Kris Longknife: Defender (2 page)

That was good because the picture then changed.

The professor took up the narration. “What you were looking at was the left end of the aft quarter, portside aft to you Sailors. What you’re now seeing is the right side, starboard aft quarter. Notice the difference.”

There was still clear evidence of damage. But many of the beams that had looked knocked about like jackstraws on the other side, were gone. The picture zoomed in further.

“We think someone has been cutting away at that wreckage with laser welding torches. We’ll need to get in closer. Have nanos take a good look at the cuts, but that side of the ship does not look like we left it, of that I am sure.”

“All hands, battle stations,” Captain Drago’s voice announced on the 1MC. “All weapons, report when you are manned and ready.”

Around
them, all hands beat to quarters. The Forward Lounge became suddenly empty.

And the Alwans looked ready to climb the walls.

Granny Rita did her best to calm them, but the idea that they were about to be in a fight to the death was having a very erratic impact on their behavior. Some ran around. Others froze in place. At any particular moment, with no particular rationale, the runners would freeze, and the statues would take off running.

They did a lot of clicking whether they were running or not.

Jack was suddenly at Kris’s elbow, just in case any of the crazy birds failed to notice she was in the way of their mad running.

“What do you do with them?” Kris asked Granny Rita.

Still, without a word from Jack, she fell back to the wall, well out of the way of traffic. Jack gave her a smile that said “Thank you, love, for not making me have to fight with you.”

Granny Rita gave the two of them a look that said . . . nothing to Kris. It did make her fidget.

Then Granny Rita shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen them like this. As I said, they don’t fight among themselves. They resolve conflicts by impressive displays.”

“How’d something like this ever rise to the top of the food chain?” Jack asked.

“You haven’t seen them feeding,” Rita said. “I’ve seen them bite strips of meat off a living, running beast. But fight among themselves. Never.”

“So how did you establish that the Heavy People were not prey?” Penny asked, watching the show with the native curiosity of a natural-born intelligence officer.

“Our Marine detachment put on a very impressive display. They also killed a few prey beasts, publicly butchered them, and held a BBQ. The Alwans discovered they liked cooked meat. We did what we had to to make friends,” Granny Rita finished vaguely.

The battle-stations Klaxon went silent. That had a settling effect on the Alwans.

“Lieutenant Lien,” called Captain Drago. “Please set Condition Charlie as quickly as you can.”

Drills had shown that having the ship changing shape while all hands were racing to be someplace else was not a good idea. Now, with all hands where they were needed, getting more armor to the ship’s hide became a priority.

Penny announced, “We are setting Condition Charlie. All hands stay put until I report the condition established.” After a pause, she added for just those close at hand, “Mimzy, set Condition Charlie.”

“Daughter,” Nelly added, “call on as many of your brothers and sisters as you need to make this go quick and clean.”

“Yes, mo
ther
,” Mimzy said in a voice Kris had practiced before a mirror when she was thirteen. “All right, crew, you heard Mom, let’s make this happen shipshape and Bristol fashion.”

Behind them, bottles at the bar folded themselves up into cases as what was left of the lounge floor rolled itself up. The glass wall vanished as the small part of the lounge Kris was using suddenly was backed up to the not airtight doors that had been fifty meters away a few seconds ago.

The Alwans watched wide-eyed.

“Condition Charlie is set throughout the ship,” Penny announced moments later.

Captain Drago followed that announcement with one of his own. “The Blue Team is relieved from its battle stations and will don high-gee stations. When they report back to their stations, the Gold Team will do the same.”

“Blue, Gold teams?” Granny Rita asked.

“I’ve told you about how great Smart Metal is,” Kris said. “This ship can handle gee forces way beyond what the Mark I Sailor can. So, we’ve got high-gee stations made of Smart Metal. They help keep us from splattering ourselves all over the deck as we honk the ship around to avoid getting hit. In combat, the
Wasp
never follows any course for more than three or four seconds.”

“Two,” Nelly put in.

“We dodge around a lot,” Kris went on, “and the gee stations let us do it. The armor is there, but it’s better not to get hit. The problem with the eggs, as we call them, is that they fit you like a second skin. Once, for political reasons, I had to go into an egg wearing undress whites. I was black-and-blue from the belt buckle, the clutch backs on my ribbons, and my shoulder boards. The standard uniform in an egg is buck naked.”

“Oh.” The old lady’s eyes lit up.

