Lost Dawns: A Short Prequel Novel to the Lost Millinnium Trilogy

by Mike Shepherd

  “What is it?” Kris demanded.

  “The draft budget it out,” the lieutenant said, holding up three readers, colored red for top secret.

  Kris scowled. “Three? Is the damn budget so big that one reader can’t hold it all?”

  “No, Admiral, but last year you busted your copy when you tossed it across the room. That cost us a whole day for putting together our rebuttals while I got you another copy. This year I put in for six copies and got three. Please don’t break more than two,” she said with a only slightly hopeful look for her admiral.

  “How bad is it?” Kris growled, advancing on her aide de camp’s desk.

  “I wouldn’t know, ma’am. These copies are coded to your thumb,” was spoken too innocently for a Longknife, even a Longknife from the side of the family that had fled a quarter of the way across the galaxy to Santa Maria.

  “Then why did you ask for six copies and settle for three,” Kris said, taking the top one of the three offered readers.

  “Well, there is talk in the lady’s room and rumors around the halls, if you know the right water coolers to drink at,” Megan said with the tiniest hint of a conspiratorial shrug, which like most any expression, looked good on the young officer. Kris wondered, as she had so many times, if she was looking at an exact reproduction of herself a few years ago, and swallowed a chuckle the budget, no doubt, did not deserve.

  It was good to have Megan back as her flag lieutenant and aide. She’d be sorry to lose her to ship duty, but the gal’s career need a space tour. Still Kris had been overjoyed when she applied for the desk outside Kris’s office. The last lieutenant had been too much in awe of a damn Longknife. Indeed, too much in awe of having a job in the Main Navy building and all the stars and birds that hurried down the halls in self-important haste.

  With any luck, he was enjoying space duty and had many tales to tell of his time close to the big, powerful and self-pretentious.

  What he couldn’t tell anyone about was the secretive junior information network that Meg had taken to like a fish to bourbon. Its existence had gone right over his head.

  Kris ran her thumb through the sensor, then looked into the tiny hole on the side of the reader. Only then did the reading surface area transform from red with a large Top Secret slashed across it and open up to show a comfortable reading white surface.

  The first page announced: Draft Defense Budget, Wardhavan, Top Secret until released to Parliament.

  A flip of the page brought her to the index. No surprises, it had the same budget centers as last year.

  The print was also getting smaller, however. Having spent her 30th birthday bringing John junior into this world, Kris found it hard to believe that her eyes were the problem.

  With a little help from her friends, Kris would ignore this issue for a while longer.

  “Nelly, could you please project the budget on the wall?”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Nelly responded. She’d gotten more nautical in her language since Kris took the desk job. Nelly had been Kris’s computer since her first day of school. Upgraded too many times to count, Nelly was now worth nearly as much as one of Kris’s battlecruisers. She’d also taken to telling bad jokes and arguing with Kris.

  Fortunately, today Nelly appeared to be in a helpful mood.

  In a flick, the long wall in Kris’s office across from the windows transformed itself. The standard bureaucratic beige wall with a copy of a large oil painting of the Battle of System X vanished. Now the first dozen pages of the budget covered the wall. While the reader had security to squelch just this kind of projection, once again, Nelly had circumvented the best Wardhaven had in order to give Kris what she asked for.

  The Executive Summary was short but not sweet. The bitter pill in the last paragraph, the total size of the budget, had way too many zeros and commas in it. That drew a whistle from Megan.

  “Your father’s not going to like the price on this thing,” Kris’s flag lieutenant commented.

  Kris shook her head in agreement. Her father had been the prime minister for about as long as Kris could remember. The brief exception had been an embarrassment to all involved and had involved a major battle where Kris and a hand full of mosquito boats took out a squadron of huge battleships.

  Kris still shivered when she thought of all the luck that went into wining that fight . . . and all the lives that had been lost under her command. It had not been the last time she’d had to look at her own butcher bill.

  There were advantages to commanding a desk.

