0235 hours CST, June 23rd, 2673; aft section of the Skate

Now that the Skate was in a combat zone—at least that was how Murphy saw it—he was taking his inspection rounds more seriously and more often. He planned to go through the boat at least once a watch, just to make sure everything was the way he liked it. It was probably excessive, but he was not going to lose the boat because some gunner had been hit by a stray wrench that should have been secured.

On this inspection round, he started at the stern of the boat, as far from the bridge as he could get, and planned to work his way forward. The Rake class torpedo boats were two hundred ten metres long. The Skate was almost as long as the aircraft carriers that fought in the middle of the twentieth century. Space-going vessels turned out to be longer than planet-bound ships; like koi in a pond, they grew to fit their habitat. This was mainly due to the size of the engines needed to push them at high acceleration and the bunkers of fuel needed to feed those engines.

Interstellar ships like the Skate turned out to be bigger than the boats that ran around a single star system. This was mainly due to the curve drive that pushed the ships between the stars. The curve drive used the space-bending aspects of gravity to shorten the interstellar distance. A more massive ship had more gravity; the curve drive used this extra mass to make the transition more efficient.

The tri-drive housed inside the torpedo boat was the smallest curve drive that was feasible for a manned star ship. The drive took up fully a third of the interior volume and length of the boat, seventy metres. Its mass made up two-thirds of the mass of the boat, fully twenty-eight thousand tons. Smaller curve drives were possible, but the smaller the mass of the vessels, the larger proportion of the space the curve drive filled up.

Murphy had to pass through engineering to get to the stern of the torpedo boat. The tri-drive engine sat at the centre of mass; effectively it was the centre of mass of the vessel. The portions of the boat fore and aft of the engine were just steerage, which was the attitude shared by most of the engineers and mechanics on the boat.

Engineering was not the destination that Murphy had in mind. He continued aft of the boat to where the offensive weapons were housed. The Mark 15 torpedo was fifty metres long and six metres wide. The internal bays were close to sixty metres long to allow the weapons operators to examine them at regular intervals. It was only during examination that the individual torpedo holding pods were pressurized.

The Mark 15 torpedo was capable of carrying a strategic warhead; the high-yield warheads were radioactive, and only authorized personnel could get near them. The bridge was at the front of the boat where a window was possible. The tri-drive gave good protection from the small doses of radiation coming off any strategic warhead, so it made sense that the majority of the crew spaces were forward of engineering. The two torpedoes that the Skate carried had conventional warheads, or else there would have been three squads of Republic Marines onboard, taking watches in the torpedo bay and the detonator locker.

Murphy was happy they were not carrying strategic warheads on board. He was not certified to arm the torpedoes, and he was not sure if Lieutenant Ridgard was either. If they had to arm the warheads, it was a two-person chain of protection. Both of them would have to be in sight of each other and the marines while they carried the detonators from the locker to the torpedo bay to be installed. That was all that Murphy knew about the procedure, and he was not looking forward to having to do it, ever.

The torpedo bay did not leave much room aft of engineering that was not support equipment for the torpedoes. There were only a few things aft of the bay itself—the exhaust ports for the engines and a few point defense laser turrets. With the Skate accelerating, the aft end of the boat was the floor, and ladders stretched up the sides of the torpedo pods toward the bow or ceiling of the torpedo bay.

Murphy’s target was the topside, aft-point defense laser turret. It was almost as far aft in the boat as he was able to get. He opened the hatch and took a moment to orient himself. The crew manning the turret had oriented it so their backs were to the floor. Murphy climbed up to the hatch and then crawled in through the short metre-wide tube to the turret itself.

“CO on deck!” one of the two crew members manning the turret shouted when she noticed who was coming in.

“As you were,” Murphy said shortly and looked around the pod. The armoured turret was currently retracted into the boat, and the barrel of the laser was farther retracted into the turret itself. The barrel rested between the two chairs of the crew members.

The gunner was currently running checks on the eight-centimetre-thick tube and the lenses of the laser, making sure the gun was ready to fire; she was also the one who noticed Murphy when he came into the compartment.

