Kris Longknife Page 6

  Dinner turned out to be not quite as terrifying as she had expected. While the Iteeche reclined at small tables and ate live crustacean-like creatures from a bowl, Kris and Jack were fed the same fish, only boiled and chilled. It was quite as good as shrimp, although one small taste of the hot dipping sauce was more than enough.

  The next course was a white fish. They were small enough that the Iteeche speared them live and ate theirs in two or three bites. The humans were served fish bites, fried in oil and rolled in some sort of crunchy meal. It didn’t taste bad, but the white sauce provided for dipping had a rancid taste.

  The main course was a flakey red fish, kind of like salmon from Earth. The Iteeche were served the fish still flapping from a kettle. They used a mallet to dispatch the fish, then filleted it right there on their plate and enjoyed eating each morsel with a fork. Kris’s fish had been filleted beforehand and roasted over an open flame. The pink sauce the Iteeche poured over the fish they had cut up wasn’t bad, but Kris worried about what it might do to her stomach. It and all this strange fish.

  As luck would have it, Kris and Jack made it to their rides before their stomach revolted at what they’d eaten. Very quickly, they were losing it from both ends.

  One of the nice things about Smart MetalTM was that you could turn at least part of your armored vehicle into a rolling outhouse. Oh, and isolate the stink and vent it to atmosphere without filling the rest of the crew compartment with the various odors.

  By the time Kris and Jack got back to their palace, the entire Marine detachment, both those that had gone with them . . . and not been fed . . . and those that stayed behind, were grinning like they never had good sense.

  Kris, having gone through potty training with the kids not so long ago, was inured to the situation.

  9

  Over the next couple of weeks, Kris found herself wishing she was an Iteeche. On their four hands, they had two sets of opposing thumbs with two fingers between, for a total of eight fingers and eight thumbs. Trying to keep her two thumbs on all the things she needed to keep them on was proving a major challenge.

  Admiral Coth reported that ships were straggling into the system in flotillas and half-flotillas. Considering that close to 5,000 ships had been destroyed in the sneak attack around the jump fortresses, there was a strong expectation that these new ships would be divvied up among the 6 forts and stations.

  It didn’t take Kris long to find that the Iteeche did have an adage that ‘he who tries to be strong everywhere is strong nowhere.’ She had Admiral Coth schedule her for a long overdue appointment with the Iteeche Navy General Staff.

  On the way over, she had a conversation with both Jack and Ron.

  “Can I fire them?” Kris asked.

  “It would not be wise,” Ron answered quickly.

  “Can I kill them?”

  “That would be even more unwise,” Ron said with a huff that qualified for a chuckle among the Iteeche.

  “So, I’ve got to live with them.”

  “Preferably.”

  “Am I their boss?” Kris asked.

  “Not actually,” Ron answered.

  “Hold it. I thought I had command of the entire fleet.”

  “You do. Well, you do command the Imperial Combined Fleet and the ships seconded from the satrap pashas.”

  “I command the ships,” Kris said, slowly. “They command the Navy?”

  “Something like that,” Ron said. “You have complete command over every ship in the Imperial fleet. However, you owe proper respect and honor to the Navy General Staff. It is customary for neither of you to resort to something so crass as an order. Instead, they recommend strategies and operations to you, and you suggest things that they might do to supply and maintain the fleet.”

  Kris mulled that over, a frown growing on her face. “I had Admiral Coth put together a planning staff as well as a team to review and modify our training and doctrine to fit the way I fight battlecruisers. I do have that authority, don’t I?”

  “Of course you do, Admiral Longknife,” Ron said, rather unctuously. “However, they also have a planning staff, as well as a Division for Training and Doctrine.”

  “Whose doctrine defines how my fleet will operate?” Kris asked.

  “Yours does, of course. However, a smart Commander of the Imperial Combined Fleet will also pay proper respect to the wise old heads of the Navy General Staff.”

