Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  Less than two minutes later, hair brushed and held in place by the stiffest hair gel known to human science (combs had no effect on the black wire that grew from Max’s scalp; that same black wire laughed at ordinary hair products), face depilated, teeth microblasted, and SCU spritzed with both Wrinkl-Bustr and Evurfresssh, Max cycled through the armored CIC hatch.

  “XO, report,” he said in a reasonable approximation of alertness.

  “Course and speed unchanged, no apparent change in enemy dispositions. No contacts within our defense perimeter. All stations still reporting secure at Condition Orange. All ship’s systems reporting nominal. Last report from the tender was thirteen minutes ago. She’s at Condition Orange, and all her systems are nominal. Change of watch is in forty-six minutes: White goes off duty, Red comes on.”

  “Very well. Officer of the Deck, I have CIC.”

  “Aye, sir,” Bhattacharyya, who was performing that function for this watch, responded. “The skipper has CIC. Computer, log that the XO transferred CIC Con to the CO at zero seven hours, fourteen minutes.”

  “CIC Con to commanding officer transfer logged at zero seven hours, fourteen minutes,” the computer announced.

  Max looked at DeCosta and jerked his head subtly in the direction of the hatch. The XO nodded his understanding and made a beeline for his rack to inspect his eyelids for light leaks for four hours. His steps in that direction contained a noticeable lack of spring, notwithstanding that, as he usually did when the men were very tired, Max had sneaked the CIC gravity generators down to .85 G, a difference that was difficult to notice consciously, but that conveyed to the mind a subliminal sense of being less fatigued. As tired as these men looked, he thought about but discarded the idea of a further reduction to 0.75. The men would consciously notice the difference when he returned the settings to normal, and he didn’t want that.

  Now that men were back on their regular watch schedule and the compartment wasn’t crammed with men at battle stations, CIC settled down into routine, or what passed for routine when each hour brought the Cumberland roughly a tenth of a light-year deeper into Krag space. The watch changed. There had been one change of watch when Max was sleeping. This was the second. These men had been off watch for eight hours, and Max noticed that they approximated living, breathing human beings much more closely than did the men who were at battle stations eight hours ago—with men that young and in such good physical condition, it didn’t take much rest for them to bounce back. Another day or two of relative normalcy and these men would be ready for anything.

  Max’s four hours in the Big Chair had less than ten minutes left to run when Kasparov interrupted his review of a group of midshipmen’s training progress reports. “Skipper,” he said, “you might want to take a look at this.”

  “Whatcha got?”

  “Sir, if you’ll open channel D and tie one of your displays into it, you can see what I’m looking at.”

  Max did so and saw a line of icons representing the computer-inferred locations of nine Krag ships, each icon accompanied by a set of numbers representing the strength, nature, type, and time of the sensor contact from which the computer plotted the position. The brightness of the icons varied with the strength and recentness of the contact. The brighter icons were stronger and more recent, meaning that the crew should consider them as being more reliable. Two of the contacts, about halfway between the forward edge of the screen and the blue “You Are Here” dot in the center of the screen, were much dimmer than the others.

  “As you know, sir, we deliberately set things up so that the Krag would slot us into a low-priority corridor because we believed that traffic-control sensor coverage would be spotty. My department has been looking for gaps in the coverage, and we think we’ve found one. We’ve been monitoring the returns we get off the ships in line with us, and if you look at the ones passing through this area,” a segment of the corridor started blinking red, “you can see that the sensor strength is very low. Given the location of the Krag tracking stations, we are confident that those signal levels are low enough that the nearest station will have only intermittent contact with a ship moving through there. So, if the tender drops off their coverage, they’re likely to attribute it to low signal strength, rather than to it changing course. And, Skipper, the segment is about 0.3 light-years long. We could pull out of the corridor right after we enter it, and it would be more than three hours before we would show up as missing.”

  “How confident are you of these conclusions, Mr. Kasparov?”

