Daring

19

Kris didn’t invite the admirals over, but their barges showed up right behind the gig that brought Commander Taussig aboard the Wasp. She invited Taussig and the woman who accompanied him to her Tac Center and had the admirals directed toward the refurbished Forward Lounge.

“Is anyone refusing to go to the lounge?” Kris asked Nelly.

“No. But they brought a lot fewer people. And all three of them have their own security details. They’re patting down each other and doing a first-class security sweep of the place.”

Kris could only chuckle at the visual that brought to mind. “Have Gunny Brown post a security detail at the hatch of the Forward Lounge. Also have Chief Beni join them and do a security sweep to his own high standards,” she told Nelly, as Jack looked on approvingly.

“I already suggested that to the chief. He likes to have a drink or two in the lounge after work. He wasn’t very happy while it was out of commission. He’s already got three senior Marines helping him make sure their watering hole does not end up in the body and fender shop again.”

“Good,” Kris said with the first real laugh she’d had in a long while.

Kris found her usual team had filed into her Tac Center as she and Nelly talked. It was not unusual for Professor mFumbo to absent himself half the time when she called. Science has its own schedule, he was quick to point out. Today, he sat eagerly in his place at the foot of the table.

Captain Drago was also there.

Kris let everyone settle in, then asked, “So, what is this gift my great-grandfather has sent our way? A neutron torpedo?”

“I’ll leave it to the doctor to explain the contraption,” Lieutenant Commander Phil Taussig said. “All your grandfather asks is that you not start a war with the dang contraption ‘if she could avoid it.’ His words, not mine.”

“It is not a dang contraption,” the young woman said, standing. “I am Nikki Mulroney. Some of you might have heard the story of my grandmother, Your Highness. She found the ‘vanishing box’ on Santa Maria that your great-grandfather, King Raymond, used in the war between humanity and the Control Computer there, eighty years ago.”

“So it really happened,” Penny said.

“Oh yes. It has been allowed to become little more than a legend, but my grandmother pointed the box at mountains and made them vanish.”

“And you have the vanishing box working again?” Kris said. That the box existed might or might not be a legend. Every story agreed that the power supply had been exhausted in the final battle with the rampaging rogue computer.

“Ah no. We do not have the vanishing box working,” the scientist said. She licked her lips before going on. “We do have something working that might be something like that instrument.”

“How something like it?” Kris asked. And how many bushes are we going to beat around to get a straight nonscientific answer out of you?

“We can not make matter vanish. However, we can manipulate matter at an ever-increasing distance.”

Which told Kris everything . . . and nothing . . . all at the same time.

“What kind of matter can you manipulate?” Penny asked before Kris could say something like it.

“Initially, all we could lift was a feather.”

“Excuse me if I say that’s not all that exciting,” Jack said. “What can you lift now?”

“Only a few cubic millimeters.”

“That doesn’t seem like much,” Kris said.

“You are correct,” the scientist agreed, with precision. “However, there was a second project being funded on Santa Maria. It involved a nearby neutron star. When we used the one project to see what we could do with the other one, we got surprising results. We succeeded in chipping a half cubic millimeter off the surface of that neutron star.”

“Half a cubic millimeter,” Kris finally said, when no one else would risk saying anything.

“Close to 150 tons of matter went flying off into space,” the boffin said.

That got a low whistle from the audience.

“What happened to it?” Professor mFumbo asked. “How did being free of the gravitational pull of the neutron star impact that mass?”

“It departed at nearly a third the speed of light. When it hit a cinder of a planet destroyed when the star went nova, it made quite an impact.”

That got low whistles from Jack and the colonel. Half a millimeter was tiny. At one-third the speed of light, even something that small was bound to leave a mark.

“No, I mean did the matter. No,” Professor mFumbo sputtered to a halt. Kris had never seen him at such a loss for words. He took two breaths and started again.

“What was it made of?” the professor said slowly.

“Ions and electrons,” the newly arrived self-proclaimed weapons expert answered quickly and simply.

He nodded. “Okay, did this half cubic millimeter of ions and electrons expand once it was free of that gravity well?”

“No,” the woman said. “As best as our instrumentation could tell, it departed the star in a compact, half-millimeter bullet, and it was the same size ten minutes later, when it impacted the planet.”

“Have you run further tests?” Kris asked. She had finally gotten what Professor mFumbo was getting at. The neutron star’s gravity crammed down the ions and electrons on its surface until there was really no space between them. That made for quite a dense solid. What happened to that matter after the heavy impact of the gravity was removed was a very good question.

