Kris Longknife: Resolute

by Mike Shepherd

  “There will be a chief down here soon with twelve self-propelled steamer trunks,” Kris told her. “No need to be too easy to find, but don’t let him get too panicked.”

  Young granddaughter was delighted that she could be a pain to a grownup and it was an order. “Just remember the point about not being too much of a pain,” her grandfather reminded her.

  Main Navy was just where Kris left it, a hulking monstrosity of concrete and glass. The lair of the Chairman of the Joint Staff was buried deep in it. Kris didn’t know when she was expected, but the secretary just waved her in.

  Jack pointed at the two chairs in the waiting room, signaled the women that they were theirs, then found a chunk of wall to hold up. Kris opened the door, ready to march in, again, as usual—and came to a dead stop.

  Mac was behind his desk, but seated in his visitor’s chair was King Raymond the First to most, Grampa to Kris. On Mac’s other side was Admiral Crossenshield, the head of Wardhaven’s black intelligence efforts. Kris eyed them for a moment . . . and they returned the favor. No one broke the silence until Kris shook her head ruefully, took a step back out of the office, and said, “You three, in here with me.”

  Kris wasn’t sure whether the shock and dismay was worse in the general’s office or in his waiting room, but under her best Longknife glare, Jack, Penny, and lastly, Abby made their way where she directed them.

  Definitely, her team was double-whammied as they walked in the door and found the full extent of this meeting. Jack’s nostrils flared. Penny looked panic-struck and ready to flee, but Abby was too close behind her to give the poor woman any running room. Abby took them in, and looked as determined not to disgrace herself as anyone facing a firing squad.

  Then again, the consternation across the room was an interesting study as well. King Ray pursed his lips and nodded his head slowly. Mac looked ready to pull out what hair he had left, but kept his hands on the desk at this latest bit of mutiny from his worst subordinate. Only Crossenshield slowly allowed a smile to creep across his face. Why was Kris not surprised.

  In the door, Kris’s team bunched up, unsure where to go. Kris headed for the chair at the end of the coffee table that put her facing her king and commanders. Seating herself, she said, “Jack,” and waved him to the couch on her right, putting him between her and Crossenshield. Probably for the admiral’s protection more than hers. She waved Penny and Abby to the couch on the other side, putting them between her and her great-grandfather. Penny got there first and took the end closer to Kris. Abby, her dark complexion strangely pale, looked around for anywhere else to sit. “Abby,” Kris said, and pointed. And the maid went where she was told.

  The tableaux now set, Kris settled in to wait for whoever had called this meeting to speak up. She was prepared to wait until someone died of dehydration. Grampa Ray broke the long silence. “Did you have to kill the Peterwald boy?”

  Kris shot back her prepared answer. “Hank was hell bent on shooting us up. Given a choice of him or me, I chose him. But he’d be alive today if someone hadn’t jiggered his survival pod. Any idea who did?” Kris said, locking eyes with Crossenshield.

  “As you said. You’ve finally found someone more people wanted dead than you,” he said, misquoting Kris.

  “You’d have to have read Abby’s report to know I said that.”

  “Of course I’ve read her report. We pay enough for it.”

  And if Crossenshield was one of the recipients of Abby’s reports, that might tell Kris a lot about many things. “I want a copy of what you got. Now!” she demanded.

  Crossenshield raised an eyebrow at the tenor of Kris’s words, or maybe it was the usual reaction of an admiral to getting an order from a lieutenant. He eyed the king who nodded almost imperceptibly, then raised his wrist, and tapped a few keys on his personal unit.

  “Jack, you got it?” Kris snapped.

  “Yes.”

  “Check it against what Abby gave me.”

  “Doing it,” Jack said.

  “I’m helping,” Nelly added.

  Abby sat primly, eyes on the ceiling, her face that of every innocent three-year-old caught with her hands in the cookie jar.

  “No mention of aliens,” Nelly said only a moment later.

  “Aliens!” came from those around the desk in perfect three part harmony. Kris ignored them and eyed Jack.

  He finally glanced up from his unit. “The words in Crossenshield’s version have been randomly modified. The style is more stilted. It reads worse than Abby’s original, but it’s basically what she gave us.”

