Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting Read online

  Suddenly, Abraham Lincoln, Clemenceau, and Mao Zedong became the center of every alien’s fire.

  The infrared readout showed them going from hot to blazing to gone.

  The other ships of the Earth task force had reloaded. In rapid succession, they fired. Another twelve alien warships vanished.

  Of the surviving four, at least two were hard hit. They did what they could, all concentrating on the Togo. It glowed and blistered off some of its armor, but it held together long enough for the other ships to recharge their guns and wipe out the last survivors of the first alien formation.

  Yi’s ships now flipped and decelerated to form up with Bethea’s task force as it came up even with them. Together, they engaged the four alien dishes as they came in range.

  Kris noted how Togo stayed in the firing line rather than fall back, out of harm’s way, so it could be repaired to fight another day. Apparently, Yi had a different attitude toward this long war than Kris did.

  The rest of the battle proceeded as Kris would have had it. The aliens were scourged at long range as Third Fleet first fell back in front of it, then followed as the alien commander chose to withdraw. They witnessed the attack of the suicide boats, including the ones that slipped through with atomics to destroy the Loki and severely damage the Puma. Unlike Admiral Yi, the experienced Admiral Bethea had her wounded cat fall back into reserve. That saved the Puma to straggle home and fight another day.

  At one point, the aliens made a thrust toward the second division of BatRon 11. Since it was already weakened by the loss of the Clemenceau and Moa, the aliens concentrated their fire on the crippled Togo, and another ship was lost. Kris noticed what looked like life pods spewing from the burning hulk of the Togo.

  “Pause again, please. Are those survivors and did we collect them?”

  Yi said nothing. Bethea stepped in. “I had the Regulus converted to an armed merchant cruiser.” An isolated dot well behind the battle line flashed red. “She collected life pods from Loki and Togo. We recovered about half their crews. Likewise when we lost Lenin and Heimdallr to mines. Unfortunately, the alien lasers were pretty heavy around the earlier three ships when we lost them. We only got two or three survivors from each.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” Kris said. She had specifically ordered that each fleet have some rescue ships with them. The Mary Ellen Carter had been ready to do that service for the First Fleet. At least Bethea had seen to it that the Third Fleet had such aid.

  Kris examined the facts of the fight, and her options. It was never easy to relieve an officer, but it was worse to let other commanders see an officer fail . . . and get away with it.

  NELLY, EXPAND THE FORWARD LOUNGE SO THE OFFICERS PRESENT CAN GET A DRINK. WE DO HAVE SOMETHING TO DRINK, DON’T WE?

  YES, KRIS, THE BAR ISN’T UP TO MOTHER MACCREEDY’S STANDARDS, BUT THEY CAN CUT THEIR THIRST.

  THEN RAISE A WALL BETWEEN THIS AREA AND THE REST.

  A CLEAR WALL.

  NO. I’LL NEED SOME PRIVACY.

  As Kris and Nelly spoke, the Forward Lounge expanded, tables and chairs appeared, and a wall rose behind those attending this meeting, a wall with a wide double door in it.

  “I need this room. Why don’t you get some coffee, or something stronger,” Kris said to her officers.

  All of them began to stand up.

  “Admirals Yi and Bethea, please stay.”

  Yi eyed Kris as he retook his seat.

  “Save me some coffee,” Bethea said as she sat back down.

  YOU WANT ANY OF US TO STAY? Jack asked for Kris’s staff.

  NOPE. I EITHER DO THIS ON MY OWN, OR I CAN FOLD AWAY MY FOUR STAR FLAG, Kris answered.

  Her staff joined the others headed for the door. While there were plenty of backward glances from the other officers, there were only small, firm smiles from Kris’s staff.

  15

  As the door swung closed behind the last officer, Kris stood.

  “Admiral Yi, your performance in this recent operation leaves a lot to be desired.”

  “I commanded Third Fleet. I fought that battle the way I saw fit,” he shot back.

  “You lost six ships. First Fleet lost none.”

  “If the enemy had reacted in a rational manner, the defeat of their first task force should have routed the rest and sent them streaming for the jump and into your arms,” he spat back.

