Kris Longknife's Replacement: Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station

by Mike Shepherd

  Please do, again was Penny.

  “I think we can find a use for them,” Sandy said.

  “Definitely, I think we can,” Admiral Drago agreed.

  “Then we shall start shipping them up here tomorrow,” President Almar said.

  Sandy shook her head. “You don’t ship them up here until some of my people get a good look at them and understand their internal workings. How to take them apart. How to put them back together. And when they come up here, they come in pieces. I don’t want any of them going off. Oh, and my folks who go down there, they get one of those extraterritorial passes we talked about.”

  “Yes,” Madame Gerrot said, “yes, you should go over them thoroughly and be trained in their maintenance. We will do our best to assure that there is as little interchange between our experts and yours, so there can be no problems between us. Still, we will give them a grant of legal immunity.”

  Sandy stood, and offered her hand. The two of them shook hands with her and Penny ushered them out.

  “What have I gotten myself into?” Sandy asked the overhead.

  “I better get my engineers looking up whatever we’ve got on those things,” Drago said.

  “Mimzy has already done the research,” Jacques answered. “There wasn’t a lot in the records aboard ship. I’m sending off a request to both Columm Almar and the Bizait Kingdom for copies of everything they have on their nuclear projects including the manuals for their nuclear weapons.”

  “It will be interesting to see how they reply,” Sandy said.

  “Well, if we can’t give my folks any better information on the care and feeding of those monsters, I’m not sending anyone down there,” Admiral Drago said, with finality. “I seem to recall that people died even when they were just working around that atomic crap.”

  “Yes,” Jacques said. “Mimzy has already found solid evidence of that.”

  Sandy shook her head. “What am I allowing on my ships?”

  “No,” Admiral Drago said. “Not ships. Ship. One ship. No more. And not a ship with any cats on it either.

  “Hmm. Good idea.”

  “Admiral,” Drago said, “with that crap around, we’re going to need a lot of good ideas.”

  Chapter 29

  Grand Admiral Sandy Santiago was starting to get anxious to get home. She’d left Alwa Station in some very capable hands . . . she would not have left it otherwise. Still, Commodore Rita Nuu Longknife had a reputation and nothing Sandy had seen in her short time orbiting Alwa led her to believe that age had softened the old gal.

  Besides, Alwa was Sandy’s command. A commander should be at her command. Though Kris had cleaned out the bug-eyed monsters pretty much in this section of space, they were still considered to be wandering variables, capable of showing up anywhere at any time.

  Sandy was not the only one antsy to get back to Alwa. General Bruce settled at her table on lunch. “I sure miss Abby. How soon before you think I can get back to the farm with her?”

  “Abby was Kris Longknife’s maid, right?” Sandy asked.

  “Maid and a whole lot of deadly more,” the general admitted.

  “So that’s how you ended up with one of Nelly’s kids.”

  “That, and it seemed like a good idea to have at least two Marines with really smart computers. I worked a lot with General Montoya.”

  Sandy nodded. So that was how a Marine got into Nelly’s family. He’d gotten close to one of those damn Longknifes and survived long enough to marry Kris’s main sidekick.

  Bruce and Abby aren’t married, Mimzy told Sandy. Apparently, this head thing not only itched but also leaked. Abby says she’s allergic to rings on her finger. Still, they’re as married as Kris and Jack. Abby is Pipra’s right hand, production scheduler and expediter. I think mom did a good job of getting all her family into exciting places.

  Can you always read my thoughts? Sandy asked.

  Actually, I wasn’t reading your thoughts. Chesty and I were following the conversation between you and General Bruce. Kris would often want Mom to brief her on background and I assumed you’d like this briefing. Was I wrong?

  No, no. Feel free to brief me anytime you think I need it, Sandy said with a sigh, glad not to have her thoughts broadcasted all over Nelly Net.

  Of course, if Mom gave you one of us, we’d likely be following a lot more of your thoughts. Not all, but a lot.

