Kris Longknife: Defender

by Mike Shepherd

  The helmsman was a chief bosun’s mate, but he still blanched at the order. “Sir, I’ll try.”

  “Try ain’t good enough, Chief,” the skipper said. “Nelly, can you lay in the course?”

  “It is done, Captain.” For once there was none of Nelly’s back talk. Even if this was the first time Captain Drago had trusted his ship to her.

  “Make it so, Nelly.”

  Over the 1MC, all hands listened to the message being broadcast from the diversion. It demanding to know what ship had entered the system, to whom they offered their oath, and . . .

  It didn’t get any farther as all three ships blasted it out of space.

  While they shot, the Wasp rotated hard, kicking its crew in the rear with three gees acceleration. Then she gave them whiplash with a second ninety-degree rotation while coasting for maybe half a second.

  Immediately, she then put on a single-gee acceleration and launched herself into a jinking pattern that would have slammed heads hard if the eggs hadn’t locked down every inch of their bodies and cushioned them.

  Kris had the larger of the three ships in her crosshairs. Twelve huge rocket motors were putting out plasma from four of eight reactors. Kris targeted where she’d expect to find two reactors and fired Lasers 1 and 2.

  Apparently engineering solutions galaxywide tend to yield the same answers. Two 18-inch lasers smashed into the engineering spaces of two reactors. Magnetic containment equipment suffered lethal disruption. Twenty-thousand-degree demons that were never meant to know the face of man were unleashed, ripping and tearing, feeding on construction that was not meant for the likes of them.

  Two untouched reactors joined the dance of destruction, then their hunger spread the entire length of the ship.

  In a blink, where a ship had been were only gases.

  Kris would watch this on the recordings after the battle. Once she’d seen the destruction begin, she was already turning to the second ship.

  It had not yet reacted to the disaster overtaking her leader. Her slow response was her doom. This ship had only nine rocket engines. Kris targeted two reactors and hit one.

  One was enough to begin the chain of catastrophic failures that ate the ship.

  The third ship had a faster captain. He’d already begun to swing his vulnerable engines away from this sudden attack. Kris had had Nelly launch four of her limited supply of high-acceleration 12-inch antimatter torpedoes at him even as she concentrated her lasers on the other two. The six 5-inch secondaries added what they could.

  The third hostile, though smaller, was still equipped with way too many lasers and was bringing them to bear on the Wasp.

  “Flip ship,” Drago ordered. “Get that wreck back between us and them.”

  Nelly was already doing it as the helmsman reached to obey.

  Kris had her eye on the alien. She still had her rear stinger. If the stern came within fifteen degrees of that puppy, she’d knock a big hole in its bow.

  NELLY, CAN YOU GIVE ME A SHOT?

  I CAN ADJUST OUR JINKING TO SHOW THEM OUR REAR, BUT ONLY FOR ONE SECOND. AND I’LL BE CHANGING COURSE EVEN AS I’M DOING THAT. I COULD FIRE THE LASER AND ADJUST ITS AIM TO MY JINKS.

  DO IT, GAL.

  A short breath later, Laser 5 fired. A few seconds more, and the wreck was once again between them and their enemy. The entire sally took less than ten seconds.

  As the Wasp returned to the safe shadow of the hulk, and to a more sedate smooth quarter gee, the ship exploded in cheers.

  Captain Drago let the crew rejoice for a moment, then punched his commlink. “All hands, good shooting and good ship handling. Two down, but anyone want to bet the third ship heads home with its tail between its legs to let its betters know that the old wreck has a new owner?”

  No one offered to take the bet.

  Even as he finished speaking, Sensors was already reporting. “Sir, the ship has continued on a course that will bring it around the hulk after us.”

  “Then we better play ring-around-the-rosy,” the captain said, and the helmsmen tucked the Wasp in close to the wreck. With one eye on the hulk-mounted sensors, he began edging them to port, keeping the hostile exactly opposite them.

  “Well, Your Royal Highness, have you got any more ideas? I’m plumb out.”

  Kris sighed. She’d been about to ask Captain Drago the same question.

  But she was the Longknife. Admitting she’d scraped the bottom of her barrel of ideas for how to keep alive while killing what was after you was just not part of the legend.

