To Honor You Call Us

by Harvey G. Phillips

  Next item.

  11:47/25JAN15

  Jinnah

  Confirmation of Spare Equipment Issuance

  He opened the item. It was a Memo, “as required by Standing Order 14-478,” confirming that the coffee pots and chillers that Max had ordered issued from Spare Equipment had, in fact, actually been issued from Spare Equipment, delivered to the compartments listed along with their respective serial numbers on Exhibit A attached thereto, and had been duly signed for by the senior man in that compartment. In what universe does the Quartermaster have time to issue a separate written memorandum every time he issues something from Spares? Logging the Order to issue the equipment and noting the date and time the order was carried out or put into effect is not enough? Wait a minute. Standing Order 14-478? That meant that at least four hundred and seventy eight standing orders were issued in the year 2114. A ship with a real fussy Captain might have a hundred or a hundred and fifty standing in orders in force at any given time. Thirty to fifty was more typical. Four hundred and seventy eight (and more likely substantially more) in a single year was beyond belief.

  He scanned through the list of communications he had received in the last day. Daily reports on virtually every routine activity on the ship, written memos when anything was issued or stored or used or replaced, daily inventories on various consumables, and on and on and on. No wonder every department on the ship seemed like it was too busy to do its job—it was too busy writing reports.

  And there was a memo from Doctor Sahin, dated yesterday evening. Max opened it. It basically said that the doctor had found out from Goldman that one of the sources of stress on the officers and senior NCOs was that they had to prepare too many reports. He recommended that Max review the reports required by the ship’s standing orders and eliminate the unnecessary ones. Great minds think alike.

  Max pulled up the file that contained all of the Ship’s Standing Orders. “There are 1,232 standing orders on file.” Damn, damn, damn. Max was kicking himself, hard. Why had he not checked the SSO file sooner? Stupid mistake. Correction. Another stupid mistake. He knew he couldn’t afford many more of those. “Display in list form, summary form, or as full text in order issued?” Max chose “list” and spent about a minute scrolling down looking at the reference lines: “Organization Of Cookware and Utensils In Galley According to Principles of Time and Motion Science; Eating In Quarters Prohibited Save For Personnel Confined Thereto; Use Of The Phrase ‘The Fact That’ In Any Correspondence Addressed To The Captain Or Being Sent To Higher Authority Prohibited; Authorized Nature of Any Issuance of Equipment from Spares or Stores to be Confirmed by Separate Written Memorandum To Commanding Officer; Sliding Down Access Ladders by any Personnel, Particularly Midshipmen, Prohibited; Display In Quarters Of Items Related To Collegiate Or Professional Sports Teams Prohibited; Cleaning Of Side Arms In Quarters Prohibited . . . sweet baby Jesus. He had never seen such a load of crap. He kicked himself again. He really should have checked the Standing Orders. This crew didn’t need to take drugs to addle its brains—they were already dizzy from chasing their own tails.

  The doctor had suggested that he go through the Standing Orders and eliminate those that imposed an undue burden on the crew—careful use of the scalpel. This problem didn’t need a scalpel. It needed a bone saw. No. A battleaxe.

  He pulled up the computer form for a Standing Order, checked the list of previous orders for the correct number, (only eleven so far this year, as Captain Oscar had been relieved on January 4th), looked up one small item, and began to type:

  U.S.S. Cumberland DPA-0004: Ship’s Standing Order #15-12

  Effective immediately:

  1. All previous Ship’s Standing Orders (SSOs) are revoked. “All” means all.

  2. The Model Standing Orders for Union Space Navy Destroyers (Small), USAdmPub 13-1885 are hereby adopted in toto as the SSOs on this vessel, as modified and supplemented by this Standing Order and such other and further Standing Orders as may be from time to time issued. Note: there are 27 Orders in the Model SSOs.

  3. The excessive reporting and memo writing on this vessel stops now. If a report or memo is not required by a regulation, a Fleet Order, or an SSO, do not, repeat do not, write it as I do not want to see it.

