Undaunted

2

^“Jinks ship,” Kris shouted. “Raise armor.”

“Jinksing pattern two initiated,” Chief Beni answered, and the ship shot up, then left, then up again. “Shields up.”

Kris mashed her commlink, ignoring that her call for armor had once again been changed to “shields up.” “Battle stations. Guns,” Kris ordered. “All hands. Battle stations. Guns.”

That done, Kris concentrated on aiming her lasers up the rear end of a very strange ship. A ship unlike any ship she’d ever seen—except on vids.

An Iteeche Death Ball was breaking toward Kris’s jump point, its vulnerable engines wide open to the Wasp’s lasers.

That was stupid. You could say many things about those four-eyed bastards, but the Iteeche were never stupid.

Kris’s shield took a hit. Smart Metal™ vaporized to ablate away what heat the metal was not able to spread quickly to the entire shield and then radiate into space.

“There are two more ships out there. I make them cruisers,” Chief Beni reported. “Greenfeld cruisers from the way their lasers are heating up. Your Highness, I think they’re the ones firing at us. Or at least shooting at the Death Ball and missing.”

“I think you may be right,” Kris whispered. On her board, two twin batteries of six-inch lasers heated up on one cruiser as they discharged. The Death Ball dodged right, left, up, down. The armor that had opened like an umbrella in front of the Wasp took another glancing hit.

KRIS, WE HAVE TO SHOOT THOSE GREENFELD BASTARDS, rang in Kris’s head.

Kris didn’t have time to make a note of Nelly’s new vocabulary. No, NELLY, WE ARE NOT GOING TO FIRE AT THE CRUISERS. I WILL NOT START A WAR TODAY.

BUT THEY’RE ENDANGERING CARA. I’VE GOT THE LASERS SIGHTED IN. I CAN HIT BOTH OF THEM.

The lasers were rock on, Kris noted. WE ARE NOT SHOOTING, NELLY.

WE HAVE TO. FOR CARA!

Kris’s hand had been rising almost without volition since this silent conversation started. Now it moved like the lightning strike of a viper, depressing a tiny portion of the computer that hung at her collarbone. Kris hadn’t pushed the off button on her computer since the first grade, when her teacher required her to take a math test unaided.

The surface of the computer gave way with unfamiliar ease. And Kris found herself with a shrieking silence in her skull.

“Captain on the bridge,” Captain Drago announced as he shot through the open bridge door, still pulling on his pants. “What’s the situation?”

Kris drew in a breath, to gain herself a moment to think and to add some noise to the silence between her ears. Focused on the world outside herself, she snapped. “We’re taking stray shots from two Greenfeld cruisers shooting at an Iteeche Death Ball. Chief, put me on guard channel. Ship’s computer, what was the frequency we finally used to make contact with the Iteeche?”

“I’ve got it. You’re on,” Chief Beni said, hitting a button on his board.

Captain Drago bounced off the overhead, aimed himself at Beni’s usual station, and grabbed a handhold on the chair as he cinched in his belt . . . apparently content to leave the rapidly developing situation to his . . . whatever Kris was to him.

Kris would have liked to stand and glare at the forward screen, hands on hips, but the Wasp had no constant course. She stayed seated.

“This is Princess Kristine Longknife on the Wardhaven exploration ship Wasp. Greenfeld cruisers, check fire. You are missing the Iteeche Death Ball and hitting me. I repeat, check fire.”

One cruiser fired its four forward six-inchers just as the Wasp dodged up, left, up, and right—and got singed again.

“Damn it,” Kris snapped. “You keep hitting me, and I’m not even in a direct line with the Iteeche.”

“Our sensors show you are,” someone from a Greenfeld cruiser snapped back. “So get out of our line of fire.”

“I’m going right,” Kris announced.

The Iteeche, Kris noticed, immediately went right as well, not letting Kris open up so much as a kilometer more lateral displacement.

It also didn’t fire.

“The four-eyed bastard is going right with you,” the Greenfeld cruiser reported.

