For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “Sensible. I’m available now if you would like to come to my day cabin.”

  “I’m on my way. Sahin out.”

  Max debated asking his steward or whoever had gash duty to clean up the mess, but decided against it. He was still picking up the pieces of the shattered coffee mug when the doctor arrived. Max waived his visitor to a chair, dropped the mug shards into a waste receptacle, and sat down.

  “I see your exaggerated startle response is still causing you problems,” Sahin said matter-of-factly.

  Damn. The man might be a babe in the woods on a starship, but his ability to observe minute details and fit them together into hypotheses about what other people were doing and thinking bordered on the uncanny. In this case, however, Max had little difficulty following the chain of deduction; after all, he was pretty good at reading “tells” himself. He caught it when the doctor glanced at the comm panel. A few errant drops of coffee were splashed where the mug had shattered, and two tiny specks of the mug itself were resting between some of the buttons. If a person were observant enough to spot the coffee and the mug pieces, and knowing that the panel had buzzed unexpectedly only a few moments before, it would be a simple matter to figure out what happened. If you noticed, that is.

  “Yes, I know better than to lie to you. I hide it pretty well when the men can see me, but I still jump pretty bad when I’m alone.”

  “You have come to understand the root of that response now, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Bram, we have been through this many times.”

  Max had undergone two major childhood traumas. First, when he was eight years old, he watched his mother and infant sisters die in a Krag biological warfare attack, after which his father almost immediately shuffled him off to the Navy. Max’s father died in an accident a few months later, and Max never saw him again. Only a year and a half after that, the cruiser on which Max served as a midshipman was boarded and taken by the Krag who killed, or tortured and killed, almost the entire crew. Max, however, survived, managing to avoid being killed or captured by hiding out for twenty-six days while the Krag relentlessly hunted him through the air ducts, access crawlways, and cable conduits.

  “You tell me, Bram, that my childhood experiences were all traumatic stresses triggering post-traumatic stress disorder, which, at its root, is an anxiety disorder. Although I am generally handling it well, part of my mind fears recurrence of these experiences and seeks to protect me from them by being constantly on guard with the fight-or-flight response set to a hair trigger. You call this ‘hypervigilance,’ which you described to me as the mind’s effort to keep me alive in a dangerous environment by monitoring every aspect of that environment very carefully. But it’s a strain on the mind and the body, like keeping a ship at General Quarters indefinitely.”

  “Generally correct,” said Sahin. “But you state that I am the one who says that these events were traumatic. You don’t admit it to yourself. Your refusal to admit the severity of these traumas is the foremost impediment to your progress in addressing your anxiety issues.”

  “Doctor, while I admit that these things were bad experiences, they were not as bad as you make out. We’re at war and these things are part of war. People experience horrible things. They live through them. They bear up. They go on with their lives.”

  “And some of them are horribly traumatized and become crippled by fears and neuroses and psychiatric disabilities requiring extensive treatment. You, my friend, are in denial. But we have spent too many hours on this subject for me to believe I am going to make progress on that issue any time soon. You will move forward when you are ready, and not before. Something will happen; sudden learning will take place, and the door will open. Until you are ready to open the door, it is useless for me to keep knocking. So, since I cannot get to the root of the poisonous plant, I am relegated to trimming the leaves. We have talked about some of the cognitive strategies for combating hypervigilance. Have you been applying those?”

  “Bram, that stuff is a lot more easily said than done. I’m supposed to work to convince myself that in this particular environment I am safe and can let down my guard. I have to tell you, though, that’s a lot easier when you’re sitting in a nice medical office on Earth or Bravo than when you’re in the Captain’s day cabin on a warship, in time of war, in a war zone, in which not only is my ship theoretically an object of sneak attack by the enemy, it actually was the subject of total surprise attack just a few days ago.”

  “I can see how that might be an issue, Max, but there is a critical distinction that you are missing. Although the ship is subject to being sprung upon unawares, crept up upon from behind, and fired upon when we are not looking, you—I mean you, personally—are not. As captain, you need to be certain that Officers DeCosta, Kasparov, Bartoli, Levy, and Bhattacharyya, as well as men like Chief Wendt and Chief LeBlanc, are ready for anything and can spring into action at a moment’s notice. You, on the other hand, do not have to keep your reflexes spring-loaded to deal with an attacker in the same room. You need not worry about some stealthy assassin tiptoeing up and blindsiding you from your eighteen hundred hour position.” Impressed by his own eloquence in the use of naval argot, the doctor allowed his face to take on a slightly smug expression.

  The smugness was short-lived. “That’s six o’clock position. Six. O’clock.”

  The doctor was crestfallen. “But I thought that ‘eighteen hundred hours’ and ‘six o’clock in the evening’ were equivalent expressions.”

  “They are when you’re telling time. But ‘six o’clock position’ is a way of giving a rough bearing to a target. It lets you give the angle of something you see with the Mark One Eyeball without having to calculate degrees. The numbers are based on the angles of the numbers on an old twelve-hour analog clock. Ever seen one?”

  “Oh, yes. I had never made the connection. Now it makes sense. Had that fact been explained to me in the first instance, I am certain that I would have understood it perfectly from the outset.”

