Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  A 150-kiloton thermonuclear explosion at a range of 214 meters would vaporize most targets, or at least, reduce them to a large field of baseball-size debris. But a Krag Demerit class destroyer was not most targets. Even at such an intimate range and even with the deflectors compromised, the vessel’s two-meter-thick armor—made of the Krag equivalent of Michiganium—in conjunction with its blast-suppression systems, were able to prevent the vessel’s destruction or even a breach of its thick, superdense hull.

  Max, however, had never intended that the two Talon missiles destroy or even meaningfully damage the enemy ship. The missiles and their warheads were the fullback and the offensive guard for this play, not the ball carrier. Like Tom Harmon, Walter Payton, Jerome Bettis, or Alnilam Woyongo bursting through the gap in the defensive line left by their blockers, the Cumberland exploited the sensor blind spot and the gaping hole left in the enemy destroyer’s deflectors by the two thermonuclear blasts to charge within 2000 meters of the destroyer without being engaged by its point-defense systems or blocked by its deflectors.

  Ordinarily, at this range, the Demerit’s highly capable close-range antiship defenses, based around the infamously wicked Doberman missile, would have made short work of a lightly built destroyer like the Cumberland. But as Max knew by virtue of the tender’s report on the Krag ship’s systems failures, the Dobermans remained kenneled in their launch tubes because the Gremlins deployed earlier by the Cumberland’s marines had cut all the power lines to the dedicated processor used to aim the missiles. The system’s backup mode, which used the destroyer’s primary sensor arrays to acquire the missiles’ targets, failed to function because the Gremlins had cut all the data lines that carried targeting information from the primary sensors to the Dobermans’ launch system.

  Even with sensor blind spots and damage from the Gremlins, the Krag commander was aware of the Union ship located only the space-combat equivalent of a biscuit toss off his beam—at 2000 meters it could scarcely be missed. Aware of his peril, he desperately fought to open up the range between his ship and the Union vessel. When he tried to engage the main sublight drive, he learned that the insidious Union sabotage robots had cut all the data linkages between the Command Nest and the drive systems. He was able, with difficulty, to establish a voice link with Engineering, only to be informed that the fusion reactor was off-line because the Gremlins had gotten to the computer that regulated the reactor’s plasma-containment field. So he ordered his running officer to engage the maneuvering thrusters, only a third of which responded to the firing command, thereby nudging the massive ship into sluggish motion, pushing it forward and yawing it away from the destroyer. He also ordered that the ship be rolled, to rotate the weakened deflectors away from the enemy on his flank.

  Far too slowly.

  “Weapons officer, this is a nuclear weapons firing order, terminal firing sequence,” Max snapped out.

  “Ready,” Levy responded instantly, practically salivating.

  “Maneuvering, don’t wait for my order. Execute your EEM as soon as we fire.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper,” Chief LeBlanc replied. “Prepared to haul ass.”

  “Very well,” Max said, suppressing a smile. “Terminal firing sequence . . . FIRE.”

  “Firing.” Levy hit the key that executed the terminal firing sequence of the POWER RUN attack profile: two Talon missiles launched at minimum speed, fired .19 seconds apart, targeted at exactly the same point on the enemy vessel’s hull. The launch impulses of the two weapons were separated by just enough time for the crew to distinguish them as two distinct jolts, like the sensation when the front and then the back tires of a fast-moving ground car run over a flaw in the pavement. While the men in CIC could still feel the second jolt through the soles of their feet, LeBlanc hit a key on his console and nearly shouted, “EEM: Executing!”

  The tap of Chief LeBlanc’s finger to the touch screen on his console directly commanded execution of the preprogrammed EEM (Escape and Evasion Maneuver), bypassing the men at the Yaw, Roll, and Drives consoles. The Cumberland peeled away from the enemy vessel and firewalled the main sublight drive to open up the range between the two vessels as rapidly as possible.

