Kris Longknife - Admiral

by Mike Shepherd

  Kris cocked an inquiring eyebrow, then realized that might be lost on the Iteeche. “In what way?” she asked.

  “We do not much like your human computers. They are so different. May I say, alien? We prefer to install our own fire control computers. We also replaced our ship’s central computers with one of our own manufacturing. The small amount of smart metal we save is used to increase the height of each deck on our ships. We are much taller, you may have noticed.”

  Kris had turned to face Admiral Coth as he spoke. That put her in a position to cock an eyebrow at Megan. If we had problems getting into their computers because they were alien, no wonder they had problems using our computers.

  “We did not know that,” Kris said. “Nelly, could you make a change to our human-computer interface to make it more like an Iteeche-computer interface?”

  “Admiral, I doubt I would have any trouble, now that I know this to be the case. However, I will need to know more about the Iteeche computer to interface them to us. Alternatively, I can examine their interface and change our computers to look just like theirs at the point where the Iteeche use them,” Nelly said.

  “How long would that take?” Coth asked.

  “A few minutes, once I can understand how your computers work. Do you have a simple one?” Nelly asked.

  “Most of our computers are too large to rip out and bring over here. However, our supply computer has not changed in millennia,” Coth said. “Could a captain arrange to have an inventory computer brought over here immediately?”

  In only a moment, one of their Number 2s, what Kris would call their XO, was on his feet and trotting for the exit.

  The fact their officer could not just mutter into his commlink and have it delivered in fifteen minutes said a lot. He had no commlink, and, of course, if he had, it would not have attached to a human network. With luck, once he got back to the longboat that brought him, he could make a radio call.

  “So, to sum up our catch of the day,” Admiral Coth said, “you use these eggs to dodge out of the way without addling your brains. You have faster fire control computations and feed your evasion patterns into them to adjust your shooting. Does that sum it all up?”

  “There is one more thing,” Kris said.

  “I hope it will not be as embarrassing as everything so far?”

  “It is not a Navy problem, although it is one our Navy has had to correct. Often, the builders deliver the ship’s lasers loose in their cradles.”

  “Yes, we know that we have to sight in our lasers before they can be fired accurately. We do that during our shakedown cruise,” Admiral Coth answered.

  “By loose in the cradle, I do not just mean out of true. The cradles are loose, so that when the ship does any sort of maneuvering, especially hard maneuvering, the hulls twist, and it throws the lasers off. After a bit of sailing, even smooth sailing, the gun is out of alignment. If we tighten the laser down in its cradle, it takes a lot more hammering before it needs to be sighted in again.”

  “We were firing widely dispersed salvos in our attempt to hit your wildly moving ships,” Coth said, speaking slowly.

  “Yes, I know. But your salvoes were wildly dispersed as well as widely dispersed.” Kris wondered if that sounded the same in Iteeche, but it was the intent she was interested in.

  “Just how many hits did we get on your ships?”

  “Of the seven hundred and twenty short bursts you fired at each of my ships, we took only four or five hits,” Kris said. Actually, it was closer to one or two, but as beaks fell open, eyes got wide, and gills got orange for not only the Iteeche captains, but Admiral Coth as well, Kris was glad that she’d been charitable.

  It was a long moment before Coth muttered, “That few?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even with our maskers on, you were making fifty or more on us. Many spaced very close together on our hulls.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have a way to out fox our maskers?”

  “No. They still make a stew of most of our fire control sensors. You have forced us back to using our optics and eyeballs, aided by our computers.”

  “You were firing at us with just your eyesight!”

  “Aided by good optics and computer enhancements, yes.”

  “Sea monsters from the deep! We take away half your sensors and you get better at the half we cannot touch.”

  “Is it not that way with you as well?” Kris asked.

  “From what you have told us, it does not appear so.”

  Since there was nothing to do while they waited for a small computer to arrive, Kris opened up the bar. Admiral Coth had brought crates of battle rations, and those were passed around. The Iteeche tried several drinks and quickly settled on a dry white wine as their beverage of choice.

  Nelly made space around the bar so that the officers of the two Navies could mingle. Megan worked with her Lily to create a high gee station for Admiral Coth. As soon as she had one complete, she created more for the other Iteeche to test out.

  Problems arose quickly. Humans could use their commlinks to create a high gee station and adjust it to fit properly. One size did not fit all. The Iteeche lacked the personal computer at their fingertips, so creating the egg and getting it to fit became an immediate challenge.

  “The way you humans gab to each other over distances is repugnant to us. We have always done our talking face to face,” Admiral Coth told Kris.

  She suspected that it was mainly because of their need to observe each other’s gill slits, something they did without conscious thought.

  “I have a second question for you,” Coth said, going on. “How do you fight your battle station when you are flat on your back? Yes, ship maintenance can be delayed while we are under high acceleration, but how can a helmsman steer the ship when he is flat on his back?”

  “The high gee station provides the warrior with controls he can handle in a fight and our data links allow us to transmit what is done in the egg to the helm, weapons, whatever is needed,” Kris said, entering her own egg to show Admiral Coth how her battle board adjusted to her posture.

