For Honor We Stand (3 page)

***

“Sir, we’re starting to get the data stream from our stealthed sensor probe in orbit.  There’s lots of interference and the signal breaks up from time to time, but what we’re getting is good enough for us to monitor what the enemy ships are doing.  Hotel one and Hotel two are settling in right where you expected, skipper,” Bartoli reported from Tactical.  “Hotel two is in a low forced orbit, staying right over our heads two hundred and seventy-seven kills above the cloud tops, and Hotel one is in the high position at just over thirty-two thousand.  Both are using active sensors, but not in any way that would detect us in these conditions.  It looks more as though they’re just making sure we know they’re here so we’ll stay under the clouds until we’re truly desperate.  Looks like they’re making themselves comfortable.”

“We need to be comfortable ourselves,” Max said.  “If we make our move too soon, they might not take the bait.”

At that moment, the security door to CIC cycled to admit Doctor Ibrahim Sahin, the ship’s Chief Medical Officer and, at least for another few days, the Acting Union Ambassador and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Pfelung, large, highly artistic, and insightfully intelligent lungfish-like aliens who had recently made common cause with the Union against the Krag.  Max had taken the unusual step of giving the doctor unrestricted CIC access after his insights into Pfelung psychology saved the ship from being blown to flaming atoms at the Battle of Pfelung.  Sauntering into the compartment right behind him, came Clouseau, a large (some might even say somewhat corpulent) black cat that had joined the ship a few weeks before by darting through a docking tube from a freighter carrying Krag contraband.  As on sailing ships of old, Spacers considered ship’s cats lucky, black ship’s cats luckier, and black ship’s cats that joined the ship of their own accord luckier still.  Clouseau, as a result, was much prized by the men and boys alike.  He lacked for no conceivable feline necessity, comfort, or (truth be told) even luxury.  The feline acted as though he owned the ship which, from his peculiar cat perspective, he did.

The doctor sat at the Commodore’s station, a console on the command island to the CO’s left (the XO was on his right).  On most ships, the Commodore’s station was used very rarely, a place for the occasional visiting senior officer or dignitary to sit in CIC out of everyone’s way and, more or less incidentally, to have a general purpose console for viewing tactical and status displays, reading and sending messages, and performing other basic functions that let him stay informed and keep busy but not get into any trouble.  On the
Cumberland
, this spot had become Doctor Sahin’s unofficial action station whenever something interesting was happening and he didn’t have patients to attend to.  Clouseau, as had become his habit, sat beside the doctor, whose spare frame left plenty of room in the seat for even a large cat.  The doctor pretended not to notice the cat while the cat pretended not to care.  Clearly, their mutual affection ran deep.

“I’m sure you have a plan,” the doctor said to Max, in a confidential tone.

“No, Doctor, I just make this stuff up as I go,” Max replied in the same fashion.  “Of course, I have a plan.”

He sniffed.  “And, no doubt, this plan of yours is extremely convoluted, highly dangerous, requires split second execution, and involves a large measure of deception, misdirection, trickery, sneakiness, and unabashed underhandedness.”

“No doubt.”

“And you wouldn’t dream of explaining it to me in advance.”

“Certainly not, that would spoil the suspense.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I don’t like suspense?”

“Did it ever occur to you that I do?  And, I
am
the Captain.  Besides, the ride will be more entertaining if you don’t know what’s around the next bend.”

“A splendid philosophy, indeed . . . for an amusement park attraction.”  The doctor, who had become fairly proficient at inducing the console in front of him to display the information he wanted, quickly surveyed the tactical situation.  “The enemy ships, why are they not firing on us?” he asked of Max.

“Because we’re not showing up on their sensors.”

“But, how can that be?  We are only a few hundred kilometers away from the nearest one.  They could practically spot us with the
model one eyeball
.”  He placed a not so subtle emphasis on what he thought to be a bit of deftly deployed naval slang.

