Chapter Ten
THE LEGACY OF RUFDROP
“All right, then,” Villjae asked. “Have we got it straight?” This time the chorus of agreement was far stronger and more confident. Going through the procedure two or three times had helped, even if all they were doing was pantomiming, holding their fingers over the buttons and pretending to push them. “Good,” he said. “Because the next time is for real. Curthaus—are you ready down there?”
“Absolutely. Just tell me when to do it.”
Villajae glanced over at Beseda. She shrugged. “Now would be about right,” she said.
Villjae shrugged. That was about as direct as Beseda was likely to be on that or any other subject. “So let’s do it. All right, everybody. Be ready on my mark. Get ready. Get set. Curthaus, start countdown on my mark. Mark!”
“MinusTen —nine—”
Villjae felt a cold sweat pop up on his forehead and instantly wished that he had told Curthaus to do a countdown from five instead. You needed the countdown to get people focused, to get them into the rhythm of the sequence, but starting from ten just gave everyone more time to get nervous, distracted—
Distracted! Villjae blinked and came back to himself. They were trying to save the world, and he was letting his mind wander. How much of the countdown had he tuned out on? Was it too late already? Had he missed—
“Five—four—three—”
No, it was all right. He’d only missed a few seconds. But it was amazing how fast your thoughts moved when you were panicking.Stay on it. Stay focused.
“Two—one—ZERO!—Breaker open—plusone —”
“Console off!” four voices shouted in unison.
“Two—”
“Console one on!” Beseda called out.
“Three—”
“Subroutine running—complete!” Ballsto called out.
“Restart confirmed!” said Beseda, almost at the same moment.
“Four—half—breaker closed!”
“I see a normal comm loop between the aiming and pointing systems,” Beseda announced. Everyone—everyone but Beseda and Villjae—cheered. Beseda just sat there calmly, without so much as a smile, and Villjae frankly stared at her.Not that there was a normal loop, Villjae thought.That she saw one. There was something just a trifle creepy about the way everything turned oracular around her. Villjae blinked and came back to the moment.You’re drifting too much, he told himself.Too long with not enough sleep. Which is just too bad, because you need to hang in there a while longer .The job’s on you now.
“All right, all right,” he said. “Let’s settle it down. I still have to steer this damn thing.” He checked his displays and saw that Beseda had somehow found the time to fiddle with the presentation. The numeric display was still there, but now, alongside it, was a multicolor symbol-logic display. The actual position track showed in an unpleasant throbbing yellow, while the optimum track appeared in a steady line of pleasing blue. The position set by the hand-controller feedback was marked by crosshairs, at present locked on to the front end of the actual position track. Villjae’s job was to move the crosshairs over to the optimum track, but to do it by moving them slowly and gently enough so as not to stress already overheated and overworked hardware to the breaking point.
There had been no time to work in any sort of buffering or overload safeties into the manual system. Yank down hard on the controller, and all the receptors in the Array would attempt to move just as hard and fast—and likely burn out and jam their positioning motors in the process.
He confirmed that the track-and-feedback system was reporting normally, reset his right hand’s grip in the controller, and reached for the hand-controller’s sync button. The sync button took whatever control coordinates the hand-controller was putting out and passed them on to the aiming system.
The button had a safety cover over it, of ancient and simple design. It was spring-loaded, so it could either snap open or snap shut, but would not stay in any intermediate position. Villjae flipped the cover up, pressed the button—and realized the mistake he had made, they had all made, a split second too late. A split second after that, the safety spontaneously snapped itself shut, mashing down on Villjae’s left index finger, in effect catching it in a miniature vise.
He cursed vigorously, but resisted the temptation to pull his finger out. He had realized, a heartbeat after he had done it, that he dared not release that button at all. It was a momentary-contact switch, the sort that went on when you pushed it, and went off as soon as it was released. It was the right sort of switch for the controller’s original purpose. It had been designed as test equipment, to impose an aiming error on the Array and see how well and quickly it corrected itself. Use the hand-controller, move the crosshairs to where you wanted to start the simulated error correction, mash down the button to blip the data to the system, and release the controller.
