Daring

63

Kris had never made a trip at 4.25 gees. She’d heard that the courier ships did, but she’d never believed it possible. She spent the entire trip floating naked in a tub of something a lot more viscous than water. Food and water both came from a tube. The skipper sent a crewwoman around to catheterize Kris.

“This just for us girls?” Kris asked.

“Nope, I get to do it to the boys, too. You ought to see how they blush.”

Other than that visit, Kris was left alone for the entire, though quick, flight to Wardhaven.

In the brief seconds that Nelly took to send Sandy Kris’s report, Sandy’s computer sent Nelly the latest update of Winston Spencer’s report on what was happening inside human space.

Refusing to give in to the temptation to wallow in self-pity and regret, Kris had Nelly run the news feed. It held no surprises.

As she’d expected, once the wreckage and bodies from her first encounter with the aliens arrived at Santa Maria, the story went public. Suddenly, everyone knew the Iteeche were losing scout ships to some unknown horror and that the mercurial Kris Longknife had insisted on taking out a squadron to see what there was to see.

That eight battleships had been added to her force by various concerned parties didn’t make it into the media.

Not then. That was saved for when the second report came back.

Kris thanked her lucky stars that a beauty like Amanda Kutter had taken the ride back to human space. She was too lovely not to be invited to all the talk shows. If she hadn’t been out there talking, the only story in the media would be that Kris Longknife had taken it into her head to attack some poor, innocent alien ship that was just wandering through the cosmos minding its own business.

If Kris had been reading a report, she would have thrown it across the room in her fury. Of course, at 4.25 gees, Kris could hardly raise a finger.

She let Nelly go on.

Amanda had gotten Kris’s story out. The destroyed alien planet and the target avian species did not get lost entirely. Still, the Emperor of Greenfeld dispatched a fast cruiser squadron to carry the message that Admiral Krätz was recalled and should return immediately.

Those cruisers might or might not have carried the same orders from Geneva and Musashi. Those two governments chose to play it close to their respective vests.

Kris noted that Wardhaven sources never mentioned that she’d been shipped the Hellburners. That seemed like a very telling omission.

It was a fast trip to Wardhaven, but before Kris was even halfway there, it was clear that she’d been set up to take whatever fall was necessary.

After a while, Kris ignored the news and spent the time floating in the tub meditating on her future. What was the old saying?

No good deed goes unpunished.

They docked at High Wardhaven station quick and smooth. The crewwoman came around to decath Kris. “I’m sorry we didn’t get to wash your uniform, but we don’t carry so much as a clothes washer. The crew is all girls, and the uniform can get very informal.”

“No problem,” Kris said. “If Grampa doesn’t give me time to shower and change clothes, he deserves what he gets.”

“Grampa?”

“My great-grandfather. King Raymond.”

“Some of the girls thought you might be that princess, but you looked so bedraggled when you boarded . . . well, you know.”

“It’s been a rough stretch,” Kris admitted, adjusting her own gig line.

“There are some folks waiting for you pierside,” the woman advised Kris.

“I bet there are,” Kris said, and marched for the tiny quarterdeck.

And bounced her head off the overhead.

“Be careful. They only chose girls less than five-foot-two and 105 pounds.”

“Where do they recruit you, ballet school?”

“Several of us did take a swing at dance.”

Kris forced herself to leave the wonderfully relaxing small talk behind and finished her exit without further head bashing.

Three station carts awaited her: Two were full of Marines, and one had a Navy captain driving. He waved her to him. She went.

He took off as fast as the cart could go as soon as she sat down. He didn’t even wait for her to buckle in.

“We’ve got to catch the next ferry dirtside. If we’re late, they’re under orders to hold it, but that will tell anyone watching that something special is going on.”

“Am I expected?”

“The media has been told you’ll be arriving in two days. Three-gee acceleration all the way. Kid, you stink. Didn’t they have a shower on that boat? That uniform’s a disgrace.”

“At 4.25 gees, you don’t shower,” Kris said. “And no, they don’t have a clothes washer. You want to drop me by Nuu House. I’d love a shower and a clean set of whites.”

“Nuu House is surrounded by reporters. So is Main Navy. Your meeting was moved just an hour ago, when there may have been another leak.”

“It’s nice to be popular,” Kris said with as much cheer as she could muster.

