“What I want is to throw them out an airlock.”
Kraft smiled as though the idea appealed to him. “Well, sir, as we are in a combat zone and as planting the thermoflasher was ‘an overt act tending to give aid and comfort to the enemy in time of war,’ it is within your authority.” On a destroyer, the Marine detachment commander was also chief of security, which made him the resident expert on the laws and regulations pertaining to crime and punishment on board ship. Kraft had, in fact, served in the Marines’ JAG Corps, retired, and was serving as a an assistant planetary prosecutor on Houstonia when it fell to the Krag while he was attending a continuing legal education seminar in a nearby system. He promptly re-enlisted and requested a combat assignment.
“I could gin up the paperwork for you and the XO to sign in no time at all. Hell, I bet we could have these three bastards sucking vacuum before dinnertime. It won’t be any trouble. Happy to do it. Sir.”
“Major, as appealing a prospect as that may be, I don’t think that executing three senior chiefs on my first day in command would be the best of ideas. For now, make sure they are in separate cells and that they can’t communicate with each other or anyone else. Feed them normal rations, and let them have full terminal access; just disable the ability to send anything. I don’t want to talk to the bastards—traitors give me an itchy trigger finger, but I want you to do a full interrogation. Bring in Dr. Sahin if you think there are psychological issues worth worrying about. I need to know if anyone else was working with them. Other than that, they’ll keep for a while.”
“Yes, sir. But if you change your mind and want them outside, dancing with the stars, you just let me know.”
“You’ll be the first, Major.”
Max went back into the corridor and rolled his wrist to look at the time display on his percom. Still forty-five minutes away from the jump point. He’d have time for that coffee and sandwich after all. And maybe some pie. He wondered if the pecan pie on this ship was any good. The way things were going, he doubted it.
* * *
CHAPTER 6
* * *
14:29Z Hours, 22 January 2315
Much to Max’s surprise, the pecan pie was top notch. After all, the Navy was never short of nuts. The ship’s progress through space was also more than satisfactory. Cumberland had made ten jumps in just over eighteen hours, wearing two of the three watches to a frazzle. Crews were used to making one or two jumps a day at most, not one jump every hour or two. So when Max asked Engineer Brown if he needed to take the jump drive down for maintenance, he took the hint. The Engineer gamely replied that because it had never been put through so many jumps in so short a time, he would be more comfortable if he could tear it down for inspection, which was at least a twelve-hour process. Max concurred that it was better to be safe than sorry, and so kept the Cumberland to .52 c as it crossed from the Alpha to the Bravo jump point in the Van Berg Minor system.
Max decided that his plan to cross each of these systems in just a few hours was too optimistic. This crew was not prepared for the pace of all those jumps so quickly. But he still wanted to get to the Free Corridor before he was expected. So, he arrived upon a compromise. The ship would travel at 10 c on compression drive about halfway across each system and at roughly 0.5 c for the remainder, allowing the crossings to be made in anywhere between nine and ten and a half hours. It was clear that this crew needed the extra time in transit for training. Lots of training.
All of the jumps so far had been uneventful, and Max had noted that the Sensor section was performing more briskly and accurately with each jump. It was still not up to the standard he had been accustomed to on the Emeka Moro and other ships on which he had served, but had already risen to adequate and was rapidly approaching fair. Intense drills and training were taking place all over the ship, from reloading missile tubes in the bow to targeting the “Stinger” aft-firing pulse cannon.
Max had visited those parts of the ship where her key functions were performed, all the while encouraging, exhorting, teaching, and occasionally ordering changes to procedures and practices that weren’t working. This was how he had spent the entirety of the middle watch: a little touch of Maxie in the night.
Things were improving. But for reasons he could not put his finger on, Max could see that they were not improving as rapidly as they should, given this crew’s undoubted ability. Perhaps it was some mental barrier left over from Captain Oscar.
Max even managed to find the time to eat a hot meal, the main course of which was something called “Navy noodle casserole,” a moderately savory offering that consisted mostly of noodles and cheese, but also contained visible quantities, very finely chopped, of various frozen vegetables. The official description of the dish mentioned meat as one of the ingredients, but if meat were present, it was in quantities below the threshold detectable by modern scientific means. It didn’t taste bad, and at least someone in the galley had enough sense to make sure to pack some zing into it in the form of onions (frozen, reconstituted), garlic (same), and various other spices, including cayenne pepper.
After that, he managed a shower and a five-hour nap before returning to CIC in time for the next jump, this time from Van Berg Minor to Tesseck A. This crew was getting good at jumps, and this one went even smoother than the one before, the CIC crew benefitting from some rest. The men were managing to restore the systems more quickly and smoothly with each jump. The jump completed, Max again craved food and drink, this time boiled crawfish and beer. Good luck finding that on the Cumberland. As Max was trying to figure what food and drink might satisfy his envie and could be found on board, he noticed Kasparov suddenly tilt his head, reflexively touch his earpiece to listen to someone in his back room, and then quickly punch a few buttons on his console, all in less than a second and a half. Max knew exactly what came next.
“Contact,” Kasparov nearly shouted, “designating as Uniform one, probable ship, approximate bearing zero-one-five mark zero-niner-zero, working on ID and range.”
