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

by Mike Shepherd

  ` The first station was now six days behind schedule.

  Sandy was in regular contact with Ada and the Colonial government. They were not happy.

  “This pushes us past the point you told us you would start shipping us our consumer goods.”

  “No plan ever survives,” Sandy said, skipping the rest about contact with the enemy. She didn’t want anyone thinking they were the enemy.

  “Tell me about that,” Ada growled.

  “Could you start rationing supplies and the release of product?” Pipra asked.

  The First Minister shrugged. “I guess we’ll have to. This is going to make a lot of people cranky. A lot of the Roosters and even some of the Ostriches don’t really understand the war above their heads. They’ve gotten to really like the largess from us Star folks. I’ll do my best to explain to them that the pickings will be slim for a bit.”

  She paused for a moment. “You are going to give us priority in the consumer goods area when you start up again, right?”

  Sandy glanced around at those taking this meeting with her. Penny’s mouth had gotten thin. Both Amanda and Jacques were shaking their heads.

  “Give me a second,” Sandy said and hit the cut off on the visual.

  “What am I missing?” she asked.

  There were some embarrassed glances among her team. Finally, Jacques spoke. “The worker bees at the fabs and yards are going to need a break. No, they’re going to expect a break and only about half of them have farms, ranches, fishing boats, what have you. Those that haven’t won the lottery are getting double tickets for this maximum effort we have them on. If you put them at the back of the line behind everyone else . . ..”

  Sandy scowled. Everyone wanted everything they wanted and they wanted it now!

  With a deep sigh, Sandy hit the activation switch for their conference talk. “I’m sorry, Ada, but we’re all going to have to share in the scarcity. We’ll start up as soon as we can, but we’ll follow the same distribution ratio we did before between the birds, your Colonials, Pipra’s immigrant workers and my fleet personnel.”

  Ada took the rejection philosophically. “Well, I had to try.”

  “Yes, no doubt, you did,” Sandy said. “Now, if you will excuse me, there are likely new fires I need to stomp out before they get any bigger.”

  “Thanks for the briefing. I look forward to the next one.”

  “Oh, two questions. Has the senate endorsed my Viceroyship? Also, how is Rita handling things?”

  “I told you that some folks were getting cranky. Some of them happen to be in my Senate. I don’t think I can get the papers through for you until consumer production is back up to speed. I’ve got several that are talking about liking what Rita did.”

  “They’d rather have their butter than forts at the jump points?” Sandy asked.

  “They’d rather have their butter keep flowing and forts at the jump points in a year or so. The issue isn’t what to do, just how fast.”

  “Devoting a full year to building the fortresses would cost us one hundred and thirty-two battlecruisers,” Sandy pointed out.

  “Some folks think the two hundred and fifty or so we got is enough,” Ada said. “They were last time. I do kind of wonder, myself. How much defense do we have to have? When will what we have be enough?”

  “We’ll know it’s enough when we beat the aliens the next time they come here,” Sandy snapped. “We’ll know it wasn’t enough when they blast Alwa down to bedrock and hurl the planet’s atmosphere out into space.”

  “Yeah,” Ada said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Sandy sat at her conference table, steaming. “Ungrateful . . ..” It was best not to finish that thought.

  “That’s the sticking point,” Amanda said. “How do we know that enough is enough to keep us alive? How close to that minimum margin do we want to skate?”

  “And we Navy types are always assumed to want too much and that’s why they can’t have more or nicer things,” Sandy growled.

  “Pretty much,” Amanda, the doctor of the Economics, the abysmal science, said.

  “Okay, what’s next on my list?” Sandy asked. Something was always next on her list.

  16

  Work on the two fortresses continued apace with them gradually making up some of the lost time. It still looked like the first one would be four days late. The second one would be ready a week later.

  Then, of course, they’d have to be moved, slowly, carefully, out to their station 200,000 klicks from the jump.

  Putting the lasers in a fixed station had benefits. With little bending, the guns would stay sighted in. With a bit more space and more powerful capacitors, the 22-inch lasers could be pushed out to 260,000 kilometers maximum range.

  If an alien ship tried to come through the back side of the jump, we’d have 60,000 kilometers to shot lasers up their vulnerable rocket motors straight through to their reactors.

  “It’s going to be hell to take a jump with this kind of a defense,” Penny commented to Sandy.

  “Yep. Wonder why nobody thought of this before?”

  “Nobody had Smart Metal that they could use to make rocket motors on a huge space station before,” Admiral Kitano said, dryly.

  “Maybe we should suggest this idea on our next report to human space,” Sandy said.

  “Yeah.”

  As if the problems of building a fortress, and the conflicts of those competing for limited resources, weren’t enough, Sandy had other people who wanted to voice their complaints.

  The scientists who were planning the study of the alien home world invited Sandy to a dinner in her honor.

  “I don’t need a dinner in my honor,” Sandy said, looking at the engraved invitation that had been hand delivered to her in the wardroom over supper.

  Amanda came to look over her shoulder. “Oh, it’s not in your honor, Admiral. It’s in their honor. Trust me.”

