Kris Longknife's Replacement: Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station

by Mike Shepherd

  “Three.”

  “Tell our long-tailed friends to select three convenient meeting places for the five or six of them and we will pick them up. The next meeting will take place in orbit. Amanda, Jacques, do you have some photos of what Viceregal pomp and circumstances might look like on this planet?”

  The two exchanged glances, then grinned from ear to ear. “Yes, ma’am. Are you thinking of decking the Relentless out like a seriously pompous feline palace?” Jacques asked.

  “I’m thinking about doing something serious to the bow on Kiel Station’s A Deck. Mimzy, how about you and your family doing some real interesting Smart Metal remodeling,” Sandy said.

  “Mother was just talking to us kids before she left about how you humans weren’t really taking advantage of all that Smart Metal allowed. We have some ideas.”

  “Take a look at what passes for the best in feline palaces, then surprise me with what you can do. Use the meteorite catcher on Kiel Station to add whatever you want to A Deck.”

  Every ship had a reinforced bow to catch the dust that littered space. Now that Kiel Station was no more to travel the void, it hardly needed a dust catcher.

  “How far can we extend it?” came from Jacques’s computer.

  “As much as you want, just so long as it’s safe,” Sandy said firmly.

  “Oh, it will be safe.”

  Sandy probably should have added a few more guidelines and restrictions. In her own defense, she would later point out, she was just getting used to working with super computers that inherited the Magnificent Nelly’s sense of humor and grandiosity.

  Clearly, she had a lot to learn.

  Chapter 26

  Sandy’s lunch at her desk the next day was interrupted by Penny. “Admiral, you might want to see what Mimzy and the gang have done to the forward section of Kiel Station.”

  Said admiral put down her sandwich, first bite not yet taken, and eyed her chief intelligence officer for alien life forms. “And just why must I see what your computers have done before I host our fine furry friends this evening? How are preparations going for the sit-down supper?”

  “They’re going fine, ma’am, although I still think that your tummy is in for an unpleasant surprise. They take their meat raw, you know, and the closer to the bone, the better.”

  Sandy’s stomach did lurch at the visual, but she held herself steady. “If we are to be allies, we will have to accommodate each other. Certainly, sharing a meal is the least we can do.”

  “If you say so, ma’am, but don’t be surprised if the cats pass on your dinner invite. They don’t much care for the smell of our burned meat and I, for one, will be eating my steak medium well.”

  Sandy had been given this warning several times. She’d just have to wait and see how it all went down.

  “Now, about Kiel’s forward section?”

  “Yes, ma’am. You’ve really got to see it to believe it.”

  So, on an empty stomach, Sandy followed Penny up to Kiel Station’s A deck. It didn’t look all that different.

  “We’ve sprouted a small pier here forward,” Penny explained. “We’ll have the admiral’s barges dock on them, so it will be a short walk to your Viceregal palace. We intend to line the pier and stairs up to A Deck with Marines in dress blues and reds. They’ll also mark off this red carpet for our honored guests.”

  Here, the Smart MetalTM of the deck had been fluffed up into a extra-wide and very red carpet. Said carpet led to wide double doors in what had previously been the forward bulkhead of the station.

  Two Marines opened what had the appearance of magnificent blond-oak doors. There were carved panels in each door showing hunting scenes. Duck shooting and riding to the hounds was something Sandy was at least mildly familiar with, but there were also panels devoted to hunting boar with spears, taking down huge cattle with lances and bow deer hunting. A couple of panels even showed several forms of fishing.

  The doors were tall and wide. They had plenty of room for panels.

  How atavistic, but not a bad hint to our new friends of where we come from.

  Sandy stepped through the door and nearly had to grab for the door jam.

  “Damn,” was all she could whisper as she fought vertigo.

  “Yeah,” Penny whispered back.