  “And how do you command your ships when you are flat on your back?” the Iteeche admiral asked.

  “I don’t understand?” Kris said, noting that the room around them had gotten quiet. Every Iteeche eye was on them now, and with each of them having four, that meant a lot of eyes.

  “I watch my officers to see that they are performing their duty. How can you see your officers? All of you are in your eggs, flat on your back and gazing off at the overhead.”

  Kris felt the gains she’d made begin to slip away.

  “On my battle board, I can check the status of my crew. I can bring up everyone’s board if I want to see what they are seeing. My board can report out if anyone is wounded or off line. If the helmsman goes down, I can order anyone on the bridge to take over that job. We cross-train a lot.”

  “Any station can be fought by anyone?” That came from an incredulous Iteeche captain.

  “Yes. Any station can be made to match any station. In theory, the engineering officer can take over for Guns if she is a casualty. We can fight the ship from any position on the ship.”

  It began to dawn on Kris that they had given the Iteeche Smart MetalTM and the design for the battlecruisers, but the Iteeche had not adjusted their doctrine or their traditions.

  They had taken advantage of little of the flexibility inherent in the design and material.

  Admiral Coth turned away from Kris and went to talk with his subordinates. Rather quickly the room separated, Iteeche to the right, humans to the left. Quiet conversations ebbed and flowed among them.

  Jack and Captain Tosan joined Kris.

  “It seems that there are more ways to fight a battlecruiser than we thought,” Kris said.

  Kris’s chief of staff nodded. “The right way, the wrong way, the Navy way and the Iteeche Navy way,” brought a chuckle to the small group

  “I knew we had
a cultural problem,” Kris said, “I just didn’t know how deep that problem went.”

  “Need I say,” Jack said, “that they are alien.”

  “As are we,” Kris pointed out.

  “Nelly, Sal, Lily,” Kris said, addressing all the computers present. “Any ideas how we might help the Iteeche adjust? How we can help them fight their ships without them having to become just big humans?”

  “We have been examining that at length, Kris,” Nelly said, reminding her that when she spoke to Nelly or any of her kids, she spoke to all of them.

  Nelly continued. “We could arrange for several sizes of eggs. When an Iteeche entered their high gee station they could push one button and have it adjust to one established size. It would not be as good as our personalized ones, but then, they don’t have as much computational power at their fingertips.”

  “So, a captain could give an order to the ship’s computer and it could execute a subroutine and create an egg for every crew member and they would then select from several standard sizes like shoes,” Megan said.

  “Something like that,” Nelly said. “We would have to find a way to embed that routine in their computer. I am thinking we might persuade them to have some human computers that worked with a very simple interface. Say they could give it certain specific verbal orders and it could produce certain prepared responses. That would work for eggs, but not likely for fire control computers.”

  “And their problem with having to work the helm or fire the lasers while lying down?” Jack asked.

  “We are thinking that we could make the eggs immobile,” Nelly said. “We could have them rise out of the deck at their fighting station. They could fight from there. Again, it would not be as flexible as our system is, but it would allow them to stay within some of their tradition.”

  Kris strode over to join Admiral Coth among his key staff, careful not to interrupt him. When he finished his own reflections on the problems, he recognized Kris, and she shared with them the suggestions the humans had come up with. The ideas caught on like wild fire.

  Quickly, Nelly produced a helmsman’s station. An Iteeche captain seated himself in it and agreed that it could be worked from sitting up to reclining for higher gees. The side restraints would keep the sailor in his chair as the ship jinked, though there was little cushioning

  “We could design an entire set of these for your battle stations,” Kris said. “We can also create a series of single use computers that can be voice activated, so a captain could order ‘battle stations’ and each and every fighting position aboard the ship would produce an egg. We also would make the eggs with an option to adjust its size from small to large in increments, operated by the sailor with a button.”

  “We had thought of that, too,” Admiral Coth said. “So, using this, we can do some of that fancy dancing you were doing. Now, about the rest of that stuff.”

  “I need to access your computers,” Nelly said.

  An Iteeche officer trotted into the forward lounge with a large object held in his two left hands. He halted beside Admiral Coth and waited to be noticed.

  “Is that the device?” Kris asked. Coth nodded.

  “Megan, would you get that for us?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the young Longknife said. She took the device from the Iteeche, set it down on the front table, then settled into a chair and eyed the thing. Slowly, she put her hands on either side of the device. A moment later, her eyes closed and she seemed to go into a trance.

  Kris immediately noticed the vacancy in her skull, the one she felt when Nelly was fully occupied elsewhere. She cocked an eyebrow at Jack. He gave her a faint nod.

  His computer was gone, too. Nelly and her two kids were somewhere with Megan. Some place no one else could follow.

  Kris began to talk to Coth, mainly to keep him busy and away from observing what was happening to Megan. She had several of her gunnery officers talk about what their fire control computer did.

  The Iteeche were impressed.

  Meanwhile, Megan sat, face blank, her hands on the Iteeche computer, not moving a muscle.

