Kris Longknife's Relief: Grand Admiral Santiago on Alwa Station

by Mike Shepherd

  “My comm tech is making that call as I make this one.”

  “Santiago out,” she said, and pulled on a fresh ship suit. A quick splash of water on her face, some teeth brushed, and she headed next door.

  The smell of fresh coffee met her.

  “I took the liberty of ordering up coffee and mid rats,” came in Mimzy’s voice.

  “Are you monitoring my sleep patterns now?” Sandy tried not to sound too grumpy.

  “When you get a call at this ungodly hour, yes, ma’am, I order coffee. I’ve also alerted Penny. She should be here about the same time as the Comm Duty Officer.

  Sandy answered a knock at her door with “Enter,” and a cute young lieutenant with a big sidearm on her hip led a commander into the admiral’s day quarters.

  “Message traffic from the pickets,” the lieutenant said. She thumbed her folder and produced a flimsy. Sandy snatched it from her hand, then frowned at the contents.

  “Another three reactor incursion, but where?”

  “H-54,” the commander said, and a star map popped into existence above the conference table. One star, about a third of the way to the middle, flashed red.

  “How’d they get that deep?” Sandy demanded.

  Penny entered at the gallop. She glanced at the star chart, then headed for the coffee.

  “They know how to make long jumps,” the intel chief said as she poured two cups of coffee. “They don’t know how to do the really long jumps that we use when we put spin on the hull as you go through the jump, but they have some idea of how far and where you can get with speed.”

  Penny joined Sandy, handed her a cup of black coffee, then eyed the map.

  “They have, no doubt, made sour jumps, but they don’t seem to know how to control where they go any more than we did until Ray Longknife found that star map on Santa Maria. Most of them don’t even use the high-speed jumps. It must be a bitch to get a base ship up to several hundred thousand kilometers per hour. Anyway, only a few wolf packs seem to even know about the long jumps.”

  “And you know this how?” Sandy asked.

  “Back when we had suicide skiffs doing their best to hit Alwa and kill a couple of million people, these unarmed one-reactor craft would show up at one of our picketed systems going hell for leather. They’d take the next jump. Sometimes they’d jump into a system just short of us. Other times they’d go way past us. Then there would be the occasional one that hit our system going balls to the wall and we’d only have a couple of seconds to shoot them down.”

  Sandy shrugged. “So with them, it was all guess work. Imagine getting in a suicide boat, jacking up your speed and not knowing if you’d hit your target or just accelerate yourself to nowhere.”

  Penny shook her head. “What must it have been like to watch your air running out knowing you’d missed your target and could do nothing but die?”

  “What do the aliens do in cases like that?” Sandy asked.

  “We’ve seen them pop open the hatch and breathe space. These guys can be quite despondent in failure.”

  It was Sandy’s turn to shake her head. Then she began to think about this situation out loud. “So, we have a cruiser that made a high-speed jump. Did it jump in from outside our picket line, or is this the bastard that we last saw at O-24?”

  “It is likely the one from O-24,” Mimzy put in from Penny’s neck. “I calculated the jump was possible if it took that jump point at better than 400,000 kilometers per second.

  “Aren’t the reactors the same?” Sandy asked.

  “I can’t tell,” Mimzy admitted. “The sensors on our pickets are low tech. We don’t want to give too much away if the aliens capture one. The report we get back from them on the reactors do not give us enough information to identify the same reactor at low power and when stressed to high energy yield.”

  “Penny,” Sandy snapped. “When we have some time, talk to me about redesigning the pickets. I’m starting to think we need better sensors on the ones out there.”

  “We already studied that option. It also involves using fuel to switch the buoys back and forth. That expends fuel in a hurry. We would have to massively increase the burden of buoy maintenance.”

  “We’ll talk later. Admiral Kitano, are you watching this?”

  “Yes, Admiral,” came from the main screen which had been silently showing a woman in a blue shipsuit that showed four stars. She really needed to run a brush through her hair.

  No doubt I do too.

  “You mentioned you have ships on five minute alert.”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “I want them away from the pier in five minutes. We’ll brief them on their way to the jump.”

  Amber snapped a few words into her commlink. Somewhere, a midnight watch was going from dull to exciting.

  “Mimzy, I need to know where that son of a bitch can go next.”

  “Depending on whether the raider intruder slows down or accelerates, I estimate it could jump to six different systems.”

  “Mimzy, start plotting us six courses that will get our battlecruisers there before that SOB gets there.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  “Amber, I want a total of twelve ships out hunting that bastard. How do I get four more?”

  “The next ready force is on an eight hour alert. However, I suspect if we tell them that only the first four away from the pier get an alien hunting license that some skippers will move a lot faster.”

  “Make it so,” Sandy ordered. “Penny, could you get me some more of that fresh bread and butter? I could use some mid rats tonight. Scrambling three divisions of battlecruisers is hungry work.”

  Penny ordered up the midnight rations while Sandy eyed the star map. Without being asked, Mimzy had lit up six more star systems. Three were close in to the skunked system. Three more were way to hell and gone. Two of those were not even within the picket sphere around Alwa. The third was too damn close to where Sandy stood.

