Kris Longknife's Bad Day Read online

  From dead slow, it took time to accelerate something that massive. Every second it took was time given the fire control systems on Kris’s ships to target them and lay a hellish amount of laser fire on them.

  A lot of alien ships died before they could get away from the murder hole.

  Kris considered one hundred or so alien warships trying to force a jump held by sixty jacked up 24-inch lasers on two forts.

  With the alien coming through the jump at one second intervals, and the defensive lasers firing two, maybe three times a minute, each alien warship was likely to take three or four hits within five seconds of cruising through the jump.

  Kris shook her head. The aliens would face a murderous task, getting their forces through a well-guarded jump into human space.

  It was also unlikely that they’d have any chance at surprise. Picket buoys now stood vigilant at every jump within ten jumps of Wardhaven. Indeed, all of human space was out-posted against any surprise attack.

  Not only would the jump forts be gunning for the alien raiders, but the battleships and battlecruisers would be on alert and stationed close to support the forts, possibly even closer in. When the fortress’s guns whacked hard, the battle fleet would be in place to finish it off quickly.

  And when the base ship, hulking big as a small moon came through, it would face the beam fortress a good two million klicks back. Say, seven seconds to spot the intruder, three seconds to study its movements, then another seven seconds for the beams to arrive.

  Kris shivered. The beam wasn’t quite like the device that had been found on Santa Maria. The humans researching it called it the Disappearing Box and were sure that it was a leftover from the Three Alien Races that built the jump points.

  Some teenage girls had found the box, opened it, and pointed it at a mountain. They weren’t sure exactly what they did next, but somehow, they activated it and the top three thousand meters of a distant mountain had vanished. Just disappeared.

  After eighty years of studying the box, human scientists had no idea how or where that mountain top had vanished to. However, in the process of looking for one thing, they’d stumbled upon something else – the beam gun.

  Kris had seen the beams focused on a neutron star and used to drive off a fifteen-thousand-ton chip hardly the size of the diamond on the engagement ring Jack kept urging her to let him buy. The tiny chip had smashed ships; Kris had yet to see what happened when the beam was widened and aimed at a structure.

  According to the budget support, that test would be completed in, Kris glanced at her calendar, two weeks. So, the budget grenadiers intended to spend a whole hunk of money on a weapon that hadn’t even been tested yet. Kris shook her head.

  “I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for those results,” Kris told herself. There was no reason why she couldn’t schedule herself to attend the test. She took a deep breath, let it out, and focused on the screen. “Okay, Nelly, enough dodging, what did the budget gods give us this year and how much will it raise my blood pressure?”

  One glance at the Battlecruiser Force line items and Kris’s frown went to a full scowl.

  She had asked for thirty-two of the new battlecruisers: four squadrons of eight ships each. One for Alwa, two for planetary defense, and one for long range patrols to spot alien raider incursions before they got too close to human space.

  “We only got twenty-four ships, Kris,” Megan said.

  Kris shook her head as she considered that development, then said, “We’ll have to short someplace or go to six ship squadrons. There are days when I really regret that I can’t blow something up.”

  Meg gave her boss an encouraging look, and Kris tried to make herself be reasonable.

  “The new 24-inch lasers are big,” her aid pointed out.

  To handle twenty of them properly, the new design came in at 75,000 tons, a fifty percent jump in displacement. To stay inside the 50,000 ton size of the 22-inch ship, she would have had to cut the number of guns from twenty to twelve. A compromise design of 65,000 tons could properly support sixteen. Kris had gone with the bigger ship; she hoped her decision wouldn’t cost more than she was prepared to pay.

  “There’s money in the budget for upgrading twenty-four of the most recently constructed battlecruisers. It will replace the old 22-inch lasers with the new 24-inch ones,” Megan said, doing her best to sound encouraging.

  Kris nodded. Such an upgrade would have been impossible without the Smart MetalTM. With it, the yards could open the ship up like a fileted fish, remove the old lasers, insert the new ones, add in an extra fusion reactor for more power, and zip her back up. Of course, you didn’t get a new battlecruiser for this; and you also had to add in another 15,000 tons of Smart MetalTM. Even then, you still could only support sixteen of the new guns. It did, however, give Kris another two dozen ships that could reach out and touch some alien raiders at 270,000 klicks.

  Last time Kris had fought the aliens, their newest lasers had just been starting to demonstrate a range of 140,000 klicks. Except for some probing around Alwa, a human outpost all the way on the other side of the galaxy, the aliens that wanted all life in the galaxy dead, except for themselves, had not been heard from in the last five years.

  Kris regularly found herself, late at night, wondering what the monsters who looked too damn much like us, were up to.

  “Okay, okay,” Kris said, knowing she was wasting time. Her beloved battlecruisers had come up short in the budget battle. How bad was it for the Battle Force and Scout Force?

  Before the battlecruisers, those two had been all of the space-going Navy there was. Battle Force designed, built, and developed doctrine for the battleships of the fleet. Scout Force did the same for the cruisers and destroyers who did the scouting and escorting of merchant ships when that became necessary.

