Citadel Page 19

  "Lack of information can cut two ways," the President said. "Can we jam the hypercom?"

  "Yes, sir," Athena said. "But there would be great public and international outcry if we did so to cut off the broadcasts."

  "Not to cut off the broadcasts," the President said. "I want to let that through. But can we stop our information from going out?"

  "Yes, sir," the AI said.

  "Do it," the President said. "I don't know that we can actually surprise them. But it would be nice to try."

  —|—

  "You owe me a drink," Erickson said. "But I don't think you're going to be in a celebratory mood."

  "What did you find?" Dana asked.

  She was about ready for a break from studying. The Myrms were well and truly shut down with the fuel shortage and it was study or listen to Rangora propaganda and people who were buying it.

  The Terran Alliance plan was being ripped apart in the media and the international stage. The French and Chinese were specifically boycotting it and most of the EU countries were stating they had a hard time coughing up the money to join. The way the EU was set up, they weren't supposed to run deficits. And nobody had come up with a way to run a war without a deficit since Caesar.

  The UN had voted in a nonbinding resolution for surrender to the Rangora. The U.S. had more or less told them to stuff it. Politely. The rest of the world was free to surrender, thank you. The Alliance was going to fight.

  If they ever had fuel to fight with.

  "You better be glad your Myrmidons are down," Erickson said. "You might want to come over to the shop with your engineering people. This is a bit complicated."

  —|—

  "Okay," Erickson said, bringing up the schematic of a relay on the screen. "This is the relay you brought in. Part of a group of four that's arrayed around the main breaker. The first point to make is that the breaker doesn't just react to ground load. It's computerized and checks for various faults. If any of its algorithms say that you're about to have a major short, it shuts down."

  "And we don't have flight power," Dana said, nodding. "Got that."

  "And that's why the commander said it was a software bug," Thermal said.

  "And the commander is... wrong," Erickson said, bringing up a picture of... something. "This is an electron spectroscopy study of the relay. Specifically, of one of the primary power interaction points. These things are incredibly refined. They have to be made like computer chips. The interaction point uses gold as its conductor."

  "Point?" Dana said. "Gold? I thought the whole system was superconductor material."

  "The internal conductors are superconductor," Erickson said, rubbing his head in thought. "But... superconductor you've got to think of as sort of an interstate for electrons. It's really easy to move on the interstate, so electrons sort of want to stay on. And there the point breaks down because in relays, you have to have a way for the electrons to exit. And when you have two superconductors in direct contact, they don't trade electrons very well."

  "Why?" Hartwell asked, frowning.

  "The way they trade electrons in a superconductor prevents it," Erickson said, shrugging. "I can do the math for you, but explaining it in English is tough. I can talk about quantum if you want. They're kind of going round and round on the track and they like it there."

  "Okay," Hartwell said, blinking. "Can you do the math?"

  "Yes," Erickson said. "The point is you have to have a way to coax them out. Lower level conductors work for that. Gold is the best. But it can't be pure gold because that's too soft and melts in an instant. So you use a gold alloy with admixtures of copper and silver. Think of it as fourteen karat."

  "Okay," Hartwell said.

  "The gold is in direct contact with the superconductor on both sides," Erickson said. "Gold-gold connections are solid. And the gold on each side can get the electrons out of their superconductor womb. The gold has got to be a specific density, quality, alloy and thickness. Specifically, it has to be between seventy and ninety nanometers thick with very little variation and right around fourteen karat with specific levels of silver and copper."

  "How thick is it?" EM1 Hartwell asked.

  "Thirty-five," Erickson said. "Ish. It varies from thirty-five to sixty. And it's about seven karat with most of the admixture being copper. So it's more red gold than gold."

  "Which means power doesn't flow evenly across the contact point," Thermal said, his jaw working. "But if you test it under power, it probably has enough gold that the machine can't tell the difference."

