To Honor You Call Us by Harvey G. Phillips, H. Paul Honsinger

visual recognition pass, and then blinkers in their request to land.  Then, every signal light on the Carrier starts flashing like a Christmas tree on stims, frantically giving them the wave off and telling them to assume a holding formation, null their drives, and put their thrusters on station-keeping.”
    “Why the wave off?”
    “Because, my friend, these fighters from the Constellation were trying to land on the Eugene F. Kranz.   They did a visual recognition pass and didn’t even notice it wasn’t their own carrier.  The Kranz had to launch two tankers to refuel the fighters and then feed them the correct rendezvous coordinates by blinker.  And you can just bet that along with those coordinates, Admiral Turgenov put in a few choice words, in his inimitable way.  Now, our friends the Krag Baggers are relegated to flying Combat Area Patrol off a third rate Escort Carrier back here in the Tertiary Defensive Perimeter until they can convince Admiral Turgenov that they can find their butts with both hands tied behind their backs.”   
    “Shouldn’t we activate our IFF transponder?”  Bartoli interrupted, concerned about being fired upon by the Krag baggers.  Just because they couldn’t navigate didn’t mean that they couldn’t shoot.
    “Negative.  Maintain EMCOM.  They’re expecting us.  Kasparov, have someone in your support room put the Krag Baggers on visual and route it to Comms for a recognition signal by lights.”
    “By lights , sir?”  Everyone knew the protocols for visual recognition by flashing lights, but they were rarely used.  It was like something out of the Battle of Jutland.
    “Yes, Mr. Kasparov, by lights.  It’s in our orders.  The Krag have all these systems seeded with stealthed EM probes.  The idea is for us to come through here without being heard or heard of.  Those fighters have orders not to hail us or talk about us by radio and, if we keep our transmitters shut down, no one will ever know we were in the neighborhood.  So, have your man on the optical scanners train one on the fighters and send the feed to Comms.”
    “Aye sir.”  Kasparov was no dummy.  He instantly understood the logic behind the procedure and immediately started speaking softly over his headset giving instructions to the correct man in the Sensor Department’s Staff Support Room.  Like most watch standers in CIC, Kasparov was backed up by a team of men in a compartment nearby called a Staff Support or “Back” Room, one for each department, in a system that went back to NASA’s Mission Control in the earliest days of space flight.  As the man in CIC could watch only a few displays at a time, there were several, sometimes as many as two dozen, other men in another compartment looking at all the relevant displays with voice, text, video, and data links to the man in CIC.  Each of those men, in turn, could pull up additional displays, access computer databases, make inquiries by voice or data link to anyone, anywhere in the ship, and otherwise do whatever was necessary to provide the man in CIC with the information he needed.  That system made the CIC the center of a web of information whose strands extended to every corner of the ship.  It had worked well for the people who ran the moon landings and it had worked very well for the Navy.  Apollo Mission Control’s legacy of achievement and excellence lived on, three and half centuries later, in the fighting CICs of the Union Space Navy.   
     Max noted that one of the screens at the Comms station changed from a Transceiver Array Status Grid to a camera feed from outside the ship.  Four of the tiny lights against the black background were moving slowly relative to the background of stars.  One of the lights blinked blue twice, red twice, green three times, and white once.  Comms was already punching up today’s Visual Recognition Codes.  “Captain, the fighter element has transmitted the correct recognition code for