But to let go of the button now, even for an instant, would be to cut off the continuous two-way flow of aiming and pointing data, possibly scrambling it in some unforeseen way, sending a truncated data packet the system would misinterpret, and then—then the stars alone knew. Not worth risking it. Just as his right hand would have to stay on the controller, and just as he dared not take his eyes off the tracking display, he would have to keep his left index finger on that button for the remainder of the run. “For star’s sake, someone get that safety cover off my finger.”
Bosley was there in an instant, and flipped the cover back. “Thank you,” Villjae said gratefully. “Damn, but that hurts. Now get some heavy adhesive tape and strap that cover open, or find a pair of pliers and pull it off the board.”
“You can’t take your finger off,” Beseda said, looking down at him with her owlish eyes.
Villjae could not quite tell if her words were an observation, a question, a command—or maybe even a curse. Having Beseda around had made spending the last thirty-six straight hours awake just that little bit more surreal. He promised himself to spend less time with her in future. “You’re right,” he said. “We forgot what kind of switch was under that safety cover. I don’t dare take either hand off the controls.”
“Might as well use them, then,” Beseda replied.
“Huh? Oh, right.” Villjae had been concentrating so hard on not perturbing the pointing system, he had almost forgotten the whole point was to make things move. But how hard and how fast could he move? He needed some sort of feedback.
“Bosley, Beseda, somebody. We still have console three live. Use it to bring up a general average strain meter reading on the Array, and rig some sort of way to get that display to where I can see it.”
“Ah, okay,” said Bosley. “Gimme about five minutes to rig it.”
“Make it three,” Villjae said. “Meantime, I’m going to work without it. We’ve got to get started.” With infinite care, he pulled gently back on the hand-controller, and watched the screen as the crosshairs drifted slowly, oh so slowly, toward the blue optimum line, pulling the throbbing yellow line along with it. It was working. It was actually working. He glanced at the power accumulation display and was delighted to see the rate line twitching up by just a trifle. Not only was manual control working, it was doing what it should. More power was getting to where they needed it.
In more than three minutes, but far less than five, Bosley propped up yet another repeater-configured datapad on the top ledge of console one, where Villjae could see it easily. Villjae was further pleased to see that the strain meter levels were well within tolerance. He could move a lot faster toward where he needed to go. Still moving with great care, he pulled the hand-controller back just a little more. The crosshairs sped up their motion toward the optimum line. Villjae watched his other gauges. The power absorption rate climbed noticeably higher, but the strain meter reading barely moved at all. Much sooner than he would have expected, he was able to bring the throbbing yellow line over the steady blue—and was rewarded with a lovely glowing green when the two merged.
It was working. It wasgoing to work. Assuming he could keep his finger on the button.
Villjae breathed a sigh of relief. “Beseda, get the Project Director on comm. Tell her we have achieved manual control and significantly improved power input. And, ah—Bosley—could you scratch my nose?”
Berana Drayax was glad to receive the news, but by the time she received it, she scarcely needed it. The incoming telemetry was telling her everything she needed or wanted to know. They were getting more power—maybe not enough more to make everyone happy, but enough to at least make Ignition possible—and maybe enough to keep them from having to choose which people to kill. That was more than enough to put a smile on the face of the Project Director, at least for the moment.
She flipped on her comm. “This is Project Director for NovaSpot Control and Temporal Confinement. Request you watch the numbers coming in from Groundside Power and update your time and power estimates based on new data. PD out.”
It washer turn to send the good news that the recipients already knew from the displays. It made for a nice change from what she’d mostly been doing so far.
Maybe, just maybe, they were going to pull this thing out after all.
