Tenacious

3

Kris used the drive back to rehash Penny’s report. Nothing new, either exciting or terrifying, was added to her set of challenges. Penny and the Endeavor had played mouse at a cat’s convention that never got called to order, thank heaven.

The star-studded ceiling of one huge auditorium in the first alien base ship they blasted had shown what looked like a particular night sky. It had been repeated in the largest room of the monster warship that Kris had captured intact while rescuing the crew of the Hornet. In that fight, Kris had disabled their reactors. She’d hoped to get prisoners. Instead, the aliens opened every hatch to space, killing themselves.

Kris’s scientists were still trying to make sense of the alien machinery and gear. Someone had actually forwarded a report to Kris suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about the aliens digging information out of our computers. Their technology looked nothing like ours, assuming we were guessing right about what they used for navigation and fire control.

That’s what the word meant. Aliens were, ipso facto, alien to our way of thinking.

However, based on Nelly’s assessment of the ceiling and projection of where and when that night sky might have sparkled down on a planet, Penny had been dispatched to look at six star systems.

The first three of which had showed nothing of interest. The next looked thoroughly beat-up. The fifth was full of questions. Penny had not gotten around to the sixth but raced for home. She arrived only to find home in the final desperate moments of a battle for survival that had cost the life of tens of billions of aliens and left the human colony on Alwa, as well as the Alwans themselves, with precious little time to prepare for the next attack.

Did Kris dare haul off a quarter or more of her defense so she could answer questions she didn’t yet know how to ask? And if she didn’t find out something about her enemy, would they and humanity find a way to stop the killing before one or the other was annihilated?

Once again, Kris found herself with few answers and a whole lot of questions.

She contacted the people who made up the next level in her way-too-small chain of command and began scheduling meetings.

The first meeting was already waiting for her at the end of the drive. Ada stood on the shady veranda of Government House, Granny Rita at her elbow. Officially, Granny Rita was Kris’s great-grandmother and retired. Any position she might hold was purely emeritus. Officially, Ada was the chief executive of a human colony of nearly two hundred thousand. However, Kris had made the mistake of giving Granny Rita a decent computer. Once the old gal got on net, she never missed out on anything interesting.

And to her, everything was interesting.

Ada was also not one to beat around the bush. “You think you’ve found the nest of these varmints that want to kill us?”

“We think so, but it doesn’t look anything like Earth,” Kris said, and let Penny repeat her brief.

“That is so far past strange, I don’t know what to say about it,” Granny Rita said, and left Ada with nothing else to do but shake her head.

“So, you’re going to go exploring,” the colonial chief added.

“It seems like a good idea, and I think we have time for it right now,” Kris admitted.

“Your absence won’t stop work on getting us farming, fishing, and other gear . . . or defensive preparations, will it?” Ada asked.

“You’ll keep doing what you’re doing,” Kris said. “Our fabricators on the moon and mines on the asteroids will keep producing the things you want. You’ll hardly miss me,” Kris said dryly.

Ada smiled at the lie. “I’ll touch base with that Pipra Strongarm woman and see what she can do to speed up our own efforts to get more land irrigated and under seed, more fish hauled out of the ocean, and more hunting parties into the deep woods for some real red meat. Good Lord, but what I’d give for a nice rare steak.”

“Wouldn’t we all,” Kris agreed.

Kris had thought that fighting aliens was her worst problem. Then she discovered that Alwa and the human colony had been living on the raw edge of starvation, surviving from one crop to the next and enduring empty bellies if the rains didn’t come on time. If Kris wanted to fight her fleet, she’d first have to find enough food to feed it. Initial steps had already been made. Matters were improving.

It would, however, take a whole lot more before Kris could take her food supply for granted. And she was hoping, preferably soon, to get more reinforcements.

How would she feed them?

“You talk to Pipra,” Kris said. “You have first call on boats, trucks, and anything you need to complete the new viaduct. Then we’ll try to manufacture some tractors to help with the planting.”

“When do we get the fourth reactor off the old Furious?” Granny Rita asked.

The Furious was Granny Rita’s old ship from the Iteeche Wars, the last survivor of her BatCruRon 16. It had languished in orbit for eighty years. Now one reactor was powering both colonial and Alwan electronic equipment and changing how they all lived. Two were powering moon fabricators so that their own reactors could be switched to ore carriers, and might have included some of the reactors blown to bits with the Proud Unicorn and Lucky Leprechaun, who hadn’t been all that lucky.

“We’re working on that reactor,” was all Kris could say. “It was cannibalized to get the other three going. We’ve ordered parts from our fabricators on the moon, but they don’t have specs for those items in their databases. It might be easier to just build a new thermonuclear reactor for you than get that one back up and running.”

