For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “Why is precise range so important?” The doctor set his criticism aside, for now.

  “Because we need to remain within 10,500 kills of the enemy in order to hit him with our pulse cannon, but if we stray within 9,987 kills, we will be within range of their pulse cannon, which has a backup optical aiming mode impervious to jamming, and with five destroyers, each armed with four forward pulse cannons, they could pound us to dust in about five seconds.”

  He looked over his shoulder at Bartoli, who nodded in confirmation that, under those circumstances, the Cumberland’s destruction would indeed require roughly five seconds.

  “Is that not a rather narrow margin, particularly given velocities at which we are travelling?”

  “It is, but we are in the capable hands of Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Fleishman. I have every confidence.”

  “From which I am sure I take the most profound reassurance.” Sahin’s tone of voice said otherwise.

  The two men fell into silence. CIC was quiet except for the occasional report from a man at his station, calmly acknowledged by Max. The signs of increasing tension were evident even without the doctor’s acute powers of observation. The shuffling of feet, the drumming of fingers, the variety of ways that men had of dealing with sweaty palms and churning stomachs. DeCosta literally found himself unable to sit down, and was prowling CIC, looking over the shoulders of the watch standers, asking them, in the friendliest terms, extremely specific and detailed questions about what they were doing and about their systems and data sources.

  As DeCosta was stepping from one station to the other, Max met his eyes and then stared pointedly at the XO station. DeCosta got the point and sat back down in his seat. As soon as the younger officer settled in, Max stood up, moved over until he was standing beside the XO’s console, and pointed to one of the tactical displays, leaning in as though to discuss some point of maneuvering or tactics.

  Instead, he said softly, “XO, you don’t want to bounce around CIC like that. It makes the men think one of two things, both of them bad: that you don’t have confidence in them or that you’re too nervous to sit down. It’s best to stay at your station unless you have a particular reason to get up.”

  He pointed to a different part of the display, maintaining the charade that he was talking to the XO about something there. “Working as a senior officer rather than someone who is actually operating a system or is analyzing a specific kind of data is hard to get used to. It leaves you feeling like you have nothing to do but worry. Breathe deeply, slowly, regularly, from the diaphragm, to calm your nerves. Always have your coffee or whatever it is you like to drink at your station. Holding a coffee cup or a can of juice gives you something to do with your hands. Sit still and don’t fidget. If you need something to do, use your console to pull up the other displays around CIC, see what everyone else is looking at, and then see what control inputs are coming from the various consoles—that tells you whether the folks at those consoles are paying attention and staying on top of things. But do it deliberately and calmly—not like you’re in a hurry or in a way that conveys nervousness. Understood?”

  The young man nodded. “Yes, sir.” Max heard something in the young man’s tone that wasn’t quite right. He needed a little bit more. Well, that’s what skippers do.

  “You’re a good officer, DeCosta, and you’ve got the makings of a damn good XO—you’ve got the tactical, systems, and ship-handling parts of the job down cold. But that’s about half the job. The other half is leadership, and two thirds of that is exemplifying in your own conduct the qualities you would most wish to see in that of the men. That means more than telling them what to do and more than showing them what you want every now and then. It means living the example. It means being what you want them to become, every minute of every day. That make sense to you?”

  “Perfect sense, sir. And Skipper?”

  “Yes, XO.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “For taking the time to explain that to me. In the middle of a battle. When you have so much else on your mind.”

  Max smiled at a pleasant memory. “Commodore Middleton told me that the middle of a battle is one of the best times to learn. He said, ‘There’s nothing like the prospect of sudden, violent death to focus the mind.’ Think nothing of it. It’s my job.”

  “Well, sir, no one has ever taken much of an interest in my development as an officer before.”

  “Not true. I know for sure that someone else has.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Admiral Hornmeyer. He picked you for this billet personally.” Max slapped him on the shoulder. Two quick, sharp pops.

