Kris Longknife - Emissary

by Mike Shepherd

  The three looked at each other. They seemed at a loss for words. One finally spoke.

  “My admiral ordered me to keep my ship right in line behind him, ma’am. He said we wouldn’t need all those jets.”

  “Now your admiral is ordering you to make your ship lively. What’s your problem?”

  The three looked pained, but could not come up with an answer.

  “Do we really want a strange computer,” the woman finally said slowly, “messing with our ships when we can see hostiles closing on us, ma’am?”

  Kris let out a heavy sigh. “I would prefer not to be doing surgery on the ships under my command at a time like this, yes. But, I’d rather risk modifying your ship on the run to you not being able to jink enough when we come under fire. Nelly has never broken a ship she’s worked a quick fix on. And she’s finished the job in plenty of times. If you want any expectations for you and your crew to live through this day, get to work on your jets.”

  Faced with Kris’s flat out threat, the three captains folded and in a moment, no ships were red on the board. Kris closed down the comm link and flopped back into her comfortable chair.

  “What gives?” she demanded of the overhead. “I spend five years at a desk and suddenly everyone forgets the king calls me his fightingest captain.”

  For a long moment, no one around her said anything. Jacques, the sociologist finally broke the silence before it bent totally out of shape.

  “Kris, when you were on the other side of the galaxy, killing the universal enemy, everyone could cheer you on . . . and then go home to watch something on the telly. Now, you’ve spent the last five years fighting tooth and nail with some of the powers-that-be here at home. People have taken sides. Some are for you, some against, and others just want you to stay far, far away from them and their own private garden. You see what I’m getting at?”

  Kris suppressed a snort. “It’s easier to worship a war goddess if she stays up on a pedestal on some far away mountain.”

  “You got it. But you came down off your mountain and got your own lovely hands muddy right alongside of them.”

  “And now I’m not so special.”

  “Your old man must have told you about not paying too much attention to the making of sausage or the passing of laws.”

  “Too many times,” Kris admitted.

  “Well, guess whose hand were jamming stuff into the sausage maker, right along with the rest of us sweaty mortals?”

  “Mine, huh?”

  “You definitely. Those three poor captains have been listening to their bosses and being good skippers. Then you toss out their god, no, all their gods, and climb up on their still warm but vacant pedestal. There’s bound to be culture shock.

  “Damn,” Kris said. “You got any suggestions, Jacques?”

  He shook his head. “None better than you’re already doing. Put the spurs to them and get what you need to keep all of us innocent bystanders from being blown to little atoms. You’ve done it before.”

  “Yes,” Kris said, then glanced Jack’s way. He gave her an encouraging smile.

  “I hope none of you object too much to me getting you and your kids in the middle of this brawl,” she said to all.

  Amanda gave a lovely shrug, followed by a glorious smile. “You kept us alive long enough to have the little darlings. I trust you to continue the same miracle at least until we can attend the hellions’ college graduation.”

  That got a laugh.

  Kris wished she could spend a few moments with her kids. The buzzing had already started in her bones. The tension would be there until Jack held her. She’d likely need half an hour at the close of this day.

  Assuming this day ever ends.

  Until she could approach the kids calmly and lovingly, it was best she let them live in their own world with gramma and grampa close at hand, sure in the love and security of their mom and dad.

  Kris sighed. It was time to get this battle on the road.

  Chapter 18

  As Kris expected, the first item on the action plan she soon received from her chief of staff and subordinate commanders was to spin up every ship in the fleet to combat revolutions. A laser hit was bad news for any ship, but if it was spinning at twenty revolutions a minute, the hit would not stay over one part of the skin long enough to burn through.

  The battlecruisers had an extra advantage. Using their Smart MetalTM hide, they could spin just the outer shell of the ship and let everyone inside stay steady. Still, strange things happened in battle and Kris wanted every ship in her fleet to be able to get a full twenty revolutions on the boat hull as well as the skin in case it was needed.

