Claws That Catch

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Okay, that’s weird.”

“Define weird,” Petty Officer First Class Guy Fedele asked, looking over the chaos gunner’s shoulder.

Part of the redesign of the Blade II had been to create a full-scale Combat Information Center instead of a small Tactical office. The CIC featured a mix of Hexosehr, Adar and human technology and included both information positions and fighting positions.

In this case, the control center for the port-side chaos ball guns. The Hexosehr system fired balls of what had only been translated as “pure chaos.” They disrupted molecular bonds through a process that was only slightly exothermic but very definite, cutting through layers of the most refractory armor as if it were air. They didn’t blow ships up, but they put great whacking holes in them. Unfortunately, the one that the Hexosehr had hastily refitted the Blade I with was only good for putting relatively small holes in ships and would only penetrate a few dozen meters. When the Blade had used a single one against Dreen dreadnoughts, it had taken dozens of hits, each requiring the Blade to penetrate the enemy’s brutal fire, to get a kill, which was one of the reasons that the original Blade had been scrapped.

However, the Blade II had been fitted with twenty of the Hexosehr prototypes per side, creating a broadside that could punch holes most of the way through a fair-sized asteroid.

“I was running the watch check on the port side battery,” the gunner said. “I got a fault in Number Seven gun. So I ran it again. No fault. But I was careful…”

“Which is good,” Fedele said. “So you ran it again.”

“And I got a fault in Number Nineteen,” the gunner said. “Fault Eight-Twelve: Failure to properly communicate. The gun got the order, communicated that it got it, but its test response wasn’t received.”

“Same fault on Seven?” the PO asked.

“Yep,” the gunner replied. “That was when I muttered.”

“Run it again,” Fedele said.

“It takes — ”

“Seven minutes to do the full response test,” Fedele said. “I know. But run the level-two diagnostic. I want to see exactly what it’s reading.”

“Shiny,” the gunner said, bringing up the options box and pressing the appropriate icons. “Gonna be a while.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Okay, now I’m creeked,” the gunner said. “PO!”

“I’m looking at nothing,” the petty officer said, looking over his shoulder again.

“No chither,” the gunner swore. “But here’s the log. Two Eight-Twelves, two different guns, right in a row.”

“And nothing on the full diagnostic?” the PO asked unnecessarily. “That’s weird.”

“That’s what I said!”

“Okay, you’re not doing anything but looking at blank screens and playing solitaire,” the PO said. “Run a level one every twenty minutes. I want to see what’s going on. I’m getting that suboptimal feeling…”

“Lieutenant Bergstresser, these results are not what I call optimal,” Captain Zanella said, examining the data from Eric’s Wyvern simulation. “You managed to lose your entire platoon four times.”

“Yes, sir,” Eric said stoically. He’d been hitting the scenario, on and off, for a week. “Sir, I’ve rethought that scenario several times. I’m not sure it’s not a lose-lose proposition. Absent the heavy weapons that I brought into the mission, the crabpus are very difficult to defeat.”

“They don’t do that sort of shit in real training,” the CO said. “If you’re thinking this is that Star Trek thing, the Kobe Mashu or whatever…”

“Kobayashi Maru, sir,” Eric said.

“It’s not that,” the CO continued. “The only thing you teach people by a lose-lose proposition is to lose. That’s been proven over and over and we don’t do it. It’s stupid. I’ve figured out three ways to win it at both the platoon and company level. Admittedly, you guys got caught flat-footed by it, but there are ways to win without Two-Gun Berg and his smoking cannon-pistols. You’re getting too focused on individual actions. You need to keep an eye on the whole picture and maneuver your squads more fluidly. I’m going to rotate you back to easier scenarios so you can get a better feel for handling multiple axes.”

Captain Zanella didn’t put it bluntly, but what he was saying was that Eric wasn’t ready for prime-time. It was not a comforting thought.

“Berg!” Miriam said, walking into his quarters.

“Jesus,” Berg said, pulling up his sheet. He’d been lying in his bed doing the unending reading the CO had assigned and was wearing only underwear. “Knock for God’s sake.”

“I’m bored,” Miriam said. “I’ve been going crazy. Then I thought to myself, ‘Eric’s an officer, I can talk to him!’ ”

“Miriam, I love you like a sister,” Eric said. “But the CO’s on my ass right now and I’ve got a bagillion tons of homework and paperwork to do. I just don’t have the time. I’m really sorry.”

“I can help,” Miriam said, picking up a book. “Ick. Military stuff.”

“I didn’t think you were prejudiced against the military,” Berg said, surprised.

“I’m not,” Miriam replied, setting the book down. “I just get bored by it really quick. Tell me a story?”

