Looking Glass 4 - Claws That Catch (19 page)

“That's a regular maintenance item,” Gants said. “But I never knew where it came from.”

“So the CO2 and organics detectors recognized the system was broken,” Miriam continued, “and shut it down automatically. Otherwise we'd be breathing that black stuff.”

“Ma'am, we're hours away from breathing pure carbon dioxide and days away from air,” Gants said gently. “We really need to figure out how to fix this thing.”

“I'm no use,” Miriam said. “I'm no use to anybody. Just ask the captain.”

“Ma'am, we really need your help,” Gants said, swearing mentally at the new CO and his stupid order. “Ma'am, if we can't figure this out, we're all going to die.”

“Everybody dies sometime,” Miriam said.

Oh, maulk, Sub Dude thought.

“Ma'am,” he said, carefully, looking at the cat stretched across her lap, “Tiny's got to breathe, too.”

Miriam glared at him for a moment, then frowned, her brow furrowing.

“There's not supposed to be build-up on the covalent shearers,” Miriam said. “The only way that you'd get that is if molecules with polar bonds were getting through. The covalent shearers can't break polar bonds. Check the polar corpuscle. It's probably detuned. Check the point and dwell settings. As to repairing the covalent shearer and the carbon cracker, you can't repair them perfectly. But you can take them and cut them up and run it through the fabber on a recycler setting. The parts will come out clean. Use a melder to join them and you'll get about ninety percent efficiency. See if that works.”

“Damn, Gants, you are a genius,” Bill said, looking at the humming recycler.

“The efficiency's high enough I recommend tearing down the other one and repairing it, sir,” the Eng said.

“Concur,” Bill replied. “Good job, Eng, Machinist. Damned good. How'd you figure out the polar corpuscle was screwed up?”

“Oh, it was pretty obvious, sir,” Gants said, sucking his teeth. “I mean, that's the only way you could get build-up on the covalent shearer, right sir?”

“Point and dwell settings?” Bill asked, shaking his head. “Why didn't I think of that?”

“Not your job to figure everything out, sir,” Gants replied.

“Point,” Bill said. “Now I have to wonder what's going to screw up next. . . .”

“Well, that was different,” the CO said, setting down his fork.

Captain Prael felt it important that the ship's officers have at least one meal together each week. It was an opportunity to talk shop and cover the minor stuff that might not be getting the attention that it deserved.

Normally, the meals were fairly good. Admittedly, shipboard fare was never exquisite; after a few weeks all the fresh food was gone and it pretty much came down to three-bean salad and chili-mac. But the sub service was well known for the quality of their meals. With nothing to see but steel walls, twelve on and twelve off, day in and day out, keeping up morale could only be done with good food. So if it wasn't four star, it tended to be the best that was possible.

But there was a vast range of difference between a four-star meal and . . . 

The current meal was listed as “Spinach Fandango.” Bill had never previously heard of spinach fandango and if this was spinach fandango he never wanted to hear of it again. He picked up some of the greenish-gray glop on a spoon and held it upside down. Despite repeated attempts, he could not, in fact, get it to fall off. No matter how hard he shook it. “Stick-to-your-ribs” was an understatement. This stuff could be used for spackling.

“I've been hearing some rumblings from my department about the quality of the chow,” the Eng said. “Since it hadn't been all that bad up here, I just put it down to the usual grumbling. If this is what they've been getting consistently . . .”

“Sir?” the gunnery officer asked, diffidently. Like children, lieutenants junior grade were meant to be seen and not heard and he knew it. “Shouldn't we still have some fresh vegetables? We were on Cheerick three days ago and I thought we got a shipment of fresh stuff.”

“Yes, we should,” the CO said. “And I'm beginning to wonder if this isn't some sort of prank. But I know how to find out. XO?”

“Sir?” Bill said, diffidently tasting the stuff. It didn't taste nearly as bad as it looked, but that was just because it looked so very, very, very bad. It only tasted very bad. Filling, though. One taste was all it took to kill his appetite.

“In addition to your other duties, you will take random meals in the enlisted mess,” the CO said. “Morale of the unit depends, among other things, on the best possible food, all things being equal. I wouldn't describe this as the best possible food, would you?”

