Much better drilled, Princess Kris Longknife’s so-called diplomatic fleet drifted up to the jump while their pursuit was still days away. Maneuvering jets took off the last bit of energy and the fleet came to a complete halt.
“I will order two ships through to scout the darkness,” Ron announced.
Kris waited as patiently as she could for several long seconds to go by before a messenger buoy popped back into the space where the jump sat and gave them an all clear.
Kris had spent most of the last two days practicing patience.
Nelly got exasperated with Kris asking over and over again, “Have you figured out the maskers yet?”
After the fourth time Nelly suggested patiently that Kris go play with the children. The fact that Nelly didn’t snap at Kris said way too much. Nelly understood Kris’s need to know what was happening but likely she was have a tough time of it and needed Kris to go away.
With a sigh, Kris took Nelly’s advice and hunted up the children in school and settled herself down in a kid-size chair to help them with their learning.
It didn’t take Ruth long to get tired of the help. “Mo-ther, I know how to do this. Don’t you have some admirally thing to do?”
The look from the young teacher was enough to send Kris on her way.
She wandered back into flag plot and spent a long moment staring at the situation that had developed in their pursuit. No extra ships had appeared from either jump point. Apparently, she could have tried to fight her way through to the jump that would take her to the Imperial Court.
Kris shrugged. Even if Admiral Darlan had attempted it, no doubt the Iteeche rebels would have taken advantage of the nearby planet to provide him with a long, running gun battle.
Would our crystal armor have made enough of a difference? Kris wondered.
She chose to ignore that question; it was a might-have-been. What she did look at were her prospects for fighting her way through her pursuers now. They were drawing together, but they were still well apart.
Could I turn this fleet around and hit the first fleet before the second fleet could haul itself into the fight?
Kris did not want to joggle Nelly’s elbow, so she fed the question into her battle board and let it do the math. Much of it was math. Could her ships jack up their deceleration to 3.5 gees, bring themselves to a halt in space and then hurl themselves back at the first group of rebel battlecruisers? It was, of course, possible, though the transports and merchant ships might not handle it so well. Still, she could give battle that way.
But could the second fleet of rebels come up quickly to turn it into that three-to-one fight that she doubted even her crystal armor could handle? Assuming they also went to 3.5 gees deceleration, then turned it into acceleration toward the future battle, when would they arrive?
The battle board gave Kris a very quick answer. She’d have the first group for just one hour before she had to take on the second.
Maybe that is worth a try.
“But what if,” came in Jack’s familiar voice, “the first fleet jacks up its deceleration and runs away from you until the other fleet can join with it?”
“You came in very quietly,” Kris said, turning to her general husband Marine.
“And aren’t you glad that I’m a good guy and don’t have a knife at your throat?”
“Is that a knife in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?” Kris asked, noting that he always had one or the other.
“I’ll show you in a minute, but let’s finish this.”
Kris turned back to the battle board and quickly entered in the option for her enemy that Jack had mentioned. Yep, the two forces could join before she caught up with the first.
“Damn, you’re smart,” she whispered.
“And I’m just a dumb jarhead,” Jack said, a chuckle in his voice. “No doubt, the admirals on the other side would think of that as soon as you hiked up your deceleration.”
“So, I’m just scratching an itch I can’t get at anyway.”
“Well, I have an itch that might be able to scratch your itch.”
“Are you setting me up?” Kris said, trying to be angry, but unable to raise the ire. “Did half the ship send you in here to get the old lady off their backs?”
“It was more like three quarters, but none of them said anything about the ‘old lady’. It was something more like, ‘could you please take that cute young admiral off to bed’?”
So, Kris let herself be seduced into bed by her dutiful husband.
After a deliciously well-spent afternoon, she found she could spend time with the children without being sent away. Between them, and Jack’s careful ministrations, the tension of the wait was held within reasonable limits.
Nelly still hadn’t given Kris a progress report when they came to a halt before the jump. That itch was galloping back with a vengeance, but Kris held any complaints.
Ron took his squadron through. As he did, Kris issued orders to Task Force 2 to hold the jump at all costs until relieved.
“I will return and support you with my full, reinforced fleet.”
Commodore Afon gave Kris a crisp reply. The comm folks made sure what they said could be picked up by the approaching fleet. They even used a less secure scrambler to pass the word along quickly.
That done, Kris followed Ron into the next system.