  5

  For the next quarter hour, they circled the wreck.

  Then the alien got sneaky and reversed course.

  The Wasp also quickly flipped ship and took off in the opposite direction.

  Unfortunately, that gave away that they had better situational awareness than the hostile. He noticed that quickly enough and started shooting up the hulk with all those lasers the aliens seemed to oversupply their ships with.

  In fifteen minutes, they’d lost so many sensors that they could no longer communicate with them by tight beam. Rather than lose more of Nelly’s next child’s brainpower, they closed their net down.

  “He’s going to switch his direction real soon,” Drago muttered.

  “So let’s change the game. How about hide-and-seek.”

  “Explain yourself, Princess.”

  “There’s a big hole in the wreck. I’d hate to take the love-boat-size Wasp in there, but at Condition Zed, we’re pretty small.”

  “Nelly, have you mapped that hole?” the captain asked.

  “No, but Professor Labao’s computer has.”

  “Lay in a course to back us into said hole next time we pass it. Be careful with my ship, Nelly. I like it just the way it is.”

  A few seconds later, Nelly flipped the Wasp, slammed on the brakes with a three-gee deceleration, and brought the ship to a dead halt in space. In a human blink, she swung the ship around, aft end to the hole in the hulk, and did a little twisting dance as she backed it into a hole that was doing its own bit of rock and roll.

  There was no crunch of metal.

  They were hardly in the shade of the hole before the alien ship slid by a good thirty thousand klicks out. Not only was he changing his direction, he was also edging out to get a longer horizon.

  “Now what do we do?” Drago asked.

  “Nelly, deploy visual sensors to the right and left, above, and below our hideout. Whatever direction he comes from next time, I want to get enough warning to accelerate out after he passes and get a shot at his engines.”

  “Doing it, Kris. By the way, Kris, we got the full coverage of that ceiling I wanted and one of the nanos discovered a boot with the leg still in it. We should be able to get DNA off it.”

  “Good! Now, Nelly, where are my visuals?”

  “Coming online.” The forward screen divided to show what was ahead of them as well as a large cross in all four major points of the compass.

  “Kris, dear,” came Granny Rita’s voice over the net, “I do hate to joggle your elbow again at a time like this, but the Alwans would like you to make a new try at contacting the alien. They feel that the demonstration you have given should persuade it to surrender to your will.”

  “Sorry, Granny, it ain’t gonna happen. This is the fifth time we’ve run into these bastards. The only one that didn’t end with one side annihilated was the one where our ship managed to run away. Fights with these people are to the death. Tell your friends to get used to it. Either they die, or we die, and I’m busy doing everything I can right now to make sure they’re the ones dead.”

  “Thank you, love, I had to try.”

  NELLY, WHAT ARE THOSE CRAZY BIRDS TALKING ABOUT?

  SORRY, KRIS, I CAN’T FOLLOW THEM. THEY ARE USING TOO MANY SOCIAL REFERENCES TO THINGS THAT HAPPENED IN TH
E PAST. LANGUAGE IS MORE THAN EACH WORD.

  ENOUGH, NELLY.

  The alien was getting smarter. He’d adjusted his orbit by fifty-five degrees. Kris barely caught a glimpse of him as he headed for an orbital crossing that wasn’t too far from their hideout. He was also blasting away at the wreck, using his firepower to swat at anything and nothing.

  “There’s a chance that one of his wild shots may blast our hole,” Nelly said. “Should I back us deeper?”

  “No,” Kris and Captain Drago said at the same time.

  “Get ready to boot us out of here on my order,” Kris said. “Jink the way you think you have to, Nelly, but get the forward end of the Wasp aimed at that bastard.”

  “Jinking pattern standing by,” Nelly said.

  Kris forgot to breathe as the alien slid close to their hole but didn’t pass directly over them. The cave did take a near hit. A girder collapsed across the exit.

  KRIS, Nelly started.

  RAM IT, Kris ordered. DRAGO CAN COMPLAIN TO ME ABOUT THE DING. NOW GO!

  The Wasp leapt into a three-gee acceleration, then warped its bow around to chase the alien across the sky.

