Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  “That’s right.”

  “So, at least from my simplistic tactical perspective, you might forgive me for saying that this plan of yours looks to be a wonderfully superlative way to set us on the short road to jinnah. Correct?”

  “Correct on both counts,” Max said.

  “Both counts?” Sahin croaked, the blood draining from his face.

  “Both counts. Correct, I forgive you for saying so, and correct, it looks like the short road to heaven. Don’t worry. It’s not. I assure you, my friend, I have no plans to stand before the pearly gates today and account for my actions in this life. Notre cher amis, les nique à rats out there, on the other hand,” he gestured toward the enemy ships displayed in the tactical projection, “at least most of them, should be having to explain themselves to Sainte-Pierre very shortly.”

  “Skipper, our range to Hotel two is just under two million kilometers. It’s starting to get a little tight,” announced Chief LeBlanc. Because the sensor beams emitted by the destroyer designated as Hotel two radiated outward from that vessel like the spokes of a wheel, the space between the beams became ever narrower as the Cumberland closed the range. Soon the beams would be so close together that even the splendid ship handling of the men under LeBlanc’s direction could not keep the ship from being caught by a high-intensity scan at what was now very close range. In that event no stealth technology possessed by the Union could thwart detection.

  “Very well, and well done, Mr. LeBlanc. Maneuvering, maintain stealthy approach. All stations prepare to execute Phase Two. Mr. Kasparov, notify me as soon as we’re scanned with anything strong enough to generate a detectable return.” Thanks to the Krag data, Mr. Kasparov now knew to a very high level of precision what that threshold was.

  “Aye, sir. You’ll know that very second.”

  “Mr. Kasparov.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Better make it that half second.”

  “Understood. Half second, it is.”

  After abating somewhat in the face of the banter between Max and Bram, the tension in CIC had snapped back to its previously high level and was rising. Max could hear it in the tone of the watch standers’ voices as they spoke to each other and to their back rooms. He could see it in the nervous shuffling of their feet, their anxious squirming in their seats, and the covert wiping of sweaty palms on the legs of their uniforms. He could smell its acrid scent in the air.

  He couldn’t blame them. Max had been in command of the Cumberland only since 21 January. Before then, since its commissioning the ship had been under the command of the inept—perhaps even mentally ill—Commander Allen K. Oscar, and although he had done everything short of abusing the crew with the cat-o’-nine-tails to ensure that every surface and fitting on the ship had gleamed from being cleaned within a millimeter of its life, the crew had experienced nothing but humiliation in fleet exercises and defeat in battle. Certainly since the change in command, this crew had met the enemy several times under Captain Robichaux and had been victorious on each occasion, but—as Max liked to say—they had gotten only a few forkfuls of good food to dispel the taste of years of slop.

  And now, once again, they were going into battle together.

  “We were just painted, Skipper,” announced Kasparov. “High-frequency tachyon radar, synthetic aperture, five-centimeter band. Signal strength is 136 Dusangs per square meter. That’s at least five times the Krag detection threshold.”

  Max came to his feet without any conscious decision to do so. “Phase Two: Execute.”

  As with Phase One, the script was already written. The actors merely had to follow their cues and carry out their parts. Mr. Nelson disengaged most of the ship’s stealth systems and extended the thermal radiator fins, allowing the Cumberland’s electronic and thermal signatures to make her presence plainly visible to Krag sensors. At that same moment, Mr. Sauvé at Countermeasures activated a program—quickly but meticulously written by himself and Mr. Levy at Weapons—that loaded an unusual response code into the ship’s IFF transponder. Meanwhile, the men around CIC quickly and efficiently armed weapons, engaged deflectors, enabled point-defense systems, ran the main sublight drive to Emergency, and pointed the ship’s bow right at Hotel two. In a few seconds, the Cumberland was accelerating hard on a collision course with the enemy destroyer.

