The comp near him was the communication and directional system. He was seated where the Illuminated One who operated the system would work, the swiveling seat turning to face the now dead control panel and screens.
To alleviate the tedium of the journey, and so as not to dwell on the firefight ahead, Dean began to take an interest in the comp. Losing himself in the old tech, he began to tinker with the panel. Beneath the desktop arrangement of the comp was a maintenance panel inset into the desktop itself, lying flush. Running his fingers along the smooth metal, Dean found a catch that enabled him to spring the panel open. Sliding off his seat so that he was kneeling on the floor and was therefore able to see the underneath of the desktop, he pulled down a series of fiber optic cables that connected the dead system with the electrical supply cable that had been shot out beneath the wag during the earlier conflagration.
Tammy, noticing what he was doing, came over and knelt beside him.
“What are you doing, sweets?” she asked him.
Ignoring the sudden rush of feeling as she referred to him thus—and that made him almost forget what he actually had been about to do—Dean concentrated on the cables and pulled at the loosest. A long stream of cable came out from beneath the desk until it spooled on the floor around them, ending with a burned out and severed end.
“See this?” he asked her. “This is the cable that powered up the comp and the radio. It got shot out when the wag was in Crossroads. But I reckon that, if I reroute the emergency into here, then mebbe we can get the comp working again.”
Tammy gave him an askew glare. “Okay. And why would you want to do that?”
Dean shrugged. ‘”Cause I’m bored, and it’ll take my mind off things. That’s all.”
Tammy smiled. “Good a reason as any, I guess.”
Then, while the Gate warrior watched, Dean took one of the other cables, which he had traced by feel to be running toward the front of the wag, and pulled at it.
“Watch you don’t blow the wag’s backup power,” Krysty said with some concern as she watched from the front of the wag. “We don’t want to get stranded while you have to patch up your own mistakes.”
Dean grinned ruefully. “I wouldn’t risk it if I thought it might do that. This cable’ll just allow me to tap into the power, it won’t make the engine cut out. I figure they’d have more than one outlet from the backup as a kind of fail safe.”
“Yeah, remind me of that if Ryan has to stop and reroute it all again because of you,” Krysty replied, wincing as Dean tugged and snapped the cable, a shorter length of it coming out from beneath the desk, so that there were now two spools of cable around him and Tammy.
“Tammy, you take this for a moment and keep it out of my way,” Dean requested, handing her the shorter length. Then, while the woman was holding the cable aloft, he took the useless, burned out cable and pulled it loose from the desk. Discarding the long loop of redundant fiber optic, he took the cable from Tammy’s hand and stripped the covering back, so that the loose strands of fiber optic sprayed out in a fine mist of substance around his hand. Selecting some of the ends, he delved beneath the desk and attempted to connect them to the junction from which he had ripped the useless cable.
“This’ll either work or give me something to think about,” he muttered as he tried to make the two pieces connect.
“Shit, it’s actually working!” Gloria said as the desktop comp spluttered twice, the lights flaring up briefly before dying away once more.
“Do we actually want it to work?” Mildred asked Ryan, who so far had said nothing, concentrating on the dark terrain ahead, barely lit by the wag’s headlights, one of which had been shot out, the other of which was only on the emergency power supply.
“Why not?” the one-eyed man queried.