“Got it, Captain.”
“Have Dr. Schell see me as soon as he’s done treating his patient. Any other measures to prevent this happening again that you can think of, bring them to me, and I’ll approve them.” He stared at the stony faces, their sidelong glares, and despaired. How could he fight his ship, when the lead Aegis petty officer had just been raped? Take Savo into battle, with the chiefs and the female officers at loggerheads? While some faceless evil slithered among them, anonymous, unknown, corrupting morale and trust?
For a moment, he contemplated just giving up. But that was futile. No one else could fill his shoes. Perhaps Singhe was right. Maybe he hadn’t listened closely enough. Been proactive enough. Whatever had happened, he was to blame.
He was the captain.
He looked at their faces again, at Staurulakis’s rapidly blinking eyes, the old chief’s leathery careful nonexpression, the female petty officer’s trembling outrage, the master-at-arms’ dropped gaze. Cleared his throat. “Now go. And let’s try hard not to make this even worse than it is.”
20
GCCS crashed again at 0130 the next morning. Dan learned about it when the TAO called an hour later. “We thought it’d come back up again. But so far it hasn’t. And, to be honest, we figured you needed the shut-eye, Skipper.”
Dan cupped the handset against his pillow, in that singular half-awake state where his brain could give rational answers while the rest of his body stayed asleep. “Uh, that’s fine, Dave. But… it never came back up, I take it.”
“Not yet, sir. And now our last satcomm path’s intermittent. Unless it gets well, that takes down VTC, SHF, EHF, UHF. That’s POTS, e-mail, chat, video, browsing. Essentially, everything.”
He sat up in the bunk, grinding sleep off his eyeballs. Remembering, with a sinking heart, last night’s conversation with Petty Officer Terranova, in sick bay. She’d avoided his eyes. Saying, in flat sentences, that she didn’t know if she’d be able to go back on duty. He hadn’t tried to persuade her. Just told her to take what time she needed. For now, Donnie and the assistant radar system controller, Eastwood, would have to share the watch, with Noblos backing them up. Though not being military, the physicist couldn’t do military things.
But… no chat, no data? Emission control had silenced radar and bridge-to-bridge radio, but usually commanders left satellite-mediated comms up. The servers were almost always ashore, and signals basically just went up and down from individual ships to the satellites. It would be difficult for an enemy to pick up such highly directional, ultra-high-frequency signals. And of course data and voice transmissions were scrambled.
Unfortunately, the Navy hadn’t drilled in a non-data-linked environment for so long, it was an open question whether they could operate without it. It had meant less independent operations, more hands-on control by Higher, and a zero-tolerance mentality for any misstep.
But, philosophy aside, without satellite data, the fleet wouldn’t have a threat picture, or over-the-horizon targeting capability. “We still have receive-only comms, right?”
The comm officer sounded uneasy. “Problems with that, too, sir. Chief’s speculating TADIXS, the strike data system, may be getting jammed or phase-shifted. We’re trying to get up on the old HF broadcast, but it’s a goat-rope. The pool of people who remember those legacy systems is pretty small. And it’s only about a thousand-baud data rate.”
“Okay, well, press on. Oh, and check the Inmarsat — we might be able to use commercial comms, at least, if the military systems go down. Status of Red Hawk?”
“Relieved on station by Hawes’s bird. Crew rest and maintenance.”
Dan signed off. He hung up and lay back, but after a few minutes sat up again, clicked the light on, and reached for the J-phone. The watch supervisor in Radio had a different explanation for the comm problem. She said they actually were getting transmissions from the satellites, but couldn’t break them. “All we get is a hiss, as if we’ve got the wrong key. But we’ve checked eight or nine times. Something’s off, but we don’t know what.”
“We had problems with scrambled voice before… that delayed-sync issue. Could there be a common point of failure?”
“If it was only on our end, the other ships’d be receiving. And they’re not.”
“How do we know that, Petty Officer? If we can’t talk to them?”
“We’re reading maintenance discussing the issue, sir. It’s not just Strike One. It’s PacFleet. Maybe worldwide. Something even weirder — staff comm-oh got Strike One to send Mitscher out to the east, she’s already pretty far out there toward the Philippines, to see if she could upload, without revealing our location. Guess what? Mitscher uploaded fine. It’s the download that doesn’t break into clear data, when we get it.”
Just peachy. Approaching the Paracel Islands, two hundred miles off the Chinese coast… where coastal radars, air defenses, and cruise missile batteries would be waiting for them… and they couldn’t talk to each other, or pass targeting data. Other than by signal flags or flashing light.
“Sir? You there?”
“Yeah. Thanks. Carry on, and call me if anything changes.”
He lay there worrying. A Vietnamese naval infantry brigade was joining the strike group, embarked in a World War II LST, to provide the ground assault force. They were being escorted by Vietnamese light units, frigates, corvettes, and missile boats. But they couldn’t carry out a landing in data silence; the American covering force would be blind to any riposte from the mainland.
Which meant that sooner or later, probably sooner, Savo was going to get the order to light off her SPY-1 again, and report what she saw.
Which would make her the target for every enemy aircraft, ship, and submarine in the South China Sea.
At 0500 his Hydra chirped. This time it was Danenhower, calling from Main Control with the news that the machinery control system was being flexed. Dan muttered, “Okay, CHENG, it’s ‘flexed.’ Tell me what that means.”
“Okay, well, you know each system’s controlled at three levels: on the bridge, in a central control station, and locally, in each machinery space. MCS lets ’em all talk to each other. So if we lose control on the bridge during battle, say, we have to press throttle commands and steering down to the local level.”
“We’re going to have a slower response time, again? Is that the bottom line here?”
“Not exactly. I’m saying we got bugs in our software, sir. We’ll have additional asses in the chairs down here, to be ready to take over if you lose control. I’m not saying it’s gonna happen, just that we’re making sure we’re ready, if it does. Since… we are at war, right?”
Dan said they seemed to be, and he appreciated the thinking ahead. He hung up, then looked at the bulkhead clock. Almost dawn. No point trying to sleep any longer.
Since almost everyone was at his or her battle quarters, the exec had arranged for breakfast on station. Dan made the rounds as gritty light oozed over the edge of the world. He drank coffee and ate sausage and egg patties clamped between fresh-baked biscuits, perched on a stack of wooden dunnage with one of the damage-control teams in the passageway outside the forward five-inch magazine. They were suited out, with tools, helmets, and masks ready to hand. No one mentioned the rape, and he didn’t bring it up.