For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Chin broke in. “IFF, sir. Sirs. Confirmed Union transponder code, identity: USS Winston Churchill, registry number BSD-0001, Type: battleship.” Pause. “Classification…Super Dreadnaught.”

  Admiral Hornmeyer looked eleven feet tall and ready to beat the entire Krag Hegemony in single combat. “There she is, gentlemen, my new flagship, fresh from the fleet yards at 40 Eridani A. She’s still got contractors on board calibrating some of the electronics and ironing out the bugs, but she’s a warhorse born and bred, and she is foaled at the turning of the tide. Because, gentlemen, the tide has turned. From now on, we take the initiative. We go on the offensive. We’re done second guessing where the Krag are going next. Let the Krag worry about where we’re going to attack them next.

  “And we’re done with falling back. Let them worry about Defense in Depth and staged retreats and evacuation corridors, because we are going forward. Forward to engage and destroy their fleets. Forward to wipe out the Krag’s supply nodes and fuel dumps and their mines and war factories. Forward to retake our systems and free our people. Forward, men! Forward to victory!”

  Only the strict “no outbursts or demonstrations” rule in CIC kept the men from cheering. Max could see the confidence in their eyes: if anyone could lead the fleet to triumph, it would be this brilliant, ass-kicking, profane, iron-assed son of a bitch.

  “Admiral,” Max said, almost breathless, “I thought the upper limit of what you could get a compression field around was about two million tons. That was going to be size of the Churchill class carrier we kept hearing all those rumors about. What happened to the carrier?”

  “The Churchill class carrier project was the cover for the Churchill class battleship project.” The admiral spoke as though he were confiding a great secret to Max and his men. “There’s no fucking way you can hide a great goddamn battleship, son, and you can’t hide the appropriations, the millions of tons of matériel, the tens of thousands of workers, and the city’s worth of infrastructure, so we hid the fucker in plain sight, along with the other battleships being built in other yards around the Union.

  “We compartmentalized the work, so most men never saw the big picture—hid the shape behind enough Zero G scaffolding to build half a dozen skyscrapers. We even had a thousand workers fabricating dozens of launch catapults and flight decks to go on a giant carrier. Won’t go to waste, though. We’ll put ’em on the next carrier we build. Biggest goddamn warship mankind has ever produced, and we’ve got four more of the motherfuckers to be launched in the next forty-five days: Leonidas, Charlemagne, Shaka, and George Washington. More after that. Maybe smaller and faster, maybe bigger and meaner. Haven’t made up our minds yet.”

  “But how do you get it to go anywhere except on sublight and jump?” Max asked. “No one can sustain a compression field that big. So much energy is lost between the center and the periphery—”

  “Son, son, son,” the admiral interrupted. “You’ve got your feet stuck in the old goddamn paradigm. We don’t sustain a field. We sustain four.”

  “Four?” He was incredulous. Then the light went on. “You mean, we solved the problem of field synchronization? But I thought the mathematics and physics of that were supposed to be fifty years out. Maybe a hundred.”

  “I hate to break it to you, Robichaux: they still are. We bought the field synchronization algorithms from the Sarthan. You know how they are. If they have it, it’s for sale, and the price has lots of zeroes in it.”

  “I know, but the word is that they wanted three and a half trillion credits for the algorithms. No credit, either. Cash on the barrelhead in Tri-Nin Depositary Instruments, or gold, platinum, palladium, uranium 235, or plutonium 239.”

  “This is one of those cases in which the rumor was abso-fucking-lutely accurate. Happens more often than I like to think about. The greedy motherfuckers would also have accepted payment in antimatter, although why anyone would want to be within a parsec of the hellish stuff, I’ll never know. But we managed to talk them down from three and a half trillion to two and three-quarters, along with waiving our claims to an uninhabited star system we’ve had in dispute with them.

