To Honor You Call Us (Man of War)

by Honsinger, H. Paul

  “Goldman, sir.” The man’s face was going from red to purple.

  “Mister Goldman, who is your relief?”

  “Ensign Harbaugh, sir.”

  Max scanned the room for the person next in rank after Goldman, quickly finding a chief petty officer first class, whose service stripes proclaimed he had been in space long enough to have served with John Glenn and Gordo Cooper. He was looking at Goldman with poorly concealed hatred, a look that confirmed the impression Max had already formed of this officer.

  “Chief, please tell Ensign Harbaugh by voice comm that he is to report here on my order to take over as senior officer in this compartment. Immediately.” The chief hit a comm button on his console and started talking into his headset.

  “Mister Goldman, I’m relieving you as sensor SSR commander and reducing you in grade to midshipman second, both effective immediately.” Max heard some whispering around the room at that. He had made an impression. Good. He was just getting started. “And pack your duffel. At 0600 tomorrow, you are to report to the midshipmen trainer for reassignment to middy quarters and to begin to repeat the units in ‘Officer’s Duties with Regard to Training and Leadership of Enlisted Men,’ plus the ‘Intensive Hands-On Practicum in Ship’s Cleaning, Maintenance, and Sanitation.’ I hope you enjoy the sewage reclamation plant because you’re going to be seeing a lot of it. I will not tolerate abuse of enlisted men by officers on my ship. Dismissed.”

  Military justice in action. Quoth the Mikado: “Let the punishment fit the crime.”

  Goldman did an about face and stomped out of the room, dripping with insubordinate attitude. Max suppressed the urge to call him back and dress him down further. No. A repeat of the mids’ course in the right way to teach and lead the lower ranks, plus a month relearning ship’s cleaning, maintenance, and sanitation, should readjust that man’s outlook. If it worked, Max would make him an officer again in four or five months. If it didn’t, Goldman would see what the galaxy looked like from the perspective of an ordinary spacer third class.

  Max then turned his attention to the cringer. He didn’t look a day over eighteen. “Spacer, what’s your name?”

  “Onizuka, sir.”

  “Onizuka, how long have you been in Sensors?”

  “Three days sir.”

  “Before that?”

  “I was in Environmental Control on the Hai Lung. Then I got twenty-four days of training in Sensors at Llellewellyn Station and then they shipped me here.”

  “And was today the first time you had ever been asked to do a spectrographic identification protocol on a real contact?”

  “Yes, sir. It was.”

  “Well, Onizuka, when I was a greenie, the first time I did a specident, I told the SSR commander that a Forthian customs probe was a Krag Limpet torpedo. The whole ship went to general quarters, and we came within a micron of firing on the damn thing. Forthia hadn’t joined the Union at that point, so I could have started a war. Fortunately, the sensors officer in CIC insisted that we follow the dual phenomenology rule and not fire until we got another reading from another kind of sensor that gave us the same answer.”

  “What did they do to you, sir?” asked the young Spacer, wide-eyed.

  “Do? To me? Not a thing except rag me about it. Endlessly. For the better part of a year, every time we encountered some sort of innocent target like a navigation buoy or a comm relay or a postage-and-parcel drone, someone or other would ask me if I thought it was hostile and whether we should fire on it. When we’d go to a bar on shore leave and the bartender would pass us some bar nuts or pretzels, someone would say, ‘Hey Robichaux, you sure that’s not a hostile target?’”

  That got him a few chuckles.

  “Now, who in here has spent some time on this console?” One man, an able spacer first, stood up. “And you are?”

  “Smith, sir.”

  “And Spacer Smith, if my luck’s holding, there will be more than one Smith aboard this ship. Right?”

  “Yes, sir. There are three.”

  “Your first name, then?”

  “James, sir. But that won’t help sir. Every one of us is named James. Sir.”

  “So, you go by your middle names, then?”

  “No, sir. I don’t have a middle name and the two other Smiths are both named James Edwin.”

  “Merciful God. What genius decided to put you three on the same ship? I must have an enemy in BuPers. What are we supposed to use as names for you three so that no one gets confused?”