“And it hasn’t fired on you since I got here,” Kris pointed out. “Has it fired on you at all?”

“Well, not exactly, but it’s Iteeche, and it’s outside their empire. That makes it a target.”

Kris was aware that the Greenfeld commander was quoting one interpretation of the Treaty of the Orange Nebula. Grampa Ray always insisted the proper reading was that you could return fire if one of them shot at you.

And Grampa Ray was a signatory to that treaty on the human side.

Kris never expected to argue the fine points of treaty language over charged lasers. But there seemed no better time than the present.

The Wasp put on a half-gee acceleration. Sulwan, in her usual cutoffs and tank top but barefooted, was now at Kris’s weapons station. She brought it up as nav.

Kris unsnapped her seat belt and took four steps toward the screen. Behind her, Captain Drago, chest bare, slipped into his seat. The bridge stations were filling up.

Kris played the only card she had.

“Cease fire, or I swear to God, if you hit me again, I, Princess Kris Longknife, great-granddaughter of Ray Longknife, will fire on you. And I hit what I aim at. Just check your file on me.”

There was a long pause. A glance at Chief Beni’s station, now fully devoted to sensors, showed the Greenfeld ships putting a full charge to their main batteries. They were eighty thousand kilometers out; the Wasp was well past their accurate range. The Iteeche Death Ball was a long shot, even at thirty thousand klicks closer.

No wonder their shooting was so far off.

“Yeah, we understand you,” finally came, as a Greenfeld Navy officer’s face filled the main screen. “What do you intend to do with your four-eyes?”

“Talk to them if I can,” Kris said. “Escort them back to their territory no matter what.”

Definitely, the Iteeche had to go back to Imperial Space. If he was one of their Wandering Men, the lawless types who’d started the Iteeche War, the crew of this Death Ball would not like that. The Iteeche attitude toward Wandering Men was similar to what humans felt toward pirates, but without the warm and fuzzy, feel-good side.

“Do you want us to stand by in case the four-eyes cause you any trouble?” the Greenfeld captain asked.

“I think I’ll have an easier time talking to him if the folks who chased him across this system kind of moseyed along, don’t you, Captain?”

“Captain,” someone said offscreen, and the screen went blank. Kris didn’t move, expecting the interruption to be short.

Behind her, Captain Drago and Sulwan exchanged whispered words. A sailor arrived with a shirt, and Drago quickly put it on, along with the purple coat he wore far more often than either his merchant skipper’s greens or reserve Navy captain’s blues.

“Lieutenant Longknife,” he said dryly, “when will I leave you in charge for a moment and not come back to find that you have started a war?”

He had no idea how close his hyperbole was to right on, but Kris tried to reply with her usual banter. “I haven’t started a war . . . yet,” Kris insisted through unmoving lips, keeping her eyes focused on the blank screen.

Since it stayed blank, she ventured a further response. “I may have just stopped Greenfeld from getting us into another Iteeche War.”

The captain said nothing, but Kris could almost hear him rolling his eyes at the overhead.

The screen blinked and came alive again.

“It seems that I have other orders that I must take care of at the moment. If you do not mind, I will use the jump you just used to make my way home.”

“I will accelerate toward the sun,” Kris said. “Before our closest point of encounter, I will rotate ship and protect my engines. You may do as you please.”

“Until we meet again, Princess Kristine Longknife of Wardhaven.” Coming from the captain, it sounded like a threat and a promise.

“Sulwan, put on one gee,” Captain Drago ordered. “Aim us in the general direction of the sun for now. Princess, what do we do with your stray Iteeche?”

Kris started to shrug.

“Hope he follows her home,” came from Marine Captain Jack Montoya as he entered the bridge.

The captain, as the commander of the rump Marine company aboard the Wasp, was under her command. As security chief of a serving member of royal blood, Kris had to do what he told her where her security was involved. That made for an interesting chain of command.

