To Honor You Call Us

by Harvey G. Phillips

  “And we have no reason to believe that the bloody thing is being used only to make the Chill, either,” said Brown. “Whoever has this beastly device could be making God knows what other pills for the men to pop and is selling them all over the ship.” Short pause. “Say, Doctor, what exactly are those Auster dots made of? Is the material anything that would break down in shipboard waste processing? It does most of the work with bacteria and enzymes.”

  “The material is some polymer that is impervious to digestive fluids. It is biologically inactive, so I never had any reason to learn the composition in more detail than that. I think it is very likely to be impervious to breakdown by saprophytic bacteria as well as by the kinds of enzymes used in waste processing.”

  Brown seemed to have grasped the thread of an idea in his hand. “And what is their size, exactly?”

  “One thousand microns.”

  “That big? That’s a tenth of a millimeter! I’ll be able to tell you exactly what we’re dealing with here. Captain, if I may use your work station, I need to get my people on this.”

  “Help yourself, Werner.”

  The doctor relinquished the work station and Brown sat at it, pulling up the text message utility, and then typing furiously for two or three minutes. He hit the SEND key with a certain relish and leaned back in the chair. “There. That should do it.”

  “Care to let us in on your brilliant plan, Werner, or are you going to keep it to yourself until you have results to announce? We know doing it that way is good for increasing the dramatic tension.” Max’s light tone took the sting out of the words.

  “Ah, yes, I was rather preoccupied with getting going on this. Gentlemen, as you know, the waste that goes down the head in your quarters and all the drains around the ship is rather heavily processed, particularly to extract the water for reuse. Virtually all of the mass is taken out, either by water extraction or by enzymatic and bacterial breakdown of the solids, but there is always a residue. We irradiate the residue to kill any remaining microorganisms, and then compress it into rectangular shapes that we call ‘black bricks’ because they are very dark, hard, and dry, and rather than tossing them into space we generally store them until we get back to a base because some Captains,” he said throwing a significant glance in Max’s direction, “are paranoid about an enemy being able to track our vessel or glean some intelligence about us if the bricks were found in deep space and their contents analyzed. We completely cleaned our treatment plant at Jellicoe Station and we’ve produced several kilograms of black bricks since then. So, I just ordered that representative samples be pulled and, pulverized finely, and then run through a particulate screen set to trap every particle between nine hundred fifty and one thousand fifty microns in size. My people will deliver the resulting particles to the Casualty Station, which has equipment for scanning objects of that size in detail, and we will know what our people have been taking.”

  “Outstanding,” said Max.

  “Let me call my people and give them instructions on how to get the results we need,” said the doctor. “They will need to exclude from the results the Auster dots from the Pharmaceutical Synthesizer in the Casualty Station, the ones from Jellicoe Station and the Casualty Stations from ships in the Task Force, and those from the five or so drug companies from whom the Navy buys pharmaceuticals.”

  “Why not just look for dots from this one MediMax?” asked Brown.

  “Because we aren’t certain that there is only one MediMax,” Kraft said. “We might have two or more Capsule Capitalists on board ship.”

  The doctor stood up and went to a corner of the room to have a lengthy conversation with his percom.

  “Let’s assume, for now, that we just have one,” Max said. “How do we catch him?”

  “That is a standard law enforcement problem,” said Kraft. “Generally, this is accomplished by having an undercover operative or a confidential informant put out the word that he is in the market for a purchase, after which he is contacted by the seller, a controlled buy is made, and the seller apprehended.”

  “That’s fine when you’re on a large station or planetside, or even a large ship like a Battlewagon or a Carrier, but it doesn’t work on a small ship like this one,” Max said. “The seller knows his buyers all too well. Except for some officers and a few senior NCOs, this crew has been together for well over a year, most of them for several years. Our man is not going to sell to someone he doesn’t know, and we can’t turn one of his customers into our undercover buyer because the jungle telegraph on this ship is way too efficient. This seller will know almost right away if we pick up one of his users.”

  “Why not just search the ship for the machine then?” Kraft asked.

  Max shook his head. “Ships are thoroughly searched for contraband every time they put into a station or receive any repair or refit. It this man has a MediMax on board, he has found some sort of brilliant hiding place for it, or it would have been turned up in one of those searches. If the refit crews didn’t find it, we’re not going to find it, at least not by looking for it.”

  “Until now, I’ve always been on stations or planetside, Captain, so I don’t know this. How do you get these people on board ship?” Kraft held up his palms in a gesture of inquiry and ignorance. Max was impressed that Kraft was so ready to admit his own lack of knowledge and to learn from someone with greater experience. This trait was anything but universal, particularly, for some reason, at the level of seniority jointly occupied by Max and the Major—Majors in the Marines and Army, and Lieutenant Commanders in the Navy and Space Guard.

