To Honor You Call Us (Man of War)

by Honsinger, H. Paul

  Guided by the carrier’s traffic controllers, the launch maneuvered its way beneath the great ship’s underbelly to settle into one of its many landing decks on the starboard side. A docking tube extended from a nearby hatch and sealed itself around the launch’s hatch. Max, the doctor, and the able spacer first who had piloted the launch crossed through the tube, through an airlock, and into a small compartment set up as a salute deck for lesser captains. The age-old boatswain’s whistle sounded as Max stepped onto the deck, and six Marines came to present arms. The boatswain then barked out “Cumberland, arriving.” Max turned to his left, saluted the Union and Admiralty flags, and then pivoted back to his right to salute the officer standing in front of him. “Permission to come aboard, sir.”

  “Permission granted,” said the lieutenant commander who greeted him, returning the salute. The doctor and the launch pilot followed, similarly saluting the flags and the officer.

  Welcome aboard, Captain, Doctor. I’m Jackson, part of the admiral’s staff. He’s expecting both of you. Please follow me. Spacer, follow the chief here and he’ll show you to the enlisted pilots lounge.”

  Max had been stationed on the Halsey for a few months but had never been into the sacred realm of the exalted admiral, so he followed the other officer almost blindly for what seemed like hours, certain that he was walking toward an unpleasant fate. The flagship seemed as big as a continent after the confined spaces aboard the Cumberland. The three men wound their way through several confusing twists and turns and finally arrived in the admiral’s outer office, there to be greeted by the full commander who served as the admiral’s flag secretary, a very responsible job in its own right. The officers exchanged salutes. “Captain, Doctor, the admiral is expecting you. Go right in.”

  Max took a deep breath, stepped up to a real wooden door, turned the knob, and went in. The admiral was glowering at the comm panel on his desk. Although Max could not hear what the poor fellow on the other end of the circuit was saying, there was no mistaking a certain pleading, penitent tone.

  The admiral listened for about twenty seconds, then cut the other man off at the knees. “Goddamn it, Captain, that sounds like a personal problem to me. This is a forward area in wartime, son. Do you fucking understand what it means to be one thousand light years from the Core Systems? I don’t think that you do. Everyone has personnel problems. You have fewer than most. Your ship has a full complement; many do not, and I have provided you with the best roster of officers available given other requirements.

  “Now, Captain, if you can’t get your shit together, reach down to whatever level this crew is at, and pull them up by their fucking bootstraps to an acceptable level of training and performance, there are lots of destroyer captains hungry to command a frigate like yours. I’ll give the job to one of them and give you something to do more suited to your talents—maybe commanding a deuterium tanker on the Europa run.”

  The admiral listened for a few seconds to sounds of acquiescence. “Good. Now go train. Hard.” A few more words over the comm. “No, dumbass. Harder than that.” Some pleading sounds emerged. “No, absolutely not. I don’t fucking have a week. I need that ship on the line, killing the Krag. You have four days. Get it done. Flag out.”

  He stabbed the comm button with brutal force, breaking the connection, if not the whole comm panel, then looked up at Max and the doctor, standing in front of his desk at painfully rigid attention. As soon as his eyes met Max’s, the admiral snapped, “And just who the fuck are you two?”

  So nice to see that the admiral is in such a good mood. They both saluted. Max snapped out, “Lieutenant Commander Maxime Robichaux and Lieutenant Doctor Ibrahim Sahin of the Cumberland, reporting as ordered, sir.”

  The admiral returned the salute so briskly that his fingernails were in danger of being flung off, and glanced at his chrono. “Sweet Jesus, Robichaux, you took your own goddamn time getting here, didn’t you? When I summon a commander to report to the flag, I expect him to appear with celerity.” Then he moderated slightly.

  “But I suppose Jackson kept you held up with all those damn ritual theatrics on the salute deck. Nothing gets past that man quickly. I’m going to have to start calling him ‘Stonewall.’” Max couldn’t help but smile at the joke. “And it is about a two–light year walk from the salute deck to here.

  “Have a seat, gentlemen.” He turned his head slightly in the approximate direction of a door in the bulkhead to the right of the one through which Max and the doctor had entered. “Bushman!” he bellowed loud enough to fracture hull metal.

