Wills could have traded the floater-bike for a standard personnel floater or wheeled vehicle but he was glad he hadn’t now; the area under the ship was crowded with cargo trucks packed with provisions and a maze of personal transports of all descriptions. The floater-bike enabled him to thread his way right up next to the loading ramp.
He walked up the edge of the ramp while several cargo trucks worked their way up the center. He found one of Helt’s people checking each one as it arrived and directing the drivers to the correct deck, “Excuse me, can you tell me where I can find Captain Helt and Commander Copeland?”
The young woman pointed at the elevator set into the side of the massive central structural column of the ship, “Take the elevator to the main engineering deck. He said that he and the Commander would be starting there.”
Wills thanked her and went to the elevator she had indicated. It was one of ten large elevators that were built into the wall of the seventy meter diameter support core and system housing. The core ran from the strut platform to just below the bridge deck at the top of the ship.
The door opened automatically as he stepped in front of it and started to reach for the button. He entered and had to think for a moment. There were no really tall buildings on Archer as yet, but there were a number of elevators in the few two and three story buildings that they did have, and all of them were voice controlled; the Weasel’s elevators used a button panel. To confuse things a bit more, this panel had been the recipient of some hasty modifications. He knew that the bottom button marked SP meant Strut Platform--where he was at the moment--and the buttons marked C1 thru C10 were the ten cargo decks, but the passenger deck buttons only indicated P1 thru P14 instead of P1 thru P35. The button that should have been P18 now had a piece of tape next to it marked ME and the buttons from P15 to P17 and P19 thru P35 and the old ME button above those had metal strips covering them. The remaining CR1 to CR5 and BR for the crew decks and bridge were normal. Well, the tape said ME for Main Engineering so he pressed it.
The deck doors and elevator doors were made of a rigid mesh that was light and strong; you could also see through it. Wills watched the parade of cargo trucks as they wound up the spiral ramp that went from deck to deck along the outer hull and got rapidly further from him as the decks he passed got wider and wider. Next came the fourteen remaining passenger decks; they were all well lit and looked ready for use, but he didn’t see a single person on any of them. Finally, he entered a bewildering structural nightmare that reached from the core to the hull and filled the three missing passenger decks below Main Engineering. His eyes were still absorbing the tangled sight when the scene abruptly changed to something even more unexpected.
The door opened on what could be called a vista. He stepped from the elevator and had to lean back to take in the extremity of the scene. A quick calculation told him that he was looking from the core to the hull horizontally and an open space of the missing seventeen passenger decks and five old engineering decks vertically. For the first time, he had a real appreciation for just how big the Weasel was. The original five deck open space of the old engineering space didn’t come close to this.
When he brought his head back down to level, he saw Helt and CeCe coming around the core; they were both grinning at him.
“Okay, so I look like a damned tourist.”
Wills swept an arm, “I signed off on this, but it looks like I didn’t really know what I was doing. What was the original idea again?”
Helt rubbed his chin; he had to think about that, “As I remember it, there was the thought that we would eventually bypass Forest and establish a new base of operations further out, or we would just hit class-three systems and begin outer system mining operations. Either way, we would need an initial power source, especially for the mining, and using the Weasel with the Berlin’s reactors seemed like a good way to use otherwise useless equipment. It also gave us a good work project when normal traffic fell off.”
Wills began walking around the core; he was now starting to see things from his more normal engineer’s point of view. The Berlin was a warship that had been built in the early, more paranoid, days of humanity’s expansion. It was armed with four neutron beam projectors that were capable of carving up fair-sized asteroids. The power required by the gravity pinch to create the fusion impulse and direct the neutron flow was immense in those earlier projectors.
The Berlin had never fought any aliens, and had been reduced to the role of a transport ship as time went on. It had crashed on Rose, the largest of Archer’s three moons when its lift ring malfunctioned. It was declared a total loss, and the beam projectors were ordered destroyed; the remaining hull, systems, and one item of cargo were given over to the Archer authorities. The twelve, old-style, twenty-terawatt, fusion reactors that were needed to power those projectors now occupied an enormous amount of space inside the Weasel; squeezed in between them were the six, much smaller, one-terawatt original reactors of the Weasel.
Wills stopped and pointed up into the dizzying mass of structural support that locked the reactors firmly in place and provided anchoring for the cabling and conduits.
“I think I’m seeing a normal attachment to the ship’s systems from the Berlin’s reactors, including the
