There were no sweets on his plate. A man of his age could not afford the culinary joys of youth. Being on the point of battle at any moment, he contented himself with green tea.
Satisfied, he retreated to his room for a three-hour nap. He did not allow the worries of the day to delay his sleep, but cleared his mind and fell asleep before he had hardly finished laying down.
In the next watch, he would have to make the hard decision to reduce his fleet to aid Admiral Santiago. The next watch would have plenty of time for that problem to gnaw at him.
27
Grand Admiral Sandy Santiago watched as Admiral Drago’s reinforced fleet slipped through the jump on the far side of the solar system. Due to the speed of light delay, his fleet’s jump had actually taken place the day before.
It was the problem with the speed of light delay that gnawed at Sandy’s gut. It had been a long time since she had heard anything from her two deployed commanders, Admiral Miyoshi’s Second Fleet or Admiral Bethea’s third. She knew it took time for messages to get out through two or three jumps, still, it would be nice to have some reinforcements herself. She looked at the screen. All that was left of Admiral Nottingham’s Sixth fleet were the fourteen battlecruisers from Earth and the Scandia squadron of Norse gods. The Odin and the other eight ships of that squadron were all very experienced veterans. The Earth ships, after a rough start, were working much better.
Still, were they enough?
Problem was, she was far too uninformed for her taste. Her last message from Admiral Miyoshi said he’d arrived at the jump he intended to blockade, and that the aliens were in system but not there yet. Admiral Bethea’s latest had her in the second system out and orbiting the nearest planet to the jump. The aliens had just shot into the system and would need several days to cross to the jump.
Battle was likely also several days away.
Admiral Drago was leading his reinforced Fourth Fleet out to intercept a huge force, hopefully at a jump. It would be a while before she knew if he’d succeeded in blocking the jump or had to fall back.
“If I didn’t believe it was impossible, I’d say that some SOB managed to coordinate a battle across hundreds of light years of space. I’d say someone managed to get me to divide my forces and was going to defeat me in detail.”
My luck can’t be that bad. Can it?
Suzie broke the silence. “Admiral, Penny asks if you can meet with her, Jacques, Amanda, and several of their support staff about the final proposal they’ve gotten from the cats.”
“Tell them I’ll meet them in my day quarters,” Sandy said, and quickly covered the short distance to her quarters.
Her space had been enlarged for the meeting. No doubt, Mimzy had felt free to rearrange Sandy’s spaces, she grumbled to herself, then softened.
Everyone knew she was living in flag plot. Of course, Mimzy knew she could work her magic to prepare for the meeting. Sandy settled into the chair at the end of the table away from the door. In a moment, the chair had changed into a massage unit and was working on a few of the million kinks in her back.
“Stop that, Suzie. Those knots are all that’s holding me together.”
“Yes, Admiral. Sorry, ma’am.”
“That’s okay, Suzie. I just need about a month of R&R.”
Her computer wisely gave Sandy the last word on that. In the few minutes it took Penny and company to come from the banquet hall to her quarters, Sandy found herself nodding off.
I have to get some rest, Sandy scolded herself.
Finally, Penny led the negotiation team into Sandy’s quarters. They looked like they’d been run over by a pack of Alwan elephants, but they were all beaming.
“You look happy,” Sandy said.
“We are. We think we’ve got something that will make you a very happy admiral,” Penny gushed. “I think your comment to the President and Prime Minister that dumping high tech into an economy needed to be a measured choice, won us a lot of this. Still, there were several countries that wanted all the tech immediately, but the President and the Prime Minister were also worrying with Amanda about that. Even Jacques finally convinced them that sudden changes in technology could lead to some really serious culture shocks. Even religion. Personally, I think the arrival of off-world aliens has already done a whale of a lot to upset their culture and they’ve seen this.”
“So?” Sandy asked. “What have you got?”
“Agreement that all of the new high tech will be limited to Gull Island, well away from any shore. They all agree to examine everything arriving and leaving to make sure our tech is strictly quarantined.”
“Personally,” Amanda put in, “I think all of them figure that everyone else will be trying to sneak the tech out to themselves. Nobody trusts anybody.”
“Then how is this working?” Sandy asked.
“They are only going to produce Smart Metal. We won’t have any of the spinners or programmers on the ground. They feed in the raw materials and produce the stuff, load it aboard longboats, and we lift it up here to the station, then send it along to the moon. Only there will our programmers and spinners actually do something high tech to it.”
“They believe that?” Sandy had to ask.
“We offered them a couple two-pound blocks of the stuff, and challenged them to make it into something,” Penny said.
That got a laugh from most of the negotiators in the room.
“They brought up their best scientists,” Amanda said. “Their best computer types. They even brought up several of the cats that had returned from Alwa. They couldn’t so much as make a hammer out of it.”
“Then Penny asked Mimzy to make a model airplane out of one block,” Jacques took over, earning himself a nasty look from his wife. “Okay. Okay, you keep telling the story.”
“No, I think you’ll have more fun with this part.”
