Kris Longknife: Mutineer

by Mike Shepherd

  “What mess?” Kris asked.

  “Not for the likes of me to know, girl, but if I was a betting man, I wouldn’t bet an Earth dollar that the Society flag is flying over Government House next Landing Day.”

  “Devolution,” both Kris and Tom whispered the word. “Is it that close?” Kris finished.

  “Ask the prime minister. Better yet, ask your grampas.”

  Kris wasn’t so sure she wanted to meet folks studied in her history books. Besides, she had things to figure out about her last mission and with the whole of human space on the line, this was no time to meet a bunch of family strangers and dump her problems on them. “Harvey, could I borrow a car? I’d like to go see Aunt Tru about some computer stuff.”

  “Tru will love that,” Harvey agreed, “but why borrow a car? Isn’t my driving good enough for you?”

  “Yes, Uncle Harvey, but aren’t you busy?”

  “Hang around this place too long, and they’ll have me taking care of the cook’s wee ones or even my own great-grandkids. Nice little tots, but if I don’t keep moving, the women will have me changing diapers. I’d rather be driving.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Kris and Tom were in the backseat of a much smaller car. Of course she had time, honorary Aunt Tru assured Kris. She’d just been working on a way to jimmy the new local lottery, but their network was down just now, so there was no rush. Tom gave Kris a questioning look and confessed to no longer being sure when the people around Kris were exaggerating. Kris laughed and told Tommy how Tru had helped her through elementary algebra in first grade and even given Kris her first computer. Then they got to Tru’s penthouse apartment; it hadn’t changed a bit, though a shiny new complex was going up next door.

  “I thought you said she was a retired government worker?” Tommy said.

  “She is. She bought this place when she won the lottery fifteen years back.”

  Tom gave Kris a sidewise glance but didn’t say a word.

  Kris missed a step, rerunning what she’d just said. “Aunt Tru would never cheat. If she could win the lottery every time, why doesn’t she?” Kris asked no one in particular.

  “Smart woman knows not to push a good thing too far.” Harvey winked.

  And Kris found herself wondering just how much of what she accepted without question as a kid was in dire need of a second look now that she was a woman.

  Then Tru opened the door, and Kris got lost in a hug of mega-huge proportions. Mother never touched, and Father never even came close to Kris, but Aunt Tru hugged. Kris let the breath go out of her as she had so many times before. With it went the tightness in her stomach and the iron-fisted grip at her throat.

  It was Tru who broke the hug and ushered them into her living room with its spectacular view of Wardhaven. With Papa Nuu’s industrial plants off planet, the capital city was a lovely place of trees, boulevards, and towering buildings watered by the Old Miss’s meanderings. Tru had heard of Kris’s experience on Sequim…it seemed most of the Rim had. There were even pictures of her LAC ride, so that was not something Kris could avoid when she met Mother, though, with luck, the woman would have no idea what she was looking at. Tru briefly swapped stories with Kris about the one or two times she had ended up with the booties, dodging bullets while she tried to find the right algorithm to close down all that noise. Now Kris caught the tightness around her aunt’s eyes, the catch in her voice.

  Tru dismissed herself to get herbal tea or fresh-squeezed lemonade for her guests. That was one of Tru’s rules; no talk before some good, healthy refreshments. Even in Kris’s bottle days, a dose of Auntie Tru’s lemonade had been better than bourbon. Kris rummaged up the computer she had removed from the crime scene on Sequim. When Tru returned with a tray, it was sitting as innocent as it could on the coffee table.

  “A little present for your Auntie Tru?” she said, putting down the tray.

  “A little old and beaten up for a present,” Kris said. “More like a puzzle. You still like puzzles?”

  “Umm,” Tru said giving the computer a quick once-over while the others served themselves. The computer was an old wrist unit, fairly thick and heavy, at least 200 grams. It used an old-fashioned display; didn’t even jack into eyeglasses. Tru tried and failed to activate it. “Wiped at a pretty low level,” she observed.

  “Can you get at it?” Kris asked.

  “Probably,” Tru muttered, eyeing the empty tray.

