Man Of War: To Honor You Call Us Part 11

"I have," Max said. "You get it on an unhappy ship. If things are going well, you never have more than 2 or 3 percent using, if that many. But if you have a b.a.s.t.a.r.d skipper and the ship isn't performing well and men don't have pride in her, if she's picked up an insulting nickname like 'The Pitiful Pittman' or 'The c.u.mberland Gap,' you can get as many as half of the men taking something to get them through it. Having a happy ship, a ship where the men know their duty, a ship that performs well and has a creditable record against the enemy-those things are the long-term cure for this."

Accustomed to being dismissed by his seniors, the doctor was openly surprised that his observations were immediately being taken so seriously by the other officers. "Thank you all for being so ready to act to resolve this problem. I can identify who is using with comprehensive neural testing. The neural performance-"

Major Kraft's percom beeped, halting the doctor in mid-sentence.

"Major," Max said, annoyed. "Decorum dictates that an officer mute his percom when meeting with other senior officers, particularly when one of them is the CO."

"I understand that very well, sir, but begging the Captain's pardon, I a.s.signed this sender a tag that would let the call come through. I believe it to be urgently relevant." He flipped the cover open to reveal the main screen. He read for less than a minute and then nodded.

"When arresting a man for any drug offense, SOP is to conduct a thorough search of his quarters and all other areas under his control. The search of Rhim's quarters turned up seventeen very small blue tablets that were not in a standard Navy prescription container as required by regulations. We brought them to be a.n.a.lyzed by Pharmacist's Mate Nguyen. The results are on data channel 208, cla.s.sified for access only by the people in this room. The tablets are clearly Atanipine. I'm betting Dr. Sahin here can tell us more than that from the a.n.a.lysis."

Sahin had already gotten up from the small meeting table and helped himself to the captain's workstation. He studied the screen for a few minutes, scrolling up and down, occasionally nodding to himself or quietly saying "ahh" and "hmmm." Then he turned to the others.

"This sample was synthesized in a MediMax Mark XIV. All MediMax machines insert a microscopic marker chip, called an Auster dot, in every pill or capsule. The Auster dot is stamped with the make, model, and serial number of the machine; the name of the medication; the dosage; and the date the drug was made. And don't worry-it is quite harmless. It pa.s.ses through the alimentary tract and is eliminated in the feces. Very useful, by the way, as a simple fecal sample tells us what medication the patient is taking. So unless the marker routines have been tampered with-and this is very, very difficult-the time stamp shows that the tablets were made only yesterday. As we have been in deep s.p.a.ce all that time, it is clear that someone has a MediMax on board and has gone into the recreational pharmaceuticals business."

"And we have no reason to believe that the b.l.o.o.d.y thing is being used only to make the Chill, either," said Brown. "Whoever has this beastly device could be making G.o.d-knows-what other pills for the men to pop and is selling them all over the ship."

"Say, Doctor," he continued, "what exactly are those Auster dots made of? Is the material anything that would break down in shipboard waste processing?"

"The material is some polymer that is impervious to digestive fluids. It is biologically inactive, so I never had any reason to learn the composition in more detail than that. I think it is very likely to be impervious to breakdown by saprophytic bacteria as well as by the kinds of enzymes used in waste processing."

Brown seemed to have grasped the thread of an idea in his hand. "And what is their size, exactly?"

"One thousand microns."

"That big? That's a tenth of a millimeter! I'll be able to tell you exactly what we're dealing with here. Captain, if I may use your workstation, I need to get my people on this."

"Help yourself, Wernher."

Sahin relinquished the workstation to Brown, who pulled up the text message utility before typing furiously for two or three minutes. He hit SEND with a certain relish and leaned back in the chair. "There. That should do it."

"Care to let us in on your brilliant plan, Wernher, or are you going to keep it to yourself until you have results to announce? We know doing it that way is good for increasing the dramatic tension." Max's light tone took the sting out of the words.

