“Because my air vehicle has a very effective anti-missile defense. If someone fires on me, they will do me no harm. However, what goes up must come down, and the flaming wreckage of your missiles’ warheads and fuel must fall back to the ground. How many of your own people do you think your missiles will kill? How much property will they destroy?”
“By all that has ever crawled out of the deep or crashed from the sky, I swear that you are a pain in my butt.”
“I’m sorry, Admiral. Someday you must come to tea at my palace. I would love to show you around the castle that we have made with these 140,000 tons of Smart Metal.”
“I can’t picture any reason I would want to see your face.”
“Admiral, you mortally wound me.”
“May a demon from the deepest, darkest pits of the ocean eat you and shit you out to fall into the abyss.”
“I’ll be looking forward to meeting you, too,” Kris said, suppressing a need to laugh. Well, suppressing it pretty well. “Big Brick II out.”
“No change in the radars. We are acquired,” Jack reported.
“Are you hearing any music that might be a missile launch?”
Nelly answered instead of Jack. “Kris there is so much noise coming from that planet that I don’t know how they avoid jamming themselves. Right now, I don’t have time for this.”
Kris leaned back in her seat and prepared not to jiggle Nelly’s elbow.
As they had before, the brick had turned into a lift body. In that sleek avatar, it approached the Imperial capital. Again, Nelly looped around to make her final approach from the opposite side from the palace.
“Hold onto your hats,” Nelly told all, and the lift body nosed up hard, but as it stalled out, it converted to a tall, thin drink of water with twenty-four huge rotors providing control while they also bled off airspeed as they fell toward the Pink Coral Palace.
Now the fireworks started. Kris hoped the crowd enjoyed the show. The only laser lights this time were coming from various places on the castle. They painted several of the nearby high rises and put on quite a show of their own.
Meanwhile, the palace slumped in upon itself, widening the base Nelly was aiming for. A long, thin wire, supported by a small balloon rose high into the night air.
“I have caught the wire,” Nelly reported, and the air vehicle shivered as the rotors switched from breaking to slowing their descent while the ship melted from the new brick into the old brick.
Kris knew they’d landed when all her instruments went to zero and green. To keep her out of her virtual hair, Nelly provided Kris with a 360-degree view of what was happening.
The Flying Brick melted onto the tower, but not into it. Like a melting candle, Smart MetalTM flowed down the outside of the castle, then over to the Iteeche Navy annex. This got it to the outer wall of the palace. There, it began to create its own wall.
A glistening wall of Smart MetalTM began to flow around the castle. It started at the water’s edge of the moat and rose some fifty feet in one smooth sheet. It was angled so that anything that was thrown at it would just roll back into the moat.
As Kris watched, someone hurled a rock at the new wall. It hit, bounced off, fell a bit, then rolled down the wall to splash in the moat.
It took a moment, but then someone in the crowd decided to try something else. Where the Molotov cocktail came from, Kris would very much like to know. But there it was, flying through the air.
The Marine in the Defensive Command Center timed it perfectly. If he shot down the bottle of gasoline too soon, it would spray flaming gas all over the crowd. If he waited too late, the bottle would hit the palace with no evidence it had been hit. He nailed it just a meter or so from the moat. The glass shattered, spewing flaming gas all over the dark water. Some did splatter onto the Smart MetalTM that now surrounded Kris’s palace.
Gravity sent it dripping down into the moat.
Kris wasn’t getting an audio feed off the crowd, but from the looks of them, most were in solid awe and cowed.
Then one Iteeche just had to test it all. He sat on his butt and slid down the moss covered stone bank into the moat. He likely was surprised when the bottom disappeared out from under him. Still, he swam across the moat in something like a butterfly stroke with a whole lot of hands flying. Once across, his problems only multiplied. The steep stone bank offered him few handholds. He tried several times before he found an outcrop, then another so that he was all the way up the stone embankment.
Now the Iteeche produced a hammer and began pounding on the Smart MetalTM. He hammered away with all his strength.
“Admiral, should we laser the hammer in two?” came to Kris from the Defensive Command Center.
“Wait one,” Kris said.
“Standing by,” came back immediately.
Kris watched the guy hammer away for a full minute, then asked, “Nelly, is he doing any damage?”
“No, Kris. Just to make sure, I reinforced the area around him. He can hammer on that section until the cows come home and not see so much as a smudge.”
“Good. Now, just for fun, Nelly, I want the palace to gently but firmly shove him back into the water. Don’t hurt him. We’re going for a pratfall here.”
“Understood, Kris.”
The next time the hammer struck the wall, the wall began to slowly balloon out as well as creep down to his hand hold. He lost it and his balance at the same time. He did something close to a back flip as he crashed back into the moat.
He came up sputtering, with no hammer in sight. Though Kris had no audio feed, it sure looked like the Iteeche in the crowd were laughing and hooting.
The guy ended up in trouble; he could not make it back up the stony bank to the street side of the moat. The Iteeche and human Marines called to him and motioning him to the drawbridge they stood on that crossed the moat between their two guard stations.