“Granny, we look like a collection of Easter eggs from the outside: boys and girls alike.” There were certain earthy aspects of Granny Rita’s outlook on life that Kris found a bit hard to take.

Now Granny shrugged. “It sounds like a young person’s way of fighting.”

“Most of our crew are under thirty,” Kris admitted.

“So, what are you going to do about us?”

The ship’s pharmacy had a small supply of antiaging pharmaceuticals. After all, Cookie, the cook, was well over eighty, as were several of the restaurateurs. Granny Rita had been glad to have her arthritis cured, her bones strengthened, and her arteries cleaned.

Still, knocking her around at high gees was not what Kris wanted to do to her newly found great-grandmother.

And the Alwans! Though their bones were more solid than they had been when they flew several million years ago, the odds were quite high that a battle might have Kris returning the six delegates looking more like boneless chicken than spokespersons for how much Alwa needed human aid.

“Nelly, do you have the specs for the water tanks the Iteeche used to survive the last battle?”

The Iteeche Empire, some eighty years ago, had almost made the human race extinct. Just ask any veteran. Just ask Granny Rita! It was Iteeche Death Balls that had gotten her into a running gunfight, them gunning, her running, that she hadn’t been able to slow down from until she was on the other side of the galaxy.

Only recently had Kris had a chance to talk to some Iteeche and discovered that their veterans were proud of how they’d saved their people from annihilation by the humans. During the Voyage of Discovery that had resulted in the shootout with the wrecked base ship they were coming up on, Kris had had three Iteeche aboard.

“Of course I have the tank designs stored in my bursting innards,” Nelly snapped. “I can knock out one for Granny and six for the Alwans. I suggest you use your normal Tac Center. That way, Granny Rita can follow the battle, or we can show pleasant scenes from around human space to relax the Alwans.”

“Do that, Nelly.”

“You’ve had Iteeche aboard?” Granny Rita said.

“It’s a long story, but the only reason I came out here and found you and that,” Kris said, nodding toward the hulk, “was because they were losing scout ships and came asking for our help.”

“So we made peace. I kept telling Ray he should do more to find a way to stop all the killing.”

“We can talk about this later,” Kris said.

“Yes. Are you expecting a fight now?”

“Yes, no, and maybe.”

“You can ask a Longknife a question, but you better not expect an answer,” Granny Rita said with a sigh.

“I don’t expect a fight,” Kris said, expanding on her initial cryptic reply. “You notice that none of us here are rushing to our battle stations. However, we now have evidence that someone has been mining this wreck. Are they its former owners or someone we haven’t met yet? We’ve run into these raiders four times. Three times they started shooting. We managed to run away the other time. Tell me, Commodore, wouldn’t you be at battle stations?”

“No question about it. Those water tanks you were talking about. You want me to get my friends into them now?”

“No, we’ll wait. All this drill may be for nothing,” Kris said, then switched topics.

“Nelly, I want to survey that hulk as fast as we can. I also want to make a change in your nano allotments. We’re going to tuck ourselves in just as close as we can to the wreck, with it between us and the jump. I want a belt of sensors around the hulk, midships, focused on the jump. Anything comes through that jump, I want to know.”

“I was already working on just such a sensor array, connected with tight-beam communications,” Nelly said. “However, how long it takes to examine the hulk will depend on how much Smart Metal Penny lets me have. Penny?”

“The
Sakura
transferred a lot of supplies to us before she left,” Penny said. It had also donated an 18-inch laser rifle that the
Wasp
now had pointed aft. Smart Metal
TM
, used to its maximum, was a most delightful and flexible material. “They also stripped out a thousand tons of Smart Metal and transferred it to us. I’ve been using most of it for armor. Nelly, if I gave you a hundred tons of the stuff, would that be enough?”

“Perfect,” the computer said. “Now, Mimzy, let’s get to work giving the boffins something to look at and making sure that jump point is under constant observation.”

The
four large screens in the Forward Lounge now showed sixteen different pictures as the nanos spread through the wreck. Or, more correctly, fifteen pictures of the wreck and one picture of blank space.

The jump point was blessedly unemployed, and Kris fervently hoped it would stay that way for a long time. A very long time.

“You don’t have to keep glancing at the jump point, Kris,” Nelly said. “I and every one of my kids have it under constant observation. If it burps out so much as a grain of sand, you will know.”

“I know, Nelly, it’s just a human thing.”

“A Longknife thing,” both Jack and Penny said at once.

Granny Rita just grunted.

