“No way in hell. Driving them will be like carrying an elephant on a skateboard while crossing an iced-over river.”
“But those merchie skippers insisted they had to keep command of their boats because they knew how to handle them.”
“Yeah.”
“Had you told them about all this rework on their boats?”
“Yeah, before you got here.”
“Van Horn knew about it?”
“Yep, that’s why he started that song and dance about the Navy would be crewing the boats.”
Kris raised her eyes to the ceiling of the yard hundreds of meters above her. Had she just been had? Had they just let her paint them out of a corner they’d wanted out of?
Am I a princess or a pawn? Do I really want an answer?
“Roy, you need me for anything more?”
“Nope, don’t see anymore crises on the horizon for, oh, five . . . ten minutes.”
She turned to Jack. “Sir knight, would you please drive me to the 109. I need a few quiet moments getting my hands dirty.”
There was no one standing guard at the brow of the 109. No surprise there. With a crew of fourteen, everyone would be doing real work.
“I’ll hang here,” Jack said, staying in the runabout. “If I see any MPs, I’ll holler.”
“You do that,” Kris said and boarded the elevator for the short ride down to the quarterdeck. No one there, either. She climbed the central ladder to the bridge.
Kris was wrong. There weren’t fourteen in the crew. Penny was at the intel station, frowning at it as it did something. “That didn’t load right,” she muttered, then spotted Kris. “Captain on the bridge,” she said.
“As you were,” Kris said, to stop the other enlisted woman on the bridge from coming to attention, even though she was under the command console, then Kris added, “And not really,” to correct any misperceptions. “Tom has the ship. Where is he?” she asked, looking around and missing his lopsided smile.
“Aft, trying to figure out what went haywire with the damn motor,” Penny said. “I’d be helping him, but between him and the chief and Tononi’s crew, they’ve maxed the engine room’s space. Fintch is smaller than me, so she’s with them. Me, I’m trying to make sure this mismatched collection of databases can talk to each other. Data, data everywhere, but not a bit of it will hook to anything. Oh, and getting the sensor feed to patch in. I’ll be an old woman with grandkids before they talk to each other.”
“Grandkids?”
“No chance of that yet. Tommy and I have hardly managed to sleep, much less sleep together. You Longknifes sure know how to throw a honeymoon.”
“About as good as the wedding receptions you Liens throw,” Kris said, heading aft for the engine room and uncomfortably aware that what for her was a crisis was for her friends a crisis with bloody inconvenient timing.
Now Kris climbed down the ladder. On the quarterdeck, she had to zig, open a hatch in the bulkhead that divided the tiny boat into two airtight compartments, and start down a ladder offset to one side. In the motor compartment, the matter-antimatter motor occupied center place. It also dominated the smell. In the rest of the boat, the faint hint of ozone and electronics accented the human sweat that processing could never quite get out of the air. Here, ozone and electronics blasted the nose. Today, however, human sweat dominated all.
“Damn it, that should have shown us something,” didn’t sound like her usual Tom. Maybe there was more than one reason Tom didn’t want his bride down here?
“I got it where you wanted it Mr. Lien,” sounded like a very contrite Fintch.
“She does, sir,” was a protective Chief Stan.
“How’s it going?” Kris said, entering into the maze that passed for a PF’s power plant. “And as you were,” she added.
“Good to see you, ma’am,” the Chief said.
“Good to see all of you. Tom. You need a break?”
“Yeah. Chief, give everyone five. Make that ten. Can you scrounge me up a cup of coffee that’s not older than I am?”
“Yes, sir. One for you too, ma’am?”
Kris didn’t need more caffeine, but it hadn’t taken her long to learn that, in the Navy, the exchange of coffee cups was a sacred ritual. “Yes, thank you, Chief.”
The others left them alone. Kris took the only real chair at the motor mech’s station. Tommy, no lopsided grin in sight, settled carefully on a thick bar of metal arching in a guard over a magnetohydrodynamics generator. He flipped a black box of his own design absently over and over in his hand.
Born in the asteroid belt of Santa Maria into a successful mining family, he’d learned early not to trust air, gravity, or any of the other things that mud hens like Kris took for granted. Still, Tom was the first friend Kris had made at Officer Candidate School. They’d fought their first firefight together, and he’d backed her up when she did the unthinkable on the Typhoon. And on Turantic.
And all the time, he’d always had that lopsided grin.
Not today.
