Individually, each problem was relatively straightforward; in combination, they demanded a tricky judgment of capabilities, possibilities, and threats. And, try as they might, neither he nor any of his staff had been able to come up with a solution to their problems which didn't violate the principle of concentration of force. To make this work was going to require the division of his forces, and that was a notion Luiz Rozsak hated with every tactician's bone in his body.

But, he reflected, as that old proverb Oravil is fond of quoting says, "Needs must when the Devil drives." And the Devil is sure as hell driving this one.

"I think you're right, Edie," he said out loud, then turned to Commander Raycraft and Commander Stensrud. "Still, Laura, you and Melanie are the ones who're going to have the toughest job if anything goes wrong with the interception. I wish we had the four-pod rings aboard Charade. I'd feel a lot more comfortable if we could just go ahead and deploy the pods and pull Melanie back out of the inner system."

Raycraft and Stensrud nodded in unison. The lightweight pods in Charade's bays were simply too stripped down for any sort of extensive independent deployment. They required too much external power supply, just for starters, and the people who'd designed them had deliberately accepted limited—very limited—operational lifetimes for their onboard systems. All of which meant Stensrud couldn't simply stack the things in Torch orbit and then get her ship the hell out of the way.

"I can't say I'm particularly enthralled by the limitations myself, Sir," Raycraft acknowledged. "On the other hand, I'll have a lot more missile defense than you will. And if your jaw of the nutcracker does what it's supposed to, it probably won't matter a lot."

"I know." Rozsak snorted in amusement. "The problem is that I've never been all that enthralled"—he used her own verb deliberately—"by operational planning that includes words like "probably won't.' "

Someone else chuckled in matching amusement, but then the admiral set his coffee cup firmly aside with an air of finality.

"All right. I think we have a plan. Now let's see how it works out as an exercise. Edie, I want you and Dirk-Steven to set that up ASAP. We don't know how long we have before the bad guys come calling, but it's always best to err on the side of pessimism in a case like this. That means we're not going to be able to spend a lot of time actually working on this in real space, so get the sims loaded to everybody. Hopefully, we'll be able to have at least one run through with everything short of live fire exercises from the Masquerades, so be ready to tweak the simulations on the basis of anything we discover in the process."

"Yes, Sir," Edie Habib replied in a rather more formal than usual tone. "A lot of this is going to come straight out of the playbook we've been working on," she continued, "so I think we can probably set up the exercise pretty quickly. We can probably be ready to go by . . . what?" She arched an eyebrow at Kamstra as she spoke. "Tomorrow morning, Dirk-Steven?"

"Better make it afternoon," Kamstra advised after a moment's thought. "I've noticed Murphy tends to turn up during the planning process, as well."

"A cogent thought," Habib agreed, and turned back to Rozsak. "Make that tomorrow afternoon, Sir. Right after lunch."

"Good," Rozsak said. "In that case, I think we can adjourn."

"So how bad is it?" Ganny El leaned over, peering into the space uncovered by a removed cover plate. The inside of that space was filled with a lot of equipment whose precise purpose she understood only vaguely.

Andrew Artlett straightened up from the piece of machinery he'd been working on, squatted on his heels, and started wiping his hands with a rag. That was rather silly, really. The interior of a hyper generator—even one for a ship as small as a mere million tons—needed to be kept clean at all times. In fact, Andrew had washed his hands before starting to work on it as thoroughly as a surgeon washes his hands before undertaking an operation.

But old habits died hard. Andrew always thought of himself as what he called a "jackleg mechanic," and such stalwart and doughty souls by definition always had dirty hands that needed to be wiped clean.

"Pretty damn bad, Ganny. It could go out at any time."

"Why?" Ganny glared at the housing. "Those damned things are supposed to be the next best thing to indestructible!"

"Well, they are . . . mostly," Andrew acknowledged. "Unfortunately, even a hyper generator has some moving parts, and this one"—he tapped a badly worn-looking rotor-like device longer than his arm—"is one of them. Worse, it's an important one of them. In fact, it's the stabilizer for the primary stage. If it goes down, you've got no hyper control at all, Ganny. Zip. And this sucker ought to have been changed out in a routine overhaul at least a hundred thousand hours ago. We really need to replace it, before we try to make another jump."

"It can't just be fixed?"

"Fixed? How?" He pointed a finger at the rotor's shaft. Even Ganny, whose many fields of expertise and knowledge did not include matters mechanical, could see that it was badly worn.

"I'd have to remove it, first. That could be done, although it'd take a while. That's the easy part. Then I'd have to add metal to it, using welding equipment we don't have, so I'd have to design and build the welding equipment which I could probably do with the odds and ends we have on this rustbucket of a so-called starship but you're looking at weeks of work, Ganny. Might be as much as two or three months. Then I'd have to turn it back down to specs using metal-shaping equipment which we also don't have. The so-called 'machine shop' on this piece of crap is a joke and you can tell that cheapskate Walter Imbesi I said so. There's no way in God's green earth I could possibly build a modern computerized machining center. And even if I could, who'd design the program? You're probably the closest we've got to a real programmer and . . ."

He cocked an inquisitive eye up at her. Ganny shook her head. "I'm not really that good a programmer and what little skill I do have runs entirely toward financial stuff. There's no way I could design a program to do what you want, Andrew."

He nodded. "What I figured. So that means I'd have to build an old-style lathe."

"A . . . what?"

He grinned. "And you claim to be the old-timer here! A 'lathe' is an antique piece of equipment, Ganny, used to cut metal. More or less contemporaneous, I think, to ox-drawn plows. Still, it'd do the trick although it'd take a lot longer than modern equipment. Fortunately, we've got a pretty good suite of measuring instruments so I could probably manage to get the shaft back to specs using a micrometer."

"A . . . what?"

"A micrometer's an ancient type of measuring tool, Ganny. Definitely contemporaneous to ox-drawn plows. Well, yardsticks anyway."

"What's a 'yardstick'?" piped up Ed Hartman. He and his two buddies had been watching the process with great interest from close up. As close up as Andrew would let them come, anyway. He was deeply suspicious of their claims to being crispy clean.

"A stick to measure a yard, what d'you think?"

"So what's a 'yard'?" asked Brice Miller.

Artlett scowled. "Ganny, is this a consultation over critical repair issues or a remedial history class?"

She smiled, and made shooing motions at the three teenagers. "Give your uncle some breathing room, kids. I'll explain to you what a yard is later."

She looked back down at Andrew. "And how long would it take to make this . . . 'lathe,' you called it?"

"At least as long as it took me to make the welding equipment. Even though it'll have to be a primitive as they come, since I've got no way to make a lead screw. Fortunately I can probably jury-rig an electromagnetic actuator of some kind."