  “Do you think we need two more ships?” Penny said as she brought Sandy a plate with fresh bread and butter that wafted scent of heaven own air.

  “Why?” Sandy asked as she buttered a thick slice of the bread that was the reward for only those up at this outrageous hour.

  “What if that turkey slows down and is loitering around in that system while we go chasing all over the place where it ain’t?”

  “Nasty little buggar, you think?”

  “Let’s just say that this nasty little buggar is not acting like our average nasty little buggar,” Sandy’s expert on the aliens said.

  “I’ve expanded the alert to four more ships,” Amber said, without being told.

  Sandy nodded. “Wouldn’t hurt to have four ships in the middle of this hunt for the damn needle.”

  “May I point out,” Mimzy put in very politely, “that there can be no coordination once these ships leave our system. They will be out of communication with us and each other.”

  “Thank you Mimzy,” Sandy said. “I didn’t need this reminder, but I might need your next one. Feel free to speak up.”

  “Thank you, Admiral.”

  A polite computer that thought ahead. I could get used to that.

  Mimzy identified several fast jumps that would require long tours of the local space, but get ships to the systems faster than the short ones. The first six ships were tasked with the three possible long jumps. They’d need more time. The last two of the Alert Five would head for H-54.

  The second wave of battlecruisers would be assigned to the three jumps that involved the hostile cruiser slowing down and taking one of the three jumps out of that system at a more sedate speed. The human ships would still be going house afire fast, but they’d get there well before the alien left.

  Sandy studied the star map, polled her advisors for any suggestions, then listened as the Alert Five were briefed as they detached from the station. They would hit Jump Point Beta at 300,000 kilometers per hour, but different spins for each of the four sect
ions. They’d all follow different courses to their intended destinations and wait a week to see what turned up before coming back.

  Starting at thirty minutes after the alert and going for the next forty-five minutes, eight more ships backed out of their berth and decelerated toward Alwa. Once they were on the other side, they too began to accelerate, intent on hitting Beta Jump at 250,000 kph.

  Already wide awake and not likely to get any more sleep tonight if she tried, Sandy asked Penny to settle down on the couch. “Now, what’s the problem with upgrading our buoys?”

  “If we use high tech in them, we need to have them blow up before they can be captured,” Sandy said. She’d ordered up another half loaf of fresh bread and offered to split it with Sandy. For the moment, the admiral declined.

  “Right now, we don’t shuffle the buoys between one system and the other unless we have a message to pass along or a sighting to report. The consensus was that if we had high quality data on the incoming hostile, we’d want to shift the observer with the back up and send several reports in. All that shuffling around requires more fuel, both for the system under threat, and all the systems that have to pass along four, five, maybe six messages before the aliens popped the sentinel in the raided system. To get a really good signature on our skunk, we’d need more computing power, higher quality sensors, bigger antennas, and bigger fuel tanks to move the bigger picket through the jump more often. You either make it huge, or you refuel it on a regular schedule a lot more often than the ones we have now.”

  “Is that the only down side?” Sandy asked.

  “You have to remember that before your fleet came out, we were strapped for resources. Now that we have more ships, I agree we should revisit this issue again.”

  “Good. Put together a study group to look at both the upgraded picket and the policy for their use. Do we need to send data back every two, three days? Could the data be collected and sent in a larger packet, cutting down on shuffling buoys between systems? Look at everything.”

  “When do you want this?”

  “It would be nice if I got it before we left for our sightseeing junket to the alien home world.”

  Sandy ran a worried, and likely tired hand, through her hair. “That’s not much time.”

  “You may have more time than we thought. I’m not leaving until I see how this turns out.”

  “Then I’ll call up the people I used last time. Could I ask your Chief of Staff to give me some names from your fleet?”

  “Please do. The same people looking at the same problem risks getting the same answer. I’m not sure my newbies to Alwa Station will dazzle your old hands, but they might stumble on something. Or into something.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  Penny dismissed herself, taking the cooling half loaf of bread that she hadn’t gotten to touch during their talk.

  Sandy turned around to eye the star map. She’d just dispatched sixteen ships with five or six thousand souls on board. Her orders would scatter them across hundreds of light years of space.

  For a moment, Sandy had considered including the Victory in the alert force. But only for a moment.

  There was no need for an admiral to command these ships. She’d scattered them, for the most part, in pairs. The two skippers would match their promotion dates and one of the commanders would become the section lead. That young man or woman would direct the two ships in their search. The final result would be only one of these sections making contact and engaging the alien.

  That assumed that Penny’s supercomputer properly calculated the options facing the alien cruiser.

  All of which begged the question.

  What are you up to?

  Why are you doing this?

  What will you do next?

  You are aliens, Sandy thought, rubbing her tired eyes. What is driving you to do this?

  Maybe the ships she’d dispatched in such haste would answer some of her questions, but Sandy had to admit she doubted that. The aliens were alien. They did what they did for alien reasons.

  And even Kris Longknife had never managed to get more than an insane old woman to talk.

