Then there were the Romanovans. Were they even going to be allies? Their enormous potential contributions weren’t even a gleam in NAVSUP’s eyes.
The shipping increase resulting from in-sector fuel production meant fewer ships sitting idly in rear areas waiting for repair and replacement parts to arrive, fewer ships being sent into combat without a complete loadout of missiles in their racks; more and better food on the men’s plates; better inventories in the ships’ spare equipment bays; more rapid issuance and installation of improved and upgraded sensors, computers, fire control systems, point defense batteries, and weapons; and a subtle but measurable increase in the fleet’s combat effectiveness and ability to inflict death and destruction upon the enemy.
Good news for everyone. Except the Krag.
As hopeful as this news was in terms of the impact on the war (even so, Max’s rough calculations told him that it was not enough to overcome Krag advantages in production capacity and population, but it did narrow the margin), the reports themselves were deadly dull, even in comparison to other naval reports. Max had several hours’ worth of material through which he had to wade, much of which consisted of tables listing the tonnage of various commodities projected to be made available in the sector month by month. There was no way that his brain was going to assimilate any of that stuff unless he gave it a break.
He decided to go to the wardroom to see what the galley had put out for midrats. Max had been serving as a midshipman on warships for three years before he learned that “midrats” stood for “midnight rations” and not for “midshipmen eat rats” or something to that effect. Starting at 00:00 and lasting until the culinary staff needed to clear for breakfast, the galley crew set food out in the wardroom and the enlisted mess. It wasn’t anything fancy, just dinner leftovers, sandwich makings, dinner rolls, sweet rolls, and a rotating variety of donuts, gelatin, fruit, cakes, pies, and cookies, and other simple but sustaining food on a self-serve, all-you-care-to-eat basis.
There were a lot of things the Navy did that just made good sense, and this was one of them. On a warship, there were men doing hard physical work and standing watches around the clock. The very least the Navy could do for these men was to make sure that they didn’t go hungry as they worked through the night, and no man had to go to his rack with an empty stomach after a long day’s duty.
Max made himself a salami and pastrami sandwich, and snagged a couple of kosher pickles, a handful of chips, three (or was it four) chocolate brownies, and two tall iced glassfuls of the reconstituted-from-powder, artificially flavored fruit beverage that, dating back to the days of the saltwater navies, has been known as “bug juice.” According to a rumor that Max had never verified, the powder from which bug juice was made also served the galley staff as an abrasive cleanser. Sometimes, Max wanted to know whether the rumor was true. Most of the time, he didn’t. There were things that men, even captains, simply should not know.
Thus fortified, Max was ready to spend some more time trying to keep up to date in the larger picture of what was happening in the war. He was walking from the wardroom to his quarters when Midshipman Hewlett overtook and passed him in the corridor, moving as fast as his little legs could carry him without running. Hewlett was the second smallest of the “squeakers,” “deck dodgers, “panel puppies,” or “hatch hangers,” the youngest group of midshipmen, the boys taken on the ship to be inducted into the satisfactions, the adventure, the dangers, and the hardships of naval service.
As the cream of the Navy’s future, all 1025 millimeters of him, whizzed past, Max noticed that the young man had around his waist a web belt, the kind made for holding hand grenades, and that in the web belt were sixteen or seventeen ping-pong balls painted in an altogether festive but distinctly non-naval array of pastels that looked as though they would be more at home at a bridal shower than on a destroyer in a war zone. Max chuckled to himself. He hadn’t seen an Easter Egg Hunt in years.
Mr. Hewlett’s miniature legs could carry him only so fast, so Max didn’t have to exert much effort to fall in behind the diminutive hatch hanger who, according to the time-sanctified rules of the Easter Egg Hunt, was prohibited from running. The midshipman rounded a corner and opened a hatch that admitted him to a room full of equipment storage lockers.