  “I’m sure. Bram, as fascinating as this is, you told me that there was a matter affecting the welfare of the crew.”

  “Indeed I did. You are aware of your standing order requiring that any man who falls asleep at his post when we are running on a regular watch schedule be examined by me to determine whether there is a medical cause for his inappropriate choice of naptimes.”

  “That’s a standard standing order on most warships. I’ve always thought it should be a regulation. The watch schedule is set up so that every man gets enough rest. If a man is falling asleep on duty, chances are he’s got some sort of problem: medical, psychiatric, personal, whatever.”

  “You should be aware that four men have been referred to me pursuant to this regulation.”

  “Well, we’re almost three weeks into the month. I admit that four would be a bit unusual, but it’s not cause for alarm.”

  “Not four men this month. Four men in the last two days.”

  “Oh. That’s different. Okay. You have my attention. What’s the reason?”

  “The purely medical diagnosis in all four cases is identical. Exhaustion. They are not getting enough sleep. The computer keeps a wake/sleep log on all ship’s personnel based on biometric monitoring. Don’t worry—it is deeply confidential, CMO Eyes Only. But it shows them being awakened at all hours, usually for duty-related matters.”

  “Duty related? That’s not supposed to happen. Regulations prohibit a superior officer from waking a man during his sleep period absent a ship’s emergency or other compelling necessity, and if he does so, he is required to log who he woke, the date and time, and his reason.”

  “This was not superiors waking inferiors, but the other way around.”

  “Oh. That’s very different. Who are these men?”

  “If you order me to tell you, I will. This is not one of those confidences protected under the Navy’s atom-sized
notion of physician–patient privilege, but I would prefer not to say. I believe we can discuss the problem and you can provide a solution without knowing which specific men came to me.”

  “All right. I’ll go along. For now. I know you well enough to be able to tell that you think you have put this whole thing together and can explain the whole problem to me. You have that self-satisfied look on your face.”

  “I wouldn’t know about ‘self-satisfied,’ but yes, I do believe I have an understanding of what is going on. I talked to these men about the specific circumstances under which they were awakened—who woke them up and what for. I then looked at the wake/sleep logs for several other men similarly situated and they showed a similar, although not quite as severe pattern of disruption. Many of these men are also showing stress-related symptoms. I have identified seventeen men who are affected. If something is not done soon, they will all begin to suffer serious medical problems from sleep deprivation and nervous exhaustion.”

  “Why? I don’t understand. We’ve tossed Captain Oscar’s obsessive cleaning routines and insane reporting requirements out the airlock. We’ve arranged the training schedule so that it is reasonable and places only sensible demands on every department. Each section on each watch is being given only a small number of exercises to build proficiency. The scores are going up, the ratings are improving, and we’re making progress. Why should seventeen men be about to drop in the traces?”

  “Because they are pulling almost the whole load. They are carrying the ship.”

  The two sat together in silence. Then it clicked. That is what Max had been seeing. That’s what was wrong. As the proficiency demands became higher and higher, the crew was responding by relying more and more on the small number of men who either had a high level of proficiency and expertise to begin with or who were very fast learners. And as the supposed proficiency level of the section or department got higher and higher, and the exercises and the work took that higher level into account, they got further and further above the heads of most of the rest of the crew, who had to rely ever more heavily on that same small number of highly proficient men.

  The weak arm was letting the strong do all the work. And the work was now so hard that the strong arm was breaking. The strong needed the help of the weak. How do you strengthen the weak arm?

  Or the weak eye.

  “Doctor, isn’t there a disease called ‘lazy eye’ that children get sometimes?”

  “There are several conditions that receive that imprecise layman’s label. I presume that you are referring to strabismic amblyopia, a condition in which there is a misalignment of the eyes that results in the highly neuroplastic brain of the child essentially learning to not see or to reject the image from one of the eyes. It is often treated by realigning the eyes with surgery and then taking some sort of action to teach the brain to accept and process the signals from the disfavored eye.”

  “Exactly. Didn’t they used to put a patch over the strong eye to force the child to see through the weak one?”

  “A crude way to say it, but yes. When the brain was presented with only one image, the child’s brain quickly learned to accept the only available visual input. As soon as the brain is using both eyes with rough equality, the patch comes off and the problem is cured. But that is not the modern treatment.”

  “Why not?”

  “Children don’t like wearing the eye patch. The other children tease them. So, we pharmacologically penalize the good eye.”

  “You what?”

  “Pharmacologically penalize. Essentially, we put in eye drops that make the vision in the good eye blurry, so the brain will start relying on the weak eye.”

  “Then that is what we’re going to have to do. To make the weak eye strong, we’re going to have to make the strong eye weak.”

  “How do you plan to do that?”

  “First, I’m going to have to trouble you for those seventeen names.”

  “I understand.” He reached into a pocket of his tunic and pulled out a folded sheet of paper. “Here they are. I thought something like this might be necessary. And next? Are you going to tell the men that they have become too dependent upon these seventeen individuals and take them off duty, requiring the other men to shoulder the weight?”

