To Honor You Call Us (Man of War)

by Honsinger, H. Paul

  “Yes. I just came off watch. I still stand watches as a mid, plus attending class and doing homework.”

  “Goldman, we want to help you, but we need something from you. From what Green has told us, we estimate that you have between thirteen and seventeen Afterburner tablets—that’s what you call this kind of stim, isn’t it? Afterburners?”

  Goldman nodded.

  “We want you to turn them over to us. All of them. And wear a biomonitor for thirty days so that we know you are staying clean. In exchange, we will treat your withdrawal medically, give you support and counseling, and not impose any discipline on you for any drug-related conduct between when you joined the ship until the moment you turn the pills over to me.”

  “What if I don’t go along? You mean I don’t get treatment when I run out of pills?”

  “I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that,” Sahin said stiffly. “I have taken a sacred oath as a physician. I would never withhold treatment from anyone who needed it. Ever. You will receive the appropriate treatment at the appropriate time irrespective of whether you cooperate with us. But I am given to understand that the captain would discipline you for possession of dangerous drugs, consumption of dangerous drugs, and reporting for duty while impaired or under the influence of dangerous drugs. I am also given to understand that he would bring a separate count for possession of each tablet, for each time you took a tablet, and for each watch for which you reported while under the influence. My estimate is that we would be contemplating at least three hundred counts, and more likely something like a thousand. I shudder to think of how long your sentence would be upon conviction on all those charges.”

  Goldman pondered that for a minute. “Ohhhh, I see. I get it now. This isn’t about establishing discipline and proving to us that we can’t take drugs in defiance of the captain’s wishes. You have to understand, that’s what it would have been about with Captain Oscar. What your guy is trying to do is to restore combat effectiveness in the shortest possible time. Right. That’s got to be it. You need everyone to turn in their pills now, so you can get everyone through withdrawal or recovered from that slowing down thing you get with people on the Chill, and get everyone back on duty ASAP. Am I interpreting my readings correctly?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that you are wrong.” Dr. Sahin could not help but smile. Even with his mind disordered by the stimulants, Goldman had analyzed the fragmentary evidence at his disposal and rapidly arrived upon the correct conclusion. If he could break the shackles of drug dependency and his self-defeating attitudes, this man could become an exceptional officer.

  “I sank a lot of money into those pills. I’d be throwing away several hundred credits.”

  “There are more important things than credits. Do not think of this as a matter of throwing the money away. Rather, I invite you to characterize it as, shall we say, tuition, the money one pays to receive a valuable education.”

  “There may be something to that, Doctor.” He paused, considering. The doctor didn’t rush him, as he knew that this man was weighing the alternatives, using the best rational analysis he could bring to bear. Sahin sat in silence. He had seen this man’s mind at work and was confident of the outcome.

  “Okay. Deal. Oh, Doctor, as one person who evaluates data to another, kind of a professional courtesy, I want you to know that your estimate is off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In calculating the number of pills I have left, you made an erroneous assumption. You assumed that I am taking the pills only to prop myself up near the end of a watch. I’m also taking them to get myself going after a short sleep period too.”

  Sahin made a note to revise his calculations with regard to other stim users.

  “I have ten tablets left, exactly. Where do you want me to bring them?” Sahin had no doubt that Goldman was telling him the truth.

  “To me. Personally. Put them in my hand. I will expect you back here in less than five minutes. And if you take any of them before you come, I will know.”

  “Five minutes.” He paused and turned back to meet the doctor’s eyes. Was that fear? “Bones, I tried to stop taking them before. It was pretty bad.”

  Yes, it was fear. While the doctor was reading Goldman’s eyes, Goldman was reading his. For the first time he could remember, Goldman looked into the eyes of a superior officer and saw sympathy, understanding, and—of all things—kindness.

  “Goldman, the entire staff of the Casualty Center will be here to help you through it. I am here to help you as well. We will give you medication to ease your symptoms. If they become severe, we will put you in the Casualty Center where someone will be watching over you every moment. Remember, young man, you are in the Navy, and in the Navy you are never, ever alone.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  05:17Z Hours, 25 January 2315

  “Verify destination.” The XO could not hide the excitement in his voice.

  “Destination is Alfa jump point in unnamed system, catalog designation Uniform Sierra Nebula Galaxy Sierra 4-1195-1486-5912-4109. Coordinates as displayed.” Even Stevenson’s reading of unexciting star catalog designations seemed to carry with it a hefty dollop of adrenalin.

  “Very well,” said the XO.

  “One minute to jump,” Stevenson called out.

  “Jump Officer, safe all systems for jump,” said Garcia.

  “Safing.” Around the CIC, console after console went dark or to static or flat gray.

  “I want the ship stealthed as soon as possible after we come out of the jump,” Max interjected into the routine. The order was promptly acknowledged.

  Everyone watched the jump clock. Then the jump officer began the countdown. “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Jumping.”

  This time, no one retched. That was always a bonus. One man at point defense systems looked a little green, but he looked almost that green before the jump. He was on the closely held list of men who were going through withdrawal. Five men, so far, had been taken off active duty: three were in their quarters and two were in the Casualty Station. The rest were standing their watches and doing their duty, with the help of a meticulous, individually designed medication regimen put together by Dr. Sahin, whose skills as a physician Max was beginning to suspect were nothing short of the genius level.

