Welcome Home / Go Away (kris longknife)

by Mike Shepherd

  Mac found himself measuring the child… and found her as cold as the father. Was this a show she was putting on, or had something happened to her out there?

  “The problem, Grampa, was that the monster mother ship had kittens. Lots and lots of kittens. Huge things that made our battlewagons look tiny. And boy, were they mad. They took off after us like you’d expect someone who had just beat up their mother ship.

  “And surprise of surprises, those kittens pack a wallop. Laser and lasers and more lasers. They didn’t have any armor. Something tells me they’ve been the biggest, meanest bastards around for a long time. Nobody’s gotten a good hit on them for a while. We changed that. I expect they’ll be slapping on the protection real quick.”

  “I warned you not to use our best weapon right off,” Mac told his king.

  “Duly noted,” the king muttered, dismissing Mac’s renewed concern with a few curt words. “Kris, did you take out the mother ship?”

  “I don’t know. Things got bad, and we had to run. It’s all in my report. But you might want to read the addendum first.”

  “Why?” the king asked evenly.

  “Because we ran into another alien ship on our way home. It was a scout ship that managed to jump deep into the Iteeche Empire and, bad luck for it, landed in the one worthless system where we were refueling. Likely they planned to make a couple of small jumps, glance into several systems, then run home. That didn’t happen. We killed it.”

  “Good.” Mac found that he and Crossie had spoken at the same time.

  “However, a couple tried to escape with their babies. Cutest things. We got them alive. Not the parents, the hatch on their craft came open. They’re dead. The kids are alive. And we’ve got a DNA sample of the aliens sniffing around the rim of the Iteeche Empire.”

  “Are they the same ones you ran into before?” the king asked.

  “Yes and no. We’ve got DNA from three of the four groups we ran into. If we can trust the DNA results, they are related. Related,” Kris repeated quickly, “but distantly, like no intermarriage in the last hundred thousand years for some. Apparently, we ran into three or four different monster mother ships wandering the stars looking for systems to devour. How much you want to bet me that we’ve found all there are?”

  “Shit,” Mac said, and discovered the other two men, even the king who was never flustered, had also resorted to cursing.

  Kris seemed satisfied with what she had said and settled into the chair she’d ignored earlier.

  “That changes everything,” Mac said, glancing at the king.

  “No it doesn’t,” Crossie insisted.

  “The people aren’t ready for another long war,” King Ray said, his voice sounding like a man who hadn’t slept in a thousand years. “We need more time to mobilize them. There are enough complaints about taxes as it is. If we start building a huge Navy, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “Ah, guys, one word of straight dope,” Kris interjected. “Wars come when someone else decides, not when you’re ready for them.”

  “You shut up, woman!” Crossie shouted. This was possibly the first time Mac had ever heard the cold fish raise his voice. “If you’d done what we wanted, there wouldn’t be any of this trouble.”

  “ You sent me the weapons,” Kris snarled. “And you dare tell me you didn’t want me to use them! If you hadn’t sent me those Hellburners, I wouldn’t have had two cents to put in. As it was, they were worth a good fifty cents.”

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” the king said, raising both hands for quiet. “Arguing what might have been is a fool’s game. We have to think of what to do now. Kris, you nailed that alien scout?”

  “Totally. That joker will not be reporting.”

  “So that band of aliens will not have a potential hot datum. However, what Kris did on the other side of the galaxy has got to draw their attention. Even if the tribes have wandered far from each other, having one of their mother ships blown to hell will focus their attention. That should buy us time. We can use it to start a media campaign to prepare the voters for what’s to come.”

  Kris jumped to her feet, head shaking. “Assuming that what’s to come ain’t coming at you already. You men disgust me. I’ve had it being your cat’s-paw. Mac, give me my papers. I’ll sign them. I quit.”

  For the first couple of years of Kris’s Navy career, every time she was called to Mac’s office for a little talk, he’d had her resignation papers filled out and in hand. He’d been quick to offer them to her for her signature. She was a problem, and Mac really wished she’d find some nice quiet job far from him and his Navy, like lion tamer in some honest circus.

