Rita Longknife--Enemy in Sight

by Mike Shepherd

  “But now we gots ourselves a mess ‘cause you was soft-hearted,” Black Bart said.

  “Billy, we going to spend this morning crying over spilt milk?” Ed asked. “It seems to me that what’s done is done. What I’m seriously concerned about is what we do next.”

  “We mow them all down,” Huzi shouted.

  The room, at least his half, rumbled in agreement.

  “How you going to mow what you can’t see?” Annie asked.

  The room got a bit quieter.

  “You’re so smart,” Billy said. “What do you think we ought to do?”

  Since he was locking eyes with Ed when he slammed down that gauntlet, Ed leaned back in his chair and waited for quiet. With the two acknowledged leaders locking silent horns, the room slowly came to silence too.

  Into the quiet, Ed took a deep breath. “As I see it, we have a choice to make. Depending on which of two options we pick, we’ll have other things to decide, but first we got to get the big one out in the open.”

  “And that would be?” Billy Maynard said, sassy as ever.

  “Do we go or do we stay?” Ed said, tossing the words flat on the table between them.

  Again, the room got real noisy. Most of the racket came from the other end of the table. What with Ed, Calico, and Annie sitting with arms folded on their chests and their mouths closed, the talk at his end of the table was limited to a few comments of agreement.

  “We can’t go,” Huzi shouted. And shouted, and shouted enough to quiet that end of the table. He punctuated the quiet with a final, “We can’t go!”

  He pointed in the general direction of the river. “There’s gold out there. And silver. And jewels if we can find them. I ain’t walkin’ away with my tail between my legs while it’s still there for the taking.”

  Ed eyed Billy. “Is that where you stand?”

  Billy didn’t seem all that sure of where he stood, but with his captains all kind of agreeing with Huzi, it was pretty clear that if he didn’t agree with them, they’d vote him out and put someone else at that end of the table to talk for the rest of them.

  “Ain’t it nice being a pirate king?” Calico Jack whispered softly.

  Annie snickered.

  “It seems we’re all for staying,” Billy said, then rubbed his week-old beard. “But how do we get the gold out of the river and into our pockets?”

  The question got some comments rolling around the table, much like waves upon the sand. And like waves that roar at the beach and then dribble away back to the ocean, the rumblings gave little suggestion of how they should solve their troubles.

  “And what do we do with those four eyed bastards while we’re getting at our gold?” one captain asked.

  “We kill ’em. The only good four-eyed bastard is a dead one,” Black Bart offered.

  “Do you agree?” Billy asked Ed’s end of the table.

  Ed tossed that one to Calico Jack with a quick nod.

  “Yeah, we’re gonna have to kill them,” Calico agreed. “We sure can’t trust them to pan for gold now, can we?”

  The room rumbled agreement.

  “But who will pan for our gold?” Kim asked from his seat behind Ed.

  Ed turned around. “You want to join us at the table?” he asked Kim.

  “Don’t mind if I do. Assuming you are indeed inviting me.”

  “As I see it, that gold is even less likely to jump out of the river and into our pockets than any fish swimming around,” Ed said. “Anyone see another way?”

  The room’s assent was there, if softly grumbled.

  “We who dig the gold will take a third of it,” Kim said, flatly. “How you divide up the other two-thirds will be your own decision.”

  “A third for you little runts,” Huzi exploded, but his was only the first shout. The other end of the table was quickly up in arms. Ed noted that even a few of his captains seemed unhappy with the demand, but they kept their mouths shut, leaving it to him to show he knew best how to protect their interests.

  Ed let the foot stomping and shouting die down quite a bit before he said softly, “If they don’t do the panning, there won’t be a gram for the rest of us. Of course, if you want, you can do the panning and let them have the rifles and stand watch on the beach for the big bastards.”

  The room got quiet again.

