For Honor We Stand (34 page)

“Gentlemen, this is the skipper.  I want to thank you for your hard work just now.  I know that because of the new training schedule you are short a few people who might have made things run a little smoother and I understand that.  I’m on your loop to remind you that just because you are constantly hearing that Mr. Krag doesn’t do very well at thinking outside the box is no excuse to keep
your
thinking inside the box.  Why?  Because we’re talking two different boxes, people.  Don’t make limiting assumptions.  Always know what your assumptions are and if, when you apply them, you turn up nonsense, go back to them and try a different set.  Keep trying until you get something that explains the data.  Men, never forget, the job of the Sensors section is to find truthful interpretations that fit the sensor data, not to find data that fits your interpretations.  It’s likely to be an exciting watch, folks, so stay alert.  Keep your eyes peeled and your minds open.  Skipper out.”

The coffee arrived.  Both men took a few sips. 

School wasn’t over.  He had dismissed the big lecture class of Freshmen and Sophomores.  Now for the Senior Seminar.  “Well, Mr. Levy, a good weapons officer doesn’t have his head stuck in the Fire Control Console.  He needs to know something about what is going on with the targets he’s shooting at.  So what’s going on here?”  Seeing a bit of a blank look, Max prompted, “Start with the basics and work up from there.”

Max could almost hear him gulp.  “Well, sir, there are two targets, Uniform One and Uniform Two, currently unidentified.  Uniform One is right on our six, matching our velocity at nineteen hundred and sixty c at a range of one-point-one-one-six AU.  Uniform Two is two hundred seventy two kills off his port beam.  I don’t think they know we’ve spotted them back there.”

“Why do you think that?”

“We just got an upgrade to our local compression detection system.  That gave us about a forty percent increase in its range.  As far as we can tell, the Krag are still at their old level of technology.  There’s no way they just blundered into us way out here in interstellar space dozens of light years from the FEBA.  The only theory that makes sense is that they somehow knew we were coming through, lay in wait along our flight path, picked us up, and then fell in behind us, beyond what they thought was our detection radius.  When we did our localization maneuver, we never entered their detection radius, so they should be ignorant of what we did.  They aren’t really interested in tracking us.  They’re acting like they know where we’re going.  They just want to get there right behind us.”

“Exactly what I had concluded.  All right.  Now, who are they?”

“Well, sir, we’ve got to presume they’re Krag.  That’s who we’re at war with.”

“Can we do more than that?  Do we have any evidence of who they are?”

“No, sir.  At this range and at superluminal velocities, all we can do is to detect bearing, range, and speed.  We don’t have any of the phenomenologies that give us an identification.”

“Don’t we?  What’s the range to Uniform One again?”

“One-point-one-one-six AU.”

“Anything about that number sound familiar to you?”

“Come to think of it, it does ring a bell, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“That’s because the contexts are too different for your brain to make the connection easily.  Fortunately, you’ve got a memory aid.”  He pointed at the keyboard.

“Riiiiight.  Sir.”  Levy typed in a query, asking the computer to find other distances, ranges, and sizes that were 1.116 AU.  There were fourteen matches.  He started down the list:  the mean diameter of the Hoffman Nebula, the periastron of a periodic comet in the Alphacen system, the length of the first experimental compression drive flight undertaken by the Pfelung, and . . . “That’s the mean distance of the Krag home world from their sun.  It’s basically their AU.”

“You got it.  That’s a nice comfy distance for them.  When they want to stand off a safe distance from something, that’s a distance they often pick.  Not always, not even most of the time, but often enough that when you see something at that range you know it’s a Krag ship.  In some ways, they’re a lot like us.  Haven’t you heard skippers say, ‘Maneuvering, put us one AU behind Hotel Three”—things like that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, there’s a clincher.  What’s the range between the two ships?”

“Two hundred seventy-two, no, two hundred and seventy-three kills.”

“No.  The exact distance.  Take it to two decimal points.  I’m betting that it’s exactly two hundred seventy-two point five three kills.”

Levy input the query.  “That’s right, sir.  How did you know?”