  The crosshairs on the lasers settled on the now-targetable aft engineering space. Kris fired three, holding just Laser 4 in reserve.

  Two of the lasers slammed into the ship but seemed to do nothing. The other one did critical damage to one of the reactors. The ship began to slew around as a couple of the rocket engines vented plasma. Its lasers were suddenly aimed at empty space, but they kept right on firing even as the rear of the ship began to vaporize.

  Kris put her last 18-inch laser into where she would have put one of the two forward reactors, the ones that powered the life support and the lasers. Her guess was good. The hit loosed demons that gobbled up the bow of the ship.

  Its lasers only died as the entire ship converted itself to a ball of expanding gas.

  Nelly cut acceleration to a single comfortable gee as the bridge crew silently took in that they would live. The aliens were dead, paying the full price for starting this fight. The humans would live to see another sunset. They would taste dinner. They still had the chance of finding someone who might love them back as strongly as they loved them.

  “Is it over?” Granny asked over the net.

  “It looks that way,” Kris answered. “Nelly, do you have a visual on the jump point?

  “Yes, Kris, and it’s quiet. I’m launching two standard low-tech buoys to take up station on either side of that jump. It will tell us anything we need to know while we drop back to the wreck and pick up the nanos we left behind.”

  “Do we have to?” the new navigator asked.

  “Those probes are Smart Metal that we can use for armor and matrix that Nelly intends to use for her next child,” Kris said. “Yes, we will return and pick them up. Who knows? Some of the nanos may have data we didn’t get a chance to download while we were fighting for our lives. Battles can be so distracting,” Kris said through a grin.

  “I am so glad that Your Highness understands the hunger of her scientists for discovery,” Professor Joao Labao added on net.

  That drew boos from several of the bridge hands, but they were careful to keep their comments low and see that their mikes were off.

  Thirty minutes later, Nelly reported that all her probes that were still able to move were back on board.

  “Navigator, set course for Alwa,” Captain Drago ordered. “One point five gees, if you please. All hands, we will maintain battle stations until we exit this system. Defense, we will maintain Condition Zed until the same. Commodore Rita Nuu Ponsa, if you feel that the one and a half gees is too much for your delegation, you may invite them to stay in their gee tanks. Since we won’t be jinking, I believe that we can pop the lid off the tanks and let them breathe on their own.”

  “Thank you, Captain. Please have someone get us out of these coffins.”

  Kris rolled her egg for what would have been her Tac Center.

  Jack made to follow.

  “You can park that egg wherever you want, Jack, but not where I’m going. Granny is not presentable and, if I have to pop this egg open to help her and her Alwans, I won’t be either.”

  Jack eyed Kris as if to say, “And I’d be seeing what that I haven’t?” but kept his reply to a gentlemanly, “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  Penny rolled her egg after Kris. “I can lend a hand.”

  HOW COME THE ALWANS GET TO SEE YOU NAKED AND I CAN’T? Jack said over Nelly Net.

  BECAUSE I SAY SO, AND LET’S SHUT THIS DOWN. I DON’T WANT TO SCANDALIZE THE COMPUTERS.

  KRIS, I FIND HUMAN SEXUALITY VERY INTERESTING, BUT HARDLY SCANDALOUS.

  NELLY, SHUT UP. JACK, SHUT UP. PENNY, LET’S GET THIS OVER WITH.

  So they did. Kris found it interesting the way the Alwans looked anywhere else but at the naked humans who helped make their lives less claustrophobic.

  To no apparent question from Kris, Granny whispered, “I’ll explain later.”

  The sigh as the Wasp edged through the next jump had to be measured on the Richter scale.

  6

  As soon as the Wasp made orbit around Alwa, the six observers demanded to be returned to the Association of Associations by the first shuttle. Granny Rita was expressly not invited to join them.

  Kris invited Granny Rita to the now-restored Forward Lounge, where the old gal could enjoy some well-aged Scotch, a luxury that had disappeared on Alwa too many years ago to count.

  “So, what’s up with the Alwans?” Kris asked, when they were both served. Kris was back to tonic water with a twist of lime.

