For Honor We Stand

by Harvey G. Phillips

  “And, if we hide and do nothing more?”

  “About two hours after we go on thermal stealth, our heat sink reaches capacity and we have to do a thermal dump. Of course, if we dump, we give away our location. Even if we extend only the radiator fins shielded from their view by our ship, we’ll create a hot spot in the planetary atmosphere that will stand out from orbit like a snowball in a coal bin. If we don’t dump, then the heat sink fails, which will do the dump for us and damage half the systems in the ship as a bonus. In either event, they lock on their pulse cannons and blow us to hell.”

  Max nodded. The kid had it figured just the way he did. “And what if Werner gives tea time a miss and effects repairs to give us back our speed advantage over the Cruisers?”

  “Sir, if I may ask, why do you call Lieutenant Brown ‘Werner’?”

  “His full name is ‘Vaughn Brown.’ Sounds like ‘von Braun’ as in ‘Werner von Braun,’ the rocket guy.”

  DeCosta nodded his recognition. “Oh. That’s been bothering me.”

  “So, XO, back to my question, what if Werner gets our main sublight back to nominal and we can outrun the Cruisers?”

  “We still lose,” DeCosta replied instantly. “Even with our twenty-three percent acceleration advantage and our seven percent top speed advantage over the Crustaceans restored, the interception geometry and the physics are totally against us. The high Cruiser is already mostly out of the gravity well and at orbital velocity, so he’s got a huge head start before the race even begins. If we try to run, he can cut us off and destroy us before we can develop enough speed to get away.”

  “That’s right. What if we try to even the odds by taking on the low ship one-on-one once the two ships are settled in different orbits?”

  “No go, skipper. It’s basic orbital mechanics. Because of the similarity in the kinetic energy values, it’s a lot easier to transfer from high orbit to a low orbit in the same plane than to boost up to low orbit from the upper atmosphere where we’re going to be. The high Cruiser can drop down into the lower orbit to help the low Cruiser faster than we can climb up to fight him. That makes it two on one and they mop the deck with us.”

  “Exactly right.” Not very helpful, but absolutely right. “OK, you’ve summarized the problem. We’ve got about four hours to solve it. Get with Kasparov and his people. Their sensors expertise makes them the closest thing to planetary scientists we’ve got. Make yourself an expert on Mengis VI and its environs. I need to know the lay of the land we’re going to be fighting on. While you’re doing that, I’ve got a bit of research of my own to do.” DeCosta got up from his station, walked over to the Sensors console, and began conversing with Lieutenant Kasparov animatedly. The two men talked in low voices, DeCosta sitting next to Kasparov in what was known as the “second fiddle position” at the large and complex Sensors Console. The two were pulling up screens in rapid succession and quickly switching from one data channel to another, apparently plowing rapidly through a great deal of information and exchanging ideas. Kasparov was also talking a lot to his SSR or “Back Room” to get information and advice from the specialists who gave him in depth support and detailed monitoring of every sensor every minute of every day. Meanwhile, Max started pulling up data on the flight and control software parameters for the Talon anti-ship missile, the Cumberland’s primary weapon.

  A few minutes later, Max’s comm buzzed. “Skipper.”

  “Captain, this is Engineering.” It was Brown. He sounded winded. “Compression drive is ready. Be aware that the compression drive control interface at the Maneuvering Station functions as OFF/ON only—there is currently no ability to regulate speed from CIC.”

  “Understood. We’ll manage. Outstanding job, Werner. Thanks. CIC out.” He cut off the channel. “XO, get us to Mengis VI.”

  “Aye, sir.” DeCosta had started back to his station when Brown said the c drive was working. He sat down and started issuing orders. “Maneuvering, set course for Mengis VI, compression drive, prepare to engage at my command. Deflector control, forward deflectors to full, lateral and rear to cruise.” Both men acknowledged the commands.

  “Course computed,” announced Maneuvering almost immediately. He had plotted the course five minutes ago and configured his console to update it continuously as the ship moved through space.

  “Maneuvering, main sublight drive to standby. Maneuvering thrusters to standby.”

