For Honor We Stand (45 page)

4.  If, at the end of watch, you need more time or more manpower to complete your work or to make sure it is right, notify your superior of that fact and get it done.  You will have all the help you need, but it is your responsibility to make it happen.

5.  It is the responsibility of every man on board to report his own errors, no matter how long ago you made them, and any errors or problems of any kind that could affect the safety and efficiency of this vessel, no matter how or when he found out about them.  Any pre-existing error that is reported within 48 hours of this notice will not result in any punishment or other consequences to any man.  If it’s been screwed up and covered up, let’s out with it.  Come clean, identify the problems, and get the job done.  Confession is good for the soul.  Remediation is good for the ship.

Attachment follows:

The
Cumberland
Creed

Each Officer, Crewman, and Midshipman serving on this vessel vows to strive to his utmost:

1.  To instill within ourselves these qualities essential to naval excellence:

Discipline--Being able to follow as well as to lead, knowing that we must master ourselves before we can master our task.

Competence--There being no substitute for total preparation and complete dedication, for space will not tolerate the careless or indifferent and our implacable enemies will seize upon the slightest error or oversight.

Confidence--Believing in ourselves as well as others, knowing that we must master fear and hesitation before we can succeed; relying upon and trusting in the abilities of our shipmates and those of ourselves.  Believing you can win is half the battle.

 Responsibility--Realizing that it cannot be shifted to others, for it belongs to each of us; we must answer for what we do--or fail to do.  The buck always stops with each of us.

Toughness--Taking a stand when we must; to try again, even if it means following a more difficult path.  Sometimes, the most valuable point of view is the one believed only by one man standing alone. 

Teamwork--Respecting and utilizing the abilities of others, realizing that we work toward a common goal, for success depends upon the efforts of all; this command will harness, respect, and encourage the growth of the abilities of every member of the team.  Every man is valuable, from the Captain to the youngest squeaker.  In the void between the stars, we have only our ship, and each other.

Honor--Recognizing that the shared burdens and dangers of space combat require that we have the highest level of trust in each other, we will always be scrupulously truthful with and steadfastly loyal to our shipmates;  our word is our bond, our shipmates are our family, and Honor is our guide star.  Every crew stands for something.  Let others stand for expediency or promotion or whatever value they choose.  This crew stands for Honor. 

2.  To be aware at all times that, suddenly and unexpectedly, we may find ourselves in a role where our performance has ultimate consequences.

3.  To recognize that the greatest error is not to have tried and failed, but that in trying we did not give our best effort.

Max was about to key the command that posted the order when he looked around CIC.  Funny, how he had not taken many slow, careful looks around this compartment in the two months and four days he had been in command.  It was the same compartment, and mostly the same men, who had greeted him on January 21 when he surprised them all by stepping onto the command island wearing his Space Combat Uniform, a side arm, and a boarding cutlass when everyone else was in Dress Blues.  It looked pretty much the same.  It felt very different.

Those men in January were losers.  Verbally and psychologically abused by a borderline psychotic CO, exhausted and distracted by his obsessions with cleanliness and control, humiliated in encounters with the enemy and in exercises, they hadn’t been fit to do battle with a troop of Junior Wilderness Girls, much less the best the Krag had to throw at them.  Now, these men were winners.  They had met the enemy in battle, had even taken on multiple vessels of superior force, seen their enemies consumed by nuclear fire, and lived to tell the tale.  They were confident.  Some of them even had a bit of a swagger to their step.   

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 detection 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.”