“Maybe it’s a nursery rhyme,” Jacques said.
They left the woman nursing her child and made their way back up to Kris’s day quarters. There, they sat around the couch and chairs and stared glumly at the floor.
“I can’t believe,” Kris said, “that anyone would be that blind to . . .” She ran out of words.
“The brainwashing on their ships must be pretty extensive,” Jacques said. “It must have started early and been all-inclusive.”
“But,” Kris started, then twisted her thought in midflight. “Even the Alwan elders with their egg check didn’t keep their people on that tight a leash.”
“Rebel Alwans could still run for the deep woods,” Penny said. “Where can you run to on a ship? It’s huge, but it’s just a ship. If you breathe their air, they own you, body and soul.”
“But for a hundred thousand years? For Christ’s sake,” Jack exploded.
But a moment later, he shrugged. “We don’t know their story. Has a ship gone rogue and been hunted down by the others. Has a crew mutinied and gone to planet? We just don’t know.”
“These people don’t even know how to live on a planet,” Jacques said. “Look at those below. Hell, you say those that destroyed the planet we found didn’t know to dig latrines. Neither did those fools. They’d piss in the water they were about to drink.” He shook his head.
“What are our choices?” Kris asked. “If we keep the woman, can we, what would you call it, deprogram her?”
“It would be a long process, and we might lose a few fingers,” Penny said.
“Or eyes,” Jack said.
“And if we send her back?” Kris asked.
“She will tell them the moment she sees her clan that she stinks of vermin, and they will kill her,” Jacques said. Then winced. “And if she tells them who I am, the men will likely kill all the women who slept with me.”
“But they’ve eaten the food you found for them,” Amanda said.
Again, the anthropologist could only shrug.
The room got very silent. Even Nelly seemed silent in Kris’s head.
Then Jack’s face got hard.
“Hon?” Kris said in question.
“I’m getting a report from the brig,” Jack said, his words distant and hard.
Kris gave her husband a puzzled look. “And.”
“The alien woman smothered her child with her own breasts as she lay in her bunk, then bit her own tongue clean off and bled out without our watch being any the wiser.”
“No!” Kris’s gut was plummeting even as she jumped to her feet, but Jack stepped between her and the door out of their quarters.
“You are not going down there, Kris. My Marines will take care of what has to be done.”
“But the baby!”
“Was killed by her mother.”
Kris’s gut had been in free fall before. Now her whole self was empty as space. And just as cold. Kris bent over, clutching for her belly. Clutching for herself. “Oh my God, I’ve killed them both.”
“You did not kill anyone,” Jack said, pulling her close, forcing her to stand, her cheek on his chest. “She killed her child. Then she killed herself.”
“But if I . . .”
“If you and our team hadn’t gotten involved,” Jacques cut her off, “they would have died soon enough. They were starving to death in a land full of food. But food they didn’t know how to reach out for. Food their training didn’t teach them could be there. They were stupid. Pissing in their own drinking water. Shitting there, too. Kris, most of them were already running a low-grade fever. One had already lost her baby, and the others would likely lose theirs to sickness or hunger before their first birthday. Kris, they didn’t know how to survive down there. I’ve helped them. Maybe those that are left will do better.”
Kris listened, but she didn’t believe a word of it.
“Kris. Look at me,” Jack said, pulling her face close to his. “Listen to what Jacques just said. Yes, these two died, but the others have a lot better chance of living because of what you did.”
“I should have seen this coming,” Kris said, tasting the cold darkness that was trying to engulf her.
“Yes,” Amanda said. “We all should have seen this coming. Jack, did your Marines have her on a suicide watch?”
Jack stared at the ceiling, thinking. “The guards were watching her. She was the best show in town. They didn’t see anything strange until the blood dripped out past her body and onto the floor.”
“That may not be a suicide watch, but it was just as good as one,” Penny said. “Kris, what were we supposed to do? She bit her own tongue out and just lay there as she bled to death.”
