“Okay, Senior. Get to it. I’ll write the message when you’ve got a functional system. Sanderson, what about sonar? The Destiny is still out there, and I’d just as soon not get ambushed by him again. And I don’t want to get rammed by some stupid supertanker when we go up above the layer.”
“I need time, Captain. I’ve got some bad cards that need replacing, and I need to check every hydrophone—”
Kane frowned, knowing Sanderson was a perfectionist, and that there was no time for perfection.
“Screw that. Senior Chief. Change out the bad cards, skip the loop check and bring the system up. I don’t care if it’s reduced status or broadband-only. I want ears and I want them now.”
“I’ll do what I can. Captain, but I can’t promise—”
“Quit bitching and get it done, Sandy.” This was from Binghamton.
Sanderson’s face turned red, but he stomped off to the for ward sonar equipment space.
“Edwards, firecontrol?”
“Bad disk drive, sir. We’re putting in the spare now and it checked out okay. Already switched a dozen cards, doing another dozen now. When we’re done the computers will be damn near brand-new. Only thing stopping us is if the spares are bad. We have no more spares, though. If one of these circuit boards dies, that’s it. That puts us into an initialization in about an hour after we reload, a half-hour to reload the modules. That’s firecontrol up in normal mode in ninety minutes, but it ain’t any good without sonar.”
“Get going. Nav?”
Mike Jensen, the navigator, had come in when Edwards was talking. Jensen was one of the superstar mid-grade officers, a tall broad-shouldered and handsome black man who had graduated in the top five percent of his Academy class and had been a runner-up for Rhodes scholar before he did physics work at Stanford. His face was swollen and lumpy, making him look more like a boxer than an academic, his right arm in a sling with a splint formed by an inflated tube.
He seemed to be struggling against his pain, one of his trademarks his refusal to take any medication or drugs, not even aspirin or coffee. He had probably turned down the prescription painkillers, Kane thought.
“The GPS Navsat looks like it lived. Its self-check put out a few bugs that we’re looking at but it’s showing the same position it did just before we got hit. The ESGN inertial navigator is dead and gone for good. Wiped the ball. But as the quartermasters say, a pencil, a calculator and a compass can do about as good.”
“Okay. How’re you doing?”
“Never better. The fractured skull is a nice touch, don’t you think, sir?”
“Smart-ass,” Kane said. “XO, get me a message draft with Jensen’s position and the Destiny encounter.”
“Aye, sir.”
Forward in sonar Sanderson’s broadband display began cascading down the screen as the Q-5 initialization completed.
He was at the beginning of a long series of self-checks and didn’t intend to tell the conn that they already had rudimentary sonar, not after the tough words spoken in control, but his anger melted when the broadband trace came down the screen with the first noises. The contact was another ship. Close aboard. Submerged.
The Destiny was close enough to collide with.
The ship’s computer system, unofficially the Second Captain, had a mouthful official moniker, the YEBMG Destiny-Hull-1 Distributed Control and Layered Artificial Neural Network Intelligence System, manufactured by Yokogawa Electronic Battle Machinery Corporation. Its architecture had been compared to the human brain by more than one research psychologist. The comparison was perhaps the only way the interfaced, interactive system could be understood by its operators.