  Now she was demanding her resignation papers.

  But across from Mac, Crossie was pointing him to the envelope in his hands. Mac opened it. The papers that fell into his lap weren’t resignation forms.

  They were orders.

  Mac looked at the king. He was studying his great-granddaughter and saying nothing.

  Mac turned to Crossie. He had a shit-eating grin on his face like a man who’d just rigged the lottery.

  So this was what the spy boss and the king had been up to while Mac had been busy elsewhere. Mac shook his head sadly.

  Damn, but I’ve been outmaneuvered here.

  “What’s the matter?” Kris snapped. “You’ve wanted me to quit for years.”

  The king spoke before Mac could get a word out. “We can’t have you out there on talk shows like that Amanda girl. You’re pretty enough that they’d all want you. And you talking up a war right now is not what I want. Sorry, Kris, but you are in the Navy, and you’ll stay in the Navy.”

  “I’ve finished my service requirement,” Kris spat.

  “Yes, but I have declared an emergency. No one leaves without our letting them out. And you, young lady, we won’t let out. Mac here has found a job for you. Madigan’s Rainbow wants a squadron of fast patrol boats to help them control their system’s space. We think you’re just the person to command their boats.”

  “I’ll still find an open mic,” Kris said, standing up.

  “Not on Madigan’s Rainbow,” Crossie shot back with a grin that was full of more evil than even Mac thought the man was capable of.

  Kris eyed them. Mac did his best to show the confidence the other two exuded that they had her just where they wanted her.

  Finally, she shook her head. Mac identified anger, frustration, and, worst of all for him to see, disgust.

  When she spoke, her words came slow and loaded. Mac could remember when words like those took inches of skin off plebes.

  “Once you may have been a great general, Raymond Longknife, maybe even a brilliant one. But now, you’re just a two-bit politician.”

  She stood there, glaring at the king as he stared back at her, his face an unreadable mask set in stone. Mac kept waiting for Ray to say something, but he didn’t say a word. He just looked at his great-granddaughter, showing not a flicker of emotion.

  Finally, Kris did an about-face that would have made any DI proud and quick marched from the room.

  When the door slammed behind her, Mac turned to the others. “That didn’t go down all that well. Now what?”

  “Now we do exactly what we planned on doing,” Crossie said, eyeing the king.

  Ray nodded. “Yes,” he hissed.

  The two of them slow marched from the room, leaving Mac behind to study the orders he would somehow have to get to Kris. Correction, that he would have someone else get to Kris. That woman was so furious that there was no way Mac would go near her without a battalion of Marines in attendance.

  And between him and her.

  But the problem was, she was right.

  She was right, and the king was wrong.

  Contemplating that and the full implication of such a thought, Mac headed down to meet his ride home.

  Mac was still musing on what he had seen and been made a guilty bystander to the next morning as he handwrote a letter to the king. He was on
his fifth version of the letter when the dimpled corporal brought Trouble into his office.

  “When’s Kris due in?” was the old general’s first question.

  Mac took a deep breath… and brought Trouble fully up to date.

  The man didn’t sit down but paced Mac’s office like a hungry tiger, growing hungrier the more he heard.

  “They kept me out of their meeting with Kris!”

  “Yep.”

  “You lied to me last night,” Trouble said, the tiger turning on Mac.

  “I was ordered to.”

  “Ray didn’t want me in that meeting, did he?”

  “No he didn’t,” Mac said, then added, “I’m not sure why he even had me in the meeting. He pretty much ignored me. Crossie handed me Kris’s orders, and I didn’t open them until they told me to.”

  “Ray is treating everyone like puppets, and he’s the puppet master.”

  “Pretty much. Would you care to give me your comments on this letter I’m working on for the king?”

  “You sure the king trusts me enough to comment on anything for him?”

  Mac handed the handwritten letter across to Trouble. “It’s not for the king. It’s from me to the king.”

