Kris Longknife: Defender

by Mike Shepherd

  THAT WOULD BE HARD TO SAY.

  Kris thought on that for a while, then remembered she needed help on her Hellburner question. She had to call another meeting with Pipra, a mining expert, and Admiral Benson. Penny and her lieutenant stayed, though Amanda excused herself. If there was a mountain of copper to be strip-mined, she needed to check on its location and the local attitudes.

  If it was down south, the ostrich types might not mind. Of course, the ore would have to be shipped north for refinement and manufacturing. Nothing came easy.

  “I was wondering when we’d talk about those Hellburners I’m collecting,” the former admiral said as he quick-walked into Kris’s office.

  Kris brought everyone up to speed on the ideas of burying the Hellburners deep under the surface of three moons close to the aliens’ line of approach from the jump to Alwa.

  The mining boss, Berkant Fulan, a man with calluses on his hand and a quick eye for details, questioned the worth of Hellburners a million kilometers or so from the likely target.

  “If we put them too close, they’ll get lased in no time flat,” Kris simply said.

  “Well, I don’t see any problems. If you’d let us use one of your frigates, we could drill some good holes with their 20-inch guns.”

  “But all we’d have to show for it is a fine dust,” Kris pointed out.

  “And the problem with that is?” Berkant asked.

  “I want gravel, rocks, pebbles, and other junk to toss into their flight path.”

  “Woman, I bet you also want egg in your beer. Speaking of, I’d settle for just a beer about now.”

  “I’m telling you what I need for a fight for your and my life. You can have a beer after we finish this meeting.”

  “A big hole in three moons. Maybe with two or three ways out,” the miner said, starting a list. “Lots of messy stuff left over. It’s an unusual request, I must say, ma’am. You think the bastards might not trust any moon behind them. Maybe they’ll laser the whole surface?”

  “I expect they will, so we may need to redig the hole before we can launch the Hellburners.”

  “Which will tie up more of my equipment,” the miner grumbled.

  “Do you have diggers to do this job?” the former admiral asked.

  “I got them. I may need some support stuff I don’t have. A conveyer belt to get all those rocks this lovely lady wants.”

  “More use for Smart Metal,” the admiral said.

  “Lots and lots of uses,” Kris said with a sigh.

  That meeting adjourned, but the yard boss stayed behind.

  “You’re going to owe me one for taking Sampson off your hands,” he said.

  “Send me the bill,” Kris said. “Just keep her too busy to cause me trouble.”

  “I doubt that’s possible, but keeping her busy, that I can do.”

  “You might also try to get her to take a fitness-for-duty physical. I can’t help but wonder if there’s more going on in her than she’s saying, and she said a lot.”

  “You want me to order her to get one?”

  Kris sighed. “Ask.”

  “I’ll ask. Absent an order, I doubt she’ll listen.”

  “Yeah. This why you stayed?” Kris said. Feeling suddenly tired.

  “No. Actually the reason was quite different. When we finally get those four large frigates spun out of the Prosperity and Enterprise, we’re going to need to name them.”

  “I suppose someone has already decided something.”

  “Yes, Your Royal Highness, Viceroy of Alwa, but they are all to hell and gone on the other side of the galaxy. I figured you might have some opinions of your own.”

  “What are the names?” Kris said, now feeling all the exhaustion of the day.

  The yard boss handed her a short list.

  She read down it. “Congress. Well, they appointed me and we’ve already got a Monarch, seems like a good idea. Royal. I guess that balances Congress, Constitution, and Constellation. Bulwark. That seems to be our job here. Ardent? Who came up with that one?”

  The admiral shrugged.

  Kris reached for a stylus and scratched through the last name.

  In its place she wrote Hornet.

  She handed the list back to the former Navy man. “There are the names for your new heavy frigates.”

  He smiled. “Good fighting names. I’ll see that they are commissioned as such, hopefully before you get back from hunting for the old Hornet.”