  The door flew open and a sixty-ish chief petty officer third stuck his gray hair and severe, lined face into the compartment. “Yes, Admiral?” The man managed somehow to sound both respectful and put out.

  “Bushman, you old burned-out thruster nozzle, it’s oh-three-fucking-hundred hours and I’m meeting with these officers. How the hell are we supposed to get jackshit done at this godforsaken hour without coffee? That’s COFFEE, Bushman. I’m sure you’ve heard of it. How long have you been my steward, man?”

  “Nineteen wonderful years, Admiral.”

  “And in that amount of time I’d have thought that a man of your worldly wisdom would have figured out some of the basics of the job. Now what do I have to do to get something in here that’s hot and black and crammed to the fucking gunwales with caffeine?”

  The man stepped all the way into the office. Max could see that, even given the limited degree to which decorations were worn on the Working Uniform, Bushman had more awards for valor than most cruiser captains. Maybe when Hornmeyer was a dashing young captain, this man was at his side in some hard-fought boarding actions. He sure hadn’t earned all that fruit salad serving coffee. “If the admiral would just take a whiff, he would smell that I started a fresh pot as soon as Captain Robichaux was piped aboard.” And then, after waiting just a split second too long, he added, “Sir.”

  “Very well, then, Bushman. When you bring it in, try not to slosh it all over these officers, will you?”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.” He smiled briefly at Max and backed out of the room.

  “Goddamn surly old Bushman. One of these days I’m going to have to bust him back to mid to show him who’s the fucking boss around here. Now. Robichaux. Right. I’ve read your reports. God knows you’ve been a busy little fucker. First thing, your prisoner roster. Been locking them up left and right haven’t you? First man—who’s that wormy little shit with the portable drug factory? Green. Right. It seems that Spacer Green has signed a formal waiver of all right to appeal your conviction by order of him for trafficking. So, I get to sentence him on my own authority. I’m sending him to a medium-security penal facility for five years. Then, he’ll serve out the rest of his enlistment. Maybe he’ll go straight and maybe he won’t. His choice, either way. Maybe Daddy’s kicking him out the airlock will be the best thing that ever happened to the slimy little bastard. He has a chance to turn his life into something if he wants, and maybe someday he’ll amount to more than a puddle of poodle piss. Or not. His choice.

  “Okay, getting to your other prisoners, there’s those three snake-shit sneaky chiefs of yours who tried to sabotage your atmosphere manifold. If that isn’t a stab in the back, I don’t fucking know what is. Those dirty sons of bitches are going to get a straight-up, full-dress, formal fucking court martial. The judge advocate has passed on outright treason—I always knew he was a goddamn pussy—and is prosecuting for attempted sabotage. I’m betting on a conviction and that they’ll be sentenced to something like seven to ten years on a penal asteroid. Then desk jobs for the rest of their terms of service—you and I know, no skipper will ever let those cocksuckers serve on his ship. It would likely be twenty-five on that asteroid instead of seven to ten, but I’m sure that the court will put some of the blame on that one-man squirrel convention of a CO these men used to have.”

  He shook his head grimly. “Oscar. One of these days, I’d like to get my hands on that loopy son of
a bitch and make him answer for what he’s done to some fine officers and men in this command. He’s the worst thing since Philip Francis Queeg. Ever heard of Philip Francis Queeg?”

  Max and Ibrahim shook their heads.

  “Fucking shame. No one reads the goddamn classics any more. Every CO in the whole fucking Navy should take a few hours off from writing all those goddamn reports that don’t amount to jackshit and read The Caine Mutiny. If a few more people had known who Philip Francis Queeg was, it would have been plain as black sky that Captain Oscar and Captain Queeg bought their bloody ball bearings from the same gag-and-gift shop, and someone would have sent Oscar off to the nut plantation where he belonged.

  “Next subject. I’ve also read a stack of communications from the Pfelung stating that they think you’re the best thing since indoor egg incubation. They want to be sure that you’re one of the officers that they get to work with because they say they like the way you swim or that you navigate the currents skillfully or some such fishy bullshit like that. You know how they talk. I told them not to worry—they’ll be seeing plenty of you, Robichaux. Maybe after they get to know you, they may lose some of their enthusiasm. They’ll start saying you swim into rocks or shit where the eggs are laid or something like that.

