“So, do we head to Pandemonium direct or via Xanadu?” Kris asked.
“You’re in charge,” Drago said. Kris snorted at that.
“Why not leave the crazies alone?” mFumbo suggested.
“I don’t think either my grampa or my father would like that,” Kris said slowly. “You got nutcases who think we all need to crawl back into Mother Earth’s womb to hide from some really nasty alien horde they say is coming. And aren’t a bit bothered by the thousands of people that would have to die for every one that survived. On top of that, they believe that some kind of good aliens will take them away when they die, and if you died doing what the Guides tell you to do, those selfsame aliens will treat you like kings and queens.”
Kris shook her head. “Seems to me that we ought to check in on them every fifty years or so.”
“That sounds fairly logical,” Jack said, with only a bit of a scowl on his face. “But are you sure it’s not just a Longknife thing? Something horribly dangerous needs doing so, of course, you’ve got to be the one to do it . . . on a shoestring?”
“Could be, but let’s just suppose you’re a Guide and you hate all things human. Who do you want to be the first human that pries open your Pandora’s box of worms, snakes, and worse? Some Joe Blow merchant captain or one of those damn Longknifes?”
The farmer glanced at the captain. “You didn’t tell me there was a Longknife involved here.”
“I distinctly remember you did not ask.”
“All the ships in human space,” the young farmer groaned, “and I have to walk onto this one.”
“I rest my case,” Kris said. What was it with her family!
8
It took three days to get away from Cuzco. Kris found it painfully slow, but Captain Drago assured her they were actually making record time . . . all things considered.
Those “things” included affidavits that everyone involved in the capture of a pirate had to make concerning everything they did to capture said pirate. Luckily, the crew of the Wasp managed to account for every pirate.
There was also the matter of loading fifty more containers on a ship that really wasn’t intended to load and unload any. When Kris asked how they would unload the containers to a planet with no station, Captain Drago assured her he was leasing two shuttles specifically designed to make easy work of lifting the containers from orbit down to a planet’s surface.
That was something Kris wanted to see. Or better yet, actually fly herself.
And the local Nuu Enterprises came up with a dewar holding a hundred pounds of Smart Metal™ to replace what they’d lost in the fight and to reinforce their shields. Even the crew that winched the dewar into place on their bow and programmed the Smart Metal™ to flow smoothly into place called the use they put it to “shields.” Kris gave up. Let someone else fight it out with the copyright lawyers.
Kris didn’t have a moment to herself until they locked down ship, slipped their mooring cables, and backed out of dock. Only then did she breathe a deep sigh of relief.
Jack caught her doing it. “You spend a couple of days with lawyers, station hands, and cops doing things where all you risk is breaking a nail, and sigh like you’re free from the labors of Hercules when we cast off. We’re headed for a bunch of crazies armed with who knows what, and you look delighted at the prospects. Woman, you are crazy.”
Kris thought about that for a moment, then gave her Marine the best imitation of one of Abby’s disapproving sniffs. “Who’s the crazy? The nut leading you, or the nut following?”
Jack turned away, muttering to himself.
Abby watched the station recede on the monitors. “I see that the Surprise is still docked on the station. What do you think they’re up to?”
Kris eyed the planet below and the cruiser above. “Cuzco is a big place, and last I heard it’s part of the Iberium Association. Surely they can hold their own against one cruiser.”
“It ain’t the cruiser that worries me. It’s that redheaded harridan on it. Vicky Peterwald.”
“You mean Ensign Vicky,” Kris said. “Last I noticed she was learning how to stand a comm officer’s watch. You keep a boot ensign properly busy, and even Vicky’s gonna have trouble scheduling enough free time to sleep and conquer the universe.”
“Humph” was Abby’s conclusion.
Kris let her have the last word. Unless you’ve been a sleep-deprived boot ensign, it’s hard to describe how much trouble you have juggling all the absolutely-must-be-done-now minutiae that seniors dump on those poor, damned JOs.