Max peeked in the door and saw Hewlett pull a padcomp out of his web belt, consult it hurriedly, and then go straight to the fifth locker on the aft wall, deftly operate the latch, reach inside, and pull out another ping-pong ball. This ball was a color that Max recognized as being called “sea-foam,” a word that he knew only by virtue of having seen, on what was still called “movie night” although the last conventional motion picture was filmed in 2023, a tridvid comedy about the mayhem, hijinks, and hilarity that ensued when identical twin brides married identical twin husbands and insisted that all the bridesmaids and groomsmen also be twins. Max remembered not getting most of the jokes.
Hewlett stuck the ball in his web belt with the others, closed the locker, and engaged the latches. Max quickly ducked out of sight into an access crawlway alcove until the boy had emerged and was going down the corridor again. If this hunt held to form, the next “egg” would be on another deck, in an entirely different part of the ship. Max knew that the boy was nearly done with the hunt because it looked as though his web belt held close to eighteen of the ping-pong balls. Easter Egg Hunts always contained eighteen “eggs.”
An Easter Egg Hunt was an old naval training exercise for midshipmen. A midshipman was issued a padcomp with the locations of eighteen “eggs” located throughout the ship. The locations were given only by the official name of the location, such as “Main Engineering Emergency Equipment Locker #4.” The locations were all places to which midshipmen have authorized access, and other than being put in those locations, the eggs were not hidden in any way. They were painted in festive pastels, to stand out on a warship. Mids were to retrieve the eggs in the order listed on their padcomps, not run at any time, and not ask for help unless in some sort of trouble. A mid could ask the ship’s computer for help, but only to show him the location of the egg, and then only with a thirty-second time penalty. He couldn’t ask the computer how to get to the location, on pain of spending twenty-four hours in the brig.
Max had no desire to chase after the midshipman to whatever far corner of the Cumberland held the final ping-pong ball or two, particularly since the path to the last “egg” usually involved crawling through an air handling shaft, worming through one of the more circuitous of the cable conduits, or traversing a narrow catwalk over a crackling, snapping, fully charged polaron differentiation grid. Instead, Max headed for where Easter Egg Hunts always end, the junior midshipmen’s lounge.
Because junior midshipmen are subject to orders by almost everyone else on the ship, not to mention being the objects of a fair amount of good-natured teasing, mostly from the senior midshipmen, they were provided with a sanctuary from all that. The junior midshipman’s lounge was off limits to all personnel except the midshipmen’s trainer, a few of the ship’s most senior officers (who, by tradition, entered rarely and only for a specific purpose), and the junior midshipmen themselves.
Max keyed in his entry code, palmed the lock, and stepped through the hatch. As always, one middie was posted just inside the door against just this contingency. When the boy saw that the man coming through the hatch was the captain, his eyes went wide. But to his credit, he did not freeze at all but performed his function without any appreciable delay.
He sprang from a sitting position to ruler-straight attention so abruptly that Max swore he could hear joints cracking, and barked out, “Captain on deck!” with as much authority as he could muster, doing a creditable job, notwithstanding the pitch of his voice falling in the frequency range depicted by the treble rather than the bass clef.
The other five deck dodgers all snapped to attention. Chief Petty Officer Tanaka, the midshipmen’s trainer w
ho stepped into the position upon the death of the beloved “Mother Goose” Chief Amborsky, gazed pointedly at a line formed by the joinder of two deck plates, resulting in the boys’ quickly shuffling a few centimeters forward or back until the toes of their boots exactly met the line. He then walked down the line, directing the boys silently with his eyes, subtle gestures, and an occasional touch to nudge a shoulder a bit further back or a chin a bit higher.
When his charges had come to attention in a manner that met his truly exacting standards, Tanaka turned with precision that could be bested only by a mechanical device, snapped out a perfect drill manual salute, and announced, “Captain, Chief Petty Officer Tanaka reporting five squeakers, cords cut but still damp, plus one in the Casualty Station and one on an Easter Egg Hunt, sir.”
