To Honor You Call Us (Man of War)

by Honsinger, H. Paul

  “First, to our greatly esteemed Dr. Ibrahim Sahin, who acquired for us this outstanding food and excellent drink. I shall never again wonder which of my officers is best suited to go planetside and act as this vessel’s victualer.” He drained his glass, containing about two fingers’ worth of the warm, dark, fragrant liquid distilled only in an exotic corner of the galaxy known as Kentucky.

  “Hear, hear! To the doctor!” the officers responded, and drained their glasses.

  “Now, recharge your guns, gentlemen,” he said. All refilled their glasses.

  “Today is Navy Day. I’m just a plain-speaking fighting man, so I can’t give you a stirring speech about what the Navy means to each of us. But I can say this. Every one of you is a volunteer, most from boyhood. Every one of you has had at least one chance—and most of you several—to leave the service at the end of a tour and has instead re-enlisted. You have decided to make the Navy your life not just once but many times. There is something about the Navy that has kept you here. Only you know, deep in your hearts, what that is. It is likely different for each of you.

  “I want to take this time to tell you what it is for me. For many years, I had the honor of serving under one of the greatest men to ever wear the uniform, Commodore—now Fleet Admiral—Charles L. Middleton.”

  Several of those present rapped their knuckles on the table or raised their glasses in tribute. Admiral Middleton was almost universally loved and respected not just for his strategic brilliance but for his psychological insight, which was reputed to be better than that of any other man in the Navy.

  “At a gathering like this, when I had just been commissioned as an ensign on board the old battlecruiser Margaret Jackie, someone asked him what it all meant. ‘Commodore Middleton, what does it all mean? Life, the Navy, our purpose for being, the Universe, and everything else?’ Now, as many of you know, old Uncle Middy can be a bit long winded”—a few men smiled at their own recollections of the admiral’s infamous loquaciousness—“and we all expected quite a speech, but not this time. He just smiled and said one word: ‘love.’

  “I didn’t get what he meant back then. I thought he was talking about romantic love or maybe the love that parents and children have for each other. But now I understand. He was talking about the kind of love that we have here, in the Navy. It may seem a strange thing to say about a service that has as its goal taking or killing the enemy, but at its very core the Navy is all about love. Because, gentlemen, loyalty is love—love for your ship and love for your shipmates. Patriotism is love—love for the Union and the things that it stands for and protects. And even courage is love—the love of all these things and added to it the love of duty and honor that is so powerful that for its sake you reach down to the very bottom of your deepest well of resolve and do what you have to do, no matter how difficult it is and no matter how afraid you may be.

  “Understood in that light, the Navy is the greatest home and repository and source of love in the galaxy. She has no equal. So, gentlemen, raise your glasses and lift your hearts to that which moves us, to that which sustains us, to that which protects us, to that which gives us life, and to that which calls us to love, to duty, to honor, to glory.

  “To the Navy. May she live forever.”

  As one man they stood and drained their glasses.

  There was even more eating and drinking and singing one deck lower and sixteen meters aft in the enlisted mess, where food was generally served cafeteria style, and the men helped themselves to whatever drink suited them. The songs included “Hearts of Steel,” just as in the wardroom; other patriotic songs; and some others of a bawdier variety. Indeed, one old able spacer managed to lead the company through seventeen of the twenty-nine verses to “The Dirty Old Whore from Alnitak, Rendezvous” before passing out, slumped against the soft-serve ice cream dispenser.

  Even Clouseau, the ship’s cat who joined the Cumberland when she was docked with the Loch Linnhe by running through the docking tube after springing out of the locker in which the Krag on board had insisted he be stuffed, was enjoying the festivities, circulating from one mid’s lap to another, begging little scraps of meat with an endearing tilt of the head and an occasional quiet meow. Indeed, he was not above stealing some of the tastier-smelling morsels from the plates of men and boys whose vigilance was impaired by drink.

