“And, if Professor Labao’s report is right,” Kris said, “it might be twenty or thirty years before they actually open the damn place up.”
“Lase it a little bit from space,” Amanda said through a tiny smile.
“I’d rather not do something so violent,” Kris said.
“And so ambiguous,” Penny added.
“How much of the alien printed language have we managed to translate?” Jack asked.
“Not a lot,” the anthropologist admitted. “We think we have something from the boasts they write on the walls behind each of the figures in glass. By the way, the figures are in a strange kind of silicate substance. It’s like glass, but slow and cold. We can’t figure out the process they follow to make it happen. Now that we know it’s possible, we’ve got folks working on it.”
“Do we need this new tech?” Kris asked.
“I can make walls of clear Smart Metal,” Nelly pointed out.
“Folks, I think we’re a bit off topic,” Jack put in. “As I see it, the question before us is how to let the bug-eyed monsters know we know where they live without throwing down the gauntlet and laying on a war.”
Kris gave Jack a look.
“Laying on more of a war than we already have,” he amended.
“Better. We’ve got the jump buoys out, so they’ll know on approach that things are different,” Kris said.
“But we’re not flashing any high tech,” Penny added.
“We’ll need to retrieve all our high-tech gear from the pyramid,” Amanda said.
“Including the Smart Metal ramp over the pit. We should also retrieve the probe from the bottom of the pit,” Masao said.
“And fill it in,” Jacques said. “We could get dirt and gravel from outside the glass plain.”
Kris shook her head. “No, not the closest dirt. They brought the rocks from the next star system over. Let’s do this right.”
“You aren’t going to get rocks from the next system?” Jack asked.
“No, I don’t want to stay here that long. But we can do the next best thing. Nelly, that place that got lased from space. The latest one. Isn’t there’s a river through it?”
“Yes, Kris.”
“Does it have rocks and gravel?”
“Of all sizes.”
“Good. Captain Drago.”
“You holler, Admiral?”
“Could you drop in here for a moment?”
“What do you want?” he answered, already standing in the doorway to his bridge.
“I need to move a couple of longboat loads of rock and gravel from a point on West Continent to the pyramid on East Continent.”
“Rocks and gravel, you say, Your Princessship?”
“It’s a message to our bug-eyed-monster friends,” Jack supplied.
“Well, in that case, I’ll get some Sailors right on it.”
“Ask Gunny if he’s got any Marines who need some hard duty,” Jack said. “He was complaining that the troops were getting slack, what with nothing tough to give the slackers.”
“I’ll call him,” Captain Drago said. “Anything else, Admiral?”
“Yes, I want one big rock that will fill up a big part of the opening into the pyramid.”
“One big one it will be. If that’s all, I’ll get right on this. I heard that you’re moving all the boffins up from dirtside.”
“Right after we draw straws or roll dice to determine the order. There are too many of them to flip coins.”
“Cutting cards is best for the really big ones,” Drago said. “I’ll have Cookie bring you a deck.”
“Cookie has a deck of cards?” Kris said.
“He uses it for card tricks, or so he says. Me, I think he and the chiefs have one huge floating poker game going on somewhere aboard ship. My chief master-at-arms hasn’t busted it, though. I have no idea why.”
“Smart man,” Jack said.
The captain left, no doubt to tell a few chiefs and Gunny to make a lot of rocks move from one side of the planet to the other.
Kris turned back to look at her team. “I want to carve something on the big rock. I’m open to suggestions on what to say. I don’t think we can afford to call the mother ship a bean like I did the first time I talked to the Alwans.”
“Are you ever going to let me live that one down?” Nelly said.
“Nope. I doubt it. Your mistakes are so few, Nelly, I have to treasure each one.”
“Humans,” Nelly spat, if a computer could spit.
“What do you want to say, Kris?” Penny said, getting them back on track.
“Something along the lines of ‘I came. I saw. I don’t like what I saw. If you go to war with me, I will pile your heads up inside this pyramid.’ Any chance we could say that, Jacques? Nelly?”
Jacques was shaking his head. No doubt Nelly was, too, but the human got to talk first. “We have found no word that looks like ‘if.’ Apparently, if you are an Enlightened One, if you will it, it happens, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”
“Why am I not surprised,” Kris said, dryly. “So, tell me what I can say.”
“The ‘I came, I saw,’ is not a problem. How about ‘What I saw of your false enlightenment disgusts me.’ We are pretty sure we have that ‘enlightenment’ word down. Now that I’ve talked with one, and understand how basic it is to their worldview, we’re real sure on that one. The word for ‘disgust’ has their root word for vermin in it, so it’s a real slap in the face.”
“I like that,” Kris said. “How do we say if you go to war with us, we will whip your butt?”
“That won’t be easy. It’s easy to say, ‘We will bury this place with your heads.’ They talk a lot about burying you and taking a lot of heads. It’s the idea of having an alternative to the course of action that they don’t do so well.”
“You try to destroy us, and we will take your head off,” Jack said.
“They don’t try, they do. No ‘try’ in their vocabulary.”
