Kris Longknife: Mutineer

by Mike Shepherd

  Kris didn’t tell him Wardhaven had do-gooders, too, and that was why she joined the Navy.

  The first station on their list was big: owners, their kids and wives, grandkids—maybe a few of those getting up marriage high—filled several dozen family-size houses. A number of families from small stations had also taken refuge there. Before it went off net, they reported groups of horse- and truck-mounted bandits roaming the area. Kris shook her head; they ought to have been able to field a continuous watch. They ought not to have gone off the air.

  Approaching the station, Kris matched the map on her reader against reality. The muddy road was wide enough for two trucks but in need of repair; Tom slipped and slid from side to side looking for the shallower potholes. The fields on either side of the road were muddy from a crop that never grew and rain that never stopped. She had an unhindered line of sight across those sodden fields to a creek that had overflowed its banks, swallowed the trees around it, and flooded hundreds of meters more. An abandoned tractor was up to its hubs in water. This muck would have channelized any attack; the raiders had to hit them from the road. They should have been mowed down.

  What were Kris and her tiny convoy driving into?

  “Lock and load,” Kris ordered as they came in sight of the station. That made a few troopers’ day. Tom left his rifle in the scabbard hanging from the door.

  “Can’t use it and drive.”

  It had been a successful farm, if three large barns said, anything about its pre-volcanic wealth. A big house held pride of place facing a central yard. Other houses and outbuildings turned the station into a small village. There was no one in view.

  Kris ordered the other trucks to halt and go on over watch, then explained that meant them watching, rifles ready, while she had Tom drive slowly in. Maybe she spotted motion behind a window. Maybe the barrel of a gun protruding out a door. With a fatalistic grimace, Kris ordered Tom to stop at the gate, dismounted, and started to walk the rest of the way in.

  Activating her mike, Kris announced, “I am Ensign Longknife of the Society Navy,” when she was a hundred meters from the nearest outbuilding. Her voice boomed from her truck’s loudspeaker. “My rigs have food. You went off net several months ago. Do you require aid?”

  A barn door opened; three men slipped out before closing it, then started walking toward Kris. At the big house, several women appeared on the porch, two with babies in arms. They also made for the center of the commons. Kris did, too.

  They met in the middle. A tall, bald man held out a hand to Kris. “I’m Jason McDowell. My father started this station.” He waved at the thin, graying woman leading the other women. “This is my wife, Latishia.”

  Kris shook his hand, then the woman’s when she joined the group. “I have food packages for you. I was hoping to leave about a month’s supply. How many people do you have here?” The man shook his head. “A hundred or so, but a month’s worth of food is too much. They’ll just come back and take it,” he said bitterly.

  “We could hide some, Jason,” his wife whispered. “They’d make us tell. Someone would give it out. They’d make us.”

  The wife looked away but nodded agreement.

  “I guess we can come out here once a week,” Kris offered, not really wanting the workload. Others now came from the barns, houses, and outbuildings; the number kept growing. Kris had expected to see guns. There weren’t any.

  “Before I can leave the food, I’ll need every person’s Identacard to verify the delivery.”

  “Don’t have any. They took ‘em.” Jason dropped the words like lumps of hot iron.

  “Does that mean you can’t help us?” Latishia asked, her hands knotting her apron. The two silent women beside her clutched their children.

  “We didn’t drive all this way to tell hungry folks we can’t feed them because of a paperwork snafu,” Kris said. And Lieutenant Pearson can finish her policies in hell.

  She chinned her mike. “Tommy, bring’ em in.”

  Still, losing Identacards was no minor matter. For the last month, these people could have had their bank accounts emptied, their personalities misused on the interplanetary web. Anything could have happened to them while they were off net and unable to say a word in their defense. This did not sound like the work of local hooligans. “With no IDs, I’ll need photographs of everyone,” Kris said, then ordered Tom to break out a camera.

  “Brother, if they’ve got a commlink, I could check our bank account,” one of the men with Jason said.

