“We can make a couple of orbital passes,” the chief said. “Drop a few remote eyes to get a good look at it.”
“I intend to put my battle squadron in a geosynchronous orbit above the target where I can keep it in constant observation,” Admiral Krätz said.
Which would keep him well out of harm’s way but in a great position to tell them what they were doing wrong. Kris also remembered recently being half a klick from a target when Krätz decided to laser it from orbit.
All the more reason to be careful with her Marines.
“I’m not putting my Marines anywhere near that site until I get a good look at it. Better yet, I want to keep getting a good look at it. Preferably with a load of ordnance I can do something with.”
“We have some ground attack craft aboard the Fury,” Vicky said.
“Ground attack craft?” Kris found herself once again echoing.
“Yes. Big ugly things,” the grand duchess said. “Thirtymillimeter Gatling cannon in its nose. Wings you can load with ordnance. I was told it was a standard design.”
“Nelly?” Kris said.
“The ground attack craft were built to provide close support to infantry during the Iteeche war. It was a standard design developed on Earth and built on several planets. If it has been properly maintained, this relic of the last war should still be functional,” Nelly said.
“Chief Mong,” Captain Drago said, “do we have mechanics familiar with a ground attack craft and able to check one out?”
“God, sir, did you find one of those old things?” didn’t sound encouraging.
“The Greenfeld battle squadron has a couple, and the princess wants to fly one.”
“I’ll put together a team immediately, sir,” he said quickly.
“Vicky, do you want to join me for a trip to the Fury?”
“No thank you. I’m comfortable here.”
“Jack, do you want to drop with your Marines or ride backseat with me?”
This put the Marine captain on the horns of a dilemma. As Kris’s chief of security, he shouldn’t let her out of his sight. As the commander of the Marine company aboard the Wasp, he really shouldn’t let them wander off without adult supervision. At the moment, he needed to be in two places at once.
Kris had read somewhere about holy people who were supposed to be able to be in two places at the same time. Jack didn’t strike Kris as anything close to holy. She waited for him to make his difficult call.
“Colonel, neither of my platoon skippers is experienced enough to lead the company,” Jack said. He didn’t have to mention that experienced platoon skippers around Kris tended to pay for that experience by ending up in hospitals somewhere and missing the Wasp’s next movement.
“This is getting to be a habit,” the colonel grumbled. “But I managed to walk away from the last drop mission. I expect I’ll survive this one.”
With her chain of command now wrapped into its usual macramé, Kris headed for a launch, leaving one final plea behind her for Chief Beni to discover something. Anything! About the alien site.
38
Kris was greeted as she boarded the Fury by a junior officer who admitted that he was personally responsible for maintaining the GACs. He wasn’t surprised that Kris had brought her own maintenance team.
He was surprised that it was led by a chief and included several petty officers.
The chief muttered something to Kris about draftee Navies regularly committing heresy by letting officers get their hands on screwdrivers.
Clearly, Kris was walking a fine line between two different faiths. She would have to keep a tight lid on matters, or a holy war might break out right there in the drop bay of the Fury.
And she’d come over to the Fury thinking that all she had to worry about was the Longknife/Peterwald thing.
Silly her.
The GACs were ugly. They also looked deadly, with their seven-barrel cannon jutting out of their nose. These particular GACs had a thick coat of paint on them that cracked in several places as Kris’s mechanics began going over them.
“I’d heard that the Greenfeld Navy was more interested in looking good than fighting good,” the chief muttered to Kris when the Greenfeld lieutenant was busy elsewhere. “If you’re just planning on having them sit here and do nothing, a fresh coat of paint will make a hangar queen look pretty, even ferocious, if you paint growling tiger teeth on ’em,” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the several craft sporting toothy grins.
“Are any of them ready to fly?” Kris asked.
“There’s one in the back. Looks all scratched and dinged up. I think it’s the one they actually fly.”
“These others?” Kris asked.
“Look good for inspections and photo ops for the admiral, don’t they?”
Kris and Jack headed for the back. GAC-7 did look much the worse for wear. The Wardhaven mechs had a half dozen black boxes plugged into several ports and were muttering various incantations over the results that showed on their screens. The belly of the beast was already laid open, and several gizmos and boxes lay on the deck as the lieutenant showed Kris’s chief his small hoard of spare parts.
The lieutenant came back grumbling. “Your chief. He wants to change out everything. He wants everything new. We don’t have new. Not for this old pig. We have old. Very old. I think old is better for this hog.”
A few minutes later, the chief came back shaking his head. “I’ve looked in this hog’s logbook. If they aren’t lying, they’ve flown this thing five hundred hours in the last two years. Me, I wouldn’t send my worst enemy out in this thing. Not in this condition. We got to do something here.”
“Can I fly it, Chief?” Kris asked, as Jack showed more and more alarm at just that prospect.
“I trained on this stuff back in B school, ma’am, though I’m not sure any of my crew have ever seen this stuff themselves. We got stuff on the Wasp that we should be able to plug into this hog. It won’t be the exact replacement for the crap they have here. The stuff they got here we replaced fifteen, twenty years ago. But, with any luck, our new modules should swap right into these old slots.”
“Chief, will this be safe to fly?” Jack demanded.
“Captain, when you launch this hog, I swear to God, if you want me to, you can put a third seat out on the wing of this bird, and I will ride right along with you.”
“Yeah. And that way, he can fix anything that breaks,” one of the petty officers whispered.
“I heard that, Betty. I’ll have them strap you under the other wing. You they can drop with the bombs.”
“I didn’t say a word, Chief.”
Kris left the sailors to their work. For the better part of the next half hour, she and Jack had a nice long discussion about the stupidity of what she was about to do. As usual, when he had most of the strong points on his side, the argument went long.
But Kris had the strongest argument on her side. The lives of his and her Marines depended on her having the best possible knowledge of the situation and making the best possible call of where to land . . . or to call the whole thing off.
Grumbling, Jack finally gave up. “Why did I ever let myself get tied up with a Longknife,” he muttered, and went to check out what flight gear the Greenfeld folks had on hand.
A good thing, too. He rejected the first four sets offered, then called the chief in to do a thorough workup on the pressure suits that looked best.