Halting the Reaper by Laurence Dahners

Author:Laurence Dahners [Dahners, Laurence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

***

Emmanuel watched as Vinargy’s crane swung the dry cask over the circular plate of Stade Emmanuel’s team had welded to the foundation screws. His crew boss was signaling the crane operator to guide the cask in over the plate. Emmanuel felt somewhat superfluous. But “a good boss knows how to delegate tasks,” he paraphrased to himself from his reading on leadership.

The Stade under-plate had been formed first. Then six long, angled, Stade screws—shaped like the twisted auger blades on a post hole digger—had been screwed in through holes in it. They’d used a rented, heavy-duty post-hole-digging machine to screw the screws thirty-two feet deep into the ground. The screws were so long that they’d had to be inserted in segments because the post hole digger could only screw in an eight-foot section at a time. Each segment had been Stade welded to the one behind it. Finally, the Stade plate had been welded to the screws.

The crew boss called out to him, “Mr. Seba, you want all the weight lowered onto the plate?”

Emmanuel nodded. No matter how many times he tried to explain the impossible strength of Stade, the crew boss continued to feel like the tiny welds holding everything together were bound to fail. When the chain to the hook holding up the cask relaxed, Emmanuel waved at the bucket truck Vinargy had loaned them for the job. The guy in the bucket skillfully guided his bucket in over the cask and released the hook.

The crane swung the chain and hook out of the way.

The crew boss guided the hook over what Emmanuel thought of as their Mylar “tent,” a capped cylinder of Mylar just big enough to fit over a cask. The crane lifted the tent up over the cask and, with a little guidance from guys pulling on cords attached to the bottom edge of the Mylar, the opening at the bottom of the tent was started over the cask. Then the tent was lowered down over the cask until the Stade plate inside the top of the tent settled onto the top of the cask.

The crew moved in, clipping the Mylar snugly to the Stade plate at the bottom. Emmanuel hooked up the cables from the big stazer to the tent’s connectors. He booted the controlling laptop and started entering the numbers Kaem had provided him. It’ll be a pisser if Kaem screwed up these numbers and they don’t work, he thought.

Everything entered, he looked up at the crew boss. “Ready?”

The man nodded.

Emmanuel hit enter. After he’d heard the loud snap of the big capacitors, he went over to feel the Stade beneath the Mylar—even though he already had the sense it was hard. It was. He turned to the crew boss, “Unclip the tent and pull it off.”

Emmanuel disconnected his cables while they were unclipping the Mylar. Stepping back, he powered down the stazer and the laptop. When he looked up, the crew boss was motioning the crane to pull the tent up and off.

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