Wing Commander #07 False Color by William Forstchen (best books to read in life .txt) 📕

fabricating Karga's hull plating and other requisite components. A landing party from Tolwyn's crew also worked over the remains of the escort Frawqirg, following up on the initial survey work Bondarevsky had done while rescuing the survivors Though badly damaged in the crash and far too small to provide all the needs of the damaged carrier, the escort was a useful source of parts and materials that otherwise wouldn't have been available.

Aboard the factory ship, the iron ore was smelted and processed, refined and re-refined to produce the durasteel alloy needed for hull plating. The computer designs obtained from the first surveys controlled the pouring, shaping, and cutting of the individual patches or replacement hull sections, and as quickly as they came off the line they were released into space, picked up by the one-man work pods carried aboard Sindri, and maneuvered into the proper places. The pods—essentially egg-shaped capsules with thrusters and manipulating arms, barely larger than a man - were supported by work gangs of spacesuited crewmen who wrestled the hull plating into position and then brought their plasma welders to bear to seal the new segments of the hull in place.

Space construction work was difficult and dangerous, especially on the scale required for Project Goliath. With so many crew members operating in spacesuits, there were bound to be accidents. A few inevitably forgot that weightless hull patches retained all of their mass and inertia in zero-g, and as a result there were casualties. Commander Katherine Manning, Karga's Medical Officer, was kept busy handling fractures and decompression sickness in the carrier's sick bay complex buried deep on the fifth deck of the superstructure. Fortunately little damage had occurred there, and the sick bay area was even air-tight, so she had less work to do to get her part of the ship up and running and could concentrate on taking care of the injured. But with power still limited and the unfamiliar Kilrathi medical equipment mostly off-line, Manning complained bitterly of having to perform surgery under primitive conditions, using a field surgery package normally used by marines planetside to fill in for the usual amenities that weren't yet available aboard Karga.

There were, of course, fatalities. The first major replacement to the buckled hull plating around the entrance to the starboard side flight deck proved particularly awkward, and when Crewman Chan misapplied thrust to his work pod at a crucial moment the result was three men dead, crushed between the new plating and the hull, and five other injuries. Chan was one of the dead, and his pod was ruined in the accident.

Bondarevsky, who had been supervising the work, wondered if Geoff Tolwyn wasn't more concerned at the loss of the pod than at Chan's death. It wasn't that the admiral was callous . . . he was merely consumed by the need to finish the job, a man so obsessed as to seem unable to perceive reality.

One by one, though, the major patches were welded into place. Other spacesuited crewmen worked their way painstakingly along the outside of the hull, using a liquid patching compound to fill in the smallest holes and marking those too large for their attention but too small for the major pieces. These were dealt with by follow-up crews armed with small plates that could be sealed over an opening and then spot-welded. By the time they were through Karga's hull was a bizarre patchwork quilt, but she would hold atmosphere without the assistance of Sindri's force fields.

Bondarevsky's role in the exterior work was limited to getting the flight decks repaired. Early on Richards gave him priority in the waiting list for patches and parts, since the faster the flight deck could be restored the more easily personnel and supplies could be transferred aboard. For the first two weeks, until the bulk of the patches were in place and the testing of hull integrity was well in hand, the salvage team and the crewmen working with them had to be shuttled back and forth each day from the City of Cashel. It was only after they could be reasonably confident the ship wasn't going to suddenly lose atmosphere that crew members could begin moving in to quarters on board on a more or less permanent basis.

All these considerations meant that work on the starboard flight deck was first on the list of things to be done, with Bondarevsky in personal charge of the details assigned there. The physical problems of repairing the wrecked hull and deck plating didn't take long to finish, but once that was over there were myriad details to deal with. The force field airlocks at each end of the flight deck had to be repaired and tested, and the massive clamshell doors that sealed off the deck when flight operations were not in train had to be put in order so that the crews working inside didn't have to rely entirely on the force fields while they were performing tasks too delicate to be done in space suits. Bondarevsky left most of the actual flight deck work to the supervision of Sparks McCullough, who knew more about the cycle of flight deck operations than most of the Landreicher crew was ever likely to learn. He concentrated on a related section of the ship, the Flight Control Center, located on the deck below the CIC where Admiral Tolwyn was hard at work attempting to restore some semblance of order to the carrier's most vital command and control systems.

The FCC was actually a whole suite of related compartments, each individual chamber responsible for one aspect of the supercarrier's flight ops. Central to all was Primary Flight Control, the nerve center which oversaw all of the fighters, bombers, and support craft operating off the carrier at any given time. Primary Flight Control was relegated to a fairly low position on the priority list of places to be restored to operational order, however, since it would still be a long time before regular flight ops