“And what about spare parts for our working one,” Ada said. “And the two you stole for your moon bases? If you don’t have spare parts for the fourth one, you don’t have spare parts for them either.”

“I could be wrong,” Granny Rita said, “but I don’t think she wanted you asking that question. They can damn near make anything they got the specs for, but if they don’t have the specs, making something is well-nigh impossible, ain’t it great-granddaughter of mine?”

“Nothing’s changed in eighty years, Granny. The time it would take to haul the part out of one of the working reactors and get its specs, replace it, make it, and install it might just make it easier, in a few months, to replace what you got here.”

“If we’re a priority,” Ada said with a nasty look on her face.

“Ada, eating is just about the highest priority we’ve got,” Kris said. “Trust us, you’re a high priority.”

“Just so long as it stays that way.”

Glad to have that meeting over with no blood on the floor, Kris and her team headed for the dock and a captain’s gig that had lately been promoted to admiral’s barge for a ride up to Canopus Station.

Admiral Benson, retired once and reactivated recently to a commodore’s job, was waiting for Kris as her honorary barge pulled into the landing bay.

“I’ve got good news and bad news for you. Which do you want first?” the old sailorman said.

“The good news,” Kris said with a shrug.

“We’ve got twenty-three of the big frigates ready to answer bells if you need to fight.”

“Twenty-three!” Kris said. “But we had thirty-three left after you spun four of the emergency war wagons back into merchant ships? Where are the other ten?”

“That’s the bad news. Even the ships that survived took hits, hits that burned off their Smart Metal. We had some ships come in with nothing but a thin hull membrane keeping space out. If the fight had gone on for a few more broadsides, we would have lost them.”

“That wasn’t in your report a week ago,” Kris pointed out.

“I was busy spooling out what was left of the four frigates we spun together from eight merchant ships. You notice we only got seven back.”

“I was wondering about that,” Kris admitted. She’d wondered about it but asked no questions. “What about the new Smart Metal coming out of the foundries on the moon?”

“Ah, yes, that metal,” the yard manager said. Kris did not like the sound of the way he said it.

“Is there a problem with it that no one told me?”

“No. No problem. Not actually, but some of us are worrying a bit about problems down the road. Right now we’re kind of pushing the safety margins to get that metal out of the mills. It’s not the same stuff that came from the foundries back in human space that was originally spun into the ships. Simply put, it doesn’t meet the standards that Mitsubishi Heavy Space Industry sets for the stuff.”

“It’s better,” came from Nelly at Kris’s neck.

“That’s what some folks think,” Benson said, with a hint of a shrug, “but it’s different. That may be good. It could be bad.”

“So when you finish beating around the bush, what are you going to tell me?” Kris said, tiring rapidly of this conversation. She had not given up her honeymoon to dance around the barn with anyone.

“No skipper wants to have a ship that’s half Mitsubishi standard and half local stuff,” the yard boss said. “Some are willing to fight a ship with the new stuff. Many of them won’t have a ship at all without this metal. The Smart Metal we had did pretty well in the fight. There were no apparent failures. Anyway, ten of the ships that were skinned the worst have been drained to refill the ships that suffered the least damage. That means we’ve got ten ships tied up to the pier with hulls and internal walls that are eggshell-thin.

“Once we get metal from the moon, we’ll spin it into them and pull out the original stuff. With the basic structure and matrix already in place, the new metal should flow in quickly. It won’t take nearly the time to refill the ship that it took to spin it out. We’ll recover the original Smart Metal from the first nine and likely refill the tenth with it.”

“How long will this take?” Kris asked.

“That depends on how long it takes the mills to cough out the Smart Metal, which depends on how long it takes the raw materials to get back from the asteroid belt, which depends on when the miners get the mines producing.”

“So you’re telling me that you haven’t the foggiest idea,” Kris said.

“Not even a guess,” the now re-retired admiral admitted.

“And if I was to take eight of the good ships off to visit the ancient home of the aliens?”

“There wouldn’t be enough left here to spit at an alien scouting force.”

“Thank you, Admiral. I find myself wondering why I’m here and not back lying on a beach enjoying the sun,” Kris said.

“I ask myself that on a regular basis,” the old ship driver said with a smile and a nod as he went his own way.

“Where’s Pipra Strongarm?” Kris asked Nelly.

“Waiting for you in your day quarters on the Wasp. Captain Drago wants to see you, and so does Abby.”

Officially, Abby was Kris’s maid who did her hair and made her look lovely for balls and other social events. In fact, Abby could shoot as well as any Marine and had saved Kris’s life too many times to count.

Trying to school her face from an I’m-going-to-bite-your-head-off scowl to I’m-the-boss, tell-me-the-truth bland, Kris headed for her next set of meetings.