For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “The two SWACS ships are flying ovals at opposite ends of the system. These first three segments are places where one of the shadows cast by one planet or another from some point in one of these ovals intersects our trajectory. Coverage is going to be weaker along those segments for at least part of each SWACS ship’s patrol cycle. The fourth is an area where our path passes near where a Krag frigate was destroyed by compression shear two days ago when it was running from the USS Battleax. There’s still a lot of residual interference. In any of those areas, our warning horizon isn’t going to be much more than it would be with just our own active sensors, which, against a highly stealthed ship, isn’t going to be much. Even with the tail deployed, we’d get only a few seconds before they were in missile range.”

  “Outstanding, XO. Absolutely outstanding. Let’s see how it matches up with my analysis.” Max’s voice was genuinely enthusiastic and was loud enough for everyone in CIC to know that he was praising the XO about something. Max touched a soft key on his own display, and the four red segments turned orange as yellow segments, almost perfectly congruent, were superimposed on them. A very close match.

  Except for one tiny spot.

  There was a tiny speck of yellow almost in the middle of the long curve: a segment of the curve so short that it was almost indistinguishable from a point in space. The XO pointed to it. “What’s that one?”

  “I didn’t expect you to identify that one, XO. It’s dynamic and not static. When the first SWACS frigate, the Sicily, is at the point of its oval most distant from Edmonton B, and the second one, the Cypress, is 69 percent of the way through its oval, there is a temporary interference zone created here, lasting for just under thirty minutes. One of the times that zone comes into existence is when we are right here.” Max touched a key, and a pale, yellow, blinking spot came into existence, right beside the tiny yellow segment.

  “And what’s worse, is that the interference pattern created is going to be fractal/chaotic, meaning that it will destroy the coherence of our own active sensor transmissions. Except for passive EM and mass detection, we’ll be blind.”

  “But that shouldn’t be a problem,” DeCosta said. “Just signal the pennant to increase or decrease speed, and sensor coverage in that area will be normal when we go through.”

  “Absolutely correct, XO. It shouldn’t be a problem. But Commander Duflot will not alter speed so much as a meter per second. So, the sensor gap will absolutely be there right when we get there. And that’s where they’re going to hit us. I’d bet our last ton of deuterium on it.”

  The doctor had been watching the proceedings with intense interest, without saying anything until now. “What makes you so sure? Why not in those other places?” Max looked at DeCosta, whose inquiring look communicated the same question.

  “Remember what Sun Tzu said about knowing your enemy?” Both men answered in the affirmative. “Well, one thing that is essential to know about the Krag is that they are the galaxy’s greatest experts on stealth, evasion, and any kind of hiding. Maybe it’s because of their rodent ancestry, or maybe it’s just a talent that they have evolved as they became sentient. In either event, they are far more attuned than most of us to the nuances of detection and perception, and are experts at exploiting weaknesses in both.”

  The Cumberland had passed without incident through the first three of the danger zones jointly predicted by the CO and XO. The fourth jointly predicted zone was only five hours ahead, but the area where Max expected to be attacked was ten minutes ahead. Cumberland and Broadsword were at general quarters: all hands at battle stations, all weapons and defenses ready, engines standing by for rapid maneuvering.

  Max had dutifully informed Commander Duflot of his expectation. Ignoring the warning, Duflot had the William Gorgas at Condition Green. Duflot’s signal, informing Max of his decision not to bring his ship to a higher alert status, included the statement: “I SEE NO NEED TO PUT MY CREW THROUGH THE INCONVENIENCE OF STANDING TO GENERAL QUARTERS WHEN THE ONLY EVIDENCE OF HEIGHTENED DANGER IS THE QUESTIONABLE JUDGMENT OF AN INFERIOR OFFICER.”

  There was no doubt in Max’s mind that Duflot meant the word “inferior” in both senses of the word.

  Max hoped that Commander Duflot, and indeed the whole group, didn’t pay too dearly for his arrogance.

  “Mr. Chin, you did signal ‘Mike Victor’ using the aft omni light?”

  “Aye, Skipper, just over three minutes ago. There’s no way the pennant saw it.”

  “Outstanding.” He turned to Kasparov. “Everyone in your section needs to be sharp, but I want particular vigilance on the sensor bands the enemy uses for his shipboard targeting scanners. Not the general sensors they use to localize other ships, but the ones they activate to get a target lock for their missiles. You detect anything that even smells like that, I want to know about it. Don’t wait for a confirmation or a second phenomenology or to take a closer look at it. Understood? We’re not going to get much warning. With the tail, we’re going to get just a few more seconds than Mr. Krag thinks, and we need to take full advantage of them.”

  “Understood, sir. We’re ready. I’ve got two extra men on that console in my back room, and Goldman is going to be here in about a minute to back me up on this console.”

  “Goldman?”

  “Yes, Skipper. I know he was busted, and I’m not presuming to promote him back to CIC status, but he is the sharpest man I’ve got on that kind of detection. I’d feel better with him at my side, sir.”

  “Kasparov, it’s your department and you’ll be making the call, so if you want to dig up Sir John Jellicoe and put him in that chair, you won’t have any complaints from me. Just tell Goldman not to get too comfortable up here. He’s still got time to serve down in the waste treatment plant.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Max sat down at his station, unconsciously rubbing his palms on the legs of his uniform to wipe off the sweat. This one was going to be hairy. Just then, Goldman cycled through the CIC security door, followed by a Marine who took up station inside the door. Goldman had lost his general CIC clearance, which meant that if he were in CIC, the Marine would be there too.

  A moment later, the doctor cycled through the door. Clouseau came in with him, scampering around his feet while somehow managing not to trip him or get stepped on. Cats do that somehow. The doctor sat at the Commodore’s Station, while Clouseau curled up on top of the signal condition equipment box for the Sensors station. The extra signal-processing load from the towed array was making the unit run about 10 degrees warmer than usual, making the box a nice toasty, pre-warmed cat perch, with the added benefit of putting the cat within easy reach of both Goldman and Finnegan, should either have a mind to pet a cat while on watch.

  Clouseau stretched invitingly, which resulted in a brief scratch behind the ears and under the chin from Finnegan. Goldman was too wrapped up in his console to notice. Clouseau looked at him with obvious irritation. Goldman was now on the cat’s shit list. Anyone who does not believe cats have shit lists has never lived with a cat.

  Seconds ticked by, tension gripping all of CIC like a vise. Max found himself having to make a distinct expenditure of attention and effort to keep from sitting on the edge of his seat or fidgeting or standing at the Sensors station watching the take from the towed array. He willed himself to sit back, hands on the arms of the chair or holding his coffee, radiating calm. He wasn’t fooling anyone.

  He kept glancing over at Kasparov and Goldman, intent upon their console, scrutinizing each of the apparently random dots representing signals processed out of the towed array. Max gave in to temptation and pulled up the same displays Kasparov and Goldman were watching.

  To the untrained eye, they were nothing more than two screens, each consisting of a black background covered with a few dozen tiny dots in assorted colors. Each dot represented some kind of signal detection. The location of the dots on the screen, lef
t or right, indicated relative bearing. One screen displayed the bearing on a horizontal plane level with the decks of the ship, with dead ahead in the center, and the two edges each representing dead astern; the other displayed the bearing to the same contacts on a vertical plane, perpendicular to the decks, with “above” the ship in the center, and “below” at the two edges of the display. To help the operator correlate the two representations of each contact, the system would highlight the dot representing a contact on one screen when the operator would touch the corresponding dot on the other with his finger or a stylus.

