Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station

by Mike Shepherd

  “The problem with that large a battery are many,” Mata Hari said. “The heat, the number of reactors and the staffing requirements would make for some very interesting designs.”

  “Also, that would delay completion of the stations,” Mimzy put in. “Right now, we’re producing two hundred and forty 22-inch lasers for the twelve battlecruisers the yards make each month. We can go to double shifts for a month and produce the four hundred and eighty you will need for two stations, one for Alpha, the other for Beta jump. To get the maximum near thousand laser battery would take four months. Can we wait that long?”

  “Can we add them later?” Ben Benson asked.

  “But of course,” Mata Hari said, accent in full force, then she dropped it. “This end of the station will be made using Smart Metal salvaged from the beam ships. However, moving the lasers into place will be a delicate process. There is also the matter of gun crew support.”

  “On our battlecruiser,” Amber said, “we have ten people at battle stations for each laser. Two hundred and forty guns means two thousand, four hundred gunners over and above the beam weapon crew and the reactor personnel.”

  “Can I call for a reality check here?” Admiral Benson asked.

  “What do you have in mind?” Sandy asked.

  “I think we need to look at our personnel needs,” Benson said. “We’ve got about two hundred and fifty ships here in orbit, not counting the fleet Admiral Drago’s got in the cat’s sky. About a quarter of the fleet is laid up in reserve, but that still means we’ve got seventy thousand crew slots. Double that if the ship has its blue or gold crew downside for crew rest or farming. My yards and base force adds another fifty to a hundred thousand. That’s who we have to choose from, but at least we have a reserve force we can call on to man the reserve fleet or plus up the battle fleet if things get terminal.”

  He paused to let that settle in. Then he waved at the holograph of the station.

  “We’ll need ten thousand sailors just to crew twenty-four battlecruisers. By the time you add in crew for the blast cannons, the lasers and juice the reactors, you’ll be adding four or five thousand more. That will need about three thousand personnel to support them and maintain the station. Two repair ships will boost that by fifteen hundred. You’re looking at thirteen, fourteen thousand at each jump point. All of them two to three days away depending on your boost. We’ll need a seven or eight percent growth in manpower just to cover this new manpower requirement.”

  “All this at a time when we’ll be cutting back on what we can offer the birds and reducing the mechanization of the Colonial economy that might free up more of us,” Ada put in, talking for the first time.”

  “The problem is duly noted,” Sandy said, cutting off that line of discussion. “Pipra, how are we going to make these two monsters and what will we have to forgo to get them?”

  “Abby?”

  But the buck didn’t stop there. “Mata Hari?”

  “We propose to construct the stations in orbit behind Canopus and Portsmouth Stations. About a million of the three million tons of structure for the fort will be salvaged Smart Metal from the three Beam ships. Another 250,000 tons will be Smart Metal from battlecruisers that aren’t going to be built this month. That leaves us with a requirement for a million and three-quarter tons of structure. We intend to draw that from present production. It will be a blend of steel, aluminum, titanium and carbon fiber composites.”

  Mimzy took over the conversation. “That will lead to a ninety percent reduction in consumer goods for at least thirty days. All defense efforts will be absorbed for the month we’ll take to build these fortresses. Capital investment will be reduced by eighty percent as metal is directed to the station from fabrication of manufacturing fabs.”

  “Ouch,” said Ada from dirtside. “For one month, the consumer side gets nothing! We can’t live with that.”

  “Actually,” Abby said, “you won’t notice any difference for a month. We got about a month’s worth of consumer goods in the pipeline. We’ll run out of stuff about the time the stations start their slow trudge out to the jump points. The ten percent you’re going to keep should give you three more days in the pipeline. We can start back up fast and move things through the delivery system as fast as we can. There may be a delay for some commodities, but not for more than a week or so.”

  “You think so?” Ada said, dubiously.

  “You can study the same project management reports I get,” Kris Longknife’s former maid replied.

  “This will be close,” Sandy said.

  “This will be close,” Pipra agreed. “Some folks will have to stay topside to work double shifts, so there won’t be a lot of taking vacations at dirtside farms, ranches and stuff. Admiral, Kris Longknife had been trying to avoid crash production projects like these. They result in delayed maintenance for machines and burning human factors like morale, tempers and good will. Are these forts worth the price we’ll pay to churn them out so fast? Can you face your workforce and tell them that their sacrifice is going to make us all safer?”

  Sandy nodded. It was interesting how everything came down to the human factors. Where do we find enough human, or bird, fingers to push the buttons, and how much do we demand from the people who make all of this possible?

  “Do you think we should go slower?” she asked Ben.

  He shrugged. “We’ll need time to train up enough gunners and support people.”

  Sandy turned to Pipra. “How long if we built the stations out of the defense side?”

  “If we made both fortresses out of Smart Metal,” Abby answered for her boss, “assuming present production levels, we estimate six months to produce a million and a half tons of the stuff, plus the million tons from the beam ships. That would give you one fortress in six months, the next one at the end of a year. During that time there would be no new battlecruisers.”

