Kris Longknife: Defender (29 page)

“I’m not sure what your command is, at the moment, though I’m sure it will have the six 18-inch lasers we took off the
Wasp
. Three pointing forward, the others aft.”

“So I’ve got just as much firepower running as chasing, huh?”

“Pretty much. Here’s the situation. Professor Labao thinks he’s narrowed the location of the alien home world to four or five stars. Assuming the stars we saw in several places on the overhead of the alien mother ship is actually a night sky of their home world. I need someone to go look, see, and run back home fast to report.”

“You’re not sending me with any Hellburners, are you?”

“No. And I mean no. Take a peek. If you see any ships, run. That will tell me as much as your seeing the planet. I have a hunch that these folks have all but abandoned their home world. However, if you start running into heavy traffic, that tells me to forget that hunch.”

“I see,” Penny said, thoughtfully. “I poke my nose under the tent but keep one eye on the exit the whole time.” She paused for a moment to think. “I can be that timid.”

“This really has to be a recon. One where I learn what you see. Heroes need not apply.”

“I get the point, Kris. I’m your coward.”

“I don’t think any coward would take this mission. It takes a lot of guts to stick your head where the lion’s mouth may be.”

“What ship can you give me? The
Wasp
?”

“Sorry, I can’t let a 20-inch laser out of orbit here, Penny. I was thinking of patching some of our ‘spare’ Smart Metal to the leftover
Hornet
reactors and six of the 18-inch lasers, but these new ships arriving may give me other options.”

“As in respinning a Smart Metal transport into a scout ship?”

“Something like that.”

“How do you think the crew will take to that?”

“Part of me says not well, but another part of me wonders why anyone would agree to come out here if they weren’t overstocked on a spirit of adventure.”

Penny smiled as she shook her head. “You expect a lot out of folks, Kris.”

“And sometimes they give me more than I have any right to ask for. Like you, Penny. Will you take Iizuka Masao with you?”

“The man is waiting with more patience than I deserve for me to get my act together. Will he follow me into the lion’s den? I’ll have to ask him.”

“You go ask him, and Nelly, make sure Mimzy gets a copy of my new fraternization policy.”

“My kids already have it, Kris. It’s you humans who haven’t opened your mail.”

“I’ll read it. I’ll read it,” Penny said. “Now, don’t you have some other fine person’s life to ruin?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Have a good one, Penny, you deserve it. And change your shoulder boards. A frigate skipper is a commander’s billet.”

Penny was already making for the door. “Thank you, Kris. Good-bye, Kris.” Leaving Kris smiling . . . and wondering whose day a princess should mess with next.

Nelly settled it. She had the manifests from the Star Line ships.

Kris
doubted she was messing with Granny Rita’s day when she called her.

“Granny, you won’t guess what just dropped into the system.”

“You sound chipper, so it can’t be aliens. Don’t keep the old girl guessing. Life’s too short to waste it on silly games.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” Kris drawled. “Your king and former husband seems to remember you fondly.”

“What makes you say that?” was lathered in caution.

“Twenty-eight frigates and fifteen auxiliaries just jumped into your nice system.”

“How are we going to feed them all?” Granny sighed.

“There are four, honest to God transports trailing them, and I just got the inventory of their cargo. They’re loaded with farm implements, trucks, Smart Metal fishing boats. All kinds of goodies.”

“How will we power them all?”

“Granny, you are a disgusting downer. Don’t you credit Grampa Ray with the sense God promised a billy goat?”

“A goat, yes. Your grampa, not so much.”

“They’re also loaded with solar-power plants and individual cells. Grampa Ray has not sent you gear that will just sit there and frustrate you.”

“Farm gear, transportation, boats, and power. Did you say anything to Ray?”

“Nope.”

“He wasn’t here long enough to see much of anything,” his former wife mused.

“He did take off with twenty or so of your best young people,” Kris pointed out.

“I figured the old bag of wind would be doing all the talking. Ray does have an ego.”

“Apparently, he must have listened a bit, because those ships are full of stuff you need.”

“You keep this up, and you’re going to force me to reassess the old fool.”

“He is a mystery, isn’t he, Granny?”

“So how soon do we get all these wonderful presents?”

“The fleet came in by Jump Point Beta and are making a one-gee approach. Say sometime late today. Probably too late to do much until tomorrow.”

“Do you have port facilities for all of them?”

“Not even close,” Kris said.

“Well, have fun. Don’t you hate being a grown-up?”

“Good-bye Granny.”

Kris’s next call was to Ada. There was no reason for her to hear the good news secondhand. The Chief of Ministries sent back a “Glory, alleluia” reply and said she’d get the colonials ready for the king’s largesse.

That left Kris with the problem of conjuring a ship for Penny out of thin air. She decided the shipyard was the best place to look for a solution. Besides, if she did what she was thinking of doing, the yard would have a whole lot of new problems to solve.

Admiral Benson, ret., was in his office with a large window overlooking the shop floor beneath him. No surprise, he had already heard of the new arrivals. “It’s nice to see the tip of the spear getting a bit sharper.”

