Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (49 page)

“You hungry?” Jack asked.

“Kind of,” Kris admitted.

“Want a hamburger and fries?”

“A cheeseburger with all the fixings, maybe double pickles, but no onions. Hold the onions. I don’t think baby likes
onions. Oh, does anyone want half a cheeseburger?” Kris added. “I don’t think I can handle a whole one.”

“I’ll take it,” Penny said. “I usually leave half of mine.”

Jack headed out to get chow, with Masao at his elbow, leaving the two women alone. Even Admiral Furzah left to see if there was any fresh meat that hadn’t been burned.

“I’m sorry about my outburst,” Penny said as soon as they were alone.

“No need, Penny. It was a miserable thing I did.”

“But you’re working on setting it straight. I should have realized you’d find a way to work this out. Worse, you were right. There wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it at the moment. The aliens saw an opening and grabbed it.”

“I don’t know,” Kris said. “Maybe I should have left the reserve fleet there. Heaven knows, I’ve just had that poor fleet flying back and forth and wasting good reaction mass.”

“Can you read minds or see the future?” Penny asked.

“Not this week,” Kris said. “I think this gestation thing is messing up my crystal ball.”

“No doubt. How do you intend to work the intercept?”

“Carefully. Very carefully. I have no idea how long it will take us to refuel or how fast they dare take the jumps. We’ll just have to play this one as it develops.”

The cheeseburgers returned. Even the feline from Sasquan had found a couple of pounds of freshly ground beef. They munched their burgers as fragments of a neutron star, chipped off six hours ago, hammered ships for the next twenty minutes, leaving them torn, twisted, or wrecked.

The one-sided battle continued as the aliens strove to get their revenge for their murdered brothers . . . and themselves.

“Kris, the alien warships will be approaching the jump soon. That is one place we know they will have to go.”

“Any suggestions, Nelly?”

“It would be nice to hammer the jump. Could I ask the beam-ship management teams about some rapid fire just as the ships reach there? They will probably try to go through at ten-second intervals. It won’t do us any good to fire the same because all we’d have to be is off by a second, and all our
darts would miss. Still, if we were to try for an eleven-second interval . . .” Nelly left the rest hanging.

“Nelly, get me the captain of the two ships.”

“Kris, for this you will likely need the captains, chief science officers, and superintendents of reactors.”

“Get me all of them.”

Kris’s screens changed to show six heads. Most were gray- or white-haired. Two were women. None looked happy to face Kris.

“In six hours, the aliens will be sending their warships through the Eta Jump headed for Alwa,” Kris began. “It would be nice if we could make them share that space with a lot of neutron darts.”

“How many?” the gray-haired man in a gray Merchant Marine uniform with four stripes on the shoulder boards said.

“They will try for ten-second intervals. They have been known to risk five-second intervals, but not at this speed. We, of course, won’t know when their ten-second intervals start. I was thinking of getting off a dart every eleven or twelve seconds for fifteen minutes.”

“So each of us would have to have primary ignition every twenty-two seconds,” the other captain, this one in blue, said.

“Something like that.”

“But there would be no
guarantee
that we’d make even
one
hit.”

Kris couldn’t remember whether this speaker was a chief scientist or in charge of reactors. Then it hit her. There was no weapons officer in the whole bunch.

I’ve got to make some changes when this is done.

“There hasn’t been an aimed shot from your weapon system this whole battle,” Kris pointed out. “We put the neutron darts out there and the aliens are kind enough to run into a few of them.”

“That’s an interesting way of thinking,” another civilian said.

“That is how battles are won and lost,” Kris answered, as evenly as she could manage.

The six looked at each other, from screen to screen. Kris had the distinct feeling they wanted to say no, but none had the courage to say it to her.

If they hadn’t the guts to say no to a princess, what are they doing out here?

Kris took the bull by the horns. “So, in thirty-two minutes will you be ready to begin a rapid fire sequence?”

“Ah,” came from six mouths.

Kris gave them her most placid face. Maybe with a Mona Lisa smile.

