10
Lieutenant Commander, Her Royal Highness, Kris Longknife, leaned back in her chair, reviewing in her mind what had just happened. Had she just become the one of those damn Longknifes who shot up the first alien contact humanity made in the last eighty years?
Lately, she’d spent some time wondering how her great-grandfather’s generation could have made such a hash of its encounter with the Iteeche. No “Hi. How are you?” Just shoot, shoot, shoot.
It looks like I owe Grampas Ray and Trouble apologies.
Kris tapped her commlink. “Professor mFumbo, have your boffins spotted anything else in this system that we need to shoot, dodge, or otherwise be aware of?”
“I’m afraid we have found nothing of interest. Or maybe the more proper answer is that I am glad to report we have not.”
“Captain Drago, I’m going to withdraw to my Tac Center. Please feed all ship data to that location after first making copies of that data and copying them out to several backup locations. Those of you on the bridge, you may want to make an extra copy of your board’s data and hide it in your sock drawer. It may come in handy when you write your memoirs of today, if you don’t need it earlier at my court-martial to prove that there were no changes to your data by me or anyone else.”
“Ain’t it great to be a part of history,” Sulwan observed dryly, but the navigator was already downloading her board to a memory chip . . . and had several more on her board ready to be filled.
Captain Drago looked around. “I’ll order a crate brought up from supply.”
“Thank you,” Kris said. “Nelly, have my staff meet in my Tac Center.”
“They are already headed there.”
“Ask the galley to bring around coffee and sandwiches. I’m hungry, and I think it’s going to be a long night.”
“Cookie is already putting together a tray for us, Kris,” Nelly reported.
With a sigh, Kris stood and began to make her way off the bridge. Behind her, a gunnery mate second class slipped into her vacant station and began to download Kris’s data.
Her team was waiting for Kris by the time she reached her private retreat. Captain Jack Montoya, Royal USMC and head of her security detail, had taken the seat to her left. There he had a clear view of the door and anyone trying to enter. Professor mFumbo held down the other end of the table. He’d come alone.
Abby, officially Kris’s maid, was to Jack’s left, fiddling with the tray of goodies . . . and also where she had a good line of sight on the door. Abby was a crack shot who even the Marine detachment’s Gunny Sergeant could only match shots with.
Penny, the staff’s intel expert, had taken the seat to Kris’s right, which put her back to the door. If something evil got as far as that without her knowing it was coming, she’d consider her job a failure and the mess something for the Marines to clean up.
To Penny’s right was Colonel Cortez, Kris’s defeated foe and ground-tactics advisor. Right now, he pursed his lips in reflection. “I’ve never been around when a galactic war got started, but that sucker didn’t leave you any choice but to shoot. Very aggressive behavior.”
“I’m glad to hear that somebody else feels the way I do,” Kris said. “But I need to know what actually happened back there and who was doing what to whom. There are too many unknowns and unthinkable things that leave me scratching my head. I do not like that. Not at all. Penny, will you take the lead on forensics?”
“I expected you’d want me to. I’ve had Mimzy capturing some of the raw feed off the boffins’ video take. The wreckage is in much bigger chunks than I would expect had a reactor failure been involved. With luck, we’ll have something bigger than atoms to examine. Professor, I hope you’ll excuse me for having my computer do what one of Nelly’s kids can do so well.”
The professor scowled at the request for forgiveness. He had been offered one of Nelly’s “children” when Kris’s computer got the biological urge to gestate. His initial experience had been something less than sterling, and he’d returned the gift.
He and Captain Drago, both.
The boffin could not be happy to have Penny using the same secret weapon that he had declined in order to steal a march on his people.
“Do what you will. But remember, what might look like something at first blush to an amateur may have a totally different meaning when examined patiently by a trained expert.”
“A good point that we will keep in mind,” Kris said. “So, Penny, what are your first observations?”
“Give me a minute,” Penny said, her unfocused gaze aimed in the general direction of the overhead. Penny’s ivory skin seemed to pale almost to translucent as her breath slowed.
Usually, this kind of first glance would have been done on one of the wall screens for all to see and comment on. Instead, Penny held whatever output she was getting to just herself and her pet computer, Mimzy. The computer feed colored the contacts of Penny’s eyes but was private to her.
The minute Penny had asked for stretched into two. Then three.
Kris began to get edgy; this was her first initial alien contact. This was humanity’s first new alien contact in eighty years. The last one had gone horribly wrong.
This one looked to be going along the same downward path.
Kris didn’t much like the trip. Worse, Kris didn’t like that this one was her responsibility.
Just as Kris was about to open her mouth, Penny’s gaze dropped from the overhead. She took a deep breath. “Okay, I think I can see how to brief this.”
“We’re ready,” Kris said.
“Nobody will ever be ready for this one,” Penny said, half under her breath.
Across from her, the wall screen lit up. Abby turned to face it. Jack pushed his chair away from the table so he could see, without losing sight of the door.
The screen opened on a view of the moon as a large explosive blew out in a gale of expanding gases. Some of the debris cloud achieved at least orbital speed, maybe escape velocity.