  4. The purpose of this Order is to reduce the paperwork on this ship from its current insane and obscene level to the merely absurd level normally associated with naval operations. It is not to stop you from communicating with your superiors. Accordingly, if you have something that YOU feel needs to be communicated up the line, go ahead and put it in a memo and send it.

  He hit the ENTER key. The computer chewed on the document for about half a second and responded: “Textual analysis indicates that this document deviates from the content and/or style customary for a document of this type. It is suggested that you may wish to delete this document or to revise it extensively before saving. Do you still wish to save it now?” Hell yes. “Order saved to Captain’s Pending Tray. Do you wish to Post to Crew immediately, Post to Crew at a specific later time, or retain the Order in the Pending Tray.” There was only one answer to that question. Damn the torpedoes, and all that. “Post to Crew Immediately.”

  There. That should put a stop to some of that insanity. He shook his head—what else had he missed? When and how would it rear up and bite him in the ass?

  Max gulped down the last of the cold coffee at the bottom of his mug and looked at his bunk. God, he was tired. Maybe a short nap. Just an hour or two. He had just about talked himself into it when his comm buzzed. “Skipper.”

  “Captain, this is the Chief Medical Officer. I am in C twenty-four,” Sahin announced formally. “I regret to report that we have a fatality.”

  “On my way.”

  ***

  Max’s quarters were on B Deck just forward of amidships, while C-24 was one deck below, and aft. Still, Max was there in less than two minutes, making a point not to look as though he were in any particular hurry or that anything was wrong. When he emerged from the corridor alcove containing the access ladder he had used to change decks into the main corridor on C Deck, he saw that he need not have bothered. There were at least twenty people in the corridor, milling about and talking, not to mention blocking his way to Compartment C-24.

  There was only one way to deal with this. When he was about ten meters away from the crowd he stopped and, using his best parade ground voice (one of the loudest in the fleet, truth be told), barked, “AH TENNN HUT!” Instantly, the milling, babbling mass of humanity froze in rigid, silent, attention. “I want this corridor cleared. If you are on duty, get to your station. If you are off duty, get to your quarters or the Mess or somewhere, just so long as it is not here. Now, MOVE.” In eight seconds, the corridor was empty, save for Max and the two Marines that someone had sensibly posted outside the hatch to C-24.

  The Marines, having gone back to Parade Rest when Max ordered everyone to leave, snapped to Present Arms as Max reached the door. When posted as a guard with shoulder arms, Present Arms was the Marine equivalent of a salute. Max saluted back, the men went back to Parade Rest, and one of them triggered the door.

  Max entered, encountering what appeared to be a snowstorm. Tiny white particles were swirling around in the air like snowflakes in the winter wind. The computer had put the air circulation system in the compartment on maximum, triggered by the presence of seven people in the compartment and that of unusually high levels of combustion products and particulates. Max scanned the room. What happened here was clear to him in about a second and a half. He had seen it before. More than once.

  Priorities. First, stop the snowstorm so people can work and think. “Computer, activate voice interface.” Few people used the computer Voice Command Interface, but the workstation was definitely something he did not want to touch right now and it would take too long to peck out the series of commands on his percom.

  “Voice Command Interface active,” said the purring contralto that someone back in Norfol
k thought was a good way for a computer to sound. Rumor, of doubtful veracity, had it that the voice was patterned on that of a centuries dead wife of a television producer. If so, that would be immortality in one of its most peculiar forms.

  “Initiate voice recognition protocol.”

  “Voice recognition protocol activated. Please state your name and rank.”

  “Robichaux, Maxwell T., Lieutenant Commander.”

  “Robichaux, Maxwell T., recognition successful. Please input command.”

