by David Poyer
Captain Cheryl Staurulakis, USN, came awake unwillingly, heart pounding and with a splitting headache. She rolled out of the bunk, hands thrust out as if to ward off a knife. Stood swaying in a darkened stateroom, panting.
The snug little sea cabin seemed suddenly immense. Then it shrank, and dwindled again, until it barely held space for air. Sudden apprehension palpitated her chest and turned her muscles to stone. Why were they not moving? Why did the knotmeter remote on her cabin bulkhead register zero? Were they dead in the water again, without power, without defenses—
Then she remembered, and reality flooded back in a reassuring tide. Her ship was safe. Not on fire. In port, not adrift and under attack.
But she was still guilty. Of sending American sailors to their deaths.
She scratched viciously at her neck, at her crotch, at her calves, until the warm blood trickled. It would stain her sheets. Her uniform. The fucking itching, that would only let her sleep in snatches.
She’d ordered Sioux City to shield Savo’s stern off Korea. The wake-homing torpedoes had mangled the smaller ship, wrecking it so badly she had to be towed to Sasebo. With thirty-two dead, and dozens more injured or burned.
And still she’d failed to intercept the Chinese missiles aimed at the homeland.
Millions dead. Because Cheryl Morehead Staurulakis hadn’t measured up.
The relief ebbed. She staggered into the little attached head. Pulled down her panties and squatted, squeezing her eyes shut as urine hissed into the stainless steel bowl.
Got to get a grip, Cheryl.
You did your best. There were just too many enemy ICBMs. Too many decoys along with the live warheads, and not enough of your own weapons to take them all out.
You’re in port now. The war’s over, and your crew’s safe. You brought them back.
Most of them, at least.
Hands over her face, she told herself this over and over and at last her lungs stopped heaving and the dancing glowing specks of broken light at the edges of her vision dimmed. She slumped, breathing deep, eyes closed. Then forced herself up, wiped, flushed, and snapped the light on.
She turned from the mirror, shuddering. Unable to meet the dead gaze that stared back from that haggard visage. The bleached-pale cheeks, the reddened, scabbed lids, the thinning, washed-out hair.
She dry-gulped an antihistamine, and rubbed cortisone cream into her hands. The doc had said that once she wasn’t under so much stress, the itching and eruptions should back off. But they seemed just as bad as ever, if not worse. Red oozing pustules from which the skin peeled. Unsightly. Maddening. Like she was under some kind of sorcerous curse.
Maybe it was for the best that Eddie was dead. That he’d been shot down, and would never see her again.
Would never see her like this.
* * *
SAVO ISLAND was the third ship named to commemorate a deadly battle fought north of Guadalcanal. The first had been an escort carrier commissioned in 1944. The second, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, had fought in the opening phases of the war just ended. Cheryl had been her operations officer, then exec, and finally skipper. After action in the Taiwan Strait, the Battle of the Central Pacific, and the East China Sea, that second Savo had been sunk in the nuclear attack on Honolulu.
Some of the crew manning this third namesake had served aboard her as well.
The current Savo’s primary mission was antimissile defense. Its Alliance interceptors were AI-enabled to discriminate between the decoys and warheads of heavy ICBMs. Displacing close to twenty thousand tons on a modified Zumwalt hull, it carried railguns and beam weapons to defend the task forces it had accompanied to war. The cruiser was armored, compartmented, and sealed from the outside air. A dynamic access network provided high-bandwidth exchange among air-, surface-, subsurface-, and ground-based tactical data systems. Instead of shafts and reduction gears, it was propelled by podded Tesla truck motors, powered by gas turbines looted from commercial airliners.
Following commissioning, and weeks of exhausting training, they’d transited to the western Pacific to stand guard as Allied forces landed in Korea. Then moved north to block a possible Chinese strike over the Sea of Okhotsk, Siberia, and the Arctic. When the war had ended with a nuclear exchange, Cheryl had fought to intercept the enemy’s heaviest missiles.