At three, Kris had once lifted a pound of dried apricots from the kitchen at Nuu House. She’d split them with several friends. They scarfed them down with no trouble.

But in their little stomachs, they soaked up liquids. Suddenly, they needed much more space, and the only way to get it was up and out.

Kris and her little friends had spent a miserable night giving back the apricots she’d stolen.

The idea of a warhead that suddenly needed a lot more room struck her with more than the usual appalling force.

The weapons developer gave the head of Kris’s boffins an acid look.

“Sir, that question did not escape our concern. We have instrumentation maintaining constant observations of all extracted neutron material. We have identified no expansion. This includes the instruments observing the warheads on the torpedoes aboard each of the three transports that came out with me.”

“Three transports. How many torpedoes did you bring?” Kris asked.

“Three.”

Kris considered that for a moment, then went on. “I know I shouldn’t ask this, but how big are these torpedoes?”

“Each of the warheads contains approximately 2.5 cubic millimeters of neutron-star material,” the scientist said. “Say about fifteen thousand tons of mass per weapon.”

Several people in the room whistled at that.

Kris held up her hand, two fingers a few millimeters apart. “Fifteen thousand tons in that tiny space?”

“Actually, we’ve spun it out into a concave lens sixty-six centimeters in diameter. That’s the same size as the torpedo. We think that might have the effect of reflecting back any lasers fired at it. We didn’t have time to test that hypothesis before we were ordered to pack up our test items and get them out here to you.”

Fifteen thousand tons in anything like that small a space. The thought boggled Kris’s mind. Her mind was getting way too familiar with the boggles.

“Pardon me,” Penny said. “But if you’ve got this wonderful device that can reach down into this huge gravity well around a neutron star and pinch out a BB-gun-size chunk with fifteen thousand tons of mass, what am I missing? Why don’t you have that doohickey out here? Think of what that can do!”

“Yes,” Dr. Malroney said, stuffing her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I do imagine the primary device has significant military possibilities. However, it takes a large asteroid to hold it and requires the power plants of several large cities to power it.”

“Mobility it ain’t got,” Abby said.

The room took a minute to absorb that.

“Let’s talk about that torpedo,” Captain Drago said. “With a fifteen-thousand-ton warhead, just how fast can you get it going?”

“The torpedo’s propulsion machinery is simplicity itself,” the woman boffin said. “Reaction mass heated with antimatter. We store the antimatter separate from the torpedo and only load it just before we launch. The containment field is of light construction. It will hold long enough to get the job done, say ten minutes to an hour.”

“How fast can you get the torpedo going?” the captain said, cutting in.

“Two seconds after launch, it will be accelerating at ten gees,” the woman scientist said. “Our initial reaction mass is water. But that’s just intended to get the rocket motors started and the torpedo away from the ship that launched it. After that, we’re using iron filings for the reaction mass. Iron and antimatter plasma has a very high specific impulse.”

Kris swallowed. “I imagine it does.”

“How many of these infernal machines did you bring out, again?” Captain Drago asked.

“Three.”

“We have four scout corvettes here,” Kris pointed out.

“Actually, I think your grandfather, our king, knew what he was doing,” said Captain Drago. “The Wasp is already some twenty thousand tons heavier than the other three scouts. That’s the price we pay to carry the extra Marines and boffins and their gear. I’m not sure how the Wasp would take to another . . . What? How large do these torpedoes mass out?”

“They come in at eighteen thousand tons—warhead, fuel, and engines,” Commander Taussig put in.

“So you’ve given this problem some thought,” Captain Drago said.

“Quite a bit on the way out.” Phil tapped his wrist unit, and a schematic of the Hornet appeared on one of Kris’s walls. “We’ll have to lock one of these puppies down right at the ship’s center of gravity. Otherwise, you put momentum on the boat, and it’s going to go in all kinds of directions. One thing I’ve liked about the Hornet is how nimble she is. If we don’t do this right, they’ll all wallow like pigs.”

“I’ll thank you not to refer to my Wasp as a pig,” Captain Drago said.

At that, the two ship drivers dropped out of the English language for the next several minutes, losing themselves in technical talk.

It was interesting to Kris to see both Professor mFumbo and Dr. Mulroney left to stare dumbly as the conversation went over their heads. Kris relaxed and enjoyed it.

