Honor Among Enemies

"I think not, Citizen Commissioner," he replied, and she twitched in pleasure. But then his hand paused. She pushed up on an elbow to demand its return, then stopped with a resigned smile. She did love the man, but Lord, he could be exasperating! Inspiration struck him at the damnedest times, and he always had to chase the new idea down before he could set it aside.

"What is it?"

"I was just thinking about the Manty Q-ships," Giscard mused. "I wish we could have confirmed whether or not Harrington is in command of them."

"I thought you just said a Q-ship was no match for a heavy cruiser," Pritchart pointed out. He nodded, and she shrugged. "Well, you've got twelve heavy cruisers, and eight battlecruisers. That seems like a reassuring amount of overkill to me."

"Oh, agreed. Agreed. But if they're all busy looking here, maybe we should go hunting somewhere else. Whatever the theoretical odds, there's always room for something to go wrong in an engagement, you know. And a Q-ship is likely to beat off one of our units, one of our light cruisers, say, and blow the entire operation by discovering our presence here."

"So?"

"So, Citizen Commissioner," Giscard said, setting his wineglass aside to free both hands and turning to her with the smile she loved, "it's time to adjust our operational patterns. We can leave dispatches for Waters and Caslet at all the approved information drops, but the rest of us are concentrated here right now. Under the circumstances, I think I'll just have a word with my staff about potential new hunting grounds... later, of course," he added wickedly, and kissed her.

Chapter TWENTY-TWO

Senior Chief Electronics Mate Lewis tried hard to keep a scowl off her face as she entered Impeller One. This wasn't Ginger's duty station, and she didn't want to be here. Unfortunately, there was a glitch in Impeller Ones links to Damage Control Central, and Lieutenant Silvetti, Ginger's boss in DCC, had sent her to supervise the techs looking for the fault. It wasn't, strictly speaking, part of her job as DCC Chief of the Watch to make routine repairs, but Silvetti had already learned to rely on her troubleshooting instincts, and the inexperienced third-class petty officer whose crew had caught the detail was likely to need a little nursemaiding.

Ginger couldn't fault Silvetti's logic, particularly since it let him designate her as a "casualty" and put Chief Sewell into her slot in DCC for the rest of the exercise. Engineering had made strides over the last few weeks but the department as a whole was still substandard and its people needed all the drills they could get. What Ginger did object to was that Randy Steilman was assigned to Impeller One, and she'd fully intended to obey Sally MacBride's orders to stay clear of him. Not because she agreed with them, but because they were orders.

"Howdy, Ginger." It was Bruce Maxwell, as newly promoted to senior chief as Ginger but ten years older and tough as a well seasoned tree stump. He was chief of the watch for Impeller One, and she didn't envy him a bit. Steilman was on Maxwell's watch, and even with his tough, no-nonsense attitude, that was enough to bring his crew's efficiency rating down a full ten percentage points. Not because Steilman didn't know his job, but because he had a constitutional objection to doing that job.

"Hi, Bruce," she replied, standing aside to clear the hatch for PO Jansen and his crew.

"Understand we've got a telemetry problem?" Maxwell raised an eyebrow as Jansen’s people clustered around the data links which drove DCC's repeater displays for Impeller One.

"Yeah." Ginger watched Jansen go to work. She had no intention of getting involved until and unless Jansen asked for help, and his people looked good as they set up portable work stands to hold their equipment and got right down to it. "Could just be a bad line plug," she told Maxwell, "but I doubt it. Something took out our readouts on all your odd-numbered nodes."

"Just the odd numbers?"

"Yep. That's the problem. They're all on the same primary link, but there're two separate secondaries, either of which should carry the load alone. Makes me think it's something to do with the monitoring system itself." She shook her head. "I wish Vulcan'd had time to do a compete refit on the drive rooms."

"You and me both," Maxwell agreed sourly. Naval designers were great believers in redundancy, and a Navy impeller room would have had two complete primary data links, which would have been as widely separated as possible to prevent a single hit from taking both out. Moreover, every line would have served a separate monitoring system, each totally independent of and isolated from all the others. Wayfarer's designers had seen no reason to include battle damage in their consideration of things which might go wrong, however. Her cost-conscious civilian ancestry showed all too clearly in her maintenance links in general, but especially here.

"If we're lucky, it's a minor hardware problem," Ginger said hopefully, "but if it's in the software..." She shrugged, and Maxwell nodded glumly, then shrugged.

"Well, wherever it is, I'm sure you'll find it," he said encouragingly, and turned back to his own duties.

A part of Ginger’s brain watched him move off towards the after end of the huge compartment, vanishing around the far side of a towering bank of generators, but most of her attention was on Jansen and his people. She stood to one side, ready to step in if he screwed up and available for advice if he wanted it, and gave a mental nod of approval as she watched his people. He had two of them checking the physical circuits, but his own focus was on the monitoring system itself, which meant he was thinking the same thing Ginger was.

Several minutes passed, and she drifted closer to watch Jansen's test screen over his shoulder. The third-class glanced up, then gave her a smile of mild triumph.

"Hardware checks out clean, Senior Chief," he reported. "Just one problem: none of these nice, functional systems are doing their jobs."

"And why do you suppose that is?" she asked.

"Well, given that all the hardware on the front end looks good, sensors and interfaces all check out at a hundred percent, and the CPU tests clean, too, it's got to be software-related. I'm interrogating the software now, but if I had to make a bet, I'd put five bucks on corruption of one of the primary execution files. It'd have to be something like that to take the whole system down. Only, if that's what it is, I can't figure out why none off the self-tests twanged back in DCC."

"Where’s the self-test software loaded?" Ginger asked.

"It's, Oh." Jansen gri

"Right." Ginger nodded. "That's why I'm going to take your bet. My five bucks says the fault's either in the communications protocols or else that it's a hardware fault after all. If the data link is down, or if the intercom just isn't accepting command input, then the system got the message to come up and report to DCC in the first place, and..."

"... and if the monitoring system never came up, then the secondaries wouldn't do us a bit of good because they're output only," Jansen finished. "You're right. That would duplicate a dead computer, wouldn't it?"

"Why they pay me the big bucks now," Ginger told him, patting him on the shoulder with a grin. Jansen returned it and started to look back at his display, then jumped in alarm at the sudden, shocking clatter of metal on metal. Ginger's head whipped around, and her blue-gray eyes flashed as she saw the source of the sound. One of Jansen's techs sat on the deck, face clenched with pain while his left hand clutched his right to his chest, and his tool kit's contents had cascaded over the decksole around him, but that wasn't what lit the dangerous glitter in her eyes.