Kris Longknife: Resolute

by Mike Shepherd

  Kris schooled her face to neutral, but that might not have been the best approach. Steve went on. “And if you start bossing people around like a tin-horn god, you can expect them to down tools and walk, maybe take your entire shift with them.”

  “Tell me,” Jack said. “Assuming Kris treats these employees as contractors, who does she talk to, maybe suggest things, occasionally plead for help when things get desperate around here, as they so often do around her.”

  “Thank you for that question, Jack,” Kris growled. “But just now I want you and Beni to hustle over to the Comm Center. I don’t want anything going out of here that talks about anything we are doing. Check the buffer on the jump buoy and erase anything that looks suspicious. You understand?”

  Jack did. He and Beni trotted off.

  Kris turned back to Steve. “How do we make this work?”

  “I’m your main contact point, Lieutenant. I’ll honcho one shift myself. The chief here will take another. I’ve got two other chiefs that will stand in for the last shifts. We’ll be the cushion between you and the worker bees. That acceptable?”

  “Will be when they get started,” Kris said.

  “Ramirez, is the first crew on their way?”

  “The reactor start-up team should dock in fifteen minutes. They added a tiger team of reactor repair crafts in case the reactor gets balky coming on-line after all this cold time.”

  “Good,” Steve said. “I’d expect initiative from that crew.”

  Which turned out to be just the ticket they needed as things slowly went down hill.

  The reactor failed to light on the first try. And second. When the third time failed, a reinforced crew was requested from the power companies running Chance’s reactors. The crew that was due to bring up the automatic weapons and security net were given a pass. And Kris began to wonder if her station might fall by default to a team of Peterwald Girl Scouts selling cookies.

  “A watched teapot never boils,” the reactor engineer said, making shooing motions. “This kettle ain’t gonna boil any faster with you two looking over my shoulder. There’s got to be something insignificant somewhere you can micromanage.”

  Steve and Kris backed out of his domain. “Old Walt is someone you have to know for a while to appreciate.”

  “And after I know him for a while, will I appreciate him?”

  “More or less,” Steve said with a shrug.

  Kris spent all of a second prioritizing the thousand things she needed to do, came up with a “not yet” on all of them, and headed for the forward end of the station.

  “I’ll dock the Greenfeld ships far forward,” she told Steve. “Care to walk around what they’ll be looking at?”

  They walked along Deck 1, the station curving away to their right and left, the stars visible through the window in the forward bulkhead of the station. Kris wanted to better know her informal deputy; she started with a soft pitch. “Is there any way we can get the locals to get our ranks right? I mean, it’s nice to be breveted up to commander, but I’ve earned these lieutenant bars on my collar.”

  “What makes you think they’re promoting you?”

  Kris eyed Steve for a second . . . and stayed puzzled.

  He chuckled. “I mean, who says it reflects anything on us. It’s their district. How do you think they feel with a lowly lieutenant. They rate an admiral. A captain at least. What do they get. Me.” He grinned. “You, at least, are one of those Longknifes, so that’s something. But you’re still a lieutenant. So they call us commanders. Get used to it.” He shrugged.

  “That’s not something I thought much about,” Kris said.

  “Well, it took them a year or two, and quite a bit of grousing, to start calling me commander. I tried not to take it personal. Then I married one of them and it all made sense.”

  Kris doubted she had the years, or the prospects of a husband, so she’d just have to adapt on her own.

  “Besides,” Steve went on, “don’t you have papers to commission that hunk of tin we got parked aft. Commission her and you brevet to captain, don’t you?”

  “Just commander, and I will not commission the Patton.”

  “Why not? From what I hear, she can actually hold air now,” Steve said with a wide grin. “They’ve got a trickle feed on the reactor. She’s making her own power. What with six Peterwald ships in the system, why not commission our own little cruiser?”

