Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “I may not know much about such things, but none of those possibilities strikes me as being at all likely.” Bram noticed that, once again, Max was looking at his plate of lamb and beans with a look of perplexity on his face—a look that he seemed to be going to great lengths to hide. So he added, “Etli Kuru Fasulye.”

  “What?”

  “Etli Kuru Fasulye,” he said, this time more slowly. “That’s what the dish is called. I provided my mother’s recipe for it to the virtuoso old francophones in the galley, and they prepare it splendidly. I had expected their efforts to be less than inspiring given that these fellows are not used to cooking with lamb or white beans, but they seem to have adapted in a most admirable fashion. One of them told me that it was quite natural that this particular mess staff should make it well because, with all the onions and garlic and pepper, although it’s a Turkish dish, it’s practically Cajun food.”

  Max smiled at the compliments of the Turkish/Arabian/European-descended doctor for the Cumberland’s largely Cajun/Southern United States–descended mess staff, all the while taking healthy bites of his own cornbread and green beans. The two men were having a late dinner in Max’s day cabin. The failed stalking of the convoy under discussion was the reason for the lateness of the dinner, although the meal tasted none the worse for having been held and reheated.

  “Another reason I’m not particularly put out,” Max said as he began to make inroads on his peach cobbler, “is that there was practically nothing to fault about the crew’s performance in the attack. Sensors picked up and identified the target nearly at the theoretical maximum range for the equipment we’ve got, Tactical assessed the enemy’s disposition of forces and lined us up for a textbook attack, Stealth kept us undetected the whole time, and Weapons had everything ready to vaporize the rat-faces. Finally, the Tactical Section and the XO jointly came to the conclusion—with which I agreed totally, by the way—that the unexpected arrival of that fighter squadron from the escort carrier that happened to be going through the system at the same time meant that there was no way to pull off the attack without unacceptable risk. Even Midshipman Park didn’t miss a beat when you asked him if you could perhaps have jasmine-scented green tea instead of coffee.”

  Max shook his head at the borderline sacrilege of any hot beverage other than coffee, or in rare cases, hot chocolate, being consumed on the Command Island of a Union Space Navy warship. Little did he know that Bram had gotten the idea from Ensign Bhattacharyya, who had not only consumed the same beverage while on watch in the Big Chair on at least one occasion, but had spilled the same beverage on the XO’s station when the ship lurched due to an accident in Engineering.

  “The only fault I have for anyone’s performance during the entire operation,” Max continued, “is the extent to which the Casualty Station was unprepared to receive wounded personnel because the Chief Medical Officer was in CIC drinking jasmine-scented green tea.”

  When Bram sat bolt upright in his chair, opening his mouth prepared to launch a stream of indignant words, Max smiled broadly and shook his finger gently in his friend’s direction. “Gotcha,” he said gently. “You are way too touchy about some things.”

  Bram deflated slightly and responded with a rueful nod. “As I am very well aware, my friend. It is a personality trait that has not served me well. I do tend to be something of a hothead and respond too quickly with cutting invective of inappropriate strength when I perceive a slight.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Max’s smile grew broader. He had, of course, noticed many times and had been the target of the referenced cutting invective of inappropriate strength more times than he cared to count. “You are in good company, my friend,” answered Max. “I have my own share of personality traits that do not serve me well.”

  “I would be interested to hear them.” Bram could, of course, have supplied a list without any prompting, but he was truly interested in learning what the skipper’s introspection had told him about his own weaknesses.

  “Well, the one I’m worried about right now is go fever.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of that one. Is it a communicable disease from Go IV or Geaux C II?”

  “No, it’s a fever only in the figurative sense. People get it worst when they get frustrated by delays or failures. It’s a Jurassic Space term. When those old NASA hands would have trouble getting one of their balky chemical rockets to work, go fever was the urge to launch or “go” even when things were not quite optimal. It was a big deal because even the smallest technical glitches would often cause the most spectacularly violent explosions. Anyway, I’m worried that, having had to let this convoy pass, I’ll be too eager to get the next one.”

