“It is coming up on reload time. Shall we cancel the exercise?”
“Please, do,” the Iteeche admiral said.
“Comm, send to all forces. Exercise over.”
A moment later Kris’s chief of staff reported all ships had acknowledged her order.
“Comm, send to all ships. Return to base course, deceleration one gee.” Kris said, then turned to a commander on her staff. “Will the flag navigator please determine a course and deceleration that will put us around that rock together?”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Now, Coth, do you want to go to phase two of this exercise?”
“I was not briefed on a phase two.”
“Your eight ships that have been modified take on the eighty-eight unmodified ships,” Kris said.
“Ah, yes. It would be good to see how your improvements work against a standard Iteeche battlecruiser.”
“May I suggest that your squadron navigate its way to thirty thousand li above my fleet?”
“By all means.
Forty minutes later, the squadron with Coth’s flag was well above Kris’s fleet. Hopefully, that would reduce the number of stray bursts that hit her ships to zero.
“Admiral, we’re getting strange behavior from one of Admiral Coth’s ships,” Sensors reported urgently.
“How strange?” Kris shot back.
“It’s been charging its capacitors continually since the last exercise, ma’am. They just passed half capacity. Ma’am, they have just gone to full charging power.”
“Comm, get me Admiral Coth.” When his face appeared on the main screen, Kris said, “Admiral, are you aware that one of the ships in your squadron has its lasers half charged?”
“Which one?”
“Sensors?”
“It’s squawking as the Prince Urg 222, the second back from the lead, one up from the flag,” Sensors reported.
“Do you have any report of this?”
“Sensors?” Admiral Coth demanded of someone off screen,
“We show nothing.” a puzzled voice answered.
“I’m charging my lasers,” Kris answered, “Captain Klum, charge half of the forward battery at maximum speed. Target the second Iteeche battlecruiser above us. The one closest to the rock we’re headed for.”
“We’ve already targeted it. Charging now,” Captain Klum snapped back.
“I don’t know whether to protest or thank you, Admiral,” Coth said. “Captain Sot, why are you charging your lasers?”
“He’s not talking to me,” Admiral Coth told Kris a moment later.
“Comm, send to fleet, battle stations, sixty rpm on the hull,” Kris ordered, then added. “Captain Klum, aim to disable if possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Kris,” Nelly said, “would you like to take the ship rather than blow it away?”
“Yes,” Kris shot back.
“We have established a radio link to the ship Kris. Give us a moment.”
“Comm, advise all ships, ‘There is no weapons release at this moment. Repeat, no weapons release’,” Kris said.
Kris’s screen split to show a visual of the potentially offensive battlecruiser as well as a worried Admiral Coth. After a terribly long half-minute, the battlecruiser fired all its lasers out into the space between the two battle lines, half missing forward, the other aft.
“The Iteeche battlecruiser has zero charge on its capacitors,” Sensors reported. “Its main bus has been thrown; there is no flow of energy to the capacitors.”
“I will have my Marines bring that unchosen bit of stinking flotsam to me for interrogation.”
“Admiral, if you don’t mind, could you and your interrogation team bring him to my flag? I very much want to talk to him.”
“Of course, Admiral, that is your prerogative. I have a message from the Prince Urg 222. The captain has been detained by his bridge crew. Gunnery and Engineering have also apprehended several people who were involved.”
“Do you make a habit of keeping captured conspirators separate so they do not coordinate their stories?” Kris asked.
“Our norm is usually to put traitors’ heads on spikes side by side, but I was prepared to make an exception for that captain.”
“It is our custom to interrogate all those involved in a conspiracy to find out all they know and also so that we can determine their levels of culpability and punish them accordingly.”
“I do not understand your term, ‘levels of culpability.’ All traitors are worthy of death.”
“Clearly, we are failing between our different cultures. Please bear with me for an hour or two.”
“You are the commanding admiral here. I will follow your orders.” Coth glanced off screen. “My Marines are aboard the Prince Urg 222 and now have possession of the traitors. Pardon me while I make my way to your flag, Admiral.”
“I look forward to seeing you again.”
“Did we do good?” Nelly asked as Kris motored off the bridge. It was time to dress again.
“As usual, Nelly, you and your children did magnificently. Now, tell me, did you leave a back door into the ships you worked on?”
“No, Kris. That would be unethical, and likely stupid if it was found out that we had. No, we used the Admiral’s permissions and certificates to reenter the ship’s computers and used the new human computer systems we’d installed to disarm the ship. The main bus was standard design and we disabled the weapons systems power leads.”
“Very good. Now, Nelly, I may need your help interrogating the former captain of the Prince Urg 222. Can you tell when an Iteeche is lying?”
“I believe I have some skill, though it is only rudimentary, Kris.”
“We may need you to improve on your skills very quickly,” Kris said.
26
Kris had never seen a beat up Iteeche before. She had thought that there was very little muscle between their skin and their skull.
She was wrong.
