“Outstanding.” Max was impressed.
“And the computer is set to notify Major Kraft, or whoever the senior Marine is on duty, about which outlet in which compartment is drawing the current,” said the XO. “The Marines swoop down on the guy, nab him and his infernal machine, and our drug problem is solved.”
“You mean our drug supply problem is solved,” cautioned the doctor.
“If you eliminate the supply, you eliminate the problem, don’t you?” Brown asked.
For all his technical competence, Brown could be surprisingly obtuse when it came to the human side of the equation. “Not that simple,” Max explained. “There is an existing supply in the hands of the people who have bought these damn pills. This Rhim guy had seventeen tablets in his quarters. What’s that—enough for a week, plus or minus?”
The doctor nodded.
“If all we do is stop the supply,” Max continued, “people are still going to have the drugs on their hands. Some of them are going to have enough for ten days, maybe even two weeks, which means they are going to be under the influence for that long and will be feeling the withdrawal effects for weeks after that. I won’t have a crew that’s back to normal for more than a month.”
“Okay. We need to take away the source, and we need to take away whatever the men have on hand. I understand that,” Garcia said. “But how do we do that? At last count there were exactly three-point-seven-four bazillion places on a destroyer to hide something as small as a few pills. Regs say we can search everyone’s quarters and effects any time we want, and that works fine when you’re looking for bottles of whisky or big bags of Havala weed, but pills? Some of them not much bigger than a millimeter across? No way would we ever find them all. Maybe I’m the pessimist here, but I don’t think we’d find even a tenth of them.”
“Oh, I think you’re not being pessimistic at all, XO. But I have an idea about how to handle that,” Max said, smiling. “I just need to get my hands on the seller.”
“I’m afraid all of you have overlooked the largest ramification here,” Sahin insisted. “We’ve got dozens of addicts on this ship. When we cut off their supply, these people are going to go through withdrawal symptoms. The slang term for withdrawal from the Chill is ‘defrosting.’ When people ‘defrost,’ they experience nausea, anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness, headaches, muscle twitches, cramps, and a host of other side effects. Many of these people are not going to be fit for duty, some of them for days.”
“Perhaps, then, we should let well enough alone,” said Brown. “Certainly, the crew are slow and don’t learn very well, but at least they’re not throwing up on the deck, doubled over with cramps, or losing their temper with their shipmates because they’re ‘defrosting.’”
Sahin had started shaking his head as soon as Brown began speaking. “Totally unacceptable. Totally. That is not a course of action that I can even reasonably consider. These people are doing physiological damage to their bodies and their brains. Some of that damage may be irreversible. It is my duty as their physician and our duty as their officers to protect them. Every man and boy on this ship is my patient, and I owe to each a duty to do no harm, even by inaction. Gentlemen, we have a responsibility, all of us. The collective, of which we are the leaders, must protect the welfare of its constituent individuals, or the collective will perish.”
“But they are adults, Doctor, and trained spacers to boot, not children who need to be told to put on a Mac when it’s raining and to eat their Brussels sprouts before they can have their pudding,” Brown said, rather loudly. “As officers we have a military duty to protect their lives, which means that we don’t risk killing them in action against the enemy imprudently, that we operate the ship in a safe and responsible manner, and that we provide them with oxygen and food and water and clean clothes and medical care. It does not mean that we have a personal duty to intervene in their personal choices. If we had such a duty, where would it end? Do we follow them around on shore leave to keep them out of the bars and the brothels? Do we stand over them off duty and take away their cigarettes and their cigars and their alcohol ration?”
Max cut off the discussion before things got too heated. “Thank you. What you said here helps me a great deal, not only because you stated your points of view so clearly but also because you showed respect toward each other’s opinions, which can be difficult sometimes. I’ve been in dozens of meetings like this, and I’ve learned that nothing tends to destroy productive discussion any faster than folks assuming that differences of opinion are the result of the other guy being stupid or misinformed or ill-intentioned, rather than being a consequence of differences in philosophy or values. Can you think of a better way to alienate someone you are trying to persuade than treating him like an idiot? Maybe you can, but none comes to my mind. Anyway, you all have my thanks.
