Lost Galaxy (Books 4-6): The Last Deceit, Swept Away, On Redemption by Young Daniel

Author:Young, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

9

Jusha vanished in the mob of ghost-white bodies and returned holding something else. “The repair kit has a voltmeter in it. We can use that to check the charge on the fermentation substrate.”

Sweeney clamped his eyes shut and shook his head. “Excuse me, but can you speak English?”

Jusha pulled out the voltmeter and held it up. The two electrodes dangled from its bottom like the tentacles of a tiny squid. “It’s simple. This stuff has a residual radioactive trace.”

“How do you know?” Phelps asked.

“I can see it.” He sloped off to the fermentation tank and lowered the electrodes into the sludge. “Hmm. It’s not as strong as I thought it was.”

“So?” Maro asked. “What do we do about it?”

“It’s easy. Look.” Jusha waddled over to the contraption on the floor. He fiddled with it for a second and pulled out a few wires., but they wouldn’t stretch more than a few feet. “Would you mind?”

Akin snarled something under her breath, hefted the array into her muscle-bound arms, and lugged it over to the fermentation vat.

Jusha smiled so cheerily that he didn’t notice her glaring at him. He stripped off the voltmeter’s head and wired the electrodes to the array.

“This can’t possibly work,” Maro muttered under his breath.

“I can’t decide which would be worse,” Akin countered, “it working or it not working.”

“I don’t suppose it will allow us to communicate with the Ovax, will it?” Bowman asked.

Jusha didn’t answer. He kept fiddling with everything, adjusting this and tweaking that. He scurried around the array and finally slumped in defeat. “The charge isn’t strong enough.”

“Isn’t that what we just said?” Van Dyke countered.

“We have to extend the wires down the refuse chute.” Jusha pointed to where the Ovax regurgitated their finished fermentation product. “There will be plenty of power coming from there.”

“Hold it,” Sweeney interrupted. “If you stopped the food supply enough to cut off power to the rest of the ship, there won’t be enough power down there to run this thing.’

“The destroyer takes billions of kilovolts of power,” Bowman replied. “The slightest disruption in supply would affect systems all over the destroyer. It stopped the laser cannons, the communications links—everything.”

“The Ovax are already continuing the fermentation process,” Maro pointed out. “Look.”

Sure enough, the Ovax had resumed taking the tree bark out of their food delivery chute. They chewed it up and spat it into the vats while others delivered the sludge to the refuse chute.

“If they’re continuing the fermentation process, that means the rest of the destroyer will be up and running soon, too,” Akin surmised. “The Pterans will be back on the march.”

“Then we have to find a way to harness the power supply,” Bowman told her. “We have to find a way to help these Ovax communicate with the rest of the population on the other destroyers.”

“How?” Phelps asked. “We don’t have wires long enough to drop down the chute. Even if we did, we wouldn’t know they were actually in the radioactive stuff down there. We don’t even know what’s in there.

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