Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting

by Mike Shepherd

  Kris squeezed her eyes closed. I used this woman to wash my hair!

  And to keep my sorry ass in one piece more times than I want to admit, another part of her pointed out.

  Kris opened her eyes to see the charts spreading apart on the screens. An orange chart formed between the yellow and green. A turquoise one sprouted between the green and yellow. Both of these two compromises went long and used finer print. A few of the folks in chairs against the walls stood to get a better look.

  “When you balance any two against each other, you get a better use of resources.”

  “Mata, show them the seventh seal, I mean seventh option.”

  “Yes, Madame,” Abby’s computer said, and the six charts spread out to make room for a black one in the middle. It filled about a third of the screen space, even with tiny print.

  “This is by no means a final plan,” Abby said. “It’s got too many places where some experts need to look them over and make a good, solid, human call. No offense meant to Nelly or her kids without whom this whole exercise would have taken years and probably not been finished in our lifetimes, right, Mata?”

  “So true, Abby.”

  “You didn’t pull this out of a steamer trunk, did you?” Kris asked Abby.

  “I pulled this out of my own little head, Baby Ducks, my head and a lot of time from Nelly’s kids.”

  “And you didn’t tell me, Nelly?” Kris said.

  “You weren’t asking. I didn’t know that you humans would ever ask. We had time on our hands, and it was a fun exercise in iterative planning,” was Nelly’s answer.

  Kris chose silence as the better part of valor.

  Now people were crowding around the walls, studying the options. Dirtside, Ada must have had some screen available because her people were now crowding around something off to the right.

  “Let me see if I can do this,” Nelly said. You could almost see her tongue working as she attempted something.

  “What kind of ‘this’ are you up to?” Kris asked.

  “Well, I can make clear Smart Metal.” Suddenly, the top of all the tables turned into what looked like a centimeter of clear glass.

  “Now if I can do this,” Nelly said, and numbers and words appeared etched in the glass. In a blink, the etchings filled in with black, duplicating the black option on the screens.

  “That wasn’t so hard,” Nelly said.

  “But on the screen, people can move things around,” Mimzy said at Penny’s collarbone. “What if they want to change a column? Move it over?”

  And a column of numbers on the table changed and moved over to the next apparent page.

  “But what if I want to change my options?” Kris said. “For example, what if I want to double Slow Light Crystals production to armor the ships I’ve got?”

  On the table, the production of Slow Light Armor doubled, and that immediately worked back through the production figures and forward to show the yards taking on more work.

  “Very good,” Kris said.

  “Only if every table has one of my kids working it,” Nelly said, with a distinct sniff.

  “So Abby hangs around her table, and Penny goes over to the Navy side,” Kris said. “And you, Nelly, stay with me.”

  In a moment, each of the tables became a work in progress.

  “I hope someone’s saving all of these options and changes somewhere,” Captain Drago said, coming up on Kris’s elbow.

  “You’re grumpy as ever when you see computers doing good,” Kris said.

  “I just don’t want them doing all this good and it getting lost when someone sneezes.”

  “We’re backing all this up,” Nelly said. “We’ll want you humans to look at some of our assumptions. For example, when we flowed extra crystal armor through the system, we made assumptions about how much time the yards need to coat a frigate with the stuff. That alone is a major process. I think our estimate is within ten percent of actual, but until a yard has done its own estimate, it’s a . . . what do you call it?”

  “Guesstimate,” Admiral Benson said, coming up on Kris’s other side.

  “I know, but I wanted to emphasize it. It’s just a guess until you do the full estimation job,” Nelly said.

  “Hmm,” Benson said. “Now, about that armor and our workload, Admiral. We’ve got more work than you’ve been led to believe.”

  “Admiral, it’s been a really bad day,” Kris warned. “Please don’t make it worse.”

  “Sorry, but here it comes. That armor the Earth yards slapped on their frigates. It ain’t nearly as good as advertised.”