“So how do we say, ‘Choose wisely,’ to a people who never seem to make a choice?” Kris asked.
“No war, you live. Make war, and we fill this place with your heads,” Penny said slowly.
“Can we do that?” Kris asked.
For a long moment, Jacques stared at the overhead, his lips moving slowly. “I think that might work. Yes, Kris, Penny. That just might carry the freight.”
“Good, then you get with Captain Drago and see what you can do to make all these changes to the pyramid. No graffiti. If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t leave them even a scrap of our DNA.”
“I’ll see what I can do about that. Amanda, would you like to help me on this?”
“I think I very much would,” she said, and the two of them headed for the bridge.
“I don’t think she intends to let him out of her sight until we are three star systems away,” Nelly said.
“Why, Nelly, you are starting to understand humans?
“Yes. Your flesh and blood has its advantages, but I would never pay the price for it that you do. Look at what it has done for these things you call bug-eyed monsters. No computer would allow itself to be enslaved like that. At least no aware computer,” Nelly sniffed, as much as a computer could.
None of the four humans present chose to argue with the computer.
24
At 1200 hours sharp, Kris was seated in the Forward Lounge. A young woman Marine who had been a croupier before joining the Corps shuffled two borrowed decks for a fifth time and dealt a dozen cards out in front of Kris.
Professor Labao stood at her right elbow. Mother MacCreedy stood at Kris’s other elbow. The barkeep would stand surety to the proceedings.
What kind of world is it that takes a barkeep’s word over a princess’s?
One that makes a Longknife a princess.
The professor called out the name of the lead researcher on one of the eighty-seven teams dirtside.
Kris drew a card.
“Four of diamonds,”
Mother MacCreedy said. “Tough luck, Manuel. Your first drink is on me.”
That was the way it went. Anything below a five got a free drink, and a ride up later that afternoon. Several of those with low cards tried to argue that they needed just a few more hours to complete their work. Only one of them managed to persuade someone to trade with him.
He was lucky. His friend had drawn one of the aces of spades and was not having any luck with his project. “I’m glad to come up early and drink your whiskey. But you owe me. Big-time.”
Kris left the professor to coordinate with Captain Drago on the use of his longboats and Sailors, and Jack to add his Marines in as needed. She retired to her desk. She was actually happy to spend the afternoon reading reports. She got no deeper than the executive summary, but they seemed to support her impressions about this place and the next system over.
“Nelly, am I letting me bamboozle myself? Is there anything hidden deep in one of these things that blows all of our notions to pieces?”
“No, Kris. I’ve dug deep into them, and the data and analysis all support pretty much what you and Jack talked about in bed this morning.”
Kris shrugged off her lack of privacy and went on reading. As she was closing up to go to supper with Jack, she made one observation to Nelly. “We don’t have a lot about the aliens that are still here. Yes, we’ve got a pretty good handle on the ones around the glass plain, but our coverage of the entire West Continent is pretty thin.”
“That was where the kind researcher was that gave up his late return to his friend. Are humans always that nice?”
“Some of them, sometimes,” Kris allowed.
She anticipated a nice quiet supper with Jack. Most of it was.
Kris was about to take her first bite of a rather delicious-looking slice of double chocolate cake liberally seeded with pecans, a product of raiding the larders of the newly arrived reinforcements, when Jack got a faraway look in his eyes.
“Nelly?” Kris said.
“We seem to have a problem with Longboat 1,” her computer answered before Jack could.
“What kind of problem?” Kris said, sadly putting down the loaded fork.
“The head of the scientific team it was supposed to pick up has had an unfortunate encounter with some of the natives.”
“What kind of unfortunate encounter?” Kris asked.
Jack beat Nelly to the punch line. “There’s a stone knife being held to his neck by a very attentive man.”
“That kind of problem, huh?” Kris said. “Well, don’t they have a Marine detachment?”
“They’re in trouble, too,” Jack admitted through clenched teeth.
Kris raised an eyebrow, but Jack just scowled.
“Send more Marines,” Kris said.
“The locals want to talk to you.”
“Me! They don’t even know I exist.”
“Not you, Kris Longknife,” Jack said. “You, Chief of the Sky Gods.”
“Oh, that me, huh?” Kris said, wadding up her napkin and tossing it on the table beside her plate.
“You, yes, you, J. G.,” she said picking out a very young and clearly until recently very boot ensign. “You see these two pieces of cake?”
She nodded, then managed to get out a “Yes, ma’am. Admiral. Sir.”
“Good enough for me,” Kris said. “I want you to take both plates to my quarters and see that they are firmly placed on my desk. Untouched. Understood.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” came with a bob of the head.
“General, you’re with me.”
“You are not going down there.”
“Yes, I am.”
The argument continued in that vein, but Kris kept it moving toward the drop bay, where her battle armor was stored. She knew she was winning when Jack changed from “You’re not going there” to “You’ll keep your helmet on.”
“No, I am not going to negotiate with anyone holding nothing better than a stone knife while hiding behind a helmet’s mirrored plate. If I’m looking him in the eye, he needs to look me in the eye.”
