“I understand we are going into another battle,” announced Professor mFumbo, following Vicky’s team onto the bridge.
“You want to get off?” Kris asked.
“If I wanted off this tub, I would have left before these mad scientists jump-started the reactor. No, I’m not leaving, but do we really have to be confined to bed?”
“Afraid so,” Drago cut in. “Unless you like the idea of standing around at three times your own weight, maybe more, I’d suggest you get in bed. A nice soft one.”
mFumbo scowled. “Could we at least see what’s going on?”
“Won’t be much to see, but I’ll send you the picture,” Drago said, and ordered his quartermaster to get the scientists off his neck. With quick efficiency, the Wasp prepared to get under way. Today, some things were different. Kris’s station came up as a fire-control post. Vicky’s high-gee station next to hers had all the readouts of Kris’s. Just none of the active controls.
Captain Krätz settled into a high-gee couch next to Captain Drago’s station. The State Security colonel was parked at the rear of the bridge, where he could see everything and touch nothing. He had two Marines behind him and Gunny in front.
Jack took position closer to Kris, where he could keep an eye on all of the strangers aboard. With a glint in his eye, he looked ready for anything.
Exactly thirty minutes from when Captain Drago said he could get the Wasp under way in a half hour, the pier tie-downs began to rattle backward, and the Wasp smartly backed away from the dock.
“Nelly, start an intercept clock,” Kris ordered. A clock before her began to count down. The initial display was 3 HR 24 MIN 24.242 SEC, but it quickly changed.
52
For the rest of Kris’s life, she would know exactly when things began to go wrong. And like so many of the things that would go wrong, Kris made the decision herself.
It seemed like a very good idea at the time.
“Stand by for high gee in five minutes,” Captain Drago announced as soon as the Wasp was away from the pier. “If you need more time, holler, but don’t expect to get it,” he finished.
Kris mashed her own commlink. “Professor mFumbo, can your scientists get their best sensors up and running? I want to know everything I can about that ship. If its reactors burp every five minutes, I want to know.”
“We were expecting this call, Your Highness. Our people should have everything we have online well before our captain starts putting on weight. You can count on us.”
“Thank you, Professor, I expected I could.”
Beside Kris, Vicky had a strange look on her face. “Courtesy, huh. Does it work?”
“When you have the best people who can think for themselves, honey is a whole lot better than a baseball bat.”
Which left Vicky with a thoughtful look.
“Captain Drago, do we gain anything by putting on more than 2.5 gees. I understand the Wasp was only tested up to there.”
“That, sadly, is true. Sulwan, could you please calculate two intercept courses. One at 2.5, the other at 3.2.”
Two lines appeared on the main screen, showing close encounters for both accelerations. “If we intercept and damage them closer to Birridas, we need to do more damage to their engines, but they have less time to repair them or correct course. Farther back, they have more time to effect repairs, but they are farther off course for a collision.”
Kris studied the lines and the tables. While the distance was measured in millions of kilometers, it didn’t really seem to matter all that much on the cosmic scale of things.
“Captain, it’s your call, but pushing the Wasp above 2.5 gees doesn’t seem to gain me anything.”
The captain said, “2.5 it is.” There might have been a hint of a sigh behind his words, but Kris was too busy with her next question to be sure.
“Captain, do we gain any advantage by being under acceleration when we actually make the flyby of the Tourin?”
“Help me follow your thinking, Your Highness.”
“Our closing speed is going to be nothing short of breathtaking. We’re going to have to track that ship while firing at close to maximum range. Any wobble could be the difference between hitting it and missing. Between hitting the aiming point and slashing the ship somewhere that could start catastrophic failure for the people aboard.”
The captain was nodding before Kris was half-done. “Sulwan, can we go from 2.5 gee to zero acceleration?”
“I don’t see any reason why not. Though I’d like to practice it at least once before we do it.”
“How long would you need to make sure the ship was rock steady?” Kris asked the navigator.