Now it was Kris’s turn to give herself up to a hopeless, helpless shrug. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“Did any of us see this coming when we decided to haul her in?” Penny asked.
As one, they all shook their heads.
“Do any of us disagree that it is far better to try to talk out a conflict than just start killing everyone in sight and keep on doing it until there is only one left standing?” Penny went on doggedly.
“Is that a trick question?” Kris asked, trying to find some humor somewhere.
“Kris.” Penny, Kris’s best friend, came to stand beside her and Jack. She spoke her words slowly, as if she were hammering them into a stone wall. “You may not be as crazy as the Alwans are, demanding a ‘talk talk’ even as the aliens are shooting at us, but you’ve done everything you could to talk to them. This woman is not your first try. Knowing you, she won’t be your last. You’ll get better, and maybe, before too many more billion aliens get themselves killed, they’ll learn they need to talk to us because we are not vermin prey.”
“Dear God, I hope so,” Kris said, as all breath left her.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Jack said, “if you will excuse me and my wife, I’d like some quiet time with her.”
Without a word said, the others left.
Kris found herself shaking. Shaking hard. “Jack, I need you to hold me.”
He folded his strong arms around her and settled onto the couch with her half in his lap. “That’s what I’m here for.”
23
Kris came awake slowly the next morning. For a moment, she couldn’t remember where she was. It was Jack’s rhythmic breathing beside her that restored her sense of time and place.
Instead of rolling out of bed, she rolled over and stared at the overhead. In her mind’s eye, she kept going back to the brig yesterday. Again, she saw a young woman nursing her baby so lovingly.
How could she have killed that child only a few minutes later?
Kris shivered.
Jack placed a loving arm over her.
“I thought you were asleep,” Kris said.
“I’ve been awake for a while.”
Kris rested a hand on Jack’s arm. “I didn’t see that coming. I should have, but I didn’t.”
“No, love, you couldn’t have seen it coming. Hell, woman, if someone marooned any man or woman in this fleet in that flea-bitten hellhole down there, they’d jump at a chance to get out.”
“It’s not a hellhole, it’s nature at its rawest,” Kris said.
“It looks pretty on a screen, but you spend a couple of hours down there, and it will lose that romantic sheen.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I have this chief of security who would never let me wander around such a hazardous place.”
“Damn straight he wouldn’t, love.”
Kris held on to that love for a long moment. When had his concern for her as the woman who was his primary morphed into concern for the woman he loved?
That mother had killed the child she loved. Could Jack kill her?
The thought alone brought another shiver.
He pulled her closer. “What’s wrong, hon?”
Kris considered answering with a dismissive “nothing,” but Jack deserved better than that. “She killed the chi
ld she loved because she loved her. Can you think of anything that would make you kill me out of love?”
Jack honored her by not shooting back a “no.”
After a pause of just the right and thoughtful length, he said, “I can’t think of anything at the moment. Can’t honestly think of anything that would make killing you even close to the bottom of my long list of things to do today.”
“But she did.”
“Remember, she’s the end product of a whole lot of history and brainwashing.”
“We have our history. And don’t tell me we don’t dump a lot of stuff on our kids. I was one not too long ago, and I’m still recovering from the experience.”
Jack chuckled. “Aren’t we all? One of the nice things about being a grown-up is that you get to pull your own strings.”
“And cut a few of the worst ones,” Kris said, making a face at the overhead.
“So, love, where is all this going?”
“We’re going. That’s for sure. I came. I saw. I don’t like what I saw, and I’m leaving, with apologies to Caesar.”
“Caesar never saw anything like this crazy-house mess.”
“How sure are you that we’ve taken an accurate measure of this mess?” Kris asked.