  Kris whirled on Steve, her face warm with an anger she didn’t understand. “I will not commission that ship. Not with that bunch of optimists and dreamers that are crawling around her. They asked to make her into a museum. I’ll let them have their museum, but they will not sail that collection of spit and glue and bailing wire anywhere, for any reason.”

  Kris shivered, both startled . . . and shocked at herself. She spun on her heels and quick-marched for the bow. Steve had to hurry to catch up with her.

  “Hey, young woman, I don’t know what I just set off, but I want you to know that I was not fishing for what I hauled in.”

  Kris slowed. She needed this fellow if she was going to get anything done here. “I don’t blame you,” she said as he rejoined her. “I won’t blame anyone. With luck, I won’t blame myself.”

  He raised two questioning eyebrows.

  “I don’t know what you heard about the recent disagreement on who controlled the space above Wardhaven,” she started slowly.

  “I followed it in the media. Not sure it made a lot of sense from a professional’s viewpoint. I figured I’d wait until the Naval Institute published something on it.”

  They walked a bit in quiet. “We needed everything we could lay our hands on. Good people volunteered. Optimists. Clubs. Gamblers. Whole families.” Kris remembered faces. “And I let them. We fought. And they died. Tugs with no guns charged battlewagons and died. System runabouts were out there trying to get a hit. Not one did.” Kris closed her eyes, willed down the tears. “Every one of them was wiped out.”

  “You had to win. And you did,” Steve said softly.

  “And I spent two weeks attending funerals,” Kris said.

  Steve attempted no answer to that.

  Kris let out two deep breaths. “The Patton is forty years obsolete and I will not allow her to get anywhere near so much as a harsh word much less a fight with that collection of old farts and kids on board. Do we understand each other, Steve?”

  “Perfectly,” the retired lieutenant said.

  Kris came to a halt, looked around, and worried her lower lip. “So how do we present a firm but friendly face to our visiting flag wavers,” she said, eyeing the escalators down to Pier 1’s landing several hundred feet below them.

  “You going to park the flagship there?”

  “Logical assignment if she’s leading in her squadron and no commodore ever hatched has been able to skip playing boats right, boats left, follow in my wake.”

  The two junior officers exchanged knowing grins.

  Steve turned around. “Well, we’ve got those security points.” He pointed at four small half globes with mirror finish on the ceiling some hundred feet above them. “Cameras and auto guns in each should be able to stop anything as gross as an armed charge.” He led Kris a third of the way around the station’s concourse to where Pier 2’s landing area was. “Four there as well. Four at Pier 3, unless they got up and walked away since I did.” He laughed.

  “Humor me,” Kris said, and they finished their walk around Deck 1 of the station. Yep, there were four more covering Pier 3. They walked back the way they’d come, to find Pier 13, then hiked around to Piers 12 and 11. All had good auto gun coverage.

  “Assuming they come up when we get power,” Kris said.

  “When we have power,” Steve went on. “We’ll have maintenance crews crawling all over Deck 1A, making sure everything we left is in just as good an order as we left it in.”

  Kris nodded. Deck 1A was an area that didn’t show up on the public schematics of the station. A work area
between Deck 1 and 2, it handled the lighting, ventilation, heating, and stuff the average tourist ignored. Kris had not taken the average tour of the Turantic Station, and had made good use of those invisible decks. “What are the access controls to Deck 1A?” Kris asked.

  Steve’s smile was predatory. “Not what the official manufacturer’s specs say. Nowhere near that easy. I’ll show you. Didn’t I hear something about you and Turantic’s Station?”

  Kris drew herself up as primly as Abby and sniffed. “Insurance claims about what happened there are still before a court, and I have been advised by counsel not to comment on every bit of media supposition that floats by,” Kris said, then smiled Steve’s way. “However, I may have some ideas for improving security and keeping the riffraff and other undesirables away from delicate equipment they could ‘accidentally’ break.”

  Steve eyed her. “Yeah, right.”

