Dr. Sahin remained seated as the rest of the men filed out of the compartment. "Captain, may I have a word with you?"

"Sure, Doctor, what's on your mind?"

"You issued a set of separate written orders to each senior officer, including me."

"Yes. I wrote them before I a.s.sumed command. Is there a problem with any of those orders?"

"Not at all. I find them very sensible indeed. They were things that I would have done in any case, but your order makes it easier to get them done-they are now captain's orders. It makes them a priority."

"What of my orders, Doctor?"

"As you recall, one of the things I was ordered to do was to review the medical records of the s.h.i.+p's complement to determine whether anyone had any special medical needs that were not being adequately addressed. I am constrained to point out to you that there is one such person on board who has a severe and unmet medical need that may adversely affect his ability to carry out his duties. I believe that he requires treatment immediately or his performance is likely to begin to deteriorate rapidly to such a degree that within a very short time he may become unfit for duty."

"Can the treatment he needs be provided on the c.u.mberland?"

"Yes. He can receive all the treatment he needs on board."

"Then he must begin to receive the proper treatment at once."

"I suspect that he may be resistant to this course of action."

"Then he must be ordered to submit to treatment. As I said just a minute ago, the needs of the s.h.i.+p come first. Who is this person?"

"His name is Rob.i.+.c.haux. Maxime Tindall Rob.i.+.c.haux."

"Doctor," Max sputtered. "There must be some kind of error. I was slightly-very slightly-wounded during my last deployment and received treatment from one of your colleagues on board the Halsey. I was thoroughly examined and found to be in perfect health back in mid-November and again just a few days ago. There's absolutely nothing wrong with me."

"Really? Are you sure about that? Captain, as you may recall, I saw your reaction when a comm panel alert signal interrupted you. I recognized that response immediately and did some extensive research into your medical records, service records, and other pieces of the digital puzzle we all leave behind as we live our lives in the service. I have also watched you very carefully since then. The pattern is undeniable. If you are to sit there and tell me that there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, then you must be telling me that you are not experiencing nightmares, disturbed sleep, exaggerated startle responses, emotional volatility, pain in the extremities, an irrational need to avoid sitting with your back to any room with people in it, difficulty trusting others, and profound feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy. Do I understand that to be your contention?"

Max felt an internal lurch, followed by a sense of vertigo, as though he were riding in an elevator that suddenly dropped three stories. He could literally feel the blood draining from his face. He said softly, "I've never reported any of those symptoms, Doctor."

"But you are experiencing them nonetheless, aren't you?" Realizing that he had sounded as though he were cross-examining the captain, he adopted a more sympathetic tone. "Please, sir, I am not asking for the benefit of any report, but because as a physician I have sworn an oath to alleviate human suffering, and I have every reason to believe that you are suffering. Further, as you said yourself, the needs of the s.h.i.+p come first. In the coming days, this s.h.i.+p and this crew are going to need a commanding officer who is not coping with the additional burdens imposed by serious emotional impairment. Captain... Max, you have done me more than one kindness in these past few days. Let me do you a kindness. I know what you are experiencing. I am an extremely acute observer. I miss very little."

Max sat silently, of two minds. He had survived and functioned all these years by keeping these problems sealed off behind a heavy pressure bulkhead. But as a perceptive leader, Max knew enough about how the human mind worked to know that under the added stresses of command, that bulkhead might be starting to crack. Perhaps this brilliant physician was already starting to see the signs. This wasn't just about him any more. Max realized that his mind, his intellect, his judgment, were the most critical systems on board.

"Doctor, I will not lie to you. The things you describe are a part of my life. But I've lived with them ever since I can remember. They're a part of me. I don't know what they are or how they might be connected, and I don't know what you or anyone else can do about them."

"Captain, these things are not disconnected from one another. Together, they are all symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. I believe they stem from two events in your childhood that I know of, and perhaps other events of which I do not know."

"Absurd. You can't mean to tell me that I'm today, at age twenty-eight, having trouble sleeping and jump at sudden noises because of something that happened when I was thirteen or fourteen."

"No, I do not mean to tell you that. I do mean to tell you that you are today having trouble sleeping and are jumping at sudden noises because of events that transpired when you were eight, and when you were ten."

The emotional elevator dropped another three floors. "Oh, you mean..."

"Exactly, Captain. I have pieced it together from hints in your jacket, peculiar turns of phrase you have used in your After Action Statements, reports, orders, and memoranda, from things I have seen you do or heard you say, and from news items. It is all very subtle, but the conclusions are plain for anyone with eyes to see them.

