Kris Longknife's Successor

by Mike Shepherd

  “So, what we have is what we have?” Sandy said.

  “It sure sounds like that.”

  Sandy considered all that had been dumped on her in the last half hour. “The colonials weren’t all that excited about having Granny Rita running the stuff she nationalized. How will they take to her owning everything?”

  Abby got a strange look on her face. “Well, if she is the one that owned it before it was nationalized, then she’d be the one demanding payment for everything. There’s talk that she’s willing to accept twenty-four dollars’ worth of glass trinkets. I can’t actually say that, but that’s the story on the street.”

  “Glass trinkets, huh?” Sandy said through a grin.

  “Twenty-four dollars of glass trinkets,” Abby corrected the admiral.

  “Yes,” Sandy said.

  “Can you imagine how this will play out back on Wardhaven?” Amber said. “What will happen when Alex Longknife realizes that his greedy grasping ways have brought his mom back, and she’s pissed?”

  The three of them took a minute to enjoy a good laugh at that thought.

  When Sandy was ready to get serious again, she said, “Is Granny Rita ready to go back to Wardhaven and take on the full role of Rita Nuu-Longknife?”

  Abby shook her head. “She’s spent most of her life here. She’d much rather be called Granny Rita by her great-grandkids than get into a fight with a bunch of corporate lawyers and her son. I’m told that she’s willing to settle for a quit claim on all the Nuu Enterprise property in the Alwa System and her proper share of the corporate profits next year. I don’t know how everyone will work that out, and no doubt, it will take time with travel between here and there so infrequent. Still, no one, except for maybe some high power corporate lawyers, are losing any sleep. Nice to see those vultures get turned into a roasted turkey dinner.”

  “So, I can relax and do my job,” Sandy said, leaning back in her chair.

  “Actually, not so much, Admiral,” Amber said.

  “Oh?” Sandy answered, giving her subordinate the eye.

  “It seems that the last couple of ships from the cats have showed up with no additional cats on board. None of those here have gone back, except the spies we sent packing, but there haven’t been any more workers Those cats make really good workers.”

  “Is there a reason for this absence? A reason we know of?”

  Amber nodded. “Admiral Drago reports that the cats want to renegotiate their contract with us.”

  Sandy leaned forward in her chair. “What do these cats want?”

  “More battlecruisers to defend them from the aliens and some of our wonderful industry to work out there, in their system. They’ve got letters back from our workers telling about the fabs as well as lunar and asteroid mines. They want in on the pot of gold.”

  “Lord love a duck,” Sandy scowled. “Back to the bargaining table with those damn kitties. This time, I’m keeping a tight hold on my pants.”

  2

  Sandy’s commlink buzzed. “Your next meeting is set up in the wardroom,” her chief yeoman informed her.

  The other two stood as Sandy got to her feet. “Abby, please have Pipra see what sort of fabrication and mining facilities we could ship to the cat system. No need debating what they want if we can’t provide anything. I doubt if after Alex’s folks get back to Wardhaven that we’ll get any more factories flown out here.”

  Sandy turned to her admiral. “Amber, I want two threat assessments from your team. What would it take to protect the Sasquan System at a decent level? Also, how much of a threat are those damn cats and their atomics to the rest of us? I have no doubt that they’re as sneaky as we humans are. I’m not sure that I’d let us into space back in the bloody twentieth century.”

  Amber nodded. “Still, ma’am, their people are a damn sight better at working our fabs and fighting our ships than the birds are. If we can afford them, they’re a good addition to our forces.”

  “Yes, but that may be the problem. They’re too damn close to being as nasty as we are. Do you trust all the humans under your command?”

  Amber said nothing, but gave a neutral shrug.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting with a bunch of boffins who have promised to tell me a lot of things that I don’t know about our main problem, the alien raiders.”

  “Have fun with the science types,” Abby said. “Both Pipra and I would love to get copies of their reports.”

  “You get me a nice report, and I’ll see what I can do about getting you some in return,” Sandy said. If she had to work with tradesmen, she’d learn how to trade.

  They left, and Sandy followed them out.

  “Hold all my calls,” she told her yeoman as she headed for the wardroom.

  It was only a few paces down the passageway to Sandy’s flag wardroom. What she saw inside was a complete change from the room where she occasionally dined. Penny and Jacques were in charge here, and both had one of Nelly’s kids. The dining room tables had vanished into the floor and one large table had been extruded in their place in the form of a hollow rectangle. The walls, usually a familiar beige required by a tradition that must date back to sailing ships, were now converted to glowing huge monitors that covered them from deck to overhead, wrapping all around the room.

  Sandy wound her way through a crowd of boffins and intelligence types to the head of the table, where a chair had been reserved for her between Penny and Jacques. Amanda sat at Jacques’ other elbow. Around the table, women and men in shipsuits with shoulder boards or shipsuits with lab coats fiddled with their commlinks, readers, or computers. Behind them, the bulkheads danced and flashed as data of one type or another was brought up and displayed.

  Sandy sat down and waited for the room to subside to a dull roar.

