For Honor We Stand

by Harvey G. Phillips

  “Now that you mention it, sir, sixty to ninety minutes to input SINs for the critical compression drive components with the drive off line would make worlds of difference.”

  “You’ve got it. Get your people together and let me know when you’re ready to start. As soon as I get the word, we’ll go sublight and keep the compression drive off line for as long as you need. Then, when we’re back on the compression drive and you are comfortable that your department can spare you for an hour or so, we need to put some heads together to see what to do about this. Like the drug problem last month, I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

  “Don’t say that, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Icebergs.” He shuddered. “Bad news all around.”

  “Wherever did you get that idea, Werner?”

  “A very distant ancestor of mine was on the black gang, shoveling coal on one of those steam-driven, coal fired, salt water ocean liners that used to be the only way of crossing oceans on Earth. His ship had a bit of a run in with one of those blighters one dark April night in the North Atlantic. He died along with all of his best mates and nearly four-fifths of her crew. She was a breathtakingly beautiful ship, though. They called her the Titanic.

  ***

  The lemon spice cake in the Captain’s Day Cabin was at least up to the galley’s usual high standards for such things, if not a bit above. Reputedly, it was made from a recipe handed down from Chief Boudreaux’s 96 year old maternal grandmother who, at last report, was still daily tending her garden’s okra, squash, peppers, and tomatoes in the tiny hamlet of Egan, Louisiana. The tang of the cake went particularly well with strong coffee to help carry the five men eating and drinking together in that small but comfortable space through the usual mid-afternoon slump.

  Brown had gotten the immediate problems with the compression drive solved and the ship was back to crossing the almost measureless distance between the stars at 1960 times the speed of light, putting another light year behind it every 4.46 hours. When Max estimated that each man had enough sugar and caffeine in him to get the job done, he sat up straight, looked them all in the eye, mustered his courage, steeled his resolve, clinched his jaw, and, in the highest tradition of naval commanders going back to the days of Nelson and John Paul Jones turned to his Chief Engineer and said, “Werner, give ‘em the bad news.”

  Brown was not surprised that the buck of explaining the situation passed so rapidly to him. It was, after all, his department, his personnel, and his responsibility. “There’s no way to sugar coat this, gentlemen. For at least the past six months, and probably extending back to eight weeks or so after this vessel was put into service, at least four, and more likely six of the individuals on this vessel performing routine adjustment, maintenance, and parts replacement have been . . . ,’ he paused as though he found it hard to finish the sentence, “gundecking their SIN inputs.”

  “Gott im Himmel,” exclaimed Kraft.

  “Droga, merda, porra,” exclaimed DeCosta.

  The doctor said nothing. All eyes turned to him. He made a sound of exasperation. “Oh. I suppose that immemorial naval custom requires that I now adopt a shocked expression and then utter an exclamation of horror in a language other than Standard. Very well. Allah askina! Will that suffice or is a stronger outburst required? Will someone now tell me what has happened? Truly, you people must remember that I am not a member of your secret society. I do not know the clubhouse password. I have never been taught the secret handshake.”

  All eyes now turned to Max, whose job this had become. “The best way to understand this problem is to understand that there are, for all intents and purposes, two USS Cumberlands. There is the tangible Cumberland made of exotic alloys and LumaTite and plastic that exists in the physical universe. And, there is the intangible mathematical/theoretical Cumberland consisting of equations and definitions and algorithms and calibration data that exists and functions in the digital realm of the ship’s computer. This digital ship is called the REFSTAMAT--the Navy has such a way with catchy acronyms; it stands for Reference State Matrix—and it has to match the real ship exactly. The degree of correspondence between the actual ship and REFSTAMAT is called ‘congruence’ and, for our computer control systems to function properly, it has to be very, very high. Ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, percent at a minimum, which we call ‘five balls,’ how a nine gets to be a ‘ball’ I don’t know. The preferable condition though, is to have a congruence of ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine percent which, you’ve probably guessed is called “six balls.” It isn’t. We call it a “six pack.”

  “And when congruence starts to degrade, we start to have problems.” Brown sounded worried. “The computer helps us manage the ship in literally millions of ways. And I mean literally ‘literally,’ not, ‘literally in the figurative sense’ which, by the way is not ‘literally’ at all, but is what so many cretins with no respect for language as a tool for precise communication mean by the term. There are about seven million commands or command interpretations sent by the computer, various sub-processors, or by control input devices to ship systems every day. When Mr. Fleischman changes the setting on the controller for the compression drive, he isn’t directly changing the degree to which the unit distorts the fabric of the space-time continuum. Instead, he is commanding the computer to formulate, send, and monitor for effect a whole host of intricate setting changes inside the drive unit designed to bring about that result. To make those determinations correctly and for the system to respond precisely to the commands, the computer has to know the precise nucleonic transfer coefficient of every modulator, the precise resistance of every resistor, the output efficiency and frequency bias of every emitter. In that way, as the simulated ship engages in digital maneuvers and receives mathematical damage and is commanded to make simulated control inputs, the computer will faithfully and accurately predict and represent what happens to the actual ship engaging in real maneuvers and sustaining real damage and doing all those other things.”

