Kris Longknife's Bad Day: A short story

by Mike Shepherd

  Not only would the jump forts be gunning for the alien raiders, but the battleships and battlecruisers would be on alert and stationed close to support the forts, possible even closer in. What the fortress’s guns whacked hard, the battle fleet would be in place to finish off quickly.

  And when the base ship, hulking big as a small moon, came through it would face the beam fortress a good two million klicks back. Say seven seconds to spot the intruder, three seconds to study its movements, then another seven seconds for the beams to arrive.

  Kris shivered. The beam wasn’t quite like the device that had been found on Santa Maria. The humans researching it called it the Disappearing Box and were sure that it was a leftover from the Three Alien Races that built the jump points.

  Some teenage girls had found the box, opened it and pointed it at a mountain. They weren’t sure exactly what they did next, but somehow, they activated it and the top three thousand meters of a distant mountain had vanished. Just disappeared.

  After eighty years of studying the box, human scientists had no idea how or where that mountain top had vanished too. However, in the process of looking for one thing, they’d stumbled upon something else – the beam gun.

  Kris had seen the beams focused on a neutron star and used to drive off a fifteen-thousand-ton chip hardly the size of the diamond on the engagement ring Jack kept urging her to let him buy. The tiny chip had smashed ships; Kris had yet to see what happened when the beam was widened and aimed at a structure.

  According to the budget support, that test would be completed in, Kris glanced at her calendar, two weeks. So, the budget grenadiers intended to spend a whole hunk of money on a weapon that hadn’t even been tested yet. Kris shook her head.

  “I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for those results,” Kris told herself. There was no reason why she couldn’t schedule herself to attend the test. She took a deep breath, let it out, and focused on the screen. “Okay, Nelly, enough dodging, what did the budget gods give us this year and how much will it raise my blood pressure.”

  One glance at the Battlecruiser Force line items and Kris’s frown went to a full scowl.

  She had asked for thirty-two of the new battlecruisers: four squadrons of eight ships each. One for Alwa, two for planetary defense and one for long range patrols to spot alien raider incursions before they got too close to human space.

  “We only got twenty-four ships, Kris,” Megan said.

  Kris shook her head as she considered that development, then said, “We’ll have to short someplace or go to six ship squadrons. There are days when I really regretted that I can’t blow something up.”

  Meg gave her boss an encouraging look, and Kris tried to make herself be reasonable.

  “The new 24-inch lasers are big,” her aid pointed out.

  To handle twenty of them properly, the new design came in at 75,000 tons, a fifty percent jump in displacement. To stay inside the 50,000 ton size of the 22-inch ship, she would have had to cut the number of guns from twenty to twelve. A compromise design of 65,000 tons could properly support sixteen. Kris had gone with the bigger ship; she hoped her decision wouldn’t cost more than she was prepared to pay.

  “There’s money in the budget for upgrading twenty-four of the most recently constructed battlecruisers. It will replace the old 22-inch lasers with the new 24-inch ones,” Megan said, doing her best to sound encouraging.

  Kris nodded. Such an upgrade would have been impossible without the Smart MetalTM. With it, the yards could open the ship up like a fileted fish, remover the old lasers, insert the new ones, add in an extra fusion reactor for more power and zip her back up. Of course, you didn’t get a new battlecruiser for this, and you also had to add in another 15,000 tons of Smart MetalTM. Even then, you still could only support sixteen of the new guns. It did, however, give Kris another two dozen ships that could reach out and touch some alien raider at 270,000 klicks.

  Last time Kris had fought the aliens, their newest lasers had just been starting to demonstrate a range of 140,000 klicks. Except for some probing around Alwa, a human outpost all the way on the other side of the galaxy, the aliens that wanted all life in the galaxy dead, except for themselves, had not been heard from in the last five years.

  Kris regularly found herself, late at night, wondering what the monsters, who looked too damn much like us, were up to.

