To Honor You Call Us

by Harvey G. Phillips

  “You would not be the first to make that mistake, surely. General Grant must have seen it many times.”

  “No, I’m not the first, but the next time I make that mistake, it might be my last. In that case, everyone on board would die with me. It was an unforgivable error.”

  “Nonsense. Ridiculous.” the doctor said with unexpected vehemence.

  “No, Doctor, you weren’t there. It was a clear error in judgment.”

  “I’m not disputing that it was an error. In fact, for the sake of argument, I am willing to grant you that it was a profound error, of incalculable enormity. What I am disputing is that the error was unforgivable. There is no such thing as an unforgivable error.” He grew grave. “Truly. I mean this most sincerely. That is one of the most important things that you, I mean you most personally and particularly, must learn as a commander and as a man. There are almost always chances of ameliorating the consequences of the wrong and there is always the prospect of forgiveness. Always. We are all the children of a merciful God. We are all imperfect, flawed, weak, limited, and prone to temptation and error. If we are contrite, strive to right our wrongs, and to abjure that transgression in the future, and if we earnestly and humbly beg his forgiveness, Allah will bestow it upon us. And, if you are yourself forgiving of faults and errors in others, you will find that men will forgive your errors as well.”

  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A line from the most famous prayer in my faith. I’m not sure I ever understood, really understood, what that meant. Until now.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps there is more for you to learn. In any event, the crew certainly knows all about the incident with the Krag weapon and, almost to a man, they hold you blameless. You are very well liked by all but a few on board.”

  “Well, maybe I won’t be so popular after I do what I have to do with these human prisoners off the freighter.”

  “You’ve decided?”

  “There isn’t much to decide. Their IDs were all forged, so we ran their DNA through the system. It turns out that they are all in the database. They’re citizens of the Union, every one. So, they’re not enemy combatants, to be treated as prisoners of war. They’re not neutrals, to be sent to a labor camp for five years or so and then repatriated. They’re traitors, plain and simple. Fils de putain.”

  “Why would anyone do such a thing?”

  “Thirty pieces of silver. The same old low treachery repeated down through the ages where a man takes his noblest loyalty and sells it to the highest bidder for a greasy bag of dirty coins. They didn’t do a very good job of covering their tracks in the ship’s computer. On delivery to a Krag Cruiser just inside their space, the freighter Captain was going to get three percent of the gold and each of the rest of the crew one percent.”

  “What were the Krag going to buy with the gold anyway? I thought they usually used their pharmaceuticals and high speed computer cores for foreign exchange.”

  “Not a thing. They have plenty of purchasing power. What they don’t have plenty of is gold. I mean the actual metal—it’s an accident of geology that most of their planets are poor in heavy metals: gold, mercury, and so forth. They need gold for industrial purposes, mainly for electrical contacts in precision equipment on their warships. Intelligence says they have a real shortage, even to the extent that it is becoming a bottleneck in their industrial production. And a little goes a long way. Forty-two metric tons is at least a year’s needs for their whole military industrial complex. Taking this cargo will put a real dent in their plans.”

  “But, if Gold is so precious, why would the Krag pay the freighter crew with it rather than something else that is less valuable to them: Romanovan Sestertii, notes on a neutral bank, pharmaceuticals that are readily sellable on the black market?”

  “My guess is that the freighter rats wouldn’t have been paid at all. Once that freighter got into Krag space under the guns of their Cruiser, the Krag would just kill the crew and keep the gold. The ship, too.”

  “I cannot say that they would not deserve it. So, what’s to happen to the freighter crew?”

  “I will be consulting with Major Kraft and completing some documents in a few moments, but it’s all just a formality.

  “You mean that you . . . that they . . . “

  “Yes, Doctor. They die. Firing squad. Right before breakfast.”

  “Sudden death tends to ruin my appetite.”

  “It never did much good for mine, either.”

