Kris Longknife: Defender

by Mike Shepherd

  The king chuckled. “Marines haven’t gotten any less sharp even if I have gotten too old to match wits with them. A Scotch, Corporal, double, and on the rocks.”

  “I’ll be right back. Your Highness, your usual?”

  “Yes, Kathy, thank you.”

  The king watched the attractive young woman’s rear sashay away from them. “In a short dress, she definitely would be getting great tips.”

  Then he turned to Kris. “You’re out of uniform.”

  “Sir, no one told me the fleet was in blues. It’s summer below, and we’ve been in whites. Until you showed up with Canopus for a station and source of down, we’ve been granting about a quarter of the crew shore leave in three-day passes.”

  She saw no need to add that she and Jack had tried to get in a two-week vacation.

  He reached into his blouse pocket and pulled out two shoulder boards and slid them across the table to Kris. “You’ve been drawing commander’s pay since the first of this month.”

  Last Kris had heard, she was AWOL and not drawing any pay. It was nice to know she now had some income, but the shoulder boards didn’t have the three stripes of a commander. They showed the one extrawide strip of a commodore.

  “Sir,” Kris said, eyebrow raised.

  “If you’re going to command a squadron all the way on the other side of the galaxy, it seemed like we ought to frock you up to commodore officially. No more of this calling you one thing while you wear the stripes of something a whole lot more junior. Frocking, or fleeting up, is an ancient custom going back to the times of wooden ships and iron men. Think sailing ships all the way on the other side of the world with no damn wire strung up anyone’s butt to get orders from people who didn’t know what was going on but thought they had enough rank to tell everyone what to do.”

  Kris eyed her great-grandfather as the drinks arrived. No one, not even Admiral Crossenshield, had crossed into the space reserved by the glass divider. Even Jack was standing at the bar, an untouched beer in his hand, never taking his eyes off her, or maybe the king.

  “I ducked up to look around on the Canopus Station once we docked,” Kris said. “There’s a full Navy yard here. That rates at least a captain. Maybe this far out, an admiral.”

  “Yeah, Benson has the job. Rear Admiral Benson, now retired, and just Mr. Benson to you. His whole staff are the best volunteers we could lay our hands on. Most retired, a few took early out to come here.”

  Kris knew she should say thank you, but the words didn’t make it past a stampede of other thoughts bubbling up her throat. “You’ve gone to a great effort to see that I command here, Grandfather. Why?”

  The king gave her a smile that was part proud grandparent . . . and part deadly battle commander. How a man could blend those two feelings was one question Kris would not ask.

  “What do you think of that big frigate I popped last on you? Princess Royal. Ten 20-inch lasers. What a war wagon. I thought you might want to transfer your flag to her.” He gave Kris no time to answer that but rushed on. “She’s not named that because you fill out a ball gown real nice, Kris. I gave her that name because you are the fightingest captain I’ve got in my fleet. The fightingest woman commander I’ve seen since your great-grandmother Rita took the 16th Battlecruiser Squadron on its last ride. Yes, I’ve bent the rules to keep you in command. You’re triple-deep selected for commander, and it took an act of Congress from a Congress I can hardly get to act at all, to allow us to start frocking up combat-experienced officers.”

  He glanced around. “I don’t think you’ve failed to notice. We desperately need battle commanders, and experienced ones are in short supply.”

  It was tempting to remind him that she’d been just as battle experienced when he shipped her off to East Siberia to command a mosquito boat flotilla for Madigan’s Rainbow, but she bit her lip and went to what she knew had to be her next question.

  “You know, sir, this is a suicide mission. I don’t see any way we can survive another attack like we faced last time. Recently, we encountered hostiles. They were shooting at anything that drifted into their space. Anything!”

  “You’ve encountered more hostiles?”

  “Yes, sir. Are you ready for my report?”

