Kris Longknife's Successor Read online

  “Something is always boiling over.”

  “I learned that with my Aunt Abby,” she said with a sad smile. “Thank you for coming.”

  “Can I see the final results?” Sandy asked.

  “If you want to,” Cara said, more sparkle in her smile this time.

  “I’d like to study how it all comes down, if you don’t mind.”

  “Take the tablet. It will stay connected over the net and I’ll see that the final readouts are sent to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  With that, Sandy was soon racing to the shuttle port to catch a ride back up to face this new crisis.

  5

  No sooner had the longboat landed in the Victory’s docking bay than Sandy found she had an ensign at her elbow. The youngster was cute as a puppy and just as eager.

  “Admiral, ma’am,” he stuttered. “Admiral Kitano is waiting for you in your flag plot with all of your available key staff.”

  “How many of my key staff?” Sandy asked. The answer to that would warn her as to how big of an issue she faced.

  “All of them, I think, Admiral,” the ensign choked out.

  “All?”

  “All the admirals of the fleet, ma’am, and a whole lot of captains, too, Admiral.”

  No wonder the kid was on senior officer overload. “Thank you, Ensign. I can take it from here.”

  “Yes, ma’am, Admiral,” and the nervous fellow fell in behind her. Did she hear a gulp of relief?

  Ensigns were just so cute. Too bad they grew up to be intense admirals, but, no doubt that kid would have lots of fun memories by the time he had to make life or death decisions.

  Two Marine guards were waiting for Sandy outside the door of her occasional wardroom. A corporal opened the door for her and announced, “Attention on deck.”

  Sandy’s “As you were,” saved wear and tear on a lot of knees which they doubtlessly would be thankful for when her staff got to be her age.

  There was a vacant chair at the end of the table closest to the hatch. Admiral Kitano sat on one side; Captain Paisley held down the other. Along both sides of the table were all the admirals that commanded her fleets, including Admiral Benson who commanded Base Force and her shipyards. Arrayed along the wall were more key staff that didn’t rate a seat at the table but might be needed to inform or execute the orders Sandy would soon be issuing, as well as the admirals’ chiefs of staff.

  “What’s the excitement about?”

  Admiral Kitano had continued to rise. Now she turned to face Sandy. “The every-other-month convoy from human space jumped into the next system out,” she reported in clipped tones. “It’s decelerating now, but they sent ahead a combat report. One of the systems they passed through had alien raiders in it. They fought a brief fight and jumped out. Unfortunately, they both entered and exited the system using fuzzy jumps.”

  Uh, oh!

  “Did any of the aliens survive the encounter?” Sandy snapped.

  “With your permission, Admiral, I’d like to turn the briefing over to Captain Paisley to bring you up to date on what we know and don’t know.”

  “Carry on, Captain,” Sandy said, as she took her seat and Amber settled into hers.

  Penny stood, and both the long walls of the wardroom suddenly became huge monitors showing identical tables of ships, star maps and the other types of information that would show up on a battle board.

  “For the last year, we’ve been getting resupply convoys every even month from human space. They usually consist of sixteen battlecruisers and eight fast transports. They’ve been bringing out approximately sixteen thousand new sailors and immigrants, in addition to mail, entertainment, news, journals, technical data, and Smart Metal. It seems crazy to ship machinery and stuff when we can fabricate what we need out of Smart Metal, so we don’t. They also bring livestock and some of the food choices that we don’t yet grow here.”

  “All the comforts of home,” Sandy said. “They go back on every odd month. What happened this time?”

  “Nelly, Kris Longknife’s computer, calculated a thousand different courses between here and human space. We have yet to use fifty of them. Still, we hit the jackpot this voyage.”

  A holographic star map appeared above their conference table. Alwa pulsed green. Planets in human space were gold. The Iteeche were brown. Closer to the green than the gold, a system pulsed red.

