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

by Mike Shepherd

  She let her mind spin through the recent action, but did her best not to latch on to any specific point. She wanted to hear what her team had taken away from this battle before she shared much of her own conclusions.

  One by one, her Chief of Staff, Chief of Ops, flag skipper and Chief of Intel wandered in, latched onto some coffee and a sandwich and settled down at the conference table to munch their food. Admiral Purswah drew a sandwich and opened it up to eye the meatloaf. She nibbled at one end, then wolfed it down and the meat from a second sandwich before joining them at the conference table.

  About the time they finished their sandwiches and drew a second cup of coffee, Sandy was ready to start.

  She leaned forward and said, “If I had any doubt after my first fight with those BEM’s, after that trap they tried to spring on me or after taking a gander at what’s under that pyramid, after this I know. Those bastards scare me.”

  That got a general consensus that the aliens were indeed scary bastards.

  “What else do I need to take away from this battle?” she asked.

  For a long moment, her team exchanged glances, then the Chief of Staff said, “Our enemy is very stupid.”

  When Sandy began to shoot a response right back at him, he held up a hand in defense. “Yes, I know, underestimating an enemy is the beginning of making stupid mistakes yourself. However, let me point out that this alien attack consisted of a charge with all forces available through an unreconnoitered choke point. They committed themselves to one roll of the dice with no feedback loop that would allow them to check out their assumptions and revise their battle plan. And, as we all know, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

  The Chief of Staff shook his head. “They gave themselves no out. They were stupid.”

  “Pardon me, Captain,” Penny said, “but may I offer a different reflection on your point?”

  “Of course,” Van said, not at all defensive.

  “Let me propose that they were not so much stupid, though they are in many ways, as much as they were overconfident. They had their new toy. They were sure those door knockers could smash through a jump, close fast with us and get their jaws in our necks. Based on the defense we’d mounted at every other jump, this looked like a brilliant battle plan.”

  “Their Enlightened One just assumed we would not have a better defense,” Mondi observed.

  “Yes, Captain,” Penny said to the Chief of Ops. “Whoever drew up their operations plan chose to assume that there was no way we could have improved our ability to defend a jump point in the time that had passed since they last tried to breach a defended jump. One thing we have noticed is that the aliens do not appear to have gone up against serious opposition in, well, the last one hundred thousand years. They do seem to have gotten sloppy.”

  Penny paused to let her listeners taste what she had served up. “They also appear to have gotten set in their ways. All the alien wolf packs we’ve run into had the same kind of ships. A huge base ship and half million ton monster warships with lots and lots of lasers that had enough range to slag a planet from orbit. In the time since they first encountered us, they’ve done three things.” Penny raised a finger. “One, come up with the cruiser design. Two,” another finger came up, “develop longer ranging lasers, though not as fast as we’ve gone from 18-incher to 22-incher.”

  “With 24-inch behemoths waiting in the wings,” Sandy put in.

  “Yes, Admiral,” Penny said, then raised a third finger. “And now we see these door knockers. While they’ve been struggling to get that bit of new tech, we’ve commissioned the first Smart Metal frigate and grown the class into battlecruisers. We’ve also developed the hell burner neutron warhead and the beam ship. We’ve also borrowed tech from allied species. The Iteeche gave us their energy tech in exchange for our Smart Metal tech, and the cats have shared with us their thermonuclear warheads which have, in just a matter of months, saved our bacon twice.”

  “Thank you for your praise,” Admiral Purswah said through a toothy smile.

  “You’re very welcome,” Sandy said, showing just as much tooth.

  “The aliens are playing catch up,” the Chief of Staff said, slowly, “but they are running after a freight liner that has been accelerating for quite some time and they’re just beginning now to try catching up.”

  “Yes,” Penny said.

  “And we have other allied aliens that we’re not only not trying to wipe out, but are protecting,” Sandy said, “and they are helping us!”

  The cat watched the discussion with alert eyes.

  “That’s what it looks like to me,” Penny said. “That is not to say these bastards are not very, very dangerous. There are a hell of a lot of them. If they get serious about a massive construction program, they might drown us in a pit of their own dead. That’s the second point. They are irrationally and totally committed to destroying any life, certainly any intelligent life in this universe. They really want us dead, and, as we just saw, they don’t quit.”

  Penny paused while quite a few heads shook slowly at the thought of an enemy who would not talk, would not surrender and would not stop doing their utmost to kill you.

  “Every time we’ve tried to talk to them, they do their best to kill us. The thing that gives me nightmares at night isn’t that the aliens may kill us or that we’ve killed a whole lot of aliens. My nightmare is what will we become if we have to mobilize our people for total war against these bug-eyed monsters and slaughter every one of them.”

  Penny paused to shake her head. “What will we become if we have to massacre each and every one of their trillions of men, women and children.”

  Those Sandy had invited to this critique found themselves at a loss for words. They could only shake their heads.

  “Mondi, put together a plan to adjust our forces back to one task force at each jump and one in orbit around that planet. I want to know everything there is to know about that place. I want to know what makes these bastards tick.”

