Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) (6 page)

Two
days later, the
Wasp
led out the
Intrepid
,
Constellation
,
Congress
,
Royal
,
Bulwark
, and
Hornet
, now with some of the old
Hornet
’s crew recovered and aboard. The
Endeavor
brought up the rear, loaded with plenty of low-tech jump-point buoys.

The
Wasp
itself carried some low tech of her own. The moon factories had knocked together several drones from aluminum, ancient carbon fiber, and simple computer-chip technology. It had taken an extra day, but now they had them for surveys when they didn’t want to risk Smart Metal
TM
.

The low-tech gear would be left on the dead alien planet. Some might be left on what everyone called the alien home world though solid proof was still needed. Just ask any of the 250 scientists aboard each of the eight ships.

“Prove it. Prove it. No guessing allowed,” was their mantra.

None of the low-tech gear would be abandoned in place on the battered world. They planned to collect it all in one location and laser it from orbit. Someone following them might know there was a new burn spot on the planet, but what was incinerated there would tell them nothing.

On the putative alien home world, they’d crash them into the deepest abyss of its oceans and dare anyone to find them.

They were coming to see, not be seen.

The trip was fast. They accelerated at two gees and took the jumps fast and with high RPMs on the ships. They covered thousands of light-years on their long jumps. They followed the
Endeavor
course as it raced back with the news of its discovery. On the way out, they kept their eyes peeled but saw not so much as the hair on the back of one alien head.

Kris liked it that way.

Once they arrived at the system with the battered planet, the surprises came fast and plentiful.

Professor Labao, who would likely never return from his sabbatical from the University of Brazilia, and most certainly not on time, presented Kris with some requests from the expedition’s scientists before they’d been in system two hours.

“Our observations of the subject planet shows that its surface has been heavily bombarded. As yet, we are not prepared to say by what. However, we would like to have some samples taken from the asteroid belt so that we can identify the exact makeup of rocks from there and compare it to what we find on the bombardment sites. Could you detach a ship to do that survey?”

“That’s why there are eight of us,” was Kris’s quick answer.

She walked the short distance from her day quarters onto the
Wasp
’s bridge. “Captain Drago, would you please order the
Intrepid
and
Congress
to slow down and split up. We want them to take random samples of several asteroids’ composition. Please advise the
Endeavor
that we would also like her to take samples on her way to and from setting up a warning jump buoy at the other jump into this system.”

“Aye, aye, Admiral. I’ll get that off immediately.”

“Thank you, Admiral,” the professor said.

“Any more requests?” Kris asked.

“Not at this time. We are studying the planet and the entire system as we approach it, but we have nothing yet to report that is different from the hasty study done by the small science team on the
Endeavor
.”

Kris smiled at the way he gave her backhanded notice that he didn’t think much of what Penny had brought back. It didn’t matter to Kris. Penny had taken only what Kris could spare at a tough time. What she’d found out was all that Kris had expected.

As the professor left, Kris stayed with Captain Drago on his bridge. “Any activity in this system?”

“If there had been, you’d have been the first to know, and we’d be turning around and hightailing it out of here, I assume, by your orders.”

“We most certainly would,” Kris said.

Her thoughts were a tad different.
Maybe. Depending on what we found. I’d still like to take a try at capturing one ship alone. Maybe someone would decide to live, not die.
But to her flag captain, she said what was more to his liking.

“Yeah, right,” Captain Drago muttered, apparently no less deft at reading Kris’s mind now that her flag sported three stars.

As they approached orbit, Kris called a staff meeting. It was a small one. At her conference table was Jack, of course. He had two rump battalions of Marines, though what they’d do this trip was still to be determined. But then Marines were good at figuring out what was needed of them while others were still wondering why they were there.

Penny and Masao were there as representatives of the early survey, even if Professor Labao didn’t think much of it. His two thousand boffins, however, still had nothing new they wanted to report to Kris. Until they did, Kris considered her friend the expert.

