For Honor We Stand Read online

  “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.”

  “So, what do we do?”

  “Have you ever read Sun Tzu?”

  “Sun Tzu?” He shook his head. “I thought that was a particularly ridiculous breed of dog. The ones that look like tiny, animated dust mops.”

  “No, that’s Shih Tzu. Very lovable pets, I hear. Sun Tzu was a Chinese general and philosopher of war. Sixth century BCE. Brilliant. Commodore Middleton made me practically memorize his book, The Art of War. Old Sun Tzu is the one who said ‘all warfare is based on deception.’”

  “A principle by which you live scrupulously.”

  “Of course. My most cherished military maxim. But he said something else that is particularly relevant here. This is a paraphrase, of course, but he said basically that when you engage your enemy it should appear to him that you are doing exactly what he expects you to do.”

  “What conceivable good does that do?”

  “A great deal, actually. Knowing what he expects, you appear to do exactly that. Give him one or two clues that point to what he has been thinking you’re going to do and that’s what he’s going to see, even if the clues could point to a hundred other things as well. After all, we all love being right, don’t we? But, the rub is that you are not doing what he expects; rather, you are doing something completely different.

  “You do something that looks like you are doing A. He jumps to the conclusion that you are doing A and launches his planned response for A, but you are doing B. And not only are you doing B, which he didn’t expect, when you made your plans for B you took into account your exact knowledge of what he would do when he thinks you are doing A. So, he is not ready for you, but you are ready for him.”

  “Very clever, indeed. Use his preconceptions against him. I understand. That goes along with modern cognitive theory that says people tend to perceive reality in light of pre-existing expectations and will ignore large amounts of contrary data before finally changing their minds.”

  “Right. That’s just what I’m counting on”

  “So, you didn’t tell me. What are you going to do?”

  “What am I doing to do? Exactly what the Krag expect. And, no, I won’t tell you what that is. You’ll just have to be surprised.” His face took on a predatory look as he tapped his finger on the icon for one of the Krag cruisers. “Just like our friends with the tails.”

  Two hours and eleven minutes passed. During that time, Max had ordered the entire crew by turns to go to the mess or the wardroom, as appropriate, for a hot breakfast. Just as her Captain would not send the Cumberland into battle unfueled, so he saw that the men who served her went into battle with a hot meal in their bellies.

  “Coming into position,” announced Bartoli. The Cumberland had not been maintaining a constant position in the atmosphere; rather, as the moon that was the source of the particle stream had moved in its orbit causing the stream to shift along with it, the ship had followed the erratic movement of the stream’s terminus in the atmosphere. The doctor could sense the tension in CIC gradually increasing as the time to implement the skipper’s plan approached. He noticed several of the watch standers covertly wiping sweaty palms on their pants or shifting nervously in their seats. There also seemed to be unusually heavy traffic in and out of the CIC’s “head” or lavatory. Obviously, whatever Captain Robichaux had in mind, the crew perceived it to be difficult, risky, or both.

  When the ship was in just the pre-planned position, and at about the time when the Krag would be surmising that the Cumberland’s heat sink was reaching capacity, Bartoli called out, “Now, Skipper.”

  Max’s adrenalin got the better of him. He came to his feet. “Execute,” he said, a little too loudly. He did his best not to cringe at how his powerful voice boomed in the CIC’s confined space.

  LeBlanc gave two sharp pats to the shoulder of Able Spacer 1st Class Fleishman, the man on Drives, who pushed his control all the way to the stop. “Main sublight ahead at Emergency,” said LeBlanc. Like a rabbit darting out from under a bush, the Cumberland shot out from the clouds in which she had been hiding, her acceleration just over 95% of nominal thanks to hasty repairs by Lieutenant Brown and his band of improvisational engineers. In a few seconds, the Destroyer cleared the atmosphere of Mengis VI, accelerating away from the planet and making straight for its closest moon, known prosaically as Mengis VI A, an unremarkable rock just over 3000 kilometers in diameter orbiting the planet at an altitude of 56,423 kilometers.

  “Mr. Nelson,” Max said to the man at the Stealth console. “Now that we are out of the atmosphere, let’s dump some heat, shall we?”

  “Aye, sir. Extending radiator fins seventeen through twenty-three.” On the sides of the ship blocked from the enemy vessels’ view, radiator fins extended themselves and soon turned cherry red, radiating into space the heat that Cumberland had stored in her heat sink. With no atmosphere around the hull to be heated, the ship could shed its thermal energy without giving away its position, so long as the fins were not in a direct line of sight with either enemy ship.”

  “Would you please tell me at least the first part of what we are doing, Captain?” asked Sahin in a tone bordering on whining, his almost pathological curiosity getting the better of him.

  “Actually, I think I’ll yield that honor to Lieutenant DeCosta. XO?”

  The executive officer smiled self-deprecatingly and waved the doctor over to his own console, which had more and larger displays tied into more data channels than the doctor’s. “Here we are, doctor.” He pointed to the icon representing the Cumberland. “The enemy expected us to keep station in the planet’s upper atmosphere until our heat sink reached its capacity, and then, having no other options, make a run for it. Even with stealth systems engaged, at this range and accelerating this hard, we can’t completely mask our drive signature, so they can detect us well enough to follow. Now, we are doing exactly what they thought we would do, running right when they expected us to run, falling right into the trap they have prepared for us.” The doctor grimaced. This wasn’t comforting at all.

  DeCosta continued. “Here is the Cruiser that was in low orbit,” he pointed to an icon moving away from the planet to fall in behind the Destroyer. “This one is the ‘chase man.’ He has gone to flank speed and is doing his best to follow us. He’s falling behind right now, but he can already tell from our acceleration curve that even with our repairs he has a higher top speed and will eventually overtake us. Right now, we are ducking into the stream of ionized matter from the volcanic moon. Here is the path of the stream,” his finger traced a long curve from the moon to the planet. “Notice that the planet’s inner moon is just about to enter it. He thinks we are using the stream to help us lose him or prevent him from getting a missile lock, so he isn�
�t concerned. We’re doing just what he expects fleeing prey to do. Run and hide.

  “Here is the cruiser that was in high orbit.” The XO pointed to another icon on the display. “If the low cruiser is the ‘chase man’ then the high cruiser is the ‘cutoff man.’ The cutoff man’s job is to station himself athwart our line of escape forcing us, he thinks, to do one of three things. One: to attack him head on, in which case we will be destroyed by his superior firepower. Two: try to go around him, in which case we are cut off using his superior speed and advantageous starting position and then destroyed by his superior firepower. Three: try to hide in the space between the chase and the cutoff man, the high cruiser serving as the anvil to the low cruiser’s hammer. In that case they use their excellent active sensor capability to locate us and their superior speed to hem us in between them, at which point we are then . . . .”

  “Destroyed by their superior firepower,” the doctor completed. “It looks gloomy, but you do not seem in the least weighed down by it.”

  “That’s because what Robert Burns said about the best laid plans of mice and men applies with particular force when the mice are the size of men. Here’s where, for them, things first start to ‘gang aft agley.’ See the computer’s projection of the cutoff man’s most likely intercept course right here?”

  “I do, but it is blinking red and seems to go right through this moon.”

  “Right. That’s because we timed our escape maneuver and aimed the direction of our exit so that this moon, Mengis VI A, blocks the cutoff man’s direct intercept vector. So, unless he wants his current speed to carry him thousands of kills out of his way, he needs to drop a lot of velocity and go around it, following the limb of this moon like this.” The XO’s finger traced along the curvature of the moon on the side facing away from the planet.

  “How do you know he’s going on that side rather than on the one nearer the planet?”