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"In other words, we're stuck with this world and what's in it?" Jaxom asked.
"Precisely. And it is up to you to work this out for yourself, or to gain help from Lytol rather than from this facility."
And that was as much time as Aivas would spend on Honshu. With additional space suits available, he initiated new projects, which, it was made clear, were much closer to the major task at hand: the destruction of Thread.
Now that the life-support systems on the Bahrain and the Buenos Aires were fully operational, Mirrim and S'len were sent on their green dragons to make the necessary links between the bridge consoles on the two smaller ships and the Yokohama link with Aivas. The Bahrain and the Buenos Aires had, however, sustained more damage over the centuries than the Yokohama, losing ante
Terry, Wansor, three of the Glass-smith's brightest journeymen, and Perschar, the artist, were ferried up by green dragons for long sessions on the Yokohama's telescope, mapping the Red Star for any distinctive features. The vid-link down to Aivas was still imperfect; Aivas had been unable to discover the problem and so had to rely on human observations. They soon reported to Aivas that only one side of the planet was turned toward them. Perschar was to do large reproductions of whatever geographic features the surface of the eccentric planet presented. Wansor had to be peeled away from the console, so exhausted by his lengthy efforts that he actually fell asleep between on the return trip.
Teams made up of green and bronze riders-all transported by the smaller green dragons-explored the deserted levels of the Yokohama in case anything else had been left behind. But the ancients had stripped an amazing amount of material from the ship. The space suits-and the banks of coldsleep capsules-were all that had been deemed useless on the surface.
Then a team of Mastersmiths was sent to all three ships, starting with the Yokohama, so that all four could familiarize themselves with the cargo bays and engine rooms. The four-Fandarel, Belterac, Evan, and Jancis-were fascinated by the ship's construction, pausing to examine the way struts had been secured, how walls, ceilings and floors had been fitted into the skeleton of the ship. It was difficult for them to assimilate the fact that the Yokohama had been assembled in space at one of the old Earth's gigantic satellite shipyards, and that the heaviest portions had been pushed into position by single workers with computer-controlled machines.
Master Fandarel made full use of the Yokohama as a schoolroom, getting Aivas to explain the designs and the safety aspects of the compartmentalization. He was truly amazed at the rationale behind the odd design of the spacegoing ship and had many questions to put to Aivas about the apparent anomalies.
The main section of the Yokohama was a huge sphere of many levels, each of which could be closed off, as could sections of each level-to sustain life, Aivas told them, should the main hull be breached. Thus heat and oxygen could be maintained only where necessary, as was being done now, to conserve supplies. The bridge area, the environmental section and the lift accessing it, a small infirmary, and Airlock A were the most heavily shielded. According to Aivas, escape pods had once been attached to Airlock A, until the Yokohama had been recommissioned as a colony ship and those pod positions had been altered to access supply drones.
The huge matter-antimatter engines were housed on a long shaft, attached to the midsection of the main sphere but separated by the heaviest shielding on the Yokohama. Two great wheels on either end of the engine shaft had held the fuel and cargo pods that had been wrapped around the engines. Those had, of course, been emptied during the journey and launched to splash down in the seas off Monaco Bay. Retrieved, the basic metal had been smelted down and reworked. The ceramic fuel tanks had been put to different uses. Very little of the superstructure of the Yokohama and the other two colony ships remained. The narrower stern wheel on the end of the engine shaft still held its band of maneuvering jets which, powered by the solar panels and in conjunction with those around the main sphere, were what kept the Yokohama's orbit stable. One of the first checks Aivas had commissioned was to ascertain how much fuel remained in the Yokohama's main tank.
Fandarel, thinking about that fuel, wondered why the settlers had dared to leave the colony ships in an orbit that was ultimately destined to decay. Aivas replied curtly that that was not an immediate concern: So far, the orbits had not decayed, and the surface of Pern was not at risk-not, at least, from ship debris.
It was while Jancis was busy patching the main engineering board into Aivas while the others were examining the "readiness" run of the great propulsion units that one of the green riders activated the red alert from the bridge. Jancis's bronze fire-lizard, Trig, became so agitated that she had a hard time calming him down enough to make sense of his response. She could raise neither S'len nor L'zan on the com. And the red alert signal continued to blink in the engineering facility.
"Thread attacking the Yokohama?" Jancis got that much from Trigs chaotic thoughts. "It can't, Trig. It can't. We're safe here! No, don't you dare breathe fire in here!"
Jancis then bellowed directions through the speaker to the bridge until S'len hit the right sequence of buttons to make voice contact.
"It's Thread, Jancis, I'm sure of it," S'len replied. "Not space debris. There's this flood of egglike things of varying sizes streaming toward us. Looks just like the stuff Aivas described to us in his lecture. Space debris wouldn't come in a steady flow, would it? This stuff goes back as far as we can see from the window. Only none of them ever hits the window, and the pilot's board is all lit up and the engineer's station is beeping at us." His words came tumbling out in his haste to describe the situation. Then his voice became agitated. "Bigath and Beerth are demanding that we go outside. They say it's Thread. I never should have even thought what I thought it is!" Then in an explosive aside: "No, Bigath, we can't fly this sort of a Fall. It's not Thread yet, -if that's what it is! We haven't any firestone, and there's no air out there, and you wouldn't fly outside anyway you'd float, just like in here. Shards! Jancis, I can't make her understand!"
S'len didn't panic easily, and Bigath was not as erratic as some greens. In the background, Jancis could also hear Aivas's loud reassurances. If Bigath was not obeying her rider, she certainly could not be disciplined by the Aivas. Her bugling challenge at Thread took on a frantic edge.
"Tell them Ruth says they're not to go! They obey him!" she said, latching on to an authority the greens respected. She didn't know a green dragon who wasn't partial to the white dragon.
"When is Ruth coming, Bigath wants to know!" S'len's tone had altered from dismay to desperation. Aivas's calm voice continued to exhort the green dragons to listen to reason, but he was using reason that the dragons were not in a state to hear.
Jancis was scribbling a note to Jaxom to come at once when S'len, with a cry of relief, said, "Ruth's here and everything's under control!"
Jancis looked at the note and then at her fire-lizard, who cocked his head at her quizzically. She considered the matter for a moment longer and then made a decision. There was absolutely no way in which Jaxom and Ruth would have known to come to the bridge. He was in Ruatha today, and Aivas had no way of communicating with him there. She checked the exact time on her watch and wrote it down on the note. She added a final phrase in big letters: "TIME IT!" Then she sent Trig off to Ruatha and Jaxom.