And mostly, she had. But a few had gotten through, sending megaton-range nukes plunging down on the western and central United States.
With the news of the armistice, her task group had been recalled to port. She was still technically in tactical command, but her units were scattered about the northwestern Pacific: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, a few in China itself, providing humanitarian aid, electrical power, potable water, and medical care. The frantic tempo of wartime operations had abruptly dropped to a sluggish crawl.
Of course, that didn’t mean she had nothing to do.
In its inimitable wisdom, the Navy had protected them all against that hideous fate.
* * *
THE wardroom. The homely smells of coffee and eggs and grits and ham. Matt Mills, her executive officer, was elbows down at the table. Even frowning and rubbing his forehead, he was easy on the eyes, blond and chiseled as any romantic lead on a Netflix series. “Morning, Skipper,” he said, starting to get up. The others rose as well.
She waved them back down and drew herself a cup from the urn, black. “Take it easy, everyone. Any progress?”
“A little.” Her second-in-command glanced at his phone. “But it’s more like death from a thousand paper cuts. We’re going to reconvene here shortly, and hit it again.”
In any sane organization, training would have started from a blank sheet with war’s end. Or even—though no one aboard was naive enough to expect this—with a month off to recover, catch up on sleep, and do planned maintenance instead of voyage repairs.
But with the abeyance of hostilities, a flood of pent-up demands had poured in. Fleet had promulgated a new and rigorous certification instruction. It increased requirements for training on Information Assurance, Antiharassment, Antidiscrimination, Sexual Assault Prevention, Cyber Awareness, Counterintelligence Awareness and Reporting, and Suicide Prevention. Personnel with less than three years of time in service had to complete Antiterrorism Level 1 training, with mandatory triennial periodicity for all others. Cheryl could exercise command discretion on Alcohol, Drugs, and Tobacco Awareness, Combating Trafficking in Persons, Domestic Violence Prevention and Reporting, Electromagnetic Warfare, Equal Opportunity, Hazing Policy, Operational Risk Management, Operations Security, Personal Financial Management, Records Management, Sexual Health and Responsibility, Stress Management, Traumatic Brain Injury Awareness, and a dozen more programs that had been suspended for the duration, but that now required backdated reports covering the period of suspension.
So for the last three days, she, Mills, and her operations officer, Dave Branscombe, along with the division officers and senior enlisted, had been locked in a massive paperwork drill. They were trying to document certifiable training events from wartime logs while at the same time building a training regimen for the next quarter from scratch.
Piecing together the past was an opportunity for creativity. But also a chance to shoot herself in the foot. If they got too fast and loose, some staff lieutenant back in Hawaii would be sure to drop a dime on them. So she was torn between encouraging her people to fudge, which would save the crew time and work that could be spent instead on actual maintenance, and reining them in, which would eat more work hours but protect her own heinie.
The choice here was clear, since that very heinie had been put at risk quite a lot lately, and theirs too along with it, all too literally. They all deserved whatever slack she could cut them.
A tap at the door, and the chiefs filed in. She pointed a chin at the urn. “Help yourself,” she said. “Chief Zotcher. Chief Terranova. Chief Van Gogh.
“Okay, to say it once more: we’re going to stretch those guidelines to the limit,
” she told them when everyone was finally settled around the table with tablets and binders. “Don’t make anything up. But count every action, every actual operation we participated in, as a training opportunity. And we put in a shitlot of hours at Condition One ABM. Don’t lie, but use your imagination.”
“Copy all. Where will you be, Captain?” Zotcher asked. The sonar chief, she suddenly noticed, had gone completely bald during the war. “In case we have any questions?”
“Any gray areas, Commander Mills will decide.”
Her exec said mildly, “I have a zone inspection today, Captain. I’ll need to break for that.”
Cheryl finished her coffee and stood. “I’ll take your inspection, XO. About time I got a good look around again.”
“Thanks, ma’am,” Mills said, but he didn’t sound especially glad to be relieved of that duty. He rubbed his forehead again, narrowing his eyes as he studied a tablet. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.