The guy kept on trying, and getting nowhere. Finally, he gave up and swam to the drawbridge where they hauled him up on a rope under his rear arms. He looked thoroughly bedraggled.
“What do we do with this dude?” Defense Central Command asked Kris.
“Toss him out the front door, but gently. I don’t want him harmed.”
“Admiral, the Iteeche guards here want his head on a pike.”
“I’m not surprised, but no. No heads on pikes if I can avoid it. He looks pretty pathetic. Am I right?”
“I’ve seen half-drowned cats with more spunk in them.”
“Turn him loose.”
A moment later, Kris’s video showed one soaked and forlorn Iteeche being shown the door. This time, Nelly had some mics in the crowd. They guy was really getting the horse’s laugh from the rest of the mob.
However, the mob seemed to have lost interest in the palace. Was it the fireworks or the laser display? Or was it the display of one tiny laser intercepting a gas-laden bottle and another Iteeche making a fool of himself trying to hammer his way in and ending up looking like a drowned cat?
Kris’s chair had long ago righted itself. She’d stayed because this was the best command center she could think of, and walking the halls of her castle would have taken her out of the loop.
Kris disembarked and found Abby and her General Bruce, Amanda and Jacques, as well as the inimitable Ambassador Tsusumu waiting for her as she entered her day quarters.
“Was that ride as fun as it looked?” General Bruce, former Marine Gunny Sergeant asked.
“Ask the Marines that dropped with us. If they think they got their money’s worth, you can set up the rides and sell tickets,” Kris drawled. “What’s your situation here?”
“All our embassy personnel and families are fine,” Abby reported.
“Despite their efforts to the contrary,” General Bruce said, dryly, “all the business types are still alive, too. Some idiot came up with an idea to do product surveys on the big guys shouting outside the door. These guys really are too dumb to live.”
“I would not dis
pute with your honorable general, Your Highness,” the ambassador from Musashi said, “but we must do something to keep the businessmen busy. If we try to lock them up among themselves, I fear they will start digging tunnels, or chew their leg off to get out of this trap.”
“I wouldn’t mind a few legless bastards,” the general muttered.
“Anybody have some ideas for an easier solution than that?” Jack asked.
“I know that the Iteeche don’t want your people talking to their people without a mandarin keeping an eye on them,” Ambassador Tsusumu said. “However, the main complaint from most of the business types I talk to concerns their total ignorance of what the Iteeche have and what they might need.”
The wise counselor paused for a moment. “They would very much like to walk a mall or bazaar. See what the Iteeche sell to each other. That would give them a better idea of what they could offer in return.”
“But the Iteeche don’t want our business types talking to their traders,” Kris pointed out.
“So, we take away all their electronic devices so they can’t talk,” the ambassador said, with a wicked gleam in his eyes. “They may wave their hands and count on their fingers, but they won’t be able to use Nelly’s marvelous translation program.”
“And we don’t let any of them out of our view for a second,” General Bruce said, then added urgently. “Chip them. We’ll need to be sure to chip them so we can find any that wander off, by accident or on purpose.”
“I think most of the businessmen would accept that,” Ambassador Tsusumu said.
“Very good,” Kris said. “Nelly, get me Ron.” A moment later, he was added to their discussion. “You did very well, Your Highness. You again landed your elephant in a tea cup. Do you intend to try it again any time soon?”
“No,” Kris admitted.
“Well, please do tell us the next time you intend to risk destroying half our city,” Ron said, dryly.
“And let someone try to shoot me down or wreck my landing aids? I think not, Ron.”
“Yes, there is that. Is there a reason you are keeping me from my bed?”
“We have a proposal from our people of business.”
At first, he was opposed to anything for those ‘dust mites,’ but Kris got him to come around for something so low key as just visits to their own markets. That, however, created more problems than Kris expected.
It took them a while to grasp the situation, but Jacques finally caught the problem. “Like many economies where scarcity is endemic, the Iteeche seem to have different levels of stores for different economic or social levels. We had laws like that all over the world. Sumptuary laws forbad people from dressing above their station in life. Some of the failed economic systems of the twentieth century had several levels of stores. For the powerful, you could buy almost anything, including an assassin. Then there were lower levels of stores where the workers might buy fewer and lower quality products. Finally, there would be a lowest level where the peasants could see what was available. They usually had to stand in line for it.”
“So, what Ron is saying doesn’t sound too weird to you?” Kris said.
“No. I imagine our men of business would like to visit all of the different levels of stores,” the ambassador said. “But how will they remember anything if we take away their computer assistant?”
“We could assign a Marine to each of them,” Jack said. “The Marine would have a commlink and could take notes and pictures of what got the merchant excited. That way, they’d have a babysitter with them at all times, or they’d be deaf, dumb, and blind, besides likely being totally lost.”
“Will you want a mandarin observing this shopping expedition?” Kris asked Ron.
“I cannot think of anything that a lord would want to do less than follow around a lot of trader gnats,” Ron said. “I suppose we can find a junior lord who has irritated his overlord enough to draw this assignment. Maybe five or six, likely from different clans that want to keep an eye on your humans.”
“Very good, Ron. Can we start tomorrow?”
“So soon?”
