HMS Prince Adrian
Madras System
April 17, 1907 PD
the com chimed.
The sound wasn’t very loud, but Brandy Bolgeo’s head popped up quickly, and an impartial observer might have described her expression as “relieved” as the attention request pulled her—oh, regretfully, of course!—out of her unending sea of paperwork.
She hit the acceptance key, then hid a frown as her caller’s face appeared.
“Lieutenant Bolgeo,” she identified herself. Regs required that, although her name and rank already appeared across the bottom of the other officer’s screen.
“Major Hendren,” her caller, equally a slave to regulations, replied, and she nodded, although she had no idea why he might be screening her. In fact, unlike Viktor Yestachenko, Clint Hendren held the rank of captain, which meant he and Brandy were equal in rank, although she was sure she was senior to him, thanks to time in grade. He was, however, properly referred to as “Major Hendren” aboard ship because a warship could have only one “Captain,” and could afford no confusion about who was intended when that title was used. Because of that, Marine captains received the “courtesy promotion” to major. It had no effect on their actual ranks, although Brandy had known a couple of Marines who hadn’t seemed to grasp that point. She didn’t really know Hendren yet—been aboard less than three days—but he seemed a pleasant enough sort.
“How can I help you, Major?” she asked.
“Well, as it happens, there’s a small problem.” Hendren smiled, but something in his tone sounded a warning, and she didn’t much care for the way he paused. Clearly he wanted to draw a response from her.
So she smiled back and simply cocked her head invitingly.
His lips seemed to thin ever so slightly.
“I’ve just come from Boat Bay Two,” he said. “Both of my pinnaces are off-line. I need them back.”
Brandy bit down—hard—on her immediate, instinctive response.
“I’m sure you do, Major,” she said instead. “I’m assuming, since you screened me, that it’s a maintenance issue. If so, I assure you my people will have you back up as quickly as possible.”
“At the moment, my people can’t do their jobs,” Hendren replied. “They won’t be able to until we get the birds back.”
“I’m aware of that.” Brandy’s expression showed just a bit too much tooth to be called a smile. “And you’ll get them back, as soon as possible.”
“I’d feel more confident of that if I hadn’t just come from the boat bay and an . . . interesting conversation I had there.” Hendren’s voice was cool, but his eyes had hardened.
“What sort of ‘conversation’?”
“One which makes me wonder just how much priority my birds actually have,” he said flatly. Brandy’s eyes flared with true anger, but he continued before she could respond. “I initially spoke to Chief Harkness about it. His response was . . . less than satisfactory, so I screened Lieutenant Tremaine to express my concerns. He seemed unimpressed. Which is why I’m contacting you directly.”
“In what way was Senior Chief Petty Officer Harkness’ response unsatisfactory?” Brandy asked coldly, and watched the Marine’s expression tighten at her pointed correction of Harkness’ rank.
“He basically told me to wait my turn.” Hendren’s voice was equally cold. “I told him that was unsatisfactory, and he said that was too bad, because there wasn’t anything he could—or, apparently, would—do about it. Since he seemed intransigent, I asked to speak to Lieutenant Tremaine. He is the boat bay officer, I believe. But when I expressed my concerns to him, he told me he had no intention of overriding Harkness. I believe the term he actually used was ‘second guessing.’”
“And did Senior Chief Petty Officer Harkness tell you what had occasioned the delay?”
“He said my people ‘broke the birds’ by overstressing the impeller nodes in our last training exercise, and that he’d had no choice but to down-check both of them until he had time to run full diagnostics. Despite the fact that both of them showed green boards when we recovered to the bay after the exercise.”
“Senior Chief Harkness is one of the most experienced small-craft flight engineers in the entire Navy,” Brandy said coldly. “He’s certainly the most experienced one aboard Prince Adrian. If he down-checked your pinnaces because he’s concerned about their nodes, I’m not at all surprised Lieutenant Tremaine declined to override him. I would have done the same.”
Hendren’s eyes narrowed.
“And would you have done that without even asking to see the evidence for his concern, Lieutenant?”
