To Honor You Call Us (Man of War)

by Honsinger, H. Paul

  Both men turned suddenly to Fahad, who said the first words he had spoken since stepping into the shop.

  “Sir, unless I miss my guess, my captain is going to take the information you gave us and follow those transponder signals to destroy the freighters that carry the goods to the Krag and to destroy the Krag ships that bring the goods home. He’ll get them, sir. He’ll blow them to flaming atoms. All of them. Since he took command, we have vaporized every Krag ship we have found, and we have shot every human traitor we could lay our hands on. We’ll kill them for you. We’ll kill the cocksuckers by the bushel fucking basket. Pardon my Frennish.”

  “Hear him. Let us be your agent, my brother.” The doctor picked up the ball and ran with it. “We shall collect their payment for you. Payment in blood. Dishonor shall stain neither you nor your family.”

  Wortham-Biggs sighed. “Thank you. Thank you both. Had you not come to me, I might have continued to provide these unclean, unholy creatures with the means to kill my own kind for years to come. I owe you a great deal more than merely the information I have provided to you, as you have kept the additional blood of thousands, perhaps millions, of innocents from my hands. Nothing I could ever do would even come close to paying my debt to you. Please. Tell me what more can I do to express my thanks.”

  The doctor waved his hand dismissively. “I am here in my capacity as a naval officer and not for the purpose of obtaining anything for myself. If you would, however, care to thank my shipmates by providing at the current market rates fitting foodstuffs to sustain them on their long voyages between the stars, I would consider any debt between us to be entirely satisfied.”

  “I will accept no payment. I know you have made some purchases already, so kindly let me know the remaining capacity of your microfreighter’s hold, and I will see it filled with such stuff as will fill their bellies and gladden their hearts. I already know where you are hangared.”

  About an hour later, having left the shop with their precious cargo of information, the two men were making their way down a broad avenue with only a few pedestrians on the walkways. It was just after 19:00 local time, and most of the locals were eating their evening meal or watching a highly anticipated soccer match between the Crocodiles, Rashid IV’s planetary team, and the Jackals, their cross-system rivals from the mining and foundry moon, Rashid V C. Casually, the doctor grasped Fahad by the arm and guided him to a shop window displaying an array of local spices and smoked meats, as if to show him an item there. “Do not look, Fahad, but I believe we are being followed.”

  “You mean the guy with the blue headband and the Fenkep-style beard about fifteen meters to my left?”

  “Precisely. You have noticed him too?”

  “Naturally. Do you think Captain Robichaux sent me to a nonaligned planet near a war zone on a covert intelligence-gathering mission along with one of his most valuable officers just because I’m a good drive and thruster man?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “I spent three years in the Navy’s Criminal Investigation Division in covert surveillance and countersurveillance, specializing in tailing and slipping tails. I had to get out when I became too familiar to too many of the wrong kind of people.”

  “Then I defer to your professional expertise. What do you recommend?”

  “Well, Bones, I was thinking about taking him.”

  After a short discussion of how that was to be accomplished, the two men walked on about half a block until they ducked inside a small sundries shop that Fahad had noticed earlier. Fahad pretended to shop for local souvenir knickknacks, consisting mainly of poorly made plastic camels, of all things, from a counter that allowed him to see out the window while Sahin made a quick purchase.

  A few moments later, the doctor exited the shop, holding an aerosol can while fumbling with the nozzle and to all appearances not looking where he was going. He then walked right into the man who had been following them. “Oh, my pardon to you, sir.”

  “Think nothing of it,” said the other while the doctor made a great show of straightening the man’s robes, which had become somewhat disarrayed by the collision.

  “My most sincere pardon, most sincere. Tell me, sir, you sound as though you are local. The way this can works is different from how they operate on my home, and I can’t get it to spray. Perhaps you can assist me. See? Nothing happens when I press here.”

