To Honor You Call Us (27 page)

“Jump complete, restoring systems,” Stevenson announced.  The now-familiar routine progressed as one system after another stirred from enforced slumber, sensor information started coming in, drives were restored and the ship inched into tentative motion to clear the datum, but this time the routine was not routine at all.  The Vaaach map had shown the expected routes and schedules of four Krag freighters as they moved through the Free Corridor.  As best could be told from analysis of the file, the original source of the data was the computer of a Krag vessel.  Apparently, the Vaaach had met the Krag vessel somewhere in deep space, hacked the computer, and downloaded the file, which was not surprising given that they had sufficient skill to penetrate the
Cumberland
’s
intricate system of serially redundant firewalls and lockouts to place a file in her systems without anyone being the wiser.  Perhaps they hacked the computers of every ship they met, in which case the Vaaach must have accumulated an amazing body of intelligence.

Two of the Krag ships were positioned so that the
Cumberland
could not reach them before they crossed into the Romanovan Imperium, a neutral power whose space Max was ordered not to violate.  But, two appeared as though they could be intercepted, and Max was going to try. 

As always, Max needed to hear from Kasparov.  Fortunately, the man and his Back Room had progressed by leaps and bounds in only a few days.  Minutes elapsed with no ship contacts other than a few freighters crawling across the system at 0.05 c. Sensors typed and classified them anyway, and Comms pulled up their transponder information in less than ten seconds.  They turned out to be a heavy ore carrier operated by Shoulder Freight Lines, ridiculously named
Shoulder’s Boulder Holder
and an eighty-five year old, bare bones, barely able to pass inspection microfreighter, its tiny hold full of small but high value items—gourmet coffee, something known as
Beluga caviar
, precision machine tools, and surgical instruments—bearing the improbable name
Queen Mary. 

By the end of this cruise, this crew might turn out to be moderately proficient. 

Max saw Kasparov’s shoulder muscles tense and his hands fly to the controls for his console.  He must have heard something from his Back Room.  Here it comes.

“Distant contact.  Designating as Uniform seven.  Bearing two-seven-five mark zero-five-three.  Reading a bearing change from right to left and from bottom to top.  Range is still uncertain but the weakness of the mass detection indicates it is in excess of two-five AU.  Bearing change is rapid for such a distant contact and I’m getting a hint of a high Doppler as well, so am classifying contact as fast—probably a warship.  Request course change to zero-niner-five mark zero-five-three to get a cross bearing on contact.”

“Maneuvering, make it so.  Make your speed zero point two five,” Max ordered.  The ship came about to a heading perpendicular to the contact’s bearing.  If the line of the first bearing to the target was the “b” side of a right triangle, the idea was now for the ship to travel along “a” side, or the base, to take a cross bearing down the “c” side, or hypotenuse, allowing it to calculate the range.  Of course, Max could have the range measured to the meter in a few minutes with active sensors, that is, by targeting the enemy with a sensor beam.  But, like nuclear submarines in the oceans of Earth centuries before, stalking warships rarely gave away their positions by using active sensors, preferring to detect their prey by the target’s own emissions while themselves remaining hidden until the last second.  The deadliest attack was the one you did not see coming.

Minutes passed, then the better part of an hour.  Working a target takes patience and nerves of steel.  And, with all the coffee Max had been drinking these past few hours, it also took a bladder the size of a beach ball.  Max had needed to take a leak for the last twenty minutes, but hated to leave his station for more than ten seconds.  If he didn’t go now, though, he’d be forced to leave to change his uniform.  “XO, I’m headed for the head.  You have CIC.”

“Understood, I have CIC.”

He was back in less than ninety seconds.

“XO, status.”  Tradition demanded that he ask, as if there is anything that could have changed meaningfully in a minute and a half that would not also be immediately obvious from the Main Status Display and the Condition Monitors. 

“Well sir, we have a priority signal from Admiral Webb in Norfolk.  The Krag have surrendered and we are supposed to deliver the message to those guys.”  He pointed at where the contact was plotted in the 3D Tactical Projection.

