After the first salvos were exchanged, the battlecruisers flipped ship to bring their aft batteries to bear.
Ruth studied that operation very seriously. “Momma, could you replay that?”
“What part?”
“The part where the ships swing around to bring their bow guns to bear, then flip over to bring the aft ones. I’d always thought you stayed on the same course while you did that, but you didn’t.”
“No, honey. The lasers can be swung fifteen degrees up, down, or sideways. We coordinate the flip ship maneuver with both the gunners and defense. That way, as we flip ship, we change our course enough to throw off the other sides’ fire solution. Momma does her best not to be there when the lasers aimed at her ship arrive where she was headed.”
“And they don’t,” Ruth said, pointing at the larger force, of which nearly half was falling out of the exercise. “Did the smaller force really get ten hits on nearly half of the larger force?”
“Yes, dear. Remember, battlecruisers fire twelve lasers in their forward batteries. If all ten hit, that’s it for the ship.”
“But momma, aren’t the other ships dodging like your ships do?”
“No, honey, they aren’t.”
“Why?”
“The Iteeche go into battle standing at their battle stations.”
“Why?”
Kris chuckled, and Ruthie grinned back. They both knew this game well and enjoyed playing it.
“The Iteeche are standing at their battle stations because the Iteeche have gone into battle standing up for ten thousand years, and they refuse to change.”
“That’s stupid,” Ruth said, frowning.
“Yes, honey, but the Iteeche can learn. Every one of the ships in the large force watched how quickly they were destroyed and how few of the smaller force got hit. They all asked to have our new systems installed and to have high gee stations.”
“Like my egg?” Ruth asked with the enthusiasm that only a six-year-old can bring to a question.
“Something like your egg,” Kris admitted, now wanting to bring a six-year-old mind into the battle of how much tech to give the Iteeche, how much of it would leak to the rebels and how much to you hold on to.
“Now, I’m told that lunch is ready. Mac and cheese for you, corn dogs for your brother.”
“And sundaes afterward!” Ruth made sure to point out.
Gramma Trouble watched the fleet sail away from the station and quickly form itself into divisions, squadrons, flotillas and wings. The kids watched from the observation deck at the end of the pier. The bulkhead and the deck were perfectly clear. The kids could see everything.
They watched the ships drift away quietly. Somewhere else on the observation deck, a three-year-old was throwing a full-fledged tantrum, complete with throwing themselves on the deck and kicking it, while pounding small fists as well. “I want my daddy! I want my daddy!” was the child’s battle cry.
Gramma Trouble slipped Ruthie’s hand into her own, but the six-year-old followed her great-great-grandmother to where a mortified woman tried to calm her child.
Gramma Trouble began by soothing the mother. “Every time the fleet sails, there’s at least one little one that can’t understand. In years to come, you’ll look back on this and laugh.”
“How many years?” the mother answered, dejection in her words.
“Probably quite a few,” the senior Ruth admitted.
Meanwhile, little Ruthie had introduced herself to a five-year-old boy who looked like he was hoping the deck would open up and let his entire family fall out into space.
Little Ruth and the older brother sat down around the little sister and slowly slid her into a hug, the three of them together. Ruth talked about going swimming in the embassy pool. Both of the kids loved that. Ruth promised them a swim when they got back, and even an ice cream treat as well.
“We had ice cream for lunch,” the boy explained.
“That doesn’t matter, we’ll have an ice cream treat after we swim,” Ruth said.
“You can do that?”
“I’m a Longknife. We do what we have to do, and you two need more ice cream,” Ruth said, authoritatively.
That seemed to settle it for them, though their mother eyed Gramma Ruth in horror.
“I told you, everything would work out,” Gramma Ruth said. “Now, we’ve got to get these kids down the beanstalk and into the swimming pool.”