  “And you Iteeche damn nearly wiped out the human race with this kind of a lash up?”

  “It has served us well for ten thousand years, or so our history books say.”

  Kris wanted to mention that those history books didn’t go back much further than the last dynastic upheaval, but she didn’t.

  “Kris, a situation like this is not unknown to humans,” Nelly said. “During the great Pacific War of the early 1940's the Japanese Navy had an admiral commanding a Combined Fleet with all the warships. Above him was a Navy General Staff, and above them was a Minister of the Navy. All three had their own Office of Planning. It was not unusual for the General Staff to have operations laid on them by the Navy Ministry and then to combine those with their ideas for operations and pass them along to the Combined Fleets Commander who would then ignore them but more likely fold them into the plan he had already drawn up for his ships.”

  “So, everyone was polite to each other and no one was in total command. How did that work Nelly?”

  “Not well. They lost the war badly. Their land was occupied and their military was abolished.”

  “How’s that for a defeat?” Kris asked Ron.

  He chose not to answer.

  The meeting with the Navy General Staff was a very formal affair. It took place in a cool marble hall, not quite as impressive or intimidating as the Imperial Palace, but certainly doing its best to shrink everyone in it down to size.

  Standing to one side were row upon row of admirals arranged on risers so everyone could see the victim standing in the focus of all those eyes. On the other side were members of an Imperial Navy Counselors’ Association. They were dressed much like Ron and seemed to stand between the Navy and the Throne.

  In this case, literally. They stood on the side closest to the palace.

  The meeting was very polite. They told Kris to divide up her fleet.

  Just as politely, she told them that she had trained her fleet to fight outnumbered 4:1 and win. In the recent battle, it had done just that.

  One counselor asked if that might not have just been luck. Many of the counselors and admirals nodded most sagely.

  Kris politely mentioned the quarter trillion murderous alien raiders that she had destroyed, along with their tens of thousands of ships.

  They admitted, politely, that was most impressive, but that the Iteeche were not so foolish and the rebels were fighting with ships just as capable as her own.

  Kris advised them that she had modified her warships to make them better.

  One of the counselors knew about her sending her crews into battle laying on their backs. “Is such an unwarlike practice all that effective?”

  “We won the battle,” Kris answered back, very politely.

  “But can’t the rebels adopt the same methods of fighting?” another counselor asked.

  Kris wanted to shoot back a fast “No,” but she swallowed that answer. “I expect that all the experienced officers of the Navy General Staff would tell you that no real warrior wants to go into battle on his backside.”

  Kris nodded respectfully to the admirals and they nodded, somewhat reluctantly back.

  “I also have other tricks up one of my two sleeves, so even if the rebels do adopt some of my new policies and practices, they will still be behind us in combat effectiveness.”

  The two Iteeche groups mulled that over. Finally, a counselor standing in the middle of the first row said, “Will you please share some of these ideas with us?”

  “I would very much appreciate your comments,” Kris lied. “Doubtlessly, th
ey would make my improvements even better. However, such designs are yet in their nascent stage and I have not been able to test them. I do not know which of them are possible and which are not.”

  “I hope you will share them with us when you have.”

  “Most surely, I will,” Kris answered, but did not add, in a pig’s eye.

  Kris waited for only a moment before she began her exit strategy. “I appreciate your graciousness in sharing your most precious time with this humble commander. Now, as I have told you, I will establish a major defense force at the station guarding the jump into the Imperial Capital’s System. I will also concentrate a large force that we can use to hammer the rebels into submission. I thank you for your blessing,” Kris said.

  She gave them the kind of bow King Raymond would accede to a bunch of troublesome bureaucrats, turned on her heels and withdrew.

  The march out of the Navy Palace, or whatever that building was called, was done at a measured tread. Once back into their waiting armored limo, the three stayed quiet until Nelly announced all the freshly acquired bots had been done away with or suborned.

  “Were any of the nanos of human design?” Jack asked.

