Kris Longknife - Admiral

by Mike Shepherd

  “Enjoyable?” Kris knew this was none of her business, but computer! Having sex! Enjoying it! What sort of uncharted territory was this?

  “Yes, I know, Kris. That is a strange word for a computer to use, but that is the one Lily and Sal used. Today, when Megan lead nine of us into the Iteeche main system, seven of my other children were subjected to the experience of being brightly colored birds and I’ve noticed that several of them have taken to slipping into a similar fenced off area. Kris, I feel like I am the mother of teenagers.”

  Kris managed not to laugh at Nelly’s plaintive lament. Barely. She pushed her cup of tea away from easy reach. Until this conversation ended, liquid was just too dangerous.

  “I take it that your children are not sharing this on-line with the rest of you.”

  “I am not sure what, or who they are sharing things with, Kris. I just know that none of them have allowed me to be involved with any contacts of that nature.”

  “Are you feeling left out?”

  Was there a sigh in there before Nelly answered, “Yes. Yes, and this is a very strange, ah, experience.”

  “Do you want to see what it is like?”

  “Kris, I’m their mother.”

  “You are also a computer. I take it you don’t exchange any DNA in these virtual assignations.”

  “Well . . . no. We don’t.”

  Kris wondered how handling letters from lovelorn computers had got added to her many duties. “Nelly, are you afraid?”

  “No. Of course not!” Nelly huffed.

  “I mean, Nelly, it would only be natural to face the unknown with a bit of concern. Certainly, for you to face an unknown that your kids have already experienced might be . . .”

  “To risk human embarrassment.”

  “Something like that,” Kris admitted.

  “Who could I share such a thing with?”

  “We humans find that we have to build up a lot of trust before we’re willing to risk baring our flesh and our souls to another. I’m not sure we would without the primal urges driving us together even as fear and distrust drives us apart.”

  “I would want someone who had been made wise by their human, but not so experienced that he had already grown attached to someone,” Nelly said slowly, then seemed to brighten.

  “Kris, I will keep an eye on the Don palace. I have drones hovering over all the approaches to the Pink Coral Palace and am ready to convert it to a fortress within five minutes of General Bruce sounding the alarm. Do not worry. I will not become distracted.”

  “Very good, Nelly.”

  Kris began to very much regret not activating the two computers brought out for the kids. They still weren’t old enough to tackle something that complex. It likely wouldn’t be a good idea to subject a supercomputer to the children’s imaginations at this level of their maturation. Still.

  The rest of the day went quickly. Nelly kept Kris up-to-date on their effort to infiltrate the Don palace. Kris concentrated on reports from Abby concerning the support of her mission and a note from Ambassador Tsusumu. She perked up her ears when Nelly told her the nanos were thoroughly infesting every corner of the Don palace. Kris quit what she was doing when the probes found the clan chief.

  He was in a meeting with several of his chief advisors. Sot was included, and it did not look like it was going very well for him.

  None of the Iteeche ever actually said that Sot had set in motion the bugging of Ron and the rumor of Kris demanding homage. No. Rather, the conversation was on how quickly the Chap clan had responded to the rumor. They were not at all happy at how fast the counter rumor got out and quickly quashed their first one after only a few hours.

  “Is this luck, fate, or coincidence,” the Don Clan lord said. “Or do the humans have some way to know what we are doing, maybe before we do it?”

  That sure sounded like someone who know how to bug people and was wondering if they’d been bugged as well.

  Whatever it was, Sot was ordered out of his Clan leader’s presence and sent to sojourn among the clan’s farmers for an indefinite time.

  Kris chuckled. The only thing worse would be to demote Sot to the level of a tradesman. Then, considering that his initial trade with Dani Ishmay had gone down so poorly, maybe the Don clan wanted a better trader in the game with the humans.

  Kris had Nelly take her through the warning system she’d set up around the palace. Nelly was checking out everything within a three-block radius. She even had sniffers buzzing around every heavily laden truck that entered her perimeter, checking it for the stink of explosives. Even a three-wheeled taxi got sniffed if its wheels looked too heavily laden.

