Chapter 132: 131. Kaden Merit

"So how do we do this?" I asked as I stared at the spinning tumbling wreck out the windows.

Sarah chimed in, "There's no way we can dock with her like that, right? She's twisting and tumbling all over the place."

"Or are you going to get the Demeter to match her tumble," I added, "Like you did with the shuttle at the Hammersmith?"

Rebecca shook her head, "Even if we could match that it wouldn't work. The way she's moving there's probably at least two g's worth of force on some parts of that ship."

"Two-point-seven at the cockpit," Jenny confirmed.

"So what's the plan?" I asked. "And why am I still in the captain's seat? I hope you don't expect me to somehow solve this puzzle."

We were all crammed into the cockpit so everyone could see what was going on outside the ship. Rebecca took Jenny's place in the copilot seat, and Cam was sitting at the engineering position. Sarah stood behind me where she could look over everyone's shoulders, and our AI stood in the cockpit doorway behind our engineer. The purple fringe in the android's hair meant Jenny's HPD was stowed and she was back to controlling her body remotely again.

Our captain reached over and activated a display on the far left side of her console. Then as she began manipulating the controls she narrated what she was doing.

"This kind of problem is one of the many things we can fix with the Demeter's tractor-repulsers," she explained. "They're good for a lot more than just towing scrap. So what I'm doing right now is adjusting the beam width? It can go as tight as one square meter, or as diffuse as about five hundred square meters. That's roughly twenty-five by twenty meters on the wide end."

The boss continued, "I'm setting it for about twelve by eight meters, which is wide enough that we won't be pulling too hard on any one point on the wreck, but not so diffuse that it becomes hard to target the specific areas I want."

"Next is the power," she stated as she adjusted another parameter. "I'm setting it at five percent. That's about as low as it goes, and it translates to a very gentle nudge rather than grabbing on and pulling. And finally the actual targeting? I'm aiming to hit the corner of the wreck where her tumble is rotating away from us. Then I'll manually pulse the tractor beam, which will apply a gentle pull against the momentum of the wreck's spin."

She glanced at me and added, "Amanda I need you to stay on top of our position, don't let us drift too close to the wreck."

"Got it," I nodded as I set my hands on the manual controls.

As soon as we were both ready she began pulsing the forward tractor-repulser beam in time with the other ship's movements. There was nothing visible outside, no beam or lights or anything. And nothing noticeable happened inside either, no hum of equipment or surge of power.

The first indication of any changes came about a minute later, when I realized we were slowly drifting closer to the wreck. The Demeter was also beginning to take on a slight downward pitch too. I used the manoeuvring thrusters to steady the ship and counter the drift to hold us at a consistent range, while Rebecca continued pulsing the tractor system.

After a full five minutes we could actually see that the other ship's tumble had slowed, and that's when Rebecca changed things up.

"It's slow enough now that I can engage an automated function in the tractor-repulser controls," she explained. "Basically it has a mode that'll do what I was just doing, but only within certain parameters. Amanda you'll need to stay ontop of the ship's thrusters, and it may pull a little harder at first but that'll taper off quickly."

She changed the parameters of the beam again, by setting the power to ten percent and the size to maximum so it would cover as much of the wreck as possible. Then she engaged the automatic function and I found myself using the manoeuvring thrusters again to counteract the pull of the tractor beam.

Meanwhile the wreck was noticeably slowing down its tumble and becoming much more stable, at least in relation to the Demeter. There was some movement in the backdrop of stars that meant we were starting to yaw with the derelict, but I was able to counter that with a little more thruster action.

"Why didn't we do this with the Hammersmith?" Sarah asked. "You said the tractor system was strong enough to tow the frigate, so it must be strong enough to stop the thing rolling right?"

The boss nodded, "We could have, but we didn't need to. The Hammersmith wasn't rolling or spinning so hard we couldn't work on it. And it's a lot harder to stabilize something that large. Remember it's all about mass and momentum, and in deep space we have nothing to push against so we need to rely on our thrusters. Or in that case we'd have needed the main engines."

"Anyways now we've got the Kaden Merit about as stable as she's going to get," Rebecca added. "We can match her movements and dock the shuttle to her, we can work safely over there. We can probably even dock the Demeter to her if necessary."

With the two ships now pretty much floating motionless and stable relative to each other we moved on to the next part of the job, which was scanning the wreck bow to stern to get a proper assessment of her condition. And since Rebecca was still in the copilot seat she took care of that, while I watched and kept an eye on the thrusters.

And as we all got our first good look at the other ship now that she wasn't in a hard spin I commented, "Wow. I thought the Demeter was kind of ugly, but that thing looks like a box with engines on the back."

Rebecca smiled, "She was definitely designed for utility rather than looks."

The Kaden Merit was about twice as long and twice as wide as the Demeter, and probably half a deck higher. She looked like someone took a two-storey warehouse building and rounded off the edges and corners, then strapped three big engine pods to the back and stuck a little cockpit on the front.

It looked like she followed a similar layout to the Demeter, in that the lower deck was probably all cargo space while the upper deck was crew and operations. The cockpit protruded from the upper deck like ours did on the Demeter. The engines were very different though.