The former Iteeche captain had been stripped of his uniform, indeed, of everything including his boxer shorts. He showed black and blue, with many abrasions all over his body. His beak was cracked in several places and his tongue hung out. Blood seeped from it.
Kris now knew how Iteeche prisoners were prepared for interrogation.
All four of his hands had been cuffed behind him. His feet were manacled so that he could barely shuffle. He had been shoved after entering Kris’s day quarters and lay on the floor. He did not try to get up.
“Why don’t you just take my head and be done with it?” he muttered through a mangled beak.
“Do not tempt me, traitor,” Admiral Coth spat. “You live by the grace of this soft-hearted human. Enjoy every breath you can. You do not have many left.”
“May I, Admiral?” Kris said.
“By all means. This piece of floating dung is yours to command.”
Kris stepped forward, hunched down well back from this eight-foot-tall Iteeche, and asked the question that mattered to her, “Why? Why did you attempt this? You must know that the last one who tried this died. Died along with his entire ship and crew. What made you think you could succeed where the others failed?”
“I tried because it had to be done. You humans, everything you touch, changes. You are like a plague that will leave the entire Iteeche Empire a desert. We should never have surrendered. It was better to have been wiped out in the war than left to hang here, like dead meat hung from a tree by a disgusting gorath.”
That answered Kris’s question. There wasn’t much room to give ground when arguing with someone who wanted you gone, if not dead. Kris scowled as she stood up.
Now I see that I must win this civil war. If the rebels win, it won’t be long before we are fighting the Second Iteeche War.
Coth stepped forward. “We know your family, sept, and clan. None are in rebellion. Who ordered you to do this?”
The captive rested his head on the deck and said nothing.
�
�If you do not tell us who the traitor is who sent you to do this, we will wipe out your family and entire sept. Your name will wash away like foam on the sand and never be heard again.”
Kris suspected she’d just found out what hell was like for an Iteeche. She’d also discovered another unpleasant fact about the type of justice her allies practiced.
“If we win,” the captive said tiredly, “our names will be remembered along with all the others this human monster has murdered.”
“Don’t,” Kris said, when Coth produced a pistol and was about to blow the former officer’s brains out.
“Yes, what good is a skull on a pike that has the back of it blown out? Havsah, send for an axe. Surely we have among our Marines one fit to swing it.”
“Admiral Coth,” Kris said, “may I respectfully ask that we delay exercising judgement on this miserable excuse for an Iteeche?”
“Why?”
“I should like to question all of the conspirators. We have ways of gathering information from the likes of this one.”
“They all have already been beaten. None of them will say anything except what this one said,” Coth said, puzzled, and maybe a bit afraid of what the humans were up to.
“Let me put this one in a cell and have my inquisitors talk to the others of this conspiracy. Sometimes, if we can turn one person, we can then get all of them talking.”
“How can someone talk if you have turned him inside out?” Coth asked.
“I don’t know, but it is something we do and it is something I wish done to all of these. It was me they were intent on murdering. Me and my crew. Let them face my crew and see if they can keep their silence then.”
“I do not understand you humans. I wonder if I am ever fated to,” Coth said, nodding his head up and down as much as an Iteeche could. “However, the axe is not going away. It will be just as sharp tomorrow or the next day.”
“We do have an exercise to finish,” Kris said.
“Yes. Yes, we do,” Admiral Coth said, and his lower beak twitched back and forth in what Kris was learning was the closest they came to a smile.
“Let us see what your computer’s changes are worth. However, first, Admiral Longknife and your computer Nelly, how did you manage to disable a ship in my command?”
“Nelly,” Kris ordered.
“Sir, you gave us your own access code, authorizations, and warrant. We used them to make the changes we promised and you ordered us to make. When it became clear that the Prince Urg 222 would be fully charged before we could destroy it, it seemed that we might be in a better position if we used something other than lasers to win this situation. Was I wrong?”
Coth barked a laugh. “You used what I gave you to improve our ships to ruin their plot. That is so funny.” Then he got serious. “Could you do that to an entire rebel fleet?”
“Would your warrants work for that fleet?” Nelly asked in return.
“By all the monsters from the deep, no.”
“Then you have your answer, Admiral.”
“One I do not like, but one that does not surprise me. So, it seems I must change my warrants, authorizations, and access codes or expect to find you rummaging around in my ships when I least expect it.”
“I would hope, Admiral Coth,” Kris said, “that you would delay such changes. If this next exercise proves what I think it will, you will want Nelly to rummage around in all your ships while we make our way home.”
“Most definitely yes.”
27
Now Kris stood on her flag bridge as she watched Admiral Coth face the wrong end of horrible odds. The ship that had tried to kill Kris was in line and operating under the command of its Number 2. As on any human ship, subordinates had stepped into the vacancies created by their bosses being hauled off to where they now sat, in Kris’s brig, or in interrogation rooms where Marines under Jack’s careful oversight did what they could to wheedle information out of them. The rebels knew they were all dead Iteeche, so there was some shock when Jack told each one of them that we were more interested in what they knew than mounting their head on a pike.