  “Skipper, my department and I are very confident. We’ll know for sure in two hours and eleven minutes when we get there. At that point we can measure the signal level directly. If the levels are higher than we expect them to be, we can abort the plan and make our move later.”

  “What about signal strength once we are out of the corridor? Do we have any way to plot a route to our patrol area while keeping the tender from being tracked?”

  “Sir, based on the location of the stations and the signal strength we are measuring from them, I think we have a pretty good model of what the observability coefficients are going to be in that area of space. Once we leave that area, all we have is the captured Krag data to tell us the location of the tracking stations and their signal characteristics. We’ll have a good idea of what route to follow, but we’ll still need to go slowly and check signal levels against our predictions.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kasparov,” Max said. “Present that same information to the XO when he comes on watch in a few minutes. He has some tactical planning to do.”

  ▪

  “I am pleased to report, Midshipman, that your injury is far less serious than one would conclude from appearances alone. While there were serious contusions and abrasions, as well as copious bleeding, there is no concussion, and no epidural or subdural hematoma. Neither is there injury to the brain.” Dr. Sahin was scrutinizing a three-dimensional projection of Midshipman Hewlett’s rather unremarkable skull and the remarkable brain encased therein. Nurse Church had already debrided and dressed the wound with his usual skill, leaving Hewlett with a large bandage on the back of his head, held in place by several orbits of standard naval-issue blue gauze wound around the boy’s scalp, looking much like a rather bizarre and irregular blue garland. Hewlett sat on an examining table, attempting by means of his still-blurry vision to make sense of the slowly rotating image.

  Sahin caught the boy squinting. “Don’t worry, my good lad, your vision will return to normal in a few hours. You are simply experiencing the eminently reasonable objections of the delicate human brain to being shaken violently in its casing. I assure you there is no damage. You may experience some blurred vision, headache, and mild nausea over the next four to twelve hours . . . quite normal under the circumstances. I am going to release you to return to your quarters. If you experience any other symptoms, or a worsening of those you have now, report back here immediately. In any event report to me in twenty-four hours so that I can reexamine you. If by then you have improved as much as I expect, I will mark you fit for duty at that time. But for the next twenty-four hours, you are under medical restriction: rest in your quarters, meals where you normally take them, and quiet recreation, such as watching trid vids and playing trideo games.

  “Or reading. I particularly recommend reading. In fact, I have prepared a list of readings I deem suitable for young midshipmen and have posted it in the ship’s database. It includes offerings such as the immortal works of pre-starflight writers James Joyce, all three Brontë sisters, Leo Tolstoy, Kalki Krishnamurthy, Marcel Proust, and even wonderful contemporary writers like May Duvol of Kirkman II and Brenrach Bach of Romper VII. There are also several excellent volumes of contemporary variable meter verse . . .”

  “Doctor,” Church interrupted, noticing a pronounced droop in the midshipman’s eyelids, which the nurse attributed equally to his injury and to profound lack of interest in the subject matter currently under discussion, “it might be better to
cover these readings at a later time. Mr. Hewlett needs his rest.”

  “Indeed, nurse. Quite right. But before I release you, Hewlett, the ravenous informational demands of insatiable bureaucracy require that I collect from you a bit more information, given that your injury apparently resulted from accident rather than enemy action. I am correct, am I not, in my assumption that there are no Krag on board?”

  “There are none, sir, at least that I’ve noticed,” Hewlett replied in all seriousness.

  “Excellent, young man. If there were, I would return your dirk to you and fetch my sidearm and blade. We would take them on together.”

  Hewlett smiled. “The rat-faced bastards wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “No doubt. Now that we have established that you were not injured in enemy action, exactly how did you come by this injury, Midshipman?”

  “I misjudged my rebound in a game of Midshipman’s Tag, sir. It’s my own fault.”

  “Midshipman’s Tag? I’m not familiar with it. It must be a singularly unusual game for you to have acquired an injury of that nature in the vicinity of your skull’s lambdoid suture. Can you explain it to me?”