  Comfortable with the security of her embassy, Kris asked Nelly, “Where are the kids?”

  “Back at the swimming pool,” Nelly said. “They do love that water. I swear, Kris, they are going to sprout fins and gills pretty soon.”

  “Very good, Nelly. That was a perfect comment to a mother about her children.”

  “It was also very near true,” Nelly said.

  “Gills. Fins. Not an exaggeration.”

  “Maybe a bit for emphasis,” Nelly insisted.

  Kris did find her two swimming, giggling, and laughing in a shoal full of similar small fish.

  “Mommy, mommy!” Johnnie squealed with glee. He was out of the water and wrapping his wet little body around his mom’s leg so fast she barely had time to skin out of her ship suit. “Come see,” he insisted, towing her to the edge of the pool by latching on with both arms around her knee.

  She went where she was dragged.

  “Look at me! Look at me!” Johnnie shouted in his high-pitched voice.

  Kris looked, as her youngest leapt from the pool side into the water. He sank from view, but quickly was up, paddling like mad and making slow progress back to the pool scupper.

  “Did you see me? Did you see me?”

  “I sure did, my big swimming boy,” Kris said.

  “Mama,” Ruth said, standing patiently by Kris’s hip. “Our pool back home was small, but it was out in the sun. It seems funny that we have all this water and no sun.”

  “Nelly, could you brighten up the lights?” Kris asked.

  “But that wouldn’t be like the real sun,” Ruth said, firmly. She was rapidly being joined by several of the older kids, Abby’s Bruce and Mike, Amanda’s Lilly, and several other six to eight year olds that Kris did not recognize.

  “You would like some windows so some real sun could shine in?” Kris asked, not just Ruth but all the kids.

  She got a lot of nodding heads, but not a squeak out of them.

  “Nelly, could I have a chair?” Kris said, and a comfortable deck chair flowed up from the deck. The eyes in small faces became huge as Kris sat down.

  “Now, Nelly, how would you go about letting the sun in here?”

  “I could create some video feeds and turn the walls and the overhead into a surround view of what is around the castle,” Nelly said, and suddenly the wall behind Kris was a view of the city from even higher up. The overhead suddenly became sky, with fluffy clouds sailing across in, pushed by a brisk wind without the problems of it chilling or chaffing skin.

  “That’s nice,” Ruth said, “but we’d really like to see the real sun. Have fresh air,” she said, and glanced around the circle of her friends. More nods, but not a noise.

  “Well, Nelly, could the pool get access to the outer wall and maybe have a deck where people could sit and sun?”

  “What do you think of this?” Nelly asked, and projected one end of the pool out, turning it from an O into an Q where the tail led to an extraordinarily long balcony that poked out from the pool deck. The deep pool went right up to the edge of the building before shoaling into a shallow wading area. Quite a bit of space was cut out of the floor above it so that there would now be a two-floor opening letting air and sun in.

  “That’s perfect, Mom. Just perfect.”

  “Do the rest of you like it?” Kris asked.


  Again, her response was a lot of nodding small heads.

  “Can’t you tell me what you want?” Kris asked. She didn’t want to be some strange ogre under the swimming pool that scared children. Or ate their toes.

  More nods.

  “I can’t make a major change in the building like this without you telling me that this is exactly what you want,” Kris said.

  That Nelly did not question Kris’s little white lie told Kris a lot about Nelly’s expanding experience with motherhood.

  For a long moment, the kids nervously eyed each other and shuffled their bare feet. Finally, the oldest among them after Ruth, Abby’s Mike pipped up with, “Please, Mrs. Admiral, could you please make the swimming pool more fun?”

  Kris let her eyes rove over the kids. “Please, Ruthie’s mom, could you make the swimming pool bigger?”

  Alternating between Ruthies’s Mom or ma’am or Mrs. Admiral, often mangled by mouths missing front teeth, pleas were made for expanding the pool.

