Defender

39

Kris Longknife breathed a sigh when the word came back from Jack that he’d found Phil. But she kept her eyes on the reports flowing back from the wreck of the Hornet.

Phil had fought her until she was fit for space no more. Kris thought the old Wasp was a wreck when they got her back to human space, but the Hornet was little more than a lump of metal with a bit of oxygen and pressure here and there.

If the reports coming up from engineering were right, however, both of the Hornet’s reactors were in decent shape. Not something you’d want to power up and ride home, but still worth saving.

The same was true of the forward 24-inch pulse lasers. They hadn’t been hit although the power lines to two were shot away somewhere amidships. Still, with some refurbishment, they would shoot again.

The computers had been destroyed with thermite charges.

The problem was, of course, how to get what could be salvaged back to Alwa.

Kris called Captain Drago in. He called in a half dozen of his ship maintainers. Together, under Kris’s unbending pressure, they put their heads together and began to solve Kris’s problem.

“You want us to swallow two huge chunks of that hulk, then kind of trash compact the rest of the wreckage, and swallow it into the Wasp as well!” This incredulous three-part harmony showed a certain lack of commitment to meeting Kris’s objectives. However, being a Longknife, Kris didn’t allow that to slow her down. Patiently, she explained again that she needed all that wreckage back in orbit above Alwa. That was her first guess as to how to do it. “Do you have a better idea?”

“Yeah, forget the whole thing,” the chief engineer grumbled.

“Our princess rarely does that,” Drago said. “Now, how do we move that wreck?”

Later that day, the Wasp pulled in closer to the Hornet. Then she began to very carefully apply her new 20-inch lasers to slicing certain portions of the hulk off the rest. First, the engines were cut away, then the reactors and the delicate instruments that made them work were sliced off. While the pinnace rounded up those stray parts before they wandered off, the Wasp turned her attention to the bow and its pulse lasers. Once they were free of the rest, the Wasp began dicing the hull into more digestible chunks.

“I don’t mind having the pinnace kind of engulf the reactors and lasers,” Captain Drago muttered to Kris. “It’s the idea of using part of my beautiful ship as a trash compactor to squish the rest of the Hornet into a nice compact box that worries me.”

“If the Smart Metal of the Wasp protests too much,” Kris said, trying to sound perfectly reasonable as she laid a charge on her flag captain that had never been ordered before, “we’ll call it quits. We can start with the rocket engines. They’re big and hollow. They ought to collapse easily.”

The young lieutenant on defense looked pale as he programmed his hull material to spread out, then squeeze together . . . with huge rocket motors in between. The moaning of the motors . . . or the hull . . . or both, rang through the Wasp.

However, both reports from the ship’s skin and eyeball assessments from Sailors on the outside said that the process went surprisingly smooth. The pinnace, with the lasers and reactors kind of lashed to one side, used the other side to nudge wreckage toward the Wasp.

Together, they made it happen.

When they were done and the Wasp’s pinnace was merging back in, there were a lot of bumps and bulges on the Wasp, enough to move her captain almost to tears.

“Almost to tears doesn’t count,” Kris said, scolding him good-naturedly.

“But my beautiful ship!”

“Will be beautiful once more as soon as we get this junk back to Alwa.”

Captain Drago didn’t look all that convinced.

Longboats were coming back as Kris finished her housekeeping chores, so she drifted down to the docking bay. She thought by now that she’d seen it all. Still, the shock of the starved Sailors had her kicking herself for not launching her search sooner. She thought of all the time she’d wasted while this poor crew was having their guts torn apart by poison, and wished some people, like Grampa Ray and Admiral Crossenshield, could see what she saw.

Politicians who called the tunes should have to physically face the price good men and women paid for their shenanigans. Kris swore if she ever found herself in their place, a risk all Longknifes ran, that she’d remember these faces when she was calling the shots.

Then Jack arrived, drifting along with a stretcher. He waved Kris toward him, and she shoved herself away from the bulkhead and floated in his direction.

“Kris,” Jack said, “Phil Taussig wants to thank you, personally.”

Kris looked down on a man whose face she couldn’t recognize. It wasn’t just the bush of hair and beard or the gaunt, sunken eyes. There was nothing here of the ready smile or the confident commander that she’d known. Kris wondered if that man could ever reinhabit this broken body.

“Thank you, Kris. I knew you’d come for us. I knew you wouldn’t desert us. Thank you,” Phil gushed, with tears running down his face. The water and glucose bags above his head had 3 written on them in grease pencil. She suspected that the poor man could cry only because they’d pumped six liters of liquid into him.

“I came as soon as I could,” Kris told him, taking his hand. “Now, you rest. We’ll be heading back to Alwa as soon as we can.”

“Alwa?”

“Yes. The planet we saved. It also has a human colony on it that we didn’t know about when we fought off the invaders. I found my great-grandma Rita Longknife.” She’d explain the full family dysfunction later.

“We saved the planet. They didn’t wipe it out.” Now Phil really was crying, though these were tears of joy. “Crew.” Phil managed to raise his voice. “We saved the planet.”

Around the landing bay, people strapped to stretchers muttered as much joy as their broken bodies could express.

“Then it was all worth it,” Phil whispered as he sank into a stupor.

“How bad?” Kris asked in a whisper to Jack.

“We won’t know for a while. We think it’s all heavy metal poisoning, but there may be other things as well. They’re creating an isolation sick ward just off the landing bay. As soon as we get them all moved in, we’ll douse down the bay and our suits to kill anything we can. You do realize you may be contaminated?”

“Why didn’t somebody hand me a moon suit?” Kris wasn’t the only person in the landing bay protected by nothing more than the cotton in their shipsuit.

“I guess the message didn’t get across. Sorry about that.”

“So we set up quarantine for us, too,” Kris grumbled.

“We’ll see how long it takes,” Jack said. Inside his faceplate, he didn’t look any happier about having Kris on one side of quarantine and him on the other.

Fortunately, the docs did blood cultures and took samples of the mud on the Marines’ boots and found nothing that looked dangerous to humans. The heavy-metal contamination seemed to be the only problem.

Twelve hours later, Kris was out of quarantine. Which was a good thing, since half an hour later, an alien ship jumped into the system.