  In Kris’s opinion, the battlecruisers with big lasers eliminated the need for battleships, and their fast speed drastically reduced the need for a scouting force. Kris had defended the Alwa system with a fleet of battlecruisers and a small number of auxiliaries. She didn’t see a need for expensive battleships or weak cruisers.

  Unfortunately, Kris didn’t get to make the call for the entire fleet.

  Nelly flipped the screen to show the section that covered the Battle Force. Megan’s young eyes spotted what Kris was looking for, flinched, and made a grab for the red reader.

  Kris spotted the main line items and let out a definitely un-princess-like series of explicatives. She would have hurled the reader at the wall, but Megan had her hands on it. For a moment, two Longknifes wrestled for its possession.

  “You promised me I could throw two against the wall,” Kris growled.

  “But we’ve got two whole weeks of working with it, Admiral. If you bust this one, you’ll only have one backup left.

  “But it would feel so good,” Kris grouched.

  The younger Longknife just shook her head. The junior officer had no respect for authority. At least not the authority of her distant cousin, Her Royal Highness Admiral Kris Longknife.

  But then, Kris had come to recognize that she needed someone at her elbow who was loyal and wouldn’t let her walk all over her. Someone besides the budget masters.

  “Okay, Lieutenant, you hold on to the reader and keep it out of harm’s way. Nelly, enlarge that section on battleships. I want to read it from my desk,” Kris said. As she paced towards it, she took off her uniform coat, hung it on a coat rack, sat, and put her feet up on her desk.

  “Now, let’s see how bad it is.”

  Kris didn’t have to study the writing on the wall for very long before she was shaking her head. “They did it again. He did it again.”

  “Twelve more battleships,” Megan said.

  “Yes, another twelve dinosaurs. Overweight and oversized targets that cost four times what a battlecruiser does and needs four times the crew to fight it,” Kris spit out.

  Kris’s battlecruisers carried twenty lasers, all firing forward or aft, with
fifteen degrees of wiggle room to aim them. These twelve new battleships would carry twenty-four of the new 24-inch lasers mounted three to a turret, four forward, four aft. The turrets allowed the lasers to fire through 150 degrees away from the long axis of the ships: up or down, fore or aft.

  Battleships had been designed that way ever since humans had been building those over-armed and armored behemoths for war.

  The problem with this kind of design was the vast amount of open space that it required inside the armored hull of the ship. The long lasers had to swing through a complete circle inside the ship as it trained on a target. The 24-inch lasers were the longest yet. The new battleships were 150,000 tons; half again larger than the monstrous 100,000 ton battleships Kris had when she fought to save Wardhaven.

  That these battleships took up twice the tonnage of a battlecruiser for only four more big lasers was bad enough. However, all those voids inside the ship for the guns’ movement meant the hulls were huge. All of that oversized hull now had to be covered with crystal armor.

  Even worse, some battleship admiral had gotten it in his head that if the battlecruisers had crystal ten centimeters thick, the battleships should have twenty centimeters of the stuff!

  Kris had a strong hunch that this was not only a costly requirement, but likely a very bad idea. While the crystal did a great job of absorbing a laser hit, distributing the energy throughout all the crystal cladding and radiating it back out into space, there was still heat involved. Lots of it.

  The Earth battlecruisers that had brought the first crystal out to Alwa had not fared well when they first went into battle. The crystal heated up when hit, that heat was transferred to the hull with what had been serious consequences.

  Alwa Station battlecruisers were quickly clad with crystal, but the Smart MetalTM behind the cladding was honeycombed with voids filled with reaction mass circulating through it, carrying off the heat and keeping the hull from melting.

  Kris wanted to test the twenty-centimeter armor in a live fire shoot. She suspected that the middle of the armor would heat up to destructive levels. She had the scientific calculations to back her up.

  Unfortunately, the battleship admirals had their own calculations that said there was no problem. It didn’t come as a surprise to Kris that those calculations were on Nuu Enterprises’ stationary.

  Her Grampa Al was at it again.

  Kris’s Grampa Al ran a significant portion of Wardhaven’s manufacturing economy. Kris was a major shareholder in Nuu Enterprises and had never been able to spend half of her annual dividends. To spend even that much had taken funding a bank on a distant planet that jump-started its entire economy.

  Nuu Enterprises was huge. Last year, Grampa Al’s spaceship building yards had won the contracts for eight of the battleships in the budget. An old crony of his had gotten the other four.

  For the last three years, all the battlecruisers had been built in yards not a part of Nuu Enterprises. Grampa Al was not happy about that. Kris, however, had been untouched by any charges centering around a conflict of interest.

  With a heavy sigh, Kris eyed the battleship construction program. She understood the battleship admirals. They’d spent their entire careers in those huge unwieldy ships, but they were able to be educated. At least some of them were. However, with Grampa Al pushing hard for more battleships and spreading the work out to subcontractors all over Wardhaven, it was turning into an impossible job to zero the battleship account and use that money to plus up the battlecruisers.

  For five years, Kris had struggled to persuade Navy, Parliament, and the general public, that battlecruisers were the best solution to their defense needs. For five years, the conservative elements in the Navy, Parliament, and people, had given her some of what she needed while still permitting the other cost centers to grow as the fear of the alien raiders became palpable.