  “You do that, Jerry.”

  “Tom, see that this man gets a link to the net.” Tom took the flood of orders with a grin and a “You got it, ma’am.”

  “Can you get everyone out here?” Kris asked.

  “My mother is bedridden,” Jason said. “I guess we could bring her down here, but…”

  “I’ll go see her. I’m just trying to keep the damn auditors from flaying me too badly when this is over.”

  “I understand. We’re in business…” Jason stopped, glanced around, ended up staring at the muddy yard. “We were.”

  “We will be again,” his wife said, offering a hand that he flinched away from. As a commissioned officer, Kris ought to leave this well enough alone. Still, Judith would never have let Kris get away in therapy with dodging what these two were running from, and Kris owed Judith her life. In the mud room of the house, Kris shucked her poncho before taking the stairs slowly to the third floor. The house was made of wood, finely polished by work and use.

  In a bedroom hung with the needlework of years, a woman lay alone on an oversize bed. She moaned in pain. With three quick steps, Kris knelt by the bed, lifted the covers from the old woman. Her weathered skin showed the blue and yellow discoloration of a several-weeks-old beating.

  “I’ve got a corpsman in the convoy. Can I have her take a look at your mother?”

  “We’ve done what we could for Mother,” the man said, eyes flinching from the woman.

  “Do you have painkillers? They took ours,” his wife said.

  “Tom, send up the corpsman. Have her home on my commlink.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Kris turned from where she knelt, looked up at the couple. “Are you going to tell me what happened here? Everybody told me when I got orders to Olympia, watch your back. Everybody carries a gun. Our Colonel doesn’t want us on the streets at night. Too many guns. Well, I haven’t seen a gun in this compound.” Kris pointed at a gun rack hanging on the wall beside a window—empty. “Where are your guns?”

  “Gone,” the man said. “They’re just gone. Leave it at that, Navy.”

  “My husband went to the fields,” the woman began softly.

  The man turned on his wife, his eyes begging her for silence. She met his eyes with her own, level, unflinching. When she didn’t turn away, he fled to the farthest corner of the room. “A farm isn’t something that you take care of when you feel like it, not if you’re like Jason and his family. His pa carved this station out of a grant. It was swamp when they came here fifty years ago. They drained it. The pumps have to be checked. Now especially. And the pumps are close to the swamps.”

  “There were five of us,” Jason said to the floor. “All armed. We knew that”—he failed to find a word—“those men were out there. We figured we’d see them coming.” Jason looked up at Kris. “We’re good shots. Pa had us practice every week, and there are things we locals call a buffalo in the swamp that can trample a crop into the mud. We’re good at hunting them.

  “They came out of a ditch. Must have been breathing through hollow reeds or something. They had the drop on us before we even knew they were there. If we’d gone for our guns, they’d have slaughtered us.” The man looked up at his wife. His voice choked. “Honey, I wish to hell we’d fought.”

  Now the woman went to her husband’s side, gave him a shoulder as he sobbed. Kris had rarely seen men cry. On the bed, the old woman struggled to find a comfortable place, moaned. Kris stood, her hand go
ing to the butt of her pistol. There were things she’d joined the Navy to take care of. At the moment, the local bad guys were two up on her. She didn’t like the score.

  As her man wept, the wife continued the story, her voice a low monotone that screamed, Wrong, by its very softness. “The trucks stopped four hundred yards out. About a dozen got out. Any of them that weren’t one of ours, we had them in our sights. Then someone shouted. ‘Woman, I got a pistol at your husband’s head. You have your men and womenfolk drop their guns, and everyone’s gonna come out of this alive. People start shooting, and he dies first.’ ”

  “I told you to shoot.” The man’s voice was begging for understanding, forgiveness. “I shouted at you, screamed for you to shoot.”

  Kris wondered what she would have done, as wife, as husband.

