For Honor We Stand (46 page)

“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 look, 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. 

“No, we wouldn’t because the Krag ships aren’t jumping after us.  They would have watched us jump out of that first system, then run to the next system on their compression drives, getting there while we were still crossing from jump in to jump out.  It wouldn’t take many jumps for them to figure out what we’re doing and to predict our route.  Then they just get a few jumps ahead of us and lie in wait, which is what they’re doing somewhere.  I’m betting it’s here.  Somewhere.”  Max turned to DeCosta who was at his station.  “XO, put yourself in the shoes, or should I say footwear, of the Krag who want to ambush our little
convoy
.”  Max heaped the word with all the scorn that born hunter/killers such as he had for the idea of plodding through space along a predictable path while waiting for the enemy to come to them instead of seeking him out and engaging him on your own terms.  It was the contempt that a wolf might have for a ewe.

“Well, sir,” he answered quickly, making it clear that he had given some thought to the matter, “there are four places I regard as likely.”  He gestured toward the tactical projection which, at the moment, displayed only a 1 AU radius around the ship.  Max nodded.  DeCosta touched a few softkeys and the display changed to an overview of the
Cumberland
’s
trajectory from jump in to jump out.  The geometrically perfect curve of the group’s projected course, traced in green, gracefully arced through the back cube of the projection.  A tiny yellow dot near the top of the display represented the system’s primary, Edmonton B.  None of the planets were visible at this scale.  DeCosta touched another key and four short segments of the green curve turned red.  “The two SWACS ships are flying ovals at opposite ends of the system.  These first three segments are places where one of the shadows cast by one planet or another from some point in one of these ovals intersects our trajectory.  Coverage is going to be weaker along those segments for at least part of each SWACs ship’s patrol cycle.  The fourth is an area where our path passes near where a Krag Frigate was destroyed by compression shear two days ago when it was running from the USS
Battleaxe.
  There’s still a lot of residual interference.  In any of those areas, our warning horizon isn’t going to be much more than it would be with just our own active sensors which, against a highly stealthed ship, isn’t going to be much.  Even with the tail deployed, we’d get only a few seconds before they were in missile range.”

“Outstanding, XO.  Absolutely outstanding.  Let’s see how it matches up with my analysis.”  Max’s voice was genuinely enthusiastic and was loud enough for everyone in CIC to know that he was praising the XO about something.  Max touched a soft key on his own display and the four red segments turned orange as yellow segments, almost perfectly congruent were superimposed on them.  A very close match. 

Except for one tiny spot. 

There was a tiny speck of yellow almost in the middle of the long curve:  a segment of the curve so short that it was almost indistinguishable from a point in space.  The XO pointed to it.  “What’s that one?”

“I didn’t expect you to identify that one, XO.  It’s dynamic and not static.  When the first SWACS Frigate, the
Sicily
is at the point of its oval most distant from Edmonton B and the second one, the
Cypress
is 69% of the way through its oval, there is a temporary interference zone created here lasting for just under thirty minutes.  One of the times that zone comes into existence is when we are right here,” he touched a key and a pale, yellow, blinking spot came into existence, right beside the tiny yellow segment.  And, what’s worse, is that the interference pattern created is going to be fractal/chaotic, meaning that it will destroy the coherence of our own active sensor transmissions.  Except for passive EM and mass detection, we’ll be blind.” 

“But that shouldn’t be a problem,” DeCosta said.  “Just signal the pennant to increase or decrease speed and sensor coverage in that area will be normal when we go through.”

“Absolutely correct, XO.  It
shouldn’t
be a problem.  But, Commander Duflot will not alter speed so much as a meter per second.  So, the sensor gap will absolutely be there right when we get there.  And, that’s where they’re going to hit us.  I’d bet our last ton of deuterium on it.”