For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “The old missile, does it have the same two-and-a-half megaton warhead as the Wolfhound?”

  “No, Skipper. They don’t have to pay for as many warheads as we do, so they pack a little bit more lithium deuteride into the warhead and get a bigger yield. They get 3.27 megatons out of theirs.”

  “That’s not a Wolfhound,” said Max. “That’s a Mastiff. Extra big warhead. I think that might be useful. Okay, what about the Rashidian fighters—how are they going to stand up against those destroyers?”

  DeCosta had already worked out the answer. “They’ll whittle the rat-faces down. But they won’t get them all. No way. Dervish is both very fast and very hard to kill. What they’re going to do is pack those little fu—um…devils into a really tight formation and just punch their way through the fighters. Instead of the fighters having a speed advantage, these destroyers are actually faster than the Rashidian fighters. The fighters won’t be able to stay with the targets and make successive attacks, which is how they’re most effective. Instead, they get a single attack run and have to fire all their missiles at once. Result is at least a 35 percent decrease in their effectiveness, and probably closer to 50.

  “When the fighters are done, applying standard analytical techniques and assuming that they use conventional tactics, it’s looking like half, maybe even two-thirds, of the Krag force will survive. That’s more than enough to accomplish their objective despite anything we do before, during, or after. If only we had a few of those moored ships or a fraction of their firepower, that could turn the balance, but those ships won’t even be able to do anything but creep around on maneuvering thrusters until ten hours after the Krag have already destroyed them. And that makes them totally useless.”

  “Totally useless? Maybe not totally.”

  Max’s “crafty grin” made an appearance, quickly noticed by most of the CIC crew, some of whom gently elbowed nearby watch standers. “Mad Max is about to do it again,” said Petty Officer Ardoin in an undertone to Spacer Sanders.

  “Mad Max?” said Sanders just as quietly.

  “Yep. Mad Max. That’s what I call him. As good a name as any. Man like that’s got to have a nickname,” Ardoin said emphatically. “I’m telling you, he’s a genuine, certified, tactical genius. He’s going to be famous, and he’s got to have a nickname.”

  “Well, you’ll have to do better than that one, mate. I can’t see that name ever catching on as a nickname for a destroyer captain or, for that matter, anywhere else, either.”

  “Minister,” said Max to Wortham-Biggs, “who’s in command of the Rashidian forces in this engagement?”

  “That would be Admiral Jassir. On the battleship Saif, one of the moored ships. A very fine officer. One of his most exceptional qualities is that he is wise enough to know that he does not know everything.”

  “An uncommon trait in admirals, that’s for sure. Chin, do you have all the comm protocols from Equilateral ready to go?”

  “Affirmative, Skipper. Frequencies, encrypts, data transfer handshaking, everything.”

  “Outstanding. Please signal Admiral Jassir. Give the admiral my most respectful compliments and inform him that I urgently request the privilege of voice communications with him at the earliest opportunity.”

  Chin acknowledged the order, entered a few commands, and said a few sentences quietly into his headset. Not thirty seconds later, Chin announced, “Sir, Vice Admiral Jassir is standing by on your primary voice channel.”

  “I’ll take it here.” Chin hit a button and flipped a switch. The red AUDIO P/U LIVE light on Max’s console came on.

  Showtime.

  “This is Lieutenant Commander Maxime Robichaux, Union Space Navy, Commanding the destroyer Cumberland. Do I have the honor of addressing Vice Admiral Jassir?”

  “This is Admiral Jassir. It is a pleasure to speak with you, Captain Robichaux.

  “And a pleasure to speak with you, as well, Admiral. You are the first flag officer of your Navy I have ever had the honor of addressing.”

  “I am sure that we are little different from the flag officers of your Navy. I must say that I have been eager to make your acquaintance after having so enjoyed the tale of your arrival at the Ministry of Trade. Thanks to you, that facility’s groundskeepers need not be concerned with their job security for some time. In any event, how you managed the ambassador’s transport will make an interesting tale to add to our Navy’s rich body of lore.” Long silence. “Provided there is any Navy after today.”

