Bold

by Mike Shepherd

  Kris and Jack eyed the choices laid out before them. There was everything Kris had ever seen on a breakfast menu: crepes with a half a dozen fruit fillings; quiches; pancakes and waffles of assorted embellishments; eggs prepared several ways; a breakfast burrito; potatoes of several sorts, including little pancakes; oatmeal with quite a few berry, fruit, or sugar toppings close at hand; a tray of assorted sweet breads. A chef stood ready to make an omelet to her specifications.

  “I didn’t know Mary Fintch had brought aboard either the chef or the produce to lay out something like this,” Kris said.

  “Oh, we know how to make all this,” the woman who stood ready to make the omelets said. Her name tag said Song, so this would be Mary’s wife. “We just had a delivery from St. Petersburg that we didn’t order. Seems someone wants to thank a Kris Longknife for getting his town a charter or something like that.”

  “This is all from Mannie?” Jack said, mouth hanging open.

  “Mannie or Mike. Mary told me, but I forgot,” Song agreed.

  Kris felt her mouth watering and loaded a plate for a long and pleasant breakfast.

  As she and Jack settled down at a table, Song brought a tray full of glasses of milk and juices. Kris took the large milk, it was clearly intended for her, and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Jack took apple juice and coffee.

  “Clearly, St. Petersburg is not going hungry,” Kris said. “Song, did you or Mary try to order fresh meats or produce while we were at Greenfeld?”

  “Funny you should ask, Your Highness. We were told that the bug infestations meant we didn’t dare take on fresh supplies. But we didn’t get that word until we tried to order some fresh meats, fruits, and vegetables. The prices being asked from the station suppliers were just outrageous. Mary tried to contact some suppliers dirtside, assuming we’d pay for transport up the beanstalk ourselves, but their prices weren’t any better.”

  “Hmm,” Kris said. “Song, if there’s no one asking for you to cook something at the moment, would you go over to that tall woman, Diana? Tell her Kris Longknife sent you, and she needs to hear what you just told me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the cook said, and made her way to where Diana was bent over a table. Kris munched her crepes while the two talked. Done, Song headed back to her place behind the table.

  Diana gave Kris a knowing nod and went two tables down to talk to someone else.

  “They can’t even keep food flowing into their capital,” Jack said, shaking his head.

  “I remember when I was campaigning for Father for the farm vote, Jack. Farming has come a long way from plowing a field and tossing out some seed. They need spare parts for their equipment: hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment. They need fertilizer, bugs to keep the bugs down, a whole lot of things. You start trouble over here, and the supply chain to over there frays and breaks. If it gets bad enough, you get famine, and people start dying,” Kris finished softly.

  After a minute, she shook herself. “It’s not smart to mess with a complicated mechanism like a modern economy. If things really did get as bad on some planets as Vicky claimed, then she’s done some herculean lifting to get it going again.”

  “We didn’t hear a word of this from the Emperor or Empress.”

  “Nope,” Kris said, “just a lot of complaining about rioting in the streets and a kid that won’t do what Papa wants.”

  “Do we have any proof that someone is out to kill Vicky?” Jack asked.

  “Kris, I have found information to verify at least one of the assassination attempts.”

  “Talk to me, Nelly.”

  “I’ve located a news story from Savannah about the Grand Duchess paying them a short visit. Very short, unannounced visit. A bit more than two days in system. The story recounts the death of a Rear Admiral Gort, shot by a bystander who was herself killed. The murder is carried on Savannah’s books as unsolved. This took place only a bit more than a week after we were hauled off that wreck of a Wasp at High Chance.”

  “Good God,” Jack whispered. “Somebody wanted Vicky dead, and they could reach very far and grasp for her that fast.”

  “She said her ‘Mr. Smith’ had been earning his pay,” Kris pointed out. “Nelly, please pass that along to our brain trust.”

