One Good Soldier

you shouldn't have joined the Navy!' Joe scanned the three-dimensional diagram of the ship, looking at all the systems at once in detail all the way down to the nuts and bolts, transistors and integrated circuits, and quantum-fluctuation exciters and spacetime limiters. His problem right now was the universal one, one that caused almost all systems to end up failing: thermal management. Waste heat was the hardest goddamned problem in all of physics and engineering to deal with. And now that one SIF generator was down, he was having to spread the structural integrity fields thin from the others to cover that section of the supercarrier. That meant that other SIF generators were now working even harder. It was an avalanche of disaster that only needed one or two more snowflakes to trigger it.

I should've taken up business or marketing, he thought.

Yeah, but then you'd be rich and would miss out on all this, his AIC, Debbie, replied in his mindvoice.

'Too bad we can't just jaunt over the ice cap of this planet and cool the thing off,' Andy said sarcastically.

'I don't think that would work, Andy,' the technology officer shouted over his shoulder. He had a flashlight between his teeth, power cabling draped across both shoulders, and a multitool in each hand, working away at an overloaded control circuit for the QMT power supply. The specialist warrant officers were the experts on the quantum-membrane teleportation technology, but those guys still needed good old-fashioned power, and all that came from Engineering. And, from what Joe could tell, the QMT had been working overtime since the battle started. That meant there were heavy casualties and/or a lot of troop movement.

'Why not, Lieutenant?'

'Well, you'd have to get the cold air in contact with the hot coolant somehow. Not sure how you'd do that. Oh shit!' A spark flew across the panel he had pulled out, discharging several thousand volts across his fingers. 'That fucking hurt,' he said, dropping the multitools and shaking his hands.

'Watch yourself, Lieutenant. Do I need to get Andy over there to show you how to handle high voltage?' Joe laughed. Then, as he panned the three-D image by the flow loops between the aft SIF generator heat exchangers and the main coolant reservoir one deck below Engineering, it hit him. 'Son of bitch, Andy! That just might work.'

'What will, Joe?'

'Cold air.' Joe continued moving the mindview diagrams around rapidly, looking for the one that would work. Then he found it. 'There it is! The main coolant lines of damned near everything flow through the exterior bulkheads that aren't pressurized. Any cooling along the flow lines is purely radiative. Hmm . . .'

Debbie, what if we pumped pressurized helium or air or something in there? he thought.

Well, the only thing we could do in a hurry is air, Joe.

Okay, let's do it. What about some water mist?

Yeah, we could do that.

Hell, we are about to jaunt into atmosphere. Let's just open up some panels and let it flow through.

That would work. With the flow speed, it would supercool the air as it was forced down the tube. My calculations show it would increase the cooling efficiency by ten percent.

That might be enough.

'CO! CHENG!'

'Go, CHENG!'

'Sir, we need to get into atmosphere. It might allow us to cool off the SIFs quicker. The sooner, the better.'

'We're headed to treetop high in about seventy seconds.'

'Great, sir.

'All right, we're hitting the air in about a minute. I want hatches opened to the bulkheads, uh . . .' Joe stepped toward a holoscreen and had his AIC display the image that was in his mind. 'Okay, that's it. Here, here, here, and here. We open these hatches and route airflow through the exterior hull walls. We need to figure out how to pull the structural integrity fields in one layer hull or just turn them on and off rapidly enough to get some airflow in there. Any ideas on that?

'Shit, at the rate we're going, the SIFs are gonna shut down anyway,' Mira complained.

'Probably, but let's hope not! Shit, there has to be a way to get the air in the exterior dry hull without compromising our security.' Joe was perplexed and running out of time. 'We'll figure it out. Get those hatches open. Andy, be careful. You'll be outside the SIFs