  “More men got out of the trucks,” the wife continued, “spread out in the mud, went to ground. There must have been thirty or forty riflemen. We had children,” she looked up at Kris, pleading for understanding. Kris nodded, tried to give what the woman wanted. The wife shook her head and went on. “Some of the men were for fighting it out, let the devil take the last one standing.”

  The woman looked Kris hard in the eye. “We have our children here. We women voted to put the guns down.” The woman glanced down at her husband. “Maybe if we’d known what came next, we’d have fought. Some of us say we wish we had. Most of us don’t.”

  Almost Kris told the woman that she didn’t have to finish the story; already Kris knew the ending. But the wife had come this far; the rest tumbled from her mouth. “They took our guns first, then our food, IDents, anything that seemed important or that they wanted. Then they had the men tie each others’ hands. There, in the mud, in front of our husbands and children, they raped us. That seemed to add something to it for them. Jason’s father, her husband,” she nodded at the old woman in bed. “He fought them, tied up, he fought them.”

  “Why didn’t I? Why didn’t I, too?” Jason moaned.

  “Because I told you not to. Because if you had, they’d have killed you like they did him. Probably beaten me like they did her.” A large sigh racked the woman. “We’re alive. Over at the Sullivan place, they’re dead. They slaughtered the kids like pigs because they tried to fight them off. We are alive, Jason,” she took her husband’s face in her hands. “We are alive. We will come through this.”

  “And we will hang those bastards,” Jason whispered.

  “If we can. It’s all in God’s hands.”

  The medic arrived; Kris left the wife to work with the corpsman and headed downstairs. Outside, she paused; her mission plan called for delivering food. The rules of engagement only allowed her to return fire if fired upon.

  “Come on you sons-a-bitches,” she whispered to the leaden air. “I got thirty trigger pullers and no kids in this convoy. You know we’re here. You know you want what we got. Come get it. Please.” As Kris marched across the yard, the man who’d asked to check on finances came walking back, shaking his head.

  “They sold the farm. Right out from under us, they sold it.”

  Kris stopped him. “I’m recording what I’m saying for a legal deposition,” she told Nelly and the man.

  “You can do that?”

  “That and more.” Quickly Kris recounted how she’d found the farm station, stripped of IDents and communications. “Any financial and legal actions taken between the time this station went off net and now are not legal and binding. I, Kristine Anne Longknife, do testify to that in any court of law,” she finished.

  “Thank you,” the young man said.

  “We’ll see what else I can do,” Kris said, spotted Tom, and shouted, “We done?”

  “Think so. I’ve got photos of everyone. Even Pearson should be happy.”

  “Good. Let’s pack it in and get moving. We got a lot more to do.”

  “Yes ma’am.” Tom stepped close. “Kris, is something wrong? You look like…well, like you want somebody dead.”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Kris snapped. “We’re armed, and there are bad guys out there. Everybody, let’s saddle up. We got things to do, places to go.”

  The troops began to collect by their rigs. They seemed in no hurry to be gone. Several of them were still holding small children, helping them to stuff their faces.

  “Ma’am?” one of Kris’s backseat guards started. “The bad guys are just going to come back. Take what we left them. Could we, maybe, at least take the kids back to town? They’ve been starving for the last month. That mom told me the little kids don’t have the stomach to digest the grass and other stuff keeping the grown-ups alive.”

  “Next week maybe we will. Not now.” Kris cut him off.

  “I said move it, troops. I expect to see you moving,” she shouted. Navy and Marines got moving.

  Jason came out of the large house, spotted her, and began a slow jog toward Kris. As emaciated as the man was, still he put one foot in front of the other until he came to hang on Kris’s truck door.

  “Listen, those guys use the swamps for their hideout. If you keep away from the worst of the swamps, you might avoid them.” Kris called up her planned track on her battle board and shared it with Jason. He shook his head. “There, four, five miles down the road, you’re headed into Dead Cow Swamp. You’ve got to go around.”

  “Can’t,” Kris found that she was grinning. “Everything around that road is flooded. It’s the only elevated road left. We’re going right up it.”