Max returned the salute. “Very well. Chief, I saw Mr. Hewlett retrieving one of your eggs from the firefighting equipment lockers. I believe you will be seeing him very shortly. With your permission, I would like to stay for the Basket Lesson.”
By custom, this was the chief’s turf and the training of the mids, his responsibility. Even as august a person as the captain entered, watched, or participated only at the midshipmen’s trainer’s invitation. Tanaka nodded his acceptance.
“Thank you. Carry on, Chief.”
“Thank you, sir.” He turned to his charges. “Midshipmen, as you were.” The boys returned to the seats they had occupied before Max came in. The compartment was small, but comfortable, with a few couches; tables that could serve equally well as dining, studying, or game tables surrounded by chairs; plus a few lounge-type chairs; a tridvid unit; and—glaring down at the proceedings as they did in every junior midshipmen’s lounge in every ship in the fleet—two icons of military virtue, presented to the boys as models worthy of emulation: Patton and Litvinoff.
As he always did when entering the lounge, Max took a moment to examine the images. General George Smith Patton, Jr., “Old Blood and Guts,” was shown in a photograph taken circa 1943 when he was a lieutenant general commanding the United States Army’s Second Corps fighting Rommel’s forces in North Africa. Patton was in a field uniform, wearing a three-starred helmet, with binoculars hanging from his neck, standing outside what looked to be a North African village, using his riding crop to indicate something in the distance to the men standing around him, his eyes and his mind clearly focused on that faraway objective and how to take or destroy it.
From the set of his mouth, he was clearly saying something, perhaps giving an order, his words now lost to history. Here was Patton in his element—in the field with his troops, radiating confidence and authority, leading his men. It occurred to Max that if Old Blood and Guts had been given an opportunity to select which of the thousands of photographs taken of him in World War II would be hanging on this wall in this time in this place, he might well have picked that very picture.
Admiral Vladimir Nickolai Litvinoff, “the Fighting Czar,” was shown in a two-dimensional capture from the famous tridvid documentary shot in the CIC of the Battleship Actium at the Battle of Rackham III on 2 November 2305. Litvinoff, then a rear admiral, was in the Working Uniform with Arms, the simple blue jumpsuit worn day to day on most warships, carrying his M-1911 sidearm and boarding cutlass, the latter looking more like a broadsword on his diminutive frame.
The image was taken at the pivotal moment of that crucial battle. Thanks to the documentary, those few minutes were engraved indelibly in the collective memory of virtually the entire human race: the task force under Litvinoff’s command seemed on the verge of being wiped out by a numerically superior Krag force. The fleet carrier James A. Lovell had just jumped in and could not launch its fighters until its systems were restored from the jump, a process that would require five critical minutes. The four officers seen in the image, staring grimly into the 3D tactical plot with Litvinoff, had just unanimously advised the admiral that his task force faced almost certain destruction unless he withdrew it immediately, abandoning the Lovell and its four squadrons of Valkyrie fighters to certain annihilation. The senior of them, Captain Fouché, had just said “Admiral, we must preserve this fleet. We must withdraw.”
Of all the men in that CIC, only Litvinoff believed that he could hold off the Krag until the fighters launched, and that he could then concentrate them and his reserve against the two battleships anchoring the Krag line, break the enemy formation, and turn defeat into victory. The image froze history at that moment: the admiral’s chin jutting out defiantly, his right hand pointing to where his force was plotted, as he said, “Withdraw? Not today. Not one meter. We will hold this line.”
And as everyone knows, it went just as the Admiral envisioned: line held, fighters deployed, forces concentrated, and Krag formation broken. A famous victory won. Litvinoff, whose reputation as a great fighting commander was secured on that day, was now a grand admiral, in overall command of all the Navy’s forces fielded against the Krag.
Max saluted first the admiral and then the general. It was the custom. Navy men saluted heroes even if, as in Patton’s case, they had been dead for centuries and were part of a service only distantly related to the modern space-faring Navy.
