Ray scowled at Trouble. The others kept very quiet.
“Forgive me, Trouble, but from the political side, I find it better to be a pessimist where our young Kris is concerned,” the king said. “Dollars to donut holes, and I mean the empty kind, she’s got a whole lot of problems following her home. Not cute puppies, more like big-teethed monsters with nasty dispositions.”
“Have it your own way,” Trouble said. “I prefer not to go looking for trouble. Enough will come along with my name on it faster than I care for.”
The room fell silent. The fall turned out to be quite a long one.
The commlink finally broke it.
“We have the message from Admiral Santiago, sir.”
“Well, read it,” the king growled.
“‘Attached is the only exchange we had with Kris and the Wasp. As you can see, we’ve ordered them not to talk and to proceed to Chance. I will keep you informed of what transpires. However, if they do as we told them, there will be no more information for the next thirty hours.’ That is all the message said, sir.”
A curt “Thank you” was all the king said before he tapped his commlink off.
“That doesn’t tell us a whole lot,” Crossie said.
“You want to have Sandy request a full report from Kris so she can forward it to us?” Trouble asked, his own answer clearly embedded in the question.
“Not on your life,” Mac said. “If Sandy’s first message got intercepted and spread all over the media, think of what would happen to the whole report.”
“It’s more likely that someone on High Chance spilled the beans to the media,” Crossie said, “than that our ciphers are compromised.”
“And if Kris sends her report to High Chance, and from there to here, what do you think are the odds someone along the way will see a huge paycheck in it?” the king snapped. “No. We wait and try to keep that report off the comm net as much as we can. This is going to be a big enough mess without its getting out before we can manage it.”
“Manipulate it, huh?” Trouble said.
He and Ray had been around this bush before. They’d beaten around it so many times that Trouble was amazed the bush was still standing. Still, it was a nasty bush, rooted in the media’s demand to know too much and political wishes and whims not to let any of their screwups see the light of day.
Trouble shook his head. This was not a political screwup. Kris had found a mess out there and, if Trouble knew the girl, had done her best to handle it. There was nothing here to hide. The people needed to know what the whole human race faced, and this ought to be handled on the straight up-and-up.
But Trouble doubted it would go that way. Not with Crossie in the room.
And not with Ray becoming more and more the politician.
Where are you, my old fighting buddy?
The conversation went on like that for the next hour. All kinds of possible ghosts and hobgoblins were invited out into the parlor and talked about until they were beating a dead horse. Or hobgoblin.
Of course, with hobgoblins, unlike horses, they come back to life the more you beat them.
After an hour, Trouble had had enough.
“I left my wife in a Greek restaurant with several fine-looking young waiters. She promised to take only my dinner home, but even if she did, the chow is getting cold. If you fellows can’t think of anything new to toss around, I think I’ll mosey along home and keep the home fires burning. Ray, you got my number. You know where I live. Anything new comes in, you holler, and I’ll come running.”
“You can bet I’ll holler,” Ray said, looking half-distracted by the last ghost they had put to rest but which was, undoubtedly, troubling him still.
So Trouble made his way back through all the security. The watch had changed while he was in with the king. He got to smile at a lot of new folks who, no doubt, would go home to their wives, sweethearts, and in the case of some of the younger ones, their old man, and tell them they’d seen a legend tonight.
Well, this legend was more than a little bothered by the other legend he’d wasted an evening with.
He’d come in knowing Kris was back. He left four hours later knowing that Kris was back. But her ship was all bent out of shape and looking like little more than a wreck.
Recalling the external picture of the Wasp, Trouble stood stock-still as the elevator dropped thirty floors. The ship had been bent… but not shot up!
No, he hadn’t seen anything that looked like a laser hit!
Of course, they were using the Smart Metal ^ TM to make a kind of shield. He checked with his computer, and it verified his own recollections.
So, if the Wasp wasn’t shot up, why was it all bent up?
Strange, with all the hobgoblins they’d interviewed tonight, not one of them had thought to raise that question. How does a ship get that bent? And why was there no battle damage?
Trouble started to press the button to take him back up.
Then he shook his head.
Would any of them really be any more qualified than he was to assess this thought? Crossie’s ship time had been short and long ago. None of the others had ever been ship drivers.
Trouble remembered spending plenty of time rubbing elbows with some damn fine ship drivers back in the day. The old Marine tried to remember if any of them were still alive? No, were any of the survivors in town and willing to share a beer with him?
He couldn’t think of any, and his computer was no help either.
Faced with a dead end, he settled for a smart move. Cold supper with Ruth.
She greeted him with a smile and, smart Marine wife that she was, not one question. No “Where you been, trooper?” or “How’d the night go with Ray?”
Instead, she settled him down at the table and managed to serve him a meal where what was supposed to be hot was hot and what was supposed to be cold was cold. They talked about the kids and grandkids.
Kris was conspicuous by her absence.
