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

by Mike Shepherd

  Would the next major cat surprise be one she wanted or had to fight?

  Did she really want that cat admiral learning so much about her command?

  She did like the way the admiral was keeping her mouth shut and her eyes open.

  I wonder what she and Penny are talking about?

  By the end of the day, Mimzy and company had pulled off the miracle they’d promised. The alien cruiser hulk now swung at the opposite end of a tether from the freighter, carefully balanced to give all aboard both vessels something like two thirds of normal gravity. The cruiser was now in a bubble of Smart MetalTM and an elevator connected it with the freighter. The freighter had been fitted out as a hotel for inquisitive boffins who could commute between a decent meal and their work site.

  Around the cruiser, squared off work areas were starting to sprout from the bubble.

  “What are those?” Sandy asked her computer to ask Mimzy.

  “Mortuaries,” the other computer answered quickly. “Although the alien cruiser was likely two thirds the size of one of our battlecruisers, it appeared to have a much larger crew. We’ve found eight hundred bodies and that does not include the engineering watch.”

  “That many bodies? Have we found out anything else?”

  “Admiral, but I don’t think I should be making direct reports to you. Jacques is now aboard the cruiser, examining the bodies. I would suggest that you talk with him.”

  Since Mimzy, no doubt, knew everything that Jacques’ computer knew, Sandy felt a cold wind blow over her grave.

  “Put me through to Jacques.”

  “Hi, Admiral,” Jacques said cheerfully. His camera showed a mass of bodies on the deck in front of him.

  “I was talking to Mimzy about the mortuaries spreading out off the cruisers. She suggested I talk to you if I wanted a briefing. She seems to think briefing admirals is above her pay grade.”

  “Not that, so much as she and her sibs have learned to let humans brief humans because some topics get at our gut and we need to hear them from another human with a gut,” Jacques answered.

  “And?”

  “As you can see, I’ve got a lot of dead bodies around me.”

  “Want to tell me about them?” Sandy said, hating the need to use a crowbar to get answers to her questions from the people around her.

  “Not really, ma’am. We’re in the early stages of our analysis and while I have some data, I don’t really want to go public with it yet.”

  “What do you say you consider me your boss and not your public,” Sandy said dryly.

  “Always, ma’am.” He paused for a moment, then went on. “We have a lot of bodies.”

  Sandy cut in. “Mimzy told me it was close to eight hundred. Likely a thousand with the missing engineering spaces.”

  “Yes. The aliens seem to go in for a whole lot of people. I think it’s part of their ideology. Part of their plan to take over the universe. Have a lot of kids,” Jacques said, then seemed to organize his thoughts and began a formal presentation.

  “We have had three chances to evaluate the alien population before this one. Each of the ships was used differently and each crew was different. The first crew was a family mining operation. There were a whole lot of people ranging from new born to old age. Lots of them. They were sleeping people in the passageways.” Jacques shook his head and the video from him waved from side to side.

  “We didn’t get to take a census on the first base ship we blew away. It looked like someone had removed the bodies and then our study was cut short when some alien warships wandered by to do more salvage work.

  “Don’t you hate it when that happens,” Sandy said dryly.

  “Our next data set was the battleship Kris brought back. It had something like ten million aliens on board. Most of them were young. The sex distribution was weighted sixty percent male, forty percent females. Many of the females were pregnant. There was one child for every twenty adults, but the pregnancies we identified would double that soon. The oldest child was just starting to toddle. Most were babes in cribs,” Jacques said.

  “Does that tell you the women that had children likely were swapped out regularly to the mother ship?” Sandy asked.

  “Again, it’s a suspicion. What we didn’t realize then, but seems important now was that the warship, battleship if you will, had a fairly normal age distribution among the men. They ranged from teenagers to men in their sixties. Women were either young, now pregnant or having delivered one child, or past the age of child bearing.”

  “Next we got to study that new base ship the aliens were trying to build in the cat’s system. Kris blew away their battleship, but we did get to count a whole lot of dead bodies floating in the vacuum they opened the budding mother ship up to when they saw we might capture them. The population census showed the base ship had something like sixty percent females and only forty percent males. For every ten adults, there were three children, ranging from infant to nearly grown. That’s a lot of youth not contributing to the economy.”

  “It does sounds mighty high,” Sandy agreed.

  “The older population was there, but it was a lot smaller than we humans would expect. And none of the older bodies showed any serious infirmities. You may remember the old woman we captured was quite vigorous in her threats to wipe us out.”

  “You think they may cull their own elderly if they can’t work?”

  “I don’t know. Not enough data to answer that, but it’s a suspicion. A suspicion that won’t get answered from this bunch.”

  “Because?” Sandy left hanging.

  “The crew of this ship is young. It appears almost all the men are in their twenties, and younger twenties at that. Even the men on what we think was the command deck weren’t much past their early thirties. The women, almost all of them are late teens or early twenties. None of them that we have checked had delivered a child and all are two to three months pregnant.”

  “What!” Sandy exclaimed.

  “Oh, and the crew sex ratio is way different something like seventy-five percent male, twenty-five percent female.”

