For Honor We Stand (33 page)

“We have a Local Compression Algorithm detection of a superluminal target under compression drive, no bearing change, indeterminate range.  I recommend a ninety degree course change, any axis, to resolve the ambiguity.”

“Very well.  Intel, have we been notified of any possible superluminal friendlies within a three light year radius?”  Intel was supposed to know what the good guys were doing as well as the bad.  In fact, it would be best if Intel knew everything about everyone.  No one was holding his breath.

“Negative, sir.  This is supposed to be an empty subsector except for us,” said Chief Petty Officer 2
^nd
Rhinelander who was standing watch at that post tonight.

Crap.  The Captain had left orders to maintain the current course and speed.  But, he hadn’t anticipated running into a possible enemy contact.  Fortunately, the Book covered this one.

“Maneuvering, reduce speed to 800 c.  Alter course, negative z, niner-zero degrees.  Make it a sharp delta, but don’t strain anything.”

Chief Lugatsch at Maneuvering acknowledged the order and then gave the command to his man on Drives to reduce speed and to his man on Pitch to turn the ship sharply “downward” 90 degrees. 

Now for the fun part.  He selected a voicecom channel and pushed the comm button.  A few seconds later a voice emerged from the comm panel.  “Skipper.”  Somehow, the Captain managed in that one word to convey the additional meaning, “I’m listening, but it had better be good.”

“Skipper, this is Levy in CIC.  We picked up a superluminal target, no bearing change, with the Local Compression Algorithm.  Pending further orders from you, I reduced speed to 800 c and ordered a negative z of 90 degrees.  We’re on the new course now and should have more from Sensors in a few minutes.  Orders, sir?”

“Well done, Levy.  Steady as she goes.  I’m on my way.  Skipper out.”

Mr. Levy was curious.  He noted the time on the Chrono.  It took the Skipper exactly one minute and forty-seven seconds between saying “skipper out” and when he cycled through the CIC security door.  As soon as the skipper entered, Levy stood, vacating the Big Chair and moving to the left to stand in the space between the CO’s and the Commodore’s Stations.  When Max reached the CO’s station and sat down, he said, “I have CIC.”

“You have CIC,” Levy responded.  He then turned in the direction of the nearest CIC omni sound pickup and announced, “Computer, log that the Officer of the Deck transferred CIC Con to the CO at 00:46.”

“CIC Con transfer to Commanding Officer logged at zero hours, forty-six minutes,” announced the Computer, its voice sounding perversely like a cross between an inhuman mechanism and a nymphomaniac sex kitten.  The regulations were clear:  only one man was in charge in CIC at any given time, and there was never, ever the slightest doubt as to who that was.  Every change was announced and the time logged.  After all, the joke went, if anything happened to the ship, and the man who had the con survived, he would be shot.  And the Navy wanted to be sure to shoot the right man. 

“Status.”

“Sir, course is zero-four-three mark two-five-eight, speed eight hundred c,” Levy reported.  “Still awaiting report from Sensors on data acquired from course change.  Ship is at Condition Blue.  All systems nominal.”  Condition Blue was the second lowest readiness state.  The lowest was Green.  Max never set Condition Green unless the ship was in a well-guarded rear area, preferably in the vicinity of at least a Carrier and a couple of Battleships, and even then only if he really trusted the Captains of the Carrier and the Battleships.  When you command a warship, the question is never whether you are being paranoid, but whether you are being paranoid enough. 

“Very well.”  Now, Max was in a quandary.  Because of his orders regarding the “Sweet Seventeen,” every department in the ship other than CIC was working without the benefit of its best men.  Not only that, under the Watch rotation system, Second Watch on Day Two of the cycle was stood by the White Watch, the weakest of the three.  Max could solve both problems by going to General Quarters, which would bring the Sweet Seventeen out of hibernation and would put everyone at Battle Stations, meaning that every position would be stood by its best man, usually with the second best right at his elbow.  But, that would defeat the whole purpose.  These men, even the least skilled of them, would have to be brought up to a standard of reasonable proficiency.  They would have to start walking without crutches.