  “No doubt, the politicians will see that every penny squeaks like a pig as it leaves the public purse,” Kris said, then added pensively. “Where to start. Nelly, bring up the Jump Fortresses.”

  Both Kris and Meg whistled when Nelly made that chapter appear.

  “They’ve doubled their budget again this year,” Med exclaimed. “And they project it doubling again next year and stay that way until the end of the Five Year Plan!”

  Kris cringed at the budget drain; she could outfit a full fleet of battlecruisers for that cost, but the Jump Fortresses were her own fault.

  “I can’t wish I never came up with stationing lasers to guard the jumps,” Kris muttered, shaking her head.

  As commander, Alwa Station, Kris had combined ideas from several good people and figured out a way to keep a dozen battleship-size lasers ready to takeout anything coming through the jumps into the Alwa system. Of course, there, she’d just been after the odd suicide speeder.

  Here on Wardhaven, the government wanted to guard every jump from invasion by a huge alien raiding base ship and its hundred or so half-million ton plus warships.

  Eager to make her father, his government and the people of Wardhaven feel safer, Kris had innocently suggested building small space stations, armed with the new 24-inch lasers some 200,000 kilometers from the jump. They’d need small engines to move them if the jump moved but they shouldn’t cost more than two battleships.

  Or eight battlecruisers as the Battle Force people had pointed out.

  Two years ago, work had started on five fortresses to guard each jump. The forts should have been finished this year.

  Then someone decided if one fortress was nice, two were twice as good for the protection of the electorate. Last year, the budget had doubled to provide for ten forts. The cost of constructing the forts should have come down this year and finished up the next. There was a picture of the first completed fortress on the screen. It was as big around as the space stations Kris had used on Alwa Station, a seven hundred meter across can with thirty 24-inch lasers always pointed at the jump.

  What happened?

  “Oh, good grief,” Megan said, and pointed her wrist unit at one place on the wall.

  Nelly quickly highlighted it.

  “They’re expanding the forts to hold bigger lasers and adding a third fortress at each jump with beam guns!” Megan exclaimed.

  Kris let out a long sigh. Why didn’t I think of that?

  She’d had experience with beam guns. Three beam ships, weighing in at a million tons or more and with reactors to power half a planet, had helped her defeat four alien wolf packs by chipping tiny but horribly heavy darts off of a neutron star.

  The beam ships themselves had been brand new, untried and cranky. One almost blew itself up and a second had to limp home with half of it reduced to junk.

  Still, the idea of stationing beam guns on Jump Fortresses to punch huge holes in incoming alien raiders was a neat idea, assuming they’d refined the equipment and were ready to operate it at a wartime tempo.

  “They’ll need a huge fort,” Kris half muttered to herself, “and they’ll need to be close enough to the jump to spot ships coming through.”

  Kris had stationed her three beam ships around a dead planet a third of an astronomical unit from the neutron star, some 50,000,000 kilometers. It had taken the beam a bit less than three minutes to cover that distance at the speed of light.

  In Kris’s battle
, the neutron star had stayed an unmoving target. A lot could happen, however, in the six minutes or so that it took a beam ship to spot an invasion force and get a beam back at it. Kris would not recommend they used that distance.

  “There is a long discussion of that in the supporting material, Kris,” Nelly said, and the screen changed from pages one though six of the fort chapter to pages 637 through 642. Nelly highlighted two full pages.

  Thank heavens for Nelly, Kris thought as she studied the supporting documents.

  There had been tests, a lot of tests. The 24-inch lasers for the forts had initially been identical to those on battleships and battlecruisers. Somebody had taken that idea and run with it. Since they had huge forts to work with, they’d doubled the length of the lasers, added extra reactors and jacked up the power in the laser and it’s duration.

  All that heat had to go somewhere, and the hulls of the forts were honeycombed with heat sinks for cooling. At least at first, the forts would have huge cooling sails. No doubt, those would be blown away quickly, but if the forts snapped up the incoming alien warships as fast as it could, the sails might still be there after the fight.