At her father’s knee, she’d gotten comfortable with people knowing more than she did about this or that technical specialization. As the great Billy Longknife said, “You don’t have to know how to make it happen. Just who . . . and when.” He was also quick to point out that his military was a spear he decided who to point at and when and where to stick them.

Kris let that thought roll around her skull for a few minutes while the two ship captains kept everyone else entertained.

When they paused for breath, Kris raised her hand for silence. It came quickly.

“Pardon me,” Kris said, “but did I miss something?”

That brought her blank stares.

“As I recall, our mission was something like ‘We come. We see. We run real fast home and report.’ Wasn’t that in all the papers?” Kris asked.

“I seem to remember hearing that rumor from someone who thought she was running the show,” Abby drawled.

Around the table, all she got was sober looks.

“If that’s the mission, how come Grampa just sent me three of the most gi-hugical and nasty weapons in human history?”

Kris let the question hang there. She had no intention of being the first to take a crack at an answer.

When the silence stretched, Colonel Cortez pursed his lips and ventured slowly. “Your great-grandfather, our king, has spent some time on the tip of the spear, Your Highness. I trust he’s developed some seriously reliable gut instincts, or he’d be dead by now even if he did only half of what they say he did.”

He paused, polled the room with his eyes, and went on. “The seriously nasty behavior of the one ship we encountered might have seriously bothered him. Commander, I understand that these weapons came with an injunction not to start a war . . . if she could avoid it.”

“Something like that. I’ve got the message here if you want to read it.” He tapped his wrist unit, and Nelly projected a picture of the transmittal form. It was like any other supply chit, except at the bottom, in his own hand, the king had handwritten the injunction, “Try not to start a war with these.”

Kris glanced around the room, suspecting what everyone else was thinking but no one wanted to say. King Ray was handing Kris a loaded gun, then resorting to the most crass of bureaucratic techniques by adding a “not order” to cover his ass.

Kris scowled as the poisoned silence grew long. Then, with a shake of her head, she went back to the practical problems at hand.

“I take it from what you two captains were saying, we’re going to need to stay put for a long while to make all of this happen.”

“Actually, not,” Captain Drago said.

“It’s a pretty standard set of mods that we’ll have to make to the Hornet, Fearless, and Intrepid,” Phil said. “The Vulcan has the machine shops and gear to make the bomb harnesses. Once their specialists take the measurements off each of the ships, our scouts can go about their business. A couple of weeks later, we can get the installation done in no time at all. You weren’t planning on our hanging around here for all that time, were you, Princess?”

“No,” Kris said, mentally taking the bull she wanted to by the horns and ignoring the stampeding elephant in the room. “Professor mFumbo, I need your astronomers and astrophysicists to earn their keep. I know they’ve enjoyed stargazing. Now I need them to help us plot a course that’s both fast and safe. Four courses.”

Kris paused to let the full impact hit all present. With their focused attention, she went on. “I want each of the four corvettes to make its own fast, long-range reconnaissance swing. Five planets out. Four different planets back if we can manage it. One jump from here, the Wasp came across a system with six jumps. Let’s move the fleet there. At least as many as will follow us. We can leave the battleships swinging around there while the scouts take a gander at what things look like three to five thousand light-years from here along a wide search pattern.”

That got a few low whistles.

“You’re not going for halfway measures,” Jack said.

“Someone asked me why we were out here, and I was dithering. The admirals want to pull up their skirts and run for home. Now Grampa has sent me the best three weapons in his quiver with the hope I won’t use them.

“I admit the idea of running into something that drains gas giants for its reaction fuel took some of the wind out of my sails for a while. But running home with nothing more to report than what we’ve seen? No. That’s not why I came out here. I’m not sure how I feel about Grampa’s latest contribution to our mission, any more than I was all that excited about the big old battlewagons everyone else thought to send along with us. What I do know is that we came out here to see, so let’s go see what there is to see.”

Kris paused. Faces that had been locked down lit up with smiles. Clearly, she’d just given them the pep talk they wanted to hear. She knew she should leave it at that, but, being a Longknife, she let her mouth add one more thought.

“And, while we’re zooming from star to star, we can set our reactors to capturing all the antimatter we put out. Then, if we find we need it, we will have it.”

Jack snorted. “Spoken like a true Longknife.”

Kris gave him the best shrug she could manage, then flipped her face into a smile. “Shall we now go see what our friends in the Forward Lounge have to say about where they’re going?”