Kris twiddled her thumbs for the next hour. Time stretched. Nothing happened.
She thought of dropping by the preschool to see how the kids were doing, then discarded the idea. Likely Ruth would just sense her mom’s nervousness and send her packing again.
Smart kids.
Now that the Iteeche rebels were on the other side of the jump, Kris was getting no intel on their developments. She couldn’t even examine her options for a fight.
Kris knew Nelly was coming back before her computer said a word. Kris felt her renewed presence in her head. Kris was tempted to start asking questions immediately, but she kept her mouth shut and did her best to do the same for her thoughts.
There are times when having a computer in your head is not all it’s cracked up to be.
“Kris, we have solved a significant portion of the challenges presented by the maskers,” Nelly finally reported from Kris’s collarbone. “However, we have not succeeded in resolving all the issues.”
Is Nelly dodging? “Tell us what you have,” Kris said.
“We can throw the mass of a battlecruiser seven times. Maybe more. Stabilizing that mass is not so easy. We’ve found that if you keep the masses at least eight hundred kilometers away from each other, the interference can be reduced to a minimum. We’ve also found that there is a limit to how far you can project the mass. If you try to cast it more than five or six thousand klicks, the mass begins to attenuate. In other words, your battlecruisers will start losing tonnage.”
“That’s not something we want,” Kris said.
“I would recommend,” Nelly went on, “that you move the casting ship to somewhere in the middle of the supposed column, say fourth or fifth.”
“I think we can do that, though we may have a problem when ships start coming through the jump.”
“I think we can work something out,” the chief of staff offered. “Maybe we could keep a pair of guard ships anchored near the jump and have them project tonnage for the first decoys through the jump until their squadron flag comes through. It can be done. However, we do need to get the mass to match up to the decoy’s location. Does your computer have any idea how we manage that?”
“You need to understand that the maskers are not native Iteeche technology,” Nelly said. “They found one in an alien ship they discovered on a planet that had once had a small colony from one of the three. They understand maskers even less than we understand the Santa Maria vanishing box. They’ve had the masker longer and looked at it less. We hammered at that enigma for eighty years and got the beam guns.” Nelly paused before going on.
“From what we’ve figured out from our lengthy study of the vanishing box, we can chip projectiles off of neutron stars. We think we can even punch holes in ships. We cannot, however, make the entire top of a mountain disappear like the original box did. We still haven’t figured out that bit of technical know-how.”
“Getting back to the maskers, we have no idea what the aliens used the gizmo for. The Iteeche have managed to use it to displace the mass of their ships. They don’t know how they do it any better than we know how to build a jump.”
Kris nodded along as Nelly made her report. It was not unusual for the mysterious residue of the three alien races that had built the highway among the stars and vanished two or three million years ago, leaving humans puzzled. Kris had found two alien planets. One was a treasure trove of objects that were completely incomprehensible, and often dangerous to the human that found them.
The second planet was a death trap. From distant observations, the planet appeared to be nearly intact. But the observations had to be visual and taken not too far from the jump.
The planet’s defensive system or something just as destructive, had also survived in something like working order. Any probe that got too far from the jump got very much destroyed. That had included at least two aggressive human expeditions that had more greed than common sense. No one had been recovered from either of those ships.
Kris let those thoughts tumble around in her brain, along with their problem of getting what they wanted from the maskers. They had given up trying to make the Santa Maria vanishing box work and settled for something quite different from what was wanted.
Could she settle for something else from the maskers?
A thought slowly worked its way into her thinking.
“Nelly, do you remember the first time we met Ron?”
“I remember some of it very clearly. Then you turned me off,” Nelly harrumphed. Nelly could hold quite a grudge if the violation of her pride was too egregious.
“Let’s ignore that for a moment, shall we?” Kris said. “I remember that sometimes the Greenfeld cruisers were shooting very close to the old Wasp. Other times, not so much.”
“Yes. It was the close shots that caused me to want to shoot back at them before they shot us to junk,” Nelly reminded Kris.
“Were you tracking their target? I know we had a visual on Ron’s death puff. Did our gravity laser track its mass?”
“Yes, Kris. I keep that incident in active memory. It helps to occasionally review both your and my decision process in that event to better sharpen my understanding of just what exactly it took to make you turn me off.”
“I’m glad you do, Nelly, but at just this moment, I’m wondering how much the masker held the phantom of the death puff still?”
