Defender

3

The four large screens in the Forward Lounge now showed sixteen different pictures as the nanos spread through the wreck. Or, more correctly, fifteen pictures of the wreck and one picture of blank space.

The jump point was blessedly unemployed, and Kris fervently hoped it would stay that way for a long time. A very long time.

“You don’t have to keep glancing at the jump point, Kris,” Nelly said. “I and every one of my kids have it under constant observation. If it burps out so much as a grain of sand, you will know.”

“I know, Nelly, it’s just a human thing.”

“A Longknife thing,” both Jack and Penny said at once.

Granny Rita just grunted.

The nanos were starting from the blasted aft section and moving inward.

Of the engineering spaces, nothing remained. The two Hellburners that hit there along with the corvettes’ lasers and smaller antimatter torpedoes had only started the damage. The hundred or more thermonuclear reactors that powered the huge rockets had lost their containment systems, freeing superheated plasma to add more destruction to what the humans started.

A third Hellburner had hit farther forward. There had been reactors there, too. Reactors that powered the ship and the uncounted lasers that dotted the ship’s surface.

Amidships, shock, whiplash, and torque added to the destruction. They came across gaping holes in the middle of the ship that appeared to have been caused by reactors that lost their containment fields when their superconducting, magnetic containment systems failed.

Kris revised her estimate of the bite they’d taken out of the monster. Her original guess was they had blown away thirty to forty percent of the base ship. Now it looked like more than half the ship was wrecked.

“It must have been pure hell aboard this ship,” Granny Rita said.

Kris nodded. “Even as it was blowing itself apart, it was shooting too many lasers to count at our battle line, blasting hundred-thousand-ton battleships with six meters of ice armor into hot gases in only seconds.”

Even Penny was shaking her head. “I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for those who suffered through this. But Kris and every human ship around had done everything they could to open communications. The aliens just came out shooting every single time we ran into them.”

Granny Rita did her best to translate all this to the Alwans. They now stood still, alone, not in any group, in stunned silence.

Kris wondered how much of this they were really getting and how much was being lost in translation.

NELLY, ARE YOU GETTING ANY OF THIS?

KRIS, AS BEST I CAN TELL, THE ALWANS DON’T BELIEVE US. THEY CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THESE ALIENS DID NOT TALK TO US. I THINK ONE OF THEM SAID SOMETHING ABOUT HOW CAN ANYONE PUT ON A COURTSHIP DANCE WITHOUT CROWING? I COULD BE WAY OFF ON THE TRANSLATION.

THAT’S OKAY, NELLY.

Kris had yet to get around to telling Granny Rita about Nelly Net, the ability she and Nelly had to talk directly to each other and to talk to anyone who had on one of Nelly’s kids. There were a lot of things they just hadn’t had time for, Kris told herself.

“We’re getting some interesting stuff,” came from Professor Labao. “We’ve only done a small part of the search, but we haven’t found a single body. Not even a skull. It’s too soon to tell for sure, but it looks like someone went over this entire ship and removed every dead body, body part, or blood smear.”

“That’s what we found on the planet they murdered,” Kris told Granny. “No graveyard. If it wasn’t for three women murdered and their bodies hidden among all the native ones, we would have nothing on that bunch of murderers.”

Granny made a face. “Beasts that they are, they seem to revere their dead.”

“That, or they want to use them for reaction mass,” Jack growled.

“We think we’re finding hydroponic gardens as well as vats for growing proteins. The vegetation is very dead. The tanks and vats are drained,” the professor added.

“See if we can get any residue,” Kris ordered. “It would help to know if they recycle their dead in the hydroponic tanks and what kind of vat meat they ate.”

“We’re on it already,” the professor answered.

“We’ve just found something else interesting. It looks like someone dug a hole in the wreck so they could get out the reactors that hadn’t blown,” said Professor Labao.

One screen went from four windows to just one. Yes, there was a huge tunnel into the wreck. Nanos following it found relatively undamaged portions of the ship, but some large chunks had been hastily removed with welding torches. There were a lot of thick power cables leading into those holes.

“Best bet,” the professor said, “is that reactors and their superconducting containment gear were hauled out through this hole. It’s about the most expensive gear aboard a ship. That, and its weapons systems.”

“Is there evidence of the lasers being taken out?” Kris asked to anyone listening on net. “Also, have we found the bridge?”

“The forward section of the ship took a lot of damage. This monster and her baby monsters might have been slaughtering the battleships, but we humans were getting our licks in, too,” came with a touch of pride from Captain Drago.

“This is a huge ship, Your Highness,” Professor Joao Labao said respectfully but firmly. “Rome was not built in a day, and we will not plumb its secrets in an afternoon.”