They would have to start walking right now.

Levy started to move toward his accustomed post at Intel to relieve Rhinelander.

“And where do you think you are going, Mister Levy?”

“Um, the Intel station, Captain.”

“
Mais, non
.  I’m not letting you off the hook that easily, young man.  You’re the Officer of the Deck, which means for the duration of this watch you are a Command Level Officer for this vessel.  Unless and until I summon Mister DeCosta to CIC, you are my acting XO.  Now, take your station, Mister.”

“Aye, sir.”  Levy stepped over to the XO’s station, sat down, and fired up the console which had been left on STAND BY, his hands moving deftly over the controls.  Apparently, Mister Levy had spent some time on the Command Console Simulator preparing for his big night in the Big Chair.  Good man.

Max cast a glance over at Hobbs at Sensors.  He was deep in a discussion with his Back Room, rapidly pulling up graphs that looked like various computer generated hypotheses of the target’s motion and the compression readings that would result, trying to find a fit.  This was typically done by the computer without much human intervention.  If Mr. Kasparov were sitting in that chair and Mr. Harbaugh running the Back Room, Max wouldn’t even think of intervening, but with Kasparov off watch and Harbaugh sequestered with the Sweet Seventeen, anything could happen.  Max should have heard some sort of call from Sensors by now—at least a bearing to the target and a recommendation of what to do to localize it.  He looked over at Hobbs again.  Nothing. 

So, Max did something he had not done since he assumed command of the
Cumberland
.  He eavesdropped.  The CO’s station had the capability of monitoring every data and voice channel on the ship.  Max’s predecessor apparently spent most of his time doing just that, either from the CO’s station or from the work station in his Day Cabin, and had configured both consoles to do it easily and efficiently.  Max hated micromanagement, but he had a feeling that that his sensors guys might be stuck on something.

He pulled up the data channels that the Sensors’ Back Room was sharing with Hobbs.  He could see that they were digging into the raw data rather than looking at what the computer was doing with it.  The raw data, and even the partially processed raw data, was too complex and too full of random variations for human beings to interpret.  It took lots and lots of computer processing to tease out the patterns.  This made no sense.  Then he looked at what the computer was generating and saw why the Sensors people were having trouble. 

The computer was putting out nonsense.  Pure garbage.  One minute, it was hypothesizing that the target was impossibly wide--272.53 kilometers wide, the size of a not inconsiderable moon--and the next postulating that it was following a zig zag course at unheard of velocities, making course changes that would tear any ship into ragged shreds, with the points of the zigs on one side and of the zags on the other forming two parallel lines 272.53 kilometers apart that tracked the
Cumberland’s
former course.  This was crap.  The computer has gotten confused.

No.  That’s wrong.  Computers don’t “get confused.” 
People confuse them
.  The oldest adage of computer use, probably articulated about twelve minutes and nineteen seconds after the first computer was turned on, is:  GIGO—garbage in, garbage out.  OK.  Find the garbage.  He pulled up some diagnostic screens.  The sensors that read the compressed space/normal space boundary checked out.  But that data went lots of places before it hit the computer.  He quickly ran the signal path and the intermediate processors—they all checked out.  He was missing something.  The computer’s conclusions were derived from what?  There was the data from the sensors.  That had to be good.  There was the algorithm that processed the data.  That had been checked by NAVCOMPSYSCOM half a million times under every conceivable data state.  That had to be good, as well.  That left the comparatively trivial few bits of data and limiting assumptions that sometimes got input by the operator.  That had to be it.  But what did the operator input?  It had been four years since Max had worked in Sensors and this version of the system was newer than that.  He didn’t know.

Time to fess up.  “Hobbs.  I could see you were having problems, so I was looking over your shoulder.  Trying to help out.”  He shrugged slightly, to acknowledge that he was admitting a kind of transgression, if even a minor one.  Just because the skipper was the closest thing to God on his ship didn’t mean he should be high-handed.  Hobbs nodded quickly, as if to admit that he was a bit over his head and was glad to have the help.  “Look, I see what you guys are doing, but you’re on the wrong track.  The problem isn’t in the data.  It’s got to be something wrong with an operator input.  I’m not familiar with this thing.  What gets supplied by the operator?”