A quick scan showed exactly one jump. There were no other jumps, either conventional or fuzzy. Still, the approaching Iteeche would not know that. On that rested Kris’s entire strategy. That, and Nelly figuring out the masker technology, how to duplicate it on the human ships, and them all, Iteeche and human, being able to throw their mass out seven times each.
They’d also need to throw that mass to exactly where the human targets would be following them.
Kris gritted her teeth. She knew what she needed to pull this off. Had the Magnificent Nelly come through with the necessary magic?
“I count eighteen Iteeche ships in the system,” Sensors reported.
“Eighteen?” Kris echoed.
“Eighteen,” Sensors repeated. “Sixteen that stay put and two that kind of wander around, Admiral.”
“Yes, Kris,” Nelly reported in an exasperated voice. “There are two that keep wandering off. It seems the Iteeche have never gotten a solid handle on keeping the maskers in one place. I’m working on that. We also have a second problem. The closer the masses are to one another, the more unstable the signal becomes. And no, I haven’t tried seven in one place or worse, the twenty-eight I’ll need to represent a four-ship division making like it’s a task force.”
“We’ve got plenty of time,” Kris said in her most soothing voice. It worked on human subordinates. She doubted it would fool Nelly.
“So, why don’t you tend to your side of the shop and I’ll take care of mine?” Nelly said and seemed to disappear again from Kris’s head.
Kris did have plenty to deal with on her side. The entire fleet, Iteeche, Human Navy and merchants were drifting in space. They had been drifting for a good quarter hour on the other side. No doubt, stomachs were well past queasy.
“Comm,” Kris ordered, “send to merchants, ‘Merchant fleet, get underway at one quarter gee. We will advise you when you need to reverse course’.”
“Thank you,” came back from quite a few open mics. Despite them being made of Smart MetalTM for the long run to Alwa, Kris ordered the Navy transports to get underway and the merchant ships immediately followed in their wake. Even Grampa Al’s three big ships didn’t quibble over the course and acceleration. One skipper did, however, feel compelled to ask a question.
“Why are we only doing a quarter gee? I and my crew would be a lot happier with at least a half gee.”
“Because,” Kris answered, “I may need for you to return to the jump a lot faster than you went out. Do you want to be left behind when the Navy sails?”
She got no answer to that.
Kris then ordered the battlecruisers to anchor in pairs and begin to swing around each other, creating a decent sense of down. Smart MetalTM battlecruisers could do that. Merchant ships with their regular materials or, even if they were Smart MetalTM, with their cargo load very likely loaded with no thought to balance, could not.
Her fleet now deployed for a long wait, Kris made her way to the sensor team on her flag bridge. She stood behind them with a clear view of what Nelly was attempting. The number of false gravity centers grew, but any apparent control over them only got worse.
Kris found Jack at her elbow. “Nelly has called her kids in to help her,” he said. “Mine is gone as well as Megan’s. I understand from Amanda and Jacques that theirs are also dragooned. I don’t know if Abby and Bruce’s computers are involved.”
Kris pursed her lips, but kept her mouth shut.
“Kris,” Nelly finally said, “I know you know we have a problem. Could you have your ship computers combine their target practice drones into fourteen per ship and see just how good a fake ship you can knock together?”
“We’ll get on it,” Kris said. For a moment, the fourteen per ship stumped her. Then it fell in place. Each of the sixteen human battlecruisers would have to make seven decoys for themselves and seven more for an Iteeche ship.
Kris turned the job over to Captain Tosen who soon had an experimental decoy drifting close aboard all four of the flagships. The target’s dumb metal had been stretched out as long as a battlecruiser. That was normal. What was unusual, was the need to create a balloon as wide around as a battlecruiser. Normally the target was a two-dimensional cutout kept broadside to a battlecruiser for the gunnery drill. It only needed to record the hits on the silhouette. Now, Kris needed a three-dimensional representation of a battlecruiser at Condition Zed.
There wasn’t enough dumb metal to do that.
“We’re going to need more metal,” the chief of staff reported to Kris.
“Can we mix Smart and dumb metal?” Jack asked.
“They’ve been working on it,” Kris said, “but we’re still not there. What I think we can do is use the dumb metal for the frame and reaction mass tanks. We could clad the frame with Smart Metal and maybe keep it rigid by blowing it up with hydrogen from the reaction tanks.”
“You are willing to pull Smart Metal from the battlecruisers to do this?” the chief of staff asked.