The mother just nodded. Grampa Trouble arrived with Johnnie, and the seven of them began to make their way toward the station rig that waited for them. The young wife was more than a bit taken aback to board an electric cart with a blue flag and five white stars on it, but the kids didn’t notice, so, for at least today, that was one thing that didn’t matter.
14
Kris lead her armada into the Zargoth system. It took quite a lot of time to move over 3,300 ships carefully through a jump, especially since half of them were merchant ships that had demonstrated on the voyage out that they had trouble maintaining acceleration and their proper station in formation.
Kris had held the acceleration to 1.25 gees. That was hard on the settlers, but let the human Marines in Admiral Kitano’s First Battlecruiser Task Force drill and exercise at extra weight.
Once through the jump, Kris had the warships put on 2.5 gees and headed for the target planet while the freighters closed the planet at a more comfortable .75 gees. She wanted her battlecruisers over the planet well before the rebels expected an invasion. Kris had little to build on, given that most of the Iteeche battlecruisers carried no Marines, but could only form an untrained landing force.
Being human, Grand Admiral Longknife offered the Iteeche a chance to surrender. She promised all of them their lives. That was an offer that got a lot of heat from Admiral Coth, but Kris did it anyway.
She need not have bothered.
There was no response. Kris might as well have been talking to the murderous alien space raiders.
Kris learned to keep Captain Quinn Sung, her new intel chief as close to her elbow as she had kept Penny. Between Quinn, Megan, and Nelly, of course, her brood studied everything they could get off the planet and reported it to Kris in stand-up meetings on her flag bridge as the target planet grew on the view screen.
“We’ve been monitoring their airwaves,” Quinn reported. “Mostly, the stations are playing martial music and showing videos of courageous civilians throwing themselves on rather stupid soldiers. In every instance, the soldiers die. About half the time, civilians live through the experience.”
“Don’t you just hate it when the trained soldiers are so dumb,” Jack said, drolly.
“Still,” Megan said, “when the civilians do die, they do it gloriously and to a swelling choral arrangement.”
“All the better to welcome them to whatever afterlife they expect,” Kris said with a sigh at the government-sponsored lie.
“I wonder how many of the population are swallowing this bull,” Kris said.
“There’s no way to tell,” Megan said.
“Most of our sensors have been applied,” Quinn said, “to helping Nelly and her brood search for the planets’ clan overlord and his court. The people of the capital are staying off the streets. When they go out, they do it furtively, quickly, and alone. No groups of more than three. Likely that’s the law, but we haven’t seen a lot of enforcers on the streets. The palace doesn’t even have that much going on. It’s like a ghost town.”
“No activity at all in the place,” Megan said. “No signal intelligence. No movement in or out. No energy signatures. It’s a ghost town.”
“I have been searching,” Nelly put in, “for a site or sites, among the huddled population, where there was still activity. We have identified six of them to date.”
Once the fleet went into orbit, longboats probed the outer atmosphere, swatting down surface-to-air missiles, and getting better signal intel, while dropping off drones which, in turn could be reformed into scout nano
s. The six interesting sites were quickly infiltrated and mapped while the defenses were measured, and the occupants fingerprinted.
“We have our first report on the six active sites,” Quinn reported. “We think we’ve found the one with the clan elite for the planet. They’re buried well underground so that lazing them from orbit would hardly raise a sweat. However, a mole in a hole can be easily isolated.”
“I can think of several ways to attack this problem,” Kris said.
“The challenge is which one will work best and kill the least?” Jack added.
“Lazing the entire complex from orbit might melt the mountain above the redoubt into a molten capstone over the top of it,” Quinn said, “but the complex runs deep, and the lower precinct might not be touched. We have already identified several escape tunnels that lead to hidden exits miles away from the mountain. We can hit them also, but if we miss even one, they’re out of there and running.”
“There is also a strong suspicion among Coth’s intel staff,” Megan said, “that the six redoubts might be connected with deeply dug maglev trains.”
