“Wait right there.” Brown stepped away and quickly returned with his OmniTesTer. The one he lovingly calibrated weekly to make sure that no one was playing any games. The one that, when it wasn’t in his hands, was behind two separate and distinct sets of keypad and biometric access control systems. It was the one that had been issued to him when he was first assigned to Engineering as a Greenie. There was a dent in one corner where he had used it to give a Krag enough of a depressed skull fracture to lay him out on the deck so that Brown could get to a weapons locker to get more ammunition for his sidearm and send the Krag to the Great Rat Nest in the Sky. “All right, my lad, take me to the nearest stickered unit.
Wang led the Engineer down the corridor and into a tiny compartment that contained a colored pipe, nearly a meter in diameter that went from deck to ceiling. For the first meter starting at the deck, the pipe was actually closer to two meters in diameter, and then tapered to the narrower gauge. On one side of the wide part, there was a rectangular protrusion with an access panel. “Right here, sir.” Brown looked where Wang was pointing. On the access panel which, like the pipe, happened to be painted bright blue, there was a sticker like the one he had just seen: the wagon with the certification of the men who worked on the unit that it met the standard for the “USS Cumberland Mark of Excellence.”
Brown opened the access panel and selected the right set of test leads on the OmniTesTer to plug into the correct set of holes in the unit’s control interface module. Might as well get some training done while I’m at it. “Wang, where are we?”
“You mean the name of the compartment, sir?”
“No, Wang, I mean our bloody stellar coordinates.” Then, he remembered that Doctor Sahin had told him that Wang, a very bright and capable man, had just a trace of some syndrome that Brown couldn’t remember the name of . . . sounds like “hamburger.” Whatever the name, while Wang could hear the slightest misalignment or imbalance in any high RPM ship’s component from ten meters away, he was oblivious to all but the most overt sarcasm and, to top it off, would probably be able to produce something close to the correct numbers: three sets of seven digits each, separated by a period. So, Brown quickly added, “Of course I mean the name of the compartment.”
“This is the Number Three Main Fusion Reactor Coolant Return Loop Intermediate Pump Room, sir.”
“Quite a mouthful, and accurate, to boot. Good man. And what is its function?”
“Sir, the liquid helium coolant for the main fusion reactor after it has cooled the reactor and is no longer liquid is cycled back to be chilled and reliquified so it can cool the pump over and over. The helium is cycled in three completely separate loops that diverge immediately after they come out of the reactor, go through three separate chiller/heat exchangers, and converge only just before returning to the repress system. In each loop, there’s one set of pumps to pull the helium out of the reactor heat exchangers, another set at the end of the return loop to pressurize it into the tanks, and halfway through is a set of pumps to keep it moving along the way in the middle. This is one of the middle ones.”
“Right again.” Brown had found the right set of leads and had plugged them into the right set of holes. Once that correctness of the attachment and the clarity of the data connection had been verified by a green light coming on right over the TEST button, Brown hit the TEST button and waited for the OmniTesTer to complete its conversation with the pump. This would take a few minutes. “All right, Wang. Why are there three separate coolant loops? Doesn’t that add a lot of weight and take up a lot of space?”
“That’s easy, sir. Multiple fault redundancy. The Navy does lots of things in threes because when you are putting men in space and then sending them into combat, a warship needs to be able to tolerate complete failure of at least two major parts of just about any system and still be able to bring the ship home—it’s a part of the human space design lineage going at least back to Jurassic space. For example, the Apollo Command Module had three fuel cells. Two were sufficient to complete the mission and one was enough to get the ship home.”
“Wang, what does a three-century old aluminum can that one of our life pods could outrun have to do with an FTL capable stealth warship?”
“Apollo stands near the beginning of our design lineage, sir. You can trace this ship through its predecessors all the way back to the ship that Max Faget and Caldwell Johnson sketched out all those years ago in Langley, Virginia. Hey, I just noticed. Faget and the Captain have the same first name. What a neat coincidence!”