  Penny stood and gaveled the meeting to order by rapping a spoon on a glass of water. That was enough to end most conversations. “We are here today to give Admiral Santiago a briefing on what we’ve discovered so far about the alien raiders. Jacques, would you begin the overview?”

  “By the way,” Sandy said, “have we finally gotten a high level of confidence that this is, indeed, actually the aliens’ home planet?”

  Jacques glanced around the table before answering her question. “We think we have at least one piece of solid evidence that connects the alien raiders we’ve found wandering the galaxy with the two bodies that we recovered from the rebel base on what we’re now calling ‘Bug-Eyed Monster Home.’ As strange as it may sound, it’s a question of blood.”

  “Blood?” Sandy asked.

  “Yes, Admiral. Blood is one of the simplest cells in the human body. The red blood cells carry oxygen and nutrients to the tissues and remove waste on the flip side. It’s a very simple and very important basic building block of a complex organism. While the additional DNA proteins are used in much of the modern alien bodies, their red blood cells are identical to the red blood cells in the two bodies we recovered from that deep fissure. The bone marrow that produces the red blood cells in the modern alien may have more DNA protein than what was in those two soldiers’ bodies, but only the four original proteins are used to produce their red blood cells.”

  Sandy stared pensively at the scientist. Two questions immediately came to her mind.

  “Okay, answer me this. If the blood cells are produced from only four proteins, why does every other cell in their bodies have six? Also, has anybody given any thought to how the alien occupation force managed to replace everybody’s DNA on that BEM’s home world?”

  Jacques nodded towards a young scientist. The fellow was a tall string bean with an unruly shock of red hair. He grinned with delight at being pointed out and quickly came to his feet.

  “I’m so glad you asked, Admiral. The extra proteins in the DNA are there to assure that the basic code of life does not get muddled. It’s there to prevent mutations from taking place in the general population.”

  Sandy was shaking her head even as he
spoke. “Excuse me, but I was led to understand that our early analysis of the first raider bodies to fall into our hands showed their genetic drift to be reasonably close to the rate that our genes drift.”

  The young scientist grinned. “Yes, Admiral, we applied our genetic drift theories and we were comfortable with the results. We still are. However, we do not spend our entire life in space. The space-raiding aliens do. They’ve been absorbing a whale of a lot more radiation than you and I. If it were not for the extra checking done by their DNA, each of those ships would probably be filled with a crazy mob of mutants eating each other’s brains.”

  Sandy eyed the young fellow. “Can you prove that?”

  “Ma’am, the entire population of the second continent, the one without the pyramid, has a population with practically no genetic drift from the northern-most point to the very southern-most point. We’ll get to the reason why that doesn’t apply to the first continent in a minute, but for the space-based raiders, those extra DNA proteins are the difference between surviving with minimal drift and being a total cock-up, ma’am.”

  “So, whoever did this wanted to create a race that could survive wandering the stars?” Sandy asked.

  Jacques shook his head. “As best we can tell, the only intent of the occupiers was just to create a slave labor force that would be obedient, docile, and not at all subject to the wandering variables that flesh is often subjected to. They wanted no troublesome surprises.”

  “So, what was that surprise that freed these docile, subservient slaves to overthrow and destroy their masters?” Sandy asked.

  Jacques pointed to a different boffin. The young man who had the floor sat down with only a slightly contained scowl.

  A petite young woman with a mane of brown hair stood immediately.

  “Admiral, connecting specific DNA to specific physical expressions such as a hereditary disease or hair color is not easy. Connecting specific DNA to behavioral traits is even more slippery. Especially when you’re dealing with dead bodies,” she said dryly.

  “However, we do have a growing database of interesting subjects that one might venture to consider statistically significant. For example, we have the three dead males from the most recently captured alien cruiser whose bodies were found in the command center. Comparing their DNA to other bodies we have from the other shipwrecks we recovered allows us to identify some specific genetic markers.”

  Sandy shook her head. “Yes, but they were scattering their seed rather widely. How many of the young women aboard were carrying their children?”

  “Thirty-four,” the young scientist said. “That would appear to be a significant flaw in the ruling class’s plan to keep the underclass both docile and subservient. However, they may have already arrived at a solution to that potential problem.

  She paused for a moment while she tapped the computer that lay on the table in front of her. On the screen behind her, photos of two cadavers appeared. One showed an attractive woman. The other a tiny infant.

  “We still have the body of the young mother and infant that Kris Longknife tried to bring back here the first time she visited the alien home world. We also have a wide range of DNA samples that we collected this trip from a large number of the small nomadic hunter-gatherers who were roaming in the immediate vicinity of the raiders’ trophy pyramid.”

  The young woman hurried on. For a scientist who was nonplussed by data analysis, she looked quite excited by her report. “If we assume that these castoffs from the alien base ships were people the powers that be wanted to get rid of, we have an interesting subpopulation of people who no longer fit into the subservient class. Surprise of surprises, Admiral, over half of them share the same genetic markers that we found in the three men from the cruiser’s command deck. They are also held by the children they had engendered on those young female crew members.”

  Sandy turned to Penny. “So, they’ve been dumping their troublemakers on the home planet with damn near no ground survival skills. No doubt, they expected them to die and be done with.”