Kris was on the bridge three days later when they completed their second jump. Initial reports on the system were all negative. “Where’s that farmer? Fronour, isn’t he?”
Two minutes later he was on the bridge. “Is this Xanadu’s system?” Kris asked.
“Are you picking up anything on the radio?”
“Not a thing,” Chief Beni reported from Sensors.
“Then I guess it might be. Skipper I rode out with said he wouldn’t have believed that a planet could have people on it and be so quiet.”
“I guess if you were afraid of the boogeyman, you wouldn’t be sending out any ‘hellos’ either,” Jack observed.
“There is one planet in the habitable zone,” Sulwan said.
“Let’s see what it looks like up close,” Captain Drago said.
That would cost them two days, even at 1.5 gees.
As they went into orbit, the planet was still silent as an undiscovered tomb. “They aren’t transmitting anything,” Chief Beni reported. “Either there is nobody down there, or every one of my sensors has gone bust or”—Beni paused a moment to scowl at those instruments—“somebody has dug a very deep hole in a planet and hid better than my daddy ever thought anybody could.”
“Professor mFumbo,” Kris said to her commlink, “you’ve got two orbits to tell us where the inhabitants are hiding on this planet. Let me know when you find them.”
“I can tell you that we haven’t found them. I’ll call you when I have.”
“Thank you,” Kris said, then turned to the bridge crew. “Shall we start a pool to see how long it takes our boffins to find the Abdicators? I want the full three hours.”
“No fair,” Jack said, “I wanted that, too.”
“Me three,” said Drago.
“Oh ye of little faith,” Sulwan said, studying her navigational board. “Even if you aren’t operating in space, still you need navigational aids to sail the rivers and seas. Roads to carry the freight.” She studied her board some more. And then some more. “At least every other planet needs them.”
Sulwan looked up from her instruments. “Maybe we will be doing well to find any hint of them in three hours.”
Three and a half hours later, Professor mFumbo opened his briefing in the captain’s in-port cabin with a sigh and an admission. “The Abdicators do not want to be found.”
“So we’ve been led to expect,” Captain Drago said. “Does that mean you didn’t find them?”
“I didn’t say that, but I want you to know that any team less than the superb one I put together would still be hunting.”
Captain Drago raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Sulwan had finally found the Abdicators with the aid of the bridge crew and Chief Beni. Kris would prefer not to have her two brain trusts at dagger points.
“How did you find them?” should get the briefing going.
“They can hide, but they cannot make their heat vanish. The laws of thermodynamics apply even to the Great Guides.”
That was the Achilles’ heel that Sulwan had spotted, too.
“It didn’t help them that it is winter in the northern hemisphere, where they are,” mFumbo said, activating a screen. “Usually, you spot an inhabited planet by the vast areas of plowed or fallow fields. Not here. No corn, no potatoes, no wheat fields in stubble. I don’t know what they are growing, but it’s some kind of perennial that they can harvest calories from and leave the roots in place.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Kris said. “Some of the drier areas of Wardhaven are planted in that for soil conservation.”
“But would you want just bread to eat, meal after meal?” mFumbo asked.
“They could have bioengineered other crops to have similar root systems,” Jack said.
“Enough farming,” Kris said. “How did you find the farms?”
“The houses are sod, half-buried in the soil. So are the barns and other outbuildings. But the sod houses are heated and showed up on infrared. We also spotted trails where trucks had traveled recently. The grass under the trails also gave back a different signature than the crop areas.
“And right smack in the middle of the hinterlands, just where you’d expect a city to be, was one. All warm and cozy, with a whole lot more of that road grass,” mFumbo said, with a proud flourish.
“The buildings here are low, grass-covered knolls. Some bigger, some smaller. And then there’s this mountain. Big, with rock pinnacles coming off it like spires. A real eye-catcher. I think we found the Assembly for the Great Guides.”
“Any other towns like that one?” Penny, Kris’s intelligence chief, asked.