  “Chief Bond decided we should go by our homeworld name. I’m from Greenlee four, so I’m ‘Greenlee.’”

  “Chief Bond has a lot of sense. Thank God none of you is from Zubin Eschamali IX. Or even worse, Fuhkher II.” That one got a few laughs. The mood in the room was starting to lighten a bit. Maybe these people can start to function now.

  “Okay, then, Greenlee. I want you to sit down right here and spend the next hour teaching Onizuka everything you can about specidents. Since he’s had the course, he must know most of what he needs, so give him the practical tips you learned on the job that weren’t in the training, and then run a few exercises. I’ve got some you haven’t seen. Access the menu under ‘Captain’s Training Files.’”

  Just then, Harbaugh came in, out of breath, pillow creases on the right side of his face, eyes bleary. The man obviously needed coffee. Max looked around for the pot. He couldn’t spot it. A cola would do. Then he noticed that there were no coffee cups or mugs, nor any beverages of any kind anywhere in the compartment. Max looked at the CPO first with all the stripes. If anyone here knew what the hell was going on, it would be this man. “Chief, what’s your name?”

  “Kleszczynska, sir.” When he got a blank stare from the captain, he spelled it.

  Max looked imploringly at the ceiling for a second. “And what do the people who have not practiced Polish tongue twisters from birth call you, Chief?”

  “Klesh, sir,” he answered, smiling.

  “Chief Klesh, where is the coffee pot for this compartment? And the drinks chiller?”

  In a voice that did not entirely conceal his disapproval, the chief responded, “Both removed at Captain Oscar’s orders, sir.”

  That figures. Men who stand rotating four hour watches around the clock are expected to stare at sensor readouts, in a darkened room, for two hundred and forty minutes, and not fall asleep at their stations without coffee or drinks to sustain them? Riiiiiiight.

  Max went to the nearest comm panel. He stabbed the button savagely. “Quartermaster.”

  “Quartermaster’s office, Chief Jinnah here.”

  “Chief, this is the skipper. Does this ship have the standard issue of coffee pots and drink chillers for a vessel of this class?”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  “Mugs and cups too?”

  “The regulation number, sir.”

  “And Chief Jinnah, if I wanted coffee pots to be used to actually make coffee and chillers to be used to chill drinks, and some cups and mugs to be available to hold beverages rather than collecting dust somewhere, how would I go about finding them?”

  “They are all in the spares bay. I can get you the grid numbers if you want them.”

  “All there at Captain Oscar’s order, I suppose.”

  A resigned sigh came over the comm. “Affirmative, sir.”

  “Chief Jinnah. Make this your priority. I want those coffee pots and those chillers issued and stocked by fourteen hundred hours. Issue the cups and mugs too.”

  “Yes, sir!” Something told Max that the chief liked his coffee.

  Max punched another key.

  “Enlisted mess, Chief Lao here.”

  “Chief, this is the skipper. I need coffee and beverage service in the Sensor SSR ASAP. Are you the man who can make that happen?”

  “Affirmative, sir. Just have the men key in what they want on the Tray Request menu, and the senior man in there key in an authorization, and I’ll have it in there in under ten minutes.” M
ost of the senior NCOs on this ship seemed to be on the ball, at any rate.

  Greenlee explained to Max that Captain Oscar had prohibited beverages at stations because he thought they didn’t “look shipshape” and because of fears of spillage (absurd because all the consoles were hermetically sealed). Accordingly, some of the men in Sensors had to be shown how to pull up the Tray Request menu from their consoles.

  While all this was going on, Chief Klesh had brought Ensign Harbaugh up to speed, and Harbaugh had been to every console to see what each man was doing and to get a look at what each sensor was reading. Max put him on getting crash training to the five men who were new to the department, with the rest of the people there either helping those five or running training exercises until the next jump.

  “And after the jump, when you’ve determined everything is clear, everyone but two of you go back to running exercises while two watch the consoles. All the senior people rotate through keeping an eye out.

