Kris Longknife: Defender (25 page)

Kris
Longknife breathed a sigh when the word came back from Jack that he’d found Phil. But she kept her eyes on the reports flowing back from the wreck of the
Hornet
.

Phil had fought her until she was fit for space no more. Kris thought the old
Wasp
was a wreck when they got her back to human space, but the
Hornet
was little more than a lump of metal with a bit of oxygen and pressure here and there.

If the reports coming up from engineering were right, however, both of the
Hornet
’s reactors were in decent shape. Not something you’d want to power up and ride home, but still worth saving.

The same was true of the forward 24-inch pulse lasers. They hadn’t been hit although the power lines to two were shot away somewhere amidships. Still, with some refurbishment, they would shoot again.

The computers had been destroyed with thermite charges.

The problem was, of course, how to get what could be salvaged back to Alwa.

Kris called Captain Drago in. He called in a half dozen of his ship maintainers. Together, under Kris’s unbending pressure, they put their heads together and began to solve Kris’s problem.

“You want us to swallow two huge chunks of that hulk, then kind of trash compact the rest of the wreckage, and swallow it into the
Wasp
as well!” This incredulous three-part harmony showed a certain lack of commitment to meeting Kris’s objectives. However, being a Longknife, Kris didn’t allow that to slow her down. Patiently, she explained again that she needed all that wreckage back in orbit above Alwa. That was her first guess as to how to do it. “Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, forget the whole thing,” the chief engineer grumbled.

“Our princess rarely does that,” Drago said. “Now, how do we move that wreck?”

Later that day, the
Wasp
pulled in closer to the
Hornet
. Then she began to very carefully apply her new 20-inch lasers to slicing certain portions of the hulk off the rest. First, the engines were cut away, then the reactors and the delicate instruments that made them work were sliced off. While the pinnace rounded up those stray parts before they wandered off, the
Wasp
turned her attention to the bow and its pulse lasers. Once they were free of the rest, the
Wasp
began dicing the hull into more digestible chunks.

“I don’t mind having the pinnace kind of engulf the reactors and lasers,” Captain Drago muttered to Kris. “It’s the idea of using part of my beautiful ship as a trash compactor to squish the rest of the
Hornet
into a nice compact box that worries me.”

“If the Smart Metal of the
Wasp
protests too much,” Kris said, trying to sound perfectly reasonable as she laid a charge on her flag captain that had never been ordered before, “we’ll call it quits. We can start with the rocket engines. They’re big and hollow. They ought to collapse easily.”

The young lieutenant on defense looked pale as he programmed his hull material to spread out, then squeeze together . . . with huge rocket motors in between. The moaning of the motors . . . or the hull . . . or both, rang through the
Wasp
.

However, both reports from the ship’s skin and eyeball assessments from Sailors on the outside said that the process went surprisingly smooth. The pinnace, with the lasers and reactors kind of lashed to one side, used the other side to nudge wreckage toward the
Wasp
.

Together, they made it happen.

When they were done and the
Wasp
’s pinnace was merging back in, there were a lot of bumps and bulges on the
Wasp
, enough to move her captain almost to tears.

“Almost to tears doesn’t count,” Kris said, scolding him good-naturedly.

“But my beautiful ship!”

“Will be beautiful once more as soon as we get this junk back to Alwa.”

Captain Drago didn’t look all that convinced.

Longboats were coming back as Kris finished her housekeeping chores, so she drifted down to the docking bay. She thought by now that she’d seen it all. Still, the shock of the starved Sailors had her kicking herself for not launching her search sooner. She thought of all the time she’d wasted while this poor crew was having their guts torn apart by poison, and wished some people, like Grampa Ray and Admiral Crossenshield, could see what she saw.

Politicians who called the tunes should have to physically face the price good men and women paid for their shenanigans. Kris swore if she ever found herself in their place, a risk all Longknifes ran, that she’d remember these faces when she was calling the shots.

Then Jack arrived, drifting along with a stretcher. He waved Kris toward him, and she shoved herself away from the bulkhead and floated in his direction.

“Kris,” Jack said, “Phil Taussig wants to thank you, personally.”

Kris looked down on a man whose face she couldn’t recognize. It wasn’t just the bush of hair and beard or the gaunt, sunken eyes. There was nothing here of the ready smile or the confident commander that she’d known. Kris wondered if that man could ever reinhabit this broken body.

“Thank you, Kris. I knew you’d come for us. I knew you wouldn’t desert us. Thank you,” Phil gushed, with tears running down his face. The water and glucose bags above his head had 3 written on them in grease pencil. She suspected that the poor man could cry only because they’d pumped six liters of liquid into him.

“I came as soon as I could,” Kris told him, taking his hand. “Now, you rest. We’ll be heading back to Alwa as soon as we can.”

“Alwa?”

“Yes. The planet we saved. It also has a human colony on it that we didn’t know about when we fought off the invaders. I found my great-grandma Rita Longknife.” She’d explain the full family dysfunction later.

“We saved the planet. They didn’t wipe it out.” Now Phil really was crying, though these were tears of joy. “Crew.” Phil managed to raise his voice. “We saved the planet.”

Around the landing bay, people strapped to stretchers muttered as much joy as their broken bodies could express.

“Then it was all worth it,” Phil whispered as he sank into a stupor.

“How bad?” Kris asked in a whisper to Jack.

“We won’t know for a while. We think it’s all heavy metal poisoning, but there may be other things as well. They’re creating an isolation sick ward just off the landing bay. As soon as we get them all moved in, we’ll douse down the bay and our suits to kill anything we can. You do realize you may be contaminated?”

“Why didn’t somebody hand me a moon suit?” Kris wasn’t the only person in the landing bay protected by nothing more than the cotton in their shipsuit.

“I guess the message didn’t get across. Sorry about that.”

“So we set up quarantine for us, too,” Kris grumbled.

“We’ll see how long it takes,” Jack said. Inside his faceplate, he didn’t look any happier about having Kris on one side of quarantine and him on the other.

Fortunately, the docs did blood cultures and took samples of the mud on the Marines’ boots and found nothing that looked dangerous to humans. The heavy-metal contamination seemed to be the only problem.

Twelve hours later, Kris was out of quarantine. Which was a good thing, since half an hour later, an alien ship jumped into the system.

Kris
and Jack had hardly had time to finish a quick shower when the Klaxon went off. “Battle stations, battle stations. All hands to battle stations.”

They hastily dressed. Abby must have taken up mind reading, because a set of Jack’s khakis was laid out beside Kris’s blue shipsuit. Done, they shot from Kris’s day cabin onto the bridge.

“What’s the situation?” Kris asked in her commodore voice.

“An alien ship just jumped in using a jump we haven’t used,” Captain Drago reported. “It’s about six hours out, assuming it holds to their usual two gees and flips at midpoint.”

“Have they spotted us?”

“We are not squawking, but our reactors are online, and our lasers are charged.”

“Then we can assume they know we’re here and will be coming to visit,” Kris concluded.

“We could try to run for the other jump,” the captain offered.

“Has the navigator plotted a course?” One showed up on the main screen.

“If they hold to their usual two to 2.5-gee acceleration, and we go at 3.5, we should just make it to the jump before they get in range,” the navigator reported.

“Can we make 3.5 gees in our present condition?” Kris asked.

“Condition?” Jack echoed.

“The
Wasp
is pregnant with the
Hornet
,” Kris said.

“I was wondering where the
Hornet
went and why the
Wasp
has all these bumps and lumps,” Jack said.

“You didn’t think I’d abandon two perfectly good reactors, did you?”

Captain Drago cleared his throat. “We can’t make over 2.5 gees in our present state. We’ll need to drop our load to show them our heels in a run.”

Kris mulled that. “Has any other ship jumped in?”

“None so far, but remember, we’re only getting our information from that jump point at the speed of light, so it’s been a while.”

“Captain Drago, will you please join me in my quarters,” Kris said, and wheeling herself in microgravity, pushed off the closest station and launched herself for the door to her day quarters. Captain Drago did not look happy, but he followed her, Jack right behind him.

“You don’t intend to fight, do you?” the captain demanded, as soon as Jack closed the door behind them.

“There is only one ship.”

“Maybe. That could change any second.”

“We have the 20-inch lasers. We should outrange them.”

“We suspect that. We don’t know for sure,” Captain Drago shot back.

“We’ll need to find out the answer to that sooner or later. Why not now?”

“My ship is loaded down with a wreck and my sick bay full of barely alive survivors. Do you really want a fight just now?”

