Brothers in Valor (Man of War Book 3)

by H. Paul Honsinger

  He turned to his console and regarded the tactical overview display. He changed the scale and rotated the view to help him create a three-dimensional mental picture of the Cumberland, the star Monroe-Tucker B at the center of the system (typically referred to as the primary), and the jump point. The primary was just over 30 AU away and about 19 AU off the straight line between the Cumberland and the jump point. He pulled up a few data screens, including some seldom-used information from the scientific and historical databases, and reviewed them quickly.

  One moment he had no idea what he was going to do, and then suddenly, he saw it. Max knew that there was one way, and only one, that would get his ship and his crew out of this system alive.

  Almost imperceptibly he shook his head. It’s highly unorthodox. No one had ever tried it in a warship. And because it involved contact with a hazard that spacers were taught from their first days as a squeaker to give a wide berth, it would be viscerally terrifying to the men, and truth be told, more than a little daunting for Max as well. He took a breath and set his jaw.

  Damn the torpedoes.

  “Maneuvering, main sublight drive to FLANK, but keep us below .80 c so we don’t have to deal with too many relativistic effects. Shape course for this system’s primary. Continue to keep the debris field between us and Hotel eight as much as possible, but make sure to point the drive right at him every now and then so that he can detect us anyway. Make it look like it’s unintentional. I want him to get a good clear detection and to follow us without it looking like we are trying to get him to follow us.” LeBlanc acknowledged the order, and within a few seconds, Max heard the ship responding. He pulled up a NAV display that told him that the ship would reach the primary’s outer atmosphere in just over eight hours. At sublight speeds, even interplanetary distances were immense.

  Having made the decision to do what he was going to do and having implemented it, Max found himself both strangely relaxed and filled with a sudden exhilaration.

  DeCosta leaned toward him, trying to conceal his mystified expression. “Skipper? May I ask . . . ?”

  Max’s comm panel beeped. He didn’t need to look at the source ID to know who it was. “Just a minute, XO. The British are finding their upper lip to be in need of stiffening.” He keyed the circuit. “Hello, Wernher. What a surprise to hear from you at this juncture! How may I be of assistance?”

  The Cumberland’s Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Vaughn J. Brown, whom Max insisted on referring to as “Wernher” because of the accidental similarity of his first and last name—Vaughn Brown—to the surname of the great German/American rocket engineer Wernher von Braun, sounded as though he was having some difficulty maintaining his customary British reserve. “Captain! Sir! I looked at the course projection. With all due respect, you can’t be thinking of doing what I think you’re thinking of doing.”

  “Well, Wernher, I think that if you’re talking about the tactic you and I discussed in my quarters three nights ago, then, yes, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.”

  “But, sir! Our discussion of that issue was preceded by our having imbibed substantial quantities of that insidious whiskey you Yanks distill in Kentucky. Even then, it seemed a crazy idea.”

  “Wernher, one word of advice. Never call someone from Kentucky a Yank. I’ll explain it to you later. As for the idea, of course it’s crazy. But, Wernher, we’re going to be in serious trouble if the only ideas we consider are the sane ones. Remember what Commodore Middleton used to say: the general consensus of considered tactical opinion is that it is better to be crazy than dead. Besides, I think that this ship has already been saved by my crazy ideas at least two or three times.”

  “Actually, Skipper, depending on what you call ‘crazy,’ it’s somewhere between six and ten by my count,” DeCosta chimed in.

  “Twelve by my reckoning,” said Brown, “if we include today’s events.”

  “True,” DeCosta admitted. “I hadn’t tallied up the past few hours. There are at least two seriously crazy ones in there, for sure.”

  “Gentlemen,” interrupted Max, “this is an exercise in engineering and tactics, not accounting. When you told me that it could be done, Wernher, was it the bourbon talking, or was it your engineering expertise?”

  “A little of both, I venture,” said the engineer. “Actually, sir, I checked it thoroughly and had a few of my lads go over it as well, and it all checks out. Theoretically.”

