To Honor You Call Us (19 page)

“Uh huh.  All of those.  I get real edgy like.  Can’t sit still.  Ants in my pants.”

“How about feelings of persecution, the sense that people are out to get you, or that everyone is against you or doesn’t like you?”

“Nah, none of that stuff.  What’s that mean, anyway?”

“What that means is that you are addicted to this pernicious substance, but not severely so.  Once you stop using, you will go through an uncomfortable period of withdrawal where you will experience the symptoms we just talked about, and perhaps some moderate nausea, all for a few days, and then you will be fine.”

“You said ‘once you stop using.’  Does that mean—?”

“Oh, yes, yes, a thousand times yes.  It most assuredly means that you are going to stop using, young man.  There is
no
doubt about that.  You and everyone else on board this ship.  No one is going to deaden their dendrites and blunt their brains on the
U.S.S. Cumberland
.  Not while I am her Chief Medical Officer.”  The doctor realized that his voice had gotten inappropriately loud for the small room.  He continued more softly.  “But, I almost forgot.  With all the discussion of this other issue, I have let your original injury slip my mind.  I’ll be right back.”  He shortly returned with a loaded pressure syringe and administered its contents.  Navy doctors don’t ask first, especially with Enlisted Men.  Any prescription or treatment is essentially an order from a superior officer, so they administer the shot or lance the boil or otherwise go ahead with what they need to do.  Explanations, if offered at all, come later.

“The energy stream in the compression drive triggered a degenerative process in the nerves in your hand.  Left untreated, the nerves would essentially have died rendering the hand useless.  This medication, known as Synaptoflex, will reverse the process and allow the damage to heal.  And, incidentally, it will also speed the rate at which your nerves recover from the Chill you have been taking.  Starting tomorrow morning, I am going to begin working with you to address why you have been taking this terrible drug and how you can prevent yourself from taking it again.  I will do everything within my power to see that you and this dangerous chemical are not mated for the rest of your life.  Until then, however, I have an unpleasant duty to perform.”

“What’s that?”

“I am required by regulations to relieve you until further notice.  You are simply too impaired to function properly.  As this demonstrates,” he pointed to Rhim’s injured right hand, “you are a hazard in your present condition, both to yourself and others.  You will receive appropriate bureaucratic paperwork shortly explaining that you retain your current rate of pay unless it is modified or stopped due to a separate disciplinary action by proper authority, as well as your right to an appeal hearing before a panel of enlisted men, or to have your case reviewed at a Captain’s Mast,
et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum
, within a day or two.”  At that moment there was a knock on the examination room door.  The doctor opened it to admit two rifle-carrying Marines and Major Kraft.

The doctor said sadly, “I’m afraid I called them a moment ago, when I was out of the room.  The regulations are quite specific on that point.”  

Major Kraft announced, “Spacer Rhim, you are under arrest for consumption of a prohibited substance.  After I read the doctor’s report, there will likely be other charges, too, but that one will do for now.  I need you to come with us.”  Turning to one of the Marines, “Carlsson, go to the Quartermaster and draw a Plain Jane for him.  We can’t have this man sitting in the Brig in his underwear.”  The Marines led him from the room.  Common sense, not to mention a specific naval regulation, said that one did not put a man in the Brig in an SCU, with its oxygen generator full of volatile chemicals and various metal hooks, straps, fittings, and other hardware just asking to be used for mischief by a prisoner.  So, Rhim was issued a Plane Jane, which was a standard ship’s working uniform but without any insignia, patches, or other markers of naval rank, occupation, and service history.  A Navy man in a Plain Jane was clothed, but visually stripped of his identity. 

Sahin picked up Rhim’s SCU and carried it to a bin for patient clothing that, for one reason or another, was left in the Casualty Station.  Then he strode to his work station, called up the text message utility, selected “Send Internally” and, when given a list of recipients, clicked on “Commanding Officer.”  He typed:  “Need to see you as soon as possible regarding matter of great urgency.”  He pressed the “SEND” key.

