Rebellion by Bill McCay Page B

They'd doubtless become more hostile when they learned the aim of the alterations. In a couple of cases Hathor managed to achieve her aims by negotiation. She even managed to foment a brief internecine war between two wouldbe successors by intermingling their troops in the same barracks. Other faction leaders were more astute or intransigent. They wouldn't move, forcing Hathor to come to blows with them. She was still husbanding her faction's resources and trying to avoid large-scale combat, so she engineered arguments and duels. The net result was several new openings in the godly hierarchy, an attendant swelling of forces in fealty to Hathor, deeper enmity from the surviving warlords, and a clearance of tenants from the old battlewagon. Briskly done, Ptah had to admit. His former wife had lost none of her skills during her long sleep. She was, in fact, well on the way to achieving supremacy on Tuat well within the threemonth timetable she'd established for herself. The job of battleship reconstruction was not going as smoothly. Ptah's efforts suffered from shortages of trained personnel.
    Even by stripping all other projects in the empire, he had little more than a skeleton crew available for refitting. He hated to admit it, but the lack of technicians was perhaps a sign that Ra's empire was running down. Certainly of late, the sun god had paid more attention to his warriors than to the constructive side of his governmental establishment. Perhaps it was past time for a successor. But Ptah might have wished for a leader a bit more flexible than Hathor. She'd have no problem making an example of him, in the expectation of encouraging the next Ptah to meet the deadlines she set. The fact that she'd be losing an invaluable technical resource, trained by Ra himself, would not matter at all to her. At least not in the short term. So Ptah was forced for the first time in a few thousand years to devote himself to short-term planning. His technicians worked twelve-hour shifts. He himself got his hands dirty, performing
    manual labor while simultaneously managing everyone else's work. When he bothered to check into it, he realized he was getting by on only a couple of hours' sleep each day-one of the advantages of a mechanically assisted body. Even so, the project fell inexorably behind schedule.
    Ptah stood in the ruins of an arcaded hall, welding a steel plate across what had been a delicately fashioned archway. Rough welds stood out like scar tissue against the inlaid metalwork of the arch. The craftsman in Ptah cried out against the quick and dirty job. But the plate, ugly as it was, did serve to seal off yet another passageway entrance. While the ship's structural integrity hadn't been compromised by all this peacetime construction, the multifarious openings to adits in the former docking station had turned the vessel's inner hull into a sieve. All such orifices had to be closed. Ptah put down his arc welder. Well, at least that joint should hold against hard vacuum.
    Although they wouldn't be able to test for leaks until the engines were up and calibrated. Then there'd be the navigation tests and, finally, physical disengagement from this rock. The odly engineer shrugged that prospect aside as being far distant in the future. He was consulting a holographic plan to see which leak next needed caulking when one of his foremen came down the companionway. "What are my people to do when they're scheduled for two jobs at the same time?" the man complained, pressed beyond tact by exhaustion and the exigency of work. "We can either install those new secondary weapons mounts, or test the fire control for the main batteries," he said bluntly, "We simply can't do both." "Install the new weapons," Ptah replied after a moment's thought.
    The foreman stared. "Half those fire-control circuits are original with the ship," he reminded Ptah. "We just patched them into new consoles.
    And there aren't any backups." This was unlike his usually