  She started by taking the squadron slowly from Condition Able, or love boat configuration as some old salts called it, to Condition Baker, then Charlie and only lastly to Condition Zed. Now the ships were shrunk down to a cozy fit. There was little elbow room but they were a much smaller target with lots of thick armor.

  That done, Kris ordered five revolutions slowly put on the outer skin of the hull. BatRon 13 had no trouble going smoothly up to five. In the other three battlecruiser squadrons, matters did not go quite so smoothly. A modification here, an adjustment there had sent protrusions from the internal hull into the external armor. Spinning the outer skin around such bumps did not go well.

  “Admiral,” Commodore Ajax said. “May I suggest we cancel this drill and let my damage control officers get with the other damage control teams and exchange a few good ideas?”

  “A good suggestion, Commodore. How long do you think they will need?”

  “Give us fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll see you in fifteen,” Kris said.

  She spent the time going over the proposed training plan that the Chief of Staff had prepared. It was good; she saw little to add to it, and signed off on it, sending copies to all the ships in her fleet.

  Ten minutes later, Ajax advised Kris that the fleet should be ready to attempt the revolution drill again. This time they gradually went up to five revolutions for the outer hull armor and then added five to the ship.

  When that went smoothly, Kris took them up to ten on both. That was when problems developed with entire ships getting out of balance and throwing their crew about. It seemed that their outer hull wasn’t quite the same all around the hull. Defense station made fine adjustments on the precise thickness of the armor.

  Kris did her best to suppress a scowl. On Alwa Station, problems like this would have been addressed before the ship left the yard.

  It wasn’t just Smart MetalTM that needed to be balanced around the ship. Minor problems could be handled by moving reaction mass from one tank to another, but if all the heavy frozen food was on one side of the ship and the lighter fresh vegetables and fruit were on another, you would need more than reaction mass to balance your ship at high revolutions.

  Fifteen minutes later after Supply, Damage Control and Defense had put their heads together and done what should have been done when alongside the pier, the ships went up to twenty revolutions. Kris was careful to do it slowly. The Bold, of all ships, developed trouble at sixteen RPMs and had to spin down to nothing to fix it, but the fleet waited for it.

  Once everyone was at twenty and twenty revolutions, Kris ordered them to fill the cooling honeycomb space of the hull with reaction mass. This was directly inboard of their spinning outer skin with the crystal armor that was supposed to slow down incoming laser fire, spread it out along the entire ship’s hull and radiate it back out to space.

  The crystal did that most effectively, but it often heated up quite a bit in the process. The inner cooling skin had proved itself critical to survival in combat. Keeping everything balanced while spinning the outer hull sounded easy, but it was an easy that only came with practice. Close to an hour later, the entire combination of spinning crystal armor and cooling honeycomb layer flowing with reaction mass were all balanced and shipshape.

  All of this should have been done in the first twenty
-four to forty-eight hours after this fleet departed High Wardhaven Station. All of this should have been taken in to consideration when stowing stores aboard warships like these. Kris found it very frustrating and revealing. Her escort had sailed unfit for a fight. This alone was a damn good reason to relieve a certain vice admiral.

  “Now, at least we’re looking more like a battle-ready fleet and less like a fancy-dressed honor guard,” Kris growled.

  Of course, no doubt if Kris asked, she’d be told all the problems came from moving Smart MetalTM around to shrink the jets and then make them large again. After due consideration, Kris decided to keep her angry questions to herself.

  The ships mended their problems and all were up to forty RPMs on the outer skin and another twenty on the entire ship four hours from the start of the drill. Now, any hostile laser fire would be aiming for a moving target.

  Gunnery practice was next on the list. It was Kris’s experience that burn through could come a lot faster on a hostile target if she aimed two, three or even four lasers at the same place on a ship’s hull. That much heat in one small space could be devastating, even to a ship with twenty rpms on the hull.