“We’ve never had a one-on-one fight with one, not since the first fight. Admittedly, this is probably one of those four- or five-hundred-thousand-tonners the aliens are so fond of. Still, it’s even odds. I’d like to take this one alive, or at least separate it from its reactors enough that it isn’t blown to gas.”

Captain Drago didn’t fire back a response to that but settled down at Kris’s staff table. “Know your enemy, huh?”

Kris nodded. “Have we had a better chance? They think they’re coming in on a badly damaged hulk. Likely, they intend to board it for intelligence. Maybe they even think they can capture the crew.”

“They’re looking for one ship,” Jack said, settling into the chair across from the captain. “They only found one.”

“Yes, but we’ve got our lasers charged and our reactors online,” the captain pointed out.

“So maybe they won’t be all surprised,” Kris agreed, “but if our 20-inch lasers
can
outrange them, we could do damage to their lasers while
we
run away and keep the range where we want it.”

“Assuming they can’t do more than two gees,” Drago said. “Remember, the 20-inchers are our surprise. What kind of surprise do they have up their sleeves?”

“We can always dump the
Hornet
and run faster,” Kris said. She’d hate to do that, but if needs must, she would.

“I’m disliking this idea of yours, Your Highness, a bit less than most,” Captain Drago said slowly. “But I have a few sneaky tricks we can add to your pot.”

For the next half hour they laid their plans. For the next half hour, no reports came into Kris’s quarters of a second ship. As it began to look like they might, indeed, have their first ever even fight, a grin slowly spread on the captain’s face.

“Yes, we might just have the souvenir Professor Labao would just love to field-strip. Your Highness, would you care to take Weapons again, just for old times’ sake?”

“Why, I don’t mind if I do,” Kris said, sounding less like her commodore self and more like her old self.

Together, they headed back to the bridge.

The
alien did have a few new tricks up its sleeve. A bit before the halfway point, it flipped ship and began to decelerate. The navigator plotted the course. It showed the alien warship coming to a dead stop in space a good five hundred thousand kilometers short of orbiting the planet.

“You can’t park a ship there,” Jack observed.

“I doubt they intend to,” Captain Drago said, rubbing his chin. “However, with less energy on their ship, they can choose how they’ll close with us. I doubt they intend to give us a shot at their vulnerable stern.”

“Yes,” Kris said. “They’ll come at us headfirst, with lasers blasting. Does this change anything for you, Captain?”

“Not at all. I don’t think our plan requires them to be as dumb as usual.”

The
Wasp
continued its predictable path in orbit. They did drop off probes to keep an eye on the alien when they were on the other side of the planet, and relays to keep them in the loop. At a million klicks out, the alien began to adjust its deceleration.

“She’s aiming to arrive just as we’re coming around the planet,” Captain Drago reported. “That will cause a problem. No way do I want to let them have a whole half orbit to shoot at us.”

The plan Kris and the captain had hatched depended on their ducking behind the planet right after they got their first shots off. Being stuck in an orbit that kept them in the alien’s crosshairs for an hour was not healthy for them.

As they vanished behind the planet for the second-to-last orbit before the battle started, the
Wasp
flipped, applied a retro burn, and dove toward the planet. As they did, they went to a modified Condition Zed, collapsing all the space not needed for battle and sending the Smart Metal
TM
off to the ship’s sides to be honeycombed with near-frozen reaction mass.

The
Wasp
was going to war.

“Now, we’ll see how he likes that surprise,” Captain Drago said, a tight grin on his lips.

Forty minutes later, they were looping out
toward
the alien ship. It was still braking. Suddenly, it went to a full 2.5 gees deceleration that appreciably slowed its approach.

“You don’t like that, do you fellow?” Kris said as she used optics to range the alien. “You thought all the moves were yours. Didn’t expect us to make one, did you?” A plot on the main screen showed their orbit beginning to fall back some two hundred thousand miles short of the present predicted point of meeting the alien.

“Now,” Captain Drago muttered, leaning forward in his command chair, “how will you take to us eliminating our final orbit? Will you charge us or choose to trail us. Your move, bastard.”

The alien began to cut back on his deceleration, gradually dropping from 2.5 gees down to 1.5.

“He’s going to come up on our rear,” Kris said. Normally that would be a smart fighting move. They’d have first shot at the
Wasp
’s vulnerable jets and reactors.

