Four weeks later Kris observed the departure of the 6th Battlecruiser Fleet from High Wardhaven station from the flag bridge of the USS Princess Royal surrounded by her personal staff. The Sweet P, as her lower decks had rechristened her, had been one of the first battlecruisers to be refit for the 24-inch lasers.
They’d slit her open, replaced her reactors and guns with more powerful ones, pumped in more Smart MetalTM, and coated it all with additional crystal armor sufficient for a battle at Condition Zed. The P Royal, however, was ten thousand tons over the normal displacement of a battlecruiser of her class. She still had the extra Smart MetalTM she’d taken on for the jaunt as the flagship of a princess arbitrator to the Greenfeld Empire to stop their civil war.
Kris had intended to offer the P Royal for Vice Admiral Jean Darlan’s flag, but he had chosen the Bold in the second task force. He was about as far from Kris as he could get and still accompany her to the Iteeche Court. Kris had hoped they would get off on a better footing, but she could understand. She had twice conducted readiness reviews of his command and he had twice flunked them. Admiral Darlan was a retread from the Battle Force and expected his battlecruisers to follow in his wake. He liked battle lines sixteen ships long, and saw no reason for his ships to “jitterbug” around.
Kris would have relieved him if she could have, but he had friends. Apparently, those friends had gotten him this command. Kris certainly hadn’t asked for him.
The Princess Royal was part of the 13th Battlecruiser Squadron which still included the Intrepid, Courageous, Furious, Resolute, Defender, Steadfast, and Monarch. Commander Ajax no long commanded the P. Royal. Instead, Commodore Ajax now flew her flag aboard Intrepid, commanding the entire squadron.
At least some of the Navy around Kris were familiar and friendly.
The thirty-two battlecruisers of the 6th fleet followed in the wake of the sixteen Imperial battlecruisers that had brought Ron to Wardhaven. They had returned only two days ago, and were now getting underway to lead the way back to court.
Behind the U.S. battlecruisers came the merchant ships.
In the lead was a luxury liner full of diplomats, contractors and support civilians. The Space Fiesta was new, the first major liner constructed of Smart MetalTM. She’d been taken over and redesigned into a high-speed passenger liner for the run either to the Iteeche Empire or to Alwa. That had involved doubling her number of reactors and adding additional rocket motors to get her up to 3.5 gees. The redesign also included pouring in extra Smart MetalTM to strengthen her girders and reinforce her strength members. Renamed the USS King Raymond I, she’d never go back to her intended role of a luxury liner.
Following her were eight fast attack transports, taken off the Alwa run. Able to make 3.5 gees and armed with 6-inch lasers, they carried more of Kris’s contractors, support staff and supplies. The Rankin had the 3rd battalion, 1st Marines, reinforced, on board. By the time a full set of attachments, MP, NCIS, Security, Special Forces and more were added on, it topped out at fourteen hundred strong.
Kris had taken pity on the tight quarters on the Rankin and put a company aboard the Princess Royal. Kris had not been able to get a Marine detachment aboard all the battlecruisers; the corps was spread pretty thin. Still, all the flagships in the fleet had a Marine platoon size detachment aboard. If things got challenging, Kris could form the ship Marines into an additional battalion to call on.
The eight attack transports got away from the station as smartly as the battlecruisers. The next two dozen plus, however, were a very motley crew. Grampa Al’s huge Glory of Free Enterprise, Pride of the Market, and Grandeur of the Profit Motive . . . tell me what you really think, Grampa, followed right behind the transports, and just as smartly.
“Nelly, are Grampa Al’s ships armed?”
“Four 18-inch long guns forward, a half-dozen 5-inchers scattered around the hull. I don’t think he wants you to shoot at them this time,” Nelly said, with a chuckle in her voice.
Kris turned to Amanda and Jacques. “Do you know Grampa Al has an ambassador of his own on the Glory?”
“No,” Amanda said.
“Yep, Grampa calls him the ‘Ambassador for Business.’ If that so-called ambassador tries to wrangle a meeting with the Emperor, Jack, you have my permission to lock him in the brig.”
“The gall of some Longknifes,” Jack muttered softly enough to be heard on the entire flag bridge. He got the laugh he deserved.
The next dozen or so merchant ships flew the flags of every major association, including Earth and her rump of The Society of Humanity. Kris wasn’t sure the credentials of the business folks aboard Earth’s Golden Hind were official, but King Ray had chosen to let them follow along, while warning Kris to be careful of them. Kris had passed that warning right along to Jack and Abby.
The last dozen or more ships were an open question. They were merchant skippers and free traders looking to make a fast buck. Jack’s Marines had searched those ships along with the others and found no contraband aboard. Kris had warned the skippers that in event that the fleet found itself surprised by things they’d been promised weren’t there, the battlecruisers might exit the area at 3.5 gees. The skippers had been a bit surprised by that, but had not withdrawn.
Be it upon their heads.
Not that Kris expected any surprises. Ron had gotten to Wardhaven with sixteen battlecruisers; she should have no problem returning with forty-eight.
Kris had never had a chance to examine the Iteeche battlecruisers before. She turned to the lieutenant on sensors and asked him to give her a readout on the Iteeche ships. Quickly one wall filled up with scans and schematics, graphs and lists.
“The Iteeche construction is nearly a mirror of ours, Admiral,” the lieutenant reported as Kris had Nelly do her own check.
“Can we get any better take on those ships?” Nelly asked.
“This is the best we can get off the antennas we’ve got, Admiral.”
“We don’t have a research team, at least not a star gazing team,” Nelly pointed out.
DAMN, Kris breathed. I THOUGHT THEY STILL HAD WHAT WE HAD FIVE YEARS AGO?
I’M SORRY KRIS. I DIDN’T CHECK UNTIL JUST NOW.
AND I DIDN’T ASK YOU TO.
WHERE WE’RE GOING IS SUPPOSED TO BE FULLY CHARTED.
AND WE’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE TO GET A FULL READ OUT ON ANY ATTACKERS. YES, I KNOW, NELLY.
“Okay, Lieutenant, tell me what you’ve got.”
“Half are carrying 24-inch lasers, the other half only 22-inchers. Their reactors are a bit more powerful than ours. Assuming that they’ve got their capacitors charged to the full, they don’t carry quite the charge ours do.”
“So, a shorter laser burst, but maybe a faster reload.”
“It would appear so, ma’am.”
“Can you get any readout from their Smart Metal or crystal armor?” Kris asked.
“It looks like they’re carrying more Smart Metal than we are, but I’m not getting any singing in the bandwidth for crystal.”
“They don’t have any?” Jack said.
“Apparently not,” the lieutenant repeated.
“So, they got Smart Metal for their power generation secret, but it appears we humans haven’t told them anything about how to build beam weapons or crystal armor,” Kris said, summing it up.
“Paranoid, anyone?” Abby asked no one.
“If you put Ray Longknife and Crossie in a barrel,” Kris growled, naming the chief of Intelligence, “and roll them downhill, you’ll have a paranoid bastard on top all the way down.”
“You think you should maybe stop saying things like that, baby duck?” Abby drawled. “What with you now being, what do they call it, the embodiment of his presence?”
Kris shrugged; eyed the array of departing ships and found it acceptable, if not all good. “Let’s get some chow. I figure this trip out is the last chance any of us will have to catch up on our sleep, time with our kids or anything else human for a very long time. Let’s take it.”