Undaunted

16

The temperature in the room must have plummeted thirty degrees in the time it took Kris to get her words out. Mac and Crossie looked like they’d turned to stone.

Grampa Ray glared at Kris. “Those hell bombs are illegal. Have been for most of two, three hundred years.”

Kris would have gotten the same answer from her third-grade teacher. She expected better from one of the men who was there. “Yes. I know. But we were fighting for our very existence.”

Grampa Ray and Trouble exchanged knowing looks. They’d been there. Mac and Crossie kept their blank expressions. They hadn’t . . . and didn’t really want to be here.

“We’d lost the knowledge of how to make them,” Ray snapped, not looking her in the eye.

It wasn’t easy to keep forcing herself on the great-grandfather she’d nearly worshipped as a god through her whole youth. Still, Kris dug in her heels and refused that answer. “Certainly, the archives on Earth must have the data.”

“They don’t,” the king said curtly. He seemed ready to walk out, but Grampa Trouble came up and placed an arm on his shoulder, encouraging him to sit down. He did. Mac and Crossie gravitated toward a corner.

Kris took a deep breath and pushed on one more time. “Even if all the records were expunged, lost, or burned, using twentieth-century technology, they originally invented the bomb in just three years. The Iteeche War lasted six. Why wasn’t it reinvented, rebuilt, and used? You could have used relativity bombs. Both sides used them in the Unity war just before we discovered the Iteeche. But they were hardly used against the Iteeche.”

“What are you getting at, girl?” Grampa Trouble asked.

“Do you think we should empty the room?” Crossie interrupted. “Let the princess and king have it for their family talk. Hell, I’m not sure I know where all this is going, but I know I’m not cleared for it.”

“My team stays,” Kris said. “Grampa Ray, do you know that the Iteeche Heroes of the Great Human War pride themselves on having kept the humans from wiping the People from the face of the stars? Their vets and our vets both think they were saving their species from being driven extinct by the other. Don’t you find that interesting?”

“Not really. It was tough on both sides.” But Grampa Ray’s eyes were fixed on the carpet.

“You want me to have Nelly bring up a star map, show you what I noticed while I and my crew and Ron and his advisors were talking about the war. I wonder if it would be half as surprising to you as it was to me.”

“I doubt it. But tell me, Princess, what did you notice?”

“It should have stood out like a sore thumb, the massacres at Port Elgin and LeMonte. They are hot topics all through the war, but they took place early on. Actually, before you and Grampa Trouble even knew there were Iteeche.”

“Not LeMonte,” Trouble said. “Port Elgin, you’re right about. It was a pirate base. We didn’t even know it had been wiped out until a pirate ship turned itself in. You want to talk about some mighty-scared boys. That crew was. They came into Elgin a week after the Iteeche hit it.

“LeMonte was an honest start-up colony,” Grampa Ray said softly. “They got off a distress signal when strange ships shot through one of their jump points. I and Trouble led a reaction force from Havoc. Have you seen the pictures of what we found?”

Now it was Kris’s turn to speak softly. “I was fifteen before they’d let me check them out of the school library. And even then, the librarian said I had to watch them with a war vet. I felt as a Longknife that I had to see them. I cried, so did Harvey, as we watched them. How could anyone do such things? I hated the Iteeche by the time I finished the documentary.

“But those weren’t Imperial troopers that did that, were they?”

“No,” Grampa Trouble said, “that was the work of their Leaderless Men, their pirates.”

“And our pirates were doing stuff just as bad to them. Ron showed me the pictures from the two of their planets that got hit. One was a Leaderless Men’s stronghold, the other was one of the new planets they’d just started to develop. Funny, the symmetry there.”

“I didn’t know our pirates hit them,” Trouble said. “Ray, we should have done a better job debriefing the pirates that came in when the going got bad.”

“I didn’t notice you all that interested in looking the gift horse in the mouth back then.”

“I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. But I was glad for the intel they brought,” Trouble admitted.

“We got everyone evacuated after LeMonte,” Ray went on. “The pictures made that easy.”

“The Iteeche pulled out of a half dozen of their newest planets, too,” Kris said. “And then you fought the war in the empty gap between our two peoples. Some feints over the top or under the bottom or around the flanks, but it was as if you set up the battlefield and both stayed to it.”

“Yeah. So long as they didn’t push into our planets, I stayed away from theirs.”

“You weren’t really trying to win the war, to wipe them out, or them to wipe us out. It was all for show.”

“No! Never.” Grampa Ray was on his feet, and if Kris had been within reach, he probably would have throttled her. Grampa Trouble stopped him before Jack had to. The Marine didn’t rise from his seat, but he measured his king and the distance to his princess. Kris was pretty sure which duty he would do.

By the grace of whatever God was watching over them, it didn’t come to that.

Trouble helped Ray back into his seat. “Never, ever say it was all for show,” the king said through tight lips.

Grampa Trouble settled Ray back down, then, with an arm on his king’s shoulder, he half turned to Kris. “Child, you must never forget the price people paid for those feints and parries. War is always serious. Serious to those who fight it. Serious to those who pay its toll. Your great-grandmother Rita’s Battle Scout Squadron 2 did one of those desperate feints. We never found so much as a survival pod from that squadron.”

“Never found a scrap of them,” Grampa Ray whispered.

“You’re right, you cold-blooded Longknife,” Grampa Trouble said to Kris. “You spotted the heart of our strategy, to get this stampede turned in upon itself. The war was already going before Ray or I got there. There was nothing we could do to stop it. Every ship we sent in to establish contact got blown to bits. Finally, we just gave up and laid it on with all we had. Sickest decision I ever saw a grown man make, but Ray made it.

“By the Battle of the Orange Nebula, we were throwing everything we had. The Empire threw in all they had. And in thirty miserable days, we chewed up a half dozen years of our wealth and left both sides with damn little to show for it.”

“Then that bastard Roth offered to talk,” Ray put in. “I could have cried. If he’d done it two days earlier, Rita would still be alive.”

Kris had always known that her great-grandmother Rita died in the waning days of the war. Now she realized what a tragedy it was. No. That wasn’t fair to all the other tragedies. All because two species couldn’t figure out a way to talk across their differences.

Kris went to kneel beside her great-grandfather. There were tears running down his cheeks. She’d never seen him cry. She hadn’t been sure he could.

“I’m sorry, Grampa. Really I am. Give me some time to think.”

“You do that, girl,” he whispered harshly.

Kris was halfway to the door, her crew following, when Grampa Ray coughed. “I’ll be there tomorrow night. Ten o’clock.”