Oh, shit. No way was this a Union ship. “General quarters. Ship versus ship.” Max gave the order that sent the entire ship to battle stations.
Klaxons immediately erupted, loud enough to grab one’s attention, but not so loud as to be distracting. In the background, Max heard the ship-wide address system broadcast the voice of the able spacer who manned the Alerts Station: “General quarters, general quarters. Set Condition One throughout the ship. Close all airtight hatches, and secure all pressure bulkheads. All hands to action stations: ship versus ship.”
The overhead lights dimmed slightly, and red lights went on in various places, providing a visible reminder that the ship was on alert. The crew quickly prepared themselves and their vessel for a possible battle with another warship: racing to the stations assigned to them for that kind of combat, closing hatches that divided the ship into seventy-eight separate airtight compartments, each of which could sustain life if the others lost atmosphere, arming weapons systems, and securing items that could become dislodged in a battle.
That was all fine and dandy, but what Max really needed right now was for his sensor people to give him a precise location and an accurate identification of that contact. Rapidly. Until he knew who it was and what they were up to, he needed to do something. Mainly, that something involved not dying.
“Maneuvering, let’s clear the datum. Give me twenty seconds at flank on the sublight and hard delta-v in X and Y and a thirteen-hundred-meters-per-second kick from the maneuvering thrusters minus Z; then reduce the main sublight to one-quarter, engage Stealth, and from whatever course that puts us on give me minus fifty degrees in X, plus thirty degrees in Y, and give me an additional seven hundred MPS push from the thrusters minus Z.”
He wanted to impart some speed to the ship quickly while making rapid changes in course in all three dimensions, to throw off any firing solution the other ship might be working up; then basically drop off their sensors while making another series of course changes
, again in all three dimensions, so the Cumberland could not be targeted or found simply by extrapolating from her prior course. In space combat, two-thirds of the battle was crossing the staggering distances that separated everything just to get to where the enemy was, and 90 percent of the rest was finding him when you got there. Max planned to use his ship’s excellent stealth capabilities to make the Cumberland difficult to find.
Max heard the engines going to peak output, saw the men at the Maneuvering Stations pushing the ship through the course changes, and felt it twisting and turning through space.
“Weapons, give me a firing solution on the contact ASAP, but do not arm warheads, do not open missile doors, and do not engage any targeting scanners. On the off chance they can read what we are doing, I don’t want to escalate this until we know who is out there and what they want.”
“Roger, Skipper.”
Kasparov was busy, talking and listening over his headset as he started to get useful information from his improved but still not proficient back room. Max bet that demoting Lieutenant Goldman and getting coffee in there boosted performance 15 percent.
“Bearing on Uniform One is firming up. Now three-five-one mark one-zero-three, range approximately two-five-zero-triple-zero kills. Change of aspect on target—target is changing course to intercept our former track before we engaged Stealth. He may not see us now. We are certainly not seeing him: between his low-albedo hull coating and how far away we are from this system’s star, he’s totally dark—no visual detection at all. We are reading him on mass, graviton flux, and very faint EM only.”
Short pause, as he listened to his back room. “Starting to get some size parameters from occultations, though.” Every now and then the other ship would come between the Cumberland’s visual scanners and a star or other light source, causing it to wink out, known as a stellar occultation. Complex calculations of the relative movements of the two ships, their ranges, and the exact apparent location of each occulted object, plus which objects were not occulted, allowed the computer to make some inferences about the other ship’s size and shape. The Cumberland, however, was so small that she created very few occultations and was very hard to spot in that manner, or in any manner for that matter.
“And?”
“Just coming up now, sir.” Ten seconds went by. Finally, Kasparov said, “Bogie is very long and very narrow, somewhere between one-eight-zero-zero and two-three-zero-zero meters in length with a fifty-two to seventy-five-meter beam. He’s got reactionless drive, so we don’t have a drive spectrum to work with on identification. On the other hand, there aren’t many races with that technology, so that narrows down the possibilities.”
Reactionless drive was an exotic technology that gave its possessor sublight propulsion without having to shoot hot gases out the back end of the ship. Because a hot sublight drive emitting brilliant plasma flying out a thruster nozzle at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light tended to stand out against the dark, cold background of interstellar space, everyone wanted reactionless drive, but only a handful of the most advanced civilizations had it.
There were only three known races with ships that combined large size, long and narrow shapes, and reactionless drive: the Lakirr, who would randomly decide either to ignore you or vaporize you in a heartbeat with their obscenely advanced weaponry—no one could ever predict which; the Sarthan, who were not dangerous at all unless you let them try to sell you something; and the Vaaach, a very powerful but highly insular species who did not get involved in anyone else’s business but who dealt swiftly and severely with anyone who got involved in theirs.
In any event, Max was not going to let pass an opportunity to gather intelligence and train his crew at the same time. Precious little was known about all three of these races, and anything learned from close observation of their vessels would be valuable to Naval Intelligence. Plus, his people needed practice tracking, identifying, and closing on ships unobserved. That was the best way to kill the enemy: sneak up on him and stab him in the back before he even knows you’re there. Besides, his crew needed confidence pronto, and the only way for them to get it was to do something difficult and live to tell about it. This was the chance to do just that.
