One of the nannies quickly produced something in clear plastic and Rita let her put it on her, then gave Alex another try.
He didn’t like the taste of the thing, and turned away.
“Dribble some milk on it,” came in three-part harmony from all the nannies present. Rita did. Alex did something with his mouth and nose that Rita decreed was cute and he began to suck.
“Little fellow, I’ve got this great big cruiser to boss, and this mess out there in deepest, darkest space, but somehow, I’ve got to find more time to spend with you.”
Alex showed no sign of hearing her. His mouth was hard at work, his little hands were balled up in fists and his eyes were closed. He ate, then fell asleep.
Rita stood and carefully carried him to his crib. At some point in the brief journey, gas interrupted his sleep, and he let out a cry. Rita scowled at getting caught in a quick getaway after promising him more time. She walked the floor for a minute, him on her shoulder, her bouncing him. He burped, surprisingly loud for such a small bundle, and then applied himself to sleep once more.
She settled him in his bed, turned on the mobile’s gentle music and turned to the nannies. “Let me know when he wakes up. I hear that a good father spends maybe twenty minutes of quality time with his kids each day. Set a stop watch. If I haven’t given Alex an hour of my time by twenty hundred hours each day, you have my permission to chase me down and drag me in here. Drag me off the bridge if need be.”
“Can we interrupt a space battle?” the senior nanny asked, wide smile out to play.
“In that case, use your best judgment.”
The nannies seemed to approve of her resolution.
Rita adjusted her uniform, straightened her shoulders, and returned to the bridge. It was time for a battle drill.
The Exeter was a strange ship. Fully armed and armored as a heavy cruiser, it also had an oversize Marine detachment to meet whatever boarding or landing situations they might find themselves in. On top of that had been added a collection of scientists who had been dragooned aboard in the short time they were back on Wardhaven.
The scientists were turning out to be a major complication to a warship’s manning table.
Some wanted to study space, the stars, the jump points, just about everything. A few seemed to understand they were out here hunting for pirates, and maybe the mythical bug-eyed monster that had populated a minor corner of human literature for the last couple of hundred years.
Oh, and the ship had to be ready to fight either the pirates or the bug-eyed monsters at any moment.
Still, most of the scientists wanted to do scientific things. So, one or more of them would corner Rita at just about every meal to explain to her why she ought to drop everything and turn the ship around to check out something they thought they might have found in the last six hours or so.
Oh, and no one was in charge of any of them. No leading scientist. No head high scientist. Every one of them, from the oldest prize winning laureate to the youngest post doc, felt fully empowered to bend Rita’s ear.
“This is not the Navy way,” Rita muttered over her cold supper after listening to one nerd explain why they needed to go back to the last system and check out the northern hemisphere of its sun.
“Can you draft them?” Ursel Jannson asked.
“Here and now,” Rita muttered thoughtfully, “not likely. I should have done the paperwork before we left the pier. Maybe next time I will.”
Despite her beef with the empty-headed geniuses, Rita found herself glad she had them, and all the ones on the Northampton, when she finally caught up with Matt.
He had found their target.
The pirates had been off by a couple of star systems, but there, in a white dwarf system with three jumps out was the wreckage of . . . something.
“Whatever it was before,” Captain Mattem Abeeb of the Northampton said as he brought Rita up to date, “it’s not much of anything now. They really did slash it to bits with their 4-inch lasers.”
Rita surveyed the map of the wreckage projected on her main screen, and then clicked it back to naked space. What was hard to see on the map was impossible to see against in the inky black of space’s vacuum.
“What can you make of it?”
Matt shook his head. “It was pretty well scattered by the time we got here. We’ve spent the last week using laser scans to try to find all the bits and pieces. We’ve had the longboats out lassoing up the larger parts. All the spare jump buoys have been working overtime jetting out to examine any part we don’t think is big enough to collect. The boffins knocked together some small sensor packages to add to the buoys. What these scientists don’t think of, our brain trust from the old Second Chance came up with. Nice synergism.”
“I’ll add my scientists to yours. Maybe your brain trust can get my eggheads to be more down to earth.”
“If not, I’ll let Kat kick their butts. There’s nothing more embarrassing to some smart guy Ph.D. than to have that diminutive gal with a master’s degree show him how the cow really did eat the cabbage.”
Rita got her own long boats out, and between the Northampton and the Exeter, they had the area well quartered and policed up before the Second Chance was due to jump in. They’d also collected well over six hundred bodies, all with four eyes and too many arms and legs. There were parts of bodies enough to add up to another two or three hundred.
“That’s a lot of people on one ship. I wonder how large it was?” Matt muttered as the body count climbed.
“A liner?” Ursel suggested.
“This far out?” Rita said.
“This far from human space. How far is it from their space?” Hesper asked.
Her question was met with grimaces.
The Second Chance jumped into the system rather later than they had expected from her last message.
Captain Ving’s message took a while to cross the star system, but it got to Rita well ahead of the ship even though it was making a good 2.5 gees.
