The Great Escape Chapter 23, Part 6 of 13

The Great Escape
Chapter 23, Part 6 of 13

"It's Cho."

Danielle went to find the engineer of the rigging team. She was sitting on a bench on the other side of the platform, working on a computer tablet, studiously ignoring the roughhousing men.

Cho was a short and slim young Chinese woman from Singapore. She had a sweet, childlike face, a small mouth, and long black hair. She looked intelligent but also reserved, probably shy.

Singapore had one of the best engineering schools in the galaxy, but Cho was a Nakatani recruit on her first job out of the engineering lab. Her overalls were shiny new and too big. Her safety harness was meticulously fastened, and her utility belt was full of textbook-recommended tools, rather than the food, emergency repair kit, lipstick, nail file, hair ties, and moisturizing hand wipes that Danielle carried after her first outing on a space rig.

Cho had never worked with a rough bunch of riggers before. Not knowing how to handle them, she kept her distance.

"Hello, Cho? It's Danielle. I used to work with Geraint as an engineer on a rigging team. Can I talk to you?"

Cho nodded but looked defensive. She didn't smile but moved her computer tab so Danielle could sit down.

"It's very daunting, your first space-rig," Danielle confided, talking without gaps so the proud girl wouldn't interrupt her or leave.

"The worst thing is not knowing how to treat the men. What the textbooks tell you to do isn't like real life. You want to be friendly and get them involved, but with men like these, being too friendly will send the wrong message."

"It's just as bad if you stay aloof, coming out of your cabin for meals or work. Then they'll think you're a snob, and they'll play up. It's important to remember that it's their rig and their rules.

They're the ones risking their lives every day. These are tough men doing tough jobs that even robots can't do. They earn the right to let off steam. But men's play can be boisterous. That's when you leave them to it and escape to your cabin. They'll soon calm down and invite you back."

"The best way to get them to accept you is to do your job well. Then they know they can rely on you."

Cho nodded but still didn't smile, though her defensiveness was beginning to dissolve.

"They'll want you around when something goes wrong. When you fix it, which you'll, because it's what you've been trained for, you'll earn their respect and, afterward, never do anything wrong in their eyes. They'll be your champions and your bodyguard."

Still, Cho didn't look persuaded.

"In my case," Danielle said, "it was a set-up. We were constructing a new hyperspace beacon with cooling-flow assemblies on opposite sides, but there were two left-handed assemblies and no right-handed ones. The lads asked me what to do. We were right up against the time limit for turning on the beacon and would incur stiff penalties if we had to wait another couple of days for the correct part to be sent."

"I told them to fit the spare left-handed assembly backward and bend the Venturi mechanism to redirect the flow. I showed them where to make the welds and the thermal joints. I calculated that the re-jigged assembly would last 100 hours, which gave us plenty of time to get the correct part sent after we met the deadline to turn on the beacon."

"The guys thought I was a genius, and from then on, they treated me as one of them.

Something like that will happen to you."

"How do you know?" Cho asked. "And what did you mean by calling it a set-up?"

"Because the team leader of the riggers deliberately hid the right-handed assembly and packed a spare left-handed assembly. He also left the technical manual for the cooling assemblies in my cabin, poking out of the bookcase, knowing I would find it, so I was familiar with the flowrates and tolerances."

"And who was that?"

"Geraint, of course."

Cho looked at the giant and smiled at last, feeling more comfortable than she had since she embarked on Earth with the rigging team.

"Did Geraint tell you that I'm not shaping up?"

"No, but I guess you reminded him of me when I first started."

"Thank you, Danielle. Can you tell me something? Why does Geraint call me Princess?"

"It's an Oakeshott Industries tradition. Every team of riggers is assigned an engineer, and if she's a woman, they call her "Princess." I like it."

"How can you like it? Isn't it sexist?"

"Of course it is! It's the best kind of sexism. The kind that makes rough, strong men respect and care for women. Forget all the feminist nonsense you learned in college. There's no time for petulance or manufactured grievances on a space-rig when you might be seconds away from a nasty death. That's when you learn to appreciate male chivalry. You'll also thank God that riggers are eighteen-stone men and not eight-stone women."

"When a servo motor freezes solid on a compression hatch, and you're pushing with all your might to close it before the cylinder implodes, sucking you into space, but it won't budge an inch, then you'll thank the man who comes to your rescue, jamming himself between you and instant death. And you'll appreciate his muscles when he closes the hatch with one push."

"I understand."

"Being called 'Princess' is nothing compared to what they call the male engineers who don't shape up," Danielle recalled with a smile. "Besides, it reminds you that the best way to be treated like a lady is to act like one."

Cho processed these ideas.

"I'll remember what you said, Danielle. Thank you."

Danielle nodded. She took a good look at the girl and thought it was likely that she would toughen up enough to succeed. It was a good sign that Cho had cut her fingernails short but applied thick nail varnish in a pale, girly pink. That was the proper attitude: feminine and functional.

Cho sat up straight, and Danielle caught a glimpse of her computer tab. Its screen was covered in equations and diagrams that seemed familiar.

"What are you working on?" Danielle asked.

"Just a problem I've found with some new hyperspace technology."

"May I see it?"

"Do you know hyperspace engineering?"

"A bit."

Cho showed Danielle how she was working out.

"I looked at it in the lab before they sent me to work on the rig. Do you know how Goldrick Junctions work?"

"Is that what they're calling the Beltway Hyperspace Junctions now? Yes, I know how they work."

"Well, I think they're incompatible with the new technology. The Travelers won't maintain band allocation, so it can't be guided out of the beltway into a spur pathway."

