For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “And you heard right, we’re on full EMCON. Here’s what’s up.” He hit a key on the control pad for the wardroom 3D tactical projector. A black cube sprang into being, salted with the tiny, white dots of stars, each labeled with the name or catalog number of the system.

  “Here’s this sector. We’re here, in the Svenskanorsk system.” He hit a key, and one of the stars started blinking red. “Our destination is the Four Power Conference in Harun on Rashid IV, here.” He hit another key, and another star, about sixty centimeters away in the projection, also started blinking.

  “We’re crossing this system at .45 c to the Bravo jump point that will take us to this system.” He hit a key and a second star, very near the first, started blinking red. “Once we get there, we begin—”

  At that moment, the blonde head and conspicuously pink ears of Midshipman Hewlett inserted themselves into the wardroom, followed—quite boldly given the circumstances—by his small form.

  “By your leave, sir,” he said to the captain, saluting, “I simply need to retrieve a tool and then I’ll be out of your way.”

  Slight smiles appeared around the room, despite the irritation of enduring a second interruption in the middle of an important briefing. A midshipman appearing in the wardroom during a senior officer briefing to “retrieve a tool” could mean only one thing.

  Max returned the salute and eyed Midshipman Oliver R. Hewlett. Unlike Duflot’s ignorance of even Füchtenschnieder’s name, Max knew more about Hewlett than did some of his bunkmates: that the boy came from planet Archopin, that he excelled in physical sciences and mathematics to such a prodigious degree that turning the boy into a naval officer (for that is the direction in which he clearly was already headed) instead of the brilliant scientist he so obviously could become might be a waste of material, and that he loved the writings of Homer and J. R. R. Tolkien of Earth, as well as Graknar-Toth 242 of Pfelung, whose writing was influenced by both. Max wondered if Captain Duflot knew as much about his weapons officer or his chief engineer as Max knew about this child who was almost certainly one of the four or five least important persons on the ship. But “least important” didn’t mean “not important.”

  “Mr. Hewlett, what tool are you to retrieve, and who sent you to retrieve it?” Max’s asked.

  “Chief Farnell sent me to get the gimbal alignment tool for the port auxiliary guidance platform. He said that the platform went into gimbal lock a little while ago and needs to be realigned, so he needs the alignment tool.” The child smiled at the captain, proud of himself for delivering the recitation in letter-perfect fashion without scrambling the unfamiliar technical terms.

  The smiles in the room grew broad.

  Max sat so that he could be at eye level with the boy. “Hewlett,” he said, nothing but interest and patience showing on his face, “do you remember your basic lesson on the ship’s inertial guidance system? You would have gotten it…let’s see…’round about your fourth or fifth day on board.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said enthusiastically. “Well, most of it anyway.”

  “Outstanding. Now, tell me what you remember about the Cumberland’s inertial measuring units?”

  “Sir, this ship has three fully independent and redundant inertial measuring units, or IMUs, at widely separated locations in the ship, each of which is individually capable of performing all inertial measurement functions. They measure changes in the ship’s attitude along the x, y, and z axes by means of three orthogonally mounted ring laser gyroscopes,” he said, reciting words painstakingly memorized, “which use the Sagnac Effect to detect rotation by the use of two circular beam path lasers in coincident counterdirectional modes. These lasers, which have no moving parts to wear out or become misaligned, replace…” It finally hit him, and his tiny form seemed to deflate, “Oh, no. Sir, this is terrible.”

  “Go on, Midshipman, take your medicine.”

  The young man went on, deeply embarrassed. His ears went from pink to bright red, with the blush spreading to his pale, cherubic cheeks. “Um…replace mechanical guidance platforms, not used since the early twenty-first century, which employed rapidly rotating motor-driven gyroscopes mounted on gimbals to maintain a stable frame of reference from which vehicle attitude was measured.” He reverted to a more normal tone of voice. A dejected tone of voice.