  Megan whistled, and Kris did too. “They tested those jacked up lasers against thirty meters of basalt and twenty meters of ice,” Kris whispered.

  The last time she’d fought the aliens, they’d taken to coating their ships with granite. Meters of it. That hadn’t stopped Kris’s Battle Fleet when it aimed to lasers for the same place. These new lasers would punch through more armor than those ships could carry and still have power left to slash through ship’s structure, equipment, crew.

  Kris frowned. “That’s nice, if you want to defend a jump. But what happens if we need to force a jump into hostile space and the bastards have this stuff?” she muttered.

  Meg raised both eyebrows. “It kind of looks like the defense has taken a huge jump over the offense. Do you think this will make war impossible between humans?”

  Kris ran a worried hand through her hair. She’d let it grow longer; it made for some new fun with Jack. She shook her head against that rabbit hole and dodged away from going down it mentally.

  “The ultimate weapon has never stopped humans from fighting. No doubt we’ll be tasked to come up with a way to force our own forts.”

  Kris dumped that into a pigeon hole to mull over in her spare time, of which she now accessional had some, and read the test of concept for the beam fortresses.

  The fortresses would be a kilometer across and five klicks long. They’d chosen to put the beam fortresses about a million kilometers back from each jump. That would give them a bit more than three seconds to know the jump had been breached and three more to do something about it.

  In battle a lot can happen in six seconds.

  Kris stared at the ceiling, seeing the jump into the Alwa system she’d tried to hold but been forced to fall back from.

  The huge half million ton warships were slow to come through. First, the came through a few seconds apart, a safe distance for such ponderous dancing pachyderms, but as more failed to report back on what was on the other side of the jump, the Enlightened Master had gotten more rambunctious with his massive ships and in the end, Kris had watched as they tiptoed through the jump at less than one second intervals.

  Tiptoes was the right word. They had only a few kilometers an hour on their ships and it took time to accelerate something that massive.

  A lot of alien ships died before they could get away from the murder hole.

  Kris considered sixty alien warships trying to force a jump held by 60 supped up 24-inch lasers that could get off three, maybe four shots a minute and shook her head.

  And that was assuming they hadn’t gotten warning from the picket buoys that now stood vigilant at every jump within ten of Wardhaven. Indeed, all of human space was outposted against any surprise arrival.

  No, there would be battleships and battlecruisers out supporting the forts.

  And when the base ship, hulking big like a small moon, came through it would face the beam fortress. Three seconds to spot the intruder, three seconds to study its movements, then another three seconds for the beams to arrive.

  Kris shivered at the thought.

  The beam wasn’t quite like the device that had been found on Santa Maria, a device left behind by the three alien species that built the jump points. Some teenage girls had found the box, opened it and pointed it at a mountain. They weren’t sure exactly what they did, but somehow they activated it and the top three thousand meters of a distant mountain had vanished.

  Just disappeared.

  Humans couldn’t duplicate the vanishing beam. Instead, scientists messing around with the concept had come up with something different.

  Kris had seen the beams focused on a neutron star, focused on it and used to drive off a fifteen-thousand-ton chip hardly the size of the diamond on the engagement ring Jack kept urging her to let him buy. The tiny chip had smashed ships; she had yet to see what happened when the beam was widened and aimed at a structure.

  According to the budget support, that test would be completed in, Kris glanced at her calendar, two weeks.

  “I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for those results,” Kris muttered to herself, maybe see about attending the tests herself.

  She took a deep breath, let it out, and focused on the screen. “Okay, Nelly, enough dodging, what did the budget gods give us this year and how much will it raise my blood pressure.

  Once glance at the Battlecruiser entry and Kris’s frown had degenerated into a full scowl.

  She’d asked for thirty-two of the new battlecruisers: four squadrons of eight ships each. One for Alwa, two for planetary defense and one for long range patrols to spot alien raider incursions before they got too close to human space.

  “We only got twenty-four ships, Kris,” Megan said.