  Chapter 17

  05:59Z Hours 30 January 2315

  Like all but the smallest naval vessels, the Cumberland had a shooting range, so that men and boys alike could acquire and maintain proficiency with firearms in the only way possible: shooting real weapons with live ammunition. The range was not very large, and the maximum distance between shooter and target was only fifteen meters, but most shooting by Naval personnel takes place in close order combat, often at arm’s length or even less, so this limitation was not considered much of a problem. When not being used for firearms, the room doubled as a small gymnasium.

  This morning, however, the armed men arrayed on the firing line were not going to be shooting at targets. They were going to be shooting at their fellow men. Men with mothers and fathers and wives and children. Men who, like them, were citizens of the Terran Union but who, for reasons that the men holding the M-88 Pulse Rifles could not fathom, had decided to betray the Human Race to an inhuman enemy bent on the annihilation of Mankind.

  And, for that, they would die. Today. Minutes from now.

  The five condemned men stood in a line against the armored back wall of the range—the one that was built to stop bullets. They looked mostly dead already. Pale, drawn, unshaven, bleary from lack of sleep, eyes vacant. Two appeared to be in a near stupor, perhaps from the injections they had received from the doctor because they were shaking so hard they could not stand or walk. These were not military men, hardened to danger and long accustomed to the idea that death might claim them on any given day. They were freighter rats, and not particularly successful ones at that, whose consciences were barely flexible enough to allow them to sell cargo to the enemy in exchange for enough wealth to settle down on some nice planet with a house, a little bit of land, and a nest egg. But this was more than they bargained for.

  Go to bed with the devil. You wake up in hell.

  The prisoners stared at the line of armed men in unconcealed horror. The Navy did not believe in blindfolds or hoods; more than thirty years of brutal war had taken away whatever squeamishness the Service may once have had about death. The shooters looked into the faces of the men they were killing and the condemned watched death coming to meet them. The only sounds were the faint hum of the air handlers, weaving an almost subliminal, bass-clef harmony with the distant thrum of the engines. All present stood in grim silence: five condemned, fifteen shooters, the Commanding Officer, the Executive Officer, the Chief Medical Officer, the Marine Detachment Commander, the non-entity assigned to the ship as Chaplain, and, for their education and instruction, the three Chiefs who had tried to sabotage the Atmosphere Manifold.

  The shooters had been selected at random by computer from the one hundred and sixteen men on board who had qualified as “Marksman” or higher with the M-88 Pulse Rifle. Eleven spacers and four Marines. The rifles were not loaded with the standard expanding/tumbling rounds used for Krag, but with old-fashioned full metal jacket ammunition. The wounds would be neat. No unnecessary blood would be spilled.

  At precisely the stroke of 06:00, Kraft hit a comm switch already configured to pipe sound to every comm unit in the ship and video to whoever wanted it. Max produced two pages from his tunic and began to read.

  “On 28 January 2315, as evidenced by the affidavits of a Commissioned Officer of the Union Space Navy and a Commissioned Officer of the Union Space Marine Corps, which affidavits are attached hereto and made a part here
of for all purposes, the five men present here today: George M. Tremonte, Hikaru Akazaki, Alexander Wong, Mohammed Bahir, and Seamus O’Leary did give aid and comfort to the enemy by knowingly transporting cargo useful as materiel of war for the purpose of selling, bartering, or otherwise transferring said materiel to the enemy, the accused being citizens of the Terran Union and the Union being in a state of war at the time.

  “Under the Fourth Revised and Supplemental Articles of War of September 9, 2112, by the authority vested in me as an officer of Command Rank in actual command of a Rated Warship on Detached Service in a War Zone, I hereby sentence the five men named above to death by firing squad, said sentence to be carried out immediately on this day, the 30th day of January in the year two thousand, three hundred and fifteen. May God have mercy on their souls. Signed, Maxime Tindall Robichaux, Lieutenant Commander, Union Space Navy, commanding the U.S.S. Cumberland.

  “Chaplain, have the prisoners been given opportunity for the religious observances associated with impending death in accordance with their respective faiths?”

  “They have,” responded the Chaplain. None had wanted so much as a prayer.

  “Chief Medical Officer, are the prisoners of sound mind and competent to stand for execution?”

