“Yes.”
“Take a look at this.” He stood up, walked over to the display wall, and pointed at a section of the orders. “As per orders of COMTRANROUT in Norfolk.…Maybe it’s my imagination, but it looks like Hornmeyer is telling us that it wasn’t his idea to put Duflot in command of the group. I think he’s saying that the decision was imposed on him by the admiral in charge of Transit Routing. I’m not sure I like the looks of that.”
“XO,” said Max, nodding, “I bet you’re right on that one. COMTRANROUT is Vice Admiral Hoffman. His brother’s a senator. I’m sure I don’t like the looks of that. Not one bit.” He snorted derisively. “Escort duty. Been there. Done that. Paid for the memory wipe. I spent the dullest year of my life doing it one month. Seriously, it’s the dullest duty in Known Space. I wish we could get a more interesting assignment.”
The doctor looked genuinely horrified. “Perish the thought,” he said hurriedly.
“What’s wrong with wanting more interesting duty?”
“The problem, Captain, with wishing for more interesting duty, is that—based on the history of your association with this vessel—you are very likely to get your wish.” He paused. “And will then wish to God that you had not.”
Max interpreted the admiral’s remark about not conserving fuel as an implicit directive to head for the rendezvous point in a straight line on compression drive at the Cumberland’s maximum safe sustained speed of 1960 c. The system in which the rendezvous was to take place lay roughly in the direction of the Core Systems, the fifty or so star systems at the heart of the Union that were home to 42 percent of its population and 67 percent if its heavy industrial capacity.
Roughly thirty light years separated the Cumberland’s current position in the Rashid system and the rendezvous point, six days’ travel at 1960 c. A quiet, six-day, high-c run would be nice. Max would see that the crew got in some much-needed training, finished repairing some of the battle damage that the Rashidian shipyard did not get to, and generally tended to the mundane but important business of keeping a warship in fighting trim—or in the case of the Cumberland, trying to get it into shape in all respects, after having been so badly, abusively, and incompetently commanded for so long by Max’s predecessor, the thrice-damned Commander Allen K. Oscar.
After getting a bit of sleep, checking on Park and the injured men in the Casualty Station (all of whom were expected to make a full recovery), and grabbing a sandwich (the last two of the “exploding ham” variety), Max followed a nagging hunch by going to Engineering to check how the compression drive was holding up under the stress of a long high-c run.
The first place Max went was MECC (pronounced “meck”), the Master Engineering Control Center, a compact compartment equipped with consoles from which all key engineering systems could be controlled and monitored. Unless there was a problem, Lieutenant Brown could usually be found here. Every console was manned, but not by Brown.
Not a good sign.
If Brown weren’t in MECC, then there was likely a problem, probably with the compression drive. Max knew: find the problem and you find Brown. Max headed for the Compression Drive Equipment Room. He palmed the scanner, punched in his code, and entered.
Brown was at the Compression Drive Main Control Console with two men standing beside him, looking so intently at the systems status displays that they didn’t hear Max come in. Max could see from his vantage point at the door that there were several caution and warning indicators blinking yellow and orange on the display. All three men looked worried and perplexed.
“It’s looking like a bloody triple failure,” Brown said to the other two men.
“But that’s impossible,” the other two responded in nearly perfect unison. The man closest to Brown, whom Max recognized as Petty Officer Second Class Ravelojaona, went on. “Those units are designed to withstand five times that much load—for thirty years without failing! If it wasn’t for the freak deflector feedback caused by that Krag warhead, we wouldn’t even be talking about replacing the originals until years after we’re all retired. Now that we’ve got three fresh units in there, I can’t believe we’re having issues with even one, much less three.”
“Somehow we must have gotten a bad set,” Brown said reasonably. “Bugger me how three bad units got past quality control, but look at the display. We just swapped them in, and none of the three is performing up to specs—they’re not smoothing out the natural particle rate fluctuations from the Randall-Sundrum generator. We’re going to have to shut the unit down. I can do a nanomolecular refusion on the old units that will let us run them at normal output until we get to the rendezvous point. The Patillo Higgins will have spares for us there. All right lads, start preparing the system for a staged shutdown. I’ll notify CIC. The skipper won’t like this one bit.”
“Bugger what the skipper thinks, old man,” Max said in a laughably bad facsimile of Brown’s British accent, causing all three heads to swivel in his direction. He went on in his usual unremarkable Standard, “Just get the problem solved. What units are we talking about?”
“The Frasch-Freiburg capacitors,” Brown answered.
“The ‘French Fries’?” Max said, disbelievingly. “But—”
“Exactly, my good man. But the board doesn’t lie.”
“This smells fishy to me, Wernher. I’ve never heard of one of these things going bad until it was old enough to run for a seat in the Assembly. You get ready to take the unit off-line, and I’ll let CIC know what to expect.” Just as Max touched the comm panel, an alarm started to blare. He snatched his hand back reflexively, as though he had somehow triggered the malfunction.
“Bloody Hell!” Brown exclaimed. “All three units just slagged.”