  However, to focus three lasers on one spot 200,000 klicks away required precise gun laying. That frequently meant modifying the laser cradles to a much tighter tolerance than most builders’ yards were willing to do because it cost time and time was money. Smart MetalTM allowed gunnery departments to make that type of adjustments to their own batteries. Every ship on Alwa station did that as a matter of course.

  Back home, not so much.

  Kris would see that it was done now.

  The fleet launched target drones; the small rockets were all motors and communications. Kris ordered them out to 200,000 kilometers. There, they spread out a web of dumb metal large enough to produce the silhouette of a battlecruiser.

  “Targets are out,” the chief of staff announced on net.

  “You may order the exercise to begin,” Kris answered.

  “Fleet, take your target under fire,” Captain Tosan ordered.

  The large screen on the flag bridge immediately reported that every ship had ceased acceleration, turned to port or starboard to bring their forward batteries to bear and opened fire. There was no way to tell this from the outside visuals. Unless a laser passed through something or hit it, there was nothing to see.

  However, on Kris’s boards were the names of her battlecruisers and representations of the silhouettes of their targets. Immediately, the drones began to report hits; they were reflected on the silhouettes beside the ship’s name. The targets were being hit; not nearly as much as Kris wanted. And few of the hits were anywhere close to each other.

  Worse, a major portion of the fleet was slow getting off their second salvo. Slower still, on their third. The exception, each time, was BatRon 13. Ajax had seen to it that her ships were dialed in and well-drilled in gunnery.

  “Cease fire, if you will, Captain.”

  The chief of staff passed along the order and the fleet grew quiet.

  “Commodore Ajax, your BatRon 13 is outstanding. Could you please have your Gunnery Officers get in contact with all the other ships and pass along any software or hardware adjustments that helped with your fine score.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Ajax said, and the fleet went to work.

  Lasers that had been delivered by their manufacturers loose in their cradles and not tightened down by the builder, (after all, the guns were government furnished equipment, correcting someone else’s fault wasn’t in their contract,) now were finally braced into place, with all wiggle room removed.

  They wouldn’t stay that way. Any ship that maneuvered hard in space bent and bowed. Maybe not much, but just enough to loosen the lasers and their cradles. Just enough so they couldn’t hit the same spot on a ship 200,000 klicks in the distance. No doubt, if the battle went long, the Gunnery Division would have to retighten them during a pause in battle.

  Two hours later, they were ready to resume gunnery practice. The targets were once more intact. Dumb metal could be ordered to adjust itself twice before it became a mist of unrelated atoms on the third try. Kris had almost died when someone gave her a nice new water craft that she thought was Smart MetalTM but wasn’t. She ended up a rapidly flooding river valley without a boat, much less a paddle.

  The drones directed their targets to fill out and again presented a full-sized battlecruiser to shoot at.

  “Captain Tosan, you may order the practice to begin again,” Kris said.

  In a moment, the order was given and the targets began to report. Twenty-four inch and 22-inch lasers began to make overlapping hits. Usually, the overlaps were enough to show that three hits had been made. Where BatRon 13 was concerned, some of the targets took only four nice, round hits. Either the other eight lasers had missed, or BatRon13's lasers were smoking the target with three lasers making a single, perfectly round twenty-four-inch hole.

  Gunnery was more accurate this time. Speed for reloading and taking aim at their targets was another matter.

  Nelly provided salvo statistics to Kris. BatRon 13 had succeeded in getting out two volleys every minute. Several of the ships, including Princess Royal, and Ajax’s flag, Intrepid, were two of the three that managed an eleventh salvo in five minutes.

  The other ships had not done nearly as well. In the five minute shoot, BatRon 13's ships had gotten off eighty-two total salvos. The best other ship, the Sovereign, almost matched BatRon 13, nine in five minutes. Three ships got off eight. Most of the rest were split between seven and six. Two had trailed at five.