Ruth talked about her coming trip to New Eden. Now that the political life there wasn’t hobbled by blinders, the kids in that place had their eyes open and were turning out to be just as much fun to teach as their big brothers and sisters had been when they’d been made blind by a blind society.
“This quarter should be a lot of fun. I hear tell that there are actually student demonstrations now.”
“Oh, you’ll love that,” the dour general in Trouble said.
“Oh yes I will,” was pure farm girl, and accompanied by a smile that made the dour general retreat in full rout.
They’d gone to bed and enjoyed each other’s company to the fullest before Ruth let her question out.
She was nuzzling against Trouble’s bare chest, her own lovely breasts making him wonder if he was really ready to fall asleep yet, when she spoke.
“Have you seen our Kris yet?”
The general knew his wife was out-of-bounds, but what he’d shared, head on the pillow, had stayed there for over eighty years.
“She looks exhausted and run through a ringer,” he answered.
“It must have been bad out there,” Ruth said.
And it may get worse back here, Trouble did not share with his wife. That would, or would not, come out soon enough, and neither of them, apparently, could do anything about it.
“Did she bring back the Wasp?”
“Yes,” Trouble admitted. “It looks a whole lot worse for the wear. The thing I find interesting is that, beat up as it is, I couldn’t spot any battle damage.”
“That’s… interesting,” Ruth said.
Over the years, “interesting” had been Ruth’s answer to a lot of things. Trouble recognized it for all the things it said… and left unsaid.
“Yes, I find that interesting, too, but there wasn’t an honest ship driver around Ray, so it didn’t get talked about much.”
“There ought to be an admiral. Not Crossie, a real honest ship fighter.”
“A lot of them didn’t make it out of
the Iteeche War,” Trouble muttered.
“Yes. We lost a lot of good friends, you and I. Still, there must be someone.”
“The crowd around Ray has gotten a lot smaller and older over the years,” Trouble said.
“That’s not good,” Ruth observed. “I’m glad the crowd around us has gotten younger and stayed a mob,” she said, and reached down to distract him from this conversation before it got morose.
He let her distract him. Then tried his own hand at distracting her.
Despite the way it started, it turned out to be a good evening. And he got a good night’s rest that left him ready to face the morning.
Which was a good thing, because the morning had a lot for him to face.
The thing about filling twenty-four hours a day with news is that you might not have that much news. Or, in the case of Kris’s return, there might not be a whole lot known about precisely what had or is happening.
Some media outlets, when faced with that, will report it and go on to something else, like a cat up a tree or a cute puppy with its head in a fence.
But other so-called news sources didn’t seem to have anyone out in the field following the fire truck to the treed cat, so they just keep talking about what they didn’t know.
In the case of Kris’s return, what they didn’t know was a lot. So they speculated.
“Where are all those battleships that followed Kris Longknife out into the depths of space? Are they going to follow her back, or did she lose over ten thousand men and women?”
“The Grand Duchess, Victoria Peterwald, followed Princess Kris out into the dark of space. Did she come back? If she’s lost, how will Emperor Henry I react to that?”
Which at least told Trouble the latest video from Chance hadn’t been leaked.
Then again, if it had, it might have saved a whole lot of empty speculation about a potential war between the U.S. and the Imperial Peterwald dynasty.
Trouble ignored the first twenty calls he got to go on someone’s show and fill up the dead air for the media. But the longer he watched what they were filling it up with, the more he wondered if he was following the right course.
“What do you think?” he asked Ruth over lunch. “Could I mess it up any worse?”
“Honey, if you got on the wrong show, you wouldn’t have to mess up. They’d arrange to cut it so you messed up whether you did or not. Even a Marine must know that there are some positions that are just a waste of flesh and blood to storm. Don’t tell me you never sat back and let the artillery pound a problem to a pulp.”
Trouble had to allow that he had. “But where’s the artillery here?” he asked.
“Ray? Can you think of a bigger gun, and doesn’t he have his own studio? Can’t he produce his own video that can’t be messed with?”
“You underestimate some news outlets, love. They can edit anything.”
His lovely bride shrugged at that. “You got me on that one. I guess I was being a bloody optimist.”
“That’s what I love in you, honey.”
“So, you’re going to go out there and let them shoot you full of proverbial and verbial holes?”
Trouble made a face. “No. I’m going to do my best to find a friendly news outlet.”
“You can be just as dead by friendly fire as any other type,” Ruth observed.
“You have any suggestions?” he asked.
“Now don’t you go getting me into this mess with you. I refuse to have anything to do with it. You’re a big boy now. You’ll get into this mess of trouble all by yourself.”
Trouble just eyed his bride of many talents.
“Though, if you must do something stupid, you could do worse than talking to Winston Spenser.”
“Winston Spenser, huh. You know him?”
“We’ve talked on background a few times. He has always been interested in Kris. He remembers how she fought the Battle of Wardhaven, and I think he dreams of being the one who writes her biography.”
“You think we can trust him?”
