Terminal Run

After a few minutes of explanations about that, Patton continued. “Project Tigershark is tougher. We’ve been trying to put a carbon processor into the body of a torpedo, but the damned things keep attacking the firing ship. And carbon computers don’t accept interlocks or hardwiring or programmed instructions. The torpedo is a killer, but unless we can guarantee the safety of the firing ship, it’s no good to us.”

Pacino agreed to accept responsibility for the Tigershark program as well. He spent the evening going over the plans for the SSNX submarine rebuild and getting detailed briefings on both projects, until his mind whirled with the new knowledge. Hours later, long after midnight, he stood on the concrete deck of graving dock two of Newport News Naval Shipyard and stared up at the floodlit hull of the submarine looming high overhead. The ship was so beautiful that it filled him with a sudden sadness that he would never go to sea again, but as he looked at it he felt inspired to give the crew of this ship a combat system that would allow them to complete their missions and come home alive.

The ship above him had been the most powerful submerged combatant designed when it had been blown in half by the plasma-tipped torpedoes of a Ukrainian sub lying in ambush. Most of the crew had been killed by the attack. The salvage vessels had gathered at the ship’s gravesite and hauled her wreckage back to the shipyard. There was little left of her that could be reused except her hull, but since fabricating a submarine hull was so expensive and time-consuming, Newport News and DynaCorp’s Electric Boat Division had begun construction on an entirely new submarine using the hull brought back from the dead. Even the deckplates had to be scrapped, the hull repaired and rewelded, the damaged midsection sliced away and a new module barged in from Groton to replace it.

Her mechanical internals — the main motor, main engines, service turbines, steam generators, and reactor — were removed through the gaps in the hull, and new mechanicals were barged in, stolen from the assembly line at Groton, where the new Virginia-class subs were constructed. New deckplates were installed in the forward spaces, the new combat consoles were shipped in — also taken from Groton — and the interior was rewired and re piped The new sail was welded in place, the new masts modularized. In twelve months, what had started as a rusting misshapen wreck had been transformed into a naval vessel ready for her launching ceremony.

In another month the ship would have been fitted out and ready to be turned over to the fleet, but the CNO’s orders to make the ship outrun enemy torpedoes had stopped all progress. The SSNX would lie here, helpless on the drydock blocks, until Pacino figured out some way to make the vessel torpedo-proof.

The weapons for the ship were as stalled as the sub itself. Project Tigershark had a dozen fatal flaws. The test launches had all been disasters. Most of the lethal Tigersharks had decided to home in on the firing ship rather than the enemy, except for the two Tigersharks that had managed to go for the target drone. Short of making the torpedo a launch-from aircraft-only weapon, the program was a dead loss. There just seemed no way to educate the carbon processors that the valid submarine target astern of them was their mother ship, since unlike their silicon cousins, they could not be programmed with safety interlocks. So far no one had been able to replicate the success of the Snare’s carbon processor in the Tigershark torpedo. It had to be based on space constraints, Pacino thought. The Snare’s brain took up the better part of the forward compartment’s deck, while on Tigershark there was at best one cubic foot of space for the unit’s brain.