“A minute, two to be on the safe side.” Sulwan glanced at the screen with its expected tracks to flyby. “Three today.”
“Sounds good to me,” the captain said.
“One more thing,” Kris said.
“You are just full of questions, Your Highness,” the captain said, but his eyes were on his board, monitoring the Wasp’s departure from High Birridas at a full gee.
“Chief Beni said I’d have as much as 1.5 seconds at close encounter to shoot. The pulse lasers have a maximum range of forty thousand kilometers. Was he assuming that I’d be firing at them for eighty thousand klicks, both coming and going?”
“Yes,” Nelly said. “With the Wasp slowing down on its approach, you may have as much as 1.76 seconds to fire.”
“Captain Drago, how much can you swivel the laser mounts from dead ahead?” Kris asked.
“Hardly at all. Fifteen degrees to right or left. Battery 1 and 2 have an up thirty degrees. Battery 3 and 4 a down thirty. We can’t rotate the batteries to follow the Tourin.”
“Can we rotate ship?” Kris asked.
“Of course,” came back immediately.
“How fast?”
All eyes turned to Sulwan. “Usually it takes a second or two. I hit the jets to get us going. When we get there, I hit the opposite jets to stop us.”
“And if you use the jets the full time you’re starting and stopping?” Kris asked.
“That’s in the book under DON’T NORMALLY THINK ABOUT IT. You’ve only got so much fuel for the reaction jets.”
“How much fuel do we have?”
“We’re pretty much topped off. If we have to load more, it’s a manual job.”
“We could do it after the flyby,” the captain said.
“Let’s plan on it,” Kris said.
“High gee in one minute,” the quartermaster announced.
“Bridge crew, let’s get cracking,” Captain Drago said.
Kris turned back to her board. “Nelly, show me the stern rocket engines of the Tourin.” They appeared on Kris’s board.
“Now, assuming I fire two lasers at thirty thousand klicks from close encounter, what kind of an angle could I get on those jets?”
A red wash swept over the right side of the rocket engines, cutting the two outer ones off at their tops, the next three in their middles, and even taking a nip out of the four inners.
“That’s optimum?” Kris said.
“Yes,” Nelly said. “We would need all the luck in the world to pull that off.” Beside Kris, Vicky raised an eyebrow.
“Nelly’s been reading fiction for several years now. It makes her easier to talk to.”
“Makes you easier to understand,” the computer added.
“Assuming I fire two more lasers at thirty thousand klicks, or as soon as we can get the Wasp settled down after a flip, what kind of damage can I do to the left side?”
The red wash now took out most of that side.
“Assuming we have all the luck in the world,” Vicky said.
“Assuming,” Kris agreed.
“Is it always like this?” Vicky asked.
“Always like what?”
“Your planning. You start with one plan. Bounce it around among your team, get it better, then have some others look at it, and it keeps getting better.”
Kris thought for a moment. “It was like this at Wardhaven.” Then Kris remembered her audience and cut off the longer explanation. “At Chance, your brother didn’t give us a lot of time to plan.”
“Do you think he’d be alive if he had?” came across as an honest question.
“I really don’t know. I tried and tried to talk him down. He had a captain with him, just like you do, but he was the commodore, and I understand Captain Slovo spent the first half of the battle in the brig.”
“Poor planning on my brother’s part.”
“And part of the reason you’re an ensign.”
“That’s the story of my life, doing penance for my brother’s sins. What about on Eden, did you plan for that?”
“Not for any of the things you threw my way. Those were run-and-shoot, shoot-and-run affairs.”
“I didn’t do any planning,” Vicky said, shaking her head thoughtfully. “Just hired whoever I could find available. Very poor planning on my part.”
“I hope you aren’t thinking of having me plan your next assassination attempt on me,” Kris said, trying to make it into a joke . . . but only half of one.
