John Ringo - Vorpal Blade

“In fact, no,” Dr. Chet said, looking up from the monitor and smiling. “There is a quite simple blood test for that. One of your samples is for that specific purpose. You have seen some science fiction TV shows, I’m sure. Did you never wonder about the fact that they had quite sophisticated medical technology yet beings with wildly different cellular structure were able to slip past their screening with impunity?”

“Actually, that has always bothered me,” Berg admitted.

“And things in the brain and weird addictions and so forth and so on,” Dr. Chet said. “By doing these tests, both before the mission and afterwards, we should be able to determine if aliens have taken over your body and are bent on world domination. Or at least the former. So, we shall begin. What is your name…”

Two hours later Berg was sweating more water than he could afford to lose in his dehydrated condition. He’d been asked to do math puzzles in his head; sometimes the questions had been too fast to answer, other times he had been given all the time he needed to answer. He’d been asked about his childhood, about his military experience, about his mother and father and sister. He had been posed nonsensical koans of the “what is the sound of one hand clapping” variety and about general philosophies. He’d been asked if he had ever killed anyone, if he’d like to kill someone, if he’d ever thought about it or about suicide. He’d been asked so many questions his head was buzzing.

“Good profile,” Dr. Chet said, nodding. “Good good profile. You are so much center of the norms I suggested for this mission I could use you as the profile.” He looked at his watch and grinned.

“And now for the bad part,” he said, pulling out two pink bottles from his lab coat, then glancing at the monitor. “You do not fear the pink bottles?”

“You can tell by looking at the monitor?” Berg asked.

“Oh, yes, at this point very easily,” Dr. Chet said. “And you do not.”

“I’ve been nauseated before,” Berg answered evenly.

“You thought you had been nauseated before,” Dr. Chet said, grinning. “You will come to a new appreciation.”

Nurse Betty had silently reappeared and started unstrapping the Marine.

“So, we will now do the MRI and CAT scans,” Dr. Chet said. “After you take your medicine.”

The pink stuff was just as awful as the white, but Berg didn’t feel any negative effects. Maybe he was immune or something.

He undressed and got into a nonmetallic robe, then was slid into the MRI. The thing was noisy as hell and it was initially boring as hell. But then Dr. Chet started asking him questions again .

The session in the MRI wasn’t all that long, though, no more than fifteen minutes. Then he was led to the CAT scan. That time, there weren’t any questions. He just lay in the thing for another fifteen or twenty minutes while it took pictures of his head.

“Very well, we are done,” Dr. Chet said after he’d gotten dressed again. It was after midnight, but if the doctor was tired it wasn’t apparent. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Berg said.

“Yes, well,” Dr. Chet said, looking at his watch. “Three… two… one. How are you feeling now ?”

“Holy maulk ,” Berg said, his eyes flying wide.

“Bathroom is through that door,” Dr. Chet said, pointing. “I’ll see you in about thirty minutes.”

“Now that’s an odd looking sub,” Miller said, looking at the boat.

The 4144 was alone in a covered pen made for six submarines. And it was odd looking. The sail was truncated and swept back with no diving plane on it. The rear section was “humped” for about a third of its length. The “hump” appeared to be a separate vessel, something like the SEAL vessel the Navy had been working on for years; there was a very definite seam where it met the boat.

Just at the tip of the composite nosecone that housed the sonar suite and other instruments was something completely different. Extending from the nosecone was a long protrusion that looked like — and Miller was sure he couldn’t be the only person to make the connection — a sword about thirty meters long, six meters high at the base where it was attached to the nose of the sub, only two meters or so wide in the horizontal dimension, and then flattened out to a point. The rest of the body of the submarine could very well represent the hilt of the blade, although it was much longer than the blade itself. It really and truly looked like the oddest, most peculiar, and largest flat-black dull sword the chief warrant officer had ever seen. Also a bit like a narwhal. He just knew that Weaver was somehow behind it.

“Uh, what the hell is the giant blade all about?” Miller asked, then paused and added, “Sir?”

“Oh, yeah, the supercavitation initiator.” Weaver shrugged. “Had to add that. Otherwise, when the ship tries to reach maximum underwater velocity there would be a serious problem with Euler buckling. Serious. Problem.”

“Oiler buckling,” the chief said. “Sounds like a game involving a football team from Texas and a bunch of gay cowboys.”

“The Oilers moved to Tennessee a long time ago, Chief. Never was a big fan of the Cowboys either.” Weaver grinned. “But it’s Euler with an E, named after the guy who understood it first.

“Uh huh.”

“You ever stood on an empty beer can slowly until the force of your entire body weight was finally enough to collapse the can flat?” Weaver explained.

“I’m more of a liquor drinker, sir.”

“Work with me here, Chief. You have seen somebody stomp a can flat before?” asked Weaver rubbing at the back of his neck and raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, sir.” Calling Bill “sir” was going to take some getting used to.

“Okay then, beer can equals submarine and big dumb SEAL equals force of water on boat at maximum underwater velocity. Flat can equals sub without initiator. Got it?”

“How does the sword help? No wait, scratch that. Euler buckling bad . Blade on nose of boat, good . Got it.” The SEAL shook his head left and right subtly.

“It’s basically the same thing that we do on supersonic stuff, plus a new trick that works kinda like the warp field. We put spikes on jets here and there to create shock waves where we want them and in a controllable manner. Ever seen the long needle on the end of a supersonic plane?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Same deal. The initiator creates a bow wave far enough out in front of the ship that a boundary layer is created around the ship. This reduces the buckling forces on the ship by about two orders of magnitude. But that only helps with the Euler buckling force some.”

“Wait a minute,” Miller said, furrowing his brow. “Nukes are built to take all kinds of unimaginable hell. It couldn’t stand up to even two or three times the normal top speed without modifications to the structure?”

“Two or three times normal top speed , perhaps,” Bill said with a grin.

“No maulk ?”

“No maulk .”

“Uh, sir. I know subs. I’ve spent one hell of a lot of time around them. They’re pretty damned fast. I mean, just between us, here in a secure sub pen, a big boat goes somewhere around seventy or eighty knots . Right?” Miller wasn’t sure if he was glad he asked the question or not. With Dr. Weaver — Lieutenant Commander Weaver — explanations could sometimes create an eyes glazing over effect that could damage one’s brain.

“Actually for this boat, the terminal velocity is a little lower than that. No matter how much power we pour into the propulsion it’s not that fast. And if it was that fast, it would…”