  “I’m not sure I could do a good job of it,” Hewlett said with some embarrassment. “If you want to know how the fusion reactor works or how the life-support system regulates atmospheric pressure, I can lay it out for you, but I’m not good at explaining the things that people do. Besides, I’m still learning the rules. But there’s going to be a match in about four hours, sir, if you’d like to watch. It’s going to be a good one, too.”

  “Match? You mean that such things are organized?”

  “Of course, sir. It wouldn’t work otherwise.”

  “I would very much like to see a match, Midshipman. Where are such things held?”

  “In the main cargo hold,” the midshipman answered in a voice that implied that only an idiot would ask such a question.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  01:57 Zulu Hours, 15 May 2315

  “Max, you must trust me about this,” Anderssen whispered. “Say and do nothing about the matter until it is decided.”

  “You know I trust you, Sig,” Max replied. “But that’s asking a lot.”

  “Indeed. Which is exactly why trust is required.”

  The skippers were walking down the corridors of the RSS Makkah, the Rashidian destroyer serving as the pennant vessel for Joint Operational Group Hotel Papa, and fell silent when they reached the hatch to which they were being led. Their XOs didn’t hear a word of it, as they were following at a discreet distance, deeply involved in their own discussion: negotiating the barter of several freshly brewed barrels of the Cumberland’s ship’s beer for a few hundred kilos of Parmesan and Romano cheese, a crate of pepperoni, and a Dixon-Sterling Industries “Micro-Pie” brand compact pizza oven.

  Their guide and escort, a formidable-looking Rashidian spacer who had been carrying before him an equally formidable-looking curved sword and an even more formidable-looking submachine gun slung over his shoulder, ushered Max, Anderssen, DeCosta, and Maynard through the hatch. The Makkah’s Wardroom was half again the size of its counterpart on the Cumberland, but just as Spartan. A steward showed the Union officers to seats at the foot of the table and inquired whether they would like coffee or any other form of refreshment. All four men requested coffee, knowing that if the coffee were to be merely excellent, it would be subpar for the Rashidian Navy.

  A moment later, and just as the coffee was being poured from a sterling silver pot into elegant, gold-rimmed china cups, another large and fearsome escort showed an adult male Pfelung, who massed 210 kilos if he massed an ounce, to a place at one side of the table where four chairs had been replaced with a long, low platform with a ramp on one end and the top contoured to fit a Pfelung body. The alien waddled on his four finlike limbs up the ramp onto the contoured area and plopped down, his eyes, mouth, and gills just higher than the edge of the table. He turned to the humans, pressed the ends of his forefins together, and blinked twice slowly, in the appropriate Pfelung greeting for the situation—recognition of the presence of other beings worthy of respect but to whom one has not been properly introduced.

  The humans returned the greeting in kind by bringing the fingertips of their left and right hands together and blinking in the same manner. The formalities of the moment satisfied, the Pfelung turned away from the humans, produced some sort of pad computer from a satchel he wore around his neck, and began manipulating it using eight or nine of the twelve fingerlike appendages that surrounded his mouth. A moment later, likely in response to those manipulations, a two-meter-long and one-meter-high holographic projection of an adolescent Pfelung appeared over the center of the table. As befitted a being who was not physically present in the room, he made no sign that he saw or recognized anyone.

  Max was on his second sip of coffee when four officers in the black and scarlet of the Rashidian equivalent of the Union Space Navy’s dress blue uniform, in which Max and his party were clad, entered the compartment, bowed, and took seats. Following Rashidian naval protocol, the Union officers remained seated, acknowledging the bow by setting down their coffee cups and nodding. One of the newcomers, wearing the insignia of a full commander, sat at the head, while the other three took the seats nearest the table’s head but on the side opposite the Pfelung. Without taking their orders, the steward served a beverage to the Pfelung that looked like muddy water, followed by coffee to the Rashidian officers, and then withdrew.

