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

by Mike Shepherd

  Penny did a face palm. “The battleship Kris Longknife brought back used two capacitors per laser, just like we do. I was assuming two capacitors meant one laser. Until the laser actually fires, we can’t get any data off them. Those extra capacitors could very well be there so three could feed one larger laser, or maybe five feed two lasers. Who knows?”

  The Intel Chief shook her head. “Damn, once again, we let what we knew get in the way of learning what we need to know.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Sandy said. “We’ll know what the lasers are good for when they use them.”

  “Assuming we don’t blow them out of space before they can,” Van pointed out.

  Sandy nodded, along with everyone else. That was the way the battles went with the aliens. They came at us. They died. We went on living.

  It would be that way until it wasn’t.

  We got better, but they were also getting better. What kind of different game was this bunch of aliens playing?

  Sandy checked with Skull Mountain that night. They’d dug out almost all of the rock fall. In the morning, they expected to get enough of a hole to slip a small grouting device into the tunnel to start the stiffening up of the passageway. Once the grouting dried, they’d slide the Smart MetalTM in to cover all sides of the tunnel. The floor, however, would be a false floor, fifteen centimeters above the tunnel floor with flexible honeycomb to dampen the impact of each step.

  There was talk that they might go barefoot in the tunnel.

  Meanwhile, the Smart MetalTM programmer had been busy.

  “Has anyone else here ever been hot air ballooning?” she asked around. No one had.

  That didn’t slow her down. She busily constructed a hydrogen extraction machine, got it going and began storing the hydrogen in large bottles. That did cause several engineers to stop by her work area. Sandy got pictures of the work group and decided that there was more than intellectual curiosity involved. The woman did have luscious breasts and the three guys were really cute.

  “You know you don’t want a large supply of free hydrogen near a flame, don’t you?” one engineer asked, showing an amazing bit of intelligence for a male whose eye’s were fixed on female mammaries.

  “Yep,” she admitted, keeping her eyes on the device extracting hydrogen. “However, you do know that we’ll get out of here a lot faster if we fly, don’t you?”

  The four then put their heads together and came up with a design for one huge Smart MetalTM dirigible. In two days, she would have enough hydrogen to fill the gigantic thing. She was also writing a program to have the Smart MetalTM extract itself from the tunnel, then reform itself into a massive gas bag.

  She had also intended to design hydrogen burning engines to propel the airship. However, the engineers put a call in for several electric fuel cells to be dropped to them when time was available. So, she added eight electric engines to the design and had a fast exit ready for all of them and their prize.

  As soon as the remains were out of the mountain, their ride would form and they’d be airlifting themselves over the trees and back to the air strip!

  “Two hours after we finish here, you can start airlifting us out of the lovely alpine meadow and boogie for home!” she told Jacques.

  Sandy called in Professor LaBao and instructed him to start pulling his teams out now. No need to panic, but Sandy wanted to devote every longboat in the fleet to pulling Jacques team out when the time came. When he was aboard the Galileo, she wanted to head for Jump Point Alpha and a fast run home.

  Then life got more complicated.

  35

  Sandy went to bed knowing that a few alien battleships with engineering casualties would probably crash Jump Point Beta at some time during the night. Most of the six ships had managed to arrange their faltering courses so that they’d hit the jump point within a few seconds of each other. They’d be going through at different speeds, but all would be between forty-seven thousand and forty-nine thousand klicks per hour.

  Sandy knew that all of them would die within two or three seconds of jumping into this system. Likely, they did too, but they didn’t waver in their murderous intent.

  Their crashing the jump was nothing for Sandy to lose sleep over. Like everyone on Alwa Station, she was getting blasé about aliens dying. That was just what they did.

  So Sandy was surprised when her computer interrupted her sleep and told her she was wanted on the flag bridge.

  They had the drill down by now. Whoever had interrupted the admiral’s sleep greeted her with a cup of coffee and a slice of hot, delicious, buttered bread and waited for her to say, “Talk to me.”

  After Sandy had taken her second sip of coffee and two bites out of the mid rats, Van opened his mouth, then closed it and glanced at Penny.

  Sandy’s Alien Intel Chief looked mortified. “We’ve never seen anything like this. I never would have expected it.”

  “Spit it out,” Sandy said.

  “There are alien cruisers in system B-1. Somehow they jumped from outside our five rings of pickets and shot into the system on the other side of Jump Point Alpha.”

  The delicious fresh bread turned to a lump of lead in Sandy’s stomach. She’d wondered why the yeoman of the watch had been standing close by. She handed the plate of bread off to the young woman. “Thank you,” she said automatically as the Sailor took it.

  “Show me,” Sandy ordered.

  “Mmm, Mmm, Mimzy,” Penny stuttered.

  Sandy had never seen the young woman so rattled, and she’d been there when they pried her and her dead husband’s body out of Kris Longknife’s fast attack boat.

  The star map formed before them. Their system was in the middle. At the moment, only two systems, the ones on the other side of the two jumps out, showed. One had an attack force of eighty-eight alien battleships bearing down on Jump Point Beta. Notes floating in the air beside Beta Jump showed twenty-four battlecruisers. A second reported six alien battleships had been vaporized an hour earlier.