  That produced a groan from Benson and the fleet commanders.

  “We might be able to squeeze some extra Smart Metal production, but we need feed stock from the asteroid mines,” Mata Hari answered, a bit defensively. “That is a full production line that can’t be pumped up overnight.”

  Sandy ran a worried hand through her hair. Her scalp felt like it was in a vice. Here she was with her first major decision. Her industrial base was balanced on the edge of a very sharp knife. The Alwa system needed protection. At the same time, she could only demand so much of her human resources before they started to crumble from too much work and not enough time to recuperate. Did this warrant a maximum effort from her people. A maximum sacrifice from yards, production and the entire planet’s consumers?

  Sandy thought on it for several very long minutes. Around her, the room was silent. At the other end of the screen, the Colonials were also quiet. She alone could make the call that would send them all down a path that could lead to a disaster. One possible disaster lay at the end of one path. Another disaster waited for them at the end of the other path.

  Of course, if they got lucky, there could be no disaster at the end of either path.

  How lucky do you feel?

  When Sandy did speak, she chose her words slowly.

  “The enemy has come up with a new twist. We can respond to it and let them know that it won’t work, or we can wait, let them push us some more, and see where that leads.”

  Sandy paused to let those ideas roll around in civilian skulls. “It’s never good to let the enemy seize the initiative. We want them responding to us, not the other way around. They’ve got aggressive kids chomping at the bit to take our scalps. We just got a batch of theirs. That is one ship that will carry no tale of tweaking our tail back home.

  “If they mess with us again, we want to add their scalps to our collection, not let a belligerent bunch of kids get bragging rights before their elders. We bled enough to cower those oldsters. I want those kids dead, dead, dead. I want two forts guarding our jump points with at least two squadrons on ready alert. And I want
this done in a month.”

  Sandy turned to Pipra. “Yes, I’ll visit the workforce of your two shifts and tell them what they’re doing will make Alwa System safe in years to come. That the work they’re doing will mean we face less threats both now and ten years from now.”

  “I’ll change the work schedule,” Pipra said, “and I’ll set up a schedule for you to come visit our lunch rooms, ma’am.”

  “Ada,” Sandy said. “Can you get the word out to the birds and Colonials that we’ve got a maximum defensive effort this month that will be tying up all means of production?”

  The First Minister nodded. “Will it take more than a month?”

  “Do you know anything big that ever came in on time and under budget?” one of her staff grumbled loud enough for all to hear.

  “We will keep you appraised of how matters are progressing,” Sandy said. “Mimzy, can you provide the Colonial government with a full project plan and update it when you update it for me?”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral. Who will be your project manager?”

  “Ben?” Sandy asked.

  “I figured this would land in my lap. Abby, Penny, I’m going to need just about all the time Nelly’s kids can give me.”

  “Understood,” Abby and Penny said together.

  “Then I think this meeting is over,” Sandy said, standing. In only a moment, her day quarters were empty. Only Amber stayed behind.

  “Tough call,” the commander of Alwa’s battle fleet said.

  “Are they all like this?” Sandy asked.

  “The ones that ended up on Kris Longknife’s desk always were. Now it’s your desk they land on.”

  “Are we overreacting to some brats that got their hands on daddy’s car and took it out for a spin? It could be just a random action on someone’s part,” Sandy said.

  “Maybe this is, but you know, they aren’t going to be the only punks to insist on taking a swing at us. If it’s not this wolf pack, it will be another one. It’s better to knock them down when they come up than let a few get away and get the rest of the packs thinking they can try us.”

  Sandy nodded. “Okay, the defense is needed. How will our troops and workers take to having us change everything? This is bound to be about as disruptive as it can get.”

  Amber shrugged. “Hard to tell. One thing bothers me. We’ve never built any major structure in space. Even the reactors we ship from the moon to either Alwa or the yards are built on the moon and lifted from there. We’ll have to build two huge structures out of several kinds of material. Do we have space riggers?”

  “I have no idea,” Sandy answered.

  “You still going to the alien home world?”

  “Not for a month, at least,” Sandy answered.

  “The best laid plans,” Amber said.

  “Yeah. What can you expect on Alwa station?”

  15

  Thus began a long month that tested Sandy well beyond anything she’d ever faced in her Navy career. She might be pushing the production workers on the moon and in the yards hard, but she pushed herself harder.

  It would not have been possible without Nelly’s kids. They designed the fortresses, using standard fabrications where they could, adjusting the design and construction of non-standard components to meet the abilities of the fabrication plants, work force, available transportation and the fortress requirements.

  The level of effort on the moon quickly tied up all the fabrication plants. There, production was switched from whatever they had been making for months or years. Suddenly workers and fabs were turning out what the forts needed. Usually, the forts absorbed the production of two shifts a day. All dirtside leaves were canceled. People who usually swapped out after a week’s hard work, now swapped out at the end of a shift. Some shifts stretched from eight to nine to finally ten hours.

