To Honor You Call Us

by Harvey G. Phillips

  Pausing, and then reconsidering his tone, he continued more reasonably. “Have you ever stood a watch schedule?” The doctor shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose that you have. You are on for four hours. And then you are off, maybe for four, maybe for eight, maybe for twelve, then you are on again for four, and then you are off again. And, four, or eight, or twelve hours later, you’re back on. On and off. On and off. In three day cycles. And, that’s not counting the dog watches—where you stand for two and then go off again. There’s one day of the cycle where you will stand three watches: First Watch, from 20:00 to 00:00, Forenoon from 08:00 to 12:00, and Second Dog from 18:00 to 20:00. That’s ten hours out of twenty-four. One schedule for day one, one schedule for day two, one schedule for day three, and then it repeats. Forever. You are up working at all hours around the clock and have to try to sleep at all hours around the clock and it is never the same two days in a row. Try staying alert when your body never, and I mean never, gets to settle into a regular schedule.

  “It’s not just the watches, either, I wasn’t just in command of the Sensor SSR for the Blue Watch, but of the entire unit, all three watches, so I had to set up the training schedule, supervise the work of all three watches, do quarterly evaluations on sixty men, write daily sensor contact reports, daily sensor array utilization reports, daily computer core access and utilization reports, daily reports on the performance of the equipment my men use, maintenance schedules, daily calibration reports and schedules, discipline reports, and every month Captain Oscar added a new kind of report or wanted an old report done more frequently because reading reports was how he kept track of what was going on around the ship and you can’t work on those when you are standing watch, oh no, because you are keeping an eye on twenty different stations all at once, so you’ve got to do it when you’re off duty, and that cuts into your time for sleeping and eating and taking a crap and everything else in a major way. Sometimes coffee wasn’t enough, you know, so I started taking stims every now and then to get me over the hump. At least, that’s how it started.”

  “And you are under their influence at this moment, are you not?” As if there was any question. If the man were to write down what he was saying it would have all come out as one, long, run-on sentence.

  “Yes. I just came off watch. I still stand watches as a Mid, plus attending class and doing homework.”

  “Goldman, we want to help you but we need something from you. From what Green has told us, we estimate that you have between thirteen and seventeen Afterburner tablets—that’s what you call this kind of stim, isn’t it? Afterburners?” Goldman nodded. “Between thirteen and seventeen of these in your possession. We want you to turn them over to us. All of them. And wear a bio-monitor for thirty days so that we know you are staying clean. In exchange, we will treat your withdrawal medically, give you support and counseling, and not impose any discipline on you for any drug-related conduct between when you joined the ship until the moment you turn the pills over to me.”

  “What if I don’t go along? You mean I don’t get treatment when I run out of pills?”

  “I’m going to pretend that I didn’t hear that,” Sahin said stiffly. “I have taken a sacred oath as a Physician. I would never withhold treatment from anyone who needed it. Ever. You will receive the appropriate treatment at the appropriate time irrespective of whether you cooperate with us. But, I am given to understand that the Captain would discipline you for Possession of Dangerous Drugs, Consumption of Dangerous Drugs, and Reporting for Duty While Impaired or Under the Influence of Dangerous Drugs. I am also given to understand that he would bring a separate count for possession of each tablet, for each time you took a tablet, and for each watch for which you reported while under the influence. My estimate is that we would be contemplating at least three hundred counts, and more likely something like a thousand. I shudder to think of how long your sentence would be upon conviction on all those charges.”

  Goldman pondered that for a minute. “Ohhhh, I see. I get it now. This isn’t about establishing discipline and proving to us that we can’t take drugs in defiance of the Captain’s wishes. You have to understand, that’s what it would be about with Captain Oscar. What your guy is trying to do is to restore combat effectiveness in the shortest possible time. Right. That’s got to be it. You need everyone to turn in their pills now, so that you can get everyone through withdrawal or recovered from that slowing down thing you get with people on the Chill and back on duty ASAP. Am I interpreting my readings correctly?”