  Amidships, between the third and fourth lines of piers was the service area that had given Kris her way up into the Command Center. All those shops were still boarded up. On the elevator, Steve used a key that just happened to be on his chain and the elevator admitted there were several additional floors above.

  “You kept those?”

  Steve glanced at them. “For fifteen years they were a part of me. I just couldn’t turn them in. I told Ramirez I lost them. She already had the papers for me to sign about losing government property.” Kris had never been around anyone long enough to have them read her mind that well. Well, Jack did, but he wasn’t reading her mind so much as figuring two steps ahead of the next trouble she’d get them into. Not the same.

  Painted gray, and smelling of oil and ozone, Deck 1A’s air ducts and power lines stood out in loud primary colors. The auto guns were arranged in large housings above the deck/ceiling. Steve took off the cover of one. “The security cameras are out there to cover the station. But if things ever get terminal, the gun shield slides over all of the hole except for the gun’s snout. These puppies are not going to be easy to kill.”

  “And target acquisition?”

  “Oh, once they shoot up the globe, we switch to the other cameras.” Steve grinned. “Dozens of tiny little things that you can’t see from down there.”

  “What if they’ve got spy nanos buzzing around?” Kris said.

  “Real tiny ones?”

  Kris nodded.

  “Something tells me we’re playing in a different league from what we expected.” Steve worried his lower lip. “On this whole planet, I think we have only one college professor teaching nano security. Tonight I’ll call him and suggest he and his class drop up here and have a talk with you and your Nelly.”

  “We may need more than eight hundred workers.”

  Steve laughed. “I knew that number was just a buy in. If we get by with double that I’ll consider it a win.” He looked around. “Want to see our Naval Defense Battery?”

  “What you got?”

  “Thirteen souped up 6-inchers.”

  “Thirteen 6-inchers. Not 4-inchers?”

  “Yeah, we added two to the bow and stern to go with the nine scattered along the outer surface of the station.”

  “How’d you get different guns?”

  “Interesting story, that. Surplus, brought out when ships were scrapped. Can you believe it, they did scrap some ships. Kind of amazing when you consider that they kept the Patton.”

  The 6-inch was a single, with no turret protection. How long it would last in a fight was anyone’s guess, but there it was, with capacitors ready to be charged and a computer ready to lay it. Steve rapped his knuckles on some metal tubs with cooling lines running off them. “We planned to fill these with water and freeze them for gun shields. Better than nothing.”

  “If you’re an optimist,” Kris said.

  “A desperate optimist,” Steve agreed.

  “If you say prayers at night, I hope you include us never having to use these.”

  “I’ll tell my wife to expand her prayer list.”

  The walk back to the elevator gave Kris time to study the layout. She didn’t like what she saw. “Anyone who opens that elevator door has access to everything up here.”

  “That door only opens to a key, and only when I’m sending the right code,” Steve said.

  Kris said nothing. The silence stretched, bent, bowed.

  “You are paranoid, Longknife,” Steve finally said.

  “In my family, that’s a survival trait.”

  “No doubt,” Steve said. “I’m starting to understand why folks might, kind of, occasionally, want to kill you.”

  “Me,” Kris said with her most innocent, wide-eyed face.

  “No, your father,” Steve muttered. “Let’s see. If we use twenty millimeter deck steel, we could encase this place,” he said, turning around in front of the elevator. “Arrange a desk there, give it a view in the elevator, and add a human eyeball to the security.”

  “And put at least one human with whatever kind of weapons you have handy as a lookout from behind the wall, just in case.”

  Steve was shaking his head. “I wanted to bring this thing in at sixteen hundred live bodies. That’ll drive it way high. How about all elevators to go to three and be eyeballed before they go anyplace else?” They got off at three in the lobby leading to the Command Post. Kris made a face at the door leading directly into that holy of holies.

  “We’ll weld that shut,” Steve said. “Put in a major security post here, and install a wall and locked door to all those corridors.”

  “Need a gunner behind armor,” Kris said.

