Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

Ultimately, command and combat are not about the machines with which men fight. They are about the men doing the fighting.

  News of the T-SEA estimate had not yet reached the Command Island because the men at the consoles in CIC had not passed on this bit of gossip. Every man in the navy knew that there were things that the skipper and the exec needed to know and things that they didn’t. And this information, by tacit but unanimous agreement, clearly fell into the latter category.

  “I suspect that this is everyone who is coming to the party,” Max said to DeCosta, gesturing toward Hotel eleven. “And while I’m sure it’s bound to be the most glittering Krag social affair of the season, I’d very much like to leave before things get too exciting. I’m open to any brilliant ideas you might have for making our exit. In fact, I’ll even listen to any not-so-brilliant ones if you’ve got ’em.”

  DeCosta shook his head. He would have loved to be the hero by coming up with some genius-level maneuver that would save himself and his shipmates, but his magician’s hat was as rabbit-free as Max’s. “Well, sir, the only thing that is coming to mind right now is what Commodore Middleton said in his Handbook for New Warship Commanders. Remember the chapter titled ‘Techniques for Evading an Enemy of Greatly Superior Force’?”

  DeCosta’s remark earned him Max’s best “are you kidding” look. Asking Max whether he remembered something from Admiral Middleton’s book was like asking a professor of Alphacen literature whether she could recite any verses from Sok Vong Than’s Lamentations for Angkor Wat. Middleton, now a fleet admiral and widely admired as an authority on both tactics and leadership, had been Max’s mentor for many years. Max idolized him, had practically memorized “Uncle Middy’s” famous (but notoriously prolix) book, and could, in fact, recite that volume’s famous “Swoop Down” chapter verbatim.

  “The ‘Three M’s’ of evading an enemy of superior force,” Max quoted, “are Minutes—meaning time—Maneuvering room, and Misdirection.” Max paused and regarded DeCosta grimly. “We’re running very low on the first two.”

  “But, sir,” DeCosta replied, smiling, “you always seem to have an inexhaustible supply of the third.”

  Misdirection. The third “M.” My favorite.

  Unfortunately, not only was the Cumberland nearly out of minutes and maneuvering room; the men’s emotional reserves were also badly depleted, a situation that was not helped by the Krag’s practice of firing a missile or two at any particularly promising set of target coordinates generated by their computers. A thermonuclear missile or two.

  Glancing at the chrono, Max observed that the Krag should be firing again very soon. Just as Max opened his mouth to announce this observation, he saw Kasparov tense.

  “Vampire! Vampire! Detection of seeker scans for enemy missiles, Ridgeback type, two sources, designating as Vampire nine and Vampire ten. Bearing one-seven-three mark two-four-two. Range 1.35 AU. Velocity is settling in at . . . 1.5 c.”

  Sometimes Max hated it when he was right. Especially when being right meant being shot at with highly advanced, superluminal, active multimodal sensor homing, antiship, fusion missiles.

  Once Kasparov, the sensors officer, located and classified the contact, Bartoli, the tactical officer, took over responsibility for tracking it and predicting what it would do. Everyone in CIC knew that, at the range from which the missiles were fired, plotting their trajectory would require Bartoli and his team to receive and process the incoming seeker scans from the missiles for just under four seconds.

  For four seconds, no one spoke. For four seconds, no one breathed. Those four seconds crawled through these men’s awareness as four unbearable eternities stretched end to end, in which each man held in agonizing suspension his expectation of living beyond the end of the current watch.

  “Bearing to Vampires changing rapidly,” reported Mr. Bartoli, almost joyfully. Born in Mobile, Alabama, on Earth, Bartoli pronounced “Vampire,” not with two syllables as “VAM pire,” but with three, “VAM pye uh,” but everyone was too relieved to notice. The rapid change in bearing meant that Vampire nine and Vampire ten would miss the ship by a large margin. The men of the Cumberland would not die.

  They would not die, at least, in the next ten minutes.

  “I’ve got enough data points to generate a rough track now,” Bartoli said, the pitch of his voice nearly half an octave below where it had been a moment ago. “Closest approach is going to be in the neighborhood of 1.45 million kilometers. No chance their seeker heads will pick us up.”