  Of course, Kris had done her best to grow that fear by standing in front of any civic group that would give her a podium to talk from. Her spiel was simple. The aliens were out there and they would sterilize any human planet if they were given the chance. Humanity needed to make sure they didn’t allow them that chance.

  Being a princess helped when you had an agenda to push on people.

  Unfortunately, admirals, politicians, and men of business had their own agenda, and could push back as much, if not more, than a princess. When their careers or jobs were on the line, they could push back very well, thank you.

  Kris glanced through the rest of the battleship building plan. The twenty-four battleships from the last two years’ construction plans were made of Smart MetalTM, would be increased to 150,000 tons, and get the 24-inch lasers. Battleships before then had been made of conventional materials and could not be modified.

  There were strong hints in the budget narrative that the entire battle fleet would need to be replaced, and replaced not according to the established Forty Year Recapitalization Plan, but much, much, faster.

  That wouldn’t bother Kris at all . . . if they just replaced them with cheaper battlecruisers that required far less crew.

  “You done, Admiral?” Megan asked.

  Kris shook her head. She felt very much like she’d been run over by a truck . . . for the fifth time. “Megan, do you see any reason that we can’t just reuse the same rebuttal that we presented last year?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Is the Scout Force just as bad?”

  Nelly flipped to the summary of the cruiser, destroyer, and smaller escort section. It left Kris shaking her head more.

  These ships were just too small to stand in any defensive line against half-million ton alien warships with hundreds upon hundreds of lasers. True, the alien lasers were short ranged, but if they got within range of you, you died. The lasers on the cruisers had less range than the alien lasers.

  Grand Duchess Vicky Peterwald had warned Kris of the disaster that befell her late, unlamented stepmother’s forces when the destroyers under her command had been ordered to make a classical run in a missile attack.

  The longer range of the new guns created far too large a killing space for the destroyers to survive long enough to get within missile range. Those destroyers that launched from a safe distance managed to escape. Their missiles, however, had been blotted out well before they could do any damage.

  No, the battlecruisers were just as fast and nimble as the cruisers and destroyers, jinking about fast enough to mess with any alien fire control solution and hitting back with battleship-sized lasers.

  Yes, different classes of ships had served a purpose seventy or even seven years ago.

  Now, however, with battlecruisers available, different classes of ships were no longer needed. The battlecruisers could slug it out in a battle line, while speeding around as fast as any destroyer. It was time to change, and change was cheaper than the old way.

  Why didn’t everyone else see what was so clear to Kris?

  She had drawn up a new manual on battle doctrine that made the optimum use of the battlecruiser’s speed, maneuverability, and offensive weapons systems. It was still circulating for comments three years after she finished it. She’d sent it out and gotten a ton of comments. She’d responded to some comments with changes to the draft manual. She’d answered others with clear and cogent arguments. That done, she’d sent the revised version out for comments again.

  She’d been through six comment cycles and was no closer to getting her manual finalized.

  Her new doctrine had been tested in fleet exercises . . . by ships not under her command and officers that didn’t appear to have read her manual. What they didn’t botch, the umpires ruled a failure.

  Being a damn Longknife with combat experience did not mean a damn thing where the entrenched bureaucrats were concerned.

  Kris took her feet off her desk and ran a worried hand through her hair. “Meg, throw together a rebuttal to this year’s budget using last year’s argument.”

  “If I can use some of Ne
lly’s spare capacity, I’ll have it on your desk first thing tomorrow morning, Admiral.”

  “Nelly?” Kris asked.

  “I’d be happy to work with Lieutenant Longknife, Kris.”

  “Good,” Kris said, then reflected a bit and added. “Oh, Megan, how’s the betting pool going about when I’ll call it quits and ask for space duty?”

  “It’s still there, ma’am,” Megan said. She knew what would come next; Kris had done this a couple of times over the last three years.

  “What do you have to pick now? A week? A month?” Kris asked?

  “A month, ma’am.”

  “Buy a ticket for me and one for you.” Nelly popped a calendar up before Kris even asked. This month was half gone. “For next month.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Nelly, order up the car and tell Jack to meet me in the basement.”

  “It isn’t quite five yet, Kris.”

  “Tell Jack I’ve had a lousy day.”

  Only a few seconds later, Nelly reported, “He’ll be there before you are.”

  About the Author

  Mike Shepherd is the National best-selling author of the Kris Longknife saga. Mike Moscoe is the award nominated short story writer who has also written several novels, most of which were, until recently, out of print. Though the two have never been seen in the same room at the same time, they are reported to be good friends.

  Mike Shepherd grew up Navy. It taught him early about change and the chain of command. He's worked as a bartender and cab driver, personnel advisor and labor negotiator. Now retired from building databases about the endangered critters of the Northwest, he’s looking forward to some fun reading and writing.

  Mike lives in Vancouver, Washington, with his wife Ellen, and not too far from his daughter and grandkids. He enjoys reading, writing, dreaming, watching grand-children for story ideas and upgrading his computer – all are never ending.

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