Claws That Catch votsb-4

by John Ringo

  “We will continue,” Colonel Che-chee responded tartly. “I would suggest Delta-One to start and a maximum of ten gravities of acceleration. I will explain to my people what is about to occur and then walk them through it. Slowly.”

  “Very well,” the CO said. “Tell me when you’re ready.” He looked over at the TACO, Alexander White, and shrugged. “I guess even a hinky fighter system is better than nothing.”

  Weaver sighed. “Define hinky.”

  The job of an XO, as noted, was to ensure that the ship functioned so that the CO just had to order it around. His was the tedious task of making sure that the personnel files were updated, that there was enough food, that the systems were working. Guns were pretty important to a warship.

  “Hinky,” the Eng said. “The port side chaos ball generator system has been having random malfunctions when we run tests on it. We’re not sure why.”

  “I assume you’ve been running down the malfunctions,” Weaver said. “Where’s the fault?”

  “We’ve been trying, sir,” the Eng said uncomfortably. “But the problem is that the system is partially Hexosehr and part human.”

  “I know that, Eng,” Weaver said dryly. “I was part of the design team. Is it in the interface? That tested out perfectly well when we installed it. For that matter, it was working when we were on Earth.”

  “It’s one of those intermittent things, sir,” the Eng said. “We get a fault in the feedback system, then when we try to run it down it’s gone. The TACO put the gun teams on it when it first cropped up. They eliminated it being in the software and they pulled down three of the ball generators and couldn’t find any fault readings in them. So I put two electronics mates and a network mate to work on it. They couldn’t find any physical faults in the system. Then the whole port side crashed the day after they got done. And then it came back up on the first restart and worked like a charm all day. Now we’ve got faults again.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not the software,” Bill said. “By the time we got to designing that, the Hexosehr had been over our software protocols pretty thoroughly and they wrote most of it. All I can suggest is keep looking. I know who I’d suggest to look at it…”

  “Miss Moon, right?” the Eng said, somewhat sarcastically.

  “O ye of little faith,” Bill said sourly. “She’s been driving me crazy. She’s going crazy being cooped up in an empty science section. And, yes, that is who I’d put on it if it weren’t for the CO’s orders. You might get some fresh ideas in there, bring in some people you normally wouldn’t. About all I can suggest.”

  “Fresh faces,” the Eng said, shrugging. “I’ll think on it, sir.”

  “I want to know right away if anything goes wrong with the guns,” Weaver said, turning back to his computer. “You know the way out.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “ What are you doing?” Weaver asked, rubbing his stomach and yawning.

  It was two hours before his shift started and he’d been up late trying to catch up on paperwork. But he’d decided there was only one choice in the ongoing battle with Chief Dump — Duppstadt, which was to check on every meal before it was cooked.

  Two hours was about right for the cooks to be just starting their preparations, but when he arrived four cooks were dumping scrambled eggs into containers, sliced bread was piled on the counters drying out and that horrible greasy bacon was already, supposedly, “cooked” and was piled in masses, the majority of it swimming in grease.

  Bill had barely been able to conjure how Duppstadt could possibly have achieved his feats of culinary legerdemain. Now he had a clear vision. So clear he stood dumbfounded, just blinking at the startled cooks.

  “Are you shiny, sir?” the lead petty officer asked.

  “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Bill asked, broken out of his stasis. “Breakfast doesn’t serve for two hours.”

  “Chief Duppstadt’s orders, sir,” the LPO said, stone-faced. “Get everything prepared in advance then clean the kitchen for inspection. Thirty minutes before chow’s up we have an inspection of the kitchen, so we have to have everything prepared in advance. Sir.”

  Bill looked at the food and couldn’t figure out what to do. His first instinct was to tell them to dump the stuff and start over, but that would be a huge waste, one whole meal down the garbage chute. Given that the limiting factor on the Blade’s endurance was quite simply food, he couldn’t do that.

  “And where is the chief?” Bill asked.