  “They are,” responded the doctor. Not much competence was required. So long as a man understood that he was about to be shot and why, he was fit to die.

  “Advocate Officer, have these men been given the protections and legal process that they are due under the circumstances?”

  “They have,” responded Major Kraft, the vessel’s legal expert. For traitors caught in the act these days, under the rules of “due process,” very little process was due.

  “Executive Officer, have all procedures required for the execution of these men under the Articles of War and Naval Regulations been fully and completely carried out to the best of your knowledge, information, and belief formed after reasonable investigation?”

  “They have,” responded the XO whose job it was to ensure that, if men were to be shot, they would be shot According to the Book.

  “Does any officer present know of any reason why these men may not be executed by firing squad here, on this day, at this time?” Everyone stood silent for the prescribed count of five. “Hearing none, we now proceed.” Max took a deep breath. He had never done this before. He had seen this done before only once: when he was twelve as a Midshipman on the old Agincourt . He had thrown up on the deck.

  “Detail, ready your weapons.” The shooters raised their rifles to their shoulders and worked the charging handles, each mechanism stripping a 7.62 x 51 mm round from the rifle’s box magazine and pushing it into the chamber. “Aim.” Fifteen index fingers moved from ready positions alongside the trigger guards, pushed the safety mechanisms forward into the fire position, and came to rest lightly on the triggers. Fifteen men aimed, three shooters for each condemned man, each framing the tiny bead at the top of his weapon’s front sight in the round aperture of the rear and then aligning both with the center of a condemned man’s chest. Unbidden, a line from a centuries old film, he could not remember the name, came to Max’s mind—a line shouted by a condemned man to his own firing squad: “Shoot straight you bastards, don’t make a mess of it.” Don’t make a mess of it, indeed. He took a shuddering breath. “Fire.”

  Max clearly heard fifteen separate weapons discharges, notwithstanding his hearing protection filters. The echo seemed to hang in the air for an eternal instant, lasting less than a second, after which all five men, with five separate thumps, fell to the deck like puppets with their strings cut.

  “Safe your arms and shoulder.” The men returned their weapons to safe and shouldered them, making the range “cold” once more and allowing Doctor Sahin to step into the target area and check the prisoners.

  Which he did. It took less than a minute for him to examine all five men. He stood and formally addressed Max, his voice sounding hollow and distant to ears still stunned by the firing of fifteen rifles at the same time in a confined space. “Captain, I have examined the prisoners and certify to you that they are all dead.”

  “Very well. Let the record reflect and let all those assembled witness that sentence was carried out and that the condemned were pronounced dead at” he looked at the time display on his percom, “06:04 hours, on 30 January 2315. Ten HUT.” All came to attention. “Dismissed.” From start to finish, it had taken four minutes. The living filed out of the room, leaving the dead where they fell, sightless eyes still open, three tiny and nearly bloodless holes clustered within a hand’s breadth on each chest, the smell of powder mingling with the sour scent of two men’s evacuated bowels.

  In a few minutes, corpsmen from the Casualty Station would come to take the bodies away to cold storage in the ship’s morgue, eventual cremation at a station or on board a hospital ship, and—if someone wished to claim the remains—a long, slow trip for their ashes on a low-priority transport back to their home worlds. Until then, though, they lay silent and alone, their bodies now empty of whatever had driven them to live and love and eat and breathe and strive and struggle and, in the end, to betray their own people and suffer death as a result.

  Later, sensing that there had been no movement and no living occupant in the compartment for more than four minutes, the computer turned off the lights, plunging the room into total darkness.

  Chapter 18

  02:27Z Hours (11:18 Local Time) 2 February 2315

  Doctor Sahin shaded his eyes from the unaccustomed glare of the sun, well, of a sun at any rate, as he stepped out of “his” microfreighter onto the landing pad. He took a deep breath, his first of unprocessed air in more than two years, expecting to scent the exotic aroma of a strange, new world. Instead, all he could smell was the burned rock aroma of thermal concrete scorched by landings from the big passenger shuttles that were the bulk of the spaceport’s traffic. The exotic strange new world scent would come later, he supposed.