  “The convoy was making its last fast passage across a star system. This jump would take it to the system next out from here and they’d decelerate in that system before coming through our jump at a decent speed. I point out the velocity of the convoy so you can understand that slowing down to fight the alien, or going back to finish them off, was not an option.”

  Sandy scowled. This way of racing around the galaxy was the only way you could get from human space to Alwa on the other side of the galaxy before every one on aboard died of boredom. Still, it involved risks. Two ships might collide in, or right next to, a jump point. Humans did their best to route their ships well away from each other. However, there were thirty to forty alien raider wolf packs out there. Also, if luck really abandoned a convoy, one of their ships might run into some other race’s first go at interstellar travel.

  This problem, however, was more basic. This convoy had stumbled on the alien raiders doing whatever alien raiders did when they weren’t doing their best to slaughter other sentient beings.

  Sandy brought her mind back to the problem as it developed.

  “The convoy jumped into this unvisited system and immediately found noise. Sensors detected reactors of an as yet unidentified type. They were close enough to Wolf Pack George but different enough to tell us this was part of an extended family but not George.”

  “Did a lot of George’s pack escape when we fought them?” Sandy asked.

  “A handful of door knockers, but nothing else,” Penny answered. The door knockers were huge alien battleships that had grown from 500,000 tons to around a million tons. All the extra weight came from blocks of granite or basalt cladding the hull. They might now be adding ice armor as well. All that extra weight made the door knockers slow but hard to kill as they led the way through a jump point. The aliens hoped that with a bit of luck, we’d still be trying to kill these heavy warships when the smaller ones zoomed through the jump. Thus, they’d force the jump and earn their name, door knockers.

  Sandy had commanded the force that chased down and destroyed about half of the door knockers that survived the massive Battle at System X. Still, the alien ships split up and she had to let some get away.

  “Did our convoy face door knockers?” Sandy asked.

  “No, ma’am. The hostile force was thirty battleships and a dozen cruisers.”

  Battleships were what the humans were calling the original alien warships. They were half a million tons of brute force, too many short-range lasers to count, all with a strong overdose of viciousness and hatred. The cruisers were smaller ships, smaller than the human battlecruisers. They were a lot faster than the battleships, but still not as fast as the human warships.

  To date, the quality control measures the aliens applied to their construction worked fine if the ship was used only moderately hard. If they really pushed their reactors, they might end up blowing themselves up.

  Still, the alien base ships, (the size of a small moon with fifty billion souls aboard,) could park itself in a planetary orbit and start a production line that could turn out ships at a terrifying pace. While the crew of a battleship was approximately a million, when you had a pool of 50 billion people to draft crews from, you could crew a lot of battleships.

  An alien grandmother had screamed that they would drown us in their blood just before she’d ordered the very same kids Sandy had spent the day with, to suicide with her.

  These aliens were crazy.

  And now at least some of them knew there were jump points they did not know about.

  “Tell me about the encounter,” Sandy ordered.r />
  “The aliens were orbiting a large ice giant,” Penny said. “It was not on the direct path between our two jumps, and they didn’t appear to be expecting us. It took them a good twelve hours before they got underway and broke orbit. We’re not sure, but we think they had one of those lattices the aliens are using to swing their ships around and get something like gravity.”

  “So, we found an outpost,” Sandy concluded.

  “It does appear so, ma’am. Our convoy accelerated from 800,000 kilometers per hour to several million. They did their best to dodge out of the way of the alien attackers. Still, they were in range of the aliens’ gun batteries for approximately one hundred and five seconds. The aliens followed their standard policy and concentrated on two of our battlecruisers. Their crystal armor held, but they suffered major damage to the crystals and overheating to the underlying hull. They will need some serious yard time,” Penny said to Admiral Benson.

  “We’re already made ready to receive them. I’ve asked for some extra crystal as well.”

  “Very well,” Sandy said.

  “One of the fast transports suffered some damage. We might want to suggest that these ships get crystal armor, too. At least those on the Alwa run.”