  “Nulling main sublight and bringing it to standby,” said Maneuvering, tactfully supplying the XO’s omission. Maneuvering was personified by Chief Petty Officer 1st Class Claude LeBlanc, the deeply experienced Cajun in immediate command of the three spacers who actually had their hands on the controls directing the motion of the ship through space: one for yaw and roll, one for pitch and trim, and one to govern the propulsion systems. Those stations, and the men who manned them, were known respectively as Yaw, Pitch, and Drives. With a few muttered words to those three, he gave effect to the XO’s commands. On LeBlanc’s console, the power indicator for the main sublight drive dropped to zero, and the drive’s status light went from green for “engaged” to blue for “standby,” followed immediately by the lights for the maneuvering thrusters. “Main sublight nulled and at standby. Maneuvering thrusters at standby. Attitude control by inertial systems only.”

  “Prepare to engage compression drive. C factor under control from Engineering.”

  “Aye, sir,” LeBlanc acknowledged. “C factor controlled from Engineering. The status light on the drive just went from red to amber. Compression drive is ready for superluminal propulsion but is not nominal.”

  “Hotel one and two approaching missile range. They just powered up their missile targeting scanners,” announced Bartoli from Tactical, unable to keep the urgency from his voice. After a few seconds, “Missile targeting scanner beams from both ships are now traversing and phase scanning. Looking for a lock.”

  “Not today. Compression drive . . . engage,” DeCosta ordered.

  “Engaging,” LeBlanc announced. He patted his Drives man twice sharply on the shoulder. “Fleishman, go.” Drives moved the control all the way forward. “Compression field forming. Instability in the compressed space forward . . . manually corrected from Engineering. Field going propulsive. Speed is zero point six. Zero point nine.” Everyone gritted their teeth at the ear-piercing shriek of “Einstein’s wail” as the ship breached “Einstein’s wall” by exceeding the speed of light. “Ship is now superluminal. One point three. Two. Six. Nine. Field approaching equilibrium . . . equilibrium achieved. Field is propulsive and stable at nine-point-eight-six c. ETA at Mengis VI is . . . five minutes and forty seconds from . . . MARK.”

  “Leaving Hotels one and two behind. Range opening up rapidly. Twelve million kilometers. Eighteen million. Twenty-four million No longer showing up on sensors.”

  “Never fear, Tactical, we’ll see them again in about two hours,” said Max.

  “Thank you, sir, I was afraid I’d miss them,” Bartoli said, his voice returned to normal.

  “You know, sir, when I got this assignment and read about the extra set of compression phase modulators on this class, I thought ‘so what, big deal, maybe it’ll save a little time crossing from jump in to jump out, but it’s not a significant combat capability,’” DeCosta said. “But it’s pretty obvious to me now that it is a big deal. The Krag don’t have it and we do. When we scoot away at ten c, they can poke along at sublight and get left behind, or they can run at eighty or a hundred c inside a star system, which is like trying to drive a ground car at three hundred KPH in a parking structure.”

  “It has been handy, no doubt,” Max agreed. “It’s always good to have a capability that your enemy lacks. Now, back to our problem. You’re the one that Admiral Hornmeyer sold to me as the budding tactical genius. What can we do?”

  “All I can think of is to find some way to even the odds. Find something that gives us a tactical advantage so we can take on one ship at a time on favorable terms.”


  “And, how do we do that?”

  “Nothing’s coming to mind, sir.”

  “What did General Konovalov say right before the Battle of Belogorsk in the East-West War?”

  “Other than, ‘Oh, shit, I’m surrounded by half a million Chinese?’”

  “Yes, other than that.” Max smiled at the joke. As much for the benefit of the rest of the tactically inexperienced people in CIC as for DeCosta, Max continued, “General ‘Stolb’ or ‘the Pillar’ Konovalov was surrounded by about four hundred and eighty-five thousand Chinese.” He looked pointedly at DeCosta as he supplied the correct number. “But he and his scratch force of only a hundred and ten thousand men—and remember that they were mainly reservists, garrison forces, and rear echelon truck drivers, cooks, and file clerks--managed to hold off a numerically superior force comprised of crack troops, and did so without resupply for eleven days until the joint United States/British/German relief force arrived. Like Trafalgar, Midway, Jutland, Marathon, Sirius B, and a dozen other battles I could name, turning back that attack was the turning point of the war.”

