Defender

27

Kris leaned back in her chair and tried to get her mind around another big mess she was in. “You’re telling me that when the food aboard is gone, we can’t count on getting any food from Alwa, colonial or native?”

Amanda nodded. “Both the natives and colonials have always lived close to the bone, but the last three years’ crops have been worse than usual. They need a good year. This year the rains again came late and weren’t enough. Have you had anyone trying to sell you food? Swap you a truckload of potatoes for a fancy computer, a TV?”

“Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a fat colonial,” Jack said. “I should have noticed. Locals are always trying to sell stuff to the fleet, but no one has shown up at the fleet landing.”

“I didn’t think much of that,” Kris said. “I never got around to asking if there was a farmer’s market to sell us fresh vegetables and fruits, meat. Why didn’t Mother MacCreedy notice?”

That brought shrugs.

“What about the ocean? There must be a lot of fish in the sea?”

“There are,” Amanda said. “But there are also things that make the sharks back on Earth look like minnows. The first desperate years, the colonials sent out wooden fishing boats, sail rigged. Half the time they got back a load of fish. The other half, splinters and half-eaten seamen washed ashore. They catch fish in rivers, and some from the beach. But I’ve seen pictures of the things that leap out of the water and snatch their catch off their lines. They are big, toothy, and ugly.”

“But Jack and I went swimming in the water!”

“Let me guess, Joe’s Seaside Paradise?” Amanda asked sourly. “That was where we were when you called. Joe said we had the very bungalow you had and offered us fishing, boating, and snorkeling. I asked him about the ‘eats everythings,’ and he said they never come there. His resort is on the Sun Coast. Much of the water is quite shallow and warmed by the sun most of the year. It’s too warm for the big stuff. It’s about the only place in colonial territory where you can enjoy the ocean.”

“And we were too dumb to ask what might nibble our toes,” Jack muttered.

“Not your fault, Jack. None of us knew yet,” Kris said. “However, maybe I slept through my ecology class, but if we remove the hunters at the top of the food chain, shouldn’t that open up a lot of good eating from lower down for us?”

“That’s the textbook answer, but how do you take out thirty meters of muscle with lots of teeth?”

Kris considered that for a moment. “You start with steel ships. Say two hundred feet long. Harpoons with explosive tips. Maybe we have to use wind at first, but we can have a backup electric motor to work our way off a lee shore. We can talk more about that later. What’s this about the colonial farms just being able to sustain the population?”

“They got the barely arable land. They worked hard to irrigate more, but it’s still poor land, and they lack fertilizer. They’re using night soil and manure from the oxen, but it’s just barely holding its own.”

“Fish offal is good fertilizer,” Jack said.

“Catch the big ones, then catch the better-eating ones. What we don’t eat goes into the soil to improve the crops,” Kris said.

“That’s a plan, but how long does it take to get it working?” Amanda asked.

“Somehow, I don’t think it would be a good idea to call up the folks I just threatened with not eating if they didn’t work and tell them that eating might not be an option even if they do work like dogs.”

“I second that motion,” Jack said.

“The fastest way to get a shark killer off the colonial shore would be a Smart Metal ship with an antimatter power plant. Nelly, get me Mr. Benson and tell him I need to see him pronto.”

“I’m working with Captain Drago on the plan for the Wasp,” came quickly back at Kris.

“Good, but as soon as you have a chance, I need for you to drop by my office on the Princess Royal. We have a problem that only you can solve.”

“I’m hearing that a lot.”

“Trust me, this one is true, and it gets to the heart of every man and woman aboard.”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. We were done, anyway, right, Captain?”

“You be sure to be here tomorrow when they start moving those guns,” Captain Drago said. “I say there are a few more power leads than your blueprints show. I know my boat.”

“Benson off,” took Kris out of that argument and left her staring at Amanda.

“Any more surprises?”

“You want to know why the Alwan population grows so slowly?”

“Will it turn my stomach?”

“Very likely.”

“I hate people who enjoy speaking truth to power, especially now that I seem to have some. At least some folks seem to think I have some. Power, not truth. Speak.”

“Every egg laid is reviewed by the elders. If they don’t like it, it’s cast outside the nest.”

“The egg? They don’t even wait for it to hatch?” Jack sounded incredulous. And just the way Kris would want her child’s dad to sound.

“How can they judge an egg?” Kris asked.

Jacques took over. “I have no idea. Maybe their sight goes into the infrared or ultraviolet. We haven’t been able to test them. They don’t like humans much, most of them.”

“It could be something worse,” Amanda said. “Maybe they aren’t judging the egg but the parents. If you’re a troublemaker, your egg’s bad.”

Kris shivered. “And every mother just accepts that their egg is trash?” Yes, kids were out of the question while she commanded a fleet on the tip of the spear, but she was a woman, and a newly married one at that.