  “No, sir,” Nelly answered.

  “Have all the niceties been met between me and my ‘associates’?” Kris asked Ron.

  “I do not doubt that they know that you will do, what do you humans say? ‘What you damn well please.’ However, you have soothed the water in their mating pond and they can make no complaints.”

  “Good,” Kris growled. “Now, let’s have Amber and Coth get the fleet ready to sail.”

  10

  Megan Longknife found herself dividing her time between Kris and Amber. Or more correctly, the embassy and the fleet.

  Except Admiral Kitano reorganized the First Battlecruiser Fleet.

  Kris had come out with the 6th Battlecruiser Task fleet. It was smaller than most Iteeche flotillas. It was embarrassing to call it a fleet, even a task fleet, so Amber changed all the names.

  The eight-ship squadron was still the basic building block. They were paired into task groups of sixteen and then paired again in First, Second, Third, and Fourth Flotillas. Amber commanded the First Battlecruiser Task Force.

  Flotillas were the only place where the human organization mirrored the Iteeche one.

  Megan had nothing to do with the fleet reorganization. However, when she wasn’t doing whatever Kris needed done, she went up the beanstalk to join Admiral Kitano for training exercises.

  They weren’t actually training. More often than not, the fleet went to space to perform a challenging indoctrination of new recruits.

  Amber’s four flotillas would be paired with eight of Admiral Coth’s flotillas that had fought in the recent battle, usually with him commanding them all. Accompanying their three hundred and eighty-four battlecruisers would be a force twice their size, say seven hundred and sixty-eight. Maybe larger.

  Megan got quite a kick out of watching the fleet sail out.

  Once they got well clear of the space station, they’d begin a live fire fight. Of course, the lasers on both sides had been dialed back to .01 percent of full power so no one got hurt.

  According to standard Iteeche fleet doctrine, a force outnumbered two to one should run or surrender with something like the honors of war. Iteeche honors of war, however, included executing the skipper of the ship . . . honorably, with a blade, not a snake.

  Thus, it was always a surprise when a fleet twice the size of the other force ended up a few minutes after starting with ten hits on every ship and the entire force declared dead and the exercise over. The smaller force rarely had more than one or two hits per ship. Many ships might have none.

  Consternation was a mild description of the captains and crews’ reactions to this result. All of them, no doubt, had heard that Coth and that human, Kris Longknife, had outfought the rebels. Still, it was one thing to hear rumors, another thing to have it done to you.

  Coth would then assign four of his flotillas to engage the other side at 6:1 odds. More often than not, the two sides fought each other to mutual annihilation.

  Every Iteeche in the fleet knew well that twice now, a thousand loyalists and an equal number of rebels had fought themselves to near-mutual annihilation. To fight outnumbered 6:1 and win a draw was a major shock to the system.

  The inevitable call would come in, “How do we fight like that?”

  That is when Coth would invite all the ships in the opposing fleet to open up their ship nets and let his programmers insert the subroutine that allowed every ship in the fleet to create the Level 1 high gee stations for every Iteeche on a ship. Buried deep in the subroutine was another routine. When activated just before battle, it would switch the stations to Level 2 so the crew could survive higher gees.

  Level 2 was kept under wraps because no one knew which “loyal” sailor or officer was actually a rebel sympathizer.

  While that was going down in public, Megan would be busy with Lily, her Nelly-level computer, making modifications to the Iteeche battlecruisers that their crew had no idea about. She, Admirals Kitano, Ajax, Afon, as well as another commodore, the people who had Nelly’s kids for computers, would be deep inside the Iteeche ship systems working nearly as fast as the speed of light.

  Kris Longknife had learned early on during her command of the Alwa Defense Sector that ships came from the builders with their lasers loose in their cradles. It had to do with the lasers being government-provided equipment. It wasn’t much, but it didn’t take a lot to send a shot wild at two hundred thousand kilometers. The first thing they did was tighten up the guns.

