Next to the ship controller, more toward the centerline, was a console for the ship systems, taking the place of the old ballast-control panel. On the port wall were a series of consoles, navigation aft, radio equipment just forward of that, then the repeater equipment for electronic countermeasures, then a sonar panel, then the weapons-control panel leading up to the ship control station.
The starboard bulkhead was the strangest part. Lined along it were five stations unlike any Patton had seen on a nuclear submarine before. They were five-foot-diameter eggs that one stepped into, and the canopy over head was made of a black substance that formed a hemisphere above the person’s head. A leather-lined structure was inside, not truly a seat but a sort of padded rail to lean against. On the rail were a helmet and gloves.
“What are these stations?” Patton asked the admiral.
“Battlecontrol stations,” Pacino said. “You’ll get inside one — the forward one is VR zero, which is yours.
Once you’re in, you lean against the rail and put on the helmet and gloves. The canopy comes down around your head. What you’ll see is a three-dimensional environment surrounding you, with a spatial relationship to your contacts. When we come to periscope depth, the computer makes your world look like your head is above water and the ships are all around you. This models the universe around the ship, and is linked to a computer called the Cyclops, a new Dynacorp wonder subsidiary. The VP of Cyclops is aboard now. I’ll introduce you to her.”
“Her?”
“Right, Colleen O’Shaughnessy.”
“O’Shaughnessy — any relation to Big Boss?”
“The old man’s daughter. Sharp cookie too.”
“Can you show me this battlecontrol system in action?”
“No. It doesn’t work, not even in demonstration mode.”
Patton’s breath caught. He didn’t want to sound stupid in front of the admiral, but he was astounded that the ship was on an operational mission without a fire-control system.
“Excuse me, sir? It doesn’t work? How are we going to fight these subs?”
“We don’t, not until Colleen finishes her coding. The system is down hard until she does.”
“Okay,” Patton said doubtfully.
Pacino had already shown him the aft spaces of the forward compartment middle level, the staterooms of officers’ country and the wardroom. They had started in the upper level, where the crew’s berthing spaces were, and the galley. The control room had been the first tactical space Patton had seen. Pacino took him forward into sonar, on the starboard forward exit to control, where five seats were placed behind an L-shaped line of consoles.
The room was empty of watchstanders.
“Shouldn’t there be someone here?” Patton asked.
“They will be.”
“Let me guess, sir. Sonar doesn’t work.”
“Correct, it’s tied into Cyclops. If the Cyclops computer is down, so is sonar.”
On the other side of a central passageway were radio and electronic countermeasures. Located forward, the computer room spanned the full width of the ship, a bite taken from the port side by the stairway and the electronic-countermeasures room. Sitting at a console with a deep seat and a number of displays was a crewman typing furiously into the keyboard. He paused to look at it, then cursed, then more typing, another look, another curse. The crewman had normal underway coveralls on, but a long black-haired ponytail.
“Colleen? We have a visitor,” Pacino said.
A woman stood from the console, not a tall woman, but beautiful and very well built. She stood, an annoyed look on her face, and extended her hand to Patton.
“Captain Patton, I assume,” she said with a quick smile, her voice unexpectedly deep.
“Colleen, I’ve heard you’re working on the Cyclops. Any prediction on when you’ll be done?”
O’Shaughnessy turned to Pacino, smiling at him.
“He’s worse than you said he’d be Admiral. Not only did he get the’when’ll it be fixed’ question out in the first minute, but it was his first question. Jesus, did they separate you two at birth. Captain? Admiral Pacino comes in here no less than once an hour to ask that same question. Now, please forgive my rudeness, but this sub is a hunk of scrap metal unless I can get this working. Now scram!”
“Don’t say scram,” Pacino said. “That means’shut down the reactor’ in sub talk.”
Patton watched as Colleen mimicked the words as they came out of Pacino’s mouth. Mimicking a three star admiral. Then he looked at Pacino, and realized that something was going on between the two of them, something more than just business. Patton turned to leave behind the admiral.
“Good luck, Ms. O’Shaughnessy,” he called.
“Colleen, please.” She was already lost again deep in her world.
“She’s a beauty,” Patton said, “isn’t she?”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Pacino said.
On the lower level was a machinery space aft, a middle area with a central passageway, a stores room to port, more berthing spaces to starboard, and the torpedo room forward. This room put the one on the Annapolis to shame. There were weapons crammed in everywhere on hydraulic rams, the room barely allowing him to get forward to the torpedo console.
“Two 21-inch tubes on the bottom, two 36-inchers on the top. The room holds forty-eight 21-inch weapons or thirty-four of the 36-inch large-bore missiles. Our loadout this run is mostly 36-inch Vortex Mod Charlie missiles, with two tube-loaded Mark 52 21-inch Hullcracker torpedoes and two room-stored Mark 52s.”
“Vortex missiles?” Patton asked. “Why haven’t I heard of them?”
“Because they’re classified secret, of course. I’ll tell you more about them later, but they’re a small version of the solid-rocket-fueled mod bravo we employed in the Japanese blockade. The weapon does a swimout on an oxidized-fuel propulsion module, then at fifty knots the control fins pop out and the solid fuel ignites, and the missile travels to its target at three hundred knots. It doesn’t have the range of the old mod bravo, but if we’re in close, we can get a kill.”
“For the SSNX, what’s close?”
“On your 688 the most distant sonar contact you could hear, a submerged target, came at what, twenty to forty miles?”
“Yessir.”
“For the SSNX, that’s close. We can detect a submerged contact eighty or ninety miles away.”
“How? What did you do?”
“Sonar’s completely different on this ship. We don’t have a wide-aperture array or a spherical array, not since the redesign. We use a system called ADI, for Acoustic Daylight Imaging.”
The two men climbed the aft ladder back to the middle level, and walked back to the control room.
“How does it work?”
“Easy to explain, hard to engineer it and implement it, even harder to connect it to a computer and make the readout meaningful. In the past we used broadband sonar, just listening to the ocean, all frequencies, all the white noise. Worked great on surface ships, since they’re so loud you hear them a hundred miles away. And it worked great on the first-and second-generation Soviet subs too, because they were clanking train wrecks. But once the third-generation Soviets came out, we switched to a combination of broadband sonar and narrowband, using towed hydrophones on long cables, and the hydrophone array was a couple hundred feet long, capable of hearing very selected frequencies a long way away, as long as it was connected to a damned good computer. The limiting factor was the computer.”
They were back in control, and Pacino leaned against the elevated periscope-stand handrails. Patton sat down in the command seat on the port aft part of the periscope stand.