Undaunted

11

Kris invited Ron to the forward lounge to watch their first jump. Normally, she would be on the bridge, but she and Captain Drago were in agreement. No Iteeche on the bridge. So long as they didn’t know about the extra jumps humans had found, and the equipment that let them not only discover the jumps but spot the spoofing that the Iteeche used to fool human weapons range finders, the bridge was off-limits.

Besides, the lounge was more private.

There were a few couples in the lounge when they arrived. Whether it was the seven-foot-tall, four-legged Iteeche, or the two Marines that trailed them in, one human, one Iteeche, Kris wasn’t sure, but all three couples beat a hasty retreat not five minutes after Kris’s strange parade entered.

The Marines settled down in the back of the lounge, near the door, and a good twenty feet from each other. That left Kris and Ron the entire forward section and its view ports. Kris found a comfortable chair. Ron unrolled a thick green rug, settled it on the floor next to her, and did that bending thing with his eight knees that got him comfortable.

“You always watch me when I go to rest.”

“It’s your knees. I’ve never seen anything like them in all human space.”

“You will excuse me if I don’t get excited about them. They’ve worked that way since I first came on land.” Ron was a comfortable pink at his neck.

“Came on land?” Kris echoed. She’d read . . . and reread . . . everything known about the Iteeche. She knew that the species had only evolved out of the oceans fifty or sixty million years ago. Historical reports said nothing about individuals starting in water.

Suddenly, Ron was flashing red and green at her. “I don’t know, but that might be a state secret.”

“What, that your kids are pollywogs, swimming in water. Is that what choosing means? You have to be chosen to come onshore?” That was a stab in the dark, but it was an educated stab. This “chosen of a chosen” had to mean something.

Here was a chance to find out.

Assuming if he told her he wouldn’t have to kill her.

That wasn’t likely.

Really.

Kris held her breath.

“If my chooser is right, and our future lies along a path with you humans, then we are going to have to find out more about each other. And it is not possible to keep you ignorant of such a common thing. Yes, my egg was fertilized and hatched in the ocean waters of the planet of my birth. I swam in the shallows as I grew. Then I was chosen to come onto land and enter the social group, you might call it family, of my chooser.” Ron’s hind legs shivered as he finished, as if he wanted to run.

Kris spoke slowly. “I guess I’m glad to know that, though I don’t see how it makes any difference. You survived growing up. I survived growing up. High school is hell on every planet.” She half laughed. “What would have happened if you hadn’t been chosen?”

Ron’s skin turned back to pink as he took a deep breath, but a couple of slits still showed white. “I would have continued to swim, eating smaller fish until I was eaten by a bigger fish. Isn’t that the way of all life?” He managed what almost sounded like a human laugh.

WONDER how LONG he’s Been PRACTICING THAT LAUGH in FRONT of The Mirror, Nelly thought to Kris.

I DON’T know, BUT I HAVE a FEELING his CHILDHOOD was EVEN More hellish Than Mine.

I WOULDN’T BET AGAINST you on THAT.

Kris smiled to hide her thoughts and keep a shiver from going up her back.

Ron reached out and ran a hand through Kris’s hair. “I have always wondered what that would feel like,” he said.

“My hair?”

“Not your hair, but any hair. We don’t have hair. You humans seem to have it all over.”

“Men more than women.”

“It seems very strange. Your human men sometimes shave their heads. Women shave the hair in their armpits”—he pointed—“and . . .” Kris grabbed his hand before it could point lower down.

“We don’t talk about the other places we have hair.”

“Oh, why?”

“You cover some parts of your bodies with clothes. We cover some parts of ours. What we cover, we don’t usually talk about.”

Now Ron showed green, with flicks of gold. “We cover ourselves as befitting our rank. A just-landed immature has no rank and covers nothing. Only as we attain status do we gain the right to cover ourselves from the sight of lesser ranks.”

“So, if you went in to see the Emperor, you’d go in bare-ass naked?”

Ron’s eyes widened, all four of them. “I never thought of that. Of course we do not. There are always guards and servants. People of lesser status, so of course we have the honor of showing our family status.”

“This is all very interesting,” Kris said, choosing her words carefully. “Interesting” was hardly the word she felt. Confusing, involved, crazy even. She had considered her family as all-encompassing while growing up. She’d faced nothing like Ron’s family burden.

Then Kris tried but failed to suppress a giggle. Teresa de Alva’s getup had probably made her the lowest-status person in the bunch of fake courtiers Kris had.

Of course, Kris would never let that out.

Like hell Kris would never let that out. She could hardly wait to tell Abby. And Abby would, of course, swear it to eternal secrecy, and have the word through the ship within a day and throughout human space in, say, two weeks.

Having a gossip columnist/spy for a maid did have an upside.

“All hands, we are approaching our jump. Zero gee in five, four, three, two, one.”

Kris’s chair was locked down, she held on to its armrests. Ron put two arms around her and held on. In a moment it turned into a hug. A rather good hug.

Kris rested her head on his shoulder. It was a bit bony, but it had been a while since she’d had a shoulder to lean on. Nice.

“How long will this take?” Ron asked.

“It depends,” Kris said. What she wanted to say was not long enough. “With you aboard, I expect Captain Drago will go through jumps supercarefully. Say just a few kilometers an hour and rock steady. I haven’t given away a secret, have I?”

“No, we have bad jumps, too. I would have thought with your supercomputing machines, you might have figured out how to forecast the movement of these jump points.”

“No such luck.”

“Jump in five, four, three, two, one.”

Kris felt a touch of dizziness. Ron closed his eyes and Kris felt his entire body tense beside her. This went on long after Kris had recovered.

“The Wasp will begin accelerating to 1.25 gees now.”

“We’re done?” Ron said, opening his eyes.

“All over.”

“That was easier than I expected.”

“Your ships have a harder go of it?”

“Ah, am I giving away more state secrets?”

“Don’t really see how it matters much.” Well, maybe if we were shooting Iteeche coming out of jumps. “I thought you’d captured enough of our ships or their wreckage that you’d have learned anything from us that would benefit you.”

“Why would we want to change the way we do things just because you did something different?”

“Or better.”

“Those who call you monkeys could hardly admit you did anything better than the wise Iteeche.”

“Well, there is that.”

“And if something is good enough, we use it. We don’t like wasting effort on the odd chance we might make it better. Like my translation machine. It was good enough for my chooser, Roