Max barely had his nose inside the compartment before he called out, "Bhattacharyya, status."

"Sir, we have an apparent commanded and authorized emergency compression drive shutdown, reason unknown. No answer from that compartment, but their status shows that they were swapping out a regulator buffer at the time. Fire and explosion in Engineering Maintenance Equipment Storage #2, which, by the way, is directly across the corridor from the compression drive equipment room. Fire suppression is active in that compartment and appears to be working. Fire crew on its way; no report from them at this time. Damage control party dispatched; no report. Marine detachment activated; no report." He then read from the status display on his console, "s.h.i.+p is subluminal, heading two-two-one mark zero-one-five, speed zero-point-three-five c, main sublight is nulled, att.i.tude control is active in all modes, all other systems and stations report nominal status."

"Very well, Mr. Bhattacharyya, and well done. I have CIC."

When the change of minute-by-minute control of the s.h.i.+p was acknowledged and logged, Max replaced Bhattacharyya at the Commander's Station. He noticed Ensign Gilbertson mopping up some sort of unidentified fluid at the XO's Station. It smelled strange. Definitely not coffee. Max was reaching for his comm panel when it beeped for attention. He knew who it was before he even looked at the source ID. He opened the circuit.

"Wernher, what happened?" With the chance of there being some sort of serious casualty down there, no way was Max going to engage Brown in the usual levity.

"b.l.o.o.d.y b.a.l.l.s up, that's what. I'm at ground zero as it were, and I've got three unconscious men. My compression drive is shut down, with the feedback regulator access covers sitting on the deck, two smashed consoles, and a bulkhead with a hole blasted in it." The sound of a cycling hatch came over the circuit. Max could hear Dr. Sahin's voice in the background, telling the pharmacist's mate to look at one of the men and Nurse Church to look at the other, while he looked at the third, presumably the one who appeared to be the most seriously injured. "As I'm sure you heard, the medical team just arrived. I can hear the fire people across the way going about their business. The lads got here quite briskly. In any event, it's pretty clear what happened here."

"Wrench in the stream?" said Max.

"Give that man a kewpie doll. That would be my working theory as well." The hatch cycled again. Max could hear Brown speaking to whomever came in. "Gonzalez, Teng, isolate those damaged consoles, and do a type two inspection of that unit and this console. Let me know the moment you are done. Get three more lads in here to help you. I want it done in fifteen minutes."

Then, to Max: "Of course, I'll review the logs and surveillance, talk to the three men when they're able to talk, and go over the physical evidence, but it looks pretty clear-cut to me. What I don't understand is how the wrench got dropped in there. I'm sure Rhim was the man performing the swap, and he's experienced on that operation. As I recall, he's performed that procedure ten times at least-maybe a dozen-all with at least two seconds to spare."

"Very well, Wernher. As this is an Engineering casualty, you are in charge of the investigation. Be sure, though, to have Dr. Sahin take a close look at these men, especially the one who was performing the swap. I want to rule out any medical or psychiatric causation."

"My thinking exactly, sir." The comm picked up some unintelligible discussion in the background. "It's looking more and more like the feedback unit was not damaged and that none of the consoles essential to operating the compression drive were damaged either. I've got two consoles that are now junk, but one is an auxiliary console for the s.h.i.+p's emergency power, and the other is a training/simulator console. Unless we discover something unexpected, compression drive will be available in less than fifteen minutes."

"That's good news, Wernher. CIC out." He closed the circuit.

CHAPTER 9.

07:47Z Hours, 23 January 2315 All three of the injured men had regained consciousness, and Dr. Sahin was intent on giving all three a thorough exam of the kind one cannot perform on an unconscious patient. Having learned who had been standing closest to the path of the hypersonic wrench and who had most likely caused the accident, Sahin had the man sitting on the examining table in his underwear, having asked him to strip off his SCU, while the doctor sat on the little stool with wheels that physicians had been putting in their examining rooms for nearly half a millennium. "What's your name, s.p.a.cer?" The doctor knew to whom he was speaking, of course, but he liked to observe how men answered all kinds of questions, even obvious ones.

"Rhim, sir," the man answered slowly.

The doctor touched his padcomp a few times to pull up the man's records. "Ordinary s.p.a.cer second cla.s.s, right?"

"Right." That answer seemed sluggish as well, which struck Dr. Sahin as odd. s.p.a.cers were not slow. They had to score in the eighty-fifth percentile in general intelligence just to be accepted for s.p.a.ce duty, and the ones who were not quick witted never made it to recruit s.p.a.cer. And what was it about this man's eyes that seemed odd?

"Been on the c.u.mberland for thirteen months, correct?"

It took the man a few moments to count the months. "Yea, that's right."

"Born on Jeffries IV, right?"

