Kris Longknife: Defender Read online

  Old men’s plans for young people don’t always work out as planned.

  “Captain,” Kris said, “you can call me paranoid, but I’d like to approach the hulk, keeping it between us and anything that might suddenly pop out of that jump.”

  “Paranoia has kept a lot of Longknifes alive,” Granny Rita said.

  “Adjusting course,” Captain Drago said.

  “Nelly, how much of the Wasp’s Smart Metal do you want to use for explorer nanos?”

  “As much as Penny will let me, Kris. I’ll be controlling them with all the self-organizing matrix that I haven’t yet used for my next child.” In half payment on the Wasp, Nelly had swapped one kid to Katsu, with solid overrides if he, or his father, should ever try to duplicate her child. Having lived with Kris for twenty years, Nelly came by her paranoia honestly. Nelly’s price for that one had been enough matrix to birth three more children to replace those lost on the long, dangerous flight from this battle.

  She’d only granted two of the new personnel on the Wasp the honor of working with one of her children. That left one child yet unborn. Nelly was willing to divide that matrix up and share it out among the exploration drones to give them top-notch guidance and sensor suites to study the hulk.

  That still left the basic question: How much Smart MetalTM would there be for her matrix to fly?

  Penny took a while to talk to Mimzy, her own computer and one of Nelly’s offspring. “Kris, I’d like to shrink the Wasp down to Condition Baker.”

  Under Baker, the “love boat” proportions of Condition Able became a bit constrained. Passageways got narrower. Unused spaces shrunk or vanished. The reaction-mass tanks that had given up a part of their contents on the way out here would be resized. All that spare metal would be moved to the outer hull of the Wasp to form a reflective surface and a honeycomb through which cool reaction mass flowed. This sandwich of armor should protect the Wasp from laser hits as good as, if not better than, the six-meter-thick ice armor on heavy battleships.

  “I concur,” Captain Drago said. This meeting with the Alwans might not be taking place on the bridge, but clearly he was following it very closely.

  He was, after all, the captain.

  “Mimzy,” Penny said, “announce to all hands that we will be going to Condition Baker in one minute and that we may go to Condition Charlie without further notice.” Charlie was worse than Baker, but not as bad as Condition Zed. When Zed was ordered, people’s quarters were compressed down into a few lockers, and the entire rest of the room vanished. The same went for the scientists’ research labs.

  Boffins had complained loudly about Condition Zed. The scientists had been shown the fine print in their contracts and reminded that they were all subject to activation as reserve officers, and as such, would follow the proper orders of their duly appointed superiors.

  The scientists complained, but they knew it wouldn’t matter if ever Captain Drago, Kris, or Penny ordered Condition Zed.

  Around Kris, the Forward Lounge began to shrink. Empty tables melted into the deck. Folks in the middle of their dinner found their table and chairs moving closer together as empty places vanished away.

  All hands went through this drill once a week for Baker and once a month for Zed. Folks kept right on eating, drinking, and when a new couple came in, the lounge expanded to provide them a table.

  The Alwans were still fixated on the wreck ahead; they failed to notice what was happening around them.

  “Princess, my boffins have noticed something strange about the wreck,” came in the calm, aristocratic voice of Professor Joao Labao. He was on sabbatical from the University of Brazília and the senior administrator of the 250 scientists aboard the Wasp and the reason the frigate could honestly claim to be a research ship. “Have your examinations identified anything different between the right and left sides of the aft end of the hulk?”

  “That’s a negative,” came from Senior Chief Beni. He’d come out of retirement to have “a shot at them that killed my kid.” “I’m getting no radio readings from that hulk. The reactors are dead. Anywhere you look on the electromagnetic spectrum or radioactive scale, she’s as dead as Caesar’s ghost.”

  “I would most certainly agree with you, Chief,” the professor said. “It’s our optics that are giving us cause for second thoughts.”

