For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “Understood. We’ll manage. Outstanding job, Wernher. 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.

  “Maneuvering, set course for Mengis VI, compression drive, prepare to engage at my command,” DeCosta ordered. “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. In charge of Maneuvering was Chief Petty Officer First 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.”

  “Hotels 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,” DeCosta said “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.’ 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 nodded. “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 60 percent do, anyway. Have I got that right?”

  Ensign Menachem Levy had just joined the ship a week ago. He was only nineteen 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 10 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.”

  “Thank you, Ensign. Now, I need a
nother 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. Mr. 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, Mr. 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,” Bartoli reported from Tactical. “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. Hotel Two is in a low forced orbit, staying right over our heads, 277 kills above the cloud tops, and Hotel One is in the high position at just over 32,000. 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 Dr. 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. The species of large, highly artistic, and insightfully intelligent lungfish-like aliens 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 fat) 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. 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 without getting into any trouble.

  On the Cumberland, this spot had become Dr. 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,” Sahin 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.”

  Sahin 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.” Sahin, 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 Max.

  “Because we’re not showing up on their sensors.”

  “How can that be? We are only a few hundred kilometers away from the nearest one. They could practically spot us with the model one eyeball.” He placed a not so subtle emphasis on what he thought to be a bit of deftly deployed naval slang.

  “That’s Mark One Eyeball. They can’t spot us because we’re sitting in the best place in this whole system to hide a warship. First, there’s the electrical discharges in the planet’s atmosphere, lightning storms like all of the thunderstorms on a terrestrial planet times a hundred thousand.

  “Second, all the volcanic ejecta that one of the planet’s moons is spewing into space interacts with the planet’s magnetic field to create Alfvén waves. They ionize all that volcanic stuff, and it flows down the magnetic lines of force to the planet. On the way, the stream of those particles zipping through the planet’s magnetic field sets up powerful synchrotron maser radiation—high-intensity radio waves that have a wonderful sensor-scrambling effect. Combine that with the gravitation, atmosphere, clouds, and magnetic field of the planet itself, and we’re almost impossible to spot unless you come on down into the atmosphere with us and hit us with an active sensor scan at close range, or our thermal stealth gives out and we make a hot spot in the atmosphere.”

  “I had no idea that you were such a physics maven,” the doctor said.

  “I’m not. One of my worst subjects, right up there with English Literature 1600 through 1900. Paradise Lost. The Brontë Sisters.” He shuddered. “I’m just an expert in the physics that gives me ways to hide from, confuse, evade, bamboozle, or misdirect an enemy. At that kind of physics, I could teach graduate-level seminars.”

  “A fine area in which to be expert in your line of work, although I rather like The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. In any event, since we are so well hidden, can we not stay here indefinitely? Perhaps the Krag will grow tired of waiting for us and scurry along on their Krag way to do their other Kragish business.”

  “No chance. First, they don’t do that. Krag are the most relentless creatures in the galaxy,” Max said with perhaps a little too much vehemence. He continued more calmly. “They’ll stay here until they die of old age. Then, with the feeble gasp of
their last, dying rat breath they’ll command their ship’s computers to destroy us if we ever come out of the clouds even if it’s a hundred years later and the ship is crewed by our great grandchildren. But they won’t have to wait that long. In just about two hours our heat sink will reach capacity. You know what that means.”

  “I do. You have explained it to me at tedious and redundant length. What perplexes me, though, is how we are remaining at this altitude and in this position without making ourselves known? If I am not mistaken, being in the atmosphere, we cannot be coasting around the planet in orbit. Therefore, we would have to use our drives, expelling hot gases that heat the atmosphere around us, thereby making the ship liable to be detected.”

  “You’re right. We’re not in orbit. And if we were in most any other ship, we’d be dead. Most warships have two maneuvering thruster systems: a main that runs off of plasma from the fusion reactor, and an auxiliary that uses liquid hypergolic bipropellant held in pressurized storage tanks. Because of the extraordinary emphasis on stealth in our design, we have a third—known by a clever acronym that I won’t bother you with, as you’d forget it instantly—that operates off of cold gas.

  “We take gas—either in the form of our own supplies or drawn in from any atmosphere that we might happen to be in—compress it to the liquid state, and then vent it without combustion through the thruster nozzles, with the rapid expansion of the gas providing thrust. We vary the expansion and compression ratios to manage the temperature of the exhaust to match ambient, so we don’t create a hot spot. So long as the fusion reactor keeps pumping out power to operate the system, we could hover here almost indefinitely.”

  “An ingenious system, no doubt,” the doctor said, thoroughly unimpressed. Even the most brilliant feats of aerospace engineering made little impression on him. “It would be even more ingenious if the designers had included a heat exchanger system to allow the cold gas to carry away the thermal energy from the heat sink, allowing you to do an almost continuous ‘thermal dump’ without creating a thermal signature. But then, I am just the Sawbones around here.”