To Honor You Call Us

by Harvey G. Phillips

  RE: Heavy Weapons Proficiency and Deck Mounts

  Pursuant to your order of 21 January 2315, I have reviewed this crew’s training history in detail and identified several areas of deficiency. Of the three million and two areas requiring immediate and intensive training, the worst, by far, is Repelling Boarders with Heavy Weapons. Review of the training logs reveals that this skill had not been drilled for so much as a minute since the ship was put into service. How about that! When I attempted to conduct a training exercise involving the mounting of an M-22 HASG, there was a definite “Oh, shit” moment when we discovered that the mount would not secure to the deck socket. The latch lever goes down and appears to engage and lock but when you let go of the weapon, its weight just pulls the mechanism out of the socket and the whole assembly falls over and hits the deck. Examination of the deck socket showed that it had been polished repeatedly to the point where it was too worn for the locking mechanism to engage it. When Aunt Emma said “if you keep rubbing that you’ll wear it out,” she was right!

  Some experienced Chief must have told Captain Allen that he was going to wear out the sockets. It won’t be hard to figure out who it was because I am sure he was still in the Brig when you took command.

  A spot check of the sockets around the ship indicated that all or virtually all are in the same condition—brilliantly polished but absolutely useless. Sort of a metaphor for Captain Oscar’s command style, don’t you think? Immediate fabrication and replacement of every bracket on the ship is recommended. Won’t that be fun? It is further recommended that we begin by replacing every fifth socket so that there are working sockets in every part of the ship ASAP. In that way, if we are boarded six hours after we start work, we won’t have all of the sockets replaced on A Deck frames 1-4 but no sockets anywhere else. That would be very bad.

  Smart man, that XO. Offbeat memos but very, very smart. And, it was a relief to Max to see that the problem would have been spotted and addressed even if he had not tripped going through that hatch. Max hit the comm switch.

  “Engineering, Brown here.”

  “Werner, this is the skipper.”

  “Ah, yes, Captain. I’ve been awaiting your call with bated breath ever since I received this sparkling prose missive from the XO scant moments ago.”

  “I need this done ASAP.”

  “Of course you do. If you were to request a task that did not have to be completed for a fortnight, I am quite certain that I should expire on the spot. In any event, I anticipated your order and have already started fabricating the parts. I loaded the specifications into a FabriFax as soon as I got the memo and the first socket came out of the machine three or four minutes ago. We are testing it right now to be sure it actually works—sometimes ‘built to spec’ doesn’t mean ‘built to work,’ you know. If it is satisfactory, we’ll start turning them out and installing them. We should have all one hundred and seventeen of them replaced in about twenty hours, depending on how long it takes to cut the old ones out. No one in living memory has ever had to replace one of these things without having to replace the deck plate as well, so we don’t really know how long it takes.”

  “Werner, you’re the best.”

  “Perhaps not, but I am the best you’ll ever get.”

  “You do know, Werner, that sometimes you border on insubordination.”

  “Only border, sir? That calls for greater effort.”

  “I look forward to it. Speaking of borders, what if we are boarded between now and then?”

  “Doing my best to ignore the leaden rapier of your purported witticism, I respectfully suggest, sir, that you endeavor to avoid that eventuality.”

  “Werner, one of your great virtues as an officer is that you are always ready with an idea I could never have come up with myself.”

  “We do so aim to please, sir. And, by the bye, we’ve not had a peep on that other matter.”

  “Thanks, Werner. Please keep me apprised regarding both these items. Skipper out.” Between Garcia and Brown, Max didn’t know who was the best officer on the ship. But, they were both damn good.

  ***

  It was 16:00 Hours, or 4:00 PM as a civilian might say, which meant the end of the Afternoon Watch and the beginning of the First Dog Watch, one of the two short (two hour rather than four) watches slipped into the rotation to throw the schedule “out of step” so that it repeated only every third day rather than being the same one day to the next. Long ago, some wit remarked that these were called “dog” watches because they are “cur tailed.” The joke remains fresh for each new generation of Midshipmen and will likely continue to be repeated so long as there are ships to be manned and watches to be stood.

