For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Max looked at the doctor, who nodded.

  “Reply that we await the honor of his visit at his convenience. Skipper out.” Max shook his head before returning to his briefing.

  Anyway, we’ve got a few more hours in this system, and with the fighter squadron from the Wasp flying escort, we don’t have anything to worry about until we jump. In that time, maybe we can figure something that will increase the chances of the envoy meeting with the other envoys instead of with a thermonuclear warhead. Anything further? Then, we’re adjourned.”

  They all stood and left the compartment. In the corridor, Brown pulled the XO aside and spoke in a confidential tone, too low, he knew, to be recorded by the monitoring system.

  “XO, I know that things are a bit different on battleships, but out here in the destroyer and frigate Navy, we take a dim view of any affront to the honor of our ship, or to that of our captain. A very dim view indeed.”

  “Battleships are the same. As far as I know, that’s a universal. Been that way in the whole Navy for centuries,” DeCosta replied.

  “Tell me then. On a battleship, would Commander Duflot’s treatment of Captain Robichaux call for the taking of corrective measures?” Brown inquired.

  “Absolutely. Serious ones.”

  “Jolly good, because it does on a destroyer as well. I would do something right now, but…”

  DeCosta nodded his understanding. “But the job of vindicating the ship’s honor in such a case customarily falls to the XO, doesn’t it?” Brown nodded.

  DeCosta stood in the corridor for a moment. What to do? On one hand, there was the possible damage to his career from taking retribution in some unknown form against Commander Duflot, a man who must have some sort of powerful connections or he would not have been given this important mission, notwithstanding his obviously limited abilities. On the other, there were the eternal and immutable naval laws. Stand for the honor of your shipmates. Stand for the honor of your captain. Stand for the honor of your ship. What to do?

  It wasn’t even close.

  “Well, ‘Wernher,’ if I may be so bold as to call you that, I would like very much to even the score and am open to any suggestions you might have.”

  “You may, any time, sir. Now, my friend, I do have an idea that might do very nicely. We just need to enlist the help of a few more co-conspirators.”

  “Whoever you need. But remember, the fewer the better.”

  “Oh, yes. ‘A slip of the lip will nuke a ship,’ and all that. Just Sparks and Gates. With the four of us, we’ll have everything we need to refresh Commander Duflot’s understanding of historical military nomenclature.”

  “Historical military nomenclature?”

  The engineer gave the XO a solid thump on the shoulder. “Vocabulary, my good man. We’re going to give the commander an unforgettable lesson on what it means to ‘hoist with one’s own petard.’ ”

  As Commander Kim Yong-Soo, skipper of the USS Broadsword, the second escort warship, was piped aboard and rendered honors, Max had time to get a good look at his counterpart. Captain Kim was of smallish stature and lightly built. Max had checked his Biosum and knew Kim to be four years his senior and roughly his equal in combat experience, with a reputation for being a tenacious and resourceful commander.

  The “fruit salad” on his dress blue uniform (Duflot had decreed that dress blues were the Uniform of the Day throughout the group) had half a row more than Max’s and included a Navy Cross and several decorations that reflected achievements in combat. He moved with the fluid efficiency of an athlete; had the beginnings of smile lines around his mouth and his dark, intelligent eyes; and looked like he was born wearing the uniform and walking the deck of a warship. Max very much liked the cut of his jib.

  Honors rendered and senior officers introduced, Max caught the subtle jerk of Kim’s head that indicated he wished Max, rather than the mid whom Max would ordinarily detail for the task, to walk him to the Casualty Station. During the short walk, they exchanged small talk, mainly inquiries about men with whom they had both served. Although the two men had never met, they had both been serving in combat commands in the same theater of operations for years, and so had a store of mutual friends, acquaintances, and shipmates. Kim seemed amiable enough, but studiously avoided saying anything of consequence and gave no hint why he wanted Max with him.

  The two men entered the Casualty Station and were shown into one of the small treatment rooms by Dr. Sahin’s head nurse, a large, burly man named Church, with immense biceps and incongruously soft hands. Kim inclined his head almost invisibly in the direction of the tiny black dome in the ceiling that held the camera for that compartment’s surveillance system. Church, a fourteen-year veteran who had served eleven and a half of those years on warships in or near the FEBA, caught the motion and its significance.

  “No monitoring in here, sir. Dr. Sahin hadn’t been on board two hours before he asked me where ‘all the bloody, damned, contemptible spy eyes’ were. I showed him, and he started snipping wires himself. Naturally, that brought Major Kraft and Lieutenant Brown down here practically at a run, and there was something of a row, with the doctor yelling about patient confidentiality and the Hippocratic Oath and with the other two men going on about safety of the vessel, security of its personnel, tracking enemy boarders, and all that.

  “They compromised—the doctor can be a very stubborn man as you may know—and now there is no monitoring in any patient area, but there is in the doctor’s administrative office, my office, the pharmacy, and all the storage areas. If we yell ‘help’ in here, it will get picked up by one of those, and we’ll have Marines in here in less than a minute. But otherwise, whatever goes on in this room is neither seen nor heard by anyone other than the people present.”

