It was late in the afternoon when Sandy’s computer alerted her that a single ship had just come screaming through Jump Point Beta at 75,000 kilometers an hour.
Normally, it was a really bad idea to hit one of the jumps into the Alwa System at such a high speed. It didn’t allow for the arriving ship to send through a buoy to warn traffic on the other side that a speedster was coming through. It tended to get captains a permanent reprimand for their promotion folder.
However, since Sandy had scattered two squadrons of battlecruisers through that jump, it was being held for any of them coming back fast.
Still, the expectation was that they would come back in pairs. What the hell was a single ship doing there by itself.
“Let me know when we find out who’s back,” Sandy ordered, and went back to her stack of readers. She wondered if Kris Longknife had ever been stuck reading something like this one.
This report was matching two reports against themselves. The consumer goods coming out of the light fabs were supposed to support the Colonial economy and repay the birds. Some of that production was still assigned to required donations. The birds expected gifts for letting the humans use their land. Call it rent. Other production went to pay both the working Colonials and birds in kind since no one dirtside knew how to set up a monetary system.
Now, they were also paying cats.
The Colonials and the cats understood money, as well as bank accounts. However, even the most assimilated Roosters had problems with the concept. Birds worked for specific items they wanted. Most Ostriches wanted a rifle. Once they earned their rifle, and several bandoleers of ammunition, they were ready to go home. Others wanted phones, TV’s, solar chargers, and other goods that made a community work.
In order to get Colonial and birds to work in the fabs, yards and ships, the Navy and immigrant industry needed products to pay them with. The Navy and fab workers also needed consumer goods to start up their private farms, fisheries and ranches.
Alwa needed a lot of consumer goods.
Balancing consumer goods against defense and industrial reinvestment was not just forcing one of them to balance against the other. No, if you wanted defense, you needed to pay the piper with consumer goods.
Sandy shook her head at how complicated this command economy was that she was running. Amanda had had to explain it again to her last night. With no effective market, it fell to Sandy, Pipra and a few others at the top to guess what people would be asking for three, six and twelve months down the line. With the help of several of Nelly’s kids, they had so far managed to get within one or two percent of demand. They’d only managed to do that by having both Colonials and birds turn in their wish lists when they started work with a clear idea of when they’d have earned what they wanted and when Pipra’s production would have to have it waiting for them.
So far, few had changed their mind, and those usually involved someone deciding to work longer. Say swapping an electric cycle for an electric car or truck.
So long as this swapping around didn’t get out of hand, the command economy was working. Neither Amanda nor Mimzy had any guess as to when it would fall apart.
“God, for a nice, simple battle,” Sandy moaned, then laughed at herself.
To clear her brain of these cascading possibilities, Sandy checked in with System Traffic Control. “You got anything on that fast mover that just came through Beta Jump?”
“Yes, Admiral. It’s reporting as a two ship section, but that can't be right.”
“Could they have been heavily damaged and merged?”
“We’re trying to assess that at the moment, ma’am.”
“Commander, why don’t you get me someone up here to brief me on all that you don’t know about those two ships. Right now!”
“Yes, Admiral. In five minutes, ma’am.”
Sandy scowled; something was up and folks didn’t want the boss gal in on it yet. “Computer, can you check with Mimzy about those ships?”
“Yes, ma’am. I am checking. The Resistance came through the jump and reported “Look what I found.” It has been queried to expand upon that explanation, but has not answered yet.”
“What does visuals show of the Resistance?”
“It appears to be way too big for one of our battlecruisers. Once it flipped over and began decelerating, it showed twice as many rocket engines as a battlecruiser.”
I begin to see why people are so reluctant to report to me.
A few minutes later, a harried commander arrived to report basically the same information. Pre-warned, Sandy thanked him for his report and sent him back on his way with a request for more information when it came available.
The commander left, looking very relieved.
“Computer, tell Mimzy to let me know when something more develops. Oh, and make a note. I need to issue a new policy memo restating the requirement for reports to be complete and not leave your superiors in the dark lest they chew the reporting captain’s ass off.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Sandy smiled at her computers quiet acceptance of her angry words. If Kris treated Nelly the same, it might explain her attitude. It might also be a good reason for Sandy to avoid a sentient computer.
Having suffered through all the bureaucratic crap that any sane person could endure for the day, Sandy took herself off to the wardroom for supper. The new arrival was the main topic of conversations and guesses about it were flowing hot and heavy.
Sandy, however, was joined by Amanda, Jacques and Penny and Admiral Perswah. The humans proceeded to discuss the complexities of their production needs while the cat remained alert and quiet. What others in the wardroom did not know was that Mimzy had been alerted to pass along any tidbit of information that developed during the meal.
They were just enjoying a last cup of coffee, tea for the cat, when Mimzy said, “We have received an expanded report from the Resistance. It seems the strange configuration of their two ships was taking all the computational resources they had to begin braking the three ships and they could not spare enough to communicate.”
“Three ships?” Sandy asked.
“Yes, Admiral. The Resistance and Sturdy have been merged into a single hull configuration in order to push the wreckage of an alien cruiser along between them.”
