About the only thing they could still do was detect other ships by their faint magnetic disturbances, until they drew close enough for visual spotting. But those magnetic signals were fuzzy. Just enough to give the sub pilots a sense of where another ship was located—which they then tried to zero in on as best as possible. Given that the solar turbulence made “steering” here more akin to white water rafting than what Aguilera normally thought of as piloting . . .
It was a grim thought. Two or more submarines, targeting the same Ekhat ship, might easily be thrown into each other by sudden shifts in the currents.
But, since there was nothing Aguilera could do about it, he pushed the worries aside. He had other concerns, anyway, and more predictable ones.
“What’s the turret environmental status?” he asked the human tech monitoring those readings. Kenny Wong, that was.
“Pretty good,” he replied, “except for Turret Six. Their environment’s degrading faster than the others, and by a big margin. I think there’s a leak somewhere. A material leak, I mean.” Wong glanced at the screens in front of a woman seated next to him, which monitored the forcefields. “Jeri’s the expert, but those readings look okay to me.”
Jeri Swanson grunted sourly. “Okay to you, maybe. To me they look like my mother’s wedding gown when they hauled it out of the trunk for me to wear the first time I got married. Can we say ‘tattered and moth-eaten’?”
She glanced up at Aguilera. Seeing the look of alarm on his face, she grunted again, even more sourly. “What? You were expecting something else? We’re in a fricking sun, Rafe.” Jeri went back to studying her monitors. “Relax. We’re still a ways off from a field collapse.”
Aguilera swallowed. He’d been so busy and preoccupied getting the tanks converted to turrets that he had only a dim awareness of other aspects of what faced them. “Will you have any warning, if the fields are about to fail?”
Grunting was Swanson’s stock in trade. “Some. Few seconds. Enough to tell you to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye. Stop pestering me, Rafe. There’s nothing you or me or anyone can do about it, so why waste time worrying? It’ll happen or it won’t.”
“What the hell happened to military protocol, anyway?” grumbled Aguilera.
“Excuse me? As I recall, you’re technically still a civilian—and were never anything more than a sergeant when you were in the service. Whereas I happen to enjoy the exalted rank of major.”
That acerbic response seemed to mollify Swanson, a bit. “Okay, sure, a staff weenie. Still a major. Relax, Rafe. I might mention that I did wind up wearing that stupid dress. It worked, well enough. Way better than the bum I married, that’s for sure.”
Aguilera decided to let the matter go. Swanson was right—there really wasn’t anything anyone could do about the forcefields. They would withstand the stress, hopefully long enough to enable them to complete their mission, or they wouldn’t. And he didn’t want to get anywhere near the subject of Swanson’s marital habits. The woman was in her mid-thirties and had been divorced four times. All bums, to hear her tell it. She seemed to have a built-in radar for detecting them, which, unfortunately, never sent off any signals until after the weddings.
So, he turned back to the other problem. “How long can they survive in Turret Six, the way their environment’s degrading?”
“Hard to tell, exactly. Partly it depends on them, of course. We need to ride herd on those cowboys, Rafe. They’ll try to stick it out as long as they can, but if they push it too far they’ll start passing out from heat prostration before they can get themselves out.”
Aguilera nodded. “Give me two minutes warning, as best you can figure it.” It would take the crew in Turret Six about a minute to evacuate. That would give Rafe another minute to try to convince them to do it. He’d need it, too, with that crew. The tank commander in Six was a cowboy. He’d grown up on a ranch in Wyoming.
“And now again,” Yaut said softly.