For Honor We Stand

by Harvey G. Phillips

  “At any rate, we’ll know very shortly,” said Max. “To stations.”

  They left, everyone but Brown going to CIC. Brown, of course, took his station in Engineering.

  After the transfer of the con from Hobbs to Max, Max sat in the Big Chair and eyed the navigational display. “Maneuvering, alter course to take us to a point in a line extended from galactic center through the RP, two AU rimward of the RP. Then approach the RP from the rimward direction at point five c, standard decel at the end.”

  Chief Leblanc acknowledged and began to implement the order. After twenty-eight minutes, as the ship was decelerating near the end of the subluminal run, Max turned to Chin and said, “Chin, One MC.”

  “One MC, aye.”

  The light went on. Max’s calm, confident voice reached out from every speaker in the ship to every heart and mind on board. “Shipmates, this is the skipper. You know where we are and as much about what we are doing as I do. We know the Vaaach asked for us by name and we know that the Vaaach are not ones for frivolities. We would not be here if there wasn’t something important for us to do. Everyone be sharp, keep your eyes, as well as your mind and your attention, focused where they are supposed to be. You, gentlemen, are my eyes and ears. My arms, hands, fingers and legs. I make the decisions, but only with the information you give me. Those decisions have meaning only because you carry them out. We’re all mountain climbers, roped together on the rock face—dependent on each other. You do your part. I’ll do mine. We’ll come through this together. Skipper out.”

  Max was always of two minds about these little pep talks. He knew he wasn’t a great orator, or even a good one, and that a lot of modern commanders thought these kinds of speeches silly or pointless. He always felt a bit foolish giving them. On the other hand, Max remembered being an Ensign on the Margaret Jackie as she was racing to get to the Battle of Dupuy III in time to stop the rout and maybe turn the tide. Max was scared stiff when Commodore Middleton came over on One MC and delivered five or six sentences that left him feeling calm and centered and able to do his job. Max understood from that experience that many of the men needed to hear from their skipper, not just the words, but the tone of voice and manner of delivery to tell them that the skipper is confident. A commander must be confident and he must communicate that confidence to his men. People always talk about how the men support the leader. They forget that, on the precipice of danger or during the fearful prelude to battle, it is the leader who supports the men. He must have enough courage, not only for himself, but to give an infusion of it to everyone under his command.

  “Station keeping at the rendezvous point,” LeBlanc announced a few minutes later.

  “We’re still three minutes early,” Max observed.

  Two minutes and fifty seconds passed. Five people managed to get in and out of the two CIC heads, an event marked by Midshipman Hewlett as a new ship’s record. At the stroke of the appointed time, Kasparov called out, “Contact, designating as Uniform one, bearing triple nipple by triple nipple.” One of the cruder bits of Navy jargon, it meant zero-zero-zero mark zero-zero-zero. The target was directly between the ship and the center of the galaxy. “Range, ten kills. Exactly ten kills. I mean to the tenth of a millimeter. No drift, either. Perfectly stationary. God knows where he came from. He just appeared. Maybe he was stealthed brilliantly and he turned it off.” He paused to listen to someone in his Back Room. “OK. OK. Now classifying as Vaaach: mass, and EM emissions are all consistent with the last vessel we encountered.”

  Chin spoke. “Visual carrier, sir. Channel 7.”

  “Let’s see it.”

  A moment later, the now familiar ferocious Koala face filled several CIC screens followed by the now familiar roaring and snarling. This time, however, there was something about the ferocious lions tearing at their meat sounds that struck Max as hinting almost of friendliness. It did not take long for the translation to appear. “This is Forest Commander Chrrrlgrf. I greet you Forest Peer Swamp Fox. I have no doubt that your tiny primate brain is filled with the question of why you were asked to meet with me at this time and place.”

  “And I greet you Forest Commander Chrrrlgrf. It did occur to me, yes.”

