For Honor We Stand (57 page)

“You bet it was a good point,” said Max.  “The thin disk of the galaxy, the part where the core and the spiral arms are, is something like eight billion years old.  The Earth’s age is four point two billion, and has evolved intelligent life that is now exploring the stars.  Assuming that the evolution of intelligent life and the period for that life to develop interstellar travel is roughly the same from race to race, that leaves nearly four billion years for some star faring race to do what the Western Europeans did on Earth, spread their culture and technology throughout this part of the galaxy, if not the whole thing.  So, Fermi was right in wondering where they were, because by all rights they should have come.  There should have been some highly advanced race that had come to Earth and brought us primitives under its sway or at least had its version of anthropologists in pith helmets and khakis studying us.”

The doctor was nodding his understanding.  “But, the Bhandka never let that happen—they created a five thousand light year wide ‘nature preserve’ where we and the Tri-Nin and the Pfelung and the rest could develop without interference and then, when we were about to reach the point where we were to be destroyed, the destroyers were themselves wiped out.  Well, that explains another thing, too.”

“What’s that.”

“The Vaaach.  Most of the time they are the embodiment of the superior attitude that comes from being truly superior, as well as showing their instinctive territoriality derived from their heritage as predators, and their highly developed ethical sensibilities; but, sometimes, you get a whiff of paternal concern.  I think it’s because they know they saved our culture from extinction.  Every time we impress them or show some promise, they look at us and think ‘but for us, these people would be gone.’  They are a very emotional race you know.  That is likely why they bind themselves so strictly to act by their rules and code of Honor, because without them they would be killing each other right and left.”

“Interesting theory.  I’d never thought of it that way, but it makes sense.  Bram, sometimes, I wish we could sit down and talk, really
talk
to the Vaaach.  Leave all of this ‘puny pink monkey” and “Warrior of Honor” crap in the hall and just carry on a conversation like sentient beings.  Man, oh, man, the things we could learn from them.”

“Indeed.  As extensive as their explorations have been, they must have made contact with hundreds of other races.  The genetic and biological information they have collected over the course of their travels would be enough to revolutionize our understanding of Exobiology, Comparative Anatomy, Comparative Biochemistry, the similarities and differences between the evolutionary paths taken on different worlds . . . .”  He hastened to add, “And, I’m sure that there would be a few interesting things to learn in other fields as well.  Perhaps even a little physics or maybe a smattering of engineering, if you place value on such things.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

***

“And what in the name of bleeding Piccadilly Circus is this?  Is this your doing, Wang?”  Chief Engineer Brown was pointing to a small label, printed on the fire-proof laminated polymer used on the ship for printing labels, affixed to the outside of the number two auxiliary cooling pump for the main fusion reactor’s primary graviton generator.  The unit had been running rough when it got its weekly test run, so it had been torn down, all of the rotary components rebalanced, lubricated, adjusted, and reassembled—a difficult and tedious five hour task.  Apparently, upon completion, the three men who had done the work had attached a label to the outside of the unit.  It was on the same pattern as the one designed by Cho the day before, this time showing that the excellence of the unit was certified by Pennoyer, Neff, and Gunderson.

“No, sir, not me” responded Ordinary Spacer 3
^rd
Class James Edwin Smith, known as “Wang” because he came from Wang IV and was one of three “James Smiths” on board, not to mention being one of two “James Edwin Smiths.”  “Never saw it before, sir.  Well, that’s not
exactly
true, sir.  I’ve never seen that one before, sir, but I’ve seen several like it.  Actually, sir, not several, sir, the more I think about it, sir, I think it’s more like dozens.  Sir.”  Wang was not accustomed to being questioned directly by so lofty a personage as a full blown Lieutenant, not to mention the ship’s Exalted and Revered Chief Engineer.  As a result, his “sir” reflex was running at Flank speed.  Notwithstanding his nervousness, Wang—although not having much in the way of leadership ability—was very bright and had a truly excellent memory.  “Sir, now that I think about it more precisely, I believe I have seen twenty-eight of them, sir.  They started showing up last night, sir.”

“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 “Werner” 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.