“The fundamental Krag unit of linear measurement is point-two-seven-two-five-three meters.  Lots of the things they do come out to a nice round power of ten of that distance.  Like the maximum range of their Foxhound missile which is?”

“Twenty-seven thousand, two hundred, and fifty-three kills.  I get it.”

“Again, they’re a lot like us that way.  Can’t you just hear the big cheese back there telling the smaller cheese ‘position yourself a thousand Kragometers,’ or whatever they call their unit, ‘off my port beam’?  That’s just the sort of thing we’d do.  That’s why I often give orders to stand off at odd ranges.” 

“So, sir, that pretty much makes them Krag.”

“I wouldn’t bet against it, Levy.  Not even if I was betting with your money.  Now, let’s get a little speculative.  What does that mean for us?”

“Well, skipper, I suppose it would have to mean that the Krag had in their possession sufficient information for an intercept.”

“Which is?”

“It’s what you need to determine a velocity vector in time and space.  Departure point, departure time, either course or destination, and speed.” 

“Right, Levy.  Now, if they had our departure point and time, course or destination, and speed, what does that imply?”

“There has to be some sort of leak, or spy, or Krag ability to intercept and decrypt at least certain critical tactical communications, or that they somehow observed our departure.”

“Observation wouldn’t have helped them.  You weren’t on watch so you wouldn’t know this.  I departed the system nearly ninety degrees off the lubber line on two axes and ran at 1580 c for an hour and a half, then turned toward the rendezvous point and increased speed to 1960 c.  So anyone taking a read on our departure or tracking us for the first ninety minutes would have been completely misled as to direction and velocity.  So, we’re back to the first set of possibilities.  How do we narrow that down?  Any ideas?”

“Sir, I’m not much on Intel.  Too much guessing.  I’m better at concrete stuff, like what my warhead is going to do against a Krag deflector.”

“Bullshit, Levy.  I’ve been a Weapons Officer and I’ve worked in Intel and I can tell you that the two have more in common than you suppose.  A great deal of Intel is just as precise and concrete and logical as the data you deal with as a Weapons Officer.  There’s lots of hard data involved in both.  It’s something you need to get a handle on.  To be a well-rounded officer you’ve got to understand at least the fundamentals of every one of the Warship Combat Disciplines:  Tactical, Weapons, Sensors, Intel, Countermeasures, and Stealth.  And it doesn’t hurt to know a thing or two about Logistics, Engineering, Damage Control, Environmental Systems, and Personnel, either.  If you want to rise to command rank, you’ve got to be a well-rounded officer.”

The young man raised an inquiring eyebrow, as if to ask if he had a chance at command rank.  Max nodded and shrugged at the same time, as if to say, “You have the potential, as far as I can tell, but whether you make it is going to be up to you.”  Just because a lot of important things went
unsaid
between Navy men did not mean that those important things went
uncommunicated
. 

“OK,” Max continued.  “How do we narrow down where the Krag are getting their information?  I’m not asking you to recite an Intel maxim.  I’m asking you to go at it logically.  You’re a logical man.  You can figure it out.”

“Well . . . where I would want to start is to know the source of their information.  We would get a good start on that by identifying which communication or report or filing or data entry, exactly, is what they got their paws on.”

“Bulls eye.  OK, then, where would the Krag get the data points they need to intercept us in the vastness of space?  Work it out.  Use elimination of you have to.”

“Well, it’s not our orders because the Admiral didn’t give us a specific c multiple or even dictate that we use compression drive instead of jumping.  It doesn’t have our time of departure or our exact starting point in the Rashid system.  Without those, you’d have a hard time finding us with twenty ships, much less two.  And then, your deceptive departure course would put us on a slightly different track.  No signals have left this ship since we left for us to be tracked with.  So, that leaves . . . our cruise plan?  Did the cruise plan include your deceptive maneuver?”

“It did.”

“That has to be it, then.  The Krag got their paws on our cruise plan.”