It didn’t help that he was as handsome as she was plain. No, as she thought herself plain. He’d made it clear . . . in an officially proper way . . . that what he saw when he looked her way was beauty.

Kris chose to ignore the confused place this was taking her. She had enough problems, and today was only forty-six minutes old.

“Ship’s computer, can you raise the Iteeche?” Kris asked.

“Contact is being attempted. The Wasp is sending the contact signal King Raymond I used that led to the initial talks at the Orange Nebula.”

“And?” Captain Drago asked.

“No reply.”

Captain Drago frowned for a second. “Ah, Princess, why are you talking to my ship’s computer and not your Nelly?” Nelly was notorious throughout human space for her superiority to other computers, personal or otherwise.

“I had to turn her off,” Kris admitted.

“Off?” Jack got out first. “You don’t ever turn Nelly off!”

“She had the Greenfeld cruisers sighted in. Was ready to fire on them. Something about protecting Cara. It was either let her start a war or turn her off.”

Kris eyed said cruisers as they reversed ship and began decelerating toward the jump point. They’d still be going at a pretty good clip when they passed through it. That was their problem.

“Nelly also was using ‘ain’t’ and ‘bastard,’ ” Kris added.

“You really need her to have that talk with your auntie Tru,” Jack said.

Kris sighed. “She’s way overdue.”

“Yes, Princess, but what do we tell this Iteeche? ‘Follow me’?” Captain Drago asked.

“No,” Kris said. “Not unless your ship’s computer knows the proper form of the pronoun ‘me’ or we might insult whoever that is and start a war on that alone. Nelly and I did a term paper in Iteeche just for fun my senior year of high school. Course, Nelly had to translate it for the teacher. We got an A.”

“We need a translator just now,” Jack said. “You willing to wake Nelly up?”

“Not while we’ve got Greenfeld cruisers in our sky,” Kris said. “Captain, can your computer say something like ‘Follow in our wake.’ ” Examination of shattered Iteeche cadavers had hinted that they were a lot more recent in their transition from sea to land. Grampa Trouble got away with saying that to the first Iteeche shipload of negotiators.

The ship computer found that line in some history and sent the message. There was no reply, but the Death Ball altered course and accelerated at one gee toward the sun.

Sulwan modified her course to swing her engines out of a direct line of fire from the cruisers and kept the one-gee acceleration.

Kris reached for a workstation and held on steady as her inner ear took a while to adjust to the twisting course, made worse by the occasional jinks up, down, or over.

Sulwan was not a trusting soul. Not with Chief Beni reporting that the cruisers had fully charged lasers.

Through all this, the Iteeche Death Ball followed the Wasp like a stray puppy followed a four-year-old kid dropping hot-dog bits of encouragement. Was it pure chance that its course also increased the distance between it and the cruisers?

And edged kind of behind the Wasp.

Captain Drago studied his board, seemed satisfied, and said, “Lieutenant Longknife, you are relieved as Officer of the Deck. Please get off of my bridge.”

“Captain, I’m your gunnery officer. If someone on the Wasp is to shoot at those Greenfeld cruisers, it should be a serving Wardhaven officer,” Kris said, turning to a vacant bridge station and tapping it in three places. It started lighting up as an offensive-weapons control station.

“One of the few things you and I agree upon,” the captain said, and mashed his commlink. “Lieutenant Pasley, please report to the bridge.”

Which Penny did, five seconds later. “I was already on my way,” she said as she slipped into the station chair at the weapons board before Kris could.

Kris scowled down at the other active duty Navy officer on the Wasp. “What’s that leave me to do?” she mumbled to herself.

“The hard stuff,” Captain Drago said, making a shooing motion with both hands. “I’ll handle the Greenfeld cruisers. They only outnumber and outgun us. They’ll never outclass us. You need to make friendly with your pet computer. I really feel the lack of her input. Oh, and there is that Iteeche. Screw matters up with them, and we’ll only wish the Greenfeld cruisers had blasted us out of space with their first shot.”