Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant by Shepherd Mike

Author:Shepherd, Mike [Shepherd, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2005-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

11

If Sandy got the Word late, milling around the pier was evidence that others had gotten the Word wrong. The armed yacht skippers stood there at the 4 o’clock meeting beside the Cushing instead of their own 4:30. Rather than send them back to their boats to grumble for half an hour, Kris invited them to lend an ear to what the fast boats were doing.

It was a good idea.

“Can we have some of those? Anything that will keep those damn battlewagons busy elsewhere has got my vote,” was Captain Luna’s response to Chandra’s briefing on the AGM 944 missiles. She got solid nods from her fellow yacht skippers.

Van Horn turned wordlessly to the Army Colonel who’d arrived late and breathless from his supply trove. “The Navy’s pretty much stole all my 944s,” the soldier said. Before a groan could get really going, he added, “But I got plenty of AGM-832s. I even got the launchers they come in. Normally truck mounted, they ought to go nicely on your boat hulls. The 832s aren’t as quick on the acceleration as the 944s but they still kick like a mule, and we pack twelve of them to a box.” He grinned to show one gold tooth in front. “And we got loads and loads of them.”

“Anybody told you lately that they love you?” Luna said.

“Not since my wife left town with a traveling Bible salesman,” the Colonel said. “I’ll start shipping 832s to the Nuu yard just as soon as I get back.”

“You do that, love.”

“Moving right along,” Roy said, turning to Phil, who launched quickly into his efforts to cool his engines down fast by replacing the radiators with ones of his own design. He finished with a big grin on his face.

Then Tom took a step forward. “And if we do it that way, we’ll end up dead in space with our coolant blown.”

“What’da’ya mean?” Phil shot back.

“You’re using small-tubed radiators. Small tubes from beginning to end.”

“The smallest possible to get the maximum radiation area.”

“You also get the maximum turbulence in the coolant mixture. On Santa Maria, we intentionally use something we call Nano Mix Overheat to get the max from our mining slurry. But to keep from wrecking the nanos, we cool them down before they overheat. We tried the small tubes. And kept blowing them out. Perturbation in the liquid mix when the outside cools too fast and tries to swap with the inside but there ain’t enough inside. You need a larger tube to start with at the front end of the radiator, then it narrows and splits into finer tubes. Fast, but not too fast.”

“We did a computer simulation on this,” the yard worker at Roy’s elbow put in.

“You have any solid data to simulate from?”

“Well ...” he started.

“Did you do a search of the literature from Santa Maria?”

“We did a search. We didn’t get anything from Santa Maria.”

“Man!” Tom spat. His lips got thin as he shook his head in short, choppy snaps. Kris made a note that this was what Tom looked like angry; too bad Penny wasn’t here to see.

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