  Each screen’s vertical axis represented time, with the newest signals at the top, a new line painting itself across the top of the screen once every two seconds, causing the previous lines to move slowly downward, leading to this data output mode being known as a “waterfall display.” The size of the dots showed strength of the signal, and color showed the frequency. If several different frequencies were detected at the same bearing, the computer would display the dots very closely together, surround them with a set of brackets, and place a bright orange vertical line at the actual bearing. A strong detection would show up as a series of large dots, of many colors, accumulating one atop the other in a column, either straight or slanting to one side as the source and the receiver moved relative to one another.

  Max pondered the situation. If he was a Krag trying to pounce on this group, where would he lurking? Not dead ahead, because that’s where the group-leading William Gorgas’s active sensor scans would be the strongest. And not dead astern, because Señor El-Krag can see that there are destroyers in the group and many destroyers are equipped with towed arrays that would provide sensitive coverage in that direction. And not dead abeam, because those bearings represent the flanks that we mammals with vital organs in our rib cages instinctively protect.

  No, they’re rodents and we’re primates. When we’re on the ground, we tend to see the threats as coming from around and above us, not below. But underground and in the underbrush is where the rodent goes when he feels threatened. Given his druthers, a rodent comes from underneath and goes for the belly or the throat or the genitalia, which is the last place a primate expects to be attacked.

  “Mr. Kasparov, let’s shift the towed array negative z to the drive trail, forty-five kills.”

  “Aye, sir, shift the tail negative z to the wake, zero-four-five kills. And sir, Goldman suggested the same thing about two seconds before you did.”

  “Outstanding. Good to see that Mr. Goldman is back to his old self. We’re going to need everyone’s best today, I think.” Goldman was one of the crew members who had been taking illegal drugs made on board by the now imprisoned Spacer Green, using an illegally obtained MediMax pharmaceutical synthesizer. Goldman had been taking stims, whereas most of the other drug abusers were taking an antianxiety medication called the “Chill.”

  “And Mr. Chin, blinker the Piranhas that they might want to focus their attention in our forward, ventral zone, offset twenty-five to thirty-five degrees from our base course on both axes.”

  Although the group was on EMCON, when the fighters stationed in this system showed up to escort the group, Max had Chin blinker them on the sly, filling them in on the situation and asking them to watch for blinkered Morse code “suggestions” from the Cumberland’s aft signal light, positioned where it was invisible from the pennant ship. Max’s growing reputation nearly guaranteed that the fighter pilots would be receptive to those suggestions. The four fighters that joined the group, twenty-year-old but still serviceable FS-51 Piranhas, ducked their finger-four formation under the group, divided into two-ship elements, and diverged to accelerate ahead in order to sanitize the area Max was concerned about, blasting it with active sensor transmissions.

  Max focused his attention again on the feed from the towed array on his console. He turned his eye to the area of the screen representing the bearings from which he thought the Krag vessels most likely to appear. Just a few random dots. Nothing yet. He picked up a dry-erase marker, commonly used in CIC for indicating or highlighting information on displays, and drew brackets around the bearings where he expected the Krag to be hiding. And just to be sure of himself, he instructed the computer to show him on an adjacent display dots of the colors associated with the most likely Krag missile targeting frequencies. Yep. Those were just the shades of garish pinkish-purple and coffee-with-too-much-cream-in-it tan that he remembered.

  His eyes went back to the two waterfall displays, and he looked again at the bracketed areas of the top lines. Nothing. Just a random speck or two of the wrong colors. He saw the men fidgeting. These men were smart, and like spacers going back to the beginning of the space services and the saltwater sailors before them, they were good at reading the mood of their captain. The captain was expecting trouble, and so were they.

  Five minutes passed. Ten. The fighters moved from one area to another, systematically searching with eyes and sensors. The group would be out of the danger area in just four more minutes. Max could almost feel Commander Duflot gloating.

  But they weren’t out of the woods yet. This is just when people start to think they’ve got it made. Just where their vigilance starts to slacken. Max could feel it around him: stances more relaxed, people taking a second or two to look away from their displays every now and then. They needed to be reminded.

