To Honor You Call Us (36 page)

“You bet you’re the Veterinarian.  Who better?  You’re licensed to perform surgery on half a dozen alien species, why not a cat?  It’s got more in common with a human than a Ghrinn or a Themp-Rah.  You want one of your nurses or a pharmacist’s mate doing surgery on a live animal?  Get used to it.  You’re the man, so you need to belly up to the table and be ready to deal with whatever comes.  And, you had better be a good Veterinarian, too, because a ship’s cat dying on board of anything but obvious old age is bad luck in a really big way.”

“Such elaborate provision!  It seems a great deal for the Navy to do when most ships never have a cat.”

“Not really.  This
is
the Navy.  We have ‘elaborate provision’ for all sorts of unlikely contingencies.  Did you know that, in the Spare Equipment Bay right now, you’ve got a top of the line neo-natal intensive care incubator, just in case we have to take on board a pregnant woman, and she gives birth, and the baby is premature or has some other problem?  Or that we carry three Zodiac inflatable boats with Evinrude-Johnson outboard motors crated for easy loading into our Cutter or our Launch in case we ever need to mount a planetary surface attack over the water?  Or that one of the autolooms that we use to make replacement uniforms is in a double-size format so that we can reproduce from computer records the flag of any power or planet in Known Space just in case we have to welcome one of its dignitaries on board?  That doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface.  You wouldn’t believe some of the unlikely items we have stored in crates down there in Spare Equipment.  If we had to, we could land on an uninhabited planet, start our own civilization, and live like kings.

“There used to be an organization on Earth, pre-stardrive, called the ‘Boy Scouts.’  I never quite understood exactly what it is they did, it must have been something good because they were around for centuries, but their motto was ‘Be Prepared.’  The Navy is very much like that.  If something bad happens to a ship that some piece of equipment would have solved, the next thing you know, the Navy has bought out the whole stock of that item from eleven planets and put one, if not two or three, in the Spare Equipment Bay of every Rated Warship in the fleet.

“So, no, Doctor, it isn’t surprising at all that the Navy has made ‘elaborate provision’ for cats being on board warships.  After all, a cat is a more likely passenger than a newborn infant requiring an intensive care incubator.  Of course, we’re especially friendly towards them now that we’re fighting the Krag, and the Krag are instinctively terrified of them, you know.  And, you never know when a cat will join a ship or which ship a cat will join.  I mean, two ships can be docked in deep space and, out of the black, you’ve got the Marine sentry at the boarding tube on the comm telling you that the other ship’s cat just came aboard.  Or you’re at Lovell or Jellicoe or Llellewellyn station, all of which have a dozen or so each, and one of them saunters off of the loading ramp into your cargo bay like it owns the place.  So, we all are prepared for it.  I don’t think you get what a big part a ship’s cat plays in our naval traditions.  Every part of the ship participates.  Even the Galley.  They make the cat’s food from recipes in the culinary database, with nutritional supplements that are in one of your supply lockers.  You’ll need to have one of your people pull those crates out of medical storage and get them to Chief Boudreaux, who is in charge down there.”

“Boudreaux?  His name ends with the same syllable as yours.  Is he one of your coworlders?”

“No, but close.  He is a Cajun, but from Louisiana itself.  Place called Mamou, I think.  I managed to steal him from the
Northumbria
where the Captain was constantly telling him not to put cayenne pepper in his soup.  He seems much happier here.  I like a little cayenne pepper in my soup.”

“You were explaining about taking care of the cat.  This is very interesting—yet another of the strange and unique facets of naval subculture.”

“Oh, yes.  It is, isn’t it.  In any event, it’s the junior Mids who are responsible for its care and feeding, cleaning its litter boxes and any messes it makes, and that sort of thing.  It’s one of the few duties the little hatch hangers don’t try to duck.  Ships’ cats tend to be rather spoiled.”

“Where does the animal generally spend its time?”