  Sandy did the morale tours, explaining why this was needed. The tour got kind of macabre. The first visit she made to a moon fab, several workers asked about the cruiser they’d caught. The next time Sandy went down, she took several pallets of “Show and Tell.”

  One of the alien lasers was included as well as command chairs and beds. Most of the workers found the alien technology crude and nothing like the products they were turning out. Poorly sealed cans of food were shown; one was opened to show a miserable looking paste. The pièce de résistance were several bodies. They were displayed as they’d been found, now encased in solid plastic. There were notes on each case.

  The two naked women had full information about the DNA samples found in their vulvas. None of them matched the DNA of the father of their fetus. Note was made that one of them was among the many who had been inseminated by just three men. That got grim looks from most of the women and not a few of the men.

  Two likely commanders and multi-baby daddies were included. The sneer on one face, the shock on another told a lot about how they’d met death. Their age compared with the rest of their crew was duly noted.

  There were pictures of all of the open hatches, and the manual overrides that allowed both hatches to open to space.

  Workers walked silently through this bit of horror. For many of them, this was their first time they had come face to face with their enemy. To meet the alien that wanted to murder them.

  It was a chilling experience.

  Sick days fell drastically after plants got a good look at that show.

  Pipra suggested that the visuals were enough; Sandy’s pep talks could just as well be videoed in. It saved Sandy time for bigger problems.

  They did not have enough people with construction experience in space. For four hundred years, space riggers had been critical to any kind of construction in space . . . most especially star ship building.

  Then came Smart MetalTM and suddenly space rigger jobs went the way of the black smith. Yes, riggers were still needed for building space stations, but there was a lot less call for them than before.

  The yards that came out from human space had a lot more spin programmers than they had riggers. The yards were located near the center of the station where gravity was low. Riggers would place the reactors of a new battlecruiser where they were needed, then step back and let the programmable matter programmers spin out the hull while other programmers did the inside of the ship.

  Some of the programmers were retreads, but most were new, younger folks with no time in the kind of space rigs needed to move modules and materials around in the vacuum of space. The same for those welders who operated the mobile welding rigs that put all the pieces together for keeps.

  Admiral Benson had to reach deep into his workforce to find people who were stale at best and too old at worst to do the necessary work.

  Sandy volunteered any Marine or Sailor that was qualified to work in zero gee vacuum, but staying alive as an infantryman was one thing. Getting a production job done while not getting killed was something else.

  Fortunately, Mimzy had the designs for the welding and moving rigs. They were dispatched to the lunar fabs and fabricated first. These rigs, however, looked more like trainers than the traditional rigs. Inside, there was space for two people. A senior rode left hand, keeping an eye on the general situation and advising the junior. That young Marine or Sailor used their better eye-hand coordination and finer motor skills to operate the rig under the guidance of the experienced hand.

  It looked like it would work.

  Of course, they started with the section just aft of the gun deck. It was simple: a steel I-beam structural frame with titanium plates for the outer skin that also added strength. The inside structures were made of steel or aluminum strength members with carbon fiber sheets dividing up the space into work areas and quarters.

  The first half kilometer of the can was the learning experience, and quite a bit of it had to be ripped out and redone as weak welds or open seams were identified by quality control rigs following after the workers.

  The first fortress was three days behind before that section was finished.
>
  Rather than tackle the gun deck, as planned, they built the second half kilometer of the can. There were a lot fewer failed seams and welds that time.

  While the riggers tackled the next half kilometer of composite structure, the programmers began to restructure the beam ships into the gun deck. By the time they finished all the intricate work the lasers needed, they were only two days behind schedule.

  The reactors for the lasers and the rest of the station were positioned, then the spinners programmed all the delicate and critical parts in Smart MetalTM. That part came in on time.

  The second fortress was started now, using some of the experienced hands and adding more trainees. There were still bad welds, but nowhere near as many as the first couple of days.

  Then they lost two workers.

  They were busy welding, apparently totally absorbed with the work, when a rigger transporting a pallet of titanium sheets lost a gripper. It just came off, and with it, the pallet swung around, ripped off the other gripper and took off on its own. The operators immediately declared an emergency, but the welders didn’t notice or hear it.

  The runaway pallet ripped the cab off the welder, opening it to space. The autopsy was not able to determine if the welders died from trauma or vacuum. It didn’t really matter; they were dead either way.

  The construction effort closed down for four days while they buried their dead and did an exhaustive check on the design of the gripper.

  The result was pretty much what you’d expect from a hurry up effort like this one.

  Five of the forty grippers that were tested, failed. A check showed that they were all produced in a light fab that usually produced farm equipment for use on Alwa. The ever-changing temperatures of space did not figure into that work. They’d been asked to produce steel of the required high quality and did, seven times out of eight.

  The production of joints for the gripping arm was moved to a heavy construction fab and the production run was doubled and half of them were tested to destruction. They all exceeded specs by one hundred percent. The other forty were shipped to Canopus Station, installed on the grippers, and work resumed.