  “I thought I had some cookies, but I seem to be out.”

  “I could bake some,” Kris said, jumping up. Tru had been the one who taught Kris all that she knew about kitchens. It wasn’t much, but Tru could whip up a wicked bunch of chocolate chip cookies, and Kris had learned from the expert.

  “You talked me into it,” Tru smiled, her eyes still concentrating on the unit. So, while Tru turned her kitchen table into a hacker/cracker dreamland, Kris led Tom in an assault on Tru’s immaculate kitchen. As they had for many years, the pans waited for Kris in the lower right drawer beside the oven. The flour was in the white earthen jar on the back of the kitchen counter. A bag of Ghirardelli chocolate chips stood its usual watch from the top shelf in the pantry. So much in the world had changed, but Aunt Tru’s kitchen was a constant Kris could always count on.

  There is something to be said for the spiritual healing power of turning a little girl loose in a kitchen to bake cookies…or a big girl, for that matter. As the wondrous smells collected around them, she and Tom licked the spoon, snatched scraps of dough, and would have pulled chunks off the main ball if Tru hadn’t announced loudly and forcefully her fear that nothing would remain to cook.

  Harvey curled up in a corner with his reader, checking all the oddities in the news and sharing the strangest with anyone listening. Tru tinkered with the computer; its cover was now off, its innards revealed like entrails to be read.

  “This bit of artificial intelligence is part of a kidnapping investigation, ongoing on Sequim, isn’t it?” Tru asked, attaching chunks of the offending unit to an analyzer she’d built herself.

  “Yes,” Kris admitted, pausing from greasing a cookie sheet. “But the local cops didn’t seem all that interested in it. At least, no one asked where it went. I figured you’d have a better chance of getting at it than anyone on Sequim. And besides, I came near to dying on a minefield set by those punks, brand-new Mark 41 land mines that aren’t even issued to my marines, much less to kidnappers. I want to know where all their tech came from.” Kris pursed her lips.

  “And the up-front money.”

  “How are they building their case?” Tru said absentmindedly.

  “On confessions,” Harvey put in. “The four are singing like fine Irish tenors in a well-stocked pub, wouldn’t you say?” he asked Tom.

  “Loud, if not so sweet,” the young ensign answered.

  “Four,” Kris turned from her kitchen duties. “We captured five.”

  “One had a heart attack the day after you bagged him,” Harvey said without looking up from his reading.

  “Hmm,” Tru muttered before Kris could ask which dead man was already filling a coffin. “I’m in, but it seems that paranoid here encrypted everything. Looks like a standard commercial package. Should have some interesting stuff in a few minutes. Who are these kidnappers?” Tru asked Harvey.

  “They claim to be just petty crooks,” Harvey said, flipping through his reader.

  “And they were from?”

  Harvey paged back. “Earth, New Haven, Columbia, New Jerusalem.” That covered a big chunk of the Seven Sisters, the first planets colonized from Earth. The first two, New Eden and New Haven had been wide open. Yamato, Columbia, Europa, and New Canton drew their original populations from specific regions of old Earth. New Jerusalem had been a unique case…and still was. Five petty thugs from Earth and three of her seven overpopulated sisters had snatched the child of the general manager of a raw rim colony. That invited a raised eyebrow from Tru.

  Harvey snorted. “Damn punks got a government dole to fee
d them and nothing else to do. Small-time hoods must have figured they could make it big out here hitting on some hardworking rim type and retire to perpetual fun and games back home.”

  Kris hid her surprise at Harvey’s attitude. She knew a lot of rim folks didn’t think much of the billions in the central worlds that wouldn’t immigrate. Kris had even studied the situation in college. It wasn’t that Earth and the Seven Sisters actually were welfare states; their teeming billions were as fully employed as you’d expect for a mature economy. What they were was self-absorbed, maybe a bit self-important, and more than a bit decadent. It wasn’t a mixture to appeal to the rim worlds. Add in an incident like this that only served to solidify misperceptions like Harvey’s, and things could get volatile. “That’s the way some folks would perceive it.” Kris skirted confrontation with her old friend.

