Kris Longknife: Redoubtable

by Mike Shepherd

  A few months earlier, Kris had gotten just such a request from an Iteeche friend. She’d passed on it. If there was something big and mean on the other side of the jump, she didn’t want to make it a present of humanity’s best tech before we had any idea what we faced.

  In theory, the jump in front of them was several thousand light-years away from where the Iteeche were losing scouts. One would think they were not connected. However, never having been a galactic overlord bent on conquering the universe, Kris wasn’t yet ready to conclude she knew exactly where the bad guy’s realm was and wasn’t.

  “Good idea, Chief,” Kris said, “but let’s hold that one in reserve for the time being.”

  “What’s that leave us?” Abby asked.

  “I hate to open my mouth,” Professor mFumbo said, clearly reluctant. This was a totally new aspect of his personality and one that Kris had never seen before. “However, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum do have some expert thoughts on just this problem.”

  “Tweedle Dee and Dum?” Kris echoed, not willing to admit that she had given them the same names but not surprised that someone else had.

  “You know, the two particle physicists I introduced you to earlier. We call them Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, but never to their faces, I assure you. No question they are strange, but also no question they are brilliant.”

  “And if we talked to them,” Kris said, “what would they tell us?”

  “It’s better that I let them tell you themselves.”

  “God help us,” Abby remarked.

  “Really it is,” the professor said. “May I call them?”

  “Do so,” Kris said. “I’m dying with curiosity.”

  A few minutes later, the two drifted in, righted themselves, and began.

  “How big,” one began, “is a jump point?” the other ended.

  “Look at your own ship, the Wasp . . . When we came aboard it, the ship was much thinner . . . but you added several layers of containers . . . and the ship grew wider.

  “Yet every time it entered a jump point . . . no matter what its beam . . . the jump point takes it in.”

  The two of them paused to examine the reception their dissertation was getting. Kris saw round eyes, glazed over, staring back at them. Her own eyes probably weren’t any better.

  Undaunted, they continued.

  “The same goes for the length of ships . . . Take a battleship. It enters the jump point . . . and it exits the jump point . . . At no time is the ship half-in . . . or half-out . . . No matter how long a ship is . . . one has never had its bow sticking out of one jump point . . . and its stern still entering from the other side.”

  Kris eyed Jack, who was eyeing her right back. “They’ve got a point,” she whispered. He nodded agreement.

  The two scientists beamed.

  “We call them jump points . . . and a point is supposed to have zero dimensions, just coordinates . . . but our jump points do a very poor job of staying at their coordinates . . . and swallow ships with much larger than zero dimensions.

  “More interesting . . . is their attitude toward . . . the ships . . . A ship is either in the point . . . or out of it . . . in this system . . . in the point . . . and then in the next system . . . Never two . . . only one.

  “Before the point . . . in the point . . . through the point . . . no matter how large . . . or long.”

  “So,” Kris said thoughtfully, “if we were to attempt to push a fiber-optic cable with a camera on it through a jump point . . .”

  “That experiment . . . was actually attempted . . . in the early days of space travel.”

  “I never heard of it,” Jack said.

  “You aren’t . . . a physicist . . . and since it failed . . . we don’t like to talk . . . about it.”

  “What happened?” Kris asked.

  “The experimenting ship . . . pushed a fiber-optic camera cable toward . . . the jump point . . . The cable never . . . went through the jump . . . It just kind of . . . bent itself . . . around the jump point . . . and ended up showing . . . the space on the . . . other side of the jump . . . in the same system.”

  “No jump,” they said together.

  “So are you again telling me that you have a very interesting bit of science, but you can’t help me a damn bit with my problem today.” Princesses were not supposed to talk like that. Whoever made that rule had never had a day like Kris was having.

  And they’d never listened to these two.

  “We might be able to do something,” they both said

  “What?”

  “We’ve been wondering . . . if Smart Metal™ . . . might allow us to . . . outsmart the jump points.

