They might fire off. Then again, they might not. On third thought, they might fire up if she looked at them hard.
It crossed Kris’s mind that they might do to burn Nelly’s matrix into something the aliens would never recognize. She found her hands trembling. It couldn’t be at the thought of her own impending death. Or Nelly’s. It had to be the exertion of dragging Jack through the mud and up the hill.
Yeah, that was it.
She found a flare gun . . . and tossed it aside. She had enough drawing her pursuers after her; she didn’t need to send up a flare.
“Kris, I’ve got the colonel on net calling for you,” Nelly announced.
“Tell him where we are.”
“He wants you to send up a rocket or light off a flare.”
“The flare I can do,” Kris said. She set Jack down gently, then just as gently lifted the clump of flares out of the yellow sack. Keeping them at arm’s length, she stepped off several paces. Deftly separating one out from the melted mass, she pulled off the top.
Nothing happened.
She tossed it aside and risked a second flare from the glob. When she flipped its top off, it fizzled for a second . . . and then went out.
“This is not working,” she grumbled. She decided to flip the tops off both the remaining flares. Both came off.
One just lay in her hand. The other started to fizzle. It kept fizzling, neither turning into a full light nor going out. Kris made a face at the two failures of one sort or another in her hand and figured she couldn’t do much worse.
“Don’t you dare,” Jack said.
But Kris was already tipping the fizzling flare over and pointing its small stream of fire into the dead one.
It caught.
The fire would have taken Kris’s hand off if not for the flight gloves. However, inside the glove, her hand felt like it had been parboiled. Still, the flare shone bright as its manufacturer ever hoped it would.
“They see us,” Nelly said.
“Oh, Kris, what am I ever going to do with you?” Jack said with a sigh.
“The flare is lit,” Kris yipped, trying to shake the pain from her hand. “We are spotted. We’re going to get rescued. And someone will put some ointment on my burn. What are you griping about?”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “Nothing you’re likely to listen to.”
Two landers came toward them. One was low and breaking for a landing in front of them. The other was higher. It fired as it crossed over them. Its rockets flew past them and vanished beyond the ridge.
And were quickly followed by a huge explosion that kept on going for most of a minute. “I’d say that got the antimatter pod and the underwing armament,” Kris said.
“And those aliens that were following us,” Nelly said. “Two of their gun rigs were stopped, looking at the GAC. Two others were headed for us. Not anymore.”
Kris waved as the lander came to a halt. From its aft ramp, two gun trucks full of Marines drove out and hightailed it across the dusty yellow plain toward the two downed flyers. Behind them, they left a plume in the thin air that might have mattered if the lander’s sister hadn’t settled a lot of alien hash.
Three minutes later, under the alert eye of a gunner at a rocket launcher, a medic was bagging Kris’s burned hand. Something in the bag made the pain go away. She relaxed into the backseat of the gun truck as it made best speed for the lander.
“Another day, and I’m not dead yet,” she muttered.
“Not for a lack of trying,” Jack added.
“We stopped the Marines from landing into a trap,” Kris pointed out.
“What is it with these jokers?” Jack asked no one in particular. “They won’t talk to us. They cram all sorts of armament into a small little mining outpost, and did I mention, they won’t say a word to us.”
“I think you did, Jack,” Kris said. Another try at talking to them and another complete failure. Another encounter and another fight. What was it with these people?
She was about to go to war with an entire alien race, and she had no idea why. Or what they were. Or what they wanted.
Well, she did know something. They didn’t want to talk. And they wanted her dead. Her and anyone else they met.
This was crazy.
An observation that she was pretty sure her grampa Ray had made several times as he fought the Iteeche.
The takeoff run gave Kris a good look at the alien site. It boiled like an active volcano. Of the two buildings, not a stick remained. Of the people who had rushed out to defend it, not so much as a single body. The rock ran like flaming lava from the pounding it had taken from Greenfeld lasers.
The flight back to the Wasp was short and silent.
40
The Wasp had already broken orbit by the time Kris got back to the bridge.
“Prepare for high-gee acceleration,” Sulwan announced from the navigator’s chair.
“Let’s get to that jump point,” Captain Drago said. “We’ve wasted enough time on this distraction.”
“Did they get off any warning message?” Kris asked.
“We can’t tell for sure, but they don’t seem to leave message buoys at the jump points. At least, we’ve never seen one,” Drago said. “I checked with the other corvette skippers. None of us saw anything at any of our jumps.”
“So there’s not a web of trade or anything like that,” Kris said.
“Lonely and solitary,” Penny said. “That’s the life they seem to lead.”
The rest of the battle fleet followed the Wasp’s lead, hard acceleration until they were halfway to the jump point, then hard deceleration the rest of the way. Several hours later, the Wasp came to a halt a few kilometers from the jump point and launched the periscope to take a glance through.
“Nothing,” Chief Beni reported once the electromagnetic sensor was through the jump point. “There’s a sun making the usual noises and nothing else. We got here ahead of the hostiles.”
