Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) (30 page)

It
is impossible to come to a dead halt in space.

Always, you are orbiting the center of the galaxy at a mind-bending pace.

Usually, you are orbiting a sun at a more reasonable speed, but you are still moving.

Finally, most times a ship is orbiting a planet of some sort. We humans don’t go to space for the view, we go for the territory. Maybe we aren’t as territorial as the newly discovered felines, but we’re looking for living space and resources.

Kris knew all of these laws of physics. Still, from her flag bridge, she ordered Captain Drago to bring her squadron to as near a dead halt as possible when they were five hundred thousand klicks from the moon where the aliens had built their orbital refuge.

Making allowances for the huge gravity well of the gas giant only a few million miles away, the squadron drifted in space. Every mind, every sensor aboard, focused its full attention on the mystery that lay ahead of them.

Every scrap of spare computing power concentrated on analyzing what the sensors revealed.

It pretty much came to one big nothing.

“As far as the electromagnetic spectrum is concerned, there is no there there,” Chief Beni reported from his usual place at sensors on the bridge. “Every instrument we’ve got says there is just nothing happening up ahead.”

“Visuals?” Kris snapped from where she sat in flag plot.

“They are still rather vague,” Professor Labao reported from her elbow. “We are unsure if that stems from the junk that has been injected into the space around the base, or because whatever we are looking at just doesn’t look like what we are looking for.”

Kris did not smile although the report was as perfectly noncommittal as she’d expect from a scientist reluctant to admit he had nothing to add to their knowledge base.

No doubt, it was very embarrassing.

“Captain Drago, lead the squadron closer. If there is a creep speed, use it.”

That got a heads-up among the feline contingent observing them from the corner of Kris’s flag bridge. The admiral actually smiled at Kris.

Of course, a feline smile showed a lot of teeth. Long, pointed ones.

Let’s keep these folks as allies,
Kris reminded herself. For the millionth time.

At four hundred thousand klicks, the observed results were no better than they had been at five hundred thousand.

By three hundred thousand, they were starting to get a decent picture.

It was ugly.

Two ships rolled and drifted alongside a long cylinder. Occasionally, they bounced off each other.

“There’s no guidance there,” Captain Drago concluded. “They’re totally out of any semblance of control.”

“But are they dead?” Kris asked. “I wouldn’t put it past them to have their lasers loaded and on automatic. Whoever closes in gets hit with one last, massive broadside.”

“They’d need sensors to know there was anyone there,” Taussig pointed out from his place at Kris’s other elbow.

“There could be something passive,” Kris insisted.

“It would have to draw some juice,” Captain Drago pointed out on net. “We are not getting anything at all. Not the low hum from capacitors, nor anything in the lower electromagnetic spectrum from something waiting to power up.”

Kris eyed Taussig, who sat at her elbow since he was now a passenger on the
Wasp
, riding along with the remnants of his
Hornet
.

“Take us in closer, Captain Drago. Professor Labao, I want that particular sector of space examined like no bit of vacuum has ever been before. I don’t trust these folks to give up without a fight.”

“There is always a first time,” Jack said.

“For a human, maybe. For them, never. It’s not ‘enlightened,’” Kris spat.

Slowly, as slowly as the laws of physics allowed, they closed in.

“We are getting some electromagnetic activity,” the chief reported at two hundred thousand klicks. “It’s in the form of low-powered electric servo motors. They’re very weak and not much of them. The kind of things we use for minimum life support.”

“So someone might be alive?”

“Possibly, on what’s left of the space station.”

“Give me a picture,” Kris ordered.

Kris knew space stations. She’d blown up at least one and fought to save another. A cylinder was the usual design for them. A simple tin can in space.

This one was no exception.

Or at least it had started as no exception.

Now. Not so much.

Unless the aliens had intentionally built a twisted and malformed cylinder, this station had suffered a catastrophic failure. It was easy to see why.

