Kris Longknife's Bad Day: A short story

by Mike Shepherd

  Kris Longknife’s Bad Day

  A short story by

  Mike Shepherd.

  Published by KL & MM Books

  April, 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Mike Moscoe

  All right reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction set 400 years in humanity’s future. Any similarity between present people, places or events would be spectacularly unlikely and is purely coincidental.

  This book is written and published by the author. Please don’t pirate it. I’m self-employed. The money I earn from the sales of these books allows me to produce more stories to entertain you. I’d hate to have to get a day job again. If this book comes into your hands free, please consider going to your favorite e-book provider and investing in a copy so I can continue to earn a living at this wonderful art.

  I would like to thank my wonderful cover artist, Scott Grimando, who did all my Ace covers and will continue doing my own book covers. I also am grateful for the editing skill of Lisa Muller and, as ever, Ellen Moscoe.

  Ver .01

  Admiral, Her Royal Highness Kris Longknife returned from a pleasant lunch with her husband sporting a smile on her face. Five years ago, to this very day she’d demanded a desk job where she could have lunch every noon with Lieutenant General Jack Montoya, RUSMC, and go home to her kids at 1700 every afternoon.

  For a while, Kris had kept count of every day she and Jack met for lunch, but somewhere about the end of the first year, she gave that up. Jack was a Marine general and had inspections and field operations that occasionally left her eating a lone lunch at her desk. Kris was type commander for the Battlecruiser Force and had her own inspections to attend, as well as fleet exercises to observe and write up. Sometimes Jack ended up eating lunch on his own as well.

  That reflection cost Kris her smile. Fleet problems always meant her crossing swords with the Battle Fleet and Scout Force type commanders as she defended her battlecruisers from their misuse. Also, during the planning for every fleet problem she’d have to spend way too much time trying to free her battlecruisers from the straight jacket of the exercise’s orders so they could go raise hell with battleships and cruisers alike.

  After three years of butting her head against the brick wall of the hide bound Navy bureaucracy, Kris’s manual for the proper doctrine for battlecruisers use remained in draft form despite everything she had done to get it signed off on.

  Kris shrugged, something she’d been doing a lot of lately, and tried to regain her cheerful self. Five years! Wow.

  The pool on when she’d leave hadn’t taken so much as a dollar bet in the last year. They were learning that when this damn Longknife said she was quite of being run ragged as a fire chaser for King Raymond I, Grampa Ray to her, she meant it.

  Kris opened the door to her outer office. She’d managed to get it repainted in a soft green. The carpet now was a light blue. Neither color was one she could get away with at Nuu house, not with Ruth and John junior grubby hands and muddy feet tracking dirt everywhere.

  Those were happy thoughts.

  But the look on Lieutenant Megan Longknife, Kris’s once again aide de camp brought Kris to a halt with a frown slowly overtaking her face.

  “What is it now?” Kris demanded.

  The young lieutenant took only a moment to answer, “The draft budget it out.” She held up three readers, colored blood red for top secret.

  Kris scowled. “Three readers? Is the damn budget so big that one reader can’t hold it all?”

  “No, Admiral,” Megan answered with the firm voice that an adult might take with a petulant three-year-old, “but last year you busted your copy when you tossed it across the room. That cost us a whole day for putting together our rebuttals while I got you another copy. This year I put in for six copies and got three. Please don’t break more than two,” she said with an only slightly hopeful look for her admiral.

  Kris chose to ignore the drama; she wasn’t that bad, really. Usually. “So, how bad is it?” Kris growled, advancing on her aide de camp’s desk like an army with banners.

  “I wouldn’t know, ma’am. These copies are coded to your thumb,” was spoken too innocently for a Longknife, even a Longknife from the side of the family that had fled a quarter of the way across the galaxy to Santa Maria.

  “Then why did you ask for six copies and settle for three,” Kris said, taking the top one of the three offered readers.

  “Well, there is talk in the lady’s head and rumors around the halls, if you know the right water coolers to drink at,” Megan said with the tiniest hint of a conspiratorial shrug, which like most any expression, looked good on the lovely young officer. Kris wondered, as she had so many times, if she was looking at an exact reproduction of herself a few years ago, and swallowed a chuckle that the budget, no doubt, did not deserve.

  It was good to have Megan back as her flag lieutenant and aide. She’d been sorry to lose her to ship duty, but the gal’s career need the space tour. Still Kris had been overjoyed when the young lieutenant put in for the desk guarding Kris’s office.

  Her last flag lieutenant had been too much in awe of a damn Longknife. Indeed, he was too much in awe of having a job in the Main Navy building and all the stars and birds that hurried down the halls in self-important haste.

  With any luck, he was enjoying space duty and had many tales to tell of his time close to the big, powerful and self-pretentious.

  What he couldn’t tell anyone about was the secretive junior officer information network that Meg had taken to like a fish to bourbon. Its existence had gone right over his head.

  Kris ran her thumb through the sensor, then looked into the tiny hole on the side of the reader. Only then did the reading surface area transform from red with a large Top Secret slashed across it and open up to show a comfortable, white reading surface.