  “I can have it for you in ten minutes, Admiral.”

  “Pardon me, Admiral,” her Chief of Staff said. “Are you not going to consider a pursuit?”

  “A pursuit of what? Mimzy, do you think we missed any of them?” Sandy asked.

  “No. Admiral. The door knockers and battleships charged the jump at a most reckless half second interval. I kept the atomic gifts from the cats burning anything that came through that jump for about sixty-six seconds. That would cover all twenty-four door knockers and one hundred twenty of the battleships. The last warhead may have burned a few thin-skinned cruisers before I stopped bombing the jump and let the cruisers charge through to their demise. Assuming that one continued coming through every half second while the jump was obscured, and the number that we shot down, I can account for all ninety of the cruisers we identified. No, Admiral. There are no survivors to pursue.”

  “I considered that very likely,” Van said. “However, there is likely a mother ship that is missing most of her battleships. Let’s say they held back sixty to ninety battlewagons. Maybe a few cruisers. Shouldn’t we send out some scouts and see what there is to see?”

  Mimzy put up the star chart again. The yellow line that had gone from the fifth layer of pickets to the third layer to finally the center of the chart now projected out to a third system.

  “There are four jumps in that system, the one they used and six possible ones for their entrance, depending on their speed. Those jumps lead to systems that have twenty-one jumps out of them, again, depending on their speed. I am sorry, Captain, but we would have to use nearly half of our battlecruisers even if we risked sending only one each into that last batch of systems, and then there would be more beyond that. I am sorry, sir, but space is vast and the aliens can hide quite well among the stars. Don’t you think it is enough that the mother ship of this wolf pack will get no word back from its strike force?”

  “The ones that tried to ambush me before got no report back,” Sandy poin
ted out. “Now this strike force just vanished as well. They are bound to get frustrated sooner or later.”

  “Frustrated, maybe,” Penny said. “Quit? Not a chance.”

  “You’ve made that point perfectly clear, Penny. Now, people, I believe our course of action has been ordered. Mondi, hop to it.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.

  26

  The return of Task Force 3, 2nd Fleet to orbit around the planet of interest was greeted with much celebration. Sandy, and any officer not on duty, was invited to a victory celebration aboard the boffin’s senior transport which had been rechristened the Galileo. The dinner was delicious. The scientists were most friendly, and the officers couldn’t buy a drink if they tried. Indeed, a Navy types glass wasn’t even allowed to get half empty.

  Sandy spotted the problem in that largess quickly and limited herself to a sip and kept them few and far between. Others weren’t so cautious and ended up sleeping it off under many a table.

  Of course, many of the Navy officers were joined by their boffin hosts as well.

  Sandy found herself enjoying the conversation of the evening. On the voyage from the jump to the planet, she’d absorbed quite a few reports on what had been going on dirtside while she’d been saving their bacon upside.

  The dig at the city that seemed to have been lazed most recently had turned up evidence of a town and technology equal to Earth in the middle ages. They had the steel plow; several had been found almost rusted away. They had the water wheel; diggers were sure they had found evidence of a mill’s grinding wheel. It had been shattered, but they’d been able to put most of it back together despite the weathering.

  What technology might have been turned to glass in the central target area would never be known.

  The examination of the alien trophy room had the evolutionary biologists giddy with excitement. Every one of the 413 specimens showed a completely different evolutionary tree. Many had DNA similar to our own and the alien raiders as well as the Iteeche and cats. Other planets had developed something completely different that met the same purpose. There seemed to be three similar systems and one totally unique method of handing down genetic material from one generation to the next.

  While most were sexual in their reproduction, at least three species seemed to have a different means of passing germ plasma from one sex to the other from all the myriad variations science had catalogued since leaving old Earth. One even seemed to have three sexes with two providing the egg and sperm while a third sex incubated the egg and fed the newborn in a pouch.

  “If we could have studied that species when they were alive, we could have gotten an extraordinary understanding of what actually takes place in the womb and how it contributes to the development of the child. It’s such a tragedy. Such a tragedy,” Professor Labao said, shaking his head.

  Sandy listened patiently as first one, then another researcher bubbled over to her. In some cases she understood every other word. In others it was worse, maybe every fourth or fifth.

  She was grateful when Jacques edged out her last baffler, offered her a glass of water masquerading as alcohol, and began to bring her up to date on the work of the anthropologists, especially the linguists.

  “We’re got a lot of their language now,” he told Sandy. “It’s strange, but most of them speak something very close to each other even if they are on separate continents. Frankly, that’s impossible. There should have been a lot more drift as the people spread out over the planet.”

  “That’s assuming they spread,” Sandy pointed out. “Couldn’t they all have been talking some proto version of this language when the planet suffered its first bombardment? What is it, one hundred thousand years ago, or one hundred ten thousand years?”

  “It’s both. This place was clobbered twice,” Jacques said. “The glass plain with the pyramid dates back to one hundred ten thousand years ago. We’re pretty sure the pyramid is only a hundred thousand years old.”

