“Tee pocking high-capacity tester for tee M-98 is a pocking tabletop pocking unit,” Poertena went on sharply. “How tee pock was I gonna carry it? Huh?”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Poertena!” Julian shot back. The two experienced armorers had already stripped down and inspected twelve plasma rifles, front to back. None of them had exhibited any sign that they would detonate like the late Nanni Bosum’s, but they’d pretty clearly deduced what must have happened to Bosum, and they had no way to test the high flux capacitor systems. The machine that did that was, as Poertena had pointed out, a tabletop model which had become an expanding ball of plasma along with the rest of the
Pahner walked into the tent and glanced at the disassembled rifles and parts strewn across its interior.
“Any luck?”
“No, Sir,” Julian admitted tiredly. “Other than expected faults, we can’t find anything. There’s nothing to indicate a malfunction that would cause a blowout,” he went on, and Pahner nodded.
“I heard you talking about capacitors. Nothing there?”
“No,” Julian said. “Bad capacitors are the most common cause of breech detonations, but—”
“But we don’t have tee pock . . . I mean, I couldn’t hump tee test module, Cap’n,” Poertena put in. “It was too po– It was too big.”
“Oh.” Pahner smiled. “Is that the only problem?”
“Yes, Sir.” Julian gestured at the torn down weapons. “We’ve got a general meter, but we can’t stress charge the capacitors. The charge exceeds the meter’s capacity.”
“Okay.” Pahner turned to the Pinopan. “Poertena, go rip the system pack out of a suit of armor. Better make it Russell’s.” The grenadier had been one of Third Platoon’s few casualties in the ambush, and would no longer require her powered armor.
“Roger, Captain.”
The small armorer trotted off towards where the armor had been stored, and Pahner turned his attention back to Julian as he extracted a precious stick of gum and popped it absentmindedly into his mouth.
“Julian. Go get me a plasma rifle that’s been positively deadlined, a section of twelve-gauge superconductor, and a cyber-pad.”
“Yes, Sir.” Julian stepped into the bowels of the tent to find the required items. He wasn’t sure what the captain was up to, but he knew it was going to be interesting.
Pahner held the charge-couple ring steady in one hand and applied the edge of his combat knife to the base of the contact points.
“Essentially, the tabletop tester for these things is identical to the built-in system in the armor.” He sheared the contact off cleanly and caught it in midair. “But the contact points are different. The old Mark Thirty- Eight used different contacts, too, but it had a field service kit. You should have heard the bitching and moaning about not having a portable tester when these Mark Ninety-Eights came out! But this trick had been around for a long time, so we just kept using it.”
“Why didn’t they specify the same design?” Julian asked. “Or a field tester?”
“You don’t know much about procurement systems, do you, Julian?” Pahner smiled crookedly and wiped a trickle of forehead sweat off on the shoulder of his uniform while he concentrated on lining up the superconductor and the contact.
“The same company that supplies the plasma rifles supplies testing equipment. Naturally, they want to sell the equipment with the rifles. If they say ‘Hey, you can use the same testers as you use on your armor,’ there goes the sale. Not to mention the fact that the tabletop model is about three times as expensive as the field tester. I never have figured out why; it does exactly the same thing.”
The captain shook his head, and this time there was very little humor in his smile.
“The Mark Ninety-Eight is about twice as powerful as the Thirty-Eight, but I think Kruplon Armaments just overcharged a Thirty-Eight and put on a new cover. The interior modules are practically identical. I’d heard the rumor that the Ninety-Eight had a tendency to blow, but this is the first time I’ve personally seen any evidence of it.”
“But why doesn’t somebody call them on it?” Julian demanded, then shook his head. “Never mind.”
“Yeah,” Poertena laughed. “You got any pocking idea how much pocking money ’e’s talking about?”
“If they lose the sale, there goes the money for the senator’s reelection campaign,” Pahner agreed quietly. “Or the big dinners for the procurement officers. Or the high-paying jobs for the retired admirals.”
He didn’t bother to mention that the Imperial Bureau of Investigation had enough to do lately tracking down various conspirators against the throne without worrying about such minor matters as exploding weapons that killed the people using them. It was, frankly, a bad time to be a Marine.
He took the mated contact and superconducting wire and wrapped them with a piece of gum the size of a pea.
“The gum will harden when the current hits it,” he said with a smile as he pressed the joint tight. “And you thought it was just a habit,” he added, blowing a tiny bubble.
Out of two dozen plasma chamber capacitors, they found a distinct drop in current management on half a dozen. As the current flow increased, they faltered. In a spike situation, the capacitors would fail catastrophically, with predictable results.
And all of them carried similar lot numbers from the same manufacturer.
“Fuck.” Captain Pahner popped another tiny bubble and smiled grimly.
“There’s microscopic cracking in tee capacitor wall,” Poertena said, examining one with a field-scope. A tiny pseudo beetle wandered across the field of view, but he didn’t even notice. “They probably let tee moisture get in. Especially when they been used and tee capacitor is swell. T’at’s death on these dry capacitors.”
“So if you don’t have a spike, everything is fine.” Julian shook his head. “And if you do, but don’t have a bum capacitor, everything is fine. But not both.”
“Right,” Pahner said. “Okay. Toss these crap capacitors into the fucking jungle, except for a couple of samples. When we get back, I think Her Majesty is probably going to hang a couple of subcontractors. Given how annoyed she’s going to be over this entire little adventure of ours, I think that may be a literal statement. And I’ll tie the rope for her.
“After you get rid of them, put together the best plasma guns you can, as many as you can. Check every component, every piece and connection. Go over all of them with a field-scope. Then put them in zipbags with something to keep them dry.
Julian grimaced.
“Losing the plasma guns is really gonna
“Can’t be helped. I’m not losing another squad to a breech blow. We’ll hold them in reserve until it really has dropped in the pot. If it turns out we can’t survive without them, we’ll bring them out.”
“It’ll take us a while to put them together,” Julian said.
“I’ll get you some help. You’ve got today and tomorrow.”
“Okeedokee,” Poertena acknowledged with a resigned headshake. “Nice pocking trick,” he added. “Where’d you learn it?”
“Son, I’m seventy-two,” the captain said. “I joined up when I was seventeen. After fifty-five years of being on the ass-end of the supply chain, you learn to make do.”
Kostas Matsugae had always enjoyed cooking on a small scale, but preparing dinner for a wider audience was a challenge. That was especially true with completely unknown spices and foods, but he was learning to make do.
With the company stopped, he finally had some leisure to experiment. He knew the troops had started complaining about the sameness of the menu, and he didn’t really blame them. With very little time each evening and a large number of meals to prepare, he’d been forced to fall back on stew almost every night. The running joke was that they’d have a different meal every day—today it was stew and barleyrice; tomorrow it was barleyrice and