“That would turn the situation into a whack-a-mole game,” Jack pointed out.
“We still haven’t gotten to the lower levels of the complexes we’re investigating,” Nelly pointed out. “The places are a maze and it’s taking a lot of time for our nano scouts to map it.
“Also,” Quinn reported, “As yet, our nanos have not located the Planetary Overlord and his closest subordinates. The senior clan officials are also off the map. Clearly, there are many more layers to dig through.”
“Have the long boats run more sweeps,” Kris ordered. “We need to kill more SAMs and locate more of the local search radars if we intend to run a drop mission. They can also drop more drones and nanos while they’re at it.”
One report on intel gathered turned into a discussion of what to do when they found the local high muckety-mucks. “You remember the time we took down a space station by causing an air fueled explosion using the nanos as dust?” Jack said. “Get the right mixture of tiny partials, a spark, and WHOOP! Walls get blown out. Lungs get exploded from the inside. It’s a great way to take out a large space.”
That got stares from most of those on the flag bridge.
“Nelly, explain,” Kris said.
“Historically, when miners dug deep into mountains to extract coal, they had to make sure coal dust was not allowed to collect. If they didn’t, the dust could ignite and explode, killing a lot of miners. It still is that way with grain silos. If you get too much dust in the air and a spark, you’ll be chasing pieces of silo over the next five counties.”
“So, we could use nanos to actually explode the tunnels?” Megan asked.
“Yep. We’d need a lot of nanos, but we could do it.”
“The question is,” Jack said, “just how big is this redoubt? Also, how compartmentalized is it? Would one explosion do the trick? If not, how many?”
“I have my own favorite trick up my sleeve,” Kris said, “though this one is borrowed.”
“What’s that?” Jack asked.
“For Ruthie’s first Christmas, we actually managed to arrange for a real family get-together. Of course, to keep Grampa Al happy, it had to be at his ‘Tower of Insecurity’.”
“Oh, right,” Jack said, scowling at the memory.
“As luck would have it,” Kris said, going on with the story, “one of his competitors chose that moment to launch a real killer attack on dear old grampa. They managed to get a flock of nanos up to the top floor. First, they ate out the windows of his private quarters. Then, if we hadn’t been there, they would have eaten the meat off his bones.”
“It might have worked,” Jack said, “but we were visiting with one cute little baby and two very magnificent computers.
Now Nelly got into the story. “Sal and I commandeered all the Smart MetalTM in the art work, office equipment, everything possible, and reformed them into defender nanos.”
“It was quite a fight,” Jack said. “Way too close, but while Nelly was defending us, she also managed to identify the location of the mobile command center controlling the attack. A Marine detachment closed them down in the nick of time.”
“And through it all,” Kris pointed out, smiling, “Ruthie giggled and cooed, showing early the proper Longknife attitude toward assassins.”
“Do you intend to repeat that attack?” Jack asked.
“No, I’d rather arrange for it to be done with more finesse. How about we have the nanos only eat out the heart of the clan leaders, leaving an identifiable body to be filmed and broadcasted to the people of Zargoth? It might also be an ice breaker for the next couple of planets on our hit list. Anyone think it will be a conversation starter?”
“Eat their hearts out?” Quinn said, kind of squeamishly. “They warned me about working for you Longknifes.”
“Sorry, Captain, but I’d rather kill just the right culprits and leave the rest of the people to pick up the pieces. So, keep me appraised of developments.”
The apparent invasion fleet was half-way to the planet when Captain Sung and Lieutenant Megan Longknife reported that they’d fully mapped all six redoubts. Probably for political reasons, all the powers that be were in one of them, running things together with the bigger fish looking over the smaller fishes' shoulders and the biggest fish making sure no one was nibbling at his tail.
It was time to decapitate this rebel planet.
15
Or maybe not.
Grand Admiral Kris Longknife knew things had hit a snag when she got a look at the long faces on Megan and Quinn as they entered the wardroom while their admiral was eating supper that evening.