  “But it says . . .”

  “It means the other,” Jacques la Duke, Ph.D. put in. “They want your ear and if the only way to get it is that, they’ll say whatever they have to say.”

  “Oh,” Sandy said, then scowled at the fancy paper and calligraphy. “Let me guess. They aren’t happy with the delay.”

  “Yep,” came from both doctorates.

  “And they want to bend my ear.”

  “Yep,” was a duet again.

  “Penny, can you get that horror show up from the lunar fabs for an evening? I think these dunderheads need some education.”

  “Wouldn’t it be just as good if we just slapped together a duplicate?” Penny asked. “We got plenty of spare bodies. They got two of the boss guys, but we’ve got one or two others that seem just as bossy.”

  “Do it,” Sandy said. She thought for a bit more. “Penny, you know the folks at Government house fairly well.”

  “Likely not as well as you’d like, ma’am.”

  “What say you call Ada and tell her I’d like to share a nice formal dinner with her and her Senate,” Sandy said, the very picture of innocence.

  “If she should ask, what should I give for a reason?”

  “Tell her I’ve come to realize that I haven’t spent enough face time with her and her people. I haven’t given them nearly enough opportunities to talk to me, tell me their concerns personally.”

  “Really?” Penny asked.

  “Tell them whatever you think will get me that dinner.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Then, ship that same show down dirtside and set it up in the banquet hall, right next to the door.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Penny said through a wide grin.

  “That won’t be quite as in your face as the old alien lady Kris Longknife took to the flock of flocks, but it ought to be damn close,” Jacques said.

  Sandy attended dinner with the boffins at a restaurant on the station. She ended up sharing a head table with Professor LaBao and several other scientists. The horror show was set up on eith
er side of the doors; every attendee had to walk past each horrible item on their way in.

  The dinner was quite good, but a lot was left on plates. Some at the head table had prepared remarks. They stood to give them, which gave them a clear view of the alien artifacts, then spent most of their talk staring down at their notes. Those that had prepared nothing beforehand tended to stare at the back of the room; their comments were very disjointed. They were also brief.

  Sandy thanked them profusely for their hospitality and assured them, that, as soon as the jump fortresses were in commission, departure would be as soon as humanly possible. In the meantime, they should use the time to plan their work and prepare.

  For the dinner with the government officials and senators, Sandy made sure the alien material was again at the back of the room. After dinner remarks were remarkable brief for politicians.

  “You are one cagy lady,” Ada said, afterwards.

  “Oh?” Sandy said, just as innocent as she could manage.

  “That little show and tell of horrors,” the bureaucrat said. “It got their attention. If that’s the way they treat their own women, God, they have to be beaten.”

  “The sooner they are defeated, the sooner they can begin to learn something better. In the meantime, we need to stay not suddenly dead.”

  “Amen, you bastard. Amen,” Ada said.

  17

  There was no book telling you how to move nearly three million tons of vessel. The million tons of beam ship was about the maximum humanity had ever kept under control while hurtling through space.

  The future fortress, Defender, was gently decelerated into a breaking orbit. Over the next couple of days they jockeyed it from one transfer orbit to the next before they finally got it into an orbit whose apogee swung it high enough, at just the right moment, for them to make an easy insertion into the trajectory for Jump Point Alpha. At a gentle half gee acceleration and deceleration, the journey took close to a week.

  Finally, they pulled into a stable orbit around Alwa’s sun which matched that of the Jump Point Alpha that Fortress Defender would guard. About that time, after careful consultation and verification that the rule book whose ink was hardly dry was really and truly reliable, Guardian began a breaking burn, the beginning of its ten day trip to Jump Point Beta.

  Sandy issued orders to Miyoshi’s 2nd Fleet with forty-eight battlecruisers attached to prepare to get under way. The support force would include the repair ships Tyogei and Artifex, the freighters Mary Allen Carter, Kinugasa Maru, Sirius, Regulus, and Polaris. Regulus and Polaris had been fitted out as transports for the boffins and their immediate supplies.

  Buoys to picket the jumps around the target system were stowed aboard the battlecruisers. Sandy intended to have a lot of buoys deployed quickly and one or two tenders just wouldn’t cut it.

  If an alien decided to crash her party, she wanted plenty of warning to get out of their way.

  Two days after Fortresses Defender and Guardian went active, the Victory followed at the tail of 2nd Fleet’s Task Force 2 as they headed out to see what the aliens had left them to see.

  18

  “The aliens have been back here,” came on net from Major ‘mPhano, skipper of the Victory’s Royal US Marine company “That rock Kris Longknife left blocking the entrance to the pyramid is gone. I think it’s been reduced to the small chunks of gravel under our feet.”

  The report came as no surprise to Sandy. The sentinel buoys at the two jumps they’d come through that had been left behind by Kris after her last visit had also been blasted to atoms. At present, her fleet was reduced by two squadrons of battlecruisers. They had orders to deploy new sentinels to cover every jump throughout the next five layers of systems.

