Barracuda: Final Bearing полностью

“That’s it?” Pacino said.

Paully White scanned it, looking at his watch.

“That message is a half-hour old yet it’s marked flash.

And it’s partial. The time on the date-time group is just about an hour after Cheyenne sank the supertanker. You don’t think—”

“It’s right there. In black and white. The Cheyenne been attacked and it’s on the bottom.” The phone rang. Pacino answered it, listened and stood. “Aye, sir.”

“Where are you going?”

“Bridge. Admiral Donner wants answers.”

“Good luck, sir.” And added, “You’ll need it.” The Destiny I’ll-class submarine Curtain of Flames was, on the outside, identical to the sister ships of the Destiny II class. The difference was the interior, forward of the high fin. On the Destiny II-class vessels the inner hull extended fifteen meters forward of the fin, housing the command module, a three-deck-tall compartment that accommodated the crew. The upper deck was laid out to contain the control room, the radio room and the senior officer’s staterooms. The middle deck contained the mess room and galley and the remainder of the staterooms, while the lower deck contained electrical equipment and the computer modules of the Second Captain, with an emergency diesel generator on the aft part of the lower deck. The Destiny I’ll-class command module, by comparison was only five meters long, allowing for a doubling of the weapon loading, since the empty space opened up by abbreviating the command module allowed the insertion of the additional weapons. The command module of the Destiny III class remained three decks tall but all the space was devoted to a new computer system. The middle and lower decks housed the conventional part of the unit, including the power supplies and the lower tiers of the processing, the distributed control system serving as a kind of brain stem for the upper functions residing in the layered neural network and the DNA soup processors, which were contained in the upper deck in large shock-proof environmentally controlled cabinets. The DNA, cellular material removed from the brains of dogs, resided in special vats, the networking of the vats allowing the DNA processor to act in parallel at much greater speeds than the electronic tiers of the unit. The integration of the computer system resulted in what had come to be called a “mental processing suite,” the term computer no longer sophisticated or accurate enough to describe the functions of the system. The mental processing suite of the Curtain of Flames had driven the ship from Yokosuka, from which it had been towed by the Destiny II-class ship Winged Serpent, to its dive point, where it submerged after a self-check of all ship systems, into the Pacific. Its mission had been coded into the processors and double-checked. The mental processing suite routinely recorded its memories of the mission into a history-module bubble memory. In the event of the loss of the ship during combat, it would physically jettison the memory from the ship for the use of the Maritime Self Defense Force’s later evaluation.

In order for the history-module bubble memory to receive the mental processing suite’s memories, the suite would dictate relevant observations into the history module. As important events occurred during a mission the suite would think into the history module, recording formal observations into what the system called a Deck Log.

Informal observations, such as the unit’s estimates of mission completion, estimates of unit survival, opinions of the mission, were considered just as relevant, and were also recorded into the Deck Log, differentiated somewhat from the official entries. The formal observations were recorded in machine language, other observations were written in more conventional if contracted Japanese. The dual memory traces comprised a complete record of the mission, and in the event of the loss of the ship could be useful in further development of the submarine-cybernetic system.

The computer-driven, unmanned Destiny I’ll-class Curtain of Flames rolled in the swells at mast-broach depth, watching the American task forces’ highest value target, the USS Ronald Reagan.