  “As I see it,” Calico Jack began, “We’re going to need a lot of cooperation here, or we might as well put our tails between Captain Huzi’s legs and slink away. Now that the big bastards have got all their people out of our hands, I don’t know what they’ll do. Maybe they’ll retreat into the jungle, wait, like Kim mentioned a bit ago, for their Navy and Soldiers to come up and slap us down.”

  The room got real quiet as some very thick heads contemplated that prospect.

  “It’s fine with me if they do that,” Calico Jack said. “I’d grab for all I could get my hands on, keep a good weather eye out for them balls entering the system, and then run like hell with the loot. We’ve done that plenty of times before.”

  Some heads were nodding along with Calico.

  Not Hornigold and Black Bart. “I say we shot them down. This is our planet. I ain’t for giving it back to nobody.”

  “We can make that call when we see how many balls come through the jump,” Ed said, dodging the question for the moment. He hoped the way he said it made it clear that he’d be very cautious when he made that call.

  His skippers nodded along with him.

  “I’m for fighting. Period. My momma didn’t have no yellow kids,” Black Bart grumbled.

  “Okay,” Calico Jack said, “we seem to be arriving at a policy. We’ll pan for gold. Maybe get the silver mine working again. We’ll guard the gold panners and the mine. We’ll use what we got in orbit to brush back any big collection of them we spot anywhere in the jungle. We might even send a few expeditions into the jungle to make sure they keep their distance.”

  “Not under your command,” Huzi snapped.

  “I’d go for a walk in the jungle with Calico,” Annie said.

  “In the moonlight,” came from somewhere at the other end of the table.

  “I think we’ll keep our punitive expeditions to daylight for now,” Jack said.

  “So, we seem to have an agreement,” Captain Billy Maynard said. “Any of them big bastards we see, we shoot on sight. With anything we got up to and including 6-inch lasers.”

  The room roared its agreement.

  “Our little friends here will pan for gold. Maybe do some digging for silver, too.”

  The room eyed Kim. He gave a shallow bow from the waist. “For one third of all gold we retrieve. The same for the silver.”

  “Of course,” Billy said, and his pledge was as good as any ever made to a girl after midnight.

  “We’ll decide how to split up the rest,” Billy said.

  “Why don’t we do it now?” Ed suggested. “Half of it for guards here on the ground. The other half for those in orbit.”

  “Why should someone cool and comfortable up there get as much as I get for sweating down here,” came from one of Billy’s skippers.

  “Because our 6-inch lasers may save your ass when you need it saved,” Annie shot right back. “Assuming some ships can get their lasers working.” She was looking hard at Black Bart when she said that.

  “I can fire when I have to.” he snarled back.

  “And hit what you’re aiming at?” Annie said.

  “Sashay your ass over here and I’ll show you what I can hit,” the pirate leered, and balled up his fist.

  Suddenly Annie’s pistol was in her hand, her aim right between Black Bart’s eyes.

  “Or not,” the pirate said, now eyes only for the table.

  “Ed, keep your hellion under control,” Billy said. “We don’t draw no guns at the Captains’ Table.”

  “Annie,” Ed said.

  Her pistol went back into its holster.

  “I think we have an agreement,” Ed said. “I�
��m assuming that Calico Jack will continue as our ground captain.”

  “He ain’t done so good,” Huzi muttered, but no one offered up a different name for a ground captain, and none of them were stupid enough to suggest that the pirates didn’t need someone in charge of setting up their dirtside defenses.

  Not after last night.

  “Calico Jack will lead the ground defenses,” Billy agreed. “I expect him to give us some idea of what he’s intended on doing before he does it.”

  “I think that can be arranged.”

  “May I ask one question?” Annie said, before the meeting could break up.

  “And what might it be?” Billy said.

  “What’s our food and ammunition situation?”

  Ed and Billy found themselves eyeing each other. Ed was the first to raise a quizzical eyebrow. “Maybe we should send back to Port Elgin and LeMonte for some food.”

  “And send someone with some gold to buy up some ammo,” Annie added with a dimpled smile, “Don’t you just hate it when a gal is right?”