***

Less than five minutes later, the doctor was in Max’s Day Cabin.  When a senior officer said “matter of great urgency,” Max took him at his word and acted accordingly.  When Max found out what the problem was, he buzzed Garcia, Kraft, and “Werner” Brown, telling them to meet him and Doctor Sahin in the Wardroom.  Seventeen minutes had elapsed since the CMO sent the text message when a steward, having brought coffee to everyone except the doctor who was “in the mood for tea today,” bowed out of the Wardroom and closed the hatch.  The meeting came to order. 

The doctor briefly explained what he knew and the effects of the Chill.

“That explains a lot,” said Max. 

“Explains what?” asked Brown.

“This crew’s performance,” Garcia finished Max’s thought.  The XO was on the same wavelength as the CO, which seemed to be his default setting.  “Lots of things are just plain slow, slower than they should be, even given all the other problems on this ship.  The performance against the enemy when Captain Oscar was in command, the performance in the fleet exercises, the performance in the training exercises I’ve been running since the change of command.  I was wondering just a few minutes ago if something like a third of the crew—excepting the officers and the NCOs—was ill or had some sort of mental disorder.  Now, I’m betting we’ve got a significant fraction, not most but a significant minority, on this drug.  Or others.  And at least a few of the NCOs and maybe an Officer or two, unless I miss my guess.”

“A third would be about right,” Kraft chimed in.  “I was about twelve hours away from coming forward with a program of random neural testing or quarters searches or something.  There’s not a doubt in my mind that a lot of these men are on something.  A blind man could see it.  I watch the Discrepancy Reports from every department, and there are just too many minor errors being made all over the ship, even for a ship in a low state of training.  Plus, I can see it in the crew’s eyes and their movements.  But, what I don’t get is why so many?  In training for this post, I learned that most ships have some kind of issue with drugs, but usually it is only a small percentage of the crew.  A manageable number.  I’ve never heard of anything this so widespread.”

“I have.”  Max said.  “You get it on an unhappy ship.  If things are going well, you never have more than two or three percent using, if that many.  But, if you have a bastard skipper and the ship isn’t performing well and men don’t have pride in her, if she’s picked up an insulting nickname like ‘The Pitiful
Pittman
’ or
‘The
Cumberland
Gap,’ you can get as many as half of the men taking something to get them through it.  Having a happy ship, a ship where the men know their duty, a ship that performs well and has a creditable record against the enemy, those things are the long term cure for this.”

Accustomed to being dismissed by his seniors, the doctor was openly surprised that his observations were immediately being taken so seriously by the other officers.  “Thank you all for being so ready to act to resolve this problem.  I can identify who is using with comprehensive neural testing.  The neural performance—”

Major Kraft’s percom beeped, halting the doctor in mid-sentence.   

“Major,” Max said, annoyed.  “Decorum dictates that an officer mutes his percom when meeting with other senior officers, particularly when one of them is the CO.”

“I understand that very well, sir, but begging the Captain’s pardon, I assigned this sender a tag that would let the call come through.  I believe it to be urgently relevant.”  He flipped the cover open to reveal the main screen.  He read for less than a minute and then nodded.  “When arresting a man for any drug offense, SOP is to conduct a thorough search of his quarters and all other areas under his control.  The search of Rhim’s quarters turned up seventeen very small blue tablets that were not in a standard Navy prescription container as required by regulations.  We brought them to be analyzed by Pharmacist’s Mate Nguyen.  The results are on Data Channel 208, classified for access only by the people in this room.  The tablets are clearly Atanipine.  I am betting Doctor Sahin here can tell us more than that from the analysis.”

