Governor by David Weber & Richard Fox

Author:David Weber & Richard Fox [Weber, David & Fox, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, Military, Action & Adventure, Space Opera
ISBN: 9781982125400
Google: u4v2zQEACAAJ
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2021-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Terrence Murphy and his staff sat around the briefing room table. Callum and Eira stood against the compartment’s outside bulkhead, still in their vac suits, while a true-scale wire diagram of a thick diamond rotated slowly in a holo above the table.

“It’s League tech,” O’Hanraghty said. “A singularity manifold for a mil-spec Fasset drive. Ours are designed a bit differently, but there’s no mistaking it. Besides—” He highlighted a flat pane of readouts at the front of the diamond. “All the maintenance LEDs and system connectors are standard RLH format.”

“Callum.” Murphy leaned forward in his seat and stroked his chin. “You’re fresh from your engineering program. What’s the cost of one of these?”

Callum had been examining his cracked helmet with a thoughtful frown that was far away from the ready room. Now he looked up suddenly and squinted in thought.

“I’m not really as up on mil-spec components as I am on the civilian-grade side,” he said, “but I’m damn sure they’re more expensive, not less, and the singularity manifold is the most expensive part of any Fasset-drive ship. They have to be manufactured to insanely careful tolerances, but the real bottleneck’s the exotic matter incorporated into one of them. Producing that much exotic matter is a royal pain in the ass. Like I say, I’m better read in on the civilian side, but my understanding is that the military version uses even more exotic matter. I’d be surprised if building one of these things didn’t eat up thousands of hours per unit.”

“And how many manifolds were destroyed on that ship?” Murphy asked.

“From the Hoplons’ video,” O’Hanraghty glanced at a slate, “two thousand four hundred and ninety-nine. That’s assuming each crate had a manifold. The scan pulse from Logan’s team detected just that in the first third of the hold his armor was able to get through, so I think it’s reasonable to assume that they all did.”

“That’s enough manifolds for…forty FTLCs,” Captain Lowe said. “That’s almost thirty percent of the Federation’s total fleet.”

“Why?” O’Hanraghty asked. “We know the League’s shipbuilding capability, and they can’t build that many ships. So why do they need so many manifolds?”

“Manifolds are one of the great bottlenecks in ship construction,” Callum said. “Laying keel and hull’s not difficult—that’s mostly automated in the yards. It’s the Fasset drives that matter, and building them is what really takes the time. Especially fabricating the manifolds. When an FTL is decommissioned, everything but the Fasset drive goes to the breakers. Not the drive fan, though. Instead, they build a new ship around it. They may upgrade by replacing the nodes, but the core of the drive is almost always recycled. My brother’s…He’s big into that. Family business.”

“Then if building these things is so hard, where were these manufactured?” Lowe asked. “And where were they going?”

“Unfortunately, Captain Buckley and his crew died when their ship blew up,” Murphy said. “The Beta Team that seized the bridge didn’t have time to un-encrypt Buckley’s ship’s logs before they had to abandon. I don’t know if they had time to download a copy.

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