“When he writes about the military, he makes fewer howling mistakes than most of his ilk,” Ruth said, maybe damning him with faint praise.
“You have his number?”
“Sally, give the general’s computer Winston Spenser’s direct number.”
Trouble raised an eyebrow. “Speed dial, huh?”
“Usually when I want him, I want him fast. He doesn’t have a show of his own, but he does sit in for a couple of people when they’re on vacation or out sick. I suspect if he offers an interview with one of Kris’s great-grandpas, he’ll get someone to take it.”
“No doubt,” Trouble said dryly.
In less than a minute, the general found himself talking to the reporter Winston Spenser. “No, I wouldn’t mind talking about Kris on camera with you,” he said, wondering how soon and how much he’d regret this.
There was one advantage to being retired; he didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to make a fool of himself in the media. He was as free a citizen as anyone else. Though some would expect him to have better judgment than the rest, and others, no doubt, expected him to be a whole lot dumber than the public in general.
It was strange how the same person was so many things to different spectrums of the public before he even opened his mouth.
Well, come three o’clock, Trouble would be opening his mouth. “With luck,” Winston’s word choice, they might just catch the six o’clock time spots.
By seven, Trouble hoped his name wouldn’t be mud in some circles. Then again, there were advantages to being known as Trouble with a capital “T” in all circles.
They had come to expect trouble from him.
The studio Winston directed Trouble to a little before three was something of a letdown and not a bit of a surprise. It was a small room with two comfortable chairs, a low table between them, but no bright lights and no cameras or cameramen.
A more thorough inspection of the room showed Trouble how he’d missed the cameras. There were several small ones mounted both high and low on the walls, covering every angle in the room.
No doubt, the camera operator was in some other room with a producer watching everything and doing what would sell the most soap or whatever was paying the most for advertising these days.
You got to be less cynical, old boy. This guy is willing to let you do what you can to spin your kid into the best light.
Maybe, his cynical self replied.
Winston opened with a couple of softball questions.
Trouble identified himself. Yes, he was a veteran of the Iteeche War. Yes, he knew Ray from way back. Oh, and yes, both he and the king had the proud honor of having one Kris Longknife, sometimes styled princess and a serving lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy, as a great-granddaughter.
And yes, she had indeed led out a Fleet of Discovery not too long ago.
Winston broke in to mention that he’d interviewed Amanda Kutter about the change in the fleet’s mission. They paused as the lovely Miss Kutter described the horror the fleet had found and its preparations for battling the same.
That left Trouble to wonder if his interview would be cut down to the few seconds that seemed to summarize all that Amanda had had to say about the selfless choice of thousands to do battle against impossible odds.
Trouble guessed that didn’t sell soap.
“So, General, I’m told that the only reason the Fleet of Discovery could hope to engage the huge alien ships was that the U.S. government provided them with a totally new and immensely destructive weapon. Something chipped off a neutron star, isn’t it?”
Bushwhacked in the first two minutes, Trouble growled to himself, but he smiled and answered. “Well, if somebody told you, maybe I should be interviewing you. Tell me, what do you know about this new superweapon?”
“Come now, General, it was in several respected magazines. Space Technology as well as Physics Today. Certainly you can speak about it.”
Quick excerpts we
re played on the screen. No doubt, some producer had started planning this ambush right after he called to ask to be tossed into this den of worms.
“That’s interesting stuff,” Trouble said. “I’m retired, Winston, and I don’t get the secret briefings I used to.” Trouble tried to poor-mouth himself. “But those do look like some real deadly toys, if you know what I mean.”
“Well, General, if you had access to such weapons and the ships of the Fleet of Discovery, what would you do? Arm the battleships with them?”
Trouble cringed at the question.
Well, old man, the door is right over there. You walked in. You can walk right out.
But who will talk for Kris if you do?
Clearly, the answer was no one.
“That’s an interesting question, Winston, and you’re asking it of an old gravel cruncher. I was a Marine, not a squid. I wasn’t a ship driver, like my great-granddaughter is. But, if you want my uneducated guess, no, I would not put them on the battleships.”
“Aren’t they the most powerful ships in her fleet?”
“Yes, but they are also the biggest. And big in this sense means a big target. Now, as a ground pounder, I am qualified to talk about a few things. Like tanks. Now, there are a lot of guys who like to drive around in those big, heavy-metal coffins. Then there are guys like me, who like to use our ability to stay small and not worth a lot of shooting at. And who love to sneak up on those big armored behemoths and slip a rocket into their back end.”
“So you think Kris would have kept the neutron torpedoes for her small corvettes and used them to sneak up on the aliens?”
“That assumes that there was a way to sneak up on something that big and bad,” Trouble pointed out. “You know, we’re guessing. Just fighting battles made of smoke and supposition. In a few days, Kris may be able to tell you herself what she faced and how she chose to face them.”
“So you think she’ll be brought here to Wardhaven and made available to the media?”
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