"At age eight, you were not merely orphaned by the Gynophage. You were horrifically, searingly scarred by it." Sahin did not relish what he was about to say, but he knew that this man's defenses would shrug off anything less than a brutally vivid explanation. "If I am not mistaken, on the first day of the attack, you were at home with your mother and your sisters when the weapon struck. You, an eight-year-old boy who had never seen physical disease or severe pain in your life, helpless, unable to summon a.s.sistance over the jammed communication systems, watched as your mother died in screaming, writhing agony before your very eyes. Unless I miss my guess, she pleaded with you to help her, and all you were able to do was to stand by and watch her die. Am I right?"

"Yes." A whisper.

"Then, before you could find another adult to help you and before your father got home-was it only an hour or two later?-you watched the same thing happen to your twin sisters, infants less than a year old. You were just as helpless, equally alone. Your father came home six hours later and found you with only corpses for company. From what I can tell, he was shattered emotionally. So he sent you into s.p.a.ce a scant two weeks later. The chief medical officer of the San Jacinto noted in his log that you were dehydrated and malnourished from having hardly eaten or drunk for what he guessed to be about two weeks. Captain Lo noted that you hardly spoke a word to anyone for nearly a month after you came on board.

"Then, sixteen months later, your world came apart around you again when your new home, the cruiser San Jacinto, was boarded and your new family, its crew, killed by the Krag. All but a few of its crew of more than four hundred perished. According to the citation that Commodore Middleton wrote when he awarded you the Navy and Marine Achievement Medal, you hid in the air ducts and access crawlways and eluded them for twenty-six days, stealing food from the cargo holds and drinking from the water reclamation units.

"I suspect very strongly that you watched with your own eyes-through the vent gratings perhaps?-as the Krag tortured your s.h.i.+pmates for information or merely tortured and killed them because we all know that is what the Krag do. And they hunted you, day and night, did they not? Relentlessly. Day after day; exhausting, sleepless night after night. Is it any wonder that you continually wake in the middle of the night, screaming, drenched in sweat, dreaming of being pursued?

"Finally, by a miracle, the s.h.i.+p was retaken by Union forces, and you were found. According to what you said during your lengthy debriefing, when you heard human voices in the corridor, you sprang out of an air duct and hacked off the arms of two Krag from behind with a boarding cutla.s.s you grabbed from an arms locker when the Krag boarded the s.h.i.+p. You carry that same boarding cutla.s.s to this day. My guess is that you sleep with it near your bed, and you like to have it within reach whenever you are under stress. I ask you, sir, with every kindness, am I incorrect as to any material fact?"

Long pause. "No. You're not." He shook his head, stunned by the accuracy of the doctor's deductions. "Even if you're right, though, what can be done? I have a s.h.i.+p to command. I've no time to engage in extensive self-examination and navel gazing. I don't have endless hours to spend lying on a couch in your office, talking about my dreams and telling you what I see in ink blots."

"There is no couch in my office. Perhaps I should requisition one. But no, I do not propose any of those things you see in those overdone trid vids. After all, as you can see, I have no beard, no Viennese accent, and no cigar. We would start by just talking. We would work around your schedule-perhaps we would talk over dinner now and then, much as friends would. Let me be your confidante. I can listen to you. You have not even admitted much of what you are experiencing to yourself, much less expressed it to another human being. By speaking to me about it, you will be teaching yourself about your feelings as well. Unburden yourself to me from time to time. My guess is that you have never had a true, confidential friend. You need one. Let me fill that role."

The two men sat together in silence for several seconds.

The comm buzzed.

Max stabbed the b.u.t.ton. "Skipper."

"Captain, this is Rochefort in Crypto. You were right. The data is a cartographic file, not text. And you've got to see this."

"On my way." Max smiled. "Later, Doctor." Pause. "Ibrahim."

"It's Bram. My friends call me Bram.'"

CHAPTER 8.

23:07Z Hours, 22 January 2315 "Hey, Starry, it just happened again." Recruit s.p.a.cer First Cla.s.s Siersma made that announcement in the standard naval issue area broadcast voice-a voice seemingly possessed by all military personnel of all services going back at least to the time of Pharaoh Thutmose III, not much louder than ordinary speech and not nearly as loud as a shout, but one that is clearly audible across even the largest room even though filled with humming, buzzing, whirring equipment.

"What happened again, Peapod?" Petty Officer Third Cla.s.s Starcevik responded in the same kind of voice. "Peapod" was a reference to the hue of the SCUs and working uniforms issued to recruit s.p.a.cers, a thoroughly repulsive shade between that of bread mold and the algae that grows on the surface of cesspools. "You managed to find the enlisted head without wandering into the galley?"

