Looking Glass 4 - Claws That Catch (25 page)

“Then thank you,” Prael said, trying hard not to growl. “When can we get the design?”

“Sir, I'd estimate at least a week,” the Eng said unhappily. “And redoing the installation will take much longer. I'm not even sure it's feasible, given that we only have a limited quantity of molycirc.”

“I'll have it tomorrow,” Miriam replied. “And it will take into account how much molycirc we have.”

“You're joking,” the Eng said.

“I will see you tomorrow, Engineer,” Miriam said. “I have to get to work.”

With that she stood up and stomped out of the wardroom, four inch heels clacking furiously.

“No way,” the Eng said. “No way in hell. Sorry, sir, but there's entirely too much detail to change. Doing that many CAD drawings is something that you'd usually give an entire team. And that is if you knew how you were going to change it. I'm still trying to figure that part out, and I've been doing this for twenty years.”

“Then we'll see who eats crow,” Prael said, nodding. “I admit I'm torn. Everyone talks about how that little weirdo walks on water; seeing her taken down a peg would not make me unhappy. On the other hand . . .”

“We have to get the reinstallation done on both systems,” the Eng said, nodding unhappily. “And that, right there, is going to take more manhours than I can spare. The faster we get the plans . . .”

“Well, even if she's done in a week, that will probably give us enough time,” the CO said. “Bring this to the attention of the XO, tell him that we got started on fixing it on his sleep shift and keep me apprised.”

“You're joking,” Weaver said, yawning.

“No, we're going to have to completely redesign and rebuild it, XO,” the Eng said unhappily. “The CO and I discussed it while you were off watch. About six hours ago.”

Like a lot of the professional officers on the Blade, Oldfield didn't think much of his new XO. Yes, he knew that Weaver had done some terrific things—fight giant octopus thingies, space battles, first venturer into the treacherous shoals of outer space, save the world for that matter—but a person who had worked his way up the ladder had a hard time taking seriously a guy who had been fast-tracked to the Eng's current rank and then bumped twice since. Nobody was that good. Besides, the guy was just a grouch.

“The design's going to take at least a week, whatever Miss Moon says,” the Eng continued. “And as for the reinstallation . . .”

“Man, y'all are damn funny sometimes,” Weaver drawled. “By y'all I mean y'all wet navy characters. This here's the Blade, Eng. Hellfire and damnation. We don't diddle around with taking a week for something like this. Ain't got the time, there's always some alien space beast or enemy fleet trying to wipe us out. Can't just go back to dry-dock and let the contractors handle it. It's figure out the problem, fast, or die. And you say you told the CO at least a week for Miriam to do the plans? That maulk is just grapping funny.”

“Yes,” the Eng said, his face tight. “Do you find that questionable, Captain?”

“Maulk,” Weaver said, laughing. “Hell, yeah, I find that questionable. You do know she's written about half the peripheral coding in AutoCAD, right? And that the company sends all their Alpha test systems to her, since she's the fastest user they've ever tracked, right? That they had to rewrite one whole generation just because she proved she could crash it simply by going faster than the program could handle? And that she's got enough classes to count for Ph.D.s in mechanical and electrical engineering and was the lead designer on this ship. A ship we designed, every last bolt and fastener, in less than a week? Most of it drawings that she did?”

“Oh,” the Eng said, his eyes wide.

“I'm kinda surprised she's not already—”

“Hi, Bill,” Miriam said, walking into the XO's office. “You want to look over this redesign? I think I managed to fix it. It was my fault to begin with, I think. I figured out a way to run the circuits and cut off thirty percent of the circuit length. But I'll admit I was hurrying the last time. I've been thinking about it since . . .”

“Be glad to, Miriam,” the XO said. “I think the Eng was just going to have supper. The menu would be a form of rook.”

“You're joking,” the CO said, looking at the blueprints laid out on his desk. “The Eng said . . .”

“The Eng was unaware of some of Miss Moon's less notable features,” Weaver said dryly. “I think he was paying too much attention to her butt and too little to her brain.”