  “I can certainly agree that to do so would be a natural, and perhaps even a nearly universal, human psychological trait,” Bram said. “Although I cannot recall that tendency ever having been identified in the literature or being given a specific term.”

  “It may not be in the psychological literature, but there’s a lot of evidence of it in the navy, especially in the flight recorders of warships destroyed by enemy action. Skippers who get go fever commit to attacks on which they should pass.”

  “I am no judge of tactics, at least the naval kind, but your crew and your superiors seem to be fairly well pleased with your tactical judgment, so I am not particularly concerned with it.” He took a sip of the splendid Four Planet coffee served with the meal. “Speaking of tactics, I saw something interesting recently.”

  With a tilt of his head, Max invited Bram to elaborate.

  “I recently watched a game of Midshipman’s Tag. I think I gained some insight into how you naval warrior types teach your tiny acolytes how to think and fight in space. I could see clear correspondences between things I saw those lads do in the air in that room to things I have seen you do in space during engagements with our rodent adversaries.”

  “You’re right, of course. The sport started with midshipmen having fun, essentially chasing one another around in cargo holds with the gravity generators turned off, but it has evolved into a powerful training tool.” Max paused, considering for a moment. “I’m surprised you took the time. But then, I expect that you treated a mid who was injured in a match, and his description of how he got hurt piqued your well-known curiosity.”

  “I do not believe my curiosity is at all well-known, except by present company. You are, nevertheless, accurate in your hypothesis about why I came to view a match. As I said, it was a most instructive experience. I am glad to have yielded to my well-known curiosity.”

  “I like to watch matches whenever I can. It gives me an insight into the mids’ tactical skills, their temperaments, and their character. Who’d you see play?”

  “I don’t quite know how to tell you. I have no idea how these teams are identified—didn’t catch a name like Eagles, Wildcats, Wolverines, or Tigers. But I can tell you that the captain of the winning team was a young gentleman whom I have treated repeatedly for xeroderma in the vicinity of the medial olecranon process—”

  “What’s that?” Max interrupted with uncharacteristic abruptness.

  “Not to worry, Max,” Bram answered soothingly. “It’s only a patch of flaky, dry skin over the lad’s right elbow. I assure you that if any of the young gentlemen were to present with a serious medical condition, I would notify you as soon as practicable.”

  “Okay. And thanks for the reassurance.” He paused, struggling briefly with the unaccustomed act of turning this particular emotion into words. When he resumed speaking, his tone was almost confidential. “I worry about them, you know. I worry about them a lot. I know I was a mid myself and that some would regard me as a success. But I’ve never been totally comfortable with the idea of having children on board a warship and taking them into combat. They’re only boys—adventurous, bright, resourceful, incredibly brave boys, I will grant you, but still only boys. The image of little Midshipman Park, dirk in hand, facing a Krag assault warrior is the stuff o
f nightmares.”

  “It seems that, although our dreams are very different, our nightmares are woven from similar cloth. I worry as well. Since I have come on board, we haven’t had any serious casualties in the Midshipmen’s Berth, but I regard with considerable anxiety the prospect of performing emergency trauma surgery on young men who are still sopranos and contraltos in the ship’s choir.”

  “But, Bram, this ship doesn’t have a choir.”

  “Then I have nothing to worry about. You comfort me greatly, brother.” He paused for another sip of his coffee. “Perhaps you should consider starting one. I would enjoy the diversion. But we have wandered far afield from the topic I introduced a few moments ago—the tag game I recently saw the midshipmen play.”

  “Right. Who did you see play?”

  “The captain of the winning team was Midshipman Kakou.”