“When a petty officer with a quarter T-century’s experience tells me he’s ‘concerned,’ I tend to assume he has a reason.” A small voice in the back of Brandy’s brain told her she wasn’t pouring any water on the fire, but at the moment, she didn’t much care.
“So you wouldn’t have?”
“I would have waited for his write-up of the problem. It may surprise you, Major, but Navy personnel can actually read and write.”
Not good, Brandy, that little voice said more loudly. Your mama taught you better than this!
Which was true, she thought. Her father, on the other hand . . .
“I’m not surprised Navy personnel can read and write,” Hendren said. His voice was still cold, but lava smoked in its depths. “I may, however, have some slight reservations about what some Navy personnel will choose to write.”
“Which means what, precisely?”
“Which means, Lieutenant, that I’ve read Harkness’ jacket. The man should be in the stockade, in my considered opinion. He’s a walking discipline disaster, and he’s never made any secret of his opinion of Her Majesty’s Marines.”
“Are you implying that Senior Chief Harkness is fabricating his concern?”
Brandy’s eyes blazed, and her right hand clenched into a serviceable fist just outside her com’s field of view.
“I’m saying that this petty officer has a problem with discipline, doesn’t like Marines, and was rather vague in his explanation to me. And that his immediate superior—who, I see, has served aboard the same ship with him almost continuously for the last five T-years—didn’t even call him in for a more comprehensive explanation. So, no, I’m not implying that he’s ‘fabricating his concern’; I’m simply observing that he hasn’t given me any cause to believe he isn’t.”
“Let me explain some things to you, Major.” Brandy’s tone could have frozen helium, and the “courtesy” part of Hendren’s courtesy promotion seemed sadly absent. “First, the operations of my department are my concern, not yours. Second, I have never known Senior Chief Harkness to be less than fully professional where his shipboard duties are concerned. Third, Lieutenant Tremaine is one of the most competent young officers with whom I’ve ever had the pleasure of working, and—as you’ve just pointed out, as a matter of fact—he’s known Senior Chief Harkness far longer—and better—than you possibly could on the basis of less than one week aboard this ship. I am not prepared to entertain aspersions against either of them.”
She held his angry gaze with one just as angry, then inhaled.
“And, fourth,” she said then, her tone marginally less steely, “this ship has been on continuous operations for well over a T-year, with no opportunity for comprehensive maintenance. For your information, we’re eighteen T-months overdue for general overhaul, and one of our reactors and about a third of our gravitics were scheduled for replacement at that time. We are well past mandatory replacement times on both. My people, including Senior Chief Harkness and Lieutenant Tremaine, although the Lieutenant isn’t actually in my chain of command, are working double watches just to keep Prince Adrian’s systems online. And while you may find this difficult to believe, Major, little things like—oh, I don’t know, Fusion Two and Life Support One, let’s say—take precedence. Senior Chief Harkness is short of his assigned personnel by almost thirty percent. That means he—and I—have to prioritize his time.”
Hendren’s jaw clenched.
“I assure you that he will provide me with a full explanation of his concerns no later than end of watch,” she continued. “I will review that explanation exactly as I review all reports from my people. And if, as I do not for one instant expect, I discover that he’s allowed his . . . fractious past with the Royal Marine Corps to affect his thinking, I will deal with that. But that is my affair, not yours.”
Hendren started to open his mouth, and Brandy raised one hand, index finger extended.
“I advise you to let go of this until and unless there’s some evidence—beyond your obvious personal dislike for what you think you know about Senior Chief Harkness—that he has, in fact, allowed his own feelings to affect the performance of his duty. At this moment, there isn’t any. You are, of course, free to take your concerns up the chain to the XO or Captain McKeon, if you wish. I think it would be . . . unwise of you to do anything of the sort, particularly in the Captain’s case, unless you have substantially more evidence of misconduct than you have so far shared with me.”
The captain clamped his jaw again. Then, finally, he nodded curtly.
“You’re probably right,” he said. “And you’re certainly right that the operations of your department are your affair—and responsibility—not mine. So I’ll leave this with you.” At least for now, his tone added. “Please inform me of when I can have my pinnaces back as soon as you have that information.”
