“You and me both,” Captain Drago said, and pushed the commlink on his command station.
“All hands, this is the captain speaking. We have an unknown situation developing here. Look smart. I may be ordering you to battle stations with very little notice. Keep that in mind as you go about your duties. Be assured that as soon as I know something, I will pass it along to you. Captain out.”
Finished, he turned to Kris. “Okay, Princess. We’ve been lugging around those boffins for you. Would you please see that they earn their pay today.”
“Yes, sir,” Kris said. “Nelly, have my staff report to my Tac Center. Advise Chief Beni and Professor mFumbo that they may report or stay at their stations, depending on where they think they can be the most productive.”
“Doing it, Kris.”
“Oh, and Nelly, have Cookie bring around some lunch to my Tac Center. I’m past hungry.”
“I already advised him. He said to tell you that he don’t do 1.7 gees all that well. But he’ll have one of the youngsters get your lunch.”
“Thank the cook for me,” Kris said, and heaved herself to her feet. Her knee complained of the extra weight . . . the one that had taken the brunt of that last nearly successful assassination attempt. She walked carefully from the bridge. It wouldn’t do to have herself laid up in sick bay just when things were starting to get interesting.
22
As the hours passed, the picture grew more grim.
The gas giant had indeed recently lost a lot of weight. Say ten percent. Say in the last two hundred years.
Chief Beni chose to keep his eyes on his board, regularly having Da Vinci dig down with him beyond the standard human/computer interface to make sense of the raw feed coming in from the antennas.
The one bit of good news was that no reactors showed up anywhere in the system. The bad news was that no other jump point was identified, either.
Kris interrupted the chief’s work once for a question.
“When that alien ship came charging off that moon intent on killing us all, you said your sensors couldn’t get anything off the ship. Are you sure that your sensors can pick up anything off these aliens?”
“Ma’am, there is a difference between something being a big black hole of nothing in space and it being a charging bull of a ship that is doing its best to keep me from digging out interesting intel on it.
“Yes, they were masking a lot of what was going on inside their boat. But there was no question in any of our minds that there was a big houseboat down there powered by a reactor of unknown design. I could also tell you it had lasers and was shooting at us.
“Don’t worry, ma’ am. I may not be able to give you a readout of their captain’s battle board on one of these alien starships, but you can bet your last dollar that I’ll be able to tell you that they are there.”
“That’s good to hear,” Kris said.
Both the chief and the professor chose to stay at their posts. Kris’s main staff reported to the Tac Center; Jack walked in, followed by a high-gee station, which, now that Kris had been introduced to one, looked very much like a wheelchair.
“I don’t need a wheelchair,” Kris snapped.
“It’s not a wheelchair,” Jack shot back, “it’s a high-gee station.”
“I don’t need a high-gee station. We aren’t even making two gees.”
“It will support your knee. Kris, you don’t want to twist that knee and end up back in sick bay.”
“You’re sounding more like a mother hen than a security chief.”
“I’ll cluck, cluck as much as I have to if it keeps you from doing something stupid,” Jack said, doggedly.
“Humor him, Kris,” Abby said.
“I do not need a high-gee station, thank you very much.”
The station maneuvered itself up next to Kris’s elbow and showed no evidence of going away.
“You are a stubborn old pig,” Kris said.
“Oink, cluck, oink, cluck,” was all Jack said.
Kris switched from chair to station. The staff gave Jack, or Kris, it was hard to tell, a ragged round of applause.
Jack took the bow, one of his silly grins all over his face. Kris spread her hands like a reigning monarch and took a bit of a bow herself.
“Now can we get down to business?” she said.
Though once she was seated in the high-gee station, Kris did find that she was a lot more comfortable than she’d been in her usual chair. The station gave her bum knee support the chair didn’t.
The hint that she might not be as young as she used to be was painful to contemplate.
Before the team finished their light lunch, Kris rapped the table for their attention. “What does a planet look like that has been nuked from space?” she asked. “And can we tell the difference between that and a planet that just got nuked in the course of its own folks being disagreeable to each other?”
Colonel Cortez cleared his throat. “One of the few agonies we humans have spared the human race is that of global nuclear war. Simply put, I don’t think there’s any way to tell at a distance whether the nuclear bombs came from some alien in orbit or from your neighbor’s bombers and rockets from across the way, so to speak.”
“You’re no help. It sounds like you’re saying all we can do is guess,” Kris said.
“And very glad I am that there is insufficient data to go on so that we must guess,” the colonel said, showing no shame.
As it turned out, the closer they got to the planet, the less they needed to guess.
“We’ve identified at least twenty-six nuclear strikes,” the chief said. “That number may be low. Some targets might have taken several hits, and what we’re identifying as a single strike may be two or three hits that have run together over time.”
Later, Chief Beni expanded on that. “Kris, I’ve got what look like cities. Dead cities. Besides the two dozen or so that are radioactive hot, there are a whole lot more that seem to have taken very large hits that gutted their centers.”
“What kind of hits?”
“It’s hard to tell, but from the craters I’d say that someone threw some pretty big rocks at them at awfully high speeds.”
The colonel leaned forward. “ Any chance, Chief, that these are natural meteorite strikes?”
“Sir, as I said, these are smack-dab in the middle of what look to be major urban centers. Somebody built them, and somebody knocked them down. Big rocks came in fast and hit right in the bull’s-eye of the town. Once, maybe. Twice, possible. But Da Vinci and I are past a thousand and still counting.”
“That’s hostile action,” the colonel said, leaning back into his chair.
A half hour later, the boffins made their initial report.
“We think we have found something interesting,” Professor mFumbo said on net. “Very little of this planet is covered in water. There are no oceans. Just some large lakes. However, all the nuclear explosions and rock craters as well as what looks like a major road network that connects them are on high plateaus that definitely look like continental plates to our observation.”
A large picture of the planet appeared on the wall in Kris’s room. Her crew gathered around it.
“You will notice what some of my team are calling beaches,” the professor said, highlighting what looked like sandy areas along the edge of the plateaus.