The nanos were starting from the blasted aft section and moving inward.

Of the engineering spaces, nothing remained. The two Hellburners that hit there along with the corvettes’ lasers and smaller antimatter torpedoes had only started the damage. The hundred or more thermonuclear reactors that powered the huge rockets had lost their containment systems, freeing superheated plasma to add more destruction to what the humans started.

A third Hellburner had hit farther forward. There had been reactors there, too. Reactors that powered the ship and the uncounted lasers that dotted the ship’s surface.

Amidships, shock, whiplash, and torque added to the destruction. They came across gaping holes in the middle of the ship that appeared to have been caused by reactors that lost their containment fields when their superconducting, magnetic containment systems failed.

Kris revised her estimate of the bite they’d taken out of the monster. Her original guess was they had blown away thirty to forty percent of the base ship. Now it looked like more than half the ship was wrecked.

“It must have been pure hell aboard this ship,” Granny Rita said.

Kris nodded. “Even as it was blowing itself apart, it was shooting too many lasers to count at our battle line, blasting hundred-thousand-ton battleships with six meters of ice armor into hot gases in only seconds.”

Even Penny was shaking her head. “I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for those who suffered through this. But Kris and every human ship around had done everything they could to open communications. The aliens just came out shooting every single time we ran into them.”

Granny Rita did her best to translate all this to the Alwans. They now stood still, alone, not in any group, in stunned silence.

Kris wondered how much of this they were really getting and how much was being lost in translation.

N
ELLY, ARE YOU GETTING ANY OF THIS?

K
RIS, AS BEST
I
CAN TELL, THE
A
LWANS DON’T BELIEVE US.
T
HEY CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THESE ALIENS DID NOT TALK TO US.
I
THINK ONE OF THEM SAID SOMETHING ABOUT HOW CAN ANYONE PUT ON A COURTSHIP DANCE WITHOUT CROWING?
I
COULD BE WAY OFF ON THE TRANSLATION.

T
HAT’S OKAY,
N
ELLY.

Kris had yet to get around to telling Granny Rita about Nelly Net, the ability she and Nelly had to talk directly to each other and to talk to anyone who had on one of Nelly’s kids. There were a lot of things they just hadn’t had time for, Kris told herself.

“We’re getting some interesting stuff,” came from Professor Labao. “We’ve only done a small part of the search, but we haven’t found a single body. Not even a skull. It’s too soon to tell for sure, but it looks like someone went over this entire ship and removed every dead body, body part, or blood smear.”

“That’s what we found on the planet they murdered,” Kris told Granny. “No graveyard. If it wasn’t for three women murdered and their bodies hidden among all the native ones, we would have nothing on that bunch of murderers.”

Granny made a face. “Beasts that they are, they seem to revere their dead.”

“That, or they want to use them for reaction mass,” Jack growled.

“We think we’re finding hydroponic gardens as well as vats for growing proteins. The vegetation is very dead. The tanks and vats are drained,” the professor added.

“See if we can get any residue,” Kris ordered. “It would help to know if they recycle their dead in the hydroponic tanks and what kind of vat meat they ate.”

“We’re on it already,” the professor answered.

“We’ve just found something else interesting. It looks like someone dug a hole in the wreck so they could get out the reactors that hadn’t blown,” said Professor Labao.

One screen went from four windows to just one. Yes, there was a huge tunnel into the wreck. Nanos following it found relatively undamaged portions of the ship, but some large chunks had been hastily removed with welding torches. There were a lot of thick power cables leading into those holes.

“Best bet,” the professor said, “is that reactors and their superconducting containment gear were hauled out through this hole. It’s about the most expensive gear aboard a ship. That, and its weapons systems.”

“Is there evidence of the lasers being taken out?” Kris asked to anyone listening on net. “Also, have we found the bridge?”

“The forward section of the ship took a lot of damage. This monster and her baby monsters might have been slaughtering the battleships, but we humans were getting our licks in, too,” came with a touch of pride from Captain Drago.

“This is a huge ship, Your Highness,” Professor Joao Labao said respectfully but firmly. “Rome was not built in a day, and we will not plumb its secrets in an afternoon.”

“Well, so far you’ve got plenty to interest me,” Kris said. “Have your boffins get the nanos collecting as much data as they can because I don’t intend to spend a day here waiting for whoever has the salvage contract on this mother to wander back through that jump point,” Kris said.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Captain Drago said.

“Your Highness, we have something I think you will find very interesting,” the professor said, as if to placate an irascible princess.