  “We’ve never had . . . access to any Smart Metal™ . . . but we wonder . . . if we made a single-molecule camera . . . attached it to a different type of Smart Metal™ . . . optimized to carry the signal . . . a kind of wire . . . and had a single- . . . molecule receiver at this end.

  “Maybe that would trick . . . the jump point . . . into seeing the first molecule . . . as a separate unit . . . the wire as also separate . . . and the last molecule the same.

  “One would be . . . on the other side . . . the wire in the point . . . and the transmitter here.”

  “Give these folks some Smart Metal™ and get the best minds on programming Smart Metal™ working with them,” Kris ordered.

  Smart Metal™ was an invention of Grampa Al’s Nuu Enterprises. It allowed naval starships to be large with comfortable private quarters one day and shrink down into a small, heavily armored man-of-war the next. Kris had once seen a spaceship converted into an air vehicle and landed on a planet . . . and had a miserable time getting everything back in order on the spaceship. The material was programmable, but programming it just right was often the problem.

  Oh, and it had almost killed Kris on at least one occasion. Several times if you counted the sudden-onset, engineering casualty problems that the initial class of Smart Metal™ ships were prone to.

  Kris was glad the problem of producing a Smart Metal™ probe for the jump point before them was someone else’s problem.

  Two hours later, a tiny object jetted away from the Wasp. It paused just short of the jump point and appeared to do nothing.

  The screen on the wall of Kris’s Tac Center changed to show a black-and-white picture of wavering space.

  “The bandwidth . . . between the camera . . . and the transmitter . . . is very narrow.”

  “Sorry about that,” both the scientists said together.

  “Now let’s see . . . what we get.”

  The picture didn’t show much change for a few seconds. Then suddenly the roiling view of twinkling stars disappeared. In its place was . . . not much of anything.

  “I always wondered . . . what null space . . . looked like.”

  “Null space?” Kris said.

  Professor mFumbo, who had joined them again only moments before the probe was launched, smiled from ear to ear. “They are the first to get a picture of it. They can name it what they bloody well choose.”

  Kris was not about to dispute that right.

  “Ready to go . . . the rest of . . . the way?” the boffins asked no one in particular.

  Apparently they were asking each other, something that struck Kris as amazing if they actually needed to. With no further words, the picture changed.

  Changed and vanished so quickly that if you’d blinked, you never would have known a different picture had been there.

  “Nelly, get that picture back.”

  “I’m already working on it,” Nelly snapped.

  “What the hell is that?” Jack said, as a snapshot appeared on the screen. Wispy tendrils in different shades of gray formed all sorts of patterns that said very little to Kris.

  “Have you ever seen the inside of a fusion reactor?” Professor mFumbo asked.

  “Can’t say that I have,” Jack said.

  “The inside of a sun, then?”

  “Never even wanted to,
” Kris said.

  “I’ll wait for others to weigh in with their ideas,” the professor said, “but I think we ought to search the sky for a nova. I will bet you ten Wardhaven dollars that this jump will take you right into the heart of that nova.”

  Kris leaned back into her high-gee chair, hardly necessary since the ship was in zero gravity. “You think someone knew that was waiting on the other side?”

  “I doubt if anyone knew what was through that jump,” Commander Fervenspiel said. “I will bet you that they knew that nothing that went in there ever came out. Cunning, these scumbags.”

  “Captain Drago, make best speed for Jump Point Beta.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” Captain Drago said, “but I am one happy man that we did not go charging in there.”

  “I think I’ve learned a good lesson. Look before I leap,” Kris said.

  “Good lesson,” Jack said aloud. “Very good lesson.” To just Kris he added, YOU THINK THAT MAY BE WHAT IS EATING THE ITEECHE SCOUTS?

  “Can we find the nova this jump leads to?” Kris asked aloud. To Jack she added, I HAVE NO IDEA. YOU REALLY WANT TO BET HUMANITY’S FUTURE THAT THE PROBLEM IS AS SIMPLE AS THAT?

  Jack offered only a shrug for a reply.

