Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella Read Online Free PDF Page B

sandwich.  “I have pulled up all the information available about the ships now building in the Nuu Yards.  I know that they are Smart Metal, a strange and expensive choice for ships intended to spend their lifetime plying the well-ordered shipping lanes between comfortable point A and profitable point B.  Honovi also sees this as strange.  He thought you might tell us something since, despite the Nuu Yards’ usually verbose press releases, there has been nothing in them about the Pride of Free Enterprise for the last six weeks.”
    She took another bite, while staring at the wall to the right of Taylor’s face.
    When she finally spoke, her words came very softly.  Taylor had to work hard to hear them over the talk at the nearby tables.  “There won’t be any press releases, even when they’re launched, take on their first cargo, and depart on their first voyage.”
    “That’s unusual,” Taylor said, equally softly.
    “Unheard of,” Annie corrected him.  “Totally unheard of.  Nuu Yards never miss a chance to herald the wheels of progress.  At least, not until these two ships came along.”
    “What’s so strange about them?” Taylor asked.
    “They’re gigantic!” Annie said.  “We’ve added the two reactors for the next two ships on to them.  Four in each hull.  Huge engines, and plenty of them.  Also, we’re pouring the Smart Metal from the next planned ships into these two. That might just mean that someone wants to ship a whole lot of stuff, but that can’t be all of it.”
    “Why?”
    Again she paused, but not to take another bite.  Now, she was arranging all the croutons in the salad in a line on the right side of the plate.
    “There is no way for a uninformed engineer to know anything about the potential use a ship will be put to,” she said.  “However, engineers are not blind.  You ask us to do something, we can’t help but extrapolate the data to its logical conclusions.  The conclusion may originate in sales, but they are, surprisingly often, logical.  Particularly if they intend to turn a profit.  And Alexander may be many things, but he never has his eyes far from the bottom line.”
    Taylor took this rambling conversation for something that would lead to somewhere.  He did not interrupt.  He was quickly rewarded for his forbearance.
    “I’ve been asked to calculate the longitudinal hull strength members needed to bear up to 2.5 gees, and to pass my calculations along to the Smart Metal programmers so they can develop a standard configuration using that acceleration.  That is unusual acceleration for a merchant ship, don’t you think?”
    “Yes, considering that Mr. Longknife had been lobbying parliament for the last five years to allow for the absolute minimum of ship, reactor and reaction mass needed to get from a specific point A to point B.”
    “Yes.  I worked on those calculations too,” Annie said, and seemed to think better of ignoring her salad.  She took a bite and chewed it slowly as she went on.  “What’s unusual about these ships is that I’ve also been asked to recalculate the lateral strength members.  How much cargo can the ship take on and keep aboard safely while high under centripetal forces.”
    “While the hull is rotating?” Taylor asked to make sure he understood.
    “Yes.  That’s crazy.  You accelerate a ship at one gee, and you’ve got a down equal to one gravity.  Nice.  That’s what lines do.  This station rotates at just the right speed so that the A Deck has enough centripetal force that you feel like it’s one gravity.  Nice.  Mix the two up and you get one hell of a confused inner ear.”
    The two stared at each other.
    “It makes no sense,” the young woman said.
    “It has to make sense,” Taylor said.  Something was gnawing at the back of his mind.
    “Wait a second,” he said and called up the Fighting Ships database.  He’d flipped through the first couple of entries before he’d launched a