“Of course, Major.”
“Hendren, clear,” the Marine said, and her display blanked.
* * *
“That’s not exactly what I told him, Ma’am,” Horace Harkness said.
“Well, it’s obviously what he heard. So what did you say to him?”
Brandy raised her eyebrows and SCPO Harkness scratched his chin thoughtfully.
“I did tell him his birds would have to wait for their place in the queue,” he said. “He didn’t seem real happy to hear that. In fact, he told me it was ‘not acceptable.’ So I told him I was sorry if it made problems for his people, but that my people had way too much on their plates for me to make any promises about adjusting priorities without clearing it with Mr. Tremaine, at least. And probably with Lieutenant O’Brien or you. That’s when he screened Mr. Tremaine, I think.”
“So you never told him it was ‘too bad’ he wanted them back?”
“No, Ma’am.” Harkness shook his head, then grimaced. “Not too sure that wasn’t the way he took it, though. I wasn’t trying to pick any fights, but I kinda had the feeling he expected me to.”
“No, really?” Brandy widened her eyes at him. “How do you suppose he could possibly have leapt to a conclusion like that?”
“Ma’am, for whatever it’s worth, you know I’ve never taken shortcuts or rearranged schedules just to spite the jarheads. May have been tempted a time or two, but I’d never do that. If nothing else, it’d give them too big a club to beat me with.” Something that was almost but not quite a smile flickered in his eyes. “Besides, I don’t pick fights with officers. Not even Marine officers.”
And that, Brandy reflected, was true. In fact, Horace Harkness never actually picked fights at all. Instead, he’d perfected what her father called the art of “interpersonal judo” designed to suck even veteran Marines into taking the first swing, and he’d used it well over the course of his career. After the last twenty-odd T-years, his role as the innocent victim of Marine combativeness might have worn a tad thin, but even granting that, he’d never, so far as Brandy knew, lipped off to a Marine officer or even offered one of them what the Service still called “silent insubordination.”
“It would appear Major Hendren is unaware of your sterling self-restraint in that regard,” she said.
“Yes, Ma’am. I sorta noticed.” Harkness grimaced again. “I really tried to avoid stepping on his toes, but I think he takes his people’s readiness states seriously. I don’t blame him for that, and he’s right, Ma’am. Till we get these birds back up, they can’t do their jobs, either. Gunny Babcock and I have already had that discussion.”
Brandy snorted. She had no doubt at all that Babcock had “discussed” the state of the Marines’ pinnaces with Harkness.
Loudly.
“All right, let’s leave that for the moment,” she said now. “He told me both pinnaces show green boards.”
“Far as the birds’ flight engineers’ boards go, they do.” Harkness nodded. “But I’m looking at the boat bay diagnostics and service flags, and they’re edging into amber on four of Marine One’s nodes and two on Marine Two.”
“Only ‘edging,’ though?” Brandy asked thoughtfully.
The flight engineer’s station aboard the pinnaces monitored current hardware states and functionality. Each time the pinnace recovered to the boat bay, however, Prince Adrian’s computers used the umbilical connections to generate a significantly more sophisticated analysis than its onboard systems allowed. Those same monitoring shipboard computers maintained a detailed, continuously updated history of every system aboard the pinnace, plotting trendlines over time and checking all of them against the “Book”-specified parameters for mandatory service.
Of course, the Book parameters incorporated a hefty safety margin. A point, she suspected, of which Major Hendren was aware.
“Yes, Ma’am. Edging. Right this minute, the computer’s showing us a range between ten and forty-three percent into the Book’s Service Immediately margin on the nodes I’m worried about. And, yes, the Major asked the same question. Wanted to know why I was pulling the birds off flight status when they hadn’t actually reached the mandatory service point.”
“And you told him—?”