  “And,” Max continued, “we have to tell the computer more than just what we do to the ship. When a new part is plugged in, the man performing the repair is supposed to enter, not just the code for that type or model of part, but the unique manufacturer’s Serial Inventory Number—and, yes, we do call it a SIN, as in “mortal sin”—for that particular part that distinguishes it from every other part ever made. That number has associated in the computer’s database with it all of the calibration test information that tells it exactly how that particular part is expected to perform—and on some critical high energy parts there are variations that are enough to matter. It’s supposed to be real simple. When you put the new part in, you use your padcomp or the nearest work station to tell the computer that you removed the current part and installed replacement part number such and such, and you’re done.”

  “Only, it’s not quite so simple in practice,” Brown jumped in, his anxiety over the situation making it difficult to remain silent. “The SIN is a thirty-five digit number. We used to use a bar code scanner, but the error rate was too high. The bar code is on the box, not on the part and sometimes the parts are mis-boxed or unboxed before they get to the installation point, so we count on the man to get the number into the computer. The software tries to make it easier by pulling one up for you—the number for the part that it thinks is most likely to come up next out of the spares inventory. Unfortunately, its guess is right only about eighty percent of the time, especially on small parts. So, what the technician is supposed to do then is to enter the correct number manually. But, when a tech is hurried, or doesn’t look, or doesn’t care, or just gets lazy, he won’t correct the number, but will just hit the ENTER key and call it done. When that happens too many times, the congruence of the REFSTAMAT starts to degrade. You don’t have a six pack. You don’t have five balls. What you’ve got, old chap, is a congruence coefficient of ninety-nine point nine, nine, which in my business is called a ‘four-nication
.’”

  The doctor, while keeping an almost perfectly open mind about what people did in their private lives and with whom they did it, was something of a prude regarding the language with which those acts were described. “Why use such an offensive term for a technical condition?”

  “Because,” Max said quietly, “when your congruence gets that low, you’re really, really screwed.”

  “Spot on.” Brown said. “We’re screwed, we should say. Now, with most systems, it doesn’t matter if something is a little bit off. Who cares if the air flow rate into the Wardroom varies by three percent because the system is coded for the wrong air impeller or if the temperature in Frozen Food Locker Number Two is two degrees colder than nominal because a heat exchanger is miscoded?” Brown started to gesture emphatically with his index finger. “But, small variations make a huge difference in certain other systems, especially in the compression drive, weapons fire control, point defense fire control, and a few other systems. The value for the traverse speed of an aiming component is a little off? The weapon misses its moving target by twenty meters. We die. The frequency bias of a point defense sensor receiver is off by one hundredth of a percent, the system reads the wrong frequency for a sensor beam return, gets the Doppler wrong, and miscalculates the velocity for an incoming Krag missile. The system shoots ahead of the missile thereby missing the intercept. We die. The compression drive regulation is off by point one or point two Oppenheimers, we get major compression shear, the continuum density interface and the hull boundary intersect. We die.”

  “A consummation devoutly to be avoided. I can see why that might cause substantial difficulty.” The doctor nodded thoughtfully. “What is to be done, then? Clearly, it is not practical to reenter the numbers for every part on the ship and to check every setting and calibration. There must be a few million.”

  Max, DeCosta, Kraft, and Brown met each other’s eyes in open disbelief for an instant. Max spoke with elaborate patience. “Doctor, there are a few million parts in the point defense systems, a few million parts in the propulsion systems, a few million parts in the sensors. The ship as a whole has just shy of fifty-five million parts.”

  “Indeed. I’m sure I had no idea. Well, then, how can the problem be addressed? Checking fifty-five million parts would take years.”

  “Fortunately, the situation is not quite that dire,” said Brown. “The only parts and components that are in question are the ones that have been the subject of replacement, maintenance, or calibration by members of the crew since the ship was put into service about a year and a half ago. I don’t think we have anything to worry about from work done in a station, a yard, or by a tender, since everything those chaps do, including the calibration inputs, is checked by an inspector as they go. We can identify what work has been done from the work orders and maintenance logs. My first cut on a list contains about fifteen thousand items. I think that there are some duplicates that didn’t get scrubbed out, plus what we call ‘inert items’ like pieces of deck, lengths of pipe, plate fasteners, and so forth. Any variation from one to the other of those is going to be so small and so non-critical that we can get those corrected at our leisure. That’s going to leave something like thirteen thousand by my estimate. If each of these things takes twenty-five minutes to locate, check, and input, and if I put six men on the job, we are talking about just over nine hundred hours to get the job done.”

  “That’s two weeks,” said Sahin.

  “About fifteen days, if I have six men working on it without breaks twenty-four hours a day. Obviously, my men aren’t going to work without breaks. I may be able to juggle my crew shifts around so that I have six men from every shift. The good part about this is that after about a day or so we will have most of the problem taken care of in terms of the components and systems that are most likely to cause trouble. After that, we’re subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns. We still need to get the data corrected, but it will make less and less of a short term difference.”