  “Perception is everything,” Tru muttered. “And reality…may be subject to change,” Tru finished with a smile and sat back in her chair. “That didn’t take so long. Let me copy this to my newest child. Sam can organize the data while we try a few of those cookies,” Tru said, then mumbled softly to her personal computer to get it working on the project.

  “They need a bit more time to cool,” Kris said, but was already using the spatula to move them to a plate. The chips were gooey and dripping; the cookies were as delicious as when Kris had needed to stand on the chair to get at them. So much had changed in her life; Aunty Tru’s cookies had not.

  The first dozen cookies were gone, the second batch just out, as a third batch went in the oven, when Tru grew distracted by Sam’s report. Tru slipped a phone in her ear, muttered a few things under her breath, and passed up the next offered cookies. She leaned back, eyes going unfixed as she listened, a frown growing on her lips. “Seems to be a perfect match for the news reports. Too perfect.”

  Kris set down a cookie, wiped her hands, and took a close look at the wrist unit. It looked old, battered, pretty much the standard type of unit that anyone could buy for twenty bucks for the last fifty years. Kris reached up to move the overhead light. Inside the back of the unit was a mess. “What’s that crud?” she asked.

  Harvey looked up from his paper, squinting. “Looks like the gunk that gets in your wristband. You know, the stuff you clean out when you’re supposed to be doing your homework.”

  “But inside the unit?”

  “Bastard must have sweated a lot and never cleaned it. Slopped over inside. Surprised it’s still working,” Harvey shook his head at such slovenliness.

  “Let me see that. Oh, Auntie’s eyes are getting old,” Tru shook her head ruefully. She left the room, returning in a moment with a black box that Tom was immediately making loving eyes at. Tru set it down next to the unit, then began muttering orders to her computer. In a moment, tiny filaments sprouted from her box and weaved their way to the unit under study. Tiny, thin strands glistened in the light as they wandered over the surface of the unit’s back. Then two attached themselves to something. Those strands attracted others, and the filaments wove together into a solid pair of wires.

  “Found the input and the output.” Tru smiled happily.

  Kris frowned. “Input and output of what?”

  “The real computer this bastard was carrying. Your poor old Aunt Tru has been wasting her time on the stalking horse they put there to distract her. Now we’ll get at the real stuff. This may take a while. Do I smell cookies burning?”

  That batch went into the trash can. While Kris made the next batch, Tru and Tommy leaned over the wrist unit, studying it with new respect. “What’s a two-bit punk doing with this kind of tech?” Harvey asked.

  “They’ve been surprising us with tech all along,” Kris called over her shoulder as she put the next cookies in the oven.

  “Yes, yes,” Tru agreed. “The old girl is getting forgetful.” Kris wiped her hands on a towel and went to stand over her two favorite elders. “What kind of computer is that? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “You won’t for a few more years,” Tru assured her. “Self-organizing circuits will revolutionize wearable computers like my Sam and your Nelly, but the cost is out of sight. Some of my friends are using it for covert missions.”

  “Like this one?” Tommy asked.

  Tru leaned back in her chair, eyeing the objects lying on her kitchen table as if seeing them for the first time. “Yes. Like this operation.”

  The following silence was broken by two beeps. Kris turned her attention to the oven, whose timer she had finally remembered how to work, while Tru returned to the center of their attention. Kris was starting to put the next dozen cookies on the sheet.

  “Don’t,” Tru ordered. “Put the dough in the refrigerator. Turn the oven off, and put the cookies in a napkin. We’re going visiting.”

  “Where?” Harvey asked.

  “Nuu House. Kris needs to talk to her Great-grandfathers Ray and Trouble.”

  Chapter Seven

  “We can’t bother them!” Kris shouted, gulping hard.

  “You can’t,” Harvey said bluntly, pocketing his reader.

  “Her great-grandfathers need to fill Kris in on a bit of family history,” Tru said, placing the computer parts carefully in a stasis box she had produced from a drawer under the table. “They are at Nuu House. We are going to Nuu House.”

  “But they’re doing important stuff,” Kris pleaded. “We can’t bother them.”

  “More important than your life?”