  “Skipper,” Bartoli called out, “the lead Krag destroyer is powering up his pulse cannon. He’s just gone to Prefire. I don’t get it. We’re out of range. They can’t hit us.”

  “Maybe they don’t know that,” said the doctor, drawing several barely “what a stupid remark” glares and snorts from various CIC personnel.

  “He’s gone to Ready.” Pause. “Firing.”

  One of the optical scanners on the hull automatically locked onto the incoming ball of brilliant plasma and followed it as it approached, a tiny speck that slowly grew to the apparent size of a pea before exploding hundreds of kilometers away from the Cumberland. Because the coolant that preserved the containment field generator was exhausted, the generator was destroyed by the plasma that surrounded it, and the released plasma violently expanded in a blast very similar to a small thermonuclear explosion. There was a collective breath of relief.

  “Uh, sir?” Bartoli didn’t sound the way one would want a tactical officer to sound after an enemy weapon has just exploded short.

  “Yes, Bartoli?”

  “The extreme outer range of Krag pulse cannon is supposed to be 9,987 kills. Well, that one just went 10,298 before detonating. More than two standard deviations beyond the average range.”

  Shit.

  Bartoli continued. “They must have made some sort of modification. If we assume that this bolt was more or less average, and given the standard deviation of range previously observed in Krag pulse cannon bolts, and given our current range, we can expect something like one round in four to have the range to reach us. Given the observed accuracy of their optical targeting system and extrapolating to the current range, and taking both factors into account—range and accuracy—we can expect to be hit by something between one in six and one in fifteen of their shots, depending on the breaks and depending on where that first round falls on the range bell curve. But sir, I have no idea what they did.”

  “I do,” said Levy.

  Max spun to face the young weapons officer. “Shoot, son.”

  “I put my back room on watching the sensor take on the Krag weapons as soon as I thought they might shoot, just to see if I could learn anything. The difference was apparent as soon as they fired—lower color temperature of the plasma. Turns out they reduced the amount of plasma in the bolt without reducing the size of the containment field. So, it’s at a lower pressure, meaning lower temperature, meaning the coolant in the field generator lasts longer before it gives out and the generator is vaporized. Buys them more range.”

  “Good job, Levy. Why did they stop firing?”

  “First shot was likely an experiment, sir, to see if the modification worked. Now that they see that it does, they’re busy modifying their pulse cannon plasma control software in the other three pulse cannons on the lead ship and in all four tubes on the other ships and, when they get that done in a few minutes, they’ll open up on us with all twenty tubes.”

  “I can hardly wait,” Max said. “And there’s no helping it because, if we pull out of their range, then the range will be too long for us as well, and then the cat is out of the bag. Looks like we’re going to have to take some hits, people. Deflector control, rear deflectors to full. Damage Control,
have DC parties stand ready to receive damage from enemy action in frames seven through twelve. Maneuvering, when they start firing again, execute evasive maneuvers at your discretion.” Max trusted LeBlanc’s judgment in how best to dodge the enemy fire.

  As all of those orders were acknowledged, Max turned to Chin. “Mister Chin, One MC.” One Main Circuit—since before World War II, the naval name for the main voice channel heard throughout the ship.

  “Aye, sir, One MC.”

  The light went on. “Men, we’re about to start receiving enemy fire. We’ll have to take it for a few minutes. Stay at your stations. Do your jobs. DC parties, you’ve been trained for this. Keep your heads and do what the old timers tell you to do and you’ll be fine. Men, you are equal to this challenge. Skipper out.”

  Just over a minute passed without a word spoken in CIC save routine reports and acknowledgments. Then, Max could almost feel Bartoli tense up. “All five hostiles going to Prefire on pulse cannons. All four tubes on each.” A few seconds. “All tubes now at Ready…firing.”

  The displays tied into the aft optical scanners picked up the cluster of twenty tiny incandescent pinpricks spat out by the Krag destroyers. The tiny stars slowly grew larger on the screen as every sphincter in the compartment puckered. LeBlanc was watching something on his console intently and muttering to his men in a low voice. Then, when the pinpricks had grown to pea sized, one of them exploded. It had come to the end of its extended range. Then another. Then two more. Then three. Then eight in quick succession, leaving five that were now very close.