  “I gave you reports on all the battles we’ve had with these bastards. Did you study any of them?”

  “I looked them over,” Yi said, again not meeting her eyes.

  “It’s clear to me that you learned nothing from them,” Kris snapped.

  “Every battle is different,” Yi shot back.

  “Enough of this. You failed to follow direct orders. You suffered casualties you didn’t need and that we can’t afford out here at the hind end of nowhere. I am relieving you of command of the Third Fleet and returning you to your permanent rank of rear admiral. I will leave you in command of Task Force 7.”

  “You can’t do that. Earth gave me command of its ships. I was kind enough to let you detach one squadron from my command to reinforce your weaker US ships. I could have objected, but I didn’t. Still, I command all Earth ships.”

  “But you will not command one of my fleets,” Kris growled.

  “I will command all Earth ships, then,” Yi said, stubbornly. “Those are my orders.”

  “Are they? Nelly, put up Rear Admiral Yi’s orders.”

  His orders, signed by the president of the Earth Union, appeared on the screen.

  “Let’s see now,” Kris said, as if she didn’t remember every word. “You will report to Commander, Alwa Defense Sector. You will place your command under her and conform to her lawful orders,” Kris read slowly. “That seems pretty straightforward to me, and very much identical to all the other ships seconded to my command. Rear Admiral, I now order you to attach the remnant of BatRon 10 and 11 to Vice Admiral Miyoshi’s Second Fleet. Do you have any questions?”

  “No. Are we done here?”

  “Yes.”

  The former fleet commander bolted for the door.

  Admiral Bethea breathed a sigh of relief as the door clicked shut behind him. “I can’t tell you how grateful I am to be out from under that man’s thumb. Thank you, Admiral.”

  “You’re welcome, but don’t get too grateful just yet. I’m giving you Third Fleet, but I can’t give you much in place of Yi’s Task Force 7.”

  “There’s not a lot left of it.”

  “Yes, but it has that nice, new armor, and those nifty 22-inch lasers.”

  “I think I can make due just fine with what I’ve got. You didn’t do too bad fighting with the old armor and 20-inch lasers. Good Lord, just a few months ago we figured 18-inch lasers were God’s answers to desperate Sailors’ dreams.”

  “Well, I’ll pull the Fourth Task Force out of Miyoshi’s fleet. The New Eden squadron at least has 22-inch lasers although you’ll have to make do with the Esperanto League’s hippie dippy division.”

  “I think the Hispania division will more than make up for them, and I really think the Esperanto frigates have more fight in them than their names imply.”

  The two shared a smile.

  “Nelly, make the wall disappear. Tell Jack I’d like some coffee.”

  “Coffee, Kris? How do you think that little one will take to the caffeine?”

  “It’s so little,” Kris whimpered.

  Betsy Bethea laughed. “My mom used to remind me that she went nine months without a drop of anything but water. ‘You owe me,’ she’d say.”

  Kris sighed and glanced at her flat midriff. “Nelly, tell Jack I want a big glass of water. With ice. Plenty of ice. I feel this sudden need to chomp on someone. I mean something. If he doesn’t want it to be him, he better get me ice.”

  “He says it’s on its way.”

  Across the room, Jack was already behind the bar and holding aloft a very large glass. Even across the room, Kris could hear the
tinkle of ice as he filled it. Done, Jack quick marched for her.

  “Nelly, could you get Admiral Miyoshi?”

  “He’s on his way,” and the commander of Kris’s Second Fleet was on his feet and trailing Jack for Kris’s table.

  “Pull up a chair,” she told the fleet commander.

  As Miyoshi sat, he raised an eyebrow. “Does this mean what you are going to tell me is likely to knock me off my feet?”

  “Only if you have good sense,” Kris said.

  “Oh, good, then I can stand. No one with good sense follows a Longknife. Certainly not all the way to the other side of the galaxy.”

  The two enjoyed the laugh. Then Kris got serious.

  “I’ve relieved Rear Admiral Yi of command of Third Fleet,” Kris said bluntly.

  “You could do nothing else,” the Musashi admiral agreed. “His performance was, ah, extremely unsatisfactory.”