"Now, Starry, you know that happened only that one time the day I was transferred on board. Anyway, most exalted petty officer, sir, this is important. I just picked up another decoherence event in one of the compression phase regulator feedback streams. It's the number four again."

All business now, Starcevik stepped quickly across the ten meters that separated his station from Siersma's. "Play it back."

Siersma instructed the console to locate and replay the performance visualization for regulator stream coherence during the time period in question. "What speed?"

"Let's have it at one one-thousandth," he responded after a judicious pause.

"You got it." Siersma entered a few commands. Within a few seconds, one of the displays on his console showed an animated graphic representing the phase, frequency, and polarization coherence of the feedback stream. Initially, it showed a tightly packed bunch of sine waves of precisely the same bland yellow color, stacked neatly one atop the other, with their peaks and valleys lining up with near perfection. Then the pattern suddenly broke down into a jumble of waveforms of different sizes, their sinuous curves out of step with one another, and the lines representing them on the display s.h.i.+ning out in an array of different colors. This chaos lasted for a few seconds of playback time, after which the wave forms settled back into their orderly march across the screen.

"Yep, that's a triple decoherence, all right. How many does that make?"

"Four in the last three hours," Siersma answered. "This is the longest. Duration of 3.7 milliseconds. And-"

"And four milliseconds is the longest the unit can handle without possibly triggering a compression phase anomaly," Starcevik finished. "Well, it sounds like the regulator buffer is starting to go. d.a.m.n thing is supposed to have a service life of fifteen hundred hours, and it's got fewer than two hundred. I guess we've got ourselves a defective unit. s.h.i.+t. We've got to swap it out, but we're not going to be dropping to sublight for hours, and we can't wait that long. If we lose the compression phase modulator while we're on the compression drive..."

Siersma nodded soberly and started to narrate in a voice copied from hundreds of educational trid vids: "In a brilliant flash of light, the c.u.mberland Gap is suddenly and beautifully transformed into the small but astronomically interesting c.u.mberland Nebula-only a few hundred kilometers across, but packed with a higher than normal concentration of aluminum and t.i.tanium from the s.h.i.+p, not to mention lots of carbon and nitrogen from you and me."

"Right. Very funny. So that means a hot swap. Rhim's the man who's had the practice performing that lovely operation. He's off checking a power conduit somewhere. I'll get him in here to take care of it."

Starcevik walked back to his three-meter-long console, slid his seat down the retaining rail past two and a half meters of compression drive controls and status displays until it was in front of the I/O terminal, and typed in a command to the computer to send s.p.a.cer Rhim a message on his percom summoning him to that compartment. He then opened a voice channel to the Master Engineering Control Center (MECC, p.r.o.nounced "meck"), notified Chief Engineer Brown of the situation, and received from him the pro forma "order" to do what he was already preparing to get done.

Just over nineteen minutes later, Rhim strolled into the compartment. "You sure took your sweet time getting here," Starcevik snapped. "I was less than a minute from calling the COB and having him send a Marine to find you and frog march your sorry a.s.s in here. It's a small s.h.i.+p. You should have been here in five minutes, tops. What the h.e.l.l too you so long?"

It took a full five seconds before Rhim answered. "Sorry, Petty Officer, I was tracing a fault along one of the conduits and was near the access for one of the main fusion reactor cooling pumps. It's a little noisy in there and I didn't hear the percom beep."

That's why it vibrates as well as beeps, dumba.s.s. But the petty officer said nothing. Starcevik was more interested in getting the buffer swapped out than he was in addressing Rhim's increasingly sluggish attention to his duties. He explained what he needed and the three men made everything ready for the hot swap.

As the junior man present, Siersma went to Spares, obtained the regulator buffer, and input its serial number so that the s.h.i.+p's computer would "know" that the part had been replaced and could factor its unique performance, ever so slightly different from the part it replaced, into its management of the s.h.i.+p. He unboxed the part and set it on top of a table/cart near the compression drive phase regulator. Starcevik and Rhim removed the main access cover from the compression drive phase regulator, after which the two men took off the smaller cover for the number four feedback stream conduit.

This action revealed a two-and-a-quarter-meter-long conduit, like a tube cut in half lengthwise. From one end to the other ran a bluish purple strand of high energy coherently modulated tachyo-gravitons. Inside the stream was a gleaming metallic rod just like the one resting on the cart-the regulator buffer. Rhim picked up the replacement unit in one hand and picked up a wrench in the other. He squinted at the numbers engraved on the tool.