“What is it with you?” the captain snapped, not taking his eyes from the drive. “First you get away with mutiny. Then you gallivant off wherever you want, missing ship’s movement. What you don’t blow up, you mess up. For God’s sakes, woman, why don’t you get out of my Navy and give us a chance to recover some of our honor?”

“I’m glad they sent along such a fan,” Kris said, holding on to her temper with her fingernails. This was not going to be a good evening. As tempting as it was to take this old fart’s head off, it would not help her with her grampa or with the Navy.

“Someday I must write my memoirs and get the truth out,” Kris said softly.

“A pack of lies,” the captain growled. “Your kind says whatever sells books.”

Kris leaned back in her seat and slid her cap over her face. “Wake me up when we get there.” That at least got her peace and quiet for the drive to the space elevator.

Kris and her guards hustled aboard the ferry, which dropped loose even as they were taking their seats. This one had Admiral Crossenshield’s secret quarters and passageway. They were never in view of the paying customers.

Dirtside, it was the same. Kris was hurried into a fleet of large SUVs with darkened windows and quickly found herself on a limited-access highway headed out of town. Somewhere she’d lost the captain who was such a groupie. The team she’d picked up did not attempt to talk to her; neither did she say a word to them.

They turned off the highway onto a winding country road. Kris had a dim recollection of visiting the place once before. It had been before Eddy died, when Grampa Al was prime minister. If that was the case, the place had very good security.

Of course, nothing was as tight as the Fortress of Security that Grampa Al had built for himself now.

When they stopped before an imposing mansion, the door was held open for Kris. Even the Marine doing the honor sniffed as she passed.

She was led upstairs to a formal study: wood paneled, thick carpet, a huge marble desk. Four overstuffed chairs had been arranged in a square. Admiral Crossenshield and Field Marshal Mac McMorrison sat at the right and left hand of King Raymond to some—Grampa, usually, to Kris.

The one empty chair faced the king.

Kris used a hip to shove it aside and stood defiantly in front of her king.

“What have you been up to?” he demanded.

“Nothing you folks didn’t want me to do,” she shot back.

“That’s not true,” the admiral in charge of Intelligence insisted.

“Isn’t it?” Kris answered. “I wanted to take a squadron of tiny scouts out to see what lurked in the big, bad universe. Lightly armed and traveling light, we could see what there was to see and run home quick with our report. So what do you send me out there with, Crossie? Eight battleships! Even better, you get three shills to serve up the ships. None from Wardhaven—excuse me, the U.S. Nope, we’re sending scouts; they’re the ones sending the battleships.”

Kris paused. No one tried to take the floor away from her. “Of course, you’re sending out a Longknife, and everyone knows that Longknifes go loaded for a fight. That’s what the legend says, right, Grampa?”

“They chose what they sent. They gave them their own orders.”

“Yes, they did, thank you very much. Of course, Crossie here sent them out a copy of our secret meeting. He made sure they knew there was something nasty out there.”

Kris again waited. Still not a note of dispute from the men across from her. For the first time, it dawned on Kris who was missing.

Grampa Trouble hadn’t been invited to this night’s work.

She should have guessed that would be the case.

“But eight dinky battleships were hardly enough to take on those aliens’ monster. No sir, I may be a Longknife, but even I’m not that crazy. Or not crazy yet. How many years, Grampa, does it take to get as crazy as the legend needs?”

“A bit longer, Kris,” he said softly. A stranger might have mistaken it for the caring voice of a grandsire.

“So you sent me the Hellburners.”

“Hellburners?” Mac asked.

“Yeah, that’s what we named the torpedoes with chunks of a neutron star in their warheads. By the way, we managed to spike that stuff with antimatter. Boy, you talk about an explosion.”

“How did it go?” the king asked.

“Rather spectacular. That huge mother ship . . . about the size of a big moon . . . we clobbered it. Maybe as much as half of her was gone when we had to duck out on the show in a hurry. Best guess is we killed ten, twenty billion aliens. Maybe more.

“The problem, Grampa, was that the monster mother ship had kittens. Lots and lots of kittens. Huge things that made our battlewagons look tiny. And boy were they mad. They took off after us like you’d expect someone to chase whoever had just beat up their mother ship.

“And boy did those kittens pack a wallop. Laser and lasers and more lasers. They didn’t have any armor. Something tells me they’ve been the biggest, meanest bastards around for a long time. Nobody’s got a good hit on them for a while. We changed that. I expect they’ll be slapping on the protection real quick.”

