For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “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, but 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, whereas 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 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. 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. 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 he is intellectually, and whether his 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 89 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 Antimatter 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 89 percent match. That means there’s an 11 percent chance that it is someone else. This has got to be the 11 percent.”

  “Captain, I believe that Mr. 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 for more than a few weeks. 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 11 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, 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 and well informed, and 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, but 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 that 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 kno
w 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,” Lee 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.”

  “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 that 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.”

  “I pray that you’re wrong too, son. Thank you. Excellent work. That will be all for now.” Lee saluted and left. He had not been gone for more than three or four minutes before the comm buzzed.

  “Skipper.”

  “Skipper, this is Chin. We finally got a confirmation from the Lee Janot, the task force’s comms vessel, confirming receipt from us of the Krag message. The admiral also signaled ‘No rush now, Robichaux. Rendezvous with the Churchill at standard cruising velocity.’ ”

  “Thank you, Chin. Please give the word to Maneuvering to reduce speed to 1575 c and alter course to rendezvous with the Churchill.”

  “Aye, sir. Chin out.”

  A few seconds later, Max could feel the vibrations and other sounds of the ship’s engines, fusion reactor, and the reactor’s cooling system all drop to a lower pitch as speed was reduced from Emergency to Cruise. The ship had been rushing back to Union space to rendezvous with a comm relay or to get close enough to one to establish a comm channel.

  “Speaking of the Churchill, I’m not certain why everyone seems to be talking about it with such rabid enthusiasm. I saw it on the visual display and it impressed me no more than did the other battleships I have seen, the Wessex or the Michigan.”

  Max almost choked on his coffee. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m entirely serious,” he replied. “I was watching when the admiral made that ‘fly by’ before zooming off to join the task force, and I am telling you that the Churchill looked no larger, nor more formidable, than the Michigan, which I saw several years ago. In fact, the two ships looked rather alike, to my mind. I must admit to being rather disappointed.”

  “I’m sure the admiral would be grieved to hear that seeing the largest and most powerful warship ever built by the human race was a letdown to you. I’ll let him know that he should have brought with him an accomplished tridvid director to make the experience more impressive and memorable. Maybe a long scene full of shots of the immense ship turning on its running lights one after the other and slowly pulling out of the orbital construction dock. Then, accompanied by a swelling fanfare full of trumpets and French horns—lots and lots of French horns—the ship passes by the camera, making a distinct ‘whoosh’ sound, in the soundless interstellar vacuum mind you, and engages its compression drive, causing it to disappear in a dramatic flash. Then, you might have been impressed.”

  “You are making a jest at my expense.”

  “Absolutely. The point is, Bram, you had nothing to show you the scale of the ship. It looked like the Michigan because the two vessels are of similar design. From what I could tell, the Churchill is very much like a scaled-up version of the Michigan. The Churchill, though, has more than ten times the mass. Ten times. Her secondary pulse cannon batteries are twice as powerful as the mains on the Michigan, and the mains have twelve times the power rating. That ship’s so huge, it has a hangar deck for a fighter wing as big as the one flown off an escort carrier.

  “And it’s almost as fast on compression drive as we are, so it can take off with a screen of fast cruisers, frigates, and destroyers; go straight across deep space to a Krag-held system; and take it without having to jump in right under the huge guns of a fixed battle station zeroed in right at the jump point. That kind of force could take some of these Krag systems without any warning, turn their flanks, punch holes in their defensive perimeter…any number of things. Can you imagine a weapon like that in the hands of an aggressive, creative, unpredictable, unorthodox tactical genius like Admiral Hornmeyer? I’d hate to be the Krag commander who had to deal with that.”

  “I had not taken the scale issue into account. I suppose it would be like examining a microorganism through a microscope without knowing the level of magnification—one would not know the size of the thing just by looking at it. I had no idea how much larger and more powerful this new ship was than our older ones.”

  “Bram, it’s literally an order of magnitude.”

  “Perhaps that will be enough to persuade those individuals who will make the grand decision to do what they should do. At least Chin’s news has got to be some kind of relief,” said Sahin. “We are not under pressure to get to the comm relay to alert the rest of the human race what’s happening.”

  “Oh, yes, sure. Huge relief. Great load off my mind. In any event, we’ll be back at the task force in three days. In order to make the rendezvous to deliver the answer, we will have to depart no later than ten days after that. We’ll know the answer then. For good or ill.”

  “What do you think will happen?”

  “I honestly don’t know, but I am very much afraid that President Lee will agree. You? You seem to have better insight into these things than I do.”

  “I don’t know about that. I may understand the formal process in more detail, but that does not necessarily mean that I can predict the outcome more accurately than you or than anyone else, for that matter. For one thing, it is not going to be up to the president. On something of this magnitude, the decision will be made by the Senate in Executive Session.

  “The president, as an ex officio Senate member and de facto leader of the Social Democratic Party, will have a say, and it will have a great deal of influence. It may even be decisive. But it is fundamentally the Senate’s choice. And as you know, the Senate is not constructed on party lines except for the Popular Members. The Members representing the other Estates vote the interests of their Estates—you know, Manufacturing, Shipping, Mining, Agriculture, Academia, Media and Communications, and the others—or what they perceive to be the best interest of the Union as a whole. How the Senate will receive this is hard to predict. I concur with you. I am very much afraid that they will agree. I have detected a certain exhaustion and want of courage in their actions lately. I will continue to pray most fervently that I am wrong. But what if I am right?”

  “Between you and me, I think this ship ignores a surrender order. I kept half of my share of the gold from that freighter we captured in January here on board, and we use that to buy all the supplies we can stuff into the ship, and we go rogue. I bet there will be others. People like Captain Kim. Hell, can you see Hornmeyer meekly turning his ships over to the Krag? Not in this lifetime. We find a way to keep fighting.”

  “I pray that it does not come to that point.”

  “Amin to that, my brother.”

  “And with that, my brother, I take my leave of you. I have a few patients on whom I must check. Good night, Max.”

  “Good night
, Bram.”

  He left. Max reached again for his bourbon. Like a small boy picking at a scab after having been told by his mother several times to leave it alone, Max called up the Krag message that was causing him so much unease. He put it on the smaller display of his workstation rather than on the display wall. Somehow, displaying it on the wall gave too much dignity and importance to the chilling words.

  From the Hegemon and High Privy Counsel of the Sovereign and Supreme Viceroys of Creation, known to you as the “Krag,” to the President, Senate, and Assembly of the Union of Earth and Terran Settled Worlds, we send greetings and the following message.

  When we initiated the present Holy War against you, it was in the sincere and faithful belief, informed by authoritative revelation, that you were unholy blasphemers and that your very physical form and genome were demonic creations of the Evil One brought forth into the Universe to challenge the Vice-Regency of Creation for which the Creator-God made and destined us. We now have increasing reason to believe that our interpretation of events and of the holy revelations we have received may have been in error.

  Your ability to resist our initial attack and subsequent offensive operations was far greater than expected. Your ability to challenge us with a continuing series of new strategies, new tactics, new weapons, new ships, and new technologies has led us to the inevitable conclusion that the Creator-God has not decreed that we must, necessarily, be the instrument of your destruction at this point in history.

  We have reexamined the evidence upon which we made our initial determination and have concluded that you are not demonic creations of the Evil One, nor are you, as we first thought, inherently and incurably evil. Rather, as is the case of all living things, and—in particular—all living things that share our common genetic heritage, you are children of the Creator-God as we are. Accordingly, we are now of the view that to seek your unconditional eradication from the Universe would be sacrilege, as the Creator-God abhors the needless death of any sentient beings whom he has brought forth.