“This is . . .” Prael was a nuclear submarine officer and had, in fact, come up through the engineering department. Like the Eng, he had a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering. He knew CAD drawings, used the program and knew how long it took to create something like this. Yes, she had started from extant drawings, but it was often more work to “fix” something in CAD drawings than to start anew. He flipped up the pages one by one and estimated how long it would have taken him to do something like this. More like a month, frankly. A day per drawing most likely, given the detail level. “Unreal,” he finally said. “I would have said impossible. And she did this in six hours?”

“Sir, I'm going to say something that will come across as insulting and is not intended to be,” Weaver replied carefully. “May I continue?”

“Go ahead, XO,” the CO said, leaning back in his chair. “What's one more insulting thing? This seems to be the week.”

“The original crew of the Blade, of whom Miriam was a member, was chosen from the absolute top of their respective fields,” Weaver pointed out. “Miss Moon is one of the top linguists in the world, with a host of secondary skills, some of which are obviously as sharp or even sharper. Dr. Robertson, our biologist, was world-renowned and, again, multiskilled. Dr. Dean, God rest his liberal soul, was a brilliant planetologist and geologist even if he couldn't figure out not to run under a herd of rampaging giant crabpus. The CO, who admittedly was a fly-boy, had a string of walk-on-water reports, never had an airman request transfer when he was a carrier commander, was a former Blue Angel and an instructor at Top-Gun. Even the individual members of the crew were chosen from the best of their rank in the sub service and the Marines were all hand-picked for the job.”

“And you're saying that the current crop is not?” the CO replied dryly.

“You were, obviously, sir,” Bill said tactfully. “The CO of any nuclear sub is carefully chosen and the CO of the Blade more so. You're someone who's been pre-tapped as a future large-ship commander or an admiral. But . . .  There's a difference between a large-ship commander, even a very good one, and someone who is at genius level in their field. It's like being pregnant; you can't be a little bit genius. The replacements are not being chosen from that genius caliber. It's another disconnect between the old hands and the new. Miriam, clearly, is at that level.”

“By the same token, you're saying you are,” the CO pointed out.

“I think I'll just stand on my record, sir,” Bill said, smiling thinly.

“So why aren't you commanding?” the CO asked, smiling just as thinly back.

“Because I haven't had a slot as XO,” Bill said. “And, hellfire, it's way more demanding than I realized; I can see why you need to do the job before you command. But the real reason is that I can do a better job where I'm at at what the Navy wants me to do.”

“Which is teach me the realities of the Space Navy?” the CO asked. “That we have to put up with the occasional flake because sometimes we really need her?”

“Or him,” Bill said. “When we've established forward bases, when a ship isn't invaluable, when there's the choice to put into dock and fix something major that's screwed up, then it will be more . . . mundane. More like the regular Navy. In the meantime . . .”

“It's just us,” the CO said, nodding. “We're a hundred fifty light-years from Earth and more from any ship that can tow us home. What? A year and a half for a Hexosehr ship to get here even if we could ask?”

“Deep space, sir,” Bill pointed out. “The Hexosehr can't come out here short of a specially built ship. And then it would be more like . . .” He paused and did some numbers in his head. “Thirty years.”

“Thanks for pointing that out,” the CO said sourly, then paused. “Really?”

“Sir, if we have a major failure we cannot correct we are as dead as a sub at the bottom of the Pacific,” Weaver said. “Deader. They could get to a sub in the Marinas Trench faster than they could get to us. Absent Hexosehr, the only people who have any chance of figuring out something really bad are myself and Miss Moon. We're both here, I guess, to teach the crew how to keep this lash-up running. But I'm up to my eyeballs in work and . . .”

“I've actually had this lecture, XO,” the CO said tightly. “From at least one unexpected source. Okay, please kindly ask Miss Moon to oversee the reinstallation. And from this point forward, she has the run of the ship. Except Conn. I will not have her on the Conn.”

“I'll pass that on, sir,” Weaver said, nodding.

“I'll climb down that far and no farther,” the CO stated, emphatically, knowing in his heart he was dooming himself to failure. Again. Sooner or later he'd have to have Miriam on the Conn. Damnit.

“Well, there's one part that doesn't work,” the Eng said, as he brought the plans back to Miriam's office. “There's more molycirc in use than we have.”

