Chapter Eighteen

“AND come out of there, you worthless piece of— Ah ha!” Scooter Smith sat back on his haunches with a triumphant grin as the recalcitrant tracking drive of the LAC’s number three laser cluster finally yielded to his ministrations. He didn’t know how the defective drive shaft had gotten past the myriad inspections which were supposed to spot such things, but that was less important than that it had. Well, that and the fact that its sub-spec materials had warped and jammed the cluster’s training gears solid at a most inopportune moment during yesterday’s exercises. It had also managed to splinter and deform itself sufficiently to resist all removal efforts with sullen stolidity for the better part of two hours, and they’d had to strip the entire unit down much further than he’d hoped, but they had it out now.

He tossed it to one of his techs and stood, rubbing the small of his back, then climbed down the side of the work stand.

One of the nicer things about HMS Minotaur’s LAC bays was that someone had actually bothered to put some thought into servicing and ammunitioning requirements. Smith’s last assignment had been as an assault shuttle section chief aboard HMS Leutzen, and, like every other shuttle maintenance specialist, it seemed as if he’d spent about a third of his on-duty time in a skinsuit or a hardsuit floating around in the zero-gee vacuum of a boat bay while he pulled hull maintenance on one or another of the small craft under his care. In most ways, Minotaur’s LACs were simply small craft writ large, and he’d expected to face the same problem, only more so. And he was spending a good bit of time suited up… but nowhere near as much of it as he’d anticipated.

Whoever had designed Minotaur had taken extraordinary pains to enhance crew efficiency. Even after five months on board, Smith was still a bit awed by the degree of automation she incorporated. Traditionally, warships had embarked crews which were enormously larger than any merchant ship of equivalent tonnage would have boasted. That was largely because merchant ships tended to be nothing more than huge, hollow spaces into which to stuff cargo, whereas warships were packed full of weapons, ammunition, defensive and offensive electronic warfare systems, sidewall generators, backup fusion plants, bigger Warshawski sails, more powerful beta nodes, and scores of other things merchantmen simply didn’t carry and hence had no reason to provide crews for. But it was also true that merchies relied far more heavily than warships on automated and remote systems to reduce manpower requirements still further.

Men-of-war could have done the same thing, but they didn’t. Or, at least, they hadn’t. The official reason was that large crews provided redundancy. After all, if the fancy automation took a hit that fried it, you needed old-fashioned people with toolkits to fix it. And people were still the ultimate self-programming remotes. If a weapon mount or a critical support system was cut off from the central control net by battle damage, or if the central computers themselves crashed, a warship had the human resources to take over and run things in local control anyway.