  “It looks like Hotel eight has spotted us. He’s coming about in a very high delta-v maneuver,” Bartoli interrupted, and then listened briefly to his back room. “All right. He’s now on course two-four-four mark zero-five-three and is accelerating hard. I can’t tell at this range whether it’s Flank or Emergency for him, but he’s definitely in a hurry. And, yes, it’s within an arc second of a perfect intercept course. I’m sure he’ll refine it shortly.”

  “Either he’s detected us, or he’s deduced what we’re doing,” DeCosta said.

  “He’s a smart one, XO. And remember, that cross-range maneuver he pulled when we were nuking his buddies is only so-so for retreat but great for setting up a missile attack, so chances are, he’s pretty aggressive, too,” Max said. “Tactical, is he overtaking us?”

  “Affirmative, sir,” Bartoli said. “Just barely. When we reach the primary, he’ll still be a few minutes behind us. But by the time he gets in range, he won’t be able to shoot at us very well. We’ll be so close to the primary that its radiation and solar wind effects will be too strong for a missile-seeker head to track. Pulse-cannon isn’t worth squat there, either. The star’s magnetic flux tends to rupture the plasma containment field unexpectedly. Sometimes immediately upon firing.”

  “That’ll ruin your whole day,” muttered Levy from Weapons.

  “So, to hit us,” Bartoli continued, sharing a smile with Levy, “he’ll have to close within about fifteen hundred kilometers and fire his missiles from a generated bearing in non-homing mode—like firing a torpedo from an old diesel-electric submarine in one of the first world wars.”

  “So, back to the matter at hand, Wernher,” said Max. “I’m going to need you to pull this off for me in . . . ,” he consulted the NAV display, “eight hours and two minutes. Can you do it?”

  “Well, sir, Professor Nekton did it about eighty years ago. Of course, he had a specialized research vessel, with specially configured deflectors and hull optimized for heat rejection. On the other hand, he stayed inside for several hours, whereas you’re talking about only about a few tenths of a second, so our task is considerably easier.”

  “Nekton?” Sahin broke in, incredulous. “Auguste P. Nekton, the astrophysicist?”

  “That’s the man,” Max said warily.

  DeCosta reached for his console to query the database. The doctor made an impatient waving gesture in the direction of the console, as though he were a waiter shooing a fly away from a diner’s soup, presumably his way of informing the XO that the query was unnecessary. Sahin stood up, walked over to the XO’s station, and grasped DeCosta’s forearm urgently. “Lieutenant, Nekton was one of the leading astrophysicists of the mid-twenty-third century. He was a fabulously brilliant man, but he was widely referred to as ‘Nutcase Nekton’ because he took his research ship inside a star and nearly immolated his whole crew. They barely escaped with their lives.” He turned to Max, genuinely frightened.

  “You’re not thinking of taking this ship inside that star, are you?” The doctor’s voice had a distinctly accusatory tone as he pointed forward in the general direction of the system’s primary, which the Cumberland was now approaching at over half the speed of light and accelerating.

  “Sir,” Max prompted, his voice a pond of very cold water coated with a thin crust of ice, “you’re not thinking of taking this ship inside that star, are you, sir?” Very softly he added, “We’re not in my quarters, Doctor.”

  “Sir. My apologies, Captain,” Sahin said, loud enough to be heard by everyone in the compartment.

  �
��Apology accepted, Doctor,” Max said at the same volume.

  “It’s just a shocking idea,” Sahin said quietly.

  “It really is,” murmured DeCosta. “It never occurred to me that we could survive in there.”

  “It’s actually not so shocking when you break it down intellectually, Doctor, XO. I’m always looking for new ways to hide from, evade, or sneak up on the enemy, so I’ve been toying with this idea for months. What got Nekton into trouble was that he let himself get too close to the core: superdense plasma at ten or fifteen million degrees Kelvin—we’re not getting anywhere near it. We wouldn’t last a microsecond. This star is about a million and a half kilometers across, and I mean to slice across at a shallow angle, a chord less than 100,000 kilometers long, never going below the upper layers of the convective zone. The temperature there is in the neighborhood of 6000 degrees Kelvin. A thermonuke warhead is 10,000 degrees, and the shields are made to withstand that, at least briefly. At that depth the internal pressure is about one six-thousandth of sea level air pressure. The hull won’t know the difference between that pressure and a vacuum. Given that we’ll be through in about four-tenths of a second, those conditions won’t prove too much for us.”