  “No surprise there, I saw three ships that thought they were invincible blown out of space. What’s the problem?”

  “What is it ever? Poor quality control. The front of that armor is level. Mirror flat. The back of the armor, not nearly so much. It seems that the crystal filaments they made don’t grow exactly to ten centimeters. They vary from 98 to 102 millimeters. It’s the mess behind the armor that transmitted heat directly into the ship’s skin.”

  “So that’s what killed them,” Drago said.

  “In spades. Our fabricators have better quality control than Earth’s. Our actual filaments are anywhere from 99 to 101 millimeters, give or take a few nanometers, if you follow my meaning. We’ll have all the armor for one ship use one length filament. Another use another selected batch.”

  “So one ship may have 99 millimeters, another 101,” Kris said.

  “Something like that. We’ve still got the problem of bolting the armor onto the hull. I’m really thinking of nuts and bolts as much as it hurts me to use technology that ancient.” Benson’s face actually looked pained.

  “We need something,” Kris said. “One of the Earth ships in my BatRon 12 was sloughing off its armor at high-gee acceleration. We can’t have that.”

  Pipra came up now on Captain Drago’s blind side. “I hate to tear my CEO away from such fun discussions of how to blow shit up, but I need her thoughts on how to grow more fabs this year so she can have more fun stuff to blow shit up with next year.”

  “Just a second, Pipra. Admiral Benson, is there any chance you could sort out the Earth crystals and standardize the length of the filaments?” Kris asked.

  He was shaking his head before she finished. “The stuff is fused together. No way can we separate it.”

  “So, we figure out a way to cool the hull behind the armor and try to keep the Earth ships out of any really hot spots,” Kris said, dryly.

  “It looks that way.”

  “I’d love to be there when you tell Admiral Yi about his little problem,” Kris said.

  “You want me to save you a seat for the show?” Benson asked.

  “Yes, but no thanks. I have too much business to allow me that pleasure. Now, Pipra, what do you have in mind?”

  “I need workers. Despite what some people think, nothing gets made without workers supervising the fabs. Don’t walk away, Admiral Benson,” she said, reaching across Captain Drago and Kris to nab the admiral’s elbow. “You said you had some Roosters and maybe even some Ostriches who might be good with machinery.”

  “Yes, for my sins, I did let that slip out,” the admiral allowed.

  “Well, some of my folks want to take the Ostriches up on the land grants they talked about giving us humans if we’d just settle in their areas. I don’t know why they want us. Maybe they think that just being close to us, the Roosters have somehow gained on them. Anyway, I got folks who would love to settle some of those 144-hectare land grants, but they’re all working their asses off, twelve hours a day, six days out of seven. You know what I mean.”

  Kris allowed that she did.

  “Heaven knows why everyone wants land, but folks do. At least a lot of my assembly-line folks dream of having their own farm or something. So . . .”

  “You want those land grants,” Kris said.

  “Oh yeah, but that’s just the first part. Folks need time to live on that land. They need homes. I
don’t know if manufactured homes are good enough for them, but even those involve a lot of stuff. To tell you the truth, this has all just been a lot of dreaming about castles in the air, so I don’t really know what they’d need to make a go of it.”

  “Let’s pass them along to some real colonists,” Kris said, smiling at the dirtside team.

  “But even before we do that,” Pipra put in, “they have to have some time off. If you’re doing twelve on and twelve off, you got just enough time to get some chow and some sleep before you’re back on the job. With one day off a week you can’t do much more than roll over in your bunk and go back to sleep.”

  “Now I’m seeing why you grabbed my elbow,” Admiral Benson said.

  “Yeah. With one of your locals shadowing one of my experienced hands, we might be able to change our workforce to twelve and twelve for a week and then a week dirtside. What do you think?”

  “It would be a start to get locals working on the moon when you get some more fabs,” the admiral said.

  “I’m thinking that,” Pipra said, “and maybe with all the automated farm equipment we’ve shipped dirtside, we can get some colonials up here, too.”