“Which explains the ‘look what I found,’ quip,” Jacques said. “Someone has a sense of humor.”
“That almost got them a reprimand,” Sandy growled. “Computer, cancel that policy memo.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Was the cat admiral smiling?
“Now, what the hell is going on here?” Sandy asked, assuming it was a rhetorical question.
“Oh my God!” Penny suddenly exclaimed, “I think they are doing something Kris Longknife did!”
“What was that?” Sandy snapped.
“You have to understand, one of the reasons we came back out here to Alwa was because of the Hornet. With the aliens mad as hell after we destroyed the first mother ship, it looked like they’d have all our heads. The Wasp zigged right while Phil Taussig’s Hornet zagged left and led the aliens off our trail so we could make it back to human space, if just barely. When we got the first frigate, Wasp, Kris wanted to find out what happened to Phil and his crew. As soon as we had gotten things going well on Alwa, we went hunting for the Hornet, expecting to find nothing but a cloud of dust, but still Kris had to do it.”
Sandy nodded. “You never leave a man behind.”
“Well, we found them, more dead than alive, and while we’re rescuing them, this alien warship, a half million tons of murder, shows up. Kris really wanted to have someone to talk to, so she set out to capture them alive. In the battle, she managed to slice off their stern with all those reactors. However, they still wouldn’t surrender. They just opened the hatches and took a deep breath of vacuum. Kris wasn’t going to let that deprive her of something to examine, so she had Admiral Drago nudge the Wasp up to the wreck and kind of pushed it out of o
rbit and all the way home.”
“A real hood ornament,” Sandy said, dryly. If this didn’t involve Kris Longknife and she wasn’t hearing it from someone who was there, Sandy would not have believed a word of this.
“Yeah, there were a few comments along that line,” Penny admitted. “Anyway, Drago said at the time that without Nelly coordinating their balance and power, he could not have pulled it off.”
“So, the Wasp took on something ten times its size,” Amanda said, “and pushed it through a couple of jumps to here?”
“Actually,” Penny said, “it was more like fourteen or fifteen times its size. That Wasp was one of the first frigates built and she was much smaller than our present battlecruisers.”
“Where is this wreck?” Sandy asked.
“It’s trailing the station by a couple of thousand klicks,” Sandy said. “We did our best to figure it out, but it’s hard getting around inside that thing and we didn’t find any tech that wasn’t too weird or too obsolete. We’d already picked up a lot from studying the wreckage of the first base ship we blew away. We learned a lot more from the base ship the aliens were starting to construct in the cat system What we have mostly learned from all three ships is that they did everything we do. They just do it different. Usually quite crudely different. There was not super tech, just a lot of brute force doing what we did a lot smarter.”
“So now we’ll have another ship to study,” Sandy said, wondering if it was all worth it.
“Yes, ma’am, but this is a new design,” Penny said. “You have to understand, we think the aliens have been using just two designs for the last hundred thousand years: their base ships and their warships or battleships. It will be interesting to see what’s changed with this new cruiser design. Also, I wonder how they’re jacking up the lasers to get more range. Yes, ma’am, those two skippers deserve a medal for pulling this off. They must have shot the tail off of the cruiser to keep it from self-exploding. Then they had to figure out how to bring it back without Nelly to balance the whole thing for them. Definitely a well done.”
“We’ll have to see what they have to say for themselves,” Sandy said, understanding how Penny could come to her conclusions, but wanting to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Admirals had to do things by the numbers.
A week later, Penny was proven quite right. The wreckage of one alien cruiser, with about one third of its stern sliced off clean as a whistle, had come to rest trailing a hundred kilometers aft of Canopus Station. Two battlecruisers had somehow flattened one side of their hulls and merged themselves together. Then they adjusted their bows to hold the alien cruiser’s stern snuggle in place.
They were now adjusting their shapes back to standard battlecruiser configuration before docking. No sooner did they seal locks than the skippers found they had orders to report to their admiral’s day quarters.
Sandy was prepared for a full, formal Admiral’s Mast, but Amber said they didn’t do things like that on Alwa Station. Instead, Sandy had all her available senior admirals present: Kitano and Benson as well as fleet commanders Bethea, Miyoshi and Hawkings.
The two commanders might have had a heart attack at all the stars, but Sandy invited them all to the conversation circle of chairs and couches, settled them in with coffee or tea, and then asked simply, “What happened?”
The two commanders, both young, one male, the other female, glanced at each other.
“Who’s senior?” Sandy asked, not taking well to the delay.
“Actually, ma’am, we both kind of are,” the young woman replied. “We both were promoted on the same day. We’re both on the same list. I’m high, an advantage I’ve always had with the name Andrews. Commander Thu was theoretically my junior, but . . .”
“So, who came up with the idea of cutting the tail off that damn cruiser and hauling it back here?” Sandy asked.
Again, the two exchanged glances. “We both kind of did,” Commander Andrew said.
“At about the same second,” Commander Thu added.
“We’d both read everything we could get our hands on about Admiral Longknife’s battles,” Andrews said.