“Thirty-eight frigates to hold off a mother ship and her brood of a couple of hundred huge monsters. Odds leave something to be desired,” Kris said.

“Yes, but they’re three, four times better than they were yesterday.”

“I have some problems I could use your help solving.”

“How many and how bad?” the old Navy man said.

“First, rumor is I’ve been made an admiral. You didn’t bring along any old shoulder boards, did you?”

He was grinning before she finished the sentence and reaching into a drawer of his desk. “I kept my first set of admiral shoulder boards around for good luck. May you wear them in good health,” he said, tossing a pair of boards across the desk to Kris.

“Would you mind helping me put them on?” Kris asked.

“Shouldn’t your husband do that?”

“If they’re your lucky shoulder boards, I wouldn’t want to do anything to jinx the luck.”

He did the honor, then stood back and gave her a salute. He might be a civilian at the moment, but Gunny would thoroughly approve of his form.

“So, one problem down. What next?”

“All the auxiliaries are Smart Metal. What kind of warship do you think you could respin two or three of them into?”

“What do you have in mind? The asteroids are coming up with all kinds of rare and exotic materials, just what we need for making lasers of our own. The crew in my weapons lab can’t wait to get their hands on the old
Hornet
’s lasers and start reworking them. Same for her reactors though I’m not sure I’d trust them out of my sight. What’s the phrase, they been rid hard and put away wet.”

“Yes, I suspected you’d say something like that. Yes, I want more support ships for the asteroid mines, but I need to spin out a frigate as well. Are the
Wasp
’s and
Intrepid
’s original 18-inchers gathering dust?”

“We put one of them in each of the Hellburner bases we set up on the moons. Assuming they get slagged real good by the bastards, we’ll need to recut our launch tunnels to get the Hellfires out.”

“That still leaves eight, or five. Have we dug bases to cover the Beta Jump Point?”

“Just starting, but those lasers aren’t being wasted. I’ve got them mounted on my station, and we’ve trained Ostriches to man them. Those birds are smart and not afraid to be mean.”

“Any chance they might sign up for ship duty?” Kris asked.

“What do you have in mind?”

Kris told him. His reaction was, at best, noncommittal. “I don’t know. Spin out a frigate to the
Wasp
’s design? I think we can do that. Find a crew? That might be a problem. You sure the merchant folks arriving planned to stay?”

“I haven’t asked them,” Kris admitted.

“Ever heard of shanghaiing?”

“Likely I’ve been guilty of that a few times in my life.”

“Come to think about it, a lot of folks might want to hitch a ride back on those empty transports. Any idea how we keep from hemorrhaging our workforce?”

“By my count, there were twenty-eight frigates escorting those nineteen auxiliary and merchant ships. How many folks do you think would want to ride the convoy home with no escort?”

“You’re a hard woman.”

“I’m a Longknife. I’ve got a fight coming and thirty-eight warships to hold the line. Would you lose a few to an escort mission?”

The retired admiral didn’t say anything for a long while. Finally, he muttered, “I guess I’d look at my orders.”

“Mine are rather vague. Put up a fight. I don’t have to win, I just have to make it look good enough that the bastards don’t think they need to go looking for where we might be from. Me, I’d prefer to win. I get to stay alive if I win.”

“We sure don’t if we lose,” Benson agreed.

“You just get ready to respin a lot of Smart Metal into what we need. Leave the personnel to me.”

“Gladly.”

The
Wasp
was on its final approach. It parked the wreck a good hundred klicks back, trailing the station. Good idea; there might well be more ships stuck swinging around each other if there wasn’t anything to grow the station coming in. The
Wasp
also dumped the wreckage of the
Hornet
ten klicks back. Yard tugs were quickly picking though the pieces; the reactors were the first to be towed in for examination.

There were shuttles coming up from Alwa loaded with boffins wanting a first look at the alien technology. There were also docs who had been dirtside, researching the local biology or starting up the geriatrics clinic. Every medical type available had been recalled to help with Phil Taussig’s survivors.

Kris was there when they wheeled Phil up from the
Wasp
’s pier.

“Good heavens, Kris, you’ve got quite a setup here. Oh, pardon me, Admiral.” In bed, weak as he was, he tried to lie at attention. How many generations of Navy did he have stiffening his backbone?

“At ease, Commander. I’m just a jumped-up captain my grandfather, the king, frocked up to an admiral. And you’ll be a full commander as quickly as Nelly can cut the paperwork. Listen, Phil, I’ve got a problem.”

“Don’t you Longknifes always?”

Kris quickly filled him in on what she’d found on Alwa. “Wow, so we weren’t just fighting for a bunch of weird bird folks, huh?”

“Nope, my own granny and two shipfuls of survivors and their kids and grandkids.”

“So, what’s the situation now?”