  As this was the third day of the cycle, the Blue Watch came off duty and would not be going back on until 20:00, four hours from now. This four hour gap was both too short and at the wrong time of day for most men to be able to sleep, so the majority of this watch was in the Enlisted Mess, taking their evening meal, which many of them washed down with a fair amount of beer, wine, or stout. The Navy allowed enlisted men to drink alcoholic beverages on a daily basis, so long as all drinking took place in the mess, with careful records of each man’s consumption so that it could be regulated if necessary, and so long as an excessive amount was not consumed too close to going on watch. Men risking their lives and spending months or even years in space, away from not only their families and sweethearts, but also from sunlight and fresh air and the feel of sky over their heads and grass under their feet, were owed the opportunity to seek a little liquid comfort in reasonable quantities from time to time.

  At a table in the corner, four men who had seen more than their share of black sky out the viewport were partaking of liquid comfort in its amber, frothy variety. One of them was Amborsky, two were Chief Petty Officer Seconds each with more than fifteen years service, and the other was Heinz Wendt, the Chief of the Boat, the most senior enlisted man on board. Wendt, more commonly known by his job title as COB (pronounced “Cobb”), as was his habit, was doing far more listening than talking.

  The first CPO 2nd, a man from planet Highlandia named Voss, was holding forth on the subject of the ship’s new CO. Many of that world’s natives, known as Highlanders, sounded more Scottish than their kin in Aberdeen and Edenborough on Earth. “I dinna ken what to make of this laddie. On one hand, you can look around and see that the man has some sense, not like that craicte bastard, Oscar. Och, what a doo-lally he was!” Then, when he turned to practical matters, the Chief’s accent faded almost into nonexistence, something which always amused his shipmates. “Putting back the coffee pots, putting back the weapons lockers, replacing the deck gun mounts, at least the men are going to be awake when they stand watch and if we’re boarded we’ll be ready to give yon wee Squeakie the welcome he deserves. I mean, you’ve got to be pure gud for that, right?” The other men nodded sagely. “But the rest? Playin’ Stare Me Down’ with the Vaaach? The Queen’s Bloomers, boys! They’ve got to be five hundred years ahead of us technologically, not to mention bein’ foul-tempered and blood-thirsty to boot. I know Destroyer Captains are supposed to be aggressive, but there’s a difference between courtin’ danger and tyin’ it to your bedposts and havin’ your way with it.” He finished with his burr in full bloom again.

  The second Chief Petty Officer 2nd was shaking his head. He was a small man, but seemed to be made of tougher material than most, as though he had been put together from bone, sinew, and gristle rather than the mere flesh from which most men were assembled. He brought nineteen years of service to the table. His name was Tanaka. He began in a very good approximation of Voss’s accent, “The bagpipes are loud, laddie, but ya’ don’t know the tune.” He then switched to his normal, extremely precise, Standard. “You weren’t in CIC then, Vossie, I was. The skipper did all right in my book. The last two times this ship faced anything that smelled like a threat, it ran. This time, not only did we not run, the skipper deliberately subjected the ship to a calculated risk, we
handled the situation, and we’re alive to tell the tale. Vossie, most of these men aren’t like you and me and Mother Goose and the COB here. They’ve never seen the elephant. You get men ready to face danger by facing danger. He’s toughening them up for the real thing. He handled that Vaaach skipper all right. Stood up, told him how he’d killed seventeen Krag with a blade up close nose to whiskers, and got treated with respect like a hunter instead of being laughed off like a little, banana eating monkey.”

  The COB leaned back, took a long pull of his brew, and then fixed his knowing gaze on Mother Goose. “I heard one of the squeakers say a little while ago the Skipper gave them instruction in edged weapons. So, Goose, you got a good look at the cut of his jib today. What’s the brief on this guy? After Captain Oscar, this crew is due for a good skipper.”