“What’s wrong, Tom?”
He didn’t look at her. He looked everywhere but at her. Finally he scowled and looked her in the eye. “I can’t get the damn motor going. The 109 should be your flagship, and she’s gonna spend the fight tied up to the pier, and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, we can’t afford to be even one ship down.”
“So what do you need to get the motor going?”
“I don’t know, Kris! They snuck a bunch of plumbers on board to shut down the motor. On a Saturday. When even the duty crew had been shanghaied off to straighten paper clips or some stupid duty around the station. Pandori really had it in for the PFs. Said they were just a—”
Kris had to cut this off. “I know the political spiel, Tom. What do you need to get the ship up and running?”
“I don’t know, Kris. I can’t find out what’s wrong. I’m trying, but I can’t.”
“So we pull old components and replace them with new ones until we find the ones that are dead and the motor works.”
“That’s—” Tom started.
Kris cut him off. “Not the way you do things on Santa Maria. I know. But Tom, I got the entire Nuu Dockyard next door with its whole workforce at our disposal. We got twelve PFs and half a dozen armed yachts to get battle ready. We got two, maybe part of a third day. Elegant ain’t a word I want to hear. Quick, dirty, ugly. I’ll take them all if it gets me ‘All power on-line. Ready to answer the helm.’ You hear me, Captain?”
Tom breathed out what might have been an argument. With a shiver, he nodded. “I hear you, Longknife. Loud and clear. How fast can you get me a dock crew with a full set of replacements for this haywire engine of mine?”
“How about before the Chief gets back with that cup of coffee. You can offer it to the yard boss. Tell him it was a princess’s, but he can have it instead.”
“I’ll do that. See what extra it gets me.”
Kris headed up the ladder. Jack didn’t quite make the electric runabout lay rubber gunning for the yard with Kris’s orders for not one but two engine overhaul teams, but he came close. With a sigh, Kris headed for PF-105. It was a coin flip as to how Babs Thompson would take having the dockyard folks take over her engine room. Wounded pride versus relief. Kris found the cheerleader and prom queen up to her elbows in engine room parts and studying schematics with her Chief of the Boat. She accepted Kris’s transfer of a portion of her domain to Nuu Docks with poor grace, but not a word. Once the hatch was closed on Babs’s exit, the Chief turned to Kris.
“Thank you, ma’am. There’s nothing more dangerous in the Navy, not even battleship guns, compared to a junior officer with a screwdriver. If you’ll pardon me saying so, ma’am.”
“I’ll try to remember that, Chief,” Kris said, suppressing a sigh as she remembered her own wish for a few moments alone with her boat, a chance to get her hands covered with honest dirt.
10
Those two ship visits spotlighted what her job had become. The skippers and crews would
fight the ships. She would get anything and everything out of their way that might interfere with them putting up the best fight possible.
The fact that some of that interference might be coming from those very skippers was a new thought for Kris, but not a totally alien one. In school she’d studied managers that were too hands-on. Micromanagers. Now she was getting a chance to help some of her friends avoid it. Oh, and avoid it herself.
Help ships get ready for the fight.
Find more ships and draft them into the fight.
That’s what a princess does.
Chapter one for a book she might write someday on the proper etiquette and education of a princess.
Kris laughed and headed for her next PF. NELLY, KEEP COUNT OF WHICH BOATS I VISIT. TICK THEM OFF FOR ME AND LET ME KNOW IF I MISS ONE.
YES, MA’AM. WHILE YOU ARE WORKING ON THESE, I AM WORKING ON MORE COMPLEX EVASION SYSTEMS, FASTER EVASION MANEUVERS. I AM ALSO WORKING ON SEVERAL FINAL ATTACK RUN-INS, DEPENDING ON HOW OUR EVASION EFFORTS SPREAD US OUT. AND HOW MANY OF US SURVIVE THE RUN-IN.
VERY GOOD, NELLY. YOU COVER THAT.
DID YOU KNOW THE CHIEF OF 109 HAD ORDERED NEW HELMETS FOR THE CREW BEFORE PANDORI CLOSED THINGS DOWN?
NO. ARE THEY GOOD ONES?
YES. THE BEST, BY MY MEASURE.
PLEASE ORDER THEM FOR ALL THE BOAT CREWS. AND THE ARMED YACHTS.
WE WILL NOT WANT THE ORDER TO RAISE A FLAG TO THE MEDIA.
