Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Other Military Science Fiction by H. Paul Honsinger

  THE MAN OF WAR TRILOGY

  To Honor You Call Us

  For Honor We Stand

  Brothers in Valor

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2015 H. Paul Honsinger

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477830000

  ISBN-10: 1477830006

  Cover art and illustration by Gene Mollica

  Cover design by Ink’d Inc

  To my beloved wife, Kathleen. You are the sine qua non—of these books, of our family, of my happiness. None would exist—none can exist without you. You are the most generous, the most kind, the most wise, and the most admirable person I know. You have my thanks, and all my love, from the bottom of my heart . . . forever.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  GLOSSARY AND GUIDE TO ABBREVIATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  For the benefit of lubbers, squeakers, and others unfamiliar with Union Space Navy terminology and slang, there is at the end of this volume a Glossary and Guide to Abbreviations, which defines many of the abbreviations, terms, and references used in these pages.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  02:27 Zulu Hours, 9 May 2315

  “New contact! Mass detection at bearing three-five-seven mark zero-six-eight. Designating as Hotel eleven and classifying as a definite hostile.” Lieutenant Kasparov’s announcement from the Sensors Station somehow managed to sound both exhausted and on edge. “Insufficient data for range determination as of yet.” He paused to listen to a few words spoken over his headset. “And, sir, this time they’re making absolutely no effort at stealth.” He paused for a beat. “Arrogant bastards.”

  “Very well.” Lieutenant Commander Max Robichaux, Union Space Navy, captain of the Khyber class destroyer USS Cumberland, acknowledged the report but let the comment pass, not because it was appropriate—which it certainly was not—but because he heartily concurred. And judging by the quiet murmurs of agreement and occasional grumbled, sulfurous profanity Max could hear from some of the men around him at their stations in the Cumberland’s Combat Information Center (CIC), he wasn’t the only one. The men had been at their General Quarters stations without a break for nearly seven hours and were a bit on the testy side.

  “I suppose one more ship full of rat-faces won’t make any difference,” Executive Officer Eduardo DeCosta said to the compartment at large, hoping that he was doing a better job of convincing the men than he was of convincing himself. “But, Skipper,” he continued at a volume calculated to reach only Max’s ears, “if you ask me, it’s a show of outright contempt. That Krag skipper is gloating that we’re pinned down and don’t constitute a threat to him.”

  Max shook his head, giving the Main Tactical Display yet another once-over. This wasn’t his first rodeo. Or his tenth. “No, XO,” Max said calmly and quietly, “coming in without stealth is a message, all right, but it’s from the commander of this attack group, not that particular skipper, and the message is not one of contempt.”

  Max rose from his seat and casually took the step and a half necessary to bring him beside the XO’s console. He leaned over as if to point out something on one of DeCosta’s displays. “Not contempt, Ed. Intimidation. Look at it from their perspective. The Krag know what this ship can do. Even outnumbered and outgunned as we are, we can inflict a lot of damage. This Krag commander sure as hell doesn’t want to tangle with humans as aggressive and determined as we were at the Battles of Pfelung and Rashid V B. So, before he faces us in battle, Commodore Squeaky intends to defeat us psychologically. Exhaust our courage. Destroy our morale. Beat us down. Break us. Once he does that, blowing us to flaming atoms will be a piece of cake. Or cheese.”

  DeCosta smiled weakly at Max’s feeble joke, sat back in his seat, digested what he had just heard, and rubbed some of the grit out of his eyes. He was exhausted. Everyone was. He met his skipper’s gaze, seeing the same mind-numbing fatigue he felt from being at General Quarters fifty-eight of the last sixty-three hours.

  “Sir, it might just be working,” said DeCosta.

  Max had no reply but a barely visible nod. It just might.

  Since he was standing, Max took the opportunity to look around CIC. The men’s energy was flagging. Although he couldn’t give them rest right now, Max could give them something that might restore them somewhat. He returned to his seat and used his console to order the galley to deliver sandwiches and candy bars to the men at their stations throughout the ship (everyone already had coffee and other drinks available). A bit of food and sugar would provide some energy for the hours ahead.

  They were going to need it.

  “Now getting a firm track on Hotel eleven,” said Lieutenant Bartoli, the tactical officer, after a few minutes. “Range is just over 7 AU. Course is one-six-eight mark two-eight-five—and it’s a pure lubber line. No constant helming, no zigzag, no effort at all to conceal his base course. I might say something about him being an arrogant bastard, but someone beat me to it. Anyway, he’s on the deceleration leg of his trajectory, and he’s right at the Standard G load for type. He’s too far away to get any kind of visual, but based on spectrography of his drive emissions and our rough calculation of his mass, our preliminary classification is one of their heavier destroyers, probably Dervish class. It appears that he plans on joining the containment group. The other ships in the containment group, by the way, have also dropped any effort at stealth. We’re picking up the full spectrum of EM, mass detection, and IR. No trouble tracking them now, sir.” As soon as he stopped speaking, Bartoli looked down and made himself conspicuously busy at his console.