  DeCosta had been nodding as Max was talking. He knew most of that. “Didn’t Konovalov say something like, ‘Use terrain to even the odds’?”

  “Very good. I’m told it sounds a lot catchier in Russian. Use the terrain. But, we’re in space, not along the Trans-Siberian Railway near the Chinese border, so what terrain do we have to use?”

  “Well, sir, the planet is a Jovian-type gas giant. That means it’s got a complex moon system, a ring system, all manner of crazy magnetic fields, electromagnetic effects, Trojan asteroids in its orbital path . . . .”

  “Is there any way to use any of that to gain a tactical advantage?”

  “There will be lots of hiding places for something as small and stealthy as a Khyber class Destroyer, and lots of moons and electromagnetic phenomena that could temporarily conceal maneuvers or weapons deployments to prevent enemy detection of what we’re doing.”

  “Yes. There are . . . .” An idea came to him. “Would it be too much to hope for that one of those moons happens to be volcanic?”

  “Not too much at all, sir. One of the moons . . . .” he glanced at his display and poked at a few buttons to pull up the data, “it’s the third major moon, the eighth one out from the planet if you count the little ones too. That one is strongly volcanic. A lot like Io in the Sol system, spewing sulfur and other material out into space.”

  Max slapped his knee. “That’s our terrain. Now, how do we use it?” He turned toward the Weapons station, enthusiasm beginning to show. “Mr. Levy, I seem to recall a report in the last few days saying that the Crustacean class Cruisers have a new countermeasures capability. They blast some sort of signal at our Talon missiles and they veer off into useless trajectories. Well, about sixty percent do, anyway. Have I got that right?”

  Ensign Menachem Levy had just joined the ship a week ago. Yes, he was only nineteen and a half years old, greener than a seasick tree frog, and was pretty weak on CIC procedures, but Max would have bet he could assemble a Talon missile from spares without checking the database for instructions. The young man knew the answer off the top of his head. “Yes, sir, that’s right, but we’ve already developed and installed a software patch that’s supposed to cut that to less than ten percent. And, if you ask me sir, I think that estimate is very conservative. Now that we’ve installed the patch, I don’t think that the new Krag countermeasures would have any effect at all.”

  Max wasn’t surprised that the Krag countermeasure against the weapon had been negated by a counter-countermeasure in the weapon. It was the story of weapons and defenses through the ages: weapons leading to countermeasures leading to improved weapons leading to improved countermeasures leading to further improved weapons in an ever-ascending spiral staircase of technological innovation and development. In this competition, each side repeatedly gains superiority, loses it, and regains it again at the cost of staggering amounts of time and energy and money with neither obtaining a decisive or enduring advantage. It was, like so many of man’s most energetic strivings, desperately important, yet ultimately futile. He thought of all those trillions of credits being spent by both sides, doing little more than canceling each other out, and suppressed a desire to shake his head.

  “Thank you, Ensign. Now, I need another opinion. Do the Krag know we’ve implemented a counter-countermeasure?”

  “I don’t know, sir.” Apologetically, he added, “I don’t get those reports.”

  “Fair enough.” The boy can’t know everything, after all. Max turned in another direction. “Intel. Mister Bhattacharyya.” Another young officer who didn’t need to be told much. “Mr. Levy doesn’t get those reports. You do. Start feeding him the ones relating to weapons and countermeasures and put together a package of the older ones you think he might find useful. Get it to him by 06:00 tomorrow.” In response to a questioning look, “And, yes, Mister Bhattacharyya, at 06:00 tomorrow you will still be alive to send him the package, he will still be alive to read it, and I will still be alive to be very unhappy if you don’t send it to him. Take that to the bank. Now, Ensign, do the Krag know about the software patch?”

