“I enjoyed shooting her,” Kris finally admitted. “I never got a chance to blow the head off that admiral on the Revenge who gutted the 109. Was I shooting at her, or at him.” Kris paused to let the question bounce around in her head for the forty millionth time. “I just don’t know.”
“You need a break,” Penny said.
“I thought Training Command was supposed to be a break.”
“Maybe for me, but you ended up dodging a couple of bombs. Did you ever relax? Do you ever relax?”
“You’re starting to sound like that police officer on Turantic. What did he say? ‘Each time you pull the trigger, it gets easier to pull it the next time.’”
“And you get more and more different from the person you started out being,” Penny added.
They both munched a few forkfuls of salad on that thought.
“And I thought I’d have dinner with you and counsel you a bit,” Kris finally said.
“You are counseling me. You’re making me feel great. I’m getting better a whole lot faster than you. I can’t tell you how good that makes me feel,” Penny said, sticking her tongue out.
Kris threw a cucumber slice at her.
“More of your aggression,” Penny said, shaking her head in mock despair. “You know what we need to do?”
“I can think of several hundred good ideas, but which one are you interested in particularly tonight?”
“We need to get drunk.”
“You know I can’t afford that.”
“I’m sure we can get several Proud Old Vets to make sure you get to your ship on time tomorrow. They’ve told me enough tales of rolling buddies into the liberty launch in the nick of time. They’d cover for us if I asked.” Penny was looking over the crowd, as if already picking out their shepherds.
“Penny, if I start drinking, there’s no guarantee that I’ll be sober by the time we get where we’re going.”
“Were you that bad a drunk?”
Kris nodded. “But, in college, I found I could get quite high on good friendship and a large bottle of ginger ale.”
“Well, I’ll just have to provide the friendship, and, Barkeep,” Penny shouted. “A bottle of your finest ginger ale.”
They polished off several bottles of ginger ale. And they didn’t do it alone. Penny’s new friends dropped in, to swap tales of battles lost and won, friends who survived, and those who didn’t. There was no method to the stories. No moral or lesson. They were just where life had taken these people. Life that, over the years, they had learned they could live with.
This wasn’t like her talking to Grampa Ray or Trouble. There, too often she sat as understudy, trying to find out how they did the family business and lived through it. How to be a Longknife and survive the experience.
Here she was listening to people whose biographies would never fill shelves in libraries. But they’d lived just as long. And maybe some of them had lived just as well or even better. Kris listened to them, and later in the evening, she learned she could cry with them. And later on, they showed they could cry with her. The place closed, and Tommy Chang joined them. His story wasn’t of war, but of man’s inhumanity to man. And of the rugged nature of a new planet that could snatch away the life it seemed to offer. Not all courage wore a uniform.
It was very late, or rather, early, when Penny escorted Kris to her room. “Feel better?” she asked.
“Are they always like that?”
“Sometimes. Usually it’s not so intense. Like all things Longknife, I think you ratcheted up the demands on them. And they came through. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”
“I’ve never felt so surrounded by friends.”
“Yes,” Penny said.
6
The Resolute hovered a kilometer from the gravity anomaly that loomed with the unknown. “We ready to send a buoy through?” Kris asked. Actually, urged.
“We’ve rigged it with a camera so we can see what it sees once it comes back,” Sulwan said.
“Assuming it comes back,” the helmsman muttered.
“Let’s be optimists,” Captain Drago said. “We’re working for one.” He punctuated that with a glance Kris’s way. Those dark eyebrows hinted at thoughts quite different from his words.
“Buoy is headed out,” Sulwan said. “Buoy is gone. Should be back in one minute,” she added quickly.
It was a very long minute. Nelly counted off every second in the back of Kris’s skull. If Kris herself hadn’t been so antsy, she might have shushed her computer.
Nelly hit sixty and nothing happened.