  “Then,” Max quipped, “for the sake of my own status as a legendary figure, we’ll just have to make sure that there is.”

  “Indeed.” The admiral didn’t sound convinced. He sighed. “Captain, we have projected the likely outcomes of a conventionally fought encounter. They are not favorable. We can expect to impose, at most, losses of 65 percent upon the enemy force.”

  “Our projections are similar. If anything, they are more pessimistic.”

  “We have some unconventional tactics in mind that may even the odds somewhat, but our projections show that they are not enough. Given the likely outcome, any suggestions you might have, even if they are the kind of unorthodox methods that we hear you tend to employ, would be well received.”

  “Unorthodox suggestions are the only kind I make, Admiral. But first, I need a bit of information. May I ask a few questions?”

  “Proceed.”

  “Your ship and the other moored ships…they are on internal power, not on power supplied from the mooring facility, aren’t they?”

  “That is correct.”

  “What’s the power source?”

  “The same as on your vessels, standard auxiliary nuclear power units. They all have G.E.-Westinghouse compact, pressurized, water-cooled fission reactors, built on license by our naval reactor fabrication plant on Rashid V A. I believe that every human power uses the old Rickover-type fission units to provide auxiliary power when the fusion reactors are off-line.”

  “Will the Rickovers run inertial guidance, attitude control, maneuvering thrusters, and navigation scanners?”

  “Certainly. We like to be able to move the ships around the yard, get them in and out of repair hangars, and so on, without having to start the main reactor. But they can creep about at twenty or thirty meters a second at most.”

  “That’s all we’ll need. Can they fire missiles?”

  “No. As on your ships, the missiles are targeted using the main sensor array, which requires more power than the fission power plant can provide. Further, the missile tubes’ acceleration coils are not configured to receive power from the Rickover.”

  “What about fire control?”

  “Fire control runs off of the ship’s main power grid, which is tied to the Rickover so one can operate the console, but it is useless without the sensor array to generate the data to compute a firing solution.”

  “Unless it receives the data from some other source,” Max said to himself as much as to the admiral. “Okay. Can power be routed to the launch coils from the main grid? Just enough to get the missiles out of their tubes?”

  “What good would that do? They would never get past the Krag point defense batteries without the acceleration from the coils.”

  “Don’t worry about that for now. Sir. Can the power be rerouted?”

  “Let me ask one of my engineers.” There was a brief discussion in the background. “Affirmative. I am informed that it is a simple matter of operating a manual power shunt.”

  “One more question. Your fleet’s in a Clarke orbit. Are they over the deuterium separation plant?”

  “As a matter of fact, they are.”

  “Then you might want to warn the people in the plant to get to their radiation shelters. In about four and a half hours, things are going to get a little hot.”

  It had been a busy four hours, but everything that coul
d be done had been done, and the pieces were in place. As usual, Max made sure that everyone on board had the opportunity to eat before going into combat. This included the captain himself, who ate two of the ham sandwiches in his cooler, sandwiches that were already enshrined in the Cumberland’s developing oral tradition as the “exploding” ham sandwiches. The doctor had left CIC to be certain that the Casualty Station was ready to receive battle casualties, if any. As a result, he had been absent when the plan for the coming battle had been formulated. Upon his return to the Commodore’s Station, he found himself surrounded by people who refused to enlighten him as to what was in store.

  “Tactical data link with all vessels is stable. Refresh rate is six cycles per second, and every ship in the provisional task force has confirmed that it is receiving and compiling data from every other ship,” Chin announced.

  Max looked around the CIC. No surprises. Every man at his station doing his job. Maybe a bit nervously, but doing it nonetheless. And maybe not with the confident professionalism and calm proficiency that Max had become used to on the Emeka Moro and some of the other taut ships on which he had served, but head and shoulders above the brow-beaten, drug-addicted, down-hearted group of misfits who had greeted him when his feet had first touched the Cumberland’s deck two months ago. Admiral Hornmeyer was right when he said that these men have come a long way. If they could just live through the next hour or two, Max was resolved to take them even further.