"Show me."

Cho flipped back the pages of her tab and went through the calculations from the beginning, apologizing for her amateurish diagrams.

"I see a mistake here," Danielle said, pointing to a formula. "That means these equations here, here, and here are wrong."

"I don't see it."

"You have the Traveler receiving the signal from the Beacon via retarded waves but at this stage of the cycle they're advanced waves."

"Oh! I'm not sure it fixes the problem, though."

"No, it makes it worse. This is a significant result, Cho. I need to think about it properly. It could be that we can't simply convert the Beltway to new technology. You need to publish it. I'll help you if you want."

"You'll help me? Who are you? Oh, my God! I'm so sorry. I've seen your picture many times, but didn't recognize you."

"That's all right. So, you'll send me the document?"

"Yes, Doctor Goldrick."

"Geraint is coming to visit me when the job's done. Will you come, too? Then we can talk about your work. You don't mind if I work on it myself and bring some others in as well?"

"I don't mind."

Cho was somewhat overwhelmed. They were distracted by some movement among the riggers. The call to embark on the shuttlecraft had been made.

Danielle stood up and beckoned Geraint and Roger over.

"Geraint, I'd like you to bring Cho with you when you come to dinner. She's given me a significant problem to consider. Please take care of her. She has a big future in hyperspace engineering."

"Ach, I'll look after her, Princess, Bach, don't you fret."

Danielle leapt up to hug the giant once more.

"Goodbye, Geraint," she said, kissing him. "I'm taking my pygmy home now. I've got work to do."

Danielle rewrote Cho's work in her office, correcting the faulty equation. She added a few lines of conclusions and put Cho's name at the top of the page. She sent the document to everyone on the Samatha Project Team, including those in the Nakatani and Oakeshott engineering labs. Then, she contacted Stephen Oakeshott.

"I've sent a report to your lab, Stephen. There's a problem with the Beltway hyperspace junctions."

"What's the problem?"

"It's complicated."

"It always is. That's why I keep you eggheads. Tell me, anyway."

Danielle explained band allocation, but Stephen was no wiser. He asked the most critical
Question for an industrialist:

"What does it mean for our business?"

"If we can't solve the problem, then we can make stand-alone hyperdrive systems and tethered pathways, like those from Celetaris to Samatha, but we can't do the most lucrative project, we can't use the new technology to upgrade the Beltway system."

"I see. So why did we miss this before?"

"Because no one was looking for it. We assumed the new technology could be ported onto the
Beltway. I'm sorry, Stephen."

"No apologies, Goldrick," Stephen insisted. "You've always been my best egghead. The question is: can you fix it?"

"I don't know. I need to work on it."

"You do that, Goldrick. Let me know what you learn."

Danielle stayed in her office all day and most of the evening, missing dinner. She returned late to her apartment, horny as always after intense brain-activity. She woke Roger from his light doze and got him to fuck her.

Sexually satisfied, Danielle slept well, rose early, and was in her office struggling to convert her original design for the Beltway hyperspace junctions to use the new technology even before Hazel, Wildchild, and Yael, inveterate early risers themselves, had finished breakfast and gone out for a run in the park.

When Wildchild and Yael turned up at Danielle's office for their morning physics lesson, Danielle said:

"I'm sorry, girls, I can't give you a lesson today. I've got a difficult problem to work on."

"Can we stay, please?" Yael asked. We want to see you work.

"If you're quiet, it'll be boring for you."

"We don't mind."

"I doubt you'll get much from watching me frown and grind my teeth," Danielle said.

She thought for a moment. Then:

"However, if you don't mind being sounding boards, it may help me to explain it from first principles."

Danielle conjured a rubber balloon from the holographic projector and explained that its surface was analogous to the three-dimensional universe, so a hyperspace jump was equivalent to squeezing together two distant points on the balloon's surface.

"The craft that passes through hyperspace is a 'Traveler'," Danielle explained, "and it travels in an interface between normal space and hyperspace that we call a 'plume'. In the old technology, the plume was created by a hyperdrive motor for relatively short hyperspace jumps, or by twin beacons to make what we call 'tethered' hyperspace pathways. In the new technology, we need a hyperdrive motor and a beacon to make the plume."

The girls had followed so far, encouraging Danielle, although the complications were beginning to emerge. She projected some equations onto the wall, and the girls blinked at their complexity.

The Wildchild got up to look at the screen more closely, waving her hand to set the rows of equations to scroll upward. She seemed to follow the sequence while Danielle continued her explanation.

"The Beltway junctions split the plume into 'allocation bands'. They allow the Traveler to remain in the plume while the hyperspace pathway changes direction."

"Redirecting the pathways is simple. It's the mechanism the junctions use to keep the Travelers in their allocation bands that's difficult. Writing these equations was the hardest job I've ever done."

As Danielle explained in the general principles and how they worked, Yael joined Wildchild in front of the screen. They scanned the equations together until Danielle finished, then conferred briefly. Then the Wildchild said:

"We understand how you fix the Traveler inside an allocation band. It's like chess."

"What do you mean?" Danielle asked.

"In chess, some laws say how a piece can move and what happens if it's taken."

"Rules of the game, yes," Danielle said, smiling encouragement, seeing where Wildchild was going with her analogy.

"And there are decisions," Wildchild continued, "concerning where I want my pieces to be."

"Tactics," Danielle said.

"Yes: rules of the game and tactics. So, there are times when a tactic is so obvious it's like a rule of the game, such as when I can move my knight one way to block an attack or another way and it'll be taken."

Danielle was pleased.

"We call that a 'forced move,' where an intelligent player has no real choice."



To be continued