For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “Yes, Mr. Gunderson?”

  “To teach us the ship, sir.”

  “What about the ship?”

  “Where things are. How to find places.”

  “Very good. That is the primary reason, the most important one. There are others. Can you tell me what they are?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “I think I do, sir.” It was Hewlett again. Now that he knew the kind of answer the chief was looking for, maybe he could look back at what he had just done and see what it had taught him.

  “Go ahead,” said Tanaka.

  “It’s more than just where things are, sir. You also learn…you learn the fastest way to get from one part of the ship to another.” He stopped talking. Obviously, he thought he had hit upon the complete answer. But Tanaka kept looking at him expectantly, silently urging him to dig deeper. Hewlett’s face became scrunched with concentration, and then suddenly lit up.

  “Oh, oh, I see now. I get it. There’s a lot more. It makes you see all of the access crawlways and cable conduits and pipes and tunnels from the inside, so you get to know them just as well as you get to know the parts of the ship you see every day.” He started talking faster.

  “And…and…you learn how to get into things, the crawlways and lockers and storage bins—how to work the locks and the latches and open the access panels and covers and remove the safety grills and work loose the vent bezels. How to get into them in a hurry, when you’re nervous and in a rush. And you have to do it over and over for all the different kinds so that I’m betting after you’ve done several of these Hunts, it will be like, you know, automatic. You won’t have to think about how to get into something. Your hands and fingers will just know how and go ahead and do it.”

  “That’s called ‘muscle memory,’ Mr. Hewlett and, yes, that’s very good. It is a refreshing surprise for a still wet squeaker to spend an hour and a half doing something and to actually get the point of why he was doing it. Don’t worry. I will not expect it to happen again any time soon.” Then he smiled. A brief, reserved smile that said that he really didn’t expect it to happen any time soon, but that he wasn’t angry about it.

  “We do many things to teach you about the ship when you are a midshipman. That is one reason you are given so many assignments in so many parts of the ship on such a rapidly changing basis, so you get to see every part of the ship and get an introduction to what every department does, how it works, who is in it, and what they do. And that is why each of you is assigned to one of the repair and maintenance teams for two watches a week: not just to hand them tools and shine a hand torch where they are working and retrieve dropped screws, but so you follow them around and crawl through the cable conduits and burrow into the nooks and crannies of this vessel. You see what’s beneath the surface, deep under the skin.

  “So, we want you to know the ship like the back of your hand, and we do many things to make that happen. Which of you gentlemen can tell me why? Why do we want you to know every little hole and burrow, every locker and latch, every panel and console?”

  Another boy stood up. Tanaka motioned for Hewlett and Gunderson to sit down. The new boy was a handsome lad, a head taller than the others, with the darkest skin Max had ever seen on a human. “Mr. Koyamba, do you have some light to shed on this subject?”

  “Sir, my father is a Marine, and he always talks about how a Marine knows everything about his rifle. He can take it apart, clean it, oil it, and put it back together in the dark really, really fast. He also used to talk about how important it is for a fighting man to know the ground he is fighting over. Isn’t the ship kind of both, sir? It’s what we fight with, but it can also be where we fight.”

  “Excellent, Mr. Koyamba. That is truly a perceptive observation. There are many full-fledged spacers who don’t have that figured out. You are absolutely right. This ship, for all practical purposes, is your entire universe. Right now, you could go ten billion kilometers from here in any direction and not find a rock bigger than Mr. Hewlett, much less something with water and an atmosphere to keep you alive.

  “Your ship and your shipmates are everything to you. The ship is your world that sustains you with air and water and shelter. Your shipmates are your family that provides you with care and support and companionship and even love. Together, ship and crew are your hometown that contains your restaurants and entertainment and school and even your hospital as well as the people who make all those places work.

  “When we encounter the Krag, it is your weapon. If we are ever boarded, it is your battleground. In order to do your jobs you will be required to have intimate knowledge of this ship. Intimate knowledge of this ship, or of any other ship on which you serve, may save your life and the lives of your shipmates. In a boarding action, knowing all the hidden places and paths can give you ways to outflank your enemy, to sneak up on him from behind, to surround him, to escape him and, if things go badly for you, to hide out, perhaps for days at a time.”

  “Chief?” It was Mr. Hewlett, again. He always seemed to be asking questions. He was almost as bad as Park.

  “Yes, Mr. Hewlett.”

  “I heard a story from one of the senior mids that once a midshipman hid out from the Krag for weeks and weeks on a ship that got taken, outsmarting them day after day. That’s just a legend, isn’t it? No one could hide for that long, right?”

  Tanaka was in a difficult spot. On one hand, he didn’t know his captain well enough to know whether his experience on the San Jacinto was a proper subject for discussion with the squeakers. On the other, there was the near sacred naval tradition that a midshipman trainer must always be truthful with his mids. Not just that he not affirmatively lie to them, but that he must be truthful: he must not mislead them, in any way, ever. He could choose to be silent on a subject, as one might expect in a military organization where much information was distributed on a need-to-know basis, but if he spoke, every word, every implication, every nuance had to be as perfectly truthful as he knew how to make it. Young people needed to have at least one adult authority figure in their lives in whom they could have unqualified trust. The Navy understood that and provided them with one. The mids knew that from their trainer they would hear only truth.