  “Pass them through to me in the Forward Lounge,” Kris said.

  “And me on the bridge,” the skipper spoke over Kris.

  The rolling, tumbling hulk had been getting closer. Now, using the powerful optical instruments usually reserved for deep-space research, the aft end of the blasted wreck jumped into clear definition.

  Bits of hull and I-beams were twisted like a child’s strand of candy. Other thick hull strength members were nearly broken through. Some hung by a thread and did their own dance as the ship waddled through space.

  “We hit it hard,” Kris muttered.

  The Alwans had broken from their fixation on the huge ship and now were once again moving quickly among themselves, talking rapidly.

  “I think,” said Granny Rita, “they are now very impressed with what you can do.”

  That was good because the picture then changed.

  The professor took up the narration. “What you were looking at was the left end of the aft quarter, portside aft to you Sailors. What you’re now seeing is the right side, starboard aft quarter. Notice the difference.”

  There was still clear evidence of damage. But many of the beams that had looked knocked about like jackstraws on the other side, were gone. The picture zoomed in further.

  “We think someone has been cutting away at that wreckage with laser welding torches. We’ll need to get in closer. Have nanos take a good look at the cuts, but that side of the ship does not look like we left it, of that I am sure.”

  “All hands, battle stations,” Captain Drago’s voice announced on the 1MC. “All weapons, report when you are manned and ready.”

  2

  Around them, all hands beat to quarters. The Forward Lounge became suddenly empty.

  And the Alwans looked ready to climb the walls.

  Granny Rita did her best to calm them, but the idea that they were about to be in a fight to the death was having a very erratic impact on their behavior. Some ran around. Others froze in place. At any particular moment, with no particular rationale, the runners would freeze, and the statues would take off running.

  They did a lot of clicking whether they were running or not.

  Jack was suddenly at Kris’s elbow, just in case any of the crazy birds failed to notice she was in the way of their mad running.

  “What do you do with them?” Kris asked Granny Rita.

  Still, without a word from Jack, she fell back to the wall, well out of the way of traffic. Jack gave her a smile that said “Thank you, love, for not making me have to fight with you.”

  Granny Rita gave the two of them a look that said . . . nothing to Kris. It did make her fidget.

  Then Granny Rita shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen them like this. As I said, they don’t fight among themselves. They resolve conflicts by impressive displays.”

  “How’d something like this ever rise to the top of the food chain?” Jack asked.

  “You haven’t seen them feeding,” Rita said. “I’ve seen them bite strips of meat off a living, running beast. But fight among themselves. Never.”

  “So how did you establish that the Heavy People were not prey?” Penny asked, watching the show with the native curiosity of a natural-born intelligence officer.

  “Our Marine detachment put on a very impressive display. They also killed a few prey beasts, publicly butchered them, and held a BBQ. The Alwans discovered they liked cooked meat. We did what we had to to make friends,” Granny Rita finished vaguely.

  The battle-stations Klaxon went sil
ent. That had a settling effect on the Alwans.

  “Lieutenant Lien,” called Captain Drago. “Please set Condition Charlie as quickly as you can.”

  Drills had shown that having the ship changing shape while all hands were racing to be someplace else was not a good idea. Now, with all hands where they were needed, getting more armor to the ship’s hide became a priority.

  Penny announced, “We are setting Condition Charlie. All hands stay put until I report the condition established.” After a pause, she added for just those close at hand, “Mimzy, set Condition Charlie.”

  “Daughter,” Nelly added, “call on as many of your brothers and sisters as you need to make this go quick and clean.”

  “Yes, mother,” Mimzy said in a voice Kris had practiced before a mirror when she was thirteen. “All right, crew, you heard Mom, let’s make this happen shipshape and Bristol fashion.”

  Behind them, bottles at the bar folded themselves up into cases as what was left of the lounge floor rolled itself up. The glass wall vanished as the small part of the lounge Kris was using suddenly was backed up to the not airtight doors that had been fifty meters away a few seconds ago.