“Everything else is smaller. Oh, they all have a larger hill in the middle, but nothing nearly as grand as this one, and none is more than a quarter its size.”
“It has a large river for shuttles to land in,” Kris observed. “It looks like you found what we’re looking for.”
Jack was shaking his head. “They are clearly very security conscious. Would they really put their most important people in the largest target?”
Kris gave Jack a pat on the back. “You are being properly paranoid, my chief of security, but you are not thinking like a top-dog politician. You are the greatest because you have the biggest and most wealthy trappings of power. They may have a bolt-hole somewhere, just in case. But while they are ruling, they must impress the serfs.”
“Did you learn that from your daddy?” Abby asked.
“No, from my first nanny,” Kris said dryly.
“Do we know enough to make contact?” Penny asked, keeping them on track.
“I think we know about all we’re going to know. I’m assuming that if the professor spent all his time talking about the heat signatures, he didn’t find any news channels or other broadcasts on the electromagnetic bands.”
“We didn’t even find the power plants or power lines. Someone is really shielding them.”
“Well, let’s go see if anyone is on guard channel,” Kris said, and tapped her commlink. “Chief Beni, please broadcast this on as many frequencies as possible. ‘Greetings, this is the United Sentient ship Wasp in orbit over you. I am Princess Kristine Longknife, empowered to make contact with you.’ ”
Chief Beni did. His message was followed by a long silence.
Kris shrugged and reached for the mike. “Hi, I am—”
“I heard who you were the first time.” The speaker sounded like a very cranky young man. “Would you please shut up and go away. We, the chosen, have no desire to have our eyeballs ripped out and fried before our eyes like you the damned will have done to you.”
“If they ripped out our eyeballs to fry them, how are we going to see them do it?” Abby asked.
“Shush. Do not debate ideology or theology with zealots.”
Kris flicked on her commlink. “I have come to speak with your Assembly of Great Guides.”
“They don’t waste time with the doubting damned. Go away.”
“I am not going away.”
“You have been warned. I have spent enough time sending out a radio beacon for the hordes. We are done here.”
“I am going to land and march my Marines straight to your Great Guides.”
“You don’t know where they are.”
“I think you are wrong.”
“We will wipe you out.”
“I doubt you can massacre a full company of Marines armed with the latest in human weapons.”
There was a scraping sound, the kind you might get if a very old type of microphone was being removed from one speaker and taken over by another.
“Miss Longknife,” came in an older and more thoughtful voice. “Are you one of those Longknifes?”
“I have the honor of having Ray Longknife as my great-grandfather.”
“And you’re a princess. Is the rest of human space falling back on those old tried and failed ruling tropes?”
“I prefer to think we are trying a new twist on an old way of looking at things.”
“Well, I’m sorry our young protector of the peace seems to have lost his peace. He did have a point. We do not disturb the Great Guides for small talk.”
“We Longknifes do not go far beyond the accepted rim of human settlement for small talk.”
“There is that. We will let you and a proper escort land. You seem very confident that you know where you are going, but we will light a bonfire beacon for you.”
“Not a radio beacon.”
“If you know us at all, you know we abhor such things.”
“Light your beacon. We’ll be down next orbit,” Kris said, then waited until her commlink button was clearly red. “Chief, are all links closed?” They apparently were closed enough that the chief did not hear the question.
“So,” Jack said, “how big is a proper escort, my risk-taking princess? How many Marines should I saddle up?”
“All of them, I think,” Kris said.
That got a wide smile from her security honcho.
Sixty-four minutes later, all four shuttles separated from the Wasp and began their descent. They held nearly a full company of Marines in full battle rattle. The only Marine not in armor was Jack, in dress red and blues. He had on his spider-silk underwear, as did Kris and Penny, Abby . . . in uniform . . . and Chief Beni with an armful of black boxes.
Cara wanted to come, too. “Isn’t meeting new and strange cultures a great way to enlarge my education?” Got a no from Kris, Abby, and Nelly, in that order. The youngster locked herself in her room to pout. Kris sincerely hoped her negotiations with the Great Guides of the Abdicators would go better than her first try with a twelve-year-old.