  “Harbaugh, Klesh, put your heads together and see if there’s anyone off duty who would be helpful in increasing these men’s proficiency in a big burning hurry. If so, get them in here. You have my leave to wake anyone in this department from both of the off-duty watches. Harbaugh, when the next watch comes on, put them to work doing the same thing this group is doing, and have them do the same for the next group.”

  “Yes sir.” Harbaugh seemed eager, anyway.

  “And Harbaugh, effective immediately, you’re the new sensor SSR commander. I need green lights across the board from this room and I need ’em yesterday. Anything you need to make that happen, you come straight to me. Understood?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Carry on, then.”

  “How in the hell did you get your hands on that?” Chief Tung pointed at the object on the table in front of him. It looked like a slightly oversize, bright yellow pancake with a few buttons and lights set in the center.

  “The lock on Ordinance Locker Number Three has had an electronic fault since we were commissioned. You can open it by entering zero-one-two-three. I never reported the problem, in case I ever needed to liberate something.” Chief Kapstein was proud of himself.

  “Why didn’t you ‘liberate’ something that would do us more good than one dinky little thermoflasher?” snarled Chief Larch-Thau. Resting at the center of the tiny table in the Goat Locker, the stolen device looked more like an hors d’oeuvre than ordnance.

  “Because, dumbass,” answered Kapstein, “there’s a sniffer in there that reads the chemicals in the air. You take out too high a volume of ordnance, the trace compound concentration in the air goes down and the computer triggers an alarm. You can slip out one or two of these little jewels, but anything more or anything bigger and you’re nabbed.”

  “But what,” Tung asked, “can we do with a thermoflasher? All the drives, deflectors, reactors, and every other high-energy component is high temperature tolerant. A thermoflasher will just burn off the paint or melt the dials. Brown can just pop on new panels or a new control interface, and it’ll be good as new.”

  “Come on,” Kapstein chided. “You mean to tell me you can’t think of a single low-energy system that’s also mission critical?”

  “You mean…?” Larch-Thau smiled, pointing at the ceiling.

  “Absolutely,” Kapstein answered.

  Having skillfully removed the ceiling panel and an air return duct access panel, all three men were crawling along the air conduit, which was approximately one meter square. Tung had already entered a command from his percom, directing the computer to reduce the airflow through this duct so that there wouldn’t be a pressure buildup to alert the computer that there was an obstruction consisting of three chief petty officers. After five minutes of stealthy creeping, they reached a branching duct that led toward the lower decks. Fortunately, there were rungs bolted to one of the sides.

  Not saying a word, they moved more slowly as they went down. After descending almost two decks, they came to another horizontal duct, which they followed for just under twenty meters. By this time, all three men were sweating, not just from the warm air in the air return ducts and the exertion, but from fear of being caught. If apprehended, the very least they would likely face would be a court martial, and at worst, in theory the skipper could toss them out the airlock.

  After a few minutes, they reached a grille that blocked their way. On the other side of the heavy metal grating they could barely discern a complex array of pipes, ducts, and electronics. Attached to the grille’s corner were three small signs. The first read: “MAIN ATMOSPHERE PROCESSOR MANIFOLD.” The second: “WARNING: ENTRY WHILE PROCESSOR IS IN OPERATION WILL KILL YOU IN LESS THAN ONE MINUTE. CONFIRM PROCESSOR IS OFFLINE AND UNIT POWER LOCKED OUT BEFORE ENTRY.” The third: “ENTRY WHILE PROCESSOR IS IN OPERATION PROHIBITED BY 60 CNR 29623 AND WILL RESULT IN SEVERE DISCIPLINARY CONSEQUENCES.”

  Larch-Thau laughed. “I wonder what’s worse: dying in less than one minute or the ‘severe disciplinary consequences.’”

  “Once you’re dead, I’m thinking that the discipline isn’t too bad,” said Kapstein. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  Tung pointed at the sign. “But…”

  “We’re not going inside, dipstick,” said Kaptstein. “We’ll just make a little deposit.” He rotated four release catches on the grille from “LOCK” to “OPEN” and punched a few buttons on the thermoflasher; then he checked the display against his percom and firmly thumbed the largest button on the unit. It was red. He shifted one side of the grill far enough back for him to stick in his arm and toss the disk a meter and a half or so into the unit, after which he reset the grille, relocked the release catches, and turned to his companions.