“The short answer is ‘wherever it wants.’  The old naval custom is that, except for the living quarters of crew who don’t like them and places where they might be in danger such as Engineering or some place that gets opened to space frequently, the cat’s allowed to go where it likes.  If a crew members sees the cat at a hatch, he’s supposed to open it.  And, of course, it can move freely between decks using the cargo ramps.  When there is a cat on board, we remove those little doors we put on to keep the Mids from using them as slides—we just resort to threats and extra duty to deter that dangerous behavior.  Different cats decide they like different places.  On the
San Jacinto
the cat liked the Enlisted Mess because it could always beg treats there.  Dugout, the cat on the
Luzon
, liked CIC and the Tactical Back Room.  On the
Agincourt
, Pistol spent most of his time in the Aft Missile Room because he liked to sleep nestled in the missile racks.”

“I’m not sure that I’m particularly comfortable with the idea of an animal crawling around in a rack full of thermonuclear warheads.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly safe.  You couldn’t detonate one of those things if you went in there and shot your sidearm at them.  In fact, you don’t get a nuclear detonation even if you explode them with another missile.  Going back to the mid twentieth century when the hellish things were invented, there is no known occurrence of any nuclear munition ever detonating accidentally.”

“What about that Krag weapon.  I thought our defensive weapons made it go off.”

“Not a chance.  The thing’s computer determined that it was about to be destroyed and detonated the weapon.  Just about any nuke is going to be programmed to detonate under those conditions.  It’s better to detonate and maybe do some damage than be blown up in a non-nuclear explosion and do none.”

“You relieve my mind.”

“You are not in danger from our own thermonuclear devices.  The ones you have to worry about are the ones that come from the Krag.  You should put it out of your mind entirely.”

“It was a source of worry for me.  I actually have had a few nightmares about it.”

“They are the last thing you should have on your mind.  Now that you mention nightmares, though, I was wondering about something.  How did you know that I had nightmares about being pursued by the Krag?  I’m sure that I have never reported any such thing.  It appears that you read my mind.”

“Oh, I assure you, I did nothing of the kind.  First, the nightmares are entirely expected and normal under the circumstances.  Even if I had no evidence that you were experiencing them, given your history I would have predicted them.  Second, while you never reported the symptom, according to your medical records you have requested medication for sleep two hundred and seventy nine times over the course of your naval career, which is substantially above the average for an officer with your length of service.  And, third, the security logs for the vessels on which you served have nine reports of Marines being summoned by persons in cabins adjacent to yours because they heard you screaming.  Taken together, these facts paint a rather compelling picture.”

“Once you put them together that way, I suppose they do.”

“The nightmares are really quite normal, you know.  You would have to be a block of stone not to have them given what you have experienced.  We shall talk about them in detail one of these evenings, when you are ready.”

“Not tonight, Doctor.  By all means, not tonight.  I was also wondering how you knew there were Krag on that freighter?  Major Kraft told me that you whispered in his ear, before any sensor readings were taken, that you were almost certain that there were Krag aboard.”

“That?  That was a perfectly elementary deduction.  Quite commonplace, I assure you.  When the boarding tube mated to the freighter boarding hatch, it took forty-five seconds for the pressure to equalize, and I felt in my eardrums that air was being pumped into the tube rather than being allowed to escape.  That meant that the air pressure on the freighter was about thirty percent higher than the pressure used on this ship, which is the naval standard—mean sea level pressure on Earth, which is just over one hundred kilopascals.  Ghifthee ships are normally equalized for Sea Level Pressure on Ghifthee Prima, which is ninety-eight kilopascals.  So, if that freighter were a Ghifthee ship in actuality, we should have bled a little pressure, not packed in nearly a third more.  Further, I know that the Krag insist that all ships that have even one of them on board run at their standard pressure, which is one hundred thirty-five kilopascals, just over a third more than what we use.  So, I suspected Krag.”

“I am impressed, Doctor.  I am also impressed that you had the ship’s armorer sharpen that ceremonial sword the metal shop made for you.”

