Kris had almost walked into enough poles, walls, ditches, whatever, as a kid lost in her games to smile as she rescued this girl from a similar fate.
“We caught them just before their brains locked down. They’re learning. Their brains are also sprouting synapses like a house afire. Just like one of our kids in their age range.”
“They’re learning to speak Standard?” Kris said, eyeing what the kids were reading.
“And they’re picking it up like a dry sponge does water. They’re also learning our vocabulary, a full, modern vocabulary.”
“They’ll be like the others, only open to talking,” Kris said.
“Yep. Doc Meade wants them back in the lab this afternoon. I don’t think she’ll mind if I bring them in early. She’s studying them, matching them against the cadavers we have and the baselines we have from their folks. These kids’ brains are so different from those of the elders we’ve got.”
Kris chewed that over.
Jacques kept talking. “So, in answer to the question you’re not asking me, yes, it was worthwhile picking them up. But the very act of bringing them into our conversation is making them different. Different from their own tribe. Different from the bloodthirsty killers among the stars. I have no idea where all this is heading, but it’s opening up what was pretty locked down beforehand.”
“I’m going to judge this as good,” Kris said.
“Kris, Captain Drago wants to talk to you.”
“Why?” Kris asked.
“There’s a problem up ahead. Maybe it’s nothing, but he’d like you to know about it sooner rather than later.
Jacques raised an inquiring eyebrow.
Kris shrugged. “You take the kids to the doctor, and I’ll see what’s worrying the captain.”
And she walked off. Quickly. Admirals never run. That might scare the average Sailor and really scare their officers.
But admirals can walk very, very quickly.
53
Kris decided to use her day quarters as a shortcut through to the Wasp’s bridge. Captain Drago had told Kris never, ever to even think of doing that, but now looked like a good time to break that rule.
So she was very surprised to find Captain Drago and Chief Beni waiting for her in what they had turned into her flag plot.
“What’s the rush?” Kris asked, her stomach already in free fall from the looks on their faces.
“The enemy isn’t there anymore,” Captain Drago said.
“What?” brought Kris up short.
“Chief, explain this to the admiral.”
“Yes, sir,” the old retired chief said. He had a black box in his hand and began tapping it. One of Kris’s large screens converted to show what Kris had looked at so many times in the last few days: a visual of the gas giant and its moons.
Always, it had shown the enemy base camp orbiting one moon.
Now it showed nothing.
“What happened?” Kris demanded.
“I don’t know, ma’am. One minute it was showing the reactors and other electronic hums. The next minute, it’s showing nothing. Not. A. Thing.”
“Of course, with the speed-of-light lag time, whatever it quit showing,” Captain Drago pointed out, “quit happening a while back.”
“Yes, yes, I know,” Kris said. “But what did they do? Could they be masking their emissions? The Iteeche had a way of throwing off our sensors in the last war,” Kris remembered.
“Yes. Somehow the bastards could throw off our radar and laser range finders by a couple hundred klicks, ma’am. We never have figured out how they did it. It’s one thing to spoof sensors a bit. It’s another thing entirely to hide the emissions coming out of a thermonuclear reactor. That’s raw physics, ma’am. You’ve got to contain the damn plasma. That means a lot of electromagnetic fields. All those I can see. Even a blind man could see them.”
“But we’re not seeing it anymore?” Kris said.
“I tell you, it’s not there.”
“So they either blew themselves up or turned everything off,” Kris said, naming the only two options she could think of.
“They didn’t blow themselves up,” Chief Beni said. “We’d have seen that.”
“So they turned off their gear,” Kris said. “Captain, what’s it look like when you dump a reactor?”
“First off, you don’t dump a dozen huge ship reactors and five gigantic city-size reactors when you’re tied up at the dock. That tends to wreck things you don’t want wrecked.”
“Things we wouldn’t want wrecked,” Kris pointed out. “What about them?”
“There’s no accounting for them,” the captain growled. “Admiral, would you be so kind as to order my chief engineer to report to your quarters and could you scare up that chief boffin? They’ve got all kinds of sensors. They might be able to add something to our conversation.”
“Nelly, make it so.”
“Already done, Kris. They’re headed here as fast as their legs can carry them. I think the rumor that we’ve lost the aliens is wandering through the ship at faster-than-light speed. You humans do like to talk.”
“And you computers don’t,” Drago said, dryly.
“We are networked by our very nature, sir.”
“We were networked long before you were,” the captain retorted.
“Enough, children,” Kris said. “Chief, can you take my board back to just before you lost the aliens? Enhance it to maximum resolution and walk it through the loss as slowly as possible.”
They were going through that loss for the second time when the chief engineers of both the Wasp and Hornet reported to Kris, with both Captain Taussig and Professor Labao only seconds behind them. Not far behind them were the two felines and their translator.
Kris brought all of them up to date on the enemy’s status, something that didn’t seem to surprise any of them, not even the cats. Then she had Chief Beni run them through what they knew about the sudden change in the aliens’ status.
The two engineers were shaking their heads as the reactors disappeared from the screen within a single second.
“I’d never scram a reactor while tied up to the pier,” Commander Manuel Ortega of the Wasp said. “Even if I had it on minimum power, and what we were getting from our targets wasn’t minimum.”
Ronnie Thiu of the Hornet agreed. “Bad idea, but those shadows on the screen? I think that might have been the plasma dissipating into space, or at least some of it. If we’re reading it this far away, it’s got to be tearing into something to create that kind of radiation signature.”
She turned to the head boffin. “Did any of your people have a better look at this?”
“I have some independent reports of this,” the professor began in lecture mode. “However, I must tell you that our most sensitive sensor for this was destroyed during the recent fight, and our best researcher in this area lost her life. Her assistant is doing the best he can with what he has available. Our computers are trying their best to enhance what we did capture.”
“My children are all working on this, Kris,” Nelly reported. “We should have something for you in the next five minutes.”
“Good,” Kris said, wondering why she was hearing about this first from Professor Labao rather than Nelly, but this situation was coming at them very fast.
“So,” Kris said, thinking on her feet as fast as she could. “We’ve lost all evidence of reactors. What about laser capacitors? Are the guns charged?”
“We’re too far out to read anything like that,” Chief Beni said.
“How close will we have to get before we know we’ve got two huge batteries of lasers loaded and aimed at us?” Kris got in before either captain present could.