  The king downed the rest of his Scotch in a single gulp and slammed it down on the table. “Damn, that’s good stuff. Okay, you bring in your team, and I’ll bring in mine, and the other frigate skippers,” he said, waving at Admiral Crossenshield. “You show me what you’ve got, and I’ll show you what I’ve brought. Yes, you’re a forlorn hope, all the way hell and gone across the galaxy, but I’ll be damned if you won’t have a fighting chance.

  “Yes, we want you to put up a fight. A fight that will leave these bastards licking their wounds and, if they beat you, celebrating that they wiped out a nest of the worst sons a bitches the galaxy ever spawned. We need you to buy us time—win, lose, or draw—to build the fleet back home that will take them apart piece by piece until they either holler uncle or, to quote an old sea dog, ‘their language is only spoken in hell.’

  “But no, Princess Royal of my blood, you and your crew are not expendable. What you’re looking at is just the first of several squadrons that were fitting out for the long jumps here when I departed human space. Those huge, bloated transports can spin out four big frigates between them to double your strength. And, as you may have heard”—this last came with a raised eyebrow—“there are factories and mining ships in them, too.

  “And all of what’s coming isn’t just from the U.S. Musashi tells me that they’ll send their 3rd Frigate Squadron just as soon as they have three others to defend themselves. Other planets are kicking in squadrons, too.”

  He almost smiled. “You showed with the Fleet of Discovery that you could lead a mismatched, divided bunch of commanders and ships. I’m glad you had the practice. You’ve only just begun to fight, my dear. You’ve only just begun.”

  “Then I better let you know the extent of the threat, Your Royal Majesty. This planet is beleaguered, and it looks to only get worse.”

  17

  The glass section receded into the deck. Mother MacCreedy had already expanded the open section of the Forward Lounge twice. Penny looked none too happy to be giving up armor, but the system was clear except what was tied up to Canopus Station.

  Oh, and the two, still-unbalanced monsters doing their best to swing around each other two hundred klicks behind the station and wobbling all over the place as they tried again and again to balance themselves.

  Kris did her best not to look at the jig those two were doing. It would not do to get the giggles in front of the king over something his regal decree had insisted was all well in hand.

  No. Not at all. Not at all.

  Between her discovering she could giggle and finding out how good it felt to make long, passionate, languid love under a palm-fringed tree, Jack was proving a very bad influence.

  She dearly wished she could have some more of that bad influence, but Kris declared over this minivacation in her head, stood up, and began to brief the king, his staff, and more importantly, the frigate captions and their XOs, senior scientists, and Marine-detachment skippers of what were to be her new squadron.

  The scientists surprised Kris. All of the frigates had a civilian contingent of fifty to sixty boffins, as well as a platoon of Marines reinforced with heavy weapons. Clearly, what she’d started with the Wasp was being adopted for the fleet. At least the fleet that volunteered for exile to the other side of the galaxy and a potentially suicidal fight.

  “Your Royal Majesty, Admiral, Captains, skippers, ladies and gentlemen. We have defeated the enemy, but they are still sniffing around here. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they’re only sniffing, not massing for an assault. At least not within two jumps of Alwa. One of the things I hope we can do very quickly now that there are more ships avail
able is extend our early-warning system to six, then twelve systems out,” Kris said, glancing at the king.

  He nodded agreement. Admiral Crossenshield made a note.

  The king nodded a lot during Kris’s briefing, and Crossie took a lot of notes.

  Kris was left wondering in that tiny portion of her brain not taken up by the briefing how it happened that the king showed up with the chief of his security and intelligence agency at his elbow. Was Crossie that important, or was Ray not about to leave human space with Crossie not under his watchful eye?

  Meanwhile, Kris kept talking.

  “The aliens removed all their dead from the wreckage of the mother ship. However, our nanos found one boot with part of a leg in it. The aliens we’re dealing with are the same ones we ran into four other times, including the raped planet. Based on genetic drift, this group, however, has not had contact with the other groups for somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years.”