They had won one gamble but must now take another.
If the aliens had beaten them into the system, Kris would very likely have called it quits. There was no way she could risk a long approach course toward the huge mother ship. Kris had to get in position to blast the mother ship, hopefully with its swarm of deployable ships still aboard. Otherwise, those ships, each several times the size of a battleship, would maul Kris’s tiny fleet before it could so much as dent them.
Kris ordered her fleet through the jump into the next system. There, they’d make a mad dash to the jump the aliens would be entering from. If they got there first, they could set up an ambush.
If the aliens came through the jump before they got there, Kris would have to give the order to run for it.
And some very nasty aliens would know there was a starfaring race out here that they should hunt down and destroy.
Well, they’d encountered the Hornet before.
One small scout was one thing. It could be ignored. Eight large battleships would be something else entirely.
Kris led PatRon 10 through the jump, the tiny Hermes trailing only behind the Wasp. For her coming role, she’d need to be up front.
Kris found herself holding her breath.
First Sulwan announced that they were in the system they had aimed for.
Then the chief announced that they had the system to themselves. A few minutes later, he reported that all eight battleships had followed PatRon 10 through and were now in the system.
Only then did Kris take a breath.
Krätz had not turned back. For better or worse, Kris would have all the ships she needed for her tragically tiny ambush.
Once again, she was assaulted by the question. What was it in her that pushed her to take the entire human race to war? Not only the humans, but the Iteeche as well, to war with someone they had never met?
Kris had written in her report to King Raymond that she was doing this to save the avian people. She’d never met one of the bird race. She’d seen pictures br
ought back by the Intrepid . She didn’t know if they were a good people or were just as steeped in evil as the alien mother ship thundering down upon them.
Still, she and her small band of Navy and Marines were willing to risk not only their own lives but the future of their entire race to stop the hostile aliens.
Was it hubris or was it right?
Part of Kris wanted to run home and hide under the bed. She’d done it once, when a soccer game had gone horribly wrong after she’d been so drunk she made a series of stupid blunders. First she fell all over the ball, then she yelled at her team players. Then she screamed at her coach.
When Longknifes screw up, they do it big.
Was she committing the greatest Longknife screwup of all times? Was she about to top even Grampa Ray?
If she kept this up, she’d end up hiding under her bed on the Wasp. Her bunk had pullout storage drawers under it. She’d really have to work to curl up in one of them.
Kris took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Generations from now, they would still be debating what she did here.
Assuming the human race survived long enough to have more generations.
“Captain Drago, take us to the next jump point at best speed,” she ordered.
A moment later, the Wasp began to accelerate smartly to 3.5 gees. Behind her, a tiny fleet followed.
Kris, and the entire human race, were committed to battle.
41
The Wasp was in free fall, but Kris was tightly strapped into a high-gee station chair, as was everyone else on the ship. At any moment, the Wasp might slam into high-acceleration maneuvers; but for now, it drifted in space, making like a rock.
It even looked like a rock. The defensive shield was deployed, but rather than looking like a parasol with a smooth, reflective surface, it was intentionally textured to resemble the surface of an asteroid. An asteroid that rolled gently as it drifted through space.
Nelly had added that bit of realistic artistry.
The other three corvettes of PatRon 10 drifted in a very loose formation around the Wasp, following the general orbit of the jump point. Their defenses also were deployed to make them look like rocks when observed from the nearby jump point.
In the back of Kris’s head a children’s song kept repeating itself annoyingly. “I’m just a little rock asteroid, pay no attention to me.” The words of the ditty were wrong; she didn’t remember how the melody went. But somehow it all fit the situation she found herself in.
While PatRon 10 drifted a scant twelve thousand klicks from the jump point, the eight battleships marched and countermarched in a line some eighty thousand klicks away from where they expected the alien ships to appear. That was close to maximum effective range for the 18- and 16-inch lasers of the battleships. Hopefully, whatever battle lasers the aliens had wouldn’t be all that better at that range.
With any luck, they’d be a lot worse.
In a short while, they’d know.
The Hermes was stationed at the jump point. It was just deploying the periscope. Kris adjusted her Weapons station to get that feed when it produced the first glimpse of what was taking place in the next system.
Kris’s gasp was joined by many others.
The view was of the rear end of the mother ship, so huge it had to be seen to be believed. A hundred (Nelly counted them) monstrous rocket engines blasted away, decelerating the alien ship as it finished its breaking maneuver and came to rest at the jump point. The sight of the roiling engines filled the view, leaving hardly a rim of black space around it.
The picture winked out as the visual periscope was withdrawn and an electromagnetic sensor took its place.
“Do we have an analysis of those engines?” Kris asked.
“Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen,” the chief said. “I’d give my right arm to run a spectrum analysis of what’s coming out of those engines.”
“What’s on your mind, Chief?”