  Once the humans were visible to enemy sensors, both the Krag and every man on the Cumberland knew that the orthodox tactical solution in this situation was what Union tacticians called ELEVES (pronounced “elves”), an acronym for ELude, EVade, and EScape. Essentially, ELEVES meant that when confronted by a vessel or vessels of superior force, the destroyer should use its speed and stealth to elude and evade the enemy, all while biding its time until the Krag made a mistake that allowed it to escape and get away for good.

  Given, however, that conventional tactics applied to this situation would result in the eventual but certain destruction of the Cumberland and the valiant, but futile, death of its crew, Max had other ideas. The Cumberland wasn’t eluding. The Cumberland wasn’t evading. The Cumberland wasn’t escaping.

  Alone, outnumbered eight to one and facing at least a twenty-five to one disadvantage in firepower, the USS Cumberland was attacking.

  “Hotel two is reacting as anticipated.” Bartoli narrated the action, much as would a sports announcer—a sports announcer who would die if the home team lost, which tended to lend a certain excitement to the commentary. “She’s engaging deflectors, enabling point-defense systems, energizing the missile-targeting scanners, and reorienting to unmask her missile tubes and most powerful pulse-cannon batteries. She is not, repeat not, under acceleration at this time. She should have a firing solution in about thirty seconds. The other ships are maintaining their relative positions in the formation.”

  Generating a firing solution required thirty seconds because doing so not only required that the Krag know the location of their target, but also that they compute the humans’ course and speed. One aims missiles, not at where the target is now, but at where it will be when the missiles arrive.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bartoli,” said Max.

  “Why isn’t the Krag ship moving?” asked Sahin. “I seem to recall your telling me once, ‘mobility is the essence of naval warfare,’ or something like that—one of your typical military aphorisms that has the benefit of being both quotably pithy and entirely uninformative.”

  “Her skipper doesn’t think he needs to move,” Max responded. “All he’s looking to do is get a firing solution and blow us to flaming atoms ASAP, without any fancy footwork. That new Ridgeback missile of theirs gives them such an enormous range advantage that he plans to just sit there, launch, and watch us die—he thinks he’s got nothing to worry about.”

  “Does he?” Sahin asked.

  Clouseau picked that moment to emit a loud, rumbling purr, after which he rolled over and draped himself over the doctor’s leg like an impossibly rotund yet almost perfectly limp black fox stole, the very picture of feline relaxation.

  Max simply looked at the cat and smiled.

  “We are well within Hotel two’s weapons range. He should have a firing solution in the next few seconds,” Bartoli announced, unable to eliminate a certain subtle but definite “oh shit” tone from his voice. “At that time Hotel two will still be more than half a million kills beyond our maximum weapons range.”

  “Very well. Steady, boys, steady.” Max quoted the age-old naval song. It actually helped.

  “Missile launch detection,” Bartoli sang out. “Two seeker heads, Ridgeback type, designating as Vampire eleven and Vampire twelve. Bearing zero-four-seven mark two-one-two. Speed zero point two c. My opinion is that the missiles are set for reduced velocity to allow more time for target acquisition. Estimating run time at this speed at thirty-five seconds.” Pause. Three beats. “Bearing to Vampires is constant. Seekers have locked on and gone to terminal acquisition mode. Missiles are now accelerating to defeat countermeasures. Revised projected
impact: fifteen seconds.”

  The doctor made a choked sound. “Aren’t you going to evade?”

  “Nope. Friendly ships don’t evade.”

  “But we’re not . . .”

  “Vampires now sending IFF interrogation.” Pause. “Response transmitted.” Although the crew of the Krag ship knew the Cumberland was an enemy vessel and didn’t bother to confirm that with an Identification Friend or Foe signal, the missiles, on the other hand, were equipped with an IFF system to prevent accidental attacks on other Krag vessels. The Krag were supremely confident that the Union could never duplicate their complex and constantly shifting IFF codes.

  But with the aid of the captured data, the Cumberland was able to transmit a valid response to the missiles’ IFF signal. Because their target properly identified itself as a friendly ship, the missiles broke off their attack, veered off onto harmless trajectories, shut down their seeker heads, nulled their drives, and safed their warheads.

