In a blink, the room returned to standard Navy gray, Sandy’s desk was back out of the wall and the huge table had shrunk down to a standard conference size.
“Now, Amber, what’s our status?
4
Grand Admiral Sandy Santiago waited impatiently for her civilian visitors to vacate her day quarters and take their chatter and their complications with them. Truth be told, she was angry.
They and their bucket of self-inflicted troubles had tied her up for the entire cruise in from Jump Point Alwa to Canopus Station. There had been all sorts of hand wringing and carrying on . . .
And now it was over with nothing but a whimper. A whimper and a decision to ignore the damn problem.
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. Everyone out here kept saying that Alwa Station was different, but it could sure be a pain in the butt.
Sandy knew she shouldn’t allow herself this disgust and anger at the civilian side of her mission. She knew in her head that the industrial base that Kris Longknife had cobbled together was a major part of why they all had survived. This just wasn’t the job Sandy had signed on for.
All her years, from the academy to present, she’d dreamed of commanding a fleet of warships in a real, knock-down, drag-out battle. She’d thought when the King gave her these orders that she’d finally gotten the chance of a life time.
She’d commanded a fleet convoying a mixed bag of support ships, factories and a mobile space station out here only to find that Kris Longknife had gone up against the best the aliens had to offer and had knocked those alien wolf packs right out of the park.
And done it all while preger enough to pop.
If she was honest with herself, Sandy was feeling a bad case of battle interruptus. Instead of getting to blow shit up, she was deep in civilian bickering shit.
Sandy took several deep breaths, went deep within herself and found her center. For a moment, she let herself reside there, grounding herself in what she knew was real, then she turned to Admiral Kitano.
“Have you had any problems with the aliens while I was off making friends with those damn cats?”
“Computer, star map, please,” the admiral said. Quickly, a volume of space came into being above the table in front of them.
Alwa showed bright Kelly green in the center of the map. Expanding out from it were scores of different colored stars, but all had a circle around them. “We’ve picketed every star system with a jump point out to fifteen jumps from Alwa. Every once in a while, one of the outer layer gets popped. We send out a squadron to check out the report, but whatever blew it away is long gone by the time we get there. We replace the jump buoy, look around for a while. Jump to the next system and put buoys at that system’s jumps and gradually spread the pickets further out, but the aliens never come back and pop the same buoy twice.”
“Any idea why?” Sandy asked.
“It’s anybody’s guess,” Amber answered. “Maybe it’s just a alien ship passing through. Remember, the first ship Kris encountered was just a family mining concern. Are ships like that independent of the huge wolf packs or are they attached to them? You tell me.”
“We don’t know a thing about the aliens, do we?”
Amber shook her head. “Not a thing.”
“Has anyone been back to that system we think might have the planet of origin of the alien raiders?”
The other admiral again shook her head. “I’m not sure it would be safe to try it. Kris left a pretty nasty message behind. If any base ship has wandered by and read it, they might be setting up a system defense to nip us off if we dare to desecrate their sacred ground again. Why do you ask? You aren’t thinking of going back there, are you?”
“I am,” Sandy said.
“For God’s sake, why?”
Sandy shrugged. “I need to wrap my head around these aliens. See if I can figure out what makes them tick. They sure don’t behave like us. They seem totally crazy. ‘Know your enemy,’ has always been good advice. Do you think we know this enemy?”
Amber snorted. “Not even close. How big a force would you plan on taking? Penny took a single light frigate when she went exploring and found the place. Kris took only a squadron when she visited there. That was all we could spare from Alwa’s defense at the time.” Admiral Kitano spoke quickly, as if she’d already thought this through several times.
“Since then, we’ve blown away another six base ships. That’s bound to have stirred up a hornet’s next. I would not suggest anything less than a fleet, say thirty-two, maybe forty-eight battlecruisers. Likely, you’ll need a few fast attack transports for Marines and scientists. We got a lot of boffins that have come out from human space hoping to get a chance to study that place. The contents of that pyramid of horror is a treasure trove for the study of comparative evolution. A full examination of all those skulls and plastic-wrapped trophies would massively advance whole areas of science.”
Sandy thought on that for only a moment before she began planning for a major fleet movement. “Forty-eight battlecruisers will need two or three repair ships to keep them going. If we stay gone for three months, we’ll likely need a half-dozen supply ships, maybe more.”
“We could run a resupply mission to you after, say, after six weeks. Fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat will break up the boredom of a long cruise.”
Sandy nodded. “It’s not like we’re beating a path to that planet.”
“Penny’s Mimzy has plotted a dozen alternate ways to get between here and there. It’s nice having a smart computer close at hand.”
“I’ll be taking Penny,” Sandy said. “How many of Nelly’s kids will that leave you?”
“Chief Bene and his Giovanni help Admiral Benson keep the yards’ schedule straight. General Steve with his Chesty commands a division, but also is adjutant to the Army Chief of Staff. You left Jacques with the Cats. I suspect that you’ll be taking Professor Labao and his Pedro with you to honcho the scientists studying the pyramid. You know Abby and her Mata Hari is Pipra’s right hand gal. Her niece Cara and her computer don’t count.”