  Kris found herself finally alone. It had been an exhausting day. No doubt, a lot of people were cussing her name as they worked late cleaning up the mess they hadn’t known they had until she showed them.

  “Nelly, did you ever get me an appointment with Ada?”

  “Yes. You were tied up in meetings, so I held off. Is eleven o’clock too early?”

  “No, it will give me time to get down and back and maybe have some meetings here to file the teeth down on the alligators up here.”

  “Strange, Ada said something along the same line. ‘No doubt your princess will leave me with a whole lot of work to do. Better I find out early in the day, so I can get some of it done.’”

  Kris read reports until she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore, then shambled off to her night quarters and barely made it out of her uniform before she fell in bed already half-asleep.

  Is this any way for a bride to behave? she asked herself. Her husband dirtside and she too exhausted to do anything if he weren’t. Of course, if he were here, he’d have to be one deck down and in the next frame.

  She fell asleep before she could contemplate any further the unfairness of it all.

  34

  Nelly woke Kris at 0545. “Kris, Jack’s shuttle will dock in fifteen minutes. Do you want to be there to greet him?”

  It was amazing just how fast Kris shot out of bed and pulled on yesterday’s whites. She had one of those female premonitions that new whites would be wasted on her returning husband. She was at the docking bay just as Longboat 2 locked in.

  Jack was first off.

  At this early hour, there were few personnel around to witness their commodore and the colonel of the Marine Strike Force throw themselves at each other and lock into a kiss that showed just how much they’d missed each other.

  They weren’t alone, though. Amanda and Jacques were just as tightly intertwined.

  And both of the men were as muddy and grimy as if they’d been on a four-week campaign. Kris’s day-old whites would need special laundering, but who cared?

  “Was it dangerous?” both women asked their men at the same time.

  “No” and “Not a bit” were their answers. The lie might have held if four Marines hadn’t exited the longboat at that moment with a pole stretched between them. Dangling from the pole was the newly named kanga-tiger.

  “That’s huge,” Kris said.

  “You shot that?” Amanda demanded of Jacques.

  “Not me. Three or four Marines took it down.”

  “Not a bit dangerous,” Kris said, elbowing Jack. Since he was in full battle rattle, the armor hurt her elbow more than it did anything to him.

  “It’s all in your perspective. You’re a viceroy. You go to meetings, or so I hear. I’m a Marine. I get to play in the mud and kill really nasty things that need killing. A job’s a job.”

  Kris kissed him again. “Want to trade?”

  “No way would I let you go for a walk in those woods. It’s not just the big things. They got little things that will take your hand off before you even know they’re there. I can’t tell you how much I admire the Alwans who’ve set up camp in those woods. Or how glad they are to find Marines willing to help them. They may have survived, but they’ve got no problems with seeing some of these ‘eat’em-ups’ get their comeuppance from a Marine fire team.”

 
Another big thing with lots of teeth was carried out. It had six legs.

  “How many of these ‘eat’em all ups’ are there?” Amanda asked.

  “I’m sure we can find a biologist willing to categorize and name them all. For me, they’re just targets . . . and chow. They make good eating,” Jack said.

  Kris adjourned to her cabin with Jack. They both needed a shower, so they saved water by sharing one. Abby was sent to get a set of greens and tans for Jack. He being her security chief, it seemed only appropriate that he accompany Kris back down to her meetings.

  “I don’t think there are any folks mad enough at me dirtside to start shooting,” Kris said from a comfortable position under Jack.

  “But I should keep an eye on you.”

  They were decent by the time Abby got back with Jack’s uniform.

  Kris had never slept on a shuttle flight. Jack had no trouble falling asleep as soon as he buckled in, and Kris rested her head on his shoulder. She found herself waking up as they docked.

  What Kris was starting to think of as her new staff were with her: Amanda and Jacques, Penny and Masao, with Abby thrown in for reasons that were not clear, as usual. Somehow, Sergeant Bruce had ended up leading the Marine security detachment.