“It’s not a coincidence. The skipper’s named after Faget—his dad was an aerospace engineer. His middle name, ‘Tindall,’ is from another brilliant Apollo guy. Get back to redundancy.”
“Oh, yes, sir, well, the multiple redundancy is part of this design lineage. You could say it’s in the Cumberland’s DNA. The cooling loops are redundant in just the same way the fuel cells were on Apollo. We also have three IMUs, three sets of data linkages between the Maneuvering stations and the fly by wire computers, of which there are three, three separate ways of getting oxygen into each compartment, three separate ways of getting carbon dioxide out of each compartment, it goes on and on. Even the people are redundant, sir, as there are always three people on board who can perform any job.”
“Right-o. Now, back to the loops, Wang.”
“Yes, sir. Each line/pump/heat exchanger sequence has the capacity at nominal pressures and revolutions to provide 60% of the cooling the Fusion Reactor needs at redline. So, we can lose one whole loop and not lose any of our fighting capabilities. We can lose two, and by running the remaining loop at higher than nominal, we can still run the reactor at about 90% of Standard. And, since each loop runs in a separate part of the ship, it would be awfully hard to knock out more than one with a single shot.”
“Excellent, Mister Wang.” He had almost said “outstanding.” The skipper’s catch word was, for want of a better word, catching. “And, you can see that this line and the pump are painted blue. What color are the others?”
“The number one is red and the number two is green.”
“Significance?”
“In all triply redundant systems, the number one is coded red, the number two green, and the number three blue, the order those colors appear in the spectrum from longest wavelength to shortest. It’s just one more thing to help keep people like me from getting confused about what we’re working on, where it goes, and what it does.”
“Top drawer, Wang, positively top drawer.” He had come even closer to saying “outstanding” this time. If he let it slip around the skipper, he would never forgive himself. That was one “up” he did not plan on giving to his young skipper in their ongoing earnest but friendly one-upmanship contest.
The OmniTesTer beeped. The display presented the results: UNIT MAIN FUS REACT COOL RET LP INTERMED PMP-003 NOMINAL FUNCTION: 0.95. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “Could be a fluke.” Brown pulled the test leads, closed the access cover, and asked Wang to take him to the next unit with the covered wagon label on it. The next unit, the number 5 point defense railgun targeting computer, tested at 0.95 as well. “Still could be a coincidence,” Brown grumbled with decidedly less conviction. When the sensor data integration module for the hull breach detection system tested at 0.96, Brown’s “too early to tell anything, really,” was highly tentative. But, then, Brown tested the number one inertial measuring unit. This system had no moving parts to wear out and operated at very low voltages to stress its components. Accordingly, if serviced and tweaked with loving perfectionism, a year and a half old IMU could, on a good day, test at 0.97. This unit came up on the OmniTesTer at 0.98. “That can’t be right.” Brown unplugged all the leads, checked to make sure he had them right, plugged them back in, and reran the test. This time it came back 0.99. Just to be sure, he ran the test a third time. Again, 0.99.
Spacer Wang was not the best observer of such things, but he could have sworn that, when he observed Lieutenant “Wer
ner” Vaughn Brown’s face carefully—very carefully, indeed—he could see an almost imperceptible hint of a smile.
Chapter 14
04:04Z Hours, 03 April 2315
During his years of naval service, Max had seen orders that struck him as odd. He had seen orders that had struck him as crazy. He had, in fact, seen orders that were insane, and not just a little bit insane, either, but totally screaming wack job “someone should be taken out of the Fleet Operations Center then put in a rubber room and shot up with half a gallon of happy juice” type insane. But, in virtually every case, he understood what was going on behind the orders—what the person who wrote them was thinking and what they were trying to accomplish. In this case, however, he didn’t have a clue.
But, he followed them anyway. In this case, his orders, sent FLASH Z priority, directed him to take his ship, at the highest speed consistent with the importance of the cargo, to a set of coordinates located in deep space 3.72 light years from the nearest star system, to rendezvous with some Union naval vessel (TBD—to be determined) which he was to identify by sending the challenge code “Glorious Sixth of June” and receiving the response “Trafalgar” in addition to the standard IFF recognition protocols. Someone, somewhere, was really into Admiral Nelson.