"Right. No. Jefferson IV." He blinked for the first time since the doctor had been speaking with him. That is what was odd about his eyes. The man was hardly blinking.

"All right, I have your medical history right here. Nothing unusual that I need to be worried about. Are you experiencing any new symptoms since the incident?"

"My hand, doctor." He held up his right hand. "I've got this feeling-a tingling-but it's almost painful, and it's been getting worse the last few hours."

"I think a colloquial expression for that, s.p.a.cer Rhim, is 'pins and needles.' Is that it?"

"Yeah, exactly. That's what it feels like."

"Let me see it." The man extended his hand and the doctor took it, carefully checking the texture and rigidity of the skin, the color, its size relative to the other hand, its temperature, how damp it was, and several other qualities.

Sahin trusted his senses first, before having recourse to instruments and laboratory tests. He had noticed earlier that the hand was slightly inflamed, being redder, larger, and damper than the other. It was almost as if the hand had suffered a mild sunburn or been very lightly scalded in hot water. Sahin had observed these signs earlier, but had explained them with the preliminary hypothesis that the man had raised his hand to s.h.i.+eld his face from the event and that the hand had therefore received more than its share of heat and shock from the wrench's hypersonic travels. But when one added the pins-and-needles sensation, another hypothesis suggested itself. During this conversation, the doctor was s.h.i.+ning his penlight into Rhim's eyes to check his pupil response, looking in his ears, feeling his pulse, checking his cervical glands for adenopathy, and so on.

"And did this hand happen to come in contact with one of the compression phase regulator feedback streams recently?"

"Yes, it did."

"I thought there were safety procedures to be sure that the stream never touched human tissue."

"There are. But-well, Doc, it's like this. Every now and then, we need to swap out one of the regulator buffers that the stream flows around. It's just this little cadmium-praseodymium-ytterbium rod with a liquid boron core that plugs into a socket in the stream conduit. You open the conduit, pull the old rod, and insert the new one. We don't shut down the drive when we do that.

"Since there are ten streams, we run the other nine at a hundred and eleven point two percent and shut down the one we need to do the buffer swap out on. It's okay, since the system lets us shut the stream down for up to eight seconds at a time and the book says they can be run at up to a hundred and thirty percent for up to a minute. So, we get past all the access covers, shut it down, pull the old rod, stick the new one in, close the door, and restart the stream. Simple."

"But you were a little slow pulling your arm out as the stream restarted, and it caught your hand as it was just beginning to power up."

"Hey, you got it pegged, Doc. That's exactly what happened."

"And who ordered you to perform this procedure?"

Answering this question seemed to require considerable reflection. "Petty Officer Third Starcevik. He's the senior man in that compartment for that watch."

"Did Petty Officer Starcevik speak with you before he had you perform this procedure? I mean, did he have a chance to see how alert you were, whether you were up to executing an operation requiring speed, dexterity, and precision?"

Another delay. "I suppose. He asked me what took me so long to get there and I answered him." Pause. "And we talked about the job and how many times I did it before, so, yea. That would be a yes."

"I see." The doctor walked away from the man to the corner of the examining room, as though in thought, while slipping his penlight out of his pocket. Without warning, he turned and tossed the light to s.p.a.cer Rhim. "Here, catch."

The light hit the s.p.a.cer squarely in the center of his chest and fell to the examining table before the man so much as flinched.

"s.p.a.cer, look me in the eyes and tell me how long you've been a tranker."

Rhim gazed back at him in apparent shock and horror at the accusation. "Doc, I don't use that stuff. You know it's against regulations to even have it on the s.h.i.+p."

Sahin actually smiled. "Now, Rhim, that line may work on some worn-out, second-rate, gone-to-s.p.a.ce-because-he-can't-make-it-in-a-modern-clinic doctor, but it doesn't fill the waterskins with me. I can spot it a mile away. Your movements are slow; your answers to questions were slow; your reflexes are slow; and you hardly ever blink your eyes. Most s.p.a.cers are nervous in the presence of the chief medical officer, but you haven't even so much as fidgeted or twitched. Your pupils are dilated and unreactive; your facial capillaries are dilated; and there is a characteristic pigmentation change in the oral and nasal mucosa. To trained eyes, you might as well have painted a sign on your forehead.

"Now, I know that most of the drugs used by men on a wars.h.i.+p do not show up very well in ordinary blood tests. But they can be tested for very easily from a sample of cerebrospinal fluid. s.p.a.cer, are you going to tell me what you are taking, or do I need to perform a spinal tap?"

"Spinal tap?"

"More properly called a lumbar puncture. Very simple, really. I take a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-millimeter needle and insert it directly into your spinal column right between your L3 and L4 vertebrae," Dr. Sahin jabbed him with his index finger roughly in the middle of his back, "and slowly push through the tissue until I feel a slight 'give'"-he gave the finger a slight shove-"which tells me that the needle has penetrated the ligmentum flavium. Then I continue to push the needle deeper into your spine until it 'gives' once more"-another shove-"telling me that I am through the dura mater and-I see signs of alarm on your face, Rhim.