In a dozen or more places, the hull looked singed, burned by the venting of superheated plasma that these spaces on the hull had not been designed to contain. The vent points showed signs of wreckage drifting by them or hanging on by a thread.

No wonder it had been so hard to get a decent picture of the alien base. Its very death had cloaked it in a veil of destruction.

“Where is the activity?” Kris asked.

“In the extreme forward section of the cylinder,” Professor Labao said. “The area farthest from a vented reactor.”

Nelly highlighted that section. It was well away from the self-destruction of the reactors. While the other end of the station appeared to be completed and done with, this end still showed where construction had been going on.

Had some low-caste workers there chosen life over death? The odds were long against it. But a mother and father had chosen life for themselves and their two babies once in Kris’s experience. Only the babies had survived, but still, of the almost hundred billion aliens Kris had slaughtered, at least two had chosen life.

“Captain Drago, I believe the
Wasp
has the best armor left after the last fight.”

“Yes, we’re at eighty-five percent,” Captain Drago reported. “Why?”

“Let’s leave the rest of the squadron at this distance. Set the strongest Condition Zed you can on the
Wasp
and nose in there. If I were you, I’d keep my engines away from them for the first pass,” Kris said, “but what do I know? I’m just the admiral.”

“And the bloody Longknife,” Drago muttered under his breath. Almost.

Kris didn’t hear him. Very carefully, she didn’t hear.

The squadron swung wide of the moon while the
Wasp
crept closer, if a ship traveling at a hundred thousand klicks an hour relative to the huge gas giant looming over them all could be said to creep.

They were fifty thousand klicks out when the aliens made their move.

“We’ve
been pinged! Radar!”

Bridge personnel are supposed to be very informative, but circumspect, in their reports. They are never supposed to shout their reports. Sad to say, old Chief Beni failed to follow proper decorum at that moment.

He was definitely shouting.

“There’s also communication from the station to the warship wrecks!”

There was no need to order battle stations. Everyone was already there. The
Wasp
even had an admiral at the Weapons station. There was also no need to order a flip of the ship. The frigate was on a nose-forward course, anyway.

N
ELLY, JINK.

I
’M DOING IT,
K
RIS,
BUT WE’VE ONLY GOT T
HRUSTERS TO PLAY WIT
H.
T
HERE’S NOT MUCH
I
CAN DO.

Nevertheless, in her high-gee egg, Kris felt the side movement as Nelly slid to the left, then dropped the ship down.

On her board, Kris held the lasers ready, but she had no target.

Nothing moved.

Captain Drago had arranged his approach so that only one of the warships was over the horizon of the alien station. Kris searched it for a target.

“Enemy lasers are powering up and coming to bear,” Nelly reported.

“Kill them,” Kris ordered.

Laser 1 on the
Wasp
’s bow shot out a stuttering blast of light. On the hulk, a section of hull exploded.

But there was more movement visible on the dinged, seared, and dented hull. Faster than human thought, Nelly popped one, then another, then four. Finally, she used all seven lasers.

A missile tried to launch from the dead ship. Nelly nailed it before it cleared its launcher. The explosion wrecked several other launchers.

Kris was fighting a zombie. It shambled and shook and tried to kill her with every twitch. The
Wasp
fought back with the clear, intelligent intent of every human and computer aboard her who loved life and intended to keep living.

Almost as suddenly as it had started, it was over. In what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a blink, the dead ship was truly dead.

The bridge crew took a second to recover their breath.

“What do we do with the other ship?” Captain Drago asked.

“I’d love to send a couple of antimatter missiles its way,” Kris said, still working on catching her breath, “but we only have a limited supply of them. Order the
Royal
to scrounge up some rocks and send them at it fast.”

“I’ve sent the order,” Nelly reported.

“And what do you want to do with that spark of life we see on the station?” Jack asked from his egg parked beside Kris’s.

“Mount up your Marines and see what you find,” Kris said. “If there’s anyone over there alive, I want a word with them. Clearly, they need to understand what a white flag means.”