Smart man.

“I have seen that video of a very large choir addressing a huge audience, followed by a lone man giving quite a long harangue to his listeners.” The subject video, picked up while the USS
Hornet
was running for its life, showed up in a small window.

“I think we have found that room.”

The screen that had been showing the huge tunnel now switched to show a massive auditorium. No, from the fine decorations, it was more like an opera house. There was statuary, usually of the same man in an heroic pose and white columns along the walls separating box seats that looked quite plush. The common people, however, were packed in row upon row, balcony atop balcony. The aisles were narrow to allow room for more seats.

“To fill as many seats as those with only aisles that size, I’d have to march them in, like Marines,” Jack said. “I’m not sure my line troops would put up with that kind of regimentation.”

“Lots and lots of people, marching in lockstep,” Kris said.

“You told me,” Granny Rita said, “about one ship you blew up after it attacked you being filled to the gills with people. It looks like they filled a monster ship like this just as tightly.”

“We are looking into what we think are the crew quarters,” the professor said. “I’ve heard of places on Earth that pack the unemployed into cramped public housing, but this is something entirely different. There’s barely room to slip yourself into a bed from a narrow passageway. No privacy. Just stacks and stacks of beds.”

“Huge numbers of people who just want to kill us,” Penny said. She had argued the hardest against Kris launching her tiny command into a battle with so little intelligence on the target. Now the look on her face bore the sadness of the ages. “How are we going to kill all these people?” she finally said.

“They’ve
got
to talk to us before we have to do that,” Kris insisted.

“Kris Longknife, an optimist?” Jack said with a bit of a smile. Jack was the only man alive she’d let get away with something like that.

Still, she elbowed him in the ribs.

He put both hands up in surrender and retreated behind a wide grin.

Granny Rita gave the two of them the eye. They sobered quickly and returned to the problem at hand.

“Kris, could we get a better look at the ceiling of the place?” Nelly asked.

One of the nanos dutifully began scanning the overhead. It took several seconds before the immense ceiling was resolved into a single picture.

“Dots. Lots of dots,” Penny said.

“In a random pattern,” Kris added, stroking her chin.

“If that thick belt of dots isn’t the Milky Way, then I’ve never looked at a star chart in my life,” Granny Rita said.

“Professor,” Nelly said. “I need to combine several of the nanos in this room and close by. I want to get a full coverage and very exact copy of that picture.”

“What are you thinking, Nelly?” Kris asked.

“I think someone went to a lot of trouble to put a very exact sky on the ceiling of this very large room that they regularly filled with people. Kris, have you heard of the Sistine Chapel?”

“We
did
take art history in college, Nelly,” Kris said sarcastically.

“Yes, but I could never tell how much you were paying attention and how much you were just using me for an easy A.”

“Nelly, what happened to you being polite?” Kris asked.

“Auntie Tru is on the other side of the galaxy and there’s no way you can threaten to take me in for her to look under my nonexistent hood.”

Kris was beginning to wonder who else might be taking advantage of their being so far from home that the threat of sending them dirtside was very much out of the question.

“Tell me, Nelly,” Jack said. “I didn’t take art history in college. Why is the Sistine Chapel so important to our present conversation?”

“You did so take art history,” Nelly snapped. “I have access to all your records, Jack, I will have you know.”

“Nelly, get back on topic,” Kris snapped.

“The Sistine Chapel was a place of worship. It was decorated with some magnificent artwork for the instruction and edification of those attending services there. The pope in charge at the time spent a lot of money to have that ceiling painted although he had a war on and paying the painter was regularly a second priority to paying his army. Anyway, I wonder if this is not such a special artifact. I am merging several nanos so that I can get a high-definition recording of not only the precise relations of the stars to each other but also any color texturing the stars might have.”

“You think this might represent the night sky over a unique planet?” Penny said.

“I think it’s possible.”

“Let me know as soon as you finish that, Nelly,” Kris said.

“Yes, your not so smart Highness,” Nelly said, her voice more smug than any computer had a right to be.

“Alert, Alert,” Nelly’s voice came in a totally different tenor, and it came over the entire 1MC. “A ship has just exited the nearest jump point. Ship matches the profile of one of the smaller hostile ships. Just four or five hundred thousand tons of crazy kill you.”

The bong-bong of the battle-station Klaxon went off.

“This is no drill. Man your battle stations. All hands, man your battle stations. This is no drill,” resounded through the ship.