“That’s where things get interesting,” Amanda said. “Tell them, Jacques.”

“No, there are those that grab their egg and flee into the deep woods or jungle.”

“And get eaten,” Kris said.

“Some. Maybe many, but not all. There’s a tribe of hunter-gatherers that are surviving in the deep woods,” Jacques said.

“I thought you said that being thrown out of the community was a death sentence,” Kris said.

“It is, for most, but there are exceptions. And imagine the attitude of Alwans that don’t care for the elders and have managed to stand up to the lions and tigers and bears in the deep woods with just their short bows and spears,” Amanda said.

“They must be good at hiding, and good at fighting when cornered,” Jack said slowly. “Just the folks that make great Marine recruits.”

“We don’t have a lot of nanos for recon dirtside,” Jacques said, “but I’ve got a few following that tribe, or tribes. I’ve also got a theory; honey, should I tell them?”

“Go ahead, love. All they can do is laugh.”

“I don’t think all Alwans have the same brain.”

“I’ve been wondering if all the Alwans were even the same species,” Kris said. “They look so different from equatorial to temperate to polar.”

“Oh, they’re all drawn from the same gene pool,” Jacques said. “Unlike us humans, who almost went extinct twenty-five or thirty thousand years ago, they have a much more diverse genetic pool to draw on. But I’m starting to think that there are parts of their brains that some Alwans don’t use, like many of the elders. Others, like the ones that hang around us and are running free in the forest, do use it.”

“Could the egg selection have something to do with that?” Kris asked.

“It kind of has me wondering. The ostrich types down at the equator don’t have an egg review. They’re a lot more aggressive and more willing to think about the future and accept that there is a past. Not so much with the elders here. What I’d give for brain scans from a couple of hundred subjects! I’ve checked out several volunteers, Alwans working with us, and they all showed the same. The problem is getting an elder.”

“The problem is the elders,” Jack said.

“Am I interrupting anything?” Mr. Benson said from the door.

“No, I think we’ve beaten this live Alwan as much as we can,” Kris said.

Amanda and Jacques nodded.

“You have a problem for me?” the former admiral said.

“Has your mess or restaurateurs bought any fresh fruit or vegetables dirtside?” Kris asked.

“Oh, that problem. Yes, Kiet, the guy running our Thai restaurant, dropped down to the farmers’ market yesterday to see about some fresh chickens, among other things.”

“How’d it go?” Amanda asked.

“He found a truckload of chickens and offered to buy them. Farmer asked him for one personal computer per chicken and wanted at least three of the good ones like Granny Rita got. The rest could be just so-so,” the former officer said.

Jack whistled. “That’s kind of steep.”

“Well, Kiet loves nothing better than haggling, so he counters with two, maybe three for the truckload. The farmer wouldn’t budge past one computer for two chickens. He says he has contracts to fill, and he might be able to swap computers for chickens, but he’s got a lot of contracts. The rest of the market was the same. Everyone owed someone something and needed a whole lot to settle the contract. Kiet came home empty-handed.”

The former admiral paused to study Kris and the tableful of people around her. “I take it that Kiet ran into something more than just a lot of opening bids from hard bargainers.”

“Kiet seems to have run full speed into a famine that’s been going on for near eighty years,” Amanda said.

“And we’ve just dropped twenty thousand hungry and hard-drinking Sailors, Marines, miners, and assembly-line supervisors into a place that not only can’t defend itself but can’t feed its defenders,” Benson concluded.

“You got it in one,” Kris said.

“Logistics, logistics, logistics,” the former admiral was heard to mutter. Then he locked eyes with Kris. “So if Alwa can’t support a defensive fleet, and we’re just supposed to be the first of many, do we pack it all in and go home?”

“Not on my watch, Admiral.”

“No offense intended, Viceroy. I believe in examining all my options, and it helps to get the worst off the table first.”

“No offense taken, Admiral. Now, as you said, logistics had just jumped ahead of a lot of things to take first place in this swamp as the biggest alligator chewing on our rump. We need things, and you’re the magician appointed to make them.”

The former admiral settled into a chair that Nelly made appear at the table.

“We need fishing boats,” Kris started with. “Big, strong ones able to tackle thirty meters of angry muscle and teeth. These leviathans have been keeping both Alwans and colonials off the oceans. They’ve been exploiting the sea’s resources for themselves. I intend to stop that.”

The admiral took that order and frowned at it for nearly a full minute. “You’re talking ancient sailing technology, ma’am, but it just happens to be a hobby of mine. Still, you can’t send men out in less than five-, six-hundred-ton boats if you want to have them come back from fighting something that big.”

“You’re not surprising me,” Kris said. “Nelly, do you have something like what the admiral is talking about in your storage?”

