The blueprints on the wall in the engineering room looked nothing like what Lem had imagined in his head.
“It’s still your idea, Lem,” said Benyawe. “Trust me. The design may look different from what you initially envisioned, but the principle is the same.” She was floating in front of him at the wall, stylus in hand.
“I don’t care if it’s my idea,” said Lem. “Throw out my idea if it’s rubbish. Don’t feel handcuffed to anything I suggested. I only care that it works. I’m not conceited enough to think I have a better grasp of this than you do, Benyawe. Do whatever you think is best.”
In truth it stung him slightly that she had changed the design a bit, even though he had fully expected her to do so. He wasn’t an engineer after all, and he only understood the science on the most fundamental level. Of course she was going to change it.
He had commissioned her months ago to develop a replacement for the glaser, and at the time he had given her a suggestion for its design, fully expecting her to dismiss his idea outright, pat him on his little head, and tell him to stop playing in her sandbox. Instead, she had thought the idea worth pursuing and assembled a team of engineers to make it work. Now that nugget of an idea had grown into schematics and actual plans.
“We call them ‘shatter boxes,’” said Benyawe. “As you know, the problem with the current glaser is that the gravity field spreads outward too quickly and too wide.”
Lem hardly needed reminding of that. It had almost meant his life. Back in the Kuiper Belt, when they had fired the glaser at a large asteroid, the gravity field had grown so quickly and stretched outward so far that it had nearly consumed the ship and turned them all to space dust. Lem’s quick thinking was all that had saved them.
Benyawe pointed to some crude drawings on the wall that looked like two cubes connected to each other by a long, coiling string. “Your initial idea was a device like a bola, with two small glasers on both ends that attach themselves to opposite poles of an asteroid.” She wiped the crude drawing away with a flick of her stylus, and floated over to the detailed schematics. “The shatter boxes operate the same way.”
The cubes were now thick discs, and one of them was disassembled in the air, as if the whole thing had been photographed a microsecond after it exploded apart, revealing each of the individual pieces inside. “When they’re fired from the mining ship, they spin through space like a bola, which as it turns out, is a brilliant mechanism if we detach the cable from each glaser at just the right instant. The spinning motion and additional guidance from us will sling them to opposite sides of the asteroid, where these anchor braces will dig into the rock.” She indicated the teethlike claws on the sides of the shatter boxes. “All that’s left is pushing the button and letting the glasers rip the rock to shreds. The two gravity fields will interact, counter each other, and keep the destructive reach of the fields to a minimum.”
“So it works,” said Lem.
“In the computer models, yes. It’s much safer than the current design.”
“Then why aren’t you clicking your heels in glee?” said Lem. “Or am I missing something?”
“There is a problem, yes,” said Benyawe.
“Which is?”
“Money. The original glaser isn’t destroyed every time we use it. The shatter boxes are. They’re consumed in the gravity field along with everything else. That’s enormously expensive and would offset most of the profit we’d reap from mining the asteroid. It’s not cost effective.”
“Then make it cost effective,” said Lem. “Use cheaper components and materials, shrink the size of the shatter boxes, remove anything that’s not absolutely essential. Do whatever it takes.”
She was quiet a moment then asked, “Are you sure this is how we should be spending our time, Lem?”
“How else would you be spending it?”
“Finding a way to fight the Formics.”
“My dear sweet Dr. Benyawe, what do you think you’ve been doing?”
She seemed confused. “You want to fire these at the Formic ship?”
“I want to use them however we can. If they can safely destroy asteroids, maybe they can safely destroy the ship or whatever happens to be inside it.”
“We’ll never catch it before it reaches Earth. And if it enters Earth’s atmosphere, it’s beyond our reach. Plus it will take months to build these once we arrive at Luna.”
“We’ll need to move this through production much faster than that,” said Lem. “We may not have months.”
Lem’s wrist pad vibrated, signaling a message from the helm. He tapped it. “Go ahead.”
Chubs’s voice said, “Long-range sensors have detected an emergency beacon.”
“From where?”