“With any luck, we won’t need the small amount that we pull from the battlecruisers’ armor. If things don’t work out our way, we can always pull the decoys back and suck the metal out of them. We sure won’t need the decoys if we’re being attacked.”
The chief of staff nodded, then began issuing orders to create the kind of balloon decoys that Kris wanted. Before she could finish, Commodore Ajax interrupted.
“Excuse me, Captain, but I’ve got a Gunnery officer who thinks we’ve got another problem that we’d better take a gander at.”
“Yes?” came from Captain Tosen along with a kind of “How can this get any worse?” sigh.
A new face appeared on the screen. “I’ve done the calculations with our Engineering officer. If they’re right, the anti-matter motors we have on our target drones are not going to hack it pushing the full weight of this balloon decoy. Has anyone else done the math?”
The chief of staff drew in a deep breath, then asked for the calculations. The numbers appeared on Kris’s screen as well. The target drone was a mere fifty tons of dumb metal. To create a full three-dimensional decoy, they’d need another hundred tons of Smart MetalTM. They’d need more reaction mass, both to move the heavier decoy and to keep it moving until the rebels exited the jump ahead of them. All of that added mass that the rocket motor would have to move.
That totaled out as a two-hundred-and-fifty-ton decoy. The drone’s anti-matter reaction motors were expected to last for a couple of hours at one to two gees pushing along just one fifth of that amount.
“We’ll need bigger motors,” Kris said to herself. On net, the same conclusion was now obvious to everyone.
“Okay,” Captain Tosen said, “anyone got a design for that size of an anti-matter motor? I’d hate to have to put a motor the size of a longboat in one.”
Kris tapped her commlink. “Comm, can you get me Abby?”
A moment later, “You called, boss lady?” came in the familiar voice.
“Yep, I called. Is your computer available to help us with an engineering problem?”
“Engineering problem? That’s not normally her line of work, but it don’t matter, Nelly’s dragooned my kid into working with her, too.”
“Ouch,” Kris said. “Are we going to have to solve this problem with no help at all?”
“I could help,” came in the cheerful voice of a young woman. “Nelly didn’t grab my Dada,” Cara announced, as confident as any teenager. “I don’t think Nelly considers us fit to do any real work. She’s wrong, but me and Dada don’t care. What can we do for you, Aunt Krissie?”
Kris swallowed the auntie bit and explained the problem.
“Give us a minute,” Cara said when Kris was done.
Exactly sixty seconds later, a schematic of an anti-matter reaction motor appeared on Kris’s screen. She passed it along to her chief of staff who passed it through to the Bold’s engineering officer.
“We were just laying out the problem and you’ve got a solution?” came across the net.
“They used one of Nelly’s kids to design it,” the chief of staff replied.
“Damn, where do we get one of those?” was just a whisper, but Kris suspected it was a sincere plea for one of the new toys.
“They are not a standard Navy issue item,” Kris answered.
Immediately, a second decoy began to form close alongside the Bold.
“Sensors, talk to me about that new one.”
“It’s a visual, laser, and radar return match for the Bold to the thirteenth decimal place. I can calculate its mass to the kilogram, and there’s not a lot there. The signature off the anti-matter reactor isn’t in any of my databases, but I’d place it as about in the middle between a captain’s gig and a target drone.”
“Good, so if we jam the right frequencies, they can see it with their eyeballs, all four of them, and touch it with their lasers, but they can’t tell a thing about it otherwise.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Comm, get me the flag,” and quickly Kris was connected. “Captain Tosen, my sensors say that you’ve got a dead ringer for a battlecruiser there. Are you ready to put them into production?”
“Yes, Admiral. So, how’s Nelly doing with the mass problem?”
“I’m waiting for her next report.”
“Well, I propose that we move the anchorage for the fleet to a line of pairs and array the decoys in line behind them.”
“I agree. Make it so,” Kris ordered.
In a moment, the fleet broke out of its present anchorage and quickly drifted into a line, then anchored itself again. Over the next hour, existing target drones were reconfigured and re-engined. The original engine was dedicated to maneuvering jets. If Kris wanted to get her ships doing their usual jig, these decoys could walk the walk.
“We’ve done our part,” Kris whispered to herself. “Now we wait for Nelly to pull the rest of the rabbit out of my hat.”
“I’m surprised at how long it’s taking her,” Jack said.
“Yes,” Kris agreed. She settled into her chair. She would not joggle Nelly’s elbow.
I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.