Kris Longknife Stalwart

by Mike Shepherd

  "Now, fill it full of primal Iteeche. Or take a look at a breeding pond. Every one of them is chow for every other one of them. It's a zero-sum game of the worst order. Then someone gets Chosen, hauled out of that hellish rat race, and sent off to school. They owe everything to their Chooser. Add to that how much of your status depends on who your Chooser is and the order of your choosing. I seriously suspect this caste system starts the first day of school. What you get out the other end is someone acculturated to looking at everything up, down, and sideways, all while looking over his or her shoulder for the bigger fish looking to chow down on the smaller fish."

  Jacques paused. "I know I'm not supposed to say this, folks, because aliens have a right to be alien, but brother, they're all crazy. The system they're born into, raised in, and live in, is bound to make them crazy. At least from a human viewpoint. Sorry if I offend, Admiral."

  Admiral Tong bowed his body gently from the waist. "No offense is taken. Indeed, I find myself filled with amazement now as I look at my peoples' ways as seen from the outside such as you have just given me. It is something that I think can be thought about for a thousand years before every last drop is squeezed from it."

  The Iteeche admiral turned to Kris. "It also makes the change you are bringing to my men and women very interesting. I find myself wondering how a child raised up in one of your 'fishbowls' with food provided would behave. Would he thrive in our society or be unable to fit in? Or worse, would he become a rebel against not just his Emperor, but our entire social structure?"

  Kris knew the admiral had several very good points. She also knew that there was no way to answer his questions. Mathematical simulations would be less than worthless. No one had any basis for the simulations, and worse, some people might mistake the results for reliable predictions.

  Finally, Kris voiced her limits. "Admiral, I have no idea what this might mean. We Humans learned long ago that you cannot change just one thing. You may or may not get your intended consequences, but you will certainly get unintended consequences. Maybe a few. Maybe a lot. You never can tell. What I can tell you is that we Humans have fought wars for thousands of years. The last eighty years have been the longest length of time for us Humans when we were not trying to kill one another. If you change enough, you can find that sweet spot that you and your people can enjoy."

  "It took thousands of years to get where you Humans are?" the Iteeche said.

  "Thousands," Kris agreed sadly.

  The Iteeche actually managed a sigh. "At least we can enjoy it for now. I know that my woman friend and I are finding our shared quarters very comforting and relaxing. I had no idea that areas of my skin so enjoyed being touched. However, that woman has discovered such places. And I find that we share many of those places. This is most anti-social of me, but I would rather enjoy this than worry about what my Chosen, or my Chosen's Chosen faces. They will be sailors, anyway. We sailors of the Imperial fleet have a more simplified structure of, what did you call it, fealty?"

  "Yes," Jacques said.

  "You obey your commander and those beneath you, obey you," Kris said.

  "Yes, all in the name of the Emperor, poor youngling."

  Kris nodded. There was no doubt in her mind that this would be a topic of conversation among a lot of people, Human and Iteeche, for a long time to come. Still, there was no need to tie up any more of her staff meeting with it.

  "Ambassador Kawaguchi, I see that you have brought a friend. He appears to be suffering from the same mortal disease you are."

  "Disease, Admiral?"

  "The diplomatic disease. It almost killed all of us just recently."

  "Oh, yes, Kris. Indeed, he is a diplomat. May I introduce you to Ambassador Kopp."

  He bowed his head stiffly to Kris; she gave him a medium nod in return.

  "Ambassador Ulrich Kopp comes to us from the Helvetican Confederacy. He has heard of my poor efforts to begin trade between the Empire and Musashi and our associates. He believes that similar trades can be worked out between their planets and the Empire."

  "How are our trade contacts going, Ambassador? I hope our move from the Pink Coral Palace has not interfered with them."

  "Oh, far less than those hooligans protesting around the old palace. I have not only met with all my former clients, but they have referred several more to me. I doubt that I and Ambassador Kopp need squabble over who gets to talk to whom."

  "You are most gracious," the new ambassador said to his senior.

