Kris Longknife - Admiral Read online

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Before they left the quarterdeck, Commodores Ajax and Afon hurried aboard with their chiefs of staff and operations officers. Jacques and Amanda were right on their heels, the result of Nelly’s initiative. All were in the dark as to why they’d been summoned so suddenly; they’d stay that way until Kris got to the wardroom.

  It fit her needs. Large enough for twenty, it had one long table and decent chairs. Kris waited while everyone took a place, verified that Nelly knew the name of all present, and took her place at the head of the table with Jack at one elbow, Megan at the other.

  Kris did not sit.

  “Whatever you thought you were going to do when you got orders for here, you can forget them. It seems that the Emperor, a young boy, likely a teenager, has just commissioned me Imperial Admiral of the First Grand Order of Steel in the Imperial Iteeche Navy and given me command of the entire Iteeche Combined Battle Fleet. As you no doubt noticed on the voyage out here, there’s a civil war on. The Imperials are losing badly and I’m expected to change that.”

  The response from around the room was various. One or two officers shook their heads. Kris heard a murmur of “Longknifes. You can’t trust ’em.” Most, however, focused expectantly on her. A few looked like hungry tigers who’d just been tossed raw meat.

  Kris went on. “Both sides are building identical battlecruisers as fast as they can. They’ve had battles with a thousand battlecruisers on each side. Those fights ended with both sides damn near wiping each other out. Now, the Imperials try to avoid battle unless they have a clear superiority. If the weaker side can’t run away, they surrender. We need to figure out how to fight outnumbered three to one and win. I’m open to suggestions.”

  That said, Kris sat down. To deafening silence.

  Twenty officers, all hopefully good, stared at each other. Others stared at the overhead.

  “Admiral,” the chief of staff finally said, breaking the hush.

  “Yes, Titania,” Kris said, turning to the woman.

  “Did the Iteeche save any battle board records from these battles? Have they written up any after-action reports?”

  “Nelly?” Kris said.

  “Kris, you may have been given a rank and command, but I have not received a single jot of data from the Iteeche. Possibly some will be forthcoming, but I’m finding the Iteeche net difficult to negotiate.”

  “How so, Nelly?”

  “The Iteeche have provided us with only one landline. It’s voice only and goes only to your flag. We’re picking up signal traffic from the planet down there, but I’m still trying to figure out how to crack it. I don’t know if it’s intentional or just alien, but we can’t hack into their airwaves. We’re working on it, but not there yet. Sorry, Kris. I would suggest you ask Ron, or that Admiral Coth who was so nice to you, for information.”

  “So, they want you to be their admiral, but they aren’t so sure they want to trust you,” a captain at the table observed slowly.

  “Captain Kurt Amera?” Kris asked as Nelly provided the name.

  “Operations, at your service,” he answered.

  “Okay, for now, let’s assume some information will be forthcoming. What’s your take on battlecruisers fighting battlecruisers?”

  “I wish I had one, Admiral,” Titania said. “No offense meant, ma’am, but we humans haven’t been thinking much about warfare between battlecruisers. Most of our attention has been focused on battlecruisers fighting alien raiders, either those huge warships or the even bigger mother ships. We’ve spent a lot of time pouring over your after-action reports but ruminations about human-on-human conflict has been relegated to late nights at the O Club.”

  “Those of us who bothered reading those reports,” Kris’s former flag skipper, now Commodore Ajax, muttered dryly but not quite under her breath.

  “Yes, so I’ve noticed,” Kris said, not at all softly. “So, now we start.”

  That did not start an avalanche of ideas her way. She waited.

  Finally, a throat got cleared and a commander spoke up. “Admiral, I’m your lowly F1. I handle personnel, staffing, and training. Since no one else wants to venture in, may I offer a thought?”

  With all the captains and admirals at the table, it took guts for a commander, and the commander in charge of personnel no less, to venture into the silence. “Please do, Commander,” Kris said.

