Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  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

  About the Author

  About the Author

  Praise for Kris Longknife MUTINEER

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

  —Elizabeth Moon

  “A fast-paced adventure.”

  —Booklist

  “Enthralling . . . fast-paced . . . A well-crafted space opera with an engaging hero . . . I’d like to read more.”

  —SFRevu

  “Everyone who has read Kris Longknife will hope for further adventures starring this brave, independent, and intrepid heroine. Mike Shepherd has written an action-packed, exciting space opera that starts at light speed and just keeps getting better. This is outer-space military science fiction at its adventurous best.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “I’m looking forward to her next adventure.”

  —Philadelphia Press/Review

  “[Shepherd] has a good sense of pace . . . Very neatly handled and served with a twist of wry. A surprisingly good read from a very underrated author.”

  —Bewildering Stories

  “Shepherd does a really good job with this book. If you’re looking for an entertaining space opera with some colorful characters, this is your book. Shepherd grew up Navy and he does an excellent job of showing the complex demands and duties of an officer. I look forward to the next in the series.”

  —Books ’n’ Bytes

  “You don’t have to be a military sci-fi enthusiast to appreciate the thrill-a-minute plot and engaging characterization.”

  —Romantic Times

  Ace titles by Mike Shepherd

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: MUTINEER

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: DESERTER

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: DEFIANT

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  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. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  KRIS LONGKNIFE: DEFIANT

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass market edition / November 2005

  Copyright © 2005 by Mike Moscoe.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-46074-0

  ACE

  Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ACE and the “A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To the magnificent men and women who do it—because there is no other choice.

  Winston told the English boat owners there was a British army in trouble on the far shore. So they set sail by the smoke of Dunkirk and brought off 300,000 embattled Tommies and Frenchmen. No one knows the price they paid.

  In ’44 off Sumar, six escort carriers desperately needed time to run. Three destroyers didn’t question their orders, but turned bows on to the entire Japanese Battle Fleet, setting a course from which none returned.

  On September 11, a smoking bier told American boat owners that hundreds of thousands needed to be taken off Manhattan. With no orders given, no commands spoken, ferries and taxies, tourist boats and tugs, anything that could sail and carry weary workers, set sail for the sea wall at the Battery to take them home. Upriver, professional divers were working on a bridge pier. They knew, with that many boats in close quarters, someone’s rope would wrap itself around another’s prop. Without instructions or promise of pay, those workmen dropped what they were doing and sailed for the smoke. A half-dozen lines or more later, their work was done. And an uncounted fraction of a million got home that night.

  And the passengers of Flight 93 made their fateful calls. It was their families who drew the heavy duty of telling loved ones they only wanted home that fate now stood in the way. And those souls who were no different from a quarter billion other Americans—except for the tickets they bought—showed a wondering world the true mettle of free men and women.

  We do what we have to do, because there is nothing else to do.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to sincerely thank Heather Alexander for permission to use her song, “The March of Cambreadth,” liberally in this novel. Anyone who hasn’t heard a hundred plus fans singing “How Many of Them Can We Make Die!” has missed out on one of life’s moments. You can own Heather’s “The March of Cambreadth” for yourself by making a quick visit to www.heatherlands.com and ordering the Midsummer album. Heck, order them all. I did . . . regularly. Every time one of my kids left home, they took my Heather collection with them, and I had to order up a new set.

  I would also like to thank the folks at the WW I discussion group for letting me raise the hypothetical question of what might have happened if the British government had fallen in July 1914 over the Irish question and then faced the beginning of World War I. I’d especially like to thank Syd Wise for his refresher on the British and Canadian systems and Luke Taper and Geoffrey Miller for the Australian model . . . which I borrowed with variations for Wardhaven. Obviously, the changes, and any mistakes, are my own.

  1

  Lieutenant Kris Longknife grinned from ear to ear, no minor accomplishment at 2.5 g’s. The short hairs on the back of
her neck were standing up. At a brace. And saluting. She was scared spitless and had never had so much fun in her life.

  This being Tuesday, under Commodore Mandanti’s rotation system, she commanded Division 3, four dinky fast patrol boats, as they charged the battleship-size target ahead of them. And, if she trusted those little hairs on the back of her neck at all, the Commodore and his gunners on the Cushing had the PF-109, Kris’s very first command, and the other boats of Div 3, pinned in the crosshairs of their defensive lasers.

