For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2) Read online

  Other Titles by H. Paul Honsinger

  The Man of War Trilogy

  To Honor You Call Us

  For Honor We Stand

  Brothers in Valor (forthcoming)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 H. Paul Honsinger

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Cover design by: Gene Molica

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477849484

  ISBN-10: 1477849483

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013944848

  To my dear wife, Kathleen. You are my inspiration and joy, my companion and my friend, my safe harbor and my love. You bring light to every day, blessings to every hour, and happiness to every moment. If my creativity is a flame, you are the spark that set it alight. But for you, all would be darkness.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  * * *

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  GLOSSARY AND GUIDE TO ABBREVIATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  * * *

  For the benefit of lubbers, squeakers, and others unfamiliar with Union Space Navy terminology and slang, there is at the end of this volume a Glossary and Guide to Abbreviations, which defines many of the abbreviations, terms, and references used in these pages.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  05:27Z Hours, 15 March 2315

  Lieutenant Commander Max Robichaux, captain of the Union Space Navy destroyer USS Cumberland, was in trouble. Not the kind of trouble that could get his ass chewed out by Vice Admiral “Hit ’em Hard” Hornmeyer, whose ass chewings were a thing of legend. And not the kind of trouble that could get him hauled before a court martial and sentenced to life at hard labor at the deuterium separation plant on Europa, Jupiter’s icy and desolate sixth moon. This was the kind of trouble that could get him killed. And not just him but also his shipmates. The lives of the 215 men and boys on board the Cumberland were in the twenty-eight-year-old skipper’s hands, and if he couldn’t pull a rabbit out of the hat sometime in the next thirty minutes, Max and his crew would all meet eternity together, in the cold, black battleground of space, a thousand light years from home.

  The tactical overview display at Max’s console in the Cumberland’s Combat Information Center (CIC) made the situation plain enough. It showed three ships, forming a long, narrow isosceles triangle, accelerating through the Mengis system, all three moving at about half the speed of light. At the apex of the triangle was Max’s ship, the Cumberland, a Khyber class destroyer in the service of the Union Space Navy. Cumberland was fast, smart, stealthy, and—for her size—powerful. And she was running for her life.

  The other two, slightly less than fifty thousand kilometers behind and about seven thousand away from each other, were “Hotels,” standing for “H”—hostile warships. These Hotels were crewed by Krag, aliens descended from Earth rodents that an alien race had transplanted, along with other Earth plants and animals, to a distant world for purposes unknown, over eleven million years ago. The Krag had been waging a brutal war of extermination against mankind for more than thirty years—a war that, unknown to most of the public and even to most of the men in the Navy, the Krag hegemony was slowly but surely winning.

  After the labels “H1” and “H2,” each icon representing an enemy ship on the display bore the computer-generated label “KRAG CRSR CRUSTACEAN,” designating the Hotels as enemy cruisers, which in general were much larger than destroyers like the Cumberland and much more heavily armed. Naval Intelligence had conferred upon this type of cruiser the only moderately ridiculous name Crustacean class. Big, powerful, and fresh from the Krag yards, they had the newest and most effective engines, deflectors, point defense systems, sensors, countermeasures, and weapons that the advanced Krag civilization could produce. The Cumberland would have been badly outmatched against just one such ship, but against two, the computer’s tactical scenario evaluation algorithm (T-SEA, pronounced “tee-see”) determined that “the correlation of forces very heavily favors H1 and H2.”

  No shit.

  T-SEA rated the odds of survival as being stacked against the Cumberland to the tune of “approximately 7824.7 to 1.”

  At least we have a chance.

  “Hotels are still on our six and closing the range,” Lieutenant (JG) Bartoli announced from Tactical a little more than twenty minutes later, his Mobile, Alabama, drawl becoming more noticeable as the tension increased—“still” came out “stee-yul.” “Now at thirty-four thousand kills. Closure rate is 773 kills per minute.”

  More important than what Bartoli said was what he did not say, what everyone in CIC knew: that the closure rate was a death sentence. Pounced upon and damaged by the cruisers when she jumped into the system, the Cumberland was no longer faster at sublight than the Krag vessels, which now had a slight speed advantage over the nominally faster destroyer. As a result, the two enemy ships would close until they reached a range of 27,253 kilometers (a nice, round number in the Krag measuring system) and each fired a salvo of six Foxhound missiles.

  Although the Cumberland’s excellent point defense systems, plus some fancy maneuvering, might manage to destroy, deflect, decoy, intercept, or evade eight or nine Foxhounds at a time, twelve would be just too many. At least one would get through, detonate its 102.8-kiloton thermonuclear warhead, and the Cumberland, along with the 215 souls aboard her—the closest thing to a family that Max had in the universe—would silently and instantaneously die in a brilliant flash of fusing hydrogen, leaving behind not so much as a single particle of solid matter to mark that they had ever existed.

