Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant Read online

  “Let this be our little secret,” Kris said. And it was. Until the five o’clock news featured them.

  But Fintch did better the second drop, and Kris stood her for membership in the Wardhaven Skiff Club, paid her first year’s dues, and got out of her way.

  If only it was half as easy to come up with ways that made it as much fun to maintain and calibrate the ship’s lasers, electronics, motors, sensors, and all the other drudgeries that went into converting a very small chunk of space into one deadly little warship.

  Dessert was on order when Phil Taussig rapped on his crystal water glass. Most fell silent, though Ted Rockefeller and Andy Gates had a problem with who-gets-in-the-last-word and didn’t shut up until they noticed ten very silent peers staring at them.

  “It could not have escaped your notice,” Phil said, “that should hostilities ever come to the space above Wardhaven, we are its last line of defense.”

  “And its worst,” Babs put in.

  “Speak for yourself,” Andy said.

  “Well, folks,” Phil said, trying to cut through the usual banter. “I, for one, would like to see us take out a battleship or two. Hopefully without being annihilated like a torpedo squadron namesake of ours was a few centuries back that I’ve mentioned once or twice.”

  “Or forty-eleven times,” Babs sighed.

  Phil Taussig was one of the two exceptions to the rule of spoiled rich kids among the boat commanders. His family was Navy, going back to the times when navies were wet water affairs. Kris suspected that Phil had been added to the mix by Mac in an effort to reduce the hooligan factor. Among his several contributions was digging up the story of Torpedo 8, a flying squadron that sounded very much like them. They’d taken on some ocean type battleships and been annihilated, almost to a man. Though Babs rolled her eyes at the ceiling, even jolly Andy Gates now gave Phil his undivided serious attention.

  “As I see it,” Phil went on, “our problem breaks down into several easy phases.” He held up a hand. “Find the enemy, approach the enemy, destroy the enemy, exit the battle area in one piece.” Phil counted each on a finger. “That says it all.”

  “Shouldn’t be any trouble finding the battleships,” Andy Gates put in. “Since our PFs don’t do star jumps, we’ll just be lounging around here in orbit when the big boys waddle in.”

  No one laughed.

  “I would suggest surviving our approach to the enemy battle line deserves one of your fingers, Phil.” Chandra Singh said, her voice slightly singsong. “If we are not alive to shoot our lasers, all else is mere sorrow.”

  Dark-eyed Chandra was the second exception to the rule. Older than the other skippers . . . she actually had two children waving from her husband’s side on the pier when the squadron pulled away. She was a mustang. She’d come up through the enlisted rates, earning her commission even before the present emergency had the Navy combing its ranks for chiefs to leaven the ranks of green college kids like Kris and her fellow skippers.

  “We’re mighty small targets,” Ted Rockefeller of Pitts Hope pointed out. His trust fund wasn’t quite as well-stocked as Kris’s. He was cute but not very smart, which he regularly showed by the misconclusions he drew. “It’ll be mighty hard for an old battlewagon to draw a bead on one of us tiny targets.”

  “Kind of like you shooting skeet,” Andy Gates said, nudging him with an elbow.

  “If they have fire control systems anything like I broke many a screwdriver over, they will spot you,” Singh said.

  “So we dodge,” Gates said. “That’s what Commodore Mandanti says. Dodge. Never go straight for more than five seconds.”

  “And if you follow his advice,” Taussig cut in, eyes locked on Kris, “you’ll be dead in three seconds. Right Kris?”

  “More likely in two,” she said. The room got very quiet as she put down her water tumbler.

  “The Commodore is a good man,” she continued, “but he was retired to his chicken ranch for fifteen years before they brought him back to ride herd on us juvenile delinquents.” That was the PF commanders’ secret name for themselves. Kris doubted it was any secret from the Commodore.

  “For most of the last fifty, sixty years, not much changed on a warship from what came out of the Iteeche Wars. No need. The Society of Humanity kept the peace throughout human space. Now human space is in pieces and . . . Well, you hear the news.” Heads nodded. Wars and war rumors sold a lot of soap these days.