  “Input two commands. Command one: Stop air circulation in this compartment. Command two: Activate AICLSS in this compartment. End input.” AICLSS was pronounced “ay kliss.” The computer voice confirmed the orders. Now, the air would be kept breathable by the Auxiliary Independent Compartment Life Support System which would extract the CO2 with a miniature scrubber and infuse oxygen from a reserve supply that would be replenished periodically from the ship’s main reservoir rather than by the brute force method of circulating high volumes of air blown in from the ship’s ventilation system. The white particles in the air began immediately to settle out, leaving Max alone in the compartment with Kraft, Sahin, a nurse, and four corpsmen. Not to mention the nearly decapitated corpse.

  As the man was clearly dead, the nurse was not necessary to assist Doctor Sahin and the Corpsmen would not be needed to carry the patient to the Casualty Station, so Max dismissed them. He then walked over to the work station, careful not to disturb anything. In front of it sat a man, in his service-issued “long-john” single piece undergarment, missing most of the top of his head. An M-62 pistol was on the floor near his limp right hand, and the remains of a pillow were messily comingled with his skull contents. Apparently, the man had used the pillow to muffle the sound of the pistol, exploding it and filling the room with disintegrated bits of the foam with it had been stuffed. After dying, the man had fallen over onto his work station, bleeding profusely onto the keyboard and touch interface pad. Bits of blood, bone, and brain decorated the ceiling, walls, floor, and furniture in a murderer’s parody of abstract painting.

  “Who was he?”

  Kraft answered, “Ranatunga. First name, Dayani. Positive ID from his Q-chip. These are his quarters. Age twenty-eight.” Max’s age. No doubt about the identification as Kraft had scanned the ID chip embedded deep in the left thigh muscle of every man in the Navy. It was called a “Q-chip” because it was embedded in the quadriceps muscle. “Chief Petty Officer Second Class. Assigned to the Tactical Section; he did Intentions and Capabilities in the Tactical SSR. Good record. Three Battle Clusters before being assigned to this ship. Outstanding FitReps. He was in line to be some ship’s COB in five to ten years or to do a rotation at one of the NCO Tactical Schools. One of our best. I’ll do the forensics, but a Greenie could put this one together. The man sat down at this terminal, typed a suicide note, took his service weapon, muffled the report with the pillow, and blew his brains out. No sign of forced entry or an intruder of any kind. Computer records indicate no one else in the room. Environmental monitoring shows a sharp increase in particulates and carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and the other gases you expect from a weapons discharge. This took place at fifteen twenty six and twelve seconds. And, yes, there is generally an alarm for such things. But, I think you can guess how this sentence ends . . . .”

  “Captain Oscar ordered that it be deactivated.”

  “Genau. Apparently, there were a few false alarms that interrupted him during his interminable Senior Officer Meetings. Finally, at fifteen forty-two and six seconds, the computer determined that no oxygen was being consumed in here even though it logged one person as being present, so it sent an automatic alert to the Security Station. I, personally, tried to reach Chief Ranatunga on the comm and on his percom. When he didn’t answer, at fifteen forty-two and thirty nine seconds I used my override to turn on the visual input on the work station. I saw a slumped man and blood on the lens, so at fifteen forty-two and fifty seconds I summoned the doctor and came directly here with two Marines. Computer records show the doctor using his CMO override to enter the compartment at fifteen forty-four and eleven seconds. The computer logged that he entered along with five other people—the nurse and the four corpsmen—I arrived at fifteen forty-four and twenty-eight seconds and posted the Marines at the door. When I came in, the first thing I did was secure the compartment, and it has been secure at all times since that moment. Nothing has been removed or touched yet. You, I, the doctor, and his people have been the only personnel in this room. I would regard this as a near-pristine crime scene.”

  Max turned to Doctor Sahin, who looked absolutely shattered. “Doctor, was he . . . .”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes. Oh, yes. He was. Absolutely.” He shook his head slowly, mournfully. “I killed him.”

  “No, Doctor, you’re wrong. This man had been dead for more than seventeen minutes when you arrived.” blurted Kraft.

