“About half so far,” he reported. “Oh, what don’t you know. They’ve just begun to speed up the scheduled deliveries. They’re also canceling anything that can’t be delivered by noon tomorrow.”
“That was fast,” his boss said.
“I suspect that our attention has not gone unnoticed,” Taylor said. “I would bet that when we accessed Prometheus, a flag went up in Longknife Tower. No doubt, this need for speed was not totally unexpected.”
“They’re moving,” came from the driver of the van. Taylor stuck his head out of the back and got a view of the commander and Kittikon, now dressed in shirts and slacks, jumping into the car in the driveway. In a moment, it gunned into the street and took off.
“Shall we follow them?”
His boss tossed the question to Taylor with a raised eyebrow.
“I suspect they’re headed for the beanstalk and from there to the Nuu Yards. Leslie, check all those merchant marine officers you identified. How many of them are on the move?”
“About two dozen. No, twenty-seven.”
“That’s an odd number,” Mahomet said.
Taylor frowned in thought, but his boss gave voice to the problem first. “A lot of them moving, but none of them compromised. How do we get someone to talk to us?”
“Usually, something comes up,” Taylor said. “They are the bad guys.”
“But these bad guys are really good,” Leslie said with a frown on her usually optimistic young face.
Taylor’s commlink buzzed. He tapped it.
“Agent Foile,” Member of Parliament Longknife said.
“Here, sir.”
“I just got a call from Annie Smedenhoff. It seems her boyfriend has just been ordered up the beanstalk to join the crew of the Pride of the Free Market. He was told something about the intended navigator being on a ship coming in but they want to sail now. Annie’s in a panic. She told him what she thinks the Prides are up to, and he’s not at all interested in going, but it seems to me that we need someone on one of those ships.”
“We most certainly do, sir,” Taylor said, smiling at Leslie. She grinned back, made a fist and punched air. “When does he have to be headed up?” the special agent asked.
“He’s been told he has four hours to pack.”
“Tell him, and Annie, to take all of the four hours. I’ll see what I can do about arranging something.”
“You do that. I’ve got to get going on something else. The whole damn fleet’s out on maneuvers and there aren’t many available to tail those ships.”
“We don’t really want to be obvious on their tail, sir.”
“I’ve watched enough TV to know that, Agent. You do what you can do. I’ll do what I have to,” and he rang off.
Taylor found himself staring at the roof of the surveillance van. The others stayed silent as he thought.
Then he tapped his commlink. He called a number he had only used twice.
A woman’s voice answered him. “You have problems, I see.”
“If you are following me, then you know I need to have someone get a message off a starship before it jumps out of the system, but no one must know it has been sent.”
“I think I have something at hand. Meet me at the Galleria. I’ll be waiting for you outside.
Things must be critical. The woman blew her cover by being there, pacing back and forth, as they rolled up. She jumped in the van and ordered. “Head for the space elevator station.”
The van moved quickly through traffic.
“I have a ring,” the tech magician said without preamble. “It will remember what it types. It can burst transmit that memory with a simple command. Three twists around the finger causes it to send.”
“So, how do we get it to the navigator?” Taylor’s boss mused.
“Rick and I could be a couple,” Leslie said, “with me headed up the beanstalk. We could do a brush-by of the guy.”
Taylor shook his head. “Both of you are Bureau. They’d spot you and suspect anything you did.”
“We don’t have time to pull in an undercover team,” the boss said. “And there’s no way to know which of our assets have been turned.”
“We could play it straight up,” Taylor said slowly.”
“Huh,” came from both the tech savvy woman and his boss.
Taylor eyed the technical magician. “Can you get instructions on how to use that ring to the navigator without Alex’s gang knowing it?”
“Do bears connect to the net in the woods?” she said with a confident smile. “But you still have to get him the ring.”
Now it was Taylor’s turn to smile. He keyed his commlink to a very familiar number. “Love, I need to ask a favor of you. Could you meet me at the space elevator station? I’ll be going up, and you may dump on me all of the anger that you have been kind enough to keep to yourself.”
“Are you asking for me to argue with you in public?” came back in a dangerously even voice.
“Yes, love.”
“That . . . will be a joy,” she said, and rang off.
“Is this a good idea?” his boss asked.
“I’ll tell you in a week,” Taylor said.
They returned to the bureau headquarters. Shortly thereafter, Taylor took public transit to the beanstalk station.
His wife accosted him as he got out at the station.
“Where do you think you’re going?” was loaded with all sorts of prickle.
“I have a job up on the station,” he said evenly.
“You’re on vacation.”
“Right after I finish this.”
“That’s what you told me yesterday, and the day before that and . . .” the argument went on from there, getting louder and more explosive. People took it in . . . and turned away, embarrassed for them. No doubt certain security cameras were also taking it in and conveying it to interested parties.
Taylor did manage to get a few quiet words in. His wife did not pause in her full harridan act, but acknowledged him with a slight widening of her eyes.
Taylor spotted Annie and a very nice looking young man. They easily filled the all too familiar role in the station of lovers about be to parted, and very reluctant to do so.
