It was growing longer as well as uniformly wider. “Yep, that’s starting to look like the tin can of a basic space station,” Kris said. Having blown one up and defended another, space stations and their structure were no stranger to her.
“Hey, I think they just popped their first dock out,” Jack said.
“They’ll need to balance things just right,” Drago said. “Three docks for us smaller frigates. Then some way to get those four big war wagons balanced without putting them too close to each other. As for those last two. God, I’d hate to have the job of balancing them. If they get out of sync, they could twist the whole station in knots.”
“I’d let those two swing around each other. Spin off a couple of their ships, and get smaller before I dared attach them to the station,” Kris said. “Captain Drago, please send to Monarch, in the clear and wide open enough for the Canopus to copy, ‘my respects and fealty to His Majesty. I respectfully suggest the Prosperity and Enterprise swing themselves bow to bow around each other while the rest of us dock on Canopus.’”
“Comm, send as requested,” the skipper ordered.
Kris settled down to watch the incoming ships for the time it would take a message to cross the space between them. This message would take more time. The Monarch’s communications folks would have to authenticate the message, then walk it to wherever King Raymond I was hanging out. That might add ten to twenty minutes to the elapse time between Kris’s sending and her getting a reply.
Of course, she had no idea where the legendary Ray Longknife hung out when he was pulling a no-notice showdown inspection. Or coming to call on his long-lost wife.
Kris spent time gnawing her lower lip, trying to figure out which she’d prefer to deal with, Ray Longknife, come full legend to inspect a command and see if it could be found wanting, or the family man, so out of practice, to face a woman who had been through a mill of horrors and successes, and was little like the woman he’d once known.
Of course, the man going to meet Rita was nothing like the one she’d sailed off from on a near-suicide mission eighty years ago.
“What are you thinking?” Jack asked as he glided up to take a handhold on Kris’s station.
“I’m remembering all the reasons I joined the Navy. How much I wanted to get out of family things,” she said, seriously, then half snorted. “Not even shipping out to the other side of the galaxy is far enough to get away from my family.”
Jack managed to surreptitiously squeeze her hand while officially getting a better handhold on her station. “Our family doesn’t have to be anything like the families we’re from,” he whispered.
Kris allowed him a smile, but with the entire bridge watching, she had to direct it at the forward screen and hope he saw it reflected back at him.
Her seated, him standing, they waited out the time lapse.
The Canopus continued its metamorphism from huge freighter to space station. At one time, she took on a spin, but only briefly. With the ship decelerating at one and a half gees, there was a clear down aboard. The spin would have made it rough for all hands.
“She spun smoothly,” Captain Drago said. “I’ve been aboard a ship that wasn’t balanced when the skipper put on battle revolutions. She damaged some delicate equipment, and we had a new skipper not ten minutes after we docked. Canopus did that test well.”
The screen came alive.
The king himself was scowling down at Kris, bigger than life.
“My, aren’t you being formal, ‘respects and fealty.’ Not a bad thing to amend to a message where you’re trying to teach your old grampa how to suck eggs. We’ve been planning this for several weeks, kiddo. Trust us to get it right. Longknife out.”
Kris blinked several times.
“Well, that answers where the king is hanging out,” Jack said. “If that wasn’t the bridge of the Monarch, I’m a boot learning how to box the square.”
“Well, I feel put in my place,” Kris said. “I guess they did pay more attention to my reports than I thought.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Senior Chief Beni said from Sensors. “There’s suddenly a whale of a lot of communications going on between the Monarch and those two overweight slugs. It’s not in standard code, but my Nelson is having no problem cracking it. Thank you, Nelly, for the loan of one of your kids.”
“What’s the message?” Kris asked.
“The first message was from the Monarch and contained your instructions for spinning out a pole from each bow to spin around on. The later messages are between the two slugs. Between their cargo and the amount of reaction mass they have left aboard, they are quite a few tons different and the distribution is all balled up. Their skippers are debating how to redesign the swing system to account for that, if it’s even possible.”
“And they wanted to dock those two disasters on the Canopus!” Captain Drago said.
“So Raymond doesn’t want you to teach him to suck eggs, but he’s only too happy to learn how, huh,” came from Granny Rita.
“Apparently,” Kris agreed. “How are things going on your end?”
“It turns out that five years ago, our Minister of Mining and Industry signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Representative of the Association of Associations for Maintaining Harmony with the Heavy People for Gifts and Arcane Knowledge. You know, our mining guy and their tax man.”
“If you say so,” Kris said.
“Anyway, their G and AK guy is young and has taken on more of our ways, so the idea of committing to paper something as important as them getting a forty-percent take of everything didn’t sound nearly as strange to him as it did to a lot of the other elders.”
“Did the memo only deal with Alwa?” Jack asked.
“Funny you should ask,” Granny Rita said, “You know, we were trying to get them to help us get back up to the Furious and bring down the reactors.”
“Yes,” Kris said, hoping she knew where this was going.
“This Alwan knew they’d want part of the energy from the reactor, so he pushed to have the memo cover everything in the Alwa system. Since most elders don’t recognize the existence of anything over the horizon, this bird was quite far-looking.”
“Well, thank you, Granny. Would you please send up a copy. Your new computer should show you how to do that.”
“Already asked it. It should be showing up any second.”
“I have it,” Nelly said.
“How are your other preparations going?” Kris asked.
“Fine. Fine. We’ll have a party fit for a king,” Rita assured her.
Kris rang off. Nelly projected the memo in front of Kris.
“You think the ink is dry on those signatures?” Abby asked.
“You would question the honor and integrity of my Granny Rita?” Kris said in shock. Shock with a large cup of skepticism in it.
“In a second,” Penny said.
“We’ll let the lawyers argue over it,” Kris said, dismissively. “Skipper, are we ready for the king?
“As ready as we’ll ever be.”
“Your Highness,” came in a carefully cultivated voice.
“Yes, Professor Joao Labao,” Kris said.
“We have several preliminary reports back from our survey and analysis of the alien base ship. Is there any chance you will have the time or desire to hear them before meeting your king?”
“Meet me in my Tac Center,” Kris ordered, “just as fast as you can glide down here.”
“On my way, with full graphics and graphs.”
“Nelly, get my entire team to the Tac Center. Skipper, would you care to attend?”
Captain Drago actually looked just a bit distressed. “I’d love to attend, but I think it better I keep an eye on the Wasp’s developments for a royal visit. Nelly, would you be so kind as to record the discussion and provide me with a copy?”