Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (2 page)

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

About the Author

1

Admiral
Kris Longknife bent over the toilet and explosively lost her breakfast.

Damn! I’ve never had battle jitters this bad.

Done, she twisted around to the sink, ran some water, and washed out her mouth.

And had to bolt for the toilet again as her stomach decided it was not done with her yet.

Double damn!

NELLY, IS THERE A FLU BUG GOING AROUND THE FLEET? Kris asked her personal computer.

Nelly, much upgraded since she was given to Kris in preschool, was plugged directly into Kris’s brain while riding at her collarbone, so, even though her mouth was otherwise occupied, Kris could pose the question.

KRIS, THERE IS NO STOMACH FLU REPORTED. THE WATER USAGE IN THE HEADS IS WITHIN ONE PERCENT OF NORMAL SO IT IS VERY UNLIKELY THERE WAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH LAST NIGHT’S SUPPER. YOU, HOWEVER, ARE AT DOUBLE, NO, TRIPLE NORMAL, Nelly pointed out, as the toilet flushed for the third time.

Again, hoping she was done, Kris did the mouth-rinsing thing.

Her stomach stayed quiescent.

Kris stood, adjusted her shipsuit, with its epaulets showing the stripes of a full admiral, and turned to face her next battle.

No wonder she was nervous: This battle was the craziest she’d ever tried. She was risking two-thirds of her fleet to take out the assassins of the mountain, as Vice Admiral Yi of Earth named them, the kamikaze base, as Vice Admiral Miyoshi of Musashi called them.

Whatever you called them, they’d been launching ships, ships that built up to a good fraction of light speed as they shot through jump point after jump point before slamming themselves into the Alwa system and heading straight for the planet.

So far, Kris’s fleet had blasted every alien suicide ship, but Kris was tired of playing defense, holding a line where one failure meant the death of millions of humans and their Alwan allies.

For the first time, Kris’s fleet was taking the offensive.

Kris had pulled two of her task fleets, better than two-thirds of her entire force, away from Alwa. The one task fleet left defending Alwa included the First Battle Squadron. It had followed Kris into hell and paid a steep price to get back, returning so bent and busted that the superintendents of the repair yards had taken one good look and suggested the ships be scrapped.

The frigates’ Smart Metal
^TM
had been drained into holding tanks. Their reactors and lasers were in the rework facilities. Once recertified for space, they’d be issued to merchant ships. The crews were now waiting for the yards to spin out new ships to bear those proud names.

Kris prayed that the ships following her this time would return in better shape.

She hoped, but only time . . . and the coming fight . . . would tell.

For one thing, Admiral Yi’s Third Fleet, half of her attack force, was somewhere out there, heading into the target system from one jump while Kris’s Second Fleet stood by to enter from another.

And Yi, being from Earth, had an attitude toward all colonial bumpkins.

No wonder my stomach has a problem. It’s just one of many today.

Peace made with her now-empty stomach, Kris turned for her flag plot. She had a battle to win.

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2

“You
okay?” Major General Jack Montoya asked. As Chief of her Royal Security Detail, Commander, Ground Forces Alwa Defense Sector, and, oh, right, husband, he was very good at reading her moods.

“I’m fine,” Kris lied.

Jack’s smile told her she wasn’t fooling him.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” he said, but he drew close to whisper it in her ear.

Kris made a face, half between a grin and a scowl, and left it to the others in flag plot to decipher. If they wanted to take it as old friends, or newlywed private chatter, that was their problem.

“I hope Yi doesn’t think his newfangled armor is magic,” Kris whispered back.

There was no smile in Jack’s scowl.

“Yi does seem to think he’s got the Shield of Great Worth or something,” Jack said.

No question, the three squadrons of ships from Old Earth had arrived with something special for armor. For several centuries, quantum computers had been slowing light and storing it for a bit. First they’d managed a few seconds, finally a whole minute. Computation at the speed of light needed this ability to store quanta of the stuff to make a 1 so the absence of it could be a 0. From time to time, someone with gold braid on their coat would wonder about using this technology to freeze a laser beam for enough time to tame it, but the problems of corralling something with that much energy had defeated them.

Those problems, and the short duration of the only two major dustups humanity had had in the last hundred years:
the Unity War, and the Iteeche War, had made for no major advances in the age-old race between arms and armor.

Some Earth lab, however, must have gotten lucky because even as Earth’s Navy started spinning out the new Smart Metal
^TM
frigates, they were coating them with doped crystals that could handle hits from powerful laser weapons.

Thus, twenty-four Earth-built frigates joined Kris’s command with their hides gleaming like diamonds.

That was the other aspect of Smart Metal
^TM
: Your ship didn’t have to stay the same, day in and day out. If there was no threat, you could set Condition Able and turn your warship into a nice, comfortable place to live. When you needed to do some fighting, you set Condition Zed and shrank your “love boat” down into something small, hard to hit, and deadly.

