One Day on Mars

work.

'Well, uh—' Fireman's Apprentice King started, but was cut off quickly by Buckley.

'Shit, Jimmy, I don't wan't you to answer me,' Buckley explained to the kid, not certain how he'd ever got accepted for supercarrier duty.

'Sorry, HT3.'

'That was a rhetorical question. You've got to learn this drill or it could get this entire deck killed. That SIF . . . ' He paused because Jimmy obviously didn't know what the SIF was. 'The structural integrity field reinforces the bladder for the catapult field generator coolant tanks. The bladder can handle most tough jerks. But if we pop out of hyperspace into a shit storm we could be in for it if those SIFs ain't at the fuckin' max. The inertial dampening system for the entire boat takes a few seconds to kick in between hyperspace mode to normal space mode.'

'Not sure what that means, HT3?' the fireman's apprentice said more in the way of a question.

'What it means, Jimmy, is that for the first few seconds we appear into normal space that bladder will get all the force of every move and bounce the Madira makes. And it was not designed to take any sort of pounding. The SIF protects it during the short transition period from hyperspace to normal space. Got it?' Buckley was pretty sure the kid didn't get it.

'Okay HT3, SIF at max when going to hyperspace. Got it.' The young tech wannabe grinned at Buckley.

'Apprentice, I don't think you do get it. That is liquid metal in that bladder, you know how hot metal has to be until it becomes a liquid?' Buckley had to admit to himself that he didn't either, but at least he knew it was pretty goddamned hot. Too hot to let loose in the deck is what Buckley did know. It was hot enough to eat through the deck plating, which was way stronger than flesh and bone. That, Buckley did know.

'Sorry, HT3. Had no training on liquid metal,' the fireman's apprentice answered.

'Well, the shit will burn you alive instantly and destroy this deck and the one below it. Now do you get it!'

'Uh.' The look on Fireman's Apprentice King's face suggested to Buckley that he did finally get it or at least that this was some dangerous shit and that it had better be handled properly. 'What do I need to do, HT3?' he said eager and a little frightened.

'It's okay, Jimmy. I already took care of it. But you know about it now.' Buckley smiled at the apprentice approvingly. 'We are about to get fuckin' hammered so why don't you strap in and start running the system flush diagnostics. We keep them running continuously during the conflict. You see anything that looks too cold, too hot, flowing too fast or too slow or not moving at all, or just out of place, you let me know.'

Everything looks right, right, Mija?

Looks spot on, Joe. Uncle Timmy's countdown for the hyperdrive system shows about two minutes.

All right. Good girl. You keep me posted on anything. Joe shifted his weight around in his seat. There were several flatscreens in front of him and multiple layers of information coming at him DTM. The direct-to-mind interface was just the only way the brain could handle that much data so quickly. Multitasking the DTM with multiple flatscreens took all of Joe's mental capabilities and took the added intelligence of the AIC to help maintain control of all the tasks in the fluids and structures control deck of the supercarrier.

Of course.

'What, do you mean we have to divert the coolant throughout the ship ourselves? During combat?' Fireman's Apprentice King was a very raw apprentice. Buckley wondered if he had ever been so raw himself.

'No,' Buckley laughed. 'The AIs do most of that. We just have to help them keep an eye on things. Sometimes, we humans see things the AICs don't. The AIs would catch the SIFs not being turned up also, unless there were some other software protocol overriding it. You see, that is the thing with AIs. They are still software and their code gets conflicting rules sometimes. Only the older more wise ones or the really really smart ones are good at dealing with those types of conflicts,' Buckley said knowingly. Hell, he had seen firsthand what happens when an AI didn't toggle some safety protocols because of conflicting code.

He remembered his roommate from tech school that used to have his original two arms and legs, but no longer did because of some damned seaman not double-checking the low-level AIs. Buckley hated to admit it, but hey, the truth was what it was and that truth was that he was an enlisted tech because he was not command and fighter- pilot smart and didn't have the willpower to stay in school long enough to get into OCS. The parallels between the human troops and the AICs were one-to-one. The smarter AIs got the cool jobs like the one Uncle Timmy had or those that were fighter pilot AICs. The dumber ones, well, they worked in the bowels of the ships. Buckley had long accepted the fact that he was the biological analogue of the shit detail AIC. But even those were pretty damned smart, most of the time. And at least his shit detail was on the flagship of the most powerful fleet in the history of mankind.

'HT3. Refuse-and-reclamation systems show purged and clear for lockdown. Hope nobody has to take a shit.'

'Well, if they do, Jimmy, I think they'll be to busy getting shot at to worry about it.'

'COB, any hiccups from the Army or the Marines?'

'They're good to go, sir,' the chief of the boat Command Master Chief Doug Kurts replied, and sipped at his coffee. 'Reminds me of that one time over the Belt when there wasn't any problems with them. You remember how that went, sir.'

'Just make sure they're good, Command Master Chief.'

'Aye sir. Good to go.'

'Navigator, are hyperspace coordinates integrated through the fleet and ready for go?' Captain Jefferson sat in the command chair in the back of the bridge and buckled his safety restraints. Uncle Timmy DTMed the fleet status into his mind. He could see the full Martian contingent of the U.S. Navy in three-dimensional formation behind the Madira ready to roar through a brief thirty second leap of hyperspace into action.

'Aye, sir, Navigator Penny Swain replied without looking up from her screens. She had the same DTM show as the CO did but with vectors, trajectory optimization calculations, and multidimensional plots of each vessel in the fleet overlaid over it. The trajectories were continuously realigning themselves. 'We are go.'