Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella (14 page)

“Blue, Gold team?” Granny Rita asked.

“I’ve told you about how handy Smart Metal is,” Kris said.  “This ship can handle gee forces way beyond what the Mark I Sailor can.  So we’ve got a new high gee station, made of Smart Metal, to help us keep from splattering ourselves all over the deck as we honk the ship around to avoid getting hit.  In combat, the
Wasp
never follows any course for more than three or four seconds.”

“Two,” Nelly put in.

“We dodge around a lot,” Kris went on, “and the gee stations let us do it.  The armor is there, but it’s better not to get hit.  The problem with the eggs as we call them is that they fit you like a second skin.  Once, for political reasons, I had to go into an egg wearing undress whites.  I was black-and-blue from the belt buckle, the clutch backs on my ribbons and my shoulders.  Ugh.  The standard uniform in an egg is buck naked.” 

“Oh.”  The old lady’s eyes lit up.

“Granny. We all look like a collection of Easter eggs from the outside, boys and girls alike.”  There were certain aspects of Granny Rita’s outlook on life that Kris found a bit hard to understand.

Now Granny shrugged.  “It sounds like a young person’s way of fighting.”

“Most of our crew members are under thirty,” Kris admitted.

“So, what are you going to do about us?” 

The ship’s pharmacy had a small supply of antiaging pharmaceuticals.  After all, Cookie, the cook, was well over a hundred as were several of the restauranteurs.  Granny Rita had been glad to have her arthritis cured, her bones strengthened and her arteries cleaned.

Still, knocking her around at high gees was not what Kris wanted to do to her new found great-grandmother. 

And the Alwans!  Though their bones were more solid than they had been when they flew several million years ago, the odd were quite high that a battle might have Kris returning the six delegates looking more like boneless chicken than spokespersons for how much Alwa needed human aid.  

“Nelly, do you have the specs for the water tanks the Iteeche used to survive the last battle?” 

The Iteeche Empire, some eighty years ago, had almost made the human race extinct.  Just ask any veteran.  Just ask Granny Rita!  It was Iteeche Death Balls that had got her into a running gun fight, them gunning, her running, that she hadn’t been able to slow down from until she was on the other side of the galaxy. 

Only recently had Kris had a chance to talk to some Iteeche and discovered that their veterans were proud of how they’d saved their people from annihilation by the humans.  During the Voyage of Discovery that had resulted in the shootout with the wrecked base ship they were coming up on, Kris had three Iteeche aboard.

“Of course I have the tank designs stored in my bursting innards,” Nelly snapped.  “I can knock out seven of them, one for Granny and six for the Alwans.  I suggest you use your normal Tac Center.  That way, Granny Rita can follow the battle or we can show pleasant scenes from around human space to relax the Alwans.”

“Do that, Nelly.”

“You’ve had Iteeche aboard?” Granny Rita said.

“It’s a long story, but the only reason I came out here and found you and that,” Kris said, nodding toward the hulk, “was because they were losing scout ships and came asking for our help.”

“So we made peace.  I kept telling Ray he should do more to find a way to stop all the killing.”

“We can talk about this later,” Kris said.

“Yes.  Are you expecting a fight, now?”

“Yes, no and maybe.”

“You can ask a Longknife a question, but you better not expect an answer,” Granny Rita said with a sigh.

“I don’t expect a fight,” Kris said, expanding on her initial cryptic reply. “You notice that none of us here are rushing to our battle stations. However, we now have evidence that someone has been mining this wreck.  Are they its former owners or someone we haven’t met yet?  We’ve run into these raiders four times.  Three times they started shooting.  We managed to run away the other time.  Tell me, Commodore, wouldn’t you be at battle stations?

“No question about it.  Those water tanks you were talking about.  You want me to get me and my friends into them now?”

“No, we’ll wait.  All this drill may be for nothing.” Kris said, then switched topics.

“Nelly, I want to survey that hulk as fast as we can.  I also want to make a change in your nano allotments.  We’re going to tuck ourselves in just as close as we can to the wreck, with it between us and the jump.  I want a belt of sensors around the hulk focused on the jump.  Anything comes through that jump, I want to know.”

“I was already working on just such a sensor array, connected with tight-beam communications,” Nelly said.  “However, how fast we can examine the hulk will depend on how much Smart Metal Penny lets me have.  Penny?”

“The
Sakura
transferred a lot of supplies to us before she left,” Penny said.  It had also donated an 18-inch laser rifle that the
Wasp
now had pointed aft.  Smart Metal
TM
, used to its maximum, was a delightful and flexible material.  “They also stripped out a thousand tons of Smart Metal and transferred it to us.  I’ve been using most of it for armor.  Nelly, if I gave you a hundred tons of the stuff, would that be enough?”

“Perfect,” the computer said.  “Now, Mimzy, let’s get to work giving the boffins something to look at and making sure that jump point is under constant observation.”

Chapter Three

The four huge screens in the Forward Lounge were now showing sixteen different pictures as the nanos spread out through the wreck.  Or, more correctly, fifteen pictures of the wreck and one picture of blank space.

The jump point was blessedly unemployed and Kris fervently hoped it would stay that way for a long time.  A very long time.

“You don’t have to keep glancing at the jump point, Kris,” Nelly said.  “I and every one of my kids have it under constant observation.  If it burps out so much as a grain of sand, you will know.”

“I know, Nelly, it’s just a human thing.”

“A Longknife thing,” both Jack and Penny said at once.

Granny Rita just grunted.

The nanos were starting from the blasted aft section, and moving inward. 