  “Brutish and solitary,” the king muttered. “Do you think they fight among themselves?”

  “No way to form an opinion on that, sir.”

  “What’s your defensive position here?” Crossie butted in.

  “Rather simple for the Wasp,” Kris said as offhandedly as she could. “If a single three-to-five-hundred-thousand-ton ship shows up, we’ll fight it. If two come through the jump gate, we’ll assess our situation and try to fight them. If one of those monster base ships jumps in system with a fleet of two hundred of those huge ships, we run.”

  “But now you’re reinforced,” a lieutenant commander, one of the frigate skippers, said.

  KRIS, THAT’S CAROLYN SAMPSON. YOU MAY REMEMBER HER DAD. HE COMMANDED ATTACK RON SIX WITH THE TYPHOON IN IT AND ORDERED THE ATTACK ON THE EARTH FLEET AT THE PARIS SYSTEM. HE DIED OF A HEART ATTACK BEFORE THE INVESTIGATION WAS EVER STARTED. SHE’S THE SENIOR-MOST FRIGATE SKIPPER, LIKELY THE REASON YOU GOT PROMOTED TO FULL COMMANDER. HER SHIP IS THE CONSTELLATION.

  THANKS, NELLY.

  Kris would likely never forget Commodore Sampson. Because of his early death, the investigation that might have cleared Kris of mutiny had ended without a conclusion.

  What are you doing here, Commander Sampson?

  “Yes, having seven frigates does change matters. If seven huge alien ships jump in, we fight. If fourteen or so jump in, we fight. If that monster base ship with all her nasty kittens jumps in, boys and girls, we run.”

  “And she’s supposed to be the best fighting commander we’ve got,” Sampson whispered, loud enough for the entire room to hear.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Commander,” Kris said, intentionally not giving a ship’s skipper the usual courtesy of being addressed as a captain. “I do fight. I do not fight against suicidal odds. Not if I know it. Not if I can help it. Now that you are all here, we’ll look at our options and see if we can come up with some surprises for the bastards.”

  Kris had Nelly fill the forward screen with the view of the alien mother ship huge and looming just after it had jumped into the next system. The view stayed as the Hellburners blew it apart. Then switched to the dead, twisting, and rolling hulk.

  With hardly a flicker, three huge alien ships appeared. One of them lazed a small rock.

  “We surprised them once. That won’t happen again. I’m open from the floor for a new suggestion as to how we sneak up on them and smash them with Hellburners. By the way, Your Majesty, did you bring out more Hellburners?”

  “Each frigate has two,” the king said. “When the Monarch and its escort take me back, we’ll leave our four behind. Use them as you see fit.”

  “Gladly, sir. By the way, I’m still open for suggestions from the floor on how we sneak up on a monstrous alien mother ship with two hundred huge escorts.”

  The floor had nothing to say. It lay there, very quietly.

  “Mr. Benson,” Kris said, “I’d like to off-load all the Hellburners from the frigates to the station. I see no prospects for a frigate surviving long enough to slip a Hellburner up the rear of a bastard’s base ship. We’ll need to think of some other way of doing the same.”

  “Hellburners aboard my station?” The former admiral looked pained at the thought. “I guess I could store them along the centerline, where there’s no gravity.”

  “And under guard. You do have a Marine detachment?” Kris asked.

  “Most definitely under guard. Do you have a plan for using those things?” Benson asked.

  “I’m working on something,” Kris said, and went on. “I’d like to say that our examination of the wreck has shown us their Achilles’ heel, but instead, we’ve drawn a lot of blanks. All the reactors have been stripped from the wreck. From the size of the cable leads coming off the reactors, the ones inside the ship were big enough to run a medium-size city. Of the lasers, nothing. The undamaged ones were salvaged. Even the ones we hit, most of the wreckage has been policed up and carted off. From the small scraps we did get, we think they’re at least 16-inch. Power and range are still unknown.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you know much,” Sampson muttered lowly.