  There was only one thing to do in this situation. American football was still played on several dozen worlds; hence, mankind had not forgotten the meaning of the word “punt.”

  “Captain, this might be something that you can answer better than I.”

  Well, Bram did say that he was supposed to talk about his experiences, right? He mentally sprayed a few gallons of insecticide on the butterflies in his stomach and stepped carefully into the breach.

  “It’s no rumor, Mr. Hewlett.” Deep breath. Do this the Navy way. Just the facts, man. “The cruiser USS San Jacinto was boarded and taken by the Krag. The logs record that active resistance ceased at 13:42 hours on 10 September 2296. She had a complement of 446. Of those, 421 gave their lives defending the ship. Twenty-four were taken captive. Most of those were killed later. All of them were tortured. That left one, a midshipman second class who, on the orders of his Mother Goose, hid himself as the ship was being taken.

  “After that, he continued to evade capture, eluding the Krag in the access crawlways, the cable conduits, the spaces between the false ceilings and the pressure bulkheads, empty food lockers, voids left by equipment upgrades, and all the other nooks and crannies and hidden ways inside a ship that you learn about as a midshipman but that a Krag wouldn’t know about.

  “He got water from the water reclamation condensers. He stole food, even going so far as to trigger alerts that would send the Krag running out of the mess to action stations, so he could grab the rations off their plates. For twenty-six days. On October 6, at 17:57 hours, San Jacinto was lured into a trap by a small task force under the command of Commodore, now Fleet Admiral, Charles L. Middleton. The midshipman and two other
survivors—the chief medical officer and the communications officer—were rescued. Oh, and the ship’s cat, wily old Sam Houston. The Krag never caught him either. He lived for several more years without once leaving the ship.”

  “But sir,” it was Hewlett again. He asked enough questions for a whole class of hatch hangers. “What about the midshipman? Almost all his shipmates were killed. All his friends. His bunkies. His Mother Goose. His CO. And then he had the rat-faces chasing him for almost a whole month. Wouldn’t he still feel guilty for living when they died? Wouldn’t he still feel afraid? What happened to him? How’s he doing? Is he okay?”

  From the mouths of babes. That’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it? How is he doing? Is he okay?

  Max looked at those faces, all etched with concern, anxiety, and worry for a little boy whom, as far as they knew, they had never met. Yet, to these midshipmen, this boy was a brother—someone like them who wore the Blue, slung his hammock in a small compartment with his six bunkies, went on Easter Egg Hunts, surreptitiously turned off the artificial gravity generators in the cargo holds and played zero-G tag, breakfasted on “spam, spam, eggs, and spam,” and was drilled by Mother Goose on how to use his dirk and put out fires and patch hull breaches and operate an escape pod. Max remembered the utter horror that had galloped across those young faces when he had described what he had been through, even though he had done it in the most clinical and bloodless terms. Those mids had taken a brief glimpse at what he had endured for twenty-six days and found it unimaginably terrifying.

  Max had spent nearly twenty years telling himself that what he had gone through wasn’t so bad, that it was little more than an unpleasant memory not to be dwelt on. He had consoled himself again and again with the rationalization that it was well within the range of normal experiences of the millions of human beings who had gone into battle with the Krag during the long course of this horrible, deadly, destructive war.

  All lies.

  The edifice of self-deception that Max had been carefully building and repairing for the better part of his life collapsed in an instant. For years he had been telling himself one thing, but those faces—those faces—told him another. Those faces told him instantly, and with a power that could never be conveyed in words, that it had been so bad.

  They convinced him in a second of what Ibrahim Sahin had been trying to get him to believe for months: that he was in denial about just how utterly, soul-breakingly terrifying those twenty-six days had actually been. The midshipmen’s faces were like a mirror, allowing him to see the experience of those twenty-six days reflected back to him, not from the perspective of the man he was today, but from the perspective of the young boy who’d actually gone through the ordeal. To those boys, what he’d survived was a thing of such unimaginable horror that they couldn’t conceive of enduring it without some sort of crippling consequences.

  And they were right. Now he knew. He really knew.

  With that knowledge, came power. Commodore Middleton never tired of quoting Sun Tzu. One of his favorites: “Know the enemy and know yourself, and in a thousand battles you will never be in peril.” All this time, he had not known the enemy he was fighting within himself. He had thought his foe to be weak and inconsequential. Wrong. His enemy was strong and terrible—a horrible, traumatic fear that had left scars that he had ignored for all these years. Now he knew. And now that he knew, he could fight effectively. Now that he knew, he could win.

  All of this went through his mind in less than five seconds. The mids wanted to know about the boy. How is he doing? Is he okay? Well, is he? Let’s find out. “Gentlemen, let me ask you. How does it look like I’m doing? Do I seem okay to you?”

  It took a full second for the boys to reason through the implication of their captain’s questions. When they got there, the shock in the room was palpable. The boys’ faces were an amalgam of wonder, amazement, surprise, and awe. It was Hewlett who managed to say what they were all thinking, “Sir, that…it…the midshipman…was you?”

