“Oh, and that mess separating frigates and merchant ships out from the Prosperity and the Enterprise? Kick someone in the butt there and get them moving. You need those plants down on the moon and those mining ships out there mining. I need a full plan by next week.”
“What about the Furious’s reactors?” the young woman asked.
“The best one goes down to the colonials. The next best two go to the moon. The last one, the one that will need the most work, goes to the colonials. Oh, and anyone who can do anything to refurbish those reactors has a job on that from right now until they’re done.”
Kris again paused to take the measurements of the people listening to her. Several, like the young woman, were already making notes on their wrist units. Some just looked dumbly at the table. There were three or four, like the small man, who Kris would bet ended up alone in the middle of some forest with nothing but the clothes on their back.
“You came here as six different corporations with six different plans for making your fortune. Now you know, it’s not your fortune you need to make but your life you need to save. I talk for only one of you, but I’d strongly suggest that we stop looking at me and mine and start looking at us and the bastards. Any questions?”
No one opened their mouth.
“There’s a nice Thai food place on B deck. It has a back room that I think you would all fit into. You might want to adjourn there and get started on your plan.”
Kris quickly found her office a lot more empty.
“Nelly, shrink the table down to us,” Kris said, then turned to her team. “Well, I could be wrong, but that seems to have gone well.”
“As far as it went,” Amanda said.
“Do you know something I don’t know?” Kris asked.
“Yes, Your Highness. I didn’t bring it up because you were using the work-to-eat thing so well, but we have a problem. A big one.”
“You have my attention.”
“Kris, there is no food surplus on Alwa. They’ve got just enough to feed themselves, maybe a bit more. The colonials are in worse shape. They got land, but it’s not that productive. A good quarter of their population is in agriculture. That’s where Jack should be getting his army, but if he does, they’re going to starve.”
“No food?” Kris said. “Where does that leave us? My fleet and all these new workers? Twenty thousand more mouths to feed!”
“I don’t know where the food will come from,” Amanda said.
27
Kris leaned back in her chair and tried to get her mind around another big mess she was in. “You’re telling me that when the food aboard is gone, we can’t count on getting any food from Alwa, colonial or native?”
Amanda nodded. “Both the natives and colonials have always lived close to the bone, but the last three years’ crops have been worse than usual. They need a good year. This year the rains again came late and weren’t enough. Have you had anyone trying to sell you food? Swap you a truckload of potatoes for a fancy computer, a TV?”
“Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a fat colonial,” Jack said. “I should have noticed. Locals are always trying to sell stuff to the fleet, but no one has shown up at the fleet landing.”
“I didn’t think much of that,” Kris said. “I never got around to asking if there was a farmer’s market to sell us fresh vegetables and fruits, meat. Why didn’t Mother MacCreedy notice?”
That brought shrugs.
“What about the ocean? There must be a lot of fish in the sea?”
“There are,” Amanda said. “But there are also things that make the sharks back on Earth look like minnows. The first desperate years, the colonials sent out wooden fishing boats, sail rigged. Half the time they got back a load of fish. The other half, splinters and half-eaten seamen washed ashore. They catch fish in rivers, and some from the beach. But I’ve seen pictures of the things that leap out of the water and snatch their catch off their lines. They are big, toothy, and ugly.”
“But Jack and I went swimming in the water!”
“Let me guess, Joe’s Seaside Paradise?” Amanda asked sourly. “That was where we were when you called. Joe said we had the very bungalow you had and offered us fishing, boating, and snorkeling. I asked him about the ‘eats everythings,’ and he said they never come there. His resort is on the Sun Coast. Much of the water is quite shallow and warmed by the sun most of the year. It’s too warm for the big stuff. It’s about the only place in colonial territory where you can enjoy the ocean.”
“And we were too dumb to ask what might nibble our toes,” Jack muttered.
“Not your fault, Jack. None of us knew yet,” Kris said. “However, maybe I slept through my ecology class, but if we remove the hunters at the top of the food chain, shouldn’t that open up a lot of good eating from lower down for us?”
“That’s the textbook answer, but how do you take out thirty meters of muscle with lots of teeth?”
Kris considered that for a moment. “You start with steel ships. Say two hundred feet long. Harpoons with explosive tips. Maybe we have to use wind at first, but we can have a backup electric motor to work our way off a lee shore. We can talk more about that later. What’s this about the colonial farms just being able to sustain the population?”
“They got the barely arable land. They worked hard to irrigate more, but it’s still poor land, and they lack fertilizer. They’re using night soil and manure from the oxen, but it’s just barely holding its own.”
“Fish offal is good fertilizer,” Jack said.
“Catch the big ones, then catch the better-eating ones. What we don’t eat goes into the soil to improve the crops,” Kris said.
“That’s a plan, but how long does it take to get it working?” Amanda asked.
“Somehow, I don’t think it would be a good idea to call up the folks I just threatened with not eating if they didn’t work and tell them that eating might not be an option even if they do work like dogs.”
“I second that motion,” Jack said.
“The fastest way to get a shark killer off the colonial shore would be a Smart Metal ship with an antimatter power plant. Nelly, get me Mr. Benson and tell him I need to see him pronto.”
“I’m working with Captain Drago on the plan for the Wasp,” came quickly back at Kris.
“Good, but as soon as you have a chance, I need for you to drop by my office on the Princess Royal. We have a problem that only you can solve.”
“I’m hearing that a lot.”
“Trust me, this one is true, and it gets to the heart of every man and woman aboard.”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes. We were done, anyway, right, Captain?”
“You be sure to be here tomorrow when they start moving those guns,” Captain Drago said. “I say there are a few more power leads than your blueprints show. I know my boat.”
“Benson off,” took Kris out of that argument and left her staring at Amanda.
“Any more surprises?”
“You want to know why the Alwan population grows so slowly?”
“Will it turn my stomach?”
“Very likely.”
“I hate people who enjoy speaking truth to power, especially now that I seem to have some. At least some folks seem to think I have some. Power, not truth. Speak.”
“Every egg laid is reviewed by the elders. If they don’t like it, it’s cast outside the nest.”
“The egg? They don’t even wait for it to hatch?” Jack sounded incredulous. And just the way Kris would want her child’s dad to sound.
“How can they judge an egg?” Kris asked.
Jacques took over. “I have no idea. Maybe their sight goes into the infrared or ultraviolet. We haven’t been able to test them. They don’t like humans much, most of them.”