  “As well it should. The Vaaach have been asked to summon you to this meeting and to guarantee safe conduct. The meeting is not with me but with the vessel that will arrive in slightly more than two minutes. It is a Krag vessel. The Krag will arrive and advance to within ten kilometers of your vessel and mine. They will transmit a message for delivery to the leadership of your people. You will confirm receipt of their message. The Krag will depart on a direct path to their space. You will depart on a direct path to your space. This will be a peaceful encounter, on pain of death. If you fire on the Krag vessel, you will be destroyed instantly. If the Krag vessel fires on you, it will be destroyed instantly. Is this acceptable?”

  “It is.”

  “Very well. Prepare to receive the Krag.”

  At the promised moment, the Krag vessel appeared on gravity wave sensors, then went subluminal and approached the rendezvous point stopping exactly at the prescribed point. Not as exactly as the Vaaach; the Krag positioned themselves with the precision of about half a meter.

  “Carrier wave from the Krag,” said Chin. “Now, an attention signal. Sir, they’re using the old Krag-Human comm protocols we worked out with them back when we were in contact. They’re telling us to prepare to copy text, Language is Standard, encoding is Formatted Text B. In thirty seconds.”

  “Send, ‘Acknowledged.’” Max’s voice was even, quiet, grim. He had a bad feeling about what the Krag were sending. He had an even worse feeling about the eventual reply.

  Chin quickly called up the old transmission protocols and punched them into the ship’s ENcoder/DECoder. “Receiving transmission.” A few seconds later, “I’m getting readable text from the ENDEC.” About twenty seconds later, almost under his breath, “Holy fucking shit.”

  “Mister Chin,” Max rebuked him in a low but even voice. “No profane editorializing on the contents of comms.” Then, to calm the twitches he was getting from his hypocrisy detector, he added, “That’s my job.”

  Chastened, Chin responded, “Yes, sir. But, you’ve got to see this.”

  The transmission ended. Max read it.

  Holy. Fucking. Shit.

  ***

  “What do you think the President and the Senate will do?” Doctor Sahin took a deep drink of his ‘fruit punch potpourri,’ made from a mixture of undisclosed and various fruits, the kind of mixture generally served by the galley when it was trying to get rid of the tail ends of several different varieties of frozen fruit juice at the same time to clear out one freezer unit, allowing the unit to be broken down making more space in the cramped Galley for the culinary specialists to work.

  Max was a bit deeper into his precious supply of Kentucky Bourbon than he usually allowed himself to get, and was more loquacious than usual. “How the fuck do I know. I don’t trust those greasy, double talking bastards as far as I could throw Hornmeyer’s new flagship. No, that’s not true. I trust President Lee. He’s one of us. Retired Cruiser Commander. I even met him once. Of course, that was the first time I was Court Martialed. He was a member of the panel that tried me. He voted to acquit. They all did.”

  “For what could you have been Court Martialed?”

  “Insubordination. It was that time when I commanded a PC-4 and Commodore Barber, that was before he was the famous throughout the fleet Admiral Barber, ordered me to disengage and withdraw when . . . .”

  Max was cut off when the comm buzzed. “Skipper.”

  “This is Lee in the Intel SSR.”

  “OK, Lee Hwang-sik, right? Philologist and LingAn Expert. Got something?”

  “As a matter of fact, sir, I think I do. How do you want it?”

  “Face to face, with the bark still on, as always. Come to my Day Cabin.”

  “On my way. Lee out.”

  Max drained his
glass but did not pour another. He took a few sips of the coffee that had also been poured for him. Lee arrived a moment later. They exchanged salutes. Lee’s was adequate, but was not what one would call exemplary. The young man always got stratospherically high FITREPS on how he performed the analytical functions that went with his billet, but mediocre ones in those categories that measured the shininess of his boots, the sharpness of creases, and the snappiness of his salutes. Max liked a man who had shiny boots, sharp creases, and snappy salutes, but he positively loved a man who was good at his job. Lee was another one of the officers handpicked for this ship by Admiral Hornmeyer.

  “Well, Lee, what’ve you got for me.”

