Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) (29 page)

Next
morning, after breakfast, Kris connected with Jacques and did make it down to where they now housed the alien natives. Their quarters were more spacious and much more to their liking.

They had what appeared to be three caves coming off a rock overhang. Below was a sandy area and what looked like a stream. When Kris crossed it, she found herself splashing.

Apparently, a certain amount of the
Wasp
’s reaction mass was in use as a creek for them.

They had their own fire and were roasting something that had, no doubt, until recently been alive on Sasquan. They seemed content.

~You chased off the other star walkers,~ the gray-bearded man said, no doubt in his voice.

~They will not walk among the stars again,~ Kris answered.

~Will you take more heads?~ the bald woman asked.

~We will either take their heads or they will take ours,~ Kris said.

The bald woman shook her head. Nelly reminded Kris that this meant agreement among these people.

~Why do you have to take their head? Why do they want to take your head?~ piped up a thin voice.

Kris turned to see the young fellow whose leg injury had started all this. Now he was up and hobbling toward them, a young-girl playmate following him like a shadow.

~They have land,~ the graybeard said. ~If you go in someone’s land, you either run away from them or fight them. If you win, it is your land.~

That explanation seemed to satisfy all the adults listening.

It didn’t satisfy the young fellow. ~But look up in the sky at night. Not this one, but the real sky. There is a lot of land. Every one of those dots of light is a star with land. Why fight?~

~You will know when you are older,~ the bald woman said.

That answer didn’t seem any more acceptable to him than it had to Kris when she was his age.

~Can I go with you, Uncle Jacques?~

The anthropologist stepped forward. ~You can go with me if your father’s father or your father’s mother says you can,~ the anthropologist said. The “if” was in Standard.

~Can we,~ came in two-part harmony from both the boy and girl.

~Go,~ the grandfather said. ~Leave your betters in some quiet. And you be sure to feed them, Jacques. When they walk off with you to pester you with questions, they miss their meat here and come home whining for meat that is already eaten.~

~I will feed them,~ Jacques assured their elders.

The four of them crossed the stream, opened the door painted to blend in with the forest motif, and stepped outside.

~Can I have my “reader”?~ both kids begged.

Jacques produced a pair of readers and gave them to the kids. In a moment, they were lost to a basic primer on letters and numbers, the kind of thing Kris had been given when she was three.

“You’re teaching them to read?” Kris asked.

“Their elders can’t grasp the concept of symbols meaning anything. They aren’t dumb. Drop them in the woods, and they’ll track a gnat that we can’t even see when it’s biting us on the ass, but try to get across to them the idea of three or four? Nope. Not possible. Me, mine. One, two, many. Big many to some, but just many to most.”

“But these kids?” Kris said, waving at the two, then grabbing one and pulling them out of the way of a hurrying Sailor.

Kris had almost walked into enough poles, walls, ditches, whatever, as a kid lost in her games to smile as she rescued this girl from a similar fate.

“We caught them just before their brains locked down. They’re learning. Their brains are also sprouting synapses like a house afire. Just like one of our kids in their age range.”

“They’re learning to speak Standard?” Kris said, eyeing what the kids were reading.

“And they’re picking it up like a dry sponge does water. They’re also learning our vocabulary, a full, modern vocabulary.”

“They’ll be like the others, only open to talking,” Kris said.

“Yep. Doc Meade wants them back in the lab this afternoon. I don’t think she’ll mind if I bring them in early. She’s studying them, matching them against the cadavers we have and the baselines we have from their folks. These kids’ brains are so different from those of the elders we’ve got.”

Kris chewed that over.

Jacques kept talking. “So, in answer to the question you’re not asking me, yes, it was worthwhile picking them up. But the very act of bringing them into our conversation is making them different. Different from their own tribe. Different from the bloodthirsty killers among the stars. I have no idea where all this is heading, but it’s opening up what was pretty locked down beforehand.”

“I’m going to judge this as good,” Kris said.

“Kris, Captain Drago wants to talk to you.”

“Why?” Kris asked.

“There’s a problem up ahead. Maybe it’s nothing, but he’d like you to know about it sooner rather than later.

Jacques raised an inquiring eyebrow.

Kris shrugged. “You take the kids to the doctor, and I’ll see what’s worrying the captain.”