NO. WE DON’T WANT THAT.
HOWEVER, YOUR GRAMPA AL SPONSORS SEVERAL FOOTBALL TEAMS. I COULD ORDER NEW HELMETS UNDER THEIR COST CODE AND HAVE THEM MAILED TO THEIR PROPER ADDRESS, THEN MISDIRECT THEM UP THE BEANSTALK TO THE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVAL STATION. THAT SHOULD GO UNNOTICED.
YES, NELLY, THAT SHOULD.
KRIS, IS THIS WHAT YOU WOULD CALL FUN?
YES, OUTSMARTING PEOPLE WHO REALLY SHOULDN’T BE ALL THAT INTERESTED IN WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS WHAT I CALL FUN.
YES, I FIND THIS FUN. I WILL ALSO REPROGRAM THE HIGH-G STATIONS TO ALLOW FOR THE HELMETS. THE YACHTS HAVE SMART METAL STATIONS, SO I COULD MODIFY THEM AS WELL, THOUGH MOST HAVE SECURITY SYSTEMS IN PLACE THAT WILL STOP ME. I WILL EXPLAIN TO THEM THAT WE HAVE ORDERED HELMETS THAT WILL HELP THEIR HUMANS AND THAT MY ADJUSTMENTS WILL MAKE THEM SAFER. I THINK THEY WILL ADOPT MY CHANGES.
YOU’LL NEGOTIATE WITH THE YACHT’S COMPUTER SYSTEMS?
I THINK THAT IS WHAT YOU WOULD CALL IT.
That was something worth thinking more about. NELLY, MENTION THAT TO AUNT TRU’S COMPUTER NEXT TIME YOU TALK TO IT. I THINK TRU WOULD FIND IT INTERESTING THAT YOU AND THE OTHER COMPUTERS ARE NEGOTIATING THINGS JUST NOW.
YOU THINK SO? IT SEEMED ONLY REASONABLE.
Yeah. Right.
The other boats were in various degrees of disarray. Kris expected Phil or Chandra would prove an exception to that, but they rather proudly pointed out the extent to which they were a mess. Chandra was testing the AGM-944s. Though the same diameter as the Foxer charges, they were four times as long. That required ripping out two of the four Foxer tubes to install missile-size ones.
“Nelly’s working on several more radical evasion schemes.”
“Good.” Chandra nodded. “I think we will need to be more wily than we ever thought we needed to be. Better we cut corners faster than we have to, than cut slower than we should have.”
“We may need more Foxers.”
Chandra blinked. “I will have to arrange for us to load new Foxer magazines while we are moving. It can be done.”
“Commander Santiago on the Halsey is looking at how many tugs we can get standing by. Just in case we use up all our consumables and need help slowing down.”
“Are we going to be diving out of the moon at them?”
“That’s one option.”
“A good one. We can maneuver behind the moon, come out on a different vector from what we went in on.”
“It could have us diving straight at Wardhaven.”
“That’s what the tugs are for,” the mustang said with a fatalistic shrug. “First we kill the battlewagons, then we worry about the rest of our lives.”
Phil’s engines were torn apart, his radiators in the yard being reworked. “If I can get an extra ten percent output from the matter-antimatter reaction, even if it’s for only the last thirty seconds, it could put me that much closer, that much faster. I’ll use the radiators to cool the engines down as far as I dare before we start the charge, then close them off to give off as little infrared as I can. Then, once we’ve blown them to hell, we can spread the radiators out and get the reactors out of the red fast. If this works, the yard can redo all the other boats before we leave. How’s Tom doing on the 109?”
“The yard’s helping on the 109 and 105. I see that you’ve got the yard working with you. Chandra has them helping her up-gun the 105. You need anything else?”
“Not now. I’m gonna let them work out the kinks in the Foxer to 944 thing on the 105 before I let them mess with my boat. You going down the squadron?”
“That seems to be my ticket. You look over the shoulders of your chiefs and techs to make sure they got everything they need to get the job done. Me, I get to look over your shoulder to see if there’s anything I can get you. Sometimes I even help you before you realize it. We’ve ordered new helmets.” Kris updated Phil on Nelly’s new evasion plan and the helmets that might keep them from addling the crews’ brains while they did the evading.
“I should have thought of that,” Phil said.