  The Alwans watched wide-eyed.

  “Condition Charlie is set throughout the ship,” Penny announced moments later.

  Captain Drago followed that announcement with one of his own. “The Blue Team is relieved from its battle stations and will don high-gee stations. When they report back to their stations, the Gold Team will do the same.”

  “Blue, Gold teams?” Granny Rita asked.

  “I’ve told you about how great Smart Metal is,” Kris said. “This ship can handle gee forces way beyond what the Mark I Sailor can. So, we’ve got high-gee stations made of Smart Metal. They help keep us from splattering ourselves all over the deck as we honk the ship around to avoid getting hit. In combat, the Wasp never follows any course for more than three or four seconds.”

  “Two,” Nelly put in.

  “We dodge around a lot,” Kris went on, “and the gee stations let us do it. The armor is there, but it’s better not to get hit. The problem with the eggs, as we call them, is that they fit you like a second skin. Once, for political reasons, I had to go into an egg wearing undress whites. I was black-and-blue from the belt buckle, the clutch backs on my ribbons, and my shoulder boards. The standard uniform in an egg is buck naked.”

  “Oh.” The old lady’s eyes lit up.

  “Granny, we look like a collection of Easter eggs from the outside: boys and girls alike.” There were certain earthy aspects of Granny Rita’s outlook on life that Kris found a bit hard to take.

  Now Granny shrugged. “It sounds like a young person’s way of fighting.”

  “Most of our crew are under thirty,” Kris admitted.

  “So, what are you going to do about us?”

  The ship’s pharmacy had a small supply of antiaging pharmaceuticals. After all, Cookie, the cook, was well over eighty, as were several of the restaurateurs. Granny Rita had been glad to have her arthritis cured, her bones strengthened, and her arteries cleaned.

  Still, knocking her around at high gees was not what Kris wanted to do to her newly found great-grandmother.

  And the Alwans! Though their bones were more solid than they had been when they flew several million years ago, the odds were quite high that a battle might have Kris returning the six delegates looking more like boneless chicken than spokespersons for how much Alwa needed human aid.

  “Nelly, do you have the specs for the water tanks the Iteeche used to survive the last battle?”

  The Iteeche Empire, some eighty years ago, had almost made the human race extinct. Just ask any veteran. Just ask Granny Rita! It was Iteeche Death Balls that had gotten her into a running gunfight, them gunning, her running, that she hadn’t been able to slow down from until she was on the other side of the galaxy.

  Only recently had Kris had a chance to talk to some Iteeche and discovered that their veterans were proud of how they’d saved their people from annihilation by the humans. During the Voyage of Discovery that had resulted in the shootout with the wrecked base ship they were coming up on, Kris had had three Iteeche aboard.

  “Of course I have the tank designs stored in my bursting innards,” Nelly snapped. “I can knock out one for Granny and six for the Alwans. I suggest you use your normal Tac Center. That way, Granny Rita can follow the battle, or we can show pleasant scenes from around human space to relax the Alwans.”

  “Do that, Nelly.”

  “You’ve had Iteeche aboard?” Granny Rita said.

  “It’s a long story, but the only reason I came out here and found you and that,” Kris said, nodding toward the hulk, “was because they were losing scout ships and came asking for our help.”

  “So we made peace. I kept telling Ray he should do more to find a way to stop all the killing.”

  “We can talk about this later,” Kris said.

  “Yes. Are you expecting a fight now?”

  “Yes, no, and maybe.”

  “You can ask a Longknife a question, but you better not expect an answer,” Granny Rita said with a sigh.

  “I don’t expect a fight,” Kris said, expanding on her initial cryptic reply. “You notice that none of us here are rushing to our battle stations. However, we now have evidence that someone has been mining this wreck. Are they its former owners or someone we haven’t met yet? We’ve run into these raiders four times. Three times they started shooting. We managed to run away the other time. Tell me, Commodore, wouldn’t you be at battle stations?”

