Far Horizon (Juggernaut #4)

Thirty One

Malachi turned the music up, and brought the visor down across his eyes. The door to his lab was definitely closed, he had checked it twice, but the noise coming from the fabrication area was still getting through, and he found it distracting. Everything was in full swing out there today. Plasma cutters, hydro blades and good old fashions grinders were hard at work making as much noise as possible.

He enjoyed that kind of work, and he would have loved to be playing with those tools, but his only concern today was to find the unbalanced coil in the tachyon emitter assembly.

With difficulty, he had finally extracted the unit from the black room, and now it lay on his worktop, separated into its major parts. He tapped the side of the visor to cycle through settings until he found the schematic library for the parts he was working on, and it sprang to life. Now he could look at any part on the table, and the eye tracking software in the visor would know what he was looking at, and provide an labelled, exploded diagram in his view. It was voice controlled too, so he could work with tools at the same time.

If only he had tech like this to work with back on the Juggernaut!

The parts still had to be checked physically one at a time, so he broke down the emitter coils into separate rings, and hooked each one up to the high resolution oscilloscope in an isolation chamber and began running tests. Each test would be run a thousand times under controlled conditions within the chamber. Gravity, humidity, and temperature could all affect the signals, and he wanted the most thorough results for his report. That would take time which he could use to compare other, less sensitive parts of the machine, with their base line specification.

He picked up his datapad to call up the default specifications just as a text message appeared on the screen. It was from Nina.

Can you talk? Urgent!

There must be a reason she couldn't send a voice message. He looked outside. It was noisy down here. Maybe it was noise up on the bridge, too.

He wrote back: Yes. Is there a problem?

We need to talk. Rec room. Now.

I'm working.

Now!

Malachi looked at the oscilloscope. It was just getting started. He had time, and he was curious.