Defender

2

Around them, all hands beat to quarters. The Forward Lounge became suddenly empty.

And the Alwans looked ready to climb the walls.

Granny Rita did her best to calm them, but the idea that they were about to be in a fight to the death was having a very erratic impact on their behavior. Some ran around. Others froze in place. At any particular moment, with no particular rationale, the runners would freeze, and the statues would take off running.

They did a lot of clicking whether they were running or not.

Jack was suddenly at Kris’s elbow, just in case any of the crazy birds failed to notice she was in the way of their mad running.

“What do you do with them?” Kris asked Granny Rita.

Still, without a word from Jack, she fell back to the wall, well out of the way of traffic. Jack gave her a smile that said “Thank you, love, for not making me have to fight with you.”

Granny Rita gave the two of them a look that said . . . nothing to Kris. It did make her fidget.

Then Granny Rita shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen them like this. As I said, they don’t fight among themselves. They resolve conflicts by impressive displays.”

“How’d something like this ever rise to the top of the food chain?” Jack asked.

“You haven’t seen them feeding,” Rita said. “I’ve seen them bite strips of meat off a living, running beast. But fight among themselves. Never.”

“So how did you establish that the Heavy People were not prey?” Penny asked, watching the show with the native curiosity of a natural-born intelligence officer.

“Our Marine detachment put on a very impressive display. They also killed a few prey beasts, publicly butchered them, and held a BBQ. The Alwans discovered they liked cooked meat. We did what we had to to make friends,” Granny Rita finished vaguely.

The battle-stations Klaxon went silent. That had a settling effect on the Alwans.

“Lieutenant Lien,” called Captain Drago. “Please set Condition Charlie as quickly as you can.”

Drills had shown that having the ship changing shape while all hands were racing to be someplace else was not a good idea. Now, with all hands where they were needed, getting more armor to the ship’s hide became a priority.

Penny announced, “We are setting Condition Charlie. All hands stay put until I report the condition established.” After a pause, she added for just those close at hand, “Mimzy, set Condition Charlie.”

“Daughter,” Nelly added, “call on as many of your brothers and sisters as you need to make this go quick and clean.”

“Yes, mother,” Mimzy said in a voice Kris had practiced before a mirror when she was thirteen. “All right, crew, you heard Mom, let’s make this happen shipshape and Bristol fashion.”

Behind them, bottles at the bar folded themselves up into cases as what was left of the lounge floor rolled itself up. The glass wall vanished as the small part of the lounge Kris was using suddenly was backed up to the not airtight doors that had been fifty meters away a few seconds ago.

The Alwans watched wide-eyed.

“Condition Charlie is set throughout the ship,” Penny announced moments later.

Captain Drago followed that announcement with one of his own. “The Blue Team is relieved from its battle stations and will don high-gee stations. When they report back to their stations, the Gold Team will do the same.”

“Blue, Gold teams?” Granny Rita asked.

“I’ve told you about how great Smart Metal is,” Kris said. “This ship can handle gee forces way beyond what the Mark I Sailor can. So, we’ve got high-gee stations made of Smart Metal. They help keep us from splattering ourselves all over the deck as we honk the ship around to avoid getting hit. In combat, the Wasp never follows any course for more than three or four seconds.”

“Two,” Nelly put in.

“We dodge around a lot,” Kris went on, “and the gee stations let us do it. The armor is there, but it’s better not to get hit. The problem with the eggs, as we call them, is that they fit you like a second skin. Once, for political reasons, I had to go into an egg wearing undress whites. I was black-and-blue from the belt buckle, the clutch backs on my ribbons, and my shoulder boards. The standard uniform in an egg is buck naked.”

“Oh.” The old lady’s eyes lit up.

“Granny, we look like a collection of Easter eggs from the outside: boys and girls alike.” There were certain earthy aspects of Granny Rita’s outlook on life that Kris found a bit hard to take.

Now Granny shrugged. “It sounds like a young person’s way of fighting.”

“Most of our crew are under thirty,” Kris admitted.

“So, what are you going to do about us?”

The ship’s pharmacy had a small supply of antiaging pharmaceuticals. After all, Cookie, the cook, was well over eighty, as were several of the restaurateurs. Granny Rita had been glad to have her arthritis cured, her bones strengthened, and her arteries cleaned.

Still, knocking her around at high gees was not what Kris wanted to do to her newly found great-grandmother.

And the Alwans! Though their bones were more solid than they had been when they flew several million years ago, the odds were quite high that a battle might have Kris returning the six delegates looking more like boneless chicken than spokespersons for how much Alwa needed human aid.

“Nelly, do you have the specs for the water tanks the Iteeche used to survive the last battle?”

The Iteeche Empire, some eighty years ago, had almost made the human race extinct. Just ask any veteran. Just ask Granny Rita! It was Iteeche Death Balls that had gotten her into a running gunfight, them gunning, her running, that she hadn’t been able to slow down from until she was on the other side of the galaxy.

Only recently had Kris had a chance to talk to some Iteeche and discovered that their veterans were proud of how they’d saved their people from annihilation by the humans. During the Voyage of Discovery that had resulted in the shootout with the wrecked base ship they were coming up on, Kris had had three Iteeche aboard.

“Of course I have the tank designs stored in my bursting innards,” Nelly snapped. “I can knock out one for Granny and six for the Alwans. I suggest you use your normal Tac Center. That way, Granny Rita can follow the battle, or we can show pleasant scenes from around human space to relax the Alwans.”

“Do that, Nelly.”

“You’ve had Iteeche aboard?” Granny Rita said.

“It’s a long story, but the only reason I came out here and found you and that,” Kris said, nodding toward the hulk, “was because they were losing scout ships and came asking for our help.”

“So we made peace. I kept telling Ray he should do more to find a way to stop all the killing.”

“We can talk about this later,” Kris said.

“Yes. Are you expecting a fight now?”

“Yes, no, and maybe.”

“You can ask a Longknife a question, but you better not expect an answer,” Granny Rita said with a sigh.

“I don’t expect a fight,” Kris said, expanding on her initial cryptic reply. “You notice that none of us here are rushing to our battle stations. However, we now have evidence that someone has been mining this wreck. Are they its former owners or someone we haven’t met yet? We’ve run into these raiders four times. Three times they started shooting. We managed to run away the other time. Tell me, Commodore, wouldn’t you be at battle stations?”

“No question about it. Those water tanks you were talking about. You want me to get my friends into them now?”

“No, we’ll wait. All this drill may be for nothing,” Kris said, then switched topics.

“Nelly, I want to survey that hulk as fast as we can. I also want to make a change in your nano allotments. We’re going to tuck ourselves in just as close as we can to the wreck, with it between us and the jump. I want a belt of sensors around the hulk, midships, focused on the jump. Anything comes through that jump, I want to know.”

“I was already working on just such a sensor array, connected with tight-beam communications,” Nelly said. “However, how long it takes to examine the hulk will depend on how much Smart Metal Penny lets me have. Penny?”

“The Sakura transferred a lot of supplies to us before she left,” Penny said. It had also donated an 18-inch laser rifle that the Wasp now had pointed aft. Smart MetalTM, used to its maximum, was a most delightful and flexible material. “They also stripped out a thousand tons of Smart Metal and transferred it to us. I’ve been using most of it for armor. Nelly, if I gave you a hundred tons of the stuff, would that be enough?”

“Perfect,” the computer said. “Now, Mimzy, let’s get to work giving the boffins something to look at and making sure that jump point is under constant observation.”