  “I told you,” Abby sniffed.

  “Any chance I could get your originals from now on?” Crossenshield asked Abby.

  “What’s this about aliens?” Grampa Ray demanded.

  “That’s why Hank and I were having that fight,” Kris said, and then filled them in on the new jump points Nelly had identified and what they found at the end of three of them.

  “Holy Mother of God,” Crossenshield whispered.

  “I’ll tell Alnaba to pack up the Santa Maria Institute and move it to a happier hunting ground,” Grampa Ray concluded.

  “You better tell her to move carefully,” Jack said. “That place is armed and dangerous and almost killed us—twice.”

  “Maybe I could help you out there,” Kris offered.

  “Don’t you think you’ve done quite enough to that section of the Rim,” Grampa Ray muttered.

  “I’ve got Nelly’s chip. It helped us make this find.”

  “Alnaba and Tru got tired of waiting for you to report on whatever you and Nelly were doing and installed a chip in Tru’s computer. They can handle this very well themselves.”

  NO THEY CAN’T!

  DON’T SAY A WORD, NELLY, Kris quickly thought, before her computer could jump in and start an argument. THEY’LL FIND OUT SOON ENOUGH THAT THEY NEED US.

  THEY SURE WILL, Nelly agreed.

  Across from Kris, King Ray, Mac, and Crossenshield seemed to be negotiating in silence the fate of worlds. Mac finally shook his head. “We better bring Chance into your United thing.”

  King Ray nodded.

  Kris slowly shook her head. “Not a good idea. Chance doesn’t much care for outsiders telling them what to do. Hank found that out the hard way. Can’t we learn from his mistake?”

  “We can’t leave them out there adrift,” Mac said.

  “Who says they’re alone? I figure them to cut a deal with the Helvetica Confederacy.”

  “We can’t afford to have the gateway to all this new alien technology in Peterwald hands. And after that shoot-out you and Hank had, Harry is going to pull out all the stops pressuring them . . .” Mac said, frowning at the star map on the wall.

  “I thought we didn’t do things like that. Pressuring people,” Kris said, raising an eyebrow to the King.

  “Sometimes you have to make exceptions,” Grampa Ray muttered, but his eyes stayed locked on hers.

  “Will you consider trying something else?” Kris asked.

  “What else is there?” Mac asked back.

  “Use the assets you have. Naval District 41 isn’t much but it’s there and Chance recognizes our right to it. It’s our ante into this game. What say you put a senior admiral in that billet. One who knows how to negotiate. Conciliate. And give him a decent force. Some ships to cooperate with the Helvetic fleet. Work together to secure their peace. Do we gain anything by working at cross purposes with the locals?”

  Kris shrugged. “The last time I checked all we wanted was what the people of Chance and the Confederacy want, for them to live in peace and prosper. Why don’t we back them in that, rather than insist they do things our way?”

  “The gal’s an optimist,” Mac growled.

  Grampa Ray chuckled. “All things considered, after what we put her through, what else could she be?”

  “It might work,” Crossenshield offered. “Assuming we don’t send a Longknife. There’s bound to be someone on our promotion list w
ith a reputation for negotiations and peacemaking.”

  “Gosh, and I thought that was all I was doing,” Kris said.

  “Sorry, gal, that’s just not our general reputation,” King Ray said.

  “I still wish she hadn’t killed the Peterwald boy,” Mac grumbled. “There’ll be hell to pay. Either of you two remember a dust-up in the Twentieth called World War I? Started when someone offed the heir apparent to one of the thrones of Europe. Pretty much wrecked the rest of that century.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Kris pointed out. Again.

  “He would have lived if his survival pod had worked,” Jack put in. “I know. I looked it over when we got it aboard.”

  “Why didn’t it?” King Ray snapped at Jack.

  “We couldn’t tell from the equipment we had available,” Jack said, choosing his words carefully. “And the folks from Greenfeld didn’t give us a lot of time to examine the body and the wreckage. The flag captain said he had personally checked the pod before they sailed. It must have been sabotaged during the month or so they were bouncing around Helvetican space. But all that time the bridge was occupied by a watch crew and under observation. How it was done . . . ?” Jack just shrugged.

