That required a genuine partnership between Truman and Harmon. There was no question as to who was in command, but Truman had to be smart enough to know when a call properly belonged to Harmon, and the two of them had worked out the COs and COLACs spheres of authority and responsibility with remarkably little friction. More than that, they were the ones who got to make up The Book on carrier ops as they went, and theyd written those spheres into it. By the time the next LAC-carrier commissioned, its skipper would already know how the areas of authority were supposed to break down.
And for all intents and purposes, Gearman was getting to write the Book for LAC engineers. His position as Harmons engineer aboard Harpy (still known officially by her call sign of "Gold One") made him her de facto staff engineer, as well, and he had to admit that he felt like a kid on Christmas whenever he contemplated the marvelous new toys the Navy had given him.
The Shrikes were sweet little ships, with the latest generation of inertial compensator and a max acceleration rate which had to be seen to be believed. And the systems engineered into them! The demanding cycle of exercises Truman and Harmon had laid on seemed to be demonstrating the fundamental soundness of the doctrine ATC had worked out for them, although a few holes had already been detected and repaired, and the hardware itself performed almost flawlessly.
But what had come as the greatest surprise to him were the differences the change in power plants made. Hed known what they were going to beintellectually, at leastbut that had been very different from the practical experience, and he sometimes found himself wondering just how many other things that everyone "knew" were true were nothing of the sort. In a very real sense, the best thing Grayson had done for the Star Kingdom was to force people in places like the Bureau of Ships to reconsider some of those "known facts" in a new light, he reflected, and wondered how long it would be before BuShips did decide to start building fission plants into at least their smaller starships.
Now that hed been exposed to the theory behind them, he could see why such reactors had been genuinely dangerous in their early, primitive incarnations back on Old Earth (or, for that matter, their reinvented early, primitive incarnations back on Grayson). Of course, most new technologiesor even established oneswere dangerous if they were misused or improperly understood. And it was obvious from the history books which BuShips had dug up when it wrote the training syllabus for the new plants that the original fission pioneers on Old Earth had misunderstood, or at least misestimated, some of the downsides of their work. Gearman was at a loss to understand how anyone could have blithely set out to build up huge stocks of radioactive wastes when they had absolutely no idea how to get rid of the stuff. On the other hand, he also had to admit that the people whod predicted that ways to deal with it would be devised in time had been correct in the long runor would have been, if not for the hysteria of the idiots whod thrown out the baby with the bath before those ways were worked outbut still...
Yet whatever his remote ancestors might have thought of fission, Gearman loved the piles in his new ships. They were smaller, lighter, and actually easier to operate than a fusion plant would have been, and the increase in endurance was incredible. In his previous stint in LACs, hed been even more paranoid about reactor mass levels than most warship engineers because hed had so little margin to play with. Now he didnt even have to consider that, and the sheer, wanton luxury of it was downright seductive. Not that there werent a few drawbacksincluding the procedure for emergency shutdown in case of battle damage. If a fusion plants mag bottle held long enough for the hydrogen flow to be shut off, that was basically that. In a fission plant, however, you were stuck with a reactor core that was its own fuel... and which would do Bad Things if the coolant failed. But the Grayson tech reps seemed confident where their fail-safes were concerned. Which wasnt to say that every engineer from the Star Kingdom would agree with them. After all, their entire tech base was so much cruder, accepted so many trade-offs...
He gave himself a mental shake. Graysons technology had been much cruder than Manticores, yes. But theyd made enormous progress in closing the gap in just the nine and a half years since joining the Alliance, and "crude" didnt necessarily mean the same thing as "unsophisticated," as the new generation of inertial compensators amply demonstrated.
And as these new fission plants are going to demonstrate all over again, he told himself firmly, and looked up as Captain Harmon turned her attention to Lieutenant Commander Stackowitz.
"Ive talked Captain Truman into signing off on the expenditure of some real missiles for live-fire exercises tomorrow, Barb," she told her staff operations officer.
"Really, Skipper?" Stackowitz brightened visibly. "Warshots, or training heads?"
"Both," Harmon said with a shark-like grin. "Training heads for the shots at the Minnie, of course, but we get to use warshots for everything else. Including," the grin grew even more shark-like, "an all-up EW exercise. Five squadrons worth."
"We get to play with Ghost Rider?" Stackowitz eyes positively glowed at that, and Harmon nodded.
"Yep. The logistics pipeline just delivered an entire new set of decoy heads with brand-new signal amplifiersthe ones you were telling me about last month, in fact. Weve got to share them with Hancock Base, but therere more than enough of them to go around."
"Oh boy," Stackowitz murmured almost prayerfully, and then gave McGyver a grin that eclipsed the COLACs. "I told you they were going to make a difference, Bruce. Now Ill show you. Ill bet you five bucks they cut Minotaurs tracking capability against us by thirty-five percentand thats with CIC knowing what were doing!"
"Ill take five dollars of that," McGyver agreed with a chuckle, and Harmon shook her head.
"Some people would bet on which direction to look for sunrise," she observed. "But now that those important financial details have been settled, lets get down to some specifics about said exercise. First of all, Barb"
She leaned forward over the table, and her staffers listened intently, entering the occasional note into their memo pads while she laid out exactly what it was she wanted to do.
Chapter Nineteen
The Earl of White Haven stood in the boat bay gallery and stared through the armorplast at the brilliantly lit, crystalline vacuum of the bay. It was odd, he thought. He was ninety-two T-years old, and hed spent far more time in space than on a planet over the last seventy of those years, yet his perceptions of what was "normal" were still inextricably bound up in the impressions of his planetbound youth. The clich "air as clear as crystal" had meaning only until someone had seen the reality of vacuums needle-sharp clarity, but that reality remained forever unnatural, with a surrealism no one could avoid feeling, yet which defied precise definition.