Defender

8

Kris checked with Captain Drago. He insisted he had everything under control and all but shooed Kris off his bridge. Besides, with the Wasp in microgravity, he needed to rotate his crew dirtside to avoid muscle loss. It would be best if Kris checked the lay of the land, assured there was a good supply of beer, and looked into the local attitude toward Sailors who might get a bit rowdy with the opposite sex. And it wouldn’t just be the local womenfolk who had to worry. The Wasp’s crew was forty-three percent women, who would be checking out the local menfolk.

Kris asked the skipper to duck into his in-space cabin for a brief consult. “Any suggestion about what we do if a hostile ship jumps into the system?” she asked when they were alone.

“If there’s just one of them, I’ll recall the crew, and we’ll fight it out, maybe put Alwa’s moon to good use. Two, I guess we could give it a try if you said so. Three or more, Your Highness, and I strongly suggest we run. Maybe they’ll chase us and leave the folks dirtside alone. This frigate is a dandy craft, Kris, but there’s a limit to what we can do.”

Kris sighed. “That was pretty much what I figured, but I wanted to hear it from you.”

“We’ve got buoys on the far side of both of the jumps into this system. We will not be surprised. Go ashore, Princess, and try, for once, to have fun.”

Thus Kris and Jack, Abby and Cara, and a platoon of Marines that just happened to include Sergeant Bruce, headed for the planet below. Penny asked to be included, along with a Musashi lieutenant who was working closely with her on intel. Amanda Kutter wanted to start working on her study of the Alwan economy and asked that Dr. Jacques la Duke join her. His area of study was anthropology, and she strongly suggested that their work would go hand in hand.

That the two of them were hand in hand drew a grin from Granny Rita. HAVE I TOLD YOU FOLKS I ALSO DO WEDDINGS?

GRANNY, BEHAVE YOURSELF.

I AM, DAUGHTER, YOU’RE THE ONE WITH A SHARP STICK UP YOUR BUTT.

Kris decided respect for Granny’s age required she let her have the last word. Several more boffins, mostly biologists but also sociologists and geologists, added themselves to the longboat.

Kris had met Granny Rita when she arrived on the Wasp. She’d looked much the worse for the ride up and Kris had rushed the old gal to sick bay. There the docs had fussed over her and started her on a cocktail of antiaging meds, all the Wasp had to offer. Granny looked better. Now Kris suggested she drop in a tank to ease the gees.

Granny refused. “I will not arrive back home in my birthday suit. I might get too many proposals for my old heart to survive.”

So Kris talked with the bosun in charge of the longboat, and the trip down took a bit longer but stayed lower on the gee meter. Even with that, Granny was sweating when they completed reentry and settled into normal flight.

“That was easier than the ride up, but you’re right. Space is a young person’s game,” Granny admitted, taking a swig from Sergeant Bruce’s offered canteen.

Then a monitor in the forward end of the cabin lit up. “Hey, that’s my planet,” Granny crowed.

“Most Alwans like the wooded areas,” she said in full lecture mode. “They no longer nest in the trees, but they like lots of trees around their houses and usually leave them open to the air, at least in the temperate zones. They plant crops, but you’d never recognize them as farms. Mostly they tend to hunt and graze, so they don’t have large population centers. I don’t know how they avoid overpopulation. That’s one of those questions we don’t ask, and they don’t tell.

“There, have the camera stay on that viaduct,” Granny ordered, and Nelly did. “That was the first project we worked on together with the Alwans. They’d never thought of bringing water to dry land. Our colony was growing, and we needed to put more land under the plow. We found a quarry and we all got together, cut the rocks, and used log rollers to get them where we needed. They’d never seen any of the engineering tricks we used to build the viaduct. We told them this was old stuff. Things we’d been doing for three, four thousand years.

“They didn’t believe we could know what had happened that long ago. That was when we showed them some books, personal tablets, and readers. That sent them into a tizzy and got me a visit from a delegation from the Association of Associations.

“We spent a good month explaining to them what we humans could do and explaining how we did it. Then the lead elder did a formal dance, feathers flying, and put the kibosh on us using most of our technology.

“Of course, the same time I was having my ears talked off by the delegation, we were also getting visits from the folks that I think, if they’d given them half a chance, would have been their engineers and scientists. While I palavered with the delegation of old farts, my first husband this side, the Enterprise’s chief engineering officer, learned a lot from the other folks and vice versa.

“That’s the way it’s been for eighty years. Some of their people attend our schools. We make sure our kids get the best education we can. It’s getting harder as more and more of the electronic devices give up the ghost, but we’ve invented paper and printing presses, and some of the Alwans have adopted our alphabet to their language and are reading their own books. All nonfiction, I might add.”

Granny might have gone on, talking their ears off, but the shuttle was coming up on the large lake that had been chosen for Haven, the first human town on Alwa.

“Ain’t she lovely,” Granny said. “We made it of adobe bricks and fired red tile for the roofs. Plenty of trees for shade. Wonderful in the cool of the evening. It’s home.”

The longboat settled onto the lake with spray and a wake that set the pulling boats and sailboats out on it to bobbing. “I bet there’s some cussing going on,” Granny said with a grin. “We haven’t had landers for a month of Sundays. Make that a century of ’em.”

Rather than accept the tow offered by a boat with twelve strong men at the oars, the bosun used the auxiliary motor to maneuver toward a long dock.