“So, if I take two,” Sandy said, “that leaves you with four and the cats with one.”
“And if Jacques shows up before you get back, I’ll send him along to you. He really does lust to study that alien home world.”
Sandy considered that for a moment, then adjusted her schedule to accommodate one lustful anthropologist. “Send a division of battlecruisers out on a fast trip to visit the cats. Tell Jacques that we’ll hold the expedition for him. He has two days to make up his mind. Is it the cats or the aliens he most wants to study?”
“And his wife, Amanda?”
“She’s has to find the cats’ economy more interesting than a primitive planet.”
Amber shook her head. “You’re cruel.”
“Okay. She’s a grown-up. She can make her own decisions.”
“So, if I send a division out on a high-speed run to catville, it will be about two weeks before you leave. You okay with that?”
“The last time I left, how long did it take trouble to break out?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“So hanging around here for a couple of weeks might not be a bad idea. I’ll see if I can stomp out a few forest fires while they’re still small.”
Thus, Sandy did hang around. She checked on her fleet’s training and availability. She visited the production facilities on the moon and made nice with workers that included mostly civilian workers but there were a few Sailors, Marines and Navy yard workers cross training as well as cats, Colonials, Roosters and Ostriches just learning the ropes.
Talk about diversity in your work place.
She also did a few admiral’s inspections and found that her crews were also a mix.
Sailors in well-worn uniforms stood beside production and yard workers with hard, calloused hands in uniforms as new and stiff and showing low rates as those worn by fresh caught Colonials, also mostly as seaman strikers. The gunnery div
isions had their share of Ostriches standing in ranks. Roosters tended toward admin and supply. The cats were still finding their place, but guns seemed their preference.
This was, of course, only the peace time crew of a ships, usually about three quarters of war manning. An equal number of crew members were dirtside on their week’s leave, off tending their farms, ranches or fishing smacks before they rotated back for a week aboard ship.
“Admiral Kitano, if half the crew are downside, and this crew can fight the ship, what will you do with the rest of the crew if we have a fight on our hands?”
“Why do you think Admiral Benson is still spinning out twelve new battlecruisers a month? Right now, our ships have a blue and gold crew. Come a fight, we aim to double our fleet, with each task force having a blue or gold task group under the rear admiral with sixteen ships each.”
“You’re thinking of everything,” Sandy reflected.
“We have to.”
They soon found that they needed to think about more things than they had planned for.
5
Admiral Ben Benson asked for a meeting with Sandy, and asked to include Admiral Kitano in it as well. He showed up right on time and began without preamble.
“Our battlecruisers have a problem. They’re evaporating,” Ben said, curtly.
A civilian might have squeaked out a “What?” but Sandy demanded more of herself.
“Please explain yourself?” she said, curtly.
“The Smart Metal the battlecruisers are made of seems to be breaking down. We noticed it before, but we thought it was just battle damage. You’ll understand, Admiral, that for the first couple of years we were here, it was a rare ship that wasn’t involved in a major battle every few months and didn’t require yard time to make good the Smart Metal burned off by the alien lasers. Hell, ma’am, Kris took a squadron of eight ships to the alien home world. She straggled back with what was left cobbled together into four wrecks. What was left of them was a whole lot shy of their standard tonnage. It has been hard to tell battle damage from material failure.”
“But now you’re sure you have material failure,” Sandy queried.
“Definitely, Admiral. We’ve got ships coming into the yard for their three month reduced availability that haven’t been shot at. They haven’t been hard used, jinking at three or more gees and we’re still finding them light with this crud mixed in with their Smart Metal matrix. We’ve got a definite problem.”
“Do we have a solution?” Amber asked.
“I think we do,” the yard boss said. “As I said, we’ve been finding this crud in the matrix for a while. The boffins and my boys put their heads together a year or so ago and came up with some nano that we release into the ship’s Smart Metal matrix to flush out the junk. Then we pump new matrix into the ship and fix what needs fixing. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. We just figured it was left over from laser hits.”
“How bad is this problem?” Sandy asked.
“In a year, as much as eight or ten percent of the Smart Metal in a ship could lose its cohesion,” Ben answered.
“That bad and we never knew it?” Amber asked.
“As I said, we figured it was just normal wear and tear on Alwa Station. You may have noticed that we’ve been running ships through a reduced availability every ninety days. We were catching ships when they were two to two and a half percent down.”
“Is there a difference between, say, ships you build compared to ships from human space?”
“Ma’am,” Ben said, “we do our best to segregate human space Smart Metal from our local manufactured stuff. A foreign built ship gets dinged up real bad, we just drain its metal into tanks and use it on the damaged ones. It’s the same for local construction. If we’re reading it right, the ships from human space are closer to the eight percent. Our ships tend toward the ten percent, so yes, there may be some difference between the manufacturing process, but the ships are still coming down with the crud.”
