Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella (5 page)

“While the hull is rotating?” Taylor asked to make sure he understood.

“Yes.  That’s crazy.  You accelerate a ship at one gee, and you’ve got a down equal to one gravity.  Nice.  That’s what lines do.  This station rotates at just the right speed so that the A Deck has enough centripetal force that you feel like it’s one gravity.  Nice.  Mix the two up and you get one hell of a confused inner ear.”

The two stared at each other.

“It makes no sense,” the young woman said.

“It has to make sense,” Taylor said.  Something was gnawing at the back of his mind.

“Wait a second,” he said and called up the
Fighting Ships
database.  He’d flipped through the first couple of entries before he’d launched a search for the
Wasp
.  Now he went back to those early entries.  They showed the fleet of Earth.  Battleships had pride of place.

“Look at these battleships.  Have you ever worked on the design of one of them?” he asked the engineer.

“No.  Not even in college.  They’re obsolete.  No one has built one since the Iteeche War.  There are scads of them left over from then.”  She paused for a moment.  “Well, almost no one. There are reports that Greenfield has built a few of them.  They didn’t do much in the war and they don’t have all the relics in orbit that most of us have.  Anyway.  No, I’ve never worked on something like that.  Corvettes, destroyers.  Yes, we make them.”

“Look at the notation on these battleships.  What’s 15 RPM mean?  This one is 20 RPM.”

“Revolutions per minute.”  Annie spoke the words as if from pure rote, something she had memorized long ago but saw no application here.

Then she shook her head.  “You don’t rotate a ship.  The
Santa Maria
, one of the first exploration starships launched from Earth, did a bad jump because it had a bad thruster and took on a rotation as it did its first jump.  They ended up way across the galaxy.  It took another ship on a bad jump to find it.”

“How’d that happen?”

“You must have read about it.  Ray Longknife’s ship was sabotaged.  We never did find out who did it.  Anyway, he and his ship ended up way the hell and gone and stumbled onto the lost colony the crew of the
Santa Maria
had set up.  At least the survivors.  All I know is that we engineers design ships to stay steady as rocks when we approach a jump.”

“So, why do these battleships
advertise how many revolutions per minute they can do?” Taylor asked.  Now he knew why you didn’t want to do RPMs.  He still didn’t know why these particular ships did them.

“Oh,” Annie said, and Taylor could almost see a
light bulb above her head light up.  “Lasers.  These battleships have thick ice armor.  See, three meters thick.  Three and a half for this big bruiser.  That’s to absorb laser hits.”

“So?” Taylor said, still not enlightened.

“Even with that much ice, if you hit it with a big enough laser, it will melt through, so they rotated the ship to force any laser hits to burn through more ice.  It creates a hell of a problem keeping the ships balanced.  You burn off some armor on a fast rotating ship and you’ve got the devil’s own time keeping your ship from spinning itself to destruction.  Now I remember this problem in class.  A classic first year problem.  How fast do you need to redistribute reaction mass and how much pumping power do you need?  I aced it.” she said with a proud smile.

“Are they asking you to figure out how much pumping you’ll need to redistribute weight on this rotating ship?” Taylor asked.

“No.  No one’s raised that problem.  I wonder if I should.”

“Please don’t do it tomorrow,” Taylor suggested, trying to sound as helpful as he might.

“Yeah.  Right.”

“So, let’s see what have we have here,” Taylor reflected.  “Merchant ships that are huge, and, unlike everything that was put forward for the last five years, have excessive power plants.  They also are designed for higher gee and we have this RPM issue, but no thought of armor.”

“No.  We’re not putting ice armor on them, though I did overhear some folks at lunch from the Navy side of the yard talking about having the new Smart Metal do its own rotation thing.  With this new stuff, we can get it spinning around on the outer skin of the ship without the crew inside having to spin with it.  It will even redistribute itself as it takes hits.  Fantastic stuff!  Oh, you didn’t hear that from me.”

“Hear what?” Taylor said, allowing himself a small but friendly smile.  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t heard anything.”  Then he frowned.  “Anything that I can connect the dots to.”

Annie took another bite from her salad.  “I think there is one more dot for your little puzzle.”

“Yes.”

Again she chewed her food.  “There is a third ship we are working on.  It’s small and has to be ready when the big two are launched.

“A third, small ship?”

“Yes, little, but not normally little.  It has three smaller reactors.  Normally, you try to fit the reactor to the ship.  Small ship, small reactor.  Big ship, bigger reactor.  If you get big enough, you add a second reactor.  That’s what is economical.  You don’t ever put three of the smallest size ones on one ship.”

“Redundancy?” Taylor guessed.

“That’s all I can figure out.  It’s also small, and not at all rigged for cargo.  In fact, it’s not  rigged for much of anything.  The programmer working on the Smart Metal configurations of the ship has gotten huge bonuses, but other than him showing off pictures of his new sports car, he’s not saying a word about his work.”

“A small ship but with redundant power
plants so that if one went down on a long voyage you’d still have the other two.  Is there anything else special about it?”

“It’s getting the same sensor suite that the big ships are getting.  That includes a Mark XII rangefinder.”

“How is that special?”

“It’s just the best, most expensive rangefinder on the market, and Westinghouse charges an arm and a leg for them.”

“Just a second,” Taylor said, and called up the entry on the
Wasp
.  “Yes, it got one of the first Mark XII rangefinders.  It was installed just before Kris Longknife found those two planets loaded with alien artifacts out past Chance.  There’s a tight control over who gets to go there and how they go.  Strange, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and no one’s beating a trail there,” Taylor mused.