"Yep, Rhim, I checked it," said Siersma. "It's a twenty-four-centimeter wrench, and the part's wrench fitting is sized at twenty-four centimeters."

Rhim nodded.

Starcevik looked at him gravely. "Now remember, Rhim, when we shut down the stream, you've got eight seconds. At the end of eight seconds, the unit will automatically restart the stream. There's nothing we can do to stop it, other than shutting down the unit and dropping the s.h.i.+p to sublight. But you've done this a dozen times before with no trouble. This time will be a cinch. So, you ready?

Again after a few seconds' delay, Rhim answered, "Affirmative. I'm ready."

"All right." He strode briskly over to his console and, remaining standing, pulled up the touch panel that controlled the feedback modulator. He looked up at Rhim over the waist high console.

"I know you're an old hat at this procedure, but I'm going to go over how we're going to do this to make sure we're all tied into the same data channel. I'm going to give you a countdown from five to zero, shutting down the stream at 'zero.' Then, I'm going to give you a count up to eight. You've got to have your hand out of there at 'eight' because those dang tach-gravs do some nasty s.h.i.+t to human tissue, all right?"

Rhim just stared at him blankly.

"Hey, Rhim, get your head back in the game. We're not playing s.p.a.cers and rat-faces here. Do you understand the procedure?"

"Uh, sure, Petty Officer. Like you said, I've done it a dozen times."

"All right," Starcevik said doubtfully. "Siersma, you get over there and stand by to help him if he needs it." Starcevik doubted that Siersma or anyone else could provide any meaningful a.s.sistance during the eight seconds that the task would take, but he felt better having the bright, young greenie there. Siersma moved over so that he was standing on Rhim's right, half a meter from where he was going to perform the swap.

"You sure you're ready?" Starcevik asked.

Rhim nodded and said, "Ready, Petty Officer."

"All right, I'm about to start the countdown." He keyed the clock he had programmed at his console to display, counting down from five and up to eight. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero. Stream is off."

Nothing. At "zero" Starcevik expected instantaneous action from Rhim. Instead, he stood there frozen. Starcevik forced his eyes back to the clock. The digit changed. "One." Finally Rhim started to move, reaching into the conduit. "Two." It looked as though Rhim was struggling to get the wrench seated on the buffer. "Three." He had it seated and was rotating it to the "remove" position, which was three quarters of a turn from the "operate" position in which Rhim had found it. "Four." Rhim removed his hands from the conduit, carrying the buffer and the wrench.

"Five." Siersma took the old buffer from Rhim and handed him the replacement part. "Six," Starcevik said with a note of urgency. Rhim reached back inside the conduit, seated the buffer and put the wrench on it. "Seven." He rotated the buffer from "remove" to "operate." When he tried to lift the wrench from the buffer, it wouldn't move. The wrench fitting on this unit was ever so slightly larger that on the other unit. Rhim pulled with all his strength. The wrench came loose and Rhim began to pull his hands out of the conduit. His left hand cleared the unit but his right was slightly behind. "Eight."

At "eight" the stream started to power up, sending a trickle of tachyo-gravitons down the conduit. Rhim's hand was caught in the edge of the stream's fifty-centimeter-wide path. The pain was excruciating and, reflexively, he dropped the wrench, staggering back from the unit just as the unit's stream containment field came up to full power. Rhim was free of the unit and apparently uninjured. The problem was that the unit was not designed to operate with a 1.37 kilogram drop forged vanadium steel wrench in the particle stream. Siersma and Starcevik realized at the same moment that the wrench was in the particle stream. While Siersma, who knew something bad was about to happen but had not yet figured out what, frantically searched his memory for everything he knew about tachyo-gravitons, the petty officer reached for his console as fast as he could to initiate an emergency shut-down of the compression drive in order to avert disaster.

Disaster was faster.

Although the tachyo-gravitons flowed freely through the carbon-carborundum composite nanofiber lined conduit, they had an affinity for ferrous metals. As a result, the wrench began to capture the particles that continued to zoom around inside the molecular recesses of the alloy from which the wrench was made, careening through the s.p.a.ces between the electron sh.e.l.ls without losing their inherent faster than light velocities. Before long, the wrench had acquired a tach-grav polarity matching that of the particles in the stream.

As with magnetic and electrical charges, the stream and the wrench repelled each other, causing the wrench to be pressed against the edge of the containment field with ever-increasing force. Unfortunately for all concerned, the forces generated by tachyo-graviton repulsion, as one might expect from the knowledge that these are the particles that allow the compression of s.p.a.ce-time to propel tens of thousands of metric tons of wars.h.i.+p through s.p.a.ce at well over a thousand times the speed of light, were extraordinarily powerful.

