“We’ll use the Sakira first. It and the Roebuck are the only ships that we know we can add jumpdrives to. But I’d like to start work on converting the Victory in parallel with converting the Sakira.”
“One second, . . . Okay, it will be here in seven days,” Blake said. “You should keep at least one flight bay active.”
“I was planning to,” Marc said.
“Good. Ajda has the plans that she and Catie made when they modified the Sakira for the asteroid mission. You can tell her to start making cabins.”
“I should do that right away. I plan to convert one of the flight bays to passenger cabins, and use part of the second for cargo space.”
“What about the Paraxeans? I assume you’ll send them to the first planet.”
“We will. By the way, does it have a name?”
“Catie and I assumed the Paraxeans would want to name it.”
“I’ll let the governor know. And yes, I’m planning to send them there. But I still haven’t heard if we can move that asteroid in one piece.”
“Hmm, with Catie at the Academy and our mysterious Dr. McDowell’s communication issues, how are you going to find out?”
“I assume I’ll send Catie to get a status update,” Marc said.
“That’s not going to be easy, she’ll be pretty much locked down for the next three weeks. You’d better send her now.”
“Call Catie . . .”
“Hi, Daddy,” Catie said, not exactly her usual exuberant self.
“Hi, Sweetie. I wonder if you would be willing to go visit Dr. McDowell before you head to Delphi City.”
“I don’t know, I’m going to be pretty busy getting ready for the Academy.”
“Don’t be that way, it doesn’t suit you.”
“I know, but I should still be mad at you.”
“It’s your choice.”
“Yeah, right. Anyway, I’ll go see him this morning. For the Paraxeans.”
“Thank you.”
“Still mad?” Blake asked.
“She’s trying to be.”
“Well, that’s an improvement over yesterday.”
“I’ll take what I can get. How big a force are you recommending I take with me?”
“Half a flight bay; so twelve Foxes and eight Lynxes; are you going to take an Oryx?”
“I wish we could, we’ll have to wait for Catie’s new ship to be built and make a run before we can get the Oryxes,” Marc said.
◆ ◆ ◆
“Dr. McDowell, . . . Dr. McDowell!”
“Oh, . . . hello, Catie,” Dr. McDowell muttered.
“How are you doing with the jump ship concept?”
“The power requirements are driving me crazy. And that engineer, Ajda, is not helping any. You know, she has a bad temper.”
“What’s the problem with the power requirements?”
“To make it work with four probes, you have to lock them together. That means you have to use their regular grav-drives,” Dr. McDowell explained. “Their fusion reactors are then having to supply all that energy, and it takes forever to charge the capacitors up to jump potential. Before you get there, something changes, and you have to use the energy to adjust the grav drives. It’s an endless cycle.”
“Oh, you don’t know about the antimatter reactors,” Catie said as she realized that their compartmentalization of knowledge had bitten them, again.
“Antimatter reactors?”
“Yes, we have more powerful reactors we can use,” Catie said. “With them, we can supply more energy. But it means we won’t be able to use probes anymore. We’ll have to build ships.”
“Antimatter reactors,” Dr. McDowell said again. “I guess that would provide more power. Whatever, get me four ships, and I can test this out. Until then, I’ll work on my other projects.”
Catie was surprised that Dr. McDowell didn’t show any interest in the antimatter reactors, but he had always been a strange one.
“I’ll go talk with Ajda about the ships,” she said to Dr. McDowell’s back. He was already back to working with his equations.
◆ ◆ ◆
“Ajda, do you have some time?”
“I do, especially if you can get that idiot, Dr. McDowell, to quit asking for impossible configurations for these probes,” Ajda said.
“I just talked with him. He’s going to wait for us to design a ship that he can use. He suspects his power requirements are impossible to meet, but he didn’t know about the antimatter reactors.”
“I can assure you that his requirements are impossible to meet!”
“So we have to design a small starship. I assume the antimatter reactors are too big for a probe.”
“You assume correctly. And they’re not going to be too easy to fit in anything smaller than the Roebuck, unless you make them significantly smaller.”
“Even if we only had it contain the drives? No flight bay, or cargo bay?”
“These drives he wants are huge. And those reactors aren’t small either, especially with the power requirements he’s asking for, plus all the extra capacitors,” Ajda said.
“Okay, I’ll see if we can get Dr. Tanaka to look at the reactors. They can probably be made smaller; the Paraxeans didn’t spend too much time simplifying their designs once they came up with them. Then I’ll have Dr. McDowell calculate the power requirements for the jumpdrives based on the new configuration.”
“Thank you!”
“How are you doing with my new ship design?”
“Your cargo ship?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it certainly is interesting. The team and I will finish up our review this week and send you the documents. We’re finding several gaps you’ll need to address.”
“Can you make sure I get the files before Monday?” Catie asked. “I’m going to be out of contact for about a week, and I’d like to be able to work on them.”
“Not a problem.”
“Thanks, bye.”
◆ ◆ ◆
“Daddy?”
“Yes, Sweetie?”
“Can we have Dr. Tanaka work on the antimatter reactor?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“The jumpdrives require too much power for a fusion reactor to supply. The antimatter reactors are kind of big and bulky. We really want to have the jump ships be as small as possible.”
“I see,” Marc said. “You know that Dr. Nakahara is working on the antimatter converter.”
“Yes, but this is more about the overall reactor,” Catie said. “Besides, isn’t he working on the quantum relays?”
“Yes he is. I guess he might not be spending too much time on the antimatter converters right