"Truly, the needle is not all that long, only as long as your hand is wide. There are many larger ones that we commonly use, so put that concern aside. Once the one-hundred-and twenty-five-millimeter needle is inside your spinal column, very near your spinal cord, I carefully withdraw some cerebrospinal fluid for testing. Of course, if I penetrate too deeply, the needle could puncture your spinal cord and paralyze you for life, but there is only a very slight risk of permanent paralysis resulting from the procedure. Don't worry. I am quite the old hand at jabbing long needles into people's spinal columns. I'll be right back with a nurse and a spinal tray." He started for the door.

"No, Doc. Wait," the s.p.a.cer pleaded. "You don't need to do that lumbar-tapping spinal-puncture thing. I admit it. I've been tranking. But only when I'm off duty."

"Thank you. And what exactly are you using?"

"The Chill."

Of course. It had to be the Chill. The Chill was the street name for Atanipine, a prescription medication used to treat cases of extreme anxiety disorder. When a patient was so severely anxious that he could not even speak about his problem to a therapist, this drug was a G.o.dsend, virtually eliminating the anxiety so that the patient could talk about his issues without suffering an anxiety attack. It was generally administered only a few hours before a therapy session, and even then only for a period of a few months because, as the treatment went on, the drug was known to slow reflexes and mental responses long after its anti-anxiety effects wore off. It could be synthesized by most MediMax units if the authorization protocols were disabled.

"Rhim, just sit right there for a moment. I'll be right back."

"You're not going to get..."

"No, I'm not going to get the spinal kit. I'm going to get a piece of diagnostic equipment."

In less than three minutes, the doctor returned with a device that looked like a black gauntlet with mitten fingers and two thumbs (one on each side), with a small numerical readout on the forearm.

"This is a neural transmission a.n.a.lyzer. It stimulates the fingertips and then measures the timing and the intensity of the neural response as it travels up the nerves through the upper forearm. It tells how efficiently and rapidly the nerves are transmitting their impulses.

"We have a more sophisticated test that involves putting a measuring device on your head and stimulating several different parts of your body, but this is accurate enough for our purposes today. Just put your arm in here-no, the other one. I don't want to use the hand that you injured. There. Now, you won't feel anything except a bit of a tickle, then a vibration, then a gentle poke or two, all on your fingertips. Nothing terribly unpleasant."

Rhim inserted his right hand, and the doctor activated the device. It was just as promised. First he felt a light brush across his fingertips, almost like a feather; then a slight vibration of each finger in turn; and then pokes by a sharp, but not penetrating object, much like a somewhat blunted pencil point, on the tips of each finger. The stimulation then stopped, and a green light came on at one corner of the readout unit. The doctor removed the device and pressed a b.u.t.ton. Two numbers appeared: 7.1 and 6.5.

"Doctor, what do those numbers mean?"

"The first number is the speed of your neural transmission. It is an index calibrated for each patient's gender, age, and other factors-I input the calibration data before I stepped in. Ten is normal. The second is a similar index for the sensitivity, accuracy, and precision with which your nerves respond to the impulses. Again, ten is the calibrated norm. Your responses, I am sorry to say, are significantly below normal in on both indices. How long have you been using this substance? Please be honest with me. I already have a good idea from the degree of neural impairment."

"More than a year. Thirteen and a half months, I think."

"That is not surprising. How much do you take?

"Usually a pointer when I get off duty. When I have a day off, I take a deuce."

"A pointer is one and a deuce is two milligrams?"

"Yea, that's right."

"At least you're not a heavy user, although the drug has still taken a substantial toll on you. Now, young man, again I need you to give me a perfectly and completely honest answer to my next question. It is my job to treat this problem and see you returned to full health, and in order to do that, I must have accurate information. My job is to cure, not judge."

The s.p.a.cer nodded his understanding.

"If you do not use for a day or two, do you experience any symptoms, such as nervousness, anxiety, loss of appet.i.te, inability to sleep, or muscle twitches, particularly around the eyes and corners of the mouth?"

"Uh-huh. All of those. I get real edgy-like. Can't sit still. Ants in my pants."

"How about feelings of persecution, the sense that people are out to get you, or that everyone is against you or doesn't like you?"

"Nah, none of that stuff. What's that mean, anyway?"

"What that means is that you are addicted to this pernicious substance, but not severely so. Once you stop using, you will go through an uncomfortable period of withdrawal where you will experience the symptoms we just talked about, and perhaps some moderate nausea, all for a few days, and then you will be fine."

"You said 'Once you stop using.' Does that mean-?"