  “It cleaned out just over a quarter of the gold and platinum reserves of the entire Union. Goddamn blood suckers. Anyway, we’ve got a whole new generation of ships being designed and built around dual and quadruple field generators. On vessels of equivalent displacement with equivalent power plants, we’re getting 30 percent more speed and a 50 percent increase in fuel efficiency. The sky is now the limit on displacement. Now we can build them big enough to carry weapons with the punch to get through the Krag defenses, deflectors powerful enough to shrug off anything they throw at us, and gigantic fusion power plants big enough to power the lot.

  “When you add in this new jump thing, we’re going to move faster and hit harder. My friends, we’re going to fucking kick some Krag ass. Given a year or two, we’re going to kick the bastards back at least two hundred light years. Maybe three hundred.”

  Then, his enthusiasm muted somewhat. “It’s no guarantee of victory. It’s not even a guarantee that the bastards won’t defeat us in the long run, but they’re not going to beat us in the short run now. They’ve still got an advantage in population, population growth, and industrial capacity, but our new ships are going to give us a qualitative advantage. What’s in that memory core is going to give us a whole toolbox full of dirty tricks to use against them. The multiple ship jump is not only going to let us throw more firepower at them faster, but the first time we use it on them, they’re going to piss themselves with surprise.

  ”When we start rolling them back, I bet that we start picking up allies like the Ghiftee and the Texians and the other independent human powers, and maybe even some more aliens. Everybody loves a winner. It’s a new fucking war, gentlemen, and we’re going to be serving the Krag some of what they’ve been serving us all these years.

  “Now, Robichaux, you and I have a few things to discuss out of the hearing of the children, and then I’m going to take command of my new flagship. This time, if the captain over there asks me nicely, I just might let them break out the white gloves, flags, fifes, bugles, drums, and all that other happy horseshit. After all, it isn’t every day that a man takes possession of the biggest goddamn warship in Known Space.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  09:42Z Hours, 15 April 2315

  “So, gentlemen,” Max said, “in conclusion, it appears we are bound for what has got to be the strangest rendezvous in the history of the Union Space Navy. The men are acting spooked about the whole thing, and it’s our job to reassure them. We need to project calm and assured confidence, to let them know we believe that everything is bound to come out fine. They look to us as examples not just of how to act and how to comport themselves but also of what to think and feel. They must see in us the traits we want to see in them. And right now, that’s courage and confidence.”

  Max was meeting with his “brain trust” in his day cabin. The assembly was powered by sugar, in the form of an impossibly delicious pound cake, and caffeine, in the form of the sublime Wortham-Biggs Four Planet Blend coffee. If only the news he had just delivered had been one-tenth as good as the refreshments.

  “I am not in the least certain that I am capable of engaging in so profound a deception,” said the doctor. “I have no confidence whatsoever that the outcome of this series of events is going to be favorable. I would be much more courageous and confident were we still in the Pfelung system, training fighter squadrons to go into battle with a Union destroyer as their battle coordination vessel. That was looking as though it would turn into a truly effective gambit.”

  “Tactic. A mode of operations or combat procedure is a ‘tactic.’ ‘Gambit’ refers to a particular stratagem or maneuver, especially the opening move in an encounter, particularly if it is designed to deceive or manipulate the enemy.”

&nbs
p; “Tactic, gambit, stratagem, maneuver, ploy…You naval people have so many different words for what is essentially the same thing: a means of killing your adversaries. It seems redundant.

  “In any event,” said the doctor, “I’m worried about this rendezvous. The Vaaach asking for you, Max, by name, and wanting to get together out in the Great Inner Gap for an unspecified reason. Why the Great Inner Gap? No one goes out there.”

  The region of the Milky Way Galaxy known to humanity and the races with which humans had commercial and cultural relations, called Known Space, lay in the Orion-Cygnus arm of the galaxy. Coreward and rimward of this area were two relatively star-poor areas separating it from the adjacent galactic arms: the Great Inner Gap, between it and the Sagittarius arm, and the Great Outer Gap separating it from the Perseus arm.