  The two Ridgeback missiles stayed that way for exactly 4.1557 seconds while their onboard computers accessed a deeply secret routine buried in the innermost interstices of their programming, compared the instructions they found there with the IFF response received from the Cumberland, and calculated an appropriate action.

  Hotel two’s commander, no fool by any stretch of the imagination, recognized that the humans had somehow spoofed the missiles’ IFF transponders. No matter. He would use his superior firepower to close whisker tips to whisker tips with the humans and pound their last-of-the-litter vessel to a pile of seed hulls. Just as he had given the order and begun to anticipate the upcoming glorious pulse-cannon duel, his tactical officer told him that the two missiles had reactivated their seeker heads.

  How peculiar.

  Searching for an explanation for this unexpected development, he quickly pulled up the IFF response transmitted by the human vessel and had the computer find which vessel had that code assigned to it. When that information appeared, the commander’s ears stood up, and his tail bent suddenly and sharply to the right, instinctive signs of extreme alarm. Effective leader that he was, however, the commander quickly mastered his emotions, relaxed his ears, and restored his tail to its proper orientation. He didn’t know what the missiles would do with the information they had just received, but he feared the worst.

  According to the message, now flashing an alarming shade of blue at the lower left of the commander’s master display, the Cumberland had not just identified itself as a run-of-the-mill Krag warship. Rather, she had identified herself to the missiles as the Personal Yacht and Royal Space Barge of Her Magnificent and Imperious Luminescence, the Dowager Matriarch and Birth Mother of the High Hegemon. In other words, the IFF return signal told the missiles that the Krag Queen Mother was on board.

  With a history of political and dynastic assassination that made the Borgias look like the Von Trapp Family Singers, the Krag were not only treacherous, but scrupulously vengeful. The Krag language didn’t even have a word for “loyalty.” Accordingly, all Krag missiles had programming hardwired directly into the deep recesses of their processor architecture, specifically designed to exact vengeance against any vessel or installation that dared to fire a weapon against a member of the Hegemon’s family line. In accordance with that programming, after just over four seconds’ computation to verify their instructions, confirm the correctness of the IFF signal, recheck the identity of the launching ship, determine that they were not launched by accident, and check for the presence of an overriding instruction from the Hegemon himself, the missiles pivoted, locked on their seekers, ran their drives up to maximum, easily blew past countermeasures and defensive systems designed for subluminal Union missiles, and blotted Hotel two from space in a flare of fusing hydrogen.

  “Hotel two destroyed!” Bartoli announced with the mandatory obviousness associated with his post.

  “The three nearest Lehrer-Lobachevsky planes are also gone,” came the follow-up announcement from Kasparov. With Hotel two now a rapidly dissipating cloud of disassociated atoms, three faces of the Krag detection enclosure winked out of existence. The door to escape was now open.

  “Phase Three: Execute,” said Max.

  The Cumberland slightly altered its course so that it went straight into the rapidly dissipating fireball that had just engulfed the Krag ship, now attenuated enough that it did not overwhelm the deflectors but still the locus of enough heat, hard radiation, and electromagnetic energy to screen the destroyer from enemy sensors. Upon reaching a set of predetermined coordinates, Maneuvering executed a radical course change.

  “On new course two-three-five mark zero-two-one,” announced LeBlanc. “Speed zero point one-five c.”

  “All stealth modes reengaged,” said Nelson.

  “There are a lot of people who would say that we should have kept going right through that vertex and made a run for it,” DeCosta said confidentially.

  “True, and that was my first impulse,” Max replied. “But they’ve got cruisers at all the jump points. That means before we could jump out, we’d have to engage and defeat a ship of greatly superior firepower. While we were doing that, the remaining ships from this battle group would catch up with us. And with one of them being a Barbell class battlecruiser with easily a dozen times our firepower, maybe more, that would not be a winnable fight. No, XO, we’ve got to whittle down the odds some before we can try to jump out of here.”

  “There are also a lot of people who would say that heading right back into the enclosure we just blew up a destroyer to escape from is . . . um . . . well . . . unorthodox, sir.”