  “I’m glad you’re having this little talk with me and not my entire crew,” Steve muttered.

  “But I’m having so much fun doing it to you,” Kris said.

  Steve walked into his former Command Post, picked up a phone, and told it he wanted to talk to Ramirez. A moment later she was on-line. “I need to talk to you about some changes.”

  Kris heard, “No surprise, you’re talking to that Longknife girl, aren’t you?”

  Steve eyed Kris. “Self same.”

  “Where do you want to talk?”

  “I’m headed for the Patton. Meet me there.”

  Five minutes later, the three of them were going over a full schematic of the station, Steve pointing out where Kris wanted improved security.

  “We can do that,” she agreed. “We’ve got some kids working on the harvest. They’d be glad for a sit-down job once a week.”

  “Youngsters?” Kris asked.

  “High school and college kids,” Ramirez agreed.

  “Rotating in for one day a week?” Kris said.

  The chief glanced at Steve, then nodded at Kris.

  “These folks are going to be the ones who make the call to pull the triggers if things get out of hand,” Steve said slowly.

  The chief sucked on her lower lip. “And you wonder if kids fresh off the farm could make that call if they are only looking at it one day a week?”

  “Kind of like that. Killing someone ain’t easy, even if you don’t know what an M-6’s going to do when you pull the trigger.”

  “How about we have them call for help at the first sign of trouble. We could get some adult supervision into the loop.”

  Kris shook her head. “You’re assuming that they can call. Strange thing happened to me awhile back. I was being frog walked off my ship by a couple of nasty-looking MPs and I asked Nelly what might be the cause of my unpleasant experience. Nelly couldn’t answer. She was being jammed from the net.”

  Steve looked at Kris wide-eyed.

  “Your pet computer couldn’t reach the net?”

  “Yes,” Nelly said from Kris’s neck. “It was most unpleasant and I still do not know what happened.”

  “Which leads me to suspect that Greenfeld has a new jammer we haven’t figured out,” Kris added. “Short ranged but just the thing for putting a couple of green kids out on their own.”

  Ramirez spat a nasty word in a language Kris didn
’t know. “And they’ll send their fanciest to our little coming-out party. Okay, I’ll see what I can do. Steve, you get some good comm honchos up here, too. Tell the owners we need their best.”

  “That I will. Now, Your Highness, there’s been a lot of work on the Patton since you last saw it. Why don’t you wander around, get the guided tour while the chief and I talk.”

  “About me, behind my back.”

  Steve shrugged. Ramirez looked quite interested in what was coming next. Kris shook her head and took the escalator down to the first landing. A young man and woman were pulling sheets of plastic from a pile and walking them up the gangplank. Kris offered them a hand, was accepted, and so boarded her potential command lugging a sheet of white plastic as tall as she was and very wide. There was no ceremony on the Patton’s quarterdeck. The place was a madhouse of power saws, drills, and printers.

  “Put the sheet down there next to the saw,” an old fellow said, then took a better look at Kris over his reading glasses. “Hey, you’re not Amy.”

  “No, I’m Amy,” the girl behind Kris said with a laugh, and put her sheet down next to Kris’s. “I don’t know who she is, but she offered to lug plastic so I put her to work.”

  “Amy, this is the commander of the station,” the old fellow said, looking like he might have swallowed his plug.

  “Well, thanks for the help,” Amy said, and headed back out for more, not at all impressed.

  “Youngsters these days. What are they teaching ’em in school?” he muttered, but smiled as he watched the girl go.

  “The same thing I think they’ve always taught,” Kris said, looking around. “Who’s kind of in charge?”

  “That would be Ananda. Heaven knows where you’ll find her but the bridge would be a good place to start.”

  On the bridge, Kris was directed to the forward 5-inch batteries. She was about to be sent aft to the other 5-inchers when the woman in question did indeed walk in. The single braid swaying down her back showed very little gray on the dark-skinned woman who barely came up to Kris’s chest. “You looking for me?”