  “You catch them by being observant and patient. It’s a standard command problem. Over time they always make mistakes,” Max explained. “The crew goes on shore leave and there’re rumors about some Able Spacer Second being flush with cash, buying drinks for all his buddies, eating at the high end restaurants, patronizing glamorous call girls, picking up expensive souvenirs and luxury items, that sort of thing. Or some crewman turns up in the Casualty Station obviously beaten by two or three other crewmen who are overheard yelling at him about cheating them or not giving them the stuff they paid for or going up on the price or cutting off their credit. Maybe you have a crewman who is a complete slacker but, seemingly, as if by magic, he has a superior who never puts him on report and two or three other crewmen who are all too willing to do his work for him. You see, one way or another, a man selling drugs on a ship is an anomaly, a deviation from the pattern. He has too much contact with too many people, spends too much money, receives too much deference, garners too much attention, and exercises too much power. Over a period of weeks or months, he stands out.

  “I’d rather not wait that long,” said Kraft.

  “Neither would I,” said Max, “but I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Brown smiled. “What if we don’t approach it as a law enforcement problem, or as a command problem?”

  “What kind of problem would it be then,” asked the Major.

  “An engineering problem.”

  ***

  An hour and a half later, Major Kraft, Lieutenant Brown, the doctor, and Garcia were in the Captain’s Day Cabin, ostensibly to share with their skipper a mid-morning cup of coffee. There was coffee, and there were even some reasonably appetizing breakfast rolls, but a morning pick-me-up was not the purpose of this little get together. The men were present to implement the Engineer’s idea without alerting the ship’s ever churning rumor mill that something was afoot.

  With a nod from the Captain, Kraft kicked things off. “The doctor has gotten the results of the Auster dot screening. There’s lots of Chill being taken, we estimate somewhere between thirty and sixty users, depending on how many are purely recreational and how many are heavy addicts. There’s also a smattering of other recreational drugs: mainly an assortment of the current generation of stims, a couple of the more popular pain meds, one or two of the muscle relaxants that people like to take with alcohol, and it looks like we’ve got o
ne or maybe two men on lucies.” They needed to find that last person right away. A crew member on hallucinogens was a serious hazard. “Every one of the dots came out of the same machine, so we’re looking for one guy. We ran the serial number and it’s a naval machine, last in official service on a Corvette, the CMD-1815. She made a forced landing on an asteroid in 2311 in some out of the way system and the crew died of hypoxia before they could be rescued. The ship was salvaged last year and the salvage crew logged the Corvette’s MediMax as having been destroyed. So, somehow, the MediMax from the CMD-1815 got from that asteroid onto this ship where it is poisoning our crew.”

  “Then we need to catch the bastard. Well, Werner, we are going to catch him, right?” Max asked.

  “I am loathe to make promises, but it is very likely we shall. The doctor gave me access to his database on the MediMax Mark XIV, which contained a complete set of specifications and schematics. Unfortunately, it did not contain the data that I needed about its electrical characteristics when in operation, so we built one.”

  “What?” Max interrupted in frank astonishment. “You built a working MediMax! In an hour and a half? That thing must have over a thousand separate parts.”

  “It’s not as though I worked some sort of miracle, you know. I had five men working on it in addition to myself, and some of those men are truly promising engineers. We got it done in just over an hour. In point of fact, it has only one hundred and ninety-three parts. We used all eleven of our FabriFaxes to churn them out. The main problem was the operating software, but we were able to copy the operating system from the ship’s unit which is compatible with the smaller machine. We got it built, calibrated, and tested. It is working exactly according to the manufacturer’s specifications.”

  Max looked at the doctor who confirmed Brown’s statement. “Indeed. I manufactured several samples of some of the more difficult pharmaceuticals and the device produced them in a manner identical to the factory unit. As far as I can tell, it is indistinguishable from the real thing except for the manufacturer’s markings and the color.”

  “The color?” Max was curious.

  “Yes sir, the color,” Brown answered. “The real thing is mostly green and yellow, the colors of which the Krag are so fond. Ours is in a proper naval color scheme: Blue and Gold.”

  “Ça c’est bon,” Max nodded his approval.

  “We tried to see if it gave off any special EM that we could pick up or had any other characteristics that would let us find it but we couldn’t turn up anything. Then two of my brighter electrical and environmental systems guys, Aaron and Liebergot, thought to measure the current this thing pulls when it’s producing medications. It turns out that when the MediMax is in the chemical synthesis phase of production, it draws different amounts of power depending on what it’s making but, at one point in the process, it runs a nucleon spectrographic analysis on the product, and when it does that, the machine pulls a current load of exactly eighteen-point-two-seven amps for three-point-two seconds, which is a lot for a device that’s not hard wired directly into the ship’s power grid to pull. So, I’ve set the computer to monitor separately electrical usage in every compartment throughout the ship and when we see a spike of eighteen point two seven amps, we have our man.”

  “Outstanding.” Max was impressed.

  “And the computer is set to notify Major Kraft or whoever the senior Marine is on duty of which outlet compartment is drawing the current,” said the XO. “The Marines swoop down on the guy, nab him and his infernal machine, and our drug problem is solved.”

