Daring

46

Kris stumbled into the wardroom for early breakfast. She’d given up on risking further sleep.

The colonel and Penny were already there, and Jack and Abby straggled in before Kris had drawn little more than dry toast and coffee for herself. At the table, they stared blearyeyed at each other.

“That was one bad night,” the colonel said, taking a sip from his coffee cup.

“I don’t never want to sleep through that again,” Abby agreed.

“I’m glad we’re all agreed that that mean kitty should be belled,” Jack said. “Any idea how we do it?”

“Cops have incident interventions, or so my dad told me. Somebody has to use their weapon, they get sat down and talk it through. Someone gets suddenly dead, it gets more serious,” Penny finished.

“What could get more serious than this week,” Kris said, pushing her toast away. She was hungry, but she couldn’t eat.

“May I suggest we ‘cry-tique’ this puppy,” the colonel offered. “It might not do a whole lot, but if we can all review what we saw, squeeze it of any information we can, then develop a single narrative we can all stand by, it might help. If we can agree that this choice, bad as it was, was far and away better than the other options, we might save ourselves from running the question over and over in our minds late at night.”

He paused for another sip of steaming coffee. “I know talking over that little fight we had on Panda has helped me come to accept that the princess here simply outplayed me. Not that my employers had dealt me all that good a hand.”

“I have most of the data saved,” Nelly said. “I can project it here, or in Kris’s Tac Center.”

Kris looked around the room. It was filled with other officers just as bedraggled by the night as her team. She shook her head. “Let’s figure out what happened first before we subject the rest of the crew to our nightmares.”

They headed for the Tac Center.

Nelly had the main screen already showing the deployment as the monstrous mother ship made its appearance.

“Okay, Nelly, what happened to the battle line while the corvettes were all otherwise busy?”

“All those big battleships didn’t fare very well,” Nelly said, and pictures began to flash on the screen. “I think we guessed right that the range of the aliens’ heavy lasers was no greater than ours, but we underestimated how many of them they could fire up. The Fury took an entire broadside from the first two scouts and blew up before it knew what hit it.”

“We all saw that. What happened to the other battleships?” Kris asked.

“From its ambush position, the Wasp took out the first two alien ships, Kris, and the battle line turned away. They had opened the range to just about maximum when the mother ship came through. That big mother had all kinds of lasers, and she used them. Even though the lasers were cutting through the gases left by the Fury’s wreck and the ice trailed by the other ships, they were hit with so many beams that it knocked five of them out of the fight one right after another. Each of them ended with an explosion when the reactors lost containment. I think those were all intentional.”

Kris nodded. She had been busy with her own shoot at the time, but the pictures Nelly flashed on the screen were the sights that had filled Kris’s dreams. Somehow, she had seen, out of the corner of her eye, the destruction of the battle line. Unprocessed, it haunted her nightmares. Now, with a deep sigh, Kris forced herself to witness that gallant force’s annihilation.

It wasn’t fair, she wanted to say. Men like Admiral Krätz and Admiral Kōta were fighting men. They deserved a fighting chance. What they got was laser fire so massive and wideranging that no matter how well they fought their ships, how they jinked or jumped, they were slaughtered. Kris watched the ships die, knowing that Professor mFumbo, and Judge Francine, and so many others of the people she’d shared the Wasp with for so long were vanishing in a blink.

She faced her dragon, fed it a tidbit, and, as best she could, made friends with it. Surely, for the rest of her life, she’d never be able to lose this beast.

“Did anyone get out of the battleships before they blew?” Penny asked after a long silence that must have been filled with quite a few silent prayers for the dead.

“There were plenty of survival pods off those five battleships,” Nelly said. “The aliens lasered every last one of them. The aliens were firing fast and wild, so there’s no way to tell if they just got in the way or if fire was actually aimed at them. I’ve searched the visuals several times, Kris. The only survivors from the battle line were the sole Greenfeld ship and Admiral Channing’s Swiftsure, which fled.”

