The Cruiser: A Dan Lenson Novel by David Poyer

1400.”
    *   *   *
    AS he was powering up his computer in the large bare captain’s suite down on the main deck level, someone knocked. “Come in,” Dan yelled.
    “Lieutenant Mills, sir.”
    “Come on in, Matt. Get a look at the equipment room?”
    “Yessir. CASREP’s on the LAN. You should have it.”
    “Is Hermelinda coming?” The supply officer. Mills nodded. Dan said to the screen, “We need to make some decisions. Higher needs to know our capability’s degraded.” He glanced at Mills, unsure if the newly arrived officer would be able to help with what really concerned him. Namely, how could they go to war with a system that wasn’t just experimental, but now significantly degraded vis-à-vis their primary mission. “My question is: How badly? I’m getting conflicting opinions.”
    Another knock, and they filed in: Almarshadi, looking even more apprehensive than usual; Donnie Wenck; the supply officer, Garfinkle-Henriques; and the chubby-cheeked petty officer from New Jersey, Terranova. Wenck was still in a first class’s dress blues. Dan was pointing to chairs when his Hydra clicked. “CO, Bridge.”
    He unclipped it. “CO.”
    “Sir, Lieutenant Staurulakis.”
    “What’cha got, Cheryl?”
    “The chief engineer reports full power and rudder trials completed satisfactorily.”
    The 1MC said, “All masters-at-arms muster in the mess decks with the executive officer.” That would be the shipwide search beginning for the missing pistol. His Hydra said, “We need to know where to head from here, Captain.”
    “You have the course plotted.”
    “The course for the eastern Med, yes sir. We’re still executing that—?”
    “Until further notice,” Dan said. “I’m going to report the radar casualty and see what kind of parts support we can finagle.”
    The Ops officer said she understood and signed off. He clicked off too and looked around the table. “Okay, we’re down one DPD. That leaves one spare, aft. What’s next? Repair? Replace? Terranova?”
    The pudgy-cheeked little FC twisted her braid, not meeting his eyes. He still couldn’t believe she was his senior tech for the most advanced radar in the Navy. “Sir, we have eight different kinds of microwave power tubes and CFAs and TWTs in the DPD. We have spares for all of them and Petty Officer—I mean, Chief—Wenck brought us some more. But our real problem’s the chassis. It’s burnt, melted, the solder joints are gone, all the cooling channels are distorted. The simplest thing to do would be to strip it down to parade rest, test the TWTs and Mark 99s and SDRs, keep the ones that are in spec and survey the others. Then plug in all the components into a totally new chassis.”
    Dan nodded. “Okay, how fast can we do that?”
    Mills said, “We can start pulling tubes as soon as the space cools down. Though some of them have radioactive components. So we’d need to do a survey before we send people in. Problem is, we don’t carry spare chassis … chassis-es.”
    Dan raised his eyebrows at the supply officer. “Hermelinda?”
    “Matt’s right, sir. Unfortunately, they’re custom-fabricated for each ship set. So they’re not in the supply system.”
    “You checked that?”
    “Wouldn’t say so if I hadn’t, Captain.”
    “Okay, good. That’s what I like to hear.”
    “I have a message out to the original equipment manufacturer, seeing if they have any in inventory. But I wouldn’t expect it.”
    “How about Dahlgren? They’re the Aegis capital, right? Would they have a chassis set, maybe even a complete driver-predriver, that they could let us have?”
    “I’ll get a message out,” Mills said.
    “Make it immediate priority. But a caveat. Everything that goes out of here about this is classified top secret,” Dan said.
    That stopped them. Garfinkle-Henriques especially looked puzzled. “Top secret,” Dan repeated, before they could ask why. “All right, let’s get to it. Matt, you stay. Oh, and