  “He gets here for inspection, sir,” the LPO said. “We’ll be ready for you to inspect in an hour and a half or so. Sorry it’s such a mess, but we were…”

  “Cooking,” Bill said. “The idea, though, LPO… Oh, never mind. When the Chief arrives for ‘inspection,’ tell him that it’s cancelled and he is to report to my office. I will expect him in one hour and forty minutes from now, not one hour and forty-two.”

  “Two hours?” Bill shouted. “You’re having the cooks prepare the food two hours in advance so you can run some damned inspection?”

  “I keep a clean kitchen, sir,” Chief Duppstadt said, standing at attention and looking at the bulkhead behind the officer. “Always have, always will. Won’t have no filth in my kitchen, sir!”

  “No, you just serve it!” Bill snarled. “Chief Duppstadt, listen to me very carefully. Here is the revised schedule for your kitchen. You will begin your meal preparations at the latest possible moment to have food on the table for the shift’s designated meal times. You may then, when the service has been completed, clean your kitchen and inspect; then you will begin preparations for the next meal, repeating this process. If I ever go down there and find two hundred pounds of eggs prepared two hours in advance and cooling, I will upon our return to Earth ensure that you are sent to the coldest, nastiest, most forsaken outpost the United States Navy has to offer, be it on Earth or off. As something other than a cook. And you had better figure out how to actually apply both eggs and bacon to a griddle for long enough that they cook or so help me God I’ll have you strapped to the exterior guns for the duration of the voyage! If I’m feeling merciful, and I rarely am after eating your slop, I will afford you the luxury of a spacesuit!”

  It had to be done.

  Bill was just at his wits end. Systems breaking that nobody knew how to fix. Crew on the edge of mutiny over the food. More paperwork than could be done by a legion of clerks and the CO riding his ass Every. Single. Moment.

  He just couldn’t take it anymore. He HAD to blow off some stress somehow. He was starting to figure out why submariners were such practical jokers. He’d considered that solution and rejected it. There was a better way.

  He picked up the guitar, tuned it carefully, then kicked on the speakers. There was a dull thump that rattled the few nicknacks on a shelf. The curtain that had replaced his door fluttered in the sudden pressure change then settled slowly, quivering as if in anticipation. Or, perhaps, fear.

  When under stress, Weaver liked to blow it off in one of several ways. His preferred method was going on long mountain bike runs. But that was sort of out on the Blade. Second to that was his karate fetish. He’d considered checking to see if any of the Marines had serious hand-to-hand skills but never quite had the time.

  The last was to play guitar. Play it very loud. And headphones just weren’t the same.

  “WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?” the torpedoman screamed.

  He’d been just about to insert a microchip into one of the ardune torps. The chip had failed a diagnostic and since it controlled the ardune release, that was considered “ungood.”

  Ardune was the Adar name for what humans called “quarkium,” a material made up entirely of unique quarks. What type of quark, up, down, strange, charmed, didn’t really matter. The thing about quarks was, they were the building blocks of matter. But they had to pair up to form “normal” particles like protons and neutrons.

  A mass of “unique” quarks acted much like the neutrons in a fission rea
ction, breaking up not just atoms but their building blocks and, along the way, releasing lots of energy. Essentially all the energy in the matter. And since they still couldn’t bind, they kept going and going and going.

  Antimatter worked on the basis of Einstein’s famous E=mc2. But antimatter only hit regular matter and converted all the energy once. Quarkium did that and kept going.

  It was brutally dangerous stuff. Also lovely for causing explosions. Which was why the torpedoes and missiles in the Blade used the stuff. But an uncontrolled release would be… ungood.

  Fortunately, he hadn’t quite gotten it seated when the room began to vibrate. He was afraid the harmonics might just shake the whole damned room apart.