  “Okay, okay,” Kris said, knowing she was wasting time. Her beloved battlecruisers had come up short in the budget battle. How bad was it for the Battle Force and Scout Force?

  Before the battlecruiser, those two had been all of the space-going Navy there was. Battle Force designed, built and developed doctrine for the battleships of the fleet. Scout Force did the same for the cruisers and destroyers who did the scouting and escorting of merchant ships when that became necessary.

  In Kris’s opinion, the battlecruisers with big lasers eliminated the need for battleships and their fast speed drastically reduced the need for a scouting force. Kris had defended the Alwa system with a fleet of battlecruisers and a small number of auxiliaries. She didn’t see a need for expensive battleships or weak cruisers.

  Unfortunately, Kris didn’t get to make the call for the entire fleet.

  Nelly flipped the screen to show the section that covered the Battle Force. Megan’s young eyes spotted what Kris was looking for, flinched and made a grab for the red reader.

  Kris spotted the main line items and let out a definitely unprincess-like series of expletives. She would have hurled the reader at the wall but Megan had her hands on it. For a moment, two Longknifes wrestled for its possession.

  “You promised me I could throw two against the wall,” Kris growled.

  “But we’ve got two whole weeks of working with it, Admiral. If you bust this one, you’ll only have one backup left.

  “But it would feel so good,” Kris grouched.

  The younger Longknife just shook her head. The junior officer had no respect for authority. At least not the authority of her distant cousin, Her Royal Highness Admiral Kris Longknife.

  But then, Kris had come to recognize that she needed someone at her elbow who was loyal and wouldn’t let her walk all over her. Someone beside the budget masters.

  “Okay, Lieutenant, you hold on to the reader and keep it out of harm’s way. Nelly, enlarge that section on battleships. I want to read it from my desk, Kris said. As she paced towards it, she took off her uniform coat, hung it on a coat rack, sat, and put her feet up on her desk.

  “Now, let’s see how bad it is.”

  Kris didn’t have to study the writing on the wall for very long before she was shaking her head. “They did it again. He did it again.”

  “Twelve more battleships,” Megan said.

  “Yes, another twelve dinosaurs. Overweight, oversized targets that cost four times what a battlecruiser does and needs four times the crew to fight it,” Kris bit out.

  Kris’s battlecruisers carried twenty lasers, all firing forward or aft, with fifteen degrees of wiggle room to aim them. These twelve new battleships would carry twenty-four of the new 24-inch lasers mounted three to a turret, four forward, four aft. The turrets allowed the lasers to fire through 150 degrees away from the long axis of the ships: up or down, fore or aft.

  Battleships had been designed that way ever since humans had been building those over armed and armored behemoths for war.

  The problem with this kind of design was the vast amount of open space that it required inside the armored hull of the ship. The long lasers had to swing through a complete circle inside the ship as it trained on a target. The 24-inch lasers were the longest yet. The new battleships were 150,000 tons; half again larger than the monstrous 100,000 ton battleships Kris had fought to save Wardhaven.

  That these battleships took up twice the tonnage of a battlecruiser for only four more big lasers was bad enough. However, all those voids inside the ship for the guns’ movement meant the hulls were huge. All of that oversize hull had to be
covered now with crystal armor.

  Worse, some battleship admiral had got it in his head that if the battlecruisers had crystal ten centimeters thick, the battleships should have twenty centimeters of the stuff!

  Kris had a strong hunch that this was not only a costly requirement, but likely a very bad idea. While the crystal did a great job of absorbing a laser hit, distributing the energy throughout all the crystal cladding and radiating it back out into space, there was still heat involved. Lots of it.

  The Earth battlecruisers that had brought the first crystal out to Alwa had not fared well when they first went into battle. The crystal heated up when hit, that heat was transferred to the hull with what had been serious consequences.

  Alwa Station battlecruisers were quickly clad with crystal, but the Smart MetalTM behind the cladding was honeycombed with voids filled with reaction mass circulating through it, carrying off the heat and keep the hull from melting.

