by John Ringo
"Lasers?" Weaver asked. "What's an SM-9?"
"Where to start?" Bill asked as they entered a hatch on the rear of the sail. There was a ladder there, which made Miller happier. He was half expecting a teleporter or something. Weaver grabbed the sides of the ladder and slid down rather expertly. He'd clearly been around boats. Miller was having various shocks but the worst one had to be Dr. William "How do you use this pistol?" Weaver as a commissioned officer with sea time.
"At the bow?" Miller asked as he slid down the ladder after Weaver.
"Torpedo room," Weaver said, opening the hatch to the conn. "Not very interesting. Planetary study drones and some microsatellites. Well, and the 'torpedoes,' which are really Adari missiles. Range of about seventy klicks. Tracking system from an AMRAAM with some Adari additions. Ardune warhead."
"That's that . . . quark stuff, right?" Miller asked, looking around the conn. It looked pretty much like most of the conns he'd seen in his time. The big difference explained the sliding hatch. There was a big . . . window just under the front of the sail. And a portion of the conn had been elevated so you could see out. He was in a submarine with a . . . window!
"Quarkium," Weaver said, nodding. "Gives about three times the bang of an equal amount of antimatter. Yield's about sixty megatons. Of course, in space it doesn't have much range. The SM-9As have a nuclear fission triggered quarkium warhead that works similar to a hydrogen bomb. The fission bomb triggers the quarkium release, which in turn releases a maulk load of gamma-rays, neutrons, neutrinos, and muons. Did I say energy? Lots of that."
"How fast are the missiles? I mean, space is big, right, so they have to be fast?" Miller continued peering out the window, on a submarine, in front of him. The window seemed to be harder to get used to than the fact that he was standing inside humanity's first starship. A freakin' window on a submarine, he thought.
"The propulsion system is a mix of Adar tech and human. The thing is basically designed around the old nuclear thermal rocket concept but uses a small quarkium reactor instead of a fission reactor. No radiators needed and we use a dense Adar coolant for propellant instead of LOX or hydrogen or water. The Adar stuff gives us waaaay better m-dot. Using an Adar material for the nozzle we were able to get over eight thousand seconds of specific impulse out of it."
"Uh, huh," Miller said, looking at the window on a submarine! "Is that good?"
"Pretty good. They've got an accurate range of about four thousand klicks if there's not a gravity well to fight, but here is the kicker. Max V is right at eighty kilometers per second so it'd take the thing a little less than a minute to travel the full accurate range. After that, they are out of propellant and would be coasting with no control. The ship can go a lot faster than that, so we'll have to be careful and not shoot ourselves." Weaver shrugged. "No idea if the missile's capabilities are good or not compared to anybody else out there, but it's the best we can do. Currently. We're looking at some ways to extend the maneuvering range. Any other questions?"
"More of a statement, sir."
"Yeah, Chief?"
"Sir, there's a grapping window on this submarine."
"Spaceship, Mister Miller," Weaver said with a laugh. "Spaceship."
"Where's your station?" Miller asked, shaking his head and finally tearing his eyes from the window on a submarine!
"Over here," Bill said, waving to a station. "It's a bit odd. I have to be able to navigate underwater and in space." Miller saw a paper plot charter and three separate computer screens. Bill brought up one of the latter and pointed at the planet on the screen. "Since I'm also, effectively, the ship's science officer and they figured that Conn's going to be asking lots of questions, they managed to squeeze me in Conn instead of the usual Nav spot downstairs. Anyway. We're here. Terra. This system's really easy to use until you start filling it with real data, but if we wanted to go to, say, Jupiter . . ."
He brought up a menu and found the planet, then punched in a command. The system displayed a series of coordinates.
"It's at angle 233 mark 5.18, more or less," Bill said. "We need to come around to 233 and point up about five degrees. Only problem is . . ." He punched in another command and nodded. "Depending on how fast we're going, we're liable to run into Venus if we go that way and we're going real close to the Sun."
"I think you need to find a different vector," Miller said dryly, trying not to look over his shoulder. He might need to know this stuff to save the universe and maulk. But there was a . . .
"Sho-tan," Bill said. "So we vector to 197, catch a slingshot around the moon, catch another around Mars and there we are . . ." he added, showing the movement on the screen.
"Glad you're doing it," Miller noted.
"That's what everybody seems to say," Weaver replied, grinning. "One guy I was showing how to do this grabbed his head right in the middle of the lecture and screamed 'Rocks don't move!' "
"Who designed the system?" Miller asked.
"I did," Bill replied, shutting it down. "We paid Rath-Mirorc fifty-five million dollars for a system and they turned one in, late, that couldn't navigate its way out of a wet paper bag. So I built one."
"That's . . . a lot of coding," Miller said. "Isn't it?"
"Nah," Bill replied, waving him towards the rear hatch. "Not that much. Besides, I scagged a bunch of it from other programs."
"Wait; what other programs?" Miller asked, as he ducked through the hatch.