  “Oh! You saw that game.” Max’s excitement practically levitated him out of his chair. Cobbler forgotten, he even set his fork down so he could gesture with both hands. “I hear that was a match for the books. Kakou’s last attack was supposed to have been incredible. Players will be copying that one for years and will probably name it after him. I wish I had been there. What audacity! One-on-one, diving down from the ceiling right at Huang’s head.” Max was using his hands to depict the movements of the players. “Then, when Huang went lateral, Kakou was perfectly set up for a firing pass.” He pantomimed throwing. “He just tagged Huang hard as he went past. The beauty of it is that Huang couldn’t throw because he was too busy trying to evade, so Kakou had him dead to rights. Bang. Bang. It was all over.”

  “You sound as though you played.”

  Max actually blushed. “Yes, I did,” he said. “At least until I was a mid second class.”

  “Why not play once you were promoted to mid one?

  “I was . . . uh . . .” His voice trailed off. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be embarrassed about it this many years later. I was scarcely more than a hatch hanger at the time. Okay, here it is. I was banned from the game. For life.”

  “What could you have conceivably done to get yourself banned? Did you deliberately injure another player?”

  “Actually, that’s allowed as long as there is no deliberate bodily contact—you can get some of those boxes moving pretty fast if you know what you’re doing. But, no. It wasn’t anything I did to another player.”

  “Then what?”

  “I was banned for unfairly manipulating the conditions of play.” Prompted by Bram’s stupefied stare, Max continued, “There are all sorts of rules about the size, mass, and capacity of those tanks the players wear on their backs that hold the nitrogen gas used to push them around in zero G. But the rules were absolutely silent about the tanks’ composition. So I had my team make their own tanks out of an alloy that was doped with trace amounts of gold, silver, and tantalum to resonate slightly with the tiny inverse gravitational field in the hold that has to be put out to null the graviton leakage into the compartment from the rest of the ship. A smart player could exploit the variances in strength and orientation of the residual to get a tiny push or pull or nudge in the right direction—not enough to be obvious, but enough to obtain a subtle advantage. Using that nudge took a lot of skill—we couldn’t even practice it in any kind of obvious way—but we learned how to make it work for us. We’ll never know if we won any matches because of it, but it made us feel like we had an edge, and that extra confidence was almost certainly the margin of victory more than once.”

  “How did you get caught?”

  “After we won the championship for our whole theater of operations, video of the match was widely distributed through the fleet. Two old friends were watching the match over a drink, and together they noticed something strange about my team’s movements—we went places we wouldn’t go unless we were trying to exploit slight gravity wells or rises, subtly sped up or slowed down faster than we should, turned sharper, that sort of thing. I thought that we were very careful and were totally nonobvious, but we couldn’t fool those guys. Anyway, they jointly sent a fleet signal to our skipper, saying that he shouldn’t tear our team’s equipment apart or subject the video to computer analysis looking for cheating. Instead, he should just ask Robichaux.

  “Well, Captain Komarov, a noble man of the highest honor if ever there was one, called me to his day cabin, told me to sit down, and without any preamble asked me, on my honor as a Union Space Navy midshipman and a member of the crew of the USS Adelaide, if in that match or any other, we had in any way altered the graviton response coefficient of the players and/or their equipment.”

  “And you admitted what you did?”

  “Of course. After I answered his question in the affirmative, he asked me what we did, and I told him in complete detail,” Max said, trying not to sound offended and not entirely succeeding. “It was a matter of honor. Besides, I didn’t consider what we did to be cheating. It was entirely consistent with the rules. Other players had modified their equipment to obtain some advantage before and weren’t penalized, although a rule change usually resulted after the fact.”

  Max fortified himself with a few bites of his now-room-temperature cobbler before continuing. “So, I never even seriously considered the possibility of not being entirely truthful to Captain Komarov. If you knew the late captain, you probably wouldn’t have asked that question.” Bram shook his head. “I thought not. In any event, he was quite an imposing figure, and one did not lie to him. About anything. Ever. And, of course, if you lie on your honor and get caught, you’re finished in the navy. To bring this dreary tale to a conclusion, once he sent me back to my duties, Komarov replied to the joint signal explaining what had happened. After that, the men who sent it went out of their way to see that I was banned from the sport for life.”

