Vorpal Blade Read online

  "Dead, if you try to blue me," Top said. "PFC Bergstresser, it has come to my attention that one small but oh so vital aspect of your in-process was overlooked. You have yet to have your pre-mission physical. That is a down-check for the mission. Thus, you will now report to the sickbay, where our very own MD will ensure that you are fit to fly."

  "Shiny, First Sergeant," Berg said, standing up. "Jaen, I'll be back to finish up the cleaning."

  "We got it," Jaen said, grinning. "You're not going to be back soon. See you tomorrow at the barracks at 0730. If you're alive."

  "Excuse me, First Sergeant," Berg said as they walked upstairs from the armory. "What did he mean by that?"

  "Our doc is somewhat unusual," Powell said. "And, unfortunately for us all, the pre-mission physical is extremely comprehensive. Extremely comprehensive. We normally give a person the day off after one. In your case, that will not be possible."

  "Ah, a new guinea pig."

  Berg had been ushered into the office by a very large black woman bearing a nametag that read "Nurse Betty." He wasn't sure what to expect, but whatever it was, the doctor was not that.

  "I am Doctor Arnold Chetowski," the doctor said, standing up and walking over to shake Berg's hand. "You may call me Doctor Chet."

  Doctor Chet was a human mountain. Nearly seven feet tall, the doctor was as broad as he was tall, with long black hair pulled back in a ponytail and the most massive beard Berg had ever seen in his life. The guy was just hairy, as was apparent by the thick hair on the backs of his massive, hamlike hands. Forget mountain, the guy looked like a Sasquatch. Incongruously, given his appearance and name, he had a slight southern accent.

  Berg's hand was briefly engulfed and he was waved to a chair.

  "We will be at this some time," Dr. Chet said, sitting down and looking at his computer monitor. "There are numerous tests you are going to have to undergo and given the rapid nature of this examination, you will, unfortunately, have to survive the rigors of the 'fast testing.' Have you eaten recently?"

  "I had to skip lunch," Berg said. "I had some McDonald's for breakfast about six this morning."

  "That will, unfortunately, change the results but I can adjust," Dr. Chet said. "I have your medical records but they are not always entirely complete. Have you any known allergies? Any medical problems whatsoever? I would go through the list, but I'm sure you've seen it."

  "Nothing, sir," Berg said.

  "Very well, I shall have to take your entirely unprofessional word for it," Dr. Chet said, looking up and grinning. "You are now permitted to chuckle."

  "Yes, sir," Berg said. "Heh. Heh."

  "Now you are permitted to fear," Dr. Chet said, pulling two bottles of white liquid out of his desk. "This is a radioactive tracer that will bind to certain chemicals in your brain so that much later I can see exactly how you think. Shortly before that test, which will take place in no less than eight hours, you shall take two more bottles of some pink stuff. Since we have to use the pink stuff, you will not enjoy the experience. Forty-three minutes after ingesting the pink stuff, you will become violently nauseated. We will try to ensure all the fixed testing is done by that time so that you can find a quiet place to vomit and feel as if you are going to die. The white stuff, by the way, simply tastes awful."

  "And I'm betting I don't get to eat anything between now and then," Berg said.

  "Or drink," Dr. Chet replied. "Nor will you have much free time. The other tests are going to take nearly eight hours."

  Dr. Chet had been on the money on the time. Berg had never heard of such extensive physical and mental testing. It made every physical he'd ever been through look like child's play. He gave enough blood samples to count for a donation, he was lovingly prodded by a somewhat effeminate male physician assistant all over his body, did all the usual "turn your head and cough" tests, went through a cardiac stress test and an electrocardiogram. He was injected for every known disease and some, he was sure, the corpsman was just making up. He might have heard wrong, but supposedly one of the injections was for "triskaidekaphobia." He was pretty sure there wasn't an immunization for fear of the number thirteen.

  Then he was ushered into a laboratory that deserved the full enunciation. There were more computer monitors than Berg had ever seen in one room, along with a "wet" lab that looked like something out of a mad scientist's nightmare. Worse, through a plexiglass window he could see a full surgical suite. The gleaming steel table gave the whole room a decidedly macabre look.

  "Well, as we wait for the lab results, we will commence upon the first of the truly interesting tests," Dr. Chet said. "If you will take a seat," he added, pointing to a chair that, while comfortable looking, had the vague appearance of an electric chair. Complete with straps.

  Berg sat down and "Nurse Betty" started hooking electrodes up to his head, chest, hands and forearms.

  "This is a device somewhat like a lie detector test," Dr. Chet said. "It combines the functions of that and an electroencephalogram. An EEG measures brain patterns, but from reading your biography I believe you know that."

  "Yes, sir," Berg said.

  "So. I shall ask you a large number of questions. I will, through this test and others, get a picture of how you think. There are various reasons to do this, besides pure curiosity of which I have an inordinate supply. Would you care to venture a guess what they may be?"

