Kris Longknife: Daring Read online

  The minute Penny had asked for stretched into two. Then three.

  Kris began to get edgy; this was her first initial alien contact. This was humanity’s first new alien contact in eighty years. The last one had gone horribly wrong.

  This one looked to be going along the same downward path.

  Kris didn’t much like the trip. Worse, Kris didn’t like that this one was her responsibility.

  Just as Kris was about to open her mouth, Penny’s gaze dropped from the overhead. She took a deep breath. “Okay, I think I can see how to brief this.”

  “We’re ready,” Kris said.

  “Nobody will ever be ready for this one,” Penny said, half under her breath.

  Across from her, the wall screen lit up. Abby turned to face it. Jack pushed his chair away from the table so he could see, without losing sight of the door.

  The screen opened on a view of the moon as a large explosive blew out in a gale of expanding gases. Some of the debris cloud achieved at least orbital speed, maybe escape velocity.

  “First things first. The explosion on the moon. It was a chemical explosive, conventional. Not something we use. That stuff is corrosive and dirty. It’s in our books, but it hasn’t met environmental standards since before we broke loose from Earth. I’ll leave it to the boffins to give you all the gory details if you want more.”

  “Was it done intentionally?” Kris asked.

  “No doubt in my mind,” Penny said. “Both because of the type of explosives and the timing. It blew within five seconds of the ship destroying itself.”

  “Isn’t that an opinion?” Abby shot at Penny.

  “A well-founded one, I think,” Penny countered. “When you have the same explosives letting go within seconds of each other, coincidence must take a backseat to facts. Once can be an accident. Twice, we should start looking for hostile activity. Three, and only a fool doesn’t assume enemy actions.”

  Spoken like a true paranoid, Kris thought, raising an eyebrow to Penny’s other listeners. The rest of the room took a moment to mull her viewpoint. No one chose to express a dissenting opinion.

  “Go on,” Kris said.

  The view on the screen changed to show the unknown ship charging up to meet them. In slow motion, Kris’s laser beam shot into the aft-most sphere of the ship.

  “I put it right where you wanted it,” Nelly said.

  “Exactly,” Kris agreed, and watched as the fusion engines sputtered, throwing the ship off its steady course.

  “Oh, and for what it’s worth,” Penny said, “the hostile was on a collision course with the Wasp until Kris’s hit in the engine room knocked it off track.”

  “Nasty little beggar,” the colonel observed dryly. “Shooting first and hell-bent on ramming. I’m developing a serious doubt that they ever intended to ask questions.”

  “It’s too early to start applying salve to our souls, Colonel,” Kris said. “But thanks anyway.”

  “It wasn’t a cheap Band-Aid I was offering, Princess, but a quite serious observation. I’m starting not to like these bad actors.”

  “Here’s one to look at,” Penny offered, to bring them back on topic.

  A body appeared, whirling out of the explosion. Two arms, two legs. A head. The face was hard to make out, but there was a most prominent jaw. Even hair.

  “They look almost human,” Jack said.

  “We’ve identified the Three alien species who built the jump points,” Kris said. “All had their own evolutionary trails and look nothing like us. Or the Iteeche. Now we run into these bug-eyed monsters. They come out shooting and look amazingly like us!”

  “Very much like us,” Penny said, and a section of the explosion filled the view screen. Several bodies were clearly visible. Two looked to have a pair of large mammary glands on their chests. The screen cycled through the next few frames slowly, letting the bodies rotate. They certainly looked female.

  “What’s that other one holding to her breast?” Kris asked.

  A third “woman” held on to a small bundle. In the next couple of frames she lost her grasp. The wrappings around the bundle also came undone.

  “I think that’s a child,” Penny said.

  “Dear Mother of God,” the colonel said. “They blew up their ship with their women and children on board! What kind of monsters are we dealing with?”

  Kris turned away from the screen, not that she could ignore it. She focused on Penny. “You’re sure they blew up the ship themselves.”

  “The explosion started in the forward sphere,” she said, and the screen’s view changed to show the entire ship, again. It began to come apart, starting, as Penny said, with the forwardmost of the spheres, then the second, then the third. The aft sphere, Engineering from all appearances, was the last to go, and seemed to fly into the least number of pieces.

  “I think they expected their destruction to involve the reactor,” Penny said. “That’s just a guess, but if the reactor had blown, it would have taken the fragmentation and dispersal of debris to a whole new level.”

  Kris nodded. She had already done a postmortem on a ship where the reactor finished off its destruction. The wreckage had been little more than atoms and molecules. Her ongoing nightmares, however, were much more substantial.

  “So, Princess,” the professor said, “your hit on the power plant seems to have resulted in our having wreckage to examine that they did not intend for us to have.”

  “It looks that way,” Kris said.

  “Look at those bodies. No space suits,” Abby said, pointing at the picture still on the wall screen. “No survival pods. They all were in a shirtsleeve environment, then some bastard opened that ship to vacuum for all of them.”

  “I don’t think survival was ever the intention,” the colonel said. “I’ve heard of ‘Victory or Death’ as a battle cry, but in all my study of human history, I’ve never encountered anything like this.”

