Able One by Ben Bova Page B

Suwazi saw her career going down in flames. The baby’s due in four months, she groaned inwardly, and this is gonna get me laid off, for sure.
    Sitting in front of Linda’s desk, Mrs. Markley radiated cold fury. “You are the branch manager, aren’t you? Why can’t you get the machines fixed?”
    Mrs. Markley was the seventh customer to barge into her office in the past half hour, complaining that the ATMs were down. Linda had tried to phone the local service company, but she’d gotten nothing but a busy signal. In desperation she had called corporate headquarters in Houston. No use. The line was so jammed with other calls that all she got was an automated message advising her to call again later.
    “I want access to my money!” Mrs. Markley was hissing. “It’s bad enough that your machines aren’t working, but your tellers refuse to cash my Social Security check!”
    “Our computers are down,” Linda tried to explain. “It’s only temporary, I’m sure. If you could come back later ...”
    Mrs. Markley rose grandly to her feet, practically twitching with rage. She reminded Linda of a beady-eyed rat.
    “If you can’t run your bank properly you should be replaced!” Mrs. Markley snapped. Then she swept out of Linda’s office.
    Linda sank back in her swivel chair and fought down the urge to burst into tears.
     
    ABL-1: Laser Bay
    “You scared, boss?”
    Startled, Harry half-turned and saw Delany’s big, bearlike form lumbering up the narrow walkway toward him. Harry had slowly worked his way past the lasing cavity and mixing chamber, heading tailward along the tanks that held the liquid oxygen and iodine toward the cramped little monitoring station where Wally Rosenberg sat, checking pressures and tankage levels.
    “What are you doing back here?” Harry demanded. Monk’s station was up in the nose, at the beam control compartment.
    “The optics are all okay,” said Delany. “I was just wondering how you guys’re feeling. You nervous about this?”
    “Nervous? Kind of,” Harry admitted. “Aren’t you?”
    Delany shrugged. “Why should I be nervous? The gooks are about to start World War III and we’re in the middle of the action. What’s there to be nervous about?”
    Harry wanted to laugh, but the best he could do was to crack a thin smile.
    “You checked the optics?” he asked Delany. “Everything’s on the tick. No problems.” “Where’s Taki?”
    “Up at the battle management console, where she should be. Maybe they’ll give her an Air Force commission if she nails those gook missiles.”
    Harry knew that he and the other civilians were manning the laser only because this was supposed to be a test flight. We’re only a skeleton crew at best, he thought. When the system’s declared operational, Air Force personnel will take over. With more than twice the number of their five-person team, at that.
    “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go up forward and see how she’s making out.”
    Delany gave him that sloppy salute of his. “Aye, aye, skipper.”
    Harry shook his head. “This isn’t the Navy, Monk.”
    “We ain’t the Air Force, either.”
    The COIL’s channel ran through the length of the plane, past the crew compartment and galley, beneath the flight deck and cockpit, and into the bulbous turret that made the plane’s nose look like a potato. Taki Nakamura’s station was up forward, at the electronics consoles that monitored the plane’s sensors and the laser’s output beam.
    Taki’s battle management compartment was directly beneath the flight deck. Harry scanned the row of consoles, most of them dark and unused until they powered up the laser. The plane’s slight swaying was more noticeable up here near the nose. Like a ship at sea, Harry thought. This big lunk of an airplane must weigh a hundred tons, but it still pitches up and down a little.
    Nakamura was sitting at the main console, her fingers flicking across the keyboard, her eyes focused intently on the display