by Chris Hechtl
Horatio nodded. “Obviously the implants are different between the branches since we each have different needs,” he explained. The Neogorilla flicked a finger to indicate he got that part. He rested his head on one meaty fist as he listened.
“Imagine a complete interface with your hardware, being able to see information fed to a HUD in your mind and in your vision. Tactical and strategic data right there,” Horatio said, pointing to his eyes. “Blueprints, maps, orders, intelligence, warnings, faces to look for, whatever,” he explained.
“Now imagine yourself five times or more tougher, stronger, faster with better reflexes and able to handle brief exposure to vacuum or poisonous atmospheres.”
“That'd suck,” the general rumbled.
“Yeah, but it's nice to have if you lose atmo or run into a sudden breach,” Horatio explained. “I know a Neocat who ran into that problem on Anvil during an assassination attempt. He survived while the team of assassins died.”
The general's eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Imagine being able to communicate securely to someone's eyes and ears,” Horatio continued. “Able to function at near peak efficiency even when you are injured or lose a limb,” he went on. “Supermen in other words. They build marines tough; this just makes them even tougher.”
“It's hard to believe, but I've seen the recordings and files.”
Horatio nodded as the Gorilla straightened and dropped his fist. “Yes, sir.” He swallowed the urge to ask why the Bekians hadn't invested in their own implants beyond security ID implants.
“Okay,” the Gorilla said, rising. Horatio immediately did the same but tried to keep out of the general's personal space as the big ape picked up the scrambler. “I'll do what I can with this. I don't know how much I can do but being aware of what is expected of me will help me,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Horatio said.
“Keep your head down and keep plugging,” the general said as he turned the device off.
“Ooh-Ra, sir,” Horatio said as he opened the door.
“Semper Fi and long live the Federation. Now get back to work,” the general said gruffly, apparently back to business.
“Aye aye, sir,” Horatio replied with a brief smile that he banished instantly when those arctic eyes turned his way. He looked away as the gorilla left. He heard a soft chuff and then snorted himself when he saw a pair of yeoman make a wide hole for the general to pass by.
He shook his head and went back to what he'd been doing.
~<><{<^>}><>~
Horatio's efforts began to pay off as Ilmarinen's revolutionary design pace and construction sent shock waves through the yard and logistics communities. Word was percolating through the ranks, obsolete hardware out, so they needed new to replace it.
Alice Walengrad's efforts had also paid off dividends as well. She'd found ways to recondition or re-manufacture some of the components and had found ways to make minor tweaks to get better results.
Eleven weeks into Ilmarinen's build and Vice Admiral Creator of Things declared a halt on all other construction. Until new hardware could come into play, the designers would be busy picking through the hulls to see what could be modified and what had to be scrapped and rebuilt. It was a daunting task.
Horatio wished they'd just halt all construction on sublight hulls, but he knew that was too much to ask for. He was also aware that Childress's faction had lined up behind the revamp project only because they had realized they could make a huge profit off of it. Not just in the current hulls being redesigned and reworked but also in the future refits planned for the rest of the existing fleet.
The waste and corruption sickened him, but there was nothing he could do about it so he kept his mouth shut.
Horatio, both of the commanders, and Admiral Zekowitz found themselves tapped to use their keys to start and then use some of the industrial replicators Caroline had brought in order to make parts that the Bekian industry couldn't. Unfortunately, due to the limits of their key library, they could only make some of the requested parts. They found that they had to make parts not just for Ilmarinen but also the fleet. In fact, after the second day of their being tapped to do the job, Albacore was abruptly ordered to port to dock for an unscheduled liberty, and the priority was shifted to build parts for the fleet first with Ilmarinen's parts on a catch as catch can basis.
Not all of the parts for the ship could be made however. They had to improvise and kludge in replacements. Bailey turned out to be something of an expert on that score but not always. Still, the new hardware they were getting would make the current crop of ships better than any older ones … once they were redesigned. Horatio found some of his staff getting reassigned to oversee the process. The slow, quiet erosion of his support by the Admiralty had begun he noted.
It bothered him a bit, but Ilmarinen was still coming together with gratifying speed. Within a week of laying her first keel block her first eight grand blocks had been completely finished, merged into the single hull form, and then welded together. The ship had a total of fifty grand blocks, and now that the crews had the bugs worked out, the next ten would be finished by the end of the second week. If they could keep that pace up, the ship would be completely roughed out within six weeks and able to launch for fitting out soon after.
During the building process, Horatio met with a series of industrialists. He learned to take such interruptions to his schedule in stride. After the third one, Pietro stopped seething about the wreckage of his plans and had adapted. Somehow the young man had managed to get something of a warning system going so they had at least an hour's notice of an arrival.
Each meeting was fairly simple, mostly a get-to-know sort of event. Introductions, shake hands or limbs, and then a dog and pony tour of the project. Most of the people he met were high rollers in the supplying companies, managers, administrators, marketing people, and such, not engineers he knew. Suits in other words. They were talking heads and bureaucrats who lived off the work of the engineers under them.
