Authors: J. L. Doty
Vickers was waiting for York when he climbed out of the zero-G tube and out onto the pod deck. Vickers grabbed York's left arm and slid the short sleeve of his service khakis upward, exposing twelve gunner's chevrons there. One of the enlisted women said, “Shit, twelve of 'em.”
York smiled at her and said, “The total is twenty-four and a half. It should be twenty-five and a half, but at Sirius Night Star they tanked me before I could attend my last gunner's blood.”
He looked Vickers in the eyes. “I tried to tell you, Chief.”
Vickers sneered. “No one came back from Sirius Night Star.”
York recalled Nathan Abraxa saying almost exactly that at the reception when Martinson had exposed his past. “A few of us did.”
Vickers said, “Get out of here and go back to the captain.”
Gunnerson was on the bridge running the ship through static drive tests, but Hensen intercepted York in the corridor outside. York snapped a crisp salute. “Sir.”
Hensen said, “What the hell did you say to Vickers to piss him off?”
“I don't think it was what I said, sir. Perhaps more what I did.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I think he didn't like that I did well in the pod.”
Hensen shook his head. “No, I don't think that's it. I know you're an ex-gunner, but . . .” One of Hensen's eyebrows shot up. “How many gunner's chevrons you got?”
“Twenty-four and a half, sir, but it should beâ”
Hensen laughed and said, “Oh, that's rich. Vickers is no longer the most senior gunner on the
Horseman
.”
It was then that York realized Gunnerson had not set him up for a fall, she'd set Vickers up, let him make himself look bad in front of his people. York wondered if he would be the one to pay the price for that.
Chapter 23:
Space Trials
Gunnerson assigned York to assist Lieutenant Kirkman and Chief Soletski in engineering. When they first met, Kirkman asked York, “You come up through the ranks, huh?”
Apparently, word had spread. “Basically,” York said. “Though it's a little more complicated than that, sir.”
“That's pretty rare in this navy. But you started on the lower decks, right?”
York wondered if that would be a problem with Kirkman. “When I was twelve, sir.”
“Then you've got what, ten years' seniority?”
York had never thought of it that way. Officially, even the two years in the
Vincent
's
tanks counted as hazardous duty. “Yes, I guess I do, sir.”
Kirkman slapped him on the back and grinned. “That means you've got more seniority than I do.”
It took another twenty days for the
Horseman
's crew to finish the refitting, then run static tests while still in dock. York spent the time wrench in hand, frequently on his back beside Soletski beneath a piece of heavy equipment. The most important test came when they fired up the ship's systems and stopped drawing power from the station. The entire engineering crew watched nervously as Kirkman brought the power plant up to standby. Nothing went wrong, so they held it at standby for a few hours and ran more tests, then carefully brought it up to operational levels. They held it there for two days while they measured and checked everything possible.
“So far, so good,” Soletski said. “Now let's see if she'll handle redline.”
Since they weren't using the power they'd be generating, Kirkman contacted Muirendan Prime's engineering department and warned them the
Horseman
would be feeding power to the station for a couple of hours instead of taking from it, then Gunnerson put the ship on Watch Condition Yellow.
Kirkman brought the power up in small increments. At each elevated level, he paused, York and the rest of the engineering crew ran a series of tests, then Kirkman went to the next level. At 70 percent of maximum, the sound coming from the core changed from a low, bass hum to an irritating whine. Soletski had warned York that using his implants to dampen his audio response would not be sufficient, so like everyone else, he wore ear protection and communicated exclusively through his implants. He now understood why implants were required to work in the engine room. When they brought the power back down to standby, everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
The day before they were scheduled to depart, Gunnerson called York up to the bridge. “You're going to work with me now, Mr. Ballin. You're going to learn how to drive this boat.”
She pointed to the captain's console and said, “Take a seat, Mr. Ballin.”
York's stomach knotted with butterflies as he sat down on the most sacred acceleration couch on the ship. He strapped in and sat there waiting for Gunnerson to tell him what to do.
She said, “We always wear headsets, York. They're a good backup to your implants, and they filter out excess noise that your implants can't scrub.”
York pulled on a headset and adjusted the wire-thin pickup in front of his mouth. Again, he waited for Gunnerson.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “when we depart, if you show me now that you learned anything at the academy, you're going to be sitting in that couch in command of this ship when we go live. So show me now that you can take this ship through a full departure sequence. You're now in command, so command.”
