46
Kris doubted she was messing with Granny Rita’s day when she called her.
“Granny, you won’t guess what just dropped into the system.”
“You sound chipper, so it can’t be aliens. Don’t keep the old girl guessing. Life’s too short to waste it on silly games.”
“Yes, Grandmother,” Kris drawled. “Your king and former husband seems to remember you fondly.”
“What makes you say that?” was lathered in caution.
“Twenty-eight frigates and fifteen auxiliaries just jumped into your nice system.”
“How are we going to feed them all?” Granny sighed.
“There are four, honest to God transports trailing them, and I just got the inventory of their cargo. They’re loaded with farm implements, trucks, Smart Metal fishing boats. All kinds of goodies.”
“How will we power them all?”
“Granny, you are a disgusting downer. Don’t you credit Grampa Ray with the sense God promised a billy goat?”
“A goat, yes. Your grampa, not so much.”
“They’re also loaded with solar-power plants and individual cells. Grampa Ray has not sent you gear that will just sit there and frustrate you.”
“Farm gear, transportation, boats, and power. Did you say anything to Ray?”
“Nope.”
“He wasn’t here long enough to see much of anything,” his former wife mused.
“He did take off with twenty or so of your best young people,” Kris pointed out.
“I figured the old bag of wind would be doing all the talking. Ray does have an ego.”
“Apparently, he must have listened a bit, because those ships are full of stuff you need.”
“You keep this up, and you’re going to force me to reassess the old fool.”
“He is a mystery, isn’t he, Granny?”
“So how soon do we get all these wonderful presents?”
“The fleet came in by Jump Point Beta and are making a one-gee approach. Say sometime late today. Probably too late to do much until tomorrow.”
“Do you have port facilities for all of them?”
“Not even close,” Kris said.
“Well, have fun. Don’t you hate being a grown-up?”
“Good-bye Granny.”
Kris’s next call was to Ada. There was no reason for her to hear the good news secondhand. The Chief of Ministries sent back a “Glory, alleluia” reply and said she’d get the colonials ready for the king’s largesse.
That left Kris with the problem of conjuring a ship for Penny out of thin air. She decided the shipyard was the best place to look for a solution. Besides, if she did what she was thinking of doing, the yard would have a whole lot of new problems to solve.
Admiral Benson, ret., was in his office with a large window overlooking the shop floor beneath him. No surprise, he had already heard of the new arrivals. “It’s nice to see the tip of the spear getting a bit sharper.”
“Thirty-eight frigates to hold off a mother ship and her brood of a couple of hundred huge monsters. Odds leave something to be desired,” Kris said.
“Yes, but they’re three, four times better than they were yesterday.”
“I have some problems I could use your help solving.”
“How many and how bad?” the old Navy man said.
“First, rumor is I’ve been made an admiral. You didn’t bring along any old shoulder boards, did you?”
He was grinning before she finished the sentence and reaching into a drawer of his desk. “I kept my first set of admiral shoulder boards around for good luck. May you wear them in good health,” he said, tossing a pair of boards across the desk to Kris.
“Would you mind helping me put them on?” Kris asked.
“Shouldn’t your husband do that?”
“If they’re your lucky shoulder boards, I wouldn’t want to do anything to jinx the luck.”
He did the honor, then stood back and gave her a salute. He might be a civilian at the moment, but Gunny would thoroughly approve of his form.
“So, one problem down. What next?”
“All the auxiliaries are Smart Metal. What kind of warship do you think you could respin two or three of them into?”
“What do you have in mind? The asteroids are coming up with all kinds of rare and exotic materials, just what we need for making lasers of our own. The crew in my weapons lab can’t wait to get their hands on the old Hornet’s lasers and start reworking them. Same for her reactors though I’m not sure I’d trust them out of my sight. What’s the phrase, they been rid hard and put away wet.”
“Yes, I suspected you’d say something like that. Yes, I want more support ships for the asteroid mines, but I need to spin out a frigate as well. Are the Wasp’s and Intrepid’s original 18-inchers gathering dust?”
“We put one of them in each of the Hellburner bases we set up on the moons. Assuming they get slagged real good by the bastards, we’ll need to recut our launch tunnels to get the Hellfires out.”
“That still leaves eight, or five. Have we dug bases to cover the Beta Jump Point?”
“Just starting, but those lasers aren’t being wasted. I’ve got them mounted on my station, and we’ve trained Ostriches to man them. Those birds are smart and not afraid to be mean.”
“Any chance they might sign up for ship duty?” Kris asked.
“What do you have in mind?”
Kris told him. His reaction was, at best, noncommittal. “I don’t know. Spin out a frigate to the Wasp’s design? I think we can do that. Find a crew? That might be a problem. You sure the merchant folks arriving planned to stay?”
“I haven’t asked them,” Kris admitted.
“Ever heard of shanghaiing?”
“Likely I’ve been guilty of that a few times in my life.”
“Come to think about it, a lot of folks might want to hitch a ride back on those empty transports. Any idea how we keep from hemorrhaging our workforce?”
“By my count, there were twenty-eight frigates escorting those nineteen auxiliary and merchant ships. How many folks do you think would want to ride the convoy home with no escort?”
“You’re a hard woman.”
“I’m a Longknife. I’ve got a fight coming and thirty-eight warships to hold the line. Would you lose a few to an escort mission?”
The retired admiral didn’t say anything for a long while. Finally, he muttered, “I guess I’d look at my orders.”
“Mine are rather vague. Put up a fight. I don’t have to win, I just have to make it look good enough that the bastards don’t think they need to go looking for where we might be from. Me, I’d prefer to win. I get to stay alive if I win.”
“We sure don’t if we lose,” Benson agreed.
“You just get ready to respin a lot of Smart Metal into what we need. Leave the personnel to me.”
“Gladly.”
The Wasp was on its final approach. It parked the wreck a good hundred klicks back, trailing the station. Good idea; there might well be more ships stuck swinging around each other if there wasn’t anything to grow the station coming in. The Wasp also dumped the wreckage of the Hornet ten klicks back. Yard tugs were quickly picking though the pieces; the reactors were the first to be towed in for examination.
There were shuttles coming up from Alwa loaded with boffins wanting a first look at the alien technology. There were also docs who had been dirtside, researching the local biology or starting up the geriatrics clinic. Every medical type available had been recalled to help with Phil Taussig’s survivors.
Kris was there when they wheeled Phil up from the Wasp’s pier.
“Good heavens, Kris, you’ve got quite a setup here. Oh, pardon me, Admiral.” In bed, weak as he was, he tried to lie at attention. How many generations of Navy did he have stiffening his backbone?
“At ease, Commander. I’m just a jumped-up captain my grandfather, the king, frocked up to an admiral. And you’ll be a full commander as quickly as Nelly can cut the paperwork. Listen, Phil, I’ve got a problem.”