The doctor had already gotten up from the small meeting table and helped himself without permission to the Captain’s data station.  He studied the screen for a few minutes, scrolling up and down, occasionally nodding to himself or quietly saying “ahh” and “hmmm.”  Then he turned to the others.  “This sample was synthesized in a MediMax Mark XIV.  All MediMax machines insert a microscopic marker chip, called an Auster dot, in every pill or capsule.  The Auster dot is stamped with the make, model, and serial number of the machine, the name of the medication, the dosage, and the date the drug was made.  And, do not worry, it is quite harmless and digestively inert—it passes through the alimentary tract and is eliminated in the feces.  Very useful, by the way, as a simple fecal sample tells us what medication the patient is taking.  So, unless the marker routines have been tampered with, and this is very, very difficult, not to mention unlikely—otherwise, why would the Auster dot be there—the time stamp shows that the tablets were made only yesterday.  As we have been in deep space all that time, it is clear that someone has a MediMax on board and has gone into the recreational pharmaceuticals business.”

“And we have no reason to believe that the bloody thing is being used only to make the Chill, either,” said Brown.  “Whoever has this beastly device could be making God knows what other pills for the men to pop and is selling them all over the ship.”  Short pause.  “Say, Doctor, what exactly are those Auster dots made of?  Is the material anything that would break down in shipboard waste processing?  It does most of the work with bacteria and enzymes.”

“The material is some polymer that is impervious to digestive fluids.  It is biologically inactive, so I never had any reason to learn the composition in more detail than that.  I think it is very likely to be impervious to breakdown by saprophytic bacteria as well as by the kinds of enzymes used in waste processing.”

Brown seemed to have grasped the thread of an idea in his hand.  “And what is their size, exactly?” 

“One thousand microns.”

“That big?  That’s a tenth of a millimeter!  I’ll be able to tell you exactly what we’re dealing with here.  Captain, if I may use your work station, I need to get my people on this.”

“Help yourself, Werner.”

The doctor relinquished the work station and Brown sat at it, pulling up the text message utility, and then typing furiously for two or three minutes.  He hit the SEND key with a certain relish and leaned back in the chair.  “There.  That should do it.”

“Care to let us in on your brilliant plan, Werner, or are you going to keep it to yourself until you have results to announce?  We know doing it that way is good for increasing the dramatic tension.”  Max’s light tone took the sting out of the words.

“Ah, yes, I was rather preoccupied with getting going on this.  Gentlemen, as you know, the waste that goes down the head in your quarters and all the drains around the ship is rather heavily processed, particularly to extract the water for reuse.  Virtually all of the mass is taken out, either by water extraction or by enzymatic and bacterial breakdown of the solids, but there is always a residue.  We irradiate the residue to kill any remaining microorganisms, and then compress it into rectangular shapes that we call ‘black bricks’ because they are very dark, hard, and dry, and rather than tossing them into space we generally store them until we get back to a base because
some
Captains,” he said throwing a significant glance in Max’s direction, “are paranoid about an enemy being able to track our vessel or glean some intelligence about us if the bricks were found in deep space and their contents analyzed.  We completely cleaned our treatment plant at Jellicoe Station and we’ve produced several kilograms of black bricks since then.  So, I just ordered that representative samples be pulled and, pulverized finely, and then run through a particulate screen set to trap every particle between nine hundred fifty and one thousand fifty microns in size.  My people will deliver the resulting particles to the Casualty Station, which has equipment for scanning objects of that size in detail, and we will know what our people have been taking.”

“Outstanding,” said Max. 

“Let me call my people and give them instructions on how to get the results we need,” said the doctor.  “They will need to exclude from the results the Auster dots from the Pharmaceutical Synthesizer in the Casualty Station, the ones from Jellicoe Station and the Casualty Stations from ships in the Task Force, and those from the five or so drug companies from whom the Navy buys pharmaceuticals.”

“Why not just look for dots from this one MediMax?” asked Brown.

“Because we aren’t certain that there is only one MediMax,” Kraft said.  “We might have two or more Capsule Capitalists on board ship.” 

The doctor stood up and went to a corner of the room to have a lengthy conversation with his percom.