Siersma figured out what was going to come next and, not trusting to Rhim's glacial reflexes, simply tackled the man right above the knees, knocking him to the deck; he landed with a surprised "Ooof."

Inside the conduit, after 2.42 seconds the repulsive force overcame the containment field and the wrench shot out of the conduit like a howitzer sh.e.l.l, pa.s.sing through the s.p.a.ce occupied a split second before by Rhim's chest. Making a distinct, ear-splitting CRACK as it broke the sound barrier and ripped through the air at Mach 8.9, it created a powerful shock wave that knocked all three men in the compartment to the deck, leaving them stunned. The wrench then rocketed its way through two engineering consoles, pa.s.sed through the compartment's bulkhead like a rifle bullet through cheap plywood, transited the corridor, which thankfully was empty, and punched its way into Engineering Maintenance Equipment Storage Compartment #2. There the errant wrench, travelling with a slight down angle, pa.s.sed down the main aisle between the storage racks and struck the destroyer's outer hull near the intersection between the hull and the compartment's lower bulkhead, or floor.

As the hull was designed to withstand anything short of a direct hit from a thermonuclear warhead, there was no chance that the wrench would penetrate it, particularly since the earlier collisions had slowed the wrench to the comparatively sedate velocity of Mach 7.2, and atmospheric compression heating had begun to soften the metal. Rather, when the wrench struck the hull, its kinetic energy was instantly converted into thermal energy, much as with a meteor strike, vaporizing the wrench in an explosion with a force equal to several hand grenades, filling the room with a fog of molten steel droplets and incandescent vaporized iron. Every piece of combustible material in the compartment caught fire in less than a second.

For Ensign Bhattacharyya in CIC, taking only his second turn as Officer of the Deck, what had been an exceptionally dull watch suddenly became very exciting. Being a bit of a nonconformist, he was drinking jasmine-scented green tea from his own personal mug when the deck took a sickening lurch, sending his tea nearly to the ceiling before it rained all over the now thankfully unoccupied XO's station. Bhattacharrya reflexively spun his chair 120 degrees to the right to face the row of systems consoles.

"I have a commanded emergency compression drive shutdown," Chief Supangat announced from the Engineering console. "Source is the compression drive equipment-room primary control console. It appears to be an authorized command. No reason known at this time. I will now attempt to ascertain the reason by voice channel."

"Very well," said Bhattacharyya reflexively, knowing this to be the correct procedure and wondering what the h.e.l.l was going on.

Then, from the row of Emergency Control Stations another forty-five-degree turn of the CO's chair to the right came an announcement from Chief Moranski, manning Damage Control Station Number One, "Multiple internal bulkhead breaches, A Deck, Frame Seven, in the vicinity of the compression drive equipment room."

Then, from another station in the same row, "Fire! Explosion and fire in Engineering Maintenance Equipment Storage Compartment #2; suppression equipment now responding." Petty Officer Second Cla.s.s Murray at the Fire Control Station had never dealt with an actual fire on s.h.i.+p, and his voice had a frightened edge to it.

"Murray," said Bhattacharyya soothingly, "Forget that it's a real fire. Work it just like it's an exercise."

"Aye, sir. It appears that all of the suppression equipment in that room is functioning normally. Temperature is already dropping, and gas a.n.a.lysis shows the rate of combustion is also decreasing rapidly." The nozzles for the fire suppression gas in that compartment, as in all compartments, were s.h.i.+elded from explosion by insulated panels designed to retract three seconds after any explosion in the area so that they would survive to fight the fire.

"Sir," Supangat threw into the mix, "I am getting no answer from the compression drive equipment room, but the status log for that compartment shows that a regulator buffer swap was being performed at that exact moment."

Regulator buffer? That didn't make any sense, but with multiple bulkhead breaches and a fire, the manual was clear as to what he should do. "General Quarters, unknown internal hazard, set Condition Two throughout the s.h.i.+p, firefighting team and damage control party to A Deck, Frame Seven."

Gustavson at Alerts punched up MC1: "General Quarters, General Quarters, set Condition Two throughout the s.h.i.+p. All hands man your stations for unspecified internal hazard. Marine detachment, secure the s.h.i.+p."

As he was repeating that announcement, Max and Garcia cycled through the hatch. Max had been on the toilet and Garcia in the shower, which is why it took both of them nearly two minutes after the s.h.i.+p precipitously dropped into normal s.p.a.ce for them to make their appearance.