“It was not at all still,” Nelly answered. “It behaved like one of our ships following a most frantic Evasion Plan 6. Maybe worse.”
“So, maybe we’re coming at this problem from the wrong direction,” Kris said slowly. “Maybe we should assume that all the battlecruisers have active maskers. Maybe we should assume that we don’t want the maskers’ phantoms too close to our decoys.”
“That I could do,” Nelly said.
“Okay, now, Ron, what are the chances that you might have given the masker technology to a fleet of human battlecruisers?” Kris asked her Iteeche associate.
Ron took a long moment to answer. He spent it swiveling his head to take in his Imperial advisor and the Navy admiral.
NELLY, CAN YOU MAKE OUT ANYTHING FROM WHAT THEY’RE DOING?
SORRY, KRIS, I’VE BEEN RECORDING ALL MY INTERACTIONS WITH RON, BUT I JUST DON’T HAVE ENOUGH BODY LANGUAGE TO MAKE A DICTIONARY FROM IT. I HAD THE COLORS OF THEIR GILLS DOWN SOLID. THIS IS A LOT HARDER TO READ.
THANK YOU, NELLY.
Ron finally turned his head forward to face Kris. “The rebels know that it is forbidden to allow any human access to maskers or its technology. We may need your programmers to help us spin the Smart Metal into battlecruisers, but both the Imperials and the rebels are in agreement that those construction workers will not sneak off with any of our embargoed technology. We know that your Grandfather Alex has offered a huge reward for this tech. We don’t like paying him for using his patented Smart Metal. We definitely don’t want him making money off of our technology.”
“I can’t agree with you more on that,” Kris drawled. She and the Iteeche at least agreed on one thing.
“Still,” Kris said, “the Emperor has called us to his court. The rebels have to know how important that is. They say that our ships are not as combat efficient as their ships. The masker tech has to be a large part of that calculation. Have you run that through your battle computer?”
“We have had a lot of spare time while your Nelly worked on reproducing the maskers. So, yes, my admiral did run some battle scenarios. Our computer would degrade the survival prospects of any ship with a failed masker by at least 36 percent.”
“So, my thirty-two ships count barely as twenty,” Kris noted.
“Yes. Although I must tell you that your crystal armor, that you have embargoed from us, is not included in the computer’s calculations.”
“Does your admiral think the opposing commander is smart enough to notice that?” Jack asked.
“I do not know,” the admiral said when Ron turned to look his way. “He is a hot head and a risk taker, or he would not have turned his back on expressing his worship due the Emperor. Is he imaginative like you, Princess Longknife? I do not know. Imagination is not something we look for in our warrior ranks.”
“The day may come when we regret that.” Ron added. “However, Kris, it is my considered opinion that if a hundred and more ships looking like human battlecruisers jumped into the next system with active maskers, that our rebel commander might very well believe that I had decided that my obligation to bring you before the Emperor had caused me to risk giving you the maskers. If one is to make a serious and formal apology to the Emperor, one might as well do it after completing one’s mission.”
Ron paused for a moment. “You must understand, Princess, that I am well known for not following the traditional logic of my people.”
Kris managed to suppress a chuckle, but still smiled. “In that case, you and I are in the same club. Most humans have a hard time following my logic as well.”
“It is a very small club,” Ron agreed.
“Then we are agreed,” Kris began. “All our ships will have eight maskers on them: one to project their own mass for them, the others to project seven masses for the decoys. The Princess Royal and Ron’s flag will jump through first with three or four extra maskers. We will then maintain position beside the jump and assure that Nelly projects mass for each decoy as it comes through.”
“What about our seven decoys?” Ron’s admiral asked.
“I will have my chief of staff arrange for each of the ‘squadrons’ to have an extra ship which they will pass off to Ron or me. By the time the last ship comes through, we should have a full hundred and twenty-eight ships ready to organize ourselves into four task fleets and advance on them at one gee.”
“And with any luck,” Ron said, “they will defecate in their pants and go to a full two gees to get away from us.
KRIS, I HAVE NOT TAUGHT RON THE FOUR-LETTER WORD FOR THAT.
BEST YOU DO NOT, NELLY. WE DON’T WANT TO TEACH THE ITEECHE ANY BAD HABITS.
“Then let’s make this happen,” Kris said.