  Kris wanted to test the twenty-centimeter armor in a live fire shoot. She suspected that the middle of the armor would heat up to destructive levels. She had the scientific calculations to back her up.

  Unfortunately, the battleship admirals had their own calculations that said there was no problem. It didn’t come as a surprise to Kris that those calculations were on Nuu Enterprises’ stationary.

  Her Grampa Al was at it again.

  Kris’s Grampa Al ran a significant portion of Wardhaven’s manufacturing economy. Kris was a major shareholding in Nuu Enterprises and had never been able to spend half of her annual dividends. And to spend even that much had taken funding a bank on a distant planet that jump started its entire economy.

  Nuu Enterprises was huge. Last year, Grampa Al’s spaceship building yards had won the contracts for eight of the battleships in the budget. An old crony of his had gotten the other four.

  For the last three years, all the battlecruisers had been built in yards not a part of Nuu Enterprises. Grampa Al was not happy about that. Kris, however, had been untouched by any charges of conflict of interest.

  With a heavy sigh, Kris eyed the battleship construction program. She understood the battleship admirals. They’d spent their entire careers in those huge, unwieldy ships. But they were educatable. At least some of them were. However, with Grampa Al pushing hard for more battleships and spreading the work out to subcontractors all over Wardhaven, it was turning into an impossible job to zero the battleship account and use that money to plus up the battlecruisers.

  For five years, Kris had struggled to persuade Navy, Parliament, and the general public that battlecruisers were the best solution to their defense needs. For five years, the conservative elements in the Navy, Parliament and people had given her some of what she needed while still permitting the other cost centers to grow as the fear of the alien raiders became palpable.

  Of course, Kris had done her best to grow that fear by standing in front of any civic group that would give her a podium to talk from. Her spiel was simple. The aliens were out there and they would sterilize any human planet if they were given the chance. Humanity needed to make sure they didn’t allow them that chance.

  Being a princess helped when you had an agenda to push on people

  Unfortunately, admirals, politicians and men of business had their own agenda and could push back as much, if not more, than a princess. When their careers or jobs were on the line, they could push back very well, thank you.

  Kris glanced through the rest of the battleship building plan. The twenty-four battleships from the last two years’ construction plans, made of Smart MetalTM, would be plused up to 150,000 tons and get the 24-inch lasers. Battleships before then had been made of conventional materials and could not be modified.

  There were strong hints in the budget narrative that the entire battle fleet would need to be replaced, and replaced not according to the established Forty Year Recapitalization Plan but much, much faster

  That wouldn’t bother Kris at all . . . if they just replaced them with cheaper battlecruisers that required far less crew.

  “You done, Admiral?” Megan asked.

  Kris shook her head. She felt very much like she’d been run over by a truck . . . for the fifth time. “Megan, do you see any reason that we can’t just reuse the same rebuttal that we presented last year?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Is the Scout Force just as bad?”

  Nelly flipped to the summery of the cruiser, destroyer and smaller escort section. It left Kris shaking her head more.

  These ships were just too small to stand in any defensive line against half million ton alien warships with hundreds upon hundreds of lasers. True, the alien lasers were short ranged, but if they got within range of you, you died. The lasers on the cruisers had less range than the alien lasers.

  Grand Duchess Vicky Peterwald had warned Kris of the disaster that befell her late, unlamented stepmother’s forces when the destroyers under her command had been ordered to make a classical run in for a missile attack.

  The longer range of the new guns created far too large a killing space for the destroyers to survive long enough to get in missile range. Those destroyers that launched from a safe distance managed to escape. Their missiles, however had been blotted out well before they could do any damage.

  No, the battlecruisers were just as fast and nimble as the cruisers and destroyers, jinking about fast enough to mess with any alien fire control solution and hitting back with battleships size lasers.

  Yes, different classes of ships had served a purpose seventy or seven years ago.