  “Jump complete, restoring systems,” Stevenson announced. The now-familiar routine progressed as one system after another stirred from enforced slumber; sensor information started coming in; drives were restored; and the ship inched into tentative motion to clear the datum. But this time the routine was not routine at all.

  The Vaaach map had shown the expected routes and schedules of four Krag freighters as they moved through the Free Corridor. As best could be told from analysis of the file, the original source of the data was the computer of a Krag vessel. Apparently, the Vaaach had met the Krag vessel somewhere in deep space, hacked the computer, and downloaded the file. This wasn’t surprising given that they had sufficient skill to penetrate the Cumberland’s intricate system of serially redundant firewalls and lockouts to place a file in her systems without anyone being the wiser. Perhaps they hacked the computers of every ship they met, in which case the Vaaach must have accumulated an amazing body of intelligence.

  Two of the Krag ships were positioned so that the Cumberland could not reach them before they crossed into the Romanovan Imperium, a neutral power whose space Max was ordered not to violate. However, two ships appeared as though they could be intercepted, and Max was going to try.

  As always, Max needed to hear from Kasparov. Fortunately, the man and his back room had progressed by leaps and bounds in only a few days. Minutes elapsed with no ship contacts other than a few freighters crawling across the system at 0.05 c. Sensors typed and classified them anyway, and Comms pulled up their transponder information in less than ten seconds. They turned out to be a heavy ore carrier operated by Shoulde
r Freight Lines, ridiculously named Shoulder’s Boulder Holder, and an eighty-five-year-old, bare-bones, barely able to pass inspection microfreighter bearing the improbable name Queen Mary, its tiny hold full of small but high-value items: gourmet coffee, something known as Beluga caviar, precision machine tools, and surgical instruments.

  By the end of this cruise, this crew might turn out to be moderately proficient.

  Max saw Kasparov’s shoulder muscles tense and his hands fly to the controls for his console. He must have heard something from his back room.

  “Distant contact. Designating as Uniform seven. Bearing two-seven-five mark zero-five-three. Reading a bearing change from right to left and from bottom to top. Range is still uncertain, but the weakness of the mass detection indicates it is in excess of two-five AU. Bearing change is rapid for such a distant contact, and I’m getting a hint of a high Doppler as well, so I’m classifying contact as fast—probably a warship. Request course change to zero-niner-five mark zero-five-three to get a cross bearing on contact.”

  “Maneuvering, make it so. Make your speed zero point two five,” Max ordered. The ship came about to a heading perpendicular to the contact’s bearing. If the line of the first bearing to the target was the “b” side of a right triangle, the idea was for the ship to now travel along “a” side, or the base, and then take a cross bearing down the “c” side, or hypotenuse, allowing it to calculate the range. Of course, with active sensors Max could have the range measured to the meter in a few minutes, targeting the enemy with a sensor beam. But like submarines in the oceans of Earth centuries before, stalking warships, rarely gave away their positions by using active sensors, preferring to detect their prey by the target’s own emissions, while they remained hidden until the last second. The deadliest attack was the one you did not see coming.

  Minutes passed, then the better part of an hour. Working a target takes patience and nerves of steel. With all the coffee Max had been drinking these past few hours, it also took a bladder the size of a beach ball. Max had needed to take a leak for the last twenty minutes but hated to leave his station for more than ten seconds. If he didn’t go now, though, he’d be forced to leave to change his uniform. “XO, I’m headed for the head. You have CIC.”

  “Understood, I have CIC.”

  He was back in less than ninety seconds.

  “XO, status.” Tradition demanded that he ask, as if there were anything that could have changed meaningfully in a minute and a half that would not also be immediately obvious from the main status display and the condition monitors.

  “No change, sir,” Garcia responded.

  Max would have been willing to kill or to die himself to get more and better information from Kasparov, but the man couldn’t tell what he didn’t know. He was talking furiously to his back room, so they must be learning something. Max itched to know. He was used to being in the trenches, not back at the chateau drinking champagne, talking on the field telephone, and moving markers around on a map. If he chose, Max could listen to their voice loop, or any other of the circuits between any of his CIC officers and their back rooms. For that matter, if he had the patience to navigate his way through all the levels of all the menus, he could pull up any display from any console in the ship. But no captain with any sense did that (Max noted, though, that Captain Oscar had configured his console with easy navigation shortcuts to do exactly that—monitor loops, scroll through every display of every CIC console, and all sorts of other ludicrous micromanagement). Max relied mostly on what his CIC people told him, plus what he could tell from a few of the normal “CO Displays” that were on the standard main menu for the commander’s console.

  “Captain,” Kasparov said, “cross bearing indicates range to target is twenty-six point seventy-four AU. Target motion analysis indicates target is bound for this system’s Bravo jump point at speed of approximately zero point five two c. Naturally, as we accumulate more data, we will be able to refine that estimate.