  Kris could only shake her head. “This is our first human encounter with someone else’s history. I know we humans have had our nasty and desperate times. I think we’ve found someone or something willing to take nasty and desperate to a whole new level. God help us.”

  Those who shared her room seemed unable to expand upon that observation. Kris looked at her options and found only one to start with.

  “Nelly, tell Captain Drago that I would like for the Wasp to make orbit around that moon so that we can examine both what our alien was doing down there and recover as much of the wreckage as possible. I’ll want to ship as much of the wreckage and bodies back to human space as we can.”

  “That will involve unloading one of the cargo ships,” the captain answered Kris immediately.

  “I figured as much. You said it would take two or three days to refuel.”

  “Refuel and resupply the ships from the replenishment ships, yes, Kris.”

  “We might as well put our time to multiple uses. Penny, put together a short report on what just happened and flash it to the rest of the fleet whenever we get a line of sight on one of them.”

  Most of the fleet was on the other side of the gas giant. With the Wasp trying to make orbit around the target moon, the two elements of Kris’s fleet were likely to make “ships passing in the night” seem downright familiar. “I’m sure they’re curious.”

  “I bet they are,” Penny said, and went silent as she began to arrange her data drop.

  11

  Kris would have preferred that the other ships of the fleet had stayed in low orbit around the gas giant while they took on reaction mass. However, she was discovering the difference between leading a fleet and commanding one.

  Where she led, they followed.

  What she wanted, they considered.

  And frequently ignored.

  The admirals flipped to see whose flag got refueled first. As it happened, the order came out Fury, Haruna, Swiftsure. And, in that order, they all refueled, then climbed out of the gas giant’s gravity well to join the Was
p orbiting the small moon.

  And hunting for the odd bits of wreckage.

  Since the battleships had large crew-transfer boats . . . some even looked like planetary assault craft . . . they did make a major contribution to the hunt for chunks of the alien wreckage.

  Maybe it was the very ad hoc nature of the fleet, but it seemed to gain more structure . . . and pay more credence to her suggestions . . . as they assimilated the full impact that they had met an alien—and Kris Longknife had blown it to bits.

  The different nationalities of her fleet had made their own arrangements for their supply needs. Most were containerships, good for passing a container from freighter to warships and quick resupply. Kris, however, needed a huge, enclosed space for collecting and organizing a messy jigsaw puzzle that had once been a truly alien ship. She drafted the Constant Star; its large Number 2 hold was just the place to do the postmortem on humanity’s latest encounter with an alien race.

  The Constant Star had been leased in haste by Admiral Channing when it became clear that this little jaunt of Kris’s might not be over in a few weeks. The Star was an older, breakbulk freighter, capable of handling containers, but still with huge cargo holds for storing this and that, and more of both. However, even after both Helvitican battle cruisers had stuffed themselves to the gills, there were still supplies piled high in the Constant Star.

  Over protests all around, Kris ordered the other supply ships to take on the balance of the Star’s cargo and empty her totally out. The skipper of the Star wasn��t very happy to be losing his paying cargo. He only perked up at the hint from Kris that he would be going home first . . . and could return with another load of supplies.

  Kris, herself, was changing her own plans. She’d intended to send the Mercury home immediately with a negative report. Instead, the Mercury hung around to help refuel the fleet and wait for Kris’s team to complete its initial analysis of this first alien encounter. Then the Mercury would escort the Constant Star back to human space so the rest of humanity could meet their new neighbor.

  Kris could well imagine the political firestorm that would follow.

  There were definite advantages to being several thousand light-years away from home.

  Kris waited until the Swiftsure made orbit, then invited all three admirals to bring whomever they chose to tour the growing collection of twisted metal tied down in the Constant Star’s forward holds. Admirals Krätz, Kōta, and Channing immediately replied that they’d be there in an hour.

  So Kris found herself, escorted by her own staff, drifting weightless through a collection of blackened and torn metal, plastic, and ceramics.

  ��Any of this new to us?” Vicky asked.

  “There’s a lot of machinery,” Kris said. “Some of it’s pretty obvious what it does. Other chunks are so fragmentary that no one has any idea what they’re supposed to do,” Kris pointed at write-ups that were attached to some pieces of metal. “These explained what can be explained. Other sheets of paper have only a big question mark.

  “Our problem is we can’t decide if our ignorance is because of the damage it suffered in the explosion or whether it really is something new. It could be just a different take on what we already have that works. Their air-reprocessing system is very different from ours. I’m not sure it’s better.”

  “And they didn’t say anything. Just started shooting, huh,” Admiral Krätz said.

  “I’d prefer to discuss that when we’ve got some weight on, if you don’t mind,” Kris said.

  “So you like my idea.” The admiral grinned like a proud papa.

  “Was it yours?” Kris asked.

  “Close enough,” Vicky said, like she was in on a secret that she wasn’t about to share with Kris.

  “I hate weightlessness,” the admiral said. “When it was clear we were headed out where there were no spaceports, I offered a prize for the best idea. It was a seaman recruit’s notion. Have you ever seen a yo-yo?”

