Challenge #01821-D360: And Stand Well Back
“If you think you have enough explosives, you evidently don’t understand the concept of explosives. -- TheDragonsFlame
"I just want a hole in the door," objected Grix. "I don't want half the ship to vaporise."
Human Steve sighed and folded her arms. "Honestly, you are no fun at all."
"I did make it clear that we were all to survive this unscathed and with maximum scavenge from this particular wreck, did I not?"
Human Steve groaned. "Yeah. You did. And I said I still had the right to blow the whole thing up if there was anything deadly in here."
"Doors," Grix insisted, "are not threatening."
"You are no fun," grumbled Human Steve as she began pulling charges off the vault door. "I still want to vaporise something with heavy explosives."
"Noted," said Grix. "Just make the door be open. With minimal damage to anything else. Please."
Human Steve took a few more charges off the door. "Okay," she grudgingly allowed. "I've under-calculated. Just for you. We'll probably need a line of det cord for the last inch. You enormous nancy."
Humans were great at making obstacles vanish. Sometimes, with a huge crater that people pointed to and said things like, "This is why you never start a fight with a Deathworlder." Unfortunately, some of them were absolutely pants at the little things like subtlety and finesse. And Human Steve was one of that number.
She finished up and advised that they both hide around the corner. Grix insisted that they also hunker behind the blast shielding they'd brought with. Which the Human did with another mutter of, "Nancy."
The explosion thundered through the frame of the ship. There was not enough air to carry the blast wave that effectively, but Grix would have worn the livesuit anyway.
The hole in the door was still glowing, as was the cookie-cutter circle of the rest of the door. "Huh," said Human Steve. "These guys had shitty security after all."
Shitty security compared to human paranoia that would make safe doors three SDU[1] thick and then rig the entire safe to blow up its contents -and the thief breaking in- if someone tried to circumvent the extant locks. And then bury that safe underneath a veritable labyrinth of increasingly complicated and deadly traps for unauthorised personnel.
"Security," said Grix, "like many things, is relative."
[1] Standard Distance Units, roughly equivalent to a meter.
[AN: I had a comment on this prompt that just HAD to be preserved for posterity:
I had a munitions training course while I was in the military. My partner and I had both made the same mistake estimating the amount of charges necessary to drop the tree we were supposed to knock over. The instructor looked at our charges, then told us to show him how we'd come up with that amount in that configuration. Since we'd both made the same assumptions, he couldn't say anything like "You idiot. Why didn't you listen to him?" But he did say "Before you light this up, let's move back another fifty feet." When I did set it off, the tree was gone. Just gone. In stead of falling over, it disappeared. I looked around for it and noticed my partner looking up in the air with a stunned expression. I looked up like him and saw the tree falling back down vaguely toward us. We'd overloaded our charge so much that we launched the tree like a missile. The instructor said someone made that same mistake nearly every class. ]
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / 3dfoto]
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