What perplexed Max was that the capture of the Main Data Core from a Krag warship was a contingency for which every Union warship and, indeed, people with ranks running up to Task Force commander, had titanium-clad standing orders from none other than the most high and exalted Chief of Naval Operations in Norfolk. The vessel obtaining the core was to transmit the code word “ENIGMA” and then race at top speed to rendezvous with the nearest Comprehensive Technical Intelligence Unit which, in Max’s case, was on board the Halsey. This business of rendezvousing in deep space with an undisclosed vessel was a deviation from the standard protocol. When Max himself broke the rules in order to win a battle it was one thing, but when flag officers started violating rules pertaining to super high priority intelligence objectives, Max started to get an unsettled feeling in his stomach and an annoying tingling sensation between his shoulder blades. They told him something odd was afoot. Very, very odd. Or, at least, something very, very different.
Max didn’t like different.
The Cumberland was at the designated coordinates, literally in the middle of nowhere, with her passive sensors tuned to the highest pitch of alertness.
And detecting nothing.
Three hours had passed, the watch had changed, and still Cumberland’s exquisitely sensitive sensors were detecting nothing but the distant stars and the vanishingly tenuous gases of interstellar space. The senior officers had long ago left CIC to the attentions of the regular watch standers and the Officer of the Deck. It was Ensign Menachem Levy’s second turn in the Big Chair, and his first with the ship at Condition Amber, a heightened state of alertness in which missiles rode in launch tubes with fully energized launch coils, their drives enabled and their warheads armed, the pulse cannons stood on Ready, and half of the crew was either at stations or awake and dressed, ready to dash to stations at a moment’s notice. When the ship was at Amber, there were reports to CIC every half hour confirming the readiness of every battle station, which reports it was Levy’s responsibility to log, there being no XO in CIC at the moment. Accordingly, he regarded himself as pleasantly busy for the first two hours and nineteen minutes he sat in the genuinely comfortable seat provided to the Destroyer’s CO, drank coffee fetched for him by Ensign George, and was pondering the notion of considering OOD to be a pleasant duty.
The twentieth minute of the hour changed his mind. He noticed Hobbs, who was once again at Sensors, turn quickly to look to the ATTN SSR display, punch up a few different displays, and exchange a few terse words with his Back Room. The process took all of three seconds before he announced, “Contact! Unidentified contact approaching under compression drive, gravity wave detection only at this time, approximate bearing two-five-two mark one-one-eight. No bearing change, no target motion analysis possible. Designating contact as Uniform one.” Levy thought to himself irrelevantly that he didn’t know when they had started the target numbering over again. In his time in CIC he had noticed that the numbers would go up for a few days sometimes and, on other occasions, the Sensor people would start at Zero after only a few hours. One of these days he needed to remember to ask. “Strength of reading increasing, no change in bearing detected. Contact is likely at constant bearing decreasing range.”
No command decision here. The book was clear on that one. “Mister Laputa, sound General Quarters.” The klaxons were still braying klaxonically when, less than a minute later, the skipper cycled through the hatch along with the XO and Kasparov. After the con had been transferred, Max decided, instead of uttering the seemingly obligatory “status” or “report” inquiry, to throw Levy a curve ball. The place to train combat officers was in combat, or at least under the reasonable threat of possible combat, and they don’t learn anything by always being confronted with the expected. “Well, Mister Levy,” the skipper said breezily, “what formal justification for sounding General Quarters do you intend to enter in the log?”
It took Levy no more than a second and a half, two at the outside, to realize he was getting a curve instead of the fast ball he had been expecting. He swung. “Sir, Sensors reported a gravity wave detection of a likely compression drive source evaluated to be at a constant bearing and decreasing range. An unidentified intercepting contact is a mandatory GC condition for any unescorted Destroyer.”