  “Thank you, Nurse Church,” said Max. Church reached for the topical disinfectant applicator to prep the injection site.

  “Nurse, that won’t be necessary,” said Kim. “I don’t need the injection. It was just an excuse to get me over here to see Captain Robichaux for an informal conference. Now, I’d be grateful if you’d excuse us, but remain in a nonmonitored area so it won’t look as though you left us alone.” Church looked at Max to see if the request was to be honored. Max nodded his approval and Church left.

  “Sorry for all the cloak-and-dagger bullshit, Max. May I call you Max?” Max nodded. “Great. My friends call me Sue.” In response to Max’s questioning expression, he added. “Long story. Involves a very old American country-western song. Anyway, my friends do call me Sue, and I’d be grateful if you would as well.”

  “It would be my pleasure, Sue.” The two shook hands. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  Despite having what was apparently a highly direct nature, Kim seemed to be having a hard time getting started. Apparently, he was uncomfortable with what he’d come here to say, so he attacked the subject from the flank.

  “Thank you for the honors when I came aboard. Not every skipper has shown me that level of courtesy.”

  “As in when you went on board the pennant?”

  “You might say that,” said Kim.

  “Let me guess: you came aboard on the port side, through the servants’ entrance, and found yourself saluting the auxiliary shit pump?”

  “Exactly. We watched him do the same thing to you, although we couldn’t see what happened when you went aboard.”

  “And when you met with him, I suppose he treated you like deck grunge from one of the enlisted head areas that he’d just scraped off the sole of his shoe, right?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Kim agreed. “I couldn’t believe it. He and I are the same rank. Of course, he’s still my senior by virtue of time in grade and being appointed commander of the group, but that just means I have to follow his orders, not that he can treat me like an inferior. I wouldn’t even talk to a mid the way he talked to me. It was beyo
nd outrageous. Of course, I know why.”

  “I wish you’d clue me in.”

  “Jealousy. Pure, bitter jealousy. The man has been stuck on convoy duty almost his entire career, hasn’t been within ten AU of a Krag, and feels that he’s been unfairly robbed of his opportunity for glory, honor, and promotion. He resents officers like us with combat records who are on the promotion ladder. He knows that unless something very improbable happens, he’ll die a commander at the con of a frigate or behind a desk, either at the grade he holds today or with a courtesy promotion to captain on the eve of retirement so he can draw a higher pension and spend the rest of his life being introduced as ‘Captain Duflot’ at cocktail parties.

  “Between you and me, having him con a Compaq-MAC class workstation would be a favor to everyone because the man’s a menace in a CIC. What he doesn’t get is that it’s not lack of combat experience that is giving the brass the false sense that he can’t cut it in battle; it’s the absolute certainty on the part of the brass that he can’t cut it in battle that has prevented him from accumulating combat experience. I was in his CIC when he was working a contact. Took him and his people more than half an hour to get it localized and classified. Turns out it was a merchie with a malfunctioning squawk box. No big deal. Thing is, though, she was at intermediate range, no stealth, no tricks, following a lubber line course. Your people or mine would have had her localized and classified with a firing solution computed, have run the registration, and would have known the size of her skipper’s pecker to millimeter precision in six or seven minutes.”

  Well, on the Cumberland, maybe twelve or thirteen. Max nodded slowly. Based on what he had seen and what he knew about human nature, it made sense. He understood it. He had even seen it before. But he had no clue what could be done about it. He met Kim’s eyes. Kim shook his head.

  “Nope. Knowing why doesn’t help, except to let you know that you, personally, didn’t do anything to earn all the crap the man is shoving in your direction.”

  “That is good to know, but getting shit on by Commander Duflot is the least of my worries.”

  “I know,” said Kim. “We’ve got some big ones. One you know about. One you don’t. The one you don’t know about is that Duflot doesn’t believe that the flag stops at the hull.”

  Max looked at Kim incredulously. “Where does the flag stop, then?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  This was an important revelation. Although the formal authority of an officer in overall command of a group of ships (a “flag”) was as complete as the authority of a captain over his own ship, tradition and custom imposed substantial limitations on that power. One of the most important of these was the long-standing practice that the flag’s actual authority over other skippers’ ships under his command extended only to their deployment and tactics, but not to how they were administered.

  The flag would tell the captains in more or less detail, depending on the circumstances, where to go, what formations to assume, when to attack or withdraw, what weapons to fire, and when to fire them. What custom and tradition said they must not do is to tell a captain how to run his ship: setting procedures, decreeing the Uniform of the Day, imposing discipline on anyone but the captain, managing personnel, and making maintenance and repair decisions.

  After giving Max a moment to process the news, Kim continued. “We caught him trying to pull a dump of all our internal surveillance data, logs, my personal logs, internal text messages, basically everything that you and I regard as sacrosanct.”

  “How did you catch him? You shouldn’t have been able to detect it since his command of the group gives him the necessary clearances. He’s just not supposed to use them absent a good reason.”