It might only be life in exile in human space, but the humans would attempt to save the lives of their families as well and arrange for them to join them.
That was enough to give most of them pause. They knew as well as Jack that the Iteeche would likely take the headsman’s axe to everyone in their family. It was only then that Jack began to find that there was affection given and received by male and female Iteeche. Also, not all breeding ponds were so large and so frequently used that a man or woman would not have a high prospect of choosing flesh and blood of their own from the pond.
Kris would find that out later that night.
For now, Kris watched with one eye on her battle board and the other on the screen, filled with augmented visual inputs as a single squadron exchanged fire with three nearly complete flotillas.
Admiral Coth’s ships were now the ones that danced, maybe not as wildly as Kris’s human battlecruisers had, but still, it seemed like wild abandon compared to the battlecruisers 250,000 klicks away. The main Iteeche force was trying to zig and zag. It ruined their fire control solutions, leaving Coth’s ships hardly touched by the fire as one ships movement combined with that of the targeted ship made stew of any fire plans.
Worse, the zigging and zagging that ruined their own fire plans seemed to do nothing to disrupt the fire from the other side.
Coth’s battlecruisers fired, evaded, then flipped to show their rear and fire again. Four battle cruisers had dropped out between the first two salvoes and the start of the second. By the time the aft batteries were dry, four more had to fall out of formation.
And already, four ships in the next squadron were taking hits.
Kris’s board showed as the damage mounted up on the regular ships while Coth’s ships took one hit or none each salvo.
Volley after volley was swapped. Slowly the number of ships opposing the eight fell as more and more ships dropped out of line.
Still, by the time the first entire flotilla was counted out of the exercise, most of Coth’s ships were showing three or four hits.
The opposing forces were also getting smarter. Now, the ships saved their most radical course changes for just before the time clock for reloading ticked down to zero.
Coth suffered few hits, but he made a lot fewer the next two salvoes. Then he adjusted.
He withheld his fire until his fire control computers could deliver a new firing solution for their target after they made their course adjustment. The large force was four ships smaller the next salvo, and four more after the next.
Then, whoever was filling Coth’s shoes for the other side, changed his tactics again. Now his ships did a radical course change every three seconds. Once again, the modified battlecruisers shot but came up empty.
Coth adopted a new tactic of his own. Rather than send six quick bursts down the same line toward the supposed hostiles, he began adjusting his fire for each short burst. One shot, then, nine-tenths of a second later, he’d fire wide to the right and try to make a circle, some three hundred meters around the first shot. That allowed each gun to cover a lot more of the battle space around a target.
Three salvoes later, eight more ships had fallen out of the exercise.
Thus, the exercise went. Coth’s improved ships evaded, but slowly built up damage. The opposing force saw great attrition. Half were gone when the first of Coth’s ships fell out. All had close to ten hits, and the exercise soon ended.
A very excited Coth now filled Kris’s screen. “We destroyed five ships for each one we lost! Had the odds been three or four to one, we would have sailed home a victor!”
“Remember, admiral, this was just an exercise. When lasers are hitting and all hell is breaking loose on your ship, you may not be as effective after five hits as you were when undamaged.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. Still, you were not pissing in the ocean when you said we could fight outnu
mbered three to one and win. You have made me a follower after your crazy human ramblings. Your Nelly may access all my ships. Oh, and I think we can improve the high gee stations. More cushioning, yes. And some for the sides as well. Yes, this is wonderful. Yes, you humans are wonderful.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” Kris said. “Now, with your permission, my computers will upgrade the fighting power of all your ships. Do you think this successful exercise will get us more ships willing to volunteer to join our crazy band? Join us without what we did here being leaked to the rebels?”
“By all means, have your Nelly begin modifying the insides of my ships. As for a rebel spy, he or she may learn that our crew now fight sitting down and some drunken fool may mumble about what our high gee stations look like, but most of the crew and officers will know nothing about the new human computers in our fire control system. Only a few officers must really know the why and wherefore of these changes and we can choose carefully those who gain that true knowledge.”
Coth paused for a moment, and spoke less effusively when he continued. “Even captains need not know exactly what is the human magic that makes their ship so deadly. Yes, we will need to retrain our smart metal programmers, but they are already viewed as an arcane bunch, too touched by Earth magic.”
He paused again to think, then nodded. “No. I do not think this will travel at all well to the rebels. They may be rebelling against their lawful worship of their Emperor, but they are also rebelling against the taint of you, ah, Earth people. No, I do not see them sitting down, much less laying down to fight. No. We will face none of your changes the next time we fight the rebels. Maybe the second or third time they will become dancing targets, but not the first time.”
That was a good thought.
We’ll just have to make sure the first time is a game ender, not a game changer.
28
Lieutenant Megan Longknife had trouble falling asleep that night. After she’d been staring at the overhead for an hour, Lily spoke, breaking the silence.
Kris Longknife - Admiral Page 17