“Understandable,” Dressler responded with a nod. Terseness was something that she could certainly deal with. Better to get down to business than to get bogged down in the flowery niceties that usually accompanied such things. “I shall have to discuss it with the Engineering staff I have aboard here and will get back to you with more detailed information about what we can do.”
The Grummians haven’t been the sort of people who had taken to any sorts of augmentation; they were, for the most part, your bog-standard humans, aside from a more recent cooperation with the Kandarinese to acquire a treatment that would prolong ones longevity for centuries. But that was the extent that they had ever wanted to go and even then, that was difficult to get people to buy into. They weren’t ever really fans of mucking around with the body and the mind, and they had no real desire to start anytime soon.
So when Admiral Weber transmitted the information over to the Pulaski, it did take some time for the relevant parties to sift through it and plan out their next course of action. One man was down in the cargo hold, chewing on the end of a stylus and pouring over a datatable containing the damaged areas overlaid on the schematics of the city. The damage wasn’t unfamiliar to him, as he’d seen it many, many times over the past few decades whenever a battle-scarred starship pulled back into his docks. But this time around there was a major complicating factor that he hadn’t really had to deal with before – gravity. Up in space, everything held together fairly well, even when it was blown to hell and back, provided the ship remained stationary. However, down here, there was that pesky issue with those damaged walls having to carry the load of everything above it.
While he was carefully contemplating his options, Colonel Dressler had briefed acting Governor Lunsford, concerning her orders and what she had hoped to accomplish here, and he did the same to her about everything that had transpired since she had left the shipyards hours before. Then, they cut both the man down in the cargo hold and Weber.
“Sidney Poole, Chief, Engineering Services, Walter P. Ellis Shipyards,” he introduced himself quickly and started twirling the stylus as he looked over the schematics again. “First off, I can’t say I’ve had much experience in this sort of environment. Everything’s a touch heavier here. But we haven’t much else to do, so we might as well give it a shot. It’ll be learning experience for everyone.”
“Now, the simpler jobs are to add supporting braces or cribbing to the buildings that are damaged the least and those where the weight from above ain’t as heavy. It becomes much more of a pain in the ass when you’ve got the ones at risk of imminent collapse, then we’re pressed for time and the braces might not cut it as well. Of course, there’s no use in not tryin’.”
He briefly tapped the piece of plastic on his chin in thought, and then said, “When we designed these cities, the base was largely put together as one piece – they’re consistent across the entire class – but the buildings, well, they had to be different, so they were modular. Since these cities are used everywhere, Mercury, here on Mars, Earth, and so forth, the parts needed to be interchangeable. Anyway, I’ll spare the history lesson.
“We can do the opposite to how they were put together: unweld the joints, decouple them from one another, and lift them off. Obviously, they need to be stabilized a bit before we even try that or we’ll risk bringing one down, but it’s a possible long term solution. Could do something akin to a forklift, wedge something into the bottom floor of a module and lift it off. Naturally, I haven’t a thing that can do that. Our ships are too small for it. But hell, we might be able to make something work…”
Lunsford then asked a question to get the man back on track and less on speculation, “What do we have for time?”
“Weeeell, the lesser damaged buildings should be fairly straightforward, just get in there, reassess the damage, add the support, reassess stability, and then leave. Ideally, an hour…ninety minutes tops. We’ve been doing what we can down here to fabricate everything beforehand. Now the more damaged ones are going to take time, and lots of it, because we need to get in there – perhaps coming in from the air – and clear what we can for room without bringing everything down on us. And then there’s the problem where multiple floors are heavily damaged, so we’ve gotta start from the bottom and continuously brace everything as we’re working our way up. That’ll be where the bulk of the time goes. That’ll be several hours, ideally, but again, with the way the damage can spread, it could easily sail past that estimate…”