“People, we are going to work up this target. Let’s see how close we can get and how much we can observe without being observed ourselves. Maneuvering, reduce drive to 10 percent, and allow the target to get ahead of us, and then let’s slip in on his six o’clock. Maintain range of at least eighteen thousand kills until I tell you to close.” Max pulled up the sensors’ best estimate of the contact’s course plot, increased the scale to maximum, and squinted at it for a moment.
“Aye, sir. Reduce drive to 10 percent, slip in on his six, keep range in excess of one-eight-triple-zero kills until ordered otherwise.”
“Skipper?” said Garcia softly, his voice carrying no farther than the edge of the command island occupied by only him and the captain.
“Yes, XO?” Max matched his volume.
“Ballsy move, sir. Risky too. What if they take offense at being tailed?”
“This crew needs to practice these skills under conditions of risk, and they need to succeed at something. Anything. If we’re spotted, we apologize, or we evade and escape, depending on who it turns out to be.”
“They might not give us that chance, sir. If it’s the Lakirr, and they woke up on the wrong side of the mossy rock this morning, they could hit us with their antiproton beam, and we’d evaporate in about three-eighths of a second.”
“Between you and me, XO, it’s not the Lakirr.”
“How do you know, sir? We’ve got no drive spectrum, no comm traffic, no markings, and no read on configuration except that the ship is something of an alien phallic symbol.”
“I can tell from their ship handling. If you watch the plot of their trajectory at large scale, you can see they’re not moving in a smooth path.” He pointed to a screen on his display, showing an almost imperceptible serpentine motion in three dimensions. “They slew their bow around ever so slightly to change the angle of their sensor beams relative to any target in their path. It reminds me of an animal following a scent by moving its nose back and forth. It’s the Vaaach. I’ve seen them do that before.”
“It’s not in the recognition protocols.”
“I sent it up the line, but Intel never included it in any of the official protocols, saying that ‘the purported observation was not supported by sufficiently variegated phenomenologies to be regarded as an authoritative indicium of vessel origin,’ which I think is IntelSpeak for ‘We didn’t think of it, so we’re not going to sign off on it.’”
Garcia chuckled. “Been there. Done that. Bought the memory wipe.”
“Anyway, trust me on this one. It’s the Vaaach. I want to see how long it takes the children to figure it out and how they do it. And no prompting from the studio audience.”
“My lips are sealed.” Whatever a studio audience was.
Chief Petty Officer First Class Claude LeBlanc directed the activities of the three spacers at the Maneuvering Stations, giving drive and course change orders. The tactical display showed that the bogie was slowly pulling ahead and the Cumberland was tiptoeing around to get behind it. After a few minutes, the bogie was dead ahead.
“Captain, I think we have an ID on the bogie,” said Kasparov. “But it’s not by the book. We have only a single phenomenology, and the one we’ve got isn’t even an accepted recognition protocol but, well, I think it’s pretty solid, sir.”
“Mr. Kasparov, when I was in Sensors, I made an identification or two that wasn’t in the ARPs, so tell me what you’ve got.”
“Now that we’re nearly on her six, we’re getting some good images of a few viewports the contact is showing aft. God only knows why they aren’t shuttered, but there they are. Maybe they think that no one would ever be back here, or maybe it’s an oversight.”
“And maybe they want us to see them so that we can do whatever it
is you just did,” Max suggested. “I hear there are some species out there that are very much into the sport of tracking and being tracked.”
“Anyway, the guys in the back room brainstormed that if we aggregated the light from all of those viewports, we might have enough photons to do a reasonably good spectral analysis.”
This was pretty damn smart. Max and Garcia smiled with approval as they worked through the concept. “So, you’re thinking that the people who design lights for a ship are going to give the crew light that closely approximates the spectral balance of their sun as seen from the surface of their homeworld, right?”
“Exactly, sir, because that’s what we do on our ships.”
“And did you get a match?”
“Yes, sir. The spectral curve from those viewports is a nearly perfect fit with what you would see at local noon on a partly cloudy day on the surface of Grrlrrmgkruhgror.”
It sounded like he had something caught in his throat. “Growl… what?”
“It’s the name of the Vaaach homeworld, sir. Sigint finally decrypted it from a civilian traffic routing message a few days ago.”
“Good job. Never seen that one before. Write it up and I’ll kick it up the line. Maybe in a month or two folks around the fleet will be taking spectra on viewports to do a ‘Kasparov ID.’”
Kasparov beamed. Max knew he could be counted on to pass that information on to his back room and that the confidence problem in that department might well be solved for good.
“And Kasparov?”
“Sir?”
“Unless I’m missing something, you just identified this target, so…”
“Oh. Sorry, sir.” He changed to his CIC announcement voice. “Target tentatively identified as originating from a neutral power, the Vaaach sovereignty. Redesignating Uniform One as Nebula One.”
“Intel, now that we know we’re dealing with the Vaaach, what does that tell us?”
To Honor You Call Us (Man of War Book 1) Page 10