  The star systems in the gaps were too few and far between, not to mention too poor in jump points that connected together in a useful network, to make them attractive targets for colonization and conquest; accordingly, military operations in the Gaps were very rare. “And why ask for you by name, anyway?”

  “Elementary, my dear Doctor,” said Brown. “They know him. And what’s more, he is now a ‘peer hunter.’ They can deal with him as a low-ranking one of their own rather than as an inferior with whom they are not supposed to have anything but the most cursory contact.”

  “At any rate, we’ll know very shortly,” said Max. “To stations.”

  They left, everyone but Brown going to CIC. Brown took his station in Engineering.

  After the transfer of the con from Hobbs to Max, Max sat in the Big Chair and eyed the navigational display. “Maneuvering, alter course to take us to a point in a line extended from galactic center through the RP, two AU rimward of the RP. Then approach the RP from the rimward direction at point five c, standard decel at the end.”

  Chief LeBlanc acknowledged and began to implement the order. After twenty-eight minutes, as the ship was decelerating near the end of the subluminal run, Max turned to Chin and said, “Chin, One MC.”

  “One MC, aye.”

  The light went on. Max’s calm, confident voice reached out from every speaker in the ship to every heart and mind on board. “Shipmates, this is the skipper. You know where we are and as much about what we are doing as I do. We know the Vaaach asked for us by name, and we know that the Vaaach are not ones for frivolities. We would not be here if there weren’t something important for us to do.

  “Everyone be sharp. Keep your eyes, as well as your mind and your attention, focused where they are supposed to be. You, gentlemen, are my eyes and ears. My arms, hands, fingers, and legs. I make the decisions, but only with the information you give me. Those decisions have meaning only because you carry them out. We’re all mountain climbers, roped together on the rock face—dependent on each other. You do your part. I’ll do mine. We’ll come through this together. Skipper out.”

  Max was always of two minds about these little pep talks. He knew he wasn’t a great orator, or even a good one, and that a lot of modern commanders thought these kinds of speeches silly or pointless. He always felt a bit foolish giving them. On the other hand, Max remembered being an ensign on the Margaret Jackie as she was racing to get to the Battle of Dupuy III in time to stop the rout and maybe turn the tide.

  Max was scared stiff when Commodore Middleton came over on One MC and delivered five or six sentences that left him feeling calm and centered and able to do his job. Max understood from that experience that many of the men needed to hear from their skipper not just the words but the tone of voice and manner of delivery to tell them that the skipper was confident. A commander must be confident, and he must communicate that confidence to his men. People always talk about how the men support the leader. They forget that on the precipice of danger or during the fearful prelude to battle, it is the leader who supports the men. He must have enough courage not only for himself but to give an infusion of it to everyone under his command.

  “Station keeping at the rendezvous point,” LeBlanc announced a few minutes later.

  “We’re still three minutes early,” Max observed.

  Two minutes and fifty seconds passed. At the stroke of the appointed time, Kasparov called out, “Contact, designating as Uniform One, bearing triple nipple by triple nipple.”

  One of the cruder bits of Navy jargon, it meant zero-zero-zero mark zero-zero-zero. The target was directly between the ship and the center of the galaxy.

  “Range, ten kills. Exactly ten kills. I mean to the tenth of a millimeter. No drift, either. Perfectly stationary. God knows where he came from. He just appeared. Maybe he was stealthed brilliantly and he turned it off.”

  He paused to listen to someone in his back room. “Okay, okay. Now classifying as Vaaach: mass and EM emissions are all consistent with the last vessel we encountered.”

  Chin spoke. “Visual carrier, sir. Channel 7.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  A moment later, the now familiar ferocious koala face filled several CIC screens, followed by the now familiar roaring and snarling. This time, however, there was something about the ferocious lions tearing at their meat sounds that struck Max as hinting almost of friendliness. It did not take long for the translation to appear.

  “This is Forest Commander Chrrrlgrf. I greet you Forest Peer Swamp Fox. I have no doubt that your tiny primate brain is filled with the question of why you were asked to meet with me at this time and place.”