  Max’s face took on a puzzled expression. “What I don’t get is that if this problem has been going on for so long, why is it that it has manifested itself only now?”

  Brown gritted his teeth in anger. “There, sir, is where we come to the real problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “As the old saying goes, skipper,” Brown answered, “it’s not the crime; it’s the coverup.”

  “Are you telling me that, not only have men on my ship been entering false data into the ship’s computer, but that they have been deliberately taking affirmative steps to conceal it?” Max spoke slowly, deliberately, formally, his voice a study in cold rage.

  “Yes, Captain. That is exactly what I mean.” The Engineer was just as formal.

  “Fils de putain,” he said, uttering the worst imprecation he ever let himself apply to someone else Who Wears the Blue. He shook his head, as much in sadness and betrayal as in anger.

  “I don’t know the procedures in your department, Lieutenant Brown,” said the doctor, “so I do not know exactly what would be involved in covering this kind of thing up. What, exactly, must one do to prevent it from coming to light?”

  “Quite a lot, actually,” Brown responded. “When the computer detects that a part’s characteristics are too far off from the ones the REFSTAMAT is assuming it has, it spits out a check alert on the component and a technician from the General Maintenance department is supposed to go and find the cause. That means laying eyes on the part, verifying that its SIN was correctly entered, and then performing whatever test, measurement, or observation necessary to determine that the component is functioning properly. If there is a malfunction, either the component gets repaired and its modified performance parameters are incorporated in the REFSTAMAT or it gets replaced and a new SIN gets entered. If the component is merely performing in a manner somewhat different from predictions, then the technician puts the appropriate kind of meter on it, tests its performance parameters, and inputs those as an observed divergence from the data associated with the SIM. After that, the new data is part of the REFSTAMAT and Bob’s your uncle.

  “When Bob is not your uncle, however, or even a relation of the most distant discernable degree, is when the aforementioned technician goes in and checks the aforementioned component, and determines that the SIN on the part and the SIN in the REFSTAMAT are not the same. In that event, everything is supposed to come to a full stop.” Brown stared bitterly into his coffee. More and more, he saw the events in terms of disloyalty to him, personally. “Again, there is a very clear procedure. The REFSTAMAT is corrected on the spot. The technician logs an MDR. That’s a Major Discrepancy Report for your benefit, doctor. The MDR is automatically routed to the Chief Engineer, the Executive Officer, and the Security Officer.” He leaned back in his seat, crossed his arms across his chest, and lapsed into silence, as though rendered mute by the enormity of the offense.

  Major Kraft continued the explanation. “We three officers, and recall, Doctor, that on a ship this small the Marine Detachment Commander doubles as the Security Officer, do not have the option of letting the report lie. Ach, nein. Das is streng verboten. Rather, we are required to conduct a thorough investigation, documented by a detailed report filed with the Office of the Inspector General, the Deputy Chief Staff for Fleet Maintenance, and the Task Force Commander’s Flag Secretary, in which we determine the root cause of how such a deplorable state of affairs came into being. Then, when we find the responsible party or parties, we are required, required mind you, to hold them for Court Martial. Not put them on report. Not issue a formal reprimand. Not refer them to Captain’s Mast. But a signed and sealed referral to a full blown, full dress, formal Court Martial. And not a three-man panel, either, but the Five Man Full Monty, because it is at least theoretically possible to be sent to a penal asteroid at hard labor for thirty years.”

  Brown reentered the conversation. “This is no simple act of dereliction of duty by a single man. Not only do we have the man who did not
enter the data correctly in the first place, but some of these components, at least several dozen and maybe as many as a few hundred, would have raised computer flags in the manner we just talked about, in which case a man would have gone to check them. That man, or those men, had to have seen that the SINs didn’t match and then failed to report it.”

  He sighed heavily. “On top of that, my initial poking around shows signs of ad hoc tweaks to the REFSTAMAT of various systems by the dozens to zero out observed anomalies. ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave,’ and all that. Divergences start to crop up and someone gets into the REFSTAMAT and starts changing parameters by trial and error until the congruence numbers get back in the right range. Of course, these ad hoc changes run the risk of making the situation worse under another set of operational conditions because it’s all educated guesswork, you see, and not very educated guesswork at that because the men doing it are fairly near the bottom of the ladder in engineering skill and experience. The ‘fix’ that solves the problem today actually makes it worse tomorrow, requiring yet another ad hoc fix, and another, until the situation deteriorates to the point we reached today. It looks as though at least three people were involved, but the best fit with the data is that it was six people. Six of the eight in the maintenance section. I find it difficult to imagine that they managed to get a deception of this magnitude past so many sets of eyes, two of which belong to me, unless these individuals worked together. There is no getting around it. This is a conspiracy.” The word left a bad taste. “They weren’t just deceiving us, they were working together to deceive us.” He sighed in disgust. “After what we’ve been through together, I expected better from these men.”