  Because the missiles were fired from such close range, no point-defense systems had time to detect and engage them. Unscathed, both of the weapons easily pierced the Demerit’s now greatly attenuated deflectors. The first missile detonated within a meter of the enemy’s hull, its variable-yield warhead set for its five-kiloton minimum to prevent damage to the second missile, a phenomenon known as the “fratricide effect.” Gremlin damage and the point-blank range launch worked together to prevent the destroyer’s blast-suppression systems from responding fully to the explosion, allowing the warhead to tear open a 5.3-meter-wide breach in the enemy ship’s hull.

  Plenty wide enough for the second missile. Its high-precision guidance system, designed to seek out weaknesses in the enemy’s defenses, easily found the opening and steered the weapon through the hull breach into the Krag vessel, where, after crashing through several internal bulkheads with the aid of its armored nose cone, it came to rest inside one of the ship’s cargo holds. Protected from explosive decompression by an automated system that slid an emergency bulkhead plate over the breach, five Krag cargo handlers experienced actually seeing the missile for 1.144 seconds—just long enough for them to be aware that they were in proximity to a thermonuclear warhead just a heartbeat away from exploding. To their credit, they merely bowed their heads in reverent submission, confident that they would soon be standing before their Creator-God.

  They did not have long to wait. This weapon was set for the 150-kiloton maximum and went off as soon as its onboard sensors confirmed that the warhead had come to rest inside the Krag vessel. Its effects played out vividly on dozens of monitors scattered throughout the Cumberland. First, all the viewports on the Krag ship lit up with a blinding glare. After an instant all of the ship’s external hatches blew out almost simultaneously, so that they—along with the hull breach opened by the first missile—poured forth blindingly white fusion plasma, like demonic mouths vomiting the very fires of hell. This infernal apparition lasted for less than a half-second, the time required for the turbulent nuclear inferno inside the ship to consume the enemy’s nearly indestructible hull, leaving nothing but the fireball itself, a short-lived miniature star, intensely bright at first, that died slowly in the cold, infinite night.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  17:02 Zulu Hours, 12 May 2315

  “Captain Robichaux, you and your unge kamerater are very polite, for which I thank you,” Captain Sigmund Anderssen said amiably. “But it does not require an Eckmanian Deceptionist to know that very little in my intelligence briefing was a surprise to you.” Another man might be put out by having his very capably delivered briefing go to waste, but rancor, after all, was not generally a part of Anderssen’s disposition. Furthermore, what little irritation that may have afflicted him yielded swiftly to the widely acknowledged soothing powers of Wortham-Briggs Four Planet Coffee. Furthermore, it would be a churlish man indeed who was anything less than perfectly genial after Max’s display of tactical brilliance and an expenditure of precious blood had saved him, his ship, and his crew. “But then again, it wasn’t news to me that most of the briefing wasn’t news to you. The admiral privately hinted to me that you might have received some intel from . . . let’s call them unsanctioned sources.”

  Captain Anderssen and his XO, Lieutenant O. N. Maynard (whom everyone called “Owen” rather than the authentically Anglo-Norman “Osbert Nuvel” with which his philologist parents had saddled him to go with his authentically Anglo-Norman surname), were in the Cumberland’s Wardroom with Max and the destroyer’s Kitchen Cabinet. The formal intelligence briefing by Anderssen had ended minutes before, and the men were sitting around the table drinking coffee, the rich, earthy aroma of which filled the compartment.

  “Positively ripping coff
ee,” Maynard remarked.

  “I thought you tender boys had plenty of everything,” said Chief Wendt.

  “I suppose that’s true most of the time,” Maynard allowed. “And we’ve always got plenty of coffee, but—as you know—there’s coffee and there’s coffee. Ours tastes like it’s been in a tin since about the time of the Ning-Braha Expedition.” Maynard pronounced “about” as “aboot,” which, when combined with his saying “tin” instead of “can” and his use of “ripping” as an adjective, gave away that he was either from Canada or from one of the worlds settled largely by the industrious and pioneer-spirited people from that country. At least he hadn’t yet called the Krag “hosers” or asked for a plate of poutine, whatever that was.

  Anderssen set his mug down. “Even though my thunder,” the word came out “dunder” in the Scandinavian way, “has been stolen with regard to the intelligence situation, I do think I have some other news for you, Captain Robichaux.”