“I’m 99.9 percent sure that some hundred and ten thousand years ago, that star up there, the first one to the left and straight on until sunset, conquered this planet. There may have even been some gene engineering to make these folks more docile. It didn’t work. It may have taken ten thousand years, but the slaves rose up and not only killed the masters but jumped right into their own star system and plowed their fields with sky-fire and salt. And they’ve been hunting for anything smart enough to be a danger so they can kill it before it has a chance to rise up. Then wash, rinse, and repeat what happened here again and again.”
Kris frowned at the overhead. “Do you think the obedience we’ve witnessed dirtside and in our own brig, the doggedness that’s kept these people wandering the stars, unable to change, might have been engineered into them by the king and queen pressed in glass down there in the pyramid?”
“Kris, people change. Slaves revolt. The underdog this war is the uberdog the next one. That’s the way of nature. That’s how it worked on Earth. The Iteeche might be more obedient than your average hairy Earthling, but they have revolts, and dynasties rise and fall. Even the Rooster elders, with their egg check, created the seeds of their overthrow. We just got there before the rebellion got big enough and swept out of the woods. Change happens. Get ready for it.”
“Except on those ships,” Kris said. “She was willing to take her own life and her child’s future rather than even consider that she might not have the world right. That she might be able to change.”
“How different is that from the captain of that first ship you shot the engines out of who then blew himself and his huge, multigenerational family into space?”
“And you said I couldn’t have seen yesterday’s murder-suicide coming?” Kris said.
“We’ve connected a lot of dots, hon. This is the first time we’ve connected one individual bug-eyed monster to the other dots.”
“Bug-eyed monsters. They look just like us, but they are the most different of any race we’ve come upon out here.”
“Yep. Now, my love, have we finished with the weighty stuff of the day, because, I have to tell you, this is not the pillow talk I envisioned when I took you for my wife.”
Kris rolled into his arms and gave him a long, loving kiss. “Is that more like it?”
He made an undecided face. “Um, is that the best you got?”
She lunged for him. “I’ll show you best.”
Much later, as Kris was washing Jack’s back in the shower, he asked, “When do we leave?”
“That depends on what the boffins have to say,” Kris said. “I hope to run into Professor Labao at breakfast and get a quick report.”
Kris did indeed find the good professor just finishing up his own breakfast as she entered the wardroom. Captain Drago had not restructured the Wasp to fully accommodate the scientists when they came back aboard from Alwa. The Forward Lounge was there, as usual, but none of the restaurants or pubs that the boffins frequented for their meals had been re-created. Like it or not, the boffins ate in the wardroom.
Usually, the Navy got the first seating and were long gone when the sleepy-eyed scientists finally stumbled to the table. Today, Kris was running late enough that she arrived when the professor was getting up to leave.
“Sit back down, Professor. I want to knock the dust of this place from my boots. How soon before I can do that?”
“We actually have a lot of research yet to finish. It should not be rushed. We have just managed to translate the dates in the trophy room of the pyramid. It seems of late that they are averaging a visit every fifty years or so, and the last one was only twenty years ago.”
“That may not be the only time they visit,” Kris said, dryly. “It appears from our discussion with one of them that they drop by regularly to maroon a few troublemakers or just some unlucky few they punish to intimidate the rest.”
“Oh. Oh. Oh! I take it that Dr. la Duke’s work has been fruitful?”
“Yep, fruitful and deadly. They don’t talk to us ‘vermin,’ they just kill themselves. Oh, and they kill all vermin.”
The good professor raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never been called a vermin.”
“I’m sure la Duke recorded all his research. Check it out in your spare time. Anyway, I’ve learned what I came here for. I wish to be going. How soon can your folks finish it up and pack it in?”
“I will see to that immediately.”
“Nelly, get me Captain Drago.”
“What can I do for you, Admiral?”
“What do you need to do to get underway for Alwa?”
“I’d like to refuel. We’re about half-full on reaction mass. That’s enough to get us back to Alwa, but we’d be coming in on fumes.”