“I told him we’re taking maintenance histories and warning lights real seriously right now, on account of how overdue at the yard we are. For that matter, I told him we’re having issues with spares. Ma’am, I’m showing warnings on six of his nodes, and we’re down to eleven certified replacement nodes. That’s it, for all our birds, not just the pinnaces, and we don’t know when—or if—we’re getting more of ’em. Some things we can print ourselves; all-up node modules, we can’t.” He shrugged. “To be honest, I think the Major’s probably right that the ones I’m worried about wouldn’t blow tomorrow, and none of them look like they’d produce the kind of catastrophic failure that could take down one of the birds completely. But if one of ’em does blow, you know we’ll have at least some collateral damage, plus we’re gonna have to write that node completely off and slap in one of our eleven replacements.”
“So what you really want to do is a teardown inspection and service-as-needed? Not a complete replacement?”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Harkness looked a bit surprised. “Why would we do a replacement before we even looked?”
“The Major said you told him his people ‘broke the birds.’ That suggests something a little more serious than ‘edging into amber’ on the diagnostics.”
“Ma’am, what I said was the flight crew might’ve broken the birds. I specifically said ‘might’ve,’ and I never said the jarheads had broken anything.”
Brandy frowned. Prince Adrian’s naval personnel provided the pilots and flight crew for all of her small craft. That included the pinnaces, although the Marines regarded those pinnaces as their personal property. Not without reason, from an operational viewpoint. What the pinnaces actually did, how they operated and—specifically—how hard they maneuvered while they did it, was determined by the Marines, and Marines had a reputation for being hard on their toys because of their aggressive training. As a consequence, there was a certain traditional tension between the Marines and their Navy “chauffeurs.” Had Hendren thought Harkness was trying to blame the maintenance down-check on systems abuse resulting from the Marines’—which, since he was the senior Marine, would mean his—unreasonable demands on the Navy flight crews?
“What’s the bottom line here on downtime?” she asked.
“My people still have two node replacements on the Number Three shuttle, and we’ve got that inertial compensator problem on the Number Two bird.”
“I know.” Brandy grimaced.
As Harkness had just pointed out, the spare parts issue had forced Prince Adrian’s engineering staff to begin rebuilding and refurbishing components that would normally have been returned to depot for repair or reclamation (whichever seemed the simplest) and replaced with depot-certified components from her onboard stores. That tied up not only personnel and workspace, but also printer capacity in the cruiser’s machine shops, which further slowed both repairs and replacements. And, as Harkness had also just pointed out, Brandy’s department was responsible for keeping all of Prince Adrian’s small craft up and running, not just the pinnaces, and with Shuttle Two and Three down, the cruiser had only a single shuttle currently available.
“We can probably put the Three bird back online by the end of the next watch,” he said. “Two’ll take longer. Problem’s not all that bad, but we can’t just fix it in place. We’ll have to open her up to get at the compensator, and we don’t have the working space to do that until we get Three out of the way.”
“And if we pull people off either of those to concentrate on the pinnaces, both shuttles stay down longer than that.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“Much as I hate it, I think we’ll have to do that, anyway. Or some of it, at least.” Brandy didn’t much like that thought. Especially if Hendren was going to take it as some sort of capitulation on her part. But they really did need at least one of the pinnaces back as soon as they could get it.
“Some of it, Ma’am?” From his expression, Harkness wasn’t especially eager to hear what he suspected was coming.
“I agree we can’t take avoidable chances on losing any more nodes than we have to, but the Major’s right that his people need their birds back. So, what we’ll have to do, I think, is put Marine Two back on limited flight status. They can have her in the event of an emergency, but we’ll restrict her power levels to minimize stress on those iffy nodes. Then we’ll prioritize getting Shuttle Three back up, but move the inspection of Marine One up in the queue, before the compensator teardown on Shuttle Two. As soon as we can clear Marine One’s return to full flight status, we pull Two off and keep her there until we’ve had time to get Shuttle Two back up.”
“We can do that, Ma’am. Switching teams back and forth is gonna slow us down, though.”
“I know. It’ll take longer for each bird, but not a lot, and this way the Marines at least get half their capability back. I doubt Major Hendren—or the Captain, for that matter—will be happy about having only half their pinnaces available, but the best we can do is the best we can do. I’ll screen Lieutenant O’Brien and Lieutenant Tremaine to make it official, but you can go ahead and give your people a heads-up now.”