  Ensign Bhattacharyya considered for a moment. “I don’t see how they could, sir, except by means of some kind of mole or signal intercept. The patch was implemented just over forty-eight hours ago and I have no report of anyone having fired a Talon at a Crustacean in that time. That makes sense, sir. Because they’re such big ships, people generally attack them with Ravens. There’s not much of anything that can stand up to a one point five megaton warhead.”

  “Right. Maximum yield on a Talon is a hundred and fifty kilotons. That won’t kill one of those big bastards.” Max paused, his lips curling into what some CIC personnel were starting to call his “crafty grin.” “Unless you can get in a sucker punch. All right. I’ve got the terrain. I’ve got the weapon. I’ve got the tactics. Mr. Levy, you and I have some missile software to rewrite.”

  ***

  “Sir, we’re starting to get the data stream from our stealthed sensor probe in orbit. There’s lots of interference and the signal breaks up from time to time, but what we’re getting is good enough for us to monitor what the enemy ships are doing. Hotel one and Hotel two are settling in right where you expected, skipper,” Bartoli reported from Tactical. “Hotel two is in a low forced orbit, staying right over our heads two hundred and seventy-seven kills above the cloud tops, and Hotel one is in the high position at just over thirty-two thousand. Both are using active sensors, but not in any way that would detect us in these conditions. It looks more as though they’re just making sure we know they’re here so we’ll stay under the clouds until we’re truly desperate. Looks like they’re making themselves comfortable.”

  “We need to be comfortable ourselves,” Max said. “If we make our move too soon, they might not take the bait.”

  At that moment, the security door to CIC cycled to admit Doctor Ibrahim Sahin, the ship’s Chief Medical Officer and, at least for another few days, the Acting Union Ambassador and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Pfelung, large, highly artistic, and insightfully intelligent lungfish-like aliens who had recently made common cause with the Union against the Krag. Max had taken the unusual step of giving the doctor unrestricted CIC access after his insights into Pfelung psychology saved the ship from being blown to flaming atoms at the Battle of Pfelung. Sauntering into the compartment right behind him, came Clouseau, a large (some might even say somewhat corpulent) black cat that had joined the ship a few weeks before by darting through a docking tube from a freighter carrying Krag contraband. As on sailing ships of old, Spacers considered ship’s cats lucky, black ship’s cats luckier, and black ship’s cats that joined the ship of their own accord luckier still. Clouseau, as a result, was much prized by the men and boys alike. He lacked for no conceivable feline necessity, comfort, or (truth be told) even luxury. The feline acted as though he owned the ship which, from
his peculiar cat perspective, he did.

  The doctor sat at the Commodore’s station, a console on the command island to the CO’s left (the XO was on his right). On most ships, the Commodore’s station was used very rarely, a place for the occasional visiting senior officer or dignitary to sit in CIC out of everyone’s way and, more or less incidentally, to have a general purpose console for viewing tactical and status displays, reading and sending messages, and performing other basic functions that let him stay informed and keep busy but not get into any trouble. On the Cumberland, this spot had become Doctor Sahin’s unofficial action station whenever something interesting was happening and he didn’t have patients to attend to. Clouseau, as had become his habit, sat beside the doctor, whose spare frame left plenty of room in the seat for even a large cat. The doctor pretended not to notice the cat while the cat pretended not to care. Clearly, their mutual affection ran deep.

  “I’m sure you have a plan,” the doctor said to Max, in a confidential tone.

  “No, Doctor, I just make this stuff up as I go,” Max replied in the same fashion. “Of course, I have a plan.”

  He sniffed. “And, no doubt, this plan of yours is extremely convoluted, highly dangerous, requires split second execution, and involves a large measure of deception, misdirection, trickery, sneakiness, and unabashed underhandedness.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And you wouldn’t dream of explaining it to me in advance.”

  “Certainly not, that would spoil the suspense.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that I don’t like suspense?”

  “Did it ever occur to you that I do? And, I am the Captain. Besides, the ride will be more entertaining if you don’t know what’s around the next bend.”

  “A splendid philosophy, indeed . . . for an amusement park attraction.” The doctor, who had become fairly proficient at inducing the console in front of him to display the information he wanted, quickly surveyed the tactical situation. “The enemy ships, why are they not firing on us?” he asked of Max.