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08-12-2011, 05:09 AM
Greenstalk started to say something, but Blueshell was back and talking fast: "I don't believe it. Anything like this should make pictures, a detailed report. Something is terribly wrong." Pham stared at him a second, then returned to his diagnostics. Five seconds passed. "You're right. Status is just looping through stale reports." He began grabbing views from cameras all over the OOB's interior. Barely half of them reported, but what they showed... The ship's water reservoir was a foggy, icy cavern. That was the banging sound -- tonnes of water, spaced. A dozen other support services had gone bizarre, and -- -- the armed checkpoint outside the workshop had slagged down. The beamers were firing continuously on low power. And for all the destruction, the diagnostics still showed green or amber or no report. Pham got a camera in the workshop itself. The place was on fire. Pham jumped up from his saddle and bounced off the ceiling. For an instant she thought he might go racing off the bridge. Then he tied himself down and grimly began trying to put out the fire. For the next few minutes, the bridge was almost quiet, just Pham quietly swearing as none of the obvious things worked. "Interlocking failures," he mumbled the phrase a couple of times. "The firesnuff automation is down.... I can't dump atmosphere from the shop. My beamers have melted everything shut." Ship fire. Ravna had seen pictures of such disasters,复件 (62) air max2 (http://snehastudios.com/photo##############/displayimage.php?pos=-116),by Dr. Dre Red Studio High-Definition Headphones From Monster? (http://www.topmonstershop.com/beats?-by-dr-dre?-red-studio-highdefinition-headphones-from-monster?-p-66.html), but they had always seemed an improbable thing. In the midst of universal vacuum, how could a fire survive? And in zero-gee, surely a fire would choke itself even if the crew couldn't dump atmosphere. The workshop camera had a hazy view on the real thing: True, the flames ate the oxygen around them. There were sheets of construction foam that were only lightly scorched, protected for the moment by dead air. But the fire spread out, moving steadily into still-fresh air. In places, heat-driven turbulence enriched the mix,复件 (54) air max1 (http://www.fearlesscomrades.com/pg/displayimage.php?pos=-297), and previously burned areas blazed up. "It's still got ventilation, Sir Pham." "I know. I can't shut it. The vents must be melted open." "It's as likely software." Blueshell was silent for a second. "Try this --" the directions were meaningless to Ravna, some low-level workaround. But Pham nodded, and his fingers danced across the console. In the workshop, the surface-hugging flames crept farther across the construction foam. Now they licked at the innards of the armor Pham had spent so much time on. This latest revision was only half finished. Ravna remembered he was working on reactive armor now .... There would be oxidizers there. "Pham, is the armor sealed --" The fire was sixty meters aft and behind a dozen bulkheads. The explosion came as a distant thump,复件 (27) air max (http://lasmurgas.org/fotos/displayimage.php?pos=-24), almost innocent. But in the camera view, the armor dismembered itself, and the fire blazed triumphant. Seconds later, Pham got Blueshell's suggestion working,复件 (52) air max2 (http://www.pinnacledetail.net/##############/displayimage.php?pos=-40), and the workshop's vents closed. The fire in the wrecked armor continued for another half hour, but did not spread beyond the shop. It took two days to clean up,复件 (36) air max2 (http://www.serresusa.com/cpg132/displayimage.php?pos=-21), to estimate the damage, and have some confidence that no new disaster was on the way. Most of the workshop was destroyed. They would have no armor on Tines world. Pham salvaged one of the beamers that had been guarding the entrance to the shop. Disaster was scattered all across the ship, the classic random ruin of interlocking failures: They had lost fifty percent of their water. The ship's landing boat had lost its higher automation. OOB's rocket drive was massively degraded. That was unimportant here in interstellar space, but their final velocity matching would be done at only 0.4 gees.