Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “Outstanding.” Max hit a key on his console.

  “Kraft here.”

  “Major Kraft, are you ready?”

  “Ja vohl! Ready to bring the war to the enemy, SIR!” Kraft sounded as though he were ready to swing from the yardarms onto the enemy deck with a knife in his teeth.

  “Outstanding. CIC out.” Max punched the circuit closed. “Chin, do you have that message prepared? Blue-on-blue casualties make me cranky.”

  “The barnacle is prepared and loaded for launch, sir.”

  “Very well.”

  Everything was in place, and all the Cumberland and its adrenalin-marinated crew could do for the moment was hold themselves in readiness for just the right moment. Ever observant, Dr. Sahin noticed the tiny beads of sweat that glistened on the upper lips and foreheads of many of the CIC watch standers, notwithstanding the compartment’s closely regulated temperature of 22.2 degrees Celsius. He glanced to his right at his friend Max Robichaux, the young man on whose shoulders the weight of more than two hundred human lives rested every minute of every day. Although Max’s face was composed, his hands were clutching the arms of the chair at the CO’s station so hard that his fingertips were white and the tendons were standing out on the backs of his hands. But the skipper’s head was held high, and his eyes were fixed firmly ahead.

  The commander and crew of the USS Cumberland felt fear. Fear of defeat. Fear of failure. Fear of death.

  And they defied it.

  The wait wasn’t long. Less than two minutes after the Cumberland was in place, Bartoli sang out, “There she goes, sir. Hotel one is making his move to dock.”

  It was important for Max to wait for this moment to make his move because, when Hotel one closed with the Nicholas Appert to dock, the tender blocked its view of Hotel two, meaning that Hotel one’s commander would have no direct view of Hotel two’s destruction and would (Max hoped) have no idea that there was another Union ship in the vicinity.

  “All right, men,” said Max, “Let’s slay the giant. Go!”

  LeBlanc patted Fleishman on the shoulder and said, “Go, son, go.”

  Fleishman pushed the main sublight drive controller from NULL to FLANK. With a glare of fusing deuterium and towing the “boulder” 5000 meters behind it, Cumberland leaped into motion straight toward Hotel two.

  “Fire the barnacle,” Max said at the moment the main sublight drive controller began to move under Fleishman’s hand. Chin flipped up a protective cover and pressed the button underneath, causing a cylinder about the same diameter as a grapefruit and half a meter long to issue from a dedicated tube on the Cumberland’s belly. It swiftly crossed the distance separating the destroyer from the tender, used its compact sensor package to locate one of the tender’s dozens of receptacles for external comms umbilicals, and fired its tiny thrusters to aim itself so that it slammed into the umbilical’s armored cover. The barnacle transmitted a digital signal, causing the cover to retract, after which it extruded a tiny fiber optic filament, tied itself into the comm receptacle, and transmitted a short message. Because the barnacle was hard-wired to the Nicholas Appert, it was totally immune from detection and interception by the Krag. Shepherded by the appropriate access codes, the barnacle’s message immediately found its way through the tender’s comms network to her commander.

  Meanwhile, the Cumberland was bearing down on Hotel two, having accelerated to roughly 10 percent of the speed of light. Only five-hundredths of a second before colliding with the enemy ship, in an automatically executed move programmed by LeBlanc and Levy into the Maneuvering computer, the Cumberland veered off and released the grappling field at a carefully calculated point in the course change, slinging the pressure bulkhead hemisphere directly toward the enemy cruiser. The Krag vessel, which had detected the attacking destroyer only 2.67 seconds earlier, had no time to evade. The only defensive measure it could take was to route additional power to its rear deflectors.

  Unfortunately for the Krag, deflectors designed to turn aside three-ton missiles built mostly of lightweight materials were useless against a thirteen-ton-plus, superdense pressure hull, particularly when that thirteen-ton-plus pressure hull is traveling at about 10 percent of the speed of light. Ensign Levy’s expertly slung boulder pierced the Krag deflectors’ layers of polarized gravitons like a rifle bullet through balsa wood and struck the enemy destroyer about thirteen meters left and four meters below dead center. The bulkhead’s enormous kinetic energy (half of its mass times the square of its velocity: more than 5 x 1016 joules—the rough equivalent of a 500-megaton thermonuclear explosion) vaporized the Krag cruiser in less than five-hundredths of a second.