  “But, Captain, why?” Brown asked over the still-open comm circuit. “What good does it do us to go through that star? Hotel eight will just follow us through or go around.”

  “He’ll follow us in, and that’s just what we want him to do.” Max smiled. A predatory expression. “XO, remember that technique Bales came up with for spoofing the Krag nav system?”

  “Sure, Skipper,” said the XO. “But we just couldn’t manage to come up with a way to use it in combat.”

  “I just came up with one.”

  ▪

  “We’ll encounter the photosphere of the primary in just over a minute, Skipper,” Bartoli said. “Hotel eight is one minute and twenty-eight seconds behind us now, and will be one minute and twenty-six seconds behind us when we reach the outer boundary of the photosphere.”

  “Very well,” Max said. “Mr. Bales, have you finished wrapping the little gift for our friends?”

  “It’s ready to go, sir,” he answered. “Complete with a nice pink bow.”

  “I can always count on you to make things festive, Mr. Bales.” Max keyed the comm circuit to Engineering. “Wernher, you ready to keep us from getting cooked?”

  “Aye, Skipper. Computer simulations indicate that we won’t get more than lightly browned. Deflectors are tuned for maximum thermal rejection and to keep the stellar plasma off of us. We may lose some of the sensor and comm arrays on the hull, but supposedly we’ll make it. In theory.”

  “Thank you, Wernher.” Weasel words noted, Wernher. He closed the circuit, sat back, and tried to look relaxed. The seconds passed. Glacially. Max tried and failed to ignore his damp palms.

  The reddish-yellow inferno that was the star Monroe-Tucker B grew steadily larger on the monitors until it filled them and the star’s burning surface was visible. Max had to will himself not to stare at it. At this range this system’s primary was not the featureless disk that Max was accustomed to seeing, but a seething, roiling, turbulent mass of living thermonuclear fire irregularly ejecting vast planet-size geysers of its glowing plasma essence into the dead blackness of space. The star seemed capable of ingesting and destroying whole worlds, much less the insignificant, mostly hollow, metal box that was the USS Cumberland. According to the instruments, the star was radiating huge amounts of energy, such as heat, light, gamma rays, and radio waves. To Max’s eyes, however, it seemed to radiate nothing but pure, undiluted danger.

  “Five seconds,” said Bartoli with the verbal equivalent of a cringe. “Four. Three. Two. One. Now.” Almost before men in CIC had time to frame in their minds the idea that they were actually traveling through the interior of a star, Bartoli said, “We’re clear.”

  Every man let out the breath he didn’t know he was holding.

  “Executing sickle maneuver,” LeBlanc announced.

  “Launching surveillance probe,” Kasparov announced.

  The Cumberland launched a stealthy surveillance probe to watch the area of the star from which it had just emerged as it carried out a sickle maneuver—a high G nearly ninety-degree turn leading into a curved sickle-shaped trajectory that followed the curvature of the star.

  “Maneuver complete. Now following the limb of the star 544 kilometers above the photosphere. Braking thrusters are at EMERGENCY,” LeBlanc called out after a few seconds. Having lost most of her velocity in making the turn, the Cumberland quickly slowed to orbital velocity for that altitude above the star. “Nulling braking thrusters. On attitude control thrusters only.”

  “Very well,” said Max, ignoring the increasing number of red and yellow caution and warning notifications appearing on his console. The Cumberland wasn’t built to do this, and she was starting to complain. There would be a price to pay. Later.

  “We should be in line of sight with Hotel eight in about five seconds,” said Bartoli. No matter how hard they tried, just about everyone in CIC counted down in his head. “Contact. It’s Hotel eight. Still on former course and speed. He’s twenty-three seconds from the photosphere.”

  A second later Bales said, “Package transmitted.”

