel from the pod to the nozzles. A data cable ran from one of Gadget’s ports through a hole drilled in the compartment;