Assuming the
Wasp
kept her rear pointed that way.

The
Wasp
reached the apogee of its orbit and began to fall back toward the planet, picking up speed as she went. The alien was still decelerating, but closing the distance on the
Wasp
that, having once applied thrust, seemed just as dead in space as it had before.

Of course, the alien’s sensors must have told him the
Wasp
’s lasers were charged and ready. But with the
Wasp
’s reactors at minimum power, the alien might assume their intended victim had one shot left and could not reload.

What were they guessing? Were they guessing any better than Kris? In a few more minutes, whoever survived the coming battle would know who had guessed right.

Whoever guessed wrong would be dead.

The alien was coming up on 150,000 klicks, and closing. The
Wasp
was falling back faster and faster toward the planet. If no power was applied, she’d graze the atmosphere of the planet, 150 klicks up. Would the aliens follow them or go higher, cutting down on the time they could keep the
Wasp
in their sights?

Then, suddenly, the alien flipped ship and presented its bow, bristling with lasers.

Surprise, surprise. Well, Kris had her own surprise ready.

“Flip ship,” Kris ordered as the alien crossed to within 120,000 klicks. Theory said the 20-inch lasers could do damage at that range and the alien lasers would still be out of range of the
Wasp
.

Kris fired Laser 1. It reached out, hit, and the alien ship became a blur.

“What the heck?” Captain Drago growled.

“Rock, sir,” Senior Chief Beni, ret., reported from Sensors. “Our lasers are hitting pumice. Volcanic rock. They’ve coated their bow with blocks of rock, sir, for armor.”

“Sneaky little bastards learned a lesson,” Kris said, as she fired Lasers 2 and 3 while beginning to recharge 1. The target shed more dust but seemed otherwise unaffected by the hits.

Kris switched to Lasers 4 and 5 and added the other two empty lasers to her recharge list.

More dust.

Laser 6 stirred more dust, then suddenly there was a flare, and something blew up.

“Maybe they needed more armor than they put on,” Kris said. “Flip ship again.” The
Wasp
turned its vulnerable stern to the alien. But the
Wasp
’s stern had four stingers. Now Kris fired all four of them at once, carefully aiming them for different sections of the bulbous alien bow filling her sights.

These sparked explosions as alien lasers and rockets blew up.

As soon as the lasers were exhausted, Kris put them in line to recharge.

“Flip ship, begin retrofire on my mark,” Captain Drago ordered. The burn would be short and carefully calculated. Instead of blazing past the planet below, the
Wasp
would risk the heat of the upper atmosphere, shooting through it at 110 klicks altitude.

It was going to get hot.

Behind them, the alien had again flipped ship and slammed on 2.5 gees deceleration, aiming to make orbit right behind the
Wasp
, where her lasers could overwhelm and destroy the human ship. But the huge alien ship dared not follow the
Wasp
, now tiny and tight, its outer hull cooled by its own reaction mass.

The alien reduced its deceleration and fell behind, disappearing below the horizon.

Kris watched as the lasers slowly reloaded. Second after slow second ticked by. Laser 1 showed fully charged after thirteen seconds. The other forward lasers took a full fifteen. This was the price of putting six 20-inch lasers on the bow of a ship whose power plant was designed for four 18-inchers. As the forward battery finished charging, the aft battery began to suck up the electricity. It was twenty-two seconds before all ten of the
Wasp
’s lasers showed red again.

For the moment, it didn’t matter. The
Wasp
was diving down, hastened by gravity, slowed by friction. Exactly what its speed would be coming out of this orbit change was anybody’s guess.

Where the alien would be was also a guess. How close would it follow? If it risked following them too close, what would the atmosphere do to his damaged bow? Questions piled up, but with ionized atmosphere blanketing the few sensors that the
Wasp
risked using, there were no answers in sight.

They blazed their way across the night of the planet below. Did the monsters look up and wonder at what the strange lights were in the sky? Would they care?

The outer hull of the
Wasp
heated up. Defense thickened the bow, changing the depth of the honeycombed armor from one to two, then three meters. The firing ports of the lasers were covered over.

Isn’t this new and fancier Smart Metal fantastic?

They vented cool reaction mass from the bow. It boiled away but protected the surface beneath.

The
Wasp
shot out into deeper space, and the hull began to cool. Quickly, they deployed their sensors, visuals, radar, and lasers.