In the case of Admiral Yi’s ships, it took a bit longer to rearrange the light-stopping crystals, but it was worth it.

Kris had reorganized her fleets around the new ships, their armor, and their 22-inch lasers. She would have preferred assigning one of the Earth squadrons to each of her three fleets. Instead, she’d let Vice Admiral Yi on the
George Washington
keep two of his new squadrons. The combat-experienced Rear Admiral Bethea led the big cats of BatRon 4 from her flag on the
Lion
. Untested Commodore Michelsen commanded the Scanda Confederacy’s BatRon 6 from his flag, the
Odin
.

Kris led the First Fleet. To Commodore Cochrane’s borrowed Earth squadron with their 22-inch lasers and innovative armor, Kris had added BatRon 8’s Sharp Ones commanded by Admiral L’Estock on
Battleax
.

Admiral Hawkings on
Renown
had BatRon 2, but his task force was missing BatRon 1. In place of it, Kris had borrowed the inexperienced but big-gunned frigates of Yamato’s BatRon 9 under Commodore Zingi on the
Mikasa
. That gave Kris twenty-four of the new 22-inch-gunned war wagons and eight of the 20-inch frigates. They had seemed huge just a few months ago.

Yi’s four squadrons were evenly divided between frigates armed with 22-inch and 20-inch lasers. Kris expected no problem from that.

Admiral Kris Longknife glanced around her flag bridge.
On any other day it would be her day quarters, but today it was a battle station for her and her key staff.

Her desk had moved itself back against the wall, leaving more room for a conference table. Around it sat Kris’s staff. Beside Jack was Commander Penny Lien-Pasley, her intelligence officer. At her elbow was Iizuka Masao, Musashi Navy Intelligence, and, hopefully, more to Penny. Between the two of them they knew everything there was to know about the alien space raiders.

Unfortunately, that was way too little.

Also around Kris’s command table was Jacques la Duke who had done the workup on the alien psychology. He’d also spent a rough week living among them . . . and lived to tell of it. His wife, Amanda Kutter, Kris’s chief economist, wasn’t needed for this battle, but she was there at his elbow.

“Alwa’s economy will do fine without me, assuming a poor crop next month doesn’t throw the whole mess into famine,” Amanda had told Kris, and stalked aboard the
Princess Royal
right behind Jacques.

Kris had shrugged; she wasn’t letting Jack out of her sight any more than she had to. She was in no position to lecture another woman.

Also added to Kris’s key staff was Admiral Furzah of Sasquan. A six-foot-tall talking cat, she had all the loving nature of the felines of Earth, which was to say she was as bloodthirsty as they came. Back on her home world, she’d commanded atomic weapons and used them on her country’s enemies.

Kris shivered to think of such ferocity. She was none too sure how much she wanted these cats loose in space, but the admiral had more combat experience than most aboard the
Princess Royal
, and her knowledge of her people’s battle lore was only matched by Nelly’s computer memory of man’s inhumanity to man.

Kris hoped this team would help her make the best of the coming fight.

Kris’s staff had expanded beyond those present. John Longfeather, an Alwan Rooster, had joined Kris for logistics. He’d been with the humans since he’d walked into town as little more than a chick and demanded to learn what they knew. He’d
been headed for Granny Rita’s government until Kris mentioned her need for admin help, and the old commodore smiled. “Have I got a Rooster for you.”

Kris’s new chief of personnel was also an Alwan, though she was an Ostrich, Betty Strongleg. She’d helped organize Ostriches for Defense before the last attack and also came with Granny Rita’s approval.

Kris was an admiral now, commanding three fleets, and her staff was bound to grow. Those two, however, were doing their work back on Cannopus Station, far from this fight.

Kris eyed the screens lining the walls of her flag bridge. They showed the readiness of her fleet and what was happening in the target system.

Four squadrons of frigates swung at anchor in matching pairs a good seventy thousand klicks back from the jump point. The frigates were big and deadly, but it was the armored merchant cruiser
Mary Ellen Carter
that held pride of place at the moment.

The
Carter
was right up at the jump point, drifting in space, and projecting probes through the jump that let Kris know what was happening on the other side. The
Carter
’s crew were all volunteers. They’d be the first to know, and maybe the first to go, when things got interesting.

The feed from the
Carter
showed things that Admiral Kris Longknife did not like. Maybe her stomach knew what it was doing when it threw up her toenails.

Yi was not following her battle plan.

There were three jump points in that system. One Yi had just brought his fleet through. The second Kris guarded and expected the hostiles to flee through . . . and right into her waiting arms.

And, as luck would always have it, there was a third. That jump was way over on the other side of the system. Still, if Yi gave the alien space raiders half a chance, they might decide for the running fight. They outnumbered Yi’s thirty-two ships by five to one with massive four- to five-hundred-thousand-ton ships, not to mention a monstrous base ship the size of a moon.