  Mother Goose drained his mug and returned it to the table with a loud thump. He turned the mug slowly between his fingertips as it almost floated on the cushion of air he had managed to trap between it and the table, an airtight seal maintained by the thin layer of water that had condensed out of the air and run down its sides. He could make the mug spin slowly, but with almost no friction, with just a feather-light touch. Amborsky knew that the source for almost all of the water vapor from which the condensation formed was the crew: mostly their exhalations and evaporated sweat. Two hundred and fifteen men and boys, and his mug was floating on what was, quite literally, the distilled essence of their hard work and their very life’s breath.

  He looked up and met the COB’s eyes. “The skipper? I think he’ll do, COB. I think he’ll do.”

  Chapter 10

  07:08Z Hours 24 January 2315

  Spending his naval career eating in messes and Wardrooms, Max had never taken meals on board ship in an intimate setting with a small number of people, except for rare invitations to dine with the Captain, in which case he had generally been too nervous to pay attention to anything other than not trailing his sleeve in the gravy. Accordingly, before his latest promotion, he had never paid particular attention to what people ate and certainly never associated their food preferences with their backgrounds. It was, therefore, something of a surprise to him that, when the steward delivered the trays containing the breakfast selections of each of the officers present, Max could instantly tell which tray would be delivered to which man.

  Max was having breakfast this morning with the four officers whom he had begun to think of as his “brain trust.” Garcia, from Texas on Earth, was having a thick slice of ham, two scrambled eggs, bacon, biscuits and gravy, and grits. The doctor received a colorful assortment of fruit and melon slices, presumably all canned or frozen. Brown, born on Avalon, received a tray containing what Max considered a particularly large and peculiar array of dishes: baked beans, sausage, three poached eggs, fried mushrooms, toast, and bacon. When Max asked the Engineer if he had enough different kinds of food in front of him, he was surprised to receive “no” for an answer, as Brown advised him that the supply situation had rendered unavailable that traditional and essential element of the classic Full English Breakfast, fried tomatoes.

  Kraft, having spent the first nine years of his life on Neue Prussen, a world whose settlers were almost exclusively German, had a slice of pumpernickel bread, a few slices of Black Forest ham, a roll, some salami, assorted cheeses, jam, and honey. Max, from Nouvelle Acadiana, was eating a breakfast that bore a distinct family resemblance to that of Garcia, containing eggs, bacon, grits, biscuits, and sausage. The main differences between Garcia’s plate and Max’s was that Max didn’t have any ham, Garcia didn’t have any sausage, and instead of gravy Max ate his biscuits with the vaguely yellow, slippery substance the Navy supplied in place of butter. Max would have also liked some beignets, but the culinary staff on the ship could never get them completely cooked in the middle without burning the edges.

  From the moment the breakfasts were laid out on the small table and Max could see how radically different they were from one another (except for his and Garcia’s), they seemed odd to him, and the more he contemplated them, the more this impression of oddness increased. Why should it be that these five men, four of whom left their home worlds before puberty and in the intervening years had not returned there for more than a week or two, would retain in this meal such a clear marker of their origins? And, why this meal only, as Max knew that at lunch and supper what these men chose to eat, particularly given the limited selections afforded to them by the Navy, differed very little from one to the other.

  Perhaps it was nothing more meaningful than habit. Because there is usually a wide variety from day to day in what people eat at noon and in the evening, these men had learned as children to adapt to variety in what would be served for these meals. Taught from a young age to expect different things, when the Navy gave them unaccustomed lunches and suppers, they adapted as they had been taught to adapt from an early age. But, in most cultures, people break their fast with a highly limited variety of dishes. Accordingly, these men did not learn in their childhood to adapt to a changing menu and so, twenty years after leaving home, they insisted upon eating the same foods they had eaten as small boys at their mothers’ tables. The Navy implicitly recognized and accommodated this difference by offering a changing but limited bill of fare at lunch and dinner while providing an unchanging but very long breakfast menu.

