Kris Longknife: Mutineer

by Mike Shepherd

  “Not you, Grampa, never you.”

  He took her arm; reluctantly, she let him guide her around the room. Tommy followed with all the enthusiasm of a ship being towed to the breakers. They passed through the outlying pickets without so much as a bobble. Father was presenting the first couple of medals to artists and bureaucrats as Trouble rousted a pair of three-stars to make room for him and her at the elbow of Earth’s Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Kris stamped a smile on her face and took the vacated seat between the two generals as Tommy took the opportunity to head for a safe, quiet corner.

  “General Ho, this is my Great-granddaughter, Ensign Longknife.” While Kris struggled to remember she was the prime minister’s daughter and had survived situations worse than this, she rapidly went down the protocol requirements: He’s uncovered. I’m uncovered. Do not salute. Wouldn’t anyway: this is a social situation. Like hell it is.

  Kris returned his formal nod.

  “I understand you did rather well by us.”

  “I did what any ensign would have done in the same situation, General.”

  “And don’t you forget that. Being a Longknife, that might not be so easy. Right, Ray?”

  Damn! Her other Great-grandfather had bounced a five-star from her seat on the other side of Ho. Just what Kris needed: a family reunion. She was still trying to figure out how to function as an ensign in a multi-star environment, and now she’d have to do the dysfunctional family thing as well. Oh hell.

  “If she survives it, she just might learn a few things,” Ray agreed.

  The prime minister was going up the list and getting more long-winded as the recipients became more politically important to his party. However, the attitude of the military around Kris saved her from further reaction. They had been invited by their political masters, so they came. Still, as a mass, they sat, arms folded across their chests. Silent as embattled sphinxes, they faced out toward a society that did not understand them, rarely needed them, and pretty much ignored them.

  As Father reached the end of his unmercifully long list, he announced that the last award would be given not by him, but by General Ho, thereby passing over Wardhaven’s own Chairman, General McMorrison. True, Kris was serving in the Society’s Navy, but the Typhoon was built and crewed by Wardhaven, and was, for all practical purposes, a Wardhaven ship. The prime minister was cruising for another lesson on the care and feeding of his own warriors…a lesson Kris would not give him.

  General Ho raised his eyebrows a fraction of an inch, and the disapproving creases around eyes and mouths deepened a similar fraction among the generals and admirals surrounding him. Still, he made his way to the podium without hesitation. The master of ceremonies handed the general the folder with Kris’s citation, then passed the medal to Kris’s father. Kris had spent the last hour praying to every bureaucratic god in the pantheon that her family would leave this one to the soldiers who knew how to do it. All to no avail. Mother was sashaying onto the stage, her petticoats flouncing. It was rapidly becoming a bloody political circus. General Ho did not suffer political circuses, bloody or otherwise.

  “Ensign Longknife, front and center,” he growled.

  The other recipients had glad-handed their way onto the stage, laughing, talking to Father, or even shouting at people in the audience. Kris marched, shoulders back, head up; her DI would have been proud of her.

  General Ho read the citation in a clear, gruff voice ending with, “Your actions, in the face of criminal acts and hostile fire, reflect credit on yourself and the Navy in which you serve.”

  Kris blinked; in the past, such citations always concluded, “and the Society of Humanity’s Navy in which you serve.” General Ho offered her the award folder. Behind her, in their ghetto, high-ranking officers shuffled their feet, a virtual scream of opposition to what was missing.

  Kris sneaked a peek at the citation. The traditional phrase was there in black and white. General Ho had omitted it. Was this his way of telling his fellow officers that the green and blue flag was coming down?

  The civilians, of course, missed this bit of drama playing out in front of them. They were on their feet as Mother and Father surrounded Kris. Mother, of course pinned on the medal.

  “Well, dear, now that you’ve got your bauble, are you ready to come home?” she whispered as she managed to put the pin into Kris’s left breast. “A miniature of it will make a lovely pendent. I know a jeweler who could place a few diamonds on it and make it truly divine.”

