Attacking a US supercarrier was also an unambiguous declaration of full-scale war. Which is why Russia’s chosen strategy for taking the USS Enterprise out of the Battle for Bering Strait was… a rowing machine.
Of course, Aviation Electronics Technician E-3 Thomas Greyson was, as far as he was concerned, just applying an operating system update to the exercise machines on one of the hangar decks. It was probably the most exciting thing he’d been given to do that day, not because it was technically challenging, but because it involved real risk of bodily harm from the fitness fanatics he had to kick off the equipment so that he could patch and reboot it. Like everything else on the Enterprise, even the fitness equipment was networked. A seaman scanned in their ID, did their workout, and the results were uploaded to a server, then to the cloud, so that they could set goals and track their progress. Some of them were on compulsory scheduled workouts due to weight issues, and the data was used to assess their fitness for service. So yeah, he got a lot of grief when the machines had to be shut down, but life sucks, as he told the grumblers.
The order for the patch had come through a day out of San Diego and landed in his inbox looking like every other routine piece of shit job he had to handle. They were sailing into a war zone, and he was patching the OS on fitness equipment. No irony in that, at all. He pulled the patch down from the attached link, validated it, then called up the interface for the equipment in question, and applied the patch. The reboot had to be done manually, pulling the power and restarting the machines one by one, which meant him trekking all over the damn ship, from deck to deck. By the time he rebooted the last machine at about 1500 Pacific West Coast time, he was the one ready to hit someone.
But he got it done. And tomorrow was sure to be another fun-filled day.
The Russian virus was elegant but complex and it had never been used before. It had been created specifically to attack the USS Enterprise. Once it had gained access to the Enterprise’s local network via the exercise machines on multiple decks across the ship, it copied itself to every available server and networked device, and then went to work. Perhaps not surprisingly, Seaman Greyson was one of the first to notice something was wrong. Back at his station, he turned on his tablet and went to enter the day’s activity in his duty log, only to find he couldn’t connect to the ship’s wireless network. It was there, his tablet just couldn’t log into it. Piece of shit tablet. He grabbed another one, entered his ID and tried to log on with that. No deal. He went over to a stationary computer and was about to try and turn that on when the general quarters alarm began to sound and total chaos broke out!
Grayson was already at his ‘combat station’ and didn’t need to go anywhere, but throughout the ship he heard people yelling, feet running, compartment doors being slammed and locked tight. He waited for an announcement — was it a drill, or ‘vampires’ — enemy missiles — inbound?! There had been a lot of talk that they might even see action on the way up to the Arctic if Russia had parked an attack sub on the seafloor ahead of them. But there was no announcement, nothing at all but the blare of the alarm. And that was almost worse than the fear that there were missiles on their way.
The first thing the virus did was take down the ship’s internal communication links. Within minutes, nothing on the ship could talk to anything else, whether it was Grayson’s rowing machine, or the primary flight control center, the bridge, combat direction center or the carrier intel center, the only way anyone or anything could communicate was suddenly, and critically, by yelling. Which there was a lot of. The next thing it did was cut the carrier’s links to the outside world: shortwave, longwave, digital radio, radar, satellite up and downlinks, they all went black. In minutes the most sophisticated ship in the navy had been reduced to the status of a steam driven world war 2 vessel, with its only communication options the infallible battery-backed Aldis lamps, flags and Morse code.
And just like a ‘fly by wire’ aircraft, the Enterprise was ‘steer by wire’; its two 700 megawatt Bechtel A1B reactors drove four shafts which took their orders from the bridge computers, just as the rudders did.
So the only communication channel on the ship that the virus left open was the link from the bridge to the steering and propulsion system. And the last thing it did before locking those down was to push the Enterprise’s speed up to 35 knots and order full right rudder.
Seaman Grayson didn’t have to worry for very long why there were no announcements. As the USS Enterprise slowly but horrifically accelerated into a wide skidding turn, it began to lean over 20 degrees and the contents of a high filing cabinet that Grayson had been using emptied themselves onto his back, knocking his head forward into his desk and taking all his worries away.
If he’d still been conscious, he would have heard the sound of metal tearing and worse, the sound no seaman or officer on an aircraft carrier wants to hear; the sound of inadequately secured aircraft sliding across hangar decks to smash into each other.
Followed by the smell no seaman anywhere, on any vessel, ever wants to smell.
Smoke!
Bunny O’Hare was smoking, but only in the metaphorical sense. She’d gone from fuming, when Rodriguez had told her she’d be left behind in an explosives-filled cave to fly out their complement of drones, to incendiary as she watched the navy launches shuttle her fellow cave dwellers out to their waiting submarine. But now… now she was smoking.
As in, smoking hot. As in the most smoking hot drone aviator in the whole damn US Navy because over the last two days she and Rodriguez had just set a personal best, single-handedly flying 15 Fantoms out the chute over a 30 hour period without one hitch. Of course, if they’d had Rodriguez’s full launch team working they could have got a hex of drones out the chute within 35 minutes but it was just her and the Lieutenant Commander doing all the heavy lifting.
They’d worked out that Bunny wasn’t needed in the trailer between launches. Once she had a Fantom airborne and set its course for Elmendorf-Richardson or Eielson, she was basically a free agent because it was flying itself on full auto until it entered air traffic control range where the Air Force controllers at the other end took over to make sure it got down safely without bumping into anything.
So once her Fantom was out the chute and on its way, she went down to the flight deck and helped Rodriguez bully the empty cartridge off the Cat and into the reloader, then dropped the next cartridge and drone onto the Cat, locked and loaded it, and helped with the pre-flight check. She learned it wasn’t as hands-off as Rodriguez had made it out to be. The damn things didn’t always come out of the cartridges clean, they tended to stick and sometimes the only solution was a good old-fashioned kick in the ass with the heel of a boot to shake them loose. The launch bars and locks on the Cat that secured the airframe to the catapult shuttle, the carriage between the two catapult beams that flung the aircraft forward, were damn fussy and even when you were sure you had a good lock, they refused to give you a green light, and you had to reseat the damn thing. Finally, every drone was loaded inside its cartridge with wings folded, and an external hydraulic pressure system had to be connected to unfold and lock the wings in place. Only then, could the pre-flight physical and digital inspection be carried out.