Even worse was the fear that she might drop some critical ball simply because of her own lack of experience. She knew she could count on Commodore Terekhov to keep an eye on her, but she'd also learned—the hard way, which, she often thought, was the way she tended to learn most things—that failure taught more than success. The commodore, unfortunately, was also aware of that minor fact, and she had no doubt at all that he was prepared to allow her to fail as part of the learning process. Which was probably all well and good from his perspective, but tended to suck vacuum from hers. Helen Zilwicki was unaccustomed to failing. She didn't like it when it happened, she didn't handle it well, and, she admitted to herself as she trotted down the ship's passage towards Lynch's office, she absolutely hated the thought of letting someone else down through her own ineptitude.
But that brought her to the other reason her present assignment was usually reserved for a full lieutenant. A flag lieutenant didn't exist simply because a flag officer needed an aide. She existed because an assignment as a flag lieutenant was a teaching experience, too. Well, in fairness,every naval assignment was a teaching experience—or it damned well ought to be, at any rate. But Manticoran flag lieutenants were far more than just aides and what were still called go-fors, and RMN flag lieutenacies were normally reserved for officers being carefully groomed for bigger and better things. The experience of managing a flag officer's schedule and sitting in on staff discussions and decision making processes other lieutenants never got to see was supposed to give a flag lieutenant a deeper insight into a flag officer's responsibilities. It was supposed to teach someone whose superiors felt she had already demonstrated the potential for eventual flag rank herself how the job was supposed to be done . . . and also how it wasn't supposed to be done.
So far, none of the senior officers she'd found herself working with seemed to resent the fact that she was a mere ensign. She didn't know how long that was going to last, though, and she had a sinking sensation that more than one lieutenant she ran into was going to resent it. Not to mention the fact that she could absolutely guarantee that at some point in her future career some officer to whom she'd just reported was going to have looked in her personnel jacket, examined her Form 210, noted her present assignment, and concluded she was receiving preferential treatment from Commodore Terekhov.
Which, after all, is only the truth, she admitted. It wasn't the first time that thought had crossed her mind, and she tried to banish it with the memory of Commander Kaplan's comments to Abigail. Which, of course, only made her wonder if she was reading too much into them in her own case . . . and if she was headed for what her father had always called a terminal case of infinitely expanding ego.
She reached her destination and pressed the admittance chime.
"Yes?" a velvety tenor inquired over the speaker above the button.
"Ensign Zilwicki, Commander," she said crisply. "Commodore Terekhov sent me."
The door opened, and she stepped through it.
Lynch's office was considerably larger than Helen's modest cubbyhole. In fact, it was larger than many an executive officer might have boasted aboard an older, more manpower-intensive ship. With a crew as small as a Saganami-C carried, there was room to give personnel a bit more cubage.
The commander was seated at his workstation in his uniform blouse, and the desktop around his terminal was mostly covered in neat stacks of data chips and sheafs of hardcopy. He was a man of moderate height, with sandy hair and deep set brown eyes, and he had a magnificent singing voice. He also appeared to be quite good at his job.
"And what can I do for the Commodore this morning, Ms. Zilwicki?" he asked.
"He asked me to bring you this, Sir," she said, placing a chip folio on the corner of his desk. "It's some thoughts he's been having about the new laser head modifications."
"I see." Lynch drew the folio closer to him, but he wasn't looking at it. Instead, he had cocked his head and those sharp brown eyes were studying Helen. "And would it happen that he discussed some of those thoughts with you before he sent you to see me?"
"As a matter of fact, he did say a little something about them," Helen acknowledged a bit cautiously.
"I rather thought he might have." Helen's eyes widened slightly, and Lynch chuckled, then pointed at a chair stacked high with what looked like tactical manuals of one sort or another. "Dump that stuff somewhere and have a seat, Ms. Zilwicki," he invited.
Helen obeyed, and Lynch tipped back his chair and gazed at her thoughtfully. She wondered what he was thinking, but the commander would have made an excellent poker player. His expression gave away virtually nothing, and she tried not to sit too nervously upright.
"Tell me, Ms. Zilwicki—Helen. What do you think of the new laser heads?"
"I think they're a great idea, Sir," she said after a moment, then grimaced. "Sorry, Sir. That sounded pretty stupid, didn't it? Of course they're a great idea."
Lynch's lips might have twitched ever so slightly, but if they had, he managed to suppress the smile quite handily.
"I think we might agree to consider that a prefatory remark," he said gravely. "But with that out of the way, what do you think of them?"
The faint twinkle Helen thought she might have seen in his eyes eased some of her tension, and she felt herself relax a bit in the chair.
"I think they're going to have a very significant tactical impact, Sir," she said. "The Mark 16 is a big enough advantage against other cruisers and battlecruisers as it stands, but with the new laser heads, they're actually going to be able to hurt genuine capital ships, as well." She shook her head. "I don't think the Havenites are going to like that one bit."
"No doubt," Lynch agreed. "Although I trust," he continued more dryly, "that what you've just said doesn't mean you think it's going to be a good idea for a heavy cruiser to take on a superdreadnought, even with the new laser heads?"
"No, Sir. Of course not," Helen said quickly. "I guess I was just thinking about Monica, Sir. If we'd had the new laser heads there, I don't think those battlecruisers would have gotten into their effective range of us in the first place. Or, at least, if they had, they would've had a lot more of the stuffing kicked out of them first."
"Now that, Ms. Zilwicki, is a very valid observation," Lynch said.
"I also think it's bound to have at least some implications for all-up MDMs," she continued. "I mean, I don't see any reason why the same engineering can't be applied to bigger laser heads, as well."
This time, Lynch simply nodded.
There was a reason it had taken so long for the laser head to replace the contact nuclear warhead as the deep-space long-ranged weapon of choice. The basic concept for a laser head was actually quite simple, dating back to pre-Diaspora days on Old Terra. In its most basic terms, a hair-thin, cylindrical rod of some suitable material (the Royal Manticoran Navy used a Hafnium medium) was subjected to the x-ray pulse of a nuclear detonation, causing it to lase in Gamma-rays until the thermal pulse of the detonation's core expansion reached the rod and destroyed it. The problem had always been that the process was inherently extraordinarily inefficient. Under normal conditions, only a few percent of the billions of megajoules released by a megaton-range nuclear warhead would actually end up in any single x-ray laser beam, mostly because—under normal conditions—a nuclear detonation propagated in a sphere, and each rod represented only a ridiculously tiny portion of the total spherical area of the explosion and so could be subjected to only a tiny percentage of the total pulse of any detonation. Which meant the overwhelming majority of the destructive effect was completely lost.