Battleship Destroyer (25 page)

"I know that the coils are combining
to magnify the waves to burn these coils out."

"That is stupid Turner, the coils
are failing from shoddy manufacturing. I just can't figure out why the burned out ones are damaging the ones beside them." She took her scanner back and returned to the pit she had been working in.

Walking out to the middle of the deck
. Jack started looking around the tank at the half a dozen open coil pits trying to think. Knowing he must be crazy to be thinking what he was thinking but he finally smiled. "Shit." Going back over to her as she dropped down to inspect a different coil, he excused himself and grabbed the scanner from the deck beside her  and walked back out into the darkness of the tank after being blinded again by the lights.

Willis
climbed out of the pit and followed Jack. "What the hell are you doing Turner?" She was starting to get pissed off. "Give me back my scanner."

Jack had to force himself to keep walking. His feet felt like someone was filling them with concrete with each step.

Taking a deep breath. "I just remembered basic gravity coil physics Willis. It is called wave propagation resonance." Using the scanner he measured the distance to the different burned coil pits and then placed the scanner on the deck and smiled. "All right, this is it even if I can't see it clearly with you shining your damn light on everything but it is there, look." He moved over so she could see the screen.

Bending down she looked closely at the scanner's screen.
"I don't see anything but vague coils."

"You have to look closely.
It is hard to see but the... “Jack straightened up and thought for a second. "You need to take this deck plate off so you can see close up what I am talking about."

"Are you
crazy? We have too much work to do now."

"Listen; the coils are burning out because of gravity stasis resonance propagation. To make it simple
, groups of coils are acting together and setting up gravity wave lenses that are magnifying the coil output at the spots where all the surrounding coil gravity waves intersect that is called the prime intersect coils." Pointing down at the sensor. "Oh, yes. I almost forgot. You can tell by the increased strength of the waves acting on this coil and the lack of power driving it." He changed the sensor readout and showed her the meter readout making her eyes open wide and her jaw drop.

Then he continued. "
By the looks of it you have 3 prime intersect coils in this tank. Where the feedback electromagnetic wave rings from the multiple prime coils intersect, the electrical resistance in those coils windings are increased at the intersect spots creating heat and burning them out. This is one of the three prime coils in this tank only because of its placement in relation to all the others." Looking at her he tried to think of what to say to convince her.  "Ah, if you pull this deck plate you will find the proof. The coil windings will be expanded from the gravity waves coming together at this point. That is where the increased wave density reading is coming from. They create tremendous pressure on the coil windings making the coil bigger than the rest, like a balloon but rarely burns them out because the current draw and coil resistance going through it drops. You will see this in all the other tanks you have been having problems with and it has an easy fix. You won't have to pull and replace anymore coils. Is that worth pulling the plate to check what I am saying?"  Jack talked as he walked over to pick up the tool for unsealing the deck plates.

"How the hell do you know that?"

"Once upon a time, I had a Doctorate in gravity coil physics and coil engineering to name just two." And then walked back and started unfastening the deck plate.

Jack sat down at the gravboard making a few adjustments the crewman he relieved did not see or care to make. Nothing major as the board was
just one of about a dozen Main Server sector boards overseeing the hundreds of trim boards lining the compartment. A third of the trim boards were manned by 3rd classes and unless the ship was loading or unloading or transferring reaction mass from tank to tank, his sector board like the trim boards, usually did not need touched. But navy regulations dictated that the main server boards controlling groups of single boards be manned at all times in case of an emergency. So as a 1st Class it fell to Jack taking his turn at what turned out to be a different board every watch whenever his section had the duty. At least he was now at a main board instead of one of the trim boards he had been stuck at for most of the past year that was not even unlocked as it ran training drills for the 3rd classes to learn how to use the boards and keep them busy while on watch. At least this one could do something if the need arose.

As a First Class now
, he was not required to run training drills all the time, his watch was keeping an overall eye on the gravity coils in his section of the ship. Though he still had to answer any questions the 3rd and 2nd Class trainees had. Jack usually used the extra time to study for his knowledge tests greatly speeding up his class work. And now that he did not have to dry out tanks so coils could be replaced, he was doing even better and managed to get a couple of hundreds. Though retuning tank gravcoil array's was still boring, at least he was not getting wet and it was a lot quieter.

H
e was even starting to enjoy teaching a half dozen First Class Gravtechs the procedures and finer points of the art. After a month they were starting to get good at it. Which was actually the boring part of the job now, waiting for them to screw up or run into a problem for him to salve. But then Ensigns and Lieutenants started sticking their noses in once in a while to ask a few questions, trying to understand what he and the techs he was training were doing. And usually started adding their vast knowledge to his to insure he was doing a proper job. Only to show off how stupid they were concerning Gravity coils. Expecting the Officers to at least have the basics down, being officers with degrees and gravity coils being their jobs, Jack was usually disappointed in them by the time they walked away and half disgusted at how dense they were. Doing his best trying not to repeat the many phrases his grandfather (Pop) used to use on him when he was just as dense.

"Your attention please. This
is Captain Halsey. We have lost contact with a fifth major colony planet on the galactic side of the republic a few days ago called New Mexico. Luckily most of the million habitants have evacuated. The President has ordered the fleet to set up a blockade while a reconnaissance in force is made into the New Mexico system to finally find out just who the hell we are trying to fight. We will be one of the reaction mass transports for the fleet. That is all."