  His expert eye judging the relative positions and ranges of the five remaining bolts, LeBlanc brought his left hand down smartly onto the right shoulder of the man at Yaw and snapped out, “Port, to the stop,” and then brought his right hand in the same manner down on the left shoulder of Pitch, “Up, to the stop.” Yaw turned his yoke all the way to the left while pitch pulled his all the way back. The agile ship pulled hard “up” and to the left. Half a second later, his hand landing on Yaw’s shoulder, LeBlanc said, “Back off a quarter.” Yaw turned his yoke one-fourth of the way between the stop and the center position. The ship straightened out slightly.

  Four pulse cannon bolts zoomed past the Cumberland and exploded. The fifth, its containment field disrupted by the ship’s drive trail, detonated harmlessly in the destroyer’s wake. LeBlanc gave the orders to return the ship to its base course. The ship straightened out and steadied on its former course, and Sauvé reestablished the lock his jamming transmitters had on the Krag missile targeting sensors, with about six-tenths of a second to spare before they were able to generate a firing solution.

  “They’re all at Prefire again,” said Bartoli. “All twenty tubes.” A pause. “Now at Ready…firing.” Again, twenty star points appeared on the optical displays, only instead of all of them simply growing larger, meaning that they were all targeted exactly on the Cumberland, most of them seemed to move ever so slowly, down, left, or right against the stellar background, indicating that they were targeted at points slightly offset from the ship’s position, in a firing pattern designed to bracket the ship so that in whatever direction it dodged, there would be a pulse cannon bolt in the vicinity.

  “Skipper,” Levy said, “My optical readings show that these bolts have a significantly lower color temperature than the others, meaning that they have much lower pressures and heat levels. My rough estimate is that they all have the range to reach us, sir, but that there is going to be a major drop in explosive yield. At least 30 percent, maybe more.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Levy.” Yes, thank you so very, very much Mr. Levy for the wonderful news. Oy vey.

  “Maneuvering, expect little or no attrition on this pattern,” said Max.

  LeBlanc knew what to do. He gave the orders to his people. Another violent maneuver. The ship headed at Emergency toward the edge of the slowly spreading pattern of glowing plasma spheres. LeBlanc had eyeballed the pattern carefully and found the two bolts at the edge that, due to random variation, were the farthest apart, and headed toward the gap between them.

  WHAM! Max felt as though he had been driving in a ground car that was rear ended by a delivery truck. The inertial compensators took out most of the blow, but that didn’t keep everyone from feeling as though their eyeballs were bouncing off the bulkheads. Two pulse cannon bolts had detonated within a kilometer of the ship, their plasma shock waves striking the Cumberland’s deflectors hard enough to give her a hard kick in the behind.

  LeBlanc ordered the ship back to its base course so that sensor jamming could be restored in what should have been, once again, in the nick of time. Unfortunately, the direct path between one of the destroyer’s jamming emitters and the targeting sensor arrays on the Krag destroyer at the far left edge of the formation—but only that destroyer—went right through the fireball created by one of the Krag plasma bolts and was disrupted for three additional tenths of a second. This was not long enough for the Krag ship to lay down the lengthy series of polyphasic, polarized, multiplaned, multifrequency scans that would give it a clear picture of what was ahead, but it was good enough to give it a firing solution on a warship only 10,500 kilometers ahead. The same explosion disrupted the Cumberland’s passive sensors to such an extent that it was not able to detect this fact.

  Accordingly, no one on board the Union destroyer was expecting incoming missiles until Bartoli called out, “Vampire, vampire, vampire! Hotel One has just fired missiles, Foxhound type. Full spread of six. No other launches.”

