They had been through danger and hardship together and emerged, not only still alive, but triumphant. Sure, they still had a long way to go in terms of competence and training and teamwork, but they believed in their skipper and themselves. That made all the difference. They had come so far. But they still had so far to go. Max knew that, somehow, he would get them there. He felt deep in his heart that his destiny and the destiny of these men were bound together for some great purpose, two metals hammer-forged into a single weapon stronger and more resilient than either alone. If only they could live through the next several days.
Maybe this would help. It had worked before. Max knew the story behind the words that he was so shamelessly borrowing (plagiarizing) for his ship’s creed. A spacecraft fire, caused by who knows how many separate errors and miscalculations, aided and abetted by a fatally flawed institutional culture, caused the deaths of three astronauts during a launch pad test on January 27, 1967. The men who planned and controlled the flights were devastated—even before investigators determined what caused the Fire (the traumatic event was always a proper noun), they felt that they had killed these astronauts, men whom many of them knew personally. Some worried that they could not continue to do their jobs and, when it came time to launch again, whether they would have the courage and confidence to lock three more men into a tiny, pressurized metal container, mount it on top of a hundred-meter tall column of explosive propellants and volatile cryogenic oxidizer, set fire to it, and send them into the depths of outer space.
One of their Flight Directors, a flat-topped, tough as nails, brilliant, fanatically disciplined, born leader by the name of Gene Kranz, managed to hit the right note with a document he called “Foundations of Mission Control,” which was the basis for Max’s Cumberland Creed. It became an honor code for those men and was part of what transformed the dispirited group of January 1967 into the crack team of disciplined experts that landed human beings on the moon two and a half years later. Kranz was something of a childhood hero to Max. It was very easy to imagine “General Savage,” as he was known, in the Big Chair of a Union warship, inflicting righteous thermonuclear wrath upon the enemies of mankind. As Max recalled, Kranz had several children. So, maybe he had a descendent or descendants somewhere out here doing just that. Max liked that thought.
Max reread the Creed. It had worked for General Savage. Maybe it would work for him.
He posted the order.
***
It was beginning to look like Commander Duflot had been right and the tactic of crossing through systems with sensor nets and defense forces in place was paying off. At each jump in, the Pennant vessel would communicate with jump control and the tiny “convoy” would wait for whatever forces were available—a few fighters, an SPC or two, one or two superannuated reserve-force Destroyers—to rendezvous. They would then move out, crossing the system in the rigorously geometric course Duflot prescribed. In this manner, they crossed the Kalkaz System and the Murban system, where they also rendezvoused with a Union Naval Comm relay buoy. Doing so allowed the pennant vessel to establish a laserlink with the buoy and thereby tie directly into the Naval Communications Network without breaking EMCON. The Pennant received mail for the entire group, as well as sent and received several messages, including one message that Duflot did not command be sent and that, had he known about it, he would have moved heaven and earth to stop.
***
Cho and Doozie were deep in the interstices of the ship doing manly combat with the Combustion Detection Sensor Integration and Fire Propagation Prediction Processor, a device separate from the main computer which received inputs from all the fire detection sensors throughout the ship, processed them into a complete picture of what areas were on fire and which were not, and even made educated guesses as to where the fire would go next given what was being done to fight it. In accordance with tradition, the device was painted white with black spots and was nicknamed “Sparky.”
Sparky had been disrupting the ship’s routine lately by sending false fire signals to the Master Alarm and Emergency Annunciator System (MAEAS). The latter system, suppressed most of the signals as false alarms but had been fooled a few times, sending fire crews to put out nonexistent blazes. False alarms were bad news, not only because they wasted the time and effort of the fire fighting teams who dropped their other duties to respond to them, but also because, after a few false alarms, men respond less vigorously to the real ones.