  "Yep," the engineer said. "Took me a while to find this. Most of the interaction points were fine. This one wasn't. What happens is you get—"

  "Arcing," Dana said. "And the relay overheats. And when it overheats, it starts to fail."

  "And you get a ground fault indication," Erickson said, bringing up a string of code. "And the main breaker throws. If you'd had your helmets off you'd have smelled ozone. But the arcing is microscopic in macro. So it's hard as hell to spot."

  "And you have no power and you plow into a SAPL beam," Thermal said. "Dammit. Six dozen people analyzing that crash and nobody caught this."

  "There wasn't much left of Thirty-Three from what I hear," Dana said.

  "We're going to need your data," Thermal said. "Mr. Erickson, thanks for finding this for us. And Comet, good job finding him. I've got to go talk to the chief."

  —|—

  "Oh... crap," Tyler muttered.

  The news about the bad relays, and potentially causing a fatal crash, had not quite overwhelmed the news that the Glatun were at war with the Rangora. But it was news. And since it was news about Apollo and Tyler Vernon, the media was going ape-shit. There were already calls for Congressional investigations.

  The problem was, Apollo and LFD had become the sole-source providers for a dozen different areas, mostly related to defense. Tyler, surprisingly, wasn't happy about that. He was a firm believer that competition made a company stronger. The problem was, he'd gone into areas like a bull when other companies either didn't notice them or were tepid at best. There had been one start-up that had tried to compete with Apollo in mining but they'd gone out of business. By the time major corporations even noticed that, despite the enormous initial costs, Apollo's balance sheet was the near order of the Earth's balance of trade. Tyler had built so many mirrors it was worth just buying time from him. Competing was pretty much out of the question. Then, based on that and his contacts with the Glatun financier Niazgol Gorku, he'd gotten Granadica. Which pretty much put the end to competing with him in orbital manufacture.

  From maple syrup to mirrors, then mining, and finally to orbital manufacturing had been a long and costly road. But it had more or less, in many cases accidentally, crushed any competition.

  But Tyler was looking at more than the news. His internal review people had already looked at, and confirmed, the findings. And then there was the really fun part.

  "Memo to CEO, LFD, Vice President of Quality Control, LFD, President of Manufacturing, LFD, copy to everyone on the same level in all branches and departments.

  "As soon as we release the results of our internal findings, the Chinese government will find someone to ritually execute. Which won't bring the lost crew back and won't solve the problem. The supplier, Qua Tang Electronics, is blacklisted. Find every person associated, every member of the board, every senior officer, and blacklist any company they are associated with as well. With something like this, and the Chinese, there is no overkill. Be wildly unaimed in your fire. Nuke first, ask questions later. Make the pain as widespread as possible.

  "Find any memo related to questions about quality control. Fire anyone who downplayed them and promote anyone who raised questions even if the first person is normally great and the 'whistle blower' is an asshole. And if any of you are on the memos, the same goes. Just tell your second he or she is in charge, pack your stuff and go home.

  "Do a press release stating all of the above and acc
epting full responsibility. It was our design, it was our manufacture, it was our quality control, and it's our fault even if one of our suppliers screwed us. No point in playing games. Come clean with everything we can find internally that's not security restricted and all of our actions. Tell legal to shut the hell up when they start whining. Take the cost of a Myrmidon. Split it between the Wounded Warrior fund and the families or beneficiaries. Double up on kids. If we get sued that is not to be considered in any settlement or reward. Make sure all of these terms are in the press release. Post it on the Internet and push it in the media and blogs until it gets through. Do not use the families for photo-ops. I want this done yesterday."

  And that was the easy part.

  —|—

  Pulling watch was a fundamental aspect of being in the Navy.

  It didn't matter that nobody was still quite sure if the Troy was a ship or a base. It didn't matter that if there was an alert—and there were alarms all throughout the base and everyone had implants so they'd get the word. It didn't matter that the main Naval area of the Troy was secured by armed civilian guards.

  Somebody had to pull watch. One petty officer from the squadron on fixed location by the entrance and a roving guard. Who, in general, didn't rove much.