Curthaus Spar wandered up the stairs from the lower level. It had been a hell of a long day, and they’d all been sweating the work like mad things. But now even his console had been darkened, shut down altogether. With all the weirdgear Villjae and Beseda had strung together, there wasn’t even room for him to go in andsit at his console. So he was out of a job, for the moment. Fine with him. He was dead tired. He deserved—they all deserved—to get somerest. Maybe he could find some dark corner, maybe fish one of the cots out of the back storeroom, unfold it and get some—
“Curthaus! Good!” It was a voice from behind his back. “Glad to see you. I need you on something.”
Curthaus knew without turning around. It was Villjae, of course. And it was impossible to say no to Villjae. The man worked harder and longer than anyone. He’d saved the day by hacking together the manual system—and now he was literally stuck with it, forced to stay on that console for fear of cutting the links if he twitched. Curthaus forced a smile on his face and turned to face the boss—and the music.
“Yeah, Villjae?” he asked, walking over to stand over the hackwired remains of console one. “What have you got?”
“Power leaks,” Villjae said without looking up from his screens. “We’re still getting way more drain from the stored power than we should be. I was sitting here thinking: The auto aim-point system had so many bugs in it they were masking each other. We were looking for one big problem. We didn’t find out we had twelve little ones until we shut down the whole thing. That gave me an idea on the power leak side. Start cutting power. Any system we don’t need right now—shut it down. Simplify the power net. See if you can clear out enough things that are superfluous right now that you’re able to spot the mistakes, the stuff that shouldn’t be drawing at all.”
“What don’t we need right now?” Curthaus asked.
Villjae shrugged. “Lights and vents to the lower level. Hell, cut back our cooling up here—we can sweat for an hour if we have to. Backup systems for jobs we’ve done. Cut all power consoles we pulled out of the loop. Get creative—but be careful you don’t shut down the stuff we do need—”
“Likeyour console. Got it. Can I borrow Bosley? He’s good at this kind of stunt. Probably be safer if we double up and watch each other for mistakes.”
“I was just about to volunteer him for you,” Villjae said with a grin, and nodded back and toward the right. “I think he’s sort of passed out over there. Give him a poke and get to it.”
Curthaus found Bosley right where Villjae’s nod had said he would be—in the nice dark corner Curthaus had been planning to filch, racked out in the cot Curthaus had hoped to use. “Great minds think alike, I guess. I hope,” he muttered to himself, and gave the side of the cot a poke with his kickboot.
“Ah! Huh? What?” Bosley sat bolt upright on the folding bed, nearly sending it toppling over.
Curthaus felt a certain dark pleasure, but also a twinge of guilt, in rousting Bosley—but if he couldn’t rack down, why should Bosley? “Come on,” he said. “Work to be done.”
Unfortunately, whatever satisfaction Curthaus derived from waking Bosley was short-lived. The kid was the sort who woke up fast, and alert—and hewas good at the sort of job they had drawn. Ten minutes after Curthaus had put his kickboot in, Bosley was doing scans of all the power buses, querying Curthaus as to what was all right to power down, and moving on to the next item almost before Curthaus could respond. Groundside Power was a big place, built to house many more people than were there at present. Just cutting out unneeded life support—without leaving those present choking in the dark—was a complicated enough job to keep them busy.
Then there were all sorts of other things—the landing field was powered up in case they needed to evac, which they didn’t. Down went lights, radar, comm links, transit tunnel services.
Thanks to some crazy in project planning being too damn clever and not smart enough six months earlier, the operational plan called for the fabricator line for receptors to be kept at standby, just in case they needed to build more receptorsafter the SunSpot started beaming power. How the hell was anyone supposed to go up topside out of the bunker complex and hook up spare receptors without being incinerated? Down with the fab line. Two or three other examples added together were enough of a power drain to be borderline-significant even on the grand scale of the Groundside Power Array. Maybe enough to add two- or three-tenths of a percent—maybe even half a percent—to outputs. As close as they were cutting things, even that much might matter—a lot.
