Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting (40 page)

“When we went on the Voyage of Discovery,” Phil said, “no one said we weren’t coming back, so yes, the old
Hornet
had a lot of family men expecting to be away for a couple of months. Now they want to settle down here.”

“Will you be going dirtside?” Kris asked Bahati.

“I’m an Information Systems specialist. Frigate systems are my specialty. I’ve made arrangements with one of the wives who is an elementary-level teacher to care for little Phil while I’m away.” She glanced at her husband. “Phil wants me
assigned to the Cannopus Yard. I want to stay on the
Hornet
. I’ve helped her work up.”

“It would be a hard day for little Phil if I lost another ship with us both on it,” Phil said. There was a darkness behind his eyes that Kris chose not to plumb.

“There are plenty of ships that need crews,” Kris said. “Jack’s still on
Wasp
most of the time, though.”

“Yes,” Bahati said.

“We’ll talk about it more later,” Phil said.

“Well,” Kris said, sensing the subject needed changing, “what is it with your frigates? You say your reactors are good for five times the power of mine. What’s all that good
for
?”

“Five times the hitting power,” Phil said, beaming at the chance to praise his new ship. “The main problem is applying all that power. They’re working on a 24-inch laser, but they’re got teething problems. Anyway, the new
Hornet
has twice the lasers, so we can fire one while the other is recharging. Each laser has twice the capacitors. Instead of a two- or three-second burst, we can hold the beam for five or six seconds. I’ve held it for almost seven seconds by feeding juice in the back while firing it out the front. We have twice the power cabling from the reactor and cooling for the lasers, but we’re firing them just as fast, every fifteen seconds. We fire off the top battery for five to seven seconds, then fire the bottom battery. By the time they’re dry, the top is just about ready.”

“If you flip ship and fire the aft battery, the front will definitely be locked and loaded,” Kris said.

“Yes. Hit them hard and hit them often.”

Kris walked with them to the Forward Lounge, where she met the key staff from the new warships and addressed all hands over the net. The briefing went pretty much to form. The folks who came out this time, even the merchant ships and factory workers, knew this was a one-way voyage until matters were settled. This time Kris announced that there would be Articles of War signed by all hands: Navy, Marines, and civilians.

“Make no mistake, you sure look like the old-time cavalry arriving just in the nick of time. There is a fight for our very lives coming. But it is a fight we will win!” Kris finished, to a cheering room.

“Now we make it happen,” Jack muttered to her as she stood beaming back at the confident new arrivals.

And they did.

It was a well-ordered drill. Freighters parked their cargos for Alwa or the moon base in a trailing or leading orbit. Kris kept them as twin-reactor ships, and several headed out to the asteroids with new miners and their gear to kick production into higher gear.

The two composite factory ships dropped down to the moon. They were set up according to the latest survey near water and better access to aluminum and iron. It took a week, but their fabs were in production just as the extra loads of minerals and other resources arrived from the mines.

Gosport Station doubled in size. The first assignment for the new yards was to spin out six more Bird class guard ships to relieve the six that had been on duty for a month. That ate up nine of the newly arrived freighters, but with Smart Metal
^TM
flowing out of the factory ships as they used rock, iron, and aluminum to replace it in their outer structure, these new Birds were closer to frigate standards.

Frigates and battlecruisers, that was the word around the stations. The newly arrived ships with their twenty 22-inch lasers certainly looked more like battlecruisers than frigates. They were cycled through the yards; there were now sixteen slips in the eight yards. Rather than respinning freighters, they were occupied by battlecruisers as yard personnel went over them with rigs designed by Benson’s crew, coating newly arrived battlecruisers with crystal armor.

All this took time.

As it turned out, the aliens were willing to give Kris time. They were working on a few tricks of their own.

Commander Hanson brought the
Victorious
back with news; the other suicide-spawning mother ship was gone. He checked two more systems. The alien warships had vanished; their dock now spun empty.