  The other system, the one Jump Point Alpha led to, now showed one hundred and twelve light cruisers traveling at over 600,000 kilometers per hour. The number of CL’s had a question mark beside it.

  Sandy whistled at the speed. “Have we ever seen any alien going this fast?”

  “No, Admiral,” Penny answered back.

  “We expecting more light cruisers?” Sandy asked.

  “Likely,” Penny said. “The jump buoy came through as soon as it spotted aliens in the system. The two buoys have been swapping back and forth at five minute intervals. Each time they swap, the number goes up.”

  “How many times have they swapped?”

  “Three times, Admiral.”

  “So, they’re not rushing through at one second intervals.”

  “No ma’am. It looks like ten second intervals. Still tight, but not a battle jump.”

  “Any idea what they intend to do?” Sandy asked.

  Penny was shaking her head before Sandy finished the question.

  “Any idea if these are from the same wolf pack or are we just getting lucky?”

  “I don’t know ma’am. As I’ve mentioned, the smaller cruiser reactors have different fingerprints from the battleships. The cruiser reactors are more like other cruisers not the battleships their mother ship builds.”

  “What do you know?” Sandy snapped, then immediately regretted allowing herself the luxury of anger.

  Penny shook her head as she took a deep sigh. Sandy feared her Intel Chief was about to break down and cry, but the woman was made of sterner stuff.

  “This behavior is outside the book, Admiral. I’ll write it up and we’ll publish it as a new chapter, but we’re off the map as far as alien capabilities, tactics and behavior is concerned.”

  Sandy stood and rested a reassuring hand on Penny’s shoulder. “Yes, we are. We surprised them with the cat’s bombs and now they’re surprising us with . . . something.”

  For a moment, the admiral mulled the map. “
Mimzy, if we picked up our skirts and ran for the jump, could we get through Jump Point Alpha and run for home?”

  “If we abandoned the scientists on the planet below and ran for it in the next two minutes, we’d need to maintain 3.2 gees for both acceleration and deceleration to hit the jump at 50,000 kilometers an hour. We would then need boost at 3.1 gee toward the jump for home. That would get us out of that system before the aliens could adjust their course and cut us off from the jump.”

  “Abandoning those below,” Van said, through a loud gulp.

  Mimzy went on. “Admiral Miyoshi’s reinforced task force could not make it to Jump Point Alpha and would likely have to fight his way to the jump in the next system. If the transports waited to pick up the scientists dirt side, they would arrive at Jump Point Alpha behind Admiral Miyoshi. Our forces would be divided into three parts. However, I do not think that you will use that option.”

  “Damn straight I won’t,” Sandy said.

  “I was not addressing the moral question, Admiral. May I point out that the jump that we use out of the B-1 system is a fuzzy jump. We have made it policy not to let the aliens see us use those jumps since they cannot see them with their equipment.”

  Sandy rolled her eyes. “That settles that. We fight here. It’s better to hold the jumps and wipe them out as they come through than it is to give up that defensive position and allow them to get at us piecemeal.”

  “Assuming they don’t go for a defensive position as well,” Penny pointed out.

  “Oh shit,” Van muttered under his breath.

  Sandy nodded. “That would explain why they’re slowing down so much in the B-2 system.”

  “The thought has crossed my mind,” Sandy said

  “Two sides, both on defensive, both waiting for the other side to risk a river crossing,” Mondi said. “It’s happened before.”

  Penny’s shadow nodded, its whisker’s twitching.

  “If we hold on the defensive too long,” Sandy said, “and Admiral Kitano wonders what’s holding us up, a battle fleet could pop out of nowhere in the B-1 system before the startled eyes of our enemy and there goes our secret of the fuzzy jumps.”

  Van nodded.

  “Okay, I’m open for suggestions on how to force an opposed jump.”

  The morning went long and produced a whole lot of strange ideas . . . none of which looked like they’d work.

  36

  Sandy called Jacques to let him know he’d soon have no fleet overhead.

  “We’ve got two alien fleets headed for us, one at each of our jumps. I’m moving the fleet out to defend both jumps.”

  “Can half the fleet hold each of the jumps?” Jacques asked.

  “I think so. That’s the thing about a battle, you never know who will win it until one side has lost it.”

  “Yeah. Listen, we’re moving as fast as we can, but we have to be careful. One false step will bring the mountain down again.”

  “I understand your problems. I just wanted you to know about mine. Please keep me up to date on your progress. I’d like a report every twelve hours, okay?”

  “Once we get inside, we’ll be working night and day,” Jacques told her, “but I’ll get you reports.”

  “Take care.”

  “You too.”

  Sandy left the Hispania League’s Independencia in orbit, protecting the transports and supporting a major collection of longboats that other battlecruisers had left behind to help get the civilians on and off the planet. Only two teams stayed on the ground. The team at Skull Mountain and the one at the most recently lazed city. The team working on languages and the strange behavior of the small groups around the pyramid kept listening in from orbit to their drones and nanos on the ground.