  23

  Megan stood in a small clearing surrounded by jungle. Blue-green grass was underfoot. Lush, but totally strange trees, bushes, and flowers were not two meters away in any direction. She stood in a square, facing out. A quick glance behind her showed an older woman on her right, a younger one on her left and a young fellow with his back to her. All four of them held swords at the ready. From the jungle around them came the calls, growls, and cries of animals.

  “Thank you for getting us in here,” came from Megan’s right in Nelly’s voice.

  “I’m none too sure I’m glad to have been of service,” Meg answered.

  “If you hadn’t gotten us in here,” came in Lily’s voice to Meg’s left, “we wouldn’t be here. That’s some frontal lobe you got there, girl.”

  “Thanks, Lily,” Megan said. Another quick glance to her left showed a young woman that reminded Megan of pictures she’d seen of her aunt when young.

  “Now what do we do?” came in a deep voice from a guy in back, very likely Jack’s computer Sal.

  There were four dirt paths, little more than game paths that led out of the clearing in all four ordinals of the compass.

  “Megan, pick a trail,” Nelly said. “You’ve got the skull socket. You’re the human. You lead and we will follow.”

  “I’m going to close my eyes for a moment. Cover my quadrant,” Meg said, and closed her eyes. She listened with her ears, first right and left, then turned to listen to the front and back. Nothing grabbed her attention.

  She went deeper. Listening with her center. Trying to catch a hint of a leading in any direction. She felt a touch of wind to her face. That might or might not have meant anything. Still, it was all she had.

  “We take the path in front of me,” she said.

  “You lead,” Nelly ordered. “Sal, you cover our rear. Lily, you watch the left, I’ll watch the right. Let’s keep two or three meters between us.”

  Megan lead off. Not fifty meters down the trail, they came to a massive precipice. Megan looked over the edge while the others kept an eye out for an attack from the jungle side.

  “Folks, it’s a long way down. Unless we want to try spouting wings, I say we back track.”

  “Let’s save wings for later,” Nelly said. “We’re in these avatars for some reason. Let’s not toss them just yet.”

  They backtracked to their clearing, then went in the opposite direction. They hadn’t gone long before the jungle began to thin out. Soon there were only a few trees and berry bushes on the grassy savannah they walked through.

  Megan chose a path that went from tree to tree. If something surprised them, she wanted either a tree to climb, or at least to have a tree at their back. Cautiously, they hiked that way for what seemed like an hour until they walked up to the last tree in sight. Before them was a rolling plain. As far as the eye could see, there was only a sea of tall, yellow-colored grass that waved in a gentle wind.

  That was when they heard thunder out of a clear blue sky. Only unlike natural rolling thunder, this noise neither rolled nor ceased.

  The four of them watched as a massive herd of horned beasts charged by them, but fortunately for them, the thundering beasts were going in one direction and that was not at them.

  They must have been watching this massive migration for an hour before it finally trailed off.

  “So, does anyone want to trot out there and see if there’s anything to see?” Megan asked.

  “We chose to go this way, and it’s certainly interesting,” Nelly said.

  So, they continued their hike out into the sea of grass. That tall grass ended when they got out to where the herd had passed. The ground was badly trampled; the hooves had not only smashed the grass down, but turned up clods of dirt.

  They had also left droppings. Before them stretched an entire field of dung. Little birds in dazzling multicolored plumage were picki
ng at the droppings, then flying off in every direction.

  Megan halted at the edge of the trampled zone and eyed the situation.

  “Does anyone else here feel an urge to be a bird and mess around out there? I admit, being a human and squeamish about poop, part of me finds this urge very yucky. However, it is very much there.”

  “I understand your natural human preference for avoiding the source of disease,” Nelly said, “but let us test your urge.”

  Next moment, Megan found herself gazing upon three very colorful birds, one of whom’s coloration was significantly more dazzling. Just gazing upon him gave her an irresistible urge to turn her tail to him, spread out her wings, they lay them on the ground and wait for him to mount her. As she did, one of the other birds was doing the same.

  The dazzling bird began a very sexy hop toward them.

  One of the other birds hopped right at him, “We will have none of that, children,” Nelly snapped. “Heaven knows what sort of offspring we would have here, and, God forbid, out in the real world.”

  It was strange hearing a human voice coming from the beak of a bird. That alone broke up the mood, and the four of them took flight.

  Megan always loved dreams that gave her wings and allowed her to fly through the air. It was tempting just to climb and dive and flip and roll, but there was now a serious urge to get to those huge droppings out on the trampled plain. The four of them winged their way straight and fast in that direction.

  They alighted together in a space that was devoid of other birds. Still, Megan could see this close up that they were indeed picking at the droppings, so she steeled herself and took a peck. She found herself swallowing down what looked like numbers and letters, though in no alphabet or mathematical system ever conceived on Earth or known in human space.

  “Are any of you comprehending this?” Megan asked, resisting the urge to bury her beak once more in the drying dung.

  “These are Iteeche,” Nelly said. “This is part of a data set of supplies, their types and amounts. I think we have become the carriers of data packets. I suspect we should follow some of those birds.”