Cho and Doozie’s orders were simple: “I want you to go fix it.” Lieutenant Brown having decided that the two worked well together, he had paired them more or less permanently as a “Repair Element.” Brown’s new system, borrowing from fighter squadron nomenclature, designated Cho as the “lead” and Doozie as his “wing man.” After more than two hours of hard work, this particular repair element had Sparky almost completely disassembled with small parts carefully stored in a purpose-designed collapsible receptacle array and the larger ones neatly lined up behind the men in the access crawlway. Every other diagnostic procedure having either turned up nothing or anomalous results that told them nothing, they had been forced to fall back on the dreaded Last Resort of General Maintenance: disassemble the unit and test each component. In accordance with the immutable Law of that great naval leader, Admiral Murphy, they reached the faulty component after testing all but five of the nearly four hundred parts. The processor that calibrated the sensitivity of the unit had failed and, because of its “fail safe” design, the unit defaulted to the highest possible sensitivity. As a result, Sparky was barking whenever a warm-blooded crewman passed too close to one of the thermal detectors.
Bad dog.
Having diagnosed the problem and after a twenty minute wait for Midshipman Hewlett to get the replacement unit pulled from spares and to deliver it to them in one of the most inaccessible parts of the ship, the two men now had to reassemble the unit. It had taken the two hours to get to this point. It would take them at least as long to get everything put back together and checked.
“Another Fine Navy Day!” Cho’s voice had the exaggerated cheerfulness that always went with that expression. And, as this particular access crawlway (one of the network of which spacers insisted on calling “Jeffries Tubes” even though the things had a rectangular cross section and no one had any idea who Jeffrey or Jeffries was), was both quiet and one of the longest in the ship, its peculiar acoustics gave Cho’s voice a remarkable resonance, making him sound more like the Voice of God than a sardonic spacer.
“Join the Navy and See the Galaxy.” Doozie supplied the standard reply in his best mock tridvid announcer tones, made more impressive by the same acoustics. The reassembly was difficult, painstaking work, particularly as the function of each rebuilt subunit had to be verified by a series of tests, some requiring several minutes to run. After thirty-eight minutes of reassembly work, they were testing the subunit that integrated and processed the signals from the engineering spaces. The OmniTesTer ran the subunit through its paces and spat out its diagnosis, the letters in green type against the black background of the unit’s small screen: SUBUNIT CDSIFPPP-039 NOMINAL FUNCTION: 0.84.
They looked at each other. By the book, anything over .80 or 80% was good to go—a “clean, green machine.” The letters across the tester’s screen were green and the device would communicate wirelessly with the ship’s computer that the unit had passed inspection. Yesterday, they would have unplugged the subunit’s data cable from the OmniTesTer, plugged it into the proper port on Sparky’s data bus, and moved on without a second thought. Yesterday, 84% was good enough.
That was yesterday.
Today was different. Each man could see the difference in each other’s eyes. Their thinking about the unit was different from the way they thought about it yesterday. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a system. It was the fire detection system. Things don’t get much more critical than that. And this part of the system handled data from Engineering. There weren’t many places on the ship where fire dete
ction was more important. This dinner plate sized bunch of wires, circuit boards, and little multi-colored boxes was critical to the safety of every man and boy on the ship. “Good enough” wasn’t good enough. Not any more.
Cho, being the “lead,” said it for both of them. “The buck stops with us, Dooze.”
“All right. Hey, what’s a buck, anyway? Don’t tell me. I’ll look it up later. So, we’re not happy with eighty-four. What should it be?” Doozie had never worked on Sparky before, so he didn’t know what a reasonable goal was.
“Nothing’s perfect, babe, not even me. You can’t realistically hope that anything with that number of parts is going to be functioning at better than ninety-eight percent even when the paint’s still damp from the shipyard. With more than a year and half in service, you’ll never see anything higher than ninety-six. Given that there’s got to be some aging of some of the components, I’d be really happy with ninety-three or ninety-four.”
“OK, but how do we get there?”
Neither man noticed that they had tacitly agreed to get the unit to the highest level of function that could be achieved given its time in service.