  Kris accredited that to his having one of Nelly’s kids. Officially, that had to be the reason. It couldn’t be that he was just as interested in staying close to Abby as she was to Jack.

  Ada greeted them at the landing with the jitney. This time, Kris rode shotgun next to Ada.

  “Before we get started, do you have any problems I need to know about?” Kris asked. “With the best of intentions, I know we can get off on the wrong foot.”

  Beside Kris, the reason the shuttle had been so sluggish pulling away from the Princess Royal became clear. It must have had five hundred tons of extra Smart MetalTM wrapped around it. The metal was streaming from the shuttle down the pier in a thin cable to form a cube ashore. On the other side of the cube, a chief was spinning a truck out.

  “So far, so good, Viceroy,” Ada said after a bit of hesitation. There was a vague tone as if she was none too confident she’d be saying that for a whole lot longer.

  “I did get a visit from a delegation of elders yesterday complaining about something involving renegades in the deep woods and us helping them. Since I’d never heard that any Alwans survived in the deep woods, that was kind of a surprise. Did I miss a report from one of your survey teams about them?”

  Kris glanced at Amanda, who got a look on her pretty face like she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar and a nod that the claim might just be true.

  “I think that’s possible,” Kris admitted.

  “Let me guess. Some more of your Marines. Now, I can’t complain about those Marines helping our fisherman land a lot more of their catch. Hopefully, your people can pull off these large trucks to carry the catch and other junk inland though I don’t know how he’s going to get it powered. We don’t have batteries that big, and I don’t know when we’ll get our new reactor online. They just started landing pieces of it late yesterday. Project manager won’t give me any idea when he’ll be done.”

  “Your reactor is in good shape. At least the first one. We’re having to cannibalize the fourth one to get all three of them working.”

  “So what I get is what I got and this split fifty-fifty may not stay that way,” Ada said with sour in her voice.

  “Ada, there are a whole lot of unknowns in everything we’re doing here. I’ve got a set of factories about to go operational on the moon in a few days. That may release more Smart Metal. I’ve got a chief designing a fishing boat that can go out and harpoon the ‘eats everythings’ and other boats to trawl for fish.”

  “Sounds like we’re going to be eating a lot of fish.”

  “It’s better than eating nothing,” Kris said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Fish offal also makes good fertilizer. You’ve said that you got the worse land on Alwa. Imagine what it will do if we add fertilizer from fish bones, guts, that kind of stuff?”

  “That report did make it to my desk,” Ada said. “Yes, it will help, but with next year’s crop at the soonest.”

  “Any chance you might get a second crop in this year if you get plenty of fertilizer and water?” Amanda asked.

  “Where’s the water coming from?”

  “We’re working on that,” Amanda said. “Once we have power, we can pump water from the deep woods. There’s lots of water there.”

  “Pipes?”

  “Steel from the moon,” Kris said.

  “You folks think big, don’t you?”

  “I wasn’t thinking small when I took out that enemy base ship,” Kris said.

  Ada sighed. “Yes, you have a point there, and it’s not one you let me forget, is it?”

  “Do you want to?”

  The jitney pulled into the round parking area in front of Government House. “There are times I wish all this was just a dream. That I could wake up and everything would be the same as it was before Granny Rita answered your call and we found out the kind of mess we’re in and never knew. You know what I mean?”

  “Do they still tell the story about the ostrich that kept its head in the sand?” Kris asked.

  “Yes, to every first grader. I know, I know, but all this change coming at me like a tidal wave, you have to let me stop once in a while and catch my breath.”

  “Ada, I hear where you’re coming from, but please realize. I had no idea what I was getting into when I talked King Ray into letting me see what this great big galaxy held. It’s been one continuous surprise after another for the rest of us, too.”