“So, Mimzy turns this one kilo block of metal into an airplane. No one looks too excited about it. Then the propeller starts to spin and a moment later, the thing is taxiing for take-off. Then Penny shows them how a hand-held tablet like they have now could be used to get the plane to circle, fly straight, climb and dive.”
“After five minutes of this, President Almar brings the thing in for a landing,” Amanda said, taking the story back over. “It taxis to a stop. The prop quits spinning. Penny says a word to Mimzy . . . and the entire plane folds itself back into a solid block. Just like that,” she said, snapping her finger.
“You’re impressing the natives,” Sandy said to her intel officer.
“I guess so, but it got our point across,” Penny said, beaming and not at all bashful for her parlor trick. “You can make the Smart Metal, but unless you’re just as smart as the metal, it’s just a block of metal.”
“So, tell me what the bottom line is?” Sandy asked. She really would like to get a few hours of sleep. Maybe even eight if no word came in from any of the blocking fleets.
“We will divide the present Smart Metal along this line,” Amanda said. “A hundred thousand tons will be flown down to Gull Island. We’ll program it into a Smart Metal fabrication plant. They will provide all the other support facilities on the island. Housing, roads, water, whatever. All made from local resources.”
“Raw material will be delivered from all the major countries by a set schedule,” Penny said. “All will establish a bond. If there is any default on their deliveries, the cost of filling their order will be taken from that bond. If anyone continues to fail in their delivery schedule, the cats are united in restricting trade with that country.”
Penny shook her head. “This is the first time the cats have done anything like this, coordinating among themselves to resolve conflicts without a fight. They’ve set up arrangements so the countries can deliver what they have an excess of. They even agreed that if someone is having problems delivering, if they give warning and demonstrate that they have a serious problem, they won’t be fined.”
“This is revolutionary
for the cats,” Jacques said. “I think this attack has put some serious fear of the bug-eyed monsters in them.”
“What’s the agreement look like?” Sandy asked.
“The Status of Forces Agreement is over a hundred thousand words,” Penny said. “It goes into a great deal of depth. You’ll need to study that in detail, but we’ve had the fleet’s legal team working with us. They see a few places where we will have to walk carefully, but nothing that is a show-stopper.”
“The Treaty on Technological Transfer and Production for Mutual Defense,” Amanda said, “is even longer. It’s over five hundred thousand words. We have some executive summaries for each of the subsections, but it’s still a monster.”
Sandy surveyed the room. She had never seen so much exhaustion. “Okay, I’m going to make a command decision. I’m tired. You’re tired. I bet the cats are tired. I propose that we all get a good meal, a good bath, and a good nights’ sleep. Eight hours of sleep. Then, we meet back here in the morning. We need to bring in some people who weren’t involved in the negotiations. Hand these monsters over to the Red Team and let them work while you and I are getting some rest and reviewing this with a fine-toothed comb.
“After breakfast, we can meet back here, or in a larger room and start going over what they think you have and what you think you meant to say. Okay?”
There were deep sighs around the room. “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Penny said.
Sandy thanked each of the negotiators personally as they left her day quarters. Done, she turned to her own bath. The wall to her night quarters, which had been pushed back to enlarge the day room, now moved forward to reclaim its space, and more. Sandy found a lovely bath already over half-filled.
“Thank you, Suzie.”
“You’re welcome, Sandy. I’ve got a float you can rest your head in. You won’t drown if you fall asleep.”
“That is a very good idea.”
Sandy stripped and settled into the luxurious bath with a contented sigh. A float did appear. She rested her head on it just as the jets began to massage her tense muscles.
She knew she’d ordered everyone to get a solid meal under their belt, but after an hour of floating in the warm soothing water, the best Sandy could do was stumble to her bed. She was asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.
Still, her last thoughts were of her widely scattered forces. What was keeping Admiral Miyoshi? Wasn’t it about time for Admiral Bethea to make contact with her foe? Admiral Drago would likely arrive at the jump point he was to blockade.
There was so much going on and so little change she could affect right now.
Content she’d done her duty as best as she saw possible, she slept the sleep of the innocent.
28
“What is our enemy doing?” Admiral Miyoshi mused.
“They have made four cruiser raids, tossing or shooting atomics through the jump before sending one, two, or four cruisers through,” Aki, his chief of staff answered, mistaking a rhetorical question for a real one.
“We have made four forays with armed probes to their side. Each gets a more promt response, although they are still much too slow, compared to our way of operating. The last time we sent four probes through in a cluster. They have twenty-seven mines. We have blown up nearly five dozen mines. However, they have replaced every mine we destroyed.”
“So, the score is zero to zero,” Miyoshi said through a scowl. “This is as bad as a kids’ hockey game. A lot of flailing around and chasing after the puck, but nothing is done in the end.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
“Yet, something is done. We are here and Admiral Santiago needs some of us back there, with her, guarding the cats.”
“Yes, sir.”