  “Very well,” said Max.

  “No change in target’s course or speed. There’s no sign that he’s aware we’re here or that we did anything. He’ll be entering the photosphere in six seconds.” Bartoli dispensed with a countdown, as everyone seemed to either have his eye on Hotel eight’s position or one of the chronos displaying a countdown. “Hotel eight has entered the star.”

  Max, Bram, DeCosta, and just about everyone else in CIC who didn’t have something urgent requiring his undivided attention had their eyes on Bartoli. The tactical officer studied his screens and shook his head. “Surveillance probe is detecting no sign of Hotel eight, sir. It doesn’t look as though she came out the other side.”

  Max slowly smiled. “She didn’t. And she won’t. She’s gone, and we didn’t even have to expend any ordnance to do it.”

  Max hit a key on his console. “Wernher, damage report.”

  “Just a tic, sir,” the noticeably irritated voice replied. “It’s not as though my brain is hardwired to the ship’s systems. I have to call up the displays and actually read them, you know, instead of just punching the comm button and asking other people what’s happening.” The circuit hung open for a few seconds. “Sir, there are a few things I’ll want to inspect personally, but here’s my preliminary report. We lost just about everything that protruded more than a meter from the hull—comms masts, point-defense turrets, and some of the more oddball sensor arrays. We have replacements for everything in stores except we’ll be two point-defense turrets short. We lost all twelve, and we’ve only ten spares. Otherwise, everything seems nominal. I would rate our combat capability as 94 percent of nominal.”

  “Thank you, Wernher.” Max closed the circuit.

  Max turned to the Sensors Officer. “Mr. Kasparov, you’re the closest thing to an astrophysicist on board. What altitude would we want if we desired to reduce the strain on the deflectors and cooling systems but remain undetected by the Krag ships in the system?”

  Kasparov considered the question for a moment and pulled up a few displays on his console. “Something between 50,000 and 80,000 kilometers should do the trick, sir.”

  “Thank you. Maneuvering, adjust our orbit to 58,297 kilometers. Burn your thrusters after that only as necessary to maintain that orbit against the friction of the corona. Now, gentlemen, we have one last problem: getting past the ship at the jump point.”

  Ever since it had become apparent that Hotel eight was destroyed, Dr. Sahin had been suppressing what was obviously extreme curiosity and frustration. When he could restrain himself no longer, he blurted out, “Is no one going to tell me what happened to that ship? Or do I have to wait to find out in the year 2347 when Admiral Max Robichau
x, Union Space Navy (Retired), publishes his memoirs?” He turned to Max. “Presumably your editor will cause the book to be written in plain Standard rather than in arcane naval jargon and polysyllabic aerospace gobbledygook. Or at least, require that you provide a glossary.”

  “Well, Doctor, it’s simple,” Max replied, working very hard not to laugh, which would only make Bram angrier. “He burned up inside the star.”

  “Why did he burn up when we did not?”

  “Because we stayed in the upper photosphere, and he went straight toward the core, although I doubt that he made it that far.” The statement did nothing to cure Sahin’s perplexity. Max made eye contact with Bales and gave him a go-ahead gesture.

  “Doctor, space navigation is dependent upon measuring distance, direction, and speed relative to a fixed point in space. We use the center of our galaxy—it’s not really fixed, but we tell the computer that it is. The term for that point, going back to Jurassic Space, is REFerence to Stable Member MATrix, or REFSMMAT. We found that one of the few functions on the Krag computer not protected by a biometric lockout was an almost-never-used routine for changing the REFSMMAT. We guess it wasn’t locked out because no one ever uses it and because the computer checks its navigation against what its star scanners are seeing several times a second. Anyway, just before the Krag ship went into the photosphere, we sent a command to wait half a second and then change the REFSMMAT. The computer couldn’t correct the error with star scans because it couldn’t see the stars from inside the primary. So, following its instructions to stay on the same course, the computer veered radically because we had moved the point from which that course was measured. The ship turned straight toward the star’s center. At the speed they were going, they were vaporized before they knew what hit them.”