  "Let me or one of my staff know if there is anything we can do to help you," Kris said. "I know that trade is an essential part of my mission. I also know that it is not easy to find what the Empire has and is willing to exchange. Even if none of the Iteeche have read of the Opium Wars, and I suspect several know of them, I will not stand for any such unequal and destructive trade."

  "Nor would I, Your Royal Highness."

  The meeting was rapidly reaching the limit that Kris had mentally set for it. She turned to Meg. "Do you have anything I should know?" contained a heavy load of DON'T.

  "Regretfully, Admiral, I come bearing a problem which only you can resolve."

  Kris gave her aide de camp a doubting look.

  Innocent as any child, or maybe dumb as any Longknife, Meg forged forward. "All these buildings we inherited from the Domm Clan, ma'am."

  "Yes?" Kris asked, letting her disinterest show.

  "They could blow down in a strong wind."

  5

  "What?" came from several humans around the table. Out of the corner of her eye, Kris noticed that the two Iteeche admirals seemed unfazed by the statement. That, more than anything, told Kris that Megan might well be on to something.

  "Talk to me," Kris snapped.

  "Walt was wiring the new buildings for electronics. While doing that, he noticed how scanty the steel was under the brick and stone facades of the buildings."

  "I thought there was a lot of steel beams in the rock pile you dug me out from under," Kris said.

  "So it seemed that day. Every time we came across a steel beam, it slowed us down. However, the apartment buildings were down, and I wasn't concerned with what kept them up before the bomb took them down. However, when Walt and I started studying the apartment buildings in our district, we didn't much care for what we found."

  A hologram of one of the many ten story apartment buildings in the former Domm, now Navy District, appeared. It showed a facade of stone, wood, and brick with a skeleton of steel to support it.

  "This is what it would look like if it was built to Wardhaven building codes," Megan said.

  A second hologram appeared. Where the Iteeche had steel, these structures had thicker beams. There was also a lot more steel spread out, adding support to the structure.

  "If these buildings were hit with a Category 3 or 4 hurricane or F3 tornado, they'd be reduced to kindling."

  Kris turned from Megan to her two Iteeche admirals. They'd been sitting very quietly while the construction practices in the Iteeche Empire were reviewed and found wanting.

  Admiral Tong shrugged. He put both of his shoulders into the motion. "If one is fated to die when the wind blows, that is your fate."

  Kris found that much fatalism more than unsettling.

  "Now I see," said Ambassador Kawaguchi. "The Empire's mandarins are quick to nix any trade in metals. If they have such a small amount of steel available to keep their buildings up, no wonder they do not want to trade any out of the Empire."

  "We fought thousands of starships in the Iteeche War," Grampa Trouble said. "I figured that they had metal to throw away, but I begin to see how heavy a tax on their resources those warships were."

  There was a lot of nodding from the Humans around the table.

  "I wonder what goes into their production of Smart Metal?" Jack asked no one in particular.

  "The basic component of Smart Metal," Nelly informed them, "is huge molecules composed of many atoms, iron, chromium, magnesium, copper, boron, carbon,
oxygen, hydrogen, and quite a few other elements. They are formed into huge molecules in the Smart Metal foundries. Each molecule is then attached to its neighbor using the same powerful bonds that hold different atoms in the molecule together.”

  "So, you had to have some sort of metal resources to feed into the foundry," Jack observed.

  "What exactly goes into Iteeche Smart Metal?" General Trouble asked.

  "I'm not aware that any Human lab has examined the Iteeche product," Kris said. "I just keep the Human and Iteeche metal segregated from each other. Maybe we need to run some tests."

  The two Iteeche admirals at the other end of the round table were fidgeting. There was nothing to be gained from making them uncomfortable. They had no control of the use of the resources of the Empire. No, Kris needed a solution to her present problem.

  "Do you and Walt have any suggestions for how we keep our buildings from falling down around the heads of our sailors and their women?" Kris asked Megan.