  19

  Acting Captain Constantine Odinkalu was having a very nice time of it. When Captain Edmon Lehrer tapped him to take over the LeMonte colony while the gold-fevered types ran off to seek their fortune, he was none too sure he could handle matters.

  If it hadn’t been for some poor investments to people of rather shady means, he would much rather have preferred to stay and try his hand at the new Savannah. Then, of course, there were the three women who didn’t remember saying yes. Or maybe he had misheard them.

  Anyway, he’d ended up on Whitebred, or LeMonte as it was now, not at all fitting in with the other inmates of this asylum.

  Then again, most of the people he didn’t fit in with had rushed aboard ship and taken off for points unknown, or at least not all that well known. Even the more adventurous icicles had grabbed anything sharp and followed the gold lust.

  That left the meek, or at least more careful, as they liked to tell themselves, planting crops and becoming rather more like a normal colony with every passing day.

  Conny had even agreed to thaw out more farmers, now that they had enough food to feed more people. The scenes of men collecting their wives. Of boyfriends rejoining their girlfriends, with trips to the altar soon after, was heartwarming.

  Hopefully, Captain Lehrer wouldn’t mind too much. The local governor who’d replaced Kim, however, had been most persuasive. “Happy farmers work harder, my friend. Give us our wives.”

  He’d given them their wives, and even turned loose some of the women who’d been unfrozen and used by the pirates. There had been some harsh words about that, but as Conny had told them, “You’re getting them back. There’s nothing more I can do.”

  On the whole, he had a happy colony.

  Then it got complicated.

  Grace O’Malley showed up, her arm in a sling, demanding a couple of tons of wheat, rice, and corn.

  “I don’t have that much,” Conny told her.

  “But the last harvest was supposed to be good.”

  “Yes,” Conny agreed, “but I woke a lot of the sleepers. The farmers wanted their wives and sweethearts.”

  “Shit, Conny, Ed’s going to skin you alive when he hears this.”

  Conny blanched. Captain Edmon Lehrer was a decent kind of man. For a pirate. What he’d do when pressed . . .?

  “Did you find gold?” Conny said, trying to change the subject.

  “More than you ever dreamed of,” she said, and smiled. It was a nice smile, though it had a lot of teeth showing.

  “Well, maybe you could use some of the gold to buy food,” Conny said, tentatively.

  “We didn’t steal the gold to spend it on food,” Grace said. Then seemed to lose herself in thought. “You know anywhere we could get ammo? Lots of ammo and grenades?”

  “I don’t know anyplace much, except Savannah.”

  Grace eyed him. “But you knew your way around Savannah pretty well, didn’t you?”

  Conny didn’t like the look on her face. “Kind of,” he said, and swallowed hard.

  “Son, you need to get one of those dock queens away from the pier. You and me, we’re going grocery shopping. For ammo and grenades, and if you’re a good boy, I’ll even buy a couple of hundred tons of food that, if the price is right, might mean that Ed will let you keep your skin.”

  20

  Captain Rita Nuu-Longknife was happy, but bored. No, make that Commodore Nuu-Longknife. She commanded a squadron of big heavy cruisers and had been granted the honor of being called commodore.

  The pay was the same, but she was supposed to be impressed with the honor.

  Honor didn’t matter a hill of beans to her. If she’d known they’d be sitting so long on their rumps above Savannah, she’d have brought little Alex along and set up housekeeping in the station hotel.

  As it was, she missed Alex, and she and Ray were hardly keeping house out of her in-port cabin. They weren’t there all that much.

  Yes, she could coordinate the scouting fleet from her ship tied alongside the station. It was Ray who was spending most of his days out of sight. He’d shuttled his battalion of Wardhaven Guard down to the planet and was exercising them with Trouble’s raw recruits from Savannah.

  If she had it right, Trouble had been a captain in the Society Marines that beat Ray off that little moon and damn near got him and her killed.

