For Honor We Stand Read Online Free PDF Page A

thruster nozzles with the rapid expansion of the gas providing thrust.  We vary the expansion and compression ratios to manage the temperature of the exhaust to match ambient, so we don’t create a hot spot.  So long as the fusion reactor keeps pumping out power to operate the system, we could hover here almost indefinitely.” 
    “An ingenious system, no doubt,” the doctor said, thoroughly unimpressed.  Even the most brilliant feats of aerospace engineering made little impression on him.  “It would be even more ingenious if the designers had included a heat exchanger system to allow the cold gas to carry away the thermal energy from the heat sink, allowing you to do an almost continuous ‘thermal dump’ without creating a thermal signature.  But then, I am just the sawbones around here.”
    Max was briefly dumbfounded.  Why didn’t anyone think of that before?  He’d have to talk to Werner about that one.  There might be a way to build that modification into the Cumberland with spares already on board or parts they could fabricate. 
    Not recognizing that he had just made a suggestion that might significantly affect the design of stealth vessels for decades to come, the doctor plowed on.  “But, how, I venture to ask, did we get in this precarious predicament?  I had no idea anything was amiss until we were hit by enemy fire and my patient rolled off the examining table.  He was heavily sedated at the time and made a most unsettling thud.”
    “That’s why your treatment beds all have restraint loops,” Max said.  “Or, didn’t you know that?”
    “I do now, and I plan to make scrupulous use of them hereafter.  I hasten to add, however, that they not be necessary if we were not hit unexpectedly by enemy weapons fire, an event for which you have yet to provide a satisfactory explanation.”
    “Simple ambush.  There’s a convoy due through here in about sixteen hours.  The Admiral sent us here to sanitize the system and make sure it was clear for the convoy.  When we jumped into the system, these two Cruisers were already here, probably tasked to lie in wait for the same convoy.”
    “How, then, did we escape?  I seem to recall your having told me on more than one occasion that Cruisers are much mightier ships than Destroyers.”
    Max restrained himself from rolling his eyes at the doctor’s apparent inability to assimilate even the most rudimentary naval knowledge, notwithstanding that he was the most conspicuously brilliant man Max had ever known.  “Much more powerful than we are, doctor.  Each of those ships packs about eight times our firepower.  How did we get away?  First, they weren’t expecting us.  Usually, the picket/scout Destroyer jumps in six or seven hours before the convoy comes through.  But, Admiral Hornmeyer sent us in early because, well, you know , that’s just the sort of thing that he does.  That crafty old bastard’s got unpredictability down to a science.  If a task force has a habit of dividing itself into two groups to attack, when he attacks it will be with three groups this time, with five the next, with four the next, and then he’ll throw everything he’s got at the enemy in one huge formation.  If a unit’s practice has been to launch attacks in the wee hours of the morning, he will attack in late afternoon one time and midmorning the next and all around the clock except the wee hours, and just when you think that’s the one time of day when you are perfectly safe, that’s just when he hits you at 02:47 with the big push.  Krag prisoners tell us that they’ve got a whole department, staffed by hundreds of officers, with no function other than to try to predict what Hornmeyer is going to do next, and three times out of four they get it wrong.”  He chuckled in admiration. 
    “Anyway, when we jumped in and surprised them, neither of us was ready for a fight, but they were closer to being ready than we were.  All our critical systems