  Max shook his head. Not today. Today is not a good day to die.

  Unconsciously squaring his shoulders and jutting out his jaw, Max pulled his seat closer to his console and accessed the controls for the tactical display. He adjusted the scale to show everything within 1 AU, or about 150 million kilometers of the ship. Nothing. Then 5 AU. Nothing. Then 10 AU. He smiled. Max punched up a voice channel and stabbed the comm button.

  “Engineering. Brown here.” Max always found the engineer’s cultured English accent reassuring.

  “Wernher! I know you said that the compression drive was out, but when you said ‘out,’ did you mean ‘out’ out or just ‘not available for high c factors over long distances’?”

  A chuckle came over the comm circuit, followed by an English accent that sounded as though it belonged on a foxhunt in Kent. “You want to know whether the compression drive is ‘out out’? Notwithstanding the inartful phrasing, I do take your meaning, sir. You want to know whether there is any capability for superluminal propulsion at all, no matter how lim
ited it may be. Pray tell, oh silver-tongued leader, what did you have in mind?”

  “I’d like to get to that gas giant, Mengis VI.” Max said. “It’s only about seven AU away.” Seven times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Only about a billion kilometers. Just a biscuit toss. Come on, Wernher.

  “Thinking about ducking into the upper layer of its atmosphere and hiding the ship in the electrical discharges from all those storms?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But sir, the way that plays out tactically, that maneuver buys us only another…four hours or so. What does that get you?”

  “Another four hours or so.”

  “Oh.” Five seconds of silence. He was probably pulling up the tactical display on his console. “I see.”

  Yes, Wernher, it really is that bad. “Well?”

  More silence. The engineer was thinking. “Sir, I don’t need to tell you the compression drive was heavily damaged when we took that last hit to the aft section.…”

  Please, let there be a “but” coming.

  “But I believe I could manage to provide very low-order superluminal propulsion for a highly limited period of time. I expect that by violating something like 150 Safety and Equipment Utilization Regulations, I could give you ten c for something like six minutes, which should get us where you want us to go.”

  “Outstanding.” Life. Four more hours of it anyway. “I’ll sign half a million SEUR waivers and have them plated in pure gold if you’ll just get me to that planet. Oh, Wernher, since we’re going to go on the compression drive already…”

  “I’m afraid not, Captain. I could probably get you to the jump point, but we’d be all dressed up with no place to go. The main jump drive power junction is demolished, and there’s no auxiliary or replacement unit on a ship this small. And before you ask, yes, my lads can build another from spares, but the unit is very intricate. It’s a twenty-four hour job, if not a thirty-six.”

  “Understood. Then just get me to that gas giant. Do what you have to do, and let me know when you’re ready.”

  “Aye, sir. Give me about five minutes.”

  “I’d give you all the time in the world, Wernher. The Krag, on the other hand, give you no more than five minutes and,” he glanced at the tactical display, “forty-seven seconds. Your tea will have to wait.”

  “Understood. No matter, the scones are still cooling. Brown out.”

  Max called the engineer “Wernher,” because his first and last name, Vaughn Brown, sounded to Max like von Braun, the surname of the famous German-American rocket engineer. Max, accordingly, called Brown by von Braun’s given name, “Wernher,” thinking the appellation both a joke and a compliment.

  “Well, XO,” said Max, turning to the man seated at his right, “what do we do when we get to the gas giant, other than join our chief engineer for some scones and Earl Grey with lemon?”

  The man to Max’s right, a die-hard coffee man born in Brazil on Earth, who had never tasted a scone, was Lieutenant Eduardo DeCosta, age twenty-three, the Cumberland’s new executive officer. DeCosta filled the berth of the late Texan, Robert Garcia, who had perished at the Battle of Pfelung a few weeks before. Until a week ago, DeCosta had been a hot-shot whiz kid in the Tactical section of the battleship Hidalgo. Now he was Max’s XO.

  Newly promoted, the young man was just discovering that the galaxy as viewed from the perspective of the tactical staff support room of an enormous battleship and the galaxy as viewed from the XO’s station right in the middle of the action in the CIC of a destroyer were vastly different places.

  As soon as he had discerned what the skipper’s plan was, DeCosta pulled up a tactical plot and the main database entry for the destination planet on his console, and by the time Max asked the question, he was already working through the situation.

  “Planet Mengis VI, number six in a twelve-planet system, 1.85 Jupiter masses, eight major moons—none inhabited, uncounted dozens of minor ones that are mostly captured asteroids, sketchy ring system, huge and very powerful magnetic field, hydrogen-helium composition with the standard trace elements and compounds for a gas giant, typical atmospheric dynamics with distinct cloud bands, extreme turbulence, violent electrical storms, multiple decks of ammonia and ammonia hydrosulfide clouds—it’s pretty much a standard naval issue gas giant—Jupiter or Epsilon Eridani V on steroids.”

