The Passage

by David Poyer

  The mutter rose again to something near anger. Vysotsky’s shout cut through it like a load of gravel being dumped. “That’s enough! Pipe down! We will not be at Gitmo long if everyone turns to and remembers what they learned a week ago. We’ll do one day’s refresher work-up, then do the battle problem the next day. If we pass, we’ll be headed back to Charleston by Friday.”

  A voice from the rear. “What about Guadeloupe?”

  “We no longer have time to make liberty in Guadeloupe. We have predeployment inspections, maintenance assistance, and a multiship battle group work-up scheduled. Then we’ll be deploying.” He waited. “Any other questions? The senior watch officer will be posting a five-section watch bill this morning. We’ll transit the Windward Passage tonight and get into Gitmo tomorrow morning. All right. Today … I know everyone’s tired, but we’ve got to get the ship cleaned up. We’ve let things go for the past few days and we need to do basic titivation. Also, restore the ship to readiness for the battle problem. Check your fire-fighting gear for proper stowage. Planning board for training will meet at fourteen hundred … .”

  After the XO broke them, Dan walked a few paces away, into the shadow of the helo hangar. Not yet 0800 and already the sun was intense, glaring off the water at a low angle till it brought tears to his eyes. He waited as his division officers and chiefs gathered—Harper and Dawson and Mainhardt; Kessler; Chief Fowler, nervously patting emptiness; Ed Horseheads, grinning at nothing; Chief Glasser; and Burdette Shuffert and his two chiefs, Alaska and Boyer.

  “Okay, you heard it,” he said to them all. “We need to put it out to the troops, make sure they understand what’s going on and why.”

  “They aren’t gonna like it.”

  “Yeah, that’s gonna take morale to about minus twenty.”

  “Tell them we’re almost home. Two days in Gitmo, then we’ll be headed back.”

  “Dan?”

  “Yessir.” He turned; it was Vysotsky. “Sorry, I forgot to mention about Dr. Shrobo. Tell him we’ve got his transportation set up out of Gitmo. He’s to have all his gear together, ready to hop off and ride over to Leeward Point as soon as we touch the pier in the morning.”

  “Aye aye, sir. Okay, let’s turn to.”

  He went along with Horseheads to see how the enlisted took it. There was considerable griping, but that was acceptable. It had bothered him once, as an ensign. But now he knew bitching and moaning was more or less the normal situation. It was only when you got dead silence that you were in trouble with American enlisted men. That meant they no longer trusted you. Satisfied, he went down to the department office, greeted Cephas, and set to work on the ever-growing pile of administration and reports.

  ALONE in his cabin that afternoon, Thomas Leighty stripped plastic off a fresh khaki shirt. Hands moving with the deftness of long practice, he pinned silver oak leaves to the collar, an inch and a half in and centered on a line bisecting the angle of the points. Then, above the left pocket, the five rows of uniform ribbons, combat ribbons, unit commendations, achievement medals; and, in careful priority, the gaudy scarlet and yellow and gold decorations from a government that no longer existed. Above that, one-quarter inch spacing and centered, he attached the crossed swords of the surface warfare insignia. And above that, pinned centrally and another quarter-inch up, the small-boat command device that every time he pinned it on made him remember the growl of engines, the distant popping of AK-47s, and the omnipresent smells of delta and river.

  Slowly buttoning it, he looked at himself soberly in the mirror. Regarding him was a face he had always thought of as expressive, handsome, almost aristocratic. The touch of gray at the temples only added to it now. And the pull-ups and exercise kept his body slim, well-muscled, honed beneath the uniform. He carried himself well, and just that conveyed an impression of self-confidence. What had the young man in Coconut Grove called it—Vernon, that was his name—something about him looking authoritative? He didn’t recall now exactly what the word was he had used. But he understood. He understood how that could appeal to a younger person.

  His eye moved to the clock. Four more minutes.

  He extended his hand, noticing a faint tremor. Yes, he was excited. He was afraid, too.