The bridge stayed quiet. Very quiet. Not even the sound of someone breathing. No surprise. Kris wasn’t breathing, either. She listened as Nelly counted. At sixty-three, the errant buoy reappeared and the main screen came to life.
“That’s a whole different set of stars,” Sulwan whispered.
“Can you match it to anything in our charts?” Drago asked.
“Not enough coverage.”
“Well, Your Highness, what are your orders?” the captain said, eyes still on the screen.
“Would you please slip your ship through this jump? We don’t want to end up in Iteeche space,” Kris said, trying to keep the proper petitioner’s tone of voice that one should have when riding in another’s ship. Not the flaming eager voice that was in her throat.
“Send the buoy through, then follow, Navigator, pianissimo.”
The buoy vanished. Sulwan nudged the Resolute forward.
It seemed to take forever to reach the jump point.
“I wonder if maybe the reason these jump points look so different might be ’cause they’re cargo jumps. Not meant for something alive,” Jack said.
“Shut up,” Kris said, along with most of the bridge crew. Not Sulwan. She had her eyes on her board.
They made the jump, shook off the effects of it, and stared at that strange star pattern they’d seen from the buoy report.
“Tell me where we are,” Captain Drago called softly.
“Just a moment, sir,” Sulwan said, her eyes on her board, her fingers flying over it. Then she smiled and looked up.
“We’re about fifteen light-years outside human space, in unclaimed territory,” the navigator reported. The main screen now showed a familiar star chart. A new point flashed red in an area that was dark with inaccessible stars.
“Doesn’t look like much of a system,” the helmsman reported. “A couple of rocks close to the star. One of them huge. Several gas giants way out. Nothing in the potential zone of life.”
Kris looked over the helmsman’s shoulder. A more thorough study might take a day. And likely would tell them little more.
“This a dead end?” she asked Sulwan.
“No. There’s a jump point not more than an hour away.”
“Head for it,” Captain Drago said, too eager to ask Kris.
“Leave the buoy here,” Kris said.
“I’m glad to see Your Highness has some sense of self-preservation,” Jack said, leaning close to her ear.
“I do know how to leave bread crumbs.”
Abby and Chief Beni picked that moment to step onto the Resolute’s bridge. Jack had serious questions about taking leave to accompany Kris’s expedition. “Anytime I’m within five light-years of you, Princess, I’m working. Or dodging incoming.”
Beni had no such questions. “You bet I want to be in on whatever you’re up to. It pays good.”
Kris had said nothing to Abby. She’d actually planned on leaving the maid behind. But Abby had shown up waving a fur bikini. “You’ll need this if you have to make a formal appearance as a Barbarian Princess to these folks.”
“Just how secret is this little shindig?” Jack remarked.
Kris shrugged . . . and remembered the steamer trunks trailing Abby aboard the Resolute. All twelve. None got left behind.
Jack raised an eyebrow as if to say “You sure you want to do this? Even Abby’s magic Ouija board is saying it’s dangerous.”<
br />
Abby didn’t trail any trunks onto the bridge just now.
“Anything interesting?” Beni asked, chomping on an apple left over from lunch.
“Doesn’t look like it, just another jump,” Kris said.
“I’ve only got two more cameras to mount on the buoys,” the chief said.
“We’ve only got three buoys,” Captain Drago pointed out. “I do wish you’d let me order some drones. It might mean a delay, but we’d be better prepared.”
“And why would the Resolute be ordering a batch of re-motes,” Kris said, shaking her head. “We don’t want questions raised. Don’t worry. It’s all taken care of.”
The look the captain gave Kris didn’t look persuaded.
The second buoy’s exploratory trip through the next jump brought back more strange stars . . . and something recorded in the radio bandwidth.
“Can you make anything of it, Chief?” Kris asked.
“It’s more static than anything else. It’s just that it’s static in the wrong place and static with too much organization in it to be ignored.”
“Go through?” Sulwan asked.
Captain Drago raised an eyebrow to Kris.
“You see anything in the buoy’s report that says we’d be in danger if we went?”