  Thus, the late USS Vauban, or at least, a piece of her, had her revenge upon the Krag.

  Screened from the event by the enormous bulk of the tender, the commander of Hotel one knew only from the explosion and the cessation of Hotel two’s transponder signal that his sister ship had been destroyed. Because he believed no Union vessels other than the tender were in the vicinity, he attributed the vessel’s destruction to a lucky shot from the tender, or the supreme bad luck of being struck by high-speed debris from the defunct USS Vauban, the latter theory being not very far from the truth.

  Just as the glare from the explosion started to fade, LeBlanc announced, “Executing next maneuver.”

  “Outstanding shot, Mr. Levy!” Max proclaimed. “We might have to start calling you ‘David.’”

  “It’s sure easier to pronounce than ‘Menachem,’” Bartoli added, his Alabama accent doing things to the name that Levy’s parents never imagined when they bestowed it upon him.

  Behind the cover of the tender, the Cumberland wheeled around, dumped velocity, and pulled up alongside the larger vessel bow to stern, so that the main starboard docking ports on each ship aligned. With a few deft maneuvering thruster pulses, the two ports kissed gently and then engaged with a firm THUMP.

  “Hard dock with the Nicholas Appert,” LeBlanc said.

  Max looked at his comms officer. “Hard-line comms with the tender established,” Chin said. “They signal that the Krag have not yet boarded. The midships deflectors will keep them off for five minutes, maybe ten.”

  “Very well.” Now that the first enemy ship was history, Max needed to destroy the second. But the Cumberland’s weapons and deflectors were simply not strong enough to go toe-to-toe with Hotel one, a Demerit class destroyer with an array of weaponry equivalent to that carried by many light cruisers. Max needed his marines to tilt the scales back in his favor.

  Max opened a comm channel that piped his voice onto the Salute Deck. “Marines! You are GO!”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Kraft responded with enthusiasm.

  But do the Marines feel the same way as their commander? Just as Max formed that question, the audio transducer on his console practically exploded with sound as the marines that filled the Salute Deck thundered, “SEMPER FI! DO OR DIE!”

  Good answer.

  At that moment, the hatches that joined the two ships opened. With Zamora and Ulmer, the two largest and most aggressive of the marines in the lead, the Cumberland’s twelve-man marine detachment stormed onto the deck of the Nicholas Appert. Following them closely were one special-skills naval officer and twenty-four “honorary marines,” navy men chosen for their size, skill with weapons, toughness, and killer instincts. Major Kraft himself trained them intensively during breaks in their regular naval duties and called them at need to fill out the marines’ ranks to make up a full platoon of hard-charging, remorseless, blood-up-to-their-elbows Krag killers.

  Meeting them was a small but intense-looking lieutenant wearing a space combat uniform along with a combat helmet and blast visor. He was carrying a Model 2309 submachine gun, a wicked little weapon with an insanely large magazine that held 250 rounds of 9 millimeter ammunition. Known as the “sandblaster” because of its resemblance to the business end of that particular piece of industrial equipment, it was designed to be used in close quarters with the
enemy. The little man looked eager to strip the paint from some rat-faces.

  Kraft and the lieutenant exchanged salutes. Under the exigencies of the situation, the customary salutes to the flag were omitted. “Welcome aboard, Major. I’m Lt. Maynard, the XO,” he said. He didn’t wait for Kraft to introduce himself. The messages from the Cumberland told him whom to expect, and with his ship under attack, Maynard—businesslike under even the most relaxed of circumstances—wasn’t in the mood for chit-chat. “We’ve done just what you asked. Follow me.” Maynard led the contingent across the waist of the ship to a narrow L-shaped space, one leg of which was about twelve meters long and the other about eight. The marines spread themselves out down the legs of the “L,” with Kraft and Maynard at the angle, flanked by Zamora and Ulmer. Maynard activated a padcomp that was stuck on the wall with a few blobs of adhesive putty. “This will tell you when the guests have arrived.” Then he handed Kraft a small munitions trigger known as a “pickle,” because it was about the size of a reasonably sized kosher dill and dull green in color. “And this will let you greet them properly.”

