Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “Given the ‘highly unfavorable correlation of forces,’” Max answered, “it’s only as aggressive as it has to be.” The men shared a smile. So much for the T-SEA run being kept secret from the skipper or the XO.

  While every other man in CIC had his mind on the next few minutes and his part in the plan, Dr. Sahin had his mind on an adjective uttered a few seconds in the past. “Aggressive? If you two, of all people, are calling this plan aggressive,” he said, coming to his feet and using the term like an epithet, “it must surely be a veritable symphony of inordinate risk-taking and wildly dangerous maneuvers. I thought that this scheme was formulated by the Tiger Team alone, but now that I hear that a certain gentleman of Cajun descent participated in the plan’s formulation, I have little doubt that each movement of that symphony is now punctuated with strategically inserted music containing the kind of diagnosable, raving insanity with which I have become all too familiar since joining this ship.”

  The CO and XO looked at each other blandly. “I don’t regard that as an insult,” said Max. “How about you, XO?”

  “Not even remotely, sir.”

  “Further,” sniffed Sahin, continuing his almost obligatory rant oblivious to the unconcern with which his remarks were being received, “as insane as the upcoming performance is going to be and pursuant to what must be a formal shipboard policy mandating that the Chief Medical Officer be kept utterly in the dark at all times, I confidently predict that no one will provide me with a program of the evening’s performance so that I can know whether I’m about to witness the tactical equivalent of Bach, Tchaikovsky, Ghar-Vhish 817, or Havenstrite.”

  DeCosta chuckled quietly. “Insane or not, Doctor, this plan is detailed enough that we had to put it all in writing. If you want to read it or follow along as we go, it’s in the database anytime you want to look at it. In fact, here.” He touched a screen a few times. “I just sent it to your console. The file is called ‘Special Attack Tiger Team Escape and Evasion Plan.’”

  “Excellent, Mr. DeCosta. I congratulate you on the imaginative title,” Sahin replied. “It has that bland, bureaucratic ring so cherished by the navy. It is not nearly as off-putting as, say, ‘Into the Jaws of Death, Into the Mouth of Hell, Will Charge the Valiant Cumberland.’ I will certainly examine it. I can hardly wait to read the entry that says, ‘At this point the heavily damaged USS Cumberland careens out of control, colliding with the Krag destroyer at 10 percent of lightspeed, reducing both vessels and their crews to high-energy elementary particles.’ I’m certain that I will find it deeply entertaining.” Several of the senior enlisted men, who had been suppressing laughter at the exchange, burst into open guffaws at this point, bringing Sahin to a sheepish, sputtering halt, at which point he sat down.

  Max turned back to DeCosta. “The only thing that frustrates me is that no one could come up with a way to use Bales’s idea about hacking the Krag REFSMMAT. I just can’t see any way around the star imager correction utility.”

  “Neither could we, but we wanted you to have that particular screwdriver in your toolbox, even though we’ve never seen the screw it fits.”

  “Thanks.”

  Both men turned their attention to their consoles, reviewing the plan, checking the readiness of various systems, and exchanging short messages with men around the ship to confirm that they understood precisely what they were to do.

  All the while trying to ignore that they were very likely to die while doing it.

  The seconds slowly ground past on the chrono, each seemingly taking longer than the one before. Every several minutes or so, a grid “square” on the Main Tactical Display changed from the black of ordinary space to yellow or orange to indicate that the enemy had searched the area. Gradually, ominously, the yellow and orange were beginning to predominate over black. Men struggled to ignore the passing seconds, the disappearing black areas on the display, the dwindling count of their own breaths from that moment until the moment of the Cumberland’s desperate and—most likely—fatal attempt to break out of the Krag trap.

  So low as to be audible only to him, Max could hear Bram humming something. Both men were fans of the nineteenth-century British operetta composers Gilbert and Sullivan, and Max recognized the tune as coming from one of their most famous offerings, The Pirates of Penzance. It took Max little effort to match lyrics to notes.