“Can’t say that I do,” Beni said, almost making it sound like he wanted to.
“If you would, Captain,” Kris said, and the Resolute followed its buoy through the jump.
This time they found themselves deep in a system’s inhabitable zone, orbiting a distant moon of a planet that had several more closer in. A planet beautifully blue and green.
“That’s where the noise is coming from. Right down around the equator,” Beni reported.
“Do we go down there?” Captain Drago asked.
“Just a moment. Nelly, do you have design instructions for remote deep-space probes in your gizzard.”
“I have such designs in my memory banks, Your Highness,” Nelly answered formally. Very formally. Did I hurt her feelings, Kris wondered. No, not possible.
She must have thought it too solidly, because Nelly answered. I DO NOT LIKE IT WHEN YOU MAKE FUN OF ME IN FRONT OF YOUR FRIENDS. I WANT RESPECT.
OKAY, GIRL, I’LL REMEMBER THAT.
“Abby, I have three ten-kilo bars of Smart Metal in my trunks.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“And some extra self-organizing computer goo, don’t I?”
“You know you do.”
“After Turantic, I never leave home without the stuff,” Kris said, giving Jack and Captain Drago a big smile. “Abby, please get one bar and a vial of the goo and meet me in Engineering. Let’s get ourselves some outriders before we go anywhere. Who knows what might be in our way.”
An hour later, Kris and Nelly had conjured up a dozen remote probes and fueled them with antimatter and reaction mass from the Resolute’s power plant. Captain Drago was much more enthusiastic about shifting his ship to a lower orbit, now that he was following behind a scout force that verified it was safe.
They settled smoothly into a comfortably low orbit and turned on all the cameras and sensors Kris had snuck aboard her leased ship. After two orbits of the planet, Kris was smiling from ear to ear. Oceans covered 65 percent of this blue-green world. Ice caps glistened at the poles. Two large continents had grass plains and forests spread over their temperate zones. The tropics were either desert or jungle with a really lovely area of green savanna. What looked like a major tropical storm system was swirling its way north from just above the equator.
“Kind of reminds you of Earth before we got done with it,” Abby said.
“What do you make of these?” Kris asked Beni, highlighting several large mounds. Some were in huge meadows amid forests. Others were scattered widely among the grassy plains.
“I’m more interested in this one,” he said, pointing at a section where the high canopy of the tropical rain forest made way for lower mounds and one tall spire. “This is where that radio noise is coming from.”
“Nelly, make us up some small drop scouts to send down to look that place over closely.”
“They will be ready for the next pass over that site.”
“Call it Site One.”
“What about these?” Jack said, pointing to one of the savanna pictures. A herd of something on eight legs was racing along. “Looks like they’re running from something!”
“Or someone said ‘last one in the river is a rotten egg’,” Abby said.
“Animals don’t waste their metabolic economy on frivolous things like that,” Jack growled.
“Unless the fastest girl gets the fastest guy,” Kris said. “Let’s launch the probes and get a closer picture.”
Three hours later, and two more orbits completed, they were no nearer to any solid answers. “They got big animals and little animals,” Abby said.
“They got animals dining on plants, and others that dine on them,” Beni pointed out.
“I say those are ruins,” Jack said, pointing to what looked very much like ruins . . . or large rock outcroppings in the middle of plains and forests.
“And none of the animals we’re looking at look at all like any of the Three species that built the jump points,” Kris said.
“Assuming anyone built them,” Captain Drago put in.
“And assuming the pictures your Great-Grampa Ray saw on Santa Maria really were of the Three,” Sulwan added.
“Questions, assumptions, everywhere and not a drop of data to hang a hat on,” Nelly finished.
“So let’s go down and see some of this up close,” Kris said.
And ducked at the onslaught of “not now,” “we’re not ready,” and “you can’t be that crazy” that followed.
“Okay, okay,” she said, raising a hand. “I want to go down there, so we are going down there. What do you bunch of nannies insist on us doing before we go?”