  “I’m not going to tell you that you are wrong.” Doctor Sahin could not help but smile. Even with his mind disordered by the stimulants, Goldman had analyzed the fragmentary evidence at his disposal and rapidly arrived upon the correct conclusion. If he could break the shackles of drug dependency and his self-defeating attitudes, this man could become an exceptional officer.

  “I sank a lot of money into those pills. I’d be throwing away several hundred credits.”

  “There are more important things than credits. Do not think of this as a matter of throwing the money away. Rather, I invite you to characterize it as, shall we say, tuition, the money one pays to receive a valuable education.”

  “There may be something to that, Doctor.” He paused, considering. The doctor didn’t rush him, as he knew that this man was weighing the alternatives using the best rational analysis he could bring to bear. Sahin sat in silence. He had seen this man’s mind at work and was confident of the outcome. “OK. Deal. Oh, Doctor, as one person who evaluates data to another, kind of a professional courtesy, I want you to know that your estimate is off.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In calculating the number of pills I have left, you made an erroneous assumption. You assumed that I am taking the pills only to prop myself up near the end of a watch. I’m also taking them to get myself going after a short sleep period, too.” Sahin made a note to revise his calculations with regard to other stim users. “I have ten tablets left, exactly. Where do you want me to bring them?” Sahin had no doubt that Goldman was telling him the truth.

  “To me. Personally. Put them in my hand. I will expect you back here in less than five minutes. And if you take any of them before you come, I will know.”

  “Five minutes.” He paused and turned back to meet the doctor’s eyes. Was that fear? “Bones, I tried to stop taking them before. It was pretty bad.”

  Yes, it was fear. While the doctor was reading Goldman’s eyes, Goldman was reading his. For the first time he could remember, Goldman looked into the eyes of a superior officer and saw sympathy, understanding, and—of all things—kindness. “Goldman, the entire staff of the Casualty Center will be here to help you through it. I am here to help you, as well. We will give you medication to ease your symptoms. If they become severe, we will put you in the Casualty Center and someone will be watching over you every moment. Remember, young man, you are in the Navy, and in the Navy you are never, ever alone.”

  Chapter 12

  05:17Z Hours 25 January 2315

  “Verify destination.” The XO could not hide the excitement in his voice.

  “Destination is Alfa jump point in unnamed system, catalog designation Uniform Sierra Nebula Galaxy Sierra four dash one-one-niner-five dash one-four-eight-six dash five-nine-one-two dash four-one-zero-nine. Coordinates as displayed.” Even Stevenson’s reading of unexciting star catalog designations seemed to carry with it a hefty dollop of adrenalin.

  “Very well,” said the XO.

  “One minute to jump,” Stevenson called out.

  “Jump Officer, safe all systems for jump,” said Garcia.

  “Safing.” Around the CIC, console after console went dark, to static, or to flat gray.

  “I want the ship stealthed as soon as possible after we come out of the jump,” Max interjected into the routine. The order was promptly acknowledged.

  Everyone watched the jump clock. Then the Jump Officer began the countdown, an almost holy ritual da
ting back even to before mankind’s first primitive rockets poked their noses beyond the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, all the way back to—of all things—a German silent film about a rocket launch into space. Real rocket engineers supposedly worked with the film’s Director to help make his movie more realistic, and when that Director came up with the idea of building audience suspense by using a count down from ten to zero, the engineers gave the cinematic idea engineering application in their own test launches. Art imitating life; life imitating art: a tossed coin spinning in the air, front and back blurring together into a single image. “Ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Jumping.”

  This time, no one retched. That was always a bonus. One man at Point Defense Systems was looking a little green, but he looked almost that green before the jump. He was on the closely-held list of men who were going through withdrawal. Five men, so far, had been taken off active duty: three were in their quarters and two were in the Casualty Station. The rest were standing their watches and doing their duty, with the help of a meticulous, individually designed medication regimen put together by Ibrahim Sahin, whose skills as a physician Max was beginning to suspect were nothing short of the Genius level.