And she walked off. Quickly. Admirals never run. That might scare the average Sailor and really scare their officers.

But admirals can walk very, very quickly.

Kris
decided to use her day quarters as a shortcut through to the
Wasp
’s bridge. Captain Drago had told Kris never, ever to even think of doing that, but now looked like a good time to break that rule.

So she was very surprised to find Captain Drago and Chief Beni waiting for her in what they had turned into her flag plot.

“What’s the rush?” Kris asked, her stomach already in free fall from the looks on their faces.

“The enemy isn’t there anymore,” Captain Drago said.

“What?” brought Kris up short.

“Chief, explain this to the admiral.”

“Yes, sir,” the old retired chief said. He had a black box in his hand and began tapping it. One of Kris’s large screens converted to show what Kris had looked at so many times in the last few days: a visual of the gas giant and its moons.

Always, it had shown the enemy base camp orbiting one moon.

Now it showed nothing.

“What happened?” Kris demanded.

“I don’t know, ma’am. One minute it was showing the reactors and other electronic hums. The next minute, it’s showing nothing. Not. A. Thing.”

“Of course, with the speed-of-light lag time, whatever it quit showing,” Captain Drago pointed out, “quit happening a while back.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” Kris said. “But what did they do? Could they be masking their emissions? The Iteeche had a way of throwing off our sensors in the last war,” Kris remembered.

“Yes. Somehow the bastards could throw off our radar and laser range finders by a couple hundred klicks, ma’am. We never have figured out how they did it. It’s one thing to spoof sensors a bit. It’s another thing entirely to hide the emissions coming out of a thermonuclear reactor. That’s raw physics, ma’am. You’ve got to contain the damn plasma. That means a lot of electromagnetic fields. All those I can see. Even a blind man could see them.”

“But we’re not seeing it anymore?” Kris said.

“I tell you, it’s not there.”

“So they either blew themselves up or turned everything off,” Kris said, naming the only two options she could think of.

“They didn’t blow themselves up,” Chief Beni said. “We’d have seen that.”

“So they turned off their gear,” Kris said. “Captain, what’s it look like when you dump a reactor?”

“First off, you don’t dump a dozen huge ship reactors and five gigantic city-size reactors when you’re tied up at the dock. That tends to wreck things you don’t want wrecked.”

“Things we wouldn’t want wrecked,” Kris pointed out. “What about them?”

“There’s no accounting for them,” the captain growled. “Admiral, would you be so kind as to order my chief engineer to report to your quarters and could you scare up that chief boffin? They’ve got all kinds of sensors. They might be able to add something to our conversation.”

“Nelly, make it so.”

“Already done, Kris. They’re headed here as fast as their legs can carry them. I think the rumor that we’ve lost the aliens is wandering through the ship at faster-than-light speed. You humans do like to talk.”

“And you computers don’t,” Drago said, dryly.

“We are networked by our very nature, sir.”

“We were networked long before you were,” the captain retorted.

“Enough, children,” Kris said. “Chief, can you take my board back to just before you lost the aliens? Enhance it to maximum resolution and walk it through the loss as slowly as possible.”

They were going through that loss for the second time when the chief engineers of both the
Wasp
and
Hornet
reported to Kris, with both Captain Taussig and Professor Labao only seconds behind them. Not far behind them were the two felines and their translator.

Kris brought all of them up to date on the enemy’s status, something that didn’t seem to surprise any of them, not even the cats. Then she had Chief Beni run them through what they knew about the sudden change in the aliens’ status.

The two engineers were shaking their heads as the reactors disappeared from the screen within a single second.

“I’d never scram a reactor while tied up to the pier,” Commander Manuel Ortega of the
Wasp
said. “Even if I had it on minimum power, and what we were getting from our targets wasn’t minimum.”

Ronnie Thiu of the
Hornet
agreed. “Bad idea, but those shadows on the screen? I think that might have been the plasma dissipating into space, or at least some of it. If we’re reading it this far away, it’s got to be tearing into something to create that kind of radiation signature.”

She turned to the head boffin. “Did any of your people have a better look at this?”

