Free Portal-eARC by Eric Flint, Ryk E Spoor Page B

grinning. “Because I think our esteemed leader is willing to pull rank AND her extreme badass nature in order to be the first one to get a real, if low-gravity, shower!”

Chapter 10.
    “Even with the reactor scrammed, the radiation in there’s gotta fry the dust, A.J.,” Brett said doubtfully, looking on as Jackie prepared to pour approximately three liters of Faerie Dust into an instrumented funnel-shape that was positioned above Nebula Storm ’s main reactor, fitting precisely into the small but fatal hole in the casing.
    “Oh, no doubt about that,” A.J. agreed cheerfully, and Horst continued for him, “And if we had not access to the many tons of drive dust made for Odin , maybe we would not be risking our most versatile sensing method this way, at least not yet. But the drive dust was meant for long-term space exposure and was hardened by some complex metamaterial design to resist a great deal of radiation. Mostly beta radiation, admittedly, and I would caution against betting that it will survive long inside a nuclear reactor, but it should last long enough to give us the data we need.”
    The problem was, of course, that opening up a fueled nuclear reactor whose core had been punched was not something one did casually; in fact, with the tools available to the combined expedition it was something that only the insane or the desperate would attempt. Still, even something crazy was better attempted with the maximal amount of knowledge.
    A.J. felt he’d redeemed himself slightly after his prior blindness to the simple solution of his Faerie Dust’s mobility, by realizing that the tougher, simpler drive dust would provide a sacrificial method to obtain a clear idea of what the precise condition of the core was. A few devices back on Earth might have been able to look straight through the reactor casing, but—after all—the casing was specifically designed to prevent radiation of any kind from getting through it. While that was meant mostly to prevent radiation from leaking out, it was equally efficient at preventing any radiation from getting in .
    He was actually pretty proud of how he’d solved the problem of knowing what they hit. Jackie and Brett had managed to put together a detailed model of the original reactor and core, and simulated what the drive dust motes would “see” as they encountered the various components. While there wasn’t really enough data for the drive dust to identify, say, uranium versus steel in isolation—unlike his bleeding-edge Faerie Dust, it wasn’t built with multimodal sensor components—but the way in which high-speed impacts would break the pieces apart would still yield a fairly good rule-of-thumb heuristic to recognize the different types of things expected inside the reactor.
    So A.J. would run his custom sensor analysis software on the drive dust as it worked its way, probably quickly degrading, through the reactor casing, and then when he’d processed the data as best he could, he’d send to to Brett’s model, where the interior would be mapped out and—with luck—the precise nature, position, and extent of the damage caused by Fitzgerald’s last shot would finally be known, allowing them to proceed with precision; possibly they’d even be able to figure out a way to do the repair without actually having to open the casing, working through the already-extant hole as though doing a laparoscopy.
    “Ready, A.J.?” Jackie asked.
    A.J. checked all the displays in his VRD. “Telemetry’s good for the whole mass. Since we’re in vacuum we don’t need to worry about any of the messy reactions that can happen in a reactor that’s been breached. Yep, we’re go.”
    “Brett?”
    The New Zealander gave her a thumbs-up. “Model’s ready to take input as fast as A.J. can feed it to me.”
    “All right. Starting the pour…now.”
    In Europa’s roughly 1/8th gravity, the speed of the almost liquid mass of drive dust motes looked more like the lazy flow of