  “Jump complete, restoring systems,” Stevenson announced. The now-familiar routine progressed as one system after another stirred from enforced slumber, sensor information started coming in, drives were restored and the ship inched into tentative motion to clear the datum, but this time the routine was not routine at all. The Vaaach map had shown the expected routes and schedules of four Krag freighters as they moved through the Free Corridor. As best could be told from analysis of the file, the original source of the data was the computer of a Krag vessel. Apparently, the Vaaach had met the Krag vessel somewhere in deep space, hacked the computer, and downloaded the file, which was not surprising given that they had sufficient skill to penetrate the Cumberland’s intricate system of serially redundant firewalls and lockouts to place a file in her systems without anyone being the wiser. Perhaps they hacked the computers of every ship they met, in which case the Vaaach must have accumulated an amazing body of intelligence.

  Two of the Krag ships were positioned so that the Cumberland could not reach them before they crossed into the Romanovan Imperium, a neutral power whose space Max was ordered not to violate. But, two appeared as though they could be intercepted, and Max was going to try.

  As always, Max needed to hear from Kasparov. Fortunately, the man and his Back Room had progressed by leaps and bounds in only a few days. Minutes elapsed with no ship contacts other than a few freighters crawling across the system at 0.05 c. Sensors typed and classified them anyway, and Comms pulled up their transponder information in less than ten seconds. They turned out to be a heavy ore carrier operated by Shoulder Freight Lines, ridiculously named Shoulder’s Boulder Holder and an eighty-five year old, bare bones, barely able to pass inspection microfreighter, its tiny hold full of small but high value items—gourmet coffee, something known as Beluga caviar, precision machine tools, and surgical instruments—bearing the improbable name Queen Mary.

  By the end of this cruise, this crew might turn out to be moderately proficient.

  Max saw Kasparov’s shoulder muscles tense and his hands fly to the controls for his console. He must have heard something from his Back Room. Here it comes.

  “Distant contact. Designating as Uniform seven. Bearing two-seven-five mark zero-five-three. Reading a bearing change from right to left and from bottom to top. Range is still uncertain but the weakness of the mass detection indicates it is in excess of two-five AU. Bearing change is rapid for such a distant contact and I’m getting a hint of a high Doppler as well, so am classifying contact as fast—probably a warship. Request course change to zero-niner-five mark zero-five-three to get a cross bearing on contact.”

  “Maneuvering, make it so. Make your speed zero point two five,” Max ordered. The ship came about to a heading perpendicular to the contact’s bearing. If the line of the first bearing to the target was the “b” side of a right triangle, the idea was now for the ship to travel along “a” side, or the base, to take a cross bearing down the “c” side, or hypotenuse, allowing it to calculate the range. Of course, Max could have the range measured to the meter in a few minutes with active sensors, that is, by targeting the enemy with a sensor beam. But, like nuclear submarines in the oceans of Earth centuries before, stalking warships rarely gave away their positions by using active sensors, preferring to detect their prey by the target’s own emissions while themselves remaining hidden until the last second. The deadliest attack was the one you did not see coming.

  Minutes passed, then the better part of an hour. Working a target takes patience and nerves of steel. And, with all the coffee Max had been drinking these past few hours, it also took a bladder the size of a beach ball. Max had needed to take a leak for the last twenty minutes, but hated to leave his station for more than ten seconds. If he didn’t go now, though, he’d be forced to leave to change his uniform. “XO, I’m headed for the head. You have CIC.”

  “Understood, I have CIC.”

  He was back in less than ninety seconds.

  “XO, status.” Tradition demanded that he ask, as if there is anything that could have changed meaningfully in a minute and a half that would not also be immediately obvious from the Main Status Display and the Condition Monitors.