  “Peterwald’s security will get to the bottom of that,” Ray mutters. “I wouldn’t want to be a survivor of that flagship.”

  Suddenly, Crossenshield sat up straight. He raised a finger to his left ear, drawing Kris’s attention to a small device lodged there. “Ray, the survivors of that flagship may have bigger worries at the moment,” he said. “Give me a second.”

  Everyone in the room watched him in silence as he listened intently, eyes locked on the ceiling. Then he began to talk in a whisper, apparently still listening. “The ship bearing Hank’s body back to Greenfeld, and the survivors of his flagship, was approaching a jump when its lateral thrusters began firing. It lost all communications and suddenly took off at a high g acceleration. It was in that configuration when it entered the jump. The ships escorting it did not find it on the other side of the jump.”

  “A bad jump,” Grampa Ray whispered.

  Mac shook his head slowly. “Harry Peterwald won’t have a body to bury. He can’t investigate whether this was some palace intrigue or heart-sick relative of someone that died in a survival pod in Wardhaven orbit.” The general waved a hand. “Yes, I know their official take is we shot the survivors but there are stories circulating on Greenfeld that the survival pods were death traps, right, Crossie?” The intel man nodded.

  “But Harry will damn well know his son died in a fight with us. And with you, young lady.”

  “I didn’t have much choice. Somebody hung me out there with no back up. Nothing but my own two hands and what I and a lot of good folks could come up with to resist Hank. Hank’s flag captain, Slovo, kept saying things were mighty strange. He hadn’t expected to find me there, had no briefing on me. But I wasn’t expecting to see them either. No brief on their trip around at all. Right, Crossenshield?”

  “We weren’t sure he’d stop by Chance,” the spy master said, holding his face blank and unreadable.

  “We,” Kris spat, and looked hard at Ray.

  “We,” Ray said. “We’re scrambling, Kris. After the attack on Wardhaven, everyone wants a chunk of the fleet. We sent what we could where we could. And Naval District 41 was the bottom of the barrel.”

  “And I was the scrapings.” Kris sighed. “No back-up. Just little old me and a couple of people too dumb to run when a Longknife wanders next to them. No offense intended, crew.”

  “None taken,” Jack said. Penny just looked sad. Abby was trying to look like she wasn’t there.

  “But we did provide you back-up,” Crossenshield said.

  “What back-up?”

  “The Resolute,” King Ray said. “If things got too bad, you had the Resolute to get you out of there. She could have outrun any of those cruisers. Why didn’t you run?”

  Jack looked at the king, then at Kris as she struggled to get out a reply. “Excuse me for butting in, but you give this gal a ship named the Resolute and expected her to use it to run away from a fight? I was starting to think you maybe understood your great-granddaughter. I guess I was wrong.”

  “Maybe we should have renamed the ship,” Crossenshield said.

  The king was looking hard at Kris. “There are times when even a Longknife finds discretion is the better part of valor. I thought Chance might be a hard lesson for you.”

  Kris snorted. “But when you add aliens to the mix?”

  “Yes,” Ray agreed. “We did our calculations assuming that only Chance was in the pot we were gambling for. Then you upped the stakes beyond anything imaginable.”

  Kris let her eyes fall to the floor. “And we had Hank leaving. We’d outplayed him on Chance. Until he found out the size of the pot, we’d won a bloodless victory. Then, suddenly, there was no place to run. He had two cruisers at Jump Point Alpha and Beta led to Greenfeld space.”

  “I’m sorry, Kris,” the king said. “We thought we had it all worked out. An assignment for you that was just your size, and an out for you if it went south.”

  “Only it went north, east, and west,” Kris said.

  On that thought, the meeting seemed to wind down to dusty death. After a long moment of silence, Mac looked at Ray, then at Kris. “Consider yourself relieved of command of Naval District 41. I don’t have a job for you just now, so hold yourself in readiness for orders.”

  No doubt, the wait would not be short.

  Back on the street, Kris let the traffic roll by for a moment, dappled by the shadows of the leaves in the early morning sun. The air here was city: ripe and full and probably poison even with her father’s best efforts. Kris had nothing to do and several million things hanging fire. What she needed was a place to think.