  The doctor then, apparently accidentally, sprayed the man in the face with a sunburn treatment product, temporarily blinding him, while, at the same moment, Fahad—who had slipped out of the shop through the delivery entrance—jabbed the man in the neck with a pressure syringe disguised as an ordinary pen. Before the man could say a word, Fahad said firmly into his ear.

  “You will say nothing and will come with us.” And then to the doctor, “I’ll call us a cab while you call your new friend.”

  Eighteen hours later, Dr. Sahin stood beside Max while the quartermaster and several men under his command used four small, highly maneuverable electric forklifts to remove cargo palettes from the microfreighter on the hangar deck and drive them down a corridor leading to the Cumberland’s main cargo hold. Once the unloading operation was running smoothly, Max began scrolling through the microfreighter’s cargo manifest.

  “Doctor, you did us proud, no doubt about that.” Max was even more than customarily enthusiastic. “We’re going to be eating better than any crew in the Navy outside of the Core Systems. Two tons of fresh-frozen beef. Real beef. Three tons of fresh-frozen chicken. Plus frozen turkeys, sausage, ham, salami, fresh and frozen vegetables, fresh and frozen fruit, frozen fish, frozen shrimp, olives, dates, real butter, honey, cheese, fresh eggs, fresh milk, a quarter ton of frozen ultra-concentrated orange juice, Russet potatoes, red potatoes, sweet potatoes, beans, rice, Arabica coffee. Morale on board is going to go up 100 percent. And your other cargo is even better.”

  A predatory grin spread across his face. “Much, much better. Let’s go to the Casualty Station and look in on our new passenger.”

  The two men walked to a closed examination room in the Casualty Station, meeting Intelligence Officer Grade 4 “Robert Jones,” a moniker that only the most gullible on board believed to be his given name, along with the tail man from Rashid IV, who was strapped securely to an examination bed, and Nurse Church to monitor the tail man’s vitals during interrogation.

  “Well, Jones, what have we learned so far?”

  “This man was given 85 ccs of Agent 11 eighteen hours and seventeen minutes ago,” said Jones. “As such, he has been completely cooperative.”

  “I had never heard of Agent 11 until today. I’m not sure I am particularly happy that such a thing exists,” said Dr. Sahin.

  Agent 11, or Compliazine, was a drug first devised for the mental health industry as a treatment for highly oppositional and noncompliant patients. But as soon as some unusual side effects of the drug were discovered in clinical trials, it quickly vanished from sight. For a period of roughly twenty-four hours, it suppressed to the point of nonexistence the ability of the subject to exercise any independent will. He would obey without question virtually any command given to him, including a command to provide truthful answers to questions.

  The drug came with certain disadvantages, though. First, in suppressing the will, Agent 11 also suppressed intelligence, such that a subject could tell you what he knew but could not make any use of that knowledge or draw any conclusions from it. Second, the drug did not so much wear off as break down in the body to component compounds, most of which were highly toxic. If the subject was not detoxified starting about twenty-four hours after administration, he would die.

  Finally, any subject could be given Agent 11 only three times, four at most, without suffering permanent brain damage. Even with these limitations, though, the drug was extremely useful for interrogations and was proving especially useful now. Because of the obvious misuse to which such a drug could be put by unscrupulous individuals, not only was the drug itself stri
ctly controlled, but its formula and even its existence were closely guarded secrets.

  Jones continued his briefing. “Name: Ernilum Grek. Occupation: espionage, specializing in surveillance and assassination. Works for the Krag, planted to feed them information on whether the Union or the locals ever started to zero in on their source of supply on Rashid IV and to kill anyone who got too close to the truth. He was planning to kill the doctor and Fahad by attacking their air car on its way from Amman back to the spaceport, and then returning to kill Wortham-Biggs and his daughter.

  “He has assassinated twelve others on five planets, some for the Krag, some for hire to various criminal organizations. Ten of those deaths are in our records as unsolved murders and the other two as accidents. We have his contacts, comm frequencies, check-in schedule, authentication codes, cipher and encryption keys, cut-out and dead-drop locations—everything.