  Kraft looked down both legs of the “L” and saw that he could dispense with his planned order for his men to get ready. Each marine, actual and honorary, was on one knee, weapon at the ready, helmet cinched in place, blast visor down, war face on. Maynard was standing, braced against his weapon’s anticipated recoil. Kraft turned to the lieutenant and said quietly, “Maynard, that’s a good way to get your head blown off. Generally speaking, you want to be doing what all these marines are doing.”

  Maynard nodded and went down on one knee, emulating as closely as possible the posture of Ulmer to his immediate left, cinched his helmet, and lowered his blast visor. Satisfied that his men were ready to meet the enemy, Kraft kneeled. A breathless minute passed. Two. Another. Then they all heard the unmistakable WHUMP of a combat docking, followed by the BLAM of the hatch being blown.

  Focused on the padcomp, Kraft could see the shattered remnants of the hatch fly into the tender’s Port Salute Deck and ricochet off the bulkheads before coming to rest. Half a second later, the padcomp’s screen flashed white, and the deck shook from several flash-bang grenades tossed into the compartment by the Krag to stun and dazzle any defenders who might be in the compartment. The padcomp image cleared from the flash-bangs just in time to display forty or so Krag, weapons at the ready, swarming into the compartment, their confusion at meeting no opposition evident in their body language. None of them noticed the fifteen or so innocuous-looking rectangular boxes mounted about chest-high on the bulkheads. Painted to match the surfaces on which they were mounted, the boxes looked like so many other of the boxes, bulges, pipes, and other fixtures that littered every wall and overhead in a warship. One of the invaders, apparently their leader, started toward what appeared to be a hatch in one of the compartment’s bulkheads.

  At that moment Kraft grasped the end of his pickle. He flipped the hinged top end up to expose a small red button, which he depressed with his thumb. All fifteen of those innocuous boxes concealed Claymore mines—their simple but effective design little changed over the centuries—containing plastic explosive charges that filled the room with tens of thousands of buckshot-size high-velocity steel pellets. Twenty-three of the forty Krag fell immediately to the deck, killed or grievously wounded by the hail of steel shot or the concussion from the explosions. The rest, shielded by their comrades, unscathed or only slightly wounded, swung their weapons looking for foes to kill but were still partly blinded by the flash.

  Kraft stood. “Now, marines!” The marines had been hiding behind false bulkheads erected inside the Salute Deck and paralleling the compartment’s forward and port walls, so that the Krag had stormed into a normal-looking, if slightly smaller-than-expected, compartment. At Kraft’s command, the marines stood in unison and rotated the large latches located on the back of each bulkhead, withdrawing the locking pins that secured them to the deck, to the overhead, and to each other. The heavy, blast-resistant panels fell into the compartment, revealing the marines. Some of the panels fell on Krag, crushing them. Many Krag, however, dimly saw the threat with their half-blinded vision and managed to back out of harm’s way.

  Not for long.

  As soon as the bulkheads hit the deck, the marines howled a ferocious “OORAH,” deafening in the compartment’s close quarters. The roar of M-88 battle rifles was punctuated by the blasts of M-72 shotguns as the men, whose “L” formation allowed them to fire without fear of inflicting friendly-fire casualties, mowed down the Krag in a lethal cross fire. Only a few of the Krag even managed to get off a shot, none of which had any effect. In less than five seconds, only the humans were on their feet. All the Krag were on the deck, dead or rapidly dying.

  Time stopped for a few seconds as the men regarded the compartment, its air filled with powder smoke, the bulkheads scarred by weapons fire, its floor covered with Krag and the slippery gore of their loud and violent demise. For many this was their first time meeting the Krag nose to snout. The quick and stunningly violent victory took a few seconds to process.

  Kraft, experienced commander that he was, gave his men those seconds, but no more. There were nearly three hundred Krag on the other side of the now-unguarded hatch, and they would not long be idle. “First detail,” he roared in his best battlefield voice, “FIRING LINE!” Six men hustled forward and took prone positions on the deck, covering the hatch with their weapons. The remaining men stood with their backs to the wall on either side of the hatch, out of sight from the interior of the Krag ship.