  “I have no idea. They haven’t said a word to me since you refused to ‘crow’ to the lone survivor. Something about how we’ve strutted our stuff and flashed our feathers. ‘They can see you are superior. Now, they must bow their heads.’”

  “That’s what they wanted me to send?” Kris asked, incredulously.

  “That’s the way they do things, young lady. Be glad of it. It saved me and my crew from a lot of bloody fighting when we dropped in. Fortunately, they had some dry land that wasn’t much used, and it wasn’t too bad for farming.”

  “You were lucky in too many ways to count,” Kris said.

  Granny raised her glass in a silent toast to those like them but no longer present. “I’ve had more luck than any human being has a right to claim since I led the remnants of BatCruRon 16 into that jump at three gees and battle revolutions.”

  Kris nodded. Eighty years ago, that was a death sentence for the Furious, Enterprise, Audacious, and Resolute.

  Granny Rita’s eyes grew distant, and her words came low. “The Iteeche were implacable after my squadron blew up their invasion fleet. Any hope of taking our base had gone up in exploding gas, as well as an awful lot of their troopers, so when I took off, they came hot and straight after me. We went through the next three jumps at higher and higher speeds, adding on more revolutions to our spin in the hope of saving some of our armor from the hammering the Iteeche were giving us.”

  The old war fighter shook her head. “We fled, but they would not give up the chase. We were long past any planets claimed by the Iteeche Empire, and still the chase went on. First the Resolute faltered, fell behind, and died fighting a dozen Death Balls. They got her, but she got half of them. Then it was the Audacious’s turn. When finally Furious and Enterprise made a jump and discovered to our great joy that no Iteeche ship had followed us through, we were hopelessly lost.

  “And while I and the Enterprise’s young skipper were trying to figure out what to do next, our two ships shot through a jump point that wasn’t even showing on our sensors. We jumped three, four times farther than I ever thought a ship could go and found ourselves even farther from any help. That happened to us twice before we managed to change course real fast and dodge whatever it was that was doing this to
us.”

  “We call them fuzzy jump points,” Kris said. “That was Nelly’s name for them, and it’s stuck. Our best guess is that the Three who built the jump points built the fuzzy ones last as some kind of expressway. They’re closer together, and they take you a whole lot farther. With fifty or so baby monster ships chasing the Wasp after this fight, the only way we managed to break contact and get back to human space were those jumps. You need special navigational gear to spot them.”

  “Well, they got us into this neighborhood. We took axes to the surviving armor on our two ships. The Furious was less damaged, so we piled everyone in her, fed anything we thought might work into the plasma chambers, and started trying to slow down.”

  Again, Granny Rita raised her now-half-empty glass. “We were down to fumes and hard tack when we stumbled into a system with that beautiful blue-green orb. It could have gotten messy, but the Light People took us in. That, my dear, is why we’re here to say howdy to you.”

  “But will the Alwans be talking to us tomorrow?” Jack asked as he joined them. “The Captain’s Gig is back. The crew report the Alwans didn’t say a word on the drop down. Not even a thank-you as they disembarked. It was made clear to the bosun flying the gig that they wanted him gone soonest.”

  Jack flagged a server down, one of his Marines supplementing his pay, and ordered a beer. It arrived very quickly.

  Granny Rita just shook her head. “The Alwans are not stupid. I know they have this blind side about fighting. They seem to have evolved into their present system of conflict resolution. I benefited from it. It will be a tough fight against hereditary impulses, but I can’t help but think when they see they were the target of an attack, and now have seen your ship attacked, that they’ll do what has to be done.”

  “Kris, there is a call coming in for you,” Nelly said.

  “From whom?”

  “One of the media services.” Nelly did her best to do something with clicks, coos, and warbles.

  “Oh, them,” Granny Rita said, “they’ve been the best when it came to reporting on the things where we Heavy People and the People got it right. One of the calls the Alwans made the first month we arrived was that they didn’t want any sudden influx of human technology. We agreed to hold things back. We didn’t bring stuff down from the Furious we really wanted, like a reactor. It’s worked pretty good. We still schooled our kids that there’s a lot more to the world than they can work with. That launch to the Furious that you observed. We finally got permission to bring down the gear for a thermonuclear reactor.”