  Oh, Sandy said. Penny would definitely be giving her a lesson on how to keep her thoughts to herself before Sandy would take any of Nelly’s brood into her head.

  Below, planetside, efforts to form some sort of integrated economy was not working. The locals could provide food, manpower and atomic weapons. Most of what they made was far too primitive to be used in any way by the fleet. But it cut worse the other way. Besides defense, the humans seemed unable to contribute to the local economy. There were just too much difference between the two technological levels. What gear Sandy had, she needed for her ships.

  As it stood at this point, once Kiel Station exhausted its inventory of Smart MetalTM and reactor parts, they’d need to be resupplied by ships from Alwa.

  Kris Longknife really had built the economy needed to support a fleet. Sandy was not ready to inject into the Sasquan economy technology that was easily four hundred years in their future.

  Then Masao came up with an idea. His minor was in the History of Technology and his computer still had all his course work on it. His computer might not be as fancy as Penny’s, bit it was no piker, either.

  He and Penny cornered Sandy at supper.

  “These cats were headed for their moon, right?” Penny said. “Kris Longknife challenged them to a moon race and they were racing right along when we showed up.”

  “As we both saw,” Sandy pointed out, without adding a comment they both knew that deserved.

  “When Earth humans went to their moon,” Masao said, “they needed much better computers to do that. Faster. Smaller. Computers got a boast coming out of the moon race and humans never slowed down after that.”

  “Yes. I seem to remember something about that in some history class,” Sandy admitted.

  “I have checked some of the computing machines that the cats use,” Masao went on. “They are still using vacuum tubes.”

  “What’s a vacuum tube?” Sandy asked.

  “Something that’s slow, heavy, hot, clunky, and burns out a lot,” Penny put in. “These folks haven’t discovered either transistor or printed circuitry boards. To us, that’s all ancient technology, but to them, it’s just the thing to give their economy a kick in the pants and us a steady income stream.”

  “It is a money tree,” Masao said, expanding the conclusion.

  “Money how?”

  “They have patent laws. If you have a patent, people who use your discover, your idea, have to pay you money to build things using it.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Sandy said.

  “We patent this technology, show the cats how to make things with it, and watch them takeoff with it.”

  Jacques and Amanda joined them at the table.

  “I’ve already been investigating this,” Jacque said. “They have some huge computing machines they use for census and scientific calculations. Some large companies are just now starting to control their inventory with computers. I can meet with some of the electronic manufactures and show them how to do things better, faster and cheaper with computers that they can make themselves.”

  “Not something like this,” Sandy said, glancing at her new, smaller, and quite helpful wrist unit.

  “Nothing close to what we have, but so much better than what they have now,” Jacques said.

  “You’re saying that if we share some horribly obsolete intellectual property, their economy will takeoff and we’ll get boat loads of local money to pay for food, clothes and other things we need from them,” Sandy said, summing it all up.

  “That’s pretty much it,” Jacque agreed.

  “So tell me
, my wise world shakers,” Sandy said, eyeing Amanda and Jacques, “who gets left behind to manage all this, make it come together without tearing this world apart worse than we’re already going to have to? Not forever, but at least for the next six to twelve months.”

  “You wouldn’t!” came from both the sociologist and the economist at about the same time.

  “You know any one better for this?” Sandy asked as innocently as she could fake.

  The two civilians looked daggers at the admiral, then turned their ire on the two intelligence officers.

  “It was your idea,” Amanda spat the intelligence officer.

  “I don’t know how to do it or that you would be assigned to make it happen.” Masao pleaded for mercy.

  “Some how. Some way. Some day I will get you. Watch your back,” Amanda said in a deadly whisper, glaring at Penny and Masao. “Both of you.”

  Done with her dinner, Sandy left the four of them to sort out the guilty from the innocent. Her day was ending rather well.