Line drive deep into right field, a stand up triple. “Outstanding, Mister Levy. Exactly correct. You may take your station.” Max pretended not to notice the young man’s sigh of relief when he stepped off the command island in the direction of the Intel station.
“All stations report secure at General Quarters,” reported Petty Officer Laputa at Alerts.
“Very well. Maneuvering, turn to face the contact, both axes. Attitude change only. Do not translate the ship.” Max was ordering that the Cumberland re-orient herself so that her most powerful weapons and her most acute sensors were pointing at the target, without changing the ship’s location. Max was turning the ship in the direction best calculated to learn about the target or to fight it.
“Target has gone subluminal,” said Kasparov. “I have mass detection of a subluminal target, congruent with the prior compression detection, bearing is two-five-five mark one-one-seven. Range forty-eight thousand kills. Speed, very slow sir, five thousand meters per second. Mass is . . . it’s big, sir, eighty-seven thousand nine hundred tons. We’ve got an optical scanner on it and my people say it looks . . . looks like one of our fleet tankers, one of the big ones, Sevastopol Class maybe. That would be consistent with the mass reading.”
Max turned to Chin. “IFF?”
“None yet, sir. Our box has sent the interrogation pulse. Nothing back, yet.”
“Re-interrogate.”
“But, sir, if we receive no response, the box will automatically . . . .”
“I’m aware of that, Mister Chin, but I don’t want to wait another sixty five seconds.”
“Aye, sir. Manual instruction for re-interrogation sent.”
“Those tankers are fifty or sixty years old. Their old IFF boxes can be a bit balky. I think some of them work on transistors.” Max wondered how many people on board actually knew what a transistor was.
“IFF received, identity checks out. Union Naval Deuterium Tanker, USS Singapore, Registry TMG zero-zero-eight-eight.”
“Target posident as friendly and redesignated as Charlie one,” said Kasparov who had relieved Hobbs at Sensors.
“Something tells me we’re not here to Rendezvous with that.”
“Pretty safe bet, XO,” said Max. “But you never know. We’ll follow the protocol. Mister Chin, signal the tanker by lights. Send “Glorious Sixth of June.”
“Aye, sir. ‘Glorious Sixth of June.’” He ordered the computer to slew the forward signal l
amp to point at the tanker, checked its aim manually, input the message, and instructed the computer to send the string of short and long flashes using Morse code, the set of dots and dashes derived from the system invented by Samuel Finley Breese Morse and the mostly forgotten Alfred Vail around 1844. By the time he had sent the message, his Back Room had already slewed an optical pickup around to focus on the Tanker’s signal lights and routed its feed to Chin’s SSR ATTN display. A few seconds later, one of the Tanker’s lights began to flash. Chin took down the message the old fashioned way with pen and paper, in case it was something longer than a sentence or two that he could easily remember. It wasn’t.
“Skipper, the Tanker sends, ‘NEGATIVE.’”
“That would mean they are not who we are here to meet.” Max said. “I expect they’ll be along shortly.”
“Skipper?” Chin was clearly uncomfortable. “Sir, what about the tanker, Shouldn’t we be hailing her, establishing a laserlink, signaling with lights, or something?”
“Negative, Chin.” Max said. “We have orders from Admiral Hornmeyer to come here and execute a specific recognition protocol. We are neither ordered nor authorized to engage in any other communications, so we are not going to engage in any other communications with any other vessel. With what we have on board, we don’t need to be passing the time of day with every deuterium tanker we run into. We’re going to sit here and wait, if not patiently, than with best facsimile thereof that we can manage.”
It actually took no small measure of patience. Another incoming contact presented itself three and a half hours later as a gravity wave detection that soon thereafter went subluminal 75,000 kilometers from the Destroyer.
“It’s small, sir,” Kasparov announced, “mass is approximately eight thousand, five hundred tons. We’ve got optical on it but can’t distinguish anything at this range.”
Before Max could ask about the IFF, Chin spoke up, “IFF confirms as friendly, skipper. A Fast Courier-Scout assigned to the Task Force, registry number CSR eight-six-five-five.”
For Honor We Stand Page 43