  The woman sighed. “Let’s go inside. If you think I’m having it bad, wait until you hear from Kuno.”

  “He’s your ministry of Mining and Industry, right?”

  “Yep, and you’ll never guess where they just discovered a whole mountain of copper.”

  “I’ve heard about the mountain. Nobody mentioned where.”

  “How about at the headwaters of our main watershed for our year-round drinking water.”

  “That would explain why no one wanted to tell me where it is,” Kris said, glancing at Amanda and Penny. Both of them were making a point of not looking at Kris.

  “Nelly, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “The information about the water source is not in my database, Kris. I didn’t know the significance of the location.”

  They had a long meeting after that, involving lots of people from the station by conference call. Yes, it was easier to dig a big hole in the ground and extract the ore, then run it through a smelter and truck the finished product to Haven, but, in the end, the miners had to settle for using Smart MetalTM to make nanos to do the extraction. It was slower, but a whole lot easier on the trees and its precious groundwater.

  As for moving the scientists down to Haven, Ada and several ministers, including education, got very excited. When the full number of boffins, some 450 to 500, came up, there were a few gulps, but as Ada said, “If they don’t mind eating a lot of fish, food won’t be a problem.” Housing would be more difficult, but they’d manage. The lumber mill hadn’t been working at full capacity, and if the deep woods truly were becoming safer, there should be plenty of timber.

  That would also give the Alwans more area to plant in their mixed-crops way.

  Assuming the elders didn’t find a reason to object.

  The meeting went into lunch. Fish rolled in thin tortillas with something like lettuce were brought in. The meeting didn’t end until well into the afternoon, leaving Kris just time enough to catch the last shuttle back and meet with her industrial team.

  The factories on the Prosperity had finally been separated from what would become two frigates and a pair of mining ships. If there were no more surprises, the
y’d be landed tomorrow. Miners could also head out tomorrow to find the minerals needed to make batteries and other modern electronic gear . . . such as lasers.

  When Jack kissed Kris good night in her day quarters, at the door to her night quarters, per regulations, Kris could claim to have had a very nice day.

  35

  Frigate Squadron 4 pulled away from the station right smartly next morning at 0900 sharp. But it wasn’t just the officers and crews who had learned a thing or three. So had their commodore.

  “Flag to squadron, set Condition Charlie,” Kris ordered.

  “Right, of course,” Captain Kitano was heard to mutter under her breath.

  Five minutes later, the squadron accelerated smartly to three gees and held that speed for most of the trip out to Alwa’s closest gas giant. Along the way, an asteroid belt provided them with ample opportunity to practice their gunnery and reloading speed. Kris hated the long wait for the lasers to recharge. She felt naked waiting fifteen seconds for the forward lasers to be ready again. Once, when the Princess Royal had targets both fore and aft, it took twenty seconds to get the lasers back online.

  “Could we recharge three lasers forward and two aft in ten seconds? Or fewer lasers in shorter time?” she asked.

  Captain Kitano shook her head. “If we try to pour too much juice too quickly to one capacitor, we’ll fry the power cables.”

  Kris nodded. NELLY, SEE WHAT YOU CAN FIND OUT ABOUT COOLING THE CABLES MORE.

  KRIS, THEY’RE ALREADY SUPERCONDUCTORS. THERE’S A LIMIT.

  THEN MAYBE WE NEED TO HAVE MORE CABLES.

  I WILL RESEARCH WHAT CAN SPEED UP RELOAD TIMES, KRIS.

  When they made orbit around the gas giant, the real fun began. Each frigate spun off a pinnace, powered by a single reactor, and stood by as the smaller ship went cloud dancing for reaction mass. Once, twice, then a third time, the pinnaces did their dance, each time bringing a supply of hydrogen, helium, and maybe other heavier slush, back to its frigate.

  Kris could only smile as the pinnaces did easily what the old Wasp had nearly wrecked herself doing. Here was another reason to love the new Smart MetalTM.