  “What was this, a frat house?” Sandy asked.

  “More like it than you realize. Our cruisers caught them totally unaware. Some of the berthing rooms. They’re small. Say twelve people crammed into a space we might give one person. What we found were nine naked men and three naked women. All showed evidence of recent sexual activity. We’ve sent the DNA recovered from the female vaginas and their fetuses off with swabs from the males. I’m waiting for the results of the tests. About a quarter of the crew were recovered from berthing spaces. We will have a significant number of data points when we get all of them back.”

  Sandy eyed the screen. It showed what was in front of Jacques. “A lot of young men. Enough young woman to pass around for sex toys. But you say this is totally different from anything you’ve seen before?”

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “Question, where do you find the women that were awake. Standing watch?”

  “While there is a higher percent of them in the messing facilities, we still find women standing watches beside the lasers and around the ship. It’s a rough guess, but say twenty percent. We’ll know more when some of the tests start coming back.”

  “Keep me informed. You say this is very different from the other alien crews.”

  “Three different samples and nothing like this one. Yes, ma’am. Oh, there is one thing that you as a ship driver might find interesting about the layout of the ship. There are no high gee acceleration couches. The average station chair allows the occupant to lay back and get his feet up a bit, but there’s not a lot of foam. Doing three gees would be a bitch. Doing jinking at three gees would toss the crew all over the place.”

  “And they sent a ship full of young guys with enough women for comfort out to twist our nose,” Sandy muttered softly.

  “Something like that, ma’am. I’ve got more questions now than I have answers. Maybe in a few days I�
�ll know something. By the way, Admiral, are we heading out for the alien home world real soon?”

  “You asking to stay behind and study this ship?”

  “No ma’am, but I think a week, more likely two, would be well spent before we do take off for that puzzle box.”

  “I’ll consider your input, Jacques. Go find me more answers. I’ve relearned my lesson on keeping my nose out of boffins’ business.”

  “Sometimes I wish I could keep my nose out of stuff like this,” Jacques said, his camera slowly panning over a huge space with bodies littering the floor.

  12

  Sandy sat in the wardroom, mulling her final cup of coffee, letting her breakfast settle while she thought. Beside her, Penny seemed to be doing the same thing. Beside her, her cat admiral was just as quiet, if more alert to her surroundings. All were enjoying the other’s quiet company while waiting for answers.

  Faced with the horrors of that hulk swinging around aft of the station, Sandy’s mind tended to spin from one thought to another, only touching down once in a while on what seemed so unthinkable.

  She found herself enjoying the human comfort of the officers eating breakfast and talking softly around her. Battleships gave their admirals their own wardroom, for them and their staff. Battlecruisers still showed much of the influence of having been frigates until recently.

  That and Admiral Kris Longknife.

  Sandy had been offered a chance to enlarge the Victory to provide for admiral’s country. She’d thought about how much Kris liked to jink her ships around in battle and had settled on adding only the minimum space.

  At a moment like this, with so much death on her mind, it was good to feel the presence of living, breathing humanity around her.

  The aliens died right where they stood, or slept. Our 22-inch lasers sliced off the engineering space quick and clean as a whistle. There was no time to order the reactors’ containment fields to be dropped and let the plasma eat the ship. Helpless in space, the skipper had ordered all hatches opened to cold, hard vacuum.

  That’s a strange order, Sandy thought. If I ordered it, how would that drill be carried out? It would have to be done manually.

  Did the alien ships have a button the skipper could slam down and open his ship to vacuum? Could he give the order and those closest to the hatches would execute it, slapping open each and every hatch.

  “Computer, make a note to ask Jacques if all the hatches were open or were some missed. If all were opened, was there an automatic activator?”

  “Yes, Admiral. Jacques is aboard the Victory and should be in the wardroom soon.”

  As if to herald the man’s arrival, Amanda appeared and went down the steam tables, asking for and getting a double load of chow. A word to an ensign, and the young woman put her tray aside and loaded two large mugs with steaming coffee. The civilian and young officer made their way towards Sandy.

  The grand admiral had been enjoying her quiet time to think. She squelched any anger at the interruption. After all, she’d stayed here for human companionship. She shouldn’t complain about getting some.

  Amanda put her tray down, thanked the ensign profusely, and seated herself. She eyed the door behind Sandy. Suddenly, the most beautiful smile lit up her face.

  A moment later, Jacques took her in his arms. He smelled of preservative, death and corruption, but Amanda didn’t flinch away. The two of them exchanged a kiss that likely went a bit beyond the acceptable level for a public display of affection, even for civilians, then the man broke from the kiss and grabbed for the coffee.

  Jacques sat, breathed in the steaming brew, then took an exploratory sip. “Hot,” he said.

  He glanced around and spotted the ice left in the bottom of Sandy’s orange juice glass.

  “May I,” he said.

  “Please do,” Sandy answered, and he dumped the glass, ice and tiny bit of juice in his coffee mug.

  Another sip was followed by a long pull on the mug. “Still a bit hot, but I need something to keep me awake.”

  “All nighter, Dear?” Amanda asked.

  “Not even a short nap. It never quit. Someone was always discovering something or some report was just back that raised more questions than the last one.”