"Oh, here and there . . ." Weaver replied. One of the crew coming the other way limpeted himself into the starboard bulkhead, so that the two officers could squeeze past.
A nuclear submarine does not have much free space. Besides the obvious areas that fill the boat—the conn, the engine room, the missile and torpedo compartments—the boat had to pack in the thousand and one things that kept it going. Kitchens, mess halls, quarters for the crew, a state-of-the-art workshop, laundries.
Because there was only so much space to work with, the boat was cramped. The corridors were narrower than a hallway in a home and much lower. Doors were narrow. Bunks in the crew compartment were four-high stacks and everything the crew carried onboard had to fit in either their bunk or a very small locker.
"You got that thing off the Internet, didn't you," the warrant officer said, sliding past the crewman. He'd spent enough time in subs to know the moves. "You're navigating using some damned freeware program!"
"Only the basic data," Bill protested. "And some of the graphics code. And the kernel, okay. But the gravitational effect algorithm is all mine! Mostly . . ."
"Oh, God," Miller muttered.
"You know we've got to be able to pinpoint our position, right?" Weaver said, cycling open another hatch.
"What?" Miller said, stepping past the officer so he could dog the hatch closed. It was the internal hatches that, in the event of flooding or depressurization, would give the crew some marginal chance to survive. "Let me guess. Use a sextant or something?"
"Sextant's old tech," Bill replied. "I figured out something better."
"I can't wait," the SEAL said.
"See, all you have to do is pick out bright spots against a dark background," Weaver said. "You need to make sure they're the right bright spots, but that's really all it is."
"Some sort of telescope?" Miller asked as they walked down a corridor. They had to stand to the side as a seaman walked past with a large box of cans in his arms. Besides all the other crowding, every nook and cranny of the boat was slowly filling with boxes of food. The major limitation to time "at sea," or in space in this case, was how much food the boat could cram in. It could desalinate water for drinking, cooking and washing. It could break out oxygen from that same water for air. But nobody had figured out a way to make more food. You could pack prepared food into a much smaller area than a hydroponics department could ever create. There were some very new systems that created meat from nutrients and a "kernel" but those were still in their infancy. Until someone came up with a replicator, the menu w
as canned food.
"There's a telescope involved," Weaver said. "But the system that picks it up comes from an optical mouse."
"An optical mouse?"
"Oh yeah, its actually kinda cool. You ever seen those optical mice that have a little red light coming out the bottom where a ball is on the old-style computer mouse?"
"Uh, huh." Miller knew Weaver well enough to know that this explanation was not going to reassure his confidence in the ship's navigation system. But, what the heck. They had some sort of weird sword that would go through the foot of the guy trying to crush them like a beer can, a navigation system off the Internet and a window on a submarine. How much worse could it get?
"Well, they work off a DSP chip that is actually quite remarkable—"
"Doc . . . Sorry, 'Sir' . . . ?"
"DSP . . . digital signal processing. Anyway, there is a little video camera inside the mouse that looks straight down at the table surface. The little red light is just for, well, light. The DSP chip stores the image from the camera and makes note of where any spots, dust specks, scratches, or any other surface features of the table are within the image. The chip then grabs another video image a fraction of a second later and compares it to the previous one. If the spots moved within the image, the chip calculates how far and then moves the cursor on the computer screen a similar distance."
Weaver paused for a breath and Miller stood motionless, not making a sound, but the slightest hint of a rictus grin began to form on his face. It was worse.
"I had the idea that the little DSP chip should work for any sort of scene change. I mean, after all, a video image of stars against the night sky looks about the same as dust specs on a tabletop with the contrast inverted. So, I blaged a few prototypes together to show that it would work. There are several small two-inch diameter telescopes distributed about the surface of the ship and each of these has an optical mouse DSP system fixed at its focal plane. The data is then piped into the main navigational computer where the vector changes found in each DSP chip are filtered and optimized. It actually works really well. And, the good news is we've got over a hundred spares on board."
"Is the whole boat like that?" Miller finally moaned. He'd given up. He had to face it. He'd lost his hardcore doing flowers. He did not want to go fly around the universe in this . . .
"Yep, pretty much," Weaver replied. "Utter blage."
"Okay, you got me again. That's twice you've used that word and I've no clue what it means," Miller said.
"Adar word," Bill replied, shrugging. "Sort of means everything from cannibalize to jury-rig. To blage, I blaged it, we can blage that, it's a blage. Funny thing is, the Adar never had the concept of blaging before they ran into us; all their stuff is so carefully crafted and integrated it makes the Japanese look sloppy. So I don't know where they got the word. But, yeah, it's about as mil-spec as a fifth grade science fair project. An Adar corporation did the IT systems integration and they did a damned fine job. And Rath-Mirorc got the SM-9s right, I'll give 'em that."
