Kris Longknife: Defender Read Free Page B

Granny Rita finished vaguely.
    The battle-stations Klaxon went silent. That had a settling effect on the Alwans.
    “Lieutenant Lien,” called Captain Drago. “Please set Condition Charlie as quickly as you can.”
    Drills had shown that having the ship changing shape while all hands were racing to be someplace else was not a good idea. Now, with all hands where they were needed, getting more armor to the ship’s hide became a priority.
    Penny announced, “We are setting Condition Charlie. All hands stay put until I report the condition established.” After a pause, she added for just those close at hand, “Mimzy, set Condition Charlie.”
    “Daughter,” Nelly added, “call on as many of your brothers and sisters as you need to make this go quick and clean.”
    “Yes, mo
ther
,” Mimzy said in a voice Kris had practiced before a mirror when she was thirteen. “All right, crew, you heard Mom, let’s make this happen shipshape and Bristol fashion.”
    Behind them, bottles at the bar folded themselves up into cases as what was left of the lounge floor rolled itself up. The glass wall vanished as the small part of the lounge Kris was using suddenly was backed up to the not airtight doors that had been fifty meters away a few seconds ago.
    The Alwans watched wide-eyed.
    “Condition Charlie is set throughout the ship,” Penny announced moments later.
    Captain Drago followed that announcement with one of his own. “The Blue Team is relieved from its battle stations and will don high-gee stations. When they report back to their stations, the Gold Team will do the same.”
    “Blue, Gold teams?” Granny Rita asked.
    “I’ve told you about how great Smart Metal is,” Kris said. “This ship can handle gee forces way beyond what the Mark I Sailor can. So, we’ve got high-gee stations made of Smart Metal. They help keep us from splattering ourselves all over the deck as we honk the ship around to avoid getting hit. In combat, the
Wasp
never follows any course for more than three or four seconds.”
    “Two,” Nelly put in.
    “We dodge around a lot,” Kris went on, “and the gee stations let us do it. The armor is there, but it’s better not to get hit. The problem with the eggs, as we call them, is that they fit you like a second skin. Once, for political reasons, I had to go into an egg wearing undress whites. I was black-and-blue from the belt buckle, the clutch backs on my ribbons, and my shoulder boards. The standard uniform in an egg is buck naked.”
    “Oh.” The old lady’s eyes lit up.
    “Granny, we look like a collection of Easter eggs from the outside: boys and girls alike.” There were certain earthy aspects of Granny Rita’s outlook on life that Kris found a bit hard to take.
    Now Granny shrugged. “It sounds like a young person’s way of fighting.”
    “Most of our crew are under thirty,” Kris admitted.
    “So, what are you going to do about us?”
    The ship’s pharmacy had a small supply of antiaging pharmaceuticals. After all, Cookie, the cook, was well over eighty, as were several of the restaurateurs. Granny Rita had been glad to have her arthritis cured, her bones strengthened, and her arteries cleaned.
    Still, knocking her around at high gees was not what Kris wanted to do to her newly found great-grandmother.
    And the Alwans! Though their bones were more solid than they had been when they flew several million years ago, the odds were quite high that a battle might have Kris returning the six delegates looking more like boneless chicken than spokespersons for how much Alwa needed human aid.
    “Nelly, do you have the specs for the water tanks the Iteeche used to survive the last battle?”
    The Iteeche Empire, some eighty years ago, had almost made the human race extinct. Just ask any veteran. Just ask Granny Rita! It was Iteeche Death Balls that had gotten her into a running gunfight, them gunning, her running, that she hadn’t been able to slow down from until she was on the