  “So, we don’t have a tool to align the gimbals on the guidance platform. Our IMUs don’t have platforms. No platforms means no gimbals. No gimbals means no gimbal lock.” The boy had it exactly right, and despite his embarrassment, it hadn’t taken him long to put it together. Smart. Can think on his feet. Doesn’t go to pieces when he learns he’s made a mistake. Who knows, the kid might be sitting in the Big Chair someday.

  The boy’s embarrassment became slightly tinged with anger. “Chief Farnell ‘practiced on my credulous simplicity.’ ” Max and the doctor shared a surprised glance at the last phrase but said nothing.

  “That’s exactly right, son. No one has had to worry about gimbal lock in a manned space vehicle since the last Apollo Command Module flew in 1975.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Hewlett came to attention. “Request to be dismissed, sir.”

  “Negative, Midshipman. Not quite yet.” Hewlett suddenly looked apprehensive. “No, son, nothing to be afraid of.” Max picked up one of the teaspoons on the coffee service tray and handed it to Hewlett.

  “Here. You bring this back to Chief Farnell and tell him that the captain has presented him with his very own ‘gimbal alignment tool’ so that he need not embarrass any more midshipmen or interrupt any more important meetings. Kindly tell Chief Farnell that I wish to see him in my day cabin at the end of watch. Oh, and Hewlett, just a few words to the wise.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “With the demands being made on the Cumberland at this time, I need my midshipmen learning how to operate, maintain, and fight this ship rather than running their legs off being pranked by crewmen. So, here are some lessons for you to remember and pass on to your bunkies. Listen carefully. There is no such thing as a length of asteroid mooring line or a three-dimensional space sextant or a left-handed dome wrench for tightening missile nose cones in their racks. It is impossible to bail out the atmosphere condenser sump—the water you take from the sump and dump into the humidifier module is immediately evaporated and recondensed and runs right back in, so you could bail for a year and never run out of water.”

  He looked at the other men present. “Gentlemen, what are some of the others?”

  “An RT is a reactor technician, you see?” said Brown. “So, if someone sends you to Engineering with instructions to ask one of the men at the reactor for an ‘RT punch,’ one of the RTs will punch you in the arm, usually hard enough to hurt. Or someone might send you to the spares bay for a ‘long weight.’ The spares clerk will then get up from his station and say he’s going to go get it for you. He comes back in fifteen or twenty minutes or maybe even half an hour, empty handed. When you ask where your part is, he’ll say something like, ‘I guess the wait wasn’t long enough.’ ”

  The XO started speaking. He was a few years younger than the other men, so his recollection was fresher. “There is no such thing as a ‘star hook,’ ‘relative bearing lubricant,’ a tube of ‘docking port sealant,’ a ‘pair of twenty-megawatt hydrogen fuses,’ or a ‘micrometeoroid dust filter.’ There is never any need to find naval jelly for the captain’s biscuits or a ‘centrifuge motor for the zero G coffeepot.’ ”

  The men all had a good laugh, with their bass and baritone and tenor guffaws joined by Hewlett’s soprano/alto giggles. Max slapped the boy on the back.

  “So, Hewlett, bring that ‘gimbal alignment tool’ to Chief Farnell with my compliments, and don’t forget that I want to see him in my day cabin at the end of watch. You are dismissed.” The boy came to attention and saluted. Max returned the salute, and Hewlett left.

  “To
be his age again! Warship service an unending wonder, nothing but adventure and the prospect of more adventure stretched out in front of you as far as the eye can see,” Kraft said, gazing after the boy wistfully.

  DeCosta and Brown smiled too, happy memories that had been deeply submerged in an ocean of present cares buoyed to the surface by the irresistible convection of nostalgia. The smile on the doctor’s face showed that, although he spent his boyhood someplace other than a warship, childhood had been a happy time for him as well. Max, however, did his best to keep the others from seeing that the only emotion he experienced at the thought of being Hewlett’s age again was undiluted horror.

  Max shook it off. Or tried to. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he caught Dr. Sahin catching him in the act of being appalled before he managed to hide it.