  “This lets us wrap up a nice package to give to the local authorities that will let them clean out the entire Krag intelligence network on their world and will let us get in one or two good pieces of disinformation to lead the Krag by the nose to exactly where we want them. Capturing this fellow has worked out very well for us.

  “I have also gotten from him a wealth of information about how the Krag run their local intelligence operatives, what the procedures are, how they are paid, and what systems they use to protect each cell. And because this man had worked for them on several other worlds before this one, we can get a general idea of the logistics they use from planet to planet. And—”

  Jones was cut off by the loud buzzing of the Casualty Station comm panel, the volume of which the doctor had set to an unusually high level to get his attention, as he had a tendency to become absorbed in what he was doing. He poked at the switch with his finger, missing it three or four times before hitting it. “Casualty, Sahin here.”

  “Doctor, this is Chief Xang in Cargo Handling. In unloading and stowing the contents of the microfreighter, we came upon a crate that is labeled ‘Personal: For Ibrahim Sahin.’ What do you want us to do with it?”

  “I have no idea what it is. What might be the size of this mysterious crate?”

  “About a meter and a half tall and about seventy-five centimeters in the other two dimensions. It’s gotta weigh a couple of hundred kilos.”

  At this, Max stepped over to the panel. “Xang, this is the skipper. I want you to have two of your best men, and I mean your best men—in fact, make it yourself and your best man—take the crate to the doctor’s quarters. By the time you get there, he will have set up a one-time-only entry keyed to your voice—that’s your voice, Chief. Take it inside, open it, and whatever it is, set it up, lay it out, or whatever is appropriate. Understood?”

  “Perfectly, sir. Don’t worry; I’ll take care of it personally.”

  “Very good. Let me know when you’re finished.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  Jones got to finish his rapturous description of the “take” from the captured Krag spy. Sahin’s own enthusiasm was dampened substantially when he learned that the man was a Union citizen, born and raised on Alphacen. That unpleasant revelation, of course, meant that sometime in the next day or so the doctor would get to start his day off with a bang.

  Once this cheerful news was announced, the doctor had to detoxify the prisoner to make sure that he didn’t die in an hour or two of the poisonous byproducts of his body’s efforts to metabolize Agent 11, rather than dying in a day or two from having five 7.62-millimeter full metal jacket bullets pierce his heart at 843 meters per second. Dead is dead, but timing is everything.

  When he finally got to his quarters and palmed the entry scanner, all the doctor could think about was taking a shower and getting into bed. To his surprise, stacked neatly in front of his desk were several dozen bright-red, rectangular packages, each about half the size of a loaf of bread. When he walked over and picked one up, he could see that the packages were vacuum-packed polyfoil labeled “Wortham-Biggs Coffee: Rashid IV Community Special Reserve, Four-Planet Blend. One Pound Net Weight.”

  Leave it to Wortham-Biggs to package his special coffee in that archaic quantity. There had to be fifty or sixty pounds. The doctor knew he could never drink that much coffee himself. He decided to give several pounds to the captain and to others to whom he wanted to show special appreciation or kindness, and to turn most of the rest over to the wardroom steward to serve to the ship’s officers on special occasions.

  Just as he was feeling good about that, savoring the memory of how good that coffee had tasted in the shop back on Rashid IV and mentally composing a note of thanks to send back to the giver of this unexpected gift, the doctor turned a corner into the main sitting area of his quarters.

  And stopped, dumbstruck.