“No, sir,” Bill replied. “And aye, aye, sir. I'll get to the bottom of this.”

“That wasn't what you was supposed to have,” Chief Petty Officer Duppstadt said. “You was supposed to have the spinach salad and goulash. I'll find out where that went, instead, sir.”

The ship's galley was not, admittedly, the most amenable compartment on the Blade. A steamy hell of boiling pots, sizzling pans and ovens running full blast, it recalled the Harry Truman expression. And Bill admitted that he was ready to get out of the kitchen the moment he stepped in.

“That's not, in fact, the point,” Bill said, patiently. “Was the spinach fandango the meal for the enlisted mess?”

“Yes, sir,” Duppstadt said. “It's a favorite.”

“It's a disaster, Chief,” the XO said angrily. “The stuff should be used for vacuum sealer! It's a noxious glue.”

“It's one of my specialties, sir,” the CPO replied, his face tight. “I've been making my spinach fandango whenever I got fresh spinach for over twenty years, sir!”

“Wait, you used fresh spinach for that . . . that . . . glop?” Bill snarled. “You used precious fresh food for that indescribable, unholy mess?”

“I ain't never had no complaints,” the chief replied, mulishly. “Captain,” he added, sarcastically.

“Was that an insult to my rank, Chief Petty Officer?” Bill said, quietly. “Because if you think you can be insolent because I'm not a 'real' Naval officer then you'd better think twice, chief or no chief.”

“No insolence intended, Captain,” the chief said.

“Then you'll refer to me as 'Sir' or 'XO,' ” Bill said. “ 'Captain' in a surly tone of voice will not do, Chief. Now do you seriously think that that mess you just slopped up is a palatable meal?”

“This isn't DC, sir,” the chief said. “There ain't no four-star chefs on no sub. And I ain't had no complaints in over twenty years.”

“Then consider this your first,” Bill said. “And you are about to receive orders, which you will abide by, chief or no chief. From here on out, the officers will receive the same food as the enlisted tables. No difference, Chief. I will be eating with the enlisted ranks by the order of the CO, who is your second complaint in 'over twenty years,' by the way. And you had better start cracking the books, Chief, because if this is your best dish, you're going to find yourself sorry and sore by the end of this cruise. You are not going to poison this crew as long as I'm the XO. I've got enough troubles on this ship without having everyone down with a case of the 'I'm dying from Chief Duppstadt's so-called food!' ”

“Jesus Christ,” Weaver swore under his breath as he left the mess compartment. “What else can go wrong?”

His eyes crossed momentarily and he shook his head.

“Tell me I didn't just say that,” he muttered as a mess specialist walked by.

“You okay, sir?” the mess specialist asked, looking at him askance.

“Just fine, just fine,” Bill replied. “Carry on.”

“XO's talking to himself,” the mess specialist said, shaking his head and spooning up something called “goulash” that Duppstadt said was a “speciality.”

“Never a good sign,” the PO next to him said.

“Heard the cooks talking,” the missileman said, sliding his tray onto the table. “XO's talking to himself.”

“Damn,” the ship's medic said, shaking his head. “We're only three weeks in. Never a good sign.”

“Better get your syringe ready,” the missile tech said, grinning.

“Carry it with me always.”

All machinists on a nuclear boat were “nukes.” That is, they had been through the Navy's brutal Nuclear Power School after learning their other craft.

Thus PO Gants had been through a course that was the near order of a bachelors in nuclear engineering. Even if most of the time he felt like a glorified plumber.

However, that meant that most of his time was not taken up with glorified plumbing: It was taken up with watching the many readouts related to the power system of the Blade II. Eight hours out of every day everyone on the ship stood “watch” with an additional four hours of “duty.” (Glorified plumbing.) What “watch” meant depended upon the speciality. But in Gants' case it meant watching a large number of readouts from, on this watch, Fusion Engine Two, which were not supposed to be fluctuating.

With a nuclear power system, such as had been on the original Nebraska, Gants would have known not only what any fluctuation meant directly but the thousands of additional issues it would cause.