Admiral Miyoshi bent over the battle board that filled the center of his flag plot. In the middle of it was the jump. A tiny bit of space that some aliens a couple of million years ago had created. He and his fleet were moored, ship to ship, 180,000 kilometers from it. His own set of atomic weapons were much closer, where they could convert the space around the jump into an atomic hell.
So far, they had only fired at some atomic warheads and minor warships.
On the other side of the jump, a dozen or so light years away in another system, was the alien fleet. That force outnumbered him over six to one. They were centered around over one hundred and sixty huge six or seven hundred thousand-ton battleships, with ninety frigates. It was now down to fifty light cruisers guarding their flank.
But they did nothing, just hovered 100,000 kilometers back from the jump. Their crews had to have been weightless for the last five days. That wasn’t adding anything to their combat efficiency. Miyoshi’s own fleet was moored in fourteen trios and a single pair, with each ship swinging around a central point. That gave the sailors at least a sense of down, even with as little as half a gee of gravity.
If the enemy charged the jump, Miyoshi would destroy each ship with either atomic fire or laser blasts. He’d done it before. He’d do it again.
Apparently, someone had survived one of those attacks and had taken the word home that jumps were a lot harder to force than they had been. Thus, the game of two cats facing the mouse hole waiting for the other cat to risk becoming the mouse and jumping into the other’s wide-open fangs.
Just as clear as it was that Miyoshi’s Second Fleet would annihilate the aliens, so it was just as assured that they would wipe his fleet out if he attempted the jump. Each of the hundred and sixty battleships mounted a hundred or more lasers. The last time we humans had fought them, the lasers could reach out 100,000 kilometers. Just as our ships now mounted 22-inch lasers with a range of 200,000 kilometers, one had to assume that the aliens might have extended the range of their lasers.
They had also deployed atomic mines in the space around the jump.
Miyoshi had no chance of successfully engaging the enemy unless they were fool enough to attack, and they were showing that, at least this bunch, had learned to respect what they insisted on calling vermin.
So why tie up his entire forty-four ships on blockade duty here? Why not send some of his fleet back to Grand Admiral Santiago’s reserve?
This raised the question, just how many ships could hold this jump? Would they have to hold it against a few more minor raids, or would the ships that remained here face a serious attack?
Admiral Miyoshi shook his head as he mulled that critical question.
“Admiral Santiago needs ships to replenish her reserve,” he muttered to himself. “We do not need a full fleet to take pot shots at light cruisers.”
“No, sir. But what if they attempt to force the jump with battleships? Last time, they sent four cruisers through in a cluster. What if they attempt us with four battleships in such a cluster? Or in a larger cluster?” Aki responded with questions his admiral found very much in the center of his own conflicted musings.
“We have the atomics,” Miyoshi said. “You and I have both watched as the aliens stormed through a jump and were immolated like moths drawn to a candle’s flame. How many battlecruisers do we need to pick off any of their ships that leak through?”
“It depends on the number of leaks.”
“The force across from us does not have any of the door knockers,” Miyoshi muttered. Most of the alien warships had one or two hundred thousand tons of rock added to their hide, a primitive armor meant to slow down the time it took lasers to burn through into the unprotected inside of a ship. Reactors, lasers, and capacitors tended to explode when hit by hot things like laser beams.
However, the aliens had fielded a larger ship. Door knockers were clearly intended to knock down the door and force a jump. Laser fire took too long to destroy these ships and while the fleet concentrated on them, battleships would have time to make it through the jump and form up into a battle array.
Those million ton monsters, with more rock and fewer reactors, were hard to kill. However, there were none facing him.
Was that evidence of intent?
Did the aliens have no intention of sending their fleet through this jump? Was his fleet being tied up by a fleet that was never intended to fight?
“Aki, can we hold the jump with half of our present force?”
“If the attack is just a probe, yes. If they try probing us with a few battleships, yes. If they send the entire fleet at us? Admiral, I do not know. Could they play a game of cat and mouse, attacking, activating our atomic mines? Pausing. Sending more through before we can reset our defense? I just don’t know, sir.”
“Neither do I, but I can’t just sit here while Admiral Santiago wants for ships in her reserve.”
“Shall I cut the orders?”
“Yes. Send to Admiral Zingi on the Mikasa. I want him to take his task force and return to Sasquan. I will keep my own battle squadron from Musashi, the Phantom and her sisters from New Eden, and the Alwan-built Furious and its divisions. In total, twenty-two battlecruisers. Zingi will take the rest and return to the cats. I know I’m sending him off with the division from the Esperanto League but I think they’ve shown themselves to have fight in them. Besides, he gets the Espania division. The Libertad, Federación Independencia, and Union have shown they fight like ten ships.”
“I will have the orders out in a few minutes, sir,” and Aki went to make his admiral’s order happen.
A few minutes later, Admiral Zingi acknowledged his orders.
“Miyoshi, don’t you go having all the fun here while I’m back with those fur balls.”
“I hope that neither you nor I get to have any fun.”
“You always were the pessimist. I will save a few targets for you.”
Kris Longknife's Successor Page 17