  “Mu-ther,” Kris whispered back, intentionally shaping the word to echo her fourteen-year-old self…and probably generations of girls. “You don’t just walk away from the Navy. They call it desertion, mutiny, things like that.”

  “Oh, your father was just telling me this morning that the Navy has itself in a budget bind. Aren’t they sending their sailors home early?”

  “Yes, Mother, but I’m an officer. We’re just on half pay, and they want us back for half of it.”

  “Well, it seems to me that—”

  “Ladies, smile for the cameras,” Father ordered through a clenched-toothed smile of his own. Kris and Mother obeyed.

  The ceremony self-destructed after that as everyone went their own way. Mother and Father had people to meet.

  General Ho had a lot of raised eyebrows to answer. Kris went looking for an out-of-the-way chair where she could recover her naturally sunny disposition and stanch the need to order a real drink.

  She had expected to be mobbed or at least respond to a few well-wishers. She found herself alone with Tommy and free to observe. The chasm between the civilian and military parts of the ceremony was as glaring as the differences between what they’d done to get here. The civilians had built, discovered, made things happen, all for the greater glory of humanity… and their own, thank you very much. Kris had damn near got herself killed so a little girl might live.

  Kris shook her head. “General Ho muttered something under his breath as he left the stage. Something about them being so far out in left field they didn’t even know what game was being played,” she said to no one. “I didn’t ask him who he meant, the audience or the generals, but I suspect I know what he’d say.”

  Tommy looked around. “It would fit both.” Thus leaving Kris with a mental picture of trying to keep a baseball game going when the two teams never left right or left field.

  Kris watched as her great-grandparents circulated, trying to manage an endgame for the Society of Humanity, striving to resolve the tension between two factions: one with an almost religious faith that humanity had to be one, the other insisting everyone had a right to do what they wanted. Still, after the split between them was resolved, there would be two groups in each of the new factions, one playing for profit, power, and the glory it brought, the other going for self-sacrifice, power, and glory. Games within games. Kris looked into the faces around her. How much game playing could the fabric of society survive?

  Kris came alert as Grampas Ray and Trouble headed her way at the same time Mother did with a young man in tow. Kris hoped Mother would flinch away; Trouble was Mother’s least favorite person in the galaxy. No such luck. Kris resigned herself to more dysfunctional family than anyone should have to survive.

  “Kris, I want you to meet Henry Smythe-Peterwald the Thirteenth. You two really should get to know each other. You have so much in common.” Right, Kris thought, and if I marry him, my father-in-law will quit trying to kill me. The hard look on Grampas Trouble’s and Ray’s faces as they took in the young man left that answer in doubt.

  Young Peterwald, however, smiled sunnily and held out a hand. About Kris’s age and height, he had the sculptured look that parents with too much money and ego gave children in these days of genetically manipulated offspring. Kris took the offered hand, but before she could say a word, her and Tommy’s beeper went off in duet. A quick flick of the wrist treated her to, “Recall. Your leave is canceled. Emergency circumstances on Olympia require your return to duty immediatel
y.”

  How’s that for a reprieve! But Kris managed a frown anyway. “Olympia, where’s that?”

  Before Nelly could answer, Grampa Trouble chuckled. “Oh, that one. You’ve drawn a dilly again, kid. New colony, not yet fifty years old. Had a volcano blow on the other side of the world from the main settlement area.”

  “Lucky for them,” Kris drawled.

  “Hardly. Massive blow, tossed enough gunk in the air that the planet skipped a summer. Total crop failure. Now, a current in the ocean offshore has gone missing, and they’ve been treated to the proverbial forty days and nights of rain.”

  “They should wish they were so lucky,” Grampa Ray cut in. “They’re at twelve months of rain and no end in sight. Looks like you’ll have your work cut out for you, young woman. Starvation, flood, and, oh, yes, complete breakdown of civil authority. Bands of heavily armed and desperate types roving the sodden landscape, fighting over what’s left.” Ray grinned at Trouble. “Yep, looks like the kid drew a nice one.”

  “Kind of reminds you of the good old days.” Trouble laughed.