  EM2 Carter, the engineer on Forty-Six, was "visiting the gentlemen's" so it was up to Dana to challenge the civilian who, somehow, had wandered into the squadron area.

  "Sir," Coxswain's Mate Third Class Dana Parker said, holding up her hand. "This is a restricted area."

  Technically, newly promoted CM3 Parker was a petty officer. But PO3s were considered "over-paid seamen."

  Under normal conditions, Dana would meet neither time in grade nor schooling requirements since she hadn't attended the Leadership Training Course.

  Promotion requirements had been somewhat relaxed with the burgeoning space Navy. She'd completed all the mandatory exams and with all the ceremony attendant on such an august position she'd been told, once again, "go hit the stores for your badge, you're on watch in an hour."

  "Yeah," Tyler said, holding out his own hand. "I know. I built it. I'm Tyler Vernon."

  "Uh..." Dana said, coloring. It wasn't like she hadn't seen the guy on TV. She remembered her dad shouting "Yeah!" when Vernon had made his famous "Live Free or Die!" speech to the Horvath. "Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. But this is still a restricted area."

  "And I have a hall pass," Tyler said, pulling out an access badge. "I was wondering if you could direct me to the CO of the One-Forty-Second?"

  "Yes, sir," Dana said. She checked the badge then swiped it through the verifier. Hoo. Unrestricted access, all areas, all conditions. The only person she could think of with the same sort of clearance was the admiral. "Squadron offices are down the corridor to port, sir."

  "That would be left as I'm walking or right?" Tyler said. "I've always had problems with port and starboard on the Troy."

  "To your left, sir," Dana said.

  "Thank you, Coxswain," Tyler said, taking his badge back. "I thought since I was here I should go deliver a personal apology."

  "You mean about the relays, sir?" Dana asked.

  "Yes," Tyler replied, sighing. "But I think I'm avoiding it by talking. If you'll excuse me, Coxswain, I need to go be abject. I'm not good at abject."

  "Yes, sir," Parker said, then opened her mouth. She closed it, though, with an audible clop.

  "You were about to say something, Coxswain?" Tyler said.

  "No, sir," Dana replied. "Above my paygrade, sir."

  "Well, hopefully it will be your paygrade, someday," Tyler said. "And now I must go..."

  —|—

  "Sir," the captain's yeoman said, looking in the door. "Mr. Vernon wants to see you."

  "Send him in."

  Captain Chris "MOGS" DiNote was the commander of the 142nd. He'd been on Troy for about two years, which made him an old hand. And it wasn't like he hadn't met Vernon before. The last time was just in somewhat better circumstances, a dining out in the admiral's quarters that was interrupted by the first Battle of Troy.

  "Mr. Vernon," DiNote said when the short financier entered his office.

  "Captain DiNote," Tyler said, coming to a stop and assuming something resembling parade rest. "This is my personal formal apology for the failure of one of our systems which appears to have contributed to the deaths of your servicemen. I sincerely regret that we failed in our quality control and design processes. There's not a lot else to say but that I'm very, very sorry. We're tracking down what went wrong and we're going to try to ensure it doesn't happen again. That being said, Jesus Christ, Chris, I'm sorry as hell."

  "Didn't figure you were happy," DiNote said, grimacing. "None of us are. Grab a chair, sir."

  "Thank you," Tyler said, sitting down.

  "Off the record?" DiNote said. "What the hell happened?"

  "On the record for all I care," Tyler said. "I've already told my people that this whole investigation is going to be a public and ritual auto-da-fé. It wasn't Granadica. Okay, we're going to have to tighten up there, some. But... To reduce the strain on Granadica, which is juggling a lot of balls, we got a lot of the components from Earth companies. Also because it was pointed out quietly that we were killing off terrestrial manufacture. And I didn't want that to happen. So a bunch of Myrmidon components come from terrestrial manufacture. Those relays, and the main breakers, were two of about two dozen. We've gone back and done the same analysis on lots that we keep on hand to check for this sort of thing. And the ones from one particular company are all bad. They were... calling it sloppy is being generous. They were skimping on the gold for obvious reasons. The nanometric lay-down is actually hard to do so I'll give them simply poor quality there. Doesn't matter. We're going to gut the company and anyone associated with it. Won't bring your sailors back, but..."

