To Honor You Call Us (42 page)

The words had evolved to fit the needs of a time harsher and more desperate than the age that gave rise to the original, but the tune was one that would have brought a smile to the face of Lord Nelson.  He knew it as “Heart of Oak.”  Over the centuries, it had become “Hearts of Steel.” 

To Stations my lads, 'tis to glory we steer,
Oh, sons of the Union, we fight without fear;
'Tis to Honor you call us, for Honor we stand;
We brothers in valor await fame’s command.

And the chorus rang out with even more gusto, as the half dozen or so Senior Midshipman who did not know the verses joined in.  These boys, ages fifteen to seventeen, were even more thoroughly inebriated than the Officers because, although naval regulations prohibited giving them alcohol, by immemorial naval tradition they were permitted beer, wine, ale, and stout on certain holidays, including Navy Day (February 5), Union Day (July 20), and the birthdays of Admiral Nelson (September 29) Admiral Halsey (October 30), and General Patton (November 11).  

Hearts of steel, that’s our ships; hearts of steel, that’s our men.

We always are ready; steady, boys, steady!

We'll fight, not surrender, again and again.

When the next verse began, the Mids stopped singing and went back to drinking.  The officers carried on, sounding very much as though they had the blood of Mars in their veins.

We’ll take payment in blood for the debt Krag must pay,
And carve them with cutlass when they come to play;
Our courage defiant ennobles the stars,

Stalwart sons of Ares, strong offspring of Mars.

The Mids joined in the Chorus again, this time even more loudly, many arm in arm and swaying back and forth in unison while Max’s booming bass and “Werner” Brown’s tuneful, yet powerful baritone practically rattled the china with “steady, boys, steady,” a phrase that had endured without change from the song’s “hard tack and salt horse” roots.   

The officers forged on into the concluding verse while the Mids refilled their glasses. 

We still make them bleed and we still make them die,

And we shout mighty cheers as they fall from the sky;

So cheer up me lads and let’s sing with one heart,

We will win this war if we all do our part.

The song was topped off by another repetition of the Chorus, sung even more loudly than the first two iterations and ending with a resounding thump as each man in the room honored tradition by pounding his fist on the table with the last “again.”  Tradition also required that, after any singing of “Hearts of Steel,” glasses be drunk down and refilled—tradition that was, in this case, enthusiastically honored.

A delightful meal, superb drink, manly singing, and naval companionship all combined to create a fine, warm mood in the wardroom, the kind of mood that made up for days and weeks of long, lonely service, short rations, protracted hardship, and extreme danger.  When glasses had been filled all around, the Captain stood at the head of the wardroom table, and began to speak, the talk in the room dying quickly.  “Gentlemen, I have two toasts.  And only two.”  Cries of “hear hear” made their way round the table, as many officers had endured endless litanies of Navy Day toasts from inebriated COs who had no inkling of when to shut up.  “First, to our greatly esteemed Doctor Ibrahim Sahin, who acquired for us this outstanding food and excellent drink.  I shall never again wonder which of my officers is best suited to go planetside and act as this vessel’s victualer.”  He drained his glass, containing about two fingers’ worth of the warm, dark, fragrant liquid distilled only in an exotic corner of the galaxy known as Kentucky. 

“Hear, hear!  To the doctor!” the officers responded, and drained their glasses.

“Now, recharge your guns, gentlemen,” he said.  All refilled their glasses.

“Today is Navy Day.  I’m just a plain-speaking fighting man, so I can’t give you a stirring speech about what the Navy means to each of us.  But I can say this.  Every one of you is a volunteer, most from boyhood.  Every one of you has had at least one chance, most of you several, to leave the Service at the end of a tour and has re-enlisted.  You have decided to make the Navy your life, not just once but many times.  There is something about the Navy that has kept you here.  Only you know, deep in your hearts, what that is.  It is likely different for each of you.