At that moment, the lock on the hatch cycled, and Midshipman Hewlett burst into the compartment, flew across the room (running was allowed in the lounge), and emphatically slapped the STOP button on the large timer mounted on the far bulkhead, halting the clock at 1:32:17. The boy then turned around and, for the first time, noticed that both Chief Tanaka and Max were in the room. Hewlett knew he was supposed to salute and report, but he didn’t know the rule to apply in this situation. Salute and report to the senior officer present? Salute and report to the person whose orders he was executing? Salute them both and then give his report? He froze.
Tanaka instantly deduced what the problem was. “Mr. Hewlett,” he said, his pronunciation exceptionally precise, his tone patient, “while the captain is the senior officer present, you have just executed my order. In that case, military courtesy dictates that you salute and report to me, then salute the senior officer.”
“Aye, aye, Chief.” The boy turned to face straight at Tanaka, pulled himself up to the limits of what little height he possessed, raised his hand to a salute, and rattled out, “Midshipman Hewlett, reporting all eighteen eggs retrieved. No problems to report.”
Tanaka returned the salute. “Very well, Midshipman.” Hewlett snapped his hand back down, pivoted to face Max, and raised his hand to another salute, just as smart as the first.
“Captain,” he said simply.
Max returned the salute. “Midshipman. Carry on.”
The boy turned back to Tanaka, who said, “At ease, Midshipman. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Hewlett then emptied the contents of his web belt into a plastic bin sitting on one of the tables and stood beside the table at parade rest. Tanaka quickly sorted the ping-pong balls, each of which bore a tiny numeral, written with a marker in Tanaka’s own handwriting. After verifying that all eighteen “eggs” were present and genuine, Tanaka turned to Hewlett.
“That’s all eighteen. As for the time, Mr. Hewlett, I’ve seen better. I’ve seen a lot better.” And then, just as bitter disappointment started to write itself across the boy’s miniature features, the chief let just a hint of a smile show as he added, “But on a first hunt, I have also seen much, much worse. The official ship’s record for the worst hunt by a midshipman is four hours, twenty-three minutes, and two seconds. But that’s not all. Every now and then I run into some poor, bedraggled boy who got sent out last year. He’s still crawling through the ship somewhere looking for that last egg. He hasn’t a clue where the port EM sensor array signal accumulation and initial processing unit is located.” Hewlett’s face brightened.
“I know where. It’s on B Deck, amidships, starboard side, in that little equipment bay just aft of CIC. It has ‘port’ in the name, not because it’s on the por
t side of the ship, but because it takes in sensor inputs from the port-side arrays.”
Damn. Max bet that the XO hadn’t learned the location of that unit yet.
“Correct. Now I know not to put any eggs there until the next batch of squeakers arrives. Now, Mr. Hewlett,” Tanaka continued, “as you are the first of this group to complete a hunt, and as each of your classmates will embark on one either today or tomorrow, could you please tell your shipmates why you did it?”
That seemed to stump him. “Because I was ordered to do it by Chief Petty Officer First Class Tanaka?” he said lamely.
“That is a literally correct and responsive answer, but not what I was looking for, Mr. Hewlett.” The chief’s voice sounded infinitely patient and understanding, yet somehow managed to convey the slightest flavor of disappointment. “What I want to know is if you can tell me the purpose of the exercise. And make no mistake, my little tadpoles, although we may call it an Easter Egg Hunt and treat it like a game, it is absolutely not a game. Not in the slightest. Does anyone else have an idea?”
One boy stood up. He was a few millimeters taller than Hewlett, but probably weighed half again as much. Hewlett, with his blond hair, fair skin, blue eyes, and pink ears blushing from the attention, looked like a tiny elf who should be making toys in Santa’s workshop, not being trained to be a deadly warrior in a desperate battle for the survival of his species. This other boy was just as fair as Hewlett, but much stockier. He looked as though he would be a natural wrestler or weight lifter. He was going to grow into a big man.
For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2) Page 22