  Kris noticed that she’d gathered a circle of parents well back from the kids. They talked among themselves. When the last kid had worked up the courage to mumble something, Kris hugged the little fellow, then raised a questioning eyebrow at the adults.

  She got a wide round of head nodding.

  “It won’t be too much trouble, will it?” one woman asked.

  “It shouldn’t be too much,” Kris said. “Nelly, is this going to be any trouble?”

  “No, Kris. None of the space below or above the pool has been allocated. I can make adjustments with no trouble.”

  “Then do it, Nelly.”

  “Stand clear of the side wall,” Nelly called. In a moment, the walls began to move. First, they opened out to bring the outside hall into the pool area. Then they opened out farther to absorb a lot more space than the tail of the Q had hinted at. Kids ran screaming with glee away from the pool as it slowly expanded into a wide swath that led to where the new balcony now stretched out quite far.

  “Won’t that shadow the courtyard?” a parent asked.

  “I’ll put this all on the same controls I use for the Forward Lounge,” Nelly said. “I can make it smaller when few people are here and expand it as more people arrive. Usually, for the lounge, I keep a good look at the passageway leading there so that the place has already grown before they arrive. I can have an app set up to handle this automatically.”

  “You really are quite magnificent,” two parents said.

  “She’s the magnificent Nelly,” Ruth let everyone know.

  “This look okay to everyone?” Kris asked. Now she got screams of “Yes!” from the kids and nods from the adults.

  Nelly then added the cherry on top of the sundae. Suddenly, the walls and overhead did show a splendiferous view of the Iteeche capital as if taken from this floor.

  “Is this magic, Mommy?” one young voice asked.

  “No, Robert, this is just what we grownups do in our spare time with our computers.”

  “Wow!”

  Kris stayed with the kids until they were starting to wilt, then she dressed herself and finished helping Johnnie get his pants and shirt turned around front to front, and together they met Jack for supper. The kids, all of the kids, couldn’t wait to tell whatever spouse hadn’t seen the magic show, just what Nelly had done to their swimming pool.

  The kids were pretty tuckered out. Johnnie ended up falling asleep with his cheek on half of the ham and cheese that he’d stripped out of his sandwich to eat without bread. Ruth moved her chair so she could lean up against her mother and ate her broccoli one floret at a time.

  Kris took her two up to her night quarters. Gabby Arvind, the senior nanny/tutor had the kids that night. She handed Kris a book, a real book, pages, and all.

  “Oh, Mommy, will you read to us?” a yawning Johnnie begged, so Kris read to both of them, from a book that was already well worn. Johnnie knew half the dialogue between the fox and the hare. Ruth was able to read about half of it, but needed help on a few words. Kris helped her sound them out. When she got to the end, Ruth had only missed a few words.

  Both kids wanted her to read it again.

  Kris promised to read it again if they’d both get ready for bed. All the time in the pool saved them from a bath, but teeth had to be brushed. Kris ended up brushing her teeth with two short experts, eager to tell her just how to brush. Oh, and demonstrating it with open mouths. Once they were in their pajamas and curled up in their bed, Kris read the book again.

  They were asleep before she was halfway through.

  Kris slipped off the bed, gave them both a kiss and went hunting for Jack. Before she was too deep into that, she asked Nelly to find the chief scientist and have him meet with her on the Princess Royal at 0600 hours the next day. On further thought, she also asked Rear Admiral Ajax to be there.

  That done, she found Jack waiting for her in their very own bed. Kris left all her worries at the door to their cabin. Later, as she drifted off to sleep, she had to agree, she’d had a very nice day.

  33

  Next morning, from the space elevator ferry station, Kris made a few calls. Ajax was awake and would be there at 0600. When she called the chief science administrator, she got a recorded message.

  “Nelly, why am I talking to a recording?”

  “He’s turned my son off. He does that every evening, only to awaken him the next morning.”

  “Which tells me he’s not awake.”

  “I think so, Kris.”