  “Yes, Mr. Hewlett. It was.”

  Silence sat heavy in the room while the midshipmen’s minds processed what they had learned, connecting what they had heard about the famously elusive midshipman with what they had heard and observed about their captain. At first, it seemed that the man who had been their commanding officer for these past few months could not possibly be that boy grown to manhood. But then the traits of the boy of legend and the traits that marked this captain, traits that were already legendary on board the Cumberland, started to fit together. The tenacity. The courage. The resourcefulness. The defiance. The refusal to be beaten. They all made sense now. Not only was it possible that this man was that boy grown to manhood, it was impossible that he be anyone else.

  Hewlett, the only one of the mids who was already standing, almost as a reflex or an instinctive response, drew himself up to attention. And saluted. When he looked back on that moment, he could never identify quite what it was that moved him on that day. Whatever the cause, whatever he felt, the other boys felt it too. As one, they came to their feet, brought themselves to the most prefect attention Tanaka had ever seen them manage, and saluted. Trying to ignore the lump that had just formed in his throat, Max returned the salute with solemn precision.

  “Thank you, gentlemen.” He managed to keep the strong emotion from showing in his voice. Most of it anyway. “I must be doing all right then.” He smiled at the boys warmly. There was nothing he could do or say that would add to what had taken place, which—to any wise leader—means that there is only one thing to do. “Carry on, gentlemen. Chief.” He started to turn toward the hatch.

  Before Max could complete the turn, Tanaka said, “Thank you, Captain.” He saluted as well. Max returned the salute and left. Both men knew that military courtesy did not call for a salute in that situation. Neither gave it a second thought.

  Max walked back to his quarters. Those logistics reports were still waiting for him. He shook his head unconsciously. Something important had just happened. Something had changed. He felt different. Some part of the turmoil that for years had raged deep in his innermost self had quieted. Not all of it. Not even most of it. But some of it. In one corner of his being, where there had been anguish and pain and fear, there was now peace.

  It felt good. It felt very good.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  00:37Z Hours, 21 March 2315

  “Middle Watch,” also known as “Graveyard Watch” (a term that the Navy, understandably, discouraged), was the least-loved watch of the day. It ran from midnight (00:00, often referred to as “four balls”) to 04:00, the period of the human diurnal cycle when intellect, strength, stamina, and alertness are at their lowest ebb. It was a well-known naval statistic that of the seven watches stood during any twenty-four-hour period, it was the Middle Watch that consumed the most coffee and high-sugar snacks.

  It was also the Middle Watch in which the crew committed the most Mandatory Logging Discrepancies, the term the Navy uses for errors and omissions of sufficient magnitude to require that they be logged by the head of the offending department. And not coincidentally, it was the watch in which the largest number of noncombat-related deaths occurred.

  Space was dangerous, the high-energy systems and toxic materials needed for its conquest even more so; accordingly, there were hundreds of ways to die on a warship, many of which did not involve contact with the enemy, but required only a moment’s inattention or an apparently trivial error to invite a visit from the Grim Reaper.

  And this Middle Watch was to prove more difficult than most. Today was the first day of the “Leadership Training” ordered by the captain for the men he privately called the “Sweet Seventeen.” When First Watch ended thirty-seven minutes ago, and the five of those seventeen who stood that watch went off duty, none of the seven assigned to stand the Middle Watch came on. Further, under the terms of the new standing
order, none of the seventeen was available to answer any questions, solve any problems, or explain how to repair the minor malfunctions that were supposed to be fixed “in department” rather than by Engineering staff.

  The captain’s theory was simple and, at least in the opinion of Dr. Sahin, ingenious. For one day in three, the other 198 officers, men, and boys would have to figure out how to operate the ship without the aid of the Sweet Seventeen. And on the other two, the seventeen’s contributions to the running of the ship would be limited to what they could do during their regular watches, which would force the rest of the ship’s complement, if not to stand on their own two feet, then to use the seventeen as a walking stick rather than a wheelchair.

  No one in the Sensors back room (or Staff Support Room as it was referred to formally) had any inkling of what the captain was doing or why. It was in that compartment that twenty or so men monitored the input from the arrays of sensitive instruments that Cumberland used to monitor its environment, locate its enemies in order to evade or flee or destroy them, manage those instruments and systems, and see that the sensors officer in CIC had on demand whatever sensor information was needed by the man in the Big Chair. It was also in that compartment where the rubber of the captain’s plan first met the road of reality.

  “Chief Klesh, the computer is telling me I’ve got a twitch on the LCDA,” announced Able Spacer First Class James Smith, referred to by everyone as “Greenlee” (from the name of his homeworld) to distinguish him from the other two James Smiths on board. The Chief Klesh to whom he made the announcement was Chief Petty Officer First Class Tadeusz Kleszczynska, of Swiatzpols, the senior man in the compartment now that Ensign Harbaugh, one of the Sweet Seventeen, was unavailable. Klesh was the fourth most senior noncom on the ship.