  “And I greet you Forest Commander Chrrrlgrf. It did occur to me, yes.”

  “The Vaaach have been asked to summon you to this meeting and to guarantee safe conduct. The meeting is not with me but with the vessel that will arrive in slightly more than two minutes. It is a Krag vessel. The Krag will arrive and advance to within ten kilometers of your vessel and mine. They will transmit a message for delivery to the leadership of your people. You will confirm receipt of their message. The Krag will depart on a direct path to their space. You will depart on a direct path to your space. This will be a peaceful encounter, on pain of death. If you fire on the Krag vessel, you will be destroyed instantly. If the Krag vessel fires on you, it will be destroyed instantly. Is this acceptable?”

  “It is.”

  “Very well. Prepare to receive the Krag.”

  At the promised moment, the Krag vessel appeared on gravity wave sensors, then went subluminal and approached the rendezvous point, stopping exactly at the prescribed point, though without quite the same precision as the Vaaach; the Krag positioned themselves with the precision of about half a meter.

  “Carrier wave from the Krag,” said Chin. “Now, an attention signal. Sir, they’re using the old Krag-Human comm protocols we worked out with them back when we were in contact. They’re telling us to prepare to copy text, Language is Standard, encoding is Formatted Text B. In thirty seconds.”

  “Acknowledge the message.” Max’s voice was even, quiet, grim. He had a bad feeling about what the Krag were sending. He had an even worse feeling about the eventual reply.

  Chin called up the old transmission protocols and punched them into the ship’s ENcoder/DECoder. “Receiving transmission.” A few seconds later, “I’m getting readable text from the ENDEC.” About twenty seconds later, almost under his breath, “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Mr. Chin,” Max rebuked him in a low but even voice. “No profane editorializing on the contents of comms.” Then, to calm the twitches he was getting from his hypocrisy detector, he added, “That’s my job.”

  Chastened, Chin responded, “Yes, sir. But you’ve got to see this.”

  The transmission ended. Max read it.

  Holy. Fucking. Shit.

  “What do you think the president and the Senate will do?” Dr. Sahin took a deep drink of his “fruit punch potpourri,” made from a mixture of undisclosed and various fruits, the kind of mixture generally served by the ga
lley when it was trying to get rid of the tail ends of several different varieties of frozen fruit juice at the same time to clear out a freezer unit.

  Max was a bit deeper into his precious supply of Kentucky bourbon than he usually allowed himself to get, and was more loquacious than usual. “How the fuck do I know? I don’t trust those greasy, double-talking bastards as far as I could throw Hornmeyer’s new flagship. No, that’s not true. I trust President Lee. He’s one of us. Retired cruiser commander. I even met him once. Of course, that was the first time I was court martialed. He was a member of the panel that tried me. He voted to acquit. They all did.”

  “For what could you have been court martialed?”

  “Insubordination. It was that time when I commanded a PC-4 and Commodore Barber, that was before he was the famous throughout the fleet Admiral Barber ordered me to disengage and withdraw when—”

  Max was cut off when the comm buzzed. “Skipper.”

  “This is Lee in the Intel SSR.”

  “Okay, Lee Hwang-Sik, right? Philologist and LingAn expert. Got something?”

  “As a matter of fact, sir, I think I do. How do you want it?”

  “Face to face, with the bark still on, as always. Come to my day cabin.”

  “On my way. Lee out.”

  Max drained his glass but did not pour another. He took a few sips of the coffee that had also been poured for him. Lee arrived a moment later and exchanged salutes with his commander. Lee’s was adequate but was not what one would call exemplary. The young man always got stratospherically high FITREPS on how he performed the analytical functions that went with his billet, but mediocre ones in those categories that measured the shininess of his boots, the sharpness of creases, and the snappiness of his salutes. Max liked a man who had shiny boots, sharp creases, and snappy salutes, but he positively loved a man who was good at his job. Lee was another one of the officers handpicked for this ship by Admiral Hornmeyer.