  “Just because we’re almost out doesn’t mean we are out, people. If I had a tail and whiskers, this is just when I’d hit us.” He felt the men’s vigilance tighten.

  He turned his own eyes back to the two waterfall displays in front of him, focusing on the two areas he had bracketed. Maybe he was being too clever. As the Cumberland approached the edge of the interference zone, there was less and less space inside the zone at those bearings relative to the ship. Maybe they would come from the flanks or from the dorsal direction. His eyes ran along the tops of the displays along every line of bearing. He couldn’t watch them all at once. That was what he had Sensors people for, but he just couldn’t keep himself from looking, even if Kasparov and Goldman might take it as a sign that he didn’t trust them to spot a threat as rapidly as he could.

  Couldn’t keep himself from looking? Bullshit. He switched the displays from the towed array data channels to the fusion reactor efficiency/performance plots. He would trust his people.

  To make a point of it, he turned away from Sensors to Weapons. “Mr. Levy, when we have well cleared the danger area, I’m going to stand down from general quarters. This time, when you take the pulse cannons from Ready back down to Prefire, I want to do a purge of the cryoconduits and get someone from GM to verify—”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw Goldman stiffen, then point to one of the waterfall displays. Kasparov shifted his gaze to where Goldman was pointing. In the half-second or so that these two actions took, Max turned back to face his console and was reaching for the reconfigured “SUMMON STEWARD—COFFEE” button when Kasparov called out, “Contact! Likely Krag missile targeting scanners, two sources close together, bearing one-zero-seven mark one-eight-five. Signal strength indicates close range.”

  The rodents came from underneath and a little behind, right for the primate’s genitals.

  Max felt every inch of skin on his body shrink as a torrent of adrenalin poured into him. The hand that he had shifted to be near the coffee button slammed down with unintended force, shattering the plastic and impressing its shape on Max’s palm in a bruise that he would carry for more than a month. Over the now-open voice channel that connected him directly to the CO’s console on the Broadsword, he nearly shouted: “Dynamo! Dynamo! Dynamo!”

  For a while, Max needed to give no more orders. Knowing that seconds, even fractions of seconds, would count when the Krag attack was detected, he and Captain Kim had worked out a complex series of orders to be implemented instantly as soon as he gave the “Dynamo!” call.

  First and most important, Max
and Kim had agreed that they had to achieve the mission’s objective—getting the envoy alive to the conference, even if it meant violating Commander Duflot’s idiotic orders and even if it meant a court martial for both of them.

  On board the Broadsword, even before the second “Dynamo!” came over the speaker, Captain Kim snapped out, “Go, McDaniel, go!”

  Able Spacer First Class Jackson McDaniel, Drives on the Broadsword, shoved the sublight drive controller all the way to the stop as Pitch and Yaw executed the well-planned course change, steering the destroyer through a violent evasive maneuver designed to throw the Krag firing solutions into whatever their species used for wastebaskets and get the ship as far away from the formation as fast as possible.

  Once Broadsword had pulled far enough away from the other Union ships, she kicked her compression drive to the maximum setting, cracked through Einstein’s Wall, and vanished from sight. Bearing the envoy to safety at more than two thousand times the speed of light, the USS Broadsword, her captain suppressing a strong personal affinity for combat, ran like a scalded dog.

  Prompted by the same call, this time broadcast over standard radio, the four fighters of the 3242nd Reserve Fighter Squadron assigned to escort the group reversed course and pointed their threat receivers back in the general direction of the Cumberland. Now that the Krag had activated their missile targeting scanners, the fighters had no problem detecting them. All four went to afterfusers, accelerating rapidly in the direction of the Krag vessels. It would, however, be minutes before they were in missile range.

  As they neared, Chin keyed a preprogrammed command to notify the William Gorgas on the emergency alert channel via laserlink of what the Cumberland had detected and what it was going to do. The only immediate response from the pennant was Duflot angrily demanding that Max tell him where the Broadsword went. No help there.