Kris Longknife: Daring Read online

  Sulwan paused for a breath. “If they are real dumb, and don’t notice that no asteroid flew into a pass at this ice giant, but just take for granted that one came out the other side, they might let us drift up close to them. We’d have to stay real, real quiet, and we’d have to use the armor for a disguise, but we could close to thirty-eight thousand klicks of them.”

  The navigator sighed, a long-winded one that would make any Irish mom proud.

  Captain Drago frowned at his navigator’s work, then eyed Kris. “It might work. Now, one question for you, Princess. Are you going to try to open communications with them before you shoot them in the back? Because if you do, and they shoot on sight like they did the Fury, all this ain’t going to be worth a bucket of warm spit.”

  “You have a good point,” Kris said. “I’ll have to think about that.”

  Then it was her turn to ask a question. “Captain, Sulwan’s course calls for us to break out in two orbits. Have you heard or seen anything from Launch 3?”

  “Nothing,” the skipper said. “And Chief Beni of all people will know that we can’t afford for them to talk to us.”

  “Yes,” Kris said. “I’ll be in my cabin if you need me.”

  “I’ll try not to need you, Commodore,” Captain Drago said.

  58

  Kris made it to her quarters without having to say another word. Once there, she stretched out, floating a few inches above her bed, and just stared at the ceiling.

  “Nelly, what went wrong with Launch 3?” she finally asked.

  “Kris, we weren’t monitoring each other’s boats. We were using just about all the capacity we had to manage the cable.”

  “Did Petty Officer Moreno’s being unconscious contribute to the situation?”

  “Maybe, Kris, but Scrounger was also in trouble. He’d lost his lunch, and the colonel was trying to do what Jack did for poor Maria. Launch 3 was the last one to fly into the jet stream. The pilot may have flinched, or tried to slow down a bit, or maybe changed his angle of attack.”

  Nelly paused, most uncomputer-like. “I do not have the data to reconstruct the incident. I am very frustrated. How do you humans stand such limitations?”

  “We get used to it, or we go crazy. Nelly, you just can’t think too much about it.”

  “Not think about something. That is not easy for one of us.”

  “I suggest you figure out how to do it.”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Kris ignored it.

  There was a second knock. “Kris, are you in there?” came in Jack’s soft voice.

  “Go away.”

  “And let you sulk in your tent?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Kris said. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Not a good idea. Now, you have two choices. We can conduct this talk through the door, or you can invite me in. It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else to go, or I’ll get tired of hanging out here in midair.”

  “I ought to let you hang out there.”

  “But you’d miss my lopsided smile,” he said.

  “Who told you I liked your lopsided grin?” Kris snapped. She sat up in bed, which, under zero gee, would have bounced her head off the overhead, but she caught herself.

  “I know that I have a lopsided grin,” Jack continued, with his grin in evidence even through the door, “and you just told me you liked it. Thank you, by the way.”

  “Nelly, open the door. At least if he’s inside, I can throw something at him.”

  The door clicked open.

  Jack floated in, shoved off the door, and came to a stop above Kris’s desk chair. He settled into a sitting position, six inches above it. Every minute or so, he’d use the chair’s arms to recenter him as the air currents or his movements caused him to drift.

  Or when Kris hit him with a fluffy little teddy bear, a gift from Cara.

  “You’ve got a good pitching arm,” Jack said. “Maybe your staff ought to form a baseball team to take on the Wasp’s other divisions.”

  “We’ll be missing three players,” Kris said to shut off the flood of cheer.

  “If anyone can find his way back to the Wasp, Chief Beni is the man. Do we know anything about the launch’s condition when it broke away from us?”

  “Nelly tells me they weren’t monitoring things on each of the boats. The pilot may have tried to slow his entry into the jet stream.” Kris rattled off the facts, trying not to touch any of the feelings they might raise. “Old Professor Scrounger appeared to be in trouble, and Colonel Cortez was trying to help him. Imagine if you’d been taking care of Maria by yourself when we hit that wall of air.”

  Jack let out a low whistle. “Worse luck for them.”

  “So they clobber in, and we make it back,” Kris muttered.

  “We won’t be breaking orbit for a while. That gives them time to get back.”

  “They’ve only got so much reaction mass and so much antimatter. They can’t hang out there forever.”

  “A couple of hours is not forever.”

  “Boy, Jack, you just will not let me get a dour word in edgewise. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that we ought to pray for them.”

  “Penny is,” Jack said. “I said a few prayers, too. There’s nothing wrong with praying at a time like this. Didn’t your family ever take you to church?”

  “Every Sunday,” Kris said. “It was a mandatory photo op. The loving family of the prime minister paying their respects to God. Course, Father usually picked a church that had nothing much to say and didn’t take up too much of his Sunday saying it.”

  “So all you’ve got is yourself to hold on to when things a whole lot bigger than you come calling,” Jack said.

  “You going to try to have me change my way of living?”

  “Nope. The priest at our parish always said it was God’s job to get you in the door. It was our job to give you a reason to come back. So, Kris, what do we do about this?”