  “Max. I do wish you’d do me the honor of calling me Max.” This was not the first time Max had made such a request.

  “All right, then, Max,” Anderssen allowed. “But only if you call me Sig.”

  “It would be my pleasure, Sig, on the condition that you tell me what your other news is.”

  Anderssen smiled and nodded his assent. “Our cargo manifest.” The tender captain produced a data chip from a uniform pocket and slid it across the Wardroom table to Max, who popped it into the reader and entered a few commands into the nearby terminal. A list of what the Nicholas Appert carried in its capacious holds appeared on the display wall.

  Max scrolled down through the more or less predictable list of fuel, spare parts, foodstuff, lubricants, medical supplies, replacement tools, office supplies, uniform buttons, dental floss, paint, replacement hull plating, structural members, nuts, bolts, fasteners, plasma welding equipment, spare consoles, calibration gear, pressurized hostile surface survival shelters, and toilet brushes (or as they were listed on the manifest, “sanitizing implements—head bowl, long-handled), encountering nothing unusual or unexpected.

  Then he came to the section for weapons and munitions. “Condor missiles? Seven Condor missiles? I’ve never even seen a Condor, much less had seven issued to me.”

  “I’ve never had one in my hold, either. The admiral let me know that, just in case you encountered an elephant and were of a mind to kill it, he wanted you to have an elephant gun,” Anderssen said, smiling. Condors were very new, very expensive, and very scarce. The large, fast, but decidedly un-nimble weapon was designed for use against high-value, non-evading targets, such as large space installations or hardened ground facilities. It was capable of breaking through heavy shielding with an eight-megaton, high-neutron penetrator munition and then destroying even very large or very tough enemy assets with a sixty-two-megaton variable blast geometry thermonuclear main warhead. Condors were the largest missiles that could be fired from the Cumberland’s launch tubes and could obliterate a command bunker dug two thousand meters underground on a planet, split open a two-kilometer-diameter nickel-iron asteroid to destroy the early-warning outpost inside, or vaporize an orbital base with its various elements dispersed over a twelve-kilometer radius. The warhead was bigger even than the fifty-megaton Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear warhead ever detonated on Earth.

  “I might just develop a taste for elephant hunting at that.” Max scrolled a bit farther down. “Mines! Proximity, delay, and auto-homing! Hundreds of them!” Grinning like an eight-year-old boy in a candy store, he scrolled farther yet. “Demolition and sabotage equipment. Assortment number three. Two complete sets. That’s just . . . just . . .” Max was speechless with delight.

  “Outstanding, sir?” Brown finished.

  “That covers it, Wernher. Outstanding,” Max said, oblivious to the Cumberland men’s poorly concealed smiles. “Given the right opportunity, we can do some very . . . interesting . . . things with that stuff.”

  “The admiral told me that these items might inspire your unique brand of tactical creativity,” Anderssen said.

  “He knows me only too well,” Max replied, the wheels already turning. “This mission is starting to look even more intriguing than I thought it was going to be.”

  The group then fell into a general discussion of these weapons systems: their capabilities, their rarity, how they were better (or in some cases, worse) than their predecessors, what defenses the Krag might use against them, how they had been used and misused by various commanders, and what havoc the Cumberland’s miniature task force might inflict with them upon the enemy.

  Midshipman Gilbertson popped his head into the Wardroom. “Pardon me, Skipper,” he said. “Are you gentlemen ready for dinner?”

  Max glanced at the chrono on the bulkhead and turned to Anderssen. “It’s straight up 18:00 hours, Sig. You gentlemen are staying for dinner, aren’t you?”

  The tender captain’s expression changed in a heartbeat from an affable smile to a mask of bland neutrality, hastily electroplated onto a base metal of mild panic. Anderssen’s sudden and intense anxiety was no display of cowardice on his part, but the reaction of any sane man with intact taste buds. Typically, naval cuisine had very little to recommend it, and even among such undistinguished company, the food on most destroyers was conspicuous for its foulness.