  “It’s what you Tiger Team guys came up with, XO. And it’s also not what the rat-faces are expecting.” He raised his voice so that it could be heard throughout CIC. “Tactical, I need a report on activity of the enemy vessels.”

  “Sir,” Bartoli responded, “they’ve taken the bait. Vessels have adopted pursuit courses, apparently based on the assumption that we continued our previous course of approximately zero-five-zero mark two-one-zero. I’m projecting our assumed course in blue. Projected enemy courses are coming up on the tactical display now in orange.” Orange arrows appeared, showing the current courses of each of the red dots, all angled to intercept the blue line.

  “Very well. And what’s the Barbell up to?”

  “That would be Hotel six.” He entered a command on his console, and the red dot that had been in the upper left corner of the cube started to blink. “He’s fallen into the same course as the others, but he’s on a slower acceleration profile, following the standard Krag pattern where the command ship of any formation of four or more ships hangs back to coordinate rather than participate in the battle unless needed.”

  “Outstanding. That will open up some range between him and the other ships, exactly as we expected. Maneuvering, continue to adhere to the battle plan.”

  “ETA at the intercept point is eight minutes and nineteen seconds,” said LeBlanc. The Cumberland altered course and speed so that it would soon emerge from the fireball and insert itself in the space between the formation of Krag ships sent to intercept it and the battlecruiser following them to coordinate their attack.

  Max regarded the Countermeasures console, almost straight ahead of him. He could see that Sauvé was frantically busy there, as were three other people from his back room, as well as Bales, whose relief was at the Computers Station while he assisted Sauvé. Max could do nothing to help these men. Either these specialists would solve the problem before them, or everyone onboard the Cumberland would die less than eight minutes from now. Their task had to be completed between the instant a few moments ago, when the Cumberland got within range of certain short-range transceivers on board the enemy battlecruiser, and when the battlecruiser armed its weapons to fire on the humans. Staring at the men wouldn’t help, so Max pulled up a set of status displays on his console and checked the readiness of weapons, engines, and other systems for what was to come. He did his best to immerse himself i
n that review, checking for anything that his still undertrained and largely unseasoned crew might have missed. He caught a few minor mistakes that he corrected with a few carefully chosen words over the voice loops. Just as his concentration was starting to fray under the friction inflicted by the ever-increasing tension, he heard a strange popping noise.

  Max looked up, and he saw the men at Countermeasures slapping each other on the backs and, in some cases, somewhat lower. “We did it, sir,” Sauvé said. “Command transmitted and acknowledged.”

  “Outstanding, gentlemen. Simply outstanding. Officer of the Deck, log my order for an extra spirits ration for every man presently standing at the Countermeasures console, now in the Countermeasures Back Room, or in the Computers Back Room, effective the next time we are on Condition Blue or lower.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” answered Sauvé, both the Officer of the Deck and the most conspicuous beneficiary of the order. Mr. Sauvé was rather fond of a particular golden-colored spirit known as tequila.

  Max looked at his coffee mug and noticed that Hewlett had refilled it unnoticed. Max met the boy’s eyes, pointed at the mug, and nodded his thanks. Hewlett mouthed, “Anything else, sir?”

  Max shook his head gently.

  “Intercepting Hotel six’s course . . . now,” announced LeBlanc. “Altering course to approach Hotel six head-on.”

  Dr. Sahin’s head snapped around at that announcement. “Head-on? You’re attacking that huge battlecruiser head-on? We won’t last a minute!”

  “Doctor,” Max said, “we’ll last considerably longer than that.” He turned to the Stealth Console. “Mr. Nelson, I think it’s time for you to unleash your inner thespian.”

  “Aye, sir,” he answered, actually grinning with enthusiasm rather than grimacing in fear as most of the CIC crew were doing not too long ago. Destroying that first ship had been tonic for everyone’s spirits. “The show begins now.” He keyed in a command that started a sequence of events designed for viewing and consumption by Hotel six’s command crew.