“First things first. The explosion on the moon. It was a chemical explosive, conventional. Not something we use. That stuff is corrosive and dirty. It’s in our books, but it hasn’t met environmental standards since before we broke loose from Earth. I’ll leave it to the boffins to give you all the gory details if you want more.”
“Was it done intentionally?” Kris asked.
“No doubt in my mind,” Penny said. “Both because of the type of explosives and the timing. It blew within five seconds of the ship destroying itself.”
“Isn’t that an opinion?” Abby shot at Penny.
“A well-founded one, I think,” Penny countered. “When you have the same explosives letting go within seconds of each other, coincidence must take a backseat to facts. Once can be an accident. Twice, we should start looking for hostile activity. Three, and only a fool doesn’t assume enemy actions.”
Spoken like a true paranoid, Kris thought, raising an eyebrow to Penny’s other listeners. The rest of the room took a moment to mull her viewpoint. No one chose to express a dissenting opinion.
“Go on,” Kris said.
The view on the screen changed to show the unknown ship charging up to meet them. In slow motion, Kris’s laser beam shot into the aft-most sphere of the ship.
“I put it right where you wanted it,” Nelly said.
“Exactly,” Kris agreed, and watched as the fusion engines sputtered, throwing the ship off its steady course.
“Oh, and for what it’s worth,” Penny said, “the hostile was on a collision course with the Wasp until Kris’s hit in the engine room knocked it off track.”
“Nasty little beggar,” the colonel observed dryly. “Shooting first and hell-bent on ramming. I’m developing a serious doubt that they ever intended to ask questions.”
“It’s too early to start applying salve to our souls, Colonel,” Kris said. “But thanks anyway.”
“It wasn’t a cheap Band-Aid I was offering, Princess, but a quite serious observation. I’m starting not to like these bad actors.”
“Here’s one to look at,” Penny offered, to bring them back on topic.
A body appeared, whirling out of the explosion. Two arms, two legs. A head. The face was hard to make out, but there was a most prominent jaw. Even hair.
“They look almost human,” Jack said.
“We’ve identified the Three alien species who built the jump points,” Kris said. “All had their own evolutionary trails and look nothing like us. Or the Iteeche. Now we run into these bug-eyed monsters. They come out shooting and look amazingly like us!”
“Very much like us,” Penny said, and a section of the explosion filled the view screen. Several bodies were clearly visible. Two looked to have a pair of large mammary glands on their chests. The screen cycled through the next few frames slowly, letting the bodies rotate. They certainly looked female.
“What’s that other one holding to her breast?” Kris asked.
A third “woman” held on to a small bundle. In the next couple of frames she lost her grasp. The wrappings around the bundle also came undone.
“I think that’s a child,” Penny said.
“Dear Mother of God,” the colonel said. “They blew up their ship with their women and children on board! What kind of monsters are we dealing with?”
Kris turned away from the screen, not that she could ignore it. She focused on Penny. “You’re sure they blew up the ship themselves.”
“The explosion started in the forward sphere,” she said, and the screen’s view changed to show the entire ship, again. It began to come apart, starting, as Penny said, with the forwardmost of the spheres, then the second, then the third. The aft sphere, Engineering from all appearances, was the last to go, and seemed to fly into the least number of pieces.
“I think they expected their destruction to involve the reactor,” Penny said. “That’s just a guess, but if the reactor had blown, it would have taken the fragmentation and dispersal of debris to a whole new level.”
Kris nodded. She had already done a postmortem on a ship where the reactor finished off its destruction. The wreckage had been little more than atoms and molecules. Her ongoing nightmares, however, were much more substantial.
“So, Princess,” the professor said, “your hit on the power plant seems to have resulted in our having wreckage to examine that they did not intend for us to have.”
“It looks that way,” Kris said.
“Look at those bodies. No space suits,” Abby said, pointing at the picture still on the wall screen. “No survival pods. They all were in a shirtsleeve environment, then some bastard opened that ship to vacuum for all of them.”
“I don’t think survival was ever the intention,” the colonel said. “I’ve heard of ‘Victory or Death’ as a battle cry, but in all my study of human history, I’ve never encountered anything like this.”
Kris could only shake her head. “This is our first human encounter with someone else’s history. I know we humans have had our nasty and desperate times. I think we’ve found someone or something willing to take nasty and desperate to a whole new level. God help us.”
Those who shared her room seemed unable to expand upon that observation. Kris looked at her options and found only one to start with.
“Nelly, tell Captain Drago that I would like for the Wasp to make orbit around that moon so that we can examine both what our alien was doing down there and recover as much of the wreckage as possible. I’ll want to ship as much of the wreckage and bodies back to human space as we can.”
“That will involve unloading one of the cargo ships,” the captain answered Kris immediately.
“I figured as much. You said it would take two or three days to refuel.”
“Refuel and resupply the ships from the replenishment ships, yes, Kris.”
“We might as well put our time to multiple uses. Penny, put together a short report on what just happened and flash it to the rest of the fleet whenever we get a line of sight on one of them.”
Most of the fleet was on the other side of the gas giant. With the Wasp trying to make orbit around the target moon, the two elements of Kris’s fleet were likely to make “ships passing in the night” seem downright familiar. “I’m sure they’re curious.”
“I bet they are,” Penny said, and went silent as she began to arrange her data drop.