Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (19 page)

“As Captain Drago can attest, this is not the first planet where someone has taken a shot at me.”

“So very not the first,” the captain muttered under his breath, for all to hear.

The tension in the room softened as they enjoyed a chuckle.

Kris waited for the chuckle to run its course. “I have been told that you can’t get milk from a cow if you don’t feed it. I’ve also thought that it would be nice if we had more cows. Lurking in the background, of course, is a rather murderous bunch of aliens who can’t wait to serve the cow up for steaks.”

Now Kris got her own dry chuckle from the room.

“So, if no one has more metaphors, shall we discuss our challenges? Ada, would you like to start?”

“You could have at least warned me I’d be first on the hot seat,” Ada said, taking a deep breath. “We’ve known for a long time that some of the older Roosters don’t like what our Viceroy is doing. We’ve put up with their obstruction, and it’s gotten worse. Was the shooter some Rooster of the old line? Possibly. Are some of the colonials worked to the bone and wishing for a day off? No question about that. Me, I’d love to let off a bit of steam. I’m really looking forward to one hell of a harvest festival with plenty of beer.”

She paused. “But all the problems aren’t down here. That Commander Sampson managed to talk a crew into hijacking a freighter and making a run for it. I’m told that someone sabotaged your birth control. It seems to be that we’ve got a whole lot of problems. Are they each different and need to be solved differently? I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m glad you’re finally getting all this out in the open.”

Ada leaned back in her chair, her piece said.

“Kris, are we looking at reducing our readiness?” Admiral Kitano said, jumping in.

“We’re examining our posture,” Kris said. “Can we maintain the present level of effort for the long haul? Could we get something better if we did something different? Is this a zero-sum game, or can we get more cows so we don’t have to demand so much from the one we have? No, Amber, I’m not saying we reduce our readiness. We have to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice. My question is this. Can we get more if we take a longer perspective? How much would a long haul cost us in the short haul?”

“I could be wrong here,” Pipra said, “but don’t you have to quit milking a cow if you want to breed it. And while it’s got a calf, don’t you have to let it at the milk. Course, once the calf is weaned you can go back to milking the cow and then, once the calf is big enough to have a calf of her own, you got two to milk.”

“Your point is well taken, even if that’s not how it works,” Kris said, “and no, Nelly, I don’t want to know how dairy farming works.”

“But I could tell you,” Nelly said, with a sparkle in her nonexistent eye.

“She has a point,” Admiral Benson said. “We could divert production from the fabricators, mills, and foundries on the moon to making more fabs, mills, and the likes. Then we’d have double the production.”

“Assuming I could find double the workforce,” Pipra pointed out.

“I’ve found Ostriches and Roosters who can work well in my yards,” Admiral Benson put in.

“There are Roosters who have been with us for three generations down here,” Ada added. “They’re providing technical support to your scientists. I think a couple have qualified for copilot slots on their aircraft. They
want
to pitch in more. They’re the third generation working with us, and I find it hard to tell them from humans in many ways.”

The three Roosters sitting at Ada’s tables ducked their heads. Kris wasn’t sure if that was agreement, embarrassment, or “Hell yes, we’re as good as any human.” Kris suspected it was time to find out.

“Okay,” Pipra said. “I’ve heard this and that about this meeting, but I still don’t know why we’re here. Admiral, Viceroy, whatever, what do you want from us?”

“Pipra, you’re a civilian, call me Kris,” Kris said, then took a deep breath. “We can argue philosophy until we’re blue in the face. What matters is what comes out of the fabricators on the moon. I want to know what that looks like depending on which option I pick. How many guns would we get on a policy that maximizes butter? Do we have enough of a market for all that butter? What does it cost in guns and butter if we get the cow pregnant with a new fabricator? Two, three new fabricators? Do we need new reactors? The Alwans want things. What could we offer to the Sailors and Marines, fab workers and asteroid miners that would make them happier to be here and maybe more productive workers? And yes,” Kris growled, “in the end, I always come back to more production. That’s just the way it is. Okay?”

