Chapter 2

Susan and I had a light breakfast in our room before I headed out to Commander Wilcox’s office for our 0845 meeting. This time I was directed to a small conference room and stood to attention when the Commander entered carrying several folders in addition to his data pad. He set them down and reached over to shake my hand.

“At ease and good morning Lieutenant. How have you been doing?”

“Sir, I’m excited and terrified at the same time. I’ve got to be crazy to think this is a good idea and that this ship makes sense at all, but all I can think about is how it can work and what we can do for the war effort. If we crack this nut, the Swarm is going to be in a world of hurt.”

“Precisely. We’re delivering a capability to the effort nobody thought we were missing, and if it pays off that payoff may make a real difference. Heck, the AIs had never even heard about people doing this before, but the US Navy and Air Force were doing ELINT and EW during the Second World War. That’s why it was so hard to make this happen, as we’re actually trying to implement a rather old idea to new technology amongst a culture that hasn’t even heard of electronic warfare before. Yeah, let’s get some real American, or should I say Earth innovation and ingenuity into this conflict, and then we’ll see just how long it takes us to kick some ass!”

Commander Wilcox’s grin was infectious enough for me to mirror it at least as well as he showed it.

“So let’s get down to it. I have the prospective crew members for you to review, and then I want to go over your impressions of what you’ve learned so far.”

Wilcox tossed over the first folder. “This is Ensign Todd Williams, formerly serving on a US Navy attack submarine, and is provisionally slotted as your XO. Like you, he’s an amateur radio operator, general class, and with an engineering degree from Northwestern. In his spare time he writes books about ancient naval history. He was being passed over for promotion because of a disagreement with his commanding officer who seems to have been concerned that his paperwork wasn’t ever on time, and that he had a bit of a drinking problem. We grabbed him at Pearl during a pickup where we found him nearly unconscious drunk and being carried out of a bar by a couple of his men.”

Another folder was tossed. “Jeff Hendricks, he was lead engineer for the R&D team at Motorola until about six months ago. PhD from Stanford, undergrad at MIT, all completed before he was 22. Likes to create abstract art using computer code, and another one of your amateur radio guys, this time extra class. He’s slotted to be the Ensign running your sensors. Was let go from Motorola because they couldn’t keep him focused on developing what they thought would sell, instead of what he thought would be - as he says - ‘wicked cool’. We grabbed him in a coffee house in Chicago while he was establishing something called a mining botnet for some new cryptocurrency. Lucky for him money isn’t going to be a concerned for him anymore.”

Wilcox pulled out another folder and handed it over. “Chris Chandler is a mechanical engineering professor from Ohio State, an extra class radio guy, and a ranked chess grand master. He likes to make medieval swords in the backyard blacksmith shop he’s made. He got in hot water with the administration for not giving preferential grades to some students based on their ethnic and cultural backgrounds and we did a targeted extraction on him as he was on his way to a disciplinary hearing. I guess we saved everybody some time there. He’s slotted as the engineer aboard.”

“The rest here are your enlisted signal technicians. One was a submarine sonar operator, another is a music producer specializing in post-production, one is a computer programmer who worked on audio systems for a software company, and another is a guy who got thrown in jail for hacking public safety radio encryption systems in Los Angeles so folks could listen to the police radios that no one supposedly were able to listen to. The final one is an Army military intelligence NCO whose new idea ended up killing half the the power grid in Seoul for three days when he conducted his little unauthorized experiment. As you can imagine, he didn’t end up remaining an NCO for long, nor did his career last long after. All of them were targeted extractions at my direction and have rather colorful lives, but really solid skills and abilities even without sleep training which should make them even better.”

“Since they’re going to be your crew, you can replace any or all of these guys, but I’d recommend giving them some serious consideration. They’ve been picked because they not only have the right CAP scores, which normally would be the only criteria, but because each of them has proven they can bring something special. For this assignment you’re going to need a whole lot of that. None of them from what we’ve seen are hard to get along with, or have a problem working with a team as long as the team is something they’re going to respect. Take a look over these, and let the AI know if you accept these assignments.”

I looked at the pile of folders. “They sound interesting at least, sort of like round pegs for square holes like I am if I can detect a theme here.”

“You got it in one. For all the good that the CAP system does, it doesn’t screen very well for folks that are doing something out of the ordinary, and you and your crew certainly will be all that and more. Now, let’s get to your reactions to what you learned yesterday. I hope the training modules I assigned weren’t too awful, but I’m hoping they were helpful at least.”