  The first page announced: DRAFT DEFENSE BUDGET, WARDHAVEN, TOP SECRET UNTIL RELEASED TO PARLIAMENT.

  A flip of the page brought her to the index. No surprises, it had the same budget cost centers as last year.

  The print was getting smaller, however. Having spent it seemed quite recently her thirtieth birthday decanting John junior from his uterine replicator into this world, Kris found it hard to believe that her eyes were the problem.

  Of course, John junior was now four. Strange how that happened.

  With a little help from her friends, Kris would ignore this issue for a while longer.

  “Nelly, could you please project the budget on the wall?”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Nelly responded. She’d gotten more nautical in her language the longer Kris spent at her desk job.

  Nelly had been Kris’s computer since her first day of school. Upgraded too many times to count, Nelly was now worth nearly as much as one of Kris’s battlecruisers. She’d also taken to telling bad jokes and arguing with Kris. Fortunately, today Nelly appeared to be in a helpful mood.

  In a blink, the long wall in Kris’s office across from the windows transformed itself. The standard bureaucratic beige wall with its large, stylized oil painting of the Battle of System X vanished. Now the first dozen pages of the budget covered it. While the reader had security to squelch just this kind of projection, once again Nelly had circumvented the best Wardhaven had in order to give Kris what she asked for.

  The Executive Summary was short but not sweet. The bitter pill in the last paragraph, the total size of the budget, had way too many zeros
and commas in it. That drew a whistle from Megan.

  “Your father’s not going to like the price on this thing,” Kris’s flag lieutenant commented.

  Kris shook her head in agreement. Her father had been the prime minister for about as long as Kris could remember. The brief exception had been an embarrassment to all involved and had resulted in a major battle where Kris and a dozen tiny mosquito boats took out a squadron of six huge battleships that threatened to pound Wardhaven back into the stone age.

  Kris still shivered when she thought of all the luck that went into wining that fight . . . and all the lives that had been lost under her command. It had been the first, but not the last time, she’d had to face her own butcher’s bill.

  There were advantages to commanding a desk.

  “No doubt, the politicians will see that every penny squeaks like a pig as it leaves the public purse,” Kris said, then added pensively. “Where to start. Nelly, bring up the Jump Fortresses.”

  Both Kris and Meg whistled when Nelly made that chapter appear.

  “They’ve doubled their budget again this year,” Meg exclaimed. “And they project it doubling again next year and stay that way until the end of the Five Year Plan!”

  Kris cringed at the budget drain; she could outfit a full fleet of battlecruisers for that cost, but the Jump Fortresses were her own fault.

  “I can’t wish I never came up with the idea of laser-armed forts guarding the jumps,” Kris muttered, shaking her head.

  As commander of distant Alwa station, Kris had combined ideas from several good people and figured out a way to keep a dozen battleship size lasers ready to take out anything coming through the jumps into the Alwa system. They’d been faced with an infestations of suicide speedsters. If even one of them got through to Alwa, millions would have died. A strong laser presence at each jump had been critical.

  However, those lasers didn’t need to be armored, just quick to shoot and deadly accurate.

  Here on Wardhaven, the government goal was to guard every jump into the system from invasion by a huge alien raiding base ship and its hundreds of half million ton warships.

  Eager to make her father, his government and the people of Wardhaven feel safer from the blood thirsty alien monsters that Kris had located in her circumnavigation of the galaxy, she had innocently suggested building small space fortresses. Equipped with the new 24-inch lasers and stationed some 200,000 kilometers from the jump, they’d need small engines to move them if the jump moved. They shouldn’t have cost more than two battleships.

  Or eight battlecruisers as the Battle Force people were oh so quick to point out.

  Two years ago, work had started on five fortresses to guard each of the five jumps into the Wardhaven system. The last of the jump forts should have been finished this year.

  Then overeducated idiot jumped to the conclusion that if one fortress was good, two fortresses would be twice as good for the protection of the electorate. Last year, the budget had doubled to provide for ten forts. The cost of constructing the forts should have come down this year and finished up the next.

  There was a picture of the first completed fortress on the screen. It was as big around as the space stations Kris had used on Alwa station, a two kilometer in diameter can with thirty 24-inch lasers always pointed at the jump.

  So, what had happened to jack up the cost and send it smashing through the out-year budget?

  “Oh, good grief,” Megan said, and pointed her wrist unit at one place on the wall. Nelly quickly highlighted it.

  “They’re expanding the forts to hold bigger lasers and adding a third fortress at each jump with beam guns!” Megan exclaimed.

  Kris let out a long sigh. Why hadn’t she thought of that.

  She was the only battle commander with actual experience with the monstrous beam guns. Three beam ships, weighing in at a half million tons or more and with reactors that could easily power half a planet, had helped her defeat four alien hoards by chipping tiny but unbelievably heavy darts off of a neutron star.

