“Instead of gin rummy, could we talk about this ship?” She looked around them. “The computer fills my head with all sorts of stuff, but I don't understand all of it and I don't think I understand the implications of any of it.”
“It does take getting used to,” the gunny agreed.
“Okay, the simple things. Pixie doesn't look like most ships -- it's not the Fleet's most common globe, or the bizarre things they do out on the Rim when they design ships. We are shaped like a cargo ship -- a long 'rail' that things are tied to. We sort of look like two balloons with an arrow through them.
“Benko-Chang turbines twist space. If you put them in the right spot, near the ship's center of gravity, the gravity well the turbines generate tugs on that center of gravity, like regular gravity does to an apple. The ship behaves like it was rolling down a very tall hill... and because the rest of the ship is attached to the turbines, perforce we come along.
“When we go to High Fan, the ship stops being in our universe and goes into another, much smaller one. Not only is it smaller, gravity doesn't seem to be as strong there as it is here. Quantum theory often defies reason and common sense. The universe we are traveling through just now is a fraction of one percent the size of ours -- yet at the same time, each point in this universe is congruent with a matching point in ours. That is, we go from A to B here, and we go from some A to some B back in our universe... only there it's a lot further than it is here.
“Moreover, the gravity field of a Benko-Chang turbine has the effect of moving points A and B here physically closer together. The thing about that is, it takes a lot of power... right close to the physical limits of the turbines. That said, we have the latest and greatest generation of turbines aboard Pixie and we should be, in theory, about twenty percent faster than anything our enemies have.
“The ship is heavily automated. Quite simply, ever since we moved our industry out into the Rim, costs have fallen steadily until we are flying a ship that costs less than what it costs to train the average Fleet officer. The sad fact is, that when they kill a Fleet ship we lose people whose training, any one of them, far outstrips what a ship costs. To be blunt, Pixie is also about doing something about the disproportionate cost of losing personnel versus cost of the hardware.”
He waved around them. “We've been modularizing equipment since the beginning. There are about fifty different 'Field Modules' that make up the electronic and control innards of this ship. Some of the first spaceships had millions of different parts -- we've come a long way since those days.
“Those modules will make repairing most things very simple and quick. Once the field modules are in general use we could go to any base and pick up the vast majority of our parts requirements off the shelf. Now, unless it's a big base, you might have to wait on a courier to return with the parts from a larger Fleet base that had what was needed. It could take weeks or months. This change alone, by the way, knocked nearly fifty percent off the cost of a ship like Pixie.”
He laughed. “When the war's over, there is going to be hell to pay again, let me tell you. In the first days of space flight, there were hundreds, even thousands of accidents. The first 'Space Force' spent the vast majority of its time trying to rescue people, and sometimes having spectacular failures and only occasional successes. That's what the Fleet grew to handle. There's not a Rim Runner alive who doesn't owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Stephanie Kinsella. Hell, there are not very many people alive who don't, even before the war. Now... without her, likely we'd have been wiped out.”
“I keep hearing the name; I've never heard of her before. When people talk about her -- it's like you just now. Reverential awe.”
“You bet! The reason you've never heard of Kinsella is the reason you are going to have to work so hard to overcome the crap they fed you in school. True, Benko and Chang discovered how to create a gravity well. But they didn't have a clue what they'd found or what it meant.” He barked a laugh. “To his dying day, Stan Benko never really understood. He was a joke all over the Rim; his son tried to sue historians, news commentators -- all sorts of people -- to get them to stop making jokes about his father. It never worked. Stephanie Kinsella asked people to give the young man a break about his old man and it stopped overnight.”
“So who was she?”
“Your momma,” he said with a laugh. “She created the Fleet, she created the Federation, she was one of the first people to command the Fleet and the person who made certain sure there would never be any of the old reservations about a woman being able to deal with combat.”
“And I've never heard of her?” Cindy asked. “How could that possibly be?”
“Because Stephanie Kinsella had a single purpose in life: to see mankind safely to the stars. She went out of her way to stay out of the limelight. If she'd have been in the limelight, if she'd have been famous, she'd never have been permitted to do the things she did. The list of her contributions to the Federation, to mankind, is as long as your arm.”
He grinned. “You have to know that on the Rim they have various things; call them 'wimp detectors' or 'dirty-foot' busters or shibboleths, the fact is there are things they bring up in innocent conversation and if they think you don't understand, they check further. Better to admit your ignorance right off.
“If you ever hear a Rim Runner say, 'The butter side is, in six hours we all die of...' You need to ask what the upside is.”
“Why is that?”
“The butter side is always down when you drop a piece of bread.”
“And the opposite of that is the upside?”
“There you have it! I tell you true: Rim Runners only talk about bad downsides if you ask them; if they offer it first there is always something better on the upside.”
“Talk to me more about the ship,” Cindy asked.
“Ships like this run on hydrogen fusion reactors. They use deuterium as fuel, and we get that by scooping up huge volumes of gas from planets like Jupiter... we use the regular hydrogen back on Earth for fuel cells and use the deuterium to fuel ships.
