Furious

65

“Nelly, how’s the translation business going?”

“Better than you have any right to expect but not nearly as well as you clearly want,” Nelly shot back. Kris noticed that Jack and Penny and all the others with one of Nelly’s kids had been leaving their computers alone.

Kris decided to leave Nelly to her work.

An hour later, Nelly said, “Kris, we have identified references to three kinds of people. There are The People, and then there are the Old People and the Heavy People. The difference between the Old and the Heavy is a slight inflection in what sounds like the same word to me. Worse, the Old ones appear to be more mythical, although they are referred to a lot.”

“Gods?” Jack asked.

“That’s possible. The Heavy People are spoken about in the present tense, we think, but not a lot.”

With little more than that, they continued to close on the planet.

It was the old chief who made the next discovery. “I’m getting a beeper. It’s not much of anything, but it sounds like a ship’s navigational warning signal.”

“Have you interrogated it?” Kris shot back.

“I’ve tried, but it doesn’t respond. It could be something entirely different from what I’m taking it for.”

“We’ll see,” Kris said, and settled into her Weapons station. All four lasers were charged and locked. Beside Kris, Penny was shrinking the Wasp down to fighting trim, Condition Baker. Not enough to make staterooms disappear, but empty spaces were getting smaller as the hide of the ship thickened, and reaction mass was sent to cool the honeycombed places beneath the armor.

The chief reported that the Sakura was doing the same.

Halfway to the planet, they flipped ship and began to decelerate at a bit more than one gee. That put most of the sensors pointed away from the planet, but Kris’s Navy folks weren’t the only ones ready to work Smart MetalTM. Several of the boffins’ sensors slithered over the hull to get a better view of the planet.

They made the next discovery.

“There’s a ship or station in orbit around that planet,” Professor Labao reported. “Our optical scopes are clearly picking up a large platform of some sort.”

“Pass it through to our screen,” Kris snapped, beating Captain Drago to the order by a hair. The planet was a lovely blue-green orb, just what a living planet should look like. The visual zoomed in. It lost its focus, then regained it. There was a dot moving across the face of the planet. It reached the night terminator and vanished into the dark.

“We estimate an hour before we reacquire it,” the professor said.

“That’s the source of my signal,” the chief added.

“It’s going to be a long hour,” Kris said. “Can you show me anything?”

An elongated blob appeared on the screen.

“Do you have any better optics?” Kris asked.

“We are working on bringing the best we have online,” Professor Labao said. “Maybe in an hour.”

Fifty-five minutes later, the planet jumped into finer focus as the new scope checked it out. Five minutes later, they got a much better view of the mystery.

“That’s a starship, but what kind?” Kris asked.

“It looks like one of our old battlecruisers,” Nelly said. “Iteeche War period and stripped of all its ice.” Two pictures appeared on screen. One ship was nice and curved, clad in its full ice armor. The other one, fresh out of the yards, looked rather naked. The mystery ship and the naked one looked remarkably similar.

“I’ve reacquired the beeper,” Chief Beni reported. “I got something this time. Let me double-check. Nope, it won’t answer me again.”

“What did it say?” Captain Drago demanded.

“Let me check historical logs, sir. This code ain’t in today’s book.”

Every eye on the bridge turned to the old chief.

“If this old log is right, we’re looking at the Society of Humanity Battlecruiser Furious, sir.”

“Furious?” Kris said, stumbling from her station. Her great-grandmother Rita Nuu Longknife had commanded the Furious in a wild fight that saved half of her husband Ray’s battle line. The Furious had vanished into a jump accelerating and spinning like no ship back eighty years ago could hope to survive.

“Unknown ships on approach vector to Alwa, identify yourself,” came as a surprise, both because it wasn’t expected . . . and because it was in Standard.

The main screen flickered several times, then settled down to show a woman who might be Kris . . . if she lived to be a hundred.

“Princess, this one is yours,” Captain Drago whispered.

Kris stood. “I am Princess Kristine Longknife, commanding the United Society explorer ship Wasp.” Kris paused, hunting for words, then hastily added. “We come in peace. Who do I have the honor of addressing?”

The message went out. It would take at least ten minutes to get there and just as long to get back. Kris stayed standing, staring at the screen.

The woman was doing the same. The mike was turned down, but Kris could hear her saying something to people offscreen. Kris herself turned to those around her, but she had nothing to say.

Then a child of two raced into view, threw its hands up at the woman, and was lifted up for a hug. A younger woman, likely the mother, galloped on-screen in hot pursuit of the toddling escapee, but the older woman would not surrender the vagrant.

Kris’s message must have gotten there at that moment. The older woman eyed the screen. “Princess Longknife, you say. Does that mean Ray somehow got himself a crown?” The woman frowned. “Did my little Alex grow up and have kids? That squirt is about the only thing I missed from the back and gone. If you’re a Longknife, you’re likely related to me. I’m Rita Nuu Ponsa, once a Longknife and a ship captain. Come on down here. There’s a passel of family for you to meet.”

Kris collapsed into her chair at Weapons.

Captain Drago ordered the helm to maintain course and one-gee deceleration. Jack came to stand beside Kris, working the tight muscles of her neck and upper back.

“Let’s hope this family reunion goes better than the last one you tried,” he said.