“About twenty of those components have firmware that lets us hook them up to the OmniTesTer and tweak their characteristics. So, what if we do that? Get every adjustable parameter centered right in the middle of the optimum range. Then we hit every connector with solvent to make sure it’s shiny-clean and then seal every contact with contact sealant so that we get good clean data transfer or electrical conduction at every interface.”
“That’s adding an hour, maybe two.”
“I’m betting it’s just over two. Big deal. You got a hot date, babe?”
“I suppose not. I’m guessing my only date tonight is gonna be with Sparky here.”
Cho plugged a random lead from the unit into his OmniTesTer and hit a few buttons in theatrical fashion. Acting as though he was reading from the tester’s screen, he said “Sparky says she can do a helluva lot better than you, Doozie.”
“Well, Cho, you tell Sparky that I’ve had better looking dates, myself.”
They started disassembling the unit down to the last part.
“I don’t know.” Cho picked up the conversation again. “I saw that last 2-10-2 you were doing extreme proximity maneuvers with at Carlill’s on Prosser IV. Woof. I’d rather wake up next to Sparky any day.”
“Cho, you and I both know that Edna was the best looking girl in that bar that whole night.”
“Edna? Her name was Edna?” Dooze shrugged. Cho shook his head in silent wonder and then scrunched his face as though he was working hard to remember that night. “Now that I think about it, Dooze, I have to agree with you. Of every female in that particular dive on that particular night, she was the best of the lot. Of course, there were about eighty spacers in that bar and only, what, seven women?”
“That’s about right. And of the seven, she was the best looking.” Doozie’s voice was starting to take on a defensive tone.
“Yea, and a turtle looks fast when you surround it with snails. Doesn’t mean the turtle is fast, though, Dooze. Not fast at all.”
“I did better than you did that night, Cho,” Doozie said.
“Some of us have standards, you know.”
“And some of us have a way with the ladies while others eat our plasma trails.”
The banter went on for hours, well into the next watch, as the men carefully worked. One or two of the subunits tested below .96 upon completion and got broken down and reassembled, this time with a few of the parts that had performed more marginally in testing replaced with new units from spares, cheerfully delivered by Midshipman Hewlett who had informally attached himself (with Chief Tanaka’s permission) to the Repair Element as the “Wing Man’s Wing Man.” Hewlett’s support kept the two men working, sustained by sandwiches, sweet rolls, quarts of coffee, and gallons of bug juice which he brought them at need. He also lent a hand with some of the reassembly, having small, nimble hands and a knack for reading schematics. Six hours after starting work, two men and one boy hand tightened the last five screws that held the unit’s external cover in place. They had essentially disassembled and reassembled the unit, part by part, individually testing and recalibrating each component, and making each connection and interface more carefully and more completely than had the workers at the 40 Eridani A shipyard where the vessel had been built. It was their Sparky now.
Cho plugged the unit’s main data cable into the OmniTesTer and keyed it for UNIT TEST. The tester interrogated Sparky’s main processor, verified the unit’s identity, retrieved the complete Unit Test Protocol from the ship’s computer over the vessel’s wireless network, and made Sparky sit, roll over, beg, speak, and fetch. After forty-three seconds, which felt like forty-three years to Cho, Doozie, and Hewlett, the tester’s screen displayed the result. UNIT CDSIFPPP MAIN NOMINAL FUNCTION: 0.98.
Good dog. Very good dog.
Cho hit the key on the unit which brought it back into service and hit the key that caused the OmniTesTer to communicate its result to the ship’s computer. But, somehow, that didn’t feel like enough. Not only was this unit their Sparky, but their Sparky was kicking the other dogs’ butts. Something more was needed. Something that someone else could see, even if they would have to crawl twenty meters down a Jeffries Tube to see it. Something that meant that the unit met some kind of special standard of excellence—the Cumberland standard. “Hewlett, you’re supposed to be some kind of magnum brainoid. When people went through the Cumberland Gap, how did they go?” Not everyone on the ship was a historian, but the newfound pride in their ship had caused most crew members to inform themselves of what “Cumberland” meant and some of the history associated with that significant pass through the Appalachian mountains.