Actually, Kris wasn’t at all surprised at the safety burden laid on her. If they’d given her a minute of peace, she would probably have outlined everything they said. Still, it must have made Jack, Captain Drago, and even Abby feel good to tell her what to do. So she let them.
Kris brought the shuttle down in a spray of water, waited until she’d bled off most of her speed, then swung the shuttle around gently to head it for the bank of the river. With no sandy beach to aim for, she settled for the foot of a trail that seemed to be where most of the locals came down to drink. The shuttle lost the last of its momentum among what looked like reeds and planted its nose gently onto the muddy bank.
“Not bad,” Jack said. “Now to get out of here as easy.”
Kris held up her arm, encased in a fully armored space suit. “I won’t drink the water. I won’t breathe the air. What more do you want, my loyal security officer.”
“A nice safe chair by a crackling fire . . . at home,” Jack said. He’d been so happy to find that the Resolute’s storage included full battle armor for this trip that he hadn’t even asked just how it came to pass that a simple merchant ship happened to come so equipped.
Kris had. “I bought them surplus. Armored suits were cheaper than the usual spacewear. I was saving money,” Captain Drago insisted. Leaving Kris to wonder if Captain Drago and Maid Abby shopped the same sales.
Jack helped Kris on with her gauntlets and helmet, then Kris did the same for him. Chief Beni was paired with the Resolute’s communications officer, the same tech who’d upped the gain on their sensors last cruise.
Captain Drago had offered four strong backs to do the fetching and carrying. Abby had suggested that she might fill one of those slots. Kris had considered her options and decided she’d rather have her group made up of four knowns to balance the unknown loyalty of the ship’s personnel.
“That assumes anyone knows where Abby’s loyalties lie,” Jack muttered darkly, but since he made no stronger objections, Kris waved Abby aboard.
With everyone suited and checked out, Kris had th
em crack the shuttle’s hatch. The air that came in was breathable, but laden with a wide selection of pollen, bugs, and the likes, enough to make Jack remark: “Now ain’t you glad you’re breathing canned air?”
Kris shrugged—a comment lost in full armor—and stepped into water up to her knees. She waded through muck and vegetation to the beach. All ashore, she closed up the ship and looked around.
The place was green. Green of leaf and branch. Even most of what passed for tree trunks were green. Some were brown, a few appeared purple. Strange sounds came from the mikes mounted to the outside of their suits. Within their sight, nothing larger than a small fly moved. While two ship’s crew tied the shuttle to solid-looking trees, Kris sent probes down the path they intended to take to Site One. When they reported back nothing that seemed worth worrying about, Kris led off.
“Who did that?” came on net.
“What?” Kris asked.
“I just got hit by a rock. Anyone throw it?” No one had.
“Let’s go, crew, but take your time. Head’s up.” Two of the crew carried low-power lasers for clearing path. Abby and another crewwoman had M-6 weapons at the ready. Kris had two automatics strapped to her suit, but was more interested in looking than shooting. “Nelly, use audio and visuals to examine our situation. I want to know immediately if you see anything that looks intelligent or hostile.”
“Or both,” Nelly added. “I am at least as interested as you are, Kris. And so far I see bushes moving in the wind. I see small animals that shouldn’t be able to throw a rock. I don’t see anything else.”
Something on six legs that reached about to Kris’s knees turned the path’s corner and trotted toward them. It took a half dozen steps, froze, and raised a snout with four curling tusks. Kris stared into two small eyes that stared back at her.
“Nelly, some noise please. All the speakers will take.”
There was a loud screech. All around them, winged things took to the air. In front of Kris, the situation didn’t change. As Kris slowly reached for her automatic, Abby came on net.
“Let me try this,” she said, and a large stone arched over Kris’s shoulder to land in front of the critter. It bounced once, and would have hit the thing, but it made a noise all its own and bolted into the green shrub beside the trail.
Kris Longknife: Resolute Page 11