  “ ‘MISSISSIPPI QUEEN’!” the torpedo room chief shouted back. “BY MOUNTAIN! ONE HIT WONDER FROM THE ’70S! GUITAR’S NOT BAD BUT I DON’T KNOW WHO IN THE HELL IS SINGING! HE SOUNDS LIKE A VULTURE THAT’S JUST FOUND A WHOLE ELEPHANT CARCASS!”

  “XO, in my professional opinion, I find that your singing is an undue stress to the crew and a potential safety hazard,” the CO said balefully. He’d been a victim of part of the concert all the way back in Conn, which was a third of the length down the ship from the XO’s quarters. “In the future you will refrain from playing your music outloud just as the rest of the crew must. That, by the way, is an order, XO.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bill said.

  “Dismissed.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Come on in,” Berg said at a knock on the hatch to his quarters.

  “Ik squeak,” the Cheerick in the opening said, waving to him.

  “You want me to come?” Berg said, looking up from his studies. “Shiny. I guess.”

  The Cheerick seemed to get lost part of the way to wherever he was leading the lieutenant then found the compartment he was looking for. After a knock he waved Berg into the quarters.

  “Perk,” Lady Che-chee said. “Come.”

  “Lady Che-Chee?” Berg asked, confused.

  Lady Che-chee’s stateroom was larger than the one that he shared but she was, after all, a colonel. Not to mention a personal friend of the Cheerick monarch.

  What surprised Berg was the books. The room was absolutely packed with them. They filled all the few bookshelves and more were piled on the deck.

  Thinking about it, he really shouldn’t have been surprised. Lady Che-chee’s manor had been similarly filled with books and even ancient tablets from early Cheerick history. The lady was a renowned soldier among the Cheerick but at heart she really seemed to be a scholar.

  However, the weird part was that most of them seemed to be in English. He spotted multiple military manuals, biographies and histories of Earth civilizations in the collection as well as some stuff that looked like military fiction.

  “Kit,” the colonel said, pointing to a human sized station chair. She picked up a device and squeaked into it for a moment, then held it out and hit a button.

  “Welcome to my quarters, Lieutenant Bergstresser. I am gratified that you have been made an officer, even if you are a male. Your prowess in battle is great. It is to be hoped that your sex will not interfere with your thinking. But you humans are different so perhaps you can be wise as well as brave.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Berg said, confused by the device as well as the summons. “May I ask what that is?”

  “Hexosehr translator,” the colonel said, speaking directly through the device. “I just got it delivered before we took off. We weren’t sure if the Hexosehr could make it in time. It works for translating Cheerick to English and a couple of other human languages and to Hexosehr and Adar. So, I wanted to ask, how do you like being an officer?”

  “I’m starting to regret it, frankly,” Berg said. “I’m spending most of my time pushing paper and the rest trying to catch up on professional studies.”

  “It’s always like that as a junior officer,” the colonel said. “But think of it as an investment for your future. The goal is always command, that’s what makes all the necessary bullmaulk necessary. What are you studying?”

  “Small unit employment,” Bill said.

  “Which manual?” the colonel said. “I’ve been studying your Earth methods and tactics. I find many of them novel and others things that I’ve been proposing for, oh, years! I had most of your military manuals sent to me even as I started to learn to read English. I probably have it here, somewhere.”

  “Marine Small Unit Tactics,” Bill said. “FMFM 6-4 Marine Rifle Company/Platoon Operations.”

  “Got it,” the colonel said, pulling out a book. “Yes, this one I have read. I believe I understand it rather well and can probably help you. I have more experience in small unit operations than I like to think about.”

  “Thank you,” Berg said.

  “I need a favor, however,” the colonel admitted. “My riders are simple people, all males, alas. And they are having a hard time understanding space combat.”

  “Well, ma’am,” Berg said, uncomfortably, “I’m not sure I understand it all that well.”

  “No, but you have more of a grasp of human technology,” the Cheerick replied. “We need to have a way to practice that does not just happen outside the hull.”

  “Use your simulator,” Berg said, frowning.

  “What is a ‘simulator’?”