York froze for a moment. He'd done this in bits and pieces, in simulations and on training cruises, and he realized he could do it now. He keyed his implants to allship.
All hands, stand by to cast off.
Gunnerson had set up the entire bridge as a large simulation, with the bridge crew supporting him in what amounted to a training exercise. The hours of practice and study kicked in, and York settled into a comfortable rhythm of issuing orders, though he was constantly in fear of doing something wrong, so the butterflies didn't go away. It all went nicely until he backed the ship away from its mooring. In the simulation, the bow clipped the edge of the dock, causing considerable damage to both.
York buried his face in his hands.
“Not bad,” Gunnerson said. “I don't like losing a couple of meters off the bow, but not bad for a first try. I like the way you asked for, and took, the advice of your crew. But don't forget that you have to make the final decision and bear the responsibility for it.”
York was surprised to learn that he hadn't failed miserably. The next day, he again sat at the captain's console, and took the ship through a real departure sequence. Gunnerson and Hensen were both there to correct or countermand any faulty order he gave, and the
Horseman
departed Muirendan Prime without incident.
Gunnerson and Hensen didn't stand a standard watch rotation, and since they took York's training quite seriously, neither did he. On that first drive out-system from Muirendan, he spent every waking moment on the bridge or down in engineering. The captain or the executive officer would ask York what command he would give next. If he guessed right, they would give the command, then have York explain why he'd chosen that particular order. If he guessed wrong, they'd give the proper order, then explain to him why his choice had been incorrect, and the horrendous consequences that would have resulted. He guessed right most of the time, and it occurred to him that maybe he wasn't really guessing.
Before they stressed any of the ship's systems, they had to put it through space trials. They drove out-system for several hours on sublight drive at one G, a bare crawl for a ship capable of twenty thousand G's. But while they'd stressed the ship's power plant, they hadn't yet tested its drive. After a little more than three hours, they'd put a million kilometers between them and the space station. York had spent a good portion of that time down in engineering helping Kirkman run tests. Satisfied that they weren't going to turn into an enormous fireball, Kirkman gave the all-clear to Gunnerson.
She ordered the sublight drive up to ten G's. Kirkman ran tests for a half hour, then Gunnerson upped it to a hundred and they ran more tests. In that way, they cautiously pushed the sublight drive to its maximum rated acceleration, and by that time they were close to heliopause with a relativistic dilation factor well over two.
They cautiously tested the transition drive in the same way, by up- and down-transiting several times and slowly pushing it to the limit. They ran crash-drive and crash-stop tests in which they started from a dead stop, accelerated at max drive in sublight until they could up-transit, then accelerated in transition as fast as they could up to three thousand lights. They coasted at that speed to run further tests, then reversed the process to get to down-transition in the shortest possible time. After they'd done that a few times and were confident the main ship's systems were operating reliably, they settled a few light-years out from Muirendan. There they test-fired all the pods and the transition launchers, tested every system on the ship, ran through simulated damage-control exercises and every possible emergency Gunnerson and Hensen could come up with.
York had previously qualified on the helm, but now he had to do so again while they practiced what they called a “
hunter-killer approach
,” an exercise in which they slowly decreased their transition velocity as far as possible while approaching a solar system. The combination of low transition velocity, and the nearby presence of a large gravitational mass, produced instabilities in the transition drive, and at a certain point the ship would spontaneously down-transit. York did rather well, held them in transition all the way down to ten lights, though young Petty Officer First Class McHenry held the record at close to nine.
A tenday after departing Muirendan, Gunnerson declared the ship and crew ready for duty as an imperial ship-of-the-line, and they set course for Cathan, an intermediate stop on the way to the front lines.
It took more than a month to get to Cathan, and during that time, Gunnerson drilled the crew relentlessly. She told York, “After more than a year on liberty, your crew loses its edge. And we've got new members to integrate and rookies to train.”
During that month, York served in just about every function on ship, the notable exception being pod gunner since he already had plenty of experience there. He enjoyed the new experience of training with one of the transition launcher crews, regretted that he wouldn't get the chance to train in a main transition battery since hunter-killers didn't have any. He even worked with Lieutenant Paulson in supply and provisioning.
One day, the two of them sat down in the wardroom for a mug of caff during a short break. “I envy you,” Paulson said.