  True to rigid but generally effective Krag tactical doctrine, the absence of a “PROGRESS ACCEPTABLE” signal from the boarders prompted a “hand” of five Krag marines from a nearby protected guard station to run to the hatch to check the status of the boarders and protect the ship from being counterboarded. They stormed through the hatch, where the first detail mowed them down with a single, short volley, each man firing a three-shot burst from his M-88. Their bodies had not yet hit the deck before Kraft yelled, “DODGER! BATES!”

  Lance Corporal Pyotr Vastislav Bomorovsky, known incongruously as the Artful Dodger or just Dodger, the nickname traditionally awarded to the marine who specialized in defeating locks, alarms, access panels, and security systems, stood. He was immediately joined by Private First Class Sodnomzondui Batbayar, who was almost never addressed by the name given to him by his Mongolian parents on the Asiatic steppes, but as Charlie Bates, the time-hallowed nickname for the man who assisted the Artful Dodger. The pair was immediately surrounded by a protective phalanx of six marine riflemen. Once so enclosed, Dodger and Bates ran onto the deck of the Krag ship and found the hatch’s control and locking mechanism.

  The failure of the recently deceased Krag boarders to transmit their “PROGRESS ACCEPTABLE” signal, combined with the failure of the even more recently deceased recon squad’s failure to transmit a “NO BOARDING THREAT” signal triggered a countdown in the hatch mechanism. The marines knew that, unless they defeated the mechanism or entered a fail-safe code within the next fifty seconds or so, the Krag hatch would close and fusion-weld itself shut as a defense against counterboarding.

  When they reached the hatch control mechanism, Dodger ripped the cover off with a tool Bates handed him. Before the cover hit the deck, Bates had slapped a pair of wire cutters into Dodger’s hand. Dodger artfully cut three wires, then pulled four more from their connections. Bates then produced from a chest pocket several sets of wires with alligator clips on each end. Taking these wires from Bates as he needed them, Dodger connected the four loose wires to each other in a crossing pattern and then attached other alligator clip wires in a complex fashion to the terminals from which they had been ripped. Once that was accomplished, Bates pulled out a wire stripper and put it in Dodger’s hand. Dodger used it to strip the ends of two of the three wires he had cut, using alligator clips to ground them to the bulkhead. As soon as the last clip made contact with the bulkhead, a light over the h
atch control mechanism changed from blue-green to yellow-orange. The hatch was hot-wired open and the fail-safe defeated.

  “Hatch secured,” Dodger announced. At that moment six Krag appeared at the end of the corridor about twenty meters away, dropped to their knees, and started shooting at Dodger, Bates, and their protectors. These appeared to be ordinary Krag spacers rather than marines, as their weapons fire was enthusiastic but not particularly accurate. The marines returned fire with their customary lethal efficacy, felling all of the Krag with a single burst, but not before one marine caught a Krag round. All the marines were wearing body armor, but this bullet found its way into the marine’s unprotected mouth and out the back of his neck, severing his spinal column. Even if he had been lying on Dr. Sahin’s operating table when he received the wound, there would have been no saving him, and his combat-hardened comrades knew it.

  Marine Private First Class Heile Tekeda had laid down his arms permanently.

  Two marines dragged Tekeda’s body back through the hatch, covering the seven feet that separated the place where he fell from the deck of the Cumberland in less than five seconds, doing their part to see that what was left of their comrade did not meet the end they planned for the Krag ship. There were two three-man naval fire teams setting up heavy weapons on the Salute Deck to defend the hatch against any counterboarding effort by the Krag. One of those men used his percom to request that orderlies come from the Casualty Station to remove the body.

  Kraft, with Zamora and Ulmer beside him, strode confidently through the hatch, with the rest of the marines on their tail. By prior arrangement they separated cleanly and quickly into three groups, standing in quiet readiness. “All right, marines,” Kraft said, his voice even. Professional. He didn’t differentiate between the actual marines and the honorary ones. Today, fighting side by side under his command, they were all marines. “You’re in enemy territory, so stay sharp, watch your backs, watch your buddies, and keep a full magazine in your weapon at all times. Let’s get it done and get back home.”