“And last we saw of that pair, they had escaped out of range of the mother ship’s lasers and her baby monster ships and were running for all they were worth,” the colonel added.

“With several hundred of those baby monsters in hot pursuit,” Nelly reported.

Kris thought for a moment how long and hard the pursuit of PatRon10 had been and how it dwindled down to just the Wasp. She found no reason to ask her team what they thought were the chances that one of the two battleships might get away.

If they made it, they’d all meet back in human space. If they didn’t, maybe the survivors would find the wreckage later.

Kris shook herself, willed herself to turn away from the slaughter of the battleships and to focus on the future. “Well, at least we’ve found a way to fight them. We can turn the jump points into a death trap for them.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” the colonel said. “I’ve been thinking about what we did to them and what we saw of them. I had my computer, Don Quixote, look up a few things about warfare back in the bad old days before atomics were fully outlawed. I don’t much care for what I found.”

“I know you’re going to tell us,” Kris said. “How bad is it?”

“There’s an ugly thing called electromagnetic pulse. It seems that the explosion of a nuke throws out a radiation pulse, especially if it’s done in space. It fries all the local electronics unless they’ve been hardened.”

“That’s a rude thing to do,” Nelly said.

“Hardened?” Kris echoed. “Nelly, do you know anything about this ‘hardened’ thing?”

“Don Quixote warned us all about it when he found it out for the colonel, Kris. If they’d sent one of their bombs through the jump first and blown it up, it likely would have converted all our computers and other electronic stuff to paperweights in one big flash. I do not like this pulse thing. When we get back, we need to search the old archives very thoroughly and find out how to do this hardening thing. There’s nothing about it in any of our accessible data.”

That didn’t sound good, but Kris did not allow it to surprise her. That was what happened in a war. You surprised them with things like Hellburners, and they surprised you with things they had up their own sleeves.

Part of what made war so much of a bleeding hell was the bleeding surprises.

“Anyone have a guess as to how badly we hurt them?” Kris asked.

“The mother ship knows it’s been in a fight,” Nelly said. “We destroyed at least the rear third of the ship and did major damage as far as amidships. They were still able to power up their lasers and direct them from the forward half of the ship, but that ship was dead in space when we left it. In addition, the hulk had taken all kinds of twists and torque. The shock damage to its machinery in the forward half must be horrible.” Nelly paused. “Casualties among the crew must start at a third and go up from there.”

“However large that is,” Kris said, thinking about all the people crammed into the small ship that first attacked them.

“Likely,” the colonel said, “from what we’ve seen of the way they live, several billion dead. Maybe tens of billions.”

“Which might explain why they showed no interest in taking any prisoners,” Penny said.

“But all of this is just guesswork,” Jack pointed out. “We went in there knowing almost nothing about our alien enemy, and we got out of there, as best we could, knowing nothing more about them.”

“Nothing, except that when confronted with a battle fleet, they still shot first and answered no questions,” Kris said, summing up the aliens in few words.

“I do not understand them,” Abby said, shaking her head.

“From the evidence,” the colonel went on, “I would say they are either intent on destroying any life that isn’t theirs, or there is something else a whole lot worse out here that they are afraid of, and they think we might be from it. Any of you see another way to interpret the data?”

“If there’s a bigger monster out there,” Kris said, shaking her head, “wouldn’t they be trying like we are to make a peaceful contact? Gain allies. My guess, Colonel, is that these folks like the galaxy their way and don’t want to share it with any other life-form.”

“I can’t dispute your conclusion,” the colonel said with a sad shake of his head.

“One more thought,” Penny put in, as the silence after that conclusion grew long and ponderous. “Nelly, could you play the video where we hit one of their ships but didn’t destroy it.”

The video changed to show one of their giant ships, hit hard in the engines by the Fearless and drifting. It continued to fire wildly. Almost a minute went by before its reactors blew, and the ship was vaporized.

“Notice what we didn’t see?” Penny asked.

“Survival pods,” Kris said.