“I want to take this time to tell you what it is for me.  For many years, I had the honor of serving under one of the greatest men to ever wear the uniform, Commodore—now Fleet Admiral—Charles L. Middleton.”  Several of those present rapped their knuckles on the table or raised their glasses in tribute.  Admiral Middleton was almost universally loved and respected, not just for his strategic brilliance but for his psychological insight which was reputed to be better than that of any other man in the Navy.  “At a gathering like this, when I had just been commissioned as an Ensign on board the old Battlecruiser
Margaret Jackie
, someone asked him what it all meant.  ‘Commodore Middleton, what does it all mean, life, the Navy, our purpose for being, the Universe, and everything else?’  Now, as many of you know, old Uncle Middy can be a bit long winded,” a few men smiled at their own recollections of the admiral’s infamous loquaciousness, “and we all expected quite a speech, but not this time.  He just smiled and said one word:  ‘love.’ 

“I didn’t get what he meant back then.  I thought he was talking about romantic love, or maybe the love that parents and children have for each other.  But now I understand.  He was talking about the kind of love that we have here, in the Navy.  It may seem a strange thing to say about a service that has as its goal taking or killing the enemy, but at its very core the Navy is all about love.  Because, gentlemen,
loyalty is love
—love for your ship, and love for your shipmates.  Patriotism is love—love for the Union and the things that it stands for and protects.  And, even Courage is love—the love of all these things and added to it the love of Duty and Honor that is so powerful that for its sake you reach down to the very bottom of your deepest well of resolve and do what you have to do no matter how difficult it is and no matter how afraid you may be.  And, understood in that light, the Navy is the greatest home and repository and source of love in the galaxy.  She has no equal.  So, gentlemen, raise your glasses and lift your hearts to that which moves us, to that which sustains us, to that which protects us, to that which gives us life, and to that which calls us to love, to duty, to honor, to glory. 

“To the Navy.  May she live forever.” 

As one man they stood and drained their glasses.  

***

There was even more eating and drinking and singing one deck lower and sixteen meters aft in the Enlisted Mess, where food was generally served cafeteria style and the men helped themselves to whatever drink suited them.  The songs included “Hearts of Steel,” just as in the Wardroom, other patriotic songs, and some others of a bawdier variety.  Indeed, one old Able Spacer managed to lead the company through seventeen of the twenty-nine verses to “The Dirty Old Whore from Alnitak, Rendezvous” before passing out slumped against the soft serve ice cream dispenser.  Even Clouseau, the ship’s cat, was enjoying the festivities, circulating from one Mid’s lap to another, begging little scraps of meat with an endearing tilt of the head and an occasional quiet meow.  Indeed, he was not above stealing some of the tastier-smelling morsels from the plates of men and boys whose vigilance was impaired by drink.

Most of the squeakers, the youngest classes Midshipmen who spent more of their day in the ship’s school than in official duties, were present and were even allowed tiny amounts of the smallest beer and of wine diluted with ginger ale under the watchful eye of Midshipman Trainer, “Mother Goose” Amborsky, who was on this day celebrating his thirty-second Navy Day in uniform.  Old Mother Goose had taken a bit more than usual of the potato Vodka he favored and was in a talkative frame of mind, almost a different man from the gruff and laconic, but inwardly gentle, man the squeakers were used to seeing.  Sensing this difference in mood, the boys had drawn out the Chief, getting him to reminisce about his younger days in the Navy and the changes in the service over the years.  At the end of one such story, about how in the Portugal Class Battlecruisers all the Midshipmen were crowded into one cabin and slept on hammocks suspended from the ceiling—hammocks that, along with their boyish burdens, tended to become hopelessly tangled if the ship’s artificial gravity failed—the youngest Midshipman, the one stuck with the nickname “Will Robinson” until someone even younger came aboard, asked, “Chief, is it true you was in the Navy on the first day of the war?”

“Aye, lad, that I was.”  He paused to take a sip of his vodka.  “That I was.  Sometimes I want to forget that day, and sometimes I think it is my duty to remember every detail until the day I die.  Mostly, I try to remember.”  Another long pause, as he considered whether to stop there or to go on.  Hell, these hatch hangers would have to hear the story sometime.