  Mother frowned. Young Peterwald shrugged, and Kris, despite the bad news, felt like a ton had been lifted from her shoulders as she and Tommy excused themselves.

  Chapter Nine

  An old lieutenant at OCS had warned the candidates, “Being in transit is the closest thing to being a civilian you can get while in uniform. And don’t you smile at me. It’s hell. And if you’re Senior Officer Present, it’s worse.” Kris had only been in transit once; between Wardhaven and High Cambria. A commander had been Senior Officer Present. He’d spent most of the passage in a corner of the bar he alternately designated Naval HQ and the O club. Kris had buried her nose in anything Nelly could dig up on the Kamikaze-class and hadn’t surfaced until the liner docked.

  Now she wished she’d taken better notes. This trip, Kris was Senior Officer Present.

  There weren’t a lot of officers to choose from, first two, later four boot ensigns. But Kris graduated a seat ahead of Tommy, mainly because of her rifle range scores. The two ensigns who joined at Pitts Hope were a whole week junior to Kris. Kris found that out from their files because the two of them came aboard, went straight to their adjoining rooms, and never came out, except for meals.

  “Doubt the door between their rooms gets closed too often.” Tommy scowled. The door between Kris’s and his rooms stayed closed… except when Kris needed help on official duties, like going over all the vaccination records of her personnel. Kris signed for all the Navy personnel that came aboard, as if they were sacks of potatoes. She also had to verify everyone was up to date on their shots and had all they needed for Olympia. Unfortunately, those requirements were subject to change. Conditions on Olympia were bad and getting worse. Not only was the planet incubating all kinds of new bugs, others that healthy humans kept under control were turning pandemic.

  “Typhoid,” Tommy yelped. “I thought we wiped that out a couple of hundred years ago.”

  “So did I, but there must have been a carrier on Olympia, cause now people are getting sick.”

  That particular problem left Kris pacing the dock at High Pitts Hope, waiting for a hastily ordered shipment of vaccine as the good ship SS Lady Hesperis prepared to raise the gangplank and leave. The vials arrived just seconds before the ship’s Third Officer’s fourth deadline expired, so Kris was not left on the station as the ship pulled away. Kris was none too sure she would have minded that.

  Kris doubted the Hussy, an ancient wreck of a liner, had ever been a good ship. Although none of the merchant crew advised them to, Kris quickly learned to strap herself into her bunk at night and hold tight to her mess gear. It seemed that Hussy’s engineers had trouble maintaining a steady burn. The ship’s accelerations and decelerations were subject to wild excursions from a small fraction of a g to three g’s and back again, without benefit of warning.

  The civilian crew’s laughs and jeers left the passengers feeling more like zoo exhibits than naval personnel on their way to save a planet.

  A glance through their records showed Kris why the rest of her shipmates took so long to learn how to survive the Hussy’s wild ways. For many, this was their first time in space. Most were raw recruits fresh from boot camp. Some had not even finished basic training, as their confusion on even how to wear the uniform showed. Kris flagged down one of her third-class petty officers and ordered him to square away a few of the worst offenders. He said, “Aye aye, ma’ am,” and headed for the problem child. Yet when Kris looked back, the PO had taken a hard right into the bar, and the recruit was still as much a wreck as before.

  Now Kris took a deep dive into the personnel folders at her disposal. She came up shaking her head and knocking on the door between her and Tommy’s room.

  “Come on in,” he shouted. She found him deep in a reader.

  “Have you seen our troops?” she said, waving her own reader.

  “I believe so. Sad to say.”

  “No, I mean their records. We’ve only got two second class and four third class POs. All are in their second or third enlistment and were pulled from advanced schools for this job. Wardhaven dollars to donut holes, under the latest policies, they’d never have been shipped over.”

  “Kind of makes you suspect that a posting to Olympia is the Navy’s way of telling all involved to shape up or get out,” Tommy said, not even looking up from his reader. “Maybe just get out.”

  Kris did not ask him what he thought that said about the two of them. Was Father trying another approach to getting her back where he wanted her? No way, Mr. Prime Minister.