Of the engineering spaces, nothing remained.  The two Hellburners that hit there along with the corvettes lasers and smaller antimatter torpedoes, had only started the damage.  The hundred or more thermonuclear reactors that powered the huge rockets had lost their containment systems, freeing superheated plasma to add more destruction to what the humans started.

A third Hellburner had hit farther forward.  There had been reactors there, too.  Reactors that powered the ship and the uncounted lasers that dotted the ship’s surface.

Amidships, shock, whiplash and torque added to the destruction.  They came across gaping holes in the middle of the ship that appeared to have been caused by reactors that lost their containment fields when their superconducting magnetic containment systems failed.

Kris revised her estimate of the bite they’d taken out of the monster.  Her original guess was they’d blown away thirty to forty percent of the base ship.  Now it looked like more than half of the ship was wrecked.

“It must have been pure hell aboard this ship,” Granny Rita said.

Kris nodded.  “Still, even as it was blowing itself apart, it was shooting too many lasers to count at our battle line, blasting hundred-thousand-ton battleships with six meters of ice armor into hot gases in only seconds.”

Even Penny was shaking her head.  “I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for those who suffered through this.  But Kris and every human ship around had done everything they could to open communications.  And the aliens just came out shooting every single time we ran into them.”

Granny Rita did her best to translate all this to the Alwans.  They now stood still, alone, not in any group, in stunned silence. 

Kris wondered how much of this they were really getting and how much was being lost in translation. 

Nelly, are you getting any of this?

Kris, as best I can tell, the Alwans don’t believe us.  They can’t believe that these aliens did not talk to us.  I think one of them said something about how can anyone put on a courtship dance without crowing.  I could be way off on the translation.

That’s okay, Nelly.

Kris had yet to get around to telling Granny Rita about Nelly Net, the ability she and Nelly had to talk directly to each other and to talk to anyone who had on one of Nelly’s kids.  There were a lot of things they just hadn’t had time for, Kris told herself.

“We’re getting some interesting stuff,” came from Professor Labao.  “We’ve only done a small part of the search but we haven’t found a single body.  Not even a skull.  It’s too soon to tell for sure, but it looks like someone went over this entire ship and removed every dead body, body part or blood smear.”

“That’s what we found on the planet they murdered,” Kris told Granny.  “No grave yard.  If it wasn’t for three women murdered and their bodies hidden among all the native ones, we would have nothing on that bunch of murderers.”

Granny made a face.  “Beasts that they are, they seem to revere their dead.”

“That, or they want to use them for reaction mass,” Jack growled.

“We think we’re finding hydroponic gardens as well as vats for growing proteins. The vegetation is very dead, the tanks and vats are drained,” the professor added.

“See if we can get any residue,” Kris ordered.  “It would help to know if they recycle their dead in the hydroponic tanks and what kind of vat meat they ate.”

“We’re on it already,” the professor answered.  

“We’ve just found something else interesting.  It looks like someone dug a hole into the wreck so they could get out the reactors that hadn’t blown,” said Professor Labao.

One screen went from four windows to just one.  Yes, there was a huge tunnel into the wreck.  Nanos following it found evidence of undamaged portions of the ships, but some large chunks had been hastily removed with welders torches.  There were a lot of thick power cabling leading out from those holes. 

“Best bet,” the professor said, “is that reactors and their superconducting containment gear were hauled out through this hole.  It’s about the most expensive gear aboard a ship.  That and its weapons systems.”

“Is there evidence of the lasers being taken out?” Kris asked to anyone listening on net.  “Also, have we found the bridge?”

“The forward section of the ship took a lot of damage.  This monster and her baby monsters might have been slaughtering the battleships, but we humans were getting our licks in too,” came with a touch of pride from Captain Drago.

“This is a huge ship, Your Highness,” Professor Joao Labao said respectfully but firmly.  “Rome was not built in a day and we will not plumb its secrets in an afternoon.”

“Well, so far you’ve got plenty to interest me,” Kris said.  “Have your boffins get the nanos collecting as much data as they can, because I don’t intend to spend a day here waiting for whoever has the salvage contract on this mother to wander back through that jump point,” Kris said.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Captain Drago said.

“Your Highness, we have something I think you will find very interesting,” the professor said, as if to placate an irascible princess.

Smart man.

“I have seen that video of a huge choir addressing an even larger audience, followed by a lone man giving quite a long harangue to his listeners.”  The subject video, picked up while the USS
Hornet
was running for its life showed up in a small window.

“I think we have found the room.”

The screen that had been showing the huge tunnel now switched to show a massive auditorium.  No, from the fine decorations it was more like an opera house.  There was statuary, usually of the same man in an heroic pose and white columns along the walls separating box seats that looked quite plush.  The common people, however, were packed in row upon row, balcony atop balcony.  The aisles were narrow to allow room for more seats.

“To fill as many seats as those with only aisles that size, I’d have to march them in, like Marines,” Jack said.  “I’m not even sure my line troops would put up with that kind of regimentation.”

“Lots and lots of people, marching in lockstep,” Kris said.

“You told me,” Granny Rita said, “about one ship you blew up after it attacked you being filled to the gills with people.  It looks like they filled a monster ship like this just as tightly.”

“We are looking into what we think are the crew quarters,” the professor said.  “I’ve heard of places on Earth that pack the unemployed into cramped public housing, but this is something entirely different.  There’s barely room to slip yourself into a bed from a narrow passageway.  No privacy.  Just stacks and stacks of beds.”

“Huge numbers of people who just want to kill us,” Penny said.  She had argued the hardest against Kris launching her tiny command into a battle with so little intelligence on the target.  Now the look on her face bore the sadness of the ages.  “How are we going to kill all these people?” she finally said.