Brown nodded. "Gentlemen, as you know, the waste that goes down the head in your quarters and all the drains around the ship is rather heavily processed, particularly to extract the water for reuse. Virtually all of the ma.s.s is taken out, either by water extraction or by enzymatic and bacterial breakdown of the solids, but there is always a residue. We irradiate the residue to kill any remaining microorganisms and then compress it into rectangular shapes that we call 'black bricks' because they are very dark, hard, and dry. And rather than tossing them into s.p.a.ce, we generally store them until we get back to a base because some captains," he said, throwing a significant glance in Max's direction, "are paranoid about an enemy being able to track our vessel or glean some intelligence about us if the bricks were found in deep s.p.a.ce and their contents a.n.a.lyzed. We completely cleaned our treatment plant at Jellicoe Station, and we've produced several kilograms of black bricks since then.

"I just ordered that representative samples be pulled and pulverized finely, before being run through a particulate screen set to trap every particle between 950 and 1050 microns in size. My people will deliver the resulting particles to the Casualty Station, which has equipment for scanning objects of that size in detail, and we'll know what our people have been taking."

"Outstanding," said Max.

"Let me call my people and give them instructions on how to get the results we need," said Sahin. "They'll need to exclude from the results the Auster dots from the pharmaceutical synthesizer in the Casualty Station, the ones from Jellicoe Station and the Casualty Stations from ships in the Task Force, and those from the five or so drug companies from whom the Navy buys pharmaceuticals."

"Why not just look for dots from this one MediMax?" asked Brown.

"Because we aren't certain that there is only one MediMax," Kraft said. "We might have two or more capsule capitalists on board ship."

The doctor went to a corner of the room to have a lengthy conversation with his percom.

"Let's a.s.sume, for now, that we just have one," Max said. "How do we catch him?"

"That is a standard law enforcement problem," said Kraft. "Generally, this is accomplished by having an undercover operative or a confidential informant put out the word that he is in the market for a purchase, after which he's contacted by the seller, a controlled buy is made, and the seller apprehended."

"That's fine when you're on a large station or planetside, or even a large ship like a battlewagon or a carrier, but it doesn't work on a small ship like this one," Max said. "The seller knows his buyers all too well. Except for some officers and a few senior NCOs, this crew has been together for well over a year, most of them for several years. Our man is not going to sell to someone he doesn't know, and we can't turn one of his customers into our undercover buyer because the jungle telegraph on this ship is way too efficient. This seller will know almost right away if we pick up one of his users."

"Why not just search the ship for the machine then?" Kraft asked.

Max shook his head. "Ships are thoroughly searched for contraband every time they put into a station or receive any repair or refit. It this man has a MediMax on board, he's found a brilliant hiding place for it, or it would have been turned up in one of those searches. If the refit crews didn't find it, we're not going to."

"Until now, I've always been on stations or planetside, Captain, so I don't know this. How do you get these people on board ship?" Kraft held up his palms in a gesture of inquiry and ignorance. Max was impressed that Kraft was so ready to admit his own lack of knowledge and to learn from someone with greater experience. This trait was anything but universal, particularly, for some reason, at the level of seniority occupied by Max and Kraft.

"You catch them by being observant and patient. It's a standard command problem. Over time they always make mistakes," Max explained. "The crew goes on sh.o.r.e leave and there are rumors about some able s.p.a.cer second being flush with cash, buying drinks for all his buddies, eating at the high-end restaurants, patronizing glamorous call girls, picking up expensive souvenirs and luxury items-that sort of thing. Or some crewman turns up in the Casualty Station obviously beaten by two or three other crewmen who are overheard yelling at him about cheating them or not giving them the stuff they paid for or going up on the price or cutting off their credit. Maybe you have a crewman who is a complete slacker, but seemingly, as if by magic, he has a superior who never puts him on report and two or three other crewmen who are all too willing to do his work for him.

"You see, one way or another, a man selling drugs on a ship is an anomaly, a deviation from the pattern. He has too much contact with too many people, spends too much money, receives too much deference, garners too much attention, and exercises too much power. Over a period of weeks or months, he stands out."

"I'd rather not wait that long," said Kraft.

"Neither would I," said Max, "but I don't know if we have an alternative."

Brown smiled. "What if we don't approach it as a law enforcement problem or as a command problem?"

"What kind of problem would it be then," asked the major.

"An engineering problem."

