"I get the picture. Thanks."

"You're saying operator error?"

Jones frowned. He didn't know all that much about Harry Ricks. "Mainly bad luck. Call it good luck, even. Nothing bad happened, and we've learned something. We know more about the Akula than we used to. A weird set of circumstances came together. Won't happen again in a hundred years, maybe. Your skipper was a victim of circumstance, and the other guy - if there was another guy there - was very damned sharp. Hey, the important thing about mistakes is that you learn from them, right?"

"Harry gets back in ten days," Mancuso said. "Can you be back here then?"

"Sorry," Jones said with a shake of the head. "I'm going to be in England. I'm going out on HMS Turbulent for a few days of hide 'n' seek. The Brits have a new processor that we need to look at, and I drew the duty."

"You're not going to ask me to present this to the CO, are you, sir?" Claggett asked after a minute's reflection.

"No, Dutch you trying to tell me something?"

It was Claggett's turn to look unhappy. "Sir, he's my boss, and he's not a bad boss, but he is a little positive in his thinking."

That was artfully done, Jones thought not a bad boss a little positive. He just called his skipper an idiot in a way that no one could ever call disloyal. Ron wondered what sort of hyper-nuc-engineer this Ricks was. The good news was that this XO had his act together. And a smart skipper listened to his XO.

"Skipper, how's Mr Chambers doing?"

"Just took over Key West. Got a kid you trained as his leading sonarman. Billy Zerwinski, just made chief, I hear."

"Oh, yeah? Good for him. I figured Mr Chambers was going places, but Billy Z as a chief? What is my Navy coming to?"

"This is taking forever," Qati observed sourly. His skin was pasty white. The man was suffering again from his drug treatment.

"That is false," Fromm replied sternly. "I told you several months, and it will be several months. The first time this was done, it took three years and the resources of the world's richest nation. I will do it for you in an eighth of that time, and on a shoestring budget. In a few days we'll start to work on the rhodium. That will be much easier."

"And the plutonium?" Ghosn asked.

"That will be the last metal work - you know why, of course."

"Yes, Herr Fromm, and we must be extremely careful, since when you work with a critical mass you must be careful that it does not become critical while you are forming it," Ghosn replied, allowing his exacerbation to show for a change. He was tired. He'd been at work for eighteen hours now, supervising the workers. "And the tritium?"

"Last of all. Again, the obvious reason. It is relatively unstable, and we want the tritium we use to be as pure as possible."