  Sandy waited patiently.

  “You ever wonder how they open those ships to space?” Jacques asked.

  “It has crossed my mind,” Sandy admitted.

  “The ship had no internal airtight bulkheads,” Jacques said. “You cut a hole anyplace and the entire ship is in trouble. You open a single hatch and the ship’s going airless. Five hatches were opened on that cruiser. Five people, all, no doubt voided to space, so we don’t know who, slapped the emergency actuator on five doors. We found several people, six guys, two gals, in the suiting up space beside the doors. We can’t tell if they were there to pop the hatch or just got caught there, but all it took was the boss guy issuing an order and people hopped to obey.”

  “They’re crazy,” Amanda said.

  “They don’t want to be captured alive,” Sandy muttered.

  “You got that right, Admiral. Oh, before you head for that puzzle planet, you ought to have Cara take you down to visit the alien children we’re raising.”

  “Why?”

  The two scientists exchanged glances. “You need to see them,” Amanda said. “You need to see them with a human child. How they relate. How they play together. Don’t wear your uniform. Just go as a friend of Cara’s, okay?”

  “We seem to need time to complete our study of this cruiser. I imagine I’ll have time. You don’t think Abby will refuse me access to Cara, do you?”

  “Abby doesn’t hold grudges. Well, not short of you trying to kill her. She may drop down with you and Cara. She likes those alien kids. I think she’s kind of adopted them. God help anyone that treats them wrong.”

  “That’s nice to know. Now, Jacques, you have to know more this morning than you knew when last we talked.”

  The man had been stuffing his mouth with pancakes, dripping with syrup. He chewed, swallowed, then took another swig of coffee and handed his empty mug to his wife.

  Sandy intercepted the coffee cup, flagged down the nearest officer. A lieutenant was the closest as he carried his tray loaded with dirty dishes. He caught the mug, finished bussing his tray, then filled it. When he returned it, Jacques did not pause in his briefing, but Amanda gave the fellow a lovely smile, likely a better pay off than either of the other two could have offered. The guy went on his way with a contented grin.

  “We finished the inventory of the bodies and ended up just eight shy of having exactly seventy-five men for every twenty-five women. I would guess the engineering watch was a bit heavier with men.”

  “And age?”

  “We’re dealing with aliens, ma’am, but we still think almost all of the men are in their twenties, say an average of twenty-four. The women are young, say an average of twenty-one. We still think three of the males on the bridge may have been in their thirties.”

  “The pregnancies?”

  “We set up several sonogram machines and ran all the female bodies through them. By midnight we knew ninety-five percent of them were pregnant. We identified reasons why the remaining twenty were barren. It said something about their medical technology. Most of them could have been corrected easily by our OB/GYN docs.”

  “Low level of medical science,” Sandy muttered.

  “At least where women and reproduction is concerned.”

  “That’s strange,” Amanda said around a bit of sausage. “Procreation seems to be a big thing with them, but they don’t focus much on increasing the fertility of barren women. Does that sound strange to anyone else but me?”

  “I’m starting to think that these Enlightened Ones,” Penny said, then added quickly by way of explanation if Sandy or Admiral Perswah didn’t remember who she was talking about, “the guys that call the shots for the aliens, consider women only good for their wombs. For making babies.”


  “The guys on that ship definitely had another use for their women,” Jacques said. “We’ve been running DNA on samples taken from every woman’s vulva through our DNA sequencing machines just as fast as we can. There was a lot of different DNA samples in each woman. The freshest sperm and the residue from old sperm often did not match. I’d say those gals were being passed around a lot.”

  “Frat house, again,” Sandy said.

  “The DNA of the fetus rarely had anything to do with the latest sperm donors,” Jacques added. “We are finding that while most of the pregnancies seem random, thirty-four of them were all impregnated by three men.”

  “You said there were three older men on the command deck,” Sandy said, scowling.

  “Yep.”

  “Rank hath it’s privileges,” Penny drawled bitterly.

  “If I may but in,” the computer at Jacques’s neck said, and Sandy had to remind herself that Jacques’s computer was one of Nelly’s kids, “we have another report just in. Among the barren women, we have identified only one or two examples of DNA in each of them, both among the new and old sperm samples. It appears that once they were identified as barren, interest in them waned.”

  “Walking wombs,” Penny spat as if the words were bit from an apple with a worm in it.

  “We really don’t like these people much, do we?” Amanda said, summing things up.

  “We haven’t found a lot to love,” Penny pointed out.

  “And I have orders to attempt to negotiate a peace treaty with them if I can,” Sandy said, shaking her head at the thought.

  All three of the old Alwa hands around her shook their heads.

  Admiral Perswah’s eyebrows shot up, but only for a second. Had Sandy managed to shock the cat?

  “I agree you have to try,” Penny said, “but you have to be really careful. You did read Kris’s report from the last battle. They seemed to be offering to surrender, but they kept right on course to attack Alwa. Kris finally had to order Admiral Benson’s fleet to take them under fire and destroy them. An enemy who will fain surrender while setting a trap is one hard bitch to approach.”