  Kris took in the bad news, found she wasn’t really all that surprised, and sighed. “We’ll have too short someplace or go to six ship squadrons. There are days when I really regretted that I can’t blow something up.”

  Meg gave her boss and encouraging look, and Kris tried to make herself be reasonable.

  “It’s the new 24-inch lasers,” Kris said.

  To handle twenty of them properly, the new design came in at 75,000 tons, a fifty percent jump in displacement. To stay inside the 50,000-ton size of the 22-inch ship, she would have had to cut the number of guns to twelve. A compromise design of 65,000 tons could properly support sixteen. Kris had gone with the bigger ship; she hoped her decision wouldn’t cost some battle commander more than she expected.

  “There’s money in the budget for upgrading twenty-four of the old 22-inch battlecruisers to the new lasers,” Megan said, almost cheerfully.

  Kris nodded. Such an upgrade would have been impossible without the Smart Metal TM. With it, the yards could open the ship up like a fileted ship, remover the old lasers, insert the new ones, add in an extra fusion reactor for more power and zip her back up. Of course, you didn’t get a new battlecruiser for this.

  You still had to add in another 15,000 tons of Smart MetalTM and you could only support sixteen of the new guns. It did, however, give Kris another two dozen ships that could reach out and touch some alien raider at 270,000 klicks.

  Last time Kris had fought the aliens, their lasers had just been starting to reach to 140,000 klicks. They hadn’t been heard from in the last five years. You had to wonder what they were up to.

  “Okay, okay,” Kris said, knowing she was wasting time. She’d been shorted; how bad was it for the Battle Force and Scout Force.

  Before the battlecruiser, those two had been all of the space-going Navy there was. Battle Force designed, built and developed doctrine for the battleships of the fleet. Scout Force did the same for the cruisers and destroyers who did the scouting and escorting of merchant ships when that became necessary.

  In Kris’s opinion, the battlecruisers with big lasers eliminated the need for b
attleships and their fast speed drastically reduced the need for a scouting force. Kris had defended the Alwa System with a fleet of battlecruisers and a small number of auxiliaries. She didn’t see a need for expensive battleships or weak cruisers.

  Unfortunately, Kris didn’t get to make the call on for the entire fleet.

  Nelly flipped the screen to show the section that covered the Battle Force. Megan’s young eyes spotted what Kris was looking for, flinched and made a grab for the red reader.

  Kris spotted the main line items and let out a definitely unprincess like series of expletives. She would have hurled the reader at the wall but Megan had her hands on it.

  For a moment, two Longknifes wrestled for its position.

  “You said I could throw two against the wall,” Kris growled.

  “But we’ve got two whole weeks of working with it, Admiral. If you bust this one, you’ll only have one backup left.

  “But it would feel so good,” Kris grumped.

  The younger Longknife just shook her head. She had no respect for authority.

  At least not the authority of her distant cousin, Admiral, Her Royal Highness Kris Longknife’s.

  But then, Kris had come to recognize that she needed someone loyal who wouldn’t let her walk all over her. Someone beside the budget masters.

  “Okay, Lieutenant, you hold on to the reader and keep it out of harm’s way. Nelly, enlarge that section on battleships. I want to read it from my desk,” Kris said. As she paced towards it, she took off her uniform coat, hung it on a coat rack, sat, and put her feet up on her desk.

  “Now, let’s see how bad it is.”

  32

  Kris Longknife shook her head. “They did it again. He did it again.”

  “Twelve more battleships,” Megan said.

  “Yes, another twelve dinosaurs. Over-weight, over-sized targets that cost four times what a battlecruiser does and needs four times the crew to fight it,” Kris bit out.

  Kris’s battlecruisers carried twenty lasers, all firing forward or aft, with fifteen degrees of wiggle room to aim them. These twelve new battleships would carry twenty-four of the new 24-inch lasers mounted three to a turret, four forward, four aft. The turrets allowed the lasers to fire through 150 degrees away from the long axis of the ships: up, down, right or left.