  It was hard to see men who’d been busy trying to kill each other just a year or so ago hoisting beers and talking about old times as if they’d been best of friends since forever.

  Then again, Rita had hired Andy Anderson, the skipper of the defense brigade that Trouble had belonged to. And she was regularly talking over ship handling with Captain Izzy Umbota who had been in the Society of Humanity Navy long before Rita managed to talk and finagle her way aboard an attack transport.

  And Rita was learning that commanding a transport was one long mile away from skippering a big heavy cruiser. These damn things had systems on them that broke every time you looked at them crooked. She’d wondered why the Navy spent so much time tied up at the pier. Now she knew. Just getting her four cruisers out here to Savannah had racked up a fix and mend list an arm long.

  And the new yard. Or correctly, the Nuu Yard’s gear was still teething. It seemed that they were working the kinks out of their gear on her ships.

  She did not think much of that honor, and she told her dad so.

  His message back started with him laughing at her, had some good advice in the middle, and ended with him laughing.

  So, Rita spent more time having her officers and sailors run more tests, drills and, in general, figuring out what needed fixing without running up the cost of an underway day.

  It was hard to believe how much it cost just to meet a payday for the ship’s crew. If you dared to take one away from the pier for a day, it cost an arm and a leg. Then the other arm and leg to fix what broke when it was out in space.

  Why the hell were war ships so damn fragile?

  “Money,” Rita growled in exasperation, then remembered. Thanks to her luck at birth, dad had seen to it that she never lacked for anything. Now, what she needed was the obscene amount that it cost to run a fleet, and she was acting like a kid who wanted a pony for Christmas and was threatening to throw a tantrum because she only got a four-wheel drive toy.

  But that wasn’t all that was bugging her. She’d pulled on just about every string she knew about to get a scouting fleet out to find those damn pirates.

  Everything!

  She had a whole lot of ships out in space hunting for the pirates.

  So what was she finding?

  Nothing! Not a damn thing!

  How did that old song go about the king who marched up the hill and then marched back down again? Was it a king or maybe some other title? Who could keep straight all the different things they called people back before they all had to work for a living.

  Anyway, she had marched a whole lo
t of ships out to the rim, up the hill, so to speak, and what had she found? Nothing.

  It was going to be very hard to march them back again.

  But she’d have to do it pretty soon. Money was running out and without any new ships going missing, the insurance rates were settling back down to their usual level. No one wanted to waste money looking for pirates that weren’t there.

  Exasperated, Rita scrawled her signature on another requisition chit. She hoped they’d have enough money to cover the cost of rewiring the damn superconducting magnetohydrodynamic track on the Artful. The ship shouldn’t have needed that replaced so soon. No doubt, it was a bad bit of work from her father’s yard.

  She thought for a moment about demanding the work for free, but, no doubt, whatever guarantee had been given to the Unity government wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on now. And the Unity thugs had taken their bribes for shoddy work and run, or been hanged, or something worse.

  No, the ships were hers now, and she’d just have to figure out a way to keep them running.

  Until time ran out on all of them.

  She smiled. The new Astute class was being called the Arguable class within her hearing, and the Asshole class when she wasn’t supposed to hear. Sailors.

  “Honey, you home?” came in Ray’s delightful voice.

  “Were else would I be? I don’t dare take the ships out for fear something will break and I’ll have to dredge up money to pay the repair bill.”

  “Everything costs money,” Ray said, coming to give her a ‘time to quit work’ kiss.

  She kissed him back harder.

  “That tasted like a ‘stay home tonight’ kiss,” he said.

  “Can we?”

  He shook his head. “There’s another reception downside tonight at the old Society Embassy. I forget what they’re calling it now, but I need to be there. Next week, we want to take Trouble’s kids out to the rifle range and let them shoot their rifles. Strange that soldiers should actually get to shoot at something.”

  “It’s even stranger when sailors get to shoot,” Rita said, dryly.