An hour and a half later, Major Kraft, Lieutenant Brown, the doctor, and Garcia were in the captain's day cabin, ostensibly to share with their skipper a mid-morning cup of coffee. There was coffee, and there were even some reasonably appetizing breakfast rolls, but a morning pick-me-up was not the purpose of this little get-together. The men were present to implement the engineer's idea without alerting the ship's ever-churning rumor mill that something was afoot.

With a nod from the captain, Kraft kicked things off. "The doctor has gotten the results of the Auster dot screening. There's lots of Chill being taken; we estimate somewhere between thirty and sixty users, depending on how many are purely recreational and how many are heavy addicts. There's also a smattering of other recreational drugs: mainly an a.s.sortment of the current generation of stims, a couple of the more popular pain meds, one or two of the muscle relaxants that people like to take with alcohol, and it looks like we've got one or maybe two men on 'lucies.'"

They needed to find that last person or persons right away. A crew member on hallucinogens was a serious hazard. "Every one of the dots came out of the same machine, so we're looking for one guy. We ran the serial number and it's a naval machine, last in official service on a Corvette, the CMD-1815. She made a forced landing on an asteroid in 2311 in some out-of-the-way system, and the crew died of hypoxia before they could be rescued. The ship was salvaged last year, and the salvage crew logged the Corvette's MediMax as having been destroyed. So, somehow, the MediMax from the CMD-1815 got from that asteroid onto this ship, where it is poisoning our crew."

"Then we need to catch the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Well, Wernher, we are going to catch him, right?" Max asked.

"I am loathe to make promises, but it is very likely we shall. The doctor gave me access to his database on the MediMax Mark XIV, which contained a complete set of specifications and schematics. Unfortunately, it did not contain the data that I needed about its electrical characteristics when in operation, so we built one."

"What?" Max interrupted. "You built a working MediMax! In an hour and a half? That thing must have over a thousand separate parts."

"It's not as though I worked some sort of miracle, you know. I had five men working on it in addition to myself, and some of those men are truly promising engineers. We got it done in just over an hour. In point of fact, it has only 193 parts. We used all eleven of our FabriFaxes to churn them out. The main problem was the operating software, but we were able to copy the operating system from the ship's unit, which is compatible with the smaller machine. We got it built, calibrated, and tested. It is working exactly according to the manufacturer's specifications."

Max looked at the doctor, who confirmed Brown's statement. "Indeed. I manufactured several samples of some of the more difficult pharmaceuticals, and the device produced them in a manner identical to the factory unit. As far as I can tell, it is indistinguishable from the real thing except for the manufacturer's markings and the color."

"The color?" Max was curious.

"Yes, sir, the color," Brown answered. "The real thing is mostly green and yellow, the colors of which the Krag are so fond. Ours is in a proper naval color scheme: Blue and gold."

"ca c'est bon," Max nodded his approval.

"We tried to see if it gave off any special EM that we could pick up or had any other characteristics that would let us find it, but we couldn't turn up anything. Then two of my brighter electrical and environmental systems guys, Aaron and Liebergot, thought to measure the current this thing pulls when it's producing medications. It turns out that when the MediMax is in the chemical synthesis phase of production, it draws different amounts of power, depending on what it's making, but at one point in the process, it runs a nucleon spectrographic a.n.a.lysis on the product, and when it does that, the machine pulls a current load of exactly eighteen-point-two-seven amps for three-point-two seconds, which is a lot for a device that's not hardwired directly into the ship's power grid. So, I've set the computer to monitor electrical usage in every compartment throughout the ship, and when we see a spike of eighteen-point-two-seven amps, we have our man."

"Outstanding." Max was impressed.

"And the computer is set to notify Major Kraft, or whoever the senior Marine is on duty, about which outlet in which compartment is drawing the current," said the XO. "The Marines swoop down on the guy, nab him and his infernal machine, and our drug problem is solved."

"You mean our drug supply problem is solved," cautioned the doctor.

"If you eliminate the supply, you eliminate the problem, don't you?" Brown asked.

For all his technical competence, Brown could be surprisingly obtuse when it came to the human side of the equation. "Not that simple," Max explained. "There is an existing supply in the hands of the people who have bought these d.a.m.n pills. This Rhim guy had seventeen tablets in his quarters. What's that-enough for a week, plus or minus?"