  Kris admitted that she had once played with one as a girl. “I couldn’t make it do anything.”

  “Well, Seaman Welt can do anything with one of those spinning things. He can do it with two at the same time. That got me thinking,” the admiral said, beaming.

  Kris could see no reason why two spinning yo-yos should give anyone an idea to spin two ships around the same point, connected by a long beam or, in the case of the Wasp and the Intrepid, a long spun bar of Smart MetalTM. Still, while the ships swung around, there was at least half a gee of fake gravity.

  And no barfing.

  This idea had been floated before the fleet left Wardhaven space. Admiral Kōta tried it with the Haruna and Chikuma using a cable. They were sister ships and supposed to displace the same tonnage. Still, there was enough difference in weight and the distribution of that weight to cause the ships to do a little dance around each other and the point that was supposed to be their mutual center of gravity. The line tended to go very taut, then limp, then taut again.

  What would happen if, no, when it snapped was not something to contemplate. Nuu Yards got a quick contract to knock together several harnesses, and each of the ships adopted a “dance” partner. For the warships, it wasn’t too bad. Each of them had a sister ship close to its tonnage at hand.

  For the auxiliaries, it was a completely different story. They were exiled to the far end of the fleet-line anchorage as they orbited the small moon . . . and given wide berths. To which several of the merchant captains had added double the planned distance.

  Still, no one was complaining about the problem. No sailor really liked microgravity.

  The grim tour got worse. Most of the technicians were left behind in the forward holds when the admirals and their chief doctors headed aft. The last hold was still open to space. One hundred and twelve bodies floated in frozen preservation there.

  “Damn, they look so much like us,” Vicky said.

  “Yeah. We run into the first alien that really looks like our brother,” Kris said, “and all it wants to do is kill us.”

  “So we killed them,” Admiral Krätz said.

  “They didn’t leave me much of a choice,” Kris said.

  “Yes, yes,” Admiral Kōta said. “Still, it would be nice to be able to talk to them. Have you recovered any computers? Any books?”

  “We’ll cover that in more depth on the Wasp,” Kris said. “It is possible that all the computers were located right by the explosives. That would expose them to a lot of heat and force and leave them in very tiny pieces.”

  “Almost as if someone didn’t want us to have anything to look at,” said Admiral Krätz.

  “If that wasn’t their intention, they sure achieved it,” Kris said.

  “What would lie at the root of that kind of behavior?” whispered Admiral Channing.

  “That is something that we can only guess at,” Kris said. “I’d like to give everyone a chance to do some of that guessing before I put the finishing touches on my report. I suspect you are all writing reports of your own?”

  The admirals nodded in various shades of noncommittal.

  “How many of them were there?” Vicky asked.

  “So far we’ve recovered all or major portions of 132 bodies,” Kris said. “Men, women, children. Elderly and babes in arms. There might be a few more out there. We’re still hunting.”

  “How big was that ship?” Vicky asked. From the open mouths, she’d only beaten the admirals to the question by a moment.

  “About the size of one of our courier ships,” Kris said.

  “What have you got, ten people on those?” Admiral Krätz asked.

  “Yes. When they were pirate schooners they used to cram twenty-five or thirty into them.”

  “For a couple of weeks. Have you found any living quarters down on the moon?”

  “Nothing,” Kris said. “All that’s down there are some digging and smelter gear. They were blown individually. But there’s nothing that looks like housing.”

  “So th
ey were living crammed into that ship,” Vicky said.

  “Having babies and growing old together,” Kris added.

  “Aliens,” Admiral Krätz said, shaking his head. “They are aliens even if they do look the most like us of any aliens we’ve found.”

  “Will the contents of this ship be shared with our home governments?” Admiral Kōta asked.

  The politician in Kris’s upbringing spotted the hot button in that question, but the fleet leader in her just shrugged. “I’m sending this cargo back to human space. Then I plan to continue my voyage of discovery. I expect to have more on my mind than who gets what of this mess.”

  The Navy officers drifted up to a window that looked into an isolated room organized like an operating center. On one table a lone body was strapped down and laid out. Its chest had been opened and its organs removed. They now floated in glass jars.

  “They’ve got everything we’ve got,” Kris said. “Different arrangement. Our guess is that they started walking upright about six million years ago, too. Give or take a few months,” she half joked.

  “Can we go in?” Admiral Krätz’s head doctor asked.

  Kris nodded. “We’re using level-three biohazard suits.”

  The three doctors who had accompanied their admirals so far took their leave and headed into the operating room.

  “Have you run a DNA check?” Admiral Channing asked.

  “Yes,” Kris said. “They have DNA, but their base molecules are different from ours. My biologists are very excited. And no, they doubt there can ever be any interbreeding. Even if our plumbing can be made to rendezvous, the genetics just aren’t going to let it happen.”

  “Kris, we need to talk,” Admiral Krätz said, waving his hand, “about all of this. Who gets what? Where do we go from here?”

  “Yes, we need to talk,” the other two admirals agreed.

  “Well, sirs, we have gravity on the Wasp. May I invite you to the Forward Lounge?”