  “If I was a betting woman,” Sandy said, “I’d bet you that this planet got hammered once and after ten thousand years of being under someone’s boots, they rose up in a bloody, messy rebellion, threw off their chains and sent a fleet of their own, either captured or built, and wrecked that planet we whizzed by. When are we going to study it?”

  “There’s not a lot to study,” Jacques said. “A hundred thousand years ago someone pounded them into the dirt, then tossed the dirt and air off the planet out into space and didn’t even leave enough for us to find one scrap of DNA.”

  “And the only DNA we think we have for that species is the family facing the tunnel entrance into the pyramid and a pile of skulls in front of them?” Sand said.

  “Yes. A guess,” Jacques answered. “Getting back to the mystery of the language, we’re all scratching our heads. Even if you assume for the moment that the planet had a single civilization with a single language on all the continents, there is no way they could have avoided differentiation over the last hundred millennium. Just think of the short time it took the Indo European language to diverge from Latin and German in old Earth’s north European area to distant Hindi and Bengali some eight thousand kilometers away. All those continents below us should have totally unintelligible languages. Still, people on one continent of this planet can hold a basic conversation with someone from ten thousand kilometers and an ocean away,” Jacques said, slowly shaking his head.

  “And the aliens who went to space have spent a hundred thousand years and their fear and hatred of anything different is just as hot as it was when they bombarded that nearby planet,” Sandy pointed out.

  “Makes you wonder if that weird DNA they have may be passing down a lot more than just genetic material to their children,” Jacques mused.

  “I’m not one of your boffins,” Sandy said with a friendly grin, not wanting to start a fight. “I don’t know enough to have an informed opinion on such matters. However, I sure would like for one of your diggers to uncover something from before a hundred and ten thousand years ago.”

  “You’re not the first to raise that question, Admiral. Some of us boffins would also love to sample some old DNA. Along that line, we just may have something for you.”

  Sandy raised two inquisitive eyebrows and Jacques led her away from the noise of the party into the hallway outside.

  “You know we sociologists have had drones, nanos and other non-invasive scouts out listening to the alien hunters and gatherers. In the process of doing that, we’ve been mapping their hunting ranges and identifying the limits of each tribes.

  “We found that very few traveled the mountains much above eight or nine thousand feet altitude. That seemed reasonable. Still, we did want to map the higher elevations. When we did, we found a cave that turned out to be more than just a cave.”

  “More than a cave?” Sandy asked.

  “Someone had dug out a major system of corridors and rooms going deep into the mountain. The cave and tunnel system was designed higher than the mouth, so water did not get in.”

  “That’s interesting,” Sandy said. “But isn’t the air that high up hard to breathe.”

  “Eight thousand feet is high, but not outside the zone of human habitation. Especially desperate humans. It’s also on a tectonic plate that seems to have parked itself for a very long time. No earthquakes. No volcanoes. Nothing to disturb a cavern. It’s also just at the tree line. Depending on the climate, it might or might not be surrounded by dense woods. The only way we spotted this cave was by low flying nanos looking for something like this. From five hundred or a thousand feet up, you see hardly anything. If you throw in forest coverage, it becomes nearly impossible to spot.”

  “A perfect hideaway if you were fleeing an invader or organizing a resistance,” Sandy muttered. “What can you tell me about this cave?”

  “It’s located high above a valley. The rock is hard, igneous rock. How they dug into the mountain is a question we can’t answer. Still, if they could grind their way in, they wo
uldn’t have to do much about supporting it. We haven’t discovered anything like post holes for timber supports. The walls, floor and overhead look like they haven’t changed in a thousand years. Or maybe a hundred thousand years. There is really no way to tell.”

  “Wouldn’t digging through that kind of rock require a high level of technology?” Sandy marveled.

  “Well, we haven’t found any residue from torches or cooking fires inside the tunnel system. A search of the surrounding area was negative for any molecular material that solar panels might leave, but after all this time, and on a windswept mountain . . .?” Jacques shrugged.

  “What about inside the tunnel system. Is there anything?”

  “The air inside the cave is fairly thin, cold, and dry. We have found some copper, some glass, the sorts of thing that would go into a lighting system. We’ve got heavy metals in some rooms. What we’re talking about here are just traces of things that don’t belong there at all. You have to understand, we’re dealing with a hundred and ten thousand years of decay. We’ve got some nanos out mapping the tunnel system while others try to analyze what there is to find in the tunnel. We just need time.”

  “This intrigues me, so I hope we’ve bought you plenty of time for your work,” Sandy said, shivering at the slaughter that had paid for that time. Still, the slaughter was of murderous aliens, hell bent on killing her and her people.

  This is the job I signed up for all those years ago.

  “Jacques,” the computer at his neck said.

  “Yes, Marie.”

  “I have been listening to you brief the admiral. We have just had a major discovery in the mapping of that tunnel system you were talking about. We found, deep in the back of the tunnels, that the ancient diggers broke though into a huge cavern. Our mapping effort will need to be redoubled.”

  “Very well, Marie. Have we exhausted our supply of Smart Metal at the cave?”

  “Yes, sir. That is why I am raising this matter at this time. It seemed like we might get faster results from the admiral than our own usual avenues.”