  “You’ve always been something of a loose cannon, young man, but there’s no denying that you got results this time out, and that’s what counts in warfare—results. Victory in combat against the enemy will obtain for you the remission of many sins, a great many sins indeed. The Admiralty loves a winner. Not real keen on losers, though.

  “And Robichaux, condolences for the loss of your XO and those men in the cutter. Damn good man, that Garcia. Damn shame to lose him. I had him pegged to have a command of his own in a year or two. I’m pulling to get the Navy Cross for him, Amborsky, and the rest.

  “But you, young man, you are the only destroyer skipper in this whole fucking war to take down a Krag battlecruiser without assistance from another warship. There’s gonna be some publicity from this, but I’m tempted to keep classified how you did it, just so it doesn’t tempt every half-assed destroyer skipper into bolting a brace of Raven missiles onto the side of his cutter. Very dangerous stunt. Unless the pilot is a fucking genius, it’s a good way to destroy the cutter and kill the pilot. With all that mass near the bow, it must have taken a brilliant goddamn pilot to manage the thing.”

  “My man Mori is, I think, the best small craft pilot in the Navy,” Max said.

  “Maybe he is. At any rate, way to kick ass. I wish I could have been there. Goddamn! I miss the real thing. Instead, I’m sitting on my fat ass two or three parsecs away from the battle, moving little electronic icons around in a fucking tactical projection. That’s not leadership, it’s a goddamn trideo game.

  “All right, next. On this Pfelung thing, half of my Intel people tell me that there is no way they would have seen through that stunt the Krag were pulling with those freighters the way you did. Congratulations. Of course, there’s the half that don’t say that and are telling me ‘Oh, hell, yes, it was right there all the time, and if we had known what Robichaux knew, we would have seen it in a heartbeat.’ What a steaming crock of grade-A bullshit. It took a real genuine Black Sky Out the Viewport combat officer to see that plan, not some electron-pushing Intel weenies—goddamn sneaky little bastards.

  “And speaking of sneaky, how’d you manage to get all those transfer requests pulled? That was a neat trick.”

  “What are you talking about, Admiral?”

  “As of 21 January 2315, there were seventy-three pending requests for transfer from personnel assigned to the Cumberland. As of today, there are none. Somehow, they were all withdrawn.”

  “But, sir,” Max asked, “can’t the men withdraw them on their own?”

  “Of course they can, dumbass. It’s the right of every man to request a transfer and his right to withdraw that request. That’s a sacred spacer right that goes back to the Saltwater Navy. But no one has ever had seventy-three transfer requests withdrawn at almost the same time. It’s too much of a coincidence. Just doesn’t goddamn happen.”

  “The reasons for wanting a transfer went away, so maybe the requests did too, sir.”

  “You might be right. It’s just a helluva lot to swallow. If it’s genuine, you might just be one of those great leaders of men, like Patton and Halsey and Litvinoff and Wong and Middleton. Like that’s fucking likely. Humph. Speaking of leadership, I know Admiral Middleton has a soft spot for you, so I sent him a signal about how your first cruise as a skipper came out. He sent this—he’s a long way off, so it came by tachyon Morse and it’s pretty terse. But I thought you’d want to have it.” He handed over a slip of paper, evidently torn right out of the decrypt printer.

  It said: “HORNEY PLEASE TELL CAPTAIN ROBICHAUX THAT HE DID AN OUTSTANDING JOB STOP I COULD NOT BE MORE PROUD OF HIM THAN IF HE WERE MY OWN SON STOP MESSAGE ENDS.”

  Despite the lump in his throat, Max could not help asking, “‘Horney,’ sir?”

  “Um, old nickname. Very old. Goes back to my mid days on the John Houbolt. People didn’t start calling me ‘Hit ’em Hard’ until I got my first command. Enough about that. Put that slip of paper in your scrapbook or wherever you keep things like that. You’ll be wanting that twenty years from now, unless you get your reckless ass killed first, that is.” Max folded it carefully and put it in one of the chest pockets of his uniform.