  “I do hope, Captain, that you are not too hard on Chief Farnell,” Brown said. “Although he is remarkably inept in his dealings with subordinates, he is one of my best men at diagnosing quirks in the guidance and attitude control systems. I would hate to see him take such a verbal drubbing that he ceased to be effective.”

  “Don’t worry, Wernher,” Max responded. “I am well aware of his contributions to the ship. I wasn’t planning on doing anything more than telling him that I want him to lay off the mids for a while and to pass the word that I don’t want them being pranked for the next month or so. We’ve got too many other things to do.”

  The engineer nodded his assent.

  “Okay, folks, now that we’ve solved the problems of the junior midshipmen’s berth, we’ve got our own problems to solve. Tougher problems.” He gestured to the red blinking star in the projection he had started to talk about earlier. “Once we jump to this system—no name, just a catalog number—you would think that our little group would engage and destroy our two pursuers and then, since we’re a light, fast frigate/destroyer group, we’d take off under compression drives at high c multiples and head across interstellar space for Rashid. Maybe not following the lubber line, you know—put a few zigs and zags in to make us hard to find in all that immensity, but otherwise we’d just strike out for our destination. The enemy would never be able to find us, much less catch us.”

  The illumination element went on over DeCosta’s head first. “You mean, sir, that’s not the plan?”

  “No, XO. Not even close.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Brown, his aristocratic Avalon accent giving the imprecation an impressive ring.

  “You got that right, mate,” Kraft replied in a rather feeble imitation Cockney, imperfectly picked up from watching tridvid dramatizations of Charles Dickens and Collette Farrar novels.

  Max gave the group an overview of Duflot’s plan and then showed them the jumps system by system. ”That will take us through nine, that’s right folks, a total of nine systems until we jump into the Rashid system. The supposed benefit of this course of action is that in each of these systems, we will have the benefit of some kind of planet-based or other high-level sensor cover, and in most of them, there are forces in place—a fighter squadron, a few system patrol craft, an older escort vessel—something of that kind.”

  “That’s insane!” DeCosta wasn’t pounding his fist on the table, but he was about as close to that as he could come in a senior officers’ meeting. “Out there in all those light years, it would take a one-in-a-million stroke of wild-assed luck to get close enough just to detect us, much less get in firing position, much less be able to do all of the difficult things you have to do to be able to hit a superluminal target with subluminal weapons. You don’t need planet-based sensor coverage and in-system forces to defend the group when you have light years to hide in and your speed to defend you.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more, XO,” said Max. “And I made my point of view abundantly clear to our new group commander. So clear, in fact, that he threatened to charge me with insubordination.

  “He also made clear that he had recorded the entire interview to show to Admiral Hornmeyer if he needed to show how insubordinate I am.”

  “Recorded it, did he?” The engineer smiled knowingly.

  “So he said. Not that it matters. Recording or not, he’s got us on EMCON, so I couldn’t send a signal to anyone. In-group comms are by lights and lasercom. External comms are restricted to the pennant ship. Oh, and we will be setting up three-way lasercom as soon as we get into formation after going through jump, so we’ll be networked with the pennant ship and the Broadsword.”

  “Formation?” DeCosta didn’t bother to hide his surprise.

  “That’s right, XO, formation.” Max didn’t bother to hide his sarcasm. “We will be in line ahead formation, 250-kill interval, with the Broadsword on point and us as Tail End Charlie. And yes, I know that with that interval our passive sensor coverage is going to be in the shitter. Commander Duflot has, however, devised a brilliant solution to that problem.”

  “You don’t mean—”

  “Indeed I do, XO. Active sensors. Yankee search omni the whole way.”

  “Queen Bess’s bleeding bottom!” It was Brown’s turn, and he was moved to employ an oath he rarely used. The old Earth nation-states still mattered, even if they had long been subordinated first to the United Earth and then to the various political associations that had united humans across the stars. The ancient throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and British Worlds was sat upon by the much-beloved (and splendidly beautiful) Queen Elizabeth VIII, affectionately known to her billions of subjects as “Queen Bess.”

