"Fine, yes. These mattresses are very firm." Ilse looked at his, as if to see if it was different.
"Good back support," he said.
"I want to work with Lieutenant Sessions on the Agulhas Current," Ilse said. "We'll have to head right through it and I can help."
"That's good," Jeffrey said. "Talk to the navigator too."
"You give permission?"
"For sure," Jeffrey said, liking how she looked with that cap on. She'd bunched her hair up above the little plastic sizing strip at the back, making a kind of ponytail. "So far you've been a real help, Ilse. Your enhancements to our models made a difference when we fought those Axis diesel subs. It's like having a sailing master aboard, twenty-first-century style."
"You mean the guy who advised the captain in the old men-o'-war?"
"Yeah," Jeffrey said. "Currents, soundings, weather, tides, wooden ships and iron men."
Ilse smiled. "Was he part of the crew?"
"Warrant officer."
"What's that mean?"
"It's like being a noncommissioned officer, like a master chief, but you're more senior. Your pay and privileges are in line with a lieutenant maybe, even a lieutenant commander." Ilse seemed to like that.
"Can I follow you around while you get ready for your watch?"
"A little tour?" Jeffrey said.
Ilse nodded.
"Ready?" Jeffrey said.
"Yes."
"See," Jeffrey said, "the oncoming watch standers already took over, except for me."
"You always go last?" Ilse said.
"On this boat, yeah. The main thing's consistency."
"Now what?" Ilse said.
"I'll take reports, starting with the helm."
"Sir," LTJG Meltzer said, "fly-by-wire ship control is rigged for nap-of-seafloor cruising, top speed twenty-six knots, general course now two one five, following route laid down by the navigator."
"Sir," COB said, "our depth is five two four zero feet, material condition ZEBRA, patrol quiet in the boat."
"Thanks, COB, Meltzer," Jeffrey said, then turned to Ilse. "I make up a watch bill every month. I try to mix people around now and then so all the crew can work together. But I also like to have the battle stations roster on duty often so they stay sharp as a group, not just at general quarters."
"Like now," Ilse said. "They're your lead-off team."
"Yup, the most experienced guys." Jeffrey sat down next to the off-going OOD at the command workstation. Jeffrey quickly skimmed the newest entries in the handwritten logbook, then spent more time on Captain Wilson's most recent instructions.
"Running as before, sir," the OOD said as Jeffrey finished. He was a junior officer from Engineering. "No new equipment casualties, no threats, all scheduled drills complete and satisfactory."
"Good," Jeffrey said. "Captain told me he was turning in."
"Yes, sir. Night orders are to go to modified ultraquiet at oh three hundred Zulu."
"I saw that, very well … Next to fill me in, Ilse, shall be the navigating department."
"Sir," the senior chief on duty said, "we're driving south-southwest between the Soudan Bank to starboard and Rodrigues Ridge to port. Our position is 18 degrees 46.1 south, 60 degrees 14.4 east. Central Madagascar is six hundred miles off our starboard beam."
"Very well, Assistant Navigator," Jeffrey said. "Ilse, in older boats he'd be called the quartermaster."
Jeffrey brought up several displays on the command console one by one. "Now I'm taking a good look at the big picture in the boat. Pumps and valves and tankage lineup first, including filtration desalinators … Air quality — we have radiacs and mass spectrometers for that."
Ilse nodded.
"Next," Jeffrey said, "is reactor and steam plant lineup and key-point pressures and temperatures. Look away for a minute, Ilse, this stuff is classified … Then come loads on the turbogenerators and hydraulics … And weapons status. See how you read the weapons board?"
"Little symbols," Ilse said. "Um, torpedo tubes, and, and missile silos?"
"We call that the vertical launch system, VLS, for our Tomahawk cruise missiles."
"How come so much is red?"
"Either we're too deep or fast to launch, or the weapon presets and firing solutions aren't loaded. Or we haven't flooded and opened the outer doors. The big Xs through the port torpedo tubes remind us they're inoperable now"
"This is great — it gives you everything at once. It's, like, idiot-proof."
"That's the idea." Jeffrey used the intercom to review secondary machinery status with the engineering officer of the watch, the EOOW. Satisfied, he hung up the mike.
"Challenger's a new ship," Jeffrey said. "The propulsion plant's still breaking in. Changes in key performance variables can give us hints of trouble. So far everything looks good."
Jeffrey stood and walked with Ilse the few paces to the sonar area. He peered at all the console screens.
"Morning, sir," Lieutenant Sessions said. "No nuclear detonations detected in this theater during the previous watch."
"A quiet night," Jeffrey said. "What's happening locally?"
"We have some neutral merchant shipping off our stern, sir. They'll be in our baffles soon but they're well distant and the range is opening fast. These submerged contacts here are biologic."
"Very well," Jeffrey said. "Sonar, I want you to get Ilse familiarized with our bottom nav and mapping capabilities. Pretend she's joined your division fresh from SUBSCHOL."
"Yes, sir," Sessions said.
Jeffrey glanced at a chronometer — it was 2326 Zulu. "Well," Jeffrey said, "now it's my turn."
Ilse thanked him and sat down next to Sessions. Jeffrey went back to the OOD. "I relieve you, sir."
"You have the conn," the OOD intoned, rising from the console.
"This is the XO," Jeffrey announced, "I have the Conn."
"Aye aye, sir," the CACC watch standers said. The ex-OOD went aft. Jeffrey sat down and made some entries in the log, then settled into the command chair, grateful for the familiar routine of conning the ship. He was glad that for the next six hours the total concentration would relieve his mind of other things, including thoughts of Ilse Reebeck that weren't related to work.
"This gravimetry display is unbelievable," Ilse said.
"It's the closest thing to magic I've ever seen," Sessions said.
"It doesn't use stored data?" Ilse said, her eyes glued to the screen.
"Nope. It's completely independent of any database or our previous course or even the need to be moving. You just turn it on and there it is."
Ilse saw a crisp rendering of the seafloor terrain around the boat, contours and perspective drawn in by computer — a synthetic view as if she were peering through a window in the bow. Her other screen showed the corresponding bird's-eye view, looking down at Challenger. Ilse ignored all the numbers to the sides, course and speed and everything, riveted to this raw live imagery of the world outside the hull.
"What's the image resolution?" Ilse said.
"At short range," Sessions said, "better than ten meters."
"And it's all derived from local gravity?"
"Uh-huh," Sessions said. "Several groups of gradiometers and accelerometers throughout the boat. They measure changes in mass concentrations from different bearings."
"And this is all continuous motion," Ilse said, "in real time?"
"Yeah, the same thing COB and Meltzer have right now. It's refreshed every ten seconds."
"It must use lots of processing power."
"It's worth it," Sessions said. "We've got a hundred times the original Seawolf-class computer capabilities. The basic gravimeter math's nonclassified, but ours has special stuff civilian geologists don't know about."