“I vaguely understand it,” she conceded. “Anything come up while I was gone?”
The XO wouldn’t have taken time out of his day to meet the tactical officer without a reason.
“Yes,” he conceded. “Real tsuris.”
She glared at him. Nobody else on the ship spoke Yiddish that she was aware of. Roslyn could fumble her way through Mandarin Chinese if she had to, but she only really spoke English.
“We had a problem with the missile launcher software,” he said more grimly. “They had to completely wipe and reboot everything, and now you have a brand-new tactical operations system.”
Roslyn winced. That was…not great. It wouldn’t be the end of the world—at this point, she and her people spoke fluent warship, and there were only so many ways to set up a TOS, but switching without planning for it was a pain.
“Thanks for the heads-up,” she told him. “I presume MarShips sent us training documents for the new mess?”
“We are the seventh lucky prototypers for version seventy-eight,” Kristofferson told her. “That means the documentation is fragmentary at best and part of your job will be to build the software techs’ tutorials into something the Navy can use.”
“I see,” Roslyn said. “It sounds like I need to get back to work ASAP.”
The Martian Department of Ship Design was usually better than that, but she guessed someone had to write the tutorials MarShips usually sent out with software updates.
“Sorry, I know it’s always better to ease back into things after two weeks’ leave,” Kristofferson told her. “But they sold Captain Daalman on it being the fastest way to get our missile launchers back and, well, the skipper wasn’t impressed with losing our main offensive firepower.”
“I get it,” Roslyn said. If Mage-Captain Laura Daalman had signed off on the changeover, she didn’t even get to complain much. Unlike prior generations of Royal Martian Navy warships, Song of the Huntress might have a Link quantum-entanglement communicator…but her Captain was still very much her master after God.
“Lieutenant Jordan will be back tomorrow,” the XO noted. “Lieutenant Samuels should have been back this morning, but she was in a groundcar accident on the way to the spaceport.”
“Is she okay?” Roslyn asked. “Why am I only hearing now?”
Mage-Lieutenants Semele Jordan and Kirtida Samuels were her two subordinate officers. Both did double duty as Jump Mages and had the same mixed ethnicity as Roslyn and Kristofferson.
“You were already on the shuttle when we got the update,” Kristofferson told her. “This was the first opportunity I had to tell you. She got hit with some bad whiplash and is undergoing soft-tissue treatment in Curiosity City. She should be back aboard in three days.”
Roslyn sighed and nodded her thanks. She’d check in on Samuels anyway. While the XO had overall responsibility for everyone aboard the ship, Roslyn was responsible for her tactical department.
“Your Chiefs have already had a first crack at the software, so while I refuse to micromanage, I will tell you to check in with them,” he concluded. “If you need anything—help, access to the MarShips techs who coded the damn thing, anything—let me know.
“Last rumor I heard had us shipping in five days at most,” Kristofferson warned. “We want to make damn sure the tactical team is at least able to fire the guns by then.”
“Unless MarShips has done something spectacular, I’m confident my people can fire the guns right now,” Roslyn replied. “But we’ll be better, given time. Five days will be plenty.”
Her own briefing from the Queen and Prince-Regent suggested they might not even have five days—but Roslyn hoped she was going to have the three to get her junior officer back!
3
“MarShips has done worse by us,” Chief Slavka Westcott noted as she and Roslyn looked over the new operating system. Roslyn had a practice copy of the software projected to her office wallscreen, to make sure they didn’t accidentally fire off gigaton missiles in Mars orbit.
Roslyn was the destroyer’s first tactical officer, a keel-plate owner like most of the rest of Huntress’s current crew. In thirteen months, she’d done as much to personalize the space as she felt she could. There were framed photos on the wall of her parents, flanked by several pieces of abstract three-dimensional art.
Someday, Roslyn would have time to learn how to make that art herself. For now, she just bought pieces made by two of the girls she’d gone to prison with.
The tactical operating system main display at least made more sense on first glance than the abstract art. There were rows of icons for the destroyer’s three main weapon systems: Phoenix IX antimatter-drive missiles, ten-gigawatt battle lasers, and five hundred-megawatt RFLAM turrets.
Roslyn could even see how the display would adjust for larger warships that carried the Samurai bombardment missiles. There was more on the main screen than on the prior version of the software, where she’d had to drill down to see details on the individual weapons systems.
Of course, limiting the people handling a particular system to seeing what they were responsible for had been an intended feature.
“It seems reasonable on the surface,” Roslyn said, poking an icon to drop down into the rear-facing missile battery. Four of Huntress’s launchers surrounded her engines, giving her a shot at a pursuer. The other sixteen of her missile launchers, plus all twelve battle lasers, pointed forward.
The software gave her ammunition counts and status reports, but it took her more than a few seconds to find the targeting systems.
“Okay, I see where I give targeting commands.” She shook her head. “This isn’t bad, but why did they change it?”
“Because they’re software geeks, sir,” Westcott said with a chuckle. She was a pale-skinned blonde, older and lighter-skinned than her boss. “If it isn’t broken, you haven’t optimized it enough yet.”
Roslyn snorted.
“All right. Is this going to be a problem for anyone?”
“We’ll walk people through it. The tutorials…exist,” Westcott said. “There’s only really you and maybe the XO and skipper who need to know the