  It was time to get her boats moving to a different evasion pattern or they’d be left powerless, drifting in space . . . like the eight boats of Division 1 and 2 that had failed in their attack just minutes before her.

  And she and the other eleven skippers of the fast patrol boats would be buying the beer for the Commodore’s gunners.

  And there would be a very critical report filed saying the PFs—small, easy, and quick to build with semi-smart metal—were failures, unable to defend a planet from attack. If that was true, each planet in the newly formed United Sentients would need a full, heavy battle fleet in its orbit if it was to weather the unknowns rapidly developing in these troubled times.

  The political ramifications of that were something Kris Longknife, Prime Minister’s daughter and great-granddaughter to King Raymond I of the U.S. alliance of ninety planets, did not want to think about. Far better for each planet to see to its own defense with a tiny mosquito fleet like her boat and let the heavy ships handle the problems of the whole alliance.

  You’re thinking too much again, Longknife. Get out of your head and kick some battleship butt.

  Kris mashed the comm button under her thumb. The order that went out was short and scrambled. What it meant was, “Division 3, prepare to change to Evasion Plan 5 on my mark.”

  Kris waited. Waited for her own helmswoman to switch to the new plan, waited for three other boats to make the same switch.

  “Ready,” Boson 3/c Fintch reported from her station beside Kris on the tiny bridge. The small brunet’s voice was hoarse under heavy acceleration. Kris gave the other boats a slow three count.

  THEY SHOULD BE READY TO EXECUTE NOW, Nelly said directly into Kris’s brain. To call the tiny computer at Kris’s neck a supercomputer would probably offend Nelly’s growing sense of her own self-importance. What Kris spent on Nelly’s last upgrade would have bought and paid for one of the battlewagons Kris and her crew were practicing to kill.

  SEND MY MARK, Kris ordered, and the computer not only sent the execute to all four boats, but made the evasion pattern change within the same nanosecond—something no mere human could do. This computer intervention was not standard Navy procedure, and it had not been easily won. But it was at the heart of the plan of attack that Kris and her division skippers had knocked together last week at the O club—with Nelly’s avid help.

  “Executing Evasion Plan 5,” Fintch reported.

  And Kris’s tiny command slammed her hard against the left headrest of her high-acceleration chair as what had been a soft left turn converted to a hard right turn and dive.

  Kris swallowed and tightened her gut muscles. Again.

  The division has started its wild charge from 150,000 klicks out, well beyond even 18-inch laser range. They’d gone to 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 g’s acceleration, mixing up their growing speed with erratic right and left, up and down swerves. Sometimes hard, sometimes easy, sometimes in between. Always unpredictable. The tiny fast patrol boats were small as bugs beside the huge battlewagon they sought to slay. Now they danced like June bugs.

  If they danced just right, they would live. And the battleship would die.

  Because the fast patrol boats, though tiny, were deadly, too. Each PF carried four 18-inch pulse lasers. The quick burst from one of them could gut a cruiser or knock a gaping hole in a battleship’s ice armor. Maybe even burn through to the mass of weapons, machinery, and humanity below.

  So cruisers and battleships mounted secondary guns that fired fast and often and tried to slash through small stuff like the PFs. And big ships spun on their long axis, rotating slashing lasers away from damaged ice and into thick, unhurt ice before burn-through into vitals could happen.

  Measure, countermeasure, counter-countermeasure, layered thick and heavy. That was the way it had been since the time beyond recall when some human first set out to kill his brother. It wasn’t enough to just have a fast ship, good weapons, and solid teamwork. You needed a plan and skill . . . and luck.

  Or so Phil had told them all when he invited them out to dinner at the O club a week ago.

  The Wardhaven O club, two blocks from Main Navy, had been ancient when Kris’s Great-grampa Ray was a freshly commissioned subaltern. Its carpeted and thickly curtained rooms were perfect for fine dinning between the wars. On its walls hung battle trophies from Wardhaven’s first unpleasantness with fellow Rim worlds. Rich oil paintings celebrating victories going back to mother Earth’s dim, bloody past before humanity spread into space four hundred years ago.