“Are there many water weeds?” the bosun called on the ship’s PA system. Right, Kris grinned, this was the poor fellow who had stranded her on Kaskatos when he sucked weeds into his reaction-tank intake. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

“Some along the shore, but I don’t remember any in the middle of the lake. Not back when I could still swim out here.”

“We’ll draw reaction mass out here, if you don’t mind,” came from the flight deck.

The dock was a substantial affair. Waiting on it was an electric-powered jitney with a half dozen seats that two people could share if they were friendly. Kris, her team, and the scientists filled it up. The driver dismounted and offered the wheel to Granny Rita and started hoofing it back to wherever he’d come from.

Baggage was light. Even Abby had only brought one steamer trunk. The Marines formed up and prepared to march wherever it was they’d be barracked.

Except for the two who took the seat behind Kris when Jack gave them a curt nod.

“Jack, for once I’m on a planet where nobody knows me. I’m safe.”

“You just went on planetwide television and bragged that you were our war leader. Commodore Rita, tell me honestly, are there never any murders: Alwa on Alwa, human on human, or, God forbid, Alwa on human.”

“We do have the occasional aberration. The Alwans carry out capital punishment in a most bloody and attention-getting way. And it’s been televised since they adopted that technology from us.”

“I rest my case,” Jack said, arms folded across his chest, “You don’t go anywhere without me, and I don’t go anywhere without at least two Marines, one of them female.”

Granny was in the jitney’s driver seat. Kris and Jack were snuggled in close beside her. With everyone aboard, she put it in gear, without letting the conversation lag.

“He won’t even let you pee by yourself.”

“Well, Granny, there was this one time on New Eden where they did their best to kill me in the ladies’ room,” Kris had to admit.

“I remember this one time when Trouble got taken by slavers in the men’s room. Embarrassed the hell out of him. Do you know Trouble, a Marine when last I saw him?”

“I have the questionable honor of having Great-grampa Trouble as a relative.”

“How in God’s name did that happen? I mean him live long enough to have a kid?”

“His first daughter married your little Alex.”

“They did? Good God, what a match that must have been. How are they doing?”

“She died in a car accident shortly after my dad was born.”

“Accident?” Granny asked suspiciously.

“My personal guess is that there was Peterwald money behind it, but the truck driver died of a heart attack a week after the accident, before the investigation was even close to done.”

“Peterwalds and Longknifes. Is that feud still going?”

Kris sighed, wondering how much to say. “Let’s make a long story short by just saying that King Raymond I and Emperor Henry I are not at war. At least not when I last heard.”

“There are advantages to being all the hell and gone on the other side of the galaxy. Thanks for dropping in. You’re helping me remember why I so enjoy it here.”

The jitney moved quietly and at a pace the Marines marching behind it had no trouble keeping up with. There was little traffic. A few other electric rigs shared the road with wagons pulled by beasts only slightly smaller than a house. Admittedly a small house, but still, Kris would not want to get into an argument with them over right of way.

However, they moved along quite docilely.

“Who or what are those?” Jack asked, apparently confident the answer to that question fell under the purview of his responsibility for Kris’s safety.

“We call them oxen,” Granny said. “They are the closest things we’ve got to beasts of burden. The Alwans raised them for food. An entire flock of them might throw a celebration and eat an entire one. Live. Or live when they start. They think it’s great fun to race after the thing and strip a nice steak-size chunk off it with their beak.”

That brought silence in the jitney for a long moment.

“So they’re a bit more bloodthirsty than they’ve let on,” Penny said.

“Where prey animals are concerned, yes. Among themselves, they are the most courteous, kind, and gentle people you could ever ask to meet.”

“So I keep being told,” Jack muttered.

“Amanda, Jacques,” Kris called back. “I think your work is going to be more important than we thought. It’s just a guess, but I’ll bet that back in their past, Alwans were a lot harder on each other.”

“That is a good supposition,” Jacques said. “They developed all this ritual display as a way to settle things without bloodshed. The flock that did it first would cut down on their internal losses and be stronger against the outsider. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.”

“You two check it out and try to find out how close to the surface the old ways are. Amanda, do you and Nelly plan on passing vocabulary back and forth between you to grow Nelly’s dictionary?”

“Yes, every night,” Amanda said.

“How about adding a short report on anything you’ve learned?” Kris said.

“That’s red with blood?” Jacques asked.

“Or even hints of it,” Jack said.

“Mais oui, mon Capitaine,” Jacques said with an informal salute.

“Penny?” Kris said.

“Read you loud and clear. Iizuka Masao and I will keep our eyes peeled for the snake in this paradise.”

“Kids, I can understand where you’re coming from, living with all the politics of humans. Remember, I survived the Unity War. I used my pregnancy with little Alex to help get Ray through security so he could kill himself and President Urm. Thank God it didn’t go down that way. Trust me, I’ve lived with these folks for eighty years, and you don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I think the folks on Santa Maria lived in harmony with the planet three hundred years before the all-controlling computer noticed them. If Ray and his former Marines hadn’t stumbled on them at the same time . . .” Penny let the oft-told tale drift off.

Granny sighed. “And we do have the aliens out there hell-bent on killing us all. That’s bound to ruffle a few feathers in the Associations. Not everyone is a ready-to-be-stuffed elder. Some of the newly chosen elders are surprisingly young and open to thinking outside their tried-and-true ways. Okay, okay, kids. You do what you do best. Just be sure to copy me on any reports you send to Kris or Jack. I may have a perfectly logical explanation for what you think is a bloody red hand.”

“Offer accepted,” came from a half dozen human voices.

The two Marines maintained a stoic silence . . . and a watchful vigilance.