One Good Soldier

visually, but we have real venting in the aft section that suddenly stopped. It's in the same corridor near an exterior maintenance hatch, sir,' Joe said quickly.

'Understood, CHENG! Keep your man under cover.'

'Aye, sir!'

'Kurt! Tell me about those SIFs!' Joe shouted with urgency.

'I've got it, Joe! There is a power inverter blown out on the main control panel of the SIF-generator distribution assembly. It is, uh, hold on . . .' Kurt clacked away at his panel keys and at the same time was talking DTM with his AIC, but it didn't matter. Joe knew the answer.

'Never mind, Kurt. I know where it is.' Joe whipped his head around to look across the room at the SIF control panels. They should have been lit up like a damned Christmas tree, but instead they looked normal. Then he shook his head and glanced to his left at the DCAS panel. That damned diagnostic system was a single-point failure in the major systems. They weren't there six years ago, before the fight at the Oort. During the repair, updating, and retrofitting of the ship afterward, the damned engineers at the Luna City shipyards had seen fit to upgrade to the new, approved all-in-one Damage Control Assessment System. If you asked Joe, it was a piece of shit.

To calm himself, he let his gaze settle for just a second on the Main Prop system—the true love of his life. The power couplings between the vacuum fluctuation energy collectors and storage system and the hyperspace projector and fluctuation-field shields were intact, and the spacetime metric modification projector tube was swirling a perfect pink and purple hue. That meant that the Main Prop was in tip-top shape and humming beautifully.

It's just a sim, Joe reminded himself. Joe had seen the real thing up close, personal, and almost deadly for himself. Sims were a piece of cake. Hell, there was no violent ship motion and gravity lurches that nearly made you vomit. There were no horrendous thwangs against the hull plating from enemy missiles. No constant and never-ending fires, blowing circuit panels, fused breakers, overheating power couplings, and, best of all, no goddamned liver-toasting hard X-rays! It was just a sim. Hell, the firemen and other lower-rank sailors might as well have been playing checkers for all they could add. In a fight, they'd be working their collective asses off. At least now they were getting to stand guard and dog down the doors. Maybe there was more they could do. But Joe decided he'd just have to get back to that one.

Right, it's just a sim, Debbie agreed with him.

The sentiment brought Joe's heart rate down a good fifteen beats per minute. That enabled him to focus on winning the sim. After all, winning was what the crew of the flagship of the fleet was best at. Under all types of unbelievable, overwhelming odds, they had come out on top time and time again in war games and in battle. Joe was sure that the admiral wasn't going to let up without a fight, so he wasn't about to let up now, either.

'The problem here is, folks,' he shouted to his engineering team as he tried to keep a calm demeanor and look each of them in the eye, 'we have a blown fuse between the power to the SIFs, Aux Prop, Main Prop, Directed Energy Guns, et cetera. And that fuse is the goddamned DCAS piece of crap. We need to unhook that thing and bypass it without shutting down the major systems. I'm sure if the admiral were to out of the blue lose his DEGs just because we are monkeying around with shit down here, he would be a bit, uh, unnerved. Any suggestions?'

Joe looked around and scratched at his head for a brief instant. He was perplexed. How the hell did he bypass that damned DCAS panel without wrecking the ship?

The problem was that there was no way to get the energy from the storage units on one side of the DCAS to the power inverters across the room on the SIF panel. That was a distance between the two panels that might as well have been light-years. Besides, that damned DCAS was tied into everything. Joe was beginning to feel like he had been in this situation before. It was deja vu all over again for him.

'Joe.' Lieutenant Mira Concepcion snapped her fingers. 'Who cares about the DCAS? If we bypass each system to the appropriate control panel, the DCAS will just read that they are not working. But we're using visuals anyway, so who gives a shit?'

'All right! Good plan. Everybody, we're breaking into teams. I'll take the