  “And if my yards aren’t spinning ships out that we don’t have Sailors to crew, we could put some of my skilled technicians down in your moon fabs, mills, and foundries.”

  “That’s what I’m seeing,” Pipra said.

  “Somebody tell me that getting colonials and Alwans up on the moon, supporting production, will be a good introduction to their becoming reserve Sailors on the ships I hope to get next year, or year after next,” Kris said.

  “If we do this right, you’ll have them sooner,” Benson said.

  “Okay, let me sashay over to the colonials and see what they think about this,” Kris said, and, taking Pipra and Benson by the arm, she walked them down the room to where Ada was busy with her team.

  “Ada, have I got a deal for you,” Kris said.

  The colonial first minister looked away from a screen Kris could now see and smiled. “I was expecting you. Have you seen how this Black Plan is changing?”

  “Nope, I’ve been up to my burning ears in people talk. People and Alwan talk, that is.”

  “Yeah. I figured as much. There’s no way for the folks you have up there to handle all that’s showing up on this plan.”

  “Can you spare us some of your more technically inclined colonials and Alwans?” Kris said, going straight for the heart of things.

  “You’re going to use us as some sort of Christmas turkey, stripping the meat off and leaving just the bone, from the looks of it,” Ada said, not at all happy.

  “That isn’t the way I’d put it,” Kris said.

  “How would you put it, then?” Granny Rita came into the conversation, clearly supporting Ada.

  “If we’re willing to increase butter so that there are more goodies for everyone dirtside,” Kris said, holding up one finger, “and we’re willing to make all this butter available for people willing to work on our growing, high-tech economy, I’m thinking that there’s a lot more turkey meat to go around, and no one gets left with the scraps.”

  “No turkey has four legs,” Baozhai from the treasury pointed out.

  “No, but if we have twice as many turkeys on the table, you do have four legs,” Kris countered.

  “The Green Plan,” Ada said.

  “The Green Plan rolled into the Black Plan,” Kris said. “If we can grow the base, we can get more of everything for everybody. More Red. More Yellow. Who knows, maybe we can keep the Green side growing, too. But we need people for all of this. People willing to learn how to make the things we all want. We can’t drive the manufacturing side with just the people they have.”

  Kris paused for a moment, then glanced at Pipra. That was enough encouragement. She took up the tale of her overworked crews who needed some serious downtime. Preferably down on the planet in dirt they could call their own.

  “I was wondering when that would come up,” Ada said.

  “Do you have a problem with a second center of human presence on Alwa?” Kris asked.

  Ada made a worried face. “I don’t know. From what I hear, the land down there is just begging for a plow. I expect some of our youngsters will pack it in and head down there. I’m not sure how their folks will take that. Kids are a built-in labor force for farms.”

  “Things are changing,” Kris said.

  “So you keep telling me,” Ada answered. “I’ve seen what happens to old birds that get in the road to stop it. I never thought I’d be one of ’em.”

  “There are a lot of changes coming,” Pipra said. “If you think you have it bad, imagine me and mine trying to see that everyone gets all the lollipops they want for the work they’re doing for this princess, or admiral, or whatever hat she’s wearing today.”

  “We’ll need to juggle a lot,” Kris said.

  “The harvest will come in next week. Thanks to all the nice gear King Raymond sent, it won’t be the backbreaking work that takes every last person every last moment of daylight. I never thought I’d say this, but I can get a few kids moving up to your fabs even now. And some Roosters. Some have been with us since we arrived and are comfortable with our tech. Which isn’t to say any of us are up to the tech level you are. It’s up to you to see that they don’t break anything.”

  Now it was Pipra’s turn to make a face. “Yeah. I hear a lot of talking, but whether it’s just pie in the sky or will deliver the goods on schedule is another matter.”

  “No time like the present to find out,” Ada said.