Max read the blank look on the man’s face before he could work up the courage to say that he didn’t know.  Max saved him the trouble.  At least he knew that the man would never even dream of bullshitting him.

“OK.  You can’t know everything Hobbs.”  Max punched himself into the circuit to the Sensors Back Room.  “This is the skipper.  Who’s on the compression detector?”

“Greenlee here, sir.”

“Greenlee?  Oh, right.  You’re the only one of my three James Smiths who’s not James Edwin Smith—you’re from Greenlee something or other.  OK, Mister Greenlee, we’ve got to figure this thing out before this target gets out from under us.  What are the operator inputs on this thing?  That’s got to be where the problem lies.”

“Sir, I can’t see where.  There’s not much to input.  The system mainly relies on the data from the sensors.  I input the calibration values from the last diagnostic.  I triple checked those.  Our speed gets read in automatically.  I checked it anyway.  It was one thousand nine hundred sixty c, now it’s eight hundred c.  For some reason it makes me manually input the compression field gradient.  I checked that twice and had Chief Klesh verify it.  It’s right.  The only other thing is number of contacts.” 

Bingo.  “It makes you input the number of contacts manually?”  Max heard his voice rising in pitch and volume.  He was starting to get a bad feeling about this.  It was starting to make sense.  A very bad kind of sense.  “You mean, it doesn’t try to get a fit for different numbers of contacts?  It just assumes the truth of the number of contacts you give it and tries to get a fit on bearing and range with the data it has?”

“That’s right, sir.” 

“And you assumed one contact,” Max said.  “Of course you did.  It was inconceivable to you that there would be two contacts out there in interstellar space that somehow were on a constant bearing with us.  It could never happen by chance.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“It didn’t happen by chance.  Have the computer assume that there are two contacts.”

“Two, sir?”

“Two.  Yes. 
Now
.”

“Aye, sir.”

Max watched the Sensors console’s SSR ATTN data channel that he had earlier pulled up for display on his own console.  In a few seconds, the nonsensical conclusions reached by the computer resolved itself into usable data.  Yep.  Two contacts.  Solid bearings, ranges, speeds.

“Contact,” said Hobbs, nearly shouting.  Max turned to him sharply and made a downward patting motion with his right hand to signal him to lower his voice.  Hobbs got the point, rattling off his designation of the contacts as Uniform One and Uniform Two, their speeds, bearings, and ranges, in something approaching a normal tone of voice.

“Maneuvering, get us back on our former course and speed.  Match our former course track exactly and put us at the point in space we would be if we had not changed course.  As fast as possible without compromising stealth.”  Lugatsch  acknowledged the order.  “Hobbs, keep a close eye on those two contacts.  Don’t blink.  Don’t even fantasize about blinking.  If they so much as swerve to run over a rattlesnake, I want to know.  Understood?” 

“Understood.”  Max could hear the compression drive increasing the ship’s speed and the cooling system for the fusion reactor working harder as the power plant increased its output to supply the staggering amount of energy needed to trick the space time continuum into propelling the ship at more than two thousand times the speed of light.  About ten minutes later, he heard the notes of both power plant and cooling plant drop as the speed dropped to 1960 c.  Lugatsch  announced that the ship was back on its former track at his former speed, where it would have been had nothing happened.

There was a Mid posted in CIC to assist the Captain.  Max waved him over to get him some coffee, pointed at the pot and raised an inquiring eyebrow at Levy who nodded.  Getting coffee was part of the job description, and the boy who happened to have that duty for this watch—a nine year old named Gilbertson, one of the second or third youngest class of squeakers--almost skipped over to the coffee pot to fetch for both officers.  Oh, to have that kind of energy at about one in the morning. 

While he was doing that, Max punched in the voice loop for the Sensors Back Room.  The USS
Cumberland
College of Advanced Space Warfare and Keeping Your Ass from Being Nuked by Some Rat-Faced Krag Bastard was now, once again, in session.