For Honor We Stand (5 page)

“Are we committing suicide?  I see that we are headed directly for the surface of that moon.”  There was discernable alarm in the doctor’s voice.

“No, doctor, we are not going to hit the surface.  We are just going to get very, very close to it.”

“How close?”

“The highest surface feature on that moon is right at seven thousand meters, so we will be at seven thousand two hundred.”

“Isn’t that, according to the old American idiom, ‘cutting it a little close’?”

“Yes.  It is.”

 “As long as you are aware of it.”  It took a very acute ear to detect the sarcasm in the statement.  Max had a very acute ear.  “In addition to cutting it a little close, aren’t we going a little fast for a ship that is going to be that close to the surface.”

“Not really.  We’ll not be going much more than one thousand kilometers per second.”

“Oh, a snail’s pace.  You
so
ease my mind.”  This time the sarcasm was not so subtle.

Max was keeping a close eye on a display on his console that he had configured to show distance to the surface of the moon.  Chief LeBlanc had a similar display.  Both men were watching the numbers as they fell rapidly.  Watching them
very
closely.  By Max’s orders, this next maneuver would be executed at the Chief’s command as he had the better “feel for the ship.”  Nevertheless, more for his own reassurance than to communicate anything new, Max said to LeBlanc, “Second maneuver at your discretion, Chief.”

“Second maneuver at my discretion,” the older Cajun acknowledged.  On various displays around CIC tied into the forward video feed, Mengis VI’s moon was growing nearer at terrifying speed.  It seemed either that the ship would slam into it at any second, or that it still had so much forward velocity that it could not pull up in time and would plow into the surface, inscribing a new canyon that some wit would probably name the
Cumberland
Valley.  People had to remind themselves to ungrit their teeth, to unclench their hands, to breathe.

“All right, men,” LeBlanc told the three men at their stations in front of him, “just like we talked about.  In five seconds.  Four.  Three.  Two.  One.  Now.”

At Chief LeBlanc’s signal the man controlling pitch and roll pitched the bow of the ship up so that it was precisely following the contour of the moon’s surface and rolled the ship so that its missile tubes, one of which was mounted in the bow exactly between the one and the two o’clock position and the other mounted between the seven and the eight were level with one another.  The braking drive disengaged and the main sublight drive went to Flank to push the ship through this maneuver, and then to one tenth power to hold the ship to the trajectory Max had ordered for it, which was anything but an orthodox Keplerian orbit.  The craters and mountains of the desolate world below them whizzed past so rapidly that they could hardly be discerned on the optical feeds.  The smallest errant twitch on the pitch controller would have slammed the
Cumberland
into the surface so hard that the only evidence she had ever existed would be the kilometer wide crater, the rapidly expanding ball of incandescent gas, and the “we regret to inform you” commgrams to the parents, orphans, and widows. 

Doctor Sahin looked at his tactical display.  The icon for the
Cumberland
and the icon for the Krag cruiser were approaching one another so fast that they would meet in only a few seconds.  He noted from the “data source slot” at the top of the display that the information on the positions of the two ships was being received from the
Cumberland
’s
sensor probe launched hours earlier.  To all appearances, nothing would stop the two ships from colliding head on at catastrophic velocities.  “This appears to be an extremely hazardous maneuver.”  The pitch of his voice was at least a major third above normal.  Maybe even a perfect fourth.

“Yes.  It is.”  Max admitted.  “But, it’s a lot less hazardous than fighting it out on even terms with those Cruisers.”

Just when Sahin was going to ask how much less hazardous it was, as he knew fighting it out with the Cruisers on even terms was certain death, the two ships came into sight of one another.  Apparently by prior arrangement, this fact required no announcement from the Sensors or Tactical Officer.  Max simply said, “Now.”