Taylor slipped the ring into his wife’s hands during an attempt to hold her hand and calm her. She slapped him with one hand as she slid the ring onto the small finger of the other.
Taylor waited until the flow of the crowd forced the two couple closer together. He stayed on the far side of his wife from Annie and her boyfriend. His wife chose that moment to turn away from him in full huff.
And ran right into the other couple.
The collision brought on a cascade of falling luggage and a flood of apologies, with several accusatory words and glowers aimed at Taylor for driving her into this personal accident.
Taylor did attempt to say a few words to the couple, but his wife talked over him. When the two younger folks moved on, there was no ring on Taylor’s wife’s finger.
It was easy to tell, she was wagging one finger of that hand under his nose. “You take your lame ass up that beanstalk and you better bring a lock pick home tonight, ‘cause I’ll have changed the lock. And I’ll have a chain on the door anyway.”
“I have to go,” Taylor said softly. Firmly. Sadly.
They argued, standing there, impeding traffic, with her holding on tight to his arm and him saying he had to go until the very last warning of the ferry’s departure forced him to yank his arm away from her and flee at top speed for the boarding dock, leaving a very angry woman crying in his wake.
I wonder if she had any idea she’d be doing something like that on that long ago spring day when she said “I do”! Taylor thought as he just barely caught the departing ferry.
Taylor continued playing the senior agent for the trip up. He encountered a full six of the Star Line merchant officers and tried desperately to suborn them. In each case, he failed.
He followed the flow of merchant officers an
d sailors right up to the gate to the Nuu Yards where a grinning pair was waiting for him.
“You can’t go in,” Security Agent Cob said, putting a hand on Taylor’s chest and shoving him back with a will.
“Yep,” Security Specialist Kittikon said. “You ruined my morning. Now I get to ruin your day, month and year.”
“I’ll see that the Port Captain withdraws their authorization to sail,” Taylor snapped.
“You try,” both said with confident grins.
So Taylor tried. It was amazing how much bureaucracy there was in a space stations port office. So he pulled strings. And found that for every string he was pulling on, there were a pair of six inch cables pulling the other way.
Taylor even resorted to trying to have the Navy defense batteries ordered to fire on the ships if they moved. It turned out that the captain with the authority to do that was away from his desk and no one knew when he’d be back.
Clearly, a lot of Alex Longknife’s money had gone into getting those ships away from their piers.
At 12:30 local they sealed locks. By 1:00 they were away and by 2:00 they were out of range of the defense batteries.
It was a well-played charade. For those actually involved in it, Taylor hoped they’d live long enough to spend their bribes. For himself, he hoped the ring and instructions worked as well as advertised.
He was back down the elevator and at his desk when Leslie jumped out of her seat at her desk. “M-688,” she whispered. “They’re going to M-688.”
Taylor called Member of Parliament Honovi Longknife with that information.
“That’s a long way away from here,” the Longknife scion said. “I’ve got a squadron of heavy cruisers getting ready to take off after them, but I’m none too sure I can catch them.”
“What about calling Kris Longknife?” Leslie put in. “The court is deliberating her fate. If they don’t chop off her head, she might be able to do something.”
“How?” Mahomet put in. “Even a Longknife needs a spaceship to chase starships.”
“Maybe she has one,” Leslie shot back. “The school kids on Musashi have been raising money to buy her a ship and go see what the situation is on the planet she tried to save. They’re having car washes and bake sales and all sorts of stuff.”
“Yeah,” Rick said. “That ought to buy her a row boat.”
“Actually,” her brother said, “it might get her a bit more than that. Mitsubishi is trying something new with Smart Metal. Let me see if Admiral Crossenshield can do something there,” the Member of Parliament and the politician who stayed home muttered, half to himself.
Taylor found himself eyeing Leslie. The charter member of the Princess Kris Longknife fan club was grinning from ear to ear.
Taylor set about finishing up loose ends, but his boss came in, took his hat and coat from the stand and handed them to him. “You go home to your wife. She did a superb job today. I hope it was acting, but I have a bad feeling about it.”
Taylor took his offered coat, put his hat on his head and took the trolley home.
The lock had not been changed. His wife met him before he had a chance to close the door with a warm hug and an even warmer kiss.
“That was most cathartic. You must involve me in your work more often,” she said slyly. “How’d the rest of your day go?”
“Better than some. Worse than others,” he answered in his usual, noncommittal way.
And they might have made a good start on making it a very good day, but the kids chose that moment to storm in from school and the best part of the day had to be put off until later.
Much later, as Taylor held his slumbering wife, he mused on the fortune he had in his family. He found his thoughts roving over what he had discovered of the ups and mostly downs of the Longknife family. He shook his head and wished Kris Longknife better luck with family in the future than she seemed to have had so far in her young life.
Preview: Kris Longknife – Defender, by Mike Shepherd,
coming from Ace in October, 2013
Life is full of decisions. It’s time for Kris to make some hard ones.
Chapter One
“That was what was about to attack Alwa?” Granny Rita said. Once commodore of BatCruRon 16, she’d fought hopeless battles. Still, her voice held dismay as she surveyed the wreckage of the alien base ship.