The doctor nodded.

"If all we do is stop the supply," Max continued, "people are still going to have the drugs on their hands. Some of them are going to have enough for ten days, maybe even two weeks, which means they are going to be under the influence for that long and will be feeling the withdrawal effects for weeks after that. I won't have a crew that's back to normal for more than a month."

"Okay. We need to take away the source, and we need to take away whatever the men have on hand. I understand that," Garcia said. "But how do we do that? At last count there were exactly three-point-seven-four bazillion places on a destroyer to hide something as small as a few pills. Regs say we can search everyone's quarters and effects any time we want, and that works fine when you're looking for bottles of whisky or big bags of Havala weed, but pills? Some of them not much bigger than a millimeter across? No way would we ever find them all. Maybe I'm the pessimist here, but I don't think we'd find even a tenth of them."

"Oh, I think you're not being pessimistic at all, XO. But I have an idea about how to handle that," Max said, smiling. "I just need to get my hands on the seller."

"I'm afraid all of you have overlooked the largest ramification here," Sahin insisted. "We've got dozens of addicts on this ship. When we cut off their supply, these people are going to go through withdrawal symptoms. The slang term for withdrawal from the Chill is 'defrosting.' When people 'defrost,' they experience nausea, anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness, headaches, muscle twitches, cramps, and a host of other side effects. Many of these people are not going to be fit for duty, some of them for days."

"Perhaps, then, we should let well enough alone," said Brown. "Certainly, the crew are slow and don't learn very well, but at least they're not throwing up on the deck, doubled over with cramps, or losing their temper with their shipmates because they're 'defrosting.'"

Sahin had started shaking his head as soon as Brown began speaking. "Totally unacceptable. Totally. That is not a course of action that I can even reasonably consider. These people are doing physiological damage to their bodies and their brains. Some of that damage may be irreversible. It is my duty as their physician and our duty as their officers to protect them. Every man and boy on this ship is my patient, and I owe to each a duty to do no harm, even by inaction. Gentlemen, we have a responsibility, all of us. The collective, of which we are the leaders, must protect the welfare of its const.i.tuent individuals, or the collective will perish."

"But they are adults, Doctor, and trained s.p.a.cers to boot, not children who need to be told to put on a Mac when it's raining and to eat their Brussels sprouts before they can have their pudding," Brown said, rather loudly. "As officers we have a military duty to protect their lives, which means that we don't risk killing them in action against the enemy imprudently, that we operate the ship in a safe and responsible manner, and that we provide them with oxygen and food and water and clean clothes and medical care. It does not mean that we have a personal duty to intervene in their personal choices. If we had such a duty, where would it end? Do we follow them around on sh.o.r.e leave to keep them out of the bars and the brothels? Do we stand over them off duty and take away their cigarettes and their cigars and their alcohol ration?"

Max cut off the discussion before things got too heated. "Thank you. What you said here helps me a great deal, not only because you stated your points of view so clearly but also because you showed respect toward each other's opinions, which can be difficult sometimes. I've been in dozens of meetings like this, and I've learned that nothing tends to destroy productive discussion any faster than folks a.s.suming that differences of opinion are the result of the other guy being stupid or misinformed or ill-intentioned, rather than being a consequence of differences in philosophy or values. Can you think of a better way to alienate someone you are trying to persuade than treating him like an idiot? Maybe you can, but none comes to my mind. Anyway, you all have my thanks.

"As interesting as those points are, I have to base my decision not on political theory, but on principles of command and military effectiveness. This ship is a weapon, and the crew is one of its components. My job as the master and commander is to make that weapon as effective as I possibly can and then bring it to bear against the enemy to inflict the maximum damage possible. That is the compa.s.s by which I steer. And that principle dictates my decision.

"These men must be made ready to fight. All of them. That means we cut off their supply of this drug as soon as humanly possible; we help them through the withdrawal; and then we get them as healthy as we are able, so they can wage war against the Krag. I appreciate the arguments, gentlemen. In another place and in another time, I could be a man of philosophy considering the eternal question of individual versus collective responsibility. Or I could be a man of G.o.d and selflessly minister to and care for my fellow men. But today, here, on this ship, I am a man of war. As a warrior, I must do whatever I can do to make these men ready to kill.