“That’s
Mark
One Eyeball.  Mark.  Anyway, they can’t spot us because we are sitting in the best place in this whole system to hide a warship.  First, there’s the electrical discharges in the planet’s atmosphere, lightning storms like all of the thunderstorms on a terrestrial planet times a hundred thousand.  Then, all the volcanic ejecta that one of the planet’s moons is spewing into space interacts with the planet’s magnetic field to create Alfven waves.  They ionize all that volcanic stuff and it flows down the magnetic lines of force to the planet.  And, on the way, the stream of those particles zipping through the planet’s magnetic field sets up powerful synchrotron maser radiation—high intensity radio waves that have a wonderful sensor scrambling effect.  Combine that with the gravitation, atmosphere, clouds, and magnetic field of the planet itself, and we’re almost impossible to spot unless you come on down into the atmosphere with us and hit us with an active sensor scan at close range or our thermal stealth gives out and we make a hot spot in the atmosphere.”

“I had no idea that you were such a physics maven.”

“I’m not.  One of my worst subjects, right up there with English Literature 1600 through 1900. 
Paradise
Lost.
  The Brontë Sisters.”  He shuddered.  “I’m just an expert in the physics that gives me ways to hide from, confuse, evade, bamboozle, or misdirect an enemy.  At that kind of physics, I could teach graduate-level seminars.”

“A fine area in which to be expert in your line of work, although I rather like
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 
In any event, since we are so well hidden, can we not, then, stay here indefinitely.  Perhaps the Krag will grow tired of waiting for us and scurry along on their Krag way to do their other Kragish business.”

“No chance.  First, they don’t do that.  Krag are the most relentless creatures in the galaxy,” Max said with perhaps a little too much vehemence.  He continued more calmly.  “They’ll stay here until they die of old age.  Then, with the feeble gasp of their last, dying rat breath they’ll command their ship’s computers to destroy us if we ever come out of the clouds even if it’s a hundred years later and the ship is crewed by our great grandchildren.  But, they won’t have to wait that long.  In order to stay hidden, we have to store in our heat sink all the heat we produce rather than radiating it into the atmosphere where it could be detected.  In just about two hours our heat sink will reach capacity.  You know what that means.”

“I do.  You have explained it to me at tedious and redundant length.  What perplexes me, though, is how we are remaining at this altitude and in this position without making ourselves known.  If I am not mistaken, being in the atmosphere, we can not be coasting around the planet in orbit.  Therefore, we would have to use our drives, expelling hot gases that heat the atmosphere around us thereby making the ship liable to be detected.”

“You’re right.  We’re not in orbit.  And, if we were in most ships we’d be dead ducks right now.  Most warships have two maneuvering thruster systems, a main that runs off of plasma from the fusion reactor, and an auxiliary that uses liquid hypergolic bi-propellant held in pressurized storage tanks.  Because of the extraordinary emphasis on stealth in our design, we have a third, known by a clever acronym that I won’t bother you with as you’d forget it instantly, that operates off of cold gas.  We take gas—either in the form of our own supplies or drawn in from any atmosphere that we might happen to be in--compress it to the liquid state and then vent it without combustion through the thruster nozzles with the rapid expansion of the gas providing thrust.  We vary the expansion and compression ratios to manage the temperature of the exhaust to match ambient, so we don’t create a hot spot.  So long as the fusion reactor keeps pumping out power to operate the system, we could hover here almost indefinitely.” 

“An ingenious system, no doubt,” the doctor said, thoroughly unimpressed.  Even the most brilliant feats of aerospace engineering made little impression on him.  “It would be even more ingenious if the designers had included a heat exchanger system to allow the cold gas to carry away the thermal energy from the heat sink, allowing you to do an almost continuous ‘thermal dump’ without creating a thermal signature.  But then, I am just the sawbones around here.”

Max was briefly dumbfounded.  Why didn’t anyone think of that before?  He’d have to talk to Werner about that one.  There might be a way to build that modification into the
Cumberland
with spares already on board or parts they could fabricate. 