“Can we refuel on the way out?”
“The two large gas giants are both about forty-five degrees off from the jump. The nearest ice giant is about a day or so out from here going the other way. I would prefer the higher reaction mass you get with ice to just hydrogen. For that, I’d need about three days.”
“Then get the Endeavor and Intrepid headed out to refuel for the rest of us. I’d like to get underway on the fastest track for home just as soon as you’re fueled.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral.”
“Three days!” Professor Labao was too much of an aristocrat to squeak, but he came close.
“Three days,” Kris said.
There was a long pause as the professor consulted with his computer. “Well, if you say so, I guess we can finish in three days.”
“Kris, I foresee a problem,” Nelly said.
“And it is?”
“All of the scientists will finish in three days. The problem is that none of them plan to finish in any less time.”
“Oops,” Kris said.
“Is there a problem?” the professor asked, almost looking innocent.
“We don’t have enough shuttles to bring everyone up at the end of day three. Some have to come up sooner,” Kris said.
“But who will decide?”
“You.”
“But I could never tell another scientist that their research is more important than another’s.”
“I thought that was what administration was all about,” Kris said.
The professor looked like Kris had just gotten 2+2 wrong. “I may have to make tough calls where money is concerned. Time on equipment, yes. But to cut someone off when they might be close to something that would open up an entire new area of research! No. I will not do it.”
“Then I will,” Kris said. “Meet me in the Forward Lounge at noon and warn all your teams to be available online.”
Jack had returned with Kris’s breakfast, and it was rapidly getting cold. She turned to eat, and the
professor hurried from the wardroom, already talking to his research teams.
“Did that go well?” Jack asked.
“I don’t think I’ll have to ask for your Marines to move the boffins back aboard at the tip of their bayonets.”
Jack grinned at the thought.
Breakfast finished, Kris called a meeting of her core team in her day quarters. Penny and Masao arrived first, still showing the black humor of two who had been taken into the love of a child only to lose it. Amanda and Jacques were the last to arrive, and kept their distance. They settled their foul moods at opposite ends of the conference table.
Before Kris could open her mouth, Nelly butted in. DON’T ASK THEM WHAT’S WRONG. THE DOCS THINK JACQUES SHOULD NOT BE INTIMATE AFTER ALL HIS CATTING AROUND ON THE SURFACE.
BUT I THOUGHT THERE WAS NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT.
OFFICIALLY, THERE ISN’T, KRIS, BUT THE DOCS THINK HE AND AMANDA SHOULD KEEP SOME EXTRA DISTANCE UNTIL THEY’VE HAD A BIT MORE TIME TO ANALYZE ANYTHING NEW IN HIS BLOOD.
“CATTING AROUND,” NELLY?
NOT MY WORD. AMANDA’S. I GOT IT FROM MY KID WHO WORKS WITH JACQUES. WE LOOKED IT UP. CATS ARE VERY PROLIFIC.
Kris started the meeting with no preamble. “We’re leaving here in three days. Do you have a problem with that?” she said, looking at Jacques.
The anthropologist shook his head. “I’m done down there. I’ll spend years going over my research, but I think we’ve already written the executive summary.”
“Then I have a question,” Kris said. “What do we do with that pyramid?”
“We don’t lase it from space,” Jacques quickly said.
“Not even a little bit?” Amanda asked.
“How much do you have in mind?”
“I was kidding, Jacques. That trip down has made you thin-skinned.”
“It is growing thicker by the second, my dear.”
“Then kidding aside,” Kris said, “what kind of calling card do we leave the next visitor?”
“Hmm, that is not an easy question, Admiral,” Jacques said. “My wife just might have the right answer. I can’t tell from my talk with the others for sure, but I think they were just dropped off near the pyramid. It is possible that the Black Hats quickly shoved them out the door, did three quick bows to the pyramid, then took off back for space. It might only be opened when there are heads to put on display.”
Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Page 15