  “You know what probably prompted that signal? It wasn’t bagging that battlecruiser or even what happened at the Battle of Pfelung. I told him about your CAPE scores.”

  Sahin broke in. “Cape? What’s a cape?”

  “Acronym, Doctor. Computerized Automatic Performance Evaluation. Your ship’s computer, arrogant little fucker that it is, constantly measures every kind of job performance on the ship that can possibly be measured by computer: how long it takes your sensor people to identify a contact, how long between a system reporting trouble to when it is fixed, and hundreds of other things, and turns them into a scaled index, updated daily, with 100 representing the most perfect crew imaginable. I told Admiral Middleton that the Cumberland’s CAPE went up from 21.7, the lowest in the Task Force, to 71.4, which is considered to be in the average range. Low average, I might add, but still average. So, Robichaux, Middleton sends me back a personal signal saying how that score improvement shows you to be some kind of diamond in the rough.

  Well, I’ll tell you something, son, Fleet Admiral Charles L. Middleton can say that all he likes—you’re not under his command, in the Big Chair on one of his ships, while he has to sit in a fucking swivel chair behind a fucking desk and yell into a goddamn comm panel, trusting his carefully laid strategic plans to the judgment of a twenty-eight-year-old Coonass who doesn’t know when to keep his goddamn pants zipped and his goddamn mouth shut. Saying things like that from where he sits is like betting with someone else’s money. I ought to transfer you to his Task Force and see how he likes the crazy shit you pull in his nice, orderly command.

  “Your men, though, that’s something different. Different thing entirely. First they put up with that bandicoot Oscar; then they go through that wild ride with you, and they still perform the way they did at the Battle of Pfelung. The ship stood and fought—not just fought but fought well—against an enemy that was superior both in numbers and in firepower. Good men. Damn good men. Been through hell. Gave ’em hell. So, in tomorrow’s Orders of the Day, I’m issuing to the Cumberland a Bronze Battle Star.

  “Light that big, bright fucker up the next time some shit-for-brains jerkoff fighter pilot calls your ship the Cumberland Gap. Getting in your comebacks by blinker is too goddamn slow.”

  How had the admiral heard about that? “I am also authorizing your vessel to display an ‘E’ for Excellence for the next thirty days. Keep this up and I wouldn’t be surprised to see your CAPE at about eighty-one or eighty-two in ninety days, which would put you in the top third.”

  “I would,” sai
d the doctor.

  “You’d be surprised? You don’t think they will improve that much?” asked the admiral, scowling. Dr. Sahin’s remark smacked of disloyalty to his crew, something of which Louis G. Hornmeyer took a very dim view.

  “Actually, sir, I expect them to do substantially better. I would bet that in ninety days their score will be at least ninety.”

  “Doctor, I’m not sure you understand how this works. These scores are indexed against the past performance of other crews—the amount of improvement required to get from the twenties to the seventies is actually less than what it would take get the Cumberland from where it is now to a ninety. There is a very strong law of diminishing returns.” Amazing how the admiral’s legendary profanity abated when he talked to the doctor.

  “I understand it perfectly. I have spent some time familiarizing myself with the subject.”

  “All right then. You said ‘bet,’ Doctor. Do you mean that literally?”

  “Yes, I suppose that I do.”

  “It’s well known that I like to put down a wager or two from time to time. I know you’re flush with prize money right now, so do you want to put some of that money at risk?”

  “It will not be at the slightest risk, with all due respect, Admiral. What do you propose as the size of the wager? How much can you afford to lose?”

  “I think a thousand is reasonable. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  “BUSHMAN!” Max expected the ceiling tiles to fall. Bushman stuck his head in. “Bushman, get the book. The doctor here wishes to make a wager.”

  The man bobbed his head and ducked back out. He reappeared less than five seconds later, carrying an old, tatty, antique-style ledger book, and sat at a side table, picking up a pen to write.

  “Bushman, the doctor and I have a bet that the CAPE scores for the Cumberland as of ninety days from this date will be ninety or higher. He is pro; I am con. The amount of the wager is one thousand credits to be paid in hard cash. Is that acceptable, Doctor?”