  “Holy chither,” Berg muttered. “You guys don’t have simulators? A simulator is just that, if that thing’s translating right. It’s a thing that simulates what you do in your job. We Marines have simulators for both Wyvern combat — we actually just climb in our Wyverns for that — and for unarmored combat. We do part of it just on a computer,” Berg added, gesturing at the monitor on the colonel’s desk. “For more of it there’s a small simulator on the ship where we can simulate entry training, for example.”

  “We have no such thing,” the colonel said, frowning. “There were none put on this ship that I know of.”

  “I’m pretty sure there weren’t,” Berg admitted. “Which was one hell of an oversight, pardon my language.” He thought about it for a second and then grinnned. “But I can think of somebody who could help…”

  “Oh, sure,” Miriam said when the problem was put to her. “You guys just follow the icons on your HUD. I can work up an interface for your helmets. Actually, you’re going to have to use the suit; there’s no separate helmet. But it should work just fine.”

  “That… sounds as if it would work,” Lady Che-chee said, sighing. “I say that as if I understood what you were saying. I lie. This… this… ‘technology’ is so hard for us to understand! Just the fact that pictures appear is too much like magic! Technology is a sword or even one of the new steam power engines. These I can understand, barely. But computers? Electronics? Heads-up-diplays? These are magic!”

  “You get used to it,” Berg promised. “It hit humans pretty fast and hard but we got used to it, too. And then the Adar came along…”

  “Just one problem,” Miriam interjected pensively. “The control of the dragonfly is entirely mental. I can’t think of any way to get that to work. I could talk to Doctor Chet and see if he’s gotten anywhere on it, but…”

  “I’d already thought of that,” Berg said. “Ever use a flight simulator program?”

  “No,” Miriam admitted.

  “Well, when you push the stick, you’re thinking where you want the plane to go,” Berg said. “Sometimes, when you don’t understand what you’re doing, you’re just really, really wishing. Especially just before a crash. But the thought is there. I don’t see why it would affect the interaction with the dragonflies. Of course, the guys are going to end up trying to use a stick when they’re flying the dragonflies. But that shouldn’t be a problem. Heck, maybe mount one for them so they have something to hold onto…”

  “Are we sure this is going to work?” Colonel Che-chee asked. “Even a Mother must consider face, as you humans would put it.”

  The Cheerick pilot ready-room was set up much like any ready-room in
history, a series of auditorium-style chairs with a dais at the front, a podium and a massive plasma-screen monitor. The major difference was that the chairs were oversized for a human. They were even oversized for a Cheeirck; they had been designed to take pilots wearing their suits.

  “It should work fine,” Miriam said. The colonel was in the front row and the diminutive linguist was up on the dais, punching in the scenario. “Just remember to use the joysticks I installed in your suits. Otherwise the computer doesn’t know where you’re trying to go. I’ve set this up for a very simple movement. We’ll take it nice and slow…”

  “…Okay, now that I’ve disconnected the arm controls on the suits for training, this should work perfectly. And I’m sure we can get Crak-chee’s arm reconnected in no-time. I’m not so sure about the damage to the chair…”

  Colonel Che-chee was panting inside her suit and the thing was filling with shed. The furry Cheerick shed massively, especially when stressed and she was very stressed. Flying a dragonfly was a matter of thinking where you were going. They had been working hard enough that control of the “joysticks” had become second nature, but she still wished she could simply think the maneuvers. There was also the fact that the Cheerick were not naturally a hunting species. They had derived from omnivores, true, but omnivores that got most of their meat from carrion and very small game. They did not have the natural chase reaction that even humans posessed. And whereas in humans, following an icon with the eyes was so automatic as to be hard-wired, indeed hard to ignore, the Cheerick had to concentrate on it.

  But not only was she following the damned dancing karat, she could spare enough time to check her… “monitors” and her riders were staying in perfect sync. They were flying as if they were crack cavalry on boards, which was where she’d drawn them from. Finally, it was coming together.