“Had to do it that way,” Miriam said, not looking up from her computer. “When Red and Sub Dude pulled all the wiring the damage was well back from the generators. I think I know why, but it's complicated.”

“I was once considered a geek,” the Eng admitted. “Try me.”

“Okay, what do you know about coordinate covalent bonds? They're sometimes called dative bonds,” Miriam asked.

“That's when you have one atom supplying both shared electrons to the other atom it's covalently bonded to, if I remember correctly.”

“Well . . . close enough. But without Ligand Field Theory I'd be afraid to delve any deeper into that aspect of it. What do you know about chaos?”

“I work in the Navy,” the Eng said with a grin. “And on a more serious note, I did some control theory in my dissertation that had some systems of coupled differential equations that would go chaotic from time to time.”

“Well, that's more of the nonlinear dynamics view of chaos where under conditions such that all potential Fourier series frequencies are present you get a system that jumps around like nuts and is wildly tending toward disorder that sort of agrees with the understanding of the classical second law of thermodynamics. What we have here is something different termed fundamental cosmic chaos.”

“Uh huh.” The Eng, of course, had taken it as though Miriam were being condescending.

“Chaos at a cosmos level is more a fundamental of the universe that strongly contrasts with the second law of thermodynamics. In fact, wild complex systems of systems that are seemingly completely random and chaotic often generate order from within the randomness. Think, oh, fractal screensavers but really more related to Schwartzchild boundaries.”

“What does this have to do with the molyc—?”

“It has everything to do with it,” Miriam said as she pushed one of the purple strands of alien metal. “The chaos generator actually does generate chaos. What it does, well at least what we think it does, is to create a sphere of uncertainty on the fundamental cosmic level. In that sphere there is nothing but the pure randomness of the vacuum energy fluctuations of creation and annihilation on the subnuclear scale. Within the sphere everything is broken down to its fundamental components and then set asunder following the rules of uncertainty and randomness. What the Hexosehr must not have realized is that the little black box creates a very thin shell around the ship of its own randomness at the event horizon of the warp bubble. Bill could explain that better, he's the expert in General Relativity and warp theory, but I believe he would agree that it is a Planck-length-thick shell where absolute fundamental cosmic chaos and uncertainty exists. It works by generating nanosecond conditions of total chaos, a moment where we could be truly anywhere in the universe or possibly the multiverse, then resetting reality so that we've made a very small movement within the time-space continuum probably because that movement is relatively chaos energy minimal, that is it approaches the highest probability of reality that we don't move at all. There is a region of vacuum energy fluctuations coming into and going out of reality. Maybe the Hexosehr realized the bubble wall was there, but they didn't realize that it was going to interact with the quantum fluctuation fields the chaos generators created. The result was that from these two colliding regions of chaos driven by different sources there was a mutual order that was created. That order was a Ligand Field phenomenon. Oh, I said I wasn't going to discuss Ligand Field Theory, didn't I?”

“Uh,” the Eng said, staring blankly at Miriam.

"But skipping trying to explain Ligand Field theory, the effect was the creation of ligands or coordinate covalent bonds under conditions that were stochastically unlikely absent the chaotic interactions of the fields and now seem to be stochastically certain. In other words: The coordinate covalent bonds that were created throughout the molycirc shouldn't be possible in this universe. The molybdenum and rhenium transition metals simply don't work that way. The chaos field phenomenon caused them to form quadruple coordinate covalent bonds which became powdery brittle in the weak chaos fields that were escaping the chaos ball generator's shielding. There was also some di-tungsten hexa hydro pyrimido pyrimidine ligands that formed but not as many. The spectral analysis of the degraded molycirc showed a bunch of odd materials. I'm making a really detailed record because there are some covalent bonds that might theoretically be useful. Some of the materials have structures and properties more similar to rare elements than molecules.

“Bottomline: The molycirc couldn't take the stress of the chaos generator field after the fractal odd order phenomenon occurred within the material's matrix. Oh, there was also some issue with lanthanide contraction, but it was less catastrophic as the other phenomenon. I think the lanthanide contraction was supposed to be stabilized by the molycirc and the chaos messed that up. Secondary effect rather than primary.”