  Harvey cut in before Kris could figure out what kind of response that deserved. “Tru, you won’t get into Nuu House. They’ve got marines crawling all over the place.

  They’re applying the Mark I eyeball to all visitors and their credentials. You and all your electron magic will not get past the first eager marine with an M-6.”

  “Old-fashioned, are they?” Tru sighed, closing the now full stasis box.

  “Very old-fashioned,” Harvey said.

  “Then we’ll have to go elsewhere. Harvey, take us to the prime minister’s residence.”

  “No,” Kris squeaked, but her chauffeur was already moving toward the door, Tru on his heels. “We can’t bother the prime minister. He’s got a full schedule. You can’t just barge in on the man who’s running the planet.” Boy, did Kris know that.

  “He will find time in his busy schedule.” Tru paused, her mouth moving in subvocal communications with Sam. “He already has. So has your mother.”

  Kris hurried after Tru, Tom following her. “My mother. Oh, no. She’s got a social schedule booked solid ‘til New Years. Besides, you don’t want to talk to my mother.” Kris tried to chuckle. It came out sounding even to herself more like a terrified cackle. “Why do you want to talk to either of them?”

  Tru and Harvey were at the elevator. Kris and Tom hurried to squeeze in as the doors closed. A woman, toy poodle in her arms, joined them on the next floor. The ride down was silent.

  “What is it you think you have to talk to Mother and Father about?” Kris asked as she hurried to keep up Harvey’s fast pace in the cool shade of the underground parking garage.

  “Your life.” Tru snapped, settling in the front seat beside Harvey. That left Kris and Tom the backseat.

  As she belted in, Kris still tried to stop the car. “So the mission could have gone bad. That’s part of the risk you take when you put on the uniform. Yeah, I want to talk to the prime minister about the equipment, but I was planning on getting him aside when he was in a good mood. Maybe, when he pins that medal on me. There’s no rush,” she insisted. “God, you don’t just barge in on my father, and definitely not my mother.” No way. You check with their personal secretaries first. Check out their moods. Then you make an appointment to slip in. There are basic things you learn when your parents run a planet.

  “Kris, you are wrong. There are things involved here that you are unaware of.” Tru turned to Harvey. “Please hurry, I don’t want to have to reschedule this meeting. People might notice what I’ve done.” Tru
smiled as she turned to Kris. “People are so confident anything a computer tells them is true. It won’t do to undermine their illusions.” Satisfied that she’d said all that she intended, Tru faced front and began to mumble to her computer. Kris had seen Tru deep in consultation with her alternate self and knew better than to interrupt.

  Accepting the inevitable, Kris leaned back in her seat.

  Tom nudged her. “We’re about to meet William Longknife, the prime minister of Wardhaven?”

  “Yeah.” Kris shrugged. “That’s my father.”

  “I’ll stay in the car.”

  If Tom thought he was scared, Kris wanted to find a deep hole to hide in. She knew what they were in for. She weighed several options, including leaping from the speeding car, and decided that if she couldn’t wait in the car, Tommy couldn’t either. “You’re with me. I deserve some backup. You were on the mission, too. You can tell Mother it wasn’t so dangerous.”

  “It was.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I had everything under control.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do. You back me up on this.”

  Tom looked none too sure about that. For a long moment, he eyed Kris, mouth half open. When he finally spoke, he surprised her. “It’s a bitch, you know, being an adult around the folks who changed your diapers.”

  Despite everything, Kris found a smile slipping onto her face. Tommy was always good for that. And maybe Santa Maria wasn’t so far from Wardhaven. Kris nodded. “The bitchiest. Why can’t they ever forget? And they didn’t change all that many diapers, what with the hired help.”

  Kris waited out the rest of the drive, reminding herself that she was a grown woman, had commanded a drop mission, and she was not going to let her mother or father buffalo her. She kept that mantra up as they parked in a reserved place in the basement of Government House, rode up a reserved elevator, and walked down a cold marble No Admittance hallway, doors opening before they came to them. Kris didn’t know there were that many automatic doors in Government House; she’d always needed someone to open them. “Nelly, remind me to ask Tru how she does that.”