  Go ye heroes, go to glory.

  Though ye die in combat gory,

  Ye shall live in song and story.

  Go to immortality.

  Go to death and go to slaughter.

  Die, and every Cornish daughter

  With her tears your grave shall water.

  Go ye heroes, go and die!

  Max fixed his friend with an icy stare. “Not funny,” he said in a low voice.

  “I intended no humor,” Sahin replied.

  Not knowing whether to be furious or merely annoyed, Max returned his gaze to the tactical display. All around him the young skipper could feel the level of tension in the compartment ratcheting higher and higher with every heartbeat. Just as he was trying to think of a way to relieve the pressure, he heard the vault door–like CIC hatch cycle and glanced over his left shoulder to see who was coming in. No one. At least no one tall enough for his head to be visible above the Firefighting and Emergency Control Stations, colloquially known as the “Firehouse,” located directly between the Command Island in the center of CIC and the hatch, behind the island and to its left. Max was about to open a voice channel to one of the marine sentries posted outside to ask why they opened the hatch, when he saw the reason. Clouseau, the rounder-by-the-day ship’s cat, came nonchalantly into view, ambled across the compartment, and—notwithstanding his considerable girth—leaped easily into the seat at the Commodore’s Station beside the doctor. By tradition, ships’ cats had the run of the vessel (except for dangerous spaces where they might be injured), and when the cat had pawed the CIC hatch, one of the marines had—in perfect accord with naval custom—let him in. Clouseau promptly curled up with his head resting on the doctor’s leg, purring loudly enough to be heard by at least a quarter of the men in the compartment, a model of feline tranquility. The doctor absently stroked the animal’s glossy, jet-black fur.

  Clouseau’s entrance instantly lowered the tension level. According to spacers—a notoriously superstitious lot, for whom cats were the center of a whole branch of voluminous lore—Clouseau was solid gold, 200 proof, certified, bona fide, Kentucky-fried good luck. Even the smallest hatch hanger knew that because they had nine lives, cats were lucky, and their luck necessarily rubbed off on any ship on which they traveled. After all, a cat can’t be lucky if its ship gets blown to flaming atoms, right? Clouseau was luckier still, however, because he was solid black—black like space, black like warships were painted—which, the men told each other, was the luckiest kind of cat to have (setting aside, for the moment, tailless cats, which were luckier still, a fact seldom mentioned on the Cumberland). The jewel in Clouseau’s crown of good fortune, though, was that he had joined the ship of his own accord by running onto the destroyer across a docking tube joining it to a freighter carrying Krag cargo. The Cumberland must be a lucky ship because this supremely lucky creature had chosen it as his new home. Then, when it became widely known on board that the freighter from which the cat had fled had been destroyed, probably by enemy action, Clouseau’s status as an icon of good luck was secure.

  Therefore, the fortunate feline’s appearance in CIC just as the ship was about to engage the enemy could, in the minds of the crew, be viewed as nothing other than an exceptionally favorable omen.

  Of course, as an experienced combat officer, Max was completely immune to that kind of unscientific hooey.

  Well, maybe not completely immune.

  The ship’s chrono turned over to 07:58. Two minutes. While the spirits in CIC had lifted somewhat, Max sensed that pessimism still pervaded the ship. Damn that T-SEA estimate and the data bus it rode in on. He knew that if thes
e men went into combat with that attitude, they would certainly die, the Krag having already beaten them in spirit.

  Like hell.

  “Mr. Chin. Give me MC1.”

  “MC1, aye.” The light on Max’s console came on, indicating that his voice was being transmitted throughout the ship over the number one main voice circuit.