Pipra lit up with a huge smile. “Then I think we all want to hear from Abby,” she said, and swept her hand around to the woman at her right elbow.

30

Kris
found herself grinning as she eyed her former maid. They’d come a long way from the afternoon Kris found Abby standing on the stairs of Nuu House, newly hired by Kris’s mother. And fired by Kris three times in the first hour of their acquaintance.

That was one of those fond moments that changed Kris’s life.

Though it had taken a while to become apparent.

“As some of you know,” Abby began, “I’ve spent too damn much of my life around one of those damn Longknifes.”

That got a laugh.

“I knew this moment was coming, knowing what I know of Kris Longknife, and I’ve been putting all my spare time, what this young woman beside me allows, on just this issue of options. I have a spectrum of options ready for your review.”

The view of the sunset vanished, to be replaced by three sets of charts: red, yellow, and green.

“Red maximizes defense. Yellow maximizes consumer goods. Green grows our industrial base. I think I got the color scheme easy to remember.”

That got nods. Abby might have gotten more, but most folks were craning around to get a better view of the charts.

“Now, before you all go yapping about all the leftovers hanging out of each of the three options, I know none of these three is the best way to go. All have a lot of unused resources hanging fire. The real issue isn’t guns, butter, or growth, but the balance between the three that uses as much as we can produce.”

Kris squeezed her eyes closed.
I used this woman to wash my hair!

And to keep my sorry ass in one piece more times than I want to admit,
another part of her pointed out.

Kris opened her eyes to see the charts spreading apart on the screens. An orange chart formed between the yellow and green. A turquoise one sprouted between the green and yellow. Both of these two compromises went long and used finer print. A few of the folks in chairs against the walls stood to get a better look.

“When you balance any two against each other, you get a better use of resources.”

“Mata, show them the seventh seal, I mean seventh option.”

“Yes, Madame,” Abby’s computer said, and the six charts spread out to make room for a black one in the middle. It filled about a third of the screen space, even with tiny print.

“This is by no means a final plan,” Abby said. “It’s got too many places where some experts need to look them over and make a good, solid, human call. No offense meant to Nelly or her kids without whom this whole exercise would have taken years and probably not been finished in our lifetimes, right, Mata?”

“So true, Abby.”

“You didn’t pull this out of a steamer trunk, did you?” Kris asked Abby.

“I pulled this out of my own little head, Baby Ducks, my head and a lot of time from Nelly’s kids.”

“And you didn’t tell me, Nelly?” Kris said.

“You weren’t asking. I didn’t know that you humans would ever ask. We had time on our hands, and it was a fun exercise in iterative planning,” was Nelly’s answer.

Kris chose silence as the better part of valor.

Now people were crowding around the walls, studying the options. Dirtside, Ada must have had some screen available because her people were now crowding around something off to the right.

“Let me see if I can do this,” Nelly said. You could almost see her tongue working as she attempted something.

“What kind of ‘this’ are you up to?” Kris asked.

“Well, I can make clear Smart Metal.” Suddenly, the top of all the tables turned into what looked like a centimeter of clear glass.

“Now if I can do this,” Nelly said, and numbers and words appeared etched in the glass. In a blink, the etchings filled in with black, duplicating the black option on the screens.

“That wasn’t so hard,” Nelly said.

“But on the screen, people can move things around,” Mimzy said at Penny’s collarbone. “What if they want to change a column? Move it over?”

And a column of numbers on the table changed and moved over to the next apparent page.

“But what if I want to change my options?” Kris said. “For example, what if I want to double Slow Light Crystals production to armor the ships I’ve got?”

On the table, the production of Slow Light Armor doubled, and that immediately worked back through the production figures and forward to show the yards taking on more work.

“Very good,” Kris said.

“Only if every table has one of my kids working it,” Nelly said, with a distinct sniff.

“So Abby hangs around her table, and Penny goes over to the Navy side,” Kris said. “And you, Nelly, stay with me.”

In a moment, each of the tables became a work in progress.

“I hope someone’s saving all of these options and changes somewhere,” Captain Drago said, coming up on Kris’s elbow.

“You’re grumpy as ever when you see computers doing good,” Kris said.