  “However, I’ve chosen to let him remain in command of Task Force 7.”

  “Hmm,” was all he said.

  “And I’m moving the Seventh to your fleet.”

  “Gods help me with a kami like that one beside my hearth,” the fleet commander said.

  “He has a point that Earth gave him command of its ships.”

  “One can only wonder why?”

  Kris raised both eyebrows in agreement with the question. “Admiral Bethea will command Third Fleet. I’m giving her your Task Force 4.

  “I will miss the Esperanto bunch. They throw great parties. Did you know, their ships are not nearly as dry as ours?”

  “No I didn’t, and I’m sorry about pulling them out of your fleet.” Kris took a deep breath, let it out, and dumped the full extent of her possible problem on her old friend. “If Yi continues to not follow orders, keep me informed. I will beach him. He is in line to replace the guy who couldn’t take no for an answer bossing the guano mine.”

  “Where will you send that one?”

  “Maybe I’ll give him command of a canoe, out where the big ‘eats everythings’ swim.” Together they laughed at the image of a canoe in waters where the big ones swam and anyone in less than a six-hundred-ton, harpoon-rigged trawler was at risk of their lives.

  Levity done, Kris surveyed the room. Yi was absent, but most of the rest seemed ready to get back to work. Kris used a spoon against her water glass to summon them.

  “Commanders of Task Force 7 should join Admiral Miyoshi at his table. Commanders of Task Force 4 will be in the Third Fleet under Admiral Bethea. Nelly, cut paperwork for my signature fleeting her up to Vice Admiral.”

  “It’s waiting on your desk as I speak, Admiral Longknife,” Nelly said. DO I HAVE TO SAY ADMIRAL LONGKNIFE EVERY TIME?

  ONLY IN MEETINGS WHERE I’VE JUST BROKEN A VICE ADMIRAL, Kris said, and tried to hide the grin from this sidebar.

  “I think we’ve learned our lessons from this last dustup,” Kris began. “The enemy is not dumb. They learn fast, and they can adjust their tactics in only seconds when we confront them with surprises. They also have a few surprises of their own,” Kris noted. “We may have to double our secondary batteries to handle their small suicide boats.”

  “Admiral Benson is working on that in the yards,” Admiral Kitano said. “He was quick to point out that need after reviewing your after-action report.”

  “Good. Now that you have the floor, Admiral Kitano, why don’t you fill us in on what the little bug-eyed monsters have been up to while we were off having fun?”

  Admiral Kitano stood, and the screen behind Kris changed to show the picket line around Alwa. Every system within ten or twelve jumps had a large, low-tech but very effective buoy at every jump. They would report any ships entering that system.

  No doubt, the picket at the used jump would be blown away by the alien. However, across the system, another buoy would take note of that, record data on the ship that did it, and pass through the jump to send that message streaming back, buoy by buoy, to Alwa. It might take a week to reach Alwa, but the data would arrive ahead of any attack.

  “We’ve lost some outer buoys,” Kitano reported. Several green dots began blinking red. “They were simple pop-and-duck-back raids. We seem to have as many system freighters as we need, at the moment, or at least Pipra assures me we’ve met demand. I’ve turned the Kamoi Maru, Activity, and Cherryleaf into buoy tenders. They’ve got enough power to run away from most, and a few 20-inch guns to handle anything they can’t run from. They should have the buoys replaced in a week and add another layer out.”

  The room nodded along with the benign report, but there was a clear feeling that there was another shoe to drop.

  “Then there is this system,” Kitano said, and a yellow dot began blinking red.

  “It’s a truly worthless system. A red giant, two white dwarfs, and a neutron star doing their own dance around each other. What planets have survived are either way-out gas giants or barren rocks. The system, however, has eight jumps into it.”

  The admiral paused. “Our scientists guess that what we have here are two star systems that collided after the three alien races that built the jumps set their initial jump maps up. Whatever the reason, you can go a lot of places from this place, and some of them allow you to jump over the nearest systems.”

  “That could be a problem,” Kris said.