  “Oh, yes, Major, you may be certain that I was sitting in my oh so comfortable chair in the Casualty Station, feeling very satisfied and capable, wallowing in the delusion that I was in control of the situation, watching some of my patients on a monitor, when this good man picked up a pistol and violently ended his life,” said the doctor, his voice dripping with sarcasm and trembling with anger, “but I killed him just as surely as if I had held the weapon to his head and pulled the trigger. His blood is on my hands, to be sure, and the smell of it will never fade. All the perfumes of Arabia shall not sweeten this little hand.”

  Max needed data, not self recrimination, and certainly not Shakespeare quotes. Macbeth? Great play. Definitely not the time for it now. “Lieutenant Sahin, I require a cogent report from my Chief Medical Officer and I need it now. Are you capable of delivering that to me?” He would have added “if not, I will summon your relief” but there was no relief for Ibrahim Sahin. He was the only physician on the ship. After him, there were a few nurses, a Pharmacist’s Mate, and some corpsmen. If Max needed a physician, he would have to figure out a way to get useful information from this man or do without.

  Doctor Sahin nodded slowly and sat on the man’s bunk. The blood had not made it that far. “Captain,” he said, “this man was one of the crewmen I was treating for drug addiction and withdrawal. He was a very heavy Chill user and his withdrawal symptoms were, initially, very severe. I prescribed Exemitrol to control the nausea, Anodynamil for the rebound anxiety, Niltremulin for the shakes, and Synaptoflex to speed his nervous system’s recovery. I kept him under close observation for eighteen hours and returned him to duty with instructions to check in with the Casualty Station every eight hours to make sure he was not having any additional symptoms. He seemed to be doing well and I had every hope that he would make a full recovery without any additional discomfort. My plan was to start weaning him from the medication in about thirty-six hours.”

  “If he was doing so well, why” he made a clumsy gesture encompassing the room “why this?” Max asked.

  “Because, my good Captain, a small number of people who take Anodynamil and Synaptoflex and who have residual amounts of Chill in their central nervous systems can suddenly and inexplicably experience sudden depression and kill themselves. It has happened before. It is right there in the literature for all the galaxy to see and I took no special precautions to prevent it. I should have kept him under strict observation until he was weaned from the medication. I should have had him in the Casualty Station right under my thumb where I could have kept him safe from harm. I was trying to help him reclaim his life and instead I killed him. I have never seen so much blood. Who would have thought the young man would have so much blood in him.”

  Great. Another Macbeth quote. An unlucky play. This is not going well. “How often? I mean, in what percentage of the people in this situation does this occur? Ten percent, twenty percent?”

  “One.”

  “Only one percent?”

  “No. One other case.”

  “O
ut of how many?

  “With this combination of drugs?”

  “Yes. That’s the only way it is known to happen, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. One out of two or three million, I suppose.”

  “Doctor, Doctor, one case? Out of two or three million? My God, man, one out of two or three million could have been caused by anything. Maybe he was exposed to cosmic rays that scrambled his brain proteins. Maybe his lover jilted him. Maybe his goldfish died. Maybe the drugs triggered a genetic predisposition to suicide. You’re the scientist, man, not me. You know better than I do that when you’re dealing with an event this rare, it is statistically impossible to identify causation. Even if you could, you don’t take precautions against a one in a million event. When I make plans, I don’t prepare contingencies for outcomes that are that remote. If you did that, you wouldn’t have the time or the energy to do anything else.”

  “But, I knew it could happen and did nothing.”

  “No, Doctor, you evaluated the risk and determined that it was not sufficiently likely to justify precautions against it. Big difference. Let me ask you this. Every drug you administer has side effects that can affect a small number of patients, right?”

  “Of course. That is a given.”

  “How many patients do you have, right now, receiving some kind of medication on this ship?”

  “With all of this business going on, slightly more than half. Under ordinary circumstances, just under a third would be taking some kind of meds, generally for minor concerns such as allergies, blood pressure, and sleep disturbance.”