  “Sir, we’ve done a linguistic and psychological pattern analysis on the Krag message and have come to what we regard as some highly reliable conclusions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, sir, as you know Standard and the Krag language are far more different from one another than any two human languages. Not only are the modes of vocalization completely different, the two languages describe the world in ways that are so different that some things just don’t translate. Standard has about eight or nine fairly close synonyms for the verb ‘to run,’ most of which describe different kinds of gait while running: scamper, trot, sprint, lope, and so on. The Krag have more than forty, describing minute variations in speed, gait, the extent to which the runner weaves from side to side or uses cover or burrows below and then goes on the surface, doubles back on himself to confuse his pursuer, and so on. They have a dozen words for ‘obedience’ but no word for ‘loyalty.’”

  “So? How does that help us? The message isn’t in Krag; it’s in Standard.”

  “But, sir, that’s just it. It’s really in Standard. I mean, if it had been originally written in Krag and translated to Standard, there would be traces of Krag syntax and Krag usage. But, more than that, there are fundamental differences in thinking between the two species that show up in their writing. For example, we tend to tell a narrative from the beginning while Krag tend to start with the event that produced the most emotion, particularly when the emotion was fear. We usually begin a syllogism with the major premise; the Krag typically begin with the conclusion. And, skipper, this message was clearly and obviously written in Standard by a native speaker—by someone who grew up speaking it from the cradle. Not only that, as far as such things go, sir, it was written well, by someone who has a talent for written expression. Whoever wrote this is a good writer.”

  “So, the Krag have at least one human working for them. Well, there are always collaborators or people who can be beaten and tortured into cooperation. That’s not really news.”

  “It might be more news than you think, skipper. You see, we can tell a lot about a person from how he writes. Some of the things we can almost always work out from a writing sample of sufficient length are intelligence, education, vocation, capacity for abstract thought, whether the person’s primary decision-making mode is logical or emotional, how organized they are intellectually, and whether their main perceptual mode is visual or auditory or tactile. Writing can be almost as individual as a fingerprint. Think about how you always know whether orders come directly from Admiral Hornmeyer rather than his staff. Even if you took out the goddamns and all that, you’d still recognize his writing. The computer can develop a prose profile from a document and can sometimes match it to an individual.”

  “I’m getting the sense that you have a match.”

  “We do. According to the computer, there is an eighty-nine percent chance that the author of the message is Senator Wesley Exeter.”

  “Senator Exeter! You’ve got to be kidding me! Wesley Exeter would rather starve to death, be beaten to a pulp, or slit his own wrists than give the Krag the time of day. He was always pushing for larger appropriations for the Navy and then turning around and criticizing us for not being aggressive enough in the war. Every year, he would get one of his friends in the Assembly to sponsor legislation withdrawing the Union from the Convention Prohibiting the Development and Deployment of Anti-Matter Weapons so we could throw some of the hellish things at the Krag. He lost his mother, wife, and four—count ‘em—four daughters in the Gynophage attack. One of them was a four month old baby. Everyone knows that the Krag took Dommert III when he was there to be with his dying father, but no one thought they would take him alive. The profile has got to be wrong. You said that it’s an eighty-nine percent match. That means there’s an eleven percent chance that it is someone else. This has got to be the eleven percent.”

  “Captain, I believe that Mister Lee might be correct,” said the doctor calmly. “We have been at war with the Krag for more than thirty years, but have never recovered anyone who has been in their hands. Not one person. We do not have any idea what they do to prisoners except for your testimony, some of which—as I interpret what you saw on board the San Jacinto--sounds like the beginning stages of a very slow but very thorough brainwashing and conversion process. I do know that if we had captured Senator Exeter and that if we were totally devoid of scruples, we could turn him into a fervent believer in any philosophy we chose or make him loyal to any cause we wished. It would take six months, maybe as much as a year, but it could be done effectively and permanently.

  “If the Krag have such techniques, and we have no reason to believe that they do not, then it is not surprising at all that they have obtained the cooperation of Senator Exeter or that of anyone else who fell into their hands and whose assistance they desired strongly enough. The explanation for eleven percent uncertainty likely lies first in the identification method itself. Lee, what is a typical match that is later confirmed to be accurate?”