“Strange, that,” was all Annie said.

“I take it that you know a lot more than I do.”

“Very likely, but it doesn’t involve what that Longknife girl is up to lately, so let’s not go there.”

“Are you putting big lasers on these ships so that they need the best rangefinder?”

“That’s just it.  All three ships have no armament.  As I understand it, there won’t even be a gun locker, although with Smart Metal, you can change that real fast.”

“Stranger and stranger,” Taylor said.  He glanced down at his notebook.  He’d totally forgotten to take notes.  He scrawled Mark XII and left it at that.

“Well, I do have a date with my cat and some good TV tonight,” Annie said, applying a napkin to her mouth.  “It’s been a ball sharing my ignorance with you.  If you ever find yourself in my neck of the woods not knowing anything and wanting to know even less, look me up.  You have my number.”

Taylor chuckled at her joke, and stood like a gentleman as she left.  He sat down and made some more notes.  He reviewed several of the pages in his two databases, then slowly ate his sandwich.  He obviously knew a lot of interesting stuff that related to each other in some rational way.

The only problem was, he didn’t know enough about the entire puzzle to see how they fit together.

Sandwich finished, he stood up, signaled a wandering trolley and bussed his own table.  As he did so, he noticed a man standing in the doorway of the restaurant, eyeing him.

“Computer, who is that man?” Taylor whispered.

“There is a 97.382 percent probability that he is Arlen Cob, a senior investigator with Nuu Security, assigned to Nuu High Wardhaven Station Docks.”

When Taylor reached the door, Arlen was gone.  Midway to the space elevator station, and with no apparent tail, Taylor attached to the transient net and called Honovi, leaving a cryptic note that he hoped the busy young man would take for a request to meet with him again for some quality baby time.  He also found a even more cryptic note from the number that was not in use at this time.  A woman’s voice asked him to meet her at a place near his office.  She used the unique name the regulars applied to it, something that brought a smile to cops, but meant nothing to most civilians.

Taylor increased his pace towards the beanstalk station.

Chapter 6

The Atrium was many places, organized around a hollow square that rose nine floors to a clear ceiling.  There were trees and vines twining green around stair wells and elevators between the floors.  Every once in a while, it seemed to rain, but it was a fine mist and only fell where the plants needed it.

A well-managed jungle, the cops called it.  While people with too much money spent it among the greenery of the nine floors, the basement had several nice places were working folks might hang out.  Government types with only the pay voters saw fit to give them.

Taylor would bet money that his caller didn’t intend to meet him in the basement.  The voice was too well manicured.

He took a seat at a finely worked cast iron table and pulled out his reader.  He was way behind on his comic strips.  Mostly, he stayed to the strips that did their jokes in a day.  He could never count on following a storyline that covered a week, much less a month.  He caught up on the last week of his favorites, then turned to the one long plotted comic he enjoyed.  He had to flip back through six weeks before he could find the beginning of this particular story ark and follow the jokes.  Taylor was smiling happily at a particularly good running line of jokes when the woman who had sent him here entered.

At least, he hoped she was looking for him.

Likely, well over half the eyes in the Atrium followed her, hoping she had come to meet them.  While engineer Annie had fit in, using light makeup and a shirt and pants that were nearly the uniform of the civilian workforce, this woman stood out. 

Her dress was clearly professional, but the tight sheath of several competing shades of gray drew the eye and made every step she took a celebrating of several million years of female evolution and locomotion.  Her makeup turned a lovely face into something striking and unforgettable.

Clearly, today she’s not afraid to be remembered. 
I wonder what she looks like when she doesn’t want to be so memorable?
the professional in Taylor thought.

As she passed his table she spoke softly, “Agent Foile, will you walk with me?”

He pocketed his reader and rose to follow her.  In a moment, he was beside her.  “No agent today.  I’m on vacation.”

“I am rarely asked to go fishing,” the woman said.  “I really doubt you are on holiday.”

Taylor chose not to press the point.

They entered an elevator and the woman pressed for nine.  Taylor had staked out a few stores on that level.  Most of them sold the most expensive works of art on Wardhaven.  However, she led him to a small restaurant.

“Your usual, Mademoiselle M?”

“Certainly, Charles.”

“It’s ready for you,” was all the maître d’ said.

Without looking back, Mademoiselle M led Taylor to a small room with a table and chairs.  She held the door open for him to enter, then closed it firmly behind her.  The room was something Tailor had only heard of.  Art work in gold frames, rich cream wallpaper with gold filigree running through it in a flower pattern, and a plush blue carpet enveloped his shoes.

“Clear,” the woman said and suddenly all the falderal vanished.  The walls were spartan white and bare of anything.  The table, chairs and carpet were still there, but Taylor had seen interrogation rooms with more warmth than this room now exuded. 

He took a chair.  She settled into the chair across from him.  From her small purse, she removed a compact and began to check her makeup.  She was careful to keep the mirror out of Taylor’s line of sight.

The agent would bet money that the “compact” was doing a far more thorough check of the security of this room than Annie’s pink box had done.

“So, how is your vacation going, Mr. Foile?” she said.  The tone was chit chat.

Taylor chose to return the soft ball with an equally easy pitch.  “So far, I’m just in the decompression stage.  I usually need a week just to shake off the stress of the job.  I was catching up on the last month of comics when you walked by.”

She put the compact away.

“So why are we here?”

“Trouble sent me.”

“He only sends me trouble.  What kind of trouble are you, Mr. Senior Chief Agent in Charge?  You still licking the wounds from your chase after Kris Longknife?”