  “I think we get to keep breathing. Has Engineering said anything about the quality of what we picked up on that one pass we did?”

  “The engineers are delighted. We got the usual hydrogen and helium, but we also picked up ice, ammonium, and methane. It’s a real mess in the tanks, but they’re doing what they can to separate it out.”

  “Quietly, I hope.”

  “The captain made a trip down to Engineering to get that message across in person. By the way, Nelly, Kris, if you haven’t gotten the word, nothing electronic gets used that we don’t have to use. Poor Cara is stuck playing chess with Sergeant Bruce.”

  “How did Cara take the trip?”

  “Abby says she did rather well. Good spacer stomach, none of the problems the other ships had. The three of them may have taken up the slack for the rest of us.”

  “For a while there, that was true,” Nelly said.

  “So, what do we do about this stranger in the system?” Jack asked.

  “We’ll likely have to kill it,” Kris said. “It’s not one of ours, and Ron says it’s definitely not one of theirs, so it’s likely one of those. They tend to shoot first and not answer any questions later. Unless you got an idea on how we can get this one talking, I won’t risk the Wasp trying to talk to them again.”

  “Who says the Wasp has to be the one doing the talking?” Jack said, his lopsided grin in full evidence.

  “Who could? We can’t leave anyone behind. Once we get out there, we’ve got to start accelerating for the next jump point if we want to make it out of Iteeche space.”

  “We’ve got a holdful of jump buoys,” Jack said.

  “Right,” Kris said. “I knew there was some reason I kept you around.”

  “Actually, it was Penny’s idea. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that we’re headed for a fight, and we don’t want to repeat the Fury’s fate. She came up with the idea of leaving a buoy in orbit and having it issue demands for the alien to stop decelerating and drop its reactor immediately.”
/>   “And it’s going to understand what we are saying?” Kris said.

  “They jumped into the Iteeche Empire. They’ve been blowing up Iteeche scout ships. They ought to have acquired some Iteeche.”

  “And we just happen to have our own Imperial Representative right on board,” Kris said, sitting up carefully so as not to show Jack how gracefully she could bounce off the overhead.

  “What is it with you, Jack?” she demanded. “All I want to do is sit here, chewing on how much life sucks, and you come barging in here like some muscle-headed Pollyanna, demanding I smile and get back on the horse and give it the spurs.”

  “That’s just the advice my grandpappy gave me and my old man. Just because he came back from the Iteeche War missing an arm and part of a leg was no reason to cry about it. Gimpy leg and all, he managed to run down Grandmama.”

  “So he never let his problems get him down.”

  Jack sobered. “It got him down, now and again, but he got back up, he always said. At least he did until the day he ate his old service revolver.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” Kris said, very aware that she wasn’t the only one with problems.

  “I take it as a warning. At least that’s what my old man said to do. Grandpappy was fine as long as he kept busy. What do you say we drop down to Iteeche country and record Ron saying, ‘Stop in the name of the Emperor.’ ”

  Kris nodded. Jack held the door open for her. She gave him just a bit of a hug as she went by him. “Thanks for coming for me.”

  “Thanks for opening the door and letting me in.”

  59

  Kris was at her battle station as the Wasp prepared to discover if she could handle a jackrabbit jump to 3.5 gees.

  Behind them, a buoy trailed, timed to go live with demands in Iteeche and several human languages that the intruder drop everything and declare its intentions. Since the demands would be coming from the ice giant’s orbit, and the alien would be over a million klicks away, Kris doubted there would be any shots fired.

  The alien would either reply, or it would be fair game.

  Of course, there was no way to tell if its reply was, “Die, you slimy aliens,” or, “We come in peace for all bug-eyed kind.”

  Just once, Kris would like a plan that didn’t have all kinds of holes in it.

  Ready or not, Sulwan mashed the deceleration button, and the Wasp began a dive toward the ice giant that had fed it enough that they hoped they could make it home.

  The plan called for them to take full advantage of the giant planet’s size. First, they would decelerate into a grazing orbit, then they would pour on the acceleration and come out from behind the planet, ready to blaze a trail across the system, and just miss diving directly into the sun.

  That assumed the alien bought into the idea that the Wasp was just a wandering rock that was not sticking to any safe orbit in this system.

  The remaining Smart MetalTM would be spread out in front of the Wasp as she came rocketing out from behind the giant. Nelly already had a program that would change the face they showed the alien. If they put a ranging laser on them, all they would see was a tumbling rock.

  Nothing here to see, move along, people . . . or bug-eyed monsters . . . as the case might be.

  Hope was not a strategy. Luck was not a tactic. That was what Kris had learned in Officer Candidate School. If she pulled this off, she’d have to write her old instructors a letter about changing the curriculum.

  On second thought, would anyone but a Longknife have the guts to pull this off? Would any rational teacher want to suggest this to any student whose best interests they cared for?

  “Nelly, remind me to skip that letter.”

  “What letter?”

  “Never mind; if you missed that, it’s just another embarrassment I don’t need to admit to.”