  “Normally, it would have gone undetected. I don’t suppose I’m revealing any dark secret if I tell you that some of us—I mean ships of the Longbow class, especially my ship and the Rapier—have been on some rather stimulating intel gathering missions.

  “After all, until you guys came along in the Khyber class, we were the stealthiest thing going. We’ve got a blacker than black dedicated processor and gateway infrastructure that’s specifically designed to ‘hack, nutcrack, and sack,’ that is, worm our way into the Krag data networks, break their encryption protocols, and pull dumps on their data. One time when the Rapier tried it, the Krag network was set up to reverse hack any intruder, and they almost lost the ship—had to pull the plug on the main computer core and come home in the auxiliary.

  “So we’ve got all sorts of reverse firewalls that other ships don’t have, including a really robust set that locks out all nonpublic files from any external access of any kind, including access by an authorized user, even one who has all the right passwords, without specific biometrically verified approval of a command level officer physically located on my ship. As soon as he got into our system, the firewalls shut him out of all the data and alerted us. Other than the public files he would have access to anyway, he got bupkis. We’ve been pretending that nothing happened and so has he, but I wanted you to know.”

  He reached into a pocket of his tunic and pulled out a data chip. “Here’s the firewall software. We know it will run on your hardware because it was written to run on Khybers as well as Longbows. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s already on your system somewhere, hidden behind a password that the brass will give you if they ever decide you need it.

  “By the way, that processor and gateway infrastructure we use to break into the Krag computers—you’ve got the hardware on board right now. Check your spares bay for a crate marked ‘ATAD HUNTING GEAR.’ Very clever. ‘ATAD’ is ‘DATA’ spelled backward. You don’t need the hardware to keep Duflot out, but you’ll want to install the software right away. That way it will have time to propagate through all your gateways and distributed processor architecture. Then when we laserlink after the jump, he’ll be locked out of all the high-level stuff. Duflot will just assume that, since Khyber is basically an updated Longbow with a few more sacrifices made in the name of stealth, you’ve got the same sort of software protections as we do. He won’t suspect that I gave this to you on the sly.”

  Installing software on the ship’s main computer without the explicit direction or approval of the Office of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information Processing and Electronic Dominance violated half a dozen regulations. Further, installing a modification to the ship’s operating system without review by his own data processing department on the word of a destroyer captain he’d met less than an hour before was both a great leap of faith and an enormous declaration of trust. Both men knew these things. Nevertheless, Max immediately took the chip and walked over to the mini-workstation in the exam room that the doctor typically used to input his exam notes.

  Kim continued, “I was worried you wouldn’t want to install it. That’s why I went to all these pains not to be recorded telling you this. I don’t mind what I say going into your system, but I do mind this asshole Duflot being able to find out about it just because he feels like it. He’d probably bring me up on charges.”

  “Well, we can’t have that, can we?” Max pushed a button that caused a dust cover to slide out of place, revealing a socket for the data chip. He inserted it, hit READ, and then walked through all the steps necessary to convince the computer that he was a user authorized to make changes to the firewall and operating system. He then flagged the changes for the attention of his Ensign Bales, and left a short note explaining the reason.

  “Okay, that’s done,” said Max. “We can say what we want without being eavesdropped on by Commander Duflot. What a sad and sorry state of affairs that is. Now, what do we do about our bigger problem? I’ve got a few ideas.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ve got one or two of my own as well,” said Kim. “Max, Commander Duflot’s orders for the group are very specific. It’s going to be impossible to do anything that will do any good without violating them, at least
to some degree. What I have in mind certainly does.”

  “Same here. All other things being equal, I’d rather not have to go through a court martial. But if that’s what it takes to keep Commander Duflot’s stupidity from getting the envoy killed, not to mention ourselves and our men…We do what we have to do. If they court martial us for it, we can freeze our asses off on Europa or dig tunnels in asteroids with a clean conscience.”

  “I thought you’d see it that way. Between you and me, let’s see if we can cook up a few surprises for the rat-faces. To that end, I’ve brought you a small present in my launch.”

  “What are you going to do about this cretin Duflot’s imbecilic directives? Surely, you’re not just going to say that yours is not to reason why.”

  The doctor asked his question over dinner in the skipper’s day cabin. Max and Bram had gotten into the habit of having dinner together two or three times a week, depending on demands of duty. Max had also gotten in the habit of notifying Chief Boudreaux in the galley when he would be dining with the doctor. The chief tended to rise above his generally high level of culinary achievement in the preparation of those meals, knowing that they were not likely, as was sometimes the case with other dinners, to be allowed to get cold and be nibbled on half-heartedly later because the person for whom they were prepared was absorbed in untangling some shipboard administrative problem or in treating some crewman’s accidental injury.

  Tonight the men were dining on a dish that Dr. Sahin had never eaten previously, Southern fried chicken. Not that he hadn’t been offered it before, but he had an aversion to the concept of frying chicken. Chicken is fatty to start with, and the idea of cooking it by immersion in hot oil seemed a procedure guaranteed to produce a dish that was inedibly greasy. The actual dish proved to be utterly at variance from his expectations.