  A portable space station and dock traveled condensed down tight. Only when you needed it did it expanded out into a full-size base. In theory, Sandy knew that the fully operational Kiel Station had a circumference of two kilometers. Most days, it didn’t matter. A Deck might have a tall overhead, but there was B Deck and a whole lot above it. The horizon was always just a short walk away.

  Suddenly, Sandy was staring up at the entire length of A Deck as it wrapped around itself and came back to meet her. Now on A Deck it was a good quarter kilometer of grassy plain before you got to the forward bulkhead. It was that forward bulkhead that stole Sandy’s breath away. It was as transparent as glass. The admiral stared straight out at the void of space, sprinkled with the occasional star. Five hundred kilometers beneath them, Sasquan showed in all the blues, greens and other colors of a living planet.

  “I wonder if the cats have ever seen how small their planet looks like from up here?” Penny whispered.

  “If not, they are in for an experience.”

  Slowly, Sandy took in all that Nelly’s kids had done, and it did take a while. This end of A Deck now looked very much like a wide, grassy savannah. Here and there it was dotted by clumps of trees and flowing water.

  “I wonder how they’re going to take to looking up two klicks to see a water fall falling up,” Penny said, through a grin.

  “As I said, they are in for an experience.”

  As if the deck above and the void before Sandy was not enough, as she walked out into the quarter klick or so of grasslands between the wide doors and the bubble at the bow, her eyes were drawn back to what the computers had done to the actual bulkhead of the station. Now, starting some ten meters above A Deck was a huge circular mirror that stretched for almost the rest of the two kilometers before petering out ten meters from the A Deck again.

  It reflected back the stars and even had a view of half of Sasquan rotating around it.

  Sandy again had to pause. She fixed her gaze on a clump of trees where a table stood waiting and held herself very still while her inner ear adjusted to what was going on around it.

  “Wow,” she said.

  “Aren’t you glad you’re getting adjusted to this now, and not when you’ve got cats at your elbow?” Penny said.

  “Yes. Speaking of having someone at an elbow, we might want to have each of our guests have someone at their elbow. I’d planned to wait for them at the table, but I think I’d better greet them as they exit the barges. You and Masao, me and Admiral Drago.” Sandy paused for a second. “Amanda and Jacques. Yes, that will do it. Let’s have the cats get used to us having men at our negotiating table. I’m not sure I like their one sex rules it all kind of way.”

  “More changes?” Penny said.

  “If these six can’t stand the heat, they need to get out of the kitchen.”

  “I’ve heard that advice before,” the intel chief answered.

  “Oh, you better warn General Bruce. I suspect his Marines that provide the honor guard from here to the table will need to get acclimatized as well.”

  “He’s got The Word. He’ll have them up here in an hour.”

  “Right, his computer is monitoring your computer and knows what we’re doing, right.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sandy frowned for a moment. “How does Masao take to having your relationship on net?”

  “Mimzy knows that we humans need our privacy, and I have a lovely tea cup that she fits into just perfectly at times.”

  “I hate that tea cup,” Mimzy said. “When have I ever told on you? I’m not nearly as bad as my mother. What she does to Kris Longknife is a pure scandal.”

  “There are some real joys to having a
Nelly class computer,” Penny said, grinning.

  “I can’t say that I haven’t been warned,” Sandy muttered, only half to herself. “Oh, and Penny, thanks for the heads up. I never would have thought that my, ah . . .”

  “Turning us loose to surprise you,” Mimzy suggested.

  “Just so,” Sandy said. “You most definitely have surprised me. Oh, and this is safe?”

  “We can patch any hole with no problem, but don’t worry. It would take a major hit before you’d even knew it happened.”

  “Thank you, Mimzy,” Sandy said. “Thank you and all of your siblings. This should certainly impress our visitors from down below.”

  Chapter 27

  Sandy’s plan to surprise the cats got off to a rocky start. The cats had a surprise of their own. The five or six world leaders turned into ten and they wanted to bring along staff, advisors and, in a few cases, opposition leaders as observers. That raised the total to something like sixty cats all told.