Curthaus was starting to realize how much they were still paying for that crash, months before, and, if he had nerve enough to speak ill of the dead, still paying for drawing Designer Rufdrop as their fearless leader, way back when.
He was starting to wish Rufdrop had done some better operational thinking before he checked out. The station design as a whole was first-level, lots of big machines pointed at one big job. But no one had really sat down and figured out how the machines should fit together, how they ought torun .
If there had been time before Ignition Day just to sit down and run through the power process in detail, that would have beensomething . If Rufdrop had just managed to turn down even one of his “politically essential” cocktail parties and seminars and publicity events, he could have held that power management meeting he had always been promising. They might have had a chance to catch some of the worst errors.
“Hey, ah, Curthaus—this one’s really off chart.”
“What have you got there?” he asked. He stood up and looked over Bosley’s shoulder at the screen he was working.
“That,” said Bosley, pointing. “Should the guide path preheater still be running?”
“Thewhat ?”
“The guide path pre—”
“Yeah, I heard you. I just couldn’t believe it’s on the screen.” The guide path had been made of the most thermal-shock resistant material available for the job—so naturally some committee had started worrying about protecting it from thermal shock. Every test had shown the path would be able to go from subzero to temps high enough to boil lead without any problem, but even so, the decision was taken to run enormous electric resistance coils down its length to bring it up closer to operating temperature before the beam from the SunSpot struck it, thus protecting it from the thermal shock that wouldn’t affect it in the first place.
“Well,” Bosley went on, “do you think it should be running now?”
“Ofcourse it shouldn’t be running. We don’t need the guide path anymore. I don’t know if weever needed it preheated, but we sure don’t need itnow . How many watts is it pulling, anyway?”
Bosley pointed to a number on the screen, and Curthaus cursed eloquently, using a few words and phrases that Bosley probably didn’t even understand. “That’s the whole mud-sucking power deficit rightthere ! Ifthat had been powered down when it should have been, if it had never been poweredup, then we’d be in power surplus right now!”
“Should I shut it down now?” Bosley reached casually for the controls.
“No! Not yet. And not all at once. The power surge could trip every breaker in the system. We need to figure out where that power’s being routed to and from and make sure we cut it gracefully. And this is such a honkinghuge mistake we gotta check and make sure it isn’t onpurpose for some crazy reason.” He sat down in the seat next to Bosley. “You keep scanning for other possible power-downs. I’ll put the preheater thing in work.”
Ninety seconds later, he had a better trace on the power routing. The preheating system was designed to work off its own quite substantial auxiliary power store, charged off the local grid. But somehow, the preheater system had read its own normal shutdown as an emergency cutoff, and done an autoshunt off main bus C to maintain operations. And bus C was bridged straight through to the main power store.
The main consoles would show no power to the preheaters, because they were watching drains from the preheaters’ own power store. And since the cutoff to the heaters happened just as the main SunSpot beam was starting to dump power to the Array, the power leak would be there from the first go.That made it look like a fault in the power store’s ability to retain a charge, not a power drain. The leak couldn’t have done a better job camouflaging itself if it had been designed to do it.
“Curthaus,” Bosley asked, “did you find anything?”
“Yeah. A hulking huge damned bloodymess, ” Curthaus growled. “Bosley, you might have just saved the world. I gotta go run this by Villjae, just in case, but he’sgotta say this is a screwup.Can’t be on purpose. Meantime, you start working out some way to turn those heaters off gently so we don’t punch an overload and blow every circuit in the joint.”
Villjae’s arms were aching. His right hand felt as if it had been welded to the controller. His left hand felt as if the welding tech had decided to keep the job simple and had just used a hammer and nail to attach Villjae’s index finger to the button. But it was the ache between his shoulder blades that had his attention. It was a throbbing knot, a silent shriek of straight-ahead pain that just kept going and going.