  “You mean our drug supply problem is solved,” cautioned the doctor.

  “If you eliminate the supply, you eliminate the problem, don’t you?” Brown asked.

  For all his technical competence, Brown could be surprisingly obtuse when it came to the human side of the equation. “Not that simple,” Max explained. “There is an existing supply in the hands of the people who have bought these damn pills. This Rhim guy had seventeen tablets in his quarters. What’s that, enough for a week, plus or minus?” The doctor nodded. “If all we do is stop the supply, people are still going to have the drugs on their hands. Some of them are going to have enough for ten days, maybe even two weeks, which means they are going to be under the influence for that long and will be feeling the withdrawal effects for weeks after that. I won’t have a crew that’s back to normal for more than a month.”

  “OK. We need to take away the source and we need to take away whatever the men have on hand. I understand that,” Garcia said. “But, how do we do that? At last count there were exactly three point seven four bazillion places on a Destroyer to hide something as small as a few pills. Regs say we can search everyone’s quarters and effects any time we want, and that works fine when you’re looking for bottles of whisky or big bags of Havala weed, but pills? Some of them not much bigger than a millimeter across? No way would we ever find them all. Maybe I’m the pessimist here, but I don’t think we’d find even a tenth of them.”

  “Oh, I think you’re not being pessimistic at all, XO. But, I have an idea about how to handle that,” Max said, smiling. “I just need to get my hands on the seller.”

  “I’m afraid all of you have overlooked the largest ramification here,” the doctor insisted. “We’ve got dozens of addicts on this ship. When we cut off their supply, these people are going to go through withdrawal symptoms. The slang term for withdrawal from the Chill is ‘defrosting.’ When people ‘defrost,’ they experience nausea, anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness, headaches, muscle twitches, cramps, and a host of other manifestations. Many of these people are not going to be fit for duty, some of them for days.”

  “Perhaps, then, we should let well enough alone,” said Brown. “Certainly, the crew are slow and don’t learn very well, but at least they’re not throwing up on the deck, doubled over with cramps, or losing their temper with their shipmates because they’re ‘defrosting.’”

  Sahin had started shaking his head as soon as Brown began speaking. “Totally unacceptable. Totally. That is not a course of action that I can even reasonably consider. These people are doing physiological damage to their bodies and their brains. Some of that damage may be irreversible. It is my duty as their physician and our duty as their officers to protect them. Every man and boy on this ship is my patient, and I owe to each a duty to do no harm, even by omission. Gentlemen, we have a responsibility, all of us. The collective must take responsibility for and take care of its errant parts. The head must think about the body. The collective, of which we are the leaders, must protect the welfare of its constituent individuals or the collective will perish.”

  “But they are adults, Doctor, and trained Spacers to boot, not children who need to be told to put on a Mac when it’s raining and to eat their Brussels sprouts before they can have their pudding.” Brown said, rather loudly. “As officers we have a military duty to protect their lives, which means that we don’t risk killing them in action against the enemy imprudently, that we operate the ship in a safe and responsible manner, and that we provide them with oxygen and food and water and clean clothes and medical care. It does not mean that we have a personal duty to intervene in their personal choices. If we had such a duty, where would it end? Do we follow them around on shore leave to keep them out of the bars and the brothels? Do we stand over them off duty and take away their cigarettes and their cigars and their alcohol ration?”

  Max cut off the discussion before things got too heated. Besides, he had heard all he needed to hear. He had decided. “Thank you. What you said here helps me a great deal, not only because you stated your points of view so clearly, but also because you showed respect toward each other’s opinions, which can be difficult sometimes. I’ve been in dozens of meetings like this, and I’ve learned that nothing tends to destroy productive discussion any faster than folks assuming that differences of opinion are the result of the other guy being stupid or misinformed or ill-intentioned rather than being a consequenc
e of differences in philosophy or values. Can you think of a better way to alienate someone you are tying to persuade than treating him like an idiot? Maybe you can, but none comes to my mind. Anyway, you all have my thanks.

  “A lot of these arguments reminded me of a political debate between the Social Democrats and the Tories. As interesting as those points are, I have to base my decision, not on political theory, but on principles of command and military effectiveness. This ship is a weapon, and the crew is one of its components. My job as the Master and Commander is to make that weapon as effective as I possibly can, and then bring it to bear against the enemy to inflict the maximum death, damage, and destruction possible. That is the compass by which I steer. And that principle dictates my decision.

  “These men must be made ready to fight. All of them. That means we cut off their supply of this drug as soon as humanly possible, we help them through the withdrawal, and then we get them as healthy as we are able so they can wage war against the Krag. I appreciate the arguments, gentlemen. In another place and in another time, I could be a Man of the Philosophy considering the eternal question of individual versus collective responsibility. Or, I could be a Man of God and selflessly minister to and care for my fellow men. But today, here, on this ship, I am neither a Man of Philosophy nor a Man of God. I am a Man of War. And, as a Man of War I must do whatever I can do to make these men ready to kill.