the walls. Jocelyn thumbed a door open and waved us in. "We use this for troubleshooting and inspections. It carries everything we need, and we don't have to shut down a tunnel to use it."
Inside the container was mostly empty space. There were doors and windows in the floor and ceiling as well as the walls and all the surfaces were padded and well equipped with handholds. Strapdown chairs with mounts that locked into the handholds were set up beside the forward windows. A quarter of the bottom rear was given over to a series of cabinets that housed batteries, switches and various tool chests. Beneath the forward window there was a spartan control board with a compact data terminal as well as various buttons, gauges and comm gear. Beside it was a small keypad. I recognized it at once from the tranship operations manual. It was the container's shipping control panel, a duplicate of the one mounted on the outside.
I walked over and examined the panel. When Jocelyn joined me, I asked, "This contains the tranship codes?"
"Not just the codes, everything about the shipment. The freight manifest, maximum and minimum allowable temperatures, power requirements, loading parameters, whether the container is pressure sealed, center of mass, priority level, customs codes, COD status and charges. Everything." She tapped a few keys and cryptic data slid over the small screen inset on the panel. PRI, COD, KPA, BOT, and others along with numbers that didn't mean anything to me. I did recognize two codes. SRC and DST indicated the container's source and destination—both were rack addresses in the up-axis hub.
I tapped a few keys and managed to bring up the DST code. "Can you set this up to go anywhere?" I asked Merral.
"Anywhere on Tiamat. The lockouts don't allow us to be loaded for an offworld destination. This container isn't vacc sealed. I'll set it for the outbound receiving racks at the down-axis hub with a routing override so we get tunnel nineteen. That'll take us right through Tiamat."
It was better than I'd hoped for. "Can you try TMU19J234C?" I asked.
She looked at me with the half accusing e
Inside the container was mostly empty space. There were doors and windows in the floor and ceiling as well as the walls and all the surfaces were padded and well equipped with handholds. Strapdown chairs with mounts that locked into the handholds were set up beside the forward windows. A quarter of the bottom rear was given over to a series of cabinets that housed batteries, switches and various tool chests. Beneath the forward window there was a spartan control board with a compact data terminal as well as various buttons, gauges and comm gear. Beside it was a small keypad. I recognized it at once from the tranship operations manual. It was the container's shipping control panel, a duplicate of the one mounted on the outside.
I walked over and examined the panel. When Jocelyn joined me, I asked, "This contains the tranship codes?"
"Not just the codes, everything about the shipment. The freight manifest, maximum and minimum allowable temperatures, power requirements, loading parameters, whether the container is pressure sealed, center of mass, priority level, customs codes, COD status and charges. Everything." She tapped a few keys and cryptic data slid over the small screen inset on the panel. PRI, COD, KPA, BOT, and others along with numbers that didn't mean anything to me. I did recognize two codes. SRC and DST indicated the container's source and destination—both were rack addresses in the up-axis hub.
I tapped a few keys and managed to bring up the DST code. "Can you set this up to go anywhere?" I asked Merral.
"Anywhere on Tiamat. The lockouts don't allow us to be loaded for an offworld destination. This container isn't vacc sealed. I'll set it for the outbound receiving racks at the down-axis hub with a routing override so we get tunnel nineteen. That'll take us right through Tiamat."
It was better than I'd hoped for. "Can you try TMU19J234C?" I asked.
She looked at me with the half accusing e