Joke.  And not a bad one.  Garcia might just make a decent CO some day.  Might as well play along.  “Outstanding news, XO.  I suggest you handle this personally.  Put on your pressure suit, grab a flag of truce from the sail locker, go out airlock four, and tie it to the forward dorsal short range VHF antenna mount right away.  Then, we’ll just run right up to them like we’re ready to invite them over for coffee and beignets.”

“Sir, shouldn’t we wait for confirmation from Norfolk before I do that?”

“Good idea.”  Max reached over and slapped the XO on the shoulder.  Who knows, he and this XO might weld into a real team one of these days.  If they lived through the next three hours.  

Max would have been willing to kill or die to get more and better information from Kasparov, but the man couldn’t tell what he didn’t know.  He was talking furiously to his back room, so they must be learning something.  Max itched to know.  He was used to being in the trenches, not back at the Chateau drinking champagne, talking on the field telephone, and moving markers around on a map.  If he chose, Max could listen to their voice loop, or any other of the circuits between any of his CIC officers and their Back Rooms.  For that matter, if he had the patience to navigate his way through all the levels of all the menus, he could pull up any display from any console in the ship.  But no Captain with any sense did that (Max noted, though, that Captain Oscar had configured his console with easy navigation shortcuts to do exactly that—monitor loops, scroll through every display of every CIC console, and all sorts of other ludicrous micromanagement).  Max relied mostly on what his CIC people told him, plus what he could tell from a few of the normal “CO Displays” that were on the standard main menu for the Commander’s Console. 

“Captain.”  It was Kasparov.  Finally.  “Cross bearing indicates range to target is two six point seven four AU.  Target motion analysis indicates target is bound for this system’s Bravo jump point at speed of approximately zero point five two c.  Naturally, as we accumulate more data, we will be able to refine that estimate.  And, sir, this is a very dusty system.  Both we and the target are in the plane of this system, so our line of sight right now is right through the bulk of the dust and it’s obscuring visual imaging.  At first, we thought that the target was enormous, but as we start to get a better angle the target image appears, under extreme magnification and enhancement, to be resolving into three ships in a line abeam formation.  Configurations are not visible at this time, but from the amount of light reflected from each our best guess right now is that we are looking at the fast military ore carrier we were expecting and two escorts of some kind.  Probably Destroyers, but they might be large Corvettes or small Frigates at this point.  So, the largest ship retains the designation Uniform seven and we are designating the apparent escorts as Uniform eight and nine.”

“Thank you, Mr. Kasparov.”  Oh, yes, thank you so bloody much, Mr. Kasparov.  Two, count-em, TWO probable Krag Destroyers.  We wouldn’t want to make things too easy, would we?  “Maneuvering, plot a course at a forty-five degree angle to the plane of this system with an azimuth that will put us on the six o’clock of that little Krag convoy while keeping us more than half a million kills away from them at all times.  We’ll slide into their six and sneak up behind them from that far back.”  Max wouldn’t normally give such a complex order to Maneuvering; instead, he would break the order down into a series of simpler steps and give each as the previous one was completed.  But LeBlanc had impressed him so far.  This man could handle what was just thrown at him, plus some.

LeBlanc acknowledged the order, spent a minute or so working with his console, and then projected a proposed course in the tactical display.  Max looked at it, saw that it was exactly what he wanted, and nodded to his fellow Cajun.  The old Chief began giving orders to his people and the
Cumberland
started once again to crawl the duck pond.

“Sensors, you
will
let me know when you get a better ID on the Krag vessels, won’t you?”

“Affirmative, sir.  It’s going to be a while.  They are still very distant, their drives are masked from us so we can’t get a specident on them, and we are still too far for optical scanners to resolve a configuration.”  Max had served his time in Kasparov’s position, so he knew all that.  It didn’t make it any less frustrating. 