“Ships burn through their fuel fairly fast -- a Benko-Chang turbine weighs ten, twelve, even twenty tons and most ships have a lot of them. Pixie has twelve and our fans are hungrier than most. On the other hand, we can stop in any system with a gas giant and refuel -- although it does take a bit of patience to refuel ourselves.” He waved at the controls.
“We carry consumables -- that's food, water, oxygen and fuel -- enough for a couple of years of remote operation. Most of the consumables, except fuel, can, to varying degrees, be recycled. A lot of this ship is devoted to recycling.
“We have a Blue laser and some anti-ship missiles -- those are missiles with a Blue laser warhead. Get one of our missiles within two light seconds of an enemy ship, and the enemy ship gets evaporated. Real soon now, we expect to have High Fan capable homing missiles like they have. I dunno about that, because we've known about them for nearly two years and the boffins haven't gotten them to work yet.
“The enemy homing missiles are about the size of a corvette, and undoubtedly cost bundles -- they just don't have that many of them.”
“Why don't ours work?”
“AIs just aren't up to it. The first part of acceptance testing is always testing dummy missiles against experienced pilots. Those pilots win nearly every time. Humans make all sorts of choices that even if a computer is programmed to consider, almost always considers them low order possibilities because they make no sense. Except what makes no sense to a computer often makes perfect sense to a pilot. Go figure. They'll get it right eventually.”
“Did the pilots do well against them in the battle?”
“Most of their missiles were targeted against ships and not fighters. But there's not a Master Pilot aloft who hasn't read up and practiced.” He waved aft. “No one is talking about it, but the solar system has some very sick gas giants these days. Jupe took fifteen hundred gigaton weapons bursts, Saturn about three hundred, Uran
us and Neptune a couple of hundred each. What ships do is head for a gas giant, stop just short of the fan well, and the missile drops to hit it, just before the ship goes back to High Fan. The homer enters the fan well, and mostly picks the planet as the best target and hits it.”
“Pixie,” Cindy reminded him.
“Well, the boffins say that their detectors can pick up a ship on High Fan at two to two and a half light months. Ours work out to three light months. It was a pretty stunning thing, figuring out we'd always known how to detect ships on High Fan.”
“We can detect ships on High Fan?”
“Yes. It's been secret, but you'll need to know it. One fan can detect another. Once we figured that out, life has gotten a lot easier.”
“One fan can detect another?”
“Yes. That's how it works. You have to tune fans to make them work together when they are close to each other. One of the very earliest of Admiral Nagoya's project officers realized that.
“That's what we're about... we're going to go out, park in the middle of where we think we'll see alien ships going by and wait and watch. When they go past, we'll track them to their destination. We should be able to get a good line on their origin as well.”
“Fans detect each other? And we're supposed to be able to track their ships as they go by? I know you don't want me to call you sir, Sergeant, and you're old enough to be my father -- you are the age my most of my school teachers. Still, sir, that is the stupidest idea I've heard of coming from someone in the Fleet... except maybe Lieutenant Servien's ideas about lewd.”
He looked at her for a moment without speaking. “There was a time, I'd have ripped you a new one, Ensign Rhodes. But we've had our noses rubbed in it, over and over again. Now I will be patient a moment longer before giving you a purple rocket. Just what do you mean?”
“I mean, if we have a fan running that can detect them, why wouldn't they be able to detect us in turn?”
“Ensign Rhodes,” he said formally after a long second's hesitation. “If -- at some point in the future -- if you start to wonder what it is that sets us apart; when you wonder why in the world someone like yourself is set above someone like myself, please remember this conversation.”
With that he got up and left Cindy alone. She glanced over the array of gauges and instruments. Nowhere could she “Master Start” and she didn't see a cascade either.
A voice whispered in her mind, describing the differences in the controls. She listened carefully and when she heard the sergeant returning, thanked the AI. The AI's reply was another part of the weirdness of everything.
“Ensign Rhodes, a good portion of my duties consists of watching and learning. What you just told Gunnery Sergeant Hodges will increase the odds of a successful mission by about three hundred percent.
“I am a machine, but self-preservation is part of my programming. Like Sergeant Hodges, I hadn't realized how much our original mission profile would have put me at risk. Thank you.”
A moment later Lieutenant Hall stood between Cindy and the sergeant, who'd resumed the right seat. “The gunny tells me, Ensign, that you have noticed something that will directly affect our mission planning and that it's too important to wait. What might that be?”
Cindy explained and her captain ran her fingers over her face, trying to rub the sleep away as she listened.
“This is going to give the boffins nightmares. It was bad enough when Bethany Booth advanced the notion at first. This is simply going to kill even more of them.”
The sergeant said soberly, “Captain, we are working with blinders on, particularly you Rim Runners. You think you have it all down pat, when in fact, you're only slightly ahead of dirty-feet like myself. You think you understand space and space travel -- and to a degree you do -- but you've made all sorts of comfortable niches and assumptions, and you have trouble looking beyond them.”