“I warned you not to use our best weapon right off,” Mac told his king.

“Duly noted,” the king muttered. “Kris, did you take out the mother ship?”

“I don’t know. Things got bad, and we had to run. It’s all in my report. But you might want to read the addendum first.”

“Why?”

“Because we ran into another alien ship on our way home. It was a scout ship that managed to jump deep into the Iteeche Empire and, bad luck for it, landed in the one worthless system where we were refueling. Likely they planned to make a couple of small jumps, glance into several systems, then run home. That didn’t happen. We killed it.”

“Good,” Mac and Crossie said.

“But a couple tried to escape with their babies. Cutest things. We got them alive. Not the parents, the hatch on their craft came open. They’re dead. The kids are alive. And we’ve got a DNA sample of the aliens sniffing around the rim of the Iteeche Empire.”

“Are they the same as the ones you ran into before?” the king asked.

“Yes and no. We’ve got DNA from three of the four groups we ran into. If we can trust the DNA results, they are related. Related,” Kris repeated, “but distantly, like no intermarriage in the last hundred thousand years for some. There are three or four of those monster mother ships wandering the stars looking for systems to devour. How much you want to bet me that we’ve found all there are?”

Each of the three men uttered their favorite swearword. Kris, her report given, settled into the chair she’d ignored.

“That changes things,” Mac said.

“No it doesn’t,” Crossie insisted.

“The people aren’t ready for another long war,” King Ray said in a tired voice. “We need more time to mobilize them. There are enough complaints about taxes as it is. If we start building a huge Navy, there’ll be hell to pay.”

“Ah, guys, one word of straight dope,” Kris said. “Wars come when someone else decides, not when you’re ready for them.”

“You shut up, woman,” Crossie shouted. “If you’d done what we wanted, there wouldn’t be any of this trouble.”

“You sent me the weapons,” Kris snapped. “You didn’t want me to use them? If you hadn’t sent me those Hellburners, I wouldn’t have had two cents to put in. As it was, they were worth a good fifty cents.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” the king said. “Arguing what might have been is a fool’s game. We have to think of what to do now. Kris, you nailed that alien scout?”

“Totally. That joker will not be reporting.”

“So that band of aliens will have a potential hot datum. However, what Kris did on the other side of the galaxy has got to draw their attention. Even if the tribes have wandered far from each other, having one of their mother ships blown to hell will have to focus their attention. That should buy us time. We can use it to start a media campaign to prepare the voters for what’s to come.”

Kris stood up, shaking her head. “Assuming that what’s to come ain’t coming at you already. You men disgust me. I’ve had it being your cat’s-paw. Mac, give me my papers. I’ll sign them. I quit.”

For the first couple of years of Kris’s Navy career, every time she was called in for one of these little talks with Mac, he had her resignation papers in hand and was quick to offer them for her signature. Kris couldn’t really blame him; she’d given him plenty of reasons to wish her on someone else’s payroll.

Now she was demanding her resignation papers . . . and all he did was sit there and shake his head.

“What’s the matter? You’ve wanted me to quit for years.”

“We can’t have you out there,” the king said, “on talk shows like that Amanda girl. You’re pretty enough that they’d all want you. And you talking up a war right now is not what we want. Sorry, Kris, but you are in the Navy, and you’ll stay in the Navy.”

“I’ve finished my service requirement,” Kris said.

“Yes, but I have declared an emergency. No one leaves without our letting them out. And you, young lady, we won’t let out. Mac here has found a job for you. Madigan’s Rainbow wants a squadron of fast patrol boats to help them control their system’s space. We think you’re just the person to command their boats.”

“I’ll still find an open mic,” Kris said, standing up.

“Not on Madigan’s Rainbow,” Crossie said with a grin full of casual evil.

Kris eyed the three of them and saw only confidence that they had her just where they wanted her. She shook her head in anger, frustration, and disgust.

Finally, she spat, “Once, you may have been a great general, Raymond Longknife, maybe even a brilliant one. But now you’re just a two-bit politician.”

Since Raymond was her king, she gave him the opportunity for the last word. He just looked at her, showing no emotions.

None at all.

Kris did an about-face that would have made her DI at OCS proud, and marched from the room.

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