  Clouseau was generally successful in obtaining whatever he wanted. In spacer lore, all cats were lucky, because of their “nine lives.” Black cats, into which category Clouseau fit quite comfortably, were even luckier. And cats that “joined” the ship on their own by running across a boarding tube or up a docking ramp were luckier still. Clouseau, then, was thrice charmed, and much cherished—even spoiled—by boys and men alike.

  Most of the squeakers, the youngest midshipmen who spent more of their day in the ship’s school than in official duties, were present and were even allowed tiny amounts of the weakest beer and of wine diluted with ginger ale under the watchful eye of Midshipman Trainer “Mother Goose” Amborsky, who on this day was celebrating his thirty-second Navy Day in uniform.

  Old Mother Goose had taken a bit more than usual of the potato vodka he favored and was in a talkative frame of mind, almost a different man from the gruff and laconic, but inwardly gentle, man the squeakers were used to seeing. Sensing this difference in mood, the boys had drawn out the chief, getting him to reminisce about his younger days in the Navy and the changes in the service over the years. At the end of one such story, about how in the Portugal class battlecruisers all the midshipmen were crowded into one cabin and slept on hammocks suspended from the ceiling—hammocks that, along with their boyish burdens, tended to become hopelessly tangled if the ship’s artificial gravity failed—the youngest midshipman, Park, the one stuck with the nickname “Will Robinson” until someone even younger came aboard, asked, “Chief, is it true you was in the Navy on the first day of the war?”

  “Aye, lad, that I was.” He paused to take a sip of his vodka. “Sometimes I want to forget that day, and sometimes I think it is my duty to remember every detail until the day I die. Mostly, I try to remember.” Another long pause as he considered whether to stop there or to go on. Hell, these hatch hangers would have to hear the story sometime.

  “I was a recruit spacer second class on the old battlecruiser Repulse. The War of the Fenestrian Succession had been over for fifteen months, and we were with what they used to call the Twenty-Second Fleet, jumping from system to system along the Fenestra Treaty Boundary as a deterrent. We were cruising along, fat, dumb, and happy, with no idea of what was about to happen. A few freighters had reported some compression trails in deep space near the border, but we gave them no mind. We thought it was space-happy sensor officers seeing star fairies from spending too many hours at their scopes. We sure as hell didn’t suspect the Krag.”

  “Why not, Chief?” asked the eternally curious Will Robinson. “Why not suspect them?”

  “Because no one had seen their beady little eyes for nearly a hundred years, that’s why. Hell, when we encountered them in 2183, we thought we were going to be fast friends with them. They were sure smart enough. Seemed friendly. And curious they were too, right eager to learn everything they could about us and not afraid to tell about themselves. We traded whole libraries of history, literature, trid vid programming, art, music—everything.

  “But things went all pear shaped when the biology information started flying back and forth. Anyone could see that life on the two planets was two pages from the same chapter of the same book. The same biology. Not similar—the same. Same basic anatomy, same biochemistry, same DNA. Life from the whole Krag planet could have almost been from some remote island on Earth that split off from a land mass long ago, kind of like Australia.

  “They had sent us the complete genetic information for hundreds of life forms on their world, and when our DNA guys worked through it, they figured out what happened pretty quick. All the life on the Krag homeworld had clearly evolved fro
m plants and animals that were alive on Earth eleven million years ago. In fact, from just 150 or so species if you don’t include the insects and bacteria. Well, paints a pretty clear picture, doesn’t it? Somebody terraformed the Krag homeworld, visited Earth eleven million years ago, picked up some specimens, and gave them a new home. No telling why.

  “Maybe they wanted to study Earth life in a new setting. Maybe they wanted a bloody zoo. Who the hell knows? Unless we find those aliens—and if we do, I’ve got a helluva bone to pick with them, let me tell you—we’ll never know. What we do know is that those animals included the ancestor of our Earth rats. But on this new world, the ugly little critters didn’t evolve into rats. They evolved over eleven million years into the Krag.