  “All right, people,” Max announced to the CIC at large, “we’re the closer. We spend most of the game in the dugout, but come the bottom of the ninth, the manager puts us in, and it’s up to us to save the game. Until then, let’s stay alert and pay attention to what all the players are doing. We just might learn something.”

  “As expected, attacking force is forming up into its own version of a Daggett Dagger,” Bartoli said. “Enemy formation consists of twenty-five ships, positively identified as Dervish class Krag destroyers. Now at bearing two-two-five mark one-two-seven. Heading is one-three-seven mark two-three-five. Continuing to close at point-six-five c. First Rashidian fighter squadron has just gone buster.”

  The doctor turned to Max. “Buster?”

  “More ‘impenetrable pilot jargon,’ Doctor. It means that the fighters have kicked in their afterfusers. They’re injecting highly compressed pure deuterium into the densest part of the plasma stream in their thruster nozzles. That initiates a second-stage inertially confined fusion reaction, increasing thrust by about 50 percent, but cutting their fuel economy roughly in half. It’s analogous to going on afterburners in an old air-breathing jet.”

  Every man in CIC, and many men elsewhere in the Cumberland whose duties did not preclude them from doing so, was watching the events on a tactical repeater and could see what was happening. It was like watching another person playing a trideo game while knowing your own life might depend on the outcome.

  The first Rashidian fighter squadron, consisting of 12 SF-89 Qibli fighters, bore down on the Krag destroyers, which in turn made no effort to evade or expend precious ordinance on anything but their primary objective—the Rashidian capital ships moored helplessly in orbit around Rashid V B.

  Realizing that they would not be fired upon, the Qibli pilots held their fire until they reached the optimum range for their antiship missiles, designated only by the unexciting model number C-57D. Once they reached that point in space, a distance of eighty-five hundred kilometers from their targets, each fighter fired all six of its missiles. In an effort to overwhelm the Krag point defense systems with their somewhat less than state-of-the-art missiles, the Rashidians theorized that an effective tactic might be for each two-fighter element to fire all twelve of its missiles at a single destroyer.

  The twelve fighters selected the foremost six enemy destroyers, paired up against them, closed to optimum missile range, and fired. In three cases, the excellent Krag point defense and countermeasures systems engaged the Rashidian missiles and defeated them. In two others, a single missile got through and in another, two reached their mutual target. Each missile carried a 250-kiloton thermonuclear warhead that made quick work of the three unlucky Dervishes, swallowing them whole in newborn miniature suns of fiery destruction.

  Everyone in CIC knew what would happen next. Everyone was wrong. The first to catch on was Max, whose finely tuned tactical sense told him the exact point at which the fighters should veer off to return to their carrier. When they reached that point and continued to accelerate toward the Krag destroyers, forward deflectors on maximum and drives firewalled, he heard himself say, “Oh, God.”

  Wortham-Biggs nodded grimly, the only man not surprised. He spoke quietly. “These men know what is at stake, Captain. Their fleet, their Navy, their homes, their families, their whole world. And all mankind besides. I ask you, would you do anything differently?” He met the eyes of Max, DeCosta, Kasparov, Bartoli, Levy, and LeBlanc and saw his answer there.

  “I thought not. My brother issued a message to the fleet immediately before we left. He said that Rashid did not join the war just to fight alongside our brothers. We joined the war to turn the tide. And not only that, but that we were going to turn the tide. At the Battle of Rashid V B. These men are resolved to do that. At all costs. This is the day. This is the hour. Mankind’s victory over the Krag begins now.”

  Discerning the fighters’ unexpected intentions, the destroyers began firing their pulse cannons. The fighters evaded. They opened up their formation to give each other room and to reduce the likelihood that the destruction of one craft would damage another, and then began weaving, dodging, twisting, sliding, jinking in three dimensions as unpredictably as possible to elude the rapid, computer-directed fire.