He had to put up with it as each company was brought on board to supply parts for a given section of the ship. Or when he was tapped to make parts for them to incorporate in their own hardware. He noted that they were not billed for the parts, not even material or labor costs.
But they still triple billed the navy. When he had Pietro do a little digging, he'd found to his infinite disgust that the bastards were charging them for the parts the navy supplied. It made him want to puke, but that was acceptable in the Bekian navy. Obviously so, since no one called them on it.
Once the suits were finished, they then handed over their engineers to get to the real work. Most of the time he ran into a wall when it came to getting them sorted out. They knew the basics and were intimately familiar with the ins and outs of the build process, but the new hardware threw them for a loop. After a day spent handholding, he'd set-up a website for them to access.
He'd been amused a few days later when Pietro had told him how often the site had been visited and that the various companies were in the process of providing retraining classes for their people to get them up to speed.
One month into the build and Ilmarinen was near completion or at least completion of her roughout stage. He'd managed to keep up with the pace and divided workload through force of will and his implants. His routine of sleeping four hours a night had helped a lot, though a few of his staff looked haggard by the end of any given week.
Since the tender was 80 percent complete, BuShip's naming department had to get involved all over again. He'd thought he'd settled them with the name of the ship, but because they'd tapped the old hull components that had been brought back up, someone had also protested his choice of a name … or protested his right to name the ship.
Well, he for one wasn't interested in saddling the ship with an eighteen character alpha numeric for a name. It was cumbersome, so he pushed for the department to leave her as the Ilmarinen. He even wrote a script bot to change the alpha numeric
tags to Ilmarinen with a notation for the records.
With Galiet on board, the hyperdrive problems had smoothed out overnight. They still had question marks about how she'd actually perform, but the Neochimp had assured him that she would be able to fine tune the software once they were in flight. As the drive pods were installed, she made certain to triple check their stats then plug in their test numbers into her hyperspace sim models. Since the hyperdrive was just a class 1, she would be limited to the Alpha and Beta band, but that was fine with Horatio.
In order to make the biggest bang for the credit, Horatio had upgraded Ilmarinen to as close to Cabeiri Zeta class standards as possible. He'd deliberately included molecular furnace and industrial replicators in the design. He, like the other transplanted personnel, were still uncertain as to why the equipment wasn't being used, just warehoused. Commander Thistle helped him with the requisition forms. Apparently, Admiral Bolt signed off on the design without a quibble.
The ship was long, a long rectangle with smoothed corners and a rounded hump midships on her dorsal and ventral surfaces. The hull on either flank at the midship's mark was beveled inward with exposed equipment and framing evident. She had a thickened X behind her midships line, each arm extending out two hundred meters. Each tip of the X supported sublight drive nacelles. She had a notched stern where another cluster of fusion engines resided.
Each of the X arms were designated to be filled with factory equipment, rock grinders, and work bays for the compliment of tugs and shuttles to feed material into. Personnel and robots would take in raw material or salvage and then break the chunks down into easily-handled sizes. Essentially the reverse of how a shipyard operated. The forward tip of each nacelle would house bussard ram scoop tractors to suck in debris and gases to also support the ship.
The material would flow in there along the arms to the axial shafts within the ship, passing through a series of molecular furnaces until it was fully processed. It would then be stored in cargo bays for use by the ship's factory equipment, industrial replicators, and machine shops. If the ship exceeded her capacity, inflatable canisters could be extended from the hull to take up the excess material until it could be used.
Everything in the main hull behind the X arms was designated as engineering space. It was all crammed with equipment and other things to prove it. With a bit of help from Bailey, they'd managed to cobble together three class 2 fusion reactors, inserted the class 1 hyperdrive, the main sublight drive pods, and the chemical, fuel, and water bunkers.
Forward of the X beyond the material stowage area would be the factories and then the boat bays for the tugs and small craft. Beyond that would be the docking points and habitat space. She was to have most of her sensors in her bow, but she had plenty of secondary sensors wherever it counted.
Most factory ships were bricks. Industrial designs that followed function well above form and aesthetics. This ship … he shook his head. She had some sexy lines but not many curves; he had to give the designers credit for that. They'd knocked off or rounded most of the corners. She wasn't a true tender though, not by a long shot.
The Ilmarinen was still just a prototype. If he had his way, she would become something of a home built and designed class, which he'd pitched as similar to the Liberty class. In other words, a multirole ship, essentially a freighter collier with some factory equipment, a small hospital, massive fuel storage, and other service centers in her hull. The extra stuff took up valuable space in the hull that could have held additional stores but allowed the ship to make parts on site if needed.
Each ship could be customized as needed. He knew that none of the follow-on ships would have the efficient factory equipment for instance. There were calls already to build a series of transport and true collier designs to shuttle personnel and equipment back and forth between Bek A and B.
He hadn't mentioned that they only had enough parts on hand to make the power plants and hyperdrive for Ilmarinen herself.