  “When we shared that theory with the Krag, they went totally batshit. Now, they’re not stupid. They can read their fossils in their rocks just like we read the fossils in our rocks. They had the same facts, but just about the same time we were developing the Theory of Evolution, they came up with a totally different kind of theory. According to them, eleven million years ago their Creator-God found a hostile world, remade it into a hospitable paradise, and then created perfect life to place on that world with the plan that it would evolve into his holy children, the Krag, and into creatures and plants to be their servants and their food.

  “What about us? Did that make us the Krag’s sacred brothers and sisters under the skin, united by bonds of kinship and chemistry? Not a bloody chance. What it did was make us unholy blasphemers for saying that life on their world was merely a transplanted offshoot of life on ours. On top of that, it made us a living, eating, breathing biological insult to their Creator-God because we were demonic spirits that had chosen to defy him by cloaking ourselves in the shape and chemistry of his true handiwork. When we wouldn’t agree to be ruled by genuine creations, meaning the Krag, they just got madder and madder, until in 2184 they cut off all contact. They refused to respond to or even acknowledge our messages, turned back all diplomatic ships, stopped all trade—everything.

  “Just before they cut off contact, they sent one last message. It said: ‘You and all the infesting vermin spawned by your world are an affront to the Creator-God and exist in defiance of His holy will. The stars will be cleansed of you.’ And then, nothing. Not a squeak. That is, until June 26, 2281.

  “Suddenly, they showed up in a dozen systems with more than a thousand ships. It looked like they had spent the whole time since 2184 busting their rat asses to build a fleet just to wipe us out. Twelve systems fell in the first ten hours. Fifty-four in the first week.

  “The Twenty-Second Fleet was cut to pieces in a matter of hours. I was in Auxiliary Pulse Cannon Fire Control standing by to assist with DC in that compartment. I didn’t have anything better to do than watching the tactical repeater as ship after ship just dropped off the display. The Rhine, Formosa, New Zealand, Galapagos, Aegean, Volga, Lincoln, Bolivar, and a dozen others.”

  He paused, experiencing a powerful echo of the horror he felt watching, mute, as ships crewed by thousands of spacers simply winked out of existence. Clouseau hopped in Amborsky’s lap and rubbed his head against the old chief, who absently stroked his black fur.

  “Still, their tactics showed that they expected to get the whole fleet with their first salvo. Didn’t happen. Our defenses had improved more than they expected during the last war, but we lost two-thirds of the fleet in less than three hours. Then Commodore Fuchida on the battleship Texas pulled what was left back four jumps, taking the jump point marker buoys with us in each system, all the way back to the Theater Strategic Reserve Force in orbit around Milvian III.

  “Because the Krag had to find the jump points by following the resonance lines and then had to compute from scratch the coordinates for their counterpoints, even with no defenses in place in any of those systems it took them nearly twelve hours before they managed to pop into the Milvian system. When they came, they did that thing they do where they jump a bunch of ships at a time instead of just one, which is the only way we can do it, and suddenly there were two battleships and six heavy battlecruisers right there.

  “We were ready for them and opened up before they could recover from the jump. We got four right away, but the rest cleared the datum, and inside of ten minutes there were another eight right behind them. Everyone knew that if they did that one more time, we would be outnumbered again; the Krag would take the system, and that would open up the jump point to Syrtis Minor, leading right into the heart of the whole Washtenaw cluster: eighty-nine worlds full of farmers and fishermen and families with nothing to defend them.

  “Fuchida ordered every ship but the Texas back to a defensive formation around the jump point leading to Syrtis and then steered his ship right into the jump point just as the next wave of Krag came through. Of course, his ship and every ship coming through the jump were instantly converted into pure energy. The explosion fried most of the Krag fleet in the system and so disrupted the fabric of space-time that the jump point was unusable for 78 days. This put a real monkey wrench in the Krag plans, kept them out of the Washtenaw cluster until we could get some ships in there to defend it, and probably kept them from winning the war in that year. It bought us time to get most of our fleet out of mothballs, manned, and put to space.