  “Occasionally we get a ninety-six or ninety-seven, but a ninety-two or ninety-three is more typical.”

  “That is roughly what I surmised. And the remainder of the difference in this case is probably the result of the brainwashing and conversion technique. When one alters a person’s belief system so fundamentally, there will be some noticeable, though not fundamental, changes in the way his brain constructs chains of reasoning and then translates them into persuasive language. Senator Exeter has been made into a different person, so his writing is going to be different, at least to a certain degree.”

  “I suppose that makes sense.” Max shook his head sadly. “It’s just that it’s hard to think about what you would have to do to a man like that to get him to work for the Krag. I’d rather think of him dead than turned into their lapdog.”

  “I am highly confident that they do have many humans working for them in many capacities, on a highly organized and systematic basis, and providing them excellent service, I might add.”

  “Doctor, what makes you say that?” Max was a bit confrontational. “I truly detest the idea of there being a force of human beings in some kind of Bureau of Quislings sitting in offices and writing reports and memos and going to meetings where they drink coffee, eat boysenberry Danish, and plot the extinction of the human race.”

  Sahin sighed briefly, as though it pained him to have to explain so obvious a matter or, perhaps, because he would prefer not to have to explain these kinds of truths to someone who would find them painful. “Max, I know they have humans working for them because they have displayed an understanding of us that is too sophisticated and too well-informed to be entirely the work of an alien race. Time and time again, they’ve played us politically and diplomatically in ways that show they understand humans far better than they could from the brief contact we had a century ago. They must have humans advising them. Not only that, they must have humans who are intelligent, well-informed, who have a detailed and sophisticated understanding of the workings of our societies, our governments, our economy, and other aspects of our civilization.”

  “In other words,” consented Max, “not only do they have people working for them, they’ve got talented people and they’ve found a way to get good work out of them. I don’t like that conclusion, but I suppose tha
t the evidence supports it.”

  “Sir, this communication certainly supports that conclusion,” said Lee. “There are textual cues that show when something is written under duress. None of those are present. To the contrary, there are also textual cues that show when a writer is doing his best work and has put his heart into it. Those cues are present here. In fact, there is evidence that the document was written with a certain enthusiasm and genuine agreement with what it says.”

  “Is there anything else in there that I need to know about?”

  “I suppose the fact that it shows that our military and our government are apparently laced with Krag spies is self-evident, so no, sir.”

  “Lee, the President is supposed to be some sort of cousin or yours, isn’t he? What do you think he’s going to do?”

  “Sorry to burst your bubble, sir,” he said with an embarrassed smile, “but that’s just one of those rumors based on our both being Korean and both having the same surname. What most people don’t understand is that ‘Lee’ is the second most common surname in Korea. Common surnames in Korea are a lot more common than they are most other places. The three most common names, Kim, Lee, and Park, together account for forty-five percent of the population. Assuming that two Lees are related in Korea is a far worse assumption than concluding that two Boudreauxs are related on your home world, or two Smiths on Earth or Alphacen.”

  “But, he is a countryman of yours. I’m not even from the same planet as he is.” Max looked at the young man with genuine curiosity. “You would have a better read on him than I do. Besides, I hear you’re some kind of expert on Union politics and have a way of telling what a politician is going to do by dissecting the language in his speeches.”

  “It is sort of a hobby, sir. Studying Philology gives one an appreciation for the nuances of language and politics is, to a great extent, a dance of language. I’ve studied the speeches of President Lee quite extensively, and I think they reveal that he is mostly bravado covering a fundamental lack of courage and resolve. As a warship captain he may have been strong and decisive, but he is over his head leading the entire Union. He doesn’t have the confidence in his own judgment to allow him to make clear, bold decisions for billions of people. I think he’s weak, sir. I’m afraid he might cave. That’s my best opinion, sir. I pray that I’m wrong.”