To Honor You Call Us (15 page)

“Aye, sir, resuming closure maneuver, same rate, closing to one three triple zero.”  Thirteen thousand kilometers.  Roughly the diameter of the Earth and, for most purposes, not that close, but for two warships from non-allied and potentially hostile races in a neutral star system, Max was practically crawling into the Vaaach’s back pocket.

More minutes crept by.  That’s what being in the Navy in wartime was all about:  weeks of unbearable tedium punctuated by hours of unbearable tension punctuated by seconds of unbearable terror.  Max had no problem bearing any of it, except that the unbearable tension part tended to wear thin pretty quickly.  A few minutes ago, he had ordered finger sandwiches delivered to CIC.  Everyone had already been getting good use out of the recently re-installed coffee pot and chiller.  Humans dealt better with tension if they could eat and drink a little.  Or, at least, Max did and what went for him went for other personnel under his command. 

“Course change warning,” announced Kasparov.  “Turning one zero seven.”

LeBlanc went with his instinct, betting that this turn would be as sharp as the last.  “Yaw hard to starboard, all the way to the stop.  Pitch down ten degrees.  Drives, back off ten percent.”  He watched his display for a few seconds.  “Pitch, push her to the stop.  He’s out turning us.  We’ve got to slow to stay in his wake.  Drives, null the main sublight.  Engage breaking drive and bring it to fifty percent.”  The ship’s main sublight drive ceased to push the ship, but with virtually no friction in the vacuum of space, the ship would not slow appreciably unless a counteracting force were applied, so the breaking drive, forward-aimed thrusters mounted on four projections that ringed the hull, fired at half power. 

The Chief watched both ships’ trajectory and velocity with an expert eye.  He’d been handling this ship since the day it came out of the yard and he was damn good at it.  And, he had the help of a brilliant fly by wire computer that was, at this moment, adjusting the relative thrust of the breaking drive thrusters so that the ship would continue to answer the turn being commanded by the maneuvering controls even as the ship slowed.  “Kill the braking drive.  Engage main sublight at twenty-eight percent.”  After a few seconds, “Drives, make it thirty percent.  Pitch and yaw, steering amidships on my mark . . . NOW.  Yaw, two degrees to port . . . and amidships . . . now.  Captain, we’re through the turn.  That one was close.  If she turns any tighter, we’re not going to be able to stay with her.”

“Understood, Chief.  I don’t want to press our luck.  Back us off to thirty thousand kills.  Let’s see if we can sneak away from this guy and go on about our business.”

Max pretended not to notice the obvious wave of relief that washed through CIC.  He had to admit, though, that as the range to target reading on his own display showed a steadily growing number, he was breathing easier as well.

An hour and fourteen minutes went by and the range to the Vaaach ship was now 28,890 kilometers.  Before long, Max was going to try to sneak his ship out of the Vaaach’s wake and slip away unnoticed with his new haul of priceless intelligence.  Max was polishing off a sandwich that the Galley had earnestly proclaimed was made from roast beef but which Max strongly suspected came from an animal of a distinctly different heritage when he heard Kasparov gasp.

“Captain,” the Sensor Officer’s voice was far too loud and far too high-pitched for Max’s comfort, “the Vaaach grav curves are doing something I don’t understand.  The whole pattern is twisting into something like an ‘S’ shape.”

Max knew what that meant.  That “S” stood for “shit.”  Very deep shit. 

Automatically, Max came to his feet.  “Maneuvering, pitch up hard, give me a delta Y of one three zero degrees, Main sublight to Emergency.”  He wanted to veer off from the present course and also slightly away from the Vaaach ship in order to get out of its path and open up the range at the same time.

“Target has turned
in its own length
and is accelerating back down its previous course.  They are already at point two five,” said Kasparov. 

Sweet Jesus.  In its own length?  How was that even possible?  As if that weren’t bad enough, the other ship had dumped .42 c of forward velocity and had put on .25 in the other direction—that’s a total delta V of 67% of the speed of light in under a minute.  God only knows how many Gs that entailed.  If the
Cumberland
tried a velocity change even a tenth that violent, the ship would tear it apart.  The biggest piece anyone would find could fit easily into a shot glass.  Obviously, the Vaaach were more advanced than anyone suspected.  The ships that had so impressed the humans with whom the Vaaach had previously made contact were probably two hundred year old sixth and seventh raters.  Today, Max was up against a Ship of the Line. 

