For Honor We Stand (26 page)

The thin, sharp-faced Heinz Wendt, the Chief of the Boat, hustled into the compartment carrying what looked like three spare parts.  He strode purposefully over to a large, roughly cylindrical assembly that seemed to grow out of the floor like some kind of geological formation bulging up from the rocky ground and handed the parts to Midshipman Shepherd who had been standing by the unit, apparently waiting for him.  The Chief then deftly popped off an access panel, set it on the deck, and turned back to the now-exposed interstices of the assembly, which Max knew to be the primary compression phase modulator.  Quickly slipping on some protective gloves carried in at that very moment by Midshipman Hewlett arriving at a run, Wendt reached back into the phase modulator, popped several latches, rotated three or four locking mechanisms, and put his hand on a large lever.  “Ready to kill the Main, Ell Tee,” he said. 

“Calibration values?”  Lieutenant Brown sounded uncharacteristically harried.

“Manually input by me, personally, all three parts.  Triple checked,” Wendt said briskly.

 “Good show, COB.  Jolly good.  Just a tick.  Preparing the secondary to take the additional output.” The pace with which Brown was operating the controls increased markedly.  Every now and then, the man to his right would reach into Brown’s control area and tap some soft keys on his display.  “Almost there.  Stand by . . . stand by . . . I’ll give you a count down from five.”

 “Any time you are ready, sir,” said Wendt.

“Here we go, then.  Five, four, three, two, one, NOW.”  At the word “now,” Brown hit a key that caused one circuit schematic on his console to go dark and another to go from mostly green to a pulsating yellow-orange, indicating that the system as a whole was being utilized at significantly more than its rated capacity.  Max could not help but notice that the schematic that went dark had several red blinking boxes, orange asterisks, yellow arrows, and other indicators that things were not well with whatever system was being represented. 

Springing into motion as soon as Brown said “now,” Wendt quickly but precisely pulled from the assembly three parts, traded them for what appeared to be identical parts held by the Midshipman, and inserted the new ones, briskly rotated the locking mechanisms and engaged the latches, reversing the procedure he had completed a few seconds before.  Immediately upon snapping the last latch closed and throwing the large lever, he decisively withdrew his hands from inside the unit and snapped out, “CLEAR.”

“Watch the tell-tales inside the unit while I re-engage it, all right COB?”

“On it, Ell Tee.”

“Here we go.”  Brown keyed a sequence, causing the schematic that had recently turned dark to re-illuminate, with the warning indications markedly reduced.  Reduced.  Not eliminated. 

“Looks good from here,” said Wendt.  At a word from Brown, he picked up and replaced the access panel cover.

“Better,” said Brown, scanning his display.  “Not good, but better.”  He and his colleagues still had to make control inputs, but only once every five to ten seconds each, not once or twice a second as it had been before.  “And, now, Captain, we beg your pardon for not snapping to attention and sounding a boatswain’s whistle when you came in.  As you can see, we’re in a bit of a sticky wicket and we had our hands full.”

“I can see that, Werner.  Carry on, by all means.  What the hell is going on, anyway?”

“Negligence.  Dereliction of duty.  Laziness.  Deception of self and others.”

“It’s the REFSTAMAT.  Right?”

“Spot on, sir.” 

“Sonofabitch.  Damn.  I should have known that would be a problem with this crew.”

“I actually suspected it might be a problem from the day I came on board, so I have done a fair amount of spot checking, but never caught anything.  I suppose my sample size was too small to be representative or the perpetrators covered their tracks too well.”

“Either that, or your people figured out what parts you would check and made sure that those inputs were valid.  Werner, you’re an engineer, a damn good one, and that makes you very methodical.  But, from a tactical standpoint, that also makes you very predictable.  If I wanted to fool you, I probably wouldn’t have a hard time.”

“Sir, you could pull the wool over the eyes of the Devil himself.  But, I see your point.”

“Werner, this rendezvous is for escort duty, not combat.  If we’re delayed for a few hours, the
William Gorgas
will wait for us.  They’ll have to.  If you want to go subluminal to get the critical compression drive components and the other systems that are the most problematic recoded, just say the word and I’ll give the order.  If we turn up a little later than expected and this Commander Duflot guy doesn’t like it, you know I’ve got your back.  I’ll never let another commander chew on my Chief Engineer.  After all,” he smiled amiably, “that’s my job.  If we have to delay, I’m on solid ground under the regs.  A good skipper doesn’t risk losing his ship to compression shear or the accordion effect just to meet an artificial deadline.”

“Now that you mention it, sir, sixty to ninety minutes to input SINs for the critical compression drive components with the drive off line would make worlds of difference.”

“You’ve got it.  Get your people together and let me know when you’re ready to start.  As soon as I get the word, we’ll go sublight and keep the compression drive off line for as long as you need.  Then, when we’re back on the compression drive and you are comfortable that your department can spare you for an hour or so, we need to put some heads together to see what to do about this.  Like the drug problem last month, I think we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg.

“Don’t say that, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Icebergs.”  He shuddered.  “Bad news all around.”

“Wherever did you get that idea, Werner?”

“A very distant ancestor of mine was on the black gang, shoveling coal on one of those steam-driven, coal fired, salt water ocean liners that used to be the only way of crossing oceans on Earth.  His ship had a bit of a run in with one of those blighters one dark April night in the North Atlantic.  He died along with all of his best mates and nearly four-fifths of her crew.  She was a breathtakingly beautiful ship, though.  They called her the
Titanic. 
    

