Tenacious

48

The battle was won, but the squadron was still in dire straits.

“Kris, did you know that many of the French and Spanish ships the British captured at the great Battle of Trafalgar were lost when a storm came up and blew them all onto the rocky shore?”

“Yes, Nelly, I seem to remember reading that somewhere.”

“We’re in danger of smashing ourselves onto the planet below.”

“Yes, I noticed, Nelly. Now shut up.”

Kris motored her high-gee station onto Captain Drago’s bridge. “Can the Wasp make orbit?”

“Yes. We’ve got one reactor off-line, but we can make it. I can’t say the same thing for the Hornet, Constellation, and Bulwark. They’re both down to a single reactor, and none of them are in good shape.”

“Could we loan them a pinnace?”

“If I do, I’m none too sure the Wasp will make orbit.”

“Penny,” Kris said, turning to her only staff officer, who had spent the battle on the Wasp’s defensive station shuttling Smart Metal^TM around to cover for hits on the armor.

“Yes.”

“Can you merge the Hornet onto the Wasp? Say something like a pinnace.”

Penny was already shaking her head before Kris finished. “No, Kris. The pinnace is a subsystem of the ship. The programming to generate it is there. Remember, the hull is a special program with all sorts of security overrides. You can’t just slide it all away from, say, one beam to let another hull merge with it.”

Kris said a most unprincesslike word. But then she was an admiral today, and she’d been told that Sailors cussed.

“We’ve got ships that aren’t going to make orbit if we don’t do something. Get me a fix, not back talk.”

“Maybe we could adjust the two ship’s hulls so they could come alongside and kind of dock together.”

“Make it happen, Penny. Find a good chief and do what you have to do. Otherwise, some of our ships are going to burn up on reentry. That’s bad for our people but worse for the people on the planet we’re supposed to be saving.”

“I’m on it,” Penny said with a huge sigh her late husband’s Irish grandma would have been proud of.

Whether it was Penny, or, more likely, a lot of good chiefs on the Wasp and Hornet, the two ships did end up docking hard but docking enough that between the Wasp’s two good reactors, and the one they could keep running on the Hornet, they made orbit.

Once Penny and the chiefs had shown it could be done, the Constellation and the Royal got cozy, and the Bulwark sidled up and not quite rammed her bow into the Congress.

Captain O’dell asked permission to try the same with the Intrepid. One of the Endeavor’s reactors was out, and the other two were none too reliable.

Eight ships had gone out to face the aliens. Four of sorts succeeded in reaching orbit again.

On the ground, you could easily see fireworks and great rejoicing. In Kris’s day quarters, there was little to celebrate.

She had the butcher’s bill to read.

The frigates were crewed by four hundred men and women; two hundred and fifty boffins and fifty Marines topped them out at seven hundred. The Wasp tipped in at some nine hundred, what with extra Marines and scientists.

Her squadron had avoided the catastrophic failure of a reactor that consigned all aboard to a fiery grave. Still, the enemy lasers had cut deep.

Kris read the list: 612 dead, 1,452 wounded with some still likely to die despite all that modern medicine could do. The Hornet, Connie, and Bulwark were hardest hit, although the Endeavor’s smaller crew had suffered heavier casualties in proportion.

What had shown up on Kris’s boards as bright red for damaged armor, lasers, and engineering had been real men and women dying as lasers slashed hard into their ships and defensive stations juggled armor around desperately to keep disaster at bay.

Kris leaned back in her chair, stared at the overhead, and found she could fervently pray. “Please, dear God, may I never fight another one like this.”

But there was more to do than mourn the dead. The living needed to eat, and they needed to celebrate that they’d once again faced death, looked it in the eye, and walked away from its hungry scythe.

“Kris, do you have a moment?” Captain Drago said after knocking on the doorsill.

“Talk to me,” Kris said, putting down the report of blood and loss.

“Cookie tells me that he’s got a deal on meat. Cheap. As in free. All we have to do is go down and get it.”

“Can we afford the reaction mass?”

“When our longboats go down for chow, they’ll be bringing back water as well. That’s one way to feed the reactor and feed the crew.”

“Free meat. Are you sure we can eat it?”

“The boffins are pretty sure. The meat offer came with a full scientific analysis of what goes into the local’s digestion. A certain President Almar wanted you to know that they were providing the full details on their physiology. To make sure, I’ll be sending down a doc to make the necessary tests, but I’d rather try it than not.”

“If Cookie says he can make it taste good, go for it. And the water. We aren’t bone dry on reaction mass, but we’ll need to refuel before we leave here.”

Captain Drago stepped in and closed the door. “Let me guess. You want to refuel from the gas giant on the other side of the system. The one where the aliens set up a base.”

Kris made a sour face. “I’d like to wipe this system clean, but these damage reports,” she said, waving her hands at her boards.

“Yeah. It would be nice if we had a repair ship to tie up to, but we have a lot of good ship maintainers, and we can do a lot with this Smart Metal.”

“We’ve done a lot.”

“I’ve got some folks working on figuring out if we can drain the Smart Metal from our two wrecked ships. Maybe move the reactors out of them and into a ship that still has some fight in it. I’ll have that report cycled through to you as soon as they’re done.”

“Do,” Kris said.

She ended up studying reports for the rest of the evening. Jack brought her a meal from the wardroom, and Kris ate it at her desk.

It was quite late when Jack finally hauled her off to bed.

When she ignored the wonderful things he was doing to her breasts, he rolled her over like a log and began doing even more wonderful things to her back.

“Am I distracting you, yet?” he asked.

“Well, you are definitely attracting my attention,” Kris admitted. She stretched and found it made a lot of her feel very good.

“Good, because I am not stopping, young lady.”

“Persistent, huh,” she said into her pillow as he did something wonderful to the lower part of her back. And then went lower.

“You fought your fight. You won. I’d like to celebrate that I’m alive if you don’t mind.”

“And you want to celebrate it with me?”

“Most definitely.”

She rolled over and smiled at her persistent husband. “Then I guess I’d better let you celebrate.”

So he did. Then she did. Then they both did until they fell asleep in each other’s arms.