  Now, however, with battlecruisers available, different classes of ships were no longer needed. The battlecruisers could slug it out in a battle line, while speeding around as fast as any destroyer. It was time to change, and the change was cheaper than the old way.

  Why didn’t everyone else see what was so clear to Kris?

  She had drawn up a new manual on battle doctrine that made the optimum use of the battlecruiser’s speed, maneuverability and offensive weapons systems. It was still circulating for comments three years after she finished it. She’d send it out and gotten a ton of comments. She’d responded to some comments with changes to the draft manual. She’d answered others with clear, cogent arguments. That done, she’d sent the revised version out for comments again.

  She’d been through six comments cycles and was no closer to getting her manual finalized.

  Her new doctrine had been tested in fleet exercises . . . by ships not under her command and officers that didn’t appear to have read her manual. What they didn’t botch, the umpires ruled a failure.

  Being a damn Longknife with combat experience did not mean a damn thing where the entrenched bureaucrats were concerned.

  Kris took her feet off her desk and ran a worried hand through her hair. “Meg, throw together a rebuttal to this year’s budget using last year’s argument.”

  “If I can use some of Nelly’s spare capacity, I’ll have it on your desk first thing tomorrow morning, Admiral.”

  “Nelly?” Kris asked.

  “I’d be happy to work with Lieutenant Longknife, Kris.”

  “Good,” Kris said, then reflected a bit and added. “Oh, Megan, how’s the betting pool going about when I’ll call it quits and ask for space duty?”

  “It’s still there, ma’am,” Megan said. She knew what would come next; Kris had done this a couple of times over the last three years.

  “What do you have to pick now? A week? A month?” Kris asked?

  “A month, ma’am.”

  “Buy a ticket for me and one for you.” Nelly popped a calendar up before Kris even asked. This month was half gone. “For next month.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Nelly, order up the car and tell Jack to meet me in the basement.”

  “It isn’t quite five yet, Kris.”

  “Tell Jack I’ve had a lousy day.”

  Only a few seconds later, Nelly reported, “He’ll be there bef
ore you are.”

  Coming Attractions

  In 2016 I amicably ended my twenty-year publishing relationship with Ace, part of Penguin Random House. In 2017, I will begin publishing through my own independent press, KL & MM Books.

  I have high hopes of bringing a lot of fun stories to you in 2017 and then again in 2018 and 2019.

  We have already started the year with Kris Longknife’s Replacement. It was published as an e-book January 5, 2017 at Amazon, (with a bit of a learning experience for me) B&N, D2D, Kobo and the iStore. Audible has this and all the other five books under contract to produce an audio book. The exact date is to be announced. Later in the summer, I hope to produce a trade paperback.

  Kris Longknife’s Replacement tells the story of Grand Admiral Sandy Santiago as she does her best to find out if a mere mortal can fill a Longknife’s shoes. Especially Kris Longknife’s shoes. Sandy has problems galore: birds, cats, vicious alien raiders. Oh, and she’s got Rita Longknife as well!

  February has a novelette for you. Kris Longknife: Among the Kicking Birds was part of KL Unrelenting. However, it went long and these four chapters were cut to one short paragraph. I hope you enjoy the full story.

  Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown is the first book of the long awaited Iteeche War series. It will be out in e-book March 1, 2017 from your favorite source. Audible and trade paperback to follow.

  Rita has had enough of Ray Longknife gallivanting around the universe. No sooner is little Al born, then ships start disappearing. Is it pirates or something more sinister? Rita gets herself command of a heavy cruiser, some nannies and heads out see what there is to see.

  April will have another short offering. Kris Longknife’s Bad Day. You just knew when Kris asked for a desk job that she’d have days like you have at the office. Well, here’s one that will bring you up to date on the technical developments in the Royal US Navy, as well as silly bureaucratic goings on. In the first draft of Emissary, these were the opening chapters, but I found a better opening and this got cut. Enjoy!