Max didn’t know exactly what happened when three Frasch-Freiburg capacitors melted and lost their resistant properties simultaneously. But since the units were responsible for evening out the random variations in the raw tachyo-graviton output from the compression drive’s Randall-Sundrum generator, it wasn’t likely to be good. He went to the Emergency Actions panel in the compartment, keyed in his access code, manually activated the compartment’s blast containment field, switched the fire suppression system from SAFE to READY, engaged the radiation shielding, and isolated the area’s atmosphere circulation. These actions showed up immediately on Brown’s status panel.
“Good man, Skipper. You’re about twenty seconds ahead of me,” Brown shouted over the alarm.
Max then keyed the comm panel to speak to CIC. Nelson was in the Big Chair. “Mr. Nelson,” he said, “sound general quarters, engineering casualty. Set Condition Two throughout the ship. Have all hands prepare for emergency compression drive shutdown.”
Nelson acknowledged the order. Max could hear the GQ alarm sounding in the background. He turned his attention back to Brown, who was going down the Compression Drive Emergency Power Down Checklist. It sounded as though he and his men were pushing to finish the checklist as fast as they could.
“Buffers purged,” said Brown.
“Buffers purged, check. Light is blue, gauges read 10 percent or lower,” answered Ravelojaona.
“Primary coolant system from RUN to AUTOSCRAM.”
“Switching primary coolant system from RUN to AUTOSCRAM,” responded Archer, the other crewman. “Main indicator selected for AUTOSCRAM. Auxiliary toggle switches confirmed disengaged.”
“Secondary coolant system from STANDBY to OFF.”
“Secondary coolant, STANDBY to OFF,” Archer answered. “Main switches thrown, auxiliary switches confirmed disengaged.”
“Confirm GO/NO GO for Emergency Compression Drive Shutdown,” said Brown. “Primary systems and emitters.”
“GO!” shouted Ravelojaona.
“Secondary systems and coolant loops.”
“GO!” shouted Archer.
“Shutting down main power to compression drive,
NOW.” He grasped a large orange-red lever on the main panel and, with obvious relief to be shutting down the system without any serious casualty, moved it decisively to the ZERO position.
Nothing happened.
“Balls!” the engineer proclaimed. “Manual!” He and Archer literally ran to a locker located near the drive unit, from which the two men each extracted an L-shaped lever with a complex-looking set of teeth on one end and a handle on the other. Each man inserted the teeth straight down in a sleeve at the base of the unit, Archer into one nearer the door and Brown into one further away. When both levers were seated, they stood up from their insertion points about chest high, where they bent at a right angle to form a meter-long handle with polymer-grip handles for two men each. When both men had firmly grasped one of the handles, Brown shouted, “Push!” Brown and Archer pushed as hard as they could, veins standing out on their faces and necks, but neither arm budged.
Max and Ravelojaona ran over to help, taking the other set of handles on each bar. This time, Max gave the order, “Give it your all on three. One. Two. Three!” All four men strained mightily for fifteen or twenty seconds, to no effect.
“Bloody, bleeding bollocks!” Brown cursed. “They’re fused. Skipper, you and I are going to have to blow the main coupling.”
“Shit,” was all that Max could say. Blowing the main coupling would disable the compression drive for hours until a new coupling was installed, but the alternative was an almost certain compression shear event that would destroy the ship so thoroughly that even her atoms would be shredded into their constituent particles.
Both men took their positions at the main power coupling, a cluster of conduits, equipment boxes, and a console mounted on the aft bulkhead. Brown palmed a biometric scanner on the console and input his authorization code, followed by Max. The console then generated two large red blocks at opposite ends of its two-meter length, each labeled BLOW COUPLING. They were far enough apart that one man could not touch both at the same time. “This has to be simultaneous,” Brown said. “On three.”
Max happened to glance over at the compression drive unit and saw that Archer was now standing near the main access panel. Ravelojaona was busy rousting out the heavy fire extinguisher in case the pyros used to blow the unit started any fires, so he wasn’t watching what the younger crewman was doing. Just as a ball of liquid nitrogen started to coalesce right behind Max’s breastbone at the sight of the man standing in what was, at that moment, the most dangerous place on the ship, he noticed a blue-green glow starting to build behind the observation port in the access panel. He knew what was going to happen.
“Archer,” he screamed, “on the deck!”
Just as the young man looked in Max’s direction and started to process the command, the glow became a blinding glare as the buildup of excess gravitons became too great for the housing to contain. The latch and hinges on the access panel failed under the extreme pressure, blowing the panel off with an ear-splitting BLAM, taking the upper half of Archer’s body with it. For a split second, the young man’s legs continued to stand upright and then flopped over onto the deck, dribbling blood. The rest of Archer’s body was smashed between the shattered access panel and the far bulkhead, turned into an obscenely gelatinous red goo by the extreme force of the impact that reduced his bones to grit and fine powder.
Removed from their generating and containment field, the gravitons passed easily through the hull of the ship and dissipated into space. The shock wave from the explosion, on the other hand, a pressure wave of ordinary air molecules, stayed in the compartment, knocking the three other men to the ground. Bleeding from their ears and noses and barely conscious from internal injuries, Brown and Max struggled to their feet and staggered to the panel. Their eyes met. Max restarted the count, his voice an almost inaudible croak. “One. Two. Three!”