  “Mr. Bartoli,” Max said in a didactic tone after watching him for about half a minute, “haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “I don’t think so, Skipper,” he said.

  Max simply looked at him impatiently, his head taking on a slight list to starboard.

  “Sir, you can’t mean that you want me to, um . . . ?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bartoli, I do want you to, um . . .” Max said, his voice firm but not harsh. “A ship has joined the enemy formation. That’s a major change in the tactical situation requiring that the tactical officer provide a summary for the benefit of everyone in CIC in order to maintain adequate situational awareness. It’s not just regulations, but immemorial naval tradition.” He spoke the last three words in the way an engineer would say “law of physics.” “No matter how many times you have said most of it or how unpleasant it may be to say.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bartoli said with resignation. “Th
e Cumberland is moored to a 6.4 kilometer diameter Kuiper Belt Object orbiting 75.9 AU from Monroe-Tucker B, the K class primary of an uninhabited system in the Rubrulram sector. Hotels one, two, four, six, seven, eight, and nine, soon to be joined by eleven, make up an eight-vessel containment and search group surrounding us in three dimensions. The containment group consists of one Barbell class battlecruiser, one Crusader class light cruiser, and six destroyers of assorted classes. The group is now shifting from the Krag’s standard seven-ship containment formation to their standard containment formation of eight. We’re looking at a cube measuring just over 4 AU between the vertices, with us near the center—the Krag apparently know that we are somewhere near the middle of their enclosure and that we’re drifting with the KBO’s out here in a matching orbit, or maybe joined with one, but they don’t know exactly where.

  “The other three hostile ships in this system, Hotels three, five, and ten, are the interdiction group. They’re all Crocodile class medium cruisers, and there’s one of them at each of this system’s jump points. So if we manage to escape the Krag Cube of Doom, we’d have to defeat a cruiser with roughly eight times our firepower in order to jump out. And if we can’t jump, we can’t get home because we don’t have enough fuel left to get home on compression drive. That is, unless there’s a Standard Hydrogen Corporation filling station out here that I don’t know about.

  “Oh, and I also have this cheerful news. We’re picking up multiple coded data transmissions in the vicinity of the cruisers. Intel and Tactical Sections concur that the transmissions mean that, apparently, each cruiser has filled the area around the jump points with Jackrabbit or Prairie Dog class sensor drones, so there’s going to be no sneaking up on them, even if we’re stealthed. The exits are covered.

  “On the good side, we are still hidden: trapped but not caught. The Stealth Section reports that all of their systems remain nominal. Thermal stealth functioning at peak effectiveness: the hull is being chilled to 48.3 degrees Kelvin, a perfect match for the temperature of the Kuiper Belt Object we’re on. The Krag infrared detectors see only a black bump on this black iceberg floating in all this black space—this isn’t the ship you’re looking for; move along. All ship’s systems, including life support, are at minimum thermal output mode to conserve heat-sink capacity, but even latched onto this snowball and dumping as much of our waste heat into it as we can without boiling off the volatiles and giving ourselves away, we’re still storing up heat faster than we’re dumping it. Our heat sink is at 94.2 percent capacity. Depending on how much stray enemy sensor output our stealth systems have to null or sequester, we’ve got somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half before we hit the maximum.

  “We’ve been monitoring the Krag search pattern and doing some probability extrapolations. The most likely time until they detect us, plus or minus one standard deviation, is—what a coincidence!—roughly an hour to an hour and a half. Of course, we could catch a break, and it could be two and a half hours when they will have had time to scan every single grid square in the search area, or the Krag could get incredibly lucky and get a solid return off of us five minutes from now. But I’m pretty confident that we’ve got at least an hour and pretty certain that we’ve got no more than ninety minutes. It’s a flip of the coin as to whether it will be heat-sink saturation or active detection by the Krag that gives us away, but it will be one or the other, no more than ninety minutes from now.

  “Of course, once that happens, things get real predictable again. Having detected us, the Krag blow us to flaming atoms with celerity. All of those ships launch a full salvo, which means something between twenty-five and forty-two Ridgeback superluminal missiles, depending on whether the ships covering the jump points decide to get in on the action. The missiles will converge from all directions in a time-on-target coordinated attack that will be impossible to evade. Based on their previous missile attack profiles, speed settings, seeker acquisition intervals, and a few other variables, I estimate the time between detection and destruction to be eight minutes and forty-seven seconds, plus or minus twenty-two seconds. The only reason it’s so long a time is that the Krag ships are still at pretty long missile range—about 3 AU—so even at superluminal velocities, it takes a while for the missiles to get here. Then it’s all over.”