  Grand Admiral Sandy Santiago frowned at this development, then added three liberty launches to the transportation mission and drafted General Bruce and three more officers, balanced by sex, into her greeting committee.

  She made sure all of them were in spidersilks. “I don’t know how this is going to go down, but I don’t want any human blood on the deck.”

  “Understood, Admiral,” Penny said. “Oh, should I expand the table?”

  Sandy got a cat-that-got-way-too-much-cream grin on her face. “Nope. We’ll do it while they’re looking.”

  “After all they will have seen before they get to the table, how impressive will that be?”

  Sandy shrugged. “They don’t know that we threw this get up all together in a day, do they?”

  “No,” Penny said, stretching out the two letters. “You may have a point.”

  Sandy still had the admiral’s barges dock at the small pier. The liberty launches with the mob got a more plebeian greeting at a new dock a quarter kilometer up A Deck. Sandy expected that to add to the fun.

  It did.

  The meet and greet at the dock went as Sandy planned. She paired off with President Almar, Admiral Drago offered Madame Gerrot an arm. She gave it a puzzled look. When he raised his elbow a bit, she got the idea and slipped her own arm in his. Down the line, the other men did likewise to the female cat they were assigned to.

  The walk down the red carpet, up the short stairs to A Deck, and then down more red carpet toward the waiting double doors started smoothly, then came to a sudden halt.

  President Almar caught sight of her staff people walking down toward them on the round A Deck.

  “What?”

  “Space has no gravity,” Sandy said. “You may have noticed as your barge came in to dock, that you seemed lightheaded for a bit.”

  Almar glanced around. “Some of us were rather disturbed.”

  “We did our best to make sure you were either under the gees of acceleration or docked with only a very brief time in free fall. We had our best pilots taking care of you.”

  “Thank you,” seemed to have a lot of “I think,” appended to it non-verbally. “Some of my scientists told me something like this. I don’t think I believed them until now.”

  Sandy went on with her explanation. “This space station is huge. It rotates slowly and the centripetal force gives us a sense of down. There are some problems with that down, for example, you are looking up at people that seem to be walking down from the overhead who feel that down is directly under them. Here, where we stand, down seems directly under us. If you could see through the decks of the station to this deck on the opposite side of the station, people would be upside down, but feeling a quite strong sense that they had a solid down.”

  President Almar spared one more glance at the approaching staff, and dismissed them only to eye the Marines.

  “You have a lot of your warriors around us, are you expecting a problem?”

  “This is not a security detail, but rather an honor guard. They are in their most formal dress. If they were truly soldiering, you would likely not even see them.”

  “On a plain as open as this?”

  “Yes,” Sandy said.

  President Almar looked around, as if to catch sight of a hidden warrior.

  Sandy wondered if General Bruce had any Marine raiders in full scout camouflage, but she hadn’t asked and didn’t feel a need to know just now. They were coming to the end of the red carpet.

  For a moment, she and President Almar examined the carved door.

  “Exquisite carving,” Prime Minister Gerrot said from behind them. “I should like to hire the artist.”

  “Yes, I had it made up yesterday just for this visit,” Sandy said.

  President Almar’s head snapped around to frown at Sandy.

  “I had all of this done yesterday just for this meeting. The artist drew on examples of how we hunted in our earlier years. I am told, some still do.”

  “No doubt,” the president said cautiously.

  At that moment, two Marines stepped forward, grabbed the bronze handles and pulled the doors open. Beyond it was a two hundred and fifty meter walk over grass that waved in a soft wind to a wooded glade where stood a heavy wooden table not unlike the one Sandy had met with them before. A waterfall thirty meters high cascaded down from pool to pool to form a small pond beside the silvan glade.

  Behind that familiar sight loomed the dark of space. In it hung stars, and one huge chunk of a lovely green and blue planet.