  “Why not just turn on the ID transponder to the main Krag squawk frequency and broadcast in the clear in the Krag language, ‘Here we bleeding are; now come blow us to flaming atoms’? It’s basic inverse square law physics—given equally sensitive sensors, they can detect our active sensor transmissions and get a bearing on us at more than double the range at which we can even begin to get a detectable sensor return.”

  “You know, Wernher, you’re actually not that far off. With what we’re going to do, a transponder signal couldn’t do a much better job of letting Mr. Krag know where we are. Because, you see, gentlemen, the route from jump in to jump out in each system is going to be a pure circumferential trajectory, three hundred AU radius, oriented exactly ninety degrees negative z to the system ecliptic.”

  “Okay,” said DeCosta, not getting it. “That’s the base course. What kind of zigzag or drunkard’s walk or randomized spiral or other variation is he going to use?”

  “None. The only reason it’s an arc instead of a line is to get us out of the civilian traffic pattern.”

  That one took a moment to sink in. “None? Zero?” DeCosta was flabbergasted. “You mean that we are just going to be following a perfect geometric arc—part of a circle with a three hundred AU radius oriented exactly ninety degrees ‘below’ each system’s ecliptic—from beginning to end: a course that any mid could plot with a compass, a protractor, a ruler, and a sheet of graph paper? Please tell me we’re going to vary our acceleration at least.”

  “Nope. AC/DC profile Bravo. We’ll use the standard acceleration for the slowest vessel in the group, which is the frigate, until we get to .455 c, and then standard deceleration as we near the jump point. The only deviation from perfect predictability is going to be in the Murban system. Duflot wants to rendezvous with NAVCOMNET relay 8677. He intends to do a laserlink with the relay so he can transmit and receive messages on the fleet network without breaking EMCON.”

  “But—but—but,” DeCosta sputtered, stunned into inarticulacy. “The first law of destroyer and frigate combat is—”

  Max nodded and made a mollifying gesture with his hand, something like a patting motion, palm facing DeCosta. “‘Stealth Is Life.’ If the enemy can’t find you, he can’t kill you. I feel your pain, XO.”

  “That means that anyone who wants to intercept and attack us need only plot us for an hour o
r two and can then extrapolate our position for the whole system crossing, get ahead of us, lie in wait, and already have a nearly perfect firing solution.” The XO was really starting to get agitated. “He doesn’t have to detect us on sensors. He just keeps an eye on the clock to know when to shoot. We’re conceding to the enemy almost every possible advantage. Is this man on the Krag payroll?”

  Max bristled. “Hold it right there, XO. It’s one thing to question the competence of a brother officer. It’s quite another to question his loyalty. I have no doubt that this man is as loyal to the Union and the Navy as you or I. He’s simply the prisoner of rather limited abilities and of his experience. He’s spent so long attached to those great convoys that are so easy to locate that he has no practical understanding at all of the tactical benefits of remaining undetected. His idea of how to defend something is to surround it with a net of sensors and layers of firepower, not to hide it in the immensity of interstellar space and then cross the void so quickly that even if the enemy localizes you, he has to run flat out to catch you, giving himself away in the process. I’ll have no more of that kind of talk on my ship, even in the privacy of these meetings. Understood?”

  “Understood, sir. Sorry, Captain.”

  “No harm done. Anyway, I made all of these tactical points to Duflot. Almost the exact words. Hell, I might as well have been trying to teach compression drive field dynamics to a gerbil.”

  He shook his head. “Idiot. The only thing that I can think to do is follow orders and then take a hard look to see if there is anything we can do within the scope of those orders that will make the failure of this mission a little less than inevitable. I’ve done one thing that might do some good, and I was wondering if—” He was interrupted by the buzz of the comm.

  He hit the button. “Skipper.”

  “We just had a request by lights from the Broadsword, sir. Her skipper wants to come aboard to see the doctor. Says he needs a shot of Vanchiere-Unkel serum for his Lavoy’s Syndrome and that his Casualty Station’s batch of the serum is no longer usable. It got accidentally put in the ambient temperature pharmaceuticals locker instead of the refrigerated one.”