"Oh, yes. It most a.s.suredly means that you are going to stop using, young man. There is no doubt about that. You and everyone else aboard this s.h.i.+p. No one is going to deaden their dendrites and blunt their brains on the USS c.u.mberland. Not while I am her chief medical officer."

The doctor realized that his voice had gotten inappropriately loud for the small room. He continued more softly. "But I almost forgot. With all the discussion of this other issue, I have let your original injury slip my mind. I'll be right back."

He shortly returned with a loaded pressure syringe and administered its contents. Navy doctors don't ask first, especially with enlisted men. Any prescription or treatment is essentially an order from a superior officer, so they administer the shot or lance the boil or otherwise go ahead with what they need to do. Explanations, if offered at all, come later.

"The energy stream in the compression drive triggered a degenerative process in the nerves in your hand. Left untreated, the nerves would essentially have died, rendering the hand useless. This medication, known as Synaptoflex, will reverse the process and allow the damage to heal. And incidentally, it will also speed the rate at which your nerves recover from the Chill you have been taking. Starting tomorrow morning, I am going to begin working with you to address why you have been taking this terrible drug and how you can prevent yourself from taking it again. I will do everything within my power to see that you and this dangerous chemical are not mated for the rest of your life. Until then, however, I have an unpleasant duty to perform."

"What's that?"

"I am required by regulations to relieve you until further notice. You are simply too impaired to function properly. As this and the incident in Engineering demonstrate," he pointed to Rhim's injured right hand, "you are a hazard in your present condition, both to yourself and others. You will receive appropriate bureaucratic paperwork shortly, explaining that you retain your current rate of pay unless it is modified or stopped due to a separate disciplinary action by proper authority, as well as your right to an appeal hearing before a panel of enlisted men or to have your case reviewed at a Captain's Mast, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, within a day or two."

There was a knock on the examination room door. The doctor opened it to admit two rifle-carrying Marines and Major Kraft. The doctor said sadly, "I'm afraid I called them a moment ago, when I was out of the room. The regulations are quite specific on that point."

Major Kraft announced, "s.p.a.cer Rhim, you are under arrest for consumption of a prohibited substance. After I read the doctor's report, there will likely be other charges too, but that one will do for now. I need you to come with us."

Turning to one of the Marines, "Carlsson, go to the quartermaster and draw a plain jane for him. We can't have this man sitting in the brig in his underwear."

The Marines led him from the room. Common sense, not to mention a specific naval regulation, said that one did not put a man in the brig in an SCU, with its oxygen generator full of volatile chemicals and various metal hooks, straps, fittings, and other hardware just asking to be used for mischief by a prisoner. So Rhim was issued a plain jane, a standard s.h.i.+p's Working Uniform, but without any insignia, patches, or other markers of naval rank, occupation, and service history. A Navy man in a plain jane was clothed but visually stripped of his ident.i.ty.

Sahin picked up Rhim's SCU and deposited it in a bin for patient clothing. Then he strode to his workstation and wrote a hurried message for the commanding officer. "Need to see you as soon as possible regarding matter of great urgency."

Less than five minutes later, the doctor was in Max's day cabin. When a senior officer said "matter of great urgency," Max took him at his word and acted accordingly. When Max found out what the problem was, he buzzed Garcia, Kraft, and "Wernher" Brown, telling them to meet him and Dr. Sahin in the wardroom. Seventeen minutes had elapsed since the CMO sent the text message, when a steward, having brought coffee to everyone except the doctor, who was "in the mood for tea today," bowed out of the wardroom and closed the hatch. The meeting came to order.

The doctor briefly explained what he knew and the effects of the Chill.

"That explains a lot," said Max.

"Explains what?" asked Brown.

"This crew's performance," Garcia finished Max's thought. "Lots of things are just plain slow, slower than they should be, even given all the other problems on this s.h.i.+p. The performance against the enemy when Captain Oscar was in command, the performance in the fleet exercises, the performance in the training exercises I've been running since the change of command. I was wondering just a few minutes ago if something like a third of the crew-excepting the officers and the NCOs-was ill or had some sort of mental disorder. Now, I'm betting we've got a significant fraction-not most, but a significant minority-on this drug. And at least a few of the NCOs and maybe an officer or two, unless I miss my guess."

"A third would be about right," Kraft said. "I was about twelve hours away from coming forward with a program of random neural testing or quarters searches or something. There's not a doubt in my mind that a lot of these men are on something. A blind man could see it. I watch the Discrepancy Reports from every department, and there are just too many minor errors being made all over the s.h.i.+p, even for a s.h.i.+p in a low state of training. Plus, I can see it in the crew's eyes and their movements. What I don't get is why so many? In training for this post, I learned that most s.h.i.+ps have some kind of issue with drugs, but usually it's only a small percentage of the crew. A manageable number. I've never heard of anything so widespread."