  “No question about it. Those water tanks you were talking about. You want me to get my friends into them now?”

  “No, we’ll wait. All this drill may be for nothing,” Kris said, then switched topics.

  “Nelly, I want to survey that hulk as fast as we can. I also want to make a change in your nano allotments. We’re going to tuck ourselves in just as close as we can to the wreck, with it between us and the jump. I want a belt of sensors around the hulk, midships, focused on the jump. Anything comes through that jump, I want to know.”

  “I was already working on just such a sensor array, connected with tight-beam communications,” Nelly said. “However, how long it takes to examine the hulk will depend on how much Smart Metal Penny lets me have. Penny?”

  “The Sakura transferred a lot of supplies to us before she left,” Penny said. It had also donated an 18-inch laser rifle that the Wasp now had pointed aft. Smart MetalTM, used to its maximum, was a most delightful and flexible material. “They also stripped out a thousand tons of Smart Metal and transferred it to us. I’ve been using most of it for armor. Nelly, if I gave you a hundred tons of the stuff, would that be enough?”

  “Perfect,” the computer said. “Now, Mimzy, let’s get to work giving the boffins something to look at and making sure that jump point is under constant observation.”

  3

  The four large screens in the Forward Lounge now showed sixteen different pictures as the nanos spread through the wreck. Or, more correctly, fifteen pictures of the wreck and one picture of blank space.

  The jump point was blessedly unemployed, and Kris fervently hoped it would stay that way for a long time. A very long time.

  “You don’t have to keep glancing at the jump point, Kris,” Nelly said. “I and every one of my kids have it under constant observation. If it burps out so much as a grain of sand, you will know.”

  “I know, Nelly, it’s just a human thing.”

  “A Longknife thing,” both Jack and Penny said at once.

  Granny Rita just grunted.

  The nanos were starting from the blasted aft section and moving inward.

  Of the engineering spaces, nothing remained. The two Hellburners that hit there along with the corvettes’ lasers and smaller antimatter torpedoes had only started t
he damage. The hundred or more thermonuclear reactors that powered the huge rockets had lost their containment systems, freeing superheated plasma to add more destruction to what the humans started.

  A third Hellburner had hit farther forward. There had been reactors there, too. Reactors that powered the ship and the uncounted lasers that dotted the ship’s surface.

  Amidships, shock, whiplash, and torque added to the destruction. They came across gaping holes in the middle of the ship that appeared to have been caused by reactors that lost their containment fields when their superconducting, magnetic containment systems failed.

  Kris revised her estimate of the bite they’d taken out of the monster. Her original guess was they had blown away thirty to forty percent of the base ship. Now it looked like more than half the ship was wrecked.

  “It must have been pure hell aboard this ship,” Granny Rita said.

  Kris nodded. “Even as it was blowing itself apart, it was shooting too many lasers to count at our battle line, blasting hundred-thousand-ton battleships with six meters of ice armor into hot gases in only seconds.”

  Even Penny was shaking her head. “I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for those who suffered through this. But Kris and every human ship around had done everything they could to open communications. The aliens just came out shooting every single time we ran into them.”

  Granny Rita did her best to translate all this to the Alwans. They now stood still, alone, not in any group, in stunned silence.

  Kris wondered how much of this they were really getting and how much was being lost in translation.

  NELLY, ARE YOU GETTING ANY OF THIS?

  KRIS, AS BEST I CAN TELL, THE ALWANS DON’T BELIEVE US. THEY CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THESE ALIENS DID NOT TALK TO US. I THINK ONE OF THEM SAID SOMETHING ABOUT HOW CAN ANYONE PUT ON A COURTSHIP DANCE WITHOUT CROWING? I COULD BE WAY OFF ON THE TRANSLATION.

  THAT’S OKAY, NELLY.