He was doing his best to focus on the aim-and-point system, struggling to keep the crosshairs where they should be, keep the green line from splitting off into yellow and blue, but it was far from easy. He longed to dedicate his whole attention to the thought ofmoving again, to revel in the mad impossible fantasy of taking his hands and fingers off the controls. To scratch his own nose, to rub his eye, or to reach for a drink seemed the very heights of hedonistic delight, and the very depths of betrayal.Sure, go ahead. Take your finger off the button. Your shoulders will stop aching—but maybe the whole aim-point system will crash, they’ll have to abort Ignition, and you’ll doom everyone in the whole damned system. But so what? Your finger won’t be sore.
He blinked, trying to bring the data screens back into some sort of focus. It was a constant struggle to keep alert, to keep his mind from drifting, to keep his eyes where they needed to be. He didn’t dare send Beseda for more coffee, or for anything else that might help keep him awake. Matters regarding liquids were critical enough as it was. He had already decided that if it came down to a choice between his dignity and the fate of humanity in the Solacian star system, then dignity would lose. If the price of keeping his finger on that button was a puddle under his chair, so be it. But so far things hadn’t gotten quite to that point. So far.
He blinked, shifted in his seat as much as he dared, and tried to concentrate on his work. After a moment, he became aware that there was someone—Curthaus—standing in front of his console. He didn’t dare shift his eyes far enough from the screens to look up, so he addressed Curthaus’s blue-checked shirt instead. “Curthaus!” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “What have you got for me?”
“A pie in the face. But maybe a good-news pie. You know anything about why the guide path preheaters are still running at full power?”
Thatwas enough to get his attention, almost enough to pull his eyes off the screens for half a moment. “Whatdid you say?”
“The preheaters are still running full blast. It’s so crazy I wanted to check with you before I pulled the plug, but it’s got to be unintentional. It looks like the breaker sequence was set wrong, and the heaters have been drawing bus C power since the millisecond the Array started drawing power.”
“Bus C! But that means—”
“We just found our power leak. Is there some completely bizarre reason this is on purpose?”
“No way. Just more of the same,” Villjae said bitterly. “More top-flight project planning from beyond the grave, that’s all.” He shook his head.
“Scary, isn’t it? I wonder if we’d be better off right now if Rufdrop had lived.”
“Worse off,” Villjae said. It was uncharitable of him, but the ache at the base of his neck was throbbing worse than ever. “We’d have to tiptoe around his ego for half an hour on every one of these glitches. He’d have to make sure we all understood it wasn’this fault—”
“And we’d all have to pretend we didn’t know that itwas his fault—”
“Before we could get anything done. Go shut the damn heaters down—without blowing a surge through the whole storage system.”
“Bosley’s working on that side of it now,” Curthaus said. “I tell you, I keep wishing this was that all-out simulation we never got. Think how slick this thing would have run if we knew all this crap before we started.”
“It’s crossed my mind,” Villjae said with a smile. “Go get started on that power-down. And find Beseda or someone, and have them relay to Drayax what you two found.”
“Will do. Except Bosley found it. Not me.”
“Good on you, Curt. He’ll get the credit—but weall found it,” Villjae said. “The same way we all missed preventing it before it happened.”
“Ouch. Right. Okay.” Suddenly it was a quiet, even private, moment, a pause before the next big rush. Curthaus glanced at the wall chrono and let out a sigh. “Not much longer,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Villjae as a stabbing pain worked its way up his motionless left arm. “Not much longer. Just forever.”
A few minutes later, the power accumulator displays twitched and quivered, then moved smoothly, gently, upward, coming to rest dead center in the middle of the green zone, exactly on the numbers they should have been showing all along. Thirty-five minutes from the predicted end of run, all the inputs and levels were finally where they were supposed to be. All the numbers except the one that mattered most. Total stored power was still only at 94.2 percent.It will have to be enough, Villjae told himself. Itwould be enough. After all they had been through, it was inconceivable that a miserable 5 or 6 percent power deficit would be enough to stop them. They were too close to give up, even if what they had wasn’t enough.