Two sharp pats on the shoulder from Chief LeBlanc to the man at Pitch and the
Cumberland
dove sharply toward the surface of the airless moon and then almost immediately leveled out, barely fifty meters above the crater-scarred terrain.  At the same moment, the ship’s computer, following the instructions given to it a few hours before, fired two Talon missiles, one from each of the forward missile tubes.  In order to give the seeker systems time to lock on given the close range and high closing velocities of the two vessels, the acceleration coils were set to give the weapons just enough velocity to clear the launch tubes and the bow of the ship instead of the .61 c which was nominal for the system.  At their highly reduced speed, the time from launch to impact was just under a second. 

The Krag had no time to react.  They were not expecting the humans.  At least not here.  At least not now.  The blaspheming monkeys were supposed to be in the midst of the particle stream frantically running for their lives where they would be located by sensors and attacked minutes from now, not popping up over the limb of this moon and attacking head on.  Accordingly, the Krag didn’t have their missile launch systems energized, the missile drives enabled, or the warhead safeties disengaged.  Neither had they prepared the ship to receive enemy fire.  In fact, the only element of the Krag cruiser’s defenses that was in place was its electronic warfare and countermeasures suite, which Union Naval Intelligence had correctly advised was always active.

The ever alert Krag computer sensed the incoming missile and reacted appropriately, transmitting a highly focused, randomly modulated EM pulse designed to disrupt the Talons’ guidance software.  One missile behaved as the Krag expected, veering wildly off into deep space, zooming out of sight and off the Krag sensor scans.  But the other flew true, straight at the Krag warship, past the powerful Krag deflectors, at the moment configured to repel space debris but not weapons fire, through the multiple point defense zones protected by interlocking layers of four distinct kinds of anti-missile weapons, all safed and deactivated, and to within just over a meter of the Cruiser’s hull, equipped with structural integrity fields and blast suppression emitters that would allow it to withstand the detonation of a nuclear warhead the size of that carried by the Union’s Talon missile, all switched to standby.  

The 150 kiloton fusion warhead blew just as the
Cumberland
streaked between the cruiser and the surface of the moon below.  The resulting globe of white-hot plasma hungrily ingested the forward two thirds of the Cruiser fracturing its very atoms into free nuclei and electrons, while melting or shattering the rear third into a spray of pea sized droplets of molten metal and plastic interspersed with tens of thousands of solid chunks of the harder parts of the hull and the more heat resistant engine parts, none larger than a man’s head.  Some of these solid pieces arced off into space to join the other debris, moonlets, and other bodies that swarmed around the enormous gas giant while others slammed into the surface of Mengis VI A, an artificial storm of meteoroids littering the tiny world like deadly metallic hail.  The fireball blossomed behind the Destroyer as, apparently due to accident triggered by the proximity of the nuclear explosion, the
Cumberland
’s
rear tube fired another missile which also zoomed away from the moon in a peculiar-looking trajectory.  If the Krag happened to have any sensor drones in the neighborhood, they would see an accidental firing and a wasted missile. 

In fist fighting, it’s called a “sucker punch.”  In warfare, it’s called “tactical surprise.”  To the crew of the
Cumberland
, it was a definite kill.  

The fireball now astern, Max called out, “Weapons, reload all tubes with Talons.  Maneuvering, fourth maneuver . . . execute.”  As Weapons acknowledged the order, a few quick pats on the shoulder from Chief LeBlanc prompted the yaw and pitch men to steer the agile warship through another violent maneuver, bending the
Cumberland’s
course under full acceleration in a sharp hairpin turn back toward the middle of the particle stream and then turning her again, this time gradually, until in a few moments, the
Cumberland
was settled in its former path, with the enemy ship that had been the low Cruiser about twelve thousand kilometers behind and slowly gaining.  As soon as the ship was re-established along its former course, Max turned to Nelson at Stealth.  “Mr. Nelson, I think it’s time for that malfunction we discussed.”

“Aye, sir.”  Nelson touched a key on his console.  A few seconds later, he announced.  “Apparent malfunction in stealth systems caused us to leak EM aft for five point three seconds after which the malfunction was ‘repaired’ and the leakage stopped.”