“The clans are gathering,” Jack whispered.

The number of arriving suicide boats dropped to nothing. Kris kept a pair of the new Birds near each jump, but sent the others to outpost jumps away from System X that weren’t
being guarded by the fleets. The original Birds were docked and up-armored.

As soon as the first sixteen frigates were up-armored to battlecruiser standards, they were dispatched to the three fleets. They relieved frigates to return to Cannopus Station and be refitted with the Iteeche power system, upgrading them to battlecruiser standards. They might not have twice the lasers, but they halved the time needed to recharge. The lasers would heat up; the yards added extra refrigeration to the guns.

All the training and practice of a lifetime was now on the line. Yard managers reached deep into their heads, their guts, their very hearts and came up with designs that had to work the first time, every time.

While Admiral Benson and his crews worked miracles, Kris sent Hanson and the
Victorious
to observe System X. She expected the aliens to move as soon as the fourth wolf pack showed up.

His report, dispatched as soon as the
Victorious
jumped back into the Alwa system, left Kris wondering if, when the aliens came, she’d be able to stop them.

The aliens were learning.

Not far from the gas giant they were fueling from was a tumbling rock of a planet. They were slicing huge slabs off it and lifting them to orbit, where they cut them to fit the outer hull of their giant warships.

Kris had expected that.

What surprised her was the growing fleet of smaller ships. Their three reactors were only slightly larger than those on frigates. From the sensor take off them, they were getting warship-size lasers, maybe bigger, set in their bows.

“They’re building frigates,” Jack said.

“We knew they could build a few fast movers,” Penny said.

“But their fast movers were never very good,” Masao said. “Many blew up or broke down.”

Kris nodded. “We’ll see if they solved their quality control problem. I figured the huge number of reactors and lasers on their ships was their way of getting around sloppy maintenance or construction standards. You can afford to have two
or three reactors off-line when you have a hundred. Not so much when you only have three.”

“But if they have fast cavalry, as fast as your own,” Admiral Furzah said, “you will not have so much freedom to maneuver.”

“Exactly,” Kris agreed. “We beat them over the head with our advantages, and they learned the lesson.”

“How fast are they knocking those small ones together?” Penny asked.

“I don’t know,” Kris said. “We need some ships on the other side of the jump, so they can observe everything while it’s happening.”

“Will they let us?” Jack asked.

“We are vermin,” Penny reminded them. “They want us to know fear even as they slay us. I’ll give you five to ten they don’t do anything so long as we stay well away from them.”

“I won’t take your bet,” Kris said, “but I’ll try it. Nelly, tell Commander Hanson that I’m promoting him to captain of a division. He’ll take
Victorious
and
Valiant
back to System X, Jump Gamma, anchor there, and observe. He’s to sail as soon as we upgrade his sensor suite to the best available. If he needs anything off
Wasp
, he’s got it. Boffins as well. I want him to fingerprint those new ships, track their production and shakedown process.”

Kris was sending him back out again. Him and his crew. They were turning into a good team. Too bad that meant she would likely use them up.

The reward for a hard job well done was a worse job.

56

Time
passed.

The aliens made use of their time. Kris used hers.

Kris wanted to see the
Conqueror
in action. Becky Kaeyat got her commodore’s star after the last fight; Kris ordered her to take BatRon 16 for a run to the closest gas giant both to get a load of reaction mass and to give the gunners a shoot. Her squadron got away from the pier a half hour ahead of Earth’s BatRon 10 with
Wasp
and
Conqueror
.

Without explanation, Kris ordered the
Relentless
and
Stonewall
on a high course.

At five million klicks from a large asteroid, Kris turned to Nelly. “Kindly have
Conqueror
knock a chip off that rock. Something the size of a small frigate and aimed well above the plane of this system to avoid trouble. Then alert the high frigates that they’ll have a target soon.”

“Done, Kris.”