Patience.  Max was tempted to run the main sublight up to full, and go charging into battle, guns blazing.  It would be better than taking all these hours to creep into position and make a sneak attack.  No, it wouldn’t.  Chances are, in a fair fight, those two Krag escorts would mop the floor with him.  Max remembered the words of Commodore Middleton:  “A fair fight comes from poor planning.  Your goal is an unfair fight.  You want to use every trick, artifice, and deceit possible to make every fight an outrageously unfair contest tilted completely in your favor, every time.  If you are above using surprise, guile, stealth, and misdirection in battle, you are too noble to be in the Navy.  Consider a career in Education.” 

An hour and a half of creeping.  “Skipper.”  It was Kasparov.  “We’ve finally got an angle that lets us do a specident on the targets’ drives—all Krag signatures.  So all three targets are now posident as Hostile.  Redesignating the probable ore carrier as Hotel One, and the two probable escorts as Hotels two and three.  We should have the IDs narrowed down to class before long.”

Whatever their precise designation, the three targets had been keeping a ruler straight course across this star system since they were first detected and were making no effort to conceal their course or make themselves hard to detect.  Whether it was because of Max’ strategy of getting into his patrol area several days early or sheer luck, these ships appeared to have no idea that there was any chance of a hostile ship in the neighborhood.  If they weren’t expecting trouble, maybe they wouldn’t be looking too hard for it. 

Or, maybe, just maybe, they wanted it to
look
as though they weren’t expecting trouble.

“Mr. Kasparov, I want you to put two men in your Back Room on optical scanners.  Watch the area from twenty thousand to five hundred thousand kills behind our little convoy like hawks for any occultations, reflections, glints, glimmers, tiny flashes from attitude control thrusters, flicking cigarette lighters, toddler’s night lights, or any artificial light source of any kind.  Tie the computer detectors into those circuits, too, sometimes they will spot something that eyeballs miss.  Then, I want you to take two more men and align the main mass detector on that azimuth and ignore everything else.”  The main mass detector usually scanned in all directions, allowing it to detect approaching vessels but greatly decreasing its sensitivity.  By training it in one direction only, Max was increasing the chance of detecting even a distant target that was taking active measures to conceal its mass signature.  “Crank up the gain way above the background noise threshold, and then have those men watch the noise, look for any repeat detections more than one standard deviation above random.  If there is something hiding in that space, you are going to slowly build up a pattern of higher than average detections along the other ship’s line of bearing.”

“Aye, sir.  What about EM detection?  We can orient the High Gain Array that we use to monitor low power eavesdropping devices from long range.”  Designed with the idea that she might someday be used to penetrate enemy space and collect intelligence,
Cumberland
was equipped with an exquisitely sensitive broadband EM sensor capability that was intended to allow her to receive signals from covertly planted “bugs” at extreme range.  The same equipment might pick up faint electromagnetic signals escaping from the hidden enemy vessel. 

“Good idea.  Do that.  Maybe they have some signal leakage they don’t know about.”  Kasparov started giving orders to his Back Room.  “Maneuvering, let’s crawl that duck pond from the West instead of the North.”

“You want to come up behind this hypothetical trailing ship?”  LeBlanc was instantly on the same page.

“You got it.  Assume the trailer is less than half a million kills behind the ore carrier.  Let’s give him a wide berth and put ourselves on his six.  Hopefully, he’s going to be watching the backs of the ships he’s protecting rather than his own.” 

“Aye sir.”

“Captain, if I may?”

“Yes, XO?”

“What makes you think anything’s back there?”

“Call it a hunch.  Well, it’s more than that, actually.  This little mini-convoy just smells fishy to me.  You see, it is very hard to use a single ship, no matter how powerful it is, to protect a gigantic target like an ore carrier that has no point defense systems.  We just use our superior stealth to sneak in to missile range, fire, and then use the combination of high speed and an exit vector screened by the exploding target to get away before we can be fired on.  But, if they put
two
escorts in there along with the ore carrier, then it’s a different ball game.”