Sandy considered this new twist on Alwa Station. “We’ll need to get this news back to human space. Strange, I never heard anything about this back there.”
“Maybe they don’t know they have the problem, ma’am. Maybe their yards are doing the same fixes. Of course, they don’t have to regularly fix battle damage, so I don’t know how they’re accounting for the problem.”
“They don’t have the test of combat,” Amber said. “Maybe they don’t feel the need to worry about ships being underweight a bit. Maybe the yards are just billing the Navy for the extra Smart Metal and fixing what needs fixing.”
“Possibly, Amber,” Sandy mused.
“If they’re doing it that way,” Ben said, “they’re setting themselves up for a major problem. That crud hanging around in the matrix is about as good for it as plaque in your arteries. Too much of that crap in the mix and it’s going to fall apart.”
Amber looked pained. “I guess we better get a fast courier off to Wardhaven and have them tackle this problem from their side.”
“It would help if a freighter or three brought out some spare matrix for the foreign construction,” Ben added.
Sandy knew something had been nagging at the back of her brain. “I was planning on taking out an oversize fleet for a three month stay at the putative alien home world. Do you foresee a problem?”
Ben shook his head. “I think we can make sure you don’t have one. Now that we know what we’ve got, we can make allowances for it. We’ll order every ship’s maintenance division to run these crud removing nanos every week or so. We could also have ships deploy with one or two thousand tons of spare Smart Metal. You’ll be heavy initially, but if your chuck the crud overboard once a week, you’ll be down to fighting trim in three months. In the meantime, you’ve got some extra armor.”
“Has your brain trust worked this through?” Sandy asked.
“I wouldn’t have asked for this meeting if I didn’t have a solution for you, Admiral.”
“God, I like meetings with your kind of people,” Sandy said with a sigh.
“Well, this problem had been creeping up on us for years, ma’am, and we had half the solution at hand when the damn thing bit us on the ass. The next problem I bring your way may not be so nice.”
“Well, thank you for this one. Amber, I think we better put off the cruise to the alien world. Make sure that all that fleet’s ships get yard time the week or two before we sail.”
“That we will do, Admiral,” Admiral Kitano said.
Done, Admiral Benson took his leave.
So for the next five weeks, Sandy did what she had to do and let her science team dash around with visions of alien sugar plums dancing in their heads.
6
Several hundred light years from any human being, a sentinel, made by human hands, stood watch at the boundary of observed human space around Alwa and the unknown. Its watch so far had been cold, alone, and uneventful.
Then it picked up the signal it was created to capture. It analyzed it against those in its storage memory and the collection of zeros and ones added up to a result that did not put it in a friendly category. This identification initiated a subroutine.
The sentinel activated itself and scurried through an anomalous bit of space. While it moved only a half kilometer, its little trip actually delivered it twenty-four light years from its previous position. It immediately sent two messages. One dispatched a message to another sentinel on the other side of the system. It was a report to its human maker that it had achieved the purpose for which it had been built.
Three alien built reactors had been identified entering a very distant star system.
The other message was to the sentinel watching patiently at this jump point. It was ordered to replace the newly arrived buoy in the other system. It obeyed. That obedience would cost the device its simple existence. The other sentinel now went back into observation mode. That order would keep it from being reduced to its atoms in two weeks.
The message might have taken several months to reach its intended human audience had it continued to cross star systems at the speed of light before hopping a score of light years in only a moment aboard the next jump point’s buoy. However, two systems in, not one, but two, probes picked up the message.
One probe was the usual one. The other was a larger probe with more powerful engines and a greater sensor suite.
This probe paid for its greater size and speed by having a unique set of orders in its computer. If an unfamiliar reactor entered the system, the probe would immediately blow itself to atoms.
Today, however, the fast probe began to accelerate at six gees. Three hundred and twelve kilometers later it was rotating at fifty-four revolutions per minute as it vanished into a blank bit of space. It materialized one hundred and sixty-four light years from where it had been.
The message it transmitted to a distant cousin in this star system also traveled slowly at the speed of light, before being received and hurled through another jump. The copy of the message that took this route arrived only three weeks after it originated.
A Communications Specialist 3/c was in the middle of a mid-watch card game when his assigned comm system began to beep. He logged the message immediately and called his duty officer as he scanned the plain language report.
The lieutenant nodded and told the petty officer he had done a good job and could go back to his game. The lieutenant drew a sidearm from the gun locker in the comm shack, slipped the message into a folder that sealed to her thumb print, and moved quickly down the passageway, up two ladders and down another passageway where she paused, knocked, and entered when told to.
The duty officer for Command, Alwa Sector look up from the classified manual he was reading, preparing for his Space Warfare Command Qualifications test. During the midnight watch, there wasn’t much else to do.
Of course, the wrong message traffic could liven up his entire night, day and week. The automatic prominent on the attractive lieutenant’s hips caused his gut to clinch. He’d been here when high speed suicide craft had been an hourly occurrence. He’d hate to go back to that mess.
Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station Page 4