“And we both knew about how the Wasp brought back an alien warship,” Thu added.
“We figured two battlecruisers against one lousy cruiser wasn’t going to be much of a fight, so we decided to make it a more sporting proposition,” she said.
“If the two of us couldn’t capture the damn thing and bring it home, we’d count it a failure on both our parts,” he said.
“We figured they must be running low on fuel, what with the jumps they made,” she said.
“So we anchored ourselves together in the ice ring of the gas giant closest to the jump and dialed everything down to minimum,” he said.
“We had the reactors just as low as we could get them and drew power for the ships off the laser capacitors, drawing them down to next to nothing.”
“The cruiser showed up, braking for all she was worth, and just made it into a refueling orbit.”
“We powered up while it was on the far side of the planet and were gunning for it as soon as it came back around.
“With these 22-inch lasers, we really have the range.”
“They didn’t know what hit them. We shaved their stern and its reactors off of them before they knew we were there.”
“Still, by the time we got there, they’d opened their locks and there was nothing on board but dead meat.”
“Who came up with a way to merge all three ships together?” Sandy asked.
Again, the two glanced at each other.
Thu spoke first. “We knew we wanted to bring the thing back.”
“The only question was how,” Andrews added.
“We got together all the folks on both our ships that had something to contribute to our problem. It turns out that one of our able seamen was a cat who worked in the yard. She was an apprentice hull programmer, just on board to get some ship time in,” he said.
“Lucky for us. We figured out how to flatten our battlecruisers so they’d fit together, but she had the know how to merge the hulls together at the molecular level,” she said.
“She’s was a trained mathematician back home,” he said.
“I think she was picking up a lot more than the shipyard hands thought,” she said.
“Once we got the two hulls locked down tight, it was easy to nuzzle up to the hulk, lock it down and head home.”
“Not so easy heading home,” Andrews corrected. “Keeping the hulls balanced was a bitch. We had to devote all the computer power we had to it.”
“We even were merging in our personal computers to the net to do all the math.”
“But we managed to get it right, and even keep them balanced when we put spin on the hulls to get us home quick.”
“Are you two twins?” Amber asked. “I’ve never seen anyone but twins toss a conversation back and forth like you two just did.”
Again, the two skippers exchanged glances. This one took longer.
“We’ve known each other for a bit,” Andrews admitted.
“Very good friends,” Thu added.
“And we’ll likely be married real soon.”
Thu’s head whipped around. Was that shock? “What?”
“I think I just proposed to you. You gonna say yes or no?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Normally, there would be some kissing after that agreement,” Sandy said dryly. “This being a formal Admiral’s Mast, I’d ask you to forego that for a moment. What you did was very well done. I’m looking forward to the reports from this new bit of technology that the aliens have knocked together. I am spot promoting both of you to captain, and we’ll try to find squadrons in the same task force for you to command, now,” coming to her feet, which brought the entire room to theirs, “I dismiss you to . . . whatever.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” came from two very happy, newly minted captains,
who then kind of floated out of the room.
COMPUTER, REMIND ME TO CHECK WITH THE CHIEF OUTSIDE FOR A FULL REPORT ON THE INAPPROPRIATE PUBLIC DISPLAY OF AFFECTION NOW TAKING PLACE IN MY OUTER OFFICE.
YES, MA’AM.
No doubt, Nelly or Mimzy would have their own comment about what just took place and would be taking place. It would be nice to share moments like these with some other sentient being.
Sandy shook off that thought. Admirals did things alone.
But Kris Longknife managed to handle matters quite well with Nelly to talk to.
Belay this discussion. I’ve got work to do, thought the sensible part of her.
“Penny, I want that cruiser gone over with a fine-toothed comb. Squeeze every bit of information you can out of it.”
“No doubt, a big chunk of the boffins will want to have a go at it.”
“Do whatever you can do to make it possible for them to have at that wreck,” Sandy said. “I don’t imagine that a whole lot of scientists will want to float around a darkened ship full of a whole lot of dead bodies floating around them.”
“Mimzy and her siblings have some ideas for that, ma’am. I’ll get back with you tomorrow. Admiral Benson, can we borrow a supply of Smart Metal and maybe any spare ship you can let us have.”
“Any spare ship?” the admiral asked.
“Yes, any spare ship. However, the closer it is to the weight of the cruiser, the better.”
Now all the admirals were eyeing the intel captain.
“I’ll could try to explain it, but it will be faster to show it. We think it will work, but it might not,” Mimzy answered from Penny’s neck.
“I’ve got a freighter just out of a yard period,” Benson said.
“We’ll take her.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to report something,” Sandy said, and the rest understood the dismissal.
“That was a damn fantastic bit of ship handling,” Admiral Bethea said as they left, which seemed to sum up everyone’s opinion as well.
With a sigh, Sandy dug back into a manpower report. No surprise, the cats were taking to work at both the yards and fabs with amazing speed. Having seen one cat’s surprising contribution to a major coup, Sandy found the report delightful . . . and terrifying all at the same time.
Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station Page 7