“Right. No one abandoned ship. They fought it as long as they were able, then someone in command ordered selfdestruct, and the entire ship blew. They must have known for a whole minute that it was doomed, but no one abandoned ship. Furthermore, there was no reason to blow that ship. We were losing. It could have hung in there and been rescued by its own ships once the fight was over. It didn’t.”

“Dear God,” Abby said in one of her rare references to any being greater than herself. “Victory or death. If they can’t return on their shield, they will damn well blow up the shield,” she said, misquoting the Spartan mother.

“And these nutcases just had to share our galaxy,” Jack grumbled. “I can’t tell you how happy I expect your grampas to be when we get home and drop this flaming hot potato right in their laps.”

“They won’t be glad,” Kris said, “but they’ll have to do something about this. They can’t ignore it.”

“Ever heard of that fine old tradition about killing the messenger?” the colonel tossed out.

On that fine thought, Kris headed up to the bridge to see how things were developing there. The view was spectacular, but hard to figure out.

How an old red giant and a young blue giant could now share the system with a white dwarf probably could be explained by a series of collisions. Kris had been told by the boffins that such driving accidents were frequent in the jumbled-up systems at the center of the galaxy.

How it happened out on the rim was a question Kris would hand off to the astronomers just as soon as she found one.

She shivered as she remembered that Professor mFumbo and so many other of the boffins she’d shared meals with and survived lectures from were either dead or had taken the early ship back to human space.

“Nelly, where did Judge Francine go?”

“Kris, she went aboard the Triumph with Admiral Channing.”

Which meant she was still running or had been gunned down already.

Kris groaned inwardly. There was no way to know what happened until they got back and allowed enough time for the others to get back.

A voice in the back of her head refused to be placated. You know they’re already dead. Maybe the Wasp can get home, but none of the rest will. You lost almost your entire first command.

Kris did not need to spend more time sitting on her rear listening to the voices in the back of her head.

Fortunately, the Wasp needed a lot of work, the kind that took Swedish steam. Strong arms and strong back. No brains required.

Kris turned to with a will.

The Wasp continued to decelerate, running at only a half gee by then. The chief engineer had taken one of the reactors off-line and had cooled half the rocket engines. Engineers and anyone fully qualified in space were crawling all over the engines identifying what had had it and pulling subunits where there was any chance that replacements were in stock or repairs could be made.

It turned out that there was a good reason why the Wasp had taken on all those sailors during the last few stops by Wardhaven. Her enlarged crew knew quite a bit about ship maintenance and set about doing it under the watchful eye of her skipper, officers, and chiefs.

And Kris found that her strange career path had deprived her of the opportunity to learn a whole lot about running a ship.

About the second time that Captain Drago tried to find something that she could do and came up dry, she gave up on working for a living and went hunting for the other folks who were mere passengers on this ship of fools. There was no Forward Lounge left, but Iteeche country still had a large room.

Kris called her staff together, with Vicky added, and settled down around a table with Ron.

“This is a fine mess you have gotten us into,” he told her through his translator.

“You were the one losing ships and asked us to help,” Kris pointed out.

“We were hoping to find out what was happening to our ships, not to get into a war with one monster of a civilization,” he said, but then he shrugged. “If we were honest with ourselves, we must have known that we could find something like this.

“When I bring this report into His Majesty’s presence, I may well be offered the Cup of Apology,” the Iteeche went on. “But they will be hiding the truth from themselves in a polluted pond.”

“Why is it that you and Kris are assuming that you’ll be in trouble for this battle?” Vicky asked. “You did your best, and it needed doing. We all agreed on that. Well, we all did except my admiral, and I think he was just chicken.”

“Maybe they feel this way because they have read a little bit of history,” Colonel Cortez said. “What’s the old saying? No good deed goes unpunished.”

Kris and her team spent the afternoon reviewing the battle for Ron the Iteeche and Grand Duchess Vicky. The two had little to add to what Kris had already concluded. They came, they saw, they got their butts kicked and got a couple of good kicks in themselves. Kris did her best to avoid putting a spin on any of it. One of the reasons she chose the Navy for a career was because she hated the way Father spun everything.