Neither turned toward the food line, but instead headed straight for her and Jack.
Kris kept buttering a roll, meticulously, and way past what it needed, until the two of them settled into the seats across the table from her.
“You two look like somebody stole your puppy and you don’t want to tell your momma your favorite Christmas present is gone ‘cause you know she won’t like having her nice day messed with.”
“Well, since you put it that way, we could always wait and mess up your day tomorrow, over breakfast,” Megan offered, through false cheer.
Quinn looked at the young lieutenant as if she had lost her mind. Megan had been with Kris longer and knew how these kinds of talks went. Quinn would learn soon enough.
“Spill it, folks,” Jack said. “We really didn’t want to sleep tonight.”
“The boss guys of Zargoth are messing with us,” Megan said. “Or, more likely, they don’t want us messing with them.”
“How so?” Kris said, and decided that roll might as well have a bite taken out of it. It was quite tasty, she discovered.
“They’re closing up all six of their redoubts tight as a tick,” Megan reported. “They’re even welding the entrances shut. They’ve put covers on all air intakes and welded them shut as well. We’ve got nanos checking on the emergency exits we’ve identified. It will be an hour before we know for sure if they’re also being welded shut, but I doubt they’ll miss them,”
“It sounds like someone has let the rebels know about that little nano infestation that follows us around,” Jack said, cutting into his meatloaf.
Kris tried one of the sautéed red potatoes on her plate and mulled the situation as she chewed. “I wonder who passed the word to the rebels about our nanos. The Don’sum’Wo clan head worked with my ‘loyal’ Nuu Enterprises boss man to scatter nanos so they could take me down. But then, the way we marched through the Chap’sum’We clan’s palace wasn’t exactly subtle.”
“These people aren’t dumb,” Jack pointed out.
“So,” Kris said. “Megan, I’m sure you’ve told Quinn that I don’t mind having my dinner ruined so long as the bearer of the lousy news also comes bearing solutions. Talk to me.”
“Well, Kris, we think we’ve got a way around this,” the lieutenant said, almos
t cheerfully. “All we need is a company of Marines, a platoon of Combat Engineers, and a couple of unique supplies.”
“Talk to me, Lieutenant.”
“It also involves me and the captain here leading the drop mission.”
Kris frowned at the young woman, but Jack spoke before she could.
“Have you been drinking too much of the Longknife Kool-Aid, kid? It’s taken me years to break this woman from her habit of gleefully rushing into suicidal missions. Have I got to start locking you up in your quarters?”
“Hey, that royal blood thing doesn’t cover me,” Megan insisted.
“Great Grampa Ray is somewhere at the bottom of your family tree,” Kris pointed out, way too placidly. “Thus, the security chief of any activity you’re attached to has the right to veto any hair-brained stunt and, if necessary, lock you up.”
Megan eyed her two flag officers like they were something the cat hacked up. “You never mentioned this before,” she said, accusingly.
“You never said anything about going off to get yourself killed, before,” Jack shot back.
“I’d really appreciate Megan coming along,” Quinn said, sounding a whole lot less sure of herself than the average four-striper. Of course, there were a whole lot of stars on the other side of the table.
“Okay, Megan. Why do you need to go?” Jack asked.
“I need to get my head into their computer system,” the lieutenant answered quickly and firmly. “I expect we’ll need Lily if we’re going to pull off this coup de main. With me and Lily, it could be a walk in the park. Without us, I think the mission should be scrubbed. Without the mission, a whole lot of innocent bystanders are going to be dead by sundown tomorrow.”
Kris could not count the number of times an argument just like that had been her response to Jack when he questioned one of her hair-brained stunts. Cutting down on the butcher’s bill was always a winning argument. Still, it was a bit of a shock to find herself on the other side of the table from some young, optimistic, and enthusiastic Longknife so willing to race out and get herself killed.
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