“The more heads, the better the thinking. Tell you what, I’ll ask the Commodore if he’d like to hold a stand-up conference on the pier beside the Cushing this evening so we can review work on the squadron. Say sixteen hundred. Each skipper can say how things are going, good ideas they’ve thought up, and plan for the next day. Nothing too long. Don’t have time for that.”
“Think you can get the shipyard boss to show up, tell us how things are going? I asked my yard rep, and all I get is ‘Everything is fine. Don’t worry.’ Just makes me worry more.”
“I’ll have Roy there.”
Kris stumbled across Jack more by accident than intent. He swore a blood oath not to let her get away like that again. At the Cushing, Kris told the Commodore about her idea of afternoon and morning meetings.
“I always had those when I was in the yard. We’re in such a hurry we’re forgetting to do it right. You’re doing a walk-around. Good Commanders always do them. Lets ’em see what’s really happening in their commands. Anyone tell you to do that?”
“No,” Kris admitted.
The Commodore smiled. “Should have known it wouldn’t take a Longknife long to figure it out. By right of blood, by right of name. By right of title, is that what you said? Got to remember that for my memoirs. Don’t hear things like that nearly enough these days. Certainly not from the likes of your old man. Anyway, yes, Your Highness, I will send runners to your fiefs and request and require that your skippers present themselves at sixteen hundred.”
“Sounds awful fancy. Sure they’ll understand what you want? What’s wrong with ‘The Commodore sends his compliments and calls a conference on the pier.’ It always worked before.”
“Ah, yes, but this has more poetry. And shouldn’t we who are about to die salute life with poetry?” the Commodore said. And for the first time, Kris noticed that the old fellow had a twinkle in his eye.
What have I unleashed? No. What are we unleashing from ourselves?
Kris skipped the Halsey. She had no illusions that she had anything to offer Sandy, other than what time the pier-side conference was. Gate 5B was now open between the yard and the Naval Station right at pier-side. Kris crossed over quickly, but the air docks were scattered along the spacefront. She didn’t know what to expect aboard the yachts. She was not surprised when she got everything from “Princess arriving,” aboard Grampa Al’s boat to “There’s a Longknife aboard. Watch your wallets,” as she crossed the brow to another.
The yachts had established their own comm
and structure, electing the skipper of the General Electric yacht Archimedes as their Commodore. Elizabeth Luna, a tall drink of water with graying raven hair and a drawl almost direct from some rawboned section of old Earth, greeted Kris with a firm handshake and a complaint. “They want to rip out my 12-inch pulse lasers. Over my dead body they get my guns.”
Kris suspected there’d be a lot of dead bodies besides Elizabeth’s. “They give a reason?” Kris asked, buying time and checking for exits. Jack displayed noticeable disinterest in Kris’s bodily safety as he studiously examined a set of crossed sabers hanging from the bridge bulkhead. Apparently, Elizabeth was fully prepared to repel boarders.
“Weight. They’re welding that damn decoy to my snout, a barge off kilter between that decoy and the Archie, and slapping together some sort of false front on all this with half-inch deck plate, and they’re worried about weight.”
“How could you use the lasers with all that junk out in front of you?” Kris asked. It sounded like a good question.
“That crap ain’t gonna be there when I’m shooting, honey. I plan to rig explosive charges to the struts holding on the cover and the decoy. Once you’ve done your part, I’m gonna cut myself lose and go gunning for any little pieces you left behind.”
Kris blinked. She considered her part in this mission just one step shy of suicide. Any reasonable person would. But intentionally going into battle in a ship speckled with explosive charges . . . ! Planning on blowing a hole in your ship so you could get out, and then charging out shooting . . . ?
PARDON ME, KRIS, BUT WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HER EXPLOSIVE CHARGES AND HAVING THE AGM-944s ABOARD? Nelly asked.
THANK YOU, NELLY, YOU MAY GO BACK TO YOUR CALCULATIONS.
YES, MA’AM.
“The other armed yachts plan to do the same?”
“Yep. We got it all worked out. You mind explaining it to the yard folks and your Navy friends? They seem to listen better when you do the talking.”
“Aren’t the reservists normally in the decoys?” Kris asked.
“No problems. I’ve moved their workstations inside. Better eats for them out of our galley, trust me. We got the staterooms all rigged as work areas for them. Even got three of them set up in the owner’s hot tub. Drained it, of course. Eight redundancy lines going forward to the decoy’s noisemakers and other stuff. Trust me, they’re safer here than there.
Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant Page 20