The walk back to the wardroom for supper was a harrowing experience. Welders were everywhere, adding patches to strengthen this or that portion of the hull. The chief had warned Kris that the Wasp was never designed for cloud dancing.

Clearly, the skipper was doing his very best to shore up those deficiencies.

Kris got a fuller briefing over supper when Captain Drago joined them.

“Before we deploy the balloot, I’m going to detach all of the shipping containers we’ve been carrying. That means a lot less room, Your Highness. I’m going to have to ask you to let your maid and her niece move in with you.”

“What will you do with the Iteeche?” Kris asked.

“Something very careful,” the skipper answered with a sigh. “I’ve also got welders outside cutting several of the spare containers into strips that we can use to reinforce the hull before we make the refueling pass. We’ll have more reinforcing strips and welders handy during the refueling pass to patch what comes apart.”

“Will it be that bad?” Jack asked.

“As your chief no doubt informed you, ships like the Wasp were never intended to do this kind of cloud dancing. However, if we want to make it home, we must refuel. I’ve got several of the best ship maintainers reviewing the design of the Wasp and identifying its weak points. We’ll strengthen them now and have teams standing by as we make the fuel run to patch holes and shore up problems. Nevertheless, all hands will be in pressure suits for the pass,” the captain added dryly.

“Not too optimistic, huh,” the colonel observed.

“I serve with a Longknife. I parked my optimism in a locker back on Wardhaven. Once I’m done here, I’ll check it back out, dust it off, and enjoy it for the rest of my natural life. But no, not today.”

“What can we do?” Kris asked.

“Not a lot, Your Highness. The ship’s crew has matters well in hand. When we start the pass, though, I would appreciate it if you and your team would form a damage-control detail.”

“Could you use Nelly or one of her kids to help with the ship-strength-analysis efforts?” Kris asked.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Captain Drago said, getting up from the table with his meal only half-eaten, “I’d prefer to place my faith in men and material that have been trained and selected for this job. No doubt Nelly is superb at pulling things out of her nonexistent hat for this or that unforeseen emergency. Still, for this, I’ll do things the old-fashioned way, thank you very much.”

“Yes, of course,” Kris said.

I COULD HAVE TOLD YOU HE’D SAY THAT, Nelly told Kris in the privacy of her own skull. I ALREADY OFFERED HIM A HAND AND HE PASSED.

THANK YOU, NELLY, Kris thought back.

As the hours stretched, and no alien ship came shooting into the system, Kris began to relax. They seemed to have slipped their pursuers. She tried not to think of what that meant for Phil Taussig and the Hornet’s crew.

That night, even sharing her room with Abby and Cara, Kris slept the repose of the dead. Until about midnight, when she woke up to the soft sounds of someone’s crying.

Kris had given Abby the lower bunk and had taken for herself the top bunk, something that usually stayed folded away into the bulkhead. Cara had a blanket on the floor. Awoken, Kris found that her maid’s niece had crawled in to share Abby’s bed and was crying softly onto a shoulder.

“Hush now,” Abby whispered with more softness than Kris would have expected from her hard-bitten maid as she stroked the girl’s hair. She spotted Kris looking over the side of the top bunk.

“Don’t worry. She’s not awake. In a little while, she’ll settle back down. She won’t remember a thing in the morning.”

Kris rolled over back into her bunk. During the day, Cara showed no ill effects from her time as a drug lord’s slave. Kris hadn’t known about the nights. So this was why Abby had been so adamant her niece would not be left behind.

The weeping subsided into soft kitten snores; Kris curled up with her pillow and drifted back to sleep.

The next day, Kris’s stateroom was detached along with all the other shipping containers. Everyone reported to the spindle of the Wasp in full battle suit or pressure suit, depending on what their battle stations required, and prepared to sweat out the near approach to one small ice giant.