The screen beside them took on a picture of a boat identified as from 1940. “Raven class minesweeper, seventy meters long,” Nelly said. “A smaller one, Admirable class, was less than sixty meters long and a hundred tons lighter.”

“We could put a harpoon on the front deck,” the shipyard boss mused. “Rig it with an explosive tip. By the way, one of the exploration teams finally found an island loaded with guano, the natural source for nitrates used in both fertilizer and explosives. We should be able to start upgrading the weapons and maybe the farms.”

“One shuttle flight at a time?” Amanda said dryly.

“Something tells me you want a five-thousand-ton bulk freighter, too, Princess.”

“We need everything,” Kris said. “We have nothing.”

“I take it that building those planes to move the scientific teams around just got knocked out of high priority?”

“No, Admiral. We’ve got a planet we know way too little about. We need more discoveries like that guano island. If it’s not raining here, where is it raining? Do they have a bumper crop or just flash floods wiping everything out? I need to know.”

“So everything is my number one priority,” Benson said drolly.

“My Marines could take beach guard and shoot those things that steal from the fisherman, Kris, but I don’t know how effective the small round from an M-6 will be.”

“We need elephant rifles,” the former admiral said. “Heavy 12mm stuff to hit something big and let it know it’s been hit.”

“And let’s not forget the hunter-gatherers in the deep forest,” Jacques said. “They are finding some food resources even as they hide. If Jack’s Marines took out the main threat to them, we might find another entire food chain to exploit.”

“Alwa’s never going to be the same,” Penny said sadly.

“If those aliens Her Highness whipped had showed up,” the old Navy officer said, “Alwa not only wouldn’t be the same, it would be very dead. I choose change and a chance to live.”

“You’ve said it for all of us,” Kris said. “Now then, we need to get all this started real fast if we’re going to make a difference real quick. I see Smart Metal as the only way to do that. With a big chunk of the boffins dirtside, it’s time to roll up their space. Jack, if we deploy a major part of your Marines, could we roll up their space?”

“I thought you wanted to go lightly on the ground with guns?” Jack said.

“If you’re a fisherman, and a Marine takes out something that’s been robbing you, hook, line, and sinker as well as fish, is that Marine a problem or a friend.”

“A friend,” Jack said. “A real buddy.”

“And maybe you invite him home to dinner and give him a place to bed down by the fire. If that gets more Smart Metal off the frigates, and into leviathan-hunting, trawling, and transporting nitrates to Haven for both fertilizer and ammo for elephant guns, we’re eating.”

Here Kris turned to Penny. “I know I’m asking you for a gallon of your life blood, but how much armor can a frigate give up and still have some sort of fighting chance?”

“I knew that question was coming,” Penny said. “You’ll have to fight your skippers, but I’d say three to five thousand tons each, maybe ten if you don’t mind a skeleton ship. That’s beside what you can off-load with the Hellburners, Marines, and boffins. I’m assuming that we’d get that back if the early-warning system went off, and the bastards started moving on us.”

“I expect that assumption to be valid,” Kris said.

“So I can maybe get a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty thousand tons of metal to build fishing boats, freighters, aircraft, and a whole lot of trucks to bring in whatever food we find in all the out-of-the-way places.”

“Is that enough Smart Metal?” Kris asked.

“It will have to be,” the old Navy man said. “We haven’t even begun looking at what the industrial folks can add to this. I hear we located a crater on the moon way up north. If what I read was right, it’s got a lot of water mixed in with its dust, and its regolith is rich in iron. They can build a stone wall around it, top it off with an iron or steel roof, get a decent magnetic field going to protect the workers, then leach most of the Smart Metal out of the plants.”

He stared at the overhead. “That could add twenty or thirty thousand more tons, but what I really want is steel from that crater. Steel for guns. Steel for boats. Steel to make trucks.”

Then he eyed Kris. “Of course, batteries and power would come in handy, too.”

“Have we got anyone to skipper and crew a fishing boat?” Amanda asked.

“Nelly?” Kris asked.

“There are several people in the fleet who worked summers as deckhands on fishing boats both on Musashi and Wardhaven. Hey, we got lucky. There’s a chief, called back from retirement, who spent his last five years skippering a fishing boat up in the northern waters of North Continent, Kris. He’s on the Connie.”

“Nelly, send to Captain Sampson, request release of this chief immediately to Navy yard. Make that soonest.”

“Sent, Kris. Received on the Constellation. Ah, Kris, Sampson sends back, ‘Why are you transferring him from my command?’”

Jack whistled. The admiral’s eyes got wide. Penny shook her head. “She sounds kind of like a young woman I know,” she said.

“I did not respond to my first order with a question. Not even half of my orders.”

“Yes,” Jack agreed, clearly lying manfully like a husband should.