  “The technologies developed in the long peace have been finding their way aboard warships. Last ten years, things have been changing. Singh, you must have noticed it as a maintainer.”

  The old Chief, now lieutenant, nodded.

  “My grandfather’s bottom line has made a few terabucks off of the new stuff. I doubt he’s been alone,” Kris said dryly, giving the rest of her mates a smile that was pure cynic. They nodded back. The technical growth had driven a long economic expansion. All peaceful. Now the plowshares were being hammered into swords and the money their families had all banked in the good times just might be in line to kill their heirs real soon. Great thought to take home to the next Christmas dinner.

  “So we need to dodge a lot,” Heather said, bringing them back to the matter at hand.

  “Jinks, I’m told, is the military term for it,” Kris supplied, Phil nodded. “And you need to do it both faster than any human can think it through and in a more random pattern than any fire control computer can analyze. Be slow. Be predictable. You’ll be dead and your ship and crew with you.”

  The servers delivered slices of pie, cake, and bowls of ice cream into that silence. From the wide-eyed looks that passed between them, it was apparent they’d never been in a room full of JOs that were quite as subdued as this bunch. Alone in their room once more, no one seemed to have any appetite.

  “Is this where I come in?” came a pleasant voice from around Kris’s neck.

  Kris undid the top button on her undress whites. This put her out of uniform, but with her depressingly small chest measurements, she’d be no distraction to the male half of the room. “Does anyone object to my computer, Nelly, joining us?”

  “I was hoping she would,” Singh said.

  “So, Nelly,” Phil began, “can you give us an erratic enough approach course?”

  “I have already given this question some thought, since I did not doubt that you would come to me for my expertise on this,” Nelly said.

  Kris rolled her eyes at the ceiling. Humility might be something ten rich kids could teach each other the hard way. But how do you teach virtue to a computer? Especially one you’d paid top dollar to make the best and who knew very well that she was. What did Singh say? “Some things in life just must be suffered.”

  Of course, after saying that to her crew, the old mustang was wont to borrow a toolbox and fix just the thing the crew insisted couldn’t be fixed.

  “What have you got for us?” Kris said.

  Nelly immediately flashed a holograph of a battleship at one end, a tiny replica of a PF at the other end. The PF started its approach at full power and maximum evasion: up down, right left, fast, slow. Its course was a corkscrew of twists and turns that made several captains at the table turn a fine shade of green.

  “You will want to start at a lower acceleration,” Singh pointed out. “Our engines are small. If we spread radiators to dissipate the heat, we present a bigger target. If we don’t, we risk overheating if we abuse them for too long. Begin the approach at one point five g’s acceleration, then build up.”

  “I don’t know,” Gates said. “Balls to the wall sounds like a great way to go to me.”

  Kris made a mental note to do it Singh’s way.

  “So each of us does our own evasion pattern and charges in,” Rockefeller said.

  “I would not suggest that,” Kris said.

  “Why? You aren’t going to say that we all have to evade the same way. What happened to unpredictable?” Alexander asked.

  Kris glanced around the tabl
e; all she got back were blank stares. She’d even managed to get ahead of Phil this time. Most of them were smart, but they hadn’t been shot at. They hadn’t gotten that gut kick that came when your best plan fell apart despite your best effort. They had yet to be left standing there, or lying, or running, and wondering what you should have done better . . . different. Kris took a deep breath and swore that she’d do this slow, earn everyone’s support.

  It had to be all for one and one for all.

  “If I zig away from a chunk of space, just as you zag into it,” Kris used her hands to show ships passing, “the shot intended for me becomes a shot that hits you.”

  “The chances against that are a million to one,” Gates spat.

  “Yes, and you’ll be just as dead,” Phil said. He chewed on his lower lip for a second. “We’re training so we can do it right the first time, every time. But we can’t expect bad luck to stay off the battlefield. Nelly, could you develop a different jinks pattern for all twelve boats? One that lets us jink all over, each boat fully random but never close to the other’s space anytime near to when another boat was in it?”