  Notwithstanding Anderssen’s best efforts to conceal his feelings, Max correctly read his reaction and added quickly, “Not to worry, Captain—we’re not having mystery meat, thrashed potatoes, and desecrated vegetables. My mess is run by Cajuns, and you know what that means. On top of that, Rashidian Prince Khalid, the older brother of King Khalil, is a friend of the ship. Every time we are in or near the Rashid System, he sees to it that we are provisioned quite handsomely. That’s where the coffee you’re drinking comes from. The prince personally selects and buys the coffee from four different planets—ruinously expensive, you know—and he then blends and roasts it himself.

  “Serving on the Cumberland is hard duty in many ways, but we do get to eat pretty well. We’re having surf and turf. I selected the menu personally: shrimp cocktail, lobster bisque, your choice of porterhouse or rib-eye steak grilled to your order, baked potato, green beans, fresh bread, of course, and your choice of strawberry pie or apple cobbler for dessert, topped, if you so desire, with your choice of whipped cream or ice cream.”

  The almost visibly salivating tender captain swiftly said, “So long as there are no exploding ham sandwiches on the menu, we will be delighted to stay for dinner.”

  During the general laughter, Max, DeCosta, and Brown looked at each other in wordless, shared amazement. Several weeks before, on a secret diplomatic mission with Sahin in the Rashid System, Max had urgently called for the Cumberland to join him while the ship was receiving resupply, repair, and refit docked to the tender USS Newport News. The tender skipper had refused to release his vessel’s docking clamps and withdraw its boarding tube until the operation, one personally ordered by Admiral Hornmeyer, was complete. DeCosta and Brown had “persuaded” him to allow the destroyer to depart immediately by placing what appeared to be small charges of plasti-blast with remote detonators in strategic locations, as though to blow the clamps and the tube. When the Newport News returned to base, its captain filed with the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG’s) office a request to court-martial the officers responsible, at which point DeCosta and Brown produced computer-verified hand-scanner data showing that the packages were not explosive at all, but were ham sandwiches (ham on white bread with spicy mustard and kosher pickle slices—just the way Max liked them—a combination now known on board as an “exploding ham sandwich”) wrapped in plastic with small antennae attached.

  The JAG lawyers declined to file charges. The relevant regulation prohibited “the employment or utilization of any substance, device, object, or instrumentality of any composition or description whatsoever in a manner calculated or likely to cause any damage, however slight, to naval, Union, or civilian proper
ty, or to bring about death or injury to any person or sentient being.” As the ham sandwiches were not “calculated or likely” to injure persons or property, the Cumberland officers received nothing harsher than a halfhearted ass chewing from Admiral Hornmeyer, who admired the ingenuity of the ploy so much that he couldn’t work himself up to his usual level of ferocity.

  With no ham sandwiches, “exploding” or otherwise, on the table, hosts and guests alike closed with and engaged their designated culinary targets with the élan traditionally exhibited by navy men in close order battle. Against such a determined and sustained attack, their supremely edible foes didn’t stand a chance. Only the pauses between the courses Max imposed to stimulate conversation kept all the food from disappearing in less time than it takes to sing all four verses of “The Spacer’s Hymn.”

  Captain Anderssen was pleasantly surprised to see that someone had cut his meat into bite-size pieces and then pushed the pieces back together into the semblance of an uncut steak so carefully that this act of courtesy could be discerned only upon close examination. Although he had the use of only one arm and had lost both of his legs as well, he was able to eat his perfectly grilled medium-rare rib eye without having to ask for assistance from anyone else at the table.

  Both visitors proved to be delightful dinner companions, particularly Anderssen, who, at sixty-six years of age, was by far the oldest man at the table. Not only was he the oldest, but—as a former full captain by rank in the regular navy, veteran of many years on combat vessels, and the highly decorated commander of various destroyers, frigates, and light cruisers in several creditable actions in three wars—he had the most combat experience by a full order of magnitude. Only grievous war wounds had taken him out of combat and relegated him to serving as a reserve lieutenant commander in the Big Chair of a tender in the Union Naval Service Command. Unlike most space-faring men (but not unlike Max), he rarely described his own exploits except when requested or when necessary for some military purpose, and even then only in the driest tactical jargon.