  "I've talked with the engineers, both Human and Iteeche. The Iteeche verified that the situation is as precarious as I feared. The Human engineers said that there had been efforts to strengthen buildings when new earthquake zones were identified late in a city planning stage. Unfortunately, it usually meant tearing the buildings up to slip additional steel into them."

  Megan paused. "We don't want to tear the buildings up. Besides, we don't have any more steel to slip into them."

  "Please tell me that you have some ideas, Lieutenant, of how to solve this problem. I really don't want to look out my window after a storm to see all my apartments turned into rock piles," Kris said. Maybe her aide de camp wasn't ready to be a lieutenant commander.

  "Smart Metal, Admiral. We drill a few holes around the outside and inside of the buildings and feed the metal in. That strengthens the buildings' supports. We should be able to do that without having to empty out any apartment while we work."

  "Any idea how much Smart Metal we'll need and where we can get it?" Kris asked.

  Megan appeared to swallow hard. "We'll need about a hundred thousand tons, ma'am. Our rough estimate is that you can get it by taking the embassy down forty or fifty stories. You might not lose too much height if you raised the ceilings by 300 millimeters. Most of the metal is in the floors."

  Kris did like the view from the observation deck atop her embassy.

  On the other side of Kris, Abby cleared her throat, soft as thunder.

  "Yes, Abby."

  "Admiral, we must have browned off some of the shipping companies when we got blockaded by our protestors. Lots of ships arrived from the human side, but no ships got emptied, so they kind of stayed up there, swinging around the hook. There was hollering that if we didn't cut loose of some of those fast attack transports, they were gonna quit sending us anymore."

  "I can just hear Grampa Al screaming something like that," Kris agreed.

  "Anyhow, we off loaded the backlog and shipped the empties back home. Interesting thing, though, the two freighters that just arrived yesterday left before any of the offloaded ones got back to human space."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, Kris, and funny thing about those freighters."

  "Funny strange, or funny ha-ha?"

  "Funny interesting," Abby said. "Both of those freighters were from the very first batch of Smart Metal freighters that Grampa Al ever spun out. They were under-powered, intended to ply the secure and established routes inside human space."

  "And they came out here?" Jack asked.

  "Yep. It took them about an extra week to get here, what with their weaker reactors."

  "Are you thinking that Grampa Al would like to have something faster on his established routes?"

  "Some of my sources say so," Abby said, glancing at Grampa Trouble. Initially, Abby had been hired as an intelligence and security agent for some organization that Grampa Trouble still had his fingers in. Kris suspected she was telling her old boss that just because the two of them were way out here, that didn't mean that she didn't still have her fingers in the right pies.

  "So, are you suggesting that we might abscond with another hundred thousand tons of Grampa Al's Smart Metal?" Kris said, grinning.

  "The thought did cross my mind."

  "What about metal fatigue?" Jack asked.

  On Alwa Station, Kris had discovered that the Smart Metal™ in her battlecruisers developed metal fatigue. Every six months or so, the metal of the ships needed to be combed through to isolate molecules of Smart Metal™ that had lost their effectiveness and needed to be pulled out of the matrix.

  "Abby?"

  "I was worried about having these ten-year-old ships plying our long trade route, so I had one of the repair ships topside do a check on one. They found very little metal fatigue. I guess if you aren't forming and reforming the metal all that much, you don't get that much fatigue."

  "Are the reactors powerful enough for us to bring them in dead-stick?" Kris asked Nelly.

  "If we bring them both in as one structure, I can land them both at once on top of our embassy and flow most of the Smart Metal out of it, then lower the reactors by elevator to the bottom of the building. Although, Kris, I would hope that Abby would have all of the metal checked for fatigue. I'd hate to have some of the outriggers with rotary wing blades fold on me during final approach," Nelly replied.

  "Abby?"

  "I'll have Admiral Kitano take personal responsibility for quality control of the metal, Kris."

  Kris turned in her chair to look out the window at the apartments far below her. The more she won, the more she found ducks trying to peck her to death.

  "I think I better go have another talk with General Konga. Let him know we'll be landing another rotary wing craft on our embassy."