CHAPTER 10.

13:22Z Hours, 23 January 2315 With his XO handling the system crossings and the jumps so well, Max felt comfortable leaving CIC to make the rounds of the ship. He was thorough, going to all three decks and inspecting every compartment in which there were men stationed or likely to be working. On three separate occasions, he stopped men from engaging in cleaning and polishing to the insane level established by Captain Oscar, insisting instead on merely the fanatical standard that was the norm in the Navy. All three men followed his orders, but with obvious reluctance. Max made a mental note of their names so that he could check on them later, as he expected that they would return to their old habits if given half a chance.

As on all Union warships, the decks were a.s.signed letters of the alphabet, starting from the ventral level, or "top," with "A" and going down. Max was on C Deck when he opened a compartment almost all of the way aft toward the Engineering s.p.a.ces. Max's knowledge of some parts of the ship was still a bit fuzzy, so he didn't know what was behind that particular hatch. Most compartments on warships were not labeled with anything more specific than a number, so as not to aid enemy boarders. It was not known whether any Krag outside of their Intel sections read Standard, but no one was going to take any chances.

Opening the hatch, he found the Small Arms and Edged Weapons Training Room, occupied by an older NCO and seven squeakers. In fact, they looked to be the squeakiest of the squeakers, the youngest of the midshipmen on board.

The NCO appeared to be almost sixty and might have acquired just a tiny bit of roundness around the middle, but he had muscular arms, broad shoulders, and a warrior's bearing. His iron-gray crew cut accentuated a craggy face that had the lines to support either a warrior's grimace or a beloved grandfather's smile. His service stripes showed that he had probably been in the same training cla.s.s as Gus Grissom. Max received a quick once-over from intense gray eyes that clearly missed very little.

These boys had joined the ship at Jellicoe Station just a few days ago. This was their first ship. Today, they were getting their first taste of basic combat instruction from Chief Petty Officer First Cla.s.s Amborsky, the lead midshipman trainer and the second most senior noncom on the ship. If a man who held this job was well liked on board, he was generally called "Mother Goose."

As soon as Amborsky saw Max, he barked, "Captain on deck!"

All of the little boys, between ages eight and ten Standard years, came immediately to a fairly good version of attention. But not good enough for Amborsky.

"My dear little lambs," he growled ferociously, his words almost a comic contrast with his tone, "when you hear 'Captain on deck,' that means you come to AH-TEN-SHUN. Feet together! Arms at your sides! Stomach in! Shoulders back! Chest out! Head high! Eyes straight ahead! Like you are proud to be in the Navy, even though the Navy has yet to have any cause to be proud of you. That's better." As he was talking, he moved around the room, nudging one boy's chin a little higher, adjusting another's shoulders a bit farther back, pushing another's feet closer together, his touches firm, but not rough or unkind.

Once the chief was satisfied that his charges had come properly to attention for their commanding officer, he pivoted and saluted the captain. "Captain, Chief Petty Officer Amborsky, reporting seven newborn squeakers partic.i.p.ating in Unit One, Module Two of Basic Combat Instruction. They have just been introduced to identifying the enemy and learned his basic characteristics, sir." It was apparent that, somehow, the Fates had seen to it that this FUBAR ship had wound up with a solid-gold Mother Goose.

Max returned the salute, and the chief snapped his hand back to his side. He looked at the earnest faces arrayed in front of him. Max put on his stern warrior face. "Identifying the enemy-sounds pretty easy to me, Chief. If it's as tall as a man, with a rat face and tiny pink ears, it's a Krag and it needs to die."

"Captain, we were just about to begin the basic instruction with the dirk. Would the captain like to watch, or would the captain like to conduct the instruction himself?" Aha, the old veteran has decided to administer a test to his new captain.

"Thank you, Chief. I believe I will conduct the instruction, at least for a while." The chief nodded, a slight glimmer of provisional approval in his eyes. Score one for Max. Max reached into a slot in the leg of his SCU and withdrew an edged weapon, holding it up before his audience. The old chief let slip the merest hint of a smile when he saw that the skipper still carried a dirk in addition to his sidearm and cutla.s.s.