* * *
SHE left them complaining and fabricating and commenced her inspection at the boatswain’s locker, in the very nook of the bow. A note taker, one of the ship’s yeomen, followed her.
It had been some months since she’d had time for a detailed reading on Savo’s material condition. Being at Condition One tended to keep a skipper glued close to CIC. This morning, as petty officer after compartment petty officer reported, “Ready for inspection, ma’am,” she snooped and pried. First, to emphasize ownership, she asked each responsible man or woman for a look at the compartment deficiency report. To emphasize responsibility, what they’d done to remedy the problems. To highlight follow-through, what the result had been. Only then did she click her flashlight on.
Working her way slowly aft through the storerooms and offices, she touched her augmented-reality glasses to match the data and documentation overlay against the ground truth of what years of experience told her at a glance. She called up compartment pressure testing reports, bent to read the tags on firefighting equipment, and pressed a finger into the rubber seals on the watertight doors. She checked fire hose discharge fittings, classification, and numbering against the records in the ship’s computers. She rattled each fuse panel looking for loose cover bolts, and inspected each individual fuse and breaker to make sure it hadn’t been replaced with one of a higher amperage rating. She uncoiled, laid out, and inspected the casualty power cables and risers for cracks, frayed insulation, and damage.
In forward berthing, she sniffed the air. Bent close to the deck, checking cleanliness in the corners with the aid of the flashlight. Then asked the presenter to turn off the overheads.
Seaman Downie bobbed his head, smirking, and went to comply. She ignored the smirk. The diminutive, eccentric Downie, long ago nicknamed “the Troll” by his shipmates, was about the only person aboard who’d gone through the entire war without a single promotion. A career seaman, as the saying went. She’d tried to transfer him out, but NavPers had decided, in its infinite wisdom, that once aboard, he would stay.
A snap, and darkness flooded the compartment. It brought back the panicky terror she’d felt waking up. She pushed it off like a too-heavy quilt and groped her way around the space, craning her neck this way and that, alert for any holes in the bulkhead or overhead or gaps in the cable penetrations. Any chink that would admit light from adjacent spaces would also compromise its watertightness, defeating the whole point of compartmentation.
But she didn’t see any. “You can turn them back on now,” she yelled.
When they came on Downie was staring into her face from four inches away. Sneaking up on her like some knife-wielding psycho in a dark alley, wearing that unsettling pixie grin. “Skipper?” he smirked. “Hey, got a question for you.”
She placed a hand on his skivvy-shirted chest, suppressing a shudder at its stiff clamminess. How long had he been wearing it? “Back off, Seaman Downie. What is it?”
“The guys are saying, I got to plan how to rig extra bunks down here. That so?”
She frowned. “First I’ve heard of it. What for?”
Downie twirled in place, a ballerina-like pirouette but without grace. “They say we’re gonna take the Army back home. Demob, they call it. Ship everybody back from the war. And we go back too.”
Scuttlebutt was amazing. And Downie, who dated from the old Savo, always seemed to have the latest and greatest. Or maybe he made it up himself. “I don’t think so,” she told him gently. “At least, not that I’ve heard. Maybe you’re just ahead of me, though. If you get any updates on that?…”
He smirked and bobbed his head. “I’ll keep you posted, Skipper.”
* * *
SHE proceeded from the office and berthing spaces to inspect the forward missile magazines. Then, to the far-belowdecks spaces where the pumps, motors, cooling equipment, pressurized gas and capacitor banks for the lasers and railgun batteries were located. Here she checked insulating matting, warning and precaution signs, deck drains, overpressure inspection and test certifications, and safety and escape gear. She made sure the alarms were live, that safety nets were rigged in the trunks, ventilation closures and controls were operational, and the emergency lighting worked.