“Captain Nuu,” Ving reported stiffly and formally. She’d know Rita when Rita was the upstart girl demanding command of an attack transport. Ving had been right behind Rita when the Wardhaven Navy caved in and let the women try to qualify in the little boats.
Rita knew Ving, but she’d never known her to be so stiffly at attention when making a report. Or to have so much trouble making that report. After a long pause, the captain began again.
“Captain Nuu Longknife, I think we’ve found the wreckage of one of those private venture scout ships. At least we’ve found an expanding cloud around one planet. Most of it is just hot gases, but there’s enough wreckage for us to identify some of the bits and pieces as a human ship.” Ving paused, a near painful look on her face.
“And there was something strange about the whole thing. We don’t have anything as strong as the sniffer, but we can analyze space. The expanded ball of hot gasses in that orbit was pretty much what you’d expect for a human ship. It was the trail of gases, likely exhaust gases that led up to the hot gas ball. There was a lot of sodium in it. It was as if whoever was running a plasma drive was using salty sea water as their reaction mass.”
Ving shook her head. “I know that nobody uses that kind of reaction mass, Rita, but that’s what we’re kind of thinking the evidence says.”
It was 2000 hours by the bridge clock. Hovering at the bridge combing was the senior nanny, aiming her finger at her wrist unit and pointing at it repeatedly.
Rita shook her head. “Not tonight,” she snapped, and turned her back on her hired help. “Mattim, we need to talk.”
“I was listening to the message. Salt water, huh?”
“What do your eggheads make of that?”
“Please, Rita. Boffins if you must, but eggheads? None of them like that particular handle. I’ve got Kat on sensors at the moment. She’s doing a check with Doctor Qin on the space around the jump. There is more sodium than you’d normally expect in space, but no one thought much of it.
With your permission, I’m going to take the Northampton through the jump and sniff around on the other side.”
“Please do that, Matt, and I’ll have my, ah, boffins, do a check on how sea water would react in a thermonuclear reactor.”
Rita leaned back in her command chair and tried to order her thoughts.
One of our pirate ships shot up an alien vessel in this system. Yes.
An alien ship seemed to have shot up a human ship in a system not too far from here. Yes.
The alien ship they were trying to piece back together had a whole lot of big, mean looking people on it. Yes.
We’ve got a big problem. Oh, yes!
Chapter 29
Admiral Horatio Whitebred had no problems. It was good to be a pirate king. Especially when he was in bed with his pirate queen.
One of the things he liked about Neva was how quickly she threw herself into passion. Some girls were like ice. Fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes even, of stroking this or licking that and they wanted more.
Neva pulled her pants down and she was hot.
Only possible problem was that she always wanted to be on top, so this afternoon, when she plopped herself down on the bed, spread her legs and invited him to take the upper hand, Whitebred jumped, literally, at the chance.
He was in her and pounding. She was throwing herself back up at him and moaning. It was going oh, so very great.
When she whipped a six-inch knife out from under the pillow beside her and drove it expertly between his ribs.
“What did you do that for,” he said, dumbly. Seeing the knife, but not feeling a thing. Not feeling much of anything, come to think about it.
“Cause you’re too dumb to live,” she said, and twisted the knife.
He watched as his blood spurted all over her naked breasts.
Now the admiral began to feel something. He felt light headed.
He began to fall. Darkness yawned below him and swallowed him up.
* * *
Captain Neva Jacobin hadn’t minded being a pirate queen. The only drag was having a pirate king. Now that she’d taken care of that, she slipped out of bed and called for Morgan.
“Yes, captain,” her third officer and best friend said, poking his head in the door.
“Clean up this mess,” Neva said.
Morgan raised an eyebrow as he took in her naked, blood spattered state. “Which mess?”
“That dead meat, for starters. I probably should wash off this mess before I meet with the captains, shouldn’t I?”
“I don’t know. I think you might make quite the impression on them dressed just the way you are.”
“You’re too eager to get me naked. I keep telling you, a girl may have to flaunt what she has to get what she wants, but a woman needs a bit of mystery to get men to compete to give her all they have. A slight difference.”
“If you insist,” Morgan said, and, producing a pair of pistols, he hollered for the help to come in and take out the trash. When one looked ready to bolt, maybe give away Neva’s surprise before she wanted it out, Morgan shot him right in the middle of the back of his head.
“That’s what I like about you, sweet cheeks, you’re a dead eye shot,” Neva said, giving him a quick kiss on said sweet cheeks as she pranced by on her way to the shower.
“I aim to please,” Morgan said and got a slap in on Neva’s fanny.
“Later.”
“How later?”
“After the captain’s meeting and whatever rigmarole I have to do to keep them all happy that they have a pirate queen calling the shots now.”
“They’ll be panting at your feet.”
An hour later, the captains were ushered into the late admiral’s conference room. Neva was already standing at the head of the table in tight leather pants and a low-cut red blouse that looked ready to succumb to gravity at any moment.
Half the men couldn’t take their eyes off her breasts. The other half of the male captains kept their eyes on the floor.
The women were another matter. The four female captains took her measure and seemed unable to draw a conclusion.
Still, none of them looked ready to challenge a word she said.