  "Nothing will," MOGS said. "The Myrms are down until the investigation is completed. And we know they're going to stay flying."

  "Replacing the relays with good ones will do it," Tyler said. "And I'll be taking out the first Myrmidon that activates. If it makes anyone feel any better, the Starfire is essentially the same design. Same components for sure. So I've been putting my own ass on the fire for the last year and a half."

  "That's a point," DiNote said, shaking his head. "A point was made, though, that there's a fundamental problem with the design."

  "Which is?" Tyler said.

  "You shouldn't lose power if a single component fails," MOGS said, leaning back and crossing his arms. "There really should be redundancy. And it's not the only place we're having problems. Tracking them down, though, is damned near impossible. We ran a couple of systems that were having problems through the same sort of analysis but they didn't have the same problems."

  "Where's the other problems?" Tyler asked, trying not to grimace.

  "Stuff just..." MOGS shrugged in frustration. "The problem is we can't track down any one point. Sometimes it's internal grav, but the inertics seem to work just fine. Just... you'll get funky gravity in some spots on some boats. Comes and goes."

  "'Funky gravity' can be a real problem," Tyler said, frowning. "I remember some of the problems Boeing had with their first grav systems. Gravity vortexes can be... critical issues."

  "None of it has really been critical so far," DiNote said. "Except the relay issue."

  "Okay," Tyler said. "Hard to track down and inconsistent problems. That's fun. And the relay issue. And things need more redundancy."

  "I'm pretty sure there's going to be a full report," DiNote said. "That's just off the top of my head."

  "I've found that these sorts of conversations and screaming at people is often more useful than a carefully prepared PowerPoint," Tyler said. "So I'm going to go scream at people. As soon as we have fuel again, I'll get Granadica started on some really good relays. And I'll get some people to look at the problems with the gravity systems. That may take some skull sweat but I know some people with really good skulls."
<
br />   CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  "Beor, that was genius," To'Jopeviq said. "The lack of fuel will hold them up for at least six months. There's no way they can get that gas mine finished before we arrive in force. They don't have enough fuel to finish the mine!"

  The trade embargo had gone into effect only shortly before the war against the Glatun. You could never really trust the official reports, but things there seemed to be going well. The current plan would free up some forces to attack Terra in no more than six months if all went well. To'Jopeviq was still having a hard time agreeing with his analysts on what would be necessary to attack the human system. The Aggressor battleships, two steps down in throw weight from assault vectors, were much more powerful than Devastators, with heavier screens and more throw weight. Avama was convinced that the simple appearance of a Rangora fleet would have the humans asking for a negotiated surrender. Toer was insisting that anything less than multiple AVs, which was pretty much out of the question, was too little.

  Either way the trade embargo was sure to cripple the humans.

  "Thank you," the Kazi said. "Unfortunately, you are not my rating officer."

  "Tell me who it is and I'll send him a letter of commendation," To'Jopeviq said. "I start to understand the problem with deciding what will work with humans. I don't think they can make up their own minds."

  "There is that," Beor said.

  "There is a study off their own hypernet," To'Jopeviq said. "Avama sent it to me showing how 'peaceful' they are. I don't know what cloud he is currently floating on because it involves a piece of land they have been battling over since their pre-history."

  "Forty thousand years?" Beor said.

  "They haven't had writing that long," To'Jopeviq said. "No, but at least five thousand. The first battles are only written about in their religious tracts. And as far as anyone can tell, it's been a battleground ever since. But the study showed that whereas if the people of the region were offered financial incentives to make peace, they rejected them. If they were offered purely ceremonial concessions, they were more willing."