“Hey, Miriam,” Gants said as he stepped into the clean room. He and the chief had both donned new coveralls, masks and hoods before being swept for any remaining particles.
“Catch,” Miriam said, tossing him the injector.
“Holy shit, ma’am,” Gants said, catching the priceless item carefully. “Without that…”
“Since it’s useless, even if you dropped it we wouldn’t have a problem,” Miriam said, grinning like a cat. “Okay, you had one problem. That caused another problem and that caused a third. Ready?”
“Go,” the chief replied.
“The injector was almost certainly misaligned before we left,” Miriam said. “You need to be clear that tolerance is in the micrometer range. More like nanometer range. I’ll come up with a better aligner for it so we don’t have the problem again. I think the Hexosehr use a microsonic system that’s better than what we use for alignment. But I’ll come up with something.”
“Okay,” Gestner said. “But what are the other problems?”
“When the injector shot the He3 into the fusion bottle, that put undue stress on the third magnet battery. Among other things, it meant that some particles were getting through the magnetic bottle. Those, in turn, degraded the material of the magnets and their support. What happened then was that as the magnets had to work harder, they started… pulsing. They weren’t designed to put out the extra power continuously so they were putting it out in fluctuations.”
“That loss of power I was seeing?” Gants asked.
“That was very late in the process,” Miriam replied. “It was actually a sign that things were about to go critical. No, this would have been indetectable to our instruments. But that caused a blowback condition, particulate mostly, which was hitting the injector. Which in turn…”
“Degraded the material of the injector,” the chief finished.
“Yes,” Miriam said. “It’s only noticeable under electron microscopy and even then I had to use a crystal flux spectrometer. But the edge of the injector is heavily degraded. So. You’re going to need to replace all the third sector magnets, all their supports including feedback systems, physical supports and power supports. And the injector. That should fix the problem.”
“I’m not sure we have all that in stock,” the chief said.
“That, Chief Gestner, is why you should be glad the XO found the fabricator you nearly left on Earth. It has every part small enough to reproduce in its database. Go see if you can figure out the shiny buttons.”
“Humming along nicely,” Captain Prael said, looking at the fusion reactor. “Good job, Eng.”
“Thank you, sir,” the engineering officer said blankly. “Chief Gestner and PO Gants were critical in determining the nature of the fault and methods of correction.”
“What was the problem?” the CO asked.
“Misalignment of the injector system led to a chain failure, sir,” the Eng said. “We’re doing up an SOP change and… personnel are working on a new alignment system that will prevent a recurrence.”
“I’ll make sure you get a letter on this,” the CO continued. “And do some up for the critical crew.”
“Yes, sir,” the Eng said, wondering if he dared slip Miss Moon into the pile. Probably not.
“Now if things will just hold together for a little while longer…” the CO muttered as he left the compartment.
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.”