  “Well sir, we have a priority signal from Admiral Webb in Norfolk. The Krag have surrendered and we are supposed to deliver the message to those guys.” He pointed at where the contact was plotted in the 3D Tactical Projection.

  Joke. And not a bad one. Garcia might just make a decent CO some day. Might as well play along. “Outstanding news, XO. I suggest you handle this personally. Put on your pressure suit, grab a flag of truce from the sail locker, go out airlock four, and tie it to the forward dorsal short range VHF antenna mount right away. Then, we’ll just run right up to them like we’re ready to invite them over for coffee and beignets.”

  “Sir, shouldn’t we wait for confirmation from Norfolk before I do that?”

  “Good idea.” Max reached over and slapped the XO on the shoulder. Who knows, he and this XO might weld into a real team one of these days. If they lived through the next three hours.

  Max would have been willing to kill or die to get more and better information from Kasparov, but the man couldn’t tell what he didn’t know. He was talking furiously to his back room, so they must be learning something. Max itched to know. He was used to being in the trenches, not back at the Chateau drinking champagne, talking on the field telephone, and moving markers around on a map. If he chose, Max could listen to their voice loop, or any other of the circuits between any of his CIC officers and their Back Rooms. For that matter, if he had the patience to navigate his way through all the levels of all the menus, he could pull up any display from any console in the ship. But no Captain with any sense did that (Max noted, though, that Captain Oscar had configured his console with easy navigation shortcuts to do exactly that—monitor loops, scroll through every display of every CIC console, and all sorts of other ludicrous micromanagement). Max relied mostly on what his CIC people told him, plus what he could tell from a few of the normal “CO Displays” that were on the standard main menu for the Commander’s Console.

  “Captain.” It was Kasparov. Finally. “Cross bearing indicates range to target is two six point seven four AU. Target motion analysis indicates target is bound for this system’s Bravo jump point at speed of approximately zero point five two c. Naturally, as we accumulate more data, we will be able to refine that estimate. And, sir, this is a very dusty system. Both we and the target are in the plane of this system, so our line of sight right now is right through the bulk of the dust and it’s obscuring visual imaging. At first, we thought that the target was enormous, but as we start to get a better angle the target image appears, under extreme magnification and enhancement, to be resolving into three ships i
n a line abeam formation. Configurations are not visible at this time, but from the amount of light reflected from each our best guess right now is that we are looking at the fast military ore carrier we were expecting and two escorts of some kind. Probably Destroyers, but they might be large Corvettes or small Frigates at this point. So, the largest ship retains the designation Uniform seven and we are designating the apparent escorts as Uniform eight and nine.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Kasparov.” Oh, yes, thank you so bloody much, Mr. Kasparov. Two, count-em, TWO probable Krag Destroyers. We wouldn’t want to make things too easy, would we? “Maneuvering, plot a course at a forty-five degree angle to the plane of this system with an azimuth that will put us on the six o’clock of that little Krag convoy while keeping us more than half a million kills away from them at all times. We’ll slide into their six and sneak up behind them from that far back.” Max wouldn’t normally give such a complex order to Maneuvering; instead, he would break the order down into a series of simpler steps and give each as the previous one was completed. But LeBlanc had impressed him so far. This man could handle what was just thrown at him, plus some.

  LeBlanc acknowledged the order, spent a minute or so working with his console, and then projected a proposed course in the tactical display. Max looked at it, saw that it was exactly what he wanted, and nodded to his fellow Cajun. The old Chief began giving orders to his people and the Cumberland started once again to crawl the duck pond.

  “Sensors, you will let me know when you get a better ID on the Krag vessels, won’t you?”

  “Affirmative, sir. It’s going to be a while. They are still very distant, their drives are masked from us so we can’t get a specident on them, and we are still too far for optical scanners to resolve a configuration.” Max had served his time in Kasparov’s position, so he knew all that. It didn’t make it any less frustrating.