  Harvey pulled the car up; she and her team piled in. “Where to?” he asked. “Home?”

  “I don’t know about you,” Kris said, “but I could use a space where I could get my head in some kind of order. Jack, where is that place you took me to awhile back?”

  “The Smugglers Roost?”

  “Yeah, that place. With Mac and Ray here, we shouldn’t have to worry about running into them there.”

  “I know the place,” said Harvey and dialed it into the car.

  The Smugglers Roost was in the sunshine this morning, the space elevator casting its shadow the other way. The beat-up industrial area still looked like a prime candidate for one of Father’s urban redevelopment projects. Kris thought that would be a shame. Though some of the red bricks were crumbling, and different colored bricks showed where others had been patched, the place looked like it must be two hundred years old, one of the first permanent buildings ever put up on Wardhaven.

  Kris led her three companions down the uneven stairs; Harvey had excused himself to run errands for his wife. Kris knew why the old chauffeur had fled the moment she took the last step down. The Roost was almost empty two hours before noon. Almost . . . but not quite. At a back table sat Grampa Trouble. He raised a beer stein in salute as Kris growled, “You owe me.”

  “And me,” Jack added.

  “So I’ll stand you all for a round. Barkeep, whatever your best is for my easily bamboozled friends here. Hi, Abby, I’m glad to see you’re joining us. Is your cover totally blown?”

  The maid gave an off-handed shrug, that left you to draw your own conclusion. Kris stowed hers away for later review.

  “You knew,” Kris said, in full accusation.

  “Of course I knew,” the old soldier said, unrepentant . . . and proud of it. Then he frowned. “I know a lot, young woman, being as old and evil as I am. But you haven’t read any sort of charges against me for a plea. I can confess right now to anything and it won’t hold up in any court of law.”

  Kris sat down, then raised her hand, fist up, one finger out. “You knew if I drafted Jack, that he’d darn near have a hammer lock on my life.”

  Trouble grinn
ed. “Yep. How’s it going young fellow?”

  “I’m still alive.” Jack sighed. “So is she, despite every effort on her part to the contrary. Tell me, do your offspring ever learn common sense?”

  “There’s no evidence to support that pipe dream. But then there’s little evidence that I have much common sense.”

  “We can drink to that,” Kris said. She looked at her hand and started to raise a second finger.

  “Hold your horses, young lady,” Grampa Trouble said and put his hand over Kris’s, folding her fingers back into a fist. “Barkeep, what’s keeping you?”

  “I’m hard of hearing. Comes from being yelled at,” muttered a fellow maybe half of Grampa Trouble’s hundred plus years as he hurried across the floor. He produced a cloth to wipe down the table. “I hear you want my finest. Which finest?”

  “Pilsner,” Trouble said, “but not for me just now. How about the rest of you. Kris, can I talk you into a beer?”

  “Grampa, even when I was drinking myself to sleep at night, I hated the taste of the stuff. I don’t think I ever got drunk enough to enjoy it. No, what I’d kill for is a milkshake. Nice, thick, creamy. And fresh made, not one of those thin ice creams trying to fake it.”

  “I should warn you,” Jack told the barkeep, “from her, the idea of killing for it might not be just a turn of phrase.”

  “Then I think the little lady came to the right place,” the gray-haired fellow said. “The Smugglers Roost prides itself on the best milkshakes this side of Guernsey Island on old Earth. Only the finest of ingredients. What will you have?

  “Chocolate,” Kris said. “No, double chocolate.”

  “I suspect I could handle a shake, too,” Abby said. “You make strawberry shakes, with fresh strawberries?”

  “They’re in season,” the barkeep assured them.

  “I’ll have one like Kris,” Penny said. “Double chocolate.”

  Jack took in a worried breath. “Only the best ingredients, you say. Sounds pricey. Don’t know if a mere First Lieutenant can afford such frippery. You paying, General?”

  “I may have gotten you drafted into your ill-paying job, son, and I may have offered to stand you to a good, healthy beer, but even I tremble at the potential cost of where these women of ill repute are leading you.”