  He’d only slowly become aware of the glances that the young steward had been giving him. Only over weeks had he noticed him lingering after his work was done. Pedersen was only twenty, not long out of boot camp, and he had a refreshing shyness about him. Tall and lithe, dungarees tight where they should be tight and flaring above polished shoes—that was what he’d noted first, just that he looked shipshape and seamanlike. But gradually, Leighty had noticed other things about him: something graceful about the way he moved; a little extra inclination in the head when he spoke to him; a glance that lingered the fraction of a second too long. Could he be mistaken? He didn’t think so. It happened, but not often.

  It was the same way it had started with the young technician—Sanderling. That, too, had started with small things, eye contact, a smile, the sense that he was being examined as he bent over a message board. Then it had moved on to a first-name basis, at least Leighty used the younger man’s first name, and then to something that he really should not have permitted. He knew that, but he couldn’t say even now he was sorry. Only that he hadn’t gotten close enough to the boy to understand how close he was to self-destruction.

  Now he stood waiting for the call.

  It had happened casually. Not at his instigation. Last night, just as dusk was falling. He’d been in his chair on the bridge. They were alongside refueling, and he couldn’t go below for dinner. Pedersen had brought him up a covered plate and stood beside him as he ate, Leighty glancing out occasionally to check on Lenson’s conning as they approached the oiler, matched courses and speeds, and sent the first line arching over. And Pedersen had asked him casually what he’d done in Miami. He hadn’t told him. But the memory of the park had risen up in his memory. And the boy, Pedersen, had said, “I had a good time, Captain. I met some other fellows. We had a good time,” looking at him as he said it.

  “Would you like to see some pictures,” Pedersen had asked then.

  And Leighty had responded, before he could think about it or stop himself, “Sure. Bring them up sometime.”

  “Is there any time we could look at them and not be disturbed?”

  And he’d said, “Yes, early in the afternoon,” thinking they’d be independent steaming by then. He could make sure they weren’t disturbed. And he’d looked after Pedersen as he’d moved gracefully off the bridge, carrying the covered tray, Leighty feeling the excitement beginning in his body.

  Yes, it had been the same with Sanderling—the dawning awareness, the tentative gestures of friendship, and then the electric suddenness of mutual recognition. But then when the boy had died, he’d looked down at the pale white patch sinking away beneath the water and found himself feeling nothing, absolutely nothing … .

  Now he looked at himself in the mirror and felt his heart pounding. He looked rapidly away, evading his own eyes, around the room, as if searching for an answer in the commonplace things he saw every day: the rudder-angle indicator, the brass lamp, the desk, the portrait of his wife and child … . He’d never been passionately attracted, but he loved her. But when you wore the mask so long, learned that role so perfectly, it was not easy sometimes to tell which was you and what was that alter ego you pretended to be. His boy? Yes, he loved Dougie. He loved his daughter, too. There was no question there. But even from that, he could not draw strength now.

  He could not pray to be changed. He wouldn’t change. He wasn’t even sure now that he wanted to. But there was one thing he could do, one thing he could say, that might make a difference.

  The trouble was that he knew he wasn’t going to say it.

  The phone buzzed discreetly. Mouth dry, he picked it up quickly. It was him, the man he’d dreamed of for days. “Yes?” he said. Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror. He cleared
his throat, and said more loudly, “Captain.”

  “Captain? Is that you?”

  “Yes. It’s me.”

  “This is Joe. Seaman Pedersen. Chief just let me off duty. You want to look at those pictures now?”

  Leighty closed his eyes. He reached deep inside himself but found no strength there. He opened his eyes again and caught the remote gyro indicator on the bulkhead. And despite his inner turmoil, a part of his mind compared the course it showed to the one the navigator had briefed him on; found that it matched; and only then released him to himself and sat back, satisfied.

  But it had told him who he was, who he really was, in this uniform, this cabin, aboard this ship.

  He wasn’t gay. He wasn’t straight. He wasn’t even Tom Leighty.

  He was the commanding officer of USS Barrett.

  “I decided against it,” he muttered.

  “You what?”