  "Why tell him?" Jack asked.

  "We'll be bringing down a hundred thousand tons of Smart Metal even closer to the palace than the last two times. He should be the first to know. With any luck, he'll offer to talk to that admiral in charge of securing the airspace over the capital. If I had to talk to the two of them, I prefer Konga," Kris answered.

  "Any other matters?" Kris asked, standing up.

  No one replied. Everyone stood. Kris stepped off the last few meters to the outside window as the room emptied. Jack came to stand beside her. The two of them gazed down on the six blocks of drab apartments ringing the embassy.

  "Who would have thought they housed their senior Iteeche clan officials in such death traps?" Kris mused.

  "Certainly not us."

  "I should have thought about that, Jack. Fifty billion people living here. Ten thousand years of blowing ships to atoms. They must be scraping the bottom of their resource barrel. I should have thought about it."

  "How could you have? No one else did. You've got Amanda chasing down the Iteeche economy and she didn't spot a metal crunch."

  "No, she didn't," Kris agreed. "I did notice how little gold was in the braid the admirals wore."

  "Yeah, but you and I both figured that was just because the clans had no respect for the Navy."

  "Yeah," Kris admitted, then changed the subject. "Jack, do you think Megan is ready for a promotion?"

  "She hasn't been a lieutenant for five years."

  "No, but she has been my dog robber. Doesn't time served close to me deserve to count double?"

  "She did do a great job with that taking down the Planetary Overlord on Zargoth," Jack said. "She also used exemplary initiative to keep the utilities working for one major city."

  "And she's not a bad aid de camp," Kris pointed out.

  "So, you want to deep select her?"

  "More like double deep select," Kris said. "Nelly, any reason why I can't or shouldn't do it?"

  "You can certainly do it, Grand Admiral. I don't think there would be any complaining about it from the fleet."

  "My opinion," Kris said. "Nelly, cut the papers and give it to me."

  "They're on the table," Nelly said, and a full set of promotion papers rose
out of the table.

  Kris strode over, looked them over, then signed them. "Now I just have to figure out when to give these to her."

  Then she turned to Jack. "Now, you need to get me an escort, Jack. I'm off to see the Guard."

  "Yeah," Kris admitted. "Well, get me an escort, Jack, I'm off to see the Guard."

  "I'll go with you."

  "I'm not so sure that both of us ought to be in the same car from now on, Jack," Kris said. As a mother, she couldn't make herself say just how shaken she'd been when both she and Jack ended up under that rock pile together.

  "They didn't get us both last time and they won't get us both next time."

  "Would you stay behind if I gave a direct order?" Kris asked.

  "Obviously, but it would take one of those."

  Kris headed for the elevator.

  Jack followed.

  6

  From Nelly, Kris found that General Konga was working from home. She soon had an invitation. The walk to his quarters was an exercise in change.

  She took the elevator down to the fiftieth floor of her own embassy, then the skybridge across to Main Navy. A moving sidewalk made that quick.

  Once in the new offices for the Iteeche Navy, the Minister of the Navy, Navy Chief of Staff, and Staff of the Combined Fleets, Kris found another elevator to take her to the bottom floor. All around her, Iteeche Navy and Marine officers and men moved quickly about their business.

  Some stared in shock at seeing their Human commander moving among them, but after a moment to recover, all gave Kris and Jack smart salutes.

  There had been whispers of riots as she began the transfer of all three staffs to the same building. They hadn't developed. Still, the three levels of the Navy's command structure eyed each other cautiously, jealous of their prerogatives.

  So far, sharing the same wardroom, mess hall, and snack bars had not killed anyone, but quite a few of the senior admirals in all three headquarters were not yet persuaded that it wasn't a likely outcome of this crazy Human experiment.

  Once on the ground floor, Kris stepped out into the bright Iteeche sunlight. She also got a whiff of the usual aroma of the Iteeche capital. It was not overwhelming. In a few moments, Kris's nose adjusted and it disappeared into the background. Still, it was there.