Undaunted

1

Lieutenant Kris Longknife sat in the captain’s chair of the Wardhaven explorer ship Wasp, the unquestioned commander of all she surveyed.

Of course, she had the conn on the midwatch, and there was very little to survey; most of the Wasp’s crew were sound asleep. Far from her sight, the scant midnight watch went about their duties, keeping the air cool, the lights on, and the ship decelerating at one gee on its established course. The only person in Kris’s sight was Chief Beni. He studied the instruments at the navigator’s position.

Most of the time, he fed his sensor data to the navigator. Just now, he took advantage of the quiet midwatch to see what she did with his input. He was also weighing his options to go to OCS, trying on an officer’s shoes to check the fit.

All in all, it looked to be a very quiet and comfortable midwatch. HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN, NELLY?

HOW LONG HAS WHAT BEEN? Kris’s pet computer, worth several ships like the Wasp, asked on the direct hookup into Kris’s brain.

Nelly was usually ten steps ahead of Kris’s own thoughts, ready to answer any question before the Navy lieutenant posed it. Kris put the surly reply down to attitude. Or, more correctly, “ ’tude.”

Kris still had a twelve-year-old girl on board. Or, more accurately, a certain girl held a ship, its crew, and one very uppity computer in thrall.

Content not to break the dim silence, Kris continued the conversation via the private link between her and Nelly. HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE ANYONE TRIED TO KILL Me?

OH, THAT. SIXTY-THREE DAYS. DO YOU WANT THE HOURS, MINUTES, SECONDS, AND NANOSECONDS, YOUR HIGH-HANDEDNESS?

THAT WON’T BE NECESSARY, Kris said, to cut off more ’tude. It had been a nice two months without the occasional potshot or heart-pounding race for life.

Kris could get to liking this.

Of course, the whole time had been spent far beyond the Rim of human occupied space. Far enough out that she hadn’t stumbled on even one Sooner world. Sooner farmers, artisans, and generally cantankerous folks saw no reason why they should obey distant Earth and not push out beyond the boundaries set for humanity by old men in suits. Kris found them kindred spirits to her own desire to have as much space as possible between herself and her closest relatives.

Still, where the law hadn’t gotten to, often thievery, pirating, and slavery had.

Kris had spent the first two months of this cruise putting down a few of those problems. Done with the intrepid side for a while, she’d spent the last two months expanding the chart of mapped and usable jump points and letting her scientists research to their hearts’ delight.

And not been shot at once.

Nice, that.

“How’s our approach to the next jump point coming?” Kris asked Chief Beni.

He shook his head. “It just took a zig away from us. I make it about fifteen thousand kilometers farther away. I would suggest . . .” He tapped the nav board several times, frowned at the results, and said, “. . . we reduce deceleration to .84 gee. That should put us there in twenty-two minutes . . . give or take one of Nelly’s nanoseconds.”

Apparently, the chief and Nelly were back to open hostilities.

Kris ignored that and worried her lower lip. Each of the jump points created by the aliens a million or two years ago orbited two, three, or more stars. That meant their apparent orbit around any one star was anything but smooth. And caused the occasional deadly bad jump.

Kris hoped this little wiggle meant only that the Wasp would arrive a bit late for the next jump. Actually, with everyone asleep, it really wasn’t a problem at all.

Kris glanced at the star map on the main screen. The Wasp had been working its way across the front of Wardhaven space . . . or to put it more politically correct . . . the 136 planets now negotiating to establish some kind of association under the leadership of Grampa Ray, King Raymond I to anyone not his great-granddaughter.

To the right of the Wasp’s search sweep was Greenfeld space, and the less said about that, the better for Kris’s day. To the left was the Helvetican Confederacy that, if Kris remembered something that had come across her desk, now included her friends on the proud planet Chance.

Above them on the star map, looming like a black hole, was the No Go Zone. Nobody in their right mind went into the buffer between humans and the Iteeche. The fight to set that zone between “us and them” had almost driven the human race extinct.

Kris doubted any Sooner or pirate would dare violate that precinct of space.

Of course, the Wasp was getting closer to that zone. Kris would have to decide soon just how close she’d go. She chuckled to herself . . . putting a buffer around a buffer. But the price for a mistake along that boundary was too high, both for her crew and the whole human race.

Maybe it was already time to go farther out rather than any farther over.

For the next few minutes, Kris did the job that Officers of the Deck did, checking to make sure that very competent people did their job as well as they always did. The reactor was well in the green. Reaction-mass tanks were still over 65 percent, so it would be a while before Captain Drago, the true monarch of this small chunk of space called the Wasp, would skim the surface of a gas giant to scoop up mass, or take the more sedate approach of heading for a space station to buy the water they heated in the reactors.

Kris glanced further into the daily reports. Sick bay had only two Marines in it, victims of a handball game that had ended with a violent collision. With no one taking shots at Kris, the Marines were also being spared the odd collateral damage of being too close to “one of those Longknifes.”

It really was nice being so far from human space.