And that’s the whole problem,Villjae realized with a start. It was going forward even when they weren’t ready that had got them into this mess. The pressure to go for it, to be ready by Ignition Day, had bulldozed all of them into reaching too much, stretching the possible too far. The whole history of Solace was the story of doing it now and fast, instead of later and right. It had come close to killing them all today—and it still might do them in if some other section had even half the problems that Groundside Power had fallen into.
Next time—if they survived long enough for next time to arrive—they might not be so lucky.
“Dammit, my back and arm hurt,” he growled.
Thirty-five minutes. That span of time seemed to stretch and compress for Villjae. He would catch himself losing concentration again and force himself to focus on the displays and the hand-controller—and the ache between his shoulder blades. Then he would blink, look at the time display, and discover that five minutes, eight minutes—or maybe no time at all—had passed.But thirty-five was just an estimate, he would remind himself.We don’t really know how steep a view-angle the Reception Array will accept.
And then he would try to keep himself alert by working out the geometry of the situation in his head. He played with the numbers, assuming the receptors lost efficiency at this rate or that rate, that the manual control would or would not allow a steeper point-angle than all the safeties on the automatics would allow.
He was trying to keep alert, keep focused, keep—don’t let your finger slip!Villjae was seriously starting to wonder if they’d have to amputate his left index finger after the job was over.
Part of his mind knew that was ridiculous, that the worst he might have would be a sore finger, and besides, they’d stopped amputating somewhere back in the near-ancient period; but the melodrama of the idea appealed to part of his psyche. He imagined himself with a look of noble suffering on his face, the admiring whispers behind him as passersby told each other of his heroic sacrifice—which was going to be a whole hell of a lot less heroic-sounding if it was a burst bladder instead of a chopped-off finger. He shifted on his chair again and checked the time. Twenty-nine minutes left.
The rest of the team was gradually assembling in the main control room. Whatever jobs they had been doing were all completed. It suddenly dawned on Villjae that the Groundside Power Reception Array had been the whole focus of his existence, all that he had worked on, thought about, or related to, for the last two years of his life. In—what?—twenty-four minutes now—all that would be gone. He couldn’t quite imagine what he was going to do next, aside from taking a shower and sleeping for a long, long time. He risked a glance up at the others in the room.
He noticed with a start that everyone else was looking at him. No, not at him—at the work he was doing. All of whatthey had done came down to whathe was doing, to his hand holding steady on the control, to keeping his finger jammed down on that damned-fool button. How did so much importance come down on doing so little?
If hecould do it at all. The shooting pain in his left arm was more or less continuous by then. And his damn finger hurt so much that he was starting to think they wouldn’t have to worry about amputation. The damn thing would fall off by itself.
“This is the voice of Ignition Control. We are coming up on five minutes until the predicted cutoff for power reception at Groundside Power. Earlier concerns about accumulated power levels have now eased significantly. We are currently showing 96.7 percent of predicted power accumulation, well within the limits set for safe operation.”
The hell you say,thought Neshobe Kalzant, staring daggers at the announcer. Ever since it had become clear 100 percent wasn’t going to happen, they’d been getting an unending stream of assurances that whatever amount of power they happened to have at that moment was going to be enough. As if anyone knew what the minimum levels for “safe” operation were.
At least the voice, too, was starting to look worn-out and disheveled. The stress and strain of the day showed on his face, if not in his words.
Neshobe looked down at the main level of the big control room. Drayax was the face to look at to learn what was really going on. The Project Director’s ability—or perhaps merely her willingness—to conceal her feelings had fallen by the wayside in the past hour or so.Maybe she figures it doesn’t matter anymore, one way or the other, Neshobe thought.Or maybe she is just too tired to give a damn anymore. Whatever the reason, it had gradually become possible to learn something by watching her. And it looked as if the news was just possibly, provisionally good. Given how bad things had looked not so long before, that had to rate somewhere near a miracle.