 “Well done, Mr. Nelson.”

 “Malfunction?”  The doctor sounded concerned.

“Not a real one,” Max mollified him.  “I wanted to be sure the Cruiser knew we were here, so we shut down a few of the electromagnetic suppression systems for a few seconds so that some of the electromagnetic radiation the ship generates in normal operation leaked in the Krag’s direction.  We gave him a contact for just over five seconds which is long enough for him to get a definite detection as well as a solid bearing, but not enough time to give his computer sufficient data points over time to do target motion analysis and spit out a firing solution.  With all the sensor interference in this particle stream, he’s going to have to close within about fifteen hundred kills to get a strong enough detection to be able to fire his weapons accurately.”

“Why, look at that.  We are doing as we were doing before!  Running away from the enemy Cruiser inside this river of ionized material.”  The doctor looked perplexed.  “I am certainly pleased that we dispatched that other ship so deftly, but are we still not in an impossible tactical situation with regard to this other vessel?  Is she not speedier and more powerful than we, such that she will eventually catch up with us and defeat us in combat?”

“It certainly looks that way, doesn’t it,” answered Max.  “As far as Mr. Krag is concerned, we never left the stream and we’ve been running for our lives the whole time.  All he has seen of us tells him that we are panicked prey, so that is all he is going to expect.”  Max looked at a chrono display that, for reasons unknown to the doctor, had been counting down and was now at just under one minute.  He then glanced at the tactical overview display which was now set on a large scale, with the
Cumberland
at the bottom of the screen, the Cruiser at the top, and a small green “x” that was apparently a stationary point in space creeping just to the left of the Destroyer and now seeming to move toward the Cruiser as the ships moved through space and the display adjusted, keeping them in the same relative positions so that they did not run off the edge of the screen.  “Speaking of which . . . .”  He hit the comm button. 

“Engineering.  Brown here.  I surmise that this is my cue.”

“Spot on my good chap.  By the way, one of these days, you’ll have to explain to me how a ‘chap’ is a good thing given that we both know being ‘chapped’ is bad.  Anyway, you’ve got thirty seconds.  I’ll give you a countdown from five.”

“Understood.”

A tense twenty-five seconds went by, Sahin wishing he had time to get in a quick question so he could find out what was going on at this stage of the proceedings but knowing that he did not.

“Five.  Four.  Three.  Two.  One.  NOW.”

“Executing,” said the Engineer over the comm.  Everyone in CIC, and presumably throughout the ship, felt a lurch as the main sublight drive abruptly stopped providing acceleration.  “Main sublight on standby,” Brown informed Max.  “As far as the Krag are concerned, they saw a plasma dump followed by a drive shutdown.  They are going to conclude that the damage they did to us earlier caused a catastrophic drive failure and that we are now without propulsion.” 

“Outstanding.”

“Outstanding?”  The doctor was aghast.  “Now that we are no longer accelerating, that huge ship full of voracious man-sized rats is now going to catch up with us and send us all to Jannah.  I had hoped to go there, but it was my cherished desire to delay the arrival for at least a few more years.”

“It’s not what it looks like, Doctor.  If you go to Paradise anytime soon, it won’t be because of anything I did today.”  Max spoke slowly and calmly.  “I just need to get the Krag ship, for targeting purposes, to stop accelerating.  Talon missiles aren’t very good at side shots on rapidly accelerating targets.”

“Side shots?  I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“And we can fire only two missiles at a time,” the doctor continued.  “My understanding is that, if a ship of that kind is prepared for our attack, with his deflectors . . .  what is the term . . .
deflecting
, it is unlikely that only two missiles will take him out of action.  Is my understanding in error?  You know how often I am wrong about such matters.”

“No, you’ve got it right this time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“You are becoming repetitious.”

“I know.”

“The Krag Cruiser has engaged its braking thrusters and is slowing rapidly.”  Mr. Bartoli sang out from Tactical.  “He’s right in the groove, sir, and he’s matching our velocity.”