  As soon as the door to the compartment closed, the commander stood, bowed to the Pfelung, then to Anderssen, then to Max, and began speaking. Max could not help but notice that he certainly looked the part of the captain of a rated warship during time of war. He was of only medium height, but his upright bearing, combined with his obvious pride and dignity, made him look taller. He was dark-skinned, even for a Rashidian, clean-shaven rather than wearing the thin, well-trimmed beard favored by most Rashidian officers, and had a strong but wiry build. Just from the way the other Rashidian officers looked at the commander, Max could tell that his subordinates held him in high regard.

  Despite what he knew was about to happen, Max liked him immediately.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” he said. “Welcome to the Makkah. I extend to you the full hospitality of this vessel. Make known anything that you need, and if we have it, then it is yours. I am Commander Hajjam. I wish to introduce my executive officer, Lieutenant Commander Housseini.” The man on Hajjam’s right stood, bowed, and sat. “I am also honored to introduce to you Lieutenant Commander Shaath, commander of the Xebec Boutouba, and his executive officer, Lieutenant Riffi.” Both men stood and nodded in turn.

  Max stood and precisely followed the coaching he had received from Dr. Sahin. “I accept your welcome, extend thanks for your hospitality, and offer you the hospitality of my vessel at any time should you need or desire it. I am Lieutenant Commander Robichaux, commander of the Cumberland. I wish to introduce my executive officer, Lieutenant DeCosta.” The XO rose, bowed, and sat. “I am also honored to introduce to you Reserve and Support Forces Lieutenant Commander, former Navy Captain, Anderssen, and his executive officer, Reserve and Support Forces Lieutenant (JG), former Navy Lieutenant, Maynard.”

  Hajjam spoke again. “It is also my honor to introduce to you Composite Force Leader Shamp-Sungnah 253, commander of the Pfelung Small Fighter Wing Carrier currently a part of this task force.” He paused, appearing to be slightly embarrassed. “I’m afraid that the rendering of the vessel’s name into Standard is far too cumbersome for the purposes of this introduction.” Knowing the Pfelung as he did, Max suspected that rather than cumbersome, the name was too odd-sounding or absurd for the dignified commander to say out loud in a formal setting. “Allow me also to introduce Fighter Jaw Full of Sharp Teeth Flight Leader Brakmor-Ent 198, who is participating in this conference by vidlink.”

  Shamp-Sungnah uttered some bloops and blurps into his tra
nslator disk, which apparently was tied into the room’s sound system, because the transducers mounted in the overhead and the bulkheads all spoke in a synthesized voice: “Your many courtesies are acknowledged and reciprocated. You may taste our mud at the time of your choosing, an event to which we look forward with great pleasure. May we now proceed, or does human social procedure require more formalities and verbal ritual? We would happily comply, if so.”

  So, he wants to fish or cut bait. Max cringed at the unspoken but still feeble joke. He’s not the only one.

  Commander Hajjam forced a smile. “No, leader, no more formalities are required. We may begin our business. To that end I direct your attention to the navigational plot of this sector, in which the blinking blue dot represents our target, and the blinking red dot represents our current position. To minimize the risk of detection as we approach our target, the tender will detach itself from the group and position itself . . .”

  Hajjam’s voice trailed off as the Pfelung commander showed rapidly increasing signs of distress, anger, or some other powerful emotion. He wriggled violently from side to side, cast his dinner-plate-size eyes back and forth between Hajjam and Max, and gave off a series of rapid, high-pitched, and apparently inarticulate sounds. “Apparently inarticulate” because the translator gave off one soft beep every second: the audible cue that it was receiving sounds that might be speech but that it was unable for one reason or another to render into Standard. After a few moments, the Pfelung became stock-still, bared its four rows (four rows on top and four rows on bottom) of small, needle-sharp teeth, and then quickly concealed them by closing its mouth. He then began to speak softly, slowly, and clearly. Although the words generated by the translator and given voice through the room’s transducers were polite, there was something in the delivery that said that the velvet glove enclosed an iron fist.