  Chapter 30

  A week later, matters had indeed sorted themselves out very well. The cats had produced their first printed circuit boards and were astounded to see what they could do with them. Admiral Drago, as Principal Human Representative, had signed contracts with several dozen companies. The signing bonuses would feed the fleet quite well for a long time to come.

  More cats also arrived for training. Even the country that had been blackballed had begged its way back into the program.

  “After all, if you humans are giving us the technology, we don’t need to steal it. Besides,” that prime minister said, shaking her head. “They could not make hide nor hair of what they saw. I swear it is magic. These boards, though, they are real.”

  Amanda was in favor of giving them lasers next. “Just the basics. The first lasers were more useful for data storage than weapons. Oh, and hormonal birth control. I just mentioned that and several biologists started taking notes. I think we may have lost the patent on that one.”

  “What about the males,” Sandy asked. “Are they still being left out of all this?”

  “They are getting to them,” Jacques answered. “This latest class had ten percent males. All college grads. It’s finally dawned on them that if they send cats to work in human space, they need to bring along the men, and not as sex toys, either.”

  Sandy found that the cats were too much . . . cat. They were too ready to get into fights over what appeared to the humans to be the smallest of matters. Maybe the males would soften them. She shook her head. The sexist attitudes she was dealing with. Totally illogical.

  Among the final steps Sandy took before her departure was to transfer her flag to the Birmingham. Admiral Drago would keep most of his 4th Fleet; she’d only take BatRon 18 back to Alwa. Beside raising her flag on Birmingham, Sandy also declared Yawata and Newcastle as Special Weapons ship. They alone would carry the thousand nuclear bombs that Sandy was taking back to Alwa. Drago would have to keep the other thousand in storage here for now.

  With those two ships off limits to cats, that left the Birmingham, Milan, Essen, Pittsburgh, Manchester and Jamshedpur to handle the cat passengers. Each took on two hundred, which increased their crew by half again.

  And this introduced the cats to the birds.

  Sandy noticed a cat sniffing cautiously at an Ostrich as she made her way to the wardroom the next morning. The Ostrich told the cat to get lost, something that only Sandy’s new computer could translate, and Sandy left it quiet.

  When verbal suggestions didn’t have the desired effect, the Ostrich waved the cat away.

  Wrong signal. The cat pounced.

  Against a Rooster, this might have been a problem, but this cat was taking on an Ostrich. The bird’s kick caught the cat in midair with enough force to stop the feline dead in mid-leap and hurl it backwards. With feline grace, it twisted its body to bounce butt first off ofthe bulkhead. It hit the deck with a screech and raced away without a backward glance.

  The Ostrich sniffed, and then went on about its duties as a Gunner 3/c.

  Word got out among the cats that the birds were not prey.

  Sandy was glad that the first couple of meetings between cats were with Ostriches. How matters would have gone down with Roosters might not have been so pretty.

  With all things as well in hand as they ever were likely to be, Sandy had a final dinner with President Almar and Madame Gerrot. They spent it discussing matters in general and raising no new problems in particular.

  They did enjoy Sandy telling them about how the Forward Reserve of the Kiel Station had come about.

  “So, you were as surprised as the rest of us?” Madame Gerrot said.

  “Yes, but I got my surprise well before you got yours.”

  “These computers of yours,” President Almar said. “I got a briefing from some of my lead scientists on what your ‘gift’ of printed circuit boards could lead to. They were quite excited. So, hundreds of years from now, we can expect this kind of surprise from that which we are now creating?”

  “Not all computers are as full of surprises as Kris Longknife’s Nelly and her children.”

  “That woman is unique,” Madame Gerrot said.

  “No surprise that her computer is the same,” the president agreed.

  The next morning, Sandy’s flag led BatRon 18 in its dive toward Sasquan as it broke orbit and headed home. The cruise to the jump out was marked by intense training both for the crew and the passengers as the ships went through their battle drills and the cats followed their mentors in watch and learn fashion.