  “They’ll be waiting for you.”

  “I kind of hope so,” Kris said, letting her grin take over her entire face. Grampa Trouble would be proud.

  “Just so you know what you’re getting into,” Jason said.

  Kris turned around, glancing down the line of trucks. “Got no children. Only Navy and Marines. This is what we get paid for.”

  “Be careful, Lieutenant, or Ensign, or whatever you are. I thought I could take anything that came. God, I was wrong.”

  “I may have some photos for you and your wife to ID next week when we come through. You may not have to wait until this mess is over before you watch a few of them swing.” Damn, I’m starting to like this.

  “Oh God, be careful.”

  “Not what they pay me for,” Kris said, leaning out the window, looking back. All her troops were mounted up. “Tom, move us out.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  In the rearview, Kris watched as Jason went from group to group, saying something. Some of the women fell to their knees in the mud, hands clasped in prayer.

  “Say your prayers for the bastards ahead of us. Not for me and mine,” Kris whispered through tightly drawn lips.

  “Would you mind telling me what the hell is going on here?” Tom asked, eyes locked straight ahead, hands in a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. “I am your second-in-command, and I am supposed to take over if something happens to you.”

  Kris popped her mike. “Troops, you just saw why we’re here. Those folks are starving because a bunch of thugs stole what they raised. They killed an old man and beat up his wife. They raped most of the women you saw back there.”

  “Raped!” echoed through the backseat like an electric shock. So, not everyone had gotten full disclosure. Well, they had it now.

  “Even the little girls,” Kris snapped. “Some of you are tired of being glorified delivery boys. Maybe you could have stayed home and delivered pizza for what we’ve done so far. Well, I’m told that our road is going to get a bit dangerous in a few minutes. These cruds like to steal things, and our trucks are the only things on the road worth stealing today. Lock and load, crew. Payback time is here, and we’ll do the collecting.”

  Kris turned to Tom; while she talked, he had called up the route on the truck’s display. Overlaying that with a photo, he stabbed a finger at Dead Cow Swamp. “There?”

  “Looks it.”

  Tom studied the map. “We could double back about five klicks. There’s that other road that sta
ys to high ground.”

  “Looks flooded to me,” Kris cut him off. “We’ve got food to deliver. If we go wandering all over the place, we’ll never make it back to base tonight.”

  “We could camp at one of the farm stations. Those folks are friendly. They’d be glad to have us stay a night.”

  “We’ve got other deliveries to make tomorrow. Tom, we are going up this road. I suggest you check your weapon. I’ve never seen you fire one.”

  “I qualified at OCS. I had to, to graduate.”

  “What did you shoot?”

  “The minimum required,” Tom said, not looking at her.

  “For God’s sake, Tom, you’re a Navy officer. You knew this was part of the job when you took it.”

  “You may have noticed, I’m driving a truck, delivering food to starving people. Didn’t the priest back home preach ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ every time there’d be a barroom fight in town and someone’d be cut up. I joined the Navy to get my college loans forgiven, not to kill.”

  “Even men who rape and kill and steal food from starving kids?” Kris spat.

  Tommy looked out over the sodden land. “This wasn’t what I had in mind.”

  “But it is what you’ve got now.” Behind Kris, while she and Tom talked, the backseat got very quiet. What were they thinking? Did it matter? They had their orders. They would follow her. Why was she wasting time arguing with Tom? She had things to do. Again, she tapped her mike.

  “Longknife here. Roll the windows down. We don’t want flying glass in the cabs.” Kris looked up, examining the front window. She spotted a release, hit it. The window on her side of the cab swung down to rest on the hood as the rain began to soak her. She told the rest of the convoy to do the same. For a long moment, they rode in silence, swaying from side to side as Tom hunted for more road and less pothole.

  “Ma’ am,” came quietly from the backseat.

  “Yes,” it was not the expectant hero. He looked white as a sheet as he stared out the window. It was the young woman behind Kris. She’d been in the middle on the ride in.