  “Very well,” Max said. I’ve got to do something. Maybe there’s time for a little misdirection after all . . . like hiding in plain sight. “Gentlemen, when those warheads detonate at the end of their runs and the effects front reaches the enemy ships, their sensors will be scrambled for about three minutes. I intend to use that effect to cover a sprint right into the middle of the fireball from the nearest warhead. The rat-faces think that warhead explosion just proved we aren’t in that particular grid square. And since they know for certain that we’re not there, I know for certain that there is where we need to be.” There were a few smiles at the odd phrasing, but everyone understood what the skipper meant. “Maneuvering, prepare to make a high-speed run to those coordinates. Stealth, let’s get ready to buy ourselves a few more minutes of heat-sink capacity by radiating when the Krag can’t detect it. Extend the radiator fins the instant the effects front reaches the enemy and keep them out until just before the fireball cools enough for the enemy to be able to get an IR detection.”

  Maneuvering and Stealth acknowledged Max’s orders. Max scanned the faces of the men at their stations. The faces were still grim, but not as grim as they had been a few moments before. When he met their eyes, he understood that they knew what he knew: this series of maneuvers would not get the Cumberland out of the Krag search pattern—they would not get the ship to safety. But they would preserve it from immediate destruction, if only for a little while longer.

  It would have to do.

  “Probable Krag firing solution computed, Skipper,” Bartoli said. “Feeding it to Maneuvering.”

  “Mr. LeBlanc, how much do you know about Kuiper Belt Objects?” Max inquired.

  “I’m just a ship driver, sir, not a planetary scientist, so not much,” he answered.

  “Then you won’t take it amiss if I point out to you that this snowball we’re bellied up against isn’t just made of water ice, but also frozen methane, ammonia, and other ices, some of which are pretty volatile. So, you might want to plot your breakaway maneuver so as to avoid hitting that thing out there with much in the way of thruster fire, because the heat could cause some of it to flash-vaporize and blow the whole body to smithereens, which—at the very least—would betray our position to the Krag. And, of course, getting out of the debris field might prove to be a more difficult navigation problem than we care to deal with today.”

  “Point taken, sir,” LeBlanc said, smiling. “I’ll give you a gentle separation.”

  “Excellent, Mr. LeBlanc. I knew I could count on you.”

  “Firing solution received,” LeBlanc said a few seconds later. “Course computed.”

  The minutes passed as the Krag missiles followed their sinuous trajectories, twisting through space along corkscrew-like paths to give their seeker heads the greatest chance of scanning and locking onto a target. The men scarcely breathed, almost as though they were afraid that the Krag homing missiles could hear them.

  After what felt like hours but was actually just over ten minutes, Kasparov snapped out, “Detonation! Detonation! Optical detection of thermonuclear explosions at predicted end of missile run. Given the distance and the lightspeed delay, warheads on Vampire nine and ten detonated approximately five seconds ago.”

  Kasparov rattled off the ranges, bearings, and measured explosive yields of the two explosions and started a countdown clock. Almost half an hour crawled by—the time it took for the electromagnetic radiation from the two 51.4-kiloton Krag thermonuclear warhea
ds, traveling at the speed of light, to reach the eight Krag ships almost 3.5 AU from the center of the enclosure—as the CIC crew sat ready to act, like a loaded and cocked weapon set to fire at a touch to the trigger.

  Max could almost hear the men sweat.

  Finally the clock reached zero. The electromagnetic radiation from the Krag warhead explosions reached the Krag ships, blinding their sensitive detectors to the fainter emissions given off by a Khyber class Union destroyer running for its life.

  Max pulled the trigger. “Go, LeBlanc, go.”

  In a heartbeat, CIC went from tense immobility into brisk, focused activity. Nelson extended the radiator fins, while Chief LeBlanc and the three men under his direction at the Maneuvering Stations expertly maneuvered the Cumberland away from the oversize iceberg that had concealed it and then steered the ship through a redline-the-drive-and-make-the-space-frame-groan acceleration/deceleration and course change maneuver that, two minutes and forty-seven seconds later, placed her in the middle of the dissipating fireball from one of the Krag warheads. Even after coming to rest in the center of the fireball, the Cumberland continued to radiate her stored heat for as long as she could do so without detection.