“We’ve got a potential alien attack marshaling somewhere out there. They could hit us anytime. My problem is that I want to hang on to every asset I’ve got. My second problem is that if ever survivors deserved home leave, you and your crew do. If I send a ship back for you, I may have a whole lot of people hitching a ride along with you.”

“I see,” Phil said. His head sank deeper into the pillow. Was moving him tiring him out, or was it the heavy load she’d just dumped on him? Maybe she shouldn’t have said anything. After all, if she got hit with a full-fledged mutiny, or if a couple of those frigates had orders already to escort the merchants back, this might all be for nothing.

If so, she would do whatever she had to do.

“We’re here, Kris. That’s all that matters. Do with us what you will,” Phil said, then seemed to collapse into his gurney.

She left Phil as a flock of people in white coats began to gather around him. Kris found herself in a situation she was all too familiar with. It was that time before battle, when she’d done everything she could and now had to wait to see if it had been enough.

She hunted up Jack, and they had a quiet lunch. He listened as she recounted her morning, nodding support, asking a few questions that helped clarify her thoughts. Yes, she was prepared to countermand orders given back in human space.

What came here, stayed here.

Would she force the crew of the
Hornet
to sit out the coming attack in hospital beds? That stumped her. She needed ships. She needed crews. Certainly she owed the
Hornet
. She and the
Wasp
’s crew would likely have been stuck there with them if Phil hadn’t gone one way and let her go the other.

“I think I’m starting to understand how Grampa Ray got to be such a bastard,” Kris finally muttered.

Kris returned to her desk; reports were piling up. Professor Labao wanted to know if Kris was going to do anything about the possible alien home planet. If so, a lot of boffins that Kris would have credited with good sense wanted in on the mission. Ada had already started making plans to extend the colonial farmlands. Her question was where the labor would come from and did Kris think any of the newly pacified forestland could be made available to the colonials.

Ada hadn’t yet contacted the Alwan elders about that hot potato. It looked like she wanted Kris to handle it.

The planetary survey was not quite done. They’d found some rare earths and other minerals needed for lasers and Smart Metal
TM
, but they were not in places easy to get to. As far away as the asteroids were, it was likely that they could be exploited faster. There was something about biological research that seemed to offer hope of a spectacular breakthrough, but the report was very vague. Like everyone in human space, Kris had heard about potential world-changing science, only to find it vanish down the “no, not really” tubes with as little fanfare as possible.

Kris read on. About suppertime, Jack came to dig her out.

“I’ve got something special for you.”

“Want to show it to me?” Kris purred.

“You have a one-track mind.”

“I’ve had a very bad day.”

The surprise was a new restaurant, The Burger Carnival. The proprietor had painted it up like an ancient traveling circus, complete with clowns and old Earth animals.

“Remind you of any place?” Jack said.

Kris wondered if she blushed, but apparently admirals were too shameless for such things. “The place where I decided to draft you,” Kris admitted.

“I thought so,” Jack said.

“Can you forgive me?” Kris asked.

“For starting us on the road to here? What’s to forgive?”

They ordered hamburgers and fries. Cheese apparently was not available for love nor money. Jack led Kris to a table in the back of the restaurant, which was actually the front of the station. They had a spectacular view of Alwa as it revolved below them. Kris tried not to look for anything she’d read about in her reports.

I’m having dinner with my husband. Right!

“Do you know what’s special about today?” Jack said, reaching across the table for her hands.

“Besides the cavalry arriving to either rescue us or go down in our defeat?”

“Forget the job,” Jack growled. “Today is our second anniversary. It’s been two months since we let Granny Rita talk us into taking the plunge. Do you regret it?”

“Never,” Kris said, squeezing Jack’s hand. “Two months. I totally forgot about it. I can hardly keep track of the time. How’d you do it?”

“I had Sal do it for me.”

“Nelly, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know it mattered to you. I know it’s a very romantic thing for you humans. I just didn’t know if it would include you, Kris.”

“Yes, I’m human, and, yes, I’m romantic, at least for Jack, and Jack, why are you doing all the girl things and me doing all the stupid boy stuff?”

“You’re the admiral,” he said with a shrug.

Kris let out a sigh. “I don’t like that, Jack.”

“But you have to. That’s what Longknifes do. They do what they have to do.”

“Well, I want to do more. Stuff I want to do as well as what I have to do.”

Dinner arrived, brought by a moonlighting Marine. The haircut gave him away. “Just what you ordered, Colonel, two burgers with all the trimmings and two orders of fries.”

Kris took a breath, and was transported back in time. Then she frowned.

“Onions, tomatoes, real potatoes. How’d you do it, Jack?” A quick glance around showed other diners making do with produce from the native Alwan fields.

“These are from your Granny Rita’s garden. Don’t look too closely at the meat, though. It’s from the deep forest. But I promise, it’s off one of the more delectable vegetarians, rather than a tough type that still thinks Marine might taste good.”

Jack awarded a grin to their waiter. He blushed at his superior’s attention.

“You amaze me, Jack. You remember our anniversary and do it enough ahead of time to talk my granny out of the fruits of her garden.”