“It might tell us where they got their reaction mass. Also, it might tell us how good they are at recycling. If they’re dumping all their trash and sewage in their reaction mass, then they’re going to need to plunder a planet more often than if they’re green.”
“I don’t think they really care,” Captain Drago said. “Talk to me about what you do know, Chief.”
“There’s an extra huge reactor behind each of those hundred rocket engines, feeding plasma directly into them. There are another several hundred or so reactors, just as huge, distributed along the length and breadth of that monster. What is it, four thousand kilometers long?”
“Something like that,” Kris said.
“Along the surface of that thing there are thousands and thousands of reactors. Maybe tens of thousands of reactors. Smaller, but big. Battleship-size reactors in the tens of thousands.”
“That’s the fleet of big ships Commander Taussig warned us about.”
“Is it too late for us to run away,” the chief almost whimpered.
“Yes, Chief, it’s too late. We either talk or fight. No running,” Kris said. But the feelings in her gut were no different from those the chief must be feeling.
What have I gotten us into?
The time for second thoughts was past. “Battle line. Turn toward the jump. Accelerate toward it, then, on my order flip ship,” she commanded.
The battleships had been ignoring normal orbital ballistics and instead had marched and countermarched eighty thousand klicks from the jump. Sometimes Admiral Krätz was in the lead, then they reversed course, and Admiral Kōta had the honors. Since no one complained, Kris guessed it was working.
As luck would have it, Krätz was currently in the lead. At his order, the battleships did a right turn, in column, and accelerated toward the jump.
Kris watched her board as all the information coming in from the Hermes’s probe reported on the mother ship. It seemed to be just about dead in space, several hundred klicks from the jump. Ponderously, it began to twist in space to bring its bow head on to the jump. The view that they got of its length and width was enough to make a brave man cry.
“I’ve got several of the smaller reactors jacking up power,” Chief Beni announced.
“That would be the scout ships,” Kris said. “So, she is going to send a few scouts through before she comes herself. Chief, I would dearly like to know how many of those huge scout ships we’re going to face.
“Admiral Krätz, would you please flip your battleships and begin decelerating at one-half gee toward the jump,” Kris gently ordered.
“It is done,” the Greenfeld admiral answered.
“Hermes, you may depart the jump.”
“Moving, Commodore,” Lieutenant Song answered.
The tiny courier ship jetted away from the jump, then cut all power and flipped ship, pointing her small silhouette back at the jump point. Then she did something that no courier ships had ever done before. She deployed a tiny Smart MetalTM shield and did her best imitation of a rock.
It wasn’t very thick, but it did cover all her nose . . . and gave her the look of just another asteroid, only this one was clearly headed harmlessly away from the jump.
To give the Hermes even that small a shield, they’d scrounged all the scraps of Smart MetalTM in the fleet. They’d pinched a kilogram off each of the corvettes’ shields. But a large chunk of that shield came from Kris’s new shoes.
Abby had groaned as she plopped the new pair of sparkling high heels down on the wardroom table two mornings back. “You paid a pretty penny for those shoes, Your Highness.”
“And that’s important just now why?” Kris asked.
“You’re all the time complaining about how your ball shoes hurt and why can’t someone come up with a stylish shoe that isn’t torture.”
“I think every woman who’s lived for the last five hundred years has made that complaint,” Penny said.
“Well, these shoes are Smart MetalTM,” Abby crowed. “If you’re dancing or showing
off, they’re stylish. You sitting down, or maybe running for your life, and they’re sensible pumps. Just tell Nelly, and it’s done.”
“Why didn’t you get me a pair of these earlier?” Kris yelped.
“These very shoes are the first sale ever made by the new company, woman. I get them just for you, and what do I get, you giving me lip and demanding to know why I didn’t get them for you yesterday.”
“I don’t think we’ll be going to many dances in the next week,” Penny pointed out.
“But the Hermes does need a shield to hide behind,” Kris agreed. “Turn them in. We need to hide the Hermes a whole lot more than my feet need to be comfortable at the next dance.”
“Assuming they throw a victory ball for us,” Abby said dryly.
So the Hermes now drifted away from the jump. She hid behind her shield’s camouflage and closed down every electronic device on board, making like a hole in space just like the other ships of PatRon 10.
For what seemed like forever, nothing happened. The battleships closed to sixty thousand klicks from the jump and continued breaking. Kris didn’t want them much closer.
But she very much wanted them to look like they were breaking toward the jump when they encountered the hostile aliens.
Kris wanted a lot of things. It didn’t look like the gods of war were going to give her any of them.
“What’s taking those aliens so long?” she muttered.
“Well, we did get here before them,” Captain Drago noted. “They don’t seem to be all that well organized.”
Then an alien ship popped into existence smack dead ahead.
Admiral Krätz’s ships were ranging the jump point, so their lasers and radar hit the ship and bounced off it. The backscatter was picked up by the passive sensors on the Wasp and the other corvettes. It told them a whole lot about the alien ship without them having to make so much as an electronic peep.
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