“You know us, Ron. We humans were born in a hurry.”
“And you hurry yourself all the way to the grave,” the Iteeche observed.
“Still, tomorrow?”
“Yes, tomorrow.” And with that answer, the Iteeche lord, J.G. took his leave.
“I will take this joyful news to the other ambassadors so that they may tell their business people,” Ambassador Tsusumu-sama said, and he also took his leave.
“Abby, how bad were things here?”
“We got a lot of people in the streets around us,” Abby said. “We asked some of the Iteeche guards if they might go out among the crowd and ask them why they were here. What they came back with was a mishmash. Some were told there would be more fireworks. Apparently, the lower caste Iteeche love fireworks. Some had been told that something interesting was going to happen here. Some heard that a very popular choir and orchestra would be playing and there would be a sing along.”
“Did any of these nice people hear that one of us humans were acting above her station in life and needed to be knocked down a peg or two?” Kris asked.
“Not a one.”
“Which isn’t to mitigate what someone was trying to do,” Jacques said. “You get a large enough mob and then feed them just the right red meat and you’ll have a real wrecking crew on your hands.”
“Well, at least we’ve learned something,” Jacques said. “I’d be very interested in seeing how this sumptuary law works out in practice. Do you think I could tag along with the traders tomorrow? I’d like to talk to some of the Iteeche tradesmen.”
Kris eyed her staff sociologist. “You do remember the Iteeche don’t much want their people learning much about our people. Oh, and every mandarin we’re likely to meet has at least one big dude with a very sharp axe.”
“I’m aware.”
“Kris, if my husband insists on this crazy idea of his, and once he’s got an idea in his head, I’ve never succeeded in getting it out of there, would you please accompany him tomorrow?”
Kris considered the idea. She’d spent today with her Navy. It likely would not need her tomorrow. Also, she would like to see more of the common Iteeche. At first, when Father sent her out to campaign, she’d been scared stiff. Then, as she did more of it, she’d come to love the common people, at least those common people who were interested enough in politics to work on a campaign or attend rallies. Father called it ‘pressing the flesh.’ Could she learn more about these people she was trying to save by pressing a bit of their flesh?
“I think I can give tomorrow over to keeping the nearest headsman from shortening your husband,” Kris told Amanda.
“Good,” the economist said, with a deep sigh.
Exhausted by the long day, and not looking forward to another long one, Kris closed down this meeting and, with Jack in hand, covered the short distance to her night quarters.
“Pardon me,” said Nelly before Kris could even fold herself into Jack’s arms for a hug and a kiss.
“Yes, Nelly.”
“I have a message from Admiral Coth that I think you might want to hear.”
“Okay, Nelly,” Kris said, letting her exhaustion into her voice.
“Admiral, I am delighted to bring you a message of fantastic import. No sooner had we unsealed out locks than our officers hit the local O clubs or sent out messages to brother officers. What we did today was on every beak. Even the petty officers were excitedly talking to other sailors. I have already received messages from nearly six hundred ship captains volunteering to join our fleet. More are coming in. I have my computer responding to all, telling them we will sortie for training at 0700 tomorrow morning. If you are busy, I can take the fleet out and run the drill. Are there humans with some of Nelly’s children that we could borrow if you can’t make it?”
He glanced off screen for a moment. “I am most embarrassed. I am told that you have
not been provided with reports from our previous battles. That is a major oversight. Attached to this message are the complete after-action reports from the survivors of both forces. I am sure your Nelly can translate them.”
He paused for a long moment, then went on, “I had no idea what the fates had in store for me when I first set eyes on you. I am so glad I was moved to offer you my service. I truly believe that you are fated to bring an end to this rebellion. It is an honor to serve under your command.”
The message ended.
Kris found herself staring at Jack.
“I think you’ve got a fan there,” he said.
“I think I’ve found another one that expects me to pull a grizzly bear out of a hat.”
“You want to take a look at the reports?” Jack asked.
“Nelly?”
“Kris, I have been correlating all the reports from the first battle into a précis. I think you will find it interesting.”
With a sigh, Kris began to loosen her uniform. Jack, ever the expert, helped her out of it as she stood, reading the analysis that Nelly projected onto the closest wall. When he had her down to bare skin, he brought her a very sexy negligee that, for all practical purposes, wasn’t there.
“You have plans for tonight?” she said, smiling over her shoulder.
“It’s been a hard day. I thought the admiral might like to remember she’s a very sexy woman.”
“Thank you, Jack. You want to take a gander at this?” Kris said, as she settled herself into a comfortable chair Nelly had pulled from the deck.
He shed his uniform, dropping it on the floor. The Smart MetalTM slid it across the floor, then hung up the blue coat and pants, or took the underwear off to the laundry. A pair of silk boxers slipped out from a drawer and slid over to where he stood.
“You really want to put those on?” Kris asked.
“If we’re going to study these after-action reports, I better.”
Kris let out a deep sigh, and kept her eyes on the report as Jack made himself decent.
After a while, Kris shook her head. “Someone read my own after-action reports,” she said.
“Someone on both sides,” Jack added.
Kris Longknife - Admiral Page 23