The second person in the turret was the camera operator; his sight was currently distracted by his helmet, which gave a panoramic view of what the cameras were currently looking at. Each camera section was made up of three main cameras and several supplemental cameras. The main cameras offered different wavelengths: human visual, infrared, and ultraviolet. The supplemental cameras added to the view, allowing the camera operator to use his peripheral vision while scanning. The supplemental cameras were visual wavelengths only and of lower resolution than the main cameras.

Both of the crew were supplementary to the computers that ran the turret. Artificial intelligence had come a long way since the invention of computers, but they always worked best when backed up by the true intelligence of organic life. While most often the computer picked the right targets and identified them, a human working with the computer made those choices faster and smarter. The human added something that the computer lacked, and something that the computer scientists had either been too fearful to add or just could not replicate: human instinct and intuition.

Murphy looked at the gunner. “Running diagnostics?” he asked her.

“Yes sir, and running some simulations too.”

“Very good, continue,” Murphy said and then looked around the turret for anything out of place. He looked over at the camera operator and decided not to disturb him for the moment. It looked like he was deeply immersed in his duties with the AI, and that was not a mental state easy to recover. Murphy looked at the two crew members, noting they were in their skin suits. He gave the compartment one more cursory look and then backed out of the tub and closed the hatch behind him.

He moved toward the bow of the boat, or upward, as the case was. He stopped at the door to the rail shotgun turret and opened it up so he could have a look inside. Again he started his inspection of the turret with the formalities of the commanding officer entering a new compartment. The turret was much bigger than the point defense laser turret he had just left.

The RSG was the secondary weapon on the torpedo boat. Seventeen barrels were grouped together into a hexagon three layers deep. Each of the twelve-millimetre barrels could fire a metal slug at one-tenth the speed of light, relative to the ship’s current velocity. Each slug had enough kinetic energy to take out a fighter, missile, or torpedo. Eight slugs were loaded into each barrel when the gun was ready to fire. When a target was located, the barrels would fan out as much as ten degrees, giving a wide shot pattern, which is how the rail shotgun got its name. With seventeen slugs fired at once, there was a good chance of one of them connecting with the target.

After the eight rounds had been fired, the barrels had to be brought back together so that the loading mechanism could load the next eight rounds into the barrels. The three gunners in the turret were tasked with keeping track of the autoloaders, barrel temperature, and other things that could go wrong with the weapon as it fired.

The turret itself was a twenty-metre-wide shallow dome that was always partially extended from the hull of the torpedo boat. The barrels themselves were forty metres long, and only ten of them were inside the turret; this left the majority of the barrels exposed to the vacuum of space.

The gun and autoloader were sealed off from the rest of the turret behind a hatch, not even a proper air lock. If maintenance needed to be done, or for some reason the gun needed to be loaded by hand, the crew members would have to don their space suits and service the gun in the vacuum of space. The three gunners and one camera operator in the turret always wore their space suits out of habit while they were in the turret.

The four crew members looked nervous as Murphy came to inspect the area. He was wearing his space suit and had been wearing it since coming into the system. He had learned several hard lessons from the last war. One of them had taught him that there often was not time to don a space suit before combat. Battle stations alarms still haunted him, running to his station and forgoing the preparation time of getting into a suit. It only took one call to battle stations and twelve hours of nervous combat to make him vow never to go through that again.

Murphy’s helmet was hooked to a tether strap on his belt, so he could climb the ladders along the base of the turret that currently made up the only flat wall. The four men and women in the turret relaxed when they saw the helmet. There were regulations written that gave the lead gunner the authority and the duty to remove anyone from the turret if he came in without the proper equipment, including the commanding officer. No lead gunner wanted to exercise the authority, ever.

“Good morning, sir,” Able Spaceman Black said after saluting Murphy. He was acting as the lead gunner. Despite the hour the gunner’s voice was still chipper.

“Good morning, lead gunner,” Murphy replied as he looked over at the taller man.

“Lead Gunner Ned Black, sir,” he replied, trying to cover his nervousness.

“What’s the status of the gun?”