On “Three” both men hit “Blow Coupling.” With a BANG the pyros detonated and broke the power connection. The compression drive unit and its control consoles shut down. As one, Max and Brown fell unconscious to the deck.
Six hours later, Max, Brown, Dr. Sahin, DeCosta, Major Kraft, and Chief Wendt were seated in the Casualty Station main ward. The treatment beds had been pushed out of the way, and a portable table set up, large enough for all six men. The heavily sedated Ravelojaona was in a patient bed in a subsidiary treatment room. As he had been a few meters closer to the blast than Max and Brown and had actually been running toward Archer to knock him to the deck, his injuries were more severe.
“I still believe that this meeting is entirely premature,” Dr. Sahin said before any of the senior officers could bring the meeting to order. “Both the captain and the chief engineer should be in bed, under light sedation, not sitting upright making decisions that can well be postponed.”
Max smiled wanly. “Doctor, I’d love to be horizontal and sedated right now, but I don’t think this can wait. I smell a rat bigger and fatter than the fattest Krag, and I want to get the stink out of my ship. Fast.” He turned to Major Kraft.
“I know I dumped a big load in your lap, but I didn’t see any choice under the circumstances.” He looked significantly at the IV line in his arm. “Have you made any progress?”
“Yes, sir,” Kraft answered. “At least as to the first stage. Because the initial issues were technical rather than legal or law-enforcement related, I enlisted the help of Chief Wendt, who has informed me that he has some conclusions for us. Other than that, he hasn’t told me what his findings are, so I will be learning them at the same time as the rest of you.”
“Very well,” said Max. “Chief?”
Wendt, a small, fox-faced, precise man in his mid-fifties, was (except for some “ancient mariners” working as cooks and stewards) the oldest on the ship. He was also Chief of the Boat, the senior noncommissioned officer on board, and was deeply experienced in the ways of naval machines and of naval men. He knew as much about the parts and pieces that went into making the Cumberland run as any man alive.
“This incident is all about the Frasch-Freiburg capacitors, or the ‘French Fries’ as the men like to call them. So I started with the capacitors themselves. I recovered the slag remaining from the meltdown of the units in the compression drive and tested twenty samples from various locations to be sure that the material I was testing was representative of the composition of the capacitors before they melted down. The slag was consistent within a few percentage points. It tested out as 76 percent silver, 17 percent tantalum, 3 percent gold, 3 percent platinum, 1 percent various impurities and trace elements.”
“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.”
Max had paled as soon as Wendt said 76 percent silver. He began to speak with some difficulty. “Bram, that’s the composition of a standard civilian capacitor. For a freighter or a short-run passenger liner. For a drive that is never run at higher than 500 c.”
“What, then, is the composition of the military unit?” Dr. Sahin asked.
“Very different,” said Wendt between gritted teeth. It’s “81 percent gold and 19 percent tantalum, not counting a thin plating of tantalum on the outside.”
Dr. Sahin nodded slowly, grimly. “I begin to understand. Am I overly cynical in concluding that the civilian unit is tantalum plated as well?”
“You are not,” said Wendt, quietly.
“Which would mean that an
y cosmetic differences between the civilian and military units are trivial, I take it, and would be fairly easily disguised?” The doctor’s voice was grim.
“Correct,” said Wendt.
“And how much gold might there be in one of these ‘french fries’?”
“Total weight, including the contact points and the main capacitor rod itself, 73.5 kilos. Each.” Wendt’s voice had a bitter edge.
“What do the civilian units cost on the open market?” asked the doctor.
“Just over 235,000 credits each,” Wendt replied.
Dr. Sahin winced at the number and then nodded sadly. “And what is the likelihood that one of these spares would be needed during the lifetime of the vessel?”
“Absent battle damage or sabotage, there is a less than 1 in 850,000 chance of any one of the original units failing and needing replacement,” said Wendt. “And if one unit failed and was replaced with one of these lower quality units, the compression drive would still function normally by routing additional graviton flux through the other two units—in practice, they can take nearly three times what they are rated for. It would show up on some of the status displays but might not be noticed for months—at least, not the way Engineering was run when Captain Oscar was in command.”
“Would it be correct to say, then, that an enterprising crew member could sell the true replacement units for several million credits, use a tiny fraction of that sum to purchase civilian units altered to look like the real thing, and reasonably expect that no one would be the wiser until the ship was taken out of commission and the culprit retired?”
“Yes. That would be accurate,” said Wendt.
“It’s a practice as old as the hills,” Max added. “They even had a name for the practice back in the Age of Sail. They called it capabarre. It was expected that certain people on the ship who had custody of the ship’s goods would sell off worn or outdated equipment and matériel for their own account. It was considered an acceptable part of their compensation. Many, however, would take the practice beyond acceptable limits and sell perfectly serviceable equipment and replace it with substandard stuff, to the detriment of their ship. These men could be court martialed, and some received very harsh sentences.”
For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2) Page 19