  Bartoli was working very hard to keep a distinct whipped, beaten, trampled tone out of his voice.

  He did not entirely succeed.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bartoli, for that oh-so-cheerful news,” said Max. “You’re a regular ray of sunshine.”

  “Any time, sir.”

  The dots representing the enemy ships slowly drifted toward their intended resting places. “Vessels in the containment group don’t appear to be in any particular hurry to get where they’re going,” Bartoli observed. “None is running its main sublight drives at anything over 45 percent thrust. I reckon they know we’re not going anywhere.”

  “Not for the moment, anyway,” said Max.

  The food arrived. Max and the men in CIC ate their assorted roast beef, ham, salami, and bologna sandwiches; munched potato chips; and consumed their Nebula Nougat, Heath, Milky Way, Mars, Almond Asteroid, and Snickers candy bars. The simple food filled their bellies and fueled their metabolisms, sustaining their bodies so that, if their hearts and minds were up to the task, these men could carry on the fight just a little bit longer. As they ate, the men grimly watched the ships of the containment group vessels reach the positions predicted by Bartoli, enclosing the humans in a giant cube, each side about 600 million kilometers long, with an enemy ship at each of the eight corners, each holding position roughly 500 million kilometers from the Cumberland.

  Originally Max and his crew had the entire system in which to hide. Now they were hemmed into a space roughly equal to that enclosed by the orbit of Mars in the Sol System. To some that might have seemed like a lot of room, but in space combat it was the equivalent of an infantry company being trapped in a mountain valley. And the Krag weren’t done yet. Not by a long shot.

  The men knew it. Despite the banter Max could feel their tension ratcheting up to an even higher level as the new formation took shape. He didn’t know what it was about that one additional ship, but there was something about being surrounded by eight ships that made a man feel much more hopeless than being surrounded by only seven.

  Seven ships. Eight ships. Either way, it’s pretty damn hopeless. Studying the tactical displays, evaluating the firepower and performance of the ships arrayed against him, and weighing the obviously considerable command abilities of the enemy admiral, Max thought that the odds against him and the Cumberland were at least 50,000 to 1.

  As soon as this thought occurred to him, he mentally kicked himself for being pessimistic.

  In fact, Max’s estimate was wildly optimistic.

  Unknown to the skipper and totally without anything remotely approaching official authorization, an up-and-coming able spacer second class named Nyombe in the Tactical Back Room had run the Cumberland’s predicament through the tactical scenario evaluation algorithm on the ship’s computer. Known as T-SEA, the algorithm was a sophisticated computer routine that predicted battle outcomes with 95.78 percent accuracy. T-SEA had dutifully stated that the Cumberland faced a “highly unfavorable correlation of forces” and calculated that her odds of surviving the encounter were one in 981,966.

  Rounded up to a more gossip-worthy “one in a million,” this estimate circulated within two and a quarter minutes to every corner of the ship by means of the Cumberland’s breathtakingly efficient jungle telegraph, made so much speedier because the duties of many crew members required that they be tied into at least one of the ship’s thirty-six voice communication channels or “loops” and were already exchanging information in real time with men in other parts of the ship.

  Officially, of course, the crew members on the loops were supposed to limit their communications to official information directly related to the performance of their particular
duties. Naval regulations clearly stated that skippers should punish severely all breaches of “loop discipline.” In reality, conversation on the loops contained as much gossip as official information, and if a skipper started locking up everyone who breached loop discipline, he wouldn’t have anyone left to man the ship.

  Short, pithy, and deeply relevant to every man on board, the T-SEA calculation seemed almost genetically engineered to spread over the loops. As the news permeated the ship, so did a feeling of resolute fatalism: a sense that, although the Cumberland would fight bravely to the last, the 215 boys and men on board were, at that very moment, living out their final moments. And while like most men, they were apprehensive about coming face-to-face with the mysteries that lie beyond this life, the belief that the ship would soon meet its end also filled the crew with grim determination. If they were going to die, the crew was determined to die well and in the best traditions of the Union Space Navy. The Cumberland would go down with her guns blazing and her pennant flying. Her men would die with their boots on.

  The skipper and the XO, however, heard none of this. Although Max and DeCosta could tie into any of the ship’s loops at any time, they rarely did so. The men at Sensors, Tactical, Intel, and all the other stations that quite literally surrounded the CO and XO in CIC were plugged into the loops every second. And for Max and DeCosta, that was enough because, by listening to what the CIC crew said “over the airwaves,” the skipper and the executive officer were “plugged in” to those officers and men and, through them, to the entire ship. The final connection wasn’t over an electronic circuit. It was face-to-face, eye to eye, man to man. And in the confines of CIC, those men were close enough to each other to smell each other’s sweat.