  Trouble hardly glanced at the letter before he said, “This is a resignation.”

  “Mine.”

  Trouble read the letter through, then slowly tore it in two. “You can’t resign, old horse.”

  “Why not? He hardly listens to me.”

  “But he listens to you more than he listens to me. And he needs to have someone around that might, just might, get through his thick head. Sorry, old boy, but someone has to stay in the barrel, and that someone just happens to be you.”

  The two of them settled into chairs facing each other. Unbidden, the corporal brought them coffee.

  They took the offered caffeine and sat silently sipping it for a long couple of minutes. Mac finally broke the silence. “What are you going to do?”

  “As soon as I finish this fine coffee,” Trouble said, “I’m going to the king’s office and blow up the bridges that have been burning for some time. Clearly, I won’t be using them again, so I might as well enjoy the fun of blowing something to bits.”

  “Be my guest since you say I’ve got to stay around and tend the fires.”

  “Put out the fires, Mac. Put out the fires.”

  Trouble finished his coffee, stood, straightened his uniform coat, which had enough ribbons to start a ladies’ dress shop, and slow marched directly from Mac’s office to the king’s. Mac followed, if only to call the fire brigade if necessary.

  He stayed out in the hall, but it hardly mattered. Trouble’s voice was loud enough to be heard throughout the thirty-third floor, and soon enough, the king’s voice was raised just as high. Mac didn’t learn any new words. He was apparently too well traveled to have missed any, but the two men demonstrated a full range of vocabulary that would make a DI blush.

  Furious in demeanor. Scarlet in the face, Trouble finally marched from the king’s office.

  “You feel better now?” Mac asked as he slow marched beside him to the elevators.

  “Amazingly, yes. There’s nothing like telling a jackass that he really needs to start wearing a bridle and harness.”

  “See you around,” Mac said.

  “Only at the club, old boy. Only at the club.”

  And they parted company.

  Trouble called Ruth for a ride. She must have been close by because she was there waiting as he came out on the street.

  “Where do you want to eat?” he asked her, in far more of a growl than the words deserved.

  “Luckily, I’ve got lunch cooking at home, General. From the sound of it, I figure our digs are the only place secure enough for you and me to have a seriously top secret talk.”

  “Yeah,” was the only word Trouble said during the drive.

  The pressure blew before Ruth could get lunch on the table. He brought her up to date on the situation between him and Ray in full, lurid detail. Somehow, neither of them broke any crockery.

  But it was a close-run thing.

  They did, however, discus Ray’s past, present and dismal future in great details. Then they digressed to his antecedents, maculate birth, and full range of disgusting habits.

  Lunch was not so much eaten as torn to pieces.

  “So,” Ruth finally said, pursing her lips in thought, “what do we do?”

  “I can’t think of anything we can do.”

  “So, Kris is going to Siberia. Who’s going with her?”

  “She’s being sent there all alone. The rest of the Wasp ’s crew is being scattered to the winds, but carefully. To places where Ray can keep them locked down and quiet.”

  “Poor Kris. Solitary confinement, huh.”

  “Yep.”

  “How do we get her out of there?”

  “Sorry, love, but this one is beyond me. I hadn’t even heard of this Madigan’s Rainbow place before Mac dropped it on me, and my net search has turned up nothing.”

  Ruth made a face. “I’ve never heard of it either, but certainly you’ve got some markers left on the table. Some friend must owe you a favor.”

  “Mac specifically told me not to touch this. Crossie told him that they were burying Kris deep, and if anyone, and Crossie hinted strongly that if anyone, particularly someone spelled T.R.O.U.B.L.E., tried to bust Kris out, they would fail and pay a high price.”

  “Hmm,” Ruth said, eyeing the ceiling. “Then I guess we wait for our Kris to bust out of there herself. Hang loose and stay flexible, so we can help her when she does.”

  Trouble found himself grinning. “Sounds like a plan, love, and I always love your plans.”

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