  “Commander,” the king said, “stow it. You just got here. When you’ve been here six weeks, if you’ve survived, we’ll talk. For now, you’re bothering me.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sampson said, bracing in her chair. She almost wiped the smirk off her face.

  Kris sighed. She’d met a lot of leadership challenges in the last five years. Lieutenant Commander Sampson looked only too eager to offer her a new one.

  “Sir, one question if I may,” Commander Sampson said.

  “Make it a good one,” the king said.

  “Yes sir. The old Furious is still in orbit. Could we salvage her reactors and put them to use powering the moon base? That might save enough reactors for another mineral exploring and extraction ship.”

  “Good idea,” the king said.

  “Bad idea,” Kris said.

  “Oh?” said the king.

  “The colonials on Alwa were trying to off-load those reactors. The Alwans don’t much care for burning forests for fuel or damming rivers. It’s bad for fishing. That space launch we caught back when was part of a major colonial and Alwan effort to get back to the Furious and bring down some new, low-impact power sources.” Kris paused.

  “I’ve already promised the use of the Wasp’s longboats to help.”

  “I thought from the report by the Sakura that the Alwans were preindustrial and happy to stay that way,” Admiral Crossenshield said.

  “The answer to that, sir, is yes, no, and maybe. The Alwans never speak with a single voice,” Kris said.

  “Sounds almost human,” the king rumbled.

  “Exactly, sir. Most of the old elders are against change. Some of the new, younger elders are more open to change. Many Alwans show up at the colony, ask for an education, and start working right alongside the colonists.”

  “No central government, huh?” the king said.

  “The survivors of the battlecruisers”—Granny Rita to be precise—“thought they had made contact with something like a central government. The Association of Associations. However, you have to realize two things. The Furious made orbit shot up pretty bad and on her last leg. Commodore Rita had to get the crew of the Furious and the Enterprise somewhere they could breathe and maybe find something to eat. Haven looked like a good target, and they went for it.”

  Kris took a deep breath. “The Wasp is now doing the first methodical mapping of the planet, and we’ve spotted what look like six different major civilizations plus several minor ones. I can’t even swear that they’re all from the same gene pool. Some around the equator look very different from those in the temperate zones, and the polar regions are different again.”

  “But they’re all confined to the planet,” Commander Sampson put in, “even the colonials, so what we do out here in the system is
none of their business.”

  This was supposed to be a Navy meeting. However, Kris noticed several tables filled with civilians, some in business suits, some in more hardworking gear. At the commander’s question, every head focused on her.

  So much for a private briefing for the king and her officers.

  Kris dropped the bomb. “As it turns out, that is not quite true. The Alwans have developed a taste for human technology. I was just recently interviewed by an Alwan TV medium. The camera needed a tripod to hold it and the mike they gave me weighed over a kilo and was about the size of a banana, but a lot of Alwans are watching TV. Modern transportation is catching on. Most involve animal-pulled wagons, but electric carts and trucks are gaining in popularity. They need to get the old Furious’s thermonuclear reactors dirtside and soon.”

  Kris had everyone in the room hanging on her words, and everyone at the business tables were scowling her way. Enough lead-in.

  “The Alwans have required royalties from the colonists to remove minerals. They want forty percent of the finished manufactured products.”

  “That’s highway robbery,” Sampson exploded, climbing half-out of her seat.

  The business types said much worse though in lower tones. Mother MacCreedy headed over to demand the tables comply with her rules or be cut off. Some of those not in suits were stomping around. Several gave Kris the universal hand signal of approbation.

  Kris tried not to smile. Maybe she succeeded.

  King Raymond stood up, and at last Commander Sampson sat down and shut up. “I can see we have a lot to discuss with the natives and the colonials. I think I’m about as fully briefed as I can stand. Commodore, do you have experienced bosuns for making the approach to, what are they calling it, Haven?”

  “Yes, sir. Our bosuns have been flying the route two or three times a day.”