“Now they’re altering course to intercept.  Closure is so rapid I can’t measure it—I’m not sure they didn’t go superluminal for a fraction of a second.”  There was a violent lurch.  Station harnesses kept anyone from falling out of their seats or being thrown around the CIC but Max was certain that one of his eyeballs was rolling around on the deck somewhere.  “We’re being held by a very powerful grappling field, sir.”

“You think?  Power rating?”

“Over two million Hawkings, sir.”

“We’d never break that.  Maneuvering, null all drives, take maneuvering thrusters and inertial attitude control off line.  Let’s not burn out anything trying to fight a two million Hawk grapfield.”  Less than a minute later, having been reeled in by the Vaaach, the
Cumberland
hung
stationary in space, like a dragonfly on a bug collector’s pin, with the now brightly-lit and decidedly menacing Vaaach ship a scant sixteen hundred meters off the bow, stabbing it with nearly a dozen brilliant spotlights.  In contrast to the familiar cylinder, ellipsoid, or elongated box forms that dominated Human, Krag, Pfelung, and most other species’ design, the Vaaach vessel was a long, narrow, flattened wedge with a sharp bow and angled corners at the stern that bent back toward the central drive unit, like a giant, barbed spear point aimed threateningly at the comparatively tiny Union Destroyer. 

“Sir,” it was Tactical.  It had to be more bad news.  “They’ve locked some sort of antimatter cannon on us.  I’m pretty sure that one shot would, well . . . .”

“I get the picture.  We’ll just have to convince them to not shoot, now, won’t we?”

“Ready to transmit, visual, aural, or text,” prompted Chin, a bit too eagerly. 

“Negative.  Not the Vaaach.  They’ve got us.  It would be . . . impertinent to speak without being spoken to.  Here’s the way this plays out.”  He tried to make it sound like plot summary for a Trid Vid comedy program.  “They’re going to let us hang here for about a minute and a half, so that there will be just enough time for it to sink in how helpless we are and how we are entirely at their mercy, but not enough time for us to detect any weakness they might have and start to formulate a plan to get away.  Then they’ll hail us on visual.  They don’t care if the standard protocol for inter-species communication is text.  They’re carnivores who hunt by sight, so they like to lay eyes on who they are talking to.  Or who they might be having for dinner.  They like to use Channel 7.  The Forest Victor, or Grove Guardian, or Tree Tamer or whatever his title is will engage us in witty blood and guts warrior banter after which they’ll either let us go with their blessing or blast us to dust with that antimatter cannon.”

Bhattacharyya at Intel snorted almost inaudibly.  It was clear that the Captain had asked for that briefing on the Vaaach to educate Bhattacharyya, not Robichaux.  “Captain?” he interjected quietly.

“Yes, Bhattacharyya?”

“So, you’ve encountered the Vaaach before?”

“Let’s just say for now that we’ve met and I’m still alive to give evasive answers about the experience,” Max answered, evasively. 

Ninety four seconds elapsed on the chrono before Chin said, “Captain, we are being hailed.  Visual.  Channel Seven.”

“Let’s see it.”

Several screens in CIC cut to an image of a large brownish-gray furry face with a small black nose and white fluffy tufts where the ears would go on an Earth mammal.  The Vaaach looked greatly like an overgrown Earth Koala bear, but for the obvious and penetrating intelligence in its yellow-green eyes, its forty-five centimeter wide mouth from which protruded twenty centimeter fangs—six of them—and the ten centimeter double-edged claws with which it was grooming the fur on its forearm.  A forearm which Max knew to be twice the diameter of his own neck.  Your average Vaaach was just over four and a half meters tall, weighed roughly three quarters of a ton, and could easily take down a fully grown grizzly bear armed with nothing but claws, teeth, and attitude.  The grooming gesture gave Max hope.  It usually represented mild condescension with a hint of rebuke, as to a wayward but promising cub. 