  “Examine the option,” Sandy said to Benson. “Also, could you get enough crystal to armor these eight before we return them to human space?”

  “We can, but it’s going to cost in consumer goods, boss.”

  Sandy rolled her eyes at the overhead. Everything the Navy needed had to be paid for from the consumer goods that the civil economy needed. Still, there was no choice.

  “Penny, send this briefing along to Abby. Tell her I’m open to any suggestions as to how we do it with the least displacement to our world.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Mimzy and Mata are exchanging data. Abby is in a meeting at the moment and will get back to us later.”

  “Very well. Okay, how many of the aliens got away?”

  “Two battleships were left drifting dead in space,” Penny reported. “They might or might not make it anywhere, but the real problem was that one of the cruisers was sent racing off to a far jump just as soon as the rest of the fleet got underway to intercept. They watched the entire battle. There was no way the convoy could chase them down and nail them.”

  Sandy shook her head. “Don’t you hate it when the evil galactic overlord starts getting smart?” she said with a sigh. “I guess after losing as many ships to us as they have, they decided they need a few survivors to report back some lessons learned.”

  “They got a very important lesson this time,” Amber observed. “There are bits of space we can disappear into that they can’t see. I guess we better add some explosives around our Mark XII fire control systems. Can’t have them finding it in the wreckage of one of our ships.”

  Admiral Benson nodded. “I’ll have the design teams get on that immediately.”

  “There is one more thing I need to share, Admiral,” Penny said, “before I sit down and hear I’ve totally ruined your day.”

  “Hit me,” Sandy said drolly.

  The star map added a second flashing green system. “That is our cat planet, ma’am. While those skunks are a long way from Alwa, they’re just outside the picket line for the Sasquan System.”

  The room took on the silence of a tomb.

  Sandy leaned back in her chair and stared at the overhead. The cats were a pain in the butt. When they weren’t causing her trouble, they were squabbling among themselves. The last time she’d paid them a visit, one of the factions among the bickering felines had kidnapped her, though for what purpose, Sandy was still not sure. Likely the ones that kidnapped her had no idea of what they intended.

  Now, those blasted cats were on strike, refusing to send her more workers, and the bloody fur balls were the best workers she had, where aliens were concerned.

  “So, we withdraw Admiral Drago and his Fourth Fleet, or do we dig in and defend the cat system? Opinions anyone?”

  Admiral Betsy Bethea, Commander, Third Fleet, spoke up first. “Kris Longknife swore that we weren’t going to let the sons of bitches get another intelligent species, ma’am. I think we all would like to keep that promise.”

  “As I would also,” Sandy said, “but can we?”

  “Despite the problems getting crews for the fortresses,” Amber said, “we have been drilling the crews. We’ve found that we can operate a gun with a quarter of the normal gun crew for one aboard a battlecruiser. That’s not to say that we can keep that up forever, or that if a laser goes down we can fix it, but even with the gun crews spread thin, only two thirds of the lasers have gun crews. If one of the guns goes down, they’ve got another they can bring up.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “Ma’am,” Admiral Benson said, “it’s not like we’re talking about a long siege. A hundred and sixty operational 24-inch lasers backed up by three beam guns can pick off a lot of ships coming through the jump. Unless they’ve got three or four wolf packs all in line to charge the jump point, sooner much more than later, they’re going to run out of targets for us.”

  “I take it that you’d still rather have a full gun crew?” Sandy asked.

  “Spreading one gun crew over six guns for preventive maintenance is a bitch, ma’am, but to date, if we order them to unlimber those guns, they come up ready to fire on the tick.”

  Sandy nodded. There was some risk involved, but it looked like an acceptable one.

  “There’s also the matter of an alert,” Admiral Kitano said. “We’ve got pickets out twelve or thirteen star systems deep. Penny tells me that even if the aliens stumbled onto a fuzzy jump, they couldn’t jump all the way into the Alwan system. For one thing, we don’t have any of those jumps in this system. I guess we’re on a spur for the galactic highway system.” Amber’s dry humor drew a chuckle from around the table.