“As interesting as those points are, I have to base my decision not on political theory, but on principles of command and military effectiveness. This ship is a weapon, and the crew is one of its components. My job as the master and commander is to make that weapon as effective as I possibly can and then bring it to bear against the enemy to inflict the maximum damage possible. That is the compass by which I steer. And that principle dictates my decision.
“These men must be made ready to fight. All of them. That means we cut off their supply of this drug as soon as humanly possible; we help them through the withdrawal; and then we get them as healthy as we are able, so they can wage war against the Krag. I appreciate the arguments, gentlemen. In another place and in another time, I could be a man of philosophy considering the eternal question of individual versus collective responsibility. Or I could be a man of God and selflessly minister to and care for my fellow men. But today, here, on this ship, I am a man of war. As a warrior, I must do whatever I can do to make these men ready to kill.
* * *
CHAPTER 10
* * *
13:22Z Hours, 23 January 2315
With his XO handling the system crossings and the jumps so well, Max felt comfortable leaving CIC to make the rounds of the ship. He was thorough, going to all three decks and inspecting every compartment in which there were men stationed or likely to be working. On three separate occasions, he stopped men from engaging in cleaning and polishing to the insane level established by Captain Oscar, insisting instead on merely the fanatical standard that was the norm in the Navy. All three men followed his orders, but with obvious reluctance. Max made a mental note of their names so that he could check on them later, as he expected that they would return to their old habits if given half a chance.
As on all Union warships, the decks were assigned letters of the alphabet, starting from the ventral level, or “top,” with “A” and going down. Max was on C Deck when he opened a compartment almost all of the way aft toward the Engineering spaces. Max’s knowledge of some parts of the ship was still a bit fuzzy, so he didn’t know what was behind that particular hatch. Most compartments on warships were not labeled with anything more specific than a number, so as not to aid enemy boarders. It was not known whether any Krag outside of their Intel sections read Standard, but no one was going to take any chances.
Opening the hatch, he found the Small Arms and Edged Weapons Training Room, occupied by an older NCO and seven squeakers. In fact, they looked to be the squeakiest of the squeakers, the youngest of the midshipmen on board.
The NCO appeared to be almost sixty and might have acquired just a tiny bit of roundness around the middle, but he had muscular arms, broad shoulders, and a warrior’s bearing. His iron-gray crew cut accentuated a craggy face that had the lines to support either a warrior’s grimace or a beloved grandfather’s smile. His service stripes showed that he had probably been in the same training class as Gus Grissom. Max received a quick once-over from intense gray eyes that clearly missed very little.
These boys had joined the ship at Jellicoe Station just a few days ago. This was their first ship. Today, they were ge
tting their first taste of basic combat instruction from Chief Petty Officer First Class Amborsky, the lead midshipman trainer and the second most senior noncom on the ship. If a man who held this job was well liked on board, he was generally called “Mother Goose.”
As soon as Amborsky saw Max, he barked, “Captain on deck!”
All of the little boys, between ages eight and ten Standard years, came immediately to a fairly good version of attention. But not good enough for Amborsky.
“My dear little lambs,” he growled ferociously, his words almost a comic contrast with his tone, “when you hear ‘Captain on deck,’ that means you come to AH-TEN-SHUN. Feet together! Arms at your sides! Stomach in! Shoulders back! Chest out! Head high! Eyes straight ahead! Like you are proud to be in the Navy, even though the Navy has yet to have any cause to be proud of you. That’s better.” As he was talking, he moved around the room, nudging one boy’s chin a little higher, adjusting another’s shoulders a bit farther back, pushing another’s feet closer together, his touches firm, but not rough or unkind.