  “Yes,” Kitano said. “Two buoys in this system have been shot up. We got fingerprints on the ships that did the shooting. They were both different.”

  Any boredom that might have been nibbling at the attendees fled.

  “Three ships observed the last attack on Alwa,” Kris said. “By any chance, can those two ships be matched to any of those three?”

  “Six massive reactors on one. Just eight giant ones on the other. Yep, they likely were scouting for two different base ships.”

  The aliens seemed to hold to a single design involving huge to the point of not quite ridiculous . . . at least to human minds. All the alien bodies that Kris’s boffins had sampled DNA from showed they had started as a pretty homogeneous group some hundred thousand years ago. They’d branched off from there over the years.

  If Kris understood the bragging that the aliens did in their horror collection of trophies from murdered planets that she’d discovered in a pyramid, there were at least forty base ships now going about the galaxy, striving to exterminate all living things not of their flesh.

  There might be as many as fifty.

  With the latest operation, Kris had destroyed three.

  That left a lot out there, and, if the ravings of the old woman Kris had captured in the Sasquan System were to be believed, the flame had been sent to all the ships demanding they join in exterminating Kris and her ilk.

  You do good at a hard job, you get an even tougher one for your reward.

  So long as they are sniffing around on this side of the galaxy, they aren’t finding humanity or the Iteeche.

  Kris knew her job. Everyone here was a volunteer.

  Hopefully, Kris Longknife would figure out a way for them to survive their job as the stalking horse for one hell of a monster.

  And I’m going to do this while my body concentrates on what evolution has made my most important traditional contribution to the human race—producing a healthy child.

  Oh, joy.

  16

  The meeting broke up shortly after that with orders to expand the picket line past the huge system the aliens seemed interested in. Captain Drago walked in quickly as the admirals and commodores were leaving. Most of those in the know stepped aside for the flag captain. He might be only a captain, but they knew he pulled more than his weight. A lot more.

  “How’s the new ship?” Kris asked.

  “Much like the old one. Oh, Admiral Benson asks that we go easy on the old girl. Or young girl. He’d dearly like to replace some of our other lost ships rather than keep replacing your flagship.”

  “No doubt you will keep that in mind the next time you get her all dinged up.”


  “Per your orders, Your Highness.”

  “That’s hitting below the belt.” Of all people, Drago knew how much Kris hated being “Your Highnessed.”

  “Does Benson think he’s got the new crystal armor right?” Jack asked. Kris could count on him to think of her safety first, second, and last.

  “Yes. I’m taking the Wasp out tomorrow for a test. We’ll let the new Endeavor plunk away at us with her 5-inch battery for a bit. If everything works, we’ll back off and let her hit us with her old 18-inchers. If they don’t faze her, we might let L’Estock have a shot at us with a battery of 20-inchers.”

  “Don’t get carried away,” Kris said. “We can’t afford to put you back in the yard. We got dinged and broken ships from this latest shoot. And we need to redesign the armor backing for the Earth ships with crystal armor.”

  “They can use the same design the Wasp has backing up her crystal belt,” Drago said. “I told those Earth skippers that they were way too optimistic about heat transfer, but would they listen to one of us hicks from the Rim?”

  “They’ll listen now,” Jack said.

  “Who’s next on my list of torturous meetings?” Kris asked.

  “Pipra just came aboard,” Drago said.

  “Pipra Strongarm is waiting in your day cabin, Kris,” Nelly reported. “Your desk and other personal items have arrived from the Princess Royal. Oh, and Dr. Meade wants to know when you will have time for her today.”

  Kris sighed. It had been easy to find time for the doc on the ride back. Hell, Kris had even considered taking up knitting little booties, only to discover there was no yarn aboard.

  With a smile, Kris went to do what Longknifes always did.

  What they had to do.

  17

  “I hear you’re pregger,” Pipra said the moment Kris walked into her day quarters. “Are congratulations in order, or are you going to take care of this problem?”

  “Is the news all over?” Kris tried to growl, but she was grinning too much. “And I will be taking very good care of this little problem for the next couple of months until I can drop him or her in daddy’s hands and let him try his hand at taking care of the little stinker for a while.”