Re: The Show Must Go Off

[Herr D]

The Show Must Go Off–part twenty-three
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I hadn’t taken any chances on my transmission range–the assembly droid’s memory was wiped and the new instructions input before the airlock opened. We’d chosen one with a quick-release open so that the puff would push him out and save a little on the first burn. The assembly droid had docking clamps put together and ready, even had time to spare for swatting micrometeors away, and Thrash touched down on the first junk-ore freighter undetected. No one was looking for a ship too small to hold three people and reserve fuel and shielding–if I hadn’t tweaked the assembly droid for batting practice, this really would have been insane to try. We lost signal about then. ‘A’ was cool under pressure. He didn’t even act curious, just helped me look up chemistry questions. I hadn’t forgotten he was an artist. When we were done I asked him to make a few color-combination choices.
“Fireworks in SPACE?!” he said, “How could THAT work?” The real reason for the morgue stop was the stasis packs. The year before, somebody’s dead uncle was being shipped back to Earth when an unnoticed meteor cluster had impacted with the fuel mixer. It turned out that the byproduct of rocket fuel burning through the cadaver null-g stasis packs was a vacuum-suitable dead-human-colored firework. The one news channel replayed it about six times, including commentary on when his copper bracelet caught and turned the flame blue for just an bit. Well. Obviously there wouldn’t be COPPER in the junk ore freighters. Copper’s good money. I explained the news flash of ‘Blue Barney.’ Turns out ‘A’ was in comatransit at the time, hadn’t heard.
We were probably looking at oranges, yellows, maybe a bit of green or red. ‘A’ was pretty enthused. He came up with five or six plans based on differing amounts of calcium to the sodium, barium, and strontium that might turn up.
The assembler droid, after docking Thrash, had him reading electronic manifests out loud and looking for frozen methane and fuel convertibles while it built droids and hijacked more with my subhacker routines. One at a time, three re-configured freighters were joined, docked to, taken over, pilfered, repointed, and launched from. With ten droids it took seven and a half hours at a breakneck pace.
When I checked in with Upclose, I discovered she was already ready. When I told her I was surprised, she said: “I used some rooms’ transmitters like an array to send some of the processing to an empty server on sunside.” That turned out to be rather important.