Amanda Kutter and Jacques la Duke had also hitched a ride on the
Wasp
. Yes, they admitted, there was plenty of economic and anthropological work to be done on Alwa, but there were so many question marks about these two planets that they’d begged to be included. Never sure what kind of lion’s mouth she’d be sticking her head in this time, Kris had signed off on their inclusion and added them to her immediate staff.

They’d been the ones who spotted the food problem on Alwa. Who knew what they’d spot here?

Captain Drago dropped in from his bridge as the meeting got underway; Kris never held a meeting that didn’t have a spare chair for him.

Professor Labao led off by projecting pictures of both sides of the ravaged planet on one of Kris’s screens.

“This planet had been bombarded so heavily that very little of the original surface remains for us to study. In some places, the bombardment sparked volcanic eruptions that added to the remaking of the surface. About the only places not hit are in the low-lying areas that have been suggested as ocean areas although they present no evidence of water, liquid or otherwise, at the present time.”

“Is there any evidence of wandering clusters of asteroids in the system now that would put the planet at risk?” Kris asked.

“No,” the professor said. “We will be better able to date the bombardment once we are on the ground and have samples; however, at the moment, it appears to have all occurred in the same approximate time frame. The two planets nearest its orbit show no such bombardment in recent times. There are also no more than the usual number of orbit-crossing asteroid bodies than you would expect to find in any system. This bombardment appears to be unique to this planet.”

“An attack,” Captain Drago growled.

“That assumes intent not yet in evidence,” the professor said, refusing to rise to the Navy officer’s bait.

“Not an attack, Captain,” Jack said, “but an annihilation. An eradication. Way more than a mere attack.”

Captain Drago nodded agreement.

“We are developing our plan of study,” the professor said, attempting to regain control of his meeting.

“We have been provided with a most interesting set of devices for our ground examination. The engineers back at the Alwa fabricators have presented us with exploration probes used in the Old Earth system. It is part balloon, part powered craft, and all that is needed to transport a rover equipped with a laboratory for sample taking and analysis. This planet has just enough of an atmosphere to allow the balloon to support this kind of device during the daylight hours. We plan to deploy them from longboats, say cruising at ten thousand meters. When the balloon probe finds an interesting area, we will have them settle to a landing. The rover will do its survey and return to transport for the night. At early dawn, we will reheat the hydrogen on the balloon, lift them off, then the propeller system attached to the balloon will take the assembly to the next area for examination. A brilliant bit of engineering design, don’t you think?”

“If it gets us what we need to know fast, then that’s great,” Kris said. She’d learned long ago that if she gave the boffins the slightest chance, they would bend her ear for hours.

“Have you got anything to tell us yet?” Jack asked, ever vigilant to protect Kris’s body, or in this case, ears.

“We do think we may have found one thing you will find of interest,” Professor Labao admitted. Cautiously.

“And that is?” Kris said.

“This,” he said and turned back to the screen. Now it showed a view of deep space. There were the usual stars in the background. It was what was in the foreground that puzzled Kris. It appeared to be a long bar. Maybe a string. It had something at each end and a large sphere in the middle.

“What is that?” Kris asked.

“We don’t know,” the professor said flatly.

“Give me your best guess,” Jack growled.

“Hey, that could be a sling,” Jacques la Duke said.

“A what?” Amanda Kutter asked before Kris could.

“How big is that hummer?” Jacques asked the professor.

“We are not sure, but it appears to be several tens of thousands of kilometers long.”

“And is it in an orbit that intersects this planet?”

“Yes,” the professor cautiously admitted. “In say another twenty thousand years it would likely collide with it.”

“Right. I wonder how many of those were once sharing this orbit?” Jacques said, standing and going to peer more closely at the screen.

“So, Jacques, since you seem to know what you’re looking at,” Amanda said testily, “let the rest of us mere mortals in on the secret.”

“Okay, there’s a lot of guessing going on here, but we anthropologists do it a lot, professionally, and if we guess right, there’s a good paycheck in it for one of us. Anyway, here’s my guess. That’s a space sling.”

“A space sling?” came from everyone in the room, Kris included.

“A space sling,” Nelly said more slowly. “Yes, it most definitely could be one.”