  Professor mFumbo and Commander Fervenspiel pushed off from their chairs to drift in front of the star map on the wall. As the Wasp slowly put on acceleration, they settled to the floor, their fingers roving from star to star.

  “Nelly, please highlight the star this jump point is supposed to go to.”

  “Kris, I don’t know which star it goes toward. I know where the star was that it went to.” A dot began flashing on the map, about equal distance between three different stars.

  “None of them look like novas,” Kris said.

  “They’re fifty to a hundred light-years from here,” the commander pointed out. “One of the problems with instantaneous transportation is that what you look at may be quite a few years out of date from what you leap to.”

  “At least two of these suns are very old,” Professor mFumbo noted.

  Kris nodded at them. To Jack and Nelly, she thought, I THINK I’VE DISCOVERED HOW TO GET A PEEK AT WHATEVER IS BEHIND THOSE KILLER JUMPS THE ITEECHE HAVE FOUND. NELLY, GET A COPY OF THE DESIGN FOR THOSE PROBES. GET SEVERAL COPIES AND SAVE THEM IN A WHOLE LOT OF PLACES.

  I AM ALREADY DOING IT, KRIS.

  31

  Twelve hours later the Wasp coasted to a halt before Jump Point Beta.

  “Captain Drago, launch a probe with a full-spectrum reconnaissance suite. No need for it to whisper a word about us,” Kris ordered.

  “Probe away,” came from the captain only seconds later.

  Kris had considered several options for this probe, including seeing if they could get more bandwidth for a wire to peek though the jump point. Some very smart people were now working on solutions to those problems. “Working on” them was the operative phrase.

  Today, Kris would do things the old-fashioned way.

  The probe was gone for ten long minutes. A second one stood by immediately to take its place on the other side the moment it slipped back and began a download to the Wasp. For the next six hours, the two probes rotated stations, one downloading what it observed while the other continued the observations.

  There was a warm yellow sun on the other side. A beautiful blue-green world orbited it in the life zone. Blue oceans showed plenty of water. The planet shimmered with a thin sheen of atmosphere. It would take the boffins a half hour to confirm what Kris knew at first glance.

  This planet was as lovely to the human eye as Mother Earth ever had been.

  In orbit around the planet was a rudely-knocked-together space station that held three ships, one of which matched the electronic profile of the Cushion Star. During the first three hours of observation, two shuttles fell away from the station and headed for the same lake dirtside.

  On a bay of that lake was a medium-size town with an agrarian hinterland far too large for its own needs. Examination easily identified that the crops growing over about half the land were those usually needed to feed a growing population: grains, fruits, vegetables. What was growing on the other half of the land’s ground cover didn’t match anything known in the farming database.

  “Do we have a spectrum fingerprint on the latest new drug turning up on the older worlds?” Kris asked.

  Abby shook her head. “No. But I suspect we do now.”

  The radio frequencies were active . . . but hash to the listening probes. “Every word on the bands is encrypted,” Chief Beni reported. “I’ve got Da Vinci working on cracking the cipher, but if it’s a daily throwaway, and they’ve already sent the key, I don’t think we’re going to crack it today.”

  “And I thought I was paranoid,” Kris said. “Jack, Commander, do you see any defenses?”

  “Nothing visible,” both said, then Commander Fervenspiel went on.

  “There’s no reason they should be active. As for the station, since it’s not a standard model, there’s no telling what defenses it has.”

  “But it likely does have defenses,” Jack added.

  “Any way we can find them out?”

  “Attack them,” the commander suggested.

  “I’d hoped to have something better to tell your admiral before he has to do that.”

  The commander shrugged. “I can’t see anything on that station standing up to a Fury-class battleship. I doubt anybody on the ground there has the weapons to stand against a brigade of our Marines.”

  Brute force did seem to be the Greenfeld solution to most problems. Having been on the receiving end of that approach once or three, Kris knew someone could throw a spanner into it.

  Not easily.

  Not cheaply.