“I just don’t want them doing all this good and it getting lost when someone sneezes.”

“We’re backing all this up,” Nelly said. “We’ll want you humans to look at some of our assumptions. For example, when we flowed extra crystal armor through the system, we made assumptions about how much time the yards need to coat a frigate with the stuff. That alone is a major process. I think our estimate is within ten percent of actual, but until a yard has done its own estimate, it’s a . . . what do you call it?”

“Guesstimate,” Admiral Benson said, coming up on Kris’s other side.

“I know, but I wanted to emphasize it. It’s just a guess until you do the full estimation job,” Nelly said.

“Hmm,” Benson said. “Now, about that armor and our
workload, Admiral. We’ve got more work than you’ve been led to believe.”

“Admiral, it’s been a really bad day,” Kris warned. “Please don’t make it worse.”

“Sorry, but here it comes. That armor the Earth yards slapped on their frigates. It ain’t nearly as good as advertised.”

“No surprise there, I saw three ships that thought they were invincible blown out of space. What’s the problem?”

“What is it ever? Poor quality control. The front of that armor is level. Mirror flat. The back of the armor, not nearly so much. It seems that the crystal filaments they made don’t grow exactly to ten centimeters. They vary from 98 to 102 millimeters. It’s the mess behind the armor that transmitted heat directly into the ship’s skin.”

“So that’s what killed them,” Drago said.

“In spades. Our fabricators have better quality control than Earth’s. Our actual filaments are anywhere from 99 to 101 millimeters, give or take a few nanometers, if you follow my meaning. We’ll have all the armor for one ship use one length filament. Another use another selected batch.”

“So one ship may have 99 millimeters, another 101,” Kris said.

“Something like that. We’ve still got the problem of bolting the armor onto the hull. I’m really thinking of nuts and bolts as much as it hurts me to use technology that ancient.” Benson’s face actually looked pained.

“We need something,” Kris said. “One of the Earth ships in my BatRon 12 was sloughing off its armor at high-gee acceleration. We can’t have that.”

Pipra came up now on Captain Drago’s blind side. “I hate to tear my CEO away from such fun discussions of how to blow shit up, but I need her thoughts on how to grow more fabs this year so she can have more fun stuff to blow shit up with next year.”

“Just a second, Pipra. Admiral Benson, is there any chance you could sort out the Earth crystals and standardize the length of the filaments?” Kris asked.

He was shaking his head before she finished. “The stuff is fused together. No way can we separate it.”

“So, we figure out a way to cool the hull behind the armor and try to keep the Earth ships out of any really hot spots,” Kris said, dryly.

“It looks that way.”

“I’d love to be there when you tell Admiral Yi about his little problem,” Kris said.

“You want me to save you a seat for the show?” Benson asked.

“Yes, but no thanks. I have too much business to allow me that pleasure. Now, Pipra, what do you have in mind?”

“I need workers. Despite what some people think, nothing gets made without workers supervising the fabs. Don’t walk away, Admiral Benson,” she said, reaching across Captain Drago and Kris to nab the admiral’s elbow. “You said you had some Roosters and maybe even some Ostriches who might be good with machinery.”

“Yes, for my sins, I did let that slip out,” the admiral allowed.

“Well, some of my folks want to take the Ostriches up on the land grants they talked about giving us humans if we’d just settle in their areas. I don’t know why they want us. Maybe they think that just being close to us, the Roosters have somehow gained on them. Anyway, I got folks who would love to settle some of those 144-hectare land grants, but they’re all working their asses off, twelve hours a day, six days out of seven. You know what I mean.”

Kris allowed that she did.

“Heaven knows why everyone wants land, but folks do. At least a lot of my assembly-line folks dream of having their own farm or something. So . . .”

“You want those land grants,” Kris said.

“Oh yeah, but that’s just the first part. Folks need time to live on that land. They need homes. I don’t know if manufactured homes are good enough for them, but even those involve a lot of stuff. To tell you the truth, this has all just been a lot of dreaming about castles in the air, so I don’t really know what they’d need to make a go of it.”