  The Krag pulse cannons quickly eliminated three of the fighters, whose pilots were ever so slightly less skilled and inventive at evasive maneuvers than their fellows. Five more succumbed to pulse cannon fire as the range closed, making hits easier to score. Another was incinerated by a destroyer’s point defense batteries, obliterated by a weapon that normally operated as an antimissile missile. The warhead was not, of itself, powerful enough to destroy the tough little fighter, but at a relative closing velocity of more than 90 percent the speed of light, the impact between missile and fighter converted both into a cloud of glowing vapor and molten bits of metal, the eternal laws of kinetic energy rendering the missile’s tiny warhead irrelevant.

  Three fighters, however, eluded destruction by the Krag defenses. They smashed through the destroyers’ deflectors like howitzer shells through plywood, their impact on the hulls of their targets shattering the fighters and nearly obliterating the destroyers as an almost incalculable amount of kinetic energy transferred from one body to the other or was converted into heat and radiation. The fusion plasma that had been contained in the Krag reactors finished the job, leaving behind scarcely a particle of solid matter, consuming the wreckage in spectacular secondary explosions that blossomed in the hearts of, and then overwhelmed, the first set of fireballs.

  Chief Tanaka, after Chief Wendt the most senior enlisted man on the ship and a man who had seen more than his share of battles, said in a voice just loud enough to be heard throughout CIC, “Farewell, my brothers.”

  Several other men, Max included, almost reflexively said, “Amen.”

  Now it was the turn of the second squadron. The first squadron had approached the destroyers at roughly a 45-degree angle. The second came at the enemy from dead ahead, afterfusers engaged, their drives maxed, as the enemy was now aware that no man had any concern for fuel consumption or prolonging the service life of his craft’s engines. Before they got inside the range of the Krag pulse cannon, they spread out and began evasive maneuvers.

  Like the first group, they launched their full load of missiles when they reached optimum range from their targets. Unlike the first group, however, the fighters did not launch in pairs. The fighters attacked only six of th
e destroyers, but in this effort each fighter launched one of its six missiles at each of the target destroyers. In that way, each destroyer was targeted not just by twelve missiles, but by twelve missiles coming in from six different attack vectors, one from each fighter.

  As the Rashidian weapons lacked the Cooperative Interactive Logic Mode of the more advanced Union missiles, this was the best tactic for creating the greatest challenge for the Krag defenses. Compared to the first attack, it was more successful. Four of the destroyers targeted met swift thermonuclear ends, brief lightning flashes of death in the endless night.

  Like their late comrades, the pilots of the second squadron did not turn aside after firing, but bored in, weaving and dodging to evade and confuse the Krag pulse cannon fire, but otherwise on an unwavering course. Unlike their comrades, however, who had lined up with each fighter aiming for a different destroyer, these fighters lined up on attack vectors that demonstrated that each destroyer under attack was being attacked by two fighters, hoping to divide the destroyer’s defensive fire and point defense systems between them and increase the likelihood of one craft getting through. The tactic initially made no difference, as the fighters were still far enough away to be engaged by the pulse cannons of almost the entire destroyer formation, ships that were under attack and ships that were not being attacked alike. Direct hits quickly blew two of the twelve fighters to flaming atoms.

  But as the range closed and the fighters moved out of the firing arcs of the ships that were not being engaged, the fighters’ attack pattern started to pay off as each destroyer was faced with the difficult choice of focusing its fire on one of the fighters and ignoring the other, or of halving its effective firepower by dividing its attention between the two. Because the defensive fire was computer directed, each ship made the same decision, the statistically sensible but counterintuitive election to focus its fire on one of the two ships and ignore the other until the first was destroyed. In this way, two more fighters quickly met their end, the defiant light of their pilots’ courage and resolve snuffed out in an instant.