Piranha: Firing Point

Now look at the great circle route between Pearl Harbor and Shanghai, or Tsingtao or Hong Kong. They all pass through the Ryukyu Island chain about here, give or take a few miles. For the Red forces, they don’t need to know exactly where we’re going, they just need to know when we’ll get there.

“Admiral Pacino has suggested a way to stop the information flow. You’re a politician, you’ve proved yourself to him, and he’s volunteered to take this off your shoulders. He did a great job in Japan. Trust him now.

He’ll do this right, ma’am, if you’ll just let him.”

For a long time Warner didn’t look at him, just kept her back to him. Finally she spoke, and when she did, her voice trembled.

“Admiral? You’re fired. Get out of my conference room.”

Colleen O’Shaughnessy walked into his office as if she owned it.

It was just after five in the morning, and the sun had yet to rise above the shimmering water of the East Loch.

She wore jeans and a simple white blouse under a black blazer, her shoes fashionable black combat-style boots.

Around her throat was a thin gold chain. Her jet black, gleaming hair fell just below her shoulders, her bangs cut just at eyebrow level, bringing out her eyes, which were the biggest Pacino could ever remember seeing.

She sat opposite him with her back to the video screen. On her right sat Emmitt Stephens, the man responsible for the construction of the SSNX. He found Stephens looking at him oddly, then realized Stephens had asked him a question and he hadn’t heard it because he was still staring at Colleen.

“What?” “I said the news is good and bad. Good news first.”

Stephens went through the notes he’d written on his Writepad computer. “SSNX hull and mechanical systems are ready for sea trials. The reactor is certified, all tests complete with the exception of initial criticality and pierside steaming. All weapons are loaded, but what you wanted with war-shot torpedoes and Vortex Mod Charlies, well, I don’t want to know. Now for the bad news.

I’ll leave that to Colleen. If you’ll excuse me. Admiral, I’ve got a lot to do.”

“Listen, Emmitt, I want you to do something. Start the reactor and bring it to the power range, then bring steam into the engine room and put the electric plant in a normal full-power lineup.”

“Sir, Admiral, are you… sir, you can’t just do that.

This isn’t an operational ship. The initial criticality is monitored by the Naval Reactors people. And it’ll take weeks to get a new reactor even close to the power range. It’s not safe.”

“Emmittt. Reactor. Critical. Now.”

Pacino and Stephens had worked together for years, and the engineering duty officer had never been comfortable with Pacino’s insistent pushing. He had gotten Seawolf out of the dock in four days when the work should have taken three weeks, then done it again for the Seawolf-class ship Piranha when it had had the Mod Bravo Vortex missiles attached. When Pacino wanted a ship, Stephens had always jumped, but it was unheard of to treat initial criticality like a normal startup. The reactor could come screaming out of the nonvisible range with enough reactivity that they wouldn’t be able to control it. A Russian submarine in Vladivostok shipyard had suffered such an incident on a restart after a core replacement, and if not for the Russian-designed double hull, the entire city of Vladivostok would have had to be evacuated.

Pacino looked imploringly into Stephens’ eyes, his hands out in an unconscious imitation of Admiral O’Shaughnessy. “Emmiitt, you’re the only one who can do this. The SSNX is your baby, you built it with your own two hands. Don’t let it be a white elephant, useless in its moment of need. There are about a billion men, women, and children in White China counting on you right now. If we delay a single minute, that’s another minute that the Reds hold the East China Sea. Can you do this, can you get it going?”

Emmitt Stephens stood, knowing that Pacino was pulling his old trick, giving him a pep talk that could fire him up, make him work around the clock, coax from him the impossible, and he smiled suddenly, knowing that once again it had worked.

“Aye, sir. I’ll do my best.”

“Good man. See you pierside.”

Pacino waved at him, then turned to Colleen O’Shaughnessy.

She looked back at him, and he found himself somehow drawn to her. She started talking about the Cyclops battlecontrol system and how it was still nonfunctional.

“… failure modes have revealed almost nothing, and the decision was made early this morning to scrap the Dynacorp code and return to an earlier version before the acquisition and restart all code entries at that point.”

“Okay, I admit it, I’m lost. What’s all that mean?”

“Well, Admiral Pacino, it means your onboard computer has just had a lobotomy and has the brain of a newborn.”

“So what now?”

“So now I recede it, writing it so it’ll work.”

“Just you?”

“That’s right. Just me.” Her voice was deep, throaty, yet refined and certain, the voice of a woman unused to being questioned.

“How long?”