“Kris, I didn’t notice any white flag,” Jack said. Kris could almost see the grimace on his face. “They set a trap, and we tripped it. It wasn’t a very good trap, and we tripped it with our usual Longknife sledgehammer, but . . .” He left the conclusion to Kris.

“Yeah,” she said with a sigh, “I’ve got to quit expecting these folks to be decent and open to negotiations. Foolish of me to even think so.”

“I’ll mount up both Marine companies,” Jack said. “Captain Drago, can we borrow the
Wasp
’s pinnace?”

“Take all the longboats, too. Better you see what lies over there than me.”

It would prove regrettable that anyone had to see it.

A
longboat went in first. It headed not for any particular hatch but for one of the vents that had been seared in the side of the station by a reactor’s hot breath.

They expected a lot of death and destruction; still, what they found was a shock even for battle-hardened Marines.

“Damn, there are bodies all over the place,” Gunny Brown reported to them as soon as he and a squad of Marines were inside.

“Was it explosive decompression when the reactors got dumped?” Kris asked.

“The bodies don’t look like they died of that, ma’am,” Gunny reported. “I got a forensic team right behind me. The sergeant heading it up thinks they were dead before space got to them.”

“Any idea what killed them?”

“There’s a lot of paper cups floating around here. Droplets of liquid. They captured some of it and they’re doing a field analysis. Give us a minute or two, Admiral.”

Kris settled back into her chair in flag plot, tightened her belt, and prepared to wait. The
Wasp
had gone to Condition Charlie after tossing a few large chunks of rubble over the horizon of the station at the derelict warship.

It hadn’t reacted to any of them.

The
Royal
was headed this way with a couple of good-size rocks and ice hunks from the giant’s ring. Next orbit, they’d see if there was any fight left in the wreck.

Show it or smash it.

Kris no longer cared which.

She was starting to develop a very negative attitude toward her enemy.

“We got the results from those droplets and the cups. There was some kind of alcoholic drink in them. Alcohol and cyanide, we think.”

Kris turned to where Amanda and Jacques sat at her conference table. Amanda was rapidly going pale. Beside her, Penny’s mouth was falling open.

It was Jacques, the anthropologist, who gave voice to what the others were struggling to get their minds around. “They poisoned themselves on their communion wine,” he said.

On the huge base ship they’d shot up, they’d discovered a memorial garden where the ashes of the dead were scattered. There they grew a grain and a fruit that seemed readily converted to alcohol. Bread and Wine.

Sacraments, they’d concluded at the time.

Now, with their chances to continue the fight slim and the option of surrender seemingly the only one any rational person would consider, the enemy had taken their own lives with their sacrament.

“Again, the aliens have chosen death before surrender,” Kris muttered to herself. Or maybe she spoke aloud.

“But to make mass suicide a religious experience. Dear God,” was, no doubt, truly intended as a prayer from Penny.

“My general tells me to tell you that we had a nation very much like that among us not all that long ago,” Zarra said from the corner where the feline observers sat.

“What became of them?” Kris asked.

“They learned different. That life is more important than a hollow death,” Zarra answered without consulting her officers. Then she had to turn and tell them what she’d said.

“They agree with what I said,” she quickly added.

“We have had groups like that also,” Jacques said. “They have also learned differently. These aliens we fight are slow learners.”

“The general says maybe they are not meant to learn. Only to die.”

“I wouldn’t mind that so much,” Kris said, and was surprised by the words as they came out of her mouth, “but they take a lot of good Sailors and Marines with them.”

“My admiral says that is always sad.”

“Yes,” Kris agreed, dryly.

“What are we going to do?” Penny asked.

“Find out who’s still alive in the aft section,” Kris said, and tapped her commlink. “Jack, have you been following this?”

“Loud and painfully clear,” he reported.

“You about to go in?”

“The pinnace is clamped onto the hull a good hundred meters short of the end. We’re about to cut our way into it.”

“Jack, be careful,” Kris said.

“Wife, I always am.”

Kris took a deep breath and gave the order. “Marines, land the landing force.”