“Be seated, ladies and gentlemen. I don’t know if you’ve heard the latest news, but our erstwhile pirate king has met a most startling fate. While he was busy piercing me, I pierced him to the heart. With that.”
She casually pointed at the bloody knife resting on the table between two pearl handled revolvers. Another of the admiral’s prized possessions.
They were loaded and in easy reach.
Neva wondered if she’d get to use them today. The possibility was positively titillating.
“Whitebred was a fool and too weak to rule. Me? I’m not weak at anything,” she said, and let the tip of her tongue play with her upper lip. “We need cash. Cold, hard cash. It’s waiting for us. All we have to do is grow ourselves some drugs and get it to market, and find ourselves some nice planets and sell them to the highest bidder. Horatio was too slow to get the drug seeds in the ground. The farmers say they have to grow food. Well, who needs a fat farmer? I’ll see that they get off their fat asses and grow us some drugs.”
She eyed her captains. Some seemed to like the idea. No one raised a question. That was good of them. “I’ll also see that all of you skippers with ships that haven’t been resupplied get the fuel and food you need and a chance to work.”
“Where will we get guns?” one captain asked.
“Who needs guns to go exploring?” she said. “Space is big and empty. Grab it by the balls and it will holler just the tune we want to dance to. Right?”
“Right.” “Yes.” and even a few “Yes, ma’am’s” came back at her.
This was going better than she expected.
One of the captains half way down the table raised his left hand as if to ask a question, but it turned out all he needed to do was scratch his head.
She smiled at how easy it was to intimidate these guys. They were eating right out of her hand.
The head scratcher dropped his left hand. Suddenly, his right hand was up, holding an ugly looking automatic.
Neva had a second to grab for the pearl handled revolver, but only a second. She felt the first slug tear into her before she heard the roar of it.
Still, she was clutching for those revolvers as two more slugs smashed into her, knocked her around and slammed her against the wall.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” were her last words.
* * *
Captain Edmon Lehrer of the former flagship Queen Anne’s Revenge kept his automatic in hand, though he was careful to keep it pointed at the deck. He didn’t want to turn this into a shootout at the OK conference room.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you that she was an idiot, a fool, and too damn bloodthirsty to live. What say you?”
They didn’t do more than mumble.
“I’d like to propose that we don’t shoot anyone in a leadership position for say, a day or three. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that we’ve had enough turnover at the top for, oh, at least a week.”
“Then who do you think should be the boss? You?” a woman captain asked.
“How about all of us for a change?” Edmon asked, settling back in his chair at the middle of the table. “Whitebred seemed to think that he had all the answers. I didn’t see many good ones from him, but he sure thought his shit didn’t stink. Her,” he paused to glance at the head of the table. The wall behind it showed smeared blood where Neva had been hit and slowly slid down.
“She was one sick puppy. To stab a man through the heart in the middle of having sex with her. Yuck.”
The guys around the table seemed to agree on that. The gals . . .. Edmon was not so sure of their reaction.
Remind me not to get in bed with any of you gals without frisking you first. Although from what I heard, she had the knife under her pillow. So, I search the room during foreplay.
&nb
sp; “Anyway, starving the farmers to grow a drug cash crop seems kind of short sighted to me. You work them to death this year or the next, then who will grow anything the year after that? Besides, from where I stand, we need to get some food on the tables for all of us, and not just when Whitebred throws a blowout because one of us brought in a boat loaded with chow. What do you say, crew?”
For a long moment, no one spoke. That was the way it was when Whitebred called a meeting. He told them what he wanted to hear from them and they nodded. At least they did after one guy who argued with the fair-haired boy showed up stabbed to death in a dark alley on the station.
Everyone figured it was Whitebred who ordered the hit. Now, Edmon wondered if it hadn’t been Neva’s work.
It was one of the women skippers who spoke up first. “You don’t bind the mouth of the guy who grows the grain, or so I was told by my granny. But we need food and we need some cash. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to do some heavy maintenance on our ships. Fix and replace what’s broke. Some parts we can cannibalize from our prizes, but that can only go so far. What are we going to do?”
“How about we do some raiding?” a younger captain offered. “I been reading up on the history of pirates and the old sea dogs weren’t just taking ships. They’d land and sack a town. There are plenty of small colonies out here that grow crops. Why don’t we land a bunch of guys with guns, shoot up the place, bag up anything they got in their food stores and, I don’t know, burn the place?”
“Rape, pillage, then burn,” one of the woman said. “You got to remember to put it in the right order.”
That got a nervous laugh from those around the table.
“Or not burn,” Edmon offered. “You sheer a sheep, you get wool every year. You kill it, you got mutton for dinner, but not much after that.”
That got him murmurs of agreement.
“They might train up themselves an army,” one captain pointed out.
“By then, we might have ourselves an army,” the first woman to speak up said.
The conversation went on into the evening. When someone called for a break, they had the body taken out. There were two that had to be hauled away. One of her crew had tried to charge into the meeting, with an automatic in each hand.
Rita Longknife - Enemy Unknown: Book I of the Iteeche War (Jump Point Universe 5) Page 15