“Quiet, Nelly. Let Jacques have the fun of telling us what he thinks he’s found,” Kris said.

Y
OU HUMANS W
ANT ALL THE FUN.

Y
ES.
N
OW HUSH, GIRL.

“Pulling a lot of stuff out of a deep gravity well,” Jacques began, “is not cheap. Most developed industrial planets have a space elevator. A beanstalk. You want to lug up something big like a reactor to install in a ship, you don’t lift it in a shuttle, you send it up the beanstalk. It’s faster, cheaper, and easier. Designing a shuttle to take a battleship-size reactor is, well, just nonsense.”

“They understand the point,” Professor Labao said, dryly. Clearly he was not happy to have lost control of
his
meeting.

And Kris thought it was
her
meeting.

“So, if you want to drain an ocean or suck a lot of air off a planet, you do something like this. I assume they didn’t care where the water and air went, they just wanted it gone. You put this thing in orbit. That center bulge is a counterweight to hold it stable in orbit. The ends swing around the center. When one end is down, it scoops up water. I’d guess there’s a pipe that sucks air when it’s down and holds it until it’s up, then spews it out. The same with the water. It freezes as it comes up into orbit. When it’s all up, the sling throws it out, and it zips off into space.”

Jacques paused for a moment. “Tell me, Professor, is there a ring of gases around the sun in this orbit?”

“I don’t know,” Professor Labao said, stiffly.

“You don’t know, or you do but don’t yet have enough information to make an official, scientifically accurate to the thirteen–decimal place statement?” Kris said. Her temper was starting to boil, and she was missing Professor mFumbo, God rest his soul. Why hadn’t he stayed on the
Wasp
instead of spreading himself and his scientists around the battleships that didn’t make it back from Kris’s first run-in with the aliens?

Mentally, Kris shook herself. She knew she was heading into a black hole of her own making. Too many had died while she had lived, and, no doubt, too many more would die. If she continued to be the lucky one, she’d survive. The emotions boiling up inside her now would not make it any better for those she’d lost.

The professor just stared at Kris.

Jack stepped in. “Jacques had a good question. Do you have any evidence at this time of an outgassing from this planet being left in its orbit? If there was water, air, and other material on that planet, it had to go somewhere.”

The professor nodded. “We do have some evidence that this particular area of space is rich in nitrogen, oxygen, water vapors, and carbon compounds, including amino acids. We wanted to check these out on our approach to orbit before we said anything, though. I mean, why would anyone scatter this planet’s, ah, lifeblood, so wastefully?”

That left the room in a dead silence.

“When the Romans conquered Carthage, they sowed the ground with salt so that it could not grow anything and never recover from the defeat,” Nelly said, and fell silent.

“If someone really hated the people of another planet,” Penny said slowly. “If they wanted to make sure life never grew up again on a planet, they’d take away the air, water, everything. They’d pound it to a pulp, and they wouldn’t care where what they ripped off went.”

“Maybe that was the intent all along,” Jacques said. “Waste it. Waste them. Throw it away. Let nothing of it enter their own living cycles.”

“Hatred that hot and that deep is . . .” Kris said. “But then, we’ve seen what they took from other planets.”

“And killed everything that lived there,” Penny said, slowly eyeing the screen that showed the planet they were approaching. “Could it have started here?”

“I doubt if we will ever know for sure,” Jacques said, “but the more we know, the better educated our guesses will be.”

They
made orbit an hour later and began the survey immediately. While Kris intended to pair the ships off and let them swing around each other to give the crew some down, that would have to wait a bit. For now, each ship went into a different orbit, one even into a polar orbit, as they mapped the planet, studying everything they could without touching anything.

The mapping showed a planet that had been hit and hit hard. There was evidence of at least five uses of atomics. These were marked by the residual radiation on the ground. However, even those five areas had been hammered by nonatomic hits with large kinetic weapons at high speeds. When you factored in several places where volcanic activity had been triggered, the entire place was a pockmarked landscape of death.

The mapping did identify a few areas where the original surface material still existed.