  That team digging around the lazed town had now dated the attack to within a few months of four hundred and twelve years ago. They’d using tree rings for that bit of data. They were turning up a lot of artifacts, although it was now clear that quite a few small holdings, say farms or villages, had also been lazed from orbit.

  The aliens did not allow any tech development on this planet. If some sophisticated culture did arise, they had no compunction about killing their own.

  That left Sandy shaking her head . . . and preparing for her next meeting with the murderers.

  Sandy and Admiral Miyoshi exchanged messages discussing options for stopping dead several possible assaults on their jumps. It was during those messages that Sandy discovered that they had another ace up their sleeve.

  “A jump periscope? What’s that?” she demanded.

  Her Chief of Staff and Ops Chief joined her in eyeing Penny.

  “Hasn’t it caught on back in human space?” said a surprised Chief of Alien Intel.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Van snapped.

  Penny eyed them, then began a hurriedly explanation. “During the circumnavigation of the galaxy, we had some scientists on board. Weird guys. Still, the two of them figured out how to extend a device, we call it a periscope, from one side of the jump to the other. That way, you can see what there is to see and pick up reactor noise and radio traffic. It takes two different periscopes to do that . . . the band width is pretty narrow . . . so you can only have one in the jump at a time. You can watch on the visual spectrum or listen in on the electromagnetic spectrum, but not both.”

  “You can look through jumps!” Sandy marveled. “Why hasn’t anyone told me?”

  Penny just shrugged. “I don’t know. I remember Kris saying that the logs of the circumnavigation got locked up something way past tight. Something about our fuzzy jump technology someone didn’t want out. What Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum came up with must have gone down the same memory hole. They both came out here with us. I guess they kept it so secret that no one back home knows about it.”

  “We have that here, aboard this task force?” Sandy demanded.

  “I don’t know which ship, if any, has it, but we can knock together a new set if we need to. Mimzy, have you got the designs in your memory?”

  “Of course, Penny.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Van said. “We can waltz a battlecruiser up to a jump, stick a probe through, and see what’s going on on the other side?”

  “We don’t usually use a battlecruiser that close to a jump, but a longboat maybe.”

  “So we can observe what the alien cruisers are doing on the other side of the jump. How close they are? How far back? What their battle array looks like?” Sandy asked.

  “Yes, Admiral.”

  “God bless!” Mondi exclaimed. “Why didn’t some one deploy that damn periscope for the last battle?”

  “Sir,” Penny said carefully, “the periscope only sees the next jump out. The aliens were jumping from farther out than that. We couldn’t see into that system.”

  “Oh,” Mondi said, almost meekly.

  “But it will work for the system those cruisers are in,” Sandy said.

  “Yes, ma’am. Right now, Admiral Shoalter has the Phantom and the Banshee on the far side of the jump passing us information. The alien cruiser force has topped out at one hundred and thirty-eight cruisers, all breaking at 3.5 gees. Two appear to have suffered engineering casualties and are headed our way ahead of the others, but we know how many they’ve got and it sure looks like they are planning on braking to a halt just the other side of the jump.”

  “So, we may have to force that jump if we want to get home,” Sandy mused. “Certainly, if we don’t want them to see a relief expedition pop into that system out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I sure wish we could goad them into attacking us,” Van said.

  “Would you attack us if you had us bottled up in one system?” Mondi asked.

  Both shook their head.

  Sandy’s team and Miyoshi’s staff exchanged message traffic, tossing out ideas for study. Most were non-starters. All the ideas for engaging the aliens on their final approach to t
he jump got shot down. Neither system had a helpful planet to swing around and then use to send our forces shooting back toward the jump.

  The only option that seemed to be available to them was to charge at the slowing enemy ships and hope to blow all of them out of space. Unfortunately, if they missed any, the aliens would be between the defenders and the transports they were supposed to defend. The battlecruisers would have to decelerate until dead in space, then accelerate in pursuit of the aliens who would, most likely be heading for their old home system for all they were worth with blood in their eyes.

  No, the place to make their stand was on their this side of the jump. Of course, if the alien stayed on their side of the jump, matters could go long.

  And it would be the aliens that had time on their side. They were likely seeking out any available allies to strengthen their cork in the bottle. The alien reinforcements would arrive knowing full well what the situation was.

  Any reinforcements from Alwa would be sticking their head into a hornet's nest with no idea it was there much less how many hornets they faced or where they were located.

  “When we came here, we used a high speed long jump to get into the B-1 system,” Sandy mused to Penny.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “So, there is no way Admiral Kitano can use that magic spyglass to see the situation in B-1?”

  “No ma’am.”

  Sandy, Van and Mondi studied the only remaining option if they and the aliens both took up a defensive position on either side of the jump; a full frontal assault through the jump.

  “We’ll face the same thing we’ve dished out to them. We know they have atomics. They could mine the jump just like we did. They’ll have all their cruisers aimed at the jump, ready to shoot at our ships as we come through one by one.”

  Mondi studied the general outline of the assault they’d drawn up. He scratched nervously at his ear. “It all depends on how good our crystal armor is, how close they put their mines and how fast the mines respond to our presence verses how quick we can shoot them down. Then you add in how fast the reaction time is of their fire control systems and gunners.”