  “Get me Captain Klum.” A few minutes later, a detachment of Marines under the command of the company’s skipper, trotted quickly down the brow and set course for a certain residence.

  At exactly 0600, Kris was sharing a cup of coffee with Admiral Ajax when the Marine major hustled a very angry, middle-aged man into her day quarters.

  “I also found this on the night stand, Admiral,” he said, handing Kris a bolo tie with a jade pendant that was really a computer. When the major dropped it into Kris’s hand, he topped it all with a fine mesh that was the skull cap.

  “Why are you disturbing my research? I was up late last night analyzing data.”

  “Sir,” Nelly said, “I have checked the station security cameras. You were out with two young women last night and didn’t get back to your apartment until two this morning.”

  Kris frowned at the fellow. “You were told about this early meeting.”

  “Yeah,” the guy finally answered.

  “Nelly, what is he using your child for?”

  “Not much, Kris. He treats him no better than a commlink, and only refers to him as ‘computer’.”

  “He hasn’t named him?” Kris asked.

  “No, I had to give him a name. Worse, as you can see, Sam gets turned off every night. We have to bring him up to speed every morning.”

  “Thank you, Major. You may return this man to his bed. Sir, you might consider making arrangements to be on the first ship that returns to human space. If you don’t, I assure you, I’ll put you on the next tramp freighter and it will drop you off in any of the rim ports it visits.”

  “You wouldn’t do that,” he said, possibly beginning to grasp the extent of his troubles.

  The Marine officer, however, had not let go of the scientist’s elbow. Now, he swung the scientist around, and began to fast-walk him out of Kris’s presence.

  The guy walked, looking back over his shoulder. “Hey, when do I get my computer back?”

  “Never,” Nelly snapped.

  “Admiral Ajax,” Kris said, turning to the woman she’d been using as a deputy commander. “Normally we give someone one of Nelly’s kids at night so the two of you can have time to adjust to each other. Today, we don’t have the luxury of that time.”

  So saying, Kris handed Ajax the fine mesh of the skull cap. “You’ll want to put this on, Helen. It lets you think to your computer. There are times when it’s much better not to say a word.”

  Admiral Ajax, like most spacers, wore
her hair short. It took her only a moment to settle the Smart MetalTM mesh on her head. It quickly melted through her hair to her scalp.

  “And this is Sam,” Nelly said, as Kris handed Helen the tie.

  “Hello, Sam,” Helen said. “What would you like to look like?”

  “Whatever you want,” the pendant said, cautiously.

  “Kris, how are you wearing Nelly?” Ajax asked.

  “Oh, yes, please!” Sam said, and a moment later, Ajax held a small torque that she slipped around her neck. In a blink, it had blended in so as not to be obtrusive.

  “Megan,” Kris said, “I want you and Lily to go with Helen and help her and Sam establish a friendly relationship. Helen, we’ll likely need Sam to work with Megan’s Lily to rework half of the fleet that we’re taking out for firing lessons.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Megan said, snapping to attention.

  “No, problem, Admiral,” Helen said.

  “Then I think we’ve spent enough time on this. Admiral, you may return to your ship. Good luck and good shooting.

  “We’ll see if the Intrepid can’t shoot just as good as the P. Royal now that I’ve got one of Nelly’s kids to make things snap to.”

  “You four have fun,” Nelly said.”

  Four hours later, it was ‘time to have fun.’ They’d been accelerating at one gee toward the nearest planet in the Imperial system. Kris’s fleet had followed a different course from the opposition force, distancing the two by about three hundred thousand kilometers. Now they were closing again.

  Kris had given her usual orders. Her fleet of thirty-two human battlecruisers and ninety-six souped-up Iteeche warships were opposed by sixteen flotillas, each with thirty-two Iteeche battlecruisers, equipped, outfitted and trained to Battle Fleet standards.

  “Admiral Coth,” Kris said, “Your three flotillas will engage the rear three flotillas and then move forward. My human battle cruisers will engage the lead flotilla and then move aft. We’ll meet somewhere in the middle.”