The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Fifty Seven

DELTA TEAM -37:48

“They’re all humped,” Kaylee said, sadly, as she looked at the sealed reactor core of the Marauder on the rolling lift. At least it was supposed to be sealed. Her pressure check showed a dozen leaks, most of them at points where the seals came into contact with other parts. Ordinarily that wasn’t a problem small ships had – but ordinarily the seals hadn’t been trying to contain the reactive materials for over a century, either. There was no real leakage now, but put the reactor into service and as soon as the coolant and fuel gasses put real pressure on them the seals would fountain radioactive material like a spacesuit with a screen door. “Every last seal. It’ll take me hours to replace them all.” She was feeling very discouraged – she had spent the last three hours just tearing it out of the Marauder. That had involved a lot of consulting the manual, finding the right tools, and improvising when she couldn’t.

“We don’t have hours, darlin’,” Wash said gently. “Why not check and see if there’s a new one in the spare parts shop?”

Kaylee smacked her grease-stained face with her grease stained hand and rolled her eyes. “Well ain’t I an idjit! Damn if you ain’t right! So used to workin’ without real spares, never thought about that. They’d have a few of these things sittin’ around, they gotta. Probably packed in pressured Xenon, to keep the stress off the seals during storage.” She looked up at the pilot gratefully. “You so smart, Wash.”

“Just lazy,” the pilot admitted with a smirk. “I didn’t like the thought of all that work, even if we could find proper equipment to re-seal a reactor.”

“Hell, for that matter, why don’t we just look for spares for all the other go se that’s busted on this crate?” Kaylee asked. “I mean, we got her mostly torn down, already. Instead o’ bustin’ our asses tryin’ to cobble somethin’ half-assed back together, we can just slap in all new avionics modules, pressure tanks, fuel cell intakes