  “And sir, this is a very dusty system. Both we and the target are in the plane of this system, so our line of sight right now is right through the bulk of the dust, and it’s obscuring visual imaging. At first, we thought that the target was enormous, but as we start to get a better angle, the target image appears, under extreme magnification and enhancement, to be resolving into three ships in a line abeam formation. Configurations are not visible at this time, but from the amount of light reflected from each, our best guess right now is that we are looking at the fast military ore carrier we were expecting and two escorts of some kind. Probably destroyers, but they might be large corvettes or small frigates at this point. So, the largest ship retains the designation Uniform seven and we are designating the apparent escorts as Uniform eight and nine.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kasparov.” Oh, yes, thank you so bloody much, Mr. Kasparov. Two—count-em, two—probable Krag destroyers. We wouldn’t want to make things too easy, would we?

  “Maneuvering, plot a course at a forty-five-degree angle to the plane of this system with an azimuth that will put us on the six o’clock of that little Krag convoy while keeping us more than half a million kills away from them at all times. We’ll slide into their six and sneak up behind them from that far back.” Max wouldn’t normally give such a complex order to Maneuvering; instead, he would break the order down into a series of simpler steps and give each as the previous one was completed. But LeBlanc had impressed him so far. This man could handle what was just thrown at him, plus some.

  LeBlanc acknowledged the order, spent a minute or so working with his console, and then projected a proposed course in the tactical display. Max saw that it was exactly what he wanted and nodded to his fellow Cajun. The old chief began giving orders to his people, and the Cumberland started once again to crawl the duck pond.

  “Sensors, you will let me know when you get a better ID on the Krag vessels, won’t you?”

  “Affirmative, sir. It’s going to be a while. They are still very distant, their drives are masked from us so we can’t get a specident on them, and we are still too far for optical scanners to resolve a configuration.” Max had served his time in Kasparov’s position, so he knew all that. It didn’t make it any less frustrating.

  Patience. Max was tempted to run the main sublight up to full and go charging into battle, guns blazing. It would be better than taking all these hours to creep into position and make a sneak attack. No, it wouldn’t. Chances were, in a fair fight those two Krag escorts would mop the floor with him. Max remembered the words of Commodore Middleton: “A fair fight comes from poor planning. Your goal is an unfair fight. You want to use every trick, artifice, and deceit possible to make every fight an outrageously unfair contest tilted completely in your favor, every time. If you are above using surprise, guile, stealth, and misdirection in battle, you are too noble to be in the Navy. Consider a career in education.”

  An hour and a half of creeping. “Skipper,” Kasparov said, “we’ve finally got an angle that lets us do a specident on the targets’ drives—all Krag signatures. So all three targets are now posident as hostile. Redesignating the probable ore carrier as Hotel One, and the two probable escorts as Hotels Two and Three. We should have the IDs narrowed down to class before long.”

  Whatever their precise designation, the three targets had been keeping a ruler-straight course across this star system since they were first detected, and were making no effort to make themselves hard to detect. Whether it was because of Max’s strategy of getting into his patrol area several days early, or sheer luck, these ships appeared to have no idea that there was any chance of a hostile ship in the neighborhood.

  Or maybe, just maybe, they wanted it to look as though they weren’t expecting trouble.

  “Mr. Kasparov, I want you to put two men in your back room on optical scanners. Watch the area like hawks, from twenty thousand to five hundred thousand kills behind our little convoy. Look for any occultations, reflections, glints, glimmers, tiny flashes from attitude c
ontrol thrusters, flicking cigarette lighters, toddler’s nightlights, or any artificial light source of any kind. Tie the computer detectors into those circuits too—sometimes they will spot something that eyeballs miss. Then, I want you to take two more men and align the main mass detector on that azimuth, and ignore everything else.”

  The main mass detector usually scanned in all directions, allowing it to detect approaching vessels but greatly decreasing its sensitivity. By training it in one direction only, Max was increasing the chance of detecting even a distant target that was taking active measures to conceal its mass signature.

  “Crank up the gain way above the background noise threshold, and then have those men watch the noise. Look for any repeat detections more than one standard deviation above random. If there is something hiding in that space, you are going to slowly build up a pattern of higher than average detections along the other ship’s line of bearing.”

  “Aye, sir. What about EM detection? We can orient the high-gain array that we use to monitor low-power eavesdropping devices from long range.”

  Designed with the idea that she might someday be used to penetrate enemy space and collect intelligence, Cumberland was equipped with an exquisitely sensitive broadband EM sensor capability that allowed her to receive signals from covertly planted “bugs” at extreme range. The same equipment might pick up faint electromagnetic signals escaping from the hidden enemy vessel.

  “Good idea. Do that. Maybe they have some signal leakage they don’t know about.” Kasparov started giving orders to his back room.

  “Maneuvering, let’s crawl that duck pond from the west instead of the north.”

  “You want to come up behind this hypothetical trailing ship?” LeBlanc was instantly on the same page.

  “You got it. Assume the trailer is less than half a million kills behind the ore carrier. Let’s give him a wide berth and put ourselves on his six. Hopefully, he’s going to be watching the backs of the ships he’s protecting, rather than his own.”