  There was a longer pause than Kris had come to expect when talking to Nelly. Long pauses were happening regularly now as Nelly gained more comprehension of the full extent and the size of the problems humans faced regularly. Nelly might be a supercomputer, but her decision trees were getting supersized. “Yes, I can do that. Each boat will need to start the attack from well-spaced positions. The Commodore usually has you in line behind the flagship. You will need more space than that to maneuver.”

  “Good observation, Nelly,” Kris said. Yes, Nelly was even responding to praise. Exactly what had Kris bought with her latest upgrade, and with that bit of Santa Maria rock in the self-organizing matrix that she’d told Nelly not to look at but . . . ? Well, there was one more spoiled brat on the PFs than the Navy had assigned.

  Phil leaned close to Kris’s ear. “I’d heard stories about your Nelly. This is the first I’ve seen her in action. Nice.”

  “You caught her on one of her better days.”

  “I heard that.”

  “Good, because I want five different evasion approach plans for all twelve boats,” Kris snapped. No use having all that computing power if she wasn’t going to put it to use. And an idle Nelly was something to avoid at all cost.

  “We can never tell when we’ll need to switch to a new random route. Face it, Nelly, they’ve got computers, too. And if they figure out one of your random sets, we need a backup and another, and another. Got it?”

  “Yes, Your slave-driving Princess-ship,” Nelly said.

  Around the room, hands covered poorly suppressed grins. None of them referred to Kris as anything but Lieutenant. Aboard ship or ashore, she was Navy, never Princess, to her shipmates.

  But what her own computer did to her . . . Well, that was a hoist of another petard.

  “One more thing,” Kris said. “We’ve got 18-inch pulse lasers. They give out a quick, powerful burst of energy on our target. But there are no reloads. We have motors, not reactors that could refill our capacitors. It’s one shot and then we’re done.”

  Heads nodded. They’d all read the manuals.

  “We need to make sure that our shots do as much damage as they can. If we’re coordinating our approaches, maybe we could do something else.”

  Phil and Singh leaned close. Others folded their arms; they’d be a hard sell. Kris ignored her melting ice cream and got into sales mode.

  “Thirty thousand kilometers to the target,” Tom reported from his station on weapons at Kris’s elbow. “Close range for the secondary armament.”

  And this close, the battlewagon’s ranging and search systems, radar, lasers, magnetic and gravitational measurements would be picking up solid returns on even the tiny signatures of the fast patrol boats. Time to make their firing solutions as complicated as possible.

  “Take the division up to three g’s acceleration. Implement evasion scheme 1 on my mark,” Kris ordered. “Begin Foxing.” She paused for the other boats to make ready, then ordered, “Mark.”

  Evasion scheme 1 was nothing if not more evasive. And now when each PF changed direction—more often, more wildly—it launched Foxing decoys as well. At each course change, a mist of iron needles, aluminum strips, and phosphorus pellets shot out just as the boat made the turn. The chaff showered out along the old course as the PF turned toward the battleship for a new course. For that fraction of a second, while the boat itself was nose on, the Foxer decoyed the radar, laser, infrared, and magnetic sensors into showing the boat on the same old course.

  That was usually just long enough to get a shot off from the battleship’s secondary lasers—at empty space.

  The Foxer’s chaff also gave color to the lasers as they cut through the space where your ship wasn’t.

  Unlike dances and fancy planet-bound fireworks shows, Navy lasers in space should show nothing. A hammer and tongs battle between a dozen ships of the line is a dark, silent affair with nothing more to show than when the ships are swinging around the station. At first, at least. For a while.

  Then laser hits flash ice armor into steam that shoots off in jets that quickly freeze again. Those crystals catch laser light, reflect it, refract it, and turn horrible murder and butchery into something unspeakably lovely that the poets write about. If they survive. That artists try to capture in paint and steel and graphics for the rest of their lives. If they live to old age. Like twenty-five.

  But PFs like Kris’s had no ice to boil off. For them, the chaff created the living color that just might let them live.