“I was a Recruit Spacer Second Class on the old Battlecruiser
Repulse.
  The War of the Fenestrian Succession had been over for fifteen months and we were with what they used to call the Twenty-second Fleet, jumping from system to system along the Fenestra Treaty Boundary as a deterrent.  We were cruising along, fat, dumb, and happy, with no idea of what was about to happen.  A few freighters had reported some compression trails in deep space near the border, but we gave them no mind.  We thought it was space happy sensor officers seeing star fairies from spending too many hours at their scopes.  We sure as hell didn’t suspect the Krag.”

“Why not, Chief?” asked the eternally curious Will Robinson.  “Why not suspect them?”

“Because no one had seen their beady little eyes for nearly a hundred years, that’s why.  Hell, when we encountered them in 2183, we thought we were going to be fast friends with them.  They were sure smart enough.  Seemed friendly.  And curious they were, too, right eager to learn everything they could about us and not afraid to tell about themselves.  We traded whole libraries of history, literature, Trid Vid programming, art, music, everything.  But, things went all pear shaped when the biology information started flying back and forth.  Anyone could see that life on the two planets was two pages from the same chapter of the same book.  The same biology.  Not similar.  The same.  Same basic anatomy, same biochemistry, same DNA.  Life from the whole Krag planet could have almost been from some remote island on Earth that split off from a land mass long ago, kind of like Australia.

“They had sent us the complete genetic information for hundreds of life forms on their world and when our DNA guys worked through it, they figured out what happened pretty quick.  All the life on the Krag home world had clearly evolved from plants and animals that were alive on Earth eleven million years ago, in fact, from just a hundred and fifty or so species if you don’t include the insects and bacteria.  Well, paints a pretty clear picture, doesn’t it?  Somebody terraformed the Krag homeworld, visited Earth eleven million years ago, picked up some specimens, and gave them a new home.  No telling why.  Maybe they wanted to study Earth life in a new setting.  Maybe they wanted a bloody zoo.  Who the hell knows?  Unless we find those aliens (and, if we do, I’ve got a helluva bone to pick with them, let me tell you), we’ll never know.  What we do know is that those animals included the ancestor of our Earth rats.  But, on this new world, the ugly little critters didn’t evolve into rats.  They evolved over eleven million years into the Krag. 

“When we shared that theory with the Krag, they went totally batshit.  Now, they’re not stupid.  They can read their fossils in their rocks just like we read the fossils in our rocks.  So, they had the same facts, but just about the same time we were developing the Theory of Evolution, they came up with a totally different kind of theory.  According to them, eleven million years ago their Creator-God found a hostile world, remade it into a hospitable paradise, and then created perfect life to place on that world with the plan that it would evolve into his holy children, the Krag, and into creatures and plants to be their servants and their food.  And, what about us?  Did that make us the Krag’s sacred brothers and sisters under the skin, united by bonds of kinship and chemistry?  Not a bloody chance.  What it did was make us unholy blasphemers for saying that life on their world was merely a transplanted offshoot of life on ours.  On top of that, it made us a living, eating, breathing biological insult to their Creator-God because we were demonic spirits that had chosen to defy him by cloaking ourselves in the shape and chemistry of his true handiwork.  When we wouldn’t agree to be ruled by genuine creations, meaning the Krag, they just got madder and madder until in 2184 they cut off all contact.  They refused to respond to or even acknowledge our messages, turned back all diplomatic ships, stopped all trade, everything.

“Just before they cut off contact, they sent one last message.  It said: ‘you and all the infesting vermin spawned by your world are an affront to the Creator-God and exist in defiance of His holy will.  The stars will be cleansed of you.”  And, then, nothing.  Not a squeak.  That is, until June 26, 2281.  Suddenly, they showed up in a dozen systems with more than a thousand ships.  It looked like they had spent the whole time since 2184 busting their rat asses to build a fleet just to wipe us out.  Twelve systems fell in the first ten hours.  Fifty-four in the first week.