“I have to agree, but it's a damning indictment of a great many people; including some I greatly respect.”
She sighed. “Pixie, this is the captain. What is the closest extant colony ahead of us with at least a Fleet Class Three base, where a delay won't unduly affect our mission specs? Priority, however, has to be transmission of this information as soon as possible.”
“Bridges, Captain. It is twenty-one light years away, and only four light years from our path. If you declare a flight emergency, we don't have to do any more of the round-about stops. Bridges has a Class Two base.”
“Pixie, drop from fans, reorient and proceed directly to Bridges at 90% of max power.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” the AI intoned. A second later they had dropped from High Fan, shifted their orientation and began to acquire the new vector.
Three of the crew promptly appeared on the bridge, including Master Chief Shinzu.
“We're off fan and reorienting,” the master chief said. “I assume there's a reason. Why no alert?”
Irene Hall explained and the master chief sighed. “This is so not good.”
Oscar Parminter, the Hindu sensor tech, was pale. “Twice now. Twice we've missed the obvious. I know they keep saying sensor watchstanders are blameless, but really? We all know the truth! Someone should have realized!” He paced a few steps away and back.
He nodded at Cindy. “And it was the ensign who noticed?”
“It was,” the sergeant told him.
“This is insane. People who've spent their entire professional lives in a field... shown up by, by...” he sputtered into silence.
Master Chief Shinzu looked at him coldly. “The day Ensign Rhodes was seconded to Rome, the flag captain of the Macarthur used the word 'children' when referring to Admiral Nagoya's project officers. One second later he'd been relieved of duty. You came, Mister Parminter, one breath short of being relieved just now.”
“The goal here,” Lieutenant Hall said, a scowl on her face, “is accomplishing our mission. Ensign Rhodes has quite properly pointed out a concern that will have to inform our mission planning, plus that of the rest of the Fleet. It is also our duty to pass this up the chain of command for proper evaluation.”
Chief Parminter said something under his breath and then said, “Permission to be excused, Captain?”
“Granted, Chief Parminter.”
He turned and left and Captain Hall looked at the other member of the crew who'd arrived. He was tall, dark and handsome, looking more like an HDD star than an enlisted person of the Fleet. He was wearing the red of a medic.
“Chief Shore?” the captain asked.
The man looked back at her directly. “It would be easy for me to say that the decision isn't in my purview. No, Captain, I don't think he'll do.”
“You're another of our Port NCOs, Chief Shore. It will never be your decision unless something catastrophic happens. That said, I value your opinion.”
“Then, Captain Hall, let me rephrase. Sir, I cannot recommend that individual for the mission. We will be spending months aloft behind the lines; he's not comfortable aloft behind ours.”
“Master Chief Shinzu, please brief Ensign Rhodes in the next day or so what will be required of her. She's the XO and that sort of paperwork is one of her hats now.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
A few moments later Cindy and the gunny were alone again. Shortly thereafter Pixie went back on High Fan, with a new destination.
The gunny laughed after a few minutes. “Odds are, Ensign, you've never fired anyone before.”
“I saw Lieutenant Servien fired,” Cindy reminded him. “You could say that Zodiac and to a lesser extent I fired her.”
He shook his head. “You were never in that person's chain of command; you were never responsible for her training. Afterwards on Rome a great many training officers had purple rockets to deal with.”
He was silent again for a minute. “When a major combatant like Rome returns, they take the cream of the crew off. Some go to other ships to leaven the crews; others go to the training command to transfer knowledg
e. That means Rome receives a lot of new faces in exchange. There's no time for full and complete training, not at first. The simple, logical, obvious things go to the bottom of the priority list when it comes to training... and now and then that results in the death of someone who should have paid more attention to the basic training.
“I suspect Lieutenant Servien was more interested in pleasing her boss than in her classroom work, and slacked on it, to get more done.” He shuddered. “At least her boss didn't try that excuse.”
“Pardon?” Cindy asked, still bemused by everything.
“He could have explained her actions as excessive attention to his requests, slighting her training. I'm pretty sure he knew that if he did that, he'd have gone out the airlock right next to her.”
“I don't understand again,” Cindy said, frustrated once more.
“The Fleet had a limited amount of time to teach new people their duties and responsibilities before Rome redeployed. If there is a course you're ordered to take to prepare you for that deployment, you need to pay attention.
“If he'd said that she was trying to hard to please him, and sloughing off on training as a result, like I said, he'd have gone out the airlock with her. That's failure to command.”
“And that's bad?”
“In the first few months of the war there were a number of command failures. People were afraid -- people who held a great deal of responsibility. More than a billion people died on New Cairo because the Fleet Aloft commander there couldn't command a row boat. Two hundred million on Grenada died because an admiral refused to engage -- essentially, he tried to turn tail and run.
“Two admirals tried to obstruct the warning messages at the start of the war. Hundreds of millions of people would have been killed -- including themselves -- if their orders had been obeyed. The officers they tried to delay quite properly ignored them.
Well-Traveled Rhodes (Kinsella Universe Book 6) Page 14
