Again, Granny shook her head. “These folks have theater. They really enjoy a show, but their media is just for what is happening now. They do not record their history. Yes, some plays are historically based, but they really don’t have any concept of either battle, like you showed us, or of recording it for later review.”
“This isn’t going over all that well, is it?” said Penny. Kris’s chief of intelligence, she also stood double duty on the bridge at Defensive Systems. On a ship that could convert your spacious stateroom into a footlocker and send the extra Smart MetalTM to armor the ship’s hide, it was a critical battle station.
Kris’s usual battle station, Weapons, was next to Penny’s, putting the enemy in the crosshairs of the Wasp’s destructive lasers. For the new Wasp, those included four long 18-inch laser rifles, usually reserved for a battleship. The Weapons Division was still looking for a chance to show what they could do.
Everyone else on the Wasp was fervently hoping the Weapons Division would continue polishing their guns and wondering what they could do. The Wasp was as far from human space as a ship could get.
She was also very alone now that the Sakura was gone.
Being far from any repair facilities and any help was no time to go looking for a fight.
On this, Kris and her entire staff agreed.
But they did want to know what kind of damage they’d done to the alien raider’s base ship. Just how good were the Hellburners at doing bad?
Inquiring minds wanted to know.
But carefully. Very carefully.
“Nelly, how far has the hulk drifted from the jump point it was just out of when we hit it?” Kris asked her personal computer. Nelly was much upgraded from the day she’d been given to the little girl Kris before she started school. Nelly was now worth at least half the value of the USS Wasp. Nelly had condescended to give the Mitsubishi Heavy Space Industry’s Chief Engineer, Katsu, one of Nelly’s kids. This had made up for the other half of the frigate’s cost not covered by bake sales and donations from the schoolchildren of Musashi.
“She was accelerating away from the jump point,” Nelly said, “at about half a gee. Then we hit her hard in the rump, and that must have accelerated her more.”
“I agree with that,” said Captain Drago, from the bridge. Hired by the Wardhaven Intelligence Service to captain the Wasp under a contract that had more to do with King Ray wanting to somehow save Kris from making all of the worst mistakes he’d made as a junior officer, Drago hadn’t kept Kris from taking on the giant planet murderer that tumbled and rolled in front of them.
Old men’s plans for young people don’t always work out as planned.
“Captain,” Kris said, “you can call me paranoid, but I’d like to approach the hulk, keeping it between us and anything that might suddenly pop out of that jump.”
“Paranoia has kept a lot of Longknifes alive,” Granny Rita said.
“Adjusting course,” Captain Drago said.
“Nelly, how much of the Wasp’s Smart Metal do you want to use for explorer nanos?”
“As much as Penny will let me, Kris. I’ll be controlling them with all the self-organizing matrix that I haven’t yet used for my next child.” In half payment on the Wasp, Nelly had swapped one kid to Katsu, with solid overrides if he, or his father, should ever try to duplicate her child. Having lived with Kris for twenty years, Nelly came by her paranoia honestly. Nelly’s price for that one had been enough matrix to birth three more children to replace those lost on the long, dangerous flight from this battle.
She’d only granted two of the new personnel on the Wasp the honor of working with one of her children. That left one child yet unborn. Nelly was willing to divide that matrix up and share it out among the exploration drones to give them top-notch guidance and sensor suites to study the hulk.
That still left the basic question: How much Smart MetalTM would there be for her matrix to fly?
Penny took a while to talk to Mimzy, her own computer and one of Nelly’s offspring. “Kris, I’d like to shrink the Wasp down to Condition Baker.”
Under Baker, the “love boat” proportions of Condition Able became a bit constrained. Passageways got narrower. Unused spaces shrunk or vanished. The reaction-mass tanks that had given up a part of their contents on the way out here would be resized. All that spare metal would be moved to the outer hull of the Wasp to form a reflective surface and a honeycomb through which cool reaction mass flowed. This sandwich of armor should protect the Wasp from laser hits as good as, if not better than, the six-meter-thick ice armor on heavy battleships.
“I concur,” Captain Drago said. This meeting with the Alwans might not be taking place on the bridge, but clearly he was following it very closely.
He was, after all, the captain.
“Mimzy,” Penny said, “announce to all hands that we will be going to Condition Baker in one minute and that we may go to Condition Charlie without further notice.” Charlie was worse than Baker, but not as bad as Condition Zed. When Zed was ordered, people’s quarters were compressed down into a few lockers, and the entire rest of the room vanished. The same went for the scientists’ research labs.
Boffins had complained loudly about Condition Zed. The scientists had been shown the fine print in their contracts and reminded that they were all subject to activation as reserve officers, and as such, would follow the proper orders of their duly appointed superiors.
The scientists complained, but they knew it wouldn’t matter if ever Captain Drago, Kris, or Penny ordered Condition Zed.
Around Kris, the Forward Lounge began to shrink. Empty tables melted into the deck. Folks in the middle of their dinner found their table and chairs moving closer together as empty places vanished away.
All hands went through this drill once a week for Baker and once a month for Zed. Folks kept right on eating, drinking, and when a new couple came in, the lounge expanded to provide them a table.
The Alwans were still fixated on the wreck ahead; they failed to notice what was happening around them.
“Princess, my boffins have noticed something strange about the wreck,” came in the calm, aristocratic voice of Professor Joao Labao. He was on sabbatical from the University of Brazília and the senior administrator of the 250 scientists aboard the Wasp and the reason the frigate could honestly claim to be a research ship. “Have your examinations identified anything different between the right and left sides of the aft end of the hulk?”
“That’s a negative,” came from Senior Chief Beni. He’d come out of retirement to have “a shot at them that killed my kid.” “I’m getting no radio readings from that hulk. The reactors are dead. Anywhere you look on the electromagnetic spectrum or radioactive scale, she’s as dead as Caesar’s ghost.”
“I would most certainly agree with you, Chief,” the professor said. “It’s our optics that are giving us cause for second thoughts.”
“Pass them through to me in the Forward Lounge,” Kris said.
“And me on the bridge,” the skipper spoke over Kris.
The rolling, tumbling hulk had been getting closer. Now, using the powerful optical instruments usually reserved for deep-space research, the aft end of the blasted wreck jumped into clear definition.
Bits of hull and I-beams were twisted like a child’s strand of candy. Other thick hull strength members were nearly broken through. Some hung by a thread and did their own dance as the ship waddled through space.