For Berana Drayax, at the moment the power accumulator leak ended, life began again. In that moment, when the power they needed stopped draining away, the use-it-or-lose-it dilemma was suddenly gone. She would not have to choose between going early or not at all, choose between exterminating the habitats on Alloy now or allowing the collapse of everything in the Solacian system later. She did not have to choose whom to kill. She could wait until Comfort eclipsed for Alloy, and harm no one by so doing. Never had she received a greater gift.
Now things were simpler, without any such horrible moral choice hanging over mere questions of engineering. They had done their best. Either Ignition would work, or it would not. Either the temporal confinement would work, and hold together long enough, or it would not.
Any number of things could still go wrong, and people, lots of people, could die. But if they did, they would do so because Drayax and the Ignition Project had tried and failed to save them, not because they were forced into a deliberate choice to kill.
“This is Project Director to all controllers,” she said into her comm unit. “Here is an update of current status. SunSpot is getting close to the horizon as seen from Groundside Power. We’re already seeing substantial drop-off in power input as the angle on SunSpot starts to lengthen and Array panels start casting shadows on each other. Obviously, that was as expected.
“Groundside Power is going to try and stretch their run as far as they can on manual, but we don’t know if that’s going to work. So we are at present looking at end of power accumulation in approx five minutes, nominal cutoff at 16:31:35. Groundside Power will attempt to continue after that time, and will advise when they have done all they could.
“While their power storage leak seems to be solved, it still seems wise to go for Ignition as soon as possible. We are therefore moving NovaSpot Ignition up to 16:43:05, the first moment allowed under the standard safety rules. NovaSpot is currently holding at minus three minutes. Last poll of all controllers showed all systems ready for Ignition at that time. This is Project Director out.”
“Three minutes past nominal,” Bosley announced, as if no one else were watching the clock.
Villjae was the only onenot watching it, but he didn’t need to be told either. He was fully aware of every second beyond nominal cutoff. He had known it wasn’t the real, absolute, definite cutoff all along, of course, but it had been the measure he had used to keep himself going. But the moment had come and gone, and nothing changed. There was still power they could get, and they had to get all they could. That was all that mattered.
Beseda was working up a variant on standard receptor-angle management, seeing if she couldn’t get the easternmost receptors at least somewhat out of the shadows of the westernmost. The gimmick might be good enough to draw a few thousand more amps. If stretching it another three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, bought them another half second of shielding, then maybe that half second would be just enough to save one more life.
“Four minutes past nominal.” said Bosley. “We’re really getting an input decline now. Losing the angle.”
Villjae nodded. Both his arms felt as if they had turned to stone, and the stone had turned to fire. But that didn’t matter. They were getting it done. Done.
“Four minutes thirty. Okay, Villjae. We’re seeing the tail-end curve signature.”
“All right,” Villjae said. That had shown up in every simulation they had managed to run. It was a sure sign that the Array had reached its maximum usable look-angle.
“Four minutes forty-five.” A pause. “Five minutes. Five minutes five, six—showing final tail-off—seven seconds—and we’re under minimum threshold. That’s it. Power it down.”
Done,Villjae told himself.Done. The others cheered and applauded, but somehow, even though he was aware of it, he didn’t really hear them.
He lifted his finger off the button and let go of the controller. He had imagined this moment a thousand times in the last hour or two—his moment of triumph, of release, of victory—and now there it was, and he was simply too tired to feel much of anything about it. He just wanted to sit there, close his eyes, and feel the weight lift off his shoulders. “Give me a minute,” he said to the others, but he spoke so quietly he could barely hear himself. “Just a minute, then I’ll be okay.”
The job was done.
It was time for great things to start.