“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?”