  “Did you know the Olympic system has seven jump points?” Tommy asked as the pause lengthened.

  “No,” she said, coming over to glance at his reader. It showed Olympia and its surroundings.

  “Thing is, from those seven jumps you can get to just about anywhere in human space in two or three more.”

  “That would make it a great trading point,” she mused.

  “Would seem so, so why are they sending the dregs of the fleet here to do a bit of this and a bit of that for it?”

  Now Kris did frown. “Nelly, what’s the organization on the ground for this mission?”

  Nelly took longer than usual to start populating Kris’s reader with an organization chart. “I am sorry,” Nelly apologized. “The daily reports do not balance and change from day to day with no explanation.”

  Tommy raised an eyebrow at that. Even as boot ensigns, they’d learned that the Navy took daily reports—or, for that matter, any reports—very seriously.

  “Who’s running this show?”

  “Lieutenant Colonel James T. Hancock, SHMC,” Nelly said.

  “Him,” Tommy breathed.

  “Must be two of them,” Kris assured him, but she didn’t have Nelly check that out. There were some things better seen first. Instead, she glanced over the Table of Organization. Mercy missions like this one didn’t have to follow any definitive structure; commanders were free to improvise on the ground. However, they usually followed the structure of a battalion or regiment, depending on the size of things. Olympia wasn’t close to battalion strength, say 200 plus or minus the 30 the daily reports couldn’t agree on. But the org chart looked like amoebas doing one of Tommy’s Irish jigs around the CO’s box.

  “Communications, medical, intelligence, finances, supply operations, MPs,” Tommy said, “all reporting direct to the CO, and then there’s this huge Admin section with most of the personnel.”

  “Notice what’s missing?” Kris said.

  Tommy looked up at her, then rolled his eyes at the overhead. “All tail, no teeth.”

  “Right, all tail, no hands giving a handout.”

  “Maybe it’s all in Admin,” Tommy suggested.

  “We wait and see.” Kris sighed. Father might be right, today’s troubles were enough to keep her busy. Maybe tomorrow’s troubles would solve each other before they got to her.

  Kris wondered
if maybe her father really was an optimist.

  ****

  Two days later, Olympia was large in the view port, giving Kris her first look at the mess she’d drawn. The orb reflected brightly, about what Kris expected when an island thirty klicks long and a dozen wide blew itself to dust. Despite the gunk in the atmosphere, she could see another line of storms blowing in from the ocean to add more to a ground already saturated from big, weeping clouds trying to make it over an inland mountain range. The desert behind showed recent signs of flash floods. Even the rain shadow was getting soaked.

  “You the woman in charge of those hellions wrecking my boat?” Kris turned to find a potbellied man who hadn’t shaved in days lumbering down on her, what might pass for a grimy captain’s hat barely hung to his head, a flimsy in his hand.

  “I believe I am Senior Officer Present,” Kris admitted.

  “Sign here.”

  “And this says…”

  “I’m delivering ninety-six enlisted and four of you officers to the Olympia Emergency Services Command, per my contract.”

  “Nelly, do we have ninety-six enlisted personnel?” Kris had studied their files; she’d never done a count.

  “Yes.”

  “Kris, shuttle is loaded,” Tom called over the net.

  “Do you have ninety-six enlisted personnel on board?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have’ em count off.”

  Tommy’s voice disappeared for a long minute. Then he was back with a crisp “Ninety-six enlisted personnel present, ma’am. Me and the other two ensigns are waiting on you.”

  “Be there soonest,” Kris said and signed. “I want a copy.”

  The captain produced a second flimsy from beneath the first. Kris’s signature had carried through. “Thank you, Captain. With luck, we won’t be sharing a ride again.”

  Kris hefted her bag. Marine battle dress was the uniform of the day, the night, and next week for this operation. The ancient warrant officer on Wardhaven who briefed them had taken great delight in pointing out that new ensigns were permitted to get their hands dirty on this tour. From the looks of things, there would be plenty of chances.