“I guess we can do it, Your Highness,” one of the civilians finally said.

I wonder if Grampa Ray gets this kind of solid support,
Kris thought, and bit her lip to kill a wry smile.

“Thank you very much. You have the thanks of a grateful world.”

They rang off.

“Did you get the feeling they didn’t want to do this?” Penny asked no one.

“I didn’t see any resistance,” Kris said, wearing her sunny smile.

“Yeah, right,” Jack muttered.

Thirty minutes later, the beam ships began a rapid-fire staccato. Beneath them, the neutron star sparked every ten, eleven, or twelve seconds.

Then Kris heard a crunch through the hull of the
Conqueror
.

“Kris,
Conqueror
has suffered a failure in one of its capacitors. It has been taken off-line and the power lines to it cut.”

“Are we in for a catastrophic failure?” This sounded too much like the failure that took
Ultimate Argument
out of the fight.

“No, Kris. The potential failure was spotted in time and the system taken off-line quickly. Also, power requirements were reduced gracefully. There was no backwash into the distribution system.”

Again, Nelly was using that passive voice. Kris considered digging deeper, then thought better of it. If Nelly wanted to be coy, it was best to leave her alone.

There was no report from the captain, but the flashes on the neutron star continued, now at the rate of five every minute or so.

With five minutes left in the shoot,
Opening Statement
took a third of its systems gracefully off-line. The last shots went out four to a minute.

When that was done, Kris authorized a four-hour stand-down for maintenance.

She got some rest while the beam ships were down. When she awoke, the alien base ship was closing fast. The two sections of Kitano’s fleet had pulled well away from them. Admiral Benson had jacked up his deceleration to cut the time needed to make orbit and was now joining
Wasp
and
Intrepid
.

It was time for Kris to make some hard decisions.

Once again, she talked to the double troika. “The alien base ship is twelve hours out. We’ll again adjust our orbit to dodge them. At their speed, they can’t make a major change but no doubt they will try. You can’t fool many people twice.”

Now it was their turn to eye her blandly.

“The best way for you to keep the aliens from slitting your throat is to nail them during the next nine hours. I’m thinking the best thing you can do for your insurance companies is to fire off a dart every minute. Can you do it?”

“One primary ignition a minute for nine straight hours?”

“Or less if you nail him,” Kris said, helpfully.

“Could maybe one of us go down for a few hours? We could spell each other?” a civilian asked.

“I don’t know. How many hits have you been making?”

“I don’t know,” seemed to be the consensus.

“By my estimate, maybe three out of a hundred hit,” Nelly said.

“We’re only getting
three
percent hits!” came from several throats.

“Not bad, all considering,” Kris said. “These aren’t guided weapons.”

“Oh,” the captain in blue said, nodding.

“So, I think darts spinning out four fragments at this range should do very well. One a minute from each ship. If you have to take a maintenance break, feel free to do so, but remember, you only have nine hours to hit them before they’ll be too close.”

The six began to talk among themselves; Kris rang off.

Over the next nine hours, Kris spent most of her time
preparing for the next battle as the Battle of the Neutron Star ground its way down to a bloody end.

Kris transferred her flag to
Wasp
, leaving Abby, Cara, and Colonel Bruce to control both of the big ships.
Wasp
joined Admiral Benson’s Reserve Fleet and, without waiting for Kitano’s reinforcements, boosted for the distant jump.

The alien ships came on, their course limited by intent and speed. The slow beat of the neutron bullets slammed alien warships and the base ship. Warships blew up. The base ship took hits, faltered, but bore in.

It was a bedraggled few that survived to watch as the beam ships again adjusted their orbit. Or tried.
Conqueror
suffered an engineering failure as it made a burn. Despite Kris’s best plans, it did not disappear soon enough behind the cinder of a planet. Every alien ship that could bring its fire to bare aimed for it in the few seconds they had her in range.

Conqueror
took hits. She burned and shed skin. Kris expected her to explode any second.