Max gripped the weapon's hilt between two fingers so that his hand did not obstruct their view. "This, gentlemen, is the general issue, Union Naval Dirk, Model M-28-2. It is not, I repeat not, a 'baby sword' as you may hear some people call it. The dirk is a real weapon used by real s.p.a.cers to kill real enemies. This particular dirk is the same one I was issued when I was your age. It has drawn enemy blood. I used it to stick a Krag in the gut, and then a Marine took off his head. This blade saved my life.

"Some of you may be wondering why we are issuing edged weapons in the twenty-fourth century. Here we are, on an FTL-capable starship propelled by nuclear fusion, handing out a weapon almost identical to that which the British Royal Navy issued to its midshipmen five hundred years ago on wooden vessels propelled by the wind. As you remember from the tour you got of this vessel when you came aboard at Jellicoe, the c.u.mberland is a pressurized metal tube surrounded by the vacuum of s.p.a.ce, crammed full of pressure vessels, pipes full of toxic liquids and gases, radioactive nuclear detonators, and other things that will kill you and lots of other people if they get holes poked in them with bullets. So s.p.a.cers need a weapon that will kill but that doesn't send little bits of metal flying through the air at three hundred meters per second. Second, edged weapons can be used by small people with very little training-you do not need to be taught how to load, aim, fire, field strip, and clean them. Edged weapons do not jam; they do not go off accidentally; and they do not run out of ammunition.

"According to official naval records, in the course of this war over two hundred Krag have been killed or seriously wounded by midshipmen wielding dirks. This simple weapon has saved hundreds of midshipmen's lives. It is not a toy. It is the first weapon issued to you in your naval career. It is going to be issued to you today, as soon as you complete this training. From that moment until the day you retire and are mustered off your last ship, naval regulations require that you keep it, or some other deadly weapon, at hand at all times. When you receive your weapon, you are no longer a boy; you are a member of the Union s.p.a.ce Navy, carrying arms and trained to use those arms to kill the enemy. From that moment, you are a warrior.

"The M-28 is approximately 483 millimeters long overall, weighs 510 grams, and does its work with a 330-millimeter-long, double-edged, high-carbon steel blade. It is issued with the edges razor sharp, and you are expected to keep them that way, making it an extremely effective slashing and cutting weapon; but that is not how we normally use it."

He slid his own dirk back into its pocket and picked up one of the blunt practice dirks on the table. "We are not going to send you into the fray against the Krag until you are a little bit older, but it is always possible that the Krag will come to you, and if that happens, your dirk is your weapon of last resort. The best way to use it is just like I did when I was fourteen."

He walked over to the chief. "You hold it underhand like this, and you stick it in at the top of the Krag's belly, right here"-he pressed the practice blade against the chief's abdomen about halfway between his navel and his solar plexus-"not where the belly ends on a man, because Krag have rib cages that come down farther than ours, but right here in the middle of its upper body. You shove as hard as you can, and you keep pushing until it won't go in any farther-all the way to the hilt if you can. Then, you pull it out so that if you cut open any blood vessels you leave a hole for it to bleed out through.

"If the Krag does not go down, do it again and again and again until he does. So, that's the drill: stab, withdraw; stab, withdraw; stab, withdraw. Keep it up until the Krag is at your feet in a puddle of its own blood. Now, we'll pair you off, except for... you," he pointed to the smallest of the lot. "You will be my partner."

Training cla.s.ses such as this always had an odd number of students for precisely that reason: so that the instructor could pick the student most in need of closer instruction, greater encouragement, or more attention, as his partner. "What's your name, son?"

"Park, sir," he managed to choke out, obviously intimidated by the presence of his exalted commanding officer. "But everyone calls me 'Will Robinson.'" The boy couldn't have been much more than a hundred centimeters tall. He looked far too small to be hundreds of light years away from his mommy.

"A respected and time-honored naval nickname-I carried it myself for sixteen weeks."

"You did, sir?"

"Absolutely. I was the Will Robinson of the Cruiser USS San Jacinto, old number CRM 1228, back in 2295. That's back when starships had steam engines and we punished disobedience by keelhauling." The little boy smiled at that. "Where are you from, Mr. Park?"