***

The lemon spice cake in the Captain’s Day Cabin was at least up to the galley’s usual high standards for such things, if not a bit above.  Reputedly, it was made from a recipe handed down from Chief Boudreaux’s 96 year old maternal grandmother who, at last report, was still daily tending her garden’s okra, squash, peppers, and tomatoes in the tiny hamlet of Egan, Louisiana.  The tang of the cake went particularly well with strong coffee to help carry the five men eating and drinking together in that small but comfortable space through the usual mid-afternoon slump. 

Brown had gotten the immediate problems with the compression drive solved and the ship was back to crossing the almost measureless distance between the stars at 1960 times the speed of light, putting another light year behind it every 4.46 hours.  When Max estimated that each man had enough sugar and caffeine in him to get the job done, he sat up straight, looked them all in the eye, mustered his courage, steeled his resolve, clinched his jaw, and, in the highest tradition of naval commanders going back to the days of Nelson and John Paul Jones turned to his Chief Engineer and said, “Werner, give ‘em the bad news.” 

Brown was not surprised that the buck of explaining the situation passed so rapidly to him.  It was, after all, his department, his personnel, and his responsibility.  “There’s no way to sugar coat this, gentlemen.  For at least the past six months, and probably extending back to eight weeks or so after this vessel was put into service, at least four, and more likely six of the individuals on this vessel performing routine adjustment, maintenance, and parts replacement have been . . . ,’ he paused as though he found it hard to finish the sentence, “gundecking their SIN inputs.”

“
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.”

All eyes now turned to Max, whose job this had become.  “The best way to understand this problem is to understand that there are, for all intents and purposes, two USS
Cumberlands.
  There is the tangible
Cumberland
made of exotic alloys and LumaTite and plastic that exists in the physical universe.  And, there is the intangible mathematical/theoretical
Cumberland
consisting of equations and definitions and algorithms and calibration data that exists and functions in the digital realm of the ship’s computer.  This digital ship is called the REFSTAMAT--the Navy has
such
a way with catchy acronyms; it stands for
Ref
erence
Sta
te
Mat
rix—and it has to match the real ship exactly.  The degree of correspondence between the actual ship and REFSTAMAT is called ‘congruence’ and, for our computer control systems to function properly, it has to be very, very high.  Ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, percent at a minimum, which we call ‘five balls,’ how a nine gets to be a ‘ball’ I don’t know.  The preferable condition though, is to have a congruence of ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine, nine percent which, you’ve probably guessed is called “six balls.”  It isn’t.  We call it a “six pack.” 

“And when congruence starts to degrade, we start to have problems.”  Brown sounded worried.  “The computer helps us manage the ship in literally millions of ways.  And I mean literally ‘literally,’ not, ‘literally in the figurative sense’ which, by the way is not ‘literally’ at all, but is what so many cretins with no respect for language as a tool for precise communication mean by the term.  There are about seven million commands or command interpretations sent by the computer, various sub-processors, or by control input devices to ship systems every day.  When Mr. Fleischman changes the setting on the controller for the compression drive, he isn’t directly changing the degree to which the unit distorts the fabric of the space-time continuum.  Instead, he is commanding the computer to formulate, send, and monitor for effect a whole host of intricate setting changes inside the drive unit designed to bring about that result.  To make those determinations correctly and for the system to respond precisely to the commands, the computer has to know the precise nucleonic transfer coefficient of every modulator, the precise resistance of every resistor, the output efficiency and frequency bias of every emitter.  In that way, as the simulated ship engages in digital maneuvers and receives mathematical damage and is commanded to make simulated control inputs, the computer will faithfully and accurately predict and represent what happens to the actual ship engaging in real maneuvers and sustaining real damage and doing all those other things.”

 “And,” Max continued, “we have to tell the computer more than just what we do to the ship.  When a new part is plugged in, the man performing the repair is supposed to enter, not just the code for that type or model of part, but the unique manufacturer’s Serial Inventory Number—and, yes, we do call it a SIN, as in “mortal sin”—for that particular part that distinguishes it from every other part ever made.  That number has associated in the computer’s database with it all of the calibration test information that tells it exactly how that particular part is expected to perform—and on some critical high energy parts there are variations that are enough to matter.  It’s supposed to be real simple.  When you put the new part in, you use your padcomp or the nearest work station to tell the computer that you removed the current part and installed replacement part number such and such, and you’re done.”

“Only, it’s not quite so simple in practice,” Brown jumped in, his anxiety over the situation making it difficult to remain silent.  “The SIN is a
thirty-five
digit number.  We used to use a bar code scanner, but the error rate was too high.  The bar code is on the box, not on the part and sometimes the parts are mis-boxed or unboxed before they get to the installation point, so we count on the man to get the number into the computer.  The software tries to make it easier by pulling one up for you—the number for the part that it thinks is most likely to come up next out of the spares inventory.  Unfortunately, its guess is right only about eighty percent of the time, especially on small parts.  So, what the technician is supposed to do then is to enter the correct number manually.  But, when a tech is hurried, or doesn’t look, or doesn’t care, or just gets lazy, he won’t correct the number, but will just hit the ENTER key and call it done.  When that happens too many times, the congruence of the REFSTAMAT starts to degrade.  You don’t have a six pack.  You don’t have five balls.  What you’ve got, old chap, is a congruence coefficient of ninety-nine point nine, nine, which in my business is called a ‘four-nication.’”

The doctor, while keeping an almost perfectly open mind about what people did in their private lives and with whom they did it, was something of a prude regarding the language with which those acts were described.  “Why use such an offensive term for a technical condition?”