  In four minutes and fifty-six seconds, it was over. The Krag sensors had recovered from the effects of the detonations, and the fireball into which the Cumberland dashed was now sufficiently reduced that the ship had to rely on its stealth systems to remain undetected. As quickly as she had sprung into motion, the Cumberland was at rest and nearly indistinguishable from the cold vastness in which she drifted: engines shut down, radiator fins retracted, attitude control thrusters deactivated, viewports shuttered, running lights extinguished, hull cryogenically chilled to just above absolute zero, her thermal energy sequestered in a massive heat sink, mass signature suppressed, EM emissions nil—“a hole in space.” Fully stealthed, the ship was virtually invisible: as difficult to detect as any space vehicle ever constructed by humankind. Cumberland was a black schooner with black sails ghosting across a dark ocean on a moonless night. Unseen and unheard, she was a shadow of a shade.

  “All right, people, let’s settle down and watch carefully. Keep your eyes open for a pattern, a mistake, anything we can exploit,” Max said.

  “And what if they don’t make a mistake?” asked DeCosta quietly.

  “Then we’ll have to make one for them,” Max answered. That didn’t come out exactly right. “You know what I mean.”

  DeCosta smiled. “Yes, sir. I do.”

  Max had bought some time, but only some. He’d shed some of the heat stored in the heat sink, freeing up about 15 percent of its capacity—capacity that would soon be consumed. He’d moved the ship into a grid square already eliminated in the search, but the talented Krag commander would spot the ruse before long. Max had delayed the inevitable moment when the Krag located the Cumberland by an hour or two at most.

  “Bearing change on all contacts,” Bartoli announced after a few minutes. “Looks like they’re closing the range.” Pause. “Confirmed. Range decreasing on all eight vessels in the containment group.”

  Twelve minutes passed. “Ships from the containment group are all taking up new positions,” Bartoli announced. “Decelerating now. From their D/C curves, it looks like they are going to wind up at these points.” Eight blinking red dots appeared in the tactical display. “Each point is roughly equidistant from our present position and about point three-seven AU closer than their previous stations. And the center of their formation is only point one-five AU from our present position, so their best guess as to where we are is much closer than before.” After a few minutes, the white dots representing the actual positions of the ships in the containment group merged with the blinking red dots. Bartoli touched a key that extinguished the red dots.

  “Containment group ships are now holding at their projected positions,” Bartoli said redundantly. “They should resume multistatic scanning in the next five minutes or so. At the closer range, their scan intensity will be higher, so they will be able to eliminate each grid more quickly. Once I get a read on their scan rate, I’ll come up with an estimated time of probable detection.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Bartoli,” Max acknowledged. I can hardly wait.

  “Tightening the noose.” This statement, loud enough to be heard throughout CIC, came from the Commodore’s Station, located on the Command Island to Max’s left, a console equipped with an exceptionally comfortable chair but only a rudimentary set of controls and displays. It was uttered by Lieutenant Doctor Ibrahim (Bram) Sahin, the Cumberland’s Chief Medical Officer (CMO), whose nonmedical talents included proficiency as a naturalist, linguist, trader, and budding diplomat. The doctor’s observations were often extremely useful and had, on at least one occasion, saved the ship, which explained why he was seated on the Command Island, when most CMOs weren’t even allowed to enter CIC absent clear necessity, much less permitted to occupy the Commodore’s Station at will. The doctor had come into CIC a few minutes before and was just now being handed a mug of coffee by a midshipman.

  Notwithstanding Sahin’s previous contributions to the Cumberland’s successes over the past few months, this last remark made Max wish to supplement the doctor’s less than perfectly turned out uniform with a strip of duct tape over his mouth. It was just what the men in CIC didn’t need to hear.

  Even if it was true.

  Max glared at Sahin and, in return, received an embarrassed shrug, which he acknowledged with an almost imperceptible nod: rebuke administered, apology offered, and apology accepted. Both men knew that Sahin had a bad habit of speaking the truth bluntly, especially at times when blunt truths were best left unspoken.