  “Commander Bill Gother, ma’am. In your position as Type Commander - Battlecruisers, you spent most of your time fighting budget battles for our big, shiny toys. When people think of power, they think of a dozen or a hundred battlecruisers in formation.” He paused for a moment, clearly here was a fellow who found himself speaking truth to power and being both careful and courageous.

  “However, when push comes to shove, it’s the men and women crewing them that make the difference. I’ve read some of the early reports from Alwa. They showed the difference you got from two ships of the same class, but with different approaches to leadership and training. I couldn’t help but notice that when you took command of this fleet, the first thing you did was initiate drills that showed you which ships needed to tighten up their lasers in their cradles, something that the crew’s training had failed to tell them needed doing. You also began to train the crews to fight the battle you wanted, using hard evasion maneuvers.”

  “That is correct, Commander.”

  “So, what’s the leadership status of the Iteeche fleet? This place calls itself an Empire. Are you promoted based on performance or connection? Do they drill their crews, or are the ships kept nice and pretty for inspection or Imperial Fleet Reviews? Is there a warrior culture or a ‘go along to get along’ attitude? If I was in your shoes, that’s the first thing I’d be looking at, Admiral.”

  “And you got all that off the top of your head,” Kris asked.

  The commander blushed. Captain Tosan stepped in. “Given half a chance, Bill will give you that argument any moment of the day or night,” she said. “Sadly, there’s never enough money in the budget for all the training he’d have us do.”

  “But I keep trying,” Kris’s F1 said, with a cheerful grin.

  “Admiral,” now it was Lieutenant Longknife who wanted to put a word in. “I don’t know if there’s a maintenance officer for the fleet, but the material condition of the ships has got to be just as important. Those battleships you shot up on your way to Greenfeld five years ago. They couldn’t keep their lasers bore sighted.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Yes, if I’m to inherit a fleet, someone’s going to have to conduct readiness inspections. We can talk more on all this adminutia later. I’d like some ideas for how we fight three times as many just like us and win.”

  The commander sat back in his chair, doing his best not to let his frustration show. Kris knew that she’d rather cavalierly dismissed some very important advice. She’d have to come back to that later.

  Ideas for a battlecruiser-on-battlecruiser battle did not come quickly. Most suggestions revolved around the traditional concepts of maneuver, speed, deception, and surprise. Most hadn’t been found to work all that well in space. Still, Kris relaxed into her seat and watched eager, sharp minds gnaw at a problem that hadn’t seemed very high on anybody’s list of things to do today.

  After a long series of failed options for battle arrays, it was clear that the only way to concentrate more firepower against one section of the line was to have ships that could outfight their opponent, and that brought them back to material and training.

  “Okay,” Kris finally said. “Better trained crews make less mistakes than those less trained. Better maintained ships with well-trained crews get more hits than those that breakdown at a critical time.”

  Kris paused to let that thought simmer. “Also, we’ve never seen an Iteeche battlecruiser at more than two gees or jinking very much. I think I need to talk to Ron.”

  “Could it be that the Iteeche don’t use high gee stations?” Jack asked.

 
“Apparently, it either wasn’t in the designs we passed to them, or, culturally, they are anathema. Jacques, have you seen anything in the media about a warrior culture?”

  “It’s been glaring by its absence,” the sociologist answered. “No war stories. No reference to the Human-Iteeche War. I’ve noted some stuff bleeped out of what we’ve intercepted. I think someone is exerting heavy self-censorship at the source.”

  “Keep us in the dark and feed us soap operas,” Amanda said.

  “It sure tastes like that,” Jacques agreed.

  “So,” Kris said, “let’s look at my options. If a rebel fleet tries to force its way into the capital system and I’m handed command of the defenses, I can fight the battle with what they’ve got, and lose, assuming half the fleet doesn’t desert to the other side.”

  Jack made a face.

  “I can try to retrain my fleet to present a more elusive target by jinking. We have no idea why the Iteeche don’t jink, so we need to check in on that.”

  Kris waited for a response. She got none from her trusty advisors.