There was the alien, right behind them. Its bow glowed red. Flaming chunks of it fell away. The alien captain had risked the low pass.

Kris could only wonder what price his crew paid for his desperate effort, but it was paying off for her. The alien was closing fast on a hundred thousand klicks.

“Prepare to flip ship,” Captain Drago ordered, ready for the
Wasp
to charge the alien.

But Kris was busy using the four aft lasers while she still had them aimed at the target. Short, split-second bursts speared at the already flaming ship, first here, then there. Explosion followed on explosion.

N
ELLY, ANALYZE THE ENEMY BOW.
I
S THERE ANYPLACE NOT BURNING?
A
NY LASER POD NOT HIT
.

Nelly took the controls and applied the last two short bursts from each laser. Then she got out an even shorter burst. The reactors had already started to recharge them, and Nelly got every little bit available.

“If there’s anything alive and shooting in that hell, I can’t make it out,” Kris’s computer reported, as the lasers went silent and the reloading began.

The alien was staggered by the hits. Its acceleration out from the low pass faltered, coming not in a steady curve but with stutters and spurts. It was hurt.

“Flip ship,” Captain Drago ordered. Still at 3.5 gees acceleration, the
Wasp
turned to charge the alien. With any luck, it was blind, its sensors burned out.

Not quite, nor was the damage as complete as Kris had wished. First one, then several lasers reached out from the ruined bow to try to catch the
Wasp
. Most failed, their fire control unable to track the charging human ship, which now went into one of Nelly’s jinking patterns.

There were still enough lasers left in the mangled bow to crisscross the space the
Wasp
must pass through. Two connected. The
Wasp
rang with hits.

But the
Wasp
was committed to a course that crossed above the alien, pinning it between the planet below and the
Wasp
’s forward batteries. As they flashed by, Kris swung the bow of the
Wasp
to bear. Four lasers reached out to slice through the stern of the alien, separating its rockets obliquely from the ship it had powered. The engineering spaces with the reactors slid off, diving planetward, while they drove the rest of the alien ship into a spin as they left.

Kris had other targets to roast and took them under fire with the last two forward lasers. Two reactors showed along the central core of the ship. Those powered the forward batteries of lasers. If allowed to go critical, they’d blow the forward section to atoms.

Nelly had gotten the locations of those two reactors from Senior Chief Beni’s sensors. Now, as Kris sliced the aft reactors off, Nelly took a stab at disabling the amidships reactors.

It might work. It might not. Kris had explained to her computer beforehand that no one had ever succeeded in disabling a reactor. They had no idea where the controls were or what would vent the plasma directly to space without taking the rest of the ship with it.

Nelly had seemed to understand that this was not something she could approach with any hope of precision. Still, the computer had accepted the assignment. Now playing staccato notes on the two last lasers like musical instruments, she poked blasts of coherent light at the area around the reactors for fractions of a second.

First, she jabbed at where the forward reactors’ controls might be. Next, she slid her stabs aft, sending a few through the heart of the plasma. That might open up vents to either side for the superhot demons to flee through. Nelly aimed her final thrusts at the possible control spaces aft of the reactor.

Flaming plasma spewed from the sides of the alien ship, sending it spinning. Even in their death throes, amidship lasers tried to light up the
Wasp
. The wild gyrations of their ship made it impossible to aim, however, and their power quickly bled away.

The alien ship corkscrewed away from the planet, leaving Kris to breathe a sigh of relief. It was headed for a high apogee. They’d have time to correct its wild flight before it went crashing into the planet below.

The stern, with the four reactors, however, did dive into the atmosphere, glowing hot with entry burns before burying itself in a muddy plain and turning it into a blistering inferno.

Maybe the monsters below should have kept a better eye on the monsters above.

“Flipping ship,” Captain Drago ordered, then applied deceleration to cancel out their own dive into heated death.

“Your Highness, I hope you’re happy,” Captain Drago muttered, “because I sincerely never want to do that again.”

“Now that we’ve caught it,” Jack said, from his high-gee station beside Kris, “what do we do with it?”

“Didn’t you ever have a puppy follow you home, Jack? Now we entice it to follow us.”

“Remind me to quit asking dumb questions around you.”

“I don’t think that’s my duty as either your commodore or your wife.”

“I’ll have my computer remind me instead,” Jack said with a good Irish sigh.