  “Accuracy seems to be better this time,” Kris said when Captain Tosan ordered the cease fire. “I expect every captain to see that their Gunnery Division drills until our fire time is much better across the board.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Captain Tosan said.

  “Captain, you may now shoot the drones,” Kris ordered.

  A minute later, the last of BatRon 13's drones was vapor. Three minutes later, only three ships were still trying to hit the small package that controlled the target. After waiting another minute, Kris ordered Intrepid and Princess Royal to join in the straggling shoot. They each got one more drone before a straggler managed to take out its target.

  Clearly, if it came to a fight any time soon, Kris’s squadrons would not be equal in their lethality. Kris awarded a Gunnery E to all of BatRon 13's ships as well as Sovereign.

  Kris also ordered dry gunnery drills. Lots of dry gunnery drills. “On Alwa Station, we regularly fired our lasers four times a minute. All Gunnery Officers will review the reports from Alwa and examine ways to apply their rapid fire procedures to our ships.” Kris could almost hear the groans. The gun crews would be drilling and drilling and drilling. The engineers as well. It took juice from the reactors to charge a laser. A lot of work hadn’t been done here.

  Done with gunnery, Kris ordered, “Take the fleet back to Condition Able. If our interloping Iteeche have not noticed how small we got, there’s no reason to give them more time to spot us.”

  “What’s next?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know about you, but my stomach is growling. Let’s call it a day and get some chow.”

  Lunch had been sandwiches brought up to the flag bridge and wolfed down without Kris taking her eyes off the screens. Supper would be a bit more civilized.

  The wardroom was not quite your usual affair. They had civilians aboard, so not everyone was in uniform . . . and they had children underfoot. These tiny to small red-suited figures seemed to be everywhere. Kris knew exactly how many short people they had aboard, but they still managed to make themselves look like a full invasion force.

  Ruth went down the steam tables like a lady, standing close to her mother and doing everything she did. Johnnie was another matter. Jack took him in tow and saw to it that his plate had more on it than ham and cheese.

  As they settled at a table with Amanda and Jack’s two children, the kids took
over the conversation.

  “I’ve never seen a ship shrink,” Ruth said.

  “I knew they could, but I didn’t think I’d ever see one,” Peter Pierre added.

  “I saw it,” Johnnie insisted. “I was swimming and they blew a whistle and made us all get out of the pool. I was last,” he tended to dawdle on the best of days. On any of them, he hated to be bossed, “I looked back and the pool just went away. It went away! Will it be back tomorrow?”

  “Yes, Dear,” Kris said. “The ship is already just the way it was.”

  “That’s good,” Johnnie said, and nibbled at a string bean, eating it a few millimeters per bite.

  “Mother, is there a problem?” Ruth asked.

  Kris eyed her daughter. At six, there was no fear in her eyes, but rather curiosity.

  “Yes, we’ve gotten a surprise,” Jack answered for Kris. “But it’s nothing your mom and dad can’t handle.”

  Ruth nodded. “Good,” and attacked her mashed potatoes.

  Peter Pierre and little Lily had watched their friends as they interrogated their parents. They seemed satisfied with the answer and they and their parents returned to eating.

  I’m glad they’re all confident. I sure wish I was, Kris reflected, and set to eating her own meal.

  Chapter 19

  The next morning started early. Kris awoke to Jack softly stroking her back. They took the first moments of the day for themselves before showering and dressing. Normally the nannies took care of the children’s morning routine, although Kris occasionally stepped in. Today, she did. Ruth dressed herself; Johnnie insisted on taking care of himself, too, but the sleeves on the ship suit got all balled up and he allowed his mommy to help “a little bit.”

  They trooped down to breakfast in the wardroom and made the first seating. Done, Ruth insisted on giving mommy a kiss, and when Kris stooped for Ruth, she got a hug and a kiss from Johnnie, too. Kris watched as two nannies herded them and several other kids off to play.

  “You’re worried,” Jack whispered as they turned to their duties.