  “The question is, if we assume the Iteeche have some reason not to use high gee stations, then what do we do next? Do I show the Iteeche how nifty our latest high gee stations are? Or do I limit what I give them, say to the kind of high gee stations we had back on the fast patrol boats ten years ago? They were good enough for three gees at most. Maybe less for an Iteeche.”

  “You mean, save a bit back so if we have to fight whomever takes the throne next, we might have a bit of an advantage.” Jack said.

  “Are you thinking your allies may not always be your allies?” Jacques asked.

  “I’m thinking that if I whisper two plus two is four where three or four Iteeche can hear it, that answer will be reported to the rebels before sunset.”

  “This place does seem to leak,” Amanda said, “although the leakage is always from Iteeche to Iteeche, never to us. Not to step on your bitching session, Kris, but I’ve got no one and nothing on the Iteeche economy. Zip.”

  “Which leaves me wondering how trade is going to go, but we’ve got to stay alive before we can let all those eager business types make their billions.”

  “So,” Jack said, “What do we do next?”

  “I need to find out how an Iteeche fleet of battlecruisers operates.”

  “You’re not planning on going aboard an Iteeche battlecruiser,” Jack said, warily. “Are you?”

  “That would be a really dumb idea,” Kris answered with a grin for her husband and security chief.

  “Ya think?” Jack muttered softly.

  “Nelly, get in contact with Ron. Tell him I’d like to take some Iteeche battlecruisers out to exercise with my task fleet. Does he have any ships that can exercise with mine?”

  “Kris, Ron says that he can take command of one of his Chooser’s battle cruiser flotillas. There are also three other flotillas available on one-hour notice.”

  Kris raised an eyebrow at Titania. “Can we get our fleet away from the pier in an hour?”

  “Damned if we’ll let the Iteeche Navy do better than us, Admiral.”

  “We sail in an hour. Pardon me, Captain,” Kris said to her chief of staff. “I’d very much like to have you and the rest of the staff join me on the Princess Royal. I know there isn’t enough time to move all your gear, but I’d like to have you close at hand when we’re watching how the Iteeche do in this exercise.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am,” Titania said. “Okay, crew, let’s get the orders issued and our asses moving.”

  Suddenly the room was empty of Navy staff, leaving Kris with just her familiar civilians alone with Jack and Megan.

  “Well, let’s go see what kind of hornet nests we can knock over next.”

  “There were a whole lot of business types filling up the Princess Royal’s Forward Lounge when we left,” Jacques said. “I don’t think they got the word that you’d gone to the Bold rather than the flag.”

  “Nelly, advise Captain Klum that I won’t be meeting with the diplomats or business people until later. Much later. Advise the clientele of the Forward Lounge that unless they’ve always wanted to see what it’s like on a battlecruiser at 3.5 gees, they need to go ashore for their next drink. I’ll call them back later.”

  Kris ate a quick lunch in the wardroom, then moseyed over to the P. Royal. Her timing was impeccable. They were not accosted by a single civilian on their walk between flagships.

  Kris studied the recent attack on her as she sat in her own wardroom on the Princess Royal, waiting for her key staff to arrive. Captain Klum, her flag captain, knocked on the open door. “Enter,” Kris said.

  With a soft groan, he settled into the chair beside Kris. Immediately, the chair converted into a massage chair and began working on his back.

  “Tough day?” Kris asked.

  “I can’t say that I haven’t seen worse.” he admitted.

  “How’d the Sweet P. do under laser fire?” Kris asked, curious about the new crystal armor and 24-inch lasers.

  “It was hot. She still is hot. She’ll be a while cooling down,” the skipper said, briskly rubbing the crown of his head with both hands. “I notice there are no reports on ice actually being used successfully under the crystal armor.”

  “I tried to get tests done, but got nowhere,” Kris admitted. “No doubt Alwa may know more than we do, but things still haven’t quieted down enough for them to have the spare time needed to fill out the paperwork. What can you tell me?”