  “I changed my mind, Joseph. I’ve got too much on my desk. I’m busy, don’t have the time, understand?”

  “Oh. All right, sir.” The voice was disappointed but relieved, too, he could tell. Maybe even as relieved as he felt. His legs trembled. A click.

  He looked at the number card beside the phone and dialed quickly, waited, spoke again, his voice stronger now, surer.

  “Dave? Captain here. Look, I want you to replace Seaman Pedersen as my steward. I don’t care who; he’s been up here too long. No, no, he’s been doing a good job. I just think they ought to be rotated occasionally.”

  He hung up again and looked at himself. From the mirror, his other self peered back.

  Slowly, sadly, it smiled at him.

  LATE that night, the bent, gawky green-suited figure sat alone in the silence of the wardroom, staring down at a printout.

  The unzipped code from within the virus. Line after line of binary, and under it, handwritten in red, was its translation into the AN/UYK-7 machine language. Here and there, arrows called out connections to op programs and other modules. But then came a section that had no call-outs, no connections.

  He sat alone, head propped on his arms, staring down at it.

  This is strange, Hank Shrobo said to himself.

  He’d expected, once he broke it, to be able to read it all. And most of it, true, he could. At the center and heart of the infector, just as he’d intuited, nestled a random-number generator. Other elegantly concise sections activated cycle stealing, privileged memory access, and negative-zero error conditions. But still one section remained that he couldn’t penetrate. It just didn’t make sense. It wasn’t even machine language. It was just gibberish.

  But why, when the rest of the virus was so short, so efficient, designed with the beautiful, elegant deadliness of a shark? Was it a message of some sort? Something that once had made sense but had changed in the thousands of replications the program had gone through since? Mutated? Evolved?

  A thrill of something like fear ran up his back.

  “Doc. Understand you’ve got it all fixed.”

  One of the officers was pulling out a chair opposite. Shrobo only glanced at the young face, neither Lenson, nor Harper, nor one of the senior officers. He didn’t recall the man’s name. He nodded, wishing the fellow would go away and let him ponder.

  “What’s that?”

  Hank shifted irritably in the chair. “It’s a printout of the virus we just broke.”

  “Is that right?”

  “But I don’t understand it—not this section of it here.” He put his finger on it, glanced at it, looked up at the overhead, then frowned down again suddenly.

  He moved his fingers slightly, so that only a portion of the code showed between them.

  Then, forgetting the man across from him, he fumbled for his pencil.

  Let’s see, he thought, keeping his excitement under control until he could test the hypothesis that had just assembled itself. He and Williams had read the long string of ones and zeros by dividing them with slashes every thirty-two bits. Those were the byte divisions for the AN/UYK-7 computer. Then they’d broken those down further into four-bit nybbles, the basic digits of a hexadecimal counting system. With four bits per digit, thirty-two bits per byte, that gave eight digits per byte. This was a word of Ultra, which could be read and understood by human and machine alike.

  Now he proceeded differently. Beginning where the gibberish started, he divided the ones and zeros into sections not of thirty-two, but of thirty. Then he subdivided these into nybbles.

  He stared at it.

  He was looking at machine language, but not for the UYK-7. For a second, his mind was blank. Then he recalled from some dim recess that … hadn’t the granddaddy Navy mainframe, the CP-642, been a UNIVAC? A real kluge, a dinosaur, tubes, the works. Sixteen bits. Then had come the AN/USQ-20. That, too, had been a UNIVAC.

  Not only that. It had been, he suddenly remembered, a thirty-bit-word system.

  “What is it?” said the man across from him. Shrobo started, then said, annoyed, “Nothing. Just had an idea. It must be for the older machine.”

  “What?”

  “This section of code here, it must be for the old USQ-twenty. I don’t know the instruction set; I can’t tell what it does … but what is it doing here?” He was talking to himself and now, forgetting the man he left sitting at the table, he got up and started pacing around the wardroom. It was like deciphering a page of modern German and finding one paragraph in Sanskrit. Unless … was it possible that the virus was older than he thought? The USQ-20 was a 1960sera machine. Could it have evolved … shit, there was that word again. He didn’t like to think about virtual viruses that evolved.