There was a pause, much longer than Kris expected. Apparently,
Conqueror
’s crew were just along to sightsee. Ten minutes later, sensors reported something going on aboard the big boy.

Two minutes later, a beam shot out from the huge ship, hit the asteroid, and a big chunk of the place took off like a billiard ball.

“Now let’s see if they can it hit,” Kris said.

Both frigates used a shoot, shoot, look, shoot, shoot, look approach to the fire control solution, or so they reported later. They only had to shoot, shoot, and look to see that the fifty-thousand-ton stone bullet was a cloud of dust.

Admittedly, it was dust moving at .05 percent the speed of light.

“Advise
Relentless
and
Stonewall
good shooting and well done. Advise
Conqueror
they were a bit slow, and the stone bullet they produced is not going to do much damage to the alien ships. We need to come up with a better plan.”

“Sent,” Nelly reported.

Kris sent Commodore Kaeyat’s squadron on to the gas giant for more fuel. She returned with the
Conqueror
and the frigates. They’d be next to have their reactors upgraded.

As it turned out, Benson had figured a way to rework the frigates to battlecruisers without running them through the yards’ graving docks. Those were reserved for the ships he intended to command. Instead, his teams brought a barge around to the pier where a frigate was moored. Using the flexibility that Smart Metal
^TM
allowed, they’d slit open the hull first around one reactor, then the next, and finally, the last, doing what needed doing. The laser cooling didn’t even take that much of an invasive effort. A tiger team would come aboard with a ton of extra Smart Metal
^TM
, pour it into the hull near the lasers, then program it into piping to cool the lasers and carry the heated reaction mass back to the reactors to feed the plasma.

The superconducting cabling to move more power to the capacitors took more work. It had to be manufactured, not squirted out, but it turned out you could have Smart Metal
^TM
swallow the stuff, like a snake, then draw it through the ship to where you wanted it.

Kris was making good use of her time.

Then she got the next report back from Captain Hansson and the
Victorious
’s sensors. They had sent a pinnace through the jump with a full week of observations. It was downloaded to the
Alarm
, a new courier ship respun from one of the newly arrived freighters. It raced back at four gees acceleration.

Kris was grateful for the speed. She was none too happy with the report.

The alien cruisers were maneuvering in sections of fourteen, close enough to her squadrons of eight as to make no difference. They formed a small dish of three, four, four, and three. For larger units, they’d form those fourteen into formations of two, three, three, and two, for a task force of 140.

“That’s a lot of fast movers,” Jack said.

“And the mother ships seem to be in some sort of contest to see how many they can knock out. They’re turning out eight or ten a day.”

“They intend to bury us,” Jack said.

“Drown us in our own blood,” Kris repeated the threat of the old woman she’d sent back to human space. She’d asked Phil how that had gone down.

He’s shrugged. “I got there. This force was ready to sail. They asked me if I wanted to go back. I said I’d go if they renamed a ship
Hornet
. They did the next day. I can’t say my wife was all that happy about being rushed aboard and off across the galaxy. Her folks were left with the job of packing up our apartment and putting it into storage. I suggested they sell it, but they insisted we’d be back. Three days after we arrived, we were boosting back. I suspect if we hadn’t aimed for Wardhaven, we’d have missed the whole thing.”

“And Captain O’dell?”

“She said she’d come back with the next fleet. She had some things she wanted to do. She also had a fortune in media interviews. That’s another sore point with my wife. She wanted me to take some of that money. I told her there was no place to spend it here.” He paused for a thoughtful moment. “She has a lot of reasons to be unhappy with me. I owe that woman, big-time.”

“We all owe folks big-time.”

“Or we will if we can figure out how to make what they gave us work. I saw the report on the
Conqueror
’s test. Not so good.”

“Not so good at defending this system,” Kris said. “But there are twelve systems between here and there. As well as a neutron star in System X.”

“But if you go out there, could they get between you and Alwa?” Phil asked.