The base hull of Ilmarinen had started out as something else. He'd thought it had been a collier, but Commander Dreamer of Ships had substituted one of his own ship designs during the process. He'd read the notes about the proposal. The original pitch had been a design test bed for a carrier ship that could create her own fighters, but he'd had a hard time believing it.
It didn't matter. She was his baby now.
Entering the home stretch of the rough in he was introduced to two commanders. The duo, a Chimera female and a human male with a curly hair and an odd British accent, were apparently, the wunderkinds of BuShips. The duo had repeatedly tried unsuccessfully to be reassigned to him and his team for months. They'd been forced to finish their current assignments before they'd been given the go ahead.
Apparently, the Ilmarinen project had kicked loose the duo. They'd applied some of what he'd been allowed to kick loose, and it had solved their project, whatever it was.
Commander Leo Fitzgerald was the human male and something of an expert in fusion reactors, shields, and gravitics. He had curly brown hair and a quiet demeanor. He was a thinker, bright and slightly cynical.
His partner Commander Gemma Simpson was a Chimera. She had long brown hair, feline gold eyes, elfin ears, a pert nose, and was something of an expert in life support, medical tech, and software. They had started out as juvenile geniuses and had been recruited by the navy. The navy had paid for their college education and litany of PHDs in their favorite subjects. Both had been partially exiled because they had recently pushed vigorously to modernize the navy. Most officers were.
He wasn't the only one to bond with the duo; they were easy to get to know, if excitable when provoked. Bailey and Galiet had told him they'd talked their ears off and run through calculations on paper napkins at a restaurant until the waiter had flat-out refused to provide anymore.
They'd come highly recommended by Zek. He felt for the rear admiral and did his best to keep the other officer in the loop and incorporate some of his design ideas into the project. But the design was mainly frozen.
He'd found out through Bailey that it had been Leo who'd gotten the grav nodes sorted out. He'd also had a small hand in the tender's fusion reactors. Those two points alone endeared the engineer to the commodore and his team.
Which meant when the two ambushed him in the observation blister where he'd hidden to watch the construction while also supposedly doing paperwork, he hadn't minded the intrusion. Nor the questions that had followed.
“Sir, why were you assigned to design rather than update and upgrade the yard and industrial centers? I mean, it’s weird having you do it on and off again now in conjunction with the construction here,” Gemma said, indicating the ship on the other side of the window.
Horatio noted the keen interest in his answer from the two commanders. It was hard to resist. Besides, he had been venting a little more and more as of late. “No plan …,” Horatio stopped himself and then shrugged. “Look, I think by now just about everyone knows the plan and orders for Admiral Zek and myself went out the lock the moment we got here. I think you've watched the news often enough,” he said, eyeing the pair.
Both engineers nodded.
“Good, glad we've got that covered.”
“Why, sir?” Gemma asked.
“Why what? Why did they do it?” Horatio asked. Gemma nodded. Horatio shrugged. “You'd have to ask them,” he said. That earned a grimace. He snorted. It wasn't like a low ranking officer would have the balls to go up and ask an admiral why they were disobeying orders. “If you are wondering what I think ….” Both engineers nodded. “Fine,” Horatio sighed. “This is a shot in the dark,” he warned. “I can get where they are coming from, I wasn't happy about Admiral Subert coming in and taking over in Pyrax. But I understood an order.”
Gemma crinkled her nose thoughtfully. “So why …”
Horatio's indifference changed abruptly to a cool professional warning tone and manner. “It is not my place to comment or question their decisions I suppos
e. An order was issued so I follow it.”
Gemma nodded. “Aye aye, sir. It still stinks.”
“We do what we can. That's all.”
“I think we should be building all of our ships like this,” Leo said, indicating Ilmarinen. “I put in for all the ships to be pulled, starting with the oldest classes. Bring them in, strip them of usable parts, then send them to the breakers,” the young man said. “I know it is harsh, but it is reality.” He shrugged fatalistically. “They are obsolete.”
“You have to remember, we and our forefathers designed the hardware with what they could safely make. They went for a quantity versus quality approach and stuck with it, only improving quality as it became available,” Gemma interjected.
“But we don't need it. Not now that we know the Xenos aren't around,” Leo retorted, obviously covering part of a former argument.
“Sir, are we going to be building more of this class?” Gemma asked outright, eyeing the admiral.
Horatio sucked in a breath and then let it out slowly. “I don't know. No one has told me,” he said.
“I don't understand, sir,” Leo said, clearly confused and not happy with his answer.
“I think part of it is that we can now build this, so people will want more—true starship warships for instance. The plan was and still is to build more. But I think some of the powers that be have realized that Bek can't make hyperdrives, at least, not yet,” Horatio explained.
“Oh,” Gemma replied with a blink. “So, she's a prototype?” she asked, clearly put out with that idea.
“Something of the sort. The brass can sort out what can be built here and what can't. What they need to work on. If I were in their shoes and wanted more of these ships, I'd build as many components as I could.”
“Like you did in Pyrax, sir? The frames? I read your history,” Gemma said, eyes bright.
Leo nodded eagerly. “You built so many ships! Why?”