“Once upon a time there was a lieutenant who got busted because he got several crappy evaluation reports,” Berg said. “Because he didn’t do the homework the CO required.”

“That one’s boring,” Miriam said.

“It’s also going to be my life story if…”

“I can take the hint,” Miriam said. “There has to be somebody on this ship I can talk to! Something I can play with!”

“I thought that was why you brought a cat,” Berg said as she stood up.

“Oh, that rat,” Miriam said, frowning. “He’s always off playing fetch with the crew. He hardly stops by anymore, the traitor.”

Tiny tossed the creature through the air, bouncing it off the port bulkhead and then pouncing on it again as it squeaked in distress. He’d discovered they tasted terrible and gave him a tummy-ache, but they were more fun to play with than a ball, which he never would have believed.

This one, though, had quit playing. So he carried it to the head, expertly operating the lever handle, then dropped it in the commode. Hitting the lever to flush, he watched the weird purple arthropoid spin round and round, then down the drain.

He flushed the toilet a few more times, just to see the water swirl, then got bored.

They seemed to always be where it was dark, so he set off down the corridor, searching for more. One of these days he was going to figure out how to open the hatches with the round wheels, but they were harder. There were probably lots of the little creatures in there.

“Morning, sir,” Sub Dude said, sitting down by the XO. All the rest of the mess was keeping as far away from the officer as possible.

“Morning, Gants,” Bill said, taking a sip of coffee. Navy coffee was almost legendary in its wholesome goodness. Chief Duppstadt had even managed to grapp that up. “This is…”

“Awful,” Gants said, taking a sip. The coffee managed to be both weak and bitter: a tough combination. “Yep, that’s a Dumpstadt special, all right. I swear he gets up for each shift just to ruin the coffee.”

Green eggs. Scrambled eggs oxidize upon contact with the atmosphere, causing the green coloration. But it takes a certain amount of time. Which meant that the eggs had been prepared at least an hour beforehand and kept warm instead of “just in time” in which case they would have been yellow. Well, white and yellow and runny, but not green and brown and runny.

The bacon appeared to have been given a brief glance at a griddle and then dumped into a pile of grease. There was toast, if you could call the stale, rocklike hardtack toast.

“Am I gonna have to get in there and run the damned kitchen myself?” Bill asked.

“Probably, sir,” Gants said, eating the green eggs and horrid bacon with if not relish then at least determination. “Chief Dumpstadt apparently knows what sailors want, and this is it. You ever had his spinach fandango?”

“Please,” Bill said, his stomach turning more at the thought. “I think I’ll just have cereal.”

“Isn’t any, sir,” Gants said. “Seems someone has been pilfering it. The chief’s cut it off until we catch up on stock levels. This is breakfast, take it or leave it.”

“I’ll see about that,” Bill said, standing up with his nearly untouched platter of food. “It seems that the chief and I are going to have to have another talk.”

Bill decided that the only choice was to change the venue, which was why the next conversation was in his office.

“Chief, I think we have a failure to communicate,” Bill said, having failed to offer the chief petty officer a seat.

“What’s wrong now, sir?” the chief asked angrily.

“Well, let’s see,” Bill said, ticking off items on his fingers. “Green eggs that were runny and cold, bacon that was so underdone you could hear the squeal from the pig and toast that could be used as a throwing weapon. Oh, and did I mention the coffee? How do you get it unpalatably bitter and so thin you can see your spoon to the bottom of the cup? That, I’ll admit, was genius.”

“The guys like their bacon rare,” the chief said plaintively.

“I think we have a different definition of rare, Chief,” Bill said. “Rare means it has at least hit a griddle, not been waved over it to get the frost off! And I doubt that you took a poll before letting that inane comment slip from your lips. By the commanding officer’s order I am now taking every meal in the enlisted mess, Chief, until you can actually learn what has apparently escaped you in ‘over twenty years’ which is to cook a palatable meal! And you’re going to do that, if I have to sit in the kitchen and help you turn flip the damned burgers! Are we clear on this, Chief? Do you understand me? Am I getting through to the two brain cells you might actually have? Because if I’m not, I will find the lowliest cook and put him in charge of the kitchen and I am morally certain than he could not do a WORSE JOB! I’ll be back for lunch, which I see is fried chicken. Try to read a cookbook between now and then or by GOD we will be having this conversation again and it WILL be reflected in your evaluation!”

“Conn, preparing to EVA through Hatch Seven.”

“Go EVA through Hatch Seven,” the COB replied, hitting the remote control. “Depressurizing.”

“Seals good. Prepared to EVA.”

“Opening outer doors.”

“Tallyho to the beasts!” Colonel Che-chee said, the Hexosehr translator in her suit transforming her words into high-pitched English.