However, the Blade II had fusion engines. He'd read the manual on fusion engines, understanding a surprising amount, but he could not really be called, in his opinion, fully certified. Then again, there were no humans that he considered “fully certified” on Hexosehr fusion engines.

So when one of the waterfall displays, vertical colored readouts that ran from green at the top through yellow then red, started flickering, he wasn't positive if it was the first signs of cataclysm or just something “hinky.”

The whole fusion conversion system was a bit of a mystery, frankly.

In nuke boats radioactive fission released heat which boiled water which turned turbines which made electricity. Which was why one name for nuke boats was “tea kettles.”

The way that fission works is a “slow” neutron is captured by uranium 235 turning it into uranium 236. This destabilizes the uranium atom which then breaks apart, fissions, into, usually, barium and krypton gas and energy. Lots of energy. The fission releases 200 times the amount of energy in the neutron and, notably, gamma rays and more neutrons. The new neutrons continue to break up more uranium, thus the “chain reaction” part. The excess energy is mostly in the form of heat.

The heat is transferred to water (or in some cases sodium or helium) which in turn is run via pipes through other water. That water, turned to steam, drives massive turbines. The turbines directly drive the propellers and also produced electrical power.

In a fusion boat, helium three (He3) atoms were fused together. Like a fission reaction, that produced heat. It also produced plasma, atoms that had been stripped of their electrons. He3 was used because, unlike deuterium and hydrogen, it produced no secondary radiation.

Instead of boiling water, a secondary Hexosehr system grabbed the stripped electrons for electricity as well as used the generated heat to produce more through the “heat converter” unit. About 90% of the generated energy was captured and turned to electricity. Which was good since too much heat in a spaceship was a bad thing. Using the Hexosehr systems gave them four times as long between chills as the Blade I.

The whole thing was encased in a magnetic containment bottle. The containment bottle was, in fact, bottle shaped, having an opening on one side. That led to the plasma conduits and the heat transfer system, which had their own magnetic containment. The helium 3 that fueled the thing was inserted through rapidly opening and closing “holes” in the magnetic containment bottle.

Input: the He3. Output: the total power released in the fusion bottle. Throughput was how much electricity was scavenged. There was an “input” side of throughput from output that was measured as well.

What he was seeing, every five seconds more or less, was a slight drop in thoughput. Just a flicker. Fusion Two was set at 80% output, a good level for fast cruising. Every now and then throughput dropped about two percent.

What was bugging him was that if the throughput was flickering, the output should have been. And there should have been other systems showing a fault.

But only throughput was flickering. Actually, input power of the throughput systems. Which meant about two percent of the output was disappearing. Somewhere. To be specific, somewhere in the bottle. Given that the power contained in the bottle was nearly as much as destroyed Nagasaki, two percent of it disappearing was . . . problematic.

He reached up and touched a control, bringing up the numeric readout of output for the last few hours. Sure enough, he could see where the output started flickering. About ten minutes ago. It wasn't visible with the waterfalls or the numeric readouts.

He sat back and contemplated that for a bit.

“Got a problem, Gants?”

The lieutenant of the watch was a nuke. He had a degree in nuclear power and had been through the same school, albeit for officers, as Gants. He had more theoretical knowledge than the machinist and Gants acknowledged that. But, like Gants, his training was in fission not fusion. They were not the same.

Gants, therefore, didn't answer directly. He called up the same screens while he thought and pointed to the changes.

“How can you have a two percent drop in throughput but less than one in output?” the lieutenant mused.

Gants had started off thinking the same thing. But he was bugged by something.

He pulled up a detail of the containment bottle. The readouts were designed for fairly large-order changes and he was looking for very slight ones.

Dialing down he finally found what he was looking for, thought about it for a moment and reached out like a cobra to hit the SCRAM button, shutting down the fusion reactor.

“What?” the LT shouted. “What are you doing?”

“We were about to lose containment, sir,” Gants said, calmly, as alarms started to scream throughout the ship.

When Weaver reached the engineering compartment, the Eng, the lieutenant of watch and Chief Gestner were bent over the panel for Fusion Two while Gants was standing off to one side, his arms folded.