Kris forgot to breathe as the alien slid close to their hole but didn’t pass directly over them. The cave did take a near hit. A girder collapsed across the exit.
KRIS, Nelly started.
RAM IT, Kris ordered. DRAGO CAN COMPLAIN TO ME ABOUT THE DING. NOW GO!
The Wasp leapt into a three-gee acceleration, then warped its bow around to chase the alien across the sky.
The crosshairs on the lasers settled on the now-targetable aft engineering space. Kris fired three, holding just Laser 4 in reserve.
Two of the lasers slammed into the ship but seemed to do nothing. The other one did critical damage to one of the reactors. The ship began to slew around as a couple of the rocket engines vented plasma. Its lasers were suddenly aimed at empty space, but they kept right on firing even as the rear of the ship began to vaporize.
Kris put her last 18-inch laser into where she would have put one of the two forward reactors, the ones that powered the life support and the lasers. Her guess was good. The hit loosed demons that gobbled up the bow of the ship.
Its lasers only died as the entire ship converted itself to a ball of expanding gas.
Nelly cut acceleration to a single comfortable gee as the bridge crew silently took in that they would live. The aliens were dead, paying the full price for starting this fight. The humans would live to see another sunset. They would taste dinner. They still had the chance of finding someone who might love them back as strongly as they loved them.
“Is it over?” Granny asked over the net.
“It looks that way,” Kris answered. “Nelly, do you have a visual on the jump point?
“Yes, Kris, and it’s quiet. I’m launching two standard low-tech buoys to take up station on either side of that jump. It will tell us anything we need to know while we drop back to the wreck and pick up the nanos we left behind.”
“Do we have to?” the new navigator asked.
“Those probes are Smart Metal that we can use for armor and matrix that Nelly intends to use for her next child,” Kris said. “Yes, we will return and pick them up. Who knows? Some of the nanos may have data we didn’t get a chance to download while we were fighting for our lives. Battles can be so distracting,” Kris said through a grin.
“I am so glad that Your Highness understands the hunger of her scientists for discovery,” Professor Joao Labao added on net.
That drew boos from several of the bridge hands, but they were careful to keep their comments low and see that their mikes were off.
Thirty minutes later, Nelly reported that all her probes that were still able to move were back on board.
“Navigator, set course for Alwa,” Captain Drago ordered. “One point five gees, if you please. All hands, we will maintain battle stations until we exit this system. Defense, we will maintain Condition Zed until the same. Commodore Rita Nuu Ponsa, if you feel that the one and a half gees is too much for your delegation, you may invite them to stay in their gee tanks. Since we won’t be jinking, I believe that we can pop the lid off the tanks and let them breathe on their own.”
“Thank you, Captain. Please have someone get us out of these coffins.”
Kris rolled her egg for what would have been her Tac Center.
Jack made to follow.
“You can park that egg wherever you want, Jack, but not where I’m going. Granny is not presentable and, if I have to pop this egg open to help her and her Alwans, I won’t be either.”
Jack eyed Kris as if to say, “And I’d be seeing what that I haven’t?” but kept his reply to a gentlemanly, “Aye, aye, ma’am.”
Penny rolled her egg after Kris. “I can lend a hand.”
HOW COME THE ALWANS GET TO SEE YOU NAKED AND I CAN’T? Jack said over Nelly Net.
BECAUSE I SAY SO, AND LET’S SHUT THIS DOWN. I DON’T WANT TO SCANDALIZE THE COMPUTERS.
KRIS, I FIND HUMAN SEXUALITY VERY INTERESTING, BUT HARDLY SCANDALOUS.
NELLY, SHUT UP. JACK, SHUT UP. PENNY, LET’S GET THIS OVER WITH.
So they did. Kris found it interesting the way the Alwans looked anywhere else but at the naked humans who helped make their lives less claustrophobic.
To no apparent question from Kris, Granny whispered, “I’ll explain later.”
The sigh as the Wasp edged through the next jump had to be measured on the Richter scale.
6
As soon as the Wasp made orbit around Alwa, the six observers demanded to be returned to the Association of Associations by the first shuttle. Granny Rita was expressly not invited to join them.
Kris invited Granny Rita to the now-restored Forward Lounge, where the old gal could enjoy some well-aged Scotch, a luxury that had disappeared on Alwa too many years ago to count.
“So, what’s up with the Alwans?” Kris asked, when they were both served. Kris was back to tonic water with a twist of lime.
“I have no idea. They haven’t said a word to me since you refused to ‘crow’ to the lone survivor. Something about how we’ve strutted our stuff and flashed our feathers. ‘They can see you are superior. Now, they must bow their heads.’”
“That’s what they wanted me to send?” Kris asked, incredulously.
“That’s the way they do things, young lady. Be glad of it. It saved me and my crew from a lot of bloody fighting when we dropped in. Fortunately, they had some dry land that wasn’t much used, and it wasn’t too bad for farming.”
“You were lucky in too many ways to count,” Kris said.
Granny raised her glass in a silent toast to those like them but no longer present. “I’ve had more luck than any human being has a right to claim since I led the remnants of BatCruRon 16 into that jump at three gees and battle revolutions.”
Kris nodded. Eighty years ago, that was a death sentence for the Furious, Enterprise, Audacious, and Resolute.
Granny Rita’s eyes grew distant, and her words came low. “The Iteeche were implacable after my squadron blew up their invasion fleet. Any hope of taking our base had gone up in exploding gas, as well as an awful lot of their troopers, so when I took off, they came hot and straight after me. We went through the next three jumps at higher and higher speeds, adding on more revolutions to our spin in the hope of saving some of our armor from the hammering the Iteeche were giving us.”
The old war fighter shook her head. “We fled, but they would not give up the chase. We were long past any planets claimed by the Iteeche Empire, and still the chase went on. First the Resolute faltered, fell behind, and died fighting a dozen Death Balls. They got her, but she got half of them. Then it was the Audacious’s turn. When finally Furious and Enterprise made a jump and discovered to our great joy that no Iteeche ship had followed us through, we were hopelessly lost.
“And while I and the Enterprise’s young skipper were trying to figure out what to do next, our two ships shot through a jump point that wasn’t even showing on our sensors. We jumped three, four times farther than I ever thought a ship could go and found ourselves even farther from any help. That happened to us twice before we managed to change course real fast and dodge whatever it was that was doing this to us.”
“We call them fuzzy jump points,” Kris said. “That was Nelly’s name for them, and it’s stuck. Our best guess is that the Three who built the jump points built the fuzzy ones last as some kind of expressway. They’re closer together, and they take you a whole lot farther. With fifty or so baby monster ships chasing the Wasp after this fight, the only way we managed to break contact and get back to human space were those jumps. You need special navigational gear to spot them.”