  “In light of what you told me,” Bram said carefully, “that hardly seems the most appropriate outcome in terms of determining whether there was an infraction of the rules and applying the proper consequences, particularly as the rules did not prohibit your actions.”

  “That’s what you would think, but the fellows who did it told me privately that they knew the outcome was unfair to me as an application of the rules, but they wanted to teach me a lesson that I would never forget: always treat your naval brothers as fairly as you are able. I hated having to give up my championship ring, deal with being known throughout the fleet—at least for a while—as a cheater, and not be able to compete anymore. But it was a good lesson. And I have never forgotten it.”

  “And just who were these gentlemen who did this to you? Have I heard of them?”

  “Probably so. At the time, they were known as Rear Admiral Middleton and Commodore Hornmeyer.”

  “That sheds a little light on a few things. I’m beginning to think that your relationships with these gentlemen are more complex than I had suspected.”

  Max took a thoughtful sip from a glass containing a few swallows of liquid the color of strong tea. This liquid, however, rather than having been hastily brewed on board the ship formerly reviled as the Cumberland Gap, had been lovingly distilled very near the actual Cumberland Gap on Earth, in the misty, tree-cloaked mountains of Kentucky.

  “You have no idea.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  * * *

  09:55 Zulu Hours, 20 May 2315

  “Aspect change on Hotel two, at least thirty degrees negative X and somewhere between five and fifteen degrees positive Y, plus I’m reading braking thrusters consistent with deceleration,” Bartoli announced. “It looks like a course change consistent with a zigzag . . . Now there goes Hotel three, similar change.” He paused a moment. “Same thing with Hotel four. Insufficient data for a heading just yet. Target motion analysis in progress. I should have the new heading for you in about five minutes. No sign that they’ve detected us, though. Their course changes appear to be at random or pseudorandom intervals; the shortest leg they’ve run was one hour, fifty-three minutes, twent
y-two seconds, and the longest, three hours, four minutes, fifty-eight seconds.” He listened to his back room for a moment, called up a different set of displays, and scrutinized them for about a quarter of a minute. “Yes, sir, definite zigzag—a two-axis change in course plus decel, followed by a steady heading.”

  “Very well,” Max said. “Maintain current status.”

  “Why the change in tactics, Skipper?” DeCosta asked quietly.

  “You mean from constant helming like they did in the last system to three-axis zigzag?”

  “Right. Sure, making course alterations in X and Y and varying their speed makes deriving a firing solution more difficult, but it’s harder by an order of magnitude if they are constantly changing course and speed. If there was any chance of being ambushed, you bet I’d be constant helming rather than following a simple zigzag. And that’s with just any old plain vanilla convoy, not with someone as important as Admiral Birch. I mentally put myself in the position of transporting Admiral Hornmeyer, and I would absolutely adopt the squirreliest, twisty-turnyest, constantly changing course you ever saw.”

  “So would I,” Max said. “You can bet on it. But I might be singing a different tune if I were trying to maneuver one of those huge deuterium tankers. Those things are a forged Michiganium bitch to steer.” He saw the executive’s eyebrows raise ever so slightly, so he explained. “I know. You’re thinking that you helm a big tanker just like you do any other cargo ship: you just enter the course and speed parameters, and the computer steers the ship. But when you’re talking about one of those huge honking one- or two-million-ton modular tankers, it takes unbelievable quantities of fuel to turn those commands entered from the helm console into actual delta V. Plus, those things don’t have gimbaled drive nozzles or ducted exhaust that let you use your main sublight to maneuver when you’re under way, so these ships make all their course changes with maneuvering thrusters, which really aren’t designed to be used to make constant course changes for days at a time. We’ve captured a few of those ships and wound up having to replace the maneuvering thrusters almost immediately, because the Krag don’t build them to take the kind of use we put them to.”