“I have some independent reports of this,” the professor began in lecture mode. “However, I must tell you that our most sensitive sensor for this was destroyed during the recent fight, and our best researcher in this area lost her life. Her assistant is doing the best he can with what he has available. Our computers are trying their best to enhance what we did capture.”

“My children are all working on this, Kris,” Nelly reported. “We should have something for you in the next five minutes.”

“Good,” Kris said, wondering why she was hearing about this first from Professor Labao rather than Nelly, but this situation was coming at them very fast.

“So,” Kris said, thinking on her feet as fast as she could. “We’ve lost all evidence of reactors. What about laser capacitors? Are the guns charged?”

“We’re too far out to read anything like that,” Chief Beni said.

“How close will we have to get before we know we’ve got two huge batteries of lasers loaded and aimed at us?” Kris got in before either captain present could.

“Five hundred thousand kilometers,” the chief said. “Plus or minus a hundred thousand.”

“We better be really slow on our final approach,” Captain Drago said.

“Absolutely,” Kris said flatly.

“What about their communications equipment?” Kris asked. “Not that they make a practice of talking to us.”

“I’m sorry, Admiral,” the chief said. “At this range, they could have comm gear online, but unless they start talking on a wide enough beam, or really jack up the power on their gear, I’m listening to a great big nothing.”

“Then please keep listening,” Kris said, “and let us know if you hear so much as a twitch.”

“You’ll be the second to know, right after Captain Drago.”

“And you were only about thirty seconds behind me on this,” the skipper of the
Wasp
told Kris. “If you’d been home gnawing your liver instead of gallivanting around my ship, you’d have known it then.”

“I’ve had enough liver for this week,” Kris said.

She glanced in the general direction of the felines. Zarra was translating like mad.

N
ELLY, IS S
HE GETTING THIS RIGH
T?

P
RETTY MUCH,
K
RIS.
T
HERE’S A LOT THAT LOOKS LIK
E MAGIC, AND THE GENE
RAL KEEPS SAYING SO.
T
HE ADMIRAL INSISTS
THAT THIS IS ADVANCE
D TECHNOLOGY . . . AND HE
WANTS SOME.

G
OOD.
C
ORR
ECT ANY MAJOR MISTAK
ES, BUT LET THEM RUN
THEIR OWN COURSE.

“Admiral,” Nelly announced to all, “we have the analysis of the main antenna’s takeaway from the recent event. I’m bringing it up on-screen.

The enemy base again appeared, only this time, each reactor stood out clear from the others. Two pairs of six reactors in the shape of a T, three aft in engineering proper, powering the ships’ rocket motors, and three strung out along the keel. The pair of six were docked nose in to a space marked out with five gigantic reactors, roaring away with plasma and the superconducting magnetohydrodynamic racetracks that the aliens used to extract electricity from the superheated plasma in their reactors.

Until only a few years ago, humans had used the same technology. Many starships still did.

Then the lights went out.

On-screen, gossamer shadows showed where the plasma went. There were brief sparkles where the plasma met something and interacted with it. On-screen, it was hard to see. No doubt, in person, it had been horrible to suffer.

“It appears that the reaction from venting the plasma,” Nelly reported, “tore the ships away from the station. We can’t be sure because the ships vanish from our observation as the plasma dissipates.”

“What happened on the station?” Kris asked.

“They stayed put for a bit more than a second after the ships, then they, too, vented. Each reactor vented in several different directions,” Nelly reported

On the screen now only the station showed. Shadows went in several directions from each reactor. Here and there were more flashes as structures not meant to face the demons of hot plasma encountered it and became one with it.

“If they were planning on doing this and being in shape to restart and attack us,” Nelly said, “I do not believe that it went as smoothly as they wanted.”

Kris found herself gnawing her lower lip.

“We’ll see what we shall see when we get closer,” she said. That didn’t have the firm finality that an admiral was supposed to bring to her words, but it was the best Kris could muster in this situation.

“Nelly, send to squadron: ‘Continue battle preparation. I don’t trust these bastards any farther than I can throw them.’”

“I sent it, Kris.”

A
L
L OF IT?

R
IGHT DOWN T
O THE “BASTARD” PART.

Kris shrugged. That might not go down with the other deathless words before battle, but it definitely reflected her thoughts. The Longknife legend would, no doubt, edit it appropriately.