  “If we know that an alien attack is on the way, we can deploy a fleet of battlecruisers, maybe two if nothing is coming up behind the other jump. We can also reinforce the gun crews to make the fortress even more deadly.”

  “I like that idea,” Sandy said. “I want a plan to do just that on my desk by 0800 three days from now. Ben?”

  Admiral Benson stiffened in his place.

  “I want you to jack up battlecruiser production. Work with Abby and Pipra to figure out how we can avoid disrupting the production lines as little as we can, but I want your yards back to laying down sixteen battlecruisers a month.”

  “Can you hold to twelve?” Benson asked. “We’ve got a plan to increase the production tempo to that level which doesn’t harm the rest too much.”

  “Work it out with all the interested parties. If you need to bring me in, do it before the convoy arrives. As soon as it gets here, I’m hijacking the fast transports, their cargo, and a lot of their passengers.”

  “I suspect I know why, Admiral,” Amber said, “but I don’t want to guess wrong.”

  “I propose to take half of the ships we have now, three fleets’ worth, and go visit our feline friends. I will take all the Smart Metal the convoy brought here and ship it over to Sasquan, as well as any yard workers. I also want to include any fab operators and lunar miners that came out this convoy. I propose to expand Kiel station to support three fleets and use what’s left over to start some heavy fabs on the cats’ moon. I figure we can use the lunar resources, along with what the cats ship up to us, to get heavy fab production up to speed. We won’t start building ships for a while, but we’ll be getting everything set up for it.”

  “Pipra’s not going to like that,” Penny said. “I had supper two days back with Abby and she told me they were already making plans to use this shipment to expand the heavy fabs here.”

  “Tell her that momma’s got to love all her kids, no matter how much of a pain they are.”

  “Well, if this doesn’t get Abby out of that meeting, she really doesn’t want to be disturbed,” Penny said.

  “Now, I think we hav
e everything well in hand. Amber, I want to reorganize our fleet here into six fleets of forty-eight battlecruisers. I intend to take three with me when we sail. Admirals Bethea and Miyoshi will bring their fleet. Also, let’s give Admiral Nottingham one. We need an Earth officer commanding a fleet. Amber?”

  “I’ve got Shoalter and L’Estock. I’d propose to give Admiral Kaeyat her third star and a fleet.”

  “I approve,” Sandy said, eyeing the young woman who’d come out as a division officer on the first eight ships given to Kris. She looked too young to be trusted with the family car keys, but she’d proven to be a fighting admiral. “You’ll have Admiral Benson doing his best to knock out some ships for his yard workers to fight. Be sure to steal them regularly for the other fleets. That should keep production humming?”

  “Admiral, you wrong me,” Admiral Benson said, his hand placed mockingly over his ‘wounded’ heart. “We’ll always keep the yards humming. It’s just so mean of you to rob the grain from the kin that grind the corn.”

  “Keep robbing,” Sandy said.

  “No doubt, I will,” Amber agreed.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have some plans I want to see, and see quickly. Dismissed.”

  Amber called the room to attention and Sandy withdrew. As the door closed behind her, the hum of happy voices were balanced against dismay and disappointment. No doubt, those sailing for the sound of the guns were the happy voices. Those left behind were the disappointed.

  Of course, they both could end up in a battle if this was just an alien ploy to pull her and half of her fleet off to guard the vulnerable cats while the real attack was aimed at the birds.

  You pay your money and you take your chances.

  6

  No surprise, Sandy wasn’t even halfway through her supper that evening before Abby and Pipra came storming into the Victory’s wardroom.

  Sandy spotted them when they paused at the door and stood glaring at all the officers as they searched the room for her. She knew she shouldn’t have, but Sandy gave in to the devil and waved cheerfully at the two of them.