  “Wow. Did you see that?” Fintch gaped at the main ahead screen for a moment as near misses lit up the decoys around them.

  “Pass it along to all hands,” Kris said. There was painfully little to do as they raced toward simulated death, their death or a battleship’s. It was either done and done right, and all the crew had left to do was watch gauges stay in the green, or it was done poorly and they’d fail as badly as the other two divisions.

  “Twenty thousand kilometers,” Tom said. “All four lasers are nominal and hot.”

  “Division, go to evasion scheme 6. Prepare to execute evasion and attack on my mark,” Kris said.

  “Yeah. Go, girls,” Nelly said, breaking her ordered quiet.

  Kris waited, gave the division an extra count. DO IT, NELLY.

  The division scattered, going into a dance that left them high, low, and medium on the battlewagon. Then, after a series of twists and turns that left Kris’s head bouncing off her headrest, it was time.

  “Fire,” Kris ordered. If Nelly had done her work right, the order was unnecessary, but this was Kris’s command, and she’d give the order herself, thank you very much.

  “Lasers firing,” Tom yelled. “All four away at sixteen thousand kilometers. All fired by the timer.”

  “Begin escape evasion,” Kris ordered. And held her breath.

  Was the battleship still there? Blown up? Damaged but still fighting?

  “Just what do you young rascals think you just did?” came over the command channel. At least Commodore Mandanti was calling them rascals today, not hooligans.

  “A coordinated attack, sir,” Kris answered. It being Tuesday, she had the lead of the division, so it fell to her to explain just what they had decided to do, her and Phil and Chandra. Heather had gone along with them, though she had her doubts. They’d persuaded the tall redhead that the entire division had to do it if it was to work at all.

  “Well, quit your bouncing around, put some decent deceleration on your boats, and explain to an old man who only happens to be your commanding officer just what this is that you call a coordinated attack, Lieutenant.”

  “Yes, sir, cease evasive maneuvering. Rotate ship, begin deceleration at one point five g’s. Motors, spread the radiators.” When she got her replies, Kris took a deep breath and began the explanation she’d prepared for.

  “Sir, an 18-i
nch pulse laser sounds mighty powerful when you read the book on it, but even the smallest battleship has a lot of ice armor, and it’s rotating at a clip intended to prevent our laser from burning through in the short time that we’re hitting their ice.”

  “That’s just part of the sad realities of being a mosquito boat skipper in a big-ship Navy.”

  “Yes sir, but what if we hit the same spot on the battlewagon with two pulse lasers simultaneously?”

  “There you go using that ‘we’ again. Who am I talking to, a princess or a Navy Lieutenant?”

  Kris gritted her teeth; the Commodore had only hit her with the princess gig two or three times. Kris was about to reply when she found she didn’t have to.

  “That ‘we,’ sir, includes me,” Phil said. “And me,” said Chandra. “And me,” said Heather. “We all kind of figured,” Phil went on, “that there wasn’t much good of going through all this risking of our fair young necks—”

  “Or old ones,” Chandra cut in.

  “If we weren’t going to leave some dead battlewagons lying around when we were done. As you saw, sir, by coordinating our approach evasion courses, we managed not to step into each other’s paths and let your defense gunners get two hits for the price of one, or hit one when they were aiming at the other.

  “Anyway, Kris suggested that if we coordinated our final approach, we might get some solid double hits on the battlewagon that would cut through the armor to the soft, chewy insides.”

  Kris was content to leave the talking to Phil now. It seemed that the Navy Way included its own way of talking about murder and mayhem. Kids brought up Navy knew how to talk to their elders. Kris wasn’t always sure the English she spoke did the job as well.

  It was good to have Phil and Chandra along to translate.

  “Hmm,” came back. “Well, then. I was going to give you credit for thirteen hits out of sixteen on the old target drone, but since you raised the stakes, let me see how many of your shots qualified as solid double hits.”

  “Damn,” Tom whispered beside Kris. “I bet if the old man found a pile of presents under his Christmas tree, he’d first check to see if Saint Nick tracked in any reindeer dung.”