  10

  Sandy went about her duty, overseeing training, assuring logistics, handling the administrative details that rose to her level.

  On the planet below, she stayed in contact with Ada as she worked a new warrant through the Colonial senate that would merge both previous warrants into a single one more in keeping with the one King Raymond had given Sandy to start with. The Colonials seemed to understand the error of the last pair of warrants. Still, getting anything through any legislative body seemed to require the suffering of the damned.

  On the moon, she reviewed production reports that Pipra always had Abby bring by at least once a week. Each week, Abby reported on the last week’s production runs and gave a forecast for the next week’s work. Each week, Abby started with a review of the forecast before walking Sandy through what goals they’d hit and why they had missed or exceeded the plan.

  Sandy got the feeling that Pipra and Abby were working hard. Hard not only at producing what was wanted, but at assuring Sandy that they had everything under control.

  Admittedly, the admiral began to trust these two civilians a bit more than she did most people not in uniform. Still, she knew that she held them on probation as much as they viewed her the same way.

  Professor Labao and his scientists continued to come up with plans they revised, finalized, then reworked again. It seemed like every one of them wanted half the resources of the expedition. Sandy let Professor Labao handle all these tempests in teacups. When the time came to actually make things happen, Sandy was prepared to cut through these self-imposed Gordian Knots with a laser.

  Sandy did wonder where the division of battlecruisers were that she’d dispatched to catville to pick up Jacques and maybe Amanda. It was a week past its fastest turnaround time, but Sandy refused to worry.

  She was proven correct when the four battlecruisers finally returned a week later. Amanda dispatched an apology immediately to Sandy.

  I WASN’T ABOUT TO LET JACQUES HEAD OFF WITHOUT ME, BUT I ALSO COULDN’T JUST DROP EVERYTHING AND RUN. WE BOTH TIED UP THE LOOSE ENDS AND NOW WE’RE YOURS.

  Sandy called them in as soon as the Implacable docked.

  “How are our feline friends?” she asked.

  “The same as when you left them,” Jacques answered for both. “Governments form and fall with amazing briskness. I expected that to be a problem, however, in most cases the new government doesn’t change the policy towards us star folks. There seems to be a fairly strong agreement that we’re good and they want what we have.”

  “You don’t think there is any chance of them causing us trouble?”

  Both Jacques and Amanda shook their head. “Actually, there is less saber rattling among the cats than anyone says they can remember,” Jacques said. “We may be forcing them into cooperation, but they seem to be finding it worthwhile none-the-less. We also brought back some thousand cats to work here, as well as a cat admiral who would like to serve as an envoy to you. We need to introduce her as soon as we can.”

  Amber nodded, not excited by the prospect of more petting in her future.

  “Are you having any problems with the cats that came back with you?” Amanda asked.

  “Actually, no problems at all. Admiral Benson and Pipra report the ones we have have taken right to work in the fabs and yards. Everything is totally different from anything they’ve ever seen, but they catch on quick. I think they sent us some of their brightest.”

  “Yeah. How have the birds taken to them?”

  “I’ve got a report here somewhere,” Sandy said, waving at her desk covered with readers. “Somewhere on the station is a Fight Club. Cats and Ostriches seem to like taking each other on.”

  “Any casualties?” Amanda asked.

  “Nothing but a few broken bones.”

  “Who’s winning?” Jacques asked.

 
; “Strangely enough, the Ostriches,” Sandy told them. “Apparently, the cats were used to using stealth to sneak up on their prey. In a fight ring, that’s not an option. If the bird can catch them on the pounce, the cat’s usually thrown all the way out of the ring. If the cat gets past the bird’s first kick, things usually go the cat’s way, even if we do make them wear mouth guard to protect their teeth . . . and keep them from biting.”

  “We have got to see that before we leave,” Jacques told Amanda.

  The look on his wife’s face showed strong suspicion that this would not be one of their best nights out.

  Sandy gave them copies of everything she had from Professor Labao, including the various iterations of the plan. The two social scientists thumbed through the stacks. Jacques had one of Nelly’s kids. He’d named her Marie Curie and called her Marie most often than not. She quickly absorbed the mass of data and helped them spot some of the more egregious abuses in scheduling resources.

  “We’ll check in with the professor and then get back to you,” Amanda said. “Kris kept us on her staff both to do what we did best and to kind of buffer her from the worst of the boffins. I suspect you’re asking us to do the same.”

  “Yes,” Sandy said, and sent them on their way. Over the next couple of days, they began to both bring order within the scientific team that would go with Sandy to the alien planet and explain what was going on to her in words a non-boffin could understand.

  Somewhere in there, Penny brought Admiral Perswah around to meet her. She was alert, quiet and reserved, about what Sandy would have expected from a alien tossed in the midst of a strange and active command. They shook paws and Sandy promised that the cat could shadow Penny through her day.

  Sandy had scheduled a delay in her departure not only to allow Amanda and Jacques to get back but to sweat out the return of her scattered battlecruiser. The wait for the two scientists was well worth it. The delay for her warships stretched on.

  Still, she refused to fear for them. As it turned out, she was correct.

  11