  Still, she’d been the one tossing monkey wrenches a time or three.

  The commander seemed to follow where Kris’s thoughts were taking her. “Not everyone has a Longknife to help them thwart overwhelming Greenfeld power.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Kris said. “Let me know when you think you have as much data as we’re likely to get from this reconnaissance.”

  “I think we have,” the commander said.

  Kris considered what that meant. They had all the available information on the target that held Cara. And there was no way Kris was comfortable about launching an attack based on the smattering of intelligence they had.

  With a sigh, Kris ordered, “Captain, the next time our scout comes back, pack it in and let’s head back to St. Pete.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the Wasp was accelerating at 1.5 gees.

  NELLY, THERE’S SOMETHING I WANT YOU TO LOOK UP. I REMEMBER READING ABOUT IT WHEN I WAS A KID. I HAVEN’T RUN ACROSS IT SINCE. NOT THAT I’D REALLY WANT TO. Kris told her computer what to look for. It took Nelly several hours to find the reference. It was in the personal library of one of the boffins.

  Kris listened to what Nelly had found and nodded. THAT WAS ABOUT WHAT I REMEMBERED. Kris tucked it away for the coming meeting with Admiral Krätz.

  As the Wasp approached High St. Petersburg, there were a number of new merchant ships tied up together. When Captain Drago sent a low-order query at them, their responders were hardly civilian: Hornet, Dauntless, Fearless, Intrepid.

  Here, for the first time, were all the ships of Kris’s Patrol Squadron 10, all except the Surprise, which was still probably lugging survival rations to Kaskatos, an unending and thankless task.

  There was also one other ship, a small schooner not unlike two of the ships Kris had just identified tied up to the pirates’ station. Its transponder was very illegally off.

  “Captain Drago, please send to PatRon 10. I will have a meeting of all COs, XOs, and senior Marine officers in the Wasp’s wardroom ten minutes after we dock. Send an information copy to Admiral Krätz with my regards and compliments. I will meet with him at his pleasure if he cannot make my staff meeting.”

  Then she turned to Commander Fervenspiel. “I will understa
nd if you wish to depart as soon as the gangway is down. I will have you provided with a copy of all the take we got from our probe.”

  “I already have orders to stay. My admiral will be here shortly and receive the data take from your own hands, Your Highness.”

  Kris raised an eyebrow at the honor.

  The commander made a small bow. “If I am to have a grand duchess on my ship, I see no reason not to start practicing now.”

  Commander Phil Taussig of the Hornet was first to board the Wasp after she tied up to her usual place between Admiral Krätz’s flagship the Fury and her sister ship the Terror.

  No sooner had he rendered honors than he stood aside. “I was just passing Kaskatos when I got your ‘all come’ message. Knowing you Longknifes, I figured it translated as ‘Hey, Rube, I got a fight brewing,’ so I brought along your two old friends.”

  Following along right behind Taussig’s XO and a Marine platoon lieutenant were Lieutenant Penny Lien Pasley and Colonel Cortez.

  Kris had left them on Kaskatos, hoping they’d get themselves a life there and become so involved that they’d forget they’d ever been close to one of those damn Longknifes. Especially one who was hankering to go out and find what or who was making scout ships vanish.

  “Like a bad penny, I’m back,” Penny said, not realizing how true that was.

  Kris, for her part, found that she’d never been so glad to see two faces in her life.

  “We got plenty of work for you,” Kris said, and passed them through to make room for Jack Campbell and the key members of his team. By the time all her command teams were aboard, the admiral was still nowhere in sight.

  “Commander Fervenspiel, you want to wait here for your elephants?”

  He failed to suppress his grin at Kris’s familiarity with his lofty superiors, so he covered it with a hand. “My orders are to listen to every word you say,” he said, with as pleasant a smile as such a declaration of so little trust allowed.

  “Sergeant Bruce.”

  “Ma’am,” the Marine said, snapping to attention.

  “When Admiral Krätz and his team arrive, show them to the wardroom.”