Some of the mountains seemed to have been left alone. They still showed where treelike vegetation had stood. The remnant of that vegetation appeared to have been torched before it was left to die without air and water. The oceanic floor also looked like it had survived in some places, particularly the deepest trenches. Those would all have to be studied in greater detail.

Although nothing appeared to be living now, the biologists still suggested that no landing be attempted.

“We know something killed this planet. We don’t know what, if anything, was applied to kill the animal life or vegetation on it before or while they slammed the planet from space. It’s best we keep our hands off the place until we know more,” was the way Professor Labao reported their first findings.

The orbital survey had already identified some kind of frozen substance at the poles. There might also be frozen water in some places underground. That allowed for the possibility of some kind of life surviving. Bitter experience on other planets had shown some of the most stubborn bugs to kill were also the most deadly toward humans.

With enough problems on her hands, Kris was only too happy to steer well clear of any more.

The third day of the survey, the ships gathered in orbit and were finally able to pass cables of Smart Metal
TM
between them and swing themselves around each other. This brought a welcome sense of down and improved morale among those who didn’t much care for floating through their day.

That day, they began the ground survey.

Longboats from the
Wasp
drew the duty of entering the planet’s thin atmosphere and launching balloon surveyors from their open aft ramps. Nine of the ten successfully inflated as they tumbled free. The last just tumbled. When the
Endeavor
made orbit, before it paired up with the
Intrepid
, it lased the wreckage on the ground, burning it down to basic atoms.

That would be the future fate of the other nine explorers: their reward for a job well-done. In one of her more reflective moments, Kris found herself wondering how Nelly felt about that.

She did her best to keep that thought to herself.

Nelly, however, was fully occupied going over the mapping survey with an intensity no human mind could match. Jacques had asked around if some of the other space slings might have made a fiery reentry. The question had drawn no interest from the scientists, but Nelly set a goal for her and her children to go over the map, quarter-meter pixel by pixel to determine if there were any new, smaller craters. It seemed to be keeping them busy when they weren’t otherwise at work.

“I’ve found one,” Nelly reported the fourth day.

“Found what?” Kris asked.

“A new, smaller crater. Something that could have been made by the center weight of a space sling.”

“Or by a meteorite that just happened to wander by,” Kris pointed out.

“Yes. We’ll need to survey the landing site.”

“Ask the scientists to add it to their survey.”

“Yes, I guess I will have to get permission before I retask one of the balloons.”

“Yes, you will, Nelly. Now, why don’t you and your kids find a couple more of those slingers? There must have been quite a few to strip this planet of water and air.”

“We are still searching the maps, Kris.”

“Keep it up. Maybe you’ll find one close to where the boffins already want to look.”

Nelly got rather quiet for a long time after that. Kris hoped she was busy and not giving Kris the silent treatment. It had been bad enough for her computer to do that when Kris deserved it.

The scientists tried to keep their work to themselves, but there were leaks. There had to be leaks on ships loaded with sensors and communication equipment and a lot of very inquisitive Sailors and Marines. It was basic to the scientific mind only to publish what they were absolutely sure of. Too many careers had been ruined by premature publicity.

Kris, however, was not against some arm-twisting when she reached the limit of her patience.

After all, this was a fighting squadron, and it was sitting here, in the mouth of the lion, so to speak. If there wasn’t a good reason to keep her people here in harm’s way, she’d take them back where they came from.

Or deeper into the lion’s throat. Depending.

Under pressure, Professor Labao relented and became more forthcoming with the results they were getting and the questions they were chasing.

“The bombardment seems to have taken place in three stages,” he said. “We could see immediately that the area subjected to atomics had also been hit during at least a second strike by kinetics. Our questions centered on whether or not there were just two or maybe three waves of kinetic strikes.”

“You say kinetic strikes,” Kris said. “Don’t you mean asteroids or meteorites?”

“No,” the professor said, and then paused maddeningly to structure his further answer.

“First, let us define our terms. An asteroid is a small solar body, likely left over from a failed planet’s formation. They come in several types: rock or mineral, though some prefer to add a third type, those rich in carbon or organic compounds. Many are covered with a thick layer of ice. Being natural, they tend to defy a single definition.