The big town was indeed the landing site designated by a huge bonfire now burning on the right shore of its river, the side with the rocky mountain. The first two shuttles were full of Marines, as was the fourth; Kris’s team was in the third. Kris left the driving to others as she scanned everything they knew about the Abdicators. That they were noisy about their views and secretive about their plans was known to all.
ANY HINT AS TO WHY THEY IMMIGRATED OUT PAST THE RIM? Kris asked Nelly.
NO HINT IN ANY OF THE MEDIA AT THE TIME. THEY WERE A GENERAL PAIN IN THE NECK, PREACHING DEATH AND DESTRUCTION ON STREET CORNERS ONE MINUTE, THEN GONE. MOST REPORTS REMARK ON THE UNIVERSAL APPROVAL OF THE PEACE AND QUIET.
BUT NO ONE KNEW OR CARED WHERE THEY WENT?
APPARENTLY NOT, KRIS. THE MEDIA HAD THE USUAL NUMBER OF CELEBRITY MURDERS, DRUG USERS, AND ANTICS TO COVER. AND THE DEBATE ON TAXES, BUDGETS, AND EXPANSION.
SHOW ME THE PICTURES OF THE GREAT GUIDES.
Nelly did. A dozen men, all in middle age, all looking very intense, stared back at Kris. None looked at all interested in what she might have to say.
The shuttle landed smoothly and ran itself up on the bank of the river. Jack dismounted first, then offered Kris a hand so she might step from the shuttle to dry land at no risk of falling into the river mud. The Marines in her shuttle trotted past their officers and ran to join the other Marines in formal ranks.
Not everyone stood row on row, making a great target. A dozen qualified snipers roamed a sort of perimeter. They would have kept back any crowd . . . if there had been a crowd. On the streets visible from where Kris stood, a half dozen women walked as if they had someplace to be. And ignored the show.
The one exception was an large open-top car with a driver in front and a man in back. Kris and Jack, Abby and Penny
maybe two paces behind, strolled through the break between first and second platoon and up to the car. The man in the back stood.
“I am Princess Kristine,” Kris said to him.
“I am Prometheus, who talked with you earlier. My driver is Lucifer, who had the honor to talk with you first.”
Who would name a child after the devil? But now that she was closer, other things became clearer. It wasn’t just women walking by, but men as well. All hair was long. Both sexes wore the same bedsheet thing as the two men in the car.
MAYBE IT IS A TOGA? Nelly offered.
Toga, Prometheus, Lucifer was all coming up Greek to Kris. But then, that could be one of the reasons they set off on their own, to build a world they wanted. Get ready for a wild bunch of mixing and matching, Kris warned herself.
Prometheus opened the door and stepped to the ground. “I brought you a car, not fire. But from the looks of matters, I would have needed a truck convoy, and we really don’t have that many trucks to spare. Would you care to ride with me or walk with your, um, friends.” He finished with a bit of a smile, though Kris had no idea why.
“Is that where we are going?” Kris said, pointing at the huge mound at the other end of the street where they stood. It was marked by two stone spires. One was white and richly veined in gold. The other was a kind of blue-gray stone with silver running through it. Kris would have bet anything one was for the good aliens, the other for the one that fried your eyeballs.
“Yes,” Prometheus said, “that is where our Great Guides assemble to meet with us. They have graciously agreed to meet with you today.”
“If it would not inconvenience your Great Guides, I will walk,” Kris said. “I’ve been cooped up in a starship for way too long. I suspect my Marines would enjoy the walk, too.”
“Understandable. It will give us more time to gather the full assembly. Your arrival was more than a little surprise.”
“Most systems have jump buoys that announce ship arrivals.”
“You will understand our reluctance to do that.”
Gunny got the company moving in the direction Jack ordered. The snipers deployed as skirmishers, but the others put on a solidly intimidating show of mass and potential firepower.
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