Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting Read online

  Praise for the Kris Longknife novels

  “A whopping good read . . . Fast-paced, exciting, nicely detailed, with some innovative touches.”

  —Elizabeth Moon, Nebula Award–winning author of Crown of Renewal

  “Shepherd delivers no shortage of military action, in space and on the ground. It’s cinematic, dramatic, and dynamic . . . [He also] demonstrates a knack for characterization, balancing serious moments with dry humor . . . A thoroughly enjoyable adventure featuring one of science fiction’s most interesting recurring heroines.”

  —Tor.com

  “A tightly written, action-packed adventure from start to finish . . . Heart-thumping action will keep the reader engrossed and emotionally involved. It will be hard waiting for the next in the series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “[Daring] will elate fans of the series . . . The story line is faster than the speed of light.”

  —Alternative Worlds

  “[Kris Longknife] will remind readers of David Weber’s Honor Harrington with her strength and intelligence. Mike Shepherd provides an exciting military science fiction thriller.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  “‘I’m a woman of very few words, but lots of action’: So said Mae West, but it might just as well have been Lieutenant Kris Longknife, princess of the one hundred worlds of Wardhaven. Kris can kick, shoot, and punch her way out of any dangerous situation, and she can do it while wearing stilettos and a tight cocktail dress. She’s all business, with a Hells Angel handshake and a ‘get out of my face’ attitude. But her hair always looks good . . . Kris Longknife is funny and she entertains us.”

  —Sci Fi Weekly

  “[A] fast-paced, exciting military SF series . . . Mike Shepherd has a great ear for dialogue and talent for injecting dry humor into things at just the right moment . . . The characters are engaging, and the plot is full of twists and peppered liberally with sharply described action. I always look forward to installments in the Kris Longknife series because I know I’m guaranteed a good time with plenty of adventure.”

  —SF Site

  Ace Books by Mike Shepherd

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: MUTINEER

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: DESERTER

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: DEFIANT

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: RESOLUTE

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: AUDACIOUS

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: INTREPID

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: UNDAUNTED

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: REDOUBTABLE

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: DARING

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: FURIOUS

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: DEFENDER

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: TENACIOUS

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: UNRELENTING

  TO DO OR DIE: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL

  VICKY PETERWALD: TARGET

  VICKY PETERWALD: SURVIVOR

  Specials

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: TRAINING DAZE

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: WELCOME HOME / GO AWAY

  Writing as Mike Moscoe

  THE FIRST CASUALTY: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL

  THE PRICE OF PEACE: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL

  THEY ALSO SERVE: A JUMP UNIVERSE NOVEL

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: UNRELENTING

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  Copyright © 2015 by Mike Moscoe.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18065-9

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / November 2015

  Cover art by Scott Grimando.

  Cover design by Diana Kolsky.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for the Kris Longknife Novels

  Ace Books by Mike Shepherd

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  About the Author

  1

  Admiral Kris Longknife bent over the toilet and explosively lost her breakfast.

  Damn! I’ve never had battle jitters this bad.

  Done, she twisted around to the sink, ran some water, and washed out her mouth.

  And had to bolt for the toilet again as her stomach decided it was not done with her yet.

  Double damn!

  NELLY, IS THERE A FLU BUG GOING AROUND THE FLEET? Kris asked her personal computer.

  Nelly, much upgraded since she was given to Kris in preschool, was plugged directly into Kris’s brain while riding at her collarbone, so, even though her mouth was otherwise occupied, Kris could pose the question.

  KRIS, THERE IS NO STOMACH FLU REPORTED. THE WATER USAGE IN THE HEADS IS WITHIN ONE PERCENT OF NORMAL SO IT IS VERY UNLIKELY THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH LAST NIGHT’S SUPPER. YOU, HOWEVER, ARE AT DOUBLE, NO, TRIPLE NORMAL, Nelly pointed out, as the toilet flushed for the third time.

  Again, hoping she was done, Kris did the mouth-rinsing thing.

  Her stomach stayed quiescent.

  Kris stood, adjusted her shipsuit, with its epaulets showing the stripes of a full admiral, and turned to face her next battle.


  No wonder she was nervous: This battle was the craziest she’d ever tried. She was risking two-thirds of her fleet to take out the assassins of the mountain, as Vice Admiral Yi of Earth named them, the kamikaze base, as Vice Admiral Miyoshi of Musashi called them.

  Whatever you called them, they’d been launching ships, ships that built up to a good fraction of light speed as they shot through jump point after jump point before slamming themselves into the Alwa system and heading straight for the planet.

  So far, Kris’s fleet had blasted every alien suicide ship, but Kris was tired of playing defense, holding a line where one failure meant the death of millions of humans and their Alwan allies.

  For the first time, Kris’s fleet was taking the offensive.

  Kris had pulled two of her task fleets, better than two-thirds of her entire force, away from Alwa. The one task fleet left defending Alwa included the First Battle Squadron. It had followed Kris into hell and paid a steep price to get back, returning so bent and busted that the superintendents of the repair yards had taken one good look and suggested the ships be scrapped.

  The frigates’ Smart MetalTM had been drained into holding tanks. Their reactors and lasers were in the rework facilities. Once recertified for space, they’d be issued to merchant ships. The crews were now waiting for the yards to spin out new ships to bear those proud names.

  Kris prayed that the ships following her this time would return in better shape.

  She hoped, but only time . . . and the coming fight . . . would tell.

  For one thing, Admiral Yi’s Third Fleet, half of her attack force, was somewhere out there, heading into the target system from one jump while Kris’s Second Fleet stood by to enter from another.

  And Yi, being from Earth, had an attitude toward all colonial bumpkins.

