In Minotaur’s case, those features meant, among other things, that better than eighty percent of the routine hull maintenance on the carrier’s LACs could be performed by cybernetic henchmen without ever requiring a suited human presence. Of course, some people—like “Silver Spanner” Maxwell—could break anything, if they put their minds to it, and Maxwell had done just that over on Bay Forty-Six. Smith had never quite understood how someone who was as fundamentally good at his job as Maxwell was could be such a walking disaster area, but there it was. It was almost as if he represented some natural force of chaos or the living personification of Murphy’s Law. He always did it by The Book… and it always ended up a disaster anyway. Smith only hoped his friend’s transfer from Minotaur’s deck force to a new slot as LAC 01-001’s assistant flight engineer would break the cycle at last, although he had to wonder just what Captain Harmon had been thinking to tap him for her personal bird.

But whatever happened to “Silver Spanner,” Smith was delighted with the new remotes. They were almost as impressive as the support a shipyard might have boasted, and he was devoutly grateful to have them. But the designers had gone still further in simplifying his task by designing the LAC bays with outsized bow access tubes. Instead of the standard buffers and docking arms which held a small craft in its boat bay, the LACs’ mooring tractors drew them bow-first into a full length docking cradle. In the process, they aligned the little ships’ sharp noses with “personnel tubes” fifteen meters across that fitted down over their bows. Since that was where all of the LACs’ armament—defensive and offensive alike—were mounted, it let Smith work on things like the jammed laser cluster without suiting up. And additional service tubes to the launchers meant missile reloads could be transported directly from Minotaur’s main missile stowage, into the LACs’ rotary magazines.

All in all, Smith considered the design concept an enormous improvement over what he’d had to put up with in Leutzen. The LACs outmassed the assault shuttles he’d worked with there by a factor of around thirty-five, yet the six-ship section he had responsibility for here was actually easier to stay on top of than the six-shuttle section he’d been assigned aboard Leutzen. Of course, the thought of what might happen to the ship’s hull integrity if some ill-intentioned Peep managed to land a hit on one of these nice, large, efficient, and vulnerable LAC bays hardly bore thinking on, but that was an inescapable consequence of Minotaur’s designed role.

“Okay, Sandford. You’re on,” he said as he stepped from the work stand’s last rung to the deck of the access tube. “Get the replacement in and let me know when you’re ready to test it. Check?”

The bow of the LAC reared above them, and despite its minuscule size compared to a ship like Minotaur, it dwarfed his entire work party. Which put the rest of the ship into a sobering perspective for people who normally saw it only from the inside.