The last hatch, as Miller recalled, would have led them to the missile compartment. The missile compartment was the one really open area on the whole boat. Three stories high, with separate decks on each story, it was lined with giant "tubes" that held the ballistic missiles with open areas down the middle and to either side. Bubbleheads called it "Sherwood Forest." It was where SEALs traditionally did their running on-board. Instead of the cavernous area he'd expected, he was confronted by another hatch, a ladder to the side and narrow corridors leading port and starboard. There were two more hatches in the corridor and ladders at both ends.
"Now it gets complicated," Weaver said. He turned right, to port, and went up the ladder. The hatch above opened on another corridor, this one with bunks along the inner bulkhead. Halfway down there was another hatch, just a simple door, with one more at the far end and another ladder going down.
"This is the security section," Bill said. "We've got two security groups. One is Marines; they play outer security. Then each of the technical people is assigned a small security and support detachment. They're drawn from Special Forces."
"No SEALs?" Miller protested.
"No SEALs," Weaver replied. "Wrong sort of mission. Anyway . . ."
He opened up a hatch and waved to the room. It was . . . small. And there were two bunks.
"You get to bunk with the Marine first sergeant," Bill said. "He previously had the compartment all to himself."
"He's going to be pleased as maulk," Miller said, tossing his seabag onto the upper bunk.
"He was indeed," Weaver said.
He led Miller out of the room and down the corridor to the ladder. At the bottom there was a door but he turned to starboard and led Miller to a door in the center of the mission specialist section. This one had a card reader and a big sign "Authorized Crew Only."
Weaver fished out his keycard and held it up, then opened the door. Beyond was the missile compartment. But it was much smaller than on a normal SSBN, with only four missile tubes.
"Those aren't Tridents," Bill said, gesturing at the missiles. "They're 9As."
"How many of them?"
"How many tubes?"
"Four."
"See?" Weaver said, grinning. "It's not true. SEALs can count to ten without taking off their shoes."
"That's it?" Miller asked. "The ship's got four missiles to defend itself?"
"And a couple of lasers that probably won't scrape the paint off of anything we find and some torpedoes that are the rough equivalent of a Saturday Night Special in space terms," Weaver said. "But I think that the LBB is probably superior tech to most of what we'll run into. If I'm right we'll be able to run away from most ships."
"Nice to hear," the SEAL said dryly.
Down both sides of the missile compartment were new generation Wyvern Mark Vs.
The Wyvern had been in development since shortly before the Chen Event. The massive suits were "piloted" by a person sitting more or less in the abdomen. The pilot wore a harness that transferred their movements to the much larger arms, legs and "head" of the Wyvern. With wheels on the elbows, knees and belly, the Wyvern was capable of just about any movement an infantryman could make and was much better armed and armored.
The Mark V stood about three meters tall, the same height as an Adar male. They looked like a very fat man with thin arms and legs, a big butt and a low, rounded vaguely insectile head. The "butt" contained a well-shielded americium nuclear generator for power while the "head" of the suit contained most of the sensors of the suits. In the case of the Wyverns on this mission those included not only full EM sensors, capable of picking up "light" ranging from X-rays to deep infrared, but a variety of other particles and waves.
The Mark V used the newest digital active camouflage system that took a reading from surrounding coloration and pattern and transmitted it to the surface of the suit. Under certain conditions, it could make the suit virtually disappear. They were still damned big things to hide, as both Weaver and Miller knew from painful experience.
"Only twenty Wyverns?" Miller asked, taking a count.
"Three levels to the section," Weaver replied. "Fifty in all. Thirty-eight Marines with armor, me, the three ground mission specialists, their security teams. And a few spares. I guess you're going to be fitted to one of those."
Each Wyvern had to be individually fitted to the user, a process that took about three hours.
"Now for the engineering section."
"I get to see that?" Miller asked. He'd never been given access to engineering.
"You said full access," Weaver replied, grinning.
"I'm not going to like this, am I?"
"Oh, sorry," Mimi said, blinking her eyes.
The small compartment she'd been directed to already had a lady in it. She was sitting at a fold-down desk with a small extensible lamp over it, typing on a computer. And she wasn't wearing a uniform like the rest of the people on the ship; she was wearing jeans, hi
gh-heels and a spaghetti-strap top. All three were black and the jeans had a dragon on the thigh.
"It's okay," the lady said, standing up and grinning. She had long red hair with the front dyed bright blue and blue and red streaks in it. She was also very pretty, arguably beautiful, with a small chin and nose and bright brown eyes. "Are you my roommate? Aren't you a little young? What's that on your shoulder?"
"I'm . . ." Mimi paused trying to figure out which question to answer. "I was told this was my room, so I guess I'm your roommate. I am young and it's weird that I'm here but there's a reason, and this is Tuffy," she finished, fishing the creature off her shoulder and holding him out.
Tuffy extended one pseudopod towards the woman and then bowed. Mimi had never seen him do that before.
"Isn't he cute?" the woman squealed, walking over and petting him gently. "Tuffy. You're Mimi Jones. Sorry it took me so long. The last picture of him I saw he didn't look so cool."