Even the newer Blade had to stop from time to time to “chill.” Space was a poor radiator of heat, being vacuum, and the Blade II built up heat slowly despite the astonishing efficiency of the various Hexosehr systems. A human nuclear power plant got less than ten percent of the actual power the plant produced, the rest turning mostly into waste heat. Thus the need for massive cooling towers and a nearby source of water. The Hexosehr He3 fusion plants translated 98% of their total output into useable power, which was considered theoretically impossible prior to meeting them.

However, even two percent of the energy of a fusion plant was a lot of heat. The Blade had exterior vanes that radiated some of it and a glaseous heat-sink that collected more. But from time to time the ship still had to stop and “chill.” The “chill” was not as extreme as the original Blade; the engine stayed up, providing artificial gravity and some way. But the output of the plant was dropped to only two percent of full power and in an hour or so the ship cooled off in the cryogenic conditions of deep space.

Given the conditions, though, chill was a great time to try out the dragonflies. The beasts, attached to support lines, had continued to live for over two weeks, much to the surprise of everyone involved. The nutrient feed was very close to identical to that their production cavern fed them, but everyone had expected them to die from the supernal cold of deep space or the long duration on the hull. However, they were hanging in there.

Designing a spacesuit for Cheerick had been another technical hurdle surmounted by the increasing number of scientists and engineers backing the Blade’s missions. Cheerick rarely wore clothing, since it was unpleasant with their fur. The space suits were, therefore, more like space armor, being hard-shells with carefully sprung flex-points. It was also hoped that if the shields failed, the armor might afford the dragonfly riders some survivability. They looked, in fact, very much like the JIM suits that deep ocean divers wore, an egglike shape with legs and arms sprouting out from it. They’d immediately been christened Humpty-Dumpty suits.

Lady Che-Chee used the jets on her Humpty suit to scoot over to her dragonfly, then assumed her mounting position. Like the boards, the dragonflies generated a sticky traction field to keep the rider in place. Unlike they boards they, fortunately, had an inertial stabilization field. Otherwise, their acceleration of a thousand and a half Earth gravities would have torn their riders in half.

“Dragonfly one rider in position,” Lady Che-Chee said. “Release clamps and feeding tube.”

The feeding tube broke loose first with a small jet of lost nutrient. Then the clamps that held the dragonfly’s feet to the hull released.

“Tallyho,” Colonel Che-chee said. “All riders in place and form on me.”

The Blade was parked in deep orbit around an M class dwarf star, well inside its dangerous heliopause but outside planetary orbits in the region called the Oort Cloud.

The dim red star was less than half the diameter of Sol and at about five thousand astronomical units from where the Blade was parked so the local “sun” was merely the brightest spot in the sky.

Oort Cloud material was extremely dispersed but with the right instruments it was possible to find a comet or two even when they were separated by the distance between the Earth and Mars on its closest pass. The target for today was just such a comet, one about the size of that believed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Wiping it out was possibly going to save some nascent race in this solar system. Assuming that any species arose on a planet around an M class star. The things were as common as ants at a picnic but they had narrow life-belts, short periods of potential life-development and darned few rocky planets. From a human perspective, M class stars were the teats-on-a-boar-hog of stars. Unless you needed a comet to blow away where nobody was going to watch.

“Telemetry?” Captain Prael asked.

“Suit transponders nominal,” the fighter combat controller replied. “Triangulation is good. Thirty percent above optimal.”

“That’s good,” Prael said, punching in a code. “Dragonflight, maneuver test first. Entering maneuver Delta-Three. Engage.”

Delta-Three was a simple combat approach maneuver with three changes in vector. Designed for approach to a firing enemy, the maneuver was more a test of the Cheerick ability to follow orders.

On the heads-up display inside the Cheerick rider’s helmets a karat appeared with a marker for acceleration. The idea was for the Cheerick riders to follow the karat as it moved across their visor and accelerate or decelerate as the indicator ordered.

Two separate screens in the CIC noted positions of the riders, one on vertical and one on horizontal. If you had the head for it and could keep an eye on both screens at more or less the same time, you could tell where something was in three-dimensions at all times.

Prael was used to thinking in three dimensions; it was the essence of submarine combat. What he was not used to was thinking fast in three dimensions. Submarine combat was very rarely fast, it was a matter of slow stalk and rare fast run, the latter always planned well in advance and well understood.

But it wasn’t really necessary to keep up when the Cheerick attempted the maneuver. On either board they were all over the map.

“Cease exercise,” the CO said, trying not to sigh. The Cheerick had only recently encountered any technology more advanced than the steel sword and mould-board plow. Expecting them to jump straight to understanding icons was idiocy. “Colonel, do you want to return and work this over or just talk to your people out there?”

“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.”