the pilot briefing room. I’ll see you tonight after your watch?”
“You bet,” I say. We can’t do dinner together because we eat in different galleys--they’d kick me out of the officer galley, and give her strange looks for eating in the enlisted mess--but I have a private cabin, a rare luxury on a warship, and we spend a lot of our free time in there.
“Later, computer jock,” she says, and gives me a quick kiss.
“Later, pilot babe,” I reply.
I watch as she walks through the hatch and into the hallway beyond. There’s definitely nothing wrong with the way her backside looks in a flight suit.
I’m on the way to the enlisted galley when I hear my job title on an overheard 1MC announcement.
“Neural Network admin, report to XO in CIC. Neural Network admin, report to XO in CIC.”
I reverse course and head to the staircase that leads down to Deck Five.
The CIC is busier than it was when I set foot into it for the first time. The XO is once again standing by the holotable, looking over a stack of printouts. I walk up to the table and render a salute.
“NN2 Grayson reporting as ordered, sir.”
The Lieutenant Commander looks up from his printout.
“Ah, Mister Grayson.”
He puts the stack of paper aside and waves me closer.
“At ease. Mister Grayson, how far away is this ship from the nearest communications relay at present?”
“Three and a half light minutes, sir--the orbital relay above Mars.”
“Very good,” he says. I’m pretty sure that he knew the answer to his question already, and that he just wants to check whether his new Network admin is on the ball.
“We’ll be entering the Alcubierre chute to Capella shortly,” he says. “Please make sure you check your pre-FTL procedures, and that all the databanks are fully synchronized with the main network before we go FTL.”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “I’ll get right on it.”
“Very good. Report network readiness to be directly by eighteen hundred hours, please.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
I don’t know much about our drive systems for interstellar travel. I do know they’re called Alcubierre drives, and that a ship traveling in an Alcubierre bubble can’t send or receive any messages, because it outruns even the near-lightspeed data traffic. Before an Alcubierre trip, every Navy ship synchronizes all its onboard data with the in-system network. I learned to run the process in Network school, and it’s just a matter of telling the computer to do it, but Navy regs still require the results of the sync to be double-checked twice by the Network admin on duty, and verified by the next senior department head up the command chain. I find that most of my daily duties consist of babysitting an automated process, and standing ready to get my head bitten off if I fail to catch any errors.
Back in the NNC, I open my admin deck, tap into the system, and start the automated protocol for pre-Alcubierre preparation. While the databanks synchronize with the nearest Navy communications relay to make sure we’re not going to deliver last month’s mail by accident, I go through the manual to make sure everything is going right. I suppose I should feel a little intimidated or overwhelmed by the fact that I’m running a department that should be staffed by two enlisted admins and a petty officer, but the truth is that everything is so automated that anyone with the ability to read a few checklists could run the NNC from their rack. Still, I don’t want to give the XO a reason to start disliking me, so I go by the book and hand-check every databank replication time stamp when the computer indicates that the process is finished. Then I hit the communications switch on the console next to the desk.
“CIC, Networks.”
“Networks, CIC. Go ahead,” comes the reply.
“Networks reporting ready for Alcubierre transition. All databanks synchronized and verified.”
“CIC copies Networks ready for Alcubierre transition.”
With the level of computer integration on the ship, I have no doubt that CIC was aware of the network status the moment the update finished, but this is the military, and everything has to have its proper procedure and ritual, like a kabuki theater with uniforms. There are the right gestures, phrases, and movements to be observed, and everybody plays along because that’s just the way it’s done.
I tell the admin deck to locate the RFID signature belonging to the dog tags of Ensign HALLEY D. The system finds her RF chip in the officer’s mess, and I tap into