  The beam ships themselves had been brand new, untried and cranky. During the battle, one almost blew itself up and a second had to limp home with half of it reduced to junk. All this without taking a single hit from the alien monsters who wanted all of humanity, and any other living thing in the galaxy, dead.

  Still, the idea of stationing beam guns on Jump Fortresses to punch huge holes in incoming alien base ships and the battering rams they’d developed to force jumps was a neat idea, assuming whoever was behind this new budget drain had refined the equipment and were ready to operate it at a wartime tempo.

  “They’ll need a huge fort,” Kris half muttered to herself, “and they’ll need to be close enough to the jump to spot ships coming through.” Kris had stationed her three beam ships around a dead planet a third of an astronomical unit from the neutron star, some 50,000,000 kilometers. It had still taken the beam almost three minutes to cover that distance even at the speed of light.

  In Kris’s battle, the neutron star had stayed an unmoving target. A lot could happen, however, in the six minutes or so that it took a beam ship to spot an invasion force, lock in a target and get a beam back at it from that far away. “I wouldn’t recommend that they hold the beam stations as far back as I had my beam ships from the neutron star,” Kris mused.

  “There is a long discussion of that in the supporting material, Kris,” Nelly said, and the screen changed from pages one though six of the long budget document to pages 637 through 642. Nelly highlighted two full pages.

  Thank heavens for Nelly, Kris thought as she studied the supporting documents. There had been tests, a lot of tests. The 24-inch lasers for the forts had initially been identical to those on battleships and battlecruisers. Somebody had taken that idea and run with it. After all, different guns meant a different development cycle and construction base.

  All of that sucked up more money for design staffs and fabrication plants, of course.

  Since the laser developers had huge forts to work with, they’d doubled the length of the lasers, added extra reactors and jacked up the power in the laser and its duration.

  All that heat had to go somewhere, so the outer hull of the forts was honeycombed with heat sinks for cooling. At least when the battle started, the forts would have huge cooling sails. No doubt, those would be blown away quickly, but if the forts snapped up the incoming alien warships fast enough, the sails might survive until well into the fight.

  Megan whistled, and so did Kris. “They tested those jacked up lasers against thirty meters of basalt backed up with twenty meters of ice,” Kris whispered.

  The last time she’d fought the aliens, they’d taken to coating their ships with stone, usually granite. Meters of it. That hadn’t stopped Kris’s battlecruisers from blowing them away by aiming two, three or even four lasers for the same place on the target. These new lasers would punch through more armor than those ships had carry and still have enough power left over to slash through ship’s structure, equipment, and crew.

  Kris frowned. “How are we going to force a jump defended like that?” she murmured, half to herself.

  Meg raised both eyebrows. “It kind of looks like the defense has taken a huge jump over the offense. Do you think this will make war impossible between humans?”

  Kris ran a worried hand through her hair. She’d let it grow longer; it made for some new fun with Jack. She shook her head against that rabbit hole and dodged away from going down it mentally.

  “The ultimate weapon has never stopped humans from trying to kill each other. No doubt we and Battle Fleet would soon be tasked with coming up with a way to force a jump defended by our own forts.”

  Kris dumped that into a pigeon hole to mull over in her spare time, of which she now occasional had some, and read the test of concept for the beam fortresses.

  The beam fortresses would be four kilometers across and ten klicks long. They’d chosen to station them about a million kilometers back
from each jump. That would give them a bit more than three seconds to know the jump had been breached. If you assumed three seconds to process the target and another three for the laser beam to get back and hit something, it totaled out at nine seconds give or take a few nanoseconds.

  In a space battle, a lot could happen in nine horribly long seconds.

  Kris stared at the ceiling, seeing the jump into the Alwa system she’d tried to hold but been forced to fall back from during the First Battle for the Alwa System. The aliens’ huge half million ton warships were slow to come through at first. They also kept their distance from each other, like ponderous dancing pachyderms, and Kris’s guard force had blown them away, one after another.

  However, as more failed to report back on what was on the other side of the jump, the Enlightened Master on the alien base ship had gotten more rambunctious with his massive ships and in the end, Kris had watched as they tiptoed through the jump at one second intervals.

  Tiptoes was the right word. The half million ton alien warships were traveling at only a few kilometers an hour to keep the jump from sending them off to God only knows where in a sour jump.

  From dead slow, it took time to accelerate something that massive. Every second that took was time given the fire control systems on Kris’s ships to target them and lay a hellish amount of laser fire on them.

  A lot of alien ships died before they could get away from the murder hole.

  Kris considered one hundred or so alien warships trying to force a jump held by sixty jacked up 24-inch lasers on two forts.

  With the alien coming through the jump at one second intervals and the defensive lasers firing two, maybe three times a minute, each alien warship was likely to take three or four hits within five seconds of cruising through the jump.

  Kris shook her head. The aliens would face a murderous task, getting their forces through a well-guarded jump into human space.

  It was also unlikely that they’d have any chance at surprise. Pickets buoys now stood vigilant at every jump within ten of Wardhaven. Indeed, all of human space was outposted against any surprise attack.