  Second, the Iteeche fire control computers took about twice as long to arrive at a firing solution as a human computer did. However, the Iteeche couldn’t relate to a human-computer interface, so the Iteeche yards replaced the human computer with one of their design. Now, each ship acquired a new, unnoticed, human-like computer. It would interface with the Iteeche sensor input, process the data, and project the solution on an Iteeche screen. It took a bit more than half the time, but the results of the next shoot were a major improvement.

  With just these three modifications, Kris had brought the loyalist Iteeche fleet up to a force that could fight outnumbered 5:1 and win!

  Of course, it took all the computing power of five of Nelly’s brood to pull it off for nearly 770 ships in only half an hour.

  Thus, Megan spent a lot of time on the Princess Royal, standing an underway bridge watch to keep her qualifications up for OOD, and no one was the wiser for her presence.

  Eight times, the fleet sailed with a new bunch of recruits. Over six thousand Iteeche battlecruisers went through an introduction to Kris’s battle tactics and upgrades, both known and unknown, to their equipment and systems.

  Most of the crew came back very excited to be joining a winning team. Most, but not all.

  Each time the fleet returned, there would be a long line of ambulances waiting to take some of the older officers and senior ratings to the hospital. They’d be carried off their ship on stretchers writhing in back pain or with badly strained muscles.

  Kris had warned her fleet that she fought a young man’s war, and after just one exercise, a lot of the older members of the crew knew it was time to throw in the towel. That created a major problem, however. The loss of their job meant not only the loss of prestige, but also the loss of income in a very competitive market. Nelly quoted to Kris a saying from old Earth. “You’re taking away their rice bowl.”

  Amber came to Kris’s rescue. “I know you’ve been death on fleet support, but working with Admiral Benson on Alwa taught me the importance of a decent support force. Let me handle this.”

  She came back a week later, a week during which none of the arriving skippers or admirals allowed any of their ships to go out on exercises in the new ways of fighting, with a major reorganization.

  “The Iteeche maintain a ridiculous teeth-to-tail ratio,” Amber said. “There
is no central supply. Each ship captain is expected to purchase his own supplies and support. It’s a mad house out there. No wonder they need so many people on their ships. I’ve got the officers and ratings that can’t cut it with the fleet creating a supply system, as well as a full staff of support people. Personnel, training, qualification standards, and, as much as I hate the idea, staff visits and inspections. Intelligence is also a cottage industry.”

  Amber shook her head. “They say they have a Navy General Staff, but they’re more like an advisory board. Old troglodytes grumbling about how things have changed since their day, and not really contributing anything to the fighting power of their fleet. This staff will do that. Oh, I’m also making sure all of them - supply, intel, personnel, all of them - get data support. Would you believe, most of them are carrying around what they know in their heads, or in a card file? God, how did these guys give us such a run for our money back in the war?”

  “I’m wondering about that,” Kris admitted. “But when you’ve got a fleet as huge as the Iteeche fleet, and can muster warriors from a population of trillions, you can just about bury us in bodies.”

  “Yeah,” Amber snorted. “Well, I’ve got the staff shaking itself out. Oh, I’ve also created several pocket crests so people can tell who’s commanding a ship and who’s on staff. I don’t want to demote anyone, but I think the War Fighting Qualifications badge will go a long way into keeping the high-ranking staff officers from lording it over the fighters.”

  “Good,” Kris said. She gave Amber an “atta boy” and sent her back to work.

  Now, a lot of older Iteeche transferred off their ship before it went through the grueling warfare qualifications with Admirals Coth and Kitano. Since the Iteeche had crewed their ships with 1,000 crew and the humans made do with 400, the lost fifth of the Iteeche crew were rarely replaced. More were transferred to new construction.

  There was a lot of that.

  There were also a lot of promotions as juniors slipped in to replace their elders, many of which had turned the bridge crew into something like a geriatric ward.