  Chief Xang had been busy. He had brought in and set up one of the small but elegant pedestal tables kept in ship’s stores to display trophies, plaques, and other honors awarded to the ship. He had installed several microspots, small but powerful and tightly focused lamps that cast a bright, precisely directional beam of light and that drew their power from hair-thin, almost invisible wires plugged into tiny pores every half-meter or so in the bulkheads. And he had placed on the table, turned to its most flattering angle, perfectly lit from above and four sides by microspots, filling the doctor’s quarters with an ethereal radiance of shimmering blues and purples and violets, the exquisitely glowing Birth of the Waters.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 20

  * * *

  19:52Z Hours, 5 February 2315 (Navy Day)

  The Cumberland’s wardroom was full of singing. Not particularly tuneful singing, as those assembled were not chosen for their musical abilities. And not particularly articulate singing, as those assembled had been partaking rather liberally of the excellent beer and wine and ardent spirits taken aboard at Rashid IV. But what the singing lacked in musicality and precision, it made up for in volume and enthusiasm, for it was Navy Day, the Union holiday set aside to honor the men (and very, very few women) who defended humanity’s very existence by service in deep space.

  The men in the wardroom were singing a particularly naval song, one with its roots sunk deep in the traditions of the service, back to the days before man reached for the stars, before he even managed to coax his frail, little ships into sailing against the wind and tide by pushing them with smoky boilers, scalding steam, and whirling machinery. This song was a legacy from the days of oaken hulls and billowing sails, of “ships of wood and men of iron.” For more than five hundred years, men had handed it down like a cherished family heirloom, until now it was given booming voice in the cold void between the stars, a thousand light years from home.

  The words had evolved to fit the needs of a time harsher and more desperate than the age that gave rise to the original, but the tune was one that would have brought a smile to the face of Lord Nelson. He knew it as “Heart of Oak.” Over the centuries, it had become “Hearts of Steel.”

  To stations, my lads, ’tis to glory we steer,

  Oh, sons of the Union, we fight without fear;

  ’Tis to Honor you call us, for Honor we stand;

  We brothers in valor await fame’s command.

  And the chorus rang out with even more gusto, as the half-dozen or so senior midshipman who did not know the verses joined in. These boys, ages fifteen to seventeen, were even more thoroughly inebriated than the officers because, although naval regulations prohibited giving them alcohol, by immemorial naval tradition they were permitted beer, wine, ale, and stout on certain holidays, including Navy Day (February 5), Union Day (July 20), and the birthdays of Admiral Nelson (September 29), Admiral Halsey (October 30), and General Patton (November 11).

  Hearts of steel, that’s our ships; hearts of steel, that’s our men.

  We always are ready; steady, boys, steady!

  We’ll fight, not surrender, again and again.

  When the next verse began, the mids stopped singing and went back to drink
ing. The officers carried on, sounding very much as though they had the blood of Mars in their veins.

  We’ll take payment in blood for the debt Krag must pay,

  And carve them with cutlass when they come to play;

  Our courage defiant ennobles the stars,

  Stalwart sons of Ares, strong offspring of Mars.

  The mids joined in the chorus again, this time even more loudly, many arm in arm and swaying back and forth in unison while Max’s booming bass and “Wernher” Brown’s tuneful yet powerful baritone practically rattled the china with “steady, boys, steady,” a phrase that had endured without change from the song’s “hard tack and salt horse” roots.

  The officers forged on into the concluding verse while the mids refilled their glasses.

  We still make them bleed and we still make them die,

  And we shout mighty cheers as they fall from the sky;

  So cheer up me lads and let’s sing with one heart,

  We will win this war if we all do our part.

  The song was topped off by another repetition of the chorus, sung even more loudly than the first two iterations and ending with a resounding thump as each man in the room honored tradition by pounding his fist on the table with the last “again.” Tradition also required that, after any singing of “Hearts of Steel,” glasses be drunk down and refilled—a tradition that never went unobserved.

  A delightful meal, superb drink, manly singing, and naval companionship all combined to create a fine, warm mood in the wardroom, the kind of mood that made up for days and weeks of long, lonely service, short rations, protracted hardship, and extreme danger.

  When glasses had been filled all around, the captain stood at the head of the wardroom table and began to speak, the talk in the room dying quickly.

  “Gentlemen, I have two toasts. And only two.” Cries of “Hear, hear!” made their way round the table, as many officers had endured endless litanies of Navy Day toasts from inebriated COs who had no inkling of when to shut up.