Once the chief was satisfied that his charges had come properly to attention for their commanding officer, he pivoted and saluted the captain. “Captain, Chief Petty Officer Amborsky, reporting seven newborn squeakers participating in Unit One, Module Two of Basic Combat Instruction. They have just been introduced to identifying the enemy and learned his basic characteristics, sir.” It was apparent that, somehow, the Fates had seen to it that this FUBAR ship had wound up with a solid-gold Mother Goose.
Max returned the salute, and the chief snapped his hand back to his side. He looked at the earnest faces arrayed in front of him. Max put on his stern warrior face. “Identifying the enemy—sounds pretty easy to me, Chief. If it’s as tall as a man, with a rat face and tiny pink ears, it’s a Krag and it needs to die.”
“Captain, we were just about to begin the basic instruction with the dirk. Would the captain like to watch, or would the captain like to conduct the instruction himself?” Aha, the old veteran has decided to administer a test to his new captain.
“Thank you, Chief. I believe I will conduct the instruction, at least for a while.” The chief nodded, a slight glimmer of provisional approval in his eyes. Score one for Max. Max reached into a slot in the leg of his SCU and withdrew an edged weapon, holding it up before his audience. The old chief let slip the merest hint of a smile when he saw that the skipper still carried a dirk in addition to his sidearm and cutlass.
Max gripped the weapon’s hilt between two fingers so that his hand did not obstruct their view. “This, gentlemen, is the general issue, Union Naval Dirk, Model M-28-2. It is not, I repeat not, a ‘baby sword’ as you may hear some people call it. The dirk is a real weapon used by real spacers to kill real enemies. This particular dirk is the same one I was issued when I was your age. It has drawn enemy blood. I used it to stick a Krag in the gut, and then a Marine took off his head. This blade saved my life.
“Some of you may be wondering why we are issuing edged weapons in the twenty-fourth century. Here we are, on an FTL-capable starship propelled by nuclear fusion, handing out a weapon almost identical to that which the British Royal Navy issued to its midshipmen five hundred years ago on wooden vessels propelled by the wind. As you remember from the tour you got of this vessel when you came aboard at Jellicoe, the Cumberland is a pressurized metal tube surrounded by the vacuum of space, crammed full of pressure vessels, pipes full of toxic liquids and gases, radioactive nuclear detonators, and other things that will kill you and lots of other people if they get holes poked in them with bullets. So spacers need a weapon that will kill but that doesn’t send little bits of metal flying through the air at three hundred meters per second. Second, edged weapons can be used by small people with very little training—you do not need to be taught how to load, aim, fire, field strip, and clean them. Edged weapons do not jam; they do not go off accidentally; and they do not run out of ammunition.
“According to official naval records, in the course of this war over two hundred Krag have been killed or seriously wounded by midshipmen wielding dirks. This simple weapon has saved hundreds of midshipmen’s lives. It is not a toy. It is the first weapon issued to you in your naval career. It is going to be issued to you today, as soon as you complete this training. From that moment until the day you retire and are mustered off your last ship, naval regulations require that you keep it, or some other deadly weapon, at hand at all times. When you receive your weapon, you are no longer a boy; you are a member of the Union Space Navy, carrying arms and trained to use those arms to kill the enemy. From that moment, you are a warrior.
“The M-28 is approximately 483 millimeters long overall, weighs 510 grams, and does its work with a 330-millimeter-long, double-edged, high-carbon steel blade. It is issued with the edges razor sharp, and you are expected to keep them that way, making it an extremely effective slashing and cutting weapon; but that is not how we normally use it.”
He slid his own dirk back into its pocket and picked up one of the blunt practice dirks on the table. “We are not going to send you into the fray against the Krag until you are a little bit older, but it is always possible that the Krag will come to you, and if that happens, your dirk is your weapon of last resort. The best way to use it is just like I did when I was fourteen.”