  “Men, this is the skipper. You know what we’re about to do. You know what is expected of you. You know what the odds are and what happens if we fail. So, then, why am I speaking to you?” He took a long, slow breath. “Because I have two things to say. First—I want to remind you what you’re fighting for: not the great cause that the whole of the Union has been fighting for these past thirty-four years, but what you and I are fighting for right now, today. Men, we’ve fought together before: to save the Pfelung, to save Rashid, even to save the Union, and that’s a noble thing. As navy men we’re bred to fight and sacrifice for others. Because of that and because you think that today you are fighting to save yourselves, some of you may feel that what you do today is less important than what you did before. I understand that, but it’s bullshit. Listen carefully. You are not fighting for yourself. You are fighting for everyone on this ship: every man, every officer, the cooks and the medics, everyone down to the smallest hatch hanger. It’s not one life you are fighting for; it’s your 214 shipmates. That’s a cause worth the best you have to give, and as noble as anything for which you or any man has ever fought or will fight in the future. Shipmates are family, and fighting to save your family is the noblest fight there is.

  “Second, I want to talk about the odds. You’ve all heard about our computer’s prediction. And there’s a lot of people who would feel pity for us in our current situation. But let me tell you something. There’s not a computer ever made that can measure the heart of a man. There’s not a computer ever made that can measure human courage, tenacity, and defiance. And I know for damn sure that there’s not a computer ever made that can measure the fighting spirit of this ship! The odds? Guess what! I don’t give a flying fusion fuck what the goddamn odds are, and neither should you. I know you. I know this ship. I’ve led you into battle. I’ve seen you fight and win when the odds said it couldn’t be done. And I know for an indisputable fucking fact that if there is anyone who deserves pity today, it’s the Krag. They’re sitting out there laughing because they think they’ve treed a fox.

  “Well, shipmates, we’re going to have the last laugh because what they’ve really done is cornered a lion! And the Krag aren’t ready to tangle with a lion. When the story of this day goes into the history books—and I assure you that it will—they’re not going to be talking about the odds. They’re not going to be talking about the goddamn T-SEA. What they’re going to be talking about—what the Union will always remember and what the Krag will never forget—will be the glorious victory won today by the officers and men of the USS Cumberland!”

  Max looked around to find that he had unconsciously risen to his feet. Almost every face in CIC was turned to him. The men’s faces shone with courage and defiance. Chin opened some voice circuits—the ones connecting the sound pickups in the parts of the ship that had the most men working in them—to the speakers in CIC, allowing Max and everyone else in the compartment to hear the men shouting, “Victory! Victory! Victory!”

  That did the trick.

  The chrono rolled over to 08:00. It was time. Max spoke into the open circuit: “Phase One: Execute.”

  Unlike the Age of Sail, there was no series of orders snapped out by the skipper to be repeated and carried out throughout the ship—nothing to bring to mind the age-old seafaring calls of “set the mizzen topgallants,” “ready about,” and “hard a lee.” Instead, the orders were already given, stored in the ship’s computer and displayed in detail as needed on each man’s console or implemented directly by the computer itself according to a timetable automatically synchronized and corrected to remain in step with actual events. It all started without another word being spoken. And it all started, as it did more often than not on any warship, at Maneuvering.

  Chief LeBlanc gave the word to Able Spacer Fleishman at Drives. The young man engaged the main sublight drive, nudging the Cumberland from a standstill (or, at least, station keeping relative to the Krag formation) into gradually accelerating motion, with the men at Yaw and Pitch steering it through a series of bizarre, often reversing, corkscrew-like maneuvers plotted for them by the computer as they went. The course looked insane, but there was method in the Cumberland’s madness.

  The Krag active sensors functioned by emitting a tight beam, like a powerful but narrowly focused searchlight, that swept the search area. Because a predictable sweep pattern would enable an enemy to avoid detection by avoiding the beam, the beam’s path was “pseudorandom,” that is, designed to be difficult to predict and containing no discernable pattern, but precisely aimed according to instructions stored in the Krag computer to intersect and synchronize with the beams emitted by other ships in selected areas of the search grid to carry out a coordinated, multistatic sensor sweep. Armed with the sensor protocols from the captured data core, the Cumberland’s computer could now recognize which of the several hundred standardized patterns each ship was using, predict where the Krag ship would scan next, and compute a path around the scans, at least for a while.