“She’s as ready as we can make her. Currently she’s not loaded, sir, but we can have her up and firing in five seconds.”

“Good. When was the last time you loaded it by hand?”

“By hand, sir?” Ned asked, his nerves starting to show.

“Yes, by hand. For whenever the loader fails for any reason.”

“Uh, I would have to check the logs, sir. But we haven’t needed to do that for two years on my watch. We keep the autoloader as well maintained as we can.”

Murphy raised an eyebrow and looked a touch concerned. “Aren’t you supposed to handload and fire the gun at least once every six months?”

“Well yes, but…” His voice trailed off.

“But?”

“Well, I don’t like to tell tales, sir. But our previous CO didn’t really follow the necessary drill schedule.”

“He didn’t? The paperwork and logs suggest that the drill schedule had been followed.”

“I wouldn’t know about the official logs, sir,” Ned hedged, falling back on formality.

“Tell me, Lead Gunner Black. How much of the drill schedule was followed on the rest of the ship?”

“I wouldn’t know about that either, sir.”

“Give me your best guess then.”

“I…I would have to say none of it, sir.”

Murphy did his best to hide his sigh. “When was the last time you fired the gun? The logs I’ve read say the gun was fired within the last three months.”

“Much longer than that, sir, at least with live rounds. We run simulations constantly, though. But live rounds are expensive, and the last time I think the gun was fired was eighteen months ago.”

“Thank you for your honesty, Black.” Murphy’s expression was set as he looked at the hatch and the windows that led to the gun itself. “We don’t have time for drills now. We don’t have time to make sure the gun still fires. But I want you and everyone who is RSG qualified to review the procedures. I will have you able to recite them backward if necessary. Your lives, all of our lives, may depend on it before the day is out. I want you personally to know everything in the book just in case.”

“Yes sir.”

Murphy turned to look around the compartment. He should not have chewed on the lead gunner, but it had been a long day, and he was short on sleep.

“The compartment still looks good and well maintained, Lead Gunner,” he said and turned to leave the compartment. The intercom whistled out a warning that the boat-wide channel was being opened, and then Lieutenant Sinkovich’s voice called out, “Lieutenant Murphy, please contact the bridge.”

Murphy walked over to the wall and pressed the button to call the bridge. “Murphy here.”

“Heat signatures have been detected, sir. Off the port bow.”

“What’s our status?”

“We’re navigating toward the cover of an asteroid, but the belt is thinning out. The heat source hasn’t been identified yet.”

“Can we dock with the asteroid quickly?” he asked and waited a few seconds for the answer.

“Yes, but we’ll need to do a quick four-G run to get into proper position.”

“Fine, four G is authorized, fifteen-second warning to the crew. I’ll be back to the bridge after we dock, out.” He looked around the turret. “Get strapped in, boys and girls. It’s going to be a rough ride.”

The intercom whistled out the boat-wide signal channel again. “All hands prepare for four-G manoeuvring in fifteen seconds.”

Lead Gunner Black rushed for his chair to get strapped in. Murphy went to a place on the current floor where there were straps he could use.

“Would you like my seat, sir?” one of the other gunners asked.

“No thank you. Just get strapped in,” he told the young enlisted gunner.

Murphy lay down on the floor behind where the gunners and camera operators sat. His hands pulled the emergency straps over his chest, and he got a good grip on some handholds. It was a touch of bravado, but his home world of Terrace as a heavy-G world, and he could take the G forces without worry of blacking out. It was only four G, after all. He geared his breathing the same way people had been taught since the invention of high-G combat.

I should have asked how long the manoeuvres were going to last, he thought as the manoeuvres started and the G forces built up to four G.

It was not long, only to the count of twenty, before the forces lessened and shifted around as the boat lined up for docking with the asteroid. He waited. Even though he could have stood up, there might have been more manoeuvring needed.

“All hands, we are now docked. Keep vibrations to a minimum.” Those were the words that Murphy waited for. He let go of the handholds, unbuckled the straps, and stood up. He used the ladders as handholds to get to the hatch. With no acceleration, there was no aspect of gravity, and he made his way out of the turret quickly.