He walked over to the chief. “You hold it underhand like this, and you stick it in at the top of the Krag’s belly, right here”—he pressed the practice blade against the chief’s abdomen about halfway between his navel and his solar plexus—“not where the belly ends on a man, because Krag have rib cages that come down farther than ours, but right here in the middle of its upper body. You shove as hard as you can, and you keep pushing until it won’t go in any farther—all the way to the hilt if you can. Then, you pull it out so that if you cut open any blood vessels you leave a hole for it to bleed out through.
“If the Krag does not go down, do it again and again and again until he does. So, that’s the drill: stab, withdraw; stab, withdraw; stab, withdraw. Keep it up until the Krag is at your feet in a puddle of its own blood. Now, we’ll pair you off, except for… you,” he pointed to the smallest of the lot. “You will be my partner.”
Training classes such as this always had an odd number of students for precisely that reason: so that the instructor could pick the student most in need of closer instruction, greater encouragement, or more attention, as his partner. “What’s your name, son?”
“Park, sir,” he managed to choke out, obviously intimidated by the presence of his exalted commanding officer. “But everyone calls me ‘Will Robinson.’” The boy couldn’t have been much more than a hundred centimeters tall. He looked far too small to be hundreds of light years away from his mommy.
“A respected and time-honored naval nickname—I carried it myself for sixteen weeks.”
“You did, sir?”
“Absolutely. I was the Will Robinson of the Cruiser USS San Jacinto, old number CRM 1228, back in 2295. That’s back when starships had steam engines and we punished disobedience by keelhauling.” The little boy smiled at that. “Where are you from, Mr. Park?”
“A small town in Korea. On Earth, sir.”
“All right, Mr. Park. Just do what I show you and you’ll do fine.”
He then proceeded to have one member of each pair pick up the practice dirk and hold it as if to stab a Krag in the belly. Max went around the room, correcting their grips. Once the grips were right, he showed them the stance that would deliver the most power, weak-side foot slightly forward, strong-side foot slightly back, leaning forward just a few degrees, and then thrusting with the strong-side arm while bracing the body by pushing forward with the legs. Finally he came back to his partner. He made sure that the boy had the correct grip and the correct stance.
Once everyone had the stance and the grip right, Max made sure each boy knew how to put them into motion, practicing stabbing and withdrawing over and over again, with Max and the chief correcting th
e boys’ form. Those who were initially handed the dirks then traded with their partners, Max and the chief again going around the room, gently correcting grip, foot placement, and body posture.
“Now,” Max announced when that was accomplished, “some of you may have noticed that Mr. Park had some difficulty reaching the right point on my belly. You will not always be able to get to the Krag’s abdomen. You may be out of position. The Krag may be standing on a higher level than you are. You may be too short. But that doesn’t mean your dirk is useless. In a fight, stab or cut whatever you can reach. Even if you don’t kill the Krag, you may help your shipmates by wounding it enough to put it out of the fight, or even by hampering and distracting it enough so that other naval personnel can attack it successfully. When I was sticking that Krag in the gut with my dirk at age fourteen, I had his undivided attention, and that allowed Marine Lance Corporal Halvorsen to come up behind it and take its head off with a battle ax.”
Max stood on a six-inch-tall wooden box, about half a meter square, apparently constructed for precisely that purpose. “Now, Mr. Park, suppose that I am a Krag warrior and I am drawing my sidearm to shoot you right in the head. There is nowhere to hide, so if you run away, all that will accomplish is getting you shot in the back of the head rather than the front.” Max pointed his finger at the boy with his thumb stuck in the air, the universal pantomime for a handgun. “I’m drawing this pistol and I’m about to shoot you. What do you do?”
“Well, sir, I guess…”
“No, son. Don’t tell me. Show me. Use your weapon. Do it. Now.” The boy didn’t move, but just stood there, looking at him timidly, as though afraid to attack the bulky, not to mention high-ranking, fully grown man in front of him. He seemed frozen in place.
To Honor You Call Us (Man of War Book 1) Page 17