“But not close to the plain,” Penny said, taking back over the story. “The small hunting groups there were really primitive. Bare-ass naked, not that the climate was all that cold, but still. No tools but some wooden spears and clubs. No stone chips. They had to make due with small game or scavenge stuff the large carnivores had chewed open.”
“Why the difference in skill sets?” Jack said.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Penny answered.
“What happens when the two tribes meet?” Kris asked.
“I wish I knew, but it didn’t happen while we were there. Kris, we could only stay in orbit for two, three days. There were two jumps into that system, besides the one we came in, and if one of them started coughing up alien monster ships, we would have run. But if all three got active at once . . .” Penny let that thought run free.
Kris didn’t much care for the situation either.
“If we go back there, we’ll need to put warning buoys at all the jumps, maybe even detach a ship to drop off buoys for the next three systems out from those jumps.”
“So it couldn’t be a small expedition like the one that rescued the Hornet’s crew,” Jack said.
Kris nodded, but her thoughts were already chasing down another rabbit hole. “Have your boffins been talking to other boffins?”
“They’re scientists, Kris,” Penny said, sounding irritated. “Of course they talk. While you’ve been busy putting out fires for two weeks and enjoying married life, all the boffins have been talking about is our expedition. However many ships you take, there will be more than enough scientists begging to fill them up.”
“And if I’m going to go, I’d better go soon,” Kris said, throwing Jack a sorrowful look. “No telling when those three alien clans will start getting frisky.”
“We’ve got a ship out replacing the warning buoys that got shot up during the recent unpleasantness,” Jack said. “It’s also stretching the warning net to eight jumps out, giving us two extra layers.”
“That’s nice,” Kris said, not really feeling all that good about it. She’d used up just about every trick she had to win the last battle. That her next set of attackers would know how she clobbered this last bunch meant she’d have to cobble together a whole new strategy for the defense of Alwa.
She’d barely managed to patch together this last one. What could she possibly do next time?
One day at a time, she reminded herself.
Kris stood.
“Okay, Jack. You owe me another twenty-seven days of honeymoon.”
“Aye, aye, wife, Viceroy, Admiral, bosswoman,” he said, saluting with a broad grin.
“I’m sorry, Kris. I didn’t mean . . .”
“Yes, you did,” Kris said, cutting off Penny’s apology. “And it needed to be done. Okay, it’s back to work for me and you. You’re going back. Not in the Endeavor. This time we go prepared for a fight. I’ll take what’s left of BatRon 1,” Kris decided. Would six ships be enough? Maybe she should pull in another couple to bring it up to a full squadron.
“Did you two bring a car big enough for four?” she asked Penny.
“Yes.”
“Fine, we’ll ride back with you. Jack, time to put on our game faces, or at least a uniform. After you,” she said.
To Kris’s great sorrow, Penny and her boyfriend stayed waiting just outside the cabin door. There was no way to stretch the delightful morning with one last quickie.
3
Kris used the drive back to rehash Penny’s report. Nothing new, either exciting or terrifying, was added to her set of challenges. Penny and the Endeavor had played mouse at a cat’s convention that never got called to order, thank heaven.
The star-studded ceiling of one huge auditorium in the first alien base ship they blasted had shown what looked like a particular night sky. It had been repeated in the largest room of the monster warship that Kris had captured intact while rescuing the crew of the Hornet. In that fight, Kris had disabled their reactors. She’d hoped to get prisoners. Instead, the aliens opened every hatch to space, killing themselves.
Kris’s scientists were still trying to make sense of the alien machinery and gear. Someone had actually forwarded a report to Kris suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about the aliens digging information out of our computers. Their technology looked nothing like ours, assuming we were guessing right about what they used for navigation and fire control.
That’s what the word meant. Aliens were, ipso facto, alien to our way of thinking.
However, based on Nelly’s assessment of the ceiling and projection of where and when that night sky might have sparkled down on a planet, Penny had been dispatched to look at six star systems.
The first three of which had showed nothing of interest. The next looked thoroughly beat-up. The fifth was full of questions. Penny had not gotten around to the sixth but raced for home. She arrived only to find home in the final desperate moments of a battle for survival that had cost the life of tens of billions of aliens and left the human colony on Alwa, as well as the Alwans themselves, with precious little time to prepare for the next attack.
Did Kris dare haul off a quarter or more of her defense so she could answer questions she didn’t yet know how to ask? And if she didn’t find out something about her enemy, would they and humanity find a way to stop the killing before one or the other was annihilated?
Once again, Kris found herself with few answers and a whole lot of questions.
She contacted the people who made up the next level in her way-too-small chain of command and began scheduling meetings.
The first meeting was already waiting for her at the end of the drive. Ada stood on the shady veranda of Government House, Granny Rita at her elbow. Officially, Granny Rita was Kris’s great-grandmother and retired. Any position she might hold was purely emeritus. Officially, Ada was the chief executive of a human colony of nearly two hundred thousand. However, Kris had made the mistake of giving Granny Rita a decent computer. Once the old gal got on net, she never missed out on anything interesting.
And to her, everything was interesting.
Ada was also not one to beat around the bush. “You think you’ve found the nest of these varmints that want to kill us?”
“We think so, but it doesn’t look anything like Earth,” Kris said, and let Penny repeat her brief.
“That is so far past strange, I don’t know what to say about it,” Granny Rita said, and left Ada with nothing else to do but shake her head.
“So, you’re going to go exploring,” the colonial chief added.
“It seems like a good idea, and I think we have time for it right now,” Kris admitted.
“Your absence won’t stop work on getting us farming, fishing, and other gear . . . or defensive preparations, will it?” Ada asked.
“You’ll keep doing what you’re doing,” Kris said. “Our fabricators on the moon and mines on the asteroids will keep producing the things you want. You’ll hardly miss me,” Kris said dryly.
Ada smiled at the lie. “I’ll touch base with that Pipra Strongarm woman and see what she can do to speed up our own efforts to get more land irrigated and under seed, more fish hauled out of the ocean, and more hunting parties into the deep woods for some real red meat. Good Lord, but what I’d give for a nice rare steak.”
“Wouldn’t we all,” Kris agreed.