Free The Synchronicity War Part 3 by Dietmar Wehr Page B

administrative Head of the Colony plus Commander Rostokov, formerly
Senior Chief Rostokov, the most experienced engineering type to survive the
bio-weapon. Shiloh had promoted him and put him in charge of all of Space
Force's infrastructure development, including conversions of power systems from
fusion to ZPG technology. Also present were two of Rostokov's subordinates.
     
    "Okay. Let's get started," said Shiloh. He looked
over at Rostokov who cleared his throat and said.
     
    "As requested, I've developed a plan to send engineer
teams to Sol to do a preliminary survey of the ships that were under
construction when the plague pulled the rug out from under everyone
there," said Rostokov. "I have enough trained personnel for four
teams. Team A will concentrate on recovery of the fighters parked on the moon.
B will go straight for the shipyard containing the heavy carrier… ah …"
     
    Shiloh realized that Rostokov was trying to remember the
carrier's name. "Midway," said Shiloh.
     
    Rostokov smiled and nodded. "Yes, Midway. Thank you,
Sir. Team C will go straight for Dreadnought, and Team D will check out a
couple of freighters that might be close enough to completion to be useful.
When Teams B, C and D have completed the surveys of their priority targets,
they'll have secondary and if there's time, tertiary targets to look over as
well. My guess is that those ships will be too far from completion to make it
worth the effort to finish them, though they might be useful as a source of
parts for other ships."
     
    Shiloh looked skeptical. "Maybe, but it seems to me
that unless we're repairing a ship that's already in that system, then it'll
very likely be easier to manufacture the necessary parts from scratch here.
Let's talk about the fighters first. How easy would it be to install ZPG units
in them while they're on the lunar surface?"
     
    Rostokov looked at one of his subordinates who gave a slight
shake of his head. "We kicked that question around last night, Sir. The
consensus is that the external temperatures are going to make it difficult. If
the boneyard is in sunlight, the temperatures will be so high that it could
damage exposed internal components and connections. If the whole area is in
darkness, then the extreme cold could potentially have the same impact, not to
mention the additional work needed to set up lights so that we could see what
we'd be doing. If we can get the fighters on board a carrier and work on them
in normal atmosphere and temperature, the conversions will go faster, MUCH
faster in fact. The big unknown is whether those fighters still have any fuel
left in them. If not, then we'd have to bring down fuel shuttles to give them
at least a minimum load."
     
    "And that means we'd have to detour to a gas giant to
pick up a load of fuel first," said Shiloh. "But if they do still
have some fuel, then we should be able to use their auto-pilots to bring them
on board, correct?"
     
    "Yes, Sir."
     
    "How long will it take to manufacture enough parts to
equip all the fighters with Z-units?"
     
    Rostokov looked at his data tablet. Shiloh was pleased that
the UFCs had worked their way down the priority list far enough to have already
produced more data tablets. 
     
    "Production of parts will take another 161 hours but
the bottleneck will be assembling them. The robotic assemblers have a
substantial backlog of other equipment with high priority." He was about
to say more when he saw Shiloh waive aside that comment.
     
    "Forget the robots. Your people can assemble the power
units on board Valiant and Resolute on our way to Sol. What about power units
for Midway and Dreadnought?"
     
    "We have enough spare units of the kind that we used
for Valiant and Resolute that we could outfit Midway or Dreadnought, but we
couldn’t do both on this trip, Sir."
     
    "Understood. In that case, it'll be Midway. We need her
to recover all the fighters in one trip. Next topic. Conversion of Midway and
Dreadnought to A.I.