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Being a qualified officer on the submarine meant being able to identify every one of those tubes on sight: what it contained, where it ran, the implications of a breech. To learn it all was daunting, as the pipes ran everywhere, layered on top of each other in every direction, but the patrols were long, diversions were few, and the men had all been screened carefully for their intelligence and their ability to work tirelessly in pursuit of engineering knowledge. Ensign Brendan Duggan was on his first patrol, in the first stage of the process, tracing the pipes and ducts of a few isolated systems at a time, learning how they tied together to make some part of the boat function. By his third patrol, he’d know every pipe of every system, and be able to hand draw most of the systems with every valve in place. Danny Jabo, on his sixth patrol, was in the final stage of the learning process. Having learned the physical composition of every system, he was tasked with learning the philosophy of its design, why it was a certain capacity, why one material had been chosen over another to construct it, the trade offs that the engineers had made in designing it, between safety, efficiency, and silence.

As part of this process, Jabo was walking Ensign Brendan Duggan through the boat, pointing out valves and ducts, attempting to help him qualify Battery Charging Line Up officer. Jabo knew almost nothing about Duggan. He was an academy guy, Jabo remembered, from somewhere in the south. He’d heard that he knew something about bluegrass music, and a rumor that he’d brought to sea a dulcimer, or a mandolin, or something like that. Thank God he’d had the sense to keep the thing stowed thus far: a nub officer couldn’t be seen doing something as frivolous as playing music.

Battery Charging Lineup Officer was traditionally the first thing a new officer qualified on board, usually in his first week at sea. The BCLU verified that the ship’s ventilation system was operating normally prior to a battery charge, as charging the battery released a number of undesirable elements into the ship’s atmosphere: hydrogen being the most dangerous. It was an unavoidable byproduct of the process that crammed electricity into the battery’s wet, acid-filled cells. Prior to the charge an enlisted man went through the ship and set everything up, but such was the importance that an officer was required to physically verify the position of every valve and every switch. To learn the battery charging lineup was good for a new officer because it took him through every area of the ship. An officer who knew what he was doing could complete it in under thirty minutes. Like so many things a new officer on a submarine did, it was at once tedious and highly important.

Duggan’s qualification was important to Jabo because it would put him one step closer to the watchbill, which might, at some point, result in an extra six hours of sleep for him. Which was why Jabo was willing to take an hour out of his sleep prior to taking the watch to walk through the ship with him, in an attempt to get Duggan to the point where he could withstand an oral examination by the engineer and get qualified, a small step toward becoming useful.

“What’s this?” Jabo asked, pointing to a large, humming machine in Auxiliary Machinery Room 2.

“A scrubber,” said Duggan confidently. “At least one of them has to be running during a battery charge.”

“Correct,” said Jabo. “What does it do?”

“Removes carbon dioxide,” said Duggan.

“What creates carbon dioxide?”

“I do,” said Duggan. “We all do. It’s a product of respiration.”

“Right,” said Jabo. Which is why non-qualified personnel on the boat like Duggan were sometimes called “scrubber loads.” Along with non-qual, nub, dink (short for “delinquent”), and host of other insults. “So how does it remove CO₂?”

Duggan hesitated just a moment, recalling a scrap of information from his memory. “It heats up a catalyst…”

“What catalyst?”

“MEA. It heats up the MEA…”

“How hot?”

Duggan stopped. “I don’t know.”

“Look that up,” Jabo said. Duggan was frustrated, he could tell, thinking this was more information than he needed to know to perform the battery charging line up successfully. “You’re going to need to learn it sooner or later,” said Jabo. “You might as well learn it now. And it’s important — this is actually one of the hottest pieces of machinery on the boat. You should know how hot. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Duggan, writing down the “look up” in his little green notebook.

“And what’s this?” said Jabo, continuing the tour, laying his hand on a machine on the other side of the space.

“A burner. Removes hydrogen.”

“And?”

Duggan hesitated a moment. “It removes something else?”

Jabo laughed. “Now, that’s something you really should know. Carbon Monoxide.”

“Okay,” said Duggan. Jabo noticed that he had brought the battery charging checklist along with him. “Let’s go through the whole thing, see if you can actually do the line up. Ready?”