  “By my ancestors,” President Almar muttered, to be joined by “Sweet Goddess,” from the prime minister behind Sandy. There were other exclamations as well.

  “Shall we enter?” Sandy invited. “You might want to rest a hand on my shoulder?”

  “Why?”

  “You just might.”

  The president didn’t need to be urged on twice. She rested one paw on Sandy’s shoulder, and, uttering a soft prayer that the spidersilk armor was as good as its advertising, Sandy and the cat took a step forward. And a second.

  Almar froze. The paw on Sandy’s shoulder sprouted four long claws that dug into her dress blues. Fortunately, the spidersilk held, and the backing did its job of hardening behind it. The claws could get no purchase. Instead, out of the corner of her eye, Sandy saw the paw rise up on her shoulder, claws extended but going nowhere.

  “By my ancestors, I have seen nothing like this,” the president muttered softly.

  “What has the goddess done? Where is the goddess?” Prime Minister Gerrot whispered.

  “This is how we view worlds,” Sandy said. “They are part of a vast universe, nurturing us with their life. You may notice that from up here, you can see no political boundaries. It is all just one world.”

  “Al, you said that these star walkers had changed us about as much as they could.”

  “Yes.”

  “You still think that?”

  “I would love for some of my senators and representatives to see this view. Admiral, could you arrange for a regular ferry service up here?”

  “That is certainly something to consider. As you can see, we have plenty of room for what we call restaurants.”

  “I know a few food providers who would love to set up shop with this kind of a view.”

  “We humans will want a few places for ourselves.”

  “It may surprise you, but we do have some dispensers who know how to burn meat. There have long been a few that feasted that way. It has been catching on since your Kris Longknife’s last visit. It turns out that meat is easier to digest after it has been warmed enough. Those old crazy health nuts were right.”

  “Now, let us move forward so others can experience this sight.”

  “Yes, yes, we should,” President Almar said, looking over her shoulder to where many of the extra sixty were being held back by Marines. “I would strongly suggest to all of you that you take a warrior’s arm before you walk out here. It is not an easy sight.”

  Nonpl
used advisors quickly submitted to taking the arm of a Marine, be they male or female human, and the procession to the negotiation and dinner table got back underway. It was not without incident.

  One cat lost bowel control and the humans discovered just how aromatic cat droppings were. No surprise, General Bruce was ready for this. A Marine quickly scooped up the mess and made it disappear.

  Two cats lost their lunch. This also was quickly cleaned up. All three chastened felines were helped back to the confines of the more normal A Deck, there to await the return of their sisters.

  With a lot of oohing and aahing and not a few calls on divine intervention, the procession made it to the table.

  “I see you were not prepared for our delegation to grow. It was a last-minute decision on the part of our new colleagues and we felt it better to accommodate them, even at the risk of inconveniencing you.”

  “It is no inconvenience,” Sandy said. “Mimzy, would you please grow the table. Will ten be enough places for you? Do some of your advisors want places at the table?”

  “No, they will stand behind.”

  “No need for them to stand. We can provide chairs for all of them,” and without another word from Sandy, the table moved forward, out of the alcove created by the trees and pond, into the savanna. As it moved, it lengthened, providing space for ten cats on one side and as many humans on the other. Between Sandy and the table, fifty-seven chairs, with proper holes in the back for tails, rose out of the grass.

  Another cat dropped a dump.

  “You can do this, like some warlock out of a nurse’s story to scare little children to stay in bed?” asked an incredulous Madame Gerrot.

  “I can do this because of our science,” Sandy replied. “We have a saying. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Since you do not have the technology, it looks like magic. I have this technology and use it every day.”

  “The goddess must walk in your train,” Madame Gerrot said, reverently.

  “Please do not speak of goddesses or magic,” Sandy repeated. “We control more of the universe than you do, but we still stand in awe of what we do not yet understand. Wouldn’t your ancestors who sailed your seas in ships of wood and sail find your steamships amazing works of magic? What about your aircraft?”