  “They don’t vary much from system to system, do they?”

  “No, sir.”

  “So, what does that give us to work with?”

  “Well, sir, I suppose that, at least in the short term, we hide out in the cloud deck in an area of higher than average electrical activity to conceal our mass and EM signature, and engage our thermal stealth systems to keep from showing up as a hot spot against the cold of the planet’s atmosphere. It’s about 160 Kelvin in there, not as cold as the interstellar background, but still only twenty-five degrees or so warmer than liquid nitrogen. A bit on the nippy side.”

  “That’s right. Now, think from the Krag perspective. When they pull into orbit at sublight about two hours after we get there, what’ll they know? What’ll they do?”

  DeCosta considered for a few seconds. But only a few. “There’s no way to avoid leaving an easy-to-follow trail through all those particles and fields, so they’ll know approximately where we are. Not enough to target their weapons, but enough to know where they want to sit and wait us out.

  “In their shoes, I would set up a standard high–low interdiction. They do it the same way we do: park one ship in low orbit right on top of their best guess as to our location, and park the other one in a higher orbit to cut off our escape if we try to slip out from underneath.”

  “Right. That’s my read on it too. Once we’ve ducked under the clouds and out of sight, why don’t we just crawl out from under the Krag and then run for it when we get far enough?”

  “Won’t work, Skipper. The main sublight drive’s thermal signature suppression systems will keep the Krag from seeing the heat from the drive itself. That’s great in space, but in a planetary atmosphere, running the drive will heat the surrounding atmospheric gases and leave a hot trail for the Krag to spot on infrared.”

  “What about creeping away on maneuvering thrusters?”

  “Way too slow, sir. Down where we’ll have to be, we’ll be plowing through that thick atmosphere. We won’t be able to get much speed going on those dinky little thrusters. We’ve only got four hours, and we won’t get far enough. We’d gain about…twelve degrees in the intercept vector, which translates into seven additional seconds before they vaporize us. Maybe eight.”

  “And if we hide and do nothing more?”

  “About two hours after we go on thermal stealth, our heat sink reaches capacity, and we have to do a thermal dump. Of course, if we dump, we give away our location. Even if we extend only the radiator fins shielded from their view by our ship, we’ll create a hot spot in the planetary atmosphere that will stand out from orbit like a snowball in a coal bin. If we don’t dump, then the heat sink fails, which will do the dump for us and damage half the systems in the ship as a bonus. In either event, they lock on their pulse cannons and blow us to hell.”

  Max nodded. The kid had it figured just the way he did. “And what if Wernher gives tea time a miss and effects repairs to give us back our speed advantage over the cruisers?”

  “We still lose,” DeCosta replied. “Even with our 23 percent acceleration advantage and our 7 percent top speed advantage over the Crustaceans restored, the interception geometry and the physics are totally against us. The high cruiser will be nearly out of the gravity well and at orbital velocity, so he’s got a huge head start before the race even begins. If we try to run, he can cut us off and destroy us before we can develop enough speed to get away.”

  “What if we try to even the odds by taking on the low ship one-on-one once the two ships are
settled in different orbits?”

  “No go, Skipper. It’s basic orbital mechanics. Because of the similarity in the kinetic energy values, it’s a lot easier to transfer from high orbit to a low orbit in the same plane than to boost up to low orbit from the upper atmosphere, where we’re going to be. The high cruiser can drop down into the lower orbit to help the low cruiser faster than we can climb up to fight him. They’ll mop the deck with us.”

  “Okay, you’ve summarized the problem. We’ve got about four hours to solve it. Get with Kasparov and his people. Their sensors expertise makes them the closest thing to planetary scientists we’ve got. Make yourself an expert on Mengis VI and its environs. I need to know the lay of the land we’re going to be fighting on. While you’re doing that, I’ve got a bit of research of my own to do.”

  DeCosta got up from his station, walked over to the Sensors console, and began conversing with Lieutenant Kasparov animatedly. The two men talked in low voices, DeCosta sitting next to Kasparov in what was known as the “second-fiddle position” at the large and complex Sensors console.

  The two pulled up screens in rapid succession and switched from one data channel to another, apparently plowing through a great deal of information and exchanging ideas. Kasparov was also talking a lot to his SSR, or “back room,” to get information and advice from the specialists who gave him in-depth support and detailed monitoring of every sensor every minute of every day. Meanwhile, Max started pulling up data on the flight and control software parameters for the Talon antiship missile, the Cumberland’s primary weapon.

  A few minutes later, Max’s comm buzzed. “Skipper.”

  “Captain, this is Engineering.” It was Brown. He sounded winded. “Compression drive is ready. Be aware that the compression drive control interface at the Maneuvering Station functions as OFF/ON only—there is currently no ability to regulate speed from CIC.”