  "The military wants to see if the stress of the mission changes the way we think?" Berg ventured. "It might be a good way to check for post-traumatic stress syndrome."

  "In fact, no," Dr. Chet said, looking up from the monitor and smiling. "There is a quite simple blood test for that. One of your samples is for that specific purpose. You have seen some science fiction TV shows, I'm sure. Did you never wonder about the fact that they had quite sophisticated medical technology yet beings with wildly different cellular structure were able to slip past their screening with impunity?"

  "Actually, that has always bothered me," Berg admitted.

  "And things in the brain and weird addictions and so forth and so on," Dr. Chet said. "By doing these tests, both before the mission and afterwards, we should be able to determine if aliens have taken over your body and are bent on world domination. Or at least the former. So, we shall begin. What is your name . . ."

  Two hours later Berg was sweating more water than he could afford to lose in his dehydrated condition. He'd been asked to do math puzzles in his head; sometimes the questions had been too fast to answer, other times he had been given all the time he needed to answer. He'd been asked about his childhood, about his military experience, about his mother and father and sister. He had been posed nonsensical koans of the "what is the sound of one hand clapping" variety and about general philosophies. He'd been asked if he had ever killed anyone, if he'd like to kill someone, if he'd ever thought about it or about suicide. He'd been asked so many questions his head was buzzing.

  "Good profile," Dr. Chet said, nodding. "Good good profile. You are so much center of the norms I suggested for this mission I could use you as the profile." He looked at his watch and grinned.

  "And now for the bad part," he said, pulling out two pink bottles from his lab coat, then glancing at the monitor. "You do not fear the pink bottles?"

  "You can tell by looking at the monitor?" Berg asked.

  "Oh, yes, at this point very easily," Dr. Chet said. "And you do not."

  "I've been nauseated before," Berg answered evenly.

  "You thought you had been nauseated before," Dr. Chet said, grinning. "You will come to a new appreciation."

  Nurse Betty had silently reappeared and started unstrapping the Marine.

  "So, we will now do the MRI and CAT scans," Dr. Chet said. "After you take your medicine."

  The pink stuff was just as awful as the white, but Berg didn't feel any negative effects. Maybe he was immune or something.

  He undressed and got into a nonmetallic robe, then was slid into the MRI. The thing was noisy as hell an
d it was initially boring as hell. But then Dr. Chet started asking him questions again.

  The session in the MRI wasn't all that long, though, no more than fifteen minutes. Then he was led to the CAT scan. That time, there weren't any questions. He just lay in the thing for another fifteen or twenty minutes while it took pictures of his head.

  "Very well, we are done," Dr. Chet said after he'd gotten dressed again. It was after midnight, but if the doctor was tired it wasn't apparent. "How are you feeling?"

  "Fine," Berg said.

  "Yes, well," Dr. Chet said, looking at his watch. "Three . . . two . . . one. How are you feeling now?"

  "Holy maulk," Berg said, his eyes flying wide.

  "Bathroom is through that door," Dr. Chet said, pointing. "I'll see you in about thirty minutes."

  5

  The SSBN Blage

  "Now that's an odd looking sub," Miller said, looking at the boat.

  The 4144 was alone in a covered pen made for six submarines. And it was odd looking. The sail was truncated and swept back with no diving plane on it. The rear section was "humped" for about a third of its length. The "hump" appeared to be a separate vessel, something like the SEAL vessel the Navy had been working on for years; there was a very definite seam where it met the boat.

  Just at the tip of the composite nosecone that housed the sonar suite and other instruments was something completely different. Extending from the nosecone was a long protrusion that looked like—and Miller was sure he couldn't be the only person to make the connection—a sword about thirty meters long, six meters high at the base where it was attached to the nose of the sub, only two meters or so wide in the horizontal dimension, and then flattened out to a point. The rest of the body of the submarine could very well represent the hilt of the blade, although it was much longer than the blade itself. It really and truly looked like the oddest, most peculiar, and largest flat-black dull sword the chief warrant officer had ever seen. Also a bit like a narwhal. He just knew that Weaver was somehow behind it.

  "Uh, what the hell is the giant blade all about?" Miller asked, then paused and added, "Sir?"

  "Oh, yeah, the supercavitation initiator." Weaver shrugged. "Had to add that. Otherwise, when the ship tries to reach maximum underwater velocity there would be a serious problem with Euler buckling. Serious. Problem."

  "Oiler buckling," the chief said. "Sounds like a game involving a football team from Texas and a bunch of gay cowboys."

  "The Oilers moved to Tennessee a long time ago, Chief. Never was a big fan of the Cowboys either." Weaver grinned. "But it's Euler with an E, named after the guy who understood it first.

  "Uh huh."

  "You ever stood on an empty beer can slowly until the force of your entire body weight was finally enough to collapse the can flat?" Weaver explained.

  "I'm more of a liquor drinker, sir."

  "Work with me here, Chief. You have seen somebody stomp a can flat before?" asked Weaver rubbing at the back of his neck and raising an eyebrow.