“Me?” York said. “Why me?”
He seemed a little sad. “The captain and XO gave up trying to push me as hard as they're pushing you long ago. I'm really not cut out for command, and I think they realized it before I did.”
York had noticed that Paulson was rather timid, especially in the way he let Vickers push him around.
“I might get promoted to full lieutenant on this tour, but I think the captain's going to classify me as unfit to command. That means I'll never go beyond that.”
York asked him, “What will you do?”
Paulson shrugged. “My enlistment contract is up in two years. I guess I'll look for something else.”
Vickers walked in at that moment, hooked a thumb over his shoulder, and said, “Paulson, I need you down in supply.”
Kirkman walked in an instant behind Vickers and frowned, his brow furrowing and his eyes narrowing with anger. “Chief Vickers,” he said sharply. The NCO turned, clearly surprised Kirkman was there. “What did I just hear?” Kirkman demanded.
Vickers said, “I just asked the lieutenantâ”
“No, you didn't,” Kirkman said. He stepped forward and stood over Vickers. Kirkman and York were of similar height, which gave them several centimeters over the chief and allowed the engineer to tower over the man. “Stand at attention when I'm addressing you.”
Vickers's eyes turned to hard, cold slits. He slowly threw his shoulders back and said, “Sir.”
“You issued an order to a superior officer,” Kirkman said. “And you did not address him properly. I believe you and Commander Hensen have talked about this before, so I'm putting you on report.”
Kirkman spun about and marched out of the room. Vickers relaxed, then turned and looked down at Paulson and York. The look he gave them told York that he would pay for seeing the master chief upbraided by an officer.
They took on supplies at Cathan and, along with three other hunter-killers, two destroyers, and a medium cruiser, were assigned to escort a large convoy to Dumark. Hensen had the bridge watch when they started out. He told York, “It would be pretty unusual for an enemy hunter-killer to sneak this far behind the front lines, but not unheard of, so we play it cautious.”
The larger military ships stayed with the slower convoy while the hunter-killers shot ahead. The four of them down-transited a quarter light-year apart in a line along the convoy's course, which stretched them out over one light-year. With their drones out, they scanned that space carefully, and when the convoy caught up with them, the hunter-killer in the rear pulled its drones in and up-transited. Using its faster drive to stay ahead of the convoy, it leapfrogged past the other hunter-killers and down-transited again. The process required each hunter-killer to up- and down-transit a little more than once a day, and York found it nerve-racking and exhausting.
Twenty days after departing Cathan, they put into Dumark without incident. Gunnerson set up a rotating skeleton crew and gave everyone else liberty. York didn't know what to do. He didn't want to go down to the surface, didn't really want to see Maja and Toll, didn't think they wanted to see him, and in any case, he'd been gone for more than ten years. He couldn't go to a bar with the enlisted men and women, and was still too junior to fraternize with the other officers. He considered going to a whorehouse, but that just didn't appeal to him, and he realized how much he was looking forward to seeing Karin at the end of their evaluation tours. York spent his liberty on ship studying, and five days later, they departed for deep-space patrol. Their destination was classified, which meant they were probably going behind enemy lines to disrupt shipping.
“It's a close approach shot,” Hensen said.
York was sitting at Navigation with Hensen looking over his shoulder. They were coasting sublight and running silent two parsecs off the feddie system Stulfanos, a major transit point for supplies going to the front. At the
Horseman
's
maximum drive of three thousand lights it had taken six days to cross the fifty light-years from Dumark to the front. Once there, Gunnerson had grown cautious, dropped back to a thousand lights, and taken almost twenty days to get to their present position.
Hensen continued. “If we drive at two thousand lights, they can detect our transition wake while we're one to two parsecs out. Drive at half that, and their detection range is cut in half. So we start out fast and steadily decrease our transition velocity so we're always just outside their detection range.”
York turned from the data on the navigation screens and looked over his shoulder at Hensen. “But that's an exponential decay curve, sir. We'll be steadily approaching zero velocity and we'll never get there.”
“We don't need to get there,” Hensen said. “We need to get close, maybe a light-month out. At that range, we can catch incoming ships just before they down-transit into the system, and outgoing ships just after up-transition out of it. If we do our job, we'll wreak absolute havoc with their supply lines.”
“But that'll still take more than a month, sir.”