  At the same time, Mr. Nelson and the Stealth Section under his command made equally skillful use of the captured Krag data. Narrow-beam sensor scans weren’t the only arrow in the Krag’s sensor quiver. The enemy also had systems, less sensitive but much harder to dodge, that projected wide cones of energy blanketing large swaths of the search area. These pulses also followed pseudorandom time, frequency, phase, amplitude, and polarization patterns governed by the Krag computers. Armed with the detailed specifications for those patterns, Nelson could set the ship’s own stealth and emulation emitters to emit pulses precisely timed to coincide with those of the Krag sensors, canceling out the enemy scans, preventing them from being reflected back or sufficiently weakening them so that the returns were below the enemy’s detection threshold.

  The men not directly involved in these activities watched tensely as the ship evaded the enemy scans, all the while drawing closer and closer to the Krag destroyer. Every man understood clearly the furious activity that kept the enemy unaware of the Cumberland’s approach and the increasing risk of detection and rapid destruction as she drew nearer to her target.

  Every man, that is, but one. Dr. Sahin spoke with his usual obliviousness into the edgy near-silence. “With all these baffling and inexplicable course changes, it is difficult to tell, but aren’t we getting closer to the Probable Detection Range for that destroyer . . . what are we calling it . . . ah, yes, ‘Hotel two’?”

  “We are,” Max replied.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

  “Quite sure.”

  “As long as you are sure,” Sahin answered, not entirely convinced. “But we’re not going to get close enough to be detected, correct?”

  “We are going to be detected. Absolutely. No question about it.”

  “But,” he sputtered, “isn’t that a bad idea? And don’t tell me that I can read the plan from my console. I can display the whole thing right in front of me, but it’s so full of your confounded tactical, topological, space geometrical, systems operational, computer cryptological, military situational mumbo jumbo that the only thing I can get out of it is likely to be a manifestation of your worn-out ‘three Bs of evading an enemy’ and ‘warfare is deception’ bromides.”

  “That’s ‘three Ms,’” Max corrected icily. Sahin cringed at the sound of his friend’s voice. One did not misquote Fleet Admiral Charles Lake Middleton around Max Robichaux.

  “Forgive me,” Bram said quickly. Max nodded his acceptance. Sahin continued, “In any event, at your repeated and, I might add, repetitious-far-beyond-the-point-of-being-annoying insistence, I have devoted extensive hours to the study of the tactical p
rimer in the ship’s database. Those same hours, I might add, could have been spent far more productively on tasks more directly correlated with success in my primary area of responsibility on board this vessel, which, I remind you, is the health of its crew, not the obliteration of its enemies. At any rate, according to my admittedly limited understanding of such things, when we get within the destroyer’s Probable Detection Range, is it not true that the ship in question will be able to compute a firing solution, and not only will it shoot at us, it will share the solution to the other seven ships?”

  “Yes,” Max answered blandly, “that’s exactly right. Your studies are paying off.”

  “This is one case where I would rather suffer in ignorance.” The pitch of his voice started to rise as he started to get wound up. “And isn’t it also true that, since those murderous rodents are now armed with that truly, truly wicked new faster-than-light, long-range Ridgeback missile of theirs, every one of those ships will open fire on us, even though they are many millions of kilometers away? All eight of them! Meaning that we will be dodging superluminal missiles fired by eight ships and not just one!”

  “Actually,” Max answered even more blandly, “that’s not quite true.”

  “Really?” Sahin sounded a bit relieved.

  “Really, Doctor. You left out the three ships guarding the jump points. There’s a better-than-even chance that they will want to get in on the kill by firing their missiles at us too. So, it could be up to eleven ships firing on us at the same time.”

  “Oh. Eleven. Thank you for that relevant and oh-so-comforting correction. And am I further correct in my understanding that the enemy has fired one of those damn new high-threshold Egg Scramblers, the kind that disrupts metaspace only at the higher quanta so that their superluminal missiles will function but we can’t outrun their missiles with our compression drive?”