NELLY, REPORT SHIP’S STATUS, Kris said in her head. Her own board said everything was fine. Nelly’s assessment would guarantee that nothing lurked deep below the surface, waiting to spoil Kris’s otherwise-quiet morning.

In the blink of an eye, Kris was listening to ALL SYSTEMS WELL WITHIN THE NORMS. EVERYONE IS SLEEPING AS WELL AS THEY NORMALLY DO AT THIS TIME. CARA IS STILL UPPLAY-ING A GAME, Nelly added, addressing the precise status of the twelve-year-old who Kris more than suspected was the most important person aboard the Wasp as far as Nelly was concerned.

SHOULDN’T SHE BE ASLEEP? TOMORROW’s A SCHOOL DAY.

I CAN JUST START IT A BIT LATE, AIN’T NO BIG THING.

Kris blinked . . . When had Nelly started using contractions? Or “ain’t”? Nelly’s computer-perfect grammar was supposed to be teaching proper grammar to a sixth grader!

Further thoughts on that were interrupted by the chief.

“We’re coming up on the jump point in two minutes, Lieutenant. What are your orders?”

Kris weighed the first, and probably only, command decision she’d make this watch. “If we just sit here, everyone’s going to wake up weightless,” she mused. That was not a problem for the sailors and Marines. But a third of those occupying the Wasp fit neither of those categories. Kris had a large scientific contingent, and even a judge brought out of retirement and empowered to apply the law to anyone for anything Kris chose to dump in her lap.

Several of the boffins besides Judge Francine did not take to microgravity all that well. Usually, the Wasp was under way at one gee or tied up to a space station with something like normal gravity. How would they handle sleeping the next four hours in zero gee and waking up in it?

Kris knew the answer to her next question, but she asked the chief anyway. “We don’t have any jump buoys, do we?”

“As a matter of fact, I see four of them ready to launch on my nav board,” the chief answered, to her surprise.

Kris’s own copy of the nav station showed nothing, so she slapped off her seat belt and walked over to Beni’s station.

As she expected, it had extra space lit up. Kris recognized it . . . a defensive battle station.

Apparently, Sulwan Kann was ready to activate all the necessary defenses of the Wasp if she got into a fight. The woman truly was Captain Drago’s right-hand man.

Kris went down the left side of the nav board, finding armor, foxers, maskers—everything needed by a ship fighting for its life. Four of the foxer launching tubes showed blue. Beside them was a notation. JUMP BUOYS.

“I guess if we aren’t faking it as a merchant ship, there’s no reason not to launch the smaller ones,” Kris said. Nelly, ask CAPTAIN DRAGO WHAT OTHER WEAPONS SYSTEMS THE WASP IS NOW CARRYING.

YES, MA’AM. I WILL ALSO SEARCH THE REPORT FROM THE LAST YARD PERIOD AND SEE IF IT TELLS YOU ANYTHING.

YOU DO THAT, Kris said. Four months out, and Kris still didn’t know just what her supposed command had hidden away in some corner storeroom.

“Zero grav in fifteen seconds,” the chief reported. Over the public-address system, a similar announcement went out . . . at a whisper . . . as the hour of the morning called for.

Kris hustled back to her station and belted in. Once the Wasp was at a dead stop five klicks from the jump point, she ordered, “Flip ship.”

Chief Beni rotated the Wasp smartly along her long axis. Now the bow faced the tiny bit of roiled space that was all that showed of the portal across seven light-years of space.

“Chief, send a buoy through the jump. Have it announce that we’ll be following in five minutes.”

“You think that is a good idea?” the chief asked. But he was grinning, and his attention was on his fingers as they went through the motions of launching the buoy.

“Weapons are full,” Kris answered. Her command board had been extended to include everything important from the weapons board. She’d done that about fifteen seconds into the watch. She didn’t expect to use the four twenty-four-inch pulse lasers hidden under the Wasp’s civilian brightwork, but . . .

Kris eyed Beni’s back as he finished his prep. “What are you afraid of, Chief?”

“I work for this Longknife woman, ma’am. It pays for me to always be afraid, ’cause she never is,” he said. But his grin got wider as he said it.

“Launch the buoy, Chief,” Kris said dryly.

“Aye, aye, Lieutenant. Buoy launched.”

Now they waited for five minutes. Around Kris, the ship continued its somnolence. The engineering watch checked in to ask if they’d be needing to put on a full-gee acceleration anytime soon, were told to expect it, and went back to tending their teakettles.

The minutes dragged by, Kris did a second and third check to make sure the twenty-four-inch lasers that the Wasp officially didn’t have were at full charge. They were and continued to be.

Much to Kris’s relief, Captain Drago did not appear to summon a full bridge crew and take her command away. Kris wasn’t quite sure why that would bother her, but she knew it would.

Five minutes gone, Kris ordered a short burst from maneuvering thrusters and the Wasp edged through the jump.

Kris felt only slightly disoriented as her ship was yanked from one star to another one seven light-years farther from Earth. With only a blink, she studied her board.

There was the jump buoy. Farther out, some thirty thousand kilometers, was a ship.

Then a laser blew the jump buoy to bits.