Free Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) by Mike Shepherd

learned long ago that if she gave the boffins the slightest chance, they would bend her ear for hours.
    “Have you got anything to tell us yet?” Jack asked, ever vigilant to protect Kris’s body, or in this case, ears.
    “We do think we may have found one thing you will find of interest,” Professor Labao admitted. Cautiously.
    “And that is?” Kris said.
    “This,” he said and turned back to the screen. Now it showed a view of deep space. There were the usual stars in the background. It was what was in the foreground that puzzled Kris. It appeared to be a long bar. Maybe a string. It had something at each end and a large sphere in the middle.
    “What is that?” Kris asked.
    “We don’t know,” the professor said flatly.
    “Give me your best guess,” Jack growled.
    “Hey, that could be a sling,” Jacques la Duke said.
    “A what?” Amanda Kutter asked before Kris could.
    “How big is that hummer?” Jacques asked the professor.
    “We are not sure, but it appears to be several tens of thousands of kilometers long.”
    “And is it in an orbit that intersects this planet?”
    “Yes,” the professor cautiously admitted. “In say another twenty thousand years it would likely collide with it.”
    “Right. I wonder how many of those were once sharing this orbit?” Jacques said, standing and going to peer more closely at the screen.
    “So, Jacques, since you seem to know what you’re looking at,” Amanda said testily, “let the rest of us mere mortals in on the secret.”
    “Okay, there’s a lot of guessing going on here, but we anthropologists do it a lot, professionally, and if we guess right, there’s a good paycheck in it for one of us. Anyway, here’s my guess. That’s a space sling.”
    “A space sling?” came from everyone in the room, Kris included.
    “A space sling,” Nelly said more slowly. “Yes, it most definitely could be one.”
    “Quiet, Nelly. Let Jacques have the fun of telling us what he thinks he’s found,” Kris said.
    Y OU HUMANS W ANT ALL THE FUN.
    Y ES. N OW HUSH, GIRL.
    “Pulling a lot of stuff out of a deep gravity well,” Jacques began, “is not cheap. Most developed industrial planets have a space elevator. A beanstalk. You want to lug up something big like a reactor to install in a ship, you don’t lift it in a shuttle, you send it up the beanstalk. It’s faster, cheaper, and easier. Designing a shuttle to take a battleship-size reactor is, well, just nonsense.”
    “They understand the point,” Professor Labao said, dryly. Clearly he was not happy to have lost control of
his
meeting.
    And Kris thought it was
her
meeting.
    “So, if you want to drain an ocean or suck a lot of air off a planet, you do something like this. I assume they didn’t care where the water and air went, they just wanted it gone. You put this thing in orbit. That center bulge is a counterweight to hold it stable in orbit. The ends swing around the center. When one end is down, it scoops up water. I’d guess there’s a pipe that sucks air when it’s down and holds it until it’s up, then spews it out. The same with the water. It freezes as it comes up into orbit. When it’s all up, the sling throws it out, and it zips off into space.”
    Jacques paused for a moment. “Tell me, Professor, is there a ring of gases around the sun in this orbit?”
    “I don’t know,” Professor Labao said, stiffly.
    “You don’t know, or you do but don’t yet have enough information to make an official, scientifically accurate to the thirteen–decimal place statement?” Kris said. Her temper was starting to boil, and she was missing Professor mFumbo, God rest his soul. Why hadn’t he stayed on the
Wasp
instead of spreading himself and his scientists around the battleships that didn’t make it back from Kris’s first run-in with the aliens?
    Mentally, Kris shook herself. She knew she was heading into a black hole of her own making. Too many had died while she had lived, and, no doubt, too