“A meteorite, on the other hand, is merely a natural object from space that has survived entry to an atmosphere. Since they are what hits the ground, they are often metallic, although some rocks do survive the heat of passage through the atmosphere.

“What is important about all of these is that they are natural, and, in the normal course of travel about a mature solar system, a bombardment like we have here just does not happen. Such, ah, traffic problems are resolved in the early days of a system. Never this late.

“No, the kinetic artifacts that we are examining are either asteroids artificially disturbed from their orbit and placed on a collision course with this planet or artifacts specifically designed to bombard this planet, or others like it.” Here he paused to clear his throat.

“Nickel-steel bullets were constructed for planetary bombardment during the Unity War and again during the Iteeche War. Thank God they were not used on inhabited planets, or one can only wonder where the killing would have stopped.”

Again he paused, as if contemplating the nonempirical question he had asked. Shaking himself, as if to shake off the lack of an answer to that question, he went on.

“It appears to us that similar kinds of bullets were used to hit this planet. Whether it occurred in one wave or in a series of waves, it seems to have followed the use of atomics and preceded the asteroid bombardment.”

Now he paused to study Kris for a moment. “We asked you to collect samples from the asteroids. We need them to test the different strikes to see if the products of those strikes came from this planet, or from the asteroids, or from somewhere else entirely.”

“Do you think you can make that kind of a determination?” Kris asked.

“Honestly, I don’t know. It’s been a hundred thousand years, more or less, since these events happened. Despite the eradication of most water and atmosphere from this planet, it still has weather cycles. There has been a dust storm in the southern hemisphere in just the short time we’ve been here. We may have set an impossible objective for our research, but if we didn’t posit the possibility that some of this attack was from beyond this system, then we would never find it out, even if it were.”

“In other words,” Kris said, “is it possible that some of the bullets that pounded this planet came from the next system over?”

“That is our thinking.”

“If we could make the association, it would certainly connect the two and very likely implicate the aliens of the next system in their first genocide,” Jack said.

“Planetcide,” Penny said.

“Precisely,” Kris said. “Well, Professor, you have our attention, and our hearty support for your survey. Have at it.”

Once that was published, the patience of the Sailors and Marines grew longer. Now they could see the need for a solid, if lengthy, forensic examination of the planet below them.

It was Captain Drago who suggested that their time could be put to some defensive purpose.

“We’re going to want to outpost the next system. If I can express a preference, I’d like to not only put warning buoys at the jumps into that system but also into the ones the next system out.”

“Give ourselves plenty of time to pick up our skirts and make a run for it,” Kris said.

“I wouldn’t have said it quite that way, but yes.”

“It will take more time to collect all those buoys,” Jack pointed out.

“Why collect them?”

“But then, if the aliens come back, they’ll know we’ve been there?” Kris said, beginning to see the answer to her question even as she asked it.

“And the problem with that is . . . ?” Captain Drago said, raising an eyebrow and grinning.

“Hold it,” Jack said. “We’re doing forensic research to discover the origin of the iron bullets that slammed this planet. Do we want some homicidal alien going over our warning buoys?”

“I checked with the engineers who designed these buoys and the factory bosses who turned them out. They are products of Alwa. The metals and silicon are from that system. There’s not one atom drawn from human space. If they go over them, they just lead them back to Alwa. No farther,” Kris said.

“The design is hardly better than the electronics we had when we left Old Earth, but the design has no fingerprints on it. The metals came from stars that burned long ago on this side of the galaxy. Yep. If we leave them, they know someone came calling but not someone from more than, oh, a couple of thousand light-years or so.”

Again, Captain Drago paused. “Do you see a downside to their knowing we know where they lived?”

Kris spoke slowly. “We know where they lived, and we didn’t do a damn thing to their old home. Nope, I don’t see a downside. Let them try to figure out why someone would do that.” Now Kris and Jack were both grinning ear to ear.

The
Endeavor
and the
Intrepid
were dispatched to picket the next systems out.

It was Nelly who came up with the smoking gun.