“So we made peace. I kept telling Ray he should do more to find a way to stop all the killing.”
“We can talk about this later,” Kris said.
“Yes. Are you expecting a fight now?”
“Yes, no, and maybe.”
“You can ask a Longknife a question, but you better not expect an answer,” Granny Rita said with a sigh.
“I don’t expect a fight,” Kris said, expanding on her initial cryptic reply. “You notice that none of us here are rushing to our battle stations. However, we now have evidence that someone has been mining this wreck. Are they its former owners or someone we haven’t met yet? We’ve run into these raiders four times. Three times they started shooting. We managed to run away the other time. Tell me, Commodore, wouldn’t you be at battle stations?”
“No question about it. Those water tanks you were talking about. You want me to get my friends into them now?”
“No, we’ll wait. All this drill may be for nothing,” Kris said, then switched topics.
“Nelly, I want to survey that hulk as fast as we can. I also want to make a change in your nano allotments. We’re going to tuck ourselves in just as close as we can to the wreck, with it between us and the jump. I want a belt of sensors around the hulk, midships, focused on the jump. Anything comes through that jump, I want to know.”
“I was already working on just such a sensor array, connected with tight-beam communications,” Nelly said. “However, how long it takes to examine the hulk will depend on how much Smart Metal Penny lets me have. Penny?”
“The Sakura transferred a lot of supplies to us before she left,” Penny said. It had also donated an 18-inch laser rifle that the Wasp now had pointed aft. Smart MetalTM, used to its maximum, was a most delightful and flexible material. “They also stripped out a thousand tons of Smart Metal and transferred it to us. I’ve been using most of it for armor. Nelly, if I gave you a hundred tons of the stuff, would that be enough?”
“Perfect,” the computer said. “Now, Mimzy, let’s get to work giving the boffins something to look at and making sure that jump point is under constant observation.”
3
The four large screens in the Forward Lounge now showed sixteen different pictures as the nanos spread through the wreck. Or, more correctly, fifteen pictures of the wreck and one picture of blank space.
The jump point was blessedly unemployed, and Kris fervently hoped it would stay that way for a long time. A very long time.
“You don’t have to keep glancing at the jump point, Kris,” Nelly said. “I and every one of my kids have it under constant observation. If it burps out so much as a grain of sand, you will know.”
“I know, Nelly, it’s just a human thing.”
“A Longknife thing,” both Jack and Penny said at once.
Granny Rita just grunted.
The nanos were starting from the blasted aft section and moving inward.
Of the engineering spaces, nothing remained. The two Hellburners that hit there along with the corvettes’ lasers and smaller antimatter torpedoes had only started the damage. The hundred or more thermonuclear reactors that powered the huge rockets had lost their containment systems, freeing superheated plasma to add more destruction to what the humans started.
A third Hellburner had hit farther forward. There had been reactors there, too. Reactors that powered the ship and the uncounted lasers that dotted the ship’s surface.
Amidships, shock, whiplash, and torque added to the destruction. They came across gaping holes in the middle of the ship that appeared to have been caused by reactors that lost their containment fields when their superconducting, magnetic containment systems failed.
Kris revised her estimate of the bite they’d taken out of the monster. Her original guess was they had blown away thirty to forty percent of the base ship. Now it looked like more than half the ship was wrecked.
“It must have been pure hell aboard this ship,” Granny Rita said.
Kris nodded. “Even as it was blowing itself apart, it was shooting too many lasers to count at our battle line, blasting hundred-thousand-ton battleships with six meters of ice armor into hot gases in only seconds.”
Even Penny was shaking her head. “I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for those who suffered through this. But Kris and every human ship around had done everything they could to open communications. The aliens just came out shooting every single time we ran into them.”
Granny Rita did her best to translate all this to the Alwans. They now stood still, alone, not in any group, in stunned silence.
Kris wondered how much of this they were really getting and how much was being lost in translation.
NELLY, ARE YOU GETTING ANY OF THIS?
KRIS, AS BEST I CAN TELL, THE ALWANS DON’T BELIEVE US. THEY CAN’T BELIEVE THAT THESE ALIENS DID NOT TALK TO US. I THINK ONE OF THEM SAID SOMETHING ABOUT HOW CAN ANYONE PUT ON A COURTSHIP DANCE WITHOUT CROWING? I COULD BE WAY OFF ON THE TRANSLATION.
THAT’S OKAY, NELLY.
Kris had yet to get around to telling Granny Rita about Nelly Net, the ability she and Nelly had to talk directly to each other and to talk to anyone who had on one of Nelly’s kids. There were a lot of things they just hadn’t had time for, Kris told herself.
“We’re getting some interesting stuff,” came from Professor Labao. “We’ve only done a small part of the search, but we haven’t found a single body. Not even a skull. It’s too soon to tell for sure, but it looks like someone went over this entire ship and removed every dead body, body part, or blood smear.”
“That’s what we found on the planet they murdered,” Kris told Granny. “No graveyard. If it wasn’t for three women murdered and their bodies hidden among all the native ones, we would have nothing on that bunch of murderers.”
Granny made a face. “Beasts that they are, they seem to revere their dead.”
“That, or they want to use them for reaction mass,” Jack growled.
“We think we’re finding hydroponic gardens as well as vats for growing proteins. The vegetation is very dead. The tanks and vats are drained,” the professor added.
“See if we can get any residue,” Kris ordered. “It would help to know if they recycle their dead in the hydroponic tanks and what kind of vat meat they ate.”
“We’re on it already,” the professor answered.
“We’ve just found something else interesting. It looks like someone dug a hole in the wreck so they could get out the reactors that hadn’t blown,” said Professor Labao.
One screen went from four windows to just one. Yes, there was a huge tunnel into the wreck. Nanos following it found relatively undamaged portions of the ship, but some large chunks had been hastily removed with welding torches. There were a lot of thick power cables leading into those holes.
“Best bet,” the professor said, “is that reactors and their superconducting containment gear were hauled out through this hole. It’s about the most expensive gear aboard a ship. That, and its weapons systems.”
“Is there evidence of the lasers being taken out?” Kris asked to anyone listening on net. “Also, have we found the bridge?”
“The forward section of the ship took a lot of damage. This monster and her baby monsters might have been slaughtering the battleships, but we humans were getting our licks in, too,” came with a touch of pride from Captain Drago.
“This is a huge ship, Your Highness,” Professor Joao Labao said respectfully but firmly. “Rome was not built in a day, and we will not plumb its secrets in an afternoon.”
“Well, so far you’ve got plenty to interest me,” Kris said. “Have your boffins get the nanos collecting as much data as they can because I don’t intend to spend a day here waiting for whoever has the salvage contract on this mother to wander back through that jump point,” Kris said.