Chapter 16: I Get Another Surprise

We pulled out of MCBH and headed around the island for Honolulu Harbor. There we tied up, and started shore leave rotation.

A week later I received a pallet with USN markings all over it. Yep, it was addressed right. I signed for it, and used our crane and freight elevator to get it to the bridge where I wired it into the S.A. radar unit.

When I powered it up none of the screen responses looked right. It asked for an authentication I.D. and an encryption string. I opened up the manual that came with it, and a loose-leaf piece of paper slipped out. It had three sets of authentication requests, codes and responses on it. I shrugged and typed in the first set, being careful not to typo anything. High security stuff sometimes had one-shot code built in. It worked. It came up and talked to the radar unit.

(Well, talked is a misnomer. It shook hands, converted to a judo throw and took over with a submission hold!) This thing wasn't what it said it was. The software dates were all wrong. The screens were all wrong. This wasn't a stupid little prototype fire control system. This was a fucking fully updated CIC.

I put my head down onto my arms and damned near died.

I crawled around the back of the thing and had a better look with the aid of a flashlight. There were LOTS more ports than there should have been. There was a big 12-volt connector for a battery farm. There were connectors for things that I had no fucking clue what they were about. It looked like a couple of data busses were there that had no congruence whatsoever with what was displayed in the manual.

I had nowhere else to turn. I called God a.k.a. the Portmaster.

"Hi. This is Tony, aboard the Blessed Silence. I recently took delivery of a crate of equipment with U.S. navy markings all over it. Whatever the hell it is, it sure ain't what's described in the manuals that came with it!"

I heard a good belly laugh come out of the phone.

"Brother, are you in for it. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines all found out that you've been transporting nuclear fuel and reactor parts all over the world with nothing more than a popgun and a slingshot."

"Popgun, hell! I've got over a dozen Starstreak missiles."

"Well, yeah. You've got a bigger popgun than your standard porn actor, but they've got a collective case of the heebie-jeebies about you getting hijacked. I'll let the Chief of naval operations over at the yards know you've twigged to the replacement. He'll send a car over for you and explain what they want to do. Capiche?"

"Yeah, yeah. Capisci."

"Good boy. You know that you've been one hell of an asset for us and we appreciate it. There's a lot of us around, and we'll do our best to take care of you."

I grinned a little and choked up as I said, "Thanks, Uncle Angelo. I appreciate it."

"Hey, that's good. Uncle Angelo. If you need a little favor call on your Uncle Angie. If it gets heavy--get in touch with Uncle Angelo. Be well."

Well, shit. I decided to have a beer and click through some of the menus in order. Using the ship's specs I filled in all the fields that I could. The manual was for shit so I took notes as I went.

After a while I heard a car horn beep down on the dock. I shrugged into my field jacket, pocketed a couple of beers and dropped my notes into my briefcase. I picked it up and headed down to the gangway. I locked up behind myself. All the watch-standing crew had duplicate keys so I didn't worry about locking anyone out.

I hopped into the back of the Ford that was waiting for me and we took off. It didn't take long to get where we were going. I had to present my papers a couple of times to get through security but finally there I was sitting with an older guy with a desk full of plans, schedules and various other kinds of confetti. We shook hands and I handed him a beer.

"Here. It ain't healthy to drink alone and after what's happened today, I need a drink!"

He grinned and shut the door. "Sam Adams. Good stuff!"

"Yup. Finest kind." I said. "Now, pray tell, what the hell did I just turn loose on my poor unsuspecting bridge? That thing took over! It kicked ass and started taking names! I thought my poor S.A. controller was going to salute the damned thing!"

He winced and grinned as he said, "Yeah, well, it's supposed to do that. Now, what have you figured out so far?"

I took him through the authentication, S.A. radar integration and primary menus that I'd seen and made notes on.

He nodded and said, "Good. You've got a good head for this sort of thing. Most people would have taken one look, and just shut the damned thing off. That would have been pretty disastrous, before all the configuration menus were run. You're about one-sixth of the way through the process. Let's grab a pro, and get the primary rack customized. Then we'll have you pilot your ship over here, where we'll install the rest. We want to replace your emitters with some new solid-state, variable-pulse-width stuff that lets you do stealth scans without lighting up the neighborhood, as well as getting a finer grain picture with three or more computer overlays."

"What about ordnance integration? The vessel can't support anything big, like a rolling airframe missile battery ... and an R2-D2 has such a characteristic outline that we'd never get away with it."

[Editor's Note: R2-D2 = nickname for the Phalanx system]

"We've got a couple of ideas. We want to mount an electrically indexed pair of weapons on your bow and stern."

"I've only got 3/8" of steel for the decking."

"We know."

He unfurled a full set of engineering plans for my ship. "We need to make some control runs across here and through here but the channels are already in place. Pulling the wire will be a snap. It'll be a little tougher getting the 12V bus run to the wheelhouse but it'll only involve one penetration down into engineering, here," he noted as he traced the runs with his finger. "We'll use armored cable for that. It'll be pulling a lot of amps. The second and third cabinets will go in here. They'll tie into your bow thrusters here and here. The wiring is right here in the console. No problem."

"This thing is designed to fight the ship, spinning it to give an opponent the worst target possible, while integrating the fire director into the target acquisition software. Trust me, I've done this mod before, and smaller vessels than yours. We'll put eight, twelve-pack Starstreak launchers, fore and aft. They'll be backed up by 7.62mm miniguns. Since both weapons systems will be on the lower deck, we can easily reinforce the decks with two arched supports under the deck for each assembly. They'll be tied directly to the steel hull. We're still trying to figure out how to shoe-horn in a magazine for the Starstreaks."

"The metal-ion sputtering you had them give the steel is great to prevent corrosion and pitting. We'll duplicate that wherever a cut or weld is made. Once we get it all mounted and buttoned up, you'll get training to customize the responses, so it doesn't surprise you. After you make friends, you'll think of it as a good watchdog. You'll be surprised how friendly it can be."

Well, he was obviously sold on it; but I was the one who had to live with it. I assumed that this was one of those 'price of doing business' things. We headed down to the ship where a naval rating pulled up a chair and played that thing like a pipe organ. I watched him roll for a while.

"I need the real operations guides for this thing. I about shit myself green when it came up and nothing matched," I said.

He picked up the binder that came with it and paged through it a bit. "Jeeze! This is almost twenty years old! Do you realize how much CIC technology has changed in that time?"