A series of roaring sounds, punctuated by growls and snarls came from the audio outputs around the room.  This lasted for about fifteen seconds.  Then, the computer produced a translation text on a screen beside the image of the Vaaach complete with supposedly helpful explanations, set off by brackets, of terms and cultural references.  The Vaaach sat, regarding the camera placidly while it knew the humans were reading the translation.  “I am Forest-Victor [a rank believed to be equivalent to a senior Captain or a Commodore] Chrrrlgrf of the Vaaach Sovereignty, son of the perilous Rawlrrhfr Forest, slayer with these claws of the strangling Targruf [a forty-meter long Anaconda-like snake, strong enough to crush a ground car, that lives deep in the Rawlrhrf Forest and is believed to kill several hundred adult Vaaach per year], and victorious commander at the Battle of Hrlrgr [a fleet engagement against Species 9 fought on August 8, 2313 involving more than seventy-five capital ships and resulting in a decisive victory for the Vaaach].  I greet you, tiny, pink, clawless, fangless, furless Human, child of the ridiculous gibbering monkeys that so amuse us in our zoos.  Identify yourself and state your purpose in straying so far from the trees out of which your ancestors so foolishly descended.”

This had to be done exactly right.  Max made a subtle hand gesture which the computer would recognize as a command to include his whole body in the imager shot.  He stood, drew his boarding cutlass, and held it across his chest in a kind of salute.  “I am Lieutenant Commander Maxime Tindall Robichaux, Union Space Navy, fierce son of planet Nouvelle Acadiana, a dangerous world completely infested with carnivorous reptilian alligators and swarming with venomous snakes.”  A minor exaggeration:  the snakes and alligators generally avoid the Polar Regions.  “A Frigate under my personal command has vanquished a Krag Battlecruiser of superior force and I have personally slain seventeen Krag with the steel you see before you, two before the sap of manhood had risen in my limbs.  My people are at war with the Krag.  We go to attack their ships in neutral space.  We intend no harm to any Vaaach nor shall we venture anywhere near your dread Sovereignty.”

The Vaaach replied with more pissed off lion and bear sounds, this time consisting of more deep bass rumbling and low snarls.  Somehow, Max got the impression that the tension level had just dropped a notch.  The translation appeared.  “The Vaaach have nothing to fear from your feeble little vessel, so do not waste our time convincing us that you are not a threat to us.  We can see that at a glance.  You state that you travel to meet the Krag in battle.  Good.  They are skilled opponents but not worthy ones.  They begin wars without declaring them.  They kill the innocent for no purpose.  They take what they do not need.  If your purpose is to kill them, we would not hinder that.  The more of them you kill, the more pleased we shall be.  Why, though, did you follow our vessel, like a blood drinking pest riding a predator’s tail?  This act does not appear to show the respect that one hunter gives another.”

“Dread Forest-Victor, many of my crew have never seen the face of the enemy and have neither drawn his blood nor had theirs drawn.  Stalking skills must be practiced against a wily target or, when the trail of the true prey is found, it will elude the stalker and vanish into the trees.”

Max watched as the eyes of the huge alien warrior read the translation of his words.  The black nose wrinkled twice, which Max thought was the equivalent of a nod.  The claws stopped grooming the arm fur.  The Vaaach held his claws with the points aimed at his own face, and seemed to be conducting a visual inspection of their sharpness.  A few rumbles ensued, followed by several low, almost relaxed roars.  Max’s screen soon read:  “So, you seek to sharpen your claws on us before you sink them into the entrails of your enemy.  It is very likely that your claws are longer than your fangs but your goal is worthy.  Your stalking was not proficient but neither was it entirely unskillful.  We will not kill you.  At least, not on this hunt.  Now, go forth to kill Krag.  We may even amuse ourselves by leaving some of its fur behind so that you may take the scent.  But, do not stalk us again, lest we kill you for your monkey impertinence.  This transmission ends now.”

The screen went blank, the grappling field disengaged, and the huge warship drew away from the
Cumberland
at astonishing speed. 

Still alive.  “Maneuvering, resume course to the jump point, point four five c. Comms, check all EM records for the last few seconds of that transmission for something buried in that message.  If there’s nothing there, have the computer folks run a file survey and see if there’s any new data that we didn’t put there.  I think the mighty Forest Victor just sent us a present.”

“Aye, sir,” answered both Maneuvering and Comms.