  Because he was a leader of men and, as he was beginning to learn, a talented one, Max was always open to lessons about human nature. He wondered whether there was such a lesson on the table before him. He had always been taught that men were flexible—that they can adapt and adjust themselves to changing circumstances as needed. But, perhaps, this breakfast was telling him that, although men are adaptable, they possess this trait only when and where they have had to be adaptable. And, where they have not had the habit of malleability forced upon them, they are as rigid and inflexible as any toddler.

  Seeing that every man had finished eating and was sipping his coffee, Max opened the meeting. “I asked all of you here to breakfast because I thought it was a convenient way for all of us to get caught up on what’s going on without having to put a ‘Senior Officers’ Meeting’ on the schedule. First, Lieutenant Brown, any sign of our little drug factory being put to use?”

  “None so far, skipper, but the doctor has done some complicated statistical and epidemiological analysis—right over my head—and has concluded that some person with an existing stockpile is going to need to make another purchase within the next twenty-four hours.”

  “Twenty-one hours,” corrected Sahin.

  “So, we need to be ready to put the bag on this bastard sometime in the next day,” Max said. “Doc, are you ready for the fallout?”

  “As ready as can be reasonably expected. I’ve been making extensive use of the ship’s pharmaceutical synthesizer, the official one, to create a significant stockpile of the various medications I will need to help control the withdrawal symptoms associated with these specific drugs, have quietly prepared to sling hammocks for the Junior Midshipmen in the Senior Midshipmen’s quarters to open up the former’s space to use as additional in-patient beds for the worst withdrawal cases, and have drawn the necessary equipment from stores so that patients in that room can be monitored—vision, sound, and vital signs—from the Casualty Station. My staff has reviewed the treatment protocols for treating these people and I have refreshed my recollection of how to counsel them.”

  “Very good.” Max continued to be puzzled by the doctor. The man was so clueless in some ways and so brilliant and accomplished in others that Max could never figure out from one moment to the next whether the next thing he did or said would reveal shocking ignorance or astonishing adeptness. “Can anyone think of any other preparations we should be making at this point?” They all shook their heads. “Next subject. Major Kraft, what’s going on with our three would-be saboteurs?”

  “They have each stood at least one watch since we returned them to duty and one of them has stood two.
A Marine has been standing by each one of them with no problems so far. Each of them has had his meeting with the doctor. They return to their quarters at the end of watch with no protest, take their meals in their quarters, and have been going along with the program. My sense is that they all understand that you could have easily put them out an airlock to go dancing with the stars and that you can still do so, which is certainly a meaningful incentive for cooperation.”

  “I thought it might be. Thank you, Major. Werner, how’re they doing in terms of job performance?”

  “They were all reasonably proficient at their jobs before this happened and they continue to be reasonably proficient. They all had a lot of room for improvement before and they all still do. In other words, I’m not seeing any change. By the bye, having a rifle-toting Marine standing around in Fire Control around the clock is something that I thought might put people off their game, but I have seen no sign of it thus far.”

  “Doctor, they have each had a meeting with you. Have you learned anything?”

  “Well, Captain, the physical and psychological condition of these men leaves a great deal to be desired. They all show symptoms of having been subjected to severe and long term stress. Two of them have clinically elevated blood pressure and have been put on medication for that condition. The other one reports substantial and prolonged sleep disturbance, digestive difficulties, and a pruritis on his arms and back that I believe to be caused by stress. In addition, all three of the men show at least some level of anxiety disorder, which I am treating with anti-anxiety medications.”

  “Although it is not strictly relevant to this subject, I think it important to tell you that virtually every man who has come through the Casualty Station since we parted company from the Task Force has manifested some level of stress-related symptoms or anxiety disorder. I am giving medication only to the most severe cases. This is not to say that the same is true of virtually every man in the ship. I suspect that the men most vulnerable to stress are the ones developing symptoms and that it is these men who are coming to see me. Nevertheless it is troubling and it indicates that these men have had a difficult time of it. I am hoping that, as this vessel becomes a ‘happy ship’ these problems will ameliorate themselves.