Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella

by Mike Shepherd

  “Kris, honey, I understand where you’re coming from, believe me. I’ve been where you are. But I have to live with these people. I beg you to accommodate them.”

  Kris had already offered Granny Rita a ride home, if only for full rejuvenation. The strong willed old woman had turned her down. The Alwans were in danger and she was not leaving them in their time of need.

  Kris expected that position would cause a lot of trouble. She’d expected that trouble at some indefinite time in the future. Strange how it popped up sooner.

  Well, what do you expect from a Longknife, even one that called herself Granny Rita Ponsa at the moment.

  “There was the approach you tried on that scout ship in the Iteeche system,” Penny said.

  “There’s not time to launch a communication’s buoy,” Kris muttered. “Nelly, can you put together some nanos. Make them give off enough noise to seem like a ship, as well as send a ‘we come in peace for all humanity’ message.”

  “It will mean that I lose some of my next child’s matrix,” Nelly complained.

  “I’ll buy you more.”

  “From the other side of the galaxy?”

  “Nelly, we don’t have time for this argument.”

  “I know, Kris. I’m already collecting the nanos and forming them into the craft you require. There is a hole in the wreck we can launch it out of. I’m using the collection of messages we sent the last time. I hope the Alwans won’t mind us sending in Iteeche as well as human.”

  “The hostiles are a hundred thousand klicks out and flipping ship,” Captain Drago said. “I’d like to knock out one or two of them before they’re close enough to ram us,” he added dryly.

  “Nelly, launch the diversion,” Kris ordered. “Lasers 1 and 2, prepare to fire: 3 and 4 stand by. Laser 5, maybe we can come up with a target for you.” Laser 5 pointed aft.

  “Helmsman, prepare to rotate ship ninety degrees to starboard, lay on three gees acceleration for five seconds, then rotate ship ninety degrees to port, lay on one gee but begin Evasion Pattern 6. Understand,” Drago ordered.

  The helmsman was a chief boatswain’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 backtalk. Even if this was the first time Captain Drago had trusted his ship to her.

  “Make it so, Nelly.”

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

  It didn’t get any farther than that as all three ships fired on it.

  While they shot, the Wasp rotated hard, kicked 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 jinxing 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 crosshair. Twelve huge rocket motors were putting out plasma from three or four reactors. Kris gave it her best guess, targeted where she’d expect to find two reactors and fired Laser 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 had already turned her attention 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 would eat the ship

  The third ship had a faster captain, he’d already began 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 had taken less than ten seconds.

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

  Captain Drago let the crew rejoice for a few moments, then punched his commlink. “All hands, good shooting, good ship handling all hands. 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 rosie,” the captain said, and the helmsmen tucked the Wasp in close to the wreck. With one eye on the sensors on the hulk, he began edging them to port, keeping the still very hostile exactly opposite to them.

  “Well, Your Royal Highness, have you got any more ideas, cause I’m plum out,” said Captain Drago.

  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.

  Chapter Five

  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 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 breaks with a three gees 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 then 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 hide-out. 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 Nelly, now where are my visuals?”

  “Coming on line,” and 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 persuaded 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 am 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 the past. Language is more than each word.

  Enough, Nelly.

  The alien was getting smarter. He’d adjusted his orbit by 55 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 or 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 he 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. “The skipper can complain to me about the dint. 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 lost 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 instincts were good. The hit loosed the plasma demons that gobbled up the forward end of the ship.

  The laser fire 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. They 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 we can use for armor and matrix that Nelly intends to use for her next child,” Kris said. “Yes, we will return quickly enough to 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 to see that their mikes were off.

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

  “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 breath 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 to help her and her Alwans’ out, 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 language 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.

  And 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 could be measured on the Richter scale.

  Preview: To Do or Die, by Mike Shepherd, coming from Ace in February, 2014

  Sometimes peace needs a helping hand. Ray Longknife and Captain and Mrs. Trouble are just the folks to give it that hand. Or fist, as need be.

  ONE

  It was a port dive like any other humanity had built since some lucky bastard brought the first log back to shore. And the topic today was no different from when the Phoenicians sailed the middle sea – pirates and slavers.

  Only this dive stood in the shadow of the New Birmingham bean pole. The shops and heavy-fabrication barns that gave a thirst to this bar’s customers sent their goods and gear up the elevator to starships in the orbital yards of High Birmingham.

  Today was different for Captain Terrence Tordon. Trouble to his enemies, Trouble to his friends, and more often than not, just plain Trouble, he’d come to accept the
label for all it meant. Born, raised and commissioned in the Society of Humanity Marine Corps, he had passed many a happy hour dives such as this.

  Today, however, was the first time he followed his wife into one.

  Commander Uxbridge led them through the bar’s door with its flashing beer ads. It was he who suggested the sun was below the yard arm and their business might better be completed in informal surroundings with a drink at hand. Uxbridge was finishing up his forty years with the Navy at the disappointing rank of commander, so no one would be surprised if he put in less than a full day.

  Trouble and his wife Ruth followed because she had questions about the source of funds now flowing into Uxbridge’s numbered Swiss accounts on Old Earth.

  Officially, Uxbridge was the czar of Navy scrap on New Birmingham. He sold off surplus gear, battle-shattered hulks – and defeated Unity ships from the recent unpleasantness. They weren’t supposed to be in working condition.

  So why were said ships showing up in the hands of pirates and slavers. Trouble had had the unfortunate experience of accepting said slavers’ hospitality not once but twice a few months ago.

  It was a major source of embarrassment for a combat Marine.

  Trouble glanced around the bar as he settled into a chair next to his wife. This early, the booths lining the walls and the tables scattered around the floor were empty except for two men in one booth. They seemed lost in haggling. Given the time and place, it likely had something to do with recreational pharmaceuticals.

  The front entrance was balanced by a rear exit. The lights were up, throwing in harsh relief dilapidation that went unnoticed in the smoky shadows at night. Behind the bar, a mirror ran the length of the room. It exhibited dents and dings that proved it metal, not glass.

  Trouble fingered the table. Painted to look like wood, it was heavy metal.

  That’s one way to avoid replacing the furniture every time the customers get rambunctious, he thought with a smile.

  Then he went back to splitting his time between Ruth’s conversation with Uxbridge and the rest of the bar. He was, after all, the guard dog here.