  In less than two minutes, a ground vehicle came across the spaceport’s vast distances to the pad. A bored, dirty driver scanned the doctor’s credit chip, debited his account, lowered a tow coupling, inserted it into the socket on the freighter’s front landing gear assembly, and gestured for Sahin and his pilot, Able Spacer Fahad, to climb aboard. He put the vehicle into drive and headed toward a hangar, towing the freighter slowly behind, clearing the pad for the next ship.

  After a short drive with the silent, sullen driver at the wheel, the microfreighter was situated in the hangar with about a dozen ships of roughly similar size. A spaceport official then appeared and handed Sahin a padcomp presenting him with several forms for his electronic signature, certifying that the ship did not have hazardous cargo, had been inspected within the past year, he would pay all hangar charges promptly, he understood that he should remove any valuable property from the freighter and deposit it in the spaceport’s vault or in one of the high-security cargo hangars provided at a reasonable charge, the Spaceport Authority disclaimed responsibility for all thefts, and he would not attempt to taxi the freighter out of the hangar himself.

  Finally, Sahin and Fahad, each carrying a nondescript overnight bag, got into one of a pair of smaller ground vehicles parked near the door to the hangar and closed the door. There was no steering wheel. Instead, there were twenty buttons on the dashboard, labeled: Incoming Travelers, Departing Travelers, Freight Terminal, Customs, Ground Transport to City, Air Passenger Terminal, and Hangar 1 through Hangar 14. Max hit the button for Incoming Travelers. The vehicle quickly took them, undoubtedly following an electronic track in the pavement, to a building marked in several languages “Incoming Travelers.” Entering the large building, they got into a fast-moving line and came to a desk behind which sat a pleasant man wearing the tan and medium brown robes that most of the natives, plus the doctor and Fahad, were wearing. He was of apparently Arabic descent, as were most of the inhabitants of this world, in his middle fifties, with a short, neatly-trimmed be
ard and sharp, intelligent brown eyes. Eyes that the doctor could easily see belonged to a very perceptive man.

  He turned to the doctor and said in Standard: “ID cube please.”

  Sahin produced his cube and handed it to the man, who placed it in his reader. The cube was, of course, an excellent forgery manufactured by the crack Intelligence Section on Admiral Hornmeyer’s flagship. As the Navy had access to the same equipment that the Union Identification Service used to make the real cubes, naval forgeries were indistinguishable from the real thing. In conformity with the standard intelligence procedure of making the lies as close to the truth as possible, most of the information contained on the cube was correct, save that there was no evidence that Sahin was a Naval Officer.

  “Ibrahim Sahin. Occupation: physician and independent trader. Born: Tubek. My sympathies to you, sir. Citizenship: Terran Union. Large number of entry visas for various worlds in the Free Corridor and elsewhere, short visits, perfectly ordinary for a trader. Provisional masters’ license, small craft only. You might want to work on those piloting scores, Doctor, they are too low to allow you to fly anything solo in our space. Trader’s Licenses and Interstellar Commerce Permits from several jurisdictions. Comprehensive Medical License from the Interspecies Coalition for the Licensure of Health Care Providers. A very difficult credential to obtain. Most impressive. Additional credentials in natural science, interest in reptiles. What is the purpose of your visit, Doctor?”

  “Business. Purchasing victuals for various freighters owned by a concern related to my family enterprises. Purchases to be transported on my Shetland microfreighter now in Hangar Three.”

  “Length of stay?”

  “Short. Anywhere from a day or two to two weeks at most.”

  The immigration official, a Lieutenant Colonel according to the discrete insignia worn as a broach on his robe, gave the doctor a hard look. He was an experienced and senior officer in his world’s Immigration and Customs service, and also had unacknowledged connections with its Intelligence establishment, all of which meant that he was a man of unusual perceptiveness. Every formal indication and every rule said this doctor was what he said he was and should be admitted, but something was telling the colonel otherwise. He had a great deal of discretion, but not enough to detain or to refuse a visa to a man with Doctor Sahin’s credentials when he did not have a shred of any specific and identifiable justification for suspecting him.