I gave out a heavy breath before I answered.

“My major concern, and one that the AI didn’t think too highly of, was that the ship is pretty much limited to passive signal interception, and outside of the drones we can reconfigure, we have nothing for offensive electronic warfare. If we get into a situation where we determine that we could make an electronic attack we won’t have the capability to do it. I figure that even if it’s not our primary mission, having that option could help. Otherwise, we’d have to report our findings and wait for some capability to be constructed to make it happen and then it might be too late. If we have that capability, there’s no waiting. It’s not like I want to be a warship, but like we say it’s better to have and not need rather than need and not have.”

Wilcox looked up. “AI, what are your concerns here?”

The AI came right back with what it told me yesterday. <The design parameters for this ship do not include offensive electronic capabilities. We feel that a ship dedicated for such a purpose would be preferable should the opportunity present itself, and that adding such a capability to this ship may degrade the core functions for this vessel. For that reason we believe such a significant alteration to the vessel is unwise.>

“Does that mean you believe another ship should be assigned alongside the Oxford to perform this role?”

The AI replied <There is no evidence that a ship with such capabilities would be useful to the Confederacy, and diverting resources to make such a ship would not be efficient.>

For as smart as the AIs were supposed to be, this one clearly was unaware at how stupid it sounded with circular reasoning like this. Maybe that was why the reason the Confederacy was in so much trouble and needed humans to bail it out.

Wilcox thought for a moment. “AI, if such modifications were made to the Oxford, what are the specific downsides?”

<Such modifications would require adding mass to the ship, most likely by adding struts to the fuselage to accommodate additional systems to radiate energy in the spectra desired. This would decrease maneuverability as well as increase power requirements in order to supply emitters. The power generation systems would require enhancement which would then require upgrading the propulsion systems further to account for the additional mass. The additional design modifications and construction effort may delay commissioning the ship for up to three standard earth days.>

Wilcox was intrigued with the idea however and continued to ask questions to the AI and myself to refine the design considerations and mitigate the impacts. In the end, he overrode the AI and dictated that the design bureau update the schematics of the ship to include a capability to generate signals between seven megahertz and 10 gigahertz at 10 kilowatts, along with the required upgrades to power generation, propulsion and structure. They wouldn’t be huge changes, but from an engineering standpoint they were pretty significant. I’d have liked to do more, but engineering is always a game of compromise and we felt this covered the most useful spectrum we knew of without making such dramatic changes that we’d delay the ship beyond what we could tolerate.

The rest of my questions and suggestions were easier, since the AI hadn’t pushed back on them before. A few concerned crew operations and safety, some were for adding sensors for spectrum in the UV and gamma ranges, and a particle detector for subatomic particles that might be of interest more from the scientific realm than intelligence, but you never know what you’re going to come up against. I figured we might find them useful, and since they’d be pretty small they didn’t have much in the way of engineering impacts. It was pretty easy to have Commander Wilcox approve them and have the AI add them to the ship’s buildout. There were no delivery impacts on those.

“Anything else?” Wilcox asked. “If we’re going to make any changes, this is the time to do them. You’re lucky we could get you here before the replicators got to work, and it’s pretty unusual the captain of the first ship in a new line gets design input on the ship they’ll be taking out.”

“Nah, I think that about does it, until we get through shakedown at least. I bet by then we’ll have a few mods to consider. I understand there usually are” I answered.

“Good enough. We got a lot done here. How about you get back home and go over those personnel dossiers before you take on a few more of those training modules. Let me know what you think and if the design bureau has any questions for you I’ll make sure they talk to you.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll do that.”

With that I left with the folders Commander Wilcox gave me. I was starting to feel a little more confident about all of this as I walked back to my quarters. Still, there was a nagging feeling like I was missing a lot of the information I should be concerned about. I knew more than a couple of days ago, but how much didn’t I know yet?

I spent the rest of the morning going over the personnel folders. While it seemed like these were pretty brilliant people, it was a collection of malcontents and screw-ups that had pissed off everyone they ever worked for. That sounded awfully familiar. The breadth of the information I got on them, including every law enforcement record connected with them, from investigations to even parking tickets, from their college and high school records all the way down to what their first grade teachers wrote about them in preparation for parent-teacher conferences was amazing. And disturbing. There was no hiding from the Confederacy. They knew everything, somehow.