Not recognizing that he had just made a suggestion that might significantly affect the design of stealth vessels for decades to come, the doctor plowed on.  “But, how, I venture to ask, did we get in this precarious predicament?  I had no idea anything was amiss until we were hit by enemy fire and my patient rolled off the examining table.  He was heavily sedated at the time and made a most unsettling thud.”

“That’s why your treatment beds all have restraint loops,” Max said.  “Or, didn’t you know that?”

“I do now, and I plan to make scrupulous use of them hereafter.  I hasten to add, however, that they not be necessary if we were not hit unexpectedly by enemy weapons fire, an event for which you have yet to provide a satisfactory explanation.”

“Simple ambush.  There’s a convoy due through here in about sixteen hours.  The Admiral sent us here to sanitize the system and make sure it was clear for the convoy.  When we jumped into the system, these two Cruisers were already here, probably tasked to lie in wait for the same convoy.”

“How, then, did we escape?  I seem to recall your having told me on more than one occasion that Cruisers are much mightier ships than Destroyers.”

Max restrained himself from rolling his eyes at the doctor’s apparent inability to assimilate even the most rudimentary naval knowledge, notwithstanding that he was the most conspicuously brilliant man Max had ever known.  “Much more powerful than we are, doctor. 
Each
of those ships packs about eight times our firepower.  How did we get away?  First, they weren’t expecting us.  Usually, the picket/scout Destroyer jumps in six or seven hours before the convoy comes through.  But, Admiral Hornmeyer sent us in early because, well,
you know
, that’s just the sort of thing that he does.  That crafty old bastard’s got unpredictability down to a science.  If a task force has a habit of dividing itself into two groups to attack, when
he
attacks it will be with three groups this time, with five the next, with four the next, and then he’ll throw everything he’s got at the enemy in one huge formation.  If a unit’s practice has been to launch attacks in the wee hours of the morning, he will attack in late afternoon one time and midmorning the next and all around the clock except the wee hours, and just when you think that’s the one time of day when you are perfectly safe,
that’s
just when he hits you at 02:47 with the big push.  Krag prisoners tell us that they’ve got a whole department, staffed by hundreds of officers, with no function other than to try to predict what Hornmeyer is going to do next, and three times out of four they get it wrong.”  He chuckled in admiration. 

“Anyway, when we jumped in and surprised them, neither of us was ready for a fight, but they were closer to being ready than we were.  All our critical systems were safed for the jump, whereas all the Krag had to do was to arm their weapons and start shooting.  We were a little bit better off than if they had been expecting us at that moment, but not enough for us to be able to get away unscathed.”  He paused, shaking his head, remembering the shock of being hit by enemy weapons fire less than a minute after coming out of jump, before he was even aware the enemy ships were present.

“You said ‘first.’  Is there a ‘second’?”

“Oh, yes.  Remember Midshipman Goldman?  The Lieutenant I demoted temporarily for verbally abusing an enlisted man?”

“I remember him well.”  He dropped his voice to just above a whisper.  “You may recall that I treated him for a stims addiction.”

“Right.  Well, it turns out he knows the ins and outs of Krag sensors better than anyone imagined.  Apparently, when he was serving on the
Themistocles
, he made the mistake of smarting off to Captain Tobias.  You know, ‘Temper Tantrum’ Tobias?  Well, Captain Tobias decided to teach Goldman a lesson and assigned him to spend five months doing nothing but disassembling, reassembling, and testing to destruction hundreds of Krag sensor multiplex relay assemblies he had just taken off a captured Krag tender.  After that experience, Goldman knew just how to configure our active sensors to emit a pulse precisely tailored to fry the multiplexers.  The trick is no good as a standard battle tactic because the emitter isn’t built to transmit a tight coherent beam, so unless you’re within ten thousand meters or so the beam spreads out too much and you aren’t hitting the multiplexer with enough power to do the job.  But, since all our weapons were off line, the rat-faced bastards had closed to about eighty-five hundred meters to finish us off.  We hit both ships with it, effectively blinding them, and ran like scalded dogs from right under their noses.  We’re not in their sights any more, but in a few hours they’ll catch up with us again and have significant advantages in numbers, firepower, and tactical position.”