  No wonder my stomach has a problem. It’s just one of many today.

  Peace made with her now-empty stomach, Kris turned for her flag plot. She had a battle to win.

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  2

  “You okay?” Major General Jack Montoya asked. As Chief of her Royal Security Detail, Commander, Ground Forces Alwa Defense Sector, and, oh, right, husband, he was very good at reading her moods.

  “I’m fine,” Kris lied.

  Jack’s smile told her she wasn’t fooling him.

  “I got a bad feeling about this,” he said, but he drew close to whisper it in her ear.

  Kris made a face, half between a grin and a scowl, and left it to the others in flag plot to decipher. If they wanted to take it as old friends, or newlywed private chatter, that was their problem.

  “I hope Yi doesn’t think his newfangled armor is magic,” Kris whispered back.

  There was no smile in Jack’s scowl.

  “Yi does seem to think he’s got the Shield of Great Worth or something,” Jack said.

  No question, the three squadrons of ships from Old Earth had arrived with something special for armor. For several centuries, quantum computers had been slowing light and storing it for a bit. First they’d managed a few seconds, finally a whole minute. Computation at the speed of light needed this ability to store quanta of the stuff to make a 1 so the absence of it could be a 0. From time to time, someone with gold braid on their coat would wonder about using this technology to freeze a laser beam for enough time to tame it, but the problems of corralling something with that much energy had defeated them.

  Those problems, and the short duration of the only two major dustups humanity had had in the last hundred years: the Unity War, and the Iteeche War, had made for no major advances in the age-old race between arms and armor.

  Some Earth lab, however, must have gotten lucky because even as Earth’s Navy started spinning out the new Smart MetalTM frigates, they were coating them with doped crystals that could handle hits from powerful laser weapons.

  Thus, twenty-four Earth-built frigates joined Kris’s command with their hides gleaming like diamonds.

  That was the other aspect of Smart MetalTM: Your ship didn’t have to stay the same, day in and day out. If there was no threat, you could set Condition Able and turn your warship into a nice, comfortable place to live. When you needed to do some fighting, you set Condition Zed and shrank your “love boat” down into something small, hard to hit, and deadly.

  In the case of Admiral Yi’s ships, it took a bit longer to rearrange the light-stopping crystals, but it was worth it.

  Kris had reorganized her fleets around the new ships, their armor, and their 22-inch lasers. She would have preferred assigning one of the Earth squadrons to each of her three fleets. Instead, she’d let Vice Admiral Yi on the George Washington keep two of his new squadrons. The combat-experienced Rear Admiral Bethea led the big cats of BatRon 4 from her flag on the Lion. Untested Commodore Michelsen commanded the Scanda Confederacy’s BatRon 6 from his flag, the Odin.

  Kris led the First Fleet. To Commodore Cochrane’s borrowed Earth squadron with their 22-inch lasers and innovative armor, Kris had added BatRon 8’s Sharp Ones commanded by Admiral L’Estock on Battleax.

  Admiral Hawkings on Renown had BatRon 2, but his task force was missing BatRon 1. In place of it, Kris had borrowed the inexperienced but big-gunned frigates of Yamato’s BatRon 9 under Commodore Zingi on the Mikasa. That gave Kris twenty-four of the new 22-inch-gunned war wagons and eight of the 20-inch frigates. They had seemed huge just a few months ago.

  Yi’s four squadrons were evenly divided between frigates armed with 22-inch and 20-inch lasers. Kris expected no problem from that.

  Admiral Kris Longknife glanced around her flag bridge. On any other day it would be her day quarters, but today it was a battle station for her and her key staff.

  Her desk had moved itself back against the wall, leaving more room for a conference table. Around it sat Kris’s staff. Beside Jack was Commander Penny Lien-Pasley, her intelligence officer. At her elbow was Iizuka Masao, Musashi Navy Intelligence, and, hopefully, more to Penny. Between the two of them they knew everything there was to know about the alien space raiders.

  Unfortunately, that was way too little.

  Also around Kris’s command table was Jacques la Duke who had done the workup on the alien psychology. He’d also spent a rough week living among them . . . and lived to tell of it. His wife, Amanda Kutter, Kris’s chief economist, wasn’t needed for this battle, but she was there at his elbow.

  “Alwa’s economy will do fine without me, assuming a poor crop next month doesn’t throw the whole mess into famine,” Amanda had told Kris, and stalked aboard the Princess Royal right behind Jacques.

  Kris had shrugged; she wasn’t letting Jack out of her sight any more than she had to. She was in no position to lecture another woman.

  Also added to Kris’s key staff was Admiral Furzah of Sasquan. A six-foot-tall talking cat, she had all the loving nature of the felines of Earth, which was to say she was as bloodthirsty as they came. Back on her home world, she’d commanded atomic weapons and used them on her country’s enemies.

  Kris shivered to think of such ferocity. She was none too sure how much she wanted these cats loose in space, but the admiral had more combat experience than most aboard the Princess Royal, and her knowledge of her people’s battle lore was only matched by Nelly’s computer memory of man’s inhumanity to man.

  Kris hoped this team would help her make the best of the coming fight.

  Kris’s staff had expanded beyond those present. John Longfeather, an Alwan Rooster, had joined Kris for logistics. He’d been with the humans since he’d walked into town as little more than a chick and demanded to learn what they knew. He’d been headed for Granny Rita’s government until Kris mentioned her need for admin help, and the old commodore smiled. “Have I got a Rooster for you.”

  Kris’s new chief of personnel was also an Alwan, though she was an Ostrich, Betty Strongleg. She’d helped organize Ostriches for Defense before the last attack and also came with Granny Rita’s approval.