  “First, Kris, you are getting very good at keeping your thoughts from me. Secondly, you are getting very strange. You know how you used to talk about my needing to spend some quality time with Auntie Tru?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m thinking we need to find someone for you to spend some quality time with, whatever that is, talking to someone about how your brain is working . . . or not.”

  “Make a note about that, Nelly, now shut up.”

  There was a loud bang, then a ripping noise came through the hull members, not over any audio system. People on the bridge looked around but saw nothing.

  “We’ve got a hull breach along the main spindle, between bulkheads G and H,” Penny reported from her station at defense. “Damage control is moving to contain it. Report is that a weld let go.”

  “Very good,” Captain Drago said calmly.

  The Wasp continued its dive toward the ice giant below. The ride started to get a bit bumpy. A clang and rattle told them something else had let go. Kris found herself holding her breath.

  She wasn’t the only one.

  “Three containers just made an unscheduled departure from the Wasp,” Penny reported. “No one in them, but I think we lost half our supply of famine biscuits.”

  “I don’t know whether to cry or cheer,” the petty officer backing Kris up whispered not at all softly. People chuckled and found they could remember how to breathe.

  “Zero gee in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . now,” Sulwan announced. “We will be in zero gee for ten minnow,” Sulwan announced. “We will be in zero gee for ten minutes. Stay close to your high-gee stations because this is only an intermission.”

  Captain Drago mashed his comm button. “Damage-control parties, keep the bridge informed on your progress. Lieutenant Pasley, can you give me any idea of what might break next?”

  “I’m not sure, sir,” Penny said.

  “We might have some ideas,” Mimzy answered at her neck. “The Wasp is not rigged for remote sensing of its hull stress, but Dada has noticed a minor air loss out of spindle compartment J, and identified a blur in the pictures coming from outside camera 53. The container it is on may not be attached as securely as we wish.”

  “Damage control,” Captain Drago ordered, “check for a leak in spindle compartment J-2-g. Advise any personnel in the outer containers that they may end up on their own if they don’t move inward like we told them to.”

  The skipper shook his head as he cut his commlink. “We ordered everyone to the spindle. But why do I think there are a few ignoring me? Boffins, likely.”

  As the ten minutes of no acceleration passed, various damage-control details reported in. The burst seam was welded shut again. The leak was plugged, then welded down. Four boffins reported to the spindle. They’d been recording the view from the close encounter with the gas giant.

  Common sense had finally prevailed over scientific curiosity.

  The second high-gee blast would accelerate them onto a course that would take them close to the alien. With luck, it would also make it look like the rock they were impersonating had approached the ice giant from behind and therefore been out of sight all along.

  That was the hope.

  Kris was only too aware that a whole lot of people had died while she did what she hoped would work.

  In the end, she reflected, she had accomplished what she set out to do. That huge mother ship was not going anywhere for a long time, if ever.

  Still, a lot of her fleet had died in the effort.

  Had it all been worth the cost?

  Kris wished she could go back and find out. Hopefully, she would get a chance to someday. But for now, getting home and reporting what had happened was her job.

  As the long hours slid by while they drifted toward the alien, Kris tried not to think about the calls she’d made and the price people had paid for them.

  The alien did nothing. They did nothing.

  They both did a whole lot of nothing.

  Then the alien went active, and matters got interesting.

  Very quickly, things got mortal.

  60

  “The alien
just ranged us,” the lieutenant, now covering sensors, reported.

  “With what?” demanded the captain.

  “Laser and radar.”

  “Did they get a ping off our cover, or from the Wasp itself?”

  “Just the cover, sir,”

  The skipper leaned forward in his seat. “Now we see what happens next.”

  Kris took the cover off the firing button.

  “Captain, we’re tracking them visually with the 24-inch pulse lasers and both of the defensive 5-inchers,” Kris reported.

  NELLY, GET READY TO RANGE THEM, THEN FIRE, ON MY ORDER.

  KRIS, I HAVE THEM IN MY CROSSHAIRS. THEY AREN’T QUITE IN RANGE, BUT IF THEY TAKE A SHOT AT US, I’LL RANGE THEM AND BE READY TO FIRE IMMEDIATELY.

  BUT WE WAIT, GIRL.

  YES, KRIS, WE WAIT.

  The alien ranged them again.

  And the buoy back at the ice giant started blaring demands on several channels and in several languages.

  “Unidentified starship in this system, identify your captain and his lineage. What port are you registered at and who has received your oath of loyalty?” The word choice was Ron the Imperial Rep’s, but Kris had chosen to send the same message out in several human languages. Let the aliens figure it out.

  “The bogey has ranged the buoy,” the new lieutenant reported.

  “It’s too far for them to fire at it,” Penny said.

  At a million kilometers, all they’d be doing was warming the metal of the thing. Still, a second later, the alien blasted away at the distant demanding source.

  “They just do not know how to say ‘How are you?’ do they?” the captain said. “Commodore Longknife, you are weapons free as far as I’m concerned.”

  Kris was tempted to give them a second warning. After all, they’d just fired off everything they appeared to have.

  “Appeared to have” was the operative phrase.

  Who knew what they really had?