“Not precisely correct.  The armorer, at my request, made it from the same alloy as the ship’s boarding cutlasses and put a fine edge on it from the outset.  Accordingly, while the sword is in the
form
of a ceremonial blade it is, in reality, a true weapon.  A wolf in sheep’s clothing, as it were.  My people use swords, you see.  They have for two thousand years and never abandoned the tradition.  I am very comfortable with them.  I would not carry one if it were not a real weapon.” 

“Very wise, Doctor.  Very wise, indeed.  Now, how’s your Krag patient?”

“He will do very well, Allah willing.”  Max cringed inwardly at the doctor’s use of the pronoun “he” for the Krag, but did not correct him.  “They are a remarkably resilient species.  I stem cell cultured the necessary soft tissue and bone and used them to reattach the severed limb.  It now has circulation, sensation, and movement and should recover about ninety five percent of its former usefulness.  I am keeping him unconscious for now as the nerve regeneration is still taking place and it is a very painful process.  He should be ready to be re-awakened in a day or so, and then he can converse with our friend from the UMID.”  He pronounced the customary acronym for the Union Military Intelligence Directorate so that it rhymed with “humid.”

“Ah, him.  I’ve never liked those guys.  They always keep to themselves, sitting in their quarters spying on you by using their high level access to surf through every database and sensor feed on the ship, until you get a prisoner, then they come out of their hole and monopolize it and never tell you what they learn.”

“This is my first experience with one.  I see him every twelve hours, regular as a pulsar, inquiring whether the patient has regained consciousness.  He is very polite to me, not demanding or imperious in the least.”

“That, Doctor, is because the prisoner is not yet awake.  When he has someone to interrogate, I suspect that he’ll change his stripes.  In any event, I’m pleased the Krag is doing well.  Perhaps we can get something useful of it.  I would be very happy to get some useful intelligence.  Maybe it knows about other Krag cargoes in the area.” 

“That would be very useful.  Perhaps it is this possibility that has so cheered the crew.  Or, perhaps, it is their recent capture of the freighter.  The whole lot of them seem astonishingly happy right now.  In, fact, they appear far happier than when we destroyed the Krag Battlecruiser, the two Corsairs, and the Ore Carrier, which perplexes me as the earlier victory seems the greater of the two.” 

Max ignored the doctor’s substitution of “Corsairs” for “Corvettes.”  “Perhaps in a strategic and tactical sense, but taking this freighter is much more important to them personally.”

“How is that—because it required more skill?”

“No, Doctor.  No.  You mean . . . I can’t believe it.  You really don’t know?”

“Know what?  You must not practice upon my credulous simplicity.”

“My friend, haven’t you ever heard of
prize money
?”  He said the words in the way a hungry meat aficionado might say “grilled steak.” 

“Certainly, I’ve heard of it.  If a crew captures a warship intact, it can be of some pecuniary benefit to them.  I do not really know the specifics.”

Max shook his head.  “There’re articles in the database, Doctor, well-written articles adapted to the most planet-bound reader, about Navy life and regulations and customs.  A man of your obvious brilliance could read and assimilate them quite easily, you know.”

“But my time is so short, and I have so much to learn of more pressing application.”

“When you have time, Doctor, I urge you.  So, let me tell you the basics of our rules about prizes.  From our first war in space through the sixteenth year of the present war, the Navy had no notion of prize money.  But, then with high losses and the population problems caused by the Gynophage, the Navy began to have difficulties filling its manpower needs and was looking for an incentive that would attract more men.  Just then, the Chief of Naval Operations happened to develop an interest in British naval fiction set in the early Nineteenth Century and came upon the idea of prize money, which we loosely borrowed from that source.

“In our system, which differs somewhat from the British one, when an enemy vessel or cargo is captured, one fifth, or twenty percent, of the value goes to the compliment of the capturing vessel as prize money.  One half of that amount, ten percent, goes to me as Captain.  One half of the remainder, a twentieth or five percent, is divided equally among the other commissioned officers, and that includes the Chief Medical Officer, while the men divide the other five percent amongst themselves by heads.”