  There were no more incidents of cats showing disrespect to birds. Now they walked half in awe of them.

  Matters did get a bit tense the first time Sandy ordered the squadron to Condition Zed. The cats did not take well to the confines of the high gee stations. Then Sandy put on 3.5 gees and the cats understood that being confined was a lot less of a problem than being squished.

  Matters were well in hand when the squadron jumped out of the Sasquan system.

  Then it got dicey.

  “Admiral,” Sensors reported tersely. “We’ve got reactors in the system. And they aren’t human. Ma’am. We got alien raiders here.”

  Chapter 31

  “Comm, bring the squadron to General Quarters. Set Condition Charlie. Sensors, show me what you’ve got on the main screen.”

  Around Sandy, the Birmingham began to shrink. For the jump they’d already gone to a more battle-worthy Condition Baker so all hands were conditioned to a tight ship. Now it got tighter. Sandy would wait for all hands to report at General Quarters before shrinking her squadron to Condition Zed – war ready fighting ships.

  The main screen switched from a picture ahead to a schematic of the system. One dwarf yellow star had a large gas giant orbiting close in with small rocky planets further out before a couple of more large gas planets.

  An ice giant was not too far away in case Sandy wanted to refuel.

  That planet may already have been used for a refueling stop. Orbiting it were the alien ships, three dozen formed into four columns of nine.

  No doubt, they had yet to learn they shared the system with humans.

  “Nav, how soon before they know we’re here?

  “An hour, Admiral.”

  Which meant two hours before Sandy would know how the aliens responded to this surprise.

  “Penny, are these more of those door knockers that got away from System X?”

  Her alien intelligence chief was looking over sensors shoulders, giving his board a serious study. “I don’t think so,” she said slowly, then walked over to stand close to Sandy. Her words, when she spoke, were soft and for her admiral only.

  “The four wolf packs that we destroyed at System X consisted of the standard huge mother ship, something the size of a small moon, and hundreds of monster warships, 400,000 to 500,000 tonners with hundreds of lasers and dozens of reactors to power them. Short range, but you don’t want to let t
hem get up in your face and personal. These, we’d seen before.”

  Penny took a deep breath. “During their confab at System X, the four wolf packs came up with the designs for two new types of ships. The door knocker you’ve already met. They’re something like the monster warship, but coated with a couple of meters of rock, say 600,000 or 800,000 tons all together with about half the lasers. They’re slower.”

  “And these?”

  “Are something else I was hoping we wouldn’t be seeing.”

  Sandy gave her subordinate raised eyebrows and she hurried on.

  “The aliens have been trying to make fast movers. The four wolf packs in System X came up with a refined cruiser model, kind of like our frigates. They have three reactors, two for propulsion and a third to power about a dozen lasers. These are newly designed guns and have about the reach of our 16-inchers. We had hoped they were unique to those four bastards.”

  “Apparently not quite as unique as we’d hoped,” Sandy observed dryly.

  “Apparently.”

  For the next two hours, they accelerated at two gees toward the gas giant and waited to see if their enemy would chose to fight them or run.

  As the clock ticked down to zero, sensors reported the alien cruisers had taken off for the nearest jump at an acceleration of 3.1.

  “So these are their fast movers,” Sandy said.

  “Yes, ma’am. The question is, can they maintain that acceleration or will some of them start falling out?”

  “Nav, lay me in a course for the jump.

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  “Now,” Sandy said, eyeing the board, but talking to Penny. “Will they accelerate half of the way to that jump then decelerate to go through slowly, or are they headed off with their hair on fire to crash that jump at full steam? Nav, give me some options.”

  Jumps were tricky things. Treat them disrespectfully and they could throw you anywhere in the galaxy. Few ships made it back from a sour jump, so insurance companies insisted that merchant captains approach them rock steady and slow. Admiralties expected no less from their captains.