  “I’ll leave you all to figure this out,” Kris said, and slipped out of the circle.

  This is delegation, right?

  She rambled up the other side of the table to where Abby stood watching others make changes to the Black Plan. Someone would do something, it would cascade up and down the visible plan. People would study it critically, then either cancel it, or look for another one.

  This was happening on all three sides of the table as well as both wall screens.

  “Are these connected?” Kris asked Abby, waving at the tabletops and walls.

  “Nope. Each group is doing its own thing. Maybe in the end they’ll all have the same plan. Or maybe they’ll be way off. Then we’ll look at the different ones and see what we like and don’t like. Either way, we win.”

  “Hmm,” Kris said.

  “Not bad for a maid, don’t you think?”

  “Not bad for a hotshot production expediter,” Kris said. “I knew you had it in you. You had to pull all those things I needed out of those steamer trunks just when I needed them.”

  Kris enjoyed a smile at fond, if desperate, memories.

  “I had a lot of help figuring out what went into those trunks,” Abby allowed.

  “But you were the one that did it in the end.”

  “I guess so. Oh, sorry I wasn’t there this morning to get a shot at that shooter.”

  “Jack and I were hardly dressed for company,” Kris said, trying not to blush.

  “Compromising positions do leave you open.”

  “I wasn’t compromised. I was with my husband.”

  “You managing?” was so vague a question that Kris needed time to think on it.

  “I am,” Kris finally said. “And those that don’t like what I’m doing can take a long walk out a short airlock.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  “So, are things as hard as Pipra says they are among the workers?”

  “Maybe worse,” Abby said. “You and her can live in your own little world of charts and reports. I got to go out and talk to the worker bees. They got a problem, I get sent to see it in the flesh. I get to share their coffee breaks with them. I like this job. Get to meet lots of interesting people, people you’re driving mighty hard, Kris.”

  Now it was Kris’s turn to make a pained face. “And if the bug-eyed monsters show up tomorrow?”

  “We’ll be in trouble,” Abb
y admitted. “But if they don’t show for a couple of months, you might well be doing their job for them.”

  Kris gave Abby the look she reserved for Commander Sampson and her ilk.

  “No, I’m not talking mutiny or open rebellion. But I am talking folks who are dog tired and need a rest. Or folks that are nose up against the candy-shop window and feeling locked out. You’ve got so much change coming at these people that it’s a crapshoot as to where it all falls apart first, second, and last, Kris. You need to get out more.”

  “The last time I was out of my bubble, I got shot at.”

  “Yeah, but maybe if you’d been out of your bubble a month ago you’d have spotted this problem sooner and headed it off at the pass.”

  Kris shrugged. “Not too long ago, I was chasing down Sampson, fighting the remnants of the bug-eyed monsters we beat the first time, and making friends with our fine feline friends.”

  “So your problems have to stand in line, and some of them get pissed and cut to the front.”

  “Cutting I don’t mind. Shooting, that’s another matter,” Kris said with a dry chuckle.

  “Yeah,” Abby agreed.

  After a few quiet moments, Abby went one way to tell a production type that his latest change was boneheaded. Kris kept moving, smiling encouragement and doing her best not to get drawn into any of the arguments raging around the screens and tables. Any hope that all of these efforts would end in one harmonious plan was rapidly going up in smoke.

  Kris found Admiral Furzah at her elbow.

  “This is an interesting development,” she said.

  “Interesting in what way to you?” Kris asked.

  “Many of my people, not all, I assure you, and maybe fewer of late, but many of my people would have used the shooting incident to land the warriors. Your Marines. Land them and take control of the situation with force. You, instead, seek to calm the fire by feeding it. Interesting.”

  “We have found that landing the Marines often has the effect of tossing gasoline on the fire. Instead of making it smaller, it makes it huge. Haven’t you found that out?”

  “Yes, we have. That is why I say that fewer would do that of late. Even we warriors, at least we older, grayer warriors, have noticed that.”