  Thank goodness for small favors. Six missiles were quite enough to lend excitement to the day. None of the men said a word, retched, passed out, or otherwise displayed any fear or emotion of any kind. Midshipman Gilbertson, only nine years old, was not quite so stoic. To his credit, his only reaction was to whisper a single word. “Shit.”

  Max thought, irrelevantly, that some one should put the young man on report. There was no evading the attack; the evasive maneuvers necessary to get away from missiles would not only break the jamming lock that was preventing the Krag from being able to see ahead, which was the entire purpose of their tactics, but would also allow all the other ships to fire their missiles. We don’t want to go there, do we? There was only one thing to do. “Maneuvering, go to Emergency and turn the handle.”

  “You heard him,” LeBlanc said to Fleishman at Drives.

  Fleishman shoved the main sublight drive controller all the way to the stop and then grasped the ring just under the knob on the lever, rotating it one-half turn clockwise. That turn sounded a tone and lit a purple light in Engineering, signaling that department to take out all of the safety interlocks and governors on the system and to cause it to generate as much thrust as possible without actually melting down the drive or blowing up the ship.

  The purple status light on the Drives console illuminated a second later, showing that Engineering had complied with the signal. The additional speed would not cause the ship to be able to outrun the missiles, but it would decrease their relative speeds, giving the point defense systems more time to respond and therefore a higher probability of destroying the incoming weapons.

  The Krag missiles were equipped with a cooperative attack mode similar to that of the Union weapons, but—at least for now—the Union jamming technology was sufficient to prevent the missiles from communicating with each other. Each weapon was on its own.

  Accordingly, each sensed the location of its brothers and veered off so that they could all approach from amidships, each from a different direction. At six thousand kilometers, the Cumberland’s electronic defense systems engaged the missiles, sweeping them with electromagnetic energy of various frequencies, polarizations, and phases, in order to confuse or disrupt the missiles. Two succumbed to the attack, one detonating and the other losing its target lock and wandering into a useless trajectory.

  As soon as the remaining four missiles got within forty-five hundred kil
ometers, the destroyer’s active missile defense system engaged them. A swarm of forty tiny Terrier antimissile missiles issued from a launch bay near the stern. Having already received their targeting instructions, the Terriers divided into four packs of ten, each pack closing rapidly on one of the attacking weapons. The attackers fought back, varying their courses to evade the defenders, broadcasting confusing electronic signals, then going silent and stealthy to evade detection, and finally transmitting high-energy pulses designed to fry the electronics of the tiny hunters.

  In this war of missile versus missile, two of the Krag weapons were overwhelmed. Three Terriers penetrated the first Foxhound’s defenses and exploded in its path, the shrapnel produced by their demise shredding the Foxhound into useless scrap. The second Foxhound had run at a deceptively slow speed, and when the Terriers committed to an intercept trajectory at that speed, accelerated at the last minute. The Terriers, however, though lacking true Cooperative Interactive Logic Mode attack software, did have a rudimentary communications ability, which caused the missiles to arrive upon distributed solutions to certain kinds of intercept calculations, sending a few missiles ahead and a few missiles behind the most probable enemy trajectory, just in case one of the operative assumptions proved to be wrong. Accordingly, two Terriers were not “fooled” by the Foxhound’s deception and were ready and waiting when it accelerated away from the remaining defending weapons. They intercepted it easily, destroying it with a combination of their small warheads and the enormous kinetic energy of projectiles colliding at high sublight velocities.

  That left two. At two thousand kilometers, the Cumberland automatically engaged the missiles with its rail guns, electromagnetically accelerating tiny projectiles to over half the speed of light in rapid-fire succession, sensors adjusting the aim to try to cause the stream of pebble-sized “bullets” and the incoming missile to intersect, destroying the latter. One missile was quickly obliterated in this fashion, its tiny fusion reactor chamber penetrated by two of the rail gun projectiles and filling the surrounding space with plasma. This plasma, however, so disrupted the rail gun targeting scanners that they were unable to engage the last missile, which aimed itself for the center of the Cumberland’s mass.