  Like now. Over the past few weeks, the Cumberland’s crew had lived through enough drama to last a lifetime. There was, of course, the thrill of answering a Vaaach invitation for a rendezvous on 15 April beyond the edge of Known Space to receive a Krag surrender ultimatum for delivery to the Union. After that there would normally have been a rest period for officers and crew before having to return to the rendezvous point with the Union’s response to the demand. Those days, however, were filled with feverish work as—under Admiral Hornmeyer’s specific orders—the Cumberland received new and upgraded CIC consoles, which were installed in a new and more logical arrangement, a nifty new weapons system that the crew was calling the “Equalizer,” and various other less visible but equally important upgrades.

  That accomplished, the Cumberland had the dubious privilege of returning on 2 May to the same rendezvous point it visited on 15 April, there to deliver humanity’s defiant answer of “NEVER,” all the while not knowing what the answer was until they actually transmitted it. In fact, Max and just about everyone else on board (except for a few of the perpetually ebullient midshipmen like Hewlett, Park, and Gilbertson) had believed the Union was going to agree to accept the Krag promise not to exterminate humankind in exchange for the Union’s surrender.

  After delivering the Union’s unexpectedly defiant response, things went well. At first. With a powerful Vaaach vessel looking on, the Krag ship sent to receive the answer withdrew from the rendezvous and cracked on toward Krag space at more than 2000 c without so much as a peep. Once the Krag vessel was out of sensor range, the Cumberland—promised safe passage out of their space by the Vaaach—withdrew and headed for Union-controlled space. The journey was uneventful until the ship crossed out of Vaaach space.

  That’s when things went to hell.

  When the Cumberland came out of its jump into the Garbo-Watkins A system, its first after leaving Vaaach space, two Derrick class destroyers were lying in wait with weapons zeroed on the jump point. The Cumberland escaped only because Max—obeying a hunch—had fired two Talon missiles just as the ship emerged from the jump. Because the ship’s computers and sensors were still in restart mode after having been shut down for the jump, it was a “blind fire,” with the missiles untargeted, their guidance systems set for a wide search pattern and their seeker he
ads programmed to identify and lock onto any vessel that didn’t transmit a friendly Identification Friend or Foe (IFF).

  Both missiles missed. Because the weapons were not aimed precisely on their targets, the enemy had four precious seconds to begin evasive action before the missiles locked onto them and ran their drives up to attack speed. Max did not regard the missiles as wasted ordnance, however. Occupied with saving their skins from imminent thermonuclear immolation, the Krag were too busy to carry out their attack on the Cumberland, which went into stealth mode and escaped.

  The jump into the next system, ironically named Bonnevie by its inhabitants before the Krag killed them all, was uneventful. But while the ship was crossing the star system from jump in to jump out, a “rat pack” of four Krag destroyers arrived on compression drive, obviously on the hunt for the Cumberland, and staked out the jump point. Max used the Cumberland’s stealth to sneak up on one and take it out with a missile attack, launched an emulator drone to lure away two more on a wild-goose chase, and slipped past the fourth to make the jump, a process that took a total of twenty-one exhausting and nerve-racking hours.

  That jump brought the Cumberland to a never-inhabited system known only by its Union Space Navy Galactic Survey number. While never home to any humans, on that day the system was hosting tourists in the form of three Krag Crustacean class cruisers that had jumped in a few hours ahead of the Cumberland and were making their way to the jump point that they knew she would use to take her one step closer to home. Max went stealthy, slipped into the drive trail of the hindmost cruiser, and followed the formation for fifteen grueling hours to the jump point. Once the Krag ships got there, they had just begun to arrange themselves into an interdiction formation and begun their active sensor scans of the likely approaches to the jump point when Max darted between them at high speed and jumped out before the Krag could get a good sensor fix, much less a weapons lock.

  Which brought Max and the Cumberland here: Monroe-Tucker B, where—before the men could so much as exchange a few high fives and hit the head—they were set upon not by a rat pack, not three cruisers, but a full-fledged attack group under the command of a Krag whose fighting skill declared him to be at least the Krag equivalent of a commodore, if not a rear admiral. The Krag commander hadn’t made a mistake yet and was using his forces with skill and assurance. This time the Krag had come with their A game.