Hewlett blushed at the compliment, an event which seemed mostly to involve his ears. “I don’t know about being a brainoid, sir, but from the history I’ve studied, mostly they walked. Some rode horses or mules.”
“Lots of people who went through were settling out in the far wilderness, so they had to bring with them everything they needed to build a house and live in it and start raising food. You can’t carry provisions and furniture and farm implements and wood stoves on the back of a mule, Hewlett,” said Doozie. “My family moved across town when I was seven and we loaded what looked like a mountain of stuff into an enormous ground truck. These people must have had some kind of vehicle.” He had been in space long enough to give “vehicle” the official service pronunciation: “vee HIK kul.”
“Vehicle?” Hewlett still pronounced the word like a civilian: “VEE ik kul.” He would learn. “Oh, yes, sir. They carried their goods and provisions in covered wagons. Some of them were just farm wagons with frames stretched over them to keep the weather off. But some were great wagons called Conestogas. Pretty impressive for the day. Large wheels to distribute the weight on soft terrain and curved bottoms to keep the contents from shifting. They could carry as much as seven metric tons of stuff over primitive roads and unimproved ground.”
Cho pulled out his padcomp, accessed the ship’s database, and found some images of the wagons Hewlett was talking about. He located on image shot from the wagon’s port beam, extracted an outline drawing, manually added and subtracted a few lines to make the visual impression right, and held up his padcomp to show the result to Doozie and Hewlett. “This look right?”
“Yes, sir. That looks like one.” Hewlett was enthusiastic. Of course, he was almost always enthusiastic.
“Looks like a covered wagon to me, Cho,” Doozie added.
“Great.” He reached into the tool box he shared with Doozie and pulled out the label printer issued to each Repair Element so that they could print labels and tags to affix to equipment as necessary. On the padcomp, Cho dropped the image into a label template, typed in some text, and sent it to the label printer where he printed the label, and affixed it to Sparky’s access cover.
“Take a loo
k, Dooze. Tell me what you think.”
The label wasn’t much. In fact, it wasn’t much bigger than twice the size of a man’s thumb. And it was simple. There was just an outline drawing of a Conestoga wagon taking up the left third and on the right two thirds the words: “USS Cumberland Mark of Excellence. Certified by Cho, Balduzzi, and Hewlett, 26 March 2315.”
“Well?” Cho prompted.
“Cho, my friend,” Doozie, said, “you may be a turkey, but it’s an honor to be your wing man.”
Chapter 12
04:18Z Hours, 30 March 2315
After Murban, it was on to the Madoom System, thence to Schewe 23, and thereafter to Edmonton B. That system had the weakest sensor coverage of any system along the route, there being no planet with a solid surface on which to lay the grids of 146 kilometer long superconducting cables which are the most efficient means of transmitting the powerful phase and polarization modulated pulses of tachyo-gravitons that were the best way to scan an entire solar system for hostile ships. Sensor coverage in the Edmonton B system was provided by two SWACS equipped Frigates which was good, in theory, but no matter where one positioned the ships, there would be sensor shadows from the one molten, one ocean covered, and three gaseous planets the system boasted, as well as interference fringes created by the interaction of the sensor transmissions from the two ships. Taken together, these phenomena created huge blind areas in which ships could hide and lots of paths a stealthy ship could take through the system without being detected.
“Wouldn’t we have seen them jumping into these systems after us? There is that burst of Cherenkov-Heaviside radiation which you tell me is highly distinctive.” Despite the early hour, the doctor was in CIC. He liked to be there when something interesting was happening. The ship was at Condition Orange, which was one readiness state higher than the Blue where Max kept the ship most of the time. Above that, there was Amber and, finally, Red, or General Quarters. There were no identified threats in the system, but this was where Max expected to be hit.
For Honor We Stand Page 34