  But like it or not, he forced himself to consider it now. Had he found the remnants of an older, more primitive form? Like mitochondria within human cells, remnants of ancient bacteria, now part of the machinery of the host? Was it possible that the virus had been around since the 1960s and only recently become virulent? Retaining at its heart the original bit of code, like the original DNA that each life-form on earth carried deep within its cells, tracing back its origin to the Adam cell, the common ancestor?

  And did that mean that it was no longer a bug, a glitch, an annoyance? … Did it mean that he was faced now with a new form of life?

  Not really knowing what he was doing, he went slowly out into the darkened, red-lighted passageway. The listing fluttered from his numb fingers. He turned back, picked it up off the deck, thrust it into the pocket of his scrub greens.

  Eyes distant, he drifted aft and down through the ship. Seamen slid around him as he passed through their compartments, grinned at one another. “Doctor DOS.” “He’s floating, man.” “He’s somewhere else.”

  Finally, he blinked, staring at a familiar door—the weight room. He smiled to himself. Why not? Maybe it would clear his mind.

  He flicked the lights on in the emptiness. The swollen scuffed leather of the punching bag pendulumed slowly as the ship sidestepped around it. The endless belt of the treadmill lay motionless, dusty footprints marking its worn surface. The familiar stark walls, the gray all-weather carpeting tilted slowly around him as he took off his shirt, selected a bar, and began racking the clanking iron disks onto it. When he had 180 pounds, he twisted the keeper nut tight, set the bar on the steel guides with a grunt, and pegged the reclining board to the proper height. He wondered for a moment if he should wait for a spotter, then decided he didn’t need to; the rolls weren’t that bad.

  He rosined his hands slowly, staring at himself in the mirror. Hemmery and Lightbulb were right: He was gaining definition. Suddenly, he thought, I’ll miss those guys. They weren’t his intellectual equals. But they’d been … friends. They’d accepted him, taken him along on liberty. Hell, they’d saved his life.

  He slid under the bar, took a breath, and began.

  He did a set, putting everything aside to concentrate on powering the mass of metal up and down smoothly, then guided the heavy bar carefully back onto its guides and shook his arms ou
t. A hundred and eighty pounds, yet he felt strength still in his biceps, his shoulders, his chest.

  The 1MC out in the passageway hissed.

  “Good evening. This is the captain speaking. I wanted to say a few words before taps about our operations over the past week, and a few words about tomorrow.

  “Today, we completed our operations with Task Force One forty-two. And we did so with distinction. There was real danger, and I’m proud of the way every man faced it. I think we all discovered something new about ourselves. Barrett was fully prepared to fight, and I’m convinced we would have won.

  “Tonight, I would like everyone to get as much rest as possible. We have only one challenge remaining on this cruise, and that is the battle problem. After all our training, I don’t anticipate it will be that difficult for us to get a top grade. I know we’ll look as good on the grading sheets as we’ve proven ourselves at sea.

  “Thank you, and good night.”

  As the silence returned, Hank looked up at the tiny grooves, the handholds on the steel rod of the bar. Tiny particles of chalk and rosin clung to it, directly above his eyes.

  The captain’s remarks made him think back over the last few days. It had been dangerous. Obviously, because people had died on the other ship. But how could that have happened? There were safety interlocks in the software to preclude accidental firing.

  Then he remembered what Lenson had told him had happened aboard Barrett. The first indication of any problem—the first sign of the virus, though of course they hadn’t known that—had been a malfunction in the weapons systems. The missiles had failed to respond to midcourse correction guidance. The gun mounts had slewed out without direction.

  Hadn’t the same thing happened to Voge—an unexplained weapons-system failure? Only this time, it had launched a missile. The Sparrow, shorter-ranged than the Barrett’s Standards, carried its own radar guidance. Once activated, it would search for, acquire, and home on any radar return within its seeker head acquisition arc.