“No. I’m sorry, Kris. I’m not ever planning another attack on you.” But she left unsaid whom she might be planning for.
And Kris doubted Vicky’s promise of peace between the two of them would hold up in a court of law.
They were less than thirty minutes from intercept when a boffin called up to the bridge.
“Are you aware the target is rotating?”
“No, we weren’t,” Kris said.
“Kind of hard to tell, but there’s a dull part on the ship. We clock it as coming by about every fifty-six seconds. That puppy is making 3.2457 gees acceleration and rotating about every minute. God help the passenger that tries to get up and walk.”
“Send me your data,” Kris said. “That may have an impact on my targeting the lasers.”
“It’s on its way, Miss Longknife.”
Vicky gave Kris a look. “Miss Longknife?”
“With the mad scientists, I can never tell what they’re going to call me. My father cut back long-term research this budget, and half of them aren’t talking to me at all.”
“So it’s not all crumpets and cream on Wardhaven.”
“I never told you it was.”
“I don’t know if the Tourin is having trouble keeping up its acceleration,” Nelly said, “or if your boffins are giving me better data, but it appears the acceleration is falling a bit.”
“What about the rotation?” Kris asked.
“If I was a bunch of gomers,” Captain Drago said, “flying a ship into a planet, I’d put on rotation. Right, Captain Krätz?”
“Yes, we should have expected it. By rotating the ship, they don’t have to correct for any rocket engine that can’t quite keep up the demanded thrust. Just as an arrow spins to balance any wobble in its flight.”
“So now we don’t know exactly which way is down for the stern when we hit it,” Vicky said.
“I should have mentioned that,” Kris said. “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That’s what makes sure that all our planning doesn’t make life boring for us.”
Once again, the Peterwald heir looked lost in thought.
With a sigh, Kris said, “Let’s see what our last ace can give us.” She tapped her commlink.
“Mr. Prometheus, we think we’ve found your son.”
The former official of Xanadu came up on Kris’s display. Behind him, she could just make out cramped scientist’s quarters. “Where do you think my son is?” the father pleaded.
“Diving a loaded starliner into a planet at about .03 the speed of light,” Kris said. “When he hits, there’ll be an explosion like a trillion tons of dynamite.”
The man said something that might have been a prayer or a curse for an Abdicationist. It meant nothing to Kris. “What can I do?” he said.
“In half an hour, I’ll try to shoot the engines out of the ship. Could you say something to him that would make him change his mind, slow his ship, turn away from the planet?”
“I will try.”
Kris turned the man over to the comm chief on the Wasp, an old chief with kids of his own. The two hit it off. In five minutes, a message for Lucifer was on its way to the Tourin.
Fifteen minutes later, a reply came back. There was no question it was laced with curses. “You have thrown yourself against the Guides. You are no better than a nonbeliever. Your eyeballs should be boiled in blood with all the heretics.”
“Should I pass this to his father?” the comm chief asked.
Kris shook her head. “The man’s hurting enough. This won’t help. If he asks, tell him we’re still waiting.”
At Kris’s elbow, Vicky took a sip of water from her high-gee station before whispering, “So Longknifes do lie.”
Kris rotated her shoulders, trying to make the padding just right for a body that suddenly weighed over 250 kilos. “Yeah, sometimes I’d rather lie to an old man than tell him the truth. Next time you hear tell of a Peterwald lie, see if it does as much good as my last one.”
Vicky said nothing to that.
The clock on Kris’s station counted down the last five minutes. The target ship was one of the brightest stars on the screen. Their encounter would be very soon.
53
“Four minutes to close encounter,” the quartermaster said.
“Cut acceleration,” the captain ordered.
Kris went from near three hundred kilos to weighing nothing.
Vicky grabbed for the burp bag, held it clamped to her mouth for a while, then put it aside, still looking green.
The State Security colonel filled his bag. Gunny handed him another and it was half-filled before he finished.