  Max recoiled in abject horror. “Oh, no, Doctor. That would never do. If I take those seventeen men out of service completely, the ship would go to pieces. We can’t do without them entirely, or even most of the time. Plus, the reaction of the men to something like that would be a disaster. The seventeen would feel as though they were being punished for performing their jobs too well, which they would resent, and the remainder of the men would interpret the action as an implication that they are incompetent, which they would resent. We mustn’t foster resentment when we can avoid it. We’re going to have to do something else entirely.”

  “Captain, I very much fear that you are about to unveil one of your ruses.”

  “Doctor, I very much fear that you are right.”

  USS Cumberland DPA-0004: Ship’s Standing Order #15-14

  20 March 2315

  Effective immediately:

  Starting tomorrow and on every third day thereafter (Day 2 of every watch cycle) the persons listed on Attachment A will attend Special Leadership Development Training from 08:00 to 16:00 hours, with appropriate breaks for coffee, lunch, and so on, as determined by the person(s) conducting said training.

  So that the listed personnel may devote full attention to their studies and be appropriately rested, they are not to be disturbed by any person for any reason without the explicit permission of the CO or XO for the entire 24-hour period of the training day.

  As this training program imposes substantial additional work requirements, the listed personnel are to be exempt from any duty-related requirements on Days 1 and 3 of the watch cycle except when they are on watch. They are not to be disturbed by any person for any reason when they are off watch, without the explicit permission of the CO or XO.

  The listed personnel are similarly prohibited from engaging in any activities related to their regular duties on Day 2 of the watch cycle or when they are off watch without explicit permission of the CO or XO.

  The provisions of this standing order are automatically suspended when the ship is at general quarters.

  Having written and posted the general order, Max spent a few hours at his workstation, slogging through the endless bureaucratic minutiae that seemed to be one of the primary burdens of command. He had his supper brought to him. It was outstanding. The Cumberland was still eating high on the hog with provisions purchased on Rashid IV and given to the ship by Mr. Wortham-Biggs in exchange for information that he had been unknowingly selling supplies to the Krag through intermediaries.

  Max dined on fruit cocktail, shrimp and crab gumbo (alas, the Rashidians did not cultivate oysters, which would have been a delightful addition), Cajun potato salad (potatoes, eggs, mayonnaise, and some mild seasonings, without all the chopped vegetables that usually go into potato salad), fresh French bread, and strawberry pie.

  Between the Rashidian supplies and having a couple of Cajuns and a few more men of Southern descent in the galley, Max was starting to worry about gaining weight and being assigned mandatory workouts with the Chub Club, crew members found to be overweight and under medical orders for exercise over and above normal requirements. He hadn’t eaten so well since the four months he had attended the Navy’s Covert Operations and Unconventional Warfare School on his homeworld of Nouvelle Acadiana five years ago. Max ate at the keyboard, reading a series of newly issued intelligence estimates on Krag intentions and capabilities in the Cumberland’s current operational area. According to Intel, the Krag were about to begin a considerable push in this sector.

  Unless, of course, they decided to consolidate their previous conquests and adopt a defensive stance for the ti
me being, before initiating a major push sometime in the future.

  Unless, of course, this sector had been indefinitely downgraded to a secondary theater in favor of major operations to take place against Task Force Sierra Bravo (Admiral Middleton’s force).

  Take your pick.

  Intel. Useless. No, that wasn’t true. When you got an Intel guy in the same room with you, you could usually get some decent answers out of him, and if you could get your hands on the intermediate level reports prepared by the Intel officers attached to the task forces, you could learn a lot. But the top level reports out of Norfolk were so full of caveats and weasel words that they meant virtually nothing. If the top Intel brass put as much effort into being right as they did into not saying anything that could later turn out to be wrong, they might get somewhere. If those guys played poker, they would try to raise, call, and fold at the same time.

  Older, more tired, but no wiser, Max turned his attention to a series of projections from NAVSUP, more fully known as the Naval Supply Systems Command, estimating the quantities of fuel, foodstuffs, ordinance, replacement parts, and other supplies that would be delivered to Task Force Tango Delta and other forces under Admiral Hornmeyer’s command over the next forty-five days.

  The Pfelung contribution to the war effort was starting to make itself felt. As an Associated Power, the Pfelung brought one considerable asset to the table in addition to their not inconsiderable Navy: deuterium. Not only were they a prime producer of the vital fuel, they were a prime producer located close to where the fighting was going on, meaning that the fleet now had a significant source of fuel that didn’t have to be hauled almost a thousand light years from the Core Systems or produced in newly constructed separation plants or portable units. As a result, total tonnage was up by almost 25 percent, as shipping capacity freed up by the Pfelung’s fuel production was used for other transport.

  NAVSUP estimated that the increase would eventually reach 40 percent, when production from the Pfelung system’s Europa-like ice moon Pfelung VII C, known locally as Strulp, was fully ramped up. The logistics bean counters hadn’t even begun to put together figures on how much difference Rashid’s contribution was going to make, particularly given that Rashid also had a substantial deuterium production facility as well as industrial capacity on Rashid V A that came close to matching some of the second or upper third tier of industrial worlds in the Core Systems.