“Well, so far you’ve got plenty to interest me,” Kris said. “Have your boffins get the nanos collecting as much data as they can because I don’t intend to spend a day here waiting for whoever has the salvage contract on this mother to wander back through that jump point,” Kris said.

“I couldn’t have said it better myself,” Captain Drago said.

“Your Highness, we have something I think you will find very interesting,” the professor said, as if to placate an irascible princess.

Smart man.

“I have seen that video of a very large choir addressing a huge audience, followed by a lone man giving quite a long harangue to his listeners.” The subject video, picked up while the USS Hornet was running for its life, showed up in a small window.

“I think we have found that room.”

The screen that had been showing the huge tunnel now switched to show a massive auditorium. No, from the fine decorations, it was more like an opera house. There was statuary, usually of the same man in an heroic pose and white columns along the walls separating box seats that looked quite plush. The common people, however, were packed in row upon row, balcony atop balcony. The aisles were narrow to allow room for more seats.

“To fill as many seats as those with only aisles that size, I’d have to march them in, like Marines,” Jack said. “I’m not sure my line troops would put up with that kind of regimentation.”

“Lots and lots of people, marching in lockstep,” Kris said.

“You told me,” Granny Rita said, “about one ship you blew up after it attacked you being filled to the gills with people. It looks like they filled a monster ship like this just as tightly.”

“We are looking into what we think are the crew quarters,” the professor said. “I’ve heard of places on Earth that pack the unemployed into cramped public housing, but this is something entirely different. There’s barely room to slip yourself into a bed from a narrow passageway. No privacy. Just stacks and stacks of beds.”

“Huge numbers of people who just want to kill us,” Penny said. She had argued the hardest against Kris launching her tiny command into a battle with so little intelligence on the target. Now the look on her face bore the sadness of the ages. “How are we going to kill all these people?” she finally said.

“They’ve got to talk to us before we have to do that,” Kris insisted.

“Kris Longknife, an optimist?” Jack said with a bit of a smile. Jack was the only man alive she’d let get away with something like that.

Still, she elbowed him in the ribs.

He put both hands up in surrender and retreated behind a wide grin.

Granny Rita gave the two of them the eye. They sobered quickly and returned to the problem at hand.

“Kris, could we get a better look at the ceiling of the place?” Nelly asked.

One of the nanos dutifully began scanning the overhead. It took several seconds before the immense ceiling was resolved into a single picture.

“Dots. Lots of dots,” Penny said.

“In a random pattern,” Kris added, stroking her chin.

“If that thick belt of dots isn’t the Milky Way, then I’ve never looked at a star chart in my life,” Granny Rita said.

“Professor,” Nelly said. “I need to combine several of the nanos in this room and close by. I want to get a full coverage and very exact copy of that picture.”

“What are you thinking, Nelly?” Kris asked.

“I think someone went to a lot of trouble to put a very exact sky on the ceiling of this very large room that they regularly filled with people. Kris, have you heard of the Sistine Chapel?”

“We did take art history in college, Nelly,” Kris said sarcastically.

“Yes, but I could never tell how much you were paying attention and how much you were just using me for an easy A.”

“Nelly, what happened to you being polite?” Kris asked.

“Auntie Tru is on the other side of the galaxy and there’s no way you can threaten to take me in for her to look under my nonexistent hood.”

Kris was beginning to wonder who else might be taking advantage of their being so far from home that the threat of sending them dirtside was very much out of the question.

“Tell me, Nelly,” Jack said. “I didn’t take art history in college. Why is the Sistine Chapel so important to our present conversation?”

“You did so take art history,” Nelly snapped. “I have access to all your records, Jack, I will have you know.”

“Nelly, get back on topic,” Kris snapped.

“The Sistine Chapel was a place of worship. It was decorated with some magnificent artwork for the instruction and edification of those attending services there. The pope in charge at the time spent a lot of money to have that ceiling painted although he had a war on and paying the painter was regularly a second priority to paying his army. Anyway, I wonder if this is not such a special artifact. I am merging several nanos so that I can get a high-definition recording of not only the precise relations of the stars to each other but also any color texturing the stars might have.”

“You think this might represent the night sky over a unique planet?” Penny said.

“I think it’s possible.”

“Let me know as soon as you finish that, Nelly,” Kris said.

“Yes, your not so smart Highness,” Nelly said, her voice more smug than any computer had a right to be.

“Alert, Alert,” Nelly’s voice came in a totally different tenor, and it came over the entire 1MC. “A ship has just exited the nearest jump point. Ship matches the profile of one of the smaller hostile ships. Just four or five hundred thousand tons of crazy kill you.”

The bong-bong of the battle-station Klaxon went off.

“This is no drill. Man your battle stations. All hands, man your battle stations. This is no drill,” resounded through the ship.