Kris took in normal life out of the corner of her eye. She concentrated on the reports from the Wasp’s inertial platform.
“We are steady,” Sulwan reported.
“All hands,” the captain announced, “where you are is where you will stay. Do not even think of moving.” The inertial platform reported the Wasp steady to the tenth decimal place.
“Rotate Batteries 3 and 4 to minus thirty,” Kris ordered. The lasers on the bottom of the Wasp angled themselves down as far as they could. “Rotate ship up thirty.”
Now the Wasp herself nosed up 30 degrees, bringing the lower two batteries zero on to the approaching liner. When it came time to flip ship during the precious second fragments the Tourin was in range, the Wasp would only have to do 150 degrees.
The actual close encounter would happen too fast for human participation. Kris, Nelly, and Vicky had gone over and over the actual plans for that fleeting second. Those plans were laid into the computer . . . waiting.
When it came time to execute, only Nelly could do it fast enough. Nelly would fire the two lower batteries. Nelly would rotate the ship, using full power throughout the spin, as Sulwan had approved. Nelly would fire the top two lasers up the kilt of the departing liner.
Humans decided what to do, but Nelly would do it.
Except that Kris had a red button under her palm.
At the first sign that the plan had gone awry, Kris would mash the button. And Nelly would find she had no plans to execute. Probably, Nelly wouldn’t remember she’d ever had a plan. With Nelly, you could never tell.
No question, Kris would remember that there had been a plan and that she had aborted it for some reason. Or had tried to abort it. Could something pass from her eye, to her brain to her hand to the red button in anything like the time they had?
She would find out soon enough.
The distance to the Tourin now counted down at a mad pace. The millions of klicks passed in reasonable time. When the count reached hundreds of thousands, the numbers raced. The last five hundred thousand klicks passed in a breath.
Kris quit breathing as the count passed a hundred thousand.
If Kris had to call it, Batteries 3 and 4 fired at
a range of thirty-five to thirty thousand klicks.
Then the ship began to flip like a mad dervish.
She fought dizziness but refused to close her eyes.
The Wasp steadied for less than a heartbeat. Lasers 1 and 2 fired.
The Tourin raced on, seeming untouched by their efforts, unmarred by the lasers’ caresses.
Kris’s eyes widened at the thought of total failure.
A spark shot out from the liner. A split second later, the ship seemed to twist off its long axis.
Then, in the blink of an eye there was nothing left of the liner and five thousand human beings but glowing dust cooling through red and yellow into violets and blue.
“Holy God,” someone whispered on the bridge.
Kris sat there.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over with,” came from the back of the bridge, no doubt the State Security colonel’s opinion.
From around Kris’s neck, a suddenly little girl’s voice asked, “Kris, did I just kill five thousand people?”
What could Kris tell her computer?
“I’m sorry, Kris,” Vicky said, reaching out to stroke Kris’s elbow. “But it’s not your fault. You did everything you could not to have this happen.”
“Did I?” Kris said, then mashed her commlink. “Everyone who’s been following this last evolution, save all your data. There will be an inquiry into it.”
“Whose?” Vicky asked.
“Mine,” Kris snapped. “Captain Drago, if you will, put one gee on this boat to help with saving data.”
“Sulwan, one gee if you please.”
Kris took on weight and stood. “Captain Drago. Captain Krätz, Jack.” Kris looked around and found faces missing. She tapped her commlink. “Colonel Cortez, Penny, and Abby, please report to my Tac Room. Professor mFumbo, you come, too.”
“Yes” and “As you wish” answered her commlink. “Why?” came on the bridge from Captain Drago.
“Because I am sick and tired of hearing that a Longknife did this or that or the other, all during the same supposed whatever. I’m tired of not knowing who did what to whom. This time, so help me God, I’m going to know just exactly what happened, and if Peterwald State Security wants to say one thing and Wardhaven intelligence patches together another story, at least I will know the truth. You understand me?”
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