  They would be breaking up into two ships sections to do it faster. Sandy had ordered them not to operate alone. She wanted ships to report back, even if posting the new outposts took longer.

  Despite the evidence of the missing buoys, Sandy had hoped the planet below them would be pretty much as Kris Longknife had left it.

  Clearly, they had been back, and they had not tread lightly.

  Sandy watched on the main screen in her day quarters as the Marines approached the door into the pyramid. In place of the rock Kris had left closing up the entrance, there was now another door. The Marines and a select team of scientists tested it carefully.

  This team had the advantage of the report written up by Jacques when he’d led a team that opened the door the first time. The door was just as hard to weasel probes through. It looked to be the spitting image of the previous one.

  Rather than push that too far, they activated the door, pushing the runes above the door in the proper sequence.

  The door slid open.

  “With forty some odd wolf packs roaming the galaxy, they couldn’t very well change the door opening code now could they?” Jacques observed dryly.

  A Smart MetalTM probe rolled forward slowly into the dark maw looming behind the door. The first couple of meters had not been booby trapped. It did not fool them one bit.

  The probe reported some sort of electromagnetic jamming that was strong enough to knock out any unprotected electronic gear. This probe, however, was hardened against just that.

  Two meters in, the walls exploded, hurling a solid salvo of darts from the right side of the tunnel, sufficient to murder anyone in the first five meters of it.

  The probe was ripped to shreds. Bits of Smart MetalTM were scattered all over the place. The programmer with the scientific team tried to bring the chunks of the probe back together but couldn’t.

  “Let’s try another buggy,” the Marine Major ordered.

  This probe rolled just a bit past where the other one had tripped something. Then the left side of the wall exploded and the high tech human prospector got hammered into tiny bits.

  They rolled two more probes down the tunnel and both of them got wiped out, one from the overhead, the other from the deck. The fifth probe explored more carefully as it trundled itself over the rubble piled up on the deck.

  The walls did not explode this time.

  However, a meter further on, rolling along smooth deck, the floor fell out from under it and the intrepid explorer plunged into a tiger pit, complete with spikes.

  “At least that’s one we were expecting,” Jacques muttered.

  A ten wheeled probe now rolled forward. At the edge of the pit, it extended a long arm of Smart MetalTM. It latched onto the far side of the pit, then began to spread itself out, forming a new floor.

  “Okay, let’s see what they’ve got waiting for us next,” the Marine officer mused and sent another probe rolling forward. This one had a tall human-shaped three-dimensional target looming above it.

  It got about two meters past the covered tiger pit before it was gunned down as the left wall proved to be loaded with machine guns rigged to fire at anything in the next four meters.

  For a moment, they watched as the smoke cleared and the shards settled.

  A moment later, a scientist said on net, “Let’s see if we can do this a bit less expensively.”

  A man in a white space suit stepped forward. He controlled a child’s remote-control toy with a meter and a half tall balloon figure bouncing around above it. The guy in the white space suit headed toward the cave with his device.

  A Marine blocked his way.

  “Is your suit armored, sir?” the Major demanded.

  “Of course not.”

  “Sergeant.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You see what you can do with this mannequin.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Damn it, I can do this,” was cut off as the Marine NCO relieved the man of a small control box and stepped between the scientist and the dark tunnel before them.

  The target dummy looked to be mounted on a child’s remote-control toy. A really basic one, no remote control, just a controller with two meters of wire between it and the truck.

  Unfortunately,
the truck’s wheels weren’t big enough to work their way over the rubble of the exploding walls. The Marine Sergeant had to carry it for a couple of meters.

  At the covered tiger pit, the sergeant settled the target on its wheels and stooped low as the target moved out until it was two meters ahead of the man.

  Which was a good idea.

  The space above the tiger pit filled with flying bullets as the right wall beside it opened up like the mad minute at some shooting range.

  The NCO tumbled back onto the rubble.

  “You okay, Sergeant?”

  “I may have taken a glancing hit. Nothing the armor wasn’t built for. Anyone got another one of those toys?”

  “We brought down a dozen,” came in the rather shaky voice of the scientist who had thought to try the cave sans armor.

  “Bring ’em on.”

  Four were shot to shreds before the guns over the tiger pit were exhausted. There was still ammo flying as the twelfth was demolished in the next murder hole.

  However, the scientists had managed to suppress the electromagnetic pulse that was jamming the shattered Smart MetalTM fragments. They’d collected them back into two probes and were ready to send them down the passage way.

  Into a game of hide and seek.

  As soon as the machine guns opened up on the human target, the probe sucked the Smart MetalTM figure down. The guns fell silent.

  The probe popped the target back up in an explosive ballooning.

  The machine guns let loose a volley. However, the target had been sucked back into its rolling base.

  The target arose from the dead. The machine guns opened up. The target vanished.

  This went on for a good twelve iterations. By the eleventh, several of the guns were falling silent. By the twelfth, only a lone gun was still firing. It burped out a few rounds the next time the target arose, only to fall silent.

  They popped the target up two or three more times with no results before the Smart Metal TM probe rolled forward again.