“It was about twice this size before we took some bites out of it,” Lieutenant Commander, Her Royal Highness, Kris Longknife said. Herself no stranger to hopeless battles, she added. “And we’re still quite a ways off. It will get bigger.”
Rita Nuu Longknife Ponce, former commodore and captain of the battlecruiser Furious, was the recognized leader of the humans, and uniformly called Granny Rita by both the heavy ones, us humans, and the indigenous inhabitants of Alwa, who were either the People, or the Light People.
Granny Rita turned to translate to the delegation of six Alwans who had come out to see and verify for all the unbelievable story Kris had told their Associations of Associations.
Privately, Granny Rita called them the assembly the flock of flocks, but she’d warned Kris never to say that where any Alwan might overhear.
Kris listened as Granny Rita and the Alwans clicked and cooed with maybe one word in five sounding familiar to Kris. It was a pigeon that they’d worked out over eighty years.
However, Nelly, Kris’s not-very-personable computer, was working on a translator for the two people. Kris wondered if some of the peace that had been maintained for the last eighty years between the Alwans and the humans might have been helped by both sides’ not fully understanding what the other side said.
When Nelly finished this effort, Kris would have to have a talk with her.
The six Alwans’ movements were quick, almost jerky, as they moved around the forward lounge. Their arms and hands waved. Kris had a feeling that a couple of million years earlier, the flock would have taken flight at this news. Now, having given up most of their feathers as well as flight, they formed and re-formed groups of two or three, talking among themselves and rarely glancing at the view screen that showed the battered alien-invasion base.
This meeting was not being held on the USS Wasp’s bridge. The Alwans had taken in the intensity of the bridge crew at their work and immediately expressed distress to Granny Rita. Kris had offered the Forward Lounge with it four huge screens. Since Kris’s staff were all equipped with Nelly or one of her children, Kris was confident they could do anything that needed doing while letting the Alwans take in the familiar activities of humans eating, drinking and, in general, enjoying themselves in the familiar surroundings of a restaurant.
And now, thanks to the magic of Katsu’s wizardry with Smart MetalTM, Kris was able to separate the restaurant from her transferred Tac Center with a transparent wall. Yep, Katsu-san could make Smart MetalTM clear as glass!
Kris missed him already, but Katsu said he had trained the Wasp’s ship maintainers as well as he could. He wanted to get back to Musashi and his job at Mitsubishi Heavy Space Industry; his head was already full of ideas for making the next class of ships even better. Thus, buzzing with new ideas, he joined the IMS Sakura for the long voyage back to human space.
Kris hated the idea that the Wasp was all by itself clear on the other side of the galaxy. Still, there was no question folks back home needed to know that the sacrifice of their Fleet of Discovery had saved the world they fought for. Even more, the strange planet they laid down their lives for had provided a home to a desperate group of humans. Now, eighty years later, it sheltered a growing human colony.
That colony was led by the former wife of King Raymond of United Society (or United Societies depending on how you thought the new constitution should be interpreted). Problem was, she had buried two husbands in the last eighty years on Alwa and was now mother to seven, grandmother to thirty-four and great-grandmother to 123. That number was subject to change . . . often.
Kris herself was included among the great-
grandchildren and had spent a full week meeting a big chunk of her half uncles, aunts, and cousins. Still to one and all of the humans on Alwa, related or not, the former commodore was Granny Rita.
Surprises on top of surprises. Kris could only wonder how the news the IMS Sakura carried would be received.
But for now, she had no time for Longknife family matters; a huge alien mother ship loomed larger and larger on their screens. Now the Alwans seemed mesmerized by its promise of death. They huddled before the screen, eyes locked on it, only occasionally whispering something low.
“This isn’t good,” Granny Rita whispered to Kris. “Once or twice, I’ve seen one group of them resort to confrontation to settle differences. When one side is fully intimidated by the others’show of force, the weaker side would just hunkers down and surrender. These folks don’t fight. If you can strut yourself a good enough show, you win.”
“Can you get across to them that a couple of human ships smaller than this one chewed that monster up pretty good and only spit out this much?” Kris asked.
Granny shrugged. “They’ve walked this ship. They know its measure. That . . .?”
“Maybe we should have shown them the two Hellburners we have amidships?” Jack said. He was her chief of security, skipper of a rump battalion of Marines composed of a reinforced Wardhaven Marine company and a borrowed, and equally reinforced Musashi Marine company.
For all too brief time, they’d managed to be lovers.
At the time, they were a fugitives and Jack not in Kris’s chain of command.
Now Kris was back on the new Wasp and Jack was keeping her safe and both of them were keeping doors open whenever it was just the two of them alone.
Simply put, Navy regs on fraternization sucked bilge water, through a straw. But Kris and Jack wore the uniform and followed the regulations.
Kris shook her head. “The Hellfire missiles look pretty tiny.” Though the few cubic millimeters of Neutron Star material weighed fifteen thousand tons, it was hard for anyone who hadn’t seen them in action to believe how destructive they were.
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