  “Yes, Admiral,” Penny said, “but with the genetic disposition to be stubborn sons of bitches, an amazing number of them have succeeded in making a go of it. Before you ask, Admiral, we also ran a DNA work up on that hunter-gatherer tribe who succeeded in bushwhacking our scientific research team and its Marine escort at the end of Kris Longknife’s visit to this planet. I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn that most members of that tribe carried the SOB marker.”

  “Do most of the tribesmen on that continent carry what you’re calling the SOB marker?” Sandy asked.

  Attention turned back to the young woman scientist. “Yes, ma’am. The marker is very prevalent on the continent with the pyramid and almost nonexistent on the other. Several hundred times more prevalent.”

  Sandy frowned at that, immediately seeing both good and bad aspects to that bit of information. “We’ll need to examine this from a fighting perspective. Looked at from one side, those who command, the Enlightened Ones, were mean enough to not only throw off their conquerors, but also wipe them out and obliterate all life on their world of origin.”

  Penny, the superb intelligence officer that she was, nodded agreement.

  “On the other hand,” Sandy said, going on, “What are the chances that the social tension within the raider wolf packs might end up tearing them apart and bringing revolution to the underclass? We all saw the way the command structure broke down in that battle I fought at the home world. How often does that happen?”

  “There’s also the matter of the cruiser we captured,” Jacques pointed out. “They were out to pull our whiskers and race back to the base ship with their trophy. They were involved in a kind of rebellion, it would seem. How much social distress is their repeated defeats at our hands causing their ruling class? They hold their position at the top based on the need to roam the galaxy, destroying all vermin. How many times can you lose to vermin before your subordinates begin to wonder if you’re as enlightened as you say you are?”

  Sandy nodded. “We are certainly throwing shade on their claims to superiority. Few ruling classes can survive that very long.”

  “May I point out,” Amanda put in, “that we’re throwing shade on some of the Enlightened Ones, yes, but most of the Enlightened Ones that crossed swords with Kris Longknife are blown to hell and gone. It’s only since Admiral Santiago arrived that we’ve had meeting engagements where the high command of the wolf packs kept their base ships well back and safe.”

  Sandy again nodded. The O Club on Canopus Station had eight banners hanging from its overhead. Eight banners representing the eight alien mother ships that the Alwa Defense Force blew away under Kris Longknife’s command. Sandy had yet to add a banner since taking command. She’d destroyed a lot of alien battleships and cruisers. Of mother ships, however, she’d not seen a one.

  The Enlightened Ones had learned at least one new trick. Keep their own noses out of the human meat grinder that they were only too willing to send their young men and warships out to test.

  Sandy had her own thought to toss into this stew pot. “There’s also the minor matter that we estimate that there are thirty or so more mother ships that we haven’t heard from. If the raiders have sent out the bat signal to gather the clans, they’ll be bringing in a whole new batch of troublemakers.”

  “So basically,” Jacques said, “we have no idea if this social tension is working on their society, or how it will express itself. I hope the admiral will forgive me if I say that this potential for revolt is just something that we must wait and see how it develops.”

  Sandy frowned in thought as she leaned back in her chair and stared at the overhead. Part of her was not surprised that the boffins had found a genetic strain for rebellion in the aliens. After all, they looked far too much like us human beings. We humans were a pretty cantankerous bunch. Occupiers had a very bad track record on Earth of keeping the downtrodden down and trodden. Of course, no human conqueror had
ever been able to genetically modify an entire population into a beaten-down population that was satisfied with being oppressed.

  This brought Sandy back to one of her first two questions. She leaned forward in her seat and eyed the first boffin who had spoken.

  “I take it you have not finished your brief, so, I’ll ask you this question. How did the occupation force manage to change the DNA of every living person on that planet? The best I have heard about gene modification involved snipping out a little here and there to get rid of an inherited genetic defect. Even then, it’s best done in the embryo stage. It’s been attempted in adults, but certainly not for a population of billions of adults.”

  The young boffin was nodding even as Sandy posed her question. He took a deep breath as soon as she finished and immediately gave her an answer.

  “Ma’am, we don’t think they changed the DNA of a massive population of adults. They had control, apparently total control of that planet. What I’m going to describe is appalling. Appalling to me and my associates who have formulated this hypothesis, as it must be to you. However, it’s not like we humans haven’t done a few things like this to our fellow man during our long and bloody history.”

  The boffin tapped his reader several times, and the screen behind him changed to show examples of the speed with which disease could spread through the Earth’s global population. The Black Death. The Spanish Flu. The Great Bird Virus of 2045. “If you modify the male population of a planet so that they can’t engender children on the females of the species, you find yourself with a blank canvas to paint on.”

  “Every male on the planet!” Sandy exclaimed.

  “Ma’am, we had sea raiders in our history who captured men and women and hauled them off to be slaves on their farms back home. Based on genetic evidence, every one of those male slaves was castrated. They made no contribution to the gene pool of the area of their captivity. We have evidence that the women did, but not the men. As I said, ma’am, this is not something I want to talk about too close to lunch. All of us who’ve come up with this model find it appalling, but it’s the only model that explains the evidence.”