"It's an ingenious design," Dubinin said.

"It should be. The Americans spent ten years perfecting it for their missile submarines, then decided not to use it. The design team was crushed."

The captain grunted. The new American reactor designs were able to use natural convection-circulation. One more technical advantage. They were so damnably clever. As both men waited, the reactor was powering up. Control rods were being withdrawn, and free neutrons from the fuel elements were beginning to interact, starting a controlled nuclear chain-reaction. At the control panel behind the captain and the Admiral, technicians called off temperature readings in degrees Kelvin, which started at absolute zero and used Celsius measurements.

"Any time now," the Master Shipwright breathed.

"You've never seen it in operation?" Dubinin asked.

"No."

Marvelous, the captain thought, looking up at the sky. What a horrible thing to see from inside a submarine. "What was that?"

"The pump just kicked in."

"You're joking." He looked at the massive, multi-barrel assembly. He couldn't - Dubinin walked over to the instrument panel and -

Dubinin laughed out loud.

"It works, Captain." the chief engineer said.

"Keep running up the power," Dubinin said.

"Ten percent now, and rising."

"Take it all the way to one-ten."

"Captain "

"I know, we never go over a hundred." The reactor was rated for fifty thousand horsepower, but like most such machines, the maximum power rating was conservative. It had been run at nearly fifty-eight thousand - once, on builder's trials, resulting in minor damage to the steam generator's internal plumbing - and the maximum useful power was fifty-four-point-nine-six. Dubinin had only done that once, soon after taking command. It was something a ship's commander did, just as a fighter pilot must find out at least one time how fast he can make his aircraft lance through the air.

"Very well," the engineer agreed.

"Keep a close eye on things, Ivan Stepanovich. If you see any problems, shut down at once." Dubinin patted him on the shoulder and walked back to the front of the compartment, hoping the welders had done their jobs properly. He shrugged at the thought. The welds had all been X-rayed for possible faults. You couldn't worry about everything, and he had a fine chief engineer to keep an eye on things.

"Twenty percent power."

The Master Shipwright looked around. The pump had also been mounted on its own small raft structure, essentially a table with spring-loaded legs. They largely prevented transmission of whatever noise the pump generated into the hull, and from there into the water. That, he thought, had been poorly designed. Well, there were always things to be done better. Building ships was one of the last true engineering art forms.

"Twenty-five."

"I can hear something now," Dubinin said.

"Speed equivalent."

"With normal hotel load-" that meant the power required to operate various ship's systems ranging from air conditioning to reading lights "-ten knots." The Akula class required a great deal of electric power for her internal systems. That was due mainly to the primitive air-conditioning systems, which alone ate up ten percent of reactor output. "We need seventeen percent power for hotel loadings before we start turning the screw. Western systems are much more efficient."