It was 0900 when she reached the mess decks. Breakfast had been cleared. Here she doubled down on deck drains, cleanliness, fixtures, and firefighting readiness. But as she’d expected, word had percolated back that the skipper was on a tear. Chief Lubkeman had his men and women turned out in spotless serving aprons and paper hats. The food prep and serving areas smelled of bleach and the decks gleamed with fresh wax. She gave these areas a quick once-over, snapped the UV disinfection lights on and off, and checked the tags on the fire-extinguishing system. “Looking good, everyone,” she complimented them, and moved on.
She clattered down two decks on metal ladders to the engineering spaces. The old Savo’s engine compartments had been a howl of noise and dry heat. Gas turbines and pumps had fattened the air with sound. But pierside now, “cold iron,” this cruiser’s spaces were capacious, quiet, and cool. Here Cheryl concentrated on valve condition, labeling, and classification. She asked for gauge and tool calibration dates, checked them against the maintenance requirements, and looked behind every console and pump for flammable consumables. Master Chief McMottie accompanied her, never more than a step behind. Each time she turned to ask a question he had his tablet out and the relevant graph or checklist ready on the screen.
The third time this happened she grimaced, torn between pleasure and annoyance. “Maybe I don’t actually need to inspect down here, Master Chief?”
McMottie half grinned. “Maybe not, ma’am. But it’s always nice to see you in coveralls.”
She squinted, but his open frank smile didn’t seem to mask a double entendre. Maybe he just meant … oh, never mind. “All right,” she snapped. “How about the overheating issue on number three drive motor?”
“Sensor fault, ma’am. Easy fix. Replaced that and CASREP’d issue’s resolved.”
“Fluctuations in the low-voltage distribution system after switching to manual control?”
“Did a root-cause analysis and found it in that new software drop. Bad response logic from the SDC when it translated the manual control order. Patched it with code from the previous flight. Ran it fifteen times. No recurrence, smooth output.”
“Give it fifty more cycles before you report it fixed.”
He nodded gravely. “Aye aye, Skipper.”
“And all those spare parts back here, still in their boxes?”
Another grave nod. “You know what they say, ma’am. ‘Engineer’’s just another word for ‘hoarder.’”
Up two platforms and aft again, this time to the after mounts. She took her time and did just as thorough a job, though her legs ached now and her headache was forming up for a new assault. She inspected for proper stowage and cycled the safety interlocks. Then looked for missile hazards, fire hazards, and hygiene and safety violations.
A bustle of activity r
ose behind her as the divisions mustered to clean, restow, and repaint. Unfortunately the hands she could call on were all too few. Her first command had manned a ten-thousand-ton hull with nearly 380 officers and enlisted, when you included the helicopter flight crews. The new cruisers displaced nearly double that, but with half the personnel. The railguns and lasers had further strained the manning situation, since the ship retained PVLS and conventional weapons. There’d been savings in admin and engineering, but even with a wartime plus-up to complement the baseline manning, she had fewer than two hundred warm bodies.
In the aft magazine a petty officer objected mildly. “Ma’am, the war’s over. We really got to worry about handling placards for HVAP projectiles?”
“The war may be over. Right now all we have is an armistice.”
His face changed. “So we could go back out.”
She considered her answer carefully. Anything the CO said would carom around the ship like a rubber bullet. “I don’t think we will, but sure … we could. This peace might not hold. And even if it does, we still have the Russians up there looking to tear off tasty pieces wherever they can.”
“Pieces. Off of China, you mean?”
“Exactly. They’re already occupying part of Manchuria, on the basis of their last-minute declaration of war. And the trouble with feeding a bear one cookie … well, you know where I’m going with that.”
He made a wry face. “I don’t want to seem … uh, contrary, Skipper … but why should we care about what happens to the slants?”
She couldn’t help letting a quarter-smile slip. But then the itch flared. She scratched at her neck, then jerked her nails away. “Whether you or I care or not doesn’t really matter. If we get tasked, we’d better be ready.” She pointed at the placard she’d found lying on the deck behind a control console. “So let’s get that glued back on, and make sure the battle lantern’s angled to illuminate it.”