“Kris, there may be a problem here,” Nelly said. “The chief has sent you a Private and Personal e-mail requesting reassignment from the Constellation. It’s one of about a hundred that I’ve been sitting on because I don’t know what to do with them officially.”

Now it was Kris’s turn to whistle. A hundred requests amounted to a quarter of the frigate’s crew when you included Marines and scientists.

“Admiral, any suggestions?” Kris said.

“You talking to this civilian?” the older man said, not suppressing a grin. “I strongly suspect this was what my king meant when he told me that I was a contractor, not a Navy officer this cruise.”

He paused, started to say something. Paused again, then did open his mouth. “It seems to me that Lieutenant Commander Sampson has a leadership challenge facing her. It also seems to me, as an old ship driver and fleet management type, that you, Commodore, have a leadership challenge facing you. Actually, several, since I walked in here, but you know what I mean.”

“I think I do,” Kris said and reflected on her choices. “Admiral, will you be needing the chief to help you design your fishing fleet between now and oh, 1400 tomorrow?”

“I got plenty of irons in my fires. No.”

“Then I’ll kick my leadership challenge down the road until then.”

“Kick. I like that idea,” the admiral said, and stood. “If you don’t mind, I got business to attend to.”

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Benson. Have a good evening,” Kris said, formally.

Once he was gone, she added, “Poor guy,” and turned to Jack.

“Do you need to be talking to some of your Marines?”

“That looks to be where I’m headed next. I want to drop a squad or two down with the beach fisherman at o’dark-early tomorrow morning. We kill a few of their problems, and it’s a visible start. I also need to talk to Captain Hayakawa. His company had just completed a six-week jungle-training rotation when they got assigned to you. Someone must have thought it was a jungle around you,” Jack deadpanned.

He got his laugh from all present, except Kris.

“I think his best jungle troopers would be the ones to use to make first contact,” Jack said. “Jacques, it would also be nice if you could come along with us.”

“Yes,” Amanda said, “he’s the anthropologist, and I’m just an economist.”

Kris could see heart’s blood pouring all over the deck of her office. “I’m sorry, Amanda,” Kris said.

“I can open a door between your quarters,” Nelly said helpfully.

“No need to,” Jacques jumped to say.

“Oh, yes, right,” Nelly actually stuttered. Kris suspected her computer had just checked and found the door already there.

“Jack, you go handle your drop operations. Amanda, you and Jacques enjoy what time you have together. Jack, leave a message for when you need Jacques tomorrow but don’t have his computer tell him until an hour before you need him.”

“You think that will give him enough time to prepare?” Jack asked.

“I’m a field man, Colonel, I’ve always got a bag packed. And besides, there’s not much to prepare for with these people. We either won’t see them, or they’ll hit us with poison darts, or they’ll let us talk to them. It’s a simple die roll.”

All three left, leaving just Penny and Masao with Kris. “I assume,” Penny said, “that because Amanda didn’t need a door opened by Nelly, there’s already a door.”

“Yes,” Nelly admitted.

“That is another one of my leadership challenges,” Kris said with a sigh. “I strongly suspect that contracts, scientists, and some Sailors have paired up their quarters and made doors,” Kris admitted. “After I hunt for the Hornet, I’ll have to do something about it. For now, it’s every captain for him- or herself.”

“Kris, Sampson is the one exception to the door thing,” Nelly said. “She has most of her enlisted personnel living sixteen to a bay. Chiefs and officers are four to a room. Men and women to separate quarters. Only she and three officers have private quarters. Sampson maintains her ship at Condition Baker. It’s the only one in the fleet.”

“And a quarter of her crew want off,” Penny said.

“Problems, problems, problems,” Kris said, rubbing her eyes and failing to suppress a yawn. “I’m sure you two have better places to be.” Kris stood. “Nelly, vanish the door from my night quarters to the main passageway. Tell Abby if she wants to see me, she either opens a door or takes the long walk through my day quarters.”

“She’s opening a door, but there’s a lock, and it’s only on her side,” Nelly reported.

“Do you want me to go out on your cruise tomorrow?” Penny asked.

“No need. The information will be as plain as the ship’s success or failure. You and Masao keep tracking the reports coming in from the discovery expeditions. They either find something, or we starve.”

And maybe, if you two keep working close together, you’ll find a way to make a door between your hearts.

“Oh, Penny, aren’t you about due to make lieutenant commander?” Kris asked.

“I honestly don’t know. I haven’t been doing the career thing very well, touching all the bases, getting my ticket punched. You know.”

“You’ve been following a Longknife around and staying alive,” Kris said through another yawn. “Nelly, cut papers for my signature. Penny gets her extra stripe the first of next month.”

“And then you’ll outrank me,” the Musashi Navy officer observed.

Oops. Maybe Kris hadn’t accomplished quite what she intended. She needed some rest. Tomorrow would come way too soon.