  Kris wasn’t tempted to drink here; she got high on just the ambiance. But the white-jacketed waiter led the twelve junior officers right through the main dinning rooms to a small one off to the side, smelling of fresh paint and new, cheap carpet.

  “What did we do to deserve this?” Kris frowned.

  “Not us,” Phil Taussig said, his perpetual smile only slightly dampened by the toxic outgassing from the recent refurbishment. “Being junior officers, and somewhat less reputable than swine to the president of this august mess, we are cast out into this for our dinner tonight.”

  “It stinks,” Babs Thompson said, making a face, which on her, the scion of one of the wealthier families on Hurt-ford, still was beautiful.

  “Probably because they had to rebuild it after the last herd of JOs got through with it,” Heather Alexander said, another rich offspring who had been shuttled to Fast Patrol Squadron 8 for crimes yet unconfessed. With the war scares, lots of young men and women were signing up to do their patriotic duty. Several of them were causing General Mac McMorrison, chair of the Joint Staff, fits as they struggled with greater or lesser success to fit their own strong heads into uniform hats.

  None of them had come as close to open mutiny as Kris had. But then, no charges had been filed, so Kris wasn’t officially a mutineer. It was now generally agreed—behind closed doors—that she had been right to relieve her first Captain of his command during what was about to become wartime.

  Of course, that hadn’t made it any easier for Mac to find Kris a second, now third commanding officer. Squadron 8, with its bunch of spoiled, hotshot orbital skiff-racing hooligans, at least looked like a safe place to dump Kris. With any luck, Mac probably figured, the troublesome JOs would take each other down a peg or twelve, teach each other a few desperately needed lessons in humility, proper social behavior, military deportment, what all. All the Navy risked was a few tiny toys half the fleet considered worthless anyway. And the last few wisps of hair on Commodore Mandanti’s shiny pate.

  How often had Kris heard her father, the Prime Minister, mutter about bringing all his problems together in a small room and letting them solve themselves? Kris savored the pleasure of being one of someone’s too many problems as she glanced around at her fellow skippers and wondered if they would find a way to prove Mac and all the other top brass wrong . . . or all too right.

  Dinner was ordered and eaten as the twelve took each other’s measures again. Most knew or had heard of each other from the skiff racing championships. Taking a thin eggshell of a craft from orbit to a one-meter-square target on the planet below while using the least amount of fuel had taught them to feel ballistics in their bones. But a racing skiff didn’t have a crew of fifteen nor did it work as part of a squadron of twelve.

  Kris kept up her end of the table banter while thanking whatever bureaucratic god it was that gave her the crew she drew. Her XO was Tommy Lien from Santa Maria’s asteroid mines. Her buddy from OCS had backed her up through thic
k and a whole lot of thin. Of all the crews, she and Tommy were the only two that had actually heard shots fired at them in anger. A few of the shots Tommy had dodged had actually been in legitimate firefights, not assassins’ bullets that had missed Kris first.

  Chief “Stan” Stanislaus was her only crew member who’d earned any hashmarks for his dress uniform. Ten years in the Navy, Kris would be losing him soon to OCS. Until then, she counted on him to see that PF-109 was real Navy rather than the playboy/girl toy flotilla that the media tagged them.

  The rest of the crew of PF-109 were a challenge. Raw and new, Kris and Tommy spent most of their time trying to come up with ways to get them past green to something close to practiced. Take Fintch at the helm. She was a whiz at ballistics and tested out of sight on the Navy’s aptitude scores . . . all involving computer games with her bottom comfortably seated on firm ground. But she’d never actually steered anything bigger than a motorbike. And never been off planet in her life!

  Fintch was actually an easy one; Kris took her over to the Wardhaven Space Yacht Club, rented a two-seat racing skiff, and took her backseat on a skiff drop. Halfway down, Kris handed Fintch the spare stick she’d hidden aboard.

  “You land her. Crash her. Your call.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Fintch said, ignoring the offered stick. And she did manage to put them down. Just over a mile from the target. Next to the number-three green at Wardhaven’s most exclusive country club. At least they didn’t scorch that much grass.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I’ll do better next time, ma’am,” Fintch insisted as the two of them hotfooted it off the course, the still cooling skiff dangling between them.