  "Yes, sir." Calling Bill "sir" was going to take some getting used to.

  "Okay then, beer can equals submarine and big dumb SEAL equals force of water on boat at maximum underwater velocity. Flat can equals sub without initiator. Got it?"

  "How does the sword help? No wait, scratch that. Euler buckling bad. Blade on nose of boat, good. Got it." The SEAL shook his head left and right subtly.

  "It's basically the same thing that we do on supersonic stuff, plus a new trick that works kinda like the warp field. We put spikes on jets here and there to create shock waves where we want them and in a controllable manner. Ever seen the long needle on the end of a supersonic plane?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Same deal. The initiator creates a bow wave far enough out in front of the ship that a boundary layer is created around the ship. This reduces the buckling forces on the ship by about two orders of magnitude. But that only helps with the Euler buckling force some."

  "Wait a minute," Miller said, furrowing his brow. "Nukes are built to take all kinds of unimaginable hell. It couldn't stand up to even two or three times the normal top speed without modifications to the structure?"

  "Two or three times normal top speed, perhaps," Bill said with a grin.

  "No maulk?"

  "No maulk."

  "Uh, sir. I know subs. I've spent one hell of a lot of time around them. They're pretty damned fast. I mean, just between us, here in a secure sub pen, a big boat goes somewhere around seventy or eighty knots. Right?" Miller wasn't sure if he was glad he asked the question or not. With Dr. Weaver—Lieutenant Commander Weaver—explanations could sometimes create an eyes glazing over effect that could damage one's brain.

  "Actually for this boat, the terminal velocity is a little lower than that. No matter how much power we pour into the propulsion it's not that fast. And if it was that fast, it would . . ."

  "Crush like a beer can, got it," Miller said. "So what gives?"

  "Well, you see the initiator there has millions of little holes in it about a millimeter in diameter that are dispersed about it in a precisely calculated manner. It took us months to run that simulation and more than eight months to construct the thing. Anyway, we force air out through those holes as we come up to speed. An envelope of water supersaturated with air flows in around the vessel and dramatically reduces the friction with the water. It really is a warping of the parameters of the ocean so that the submarine can go faster through it than it should normally be able to. And, of course, it's got a spaceship engine in it. That helps. A prop won't work by a long shot."

  "Did you think of that?" Miller hesitated and then added, "Sir?"

  "Nope," Weaver admitted. "The Russians have been trying to figure out how to do it for fifty years. Some call it supercavitation; others call it underwater warp drive. The U.S. Navy decided to go slow and stealthy and quit trying to figure it out because the propulsion system required was a volatile rocket engine. The Navy didn't want that on a sub. But the new drive changed their mind and DARPA was so thrilled by it that they lobbied hard for the design and even paid for most of it."

  Weaver looked at his ship with affection. Oh sure it was Captain Steven Blankemeier's command—and most certainly it was the captain's ship—but Weaver thought of it as his ship. After all, he'd designed most of the retrofit systems on it. Nobody understood it like he did.

  "It looks like a sword. A short squatty sword with a big assed grip, but a sword nonetheless."

  "Never noticed that," Weaver admitted. "Hmmm."

  "Sooo, we sort of ram the water with that sword thingy . . ." Miller said.

  "Correct."

  "And we use it to make fizzy stuff that makes the ship slipperyer."

  "More slippery. Sure."

  "And that keeps us from getting crushed like a beer can."

  "You see?" Weaver said. "It is possible to explain things to SEALs."

  "Got a question, sir," Miller said, stone-faced.

  "Go."

  "So, can we ram people with that? Sort of like a narwhal skewering a whaling ship? I mean, it's not our first line of defense but is there, like, a ramming speed? Sir?"

  "Let's just tour the ship, shall we?"

  The strangest thing on the exterior of the ship was definitely the ramming blade. However, close on the heels of the blade was the odd appearance of the base of the sail. There was some sort of sliding hatch on the front that really looked out of place. It currently covered whatever was under it, but if memory served it was right above the conn.

  The Navy had balked at giving a civilian "full access" to the details of the 4144. But they had admitted a willingness to give access to a SEAL chief warrant officer. Which was why Miller, wearing a brand new pair of digi-cam, carrying a seabag and occasionally rubbing his recently shaved head, was following Weaver across the gangplank to the spaceship.

  He paused and saluted the American flag, then saluted the bridge.

  "Permission to come aboard, Lieutenant?" h
e asked the officer manning the entry.

  "Permission granted," the LT said, extending his hand. "Lieutenant Jon Souza, tactical officer."

  "Pleased to meet you, sir," Miller replied.

  "Time's a wastin'," Bill said, nodding at the lieutenant. "How's the loading going?"

  The boat was bustling with loading.

  "We've got the ardune torps loaded," the lieutenant replied. "We're waiting until this evening to load the SM-9s. Laser Two failed the last charge cycle test. Brian's got it stripped down."

  "While all that's good to hear," Bill said. "I hope we don't need any of it."