  “We’ve got bots out, checking the armor, shining lasers in to see if the crystal still works. We got sections that were hit pretty hard. Thank God, we had the hull rotating as fast as we did. Still, the 24-inch lasers overloaded two to three-meter strips along our hide. Some of the crystal held. Some failed. We got nanos cruising through the honeycomb under the armor. We have strips that were heated beyond the specs. We’re rolling up tons of failed Smart Metal and drawing it out of the matrix.”

  “Do we need a yard period?” Kris asked, knowing she’d have to refuse the request to dock her flagship in an Iteeche shipyard.

  “Your smart computers have been working with my damage control and maintenance crew.”

  “Nelly?” Kris asked.

  “We’ve isolated the failed crystal and are sorting it out of the crystal cladding,” her computer informed them. “I have given them schematics on the gadgets that Canopus Station on Alwa used to apply the crystal armor to our ships. That should work when it comes to cutting out the failed armor. We can program the crystal around it. The broken crystal will just be shunted to the stern and removed when we have it all together. Of the failed Smart Metal, the problem is known and can be handled per our usual devices.”

  “How much of the P. Royal will be uncovered by crystal armor?” Kris asked, eyeing the skipper.

  “Possibly, none.”

  “None?”

  “The P. Royal has always been a bit heavy, what with your flag quarters, Forward Lounge, Marine quarters, and all. If we drain out the failed Smart Metal, we’re going to lose about a thousand tons of the ten thousand extra tons we’ve been carrying around. I don’t know for sure yet, but our estimates are that we’ll still be covered when we’re done.”

  The skipper eyed Kris, with a small, tight smile. “Of course, we may have to tighten up your quarters a bit.”

  “And I just invited the ComBatCru staff to join us.”

  The Sweet P.’s captain groaned softly.

  “Maybe I can offload some Marines or ship some boffins to another boat,” Kris offered.

  “That would be appreciated.”

  Jack and Meg arrived. Captain Klum stood and took his leave. He had to stand aside to let Jacques and Amanda enter the wardroom. The two civilians had observed the brief battle, but had no report they needed to generate. Admiral Ajax and Afon arrived right after the others with a few of their key staff.

  Right on the dot, Titania led the staff in to join them. Each came with anywhere from
several to an armful of readers. Kris would have to make sure the conversation didn’t get too granular.

  Once everyone was seated, Kris said, “Nelly, could you raise Ron for me? I have a few questions.”

  The main screen quickly filled with a picture of Ron. “Your Highness, how may I be of service to you?”

  “This is Imperial Admiral of the First Order of Steel business, Ron.”

  “Yes, my Imperial Colleague,” Ron said. That told Kris something about the Iteeche she called Ron. If he could greet her as a colleague while she was the highest-ranking admiral in the Navy, that either said a lot about his role as Counselor to the Emperor, or a lot about where the Navy stood in the pecking order.

  Kris schooled her face carefully to show nothing, but down the table a bit, Jacques turned to his wife and raised an eyebrow that also just happened to be cocked Kris’s way.

  More minefields to cross.

  Kris cleared her throat. “I am curious about this recent unpleasant development. You said that the Imperium had battlecruiser fleets ready to sortie in an hour. Were there only these three?”

  “Yes, I’m very much interested in that. My Wise and Eminent Chooser has sent soldiers from his own guard as well as Imperial troopers to see that certain people do not leave their offices and certain records are not lost.”

  “I’m grateful for that. Now, who chose the task fleets?”

  “There were eight flotillas on one-hour notice. Three were chosen by Command, Imperial Presence Protection Fleets. Two reported unable to sail at full strength, and two others were chosen.”

  “The two that shot at me?”

  “No. One of the attacking flotillas was in the first alert. The second attacking flotilla was in the second choosing.”

  “And while someone likely wanted all three to shoot at us,” Jack muttered loudly, “they figured two was good enough and having someone else fall out would look suspicious.”

  “No doubt,” Ron said, dryly. “My Wise and Eminent Chooser will have many Navy officers to talk with.”