Where our two main engines were built into the upper part of the hull, the engines on the Kaden Merit stuck out at the back. They were arranged in a triangular pattern, one was in the lower left, the destroyed one was on the lower right, and the third one was raised up in the middle. All three were connected by struts and braces, which were in turn connected to the vessel's hull aft of the cargo hold.

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One odd thing I noticed was there was no main cargo airlock on the front or sides of the craft. It looked like there was a ramp that lowered from below, plus there was a large square airlock on the bottom of the hull. I was positive she was even less aerodynamic than the Demeter, but it looked like the Kaden Merit was actually capable of handling atmosphere and landings.

Another notable detail was the lack of any kind of shuttlecraft. She did have port and starboard airlocks on the upper deck, they were positioned at the aft end of the deck and could potentially allow shuttles to dock. Except the starboard airlock was damaged along with the hull when the engine exploded, so there was no chance of docking anything there now.

One final thing that caught my eye was a large dome-shaped structure on the top of the hull a little ways aft of centre. It seemed like something mechanical, like possibly a housing for an advanced sensor suite. I might have guessed it was a tractor-repulser similar to what we had on the Demeter, except it didn't make sense that it'd be on the very top of the ship pointing upwards.

While I was marvelling at the complete lack of aesthetics Sarah leaned forward to take a closer look at the sensor readouts. Cam was doing the same thing, peering around Rebecca's side so they could see the details. It seemed like both our mechanics were very interested in the wreck we were here to salvage.

"So it looks pretty obvious what happened here," Sarah stated. "The number three engine exploded, probably while she was in a level zero jump. And the blast took out enough hull plates at the starboard-aft part of the ship to depressurize both decks."

I asked, "Do you think anyone survived? It looks like there's an empty escape pod mount at the top of the hull, just aft of the cockpit."

Rebecca frowned, "I'm sure I don't have to ask, but I take it we haven't detected any emergency beacons? No emergency transmissions?"

"Negative captain," Jenny replied. "I've been monitoring comms since we reached their last known coordinates two days ago."

Sarah was still looking at the sensor readings, she stated "I don't see any damage on engines one and two, so whatever happened was probably limited to number three. The complete lack of power makes me think they suffered more damage in engineering. Maybe a secondary explosion took out the power plant?"

"What do you reckon caused the engine to blow up in the first place?" Cam asked. "Do you think someone was shooting at them? I don't guess ship's engines normally just explode on their own..."

The boss shook her head, "I don't see any sign of a fire fight. No recent laser damage on any of the other engine pods or the hull. In fact the only recent damage is the blown engine and holes in the hull next to it."

"Ship engines don't normally blow up on their own," Sarah stated. Then she made a face and admitted, "On the other hand, extremely poor maintenance can lead to some extremely catastrophic failures..."

The cat-kin nodded, "I've seen that happen. One of the guys back home had his granddaddy's grav-sled come apart on him on account of never ever letting me replace some old power couplers for him."

Everyone was quiet for a few moments after that, and I couldn't help trying to picture what that might have been like. It wasn't hard to imagine some macho tough-guy farmer being too full of himself to let the resident oddball mechanic poke around at his ride. It was just as easy to imagine the guy's face when his grav-sled's engine spontaneously disassembled itself, possibly while he was travelling at high speed over his farm.

"All right," Rebecca stated eventually. "We have two priorities. One, check that our customer's cargo is intact and that we can get it into our hold. And two, figure out the condition of the rest of that wreck. I need to know if it's worth our time to tow the whole damn thing to Rolandan-2 and turn it over to Tamsin's people, or if we're better off stripping the valuables off it out here."

I asked, "How do you want to go about that?"

After another second or two she asked Sarah, "What's the quickest easiest way for you to assess that ship's overall condition?"

The cute blonde engineer shrugged, "If I can get emergency power going we could just ask the ship? Get a damage report from her computer, maybe consult the ship's logs? That should give us the most accurate information. Otherwise we're going on visual inspections, what our sensors can pick up, and some educated guesswork."

"Worst case scenario I could take a portable energy pack over so we can dump their logs," she added.

Rebecca nodded, "All right. You and I will head over there and do a preliminary inspection of the interior. Bring an energy pack just in case, and whatever else you need to dump the logs. I'm not expecting to start salvaging anything on this trip, it's just recon and information gathering. Expect an hour or two EVA."

"Amanda you'll stay in charge here," she added. "Cam, you'll stay here with Amanda for this one. Once we're confident it's safe over there, we might get you on an EVA or two if you're up for it."

Jenny had been quiet for a while but the AI finally spoke up at that point.

"What about the crew?" she asked. "There are going to be remains over there."

The captain sighed, "I know. For now we'll leave them alone."

"Getting into their logs will let us know how many folks were on board," Sarah commented. "And should tell us if there's an escape pod floating around out there that we missed. That'll also let us confirm exactly when all this happened, so we'll know roughly where to look for the pod."

"Then let's get moving," Rebecca decided. "Amanda you're still in command of the Demeter for now. Jenny you're on sensors and comms. Cam, you can stay here in the cockpit and watch how we do this. Sarah, get what you need and meet me in the starboard airlock as soon as you're ready."