Jack (for some reason) found it hard to concentrate on studying the rest of the shift and well into the next day as everyone kept talking about the news and speculating on the attack and what
kind of enemy crew would be found in what had over a year of news reports with few facts and much speculation, become known as the Spider ship enemy, after a news cast showed one of their scout ships at long range attacking and destroying a gravity coil factory in the Ort cloud around one of the inner systems far from the front lines. Most of the crew talking about how badly we were going to beat them. Jack found himself wishing he was on one of the battleships in the thick of the coming battle. Thinking how lucky Tom was to be on the front lines.

Finally
for the first time in days he was sitting on his bunk studying again while waiting for chow, he was deep into concentrating on his studies when Willis walked up to him. "There you are. I have been looking for you everywhere including the 1st class mess and lounge.  Not many crewmen spend their spare time in their bunks studying. Come with me, you are in my maintenance crew now."

Jack followed her to the central personnel elevator and not the cargo elevator he had been restricte
d to when going up ship to dry out the tanks. A crew was already there with tool and equipment carts. The elevator rushed up ship though the central open pipe chase connecting all the tanks with hundreds of huge pipes running up through it. But even at speed, it took quite a long time to get past all the grated tank decks then through the first armored deck to the officer, passenger and navigation section at the bow of the ship. "You just follow and stay close to me. I will tell you if I need you to do something which will just be running back to get things from the coil winding shop if we need something. For now just get to know and used to how we do things."

Jack frowned. He had only been in the grav
coil winding shop a few times and did not have a clue where anything was in it.  Making him start to panic at the prospect of being sent back down after something he would not have a clue where to find.

The elevator opened and
Willis walked off with her crew. Jack tagging along behind down a long passageway that seemed to go on forever as they wound their way through the ship. They entered a compartment full of consul screens and plot tanks and consuls filled with officers and even larger screens on the bulkheads around some ¾ of the compartment and overhead. Then Jack saw the Captain sitting in a huge chair with control packed arms and see through screens completely surrounding it. Willis and her crew started pulling deck plates and checking coils talking in whispers. Jack just wondered around trying to look invisible afraid to get very far from the hatch and escape. Something he was good at on the Turner Joy. But something was wrong as he realized the bridge looked too much like the bridge on Tom's hug Battle cruiser and not anything like a transport’s much smaller and simpler bridge.  Tom and Jack had spent much time and effort designing Tom's bridge to be the perfect bridge only for the game to turn it back to what Jack was looking at here. It had taken months before they had finally given up and let the game have its way. A lesson Jack let stand on his ships, finally realizing the only choice the game left them as far as the bridge went was basically the size and again unless The Game wanted it different for that ship. All Jack had wanted for his Destroyer Bridge was little more than the size of a fighter cockpit or shuttle boat bridge. At least nothing bigger than the Turner Joy’s transport bridge but the game would have nothing of it and always turned it back into a relatively large bridge with many crew stations in easy reach and hearing.

T
hen Jack looked at a nearby console and the button and control layout on it looked all too familiar right down to the buttons around the edge that included the worn lettering on buttons used more than the others. The same buttons Jack had worn down as he climbed the ranks performing the various jobs around the bridge over the years. After the third console that looked like one he had spent a year at, he had to turn away in disbelief to look at the view screens of space around the ship only to see what looked like a flight of fighters passing close between them and another Dwarf Tanker Transport in the distance. Only to realize the fighters in the flight of 4 in a V formation closely resembled a certain large Battleship Destroyer he had spent years designing complete with drop tanks covering the back and belly and huge guns sticking out ahead of them from low slung flush turrets above and below the bow. Though his Destroyer had no turrets. They were simply too expensive and time consuming to build and maintain on his budget. Though a turret would have freed up a lot of space inside the hull that he could have used for torpedo tubes and their magazines. The problem was exacerbated with the fact that the turrets he could see where exact copies of the turrets he had designed but was having problems getting all the bugs out of.

Quickly looking away in disbelief
at the hallucination or trick of his eyes, Jack spotted a screen taking up a good portion of the back bulkhead and found a damage control map of the ship. The first he had seen. He quickly realized that he had only seen or even knew about a small fraction of the ship. Even the stern engineering section he thought he was well acquainted with had 50 decks of storage holds farther down between the ships huge engines as well as at least 20 heavy equipment and some 50 low overhead troop decks he had not found or even known to look for. Then Jack noticed the huge boats sitting in locks hanging out like huge tanks down the sides between each of the six cooling fins. Then he really got a shock when he saw the hundreds of passenger decks in the bow section. "Why would a Tanker have hundreds of passenger decks?" He said to himself. Then spotted the massive fighter launch bay that looked big enough to house fighters the size of destroyers.

The officer at the console next to Jack looked up
at Jack staring at the 8 by 20 foot screen, did a double take and frowned. After glancing at the crew jerking up deck plates randomly around the compartment, she smiled taking a deep breath reaching into her pocket for her stun gun. Resisting the urge to reach out and touch him with it on full power. But finally took a deep breath shaking her head. "If the fleet can’t stop them, we are supposed to evacuate as many refugees as we can from their path of advance. The empty passenger decks are enough to hold a million in tolerable comfort with each mass tank able to squeeze in a thousand cargo containers holding cargo or 20,000 passengers in an emergency. The idea is to strip the next planet and the system before the enemy gets to it."

Jack looked at her shocked. "No
w how the hell could? That does not even seem possible."