Beside her, Penny’s face showed a hard smile. “I talked with her first officer,” she whispered. “I told him how you could move Smart Metal around to shield where you were vulnerable. I think he listened to me.”

“I think he did,” Kris said.

Hit, skin blazing as it steamed off into space,
Conqueror
held together even as its orbit took it out of harm’s way. The desperate Enlightened One wore ship trying to follow only to have the base ship clip the tip of a tall mountain on the dead planet. With as much energy as the small moon had on it, the collision was catastrophic. A quarter of the base ship splattered itself across airless waste. What was left of the Enlightened One’s domain ricocheted off, took out three warships, and headed out, spinning wildly, into nowhere.

New stars appeared and disappeared quickly as warships that had survived the battle thus far chose to end it quickly rather than face their cold future.

Twenty minutes later, the beam ships came back in communication with Kris. Reports from
Conqueror
were bad but could have been worse. Despite all her punishment, she was still holding air pressure for her crew and machinery. There was no question that she would never again fire a neutron slug.

“We’re still here,” her captain reported. “And my first officer says to tell that staff gal of yours that he learned a thing or three from her or else we wouldn’t be.”

“The next time you go into battle, we’ll see that you have some defensive officers and a few lasers of your own.”

“Oh, please,” he said.

Kris turned her gaze toward the jump ahead.

“Once more, into the fight,” she whispered to herself and baby.

68

Admiral
Benson’s flag,
Temptress
, led the fleet through the jump at 50,000 kph and began braking, bending its course toward the near gas giant.
Wasp
came though, at the tag end of Hanson’s BatRon 16. In another three minutes, the rest of the reserve fleet was in system and braking for a refueling stop.

Of the aliens that had gone through the jump many hours earlier, there was nothing. They had definitely used it for a long jump and were well on their way to Alwa. Time was critical.

Kris would have to hold the refueling pass to one partial orbit, grazing the giant’s atmosphere before taking off for the fuzzy jump.

“Nelly, can we take a battlecruiser down for a refueling pass?”

“It won’t be good for the crystal,” Nelly answered. “It’s designed to slow down light, not transfer heat.”

“Nelly, ask anyone you can what we can do to protect the crystal and get a fuel-capturing arrangement on a battlecruiser.”

Ten minutes later,
Wasp
’s ship maintainer, an old friend of Kris’s, L. J. Mong, the chief of the boat, and several other chiefs were in her day quarters.

“Ma’am, the whole idea of the pinnace was to keep the frigates out of a gas giant’s atmosphere. However, thanks to some calculations by your computer, we do have an idea,” he said. Behind Kris, a new view opened up on the screen. On top,
Wasp
was almost as small as Condition Zed, but with her crystal armor buried under several centimeters of cooling Smart Metal
^TM
. Below, the poor ship bulged out worse than Kris, with a huge maw open to take in reaction mass.

“You think that will do?” Kris asked.

“We don’t know for sure, ma’am, but we don’t think we’ll lose any ships. We just aren’t sure what kind of shape we’ll be in when we’re finished.”

Kris thought for a moment. “I’m willing to take on the hostiles with sixteen ships. Will this foul up more than half the fleet?”

Senior Command Chief Mong eyed the other chiefs, then glanced at the lieutenant commander in charge of maintaining the
Wasp
. “I don’t suppose so, ma’am.”

“Then pass that schematic to the fleet. If anyone has suggestions, they can talk to me anytime.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the chiefs said, and they followed their officer out of Kris’s day quarters.

“Sixteen ships, huh? Against how many?” Jack asked.

“About a hundred at last count. We got a third of them. Maybe winged more.”

“We’ll see what we see.”

The close pass to the gas giant left one ship unable to reorient itself afterward. The
Opal
out of Hekate couldn’t change its configuration back. This might have been as much a problem with the Smart Metal
^TM
as the pass.

Looking very much like Kris felt, the
Opal
was ordered back to System X to deliver its reaction mass to the ships coming along behind. She would also pass along the idea for capturing reaction mass without slowing down.