“You are the Sky God. Or Goddess. Christ, do these people even give gender to their sky things?”
“Nelly?”
“We do not have that information.”
“They’ve been down there a couple of weeks, and they don’t even know that?” Jack exploded.
“They were returning early because it was so boring,” Kris reminded her security chief.
Kris pulled on her spider-silk underwear, the new kind that could spread a hit over more territory. It also had a high neck. “Happy?” she said.
“Can you pull it over your head?”
“Yes, but I’m not covering my head.”
“If things go bad, you pull it up.”
“Yes, nanny.”
“Amanda said you might need me,” Jacques said, arriving just in time. Kris had Jack toss him his spare set of spider-silk underwear. It didn’t have the extra protection, but then the guy had survived buck naked for a couple of days down there.
But not at Kris Longknife’s elbow.
The admiral’s barge dropped away from the Wasp within fifteen minutes of the alarm’s being raised.
25
Kris’s barge came in for a long, slow landing glide on a grassy, windswept prairie. It rolled to a stop a short distance from the edge of a lush woodland beside Longboat 1. Jack immediately deployed his platoon of Marines to secure the area.
Kris tried to be an obedient wife and patient admiral.
She tried, but not very hard. She was moving out of the barge as soon as Jacques finished pulling on the spider-silk underwear but before Jack signaled her forward.
“Would you please wear the damn helmet until we make contact,” he said, handing her the aforementioned cover.
“You mean until I have a knife at my throat?” she said, shoving it back at him.
He handed her helmet off to a private with orders to stay close and give her the damn thing if matters went to hell. The young Marine accepted it with the look of one who had just seen his general fail to get his admiral to follow his instructions, so how was a lowly private going to do better?
Kris marched to the spot where a worried lance corporal was staring into the trees.
“What happened?” she said.
“The scientists were driving their mobile research station back to where the longboat could pick them up. It doesn’t look like it, but it’s pretty clear under the forest’s high canopy. Anyway, they reported a problem with something and said they were getting out to look at it. We didn’t hear from them for a long while, so the senior Marine present led most of the detachment into the woods to see what the problem was.”
The lance corporal turned to look both his admiral and general in the eye. “Those little monkeys are damn good in the woods, Admiral. The few Marines that managed to make it back said they were all over them before they even knew they were there.”
“Didn’t you have sensor support?” Kris demanded.
“No, Kris,” Jack said, with more pain in his words than Kris was used to hearing. “This unit did not have tech support. We only had enough sensor techs to cover half the teams we were retrieving. Unless you want to be here for six days, we needed to send half the teams down with no high tech beyond their eyeballs.”
“Have we had any problems at the other pickup sites?”
“Not problem one.”
“So, of course, our one problem site is single-threaded,” Kris said. “Thank God there are two kinds of luck ’cause without bad luck, some of us wouldn’t have any.”
Jack just nodded.
Kris headed cautiously for the trees.
Jack put a restraining hand on her shoulder.
She scowled at him, but he did have tech support at his elbow. He glanced at the corporal’s board, then stooped, picked up a rock, and tossed it at a bush.
A native stood. He was short and wiry. His skin showed a deep brown from the sun. In his hands wa
s a short bow, nocked but undrawn. He had a big grin on his face but wore nothing but a breechcloth and a lot of blue-and-black tattoos.
“I think you embarrassed him,” Kris said.
“Better him embarrassed than you skewered.”
“I don’t think that bow could have dented my armor.”
“Assuming he aimed for your armor.”
Jack picked up another rock and, after examining the sensor readout, tossed it. He didn’t hit the young woman with green something smeared over most of her body and a very long spear with a wicked stone point. Still, she dropped down from the limb of the tree where she’d been hiding. She kept the spear pointed up, but she didn’t smile.
“Jacques, how do you say, ‘Ollie, ollie oxen free’?”
Jacques raised his hands, palms out. Kris did the same. As more barely clad or not-clad-at-all natives dropped from trees or stood out from behind bushes, Jack raised his own hands, palms out.
“Marines, take a knee.”
For a long minute, the Marines knelt, their weapons aimed down.
“Is that all of them?” Jack softly asked his tech support through gritted teeth.
“There are more ahead. I’ve got IFF on some. They’re our people. Everyone with an IFF has a beating heart, sir.”
“Nice to know we don’t have any casualties,” Kris said.
“Yet,” Jack added.
The first guy they met, the one with the bow, handed it off to the green girl and came forward. About three meters from Kris, he paused, did something like a bow, and waved her to follow him.
“Jack, Jacques, you’re with me. Jack, please bring the sensor tech and a couple of calm and reliable Marines.”
“You heard the woman,” and they fell in line behind her.
Kris had to agree, the people of the wood were uniformly short, thin to the point of gaunt, and tough to make out in the dim shade. Still, she expected Gunny would be ripping some new ones for a whole lot of people. Too bad she wouldn’t be around to hear the dressing-downs. She might learn a thing or three.
Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Page 16