  “Just before he hit the jump point, Fuchida sent a last message. It said: ‘We will meet again in that place where warriors go to take their rest.’ We’ve been fighting ever since. And though we’ve fallen back, no Union system, station, or vessel has ever, ever surrendered to the Krag. And none ever will.”

  He paused a moment, as if to attend briefly to some echo of the past, still petting Clouseau.

  “So, now, if you ever hear anyone say that a man is as brave as Commodore Fuchida or that a ship has gone on to rendezvous with the Texas, you’ll know what they are talking about.”

  “Chief?” Will Robinson had another question. Always another question.

  “What is it?”

  “How many men were on the Texas?”

  “On the Texas? Let’s see, Hesse class battleship… just under fourteen hundred. A drop in the bucket of those who fell that day.”

  “Did they die for nothing?”

  “No, son, they didn’t. You and I are going to make sure of that.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 21

  * * *

  10:49Z Hours, 6 February 2315

  After the Cumberland had paid a call at the abandoned asteroid mining station in an uninhabited system that harbored the first of its hidden supply caches and had restocked its missile racks and fuel bunkers, Max was feeling a little better about the next phase of his mission. It was about time for him to meet the Krag prisoner taken when the Loch Linnhe was boarded.

  The intelligence officer had been interrogating it extensively and Max had read Smith’s report. Jones’s report. Jones? Yes, Jones. Because their names were entirely fictitious, why couldn’t they have names that were easier to remember? The last one Max had worked with was “Johnson,” the one before that “Gray,” and the one before that, who looked distinctly Germanic and had a slight Teutonic accent, was imaginatively named “Schmidt.” Why not “Beddingfield” or “Kleinknecht”—something that a brain can hang on to?

  Max entered the brig, which held seven wedge-shaped cells arranged like slices of pie with their ends cut off, all opening into a circular central guard area. The prisoners could be isolated from being able to see or hear one another by extending wall panels that telescoped out from the bulkhead between each cell to a clear partition that surrounded the guard. Since the human spy had been executed and Green was in the gym for his exercise period, the Krag was the only prisoner. The outer wall of the cell was a polymer barrier two centimeters thick with a door in it. The wall could be rendered transparent or opaque by polarization. At the moment, it was opaque—a flat black.

  “Okay, Futrell, let me see Squeaky here.”

  Marine Lance Corporal Futrell turned
a dial, and the wall went from black to transparent, revealing the Krag curled up on the cot. Literally curled, the way a mouse curls up when it sleeps. The cell brightened from the wall being made transparent, alerting the Krag that it was being observed. It sprang to its feet, looking for all the worlds like a man with hunched shoulders, spindly legs, short but powerful arms, a tail, and a rat’s head. There was a wary intelligence in its eyes, and the top of its head was dome-shaped to enclose a brain capable of inventing star drives and formulating plans for the eradication of humans from the galaxy. Just looking at one made Max want to pull out his boarding cutlass and start hacking.

  “Activate the translator.”

  No one actually spoke the Krag language, as human vocal apparatus could not duplicate many of the squeaks and chitters that made up about half of the sounds it used. And no human could understand Krag because many of the squeaks were above the range of human hearing, and many of the chitters were so fast and so similar to one another that most human ears could not distinguish them. Supposedly, Krag had similar difficulties understanding human speech.

  At Max’s command, the upper left-hand corner of the wall went from transparent back to opaque and displayed text in large amber letters: “Standard (spoken) to Krag (written) and Krag (spoken) to Standard (written) translation matrices activated. Begin when ready.”

  The Krag made some chittering and squeaking noises interspersed with a few sounds that vaguely resembled human speech. The translation matrix considered the Krag’s statement for a few moments and displayed: “When I get back home, I must inform the zookeeper that he has left the monkey cage unlocked again. If you are looking for a banana, I’m afraid I have none with me.”

  The Krag homeworld had both monkeys and bananas. Only, unfortunately, it was the rodents instead of the primates that had developed big brains, harnessed fire, and mastered nuclear fusion.