  “All right, boys, back to the Goat Locker.”

  The crawl back seemed much faster than going the other way, perhaps because three chiefs in an air duct could always be explained, but three chiefs in an air duct with one of those chiefs carrying a piece of thermoexplosive ordinance might prove a bit harder to pass off.

  Once back at their starting point with the duct and ceiling panel returned to their original condition, Kapstein reached into a chiller and removed three soda bottles whose labels were an ever so slightly darker shade of green than the norm, and passed them out. Each man opened his bottle and quickly downed an “off the books” contraband beer, which—like all alcoholic beverages—was banned unless consumed in the wardroom or the enlisted mess and officially logged to the drinker.

  “Here’s the drill, boys,” Kapstein said with a grateful belch. “Our little deposit is set to do its business in the middle of the next watch. If you’re on watch, be sure to be doing something that’s in view of other people, preferably a senior chief or an officer or two. If not, be sure to be in the mess or someplace where there’s lots of people to say you were there. That way, you’ve got a triple-shielded alibi and Bob’s your uncle.” They laughed together and, as one, dropped into the chairs that surrounded the table.

  Just as the laughter started to die down, they heard a faint noise in the corridor. Before they could begin to stand, the hatch lock cycled, and two gigantic Marines burst into the room, pulse rifles slung, but sidearms in their hands. They were followed a second later by Major Kraft, his sidearm pointed at the center of Kapstein’s chest.

  “Hands on the table and freeze!” he demanded in a voice that threatened to crack the bulkheads. “We’ve got the last forty minutes of your lives on video,” he added. “And Bob is no longer your uncle. Your mother’s sister just divorced him. Zamora, Ulmer, put cuffs on these… individuals. Let’s see if they like the brig as much as they like the Goat Locker.”

  Max left Sensors just as the coffee and drinks arrived—he had not ordered anything for himself—and started for the wardroom. He still craved that coffee and chicken-salad sandwich. He was just bellying up to the pot of dark roast—at least that idiot Captain Oscar hadn’t banished coffee from the wardroom—when his percom beeped. He looked at the screen.
“NDED IN BRG.” Needed in Brig.

  Great.

  One of the benefits of serving on a small vessel was that everything was close to everything else. Climb down one level to C Deck, walk forward about eleven meters along the one corridor that ran along the center of the inhabited portion of that deck, and turn right into the second to last hatch.

  There he met Major Kraft, the Marine commander. As always, Kraft seemed to be enjoying his job. “Captain, that little hook we put in the water a few hours ago has already caught us some fish. We got Tung, Kapstein, and Larch-Thau on visual surveillance, trying to plant a thermoflasher in the atmosphere processor primary manifold. They’re in there.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the closed security door.

  The Primary Manifold was a ton-and-a-half, fifty-eight-cubic-meter, bewilderingly complex apparatus that ducted all of the air recirculated from the ship after it came in through the primary air return duct, scrubbed out the carbon dioxide, analyzed its composition, and adjusted it. If the air were too dry, the manifold added water vapor. If it were oxygen depleted, it added O2. If there were too much argon, krypton, or radon, the air was routed across a catalyst bed that removed it, and so on. The unit was triple and, as to some functions, quadruple fault redundant, and the ship carried ample spares for any component of the unit that could wear out or break.

  For that reason, and because it was so large and heavy that carrying a spare was impractical, the huge unit itself was one of the few pieces of critical equipment on the ship for which there was no backup and no replacement. In the unlikely event that a manifold were destroyed—usually by enemy action—the ship would go on emergency atmosphere scrubbers. If it didn’t get back to base or have its crew offloaded to a rescue ship, the air quality would get bad enough to start doing damage to the men in two or three days. It was the perfect sabotage target, which is why Max had put it under surveillance. If the thermoflasher had detonated, it would have instantly melted the entire unit to worthless, unreparable, unsalvageable slag.

  “What do you want to do with them, Captain?”