Max smiled.  “See, Mr. Levy, you may be able to get a handle on Intel after all.  That makes a pretty little puzzle for Intel, doesn’t it?  How did they get it?  Send a message to the XO that, on my order, I want you and Bhattacharyya to have your administrative periods today at the same time.  You and he are going to trace what happens to a Cruise Plan when it gets filed, and come up with your best hypothesis about how the Krag got it.  Look at it from their perspective.  If you wanted to get a Cruise Plan, how would you go about doing it?  Route your report, nothing fancy, two pages or so, to me.  I’ll put my spin on it and send it to Admiral Hornmeyer’s N-2 section—see what the Intel/Security boys have to say when they learn they’ve got a major leak somewhere.  Meanwhile, I’ll get off a signal directly to the Admiral right away to let him know there’s a leak and that any compartmentalization he was counting on for this mission has been blown.”

“But, sir, with all due respect, the leak isn’t the biggest problem we’ve got.”

“Don’t worry, Ensign, I haven’t forgotten about our friends back there with the whiskers and tails.  I just haven’t found out what to do about them yet.”

***

“Hey!  Cho!”  Recruit Spacer 2
^nd
Class Antonio “Doozie” Balduzzi yelled down 37.9 meters of access crawlway to his partner, Able Spacer 3d Class Cho Jintao.  Fortunately, he had a powerful set of lungs to carry his voice over the distance, particularly with the profusion of humming, buzzing, chirping, clicking, whizzing, whumping, and even, occasionally, banging equipment between the two men in the confined space. 

“Yeah, what?”  Cho’s powers of projection, while not quite on par with Balduzzi’s, were still quite impressive.  Neither man had any difficulty hearing the other.  It never occurred to either to use their percoms to open a voice channel. 

“This one’s running at seventy-three percent, and the one before was running at seventy-seven.”

“Damn, Doozie, I’m seeing the same thing.  The last one I checked was at seventy-five and the one before that at seventy-two.”  Doozie crawled aft to the gravity generator regulator that controlled the gravity generators that the two men had just checked.  Cho was running a diagnostic routine on the mechanism and was getting nothing but green lights. 

“I bet every one in this series is doing something similar.”

“I’ve got the same feeling, but I’ll be a Pfelung’s grandmother if I can tell you why,” said Cho.  “I’ve just run two diagnostics on the regulator.  It checks out across the board.  The machine is clean and green.”

“What do you do in this situation?”  Because he fell below the ship’s proficiency average in his specialty, Doozie had never been sent to work on an equipment problem that wasn’t instantly diagnosed by the computer or that turned out to be a straightforward fix involving swapping out a board or a module.

“Well, babe, what I normally do in this situation is I call Petty Officer Liebergot.  Him or Aaron.  They’re the hottie Scottys on all the electrical/environmental subsystems, and the gravity generators are right down Liebergot’s alley, but they’re both off limits today because of the skipper’s new training thing.”

“Is there anyone else we can call?”

“At zero two twenty-seven?  Any man not on the White Watch, is in his rack inspecting his eyelids for photon leaks.  So, my friend, you and I are the White Watch experts on this system.  For better or worse, it’s you and me babe.”  Doozie was starting to get annoyed at Cho’s habit of calling him “babe,” but he did his best to overlook it. 

“Can we leave it to the next watch?  You and I and everybody else know that the Blue Watch has got a lot more on the ball than we do in White.  I’m sure there’s someone in that bunch that can straighten this out.”

“Invalid input, babe.  Two reasons.  One, the work order came from Lieutenant Brown himself and he marked it ‘Resolve this Watch,’ which means it gets done before end of watch or we die trying.  We don’t get to hand it off to someone else.  And, two, there’s a real safety issue.  Think about it, Dooze, a man steps from one gee nominal through a gradient that’s only a millimeter or two wide into a zone that’s point seven three gees, and then skips down the corridor literally light on his feet for about forty meters and then hits one gee again without warning.  You think he might have a chance of tripping, especially if he’s carrying something?  And not just any schmo, either, but a shipmate.  You want some guy you bunk or eat chow with laid up with a broken ankle or a concussion because you passed the buck on a work order?  For me that’s at least a forty light year guilt trip and I’m not up for it.  You?”