  “Yes, Kris, it is done. Judge Diana says they are close to having a report ready for you.”

  Kris and Jack finished their delicious breakfast and self-bussed their table. Just as she turned around, Kris was presented with all three of her brain trust with their heads together in the center of the room.

  As Kris and Jack walked toward them, the three turned to meet them.

  “We’re ready to brief you, Your Highness,” Diana reported.

  44

  The room began to change around Kris as she wound her way to the three leaders who were there to advise her on matters less mortal than her normal business. Tables that had been scattered around the room started moving, following the people who had been working on them. The room reformed itself into a triangle with five comfortable chairs in the center. Several new tables appeared in the triangle as other cluttered tables moved to form a loose second row behind the first. Chairs that had sunk into the floor as the tables began their perambulations reappeared as the tables settled into their places. Quite a few of them were easy chairs.

  God, you have to love this Smart Metal, Kris thought as she took one of the chairs in the center, Jack at her right elbow. The judge, the mediator, and the arbitrator settled into place in front of her.

  For a long minute, as the migration of the tables finished up, the three across from Kris sat, apparently lost in some quiet meditation.

  Kris, who was used to action, forced herself to try some deep-breathing exercises to keep from taking the floor and telling them what she wanted.

  These people are here because a whole lot of folks thought this new challenge might not be amenable to my usual solution of blowing something up. Let’s let them have their say.

  I can always blow stuff up later, Kris thought, and made no effort to suppress what was, no doubt, a fey smile.

  Across from her, Al, Bill, and Diana exchanged glances, then Diana cleared her throat.

  “I think, as a judge, I should be the one to explain this.”

  “Explain what?” Kris said, jumping in the moment Diana paused for a breath. Kris clamped her mouth shut. Listen, don’t talk, she ordered herself.

  “Your Highness,” Diana want on, “we think there is something that really must be at the forefront of our conversation here today.”

  Kris gritted her teeth and did not venture into Diana’s second pause.

  The judge seemed surprised at Kris’s silence. Surprised and pleased.

  “Many people would think that we are gathered here to determine guilt and innocence. Who is in the right and who is wrong? I may have the honor of being called a judge and have a courtroom, but determining the guilty is not the purpose of my court.”

  Kris continued to keep her mouth shut, but she couldn’t avoid a puzzled frown.

  “So you want to know what my court is about?” Diana said.

  This time, Kris allowed herself a “Yes.”

  A tight smile flitted across Diana’s face as she nodded thoughtfully. “When I sit in robes, my purpose is to find the best path for the children. I want to examine every option that my associates can dig up, then decide which one is best for that young person’s future. I cannot waste my time searching for who might be the guilty party who brought on this situation. I. Am. There. For. The. Child. I am there to find a way forward out of a mess.”

  Kris leaned back in her chair, and, for once, didn’t have to clinch her jaw to keep words from dropping out of her mouth. What Diana had said was not at all what Kris had expected. In all the time she had spent with these three and their supporting staff, this rather peculiar idea had never c
rossed her mind.

  It did not go down easy for Kris.

  All her life, she’d been looking for the right way. Campaigning for her father, the whole idea had been to convince people that his party was the right one and the other parties were wrong. In the Navy, Kris had always looked for the best way. The one that left her enemy defeated and her victorious. That left as many of her people alive as possible.

  Worse, as Kris listened to Vicky last night, she’d found herself wanting the Empress defeated and all her ambitions left in the dust.

  When Kris began speaking, her words kind of fell out of her mouth. “You don’t want to prove who’s right and who’s wrong? You want me to look at this civil war and ignore who’s responsible for starting it? For creating all this havoc? Causing all these deaths?”

  “Strange as it may seem, you are correct,” Al, the mediator, said softly. “We can’t afford to waste our time and effort on that. We came here to end a civil war. It will take everything we have, every bit of our experience and skill, to end this war. Any effort or time we waste seeking out the guilty and trying to devise punishments for them is effort taken away from ending the war and restoring this Empire to peace and prosperity.”

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” Jack said. “Someone deserves to be punished for what they’ve done to the people of the Greenfeld Empire.”

  “Maybe someone will,” Bill the arbitartor said. “But. It. Can. Not. Be. Us.”

  “We can try to end this civil war,” Diana said, “or we can try to punish the guilty. Your Highness, please say again what your purpose for coming here is.”

  Kris took several deep breaths as she considered her mission before she spoke softly. “Before a few minutes ago, I would have considered punishing the guilty and ending this civil war one and the same.” Kris paused. “I don’t like the idea that they are not. Tell me why we can’t do both.”

  The three looked at each other for a moment, then Al faced Kris. “For a moment, let us say that the Emperor, or was it the Empress who said it. Anyway, let’s say that we tell the Grand Duchess that her actions here have been in the wrong and that the right thing for her to do is return to her father’s loving arms at the Palace. How do you think that would go over?”

  “Other than that she would be dead within a week?” Kris asked.

  “There is that likelihood,” Al said. “But before she actually boarded a ship for Greenfeld, how do you think our conversations would proceed?”

  “You tell her that,” Jack said, “and she’ll tell you to go to hell and this mission will get no more cooperation from her side of this civil war.”

  “Precisely,” Al said. “The Emperor’s, or is it the Empress’s, solution is a nonstarter from the Grand Duchess’s perspective.”

  “We haven’t gotten quite so specific a proposed resolution to this civil war from the Grand Duchess’s side,” Diana said, “but I suspect it would go something like this. The Empress abdicates and divorces the Emperor. Her family, as well as herself, is banished from the Empire and may leave with only the clothes on their back. All properties that have changed hands in the last three or four years are returned to their rightful owners, and all cases involving murder and rape are referred to courts established by the Grand Duchess’s new regime. Have I about got it right?”

  Kris nodded. “Pretty much. Vicky was quite reserved when talking to me yesterday, but I could feel the rage and need for vengeance.”

  “Do you see the Empress’s faction agreeing to anything like that?” Diana asked.

  Kris just shook her head.

  “So you see our challenge,” Diana said. “We need to find a solution that is acceptable to both sides. Hurling condemnations and anathemas around is not productive.”

  “No matter how satisfactory it may feel for the moment,” Bill added.

  “So where do we go from here?” Kris asked.

  The three looked at each other a bit sheepishly. It was Diana who first smiled, shrugged, and leaned toward Kris.

  “Having just won your support to our viewpoint that we are not here to determine the guilty party, we must now determine what the true circumstances are in the Empire. Doing that will, no doubt to some skeptics, look like we are hunting for the guilty.”

  Kris had to chuckle. “So you’ve spent the last fifteen minutes stampeding me off in one direction, and now you’re going to take me off in the other?”

  “It may look that way,” Al said.

  “Well, lead on, and I will follow,” Kris said.

  45

  Bill took the lead on their presentation. “For what it is worth, we have been able to develop more information in support of the Grand Duchess’s side than the Empress’s. Admittedly, the Empress gave us nothing more than her narrative, and quite a bit of the message traffic on Greenfeld was heavily encrypted, but what we have gathered here has allowed us to put what we dredged up there into a perspective that is not very supportive of the Empress.”

  He glanced over to a woman seated at a table in the inner triangle and nodded. She stood and walked over to a large screen on one wall. Kris’s chair moved to face that direction.

  Bill continued. “The Grand Duchess’s people have been fully cooperative with our staff. Assuming we are not looking at a perfectly choreographed lie, it is persuasive. Iba, would you please brief Her Highness on what we find persuasive to a reasonable person.”

  “Yes, sir. Your Highness, there have been three attempts on the Grand Duchess’s life here on St. Petersburg, assuming we ignore the attacks on the entire planet. In one, she was left chained to a bed in a remote cabin. In another, a car bomb failed to kill her but slaughtered innocent bystanders. A third took place along a country road in the hills above Sevastopol. We chose to investigate the first two. We had limited staff for field trips yesterday,” she explained.

  A picture of a decrepit farmhouse beside a burned-out barn appeared on the screen. “This site had been investigated previously but was pretty much undisturbed. We found the Grand Duchess’s DNA present, as well as traces of her blood. Her bare footprints showed where she had walked away from here. All this fitted the story we were given.”

  Now a city street filled the screen. Bodies lay strewn on the ground; cars were burning. “The scene of this car bombing had been cleaned up. We talked with several of the survivors. They truly believed what they said. We talk not only to those witnesses provided but also to random subjects in the surrounding buildings. The variations in their stories were reasonable and within the expected range.”

  The young woman paused. “It is our conclusions that, even out here where support for the Grand Duchess is readily voiced, there have been serious attempts on her life. Unfortunately, none of the perpetrators lived to testify. They either escaped or died resisting arrest.”

  The screen changed to show bags being stacked for transport. “These are standard famine biscuits. These pictures were offered in support of the story that the Grand Duchess led a major relief effort to the colony on Pozen. In support of this claim, we stripped off the net orders, transit invoices, and even letters to pen pals from fifth graders. It appears that some of the biscuits were baked by the kids from grain they grew themselves. We found too many references to this in private mails to doubt the actuality of this event.”

  “A Peterwald really tried to help people. Who’d have thunk it?” Kris said.

  “The private e-mails had quite a few references to just that, Your Highness. Even some of the youngsters didn’t hold the Imperium in much regard. But of the Grand Duchess’s efforts to feed the hungry and defend the planet, there are just too many public and private comments to doubt that the people really believe this and participated in it. Oh, and we found archived media reports of Vicky, they actually called her Vicky in some press stories, handing out ribbons at city fairs. The kidnapping occurred while she was visiting a carnival. She’d j
ust won a little girl a huge stuffed bear when all hell broke loose.”

  The young woman allowed herself a slight shrug. “I couldn’t make this stuff up.”

  “I don’t think you are,” Kris said. “It seems at least one Peterwald has changed her stripes. What about the space battles?”

  An older man stood. His crew cut and ramrod-straight back hinted strongly that he had come to this vocation as a second career. The screen changed behind him to show a map of the Imperium. The planets were divided into two groups that showed red and blue.

  “Vice Admiral von Mittleburg cooperated completely with us in examining the fighting that has been going on in the civil war. He walked us through the strategy they are presently using. It involved fixing a major part of the Empress’s fleet here, in front of St. Petersburg, while several of their fleets nibbled around the flanks, cutting planets out of the Empress’s holdings. He credits the Grand Duchess for the basic idea although it is plain that it was the Empress that chose to concentrate her fleet in a thrust directly at St. Petersburg.”

  “Is this where Vicky has operated from?” Kris asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So the Empress was going for the Grand Duchess,” Kris said. “Something tells me that she knows that Vicky is nobody’s patsy.”

  “The data is open to that interpretation by a reasonable person,” Bill said.

  When have I ever been called a reasonable person?

  When the silence grew, the briefer continued. “The admiral had nothing but praise for the Grand Duchess. He’s found her courageous, creative, and flexible. He repeatedly mentioned how well she listened although she can be quite headstrong at times.”

  The briefer chuckled. “I think Vice Admiral von Mittleburg views the Grand Duchess like a daughter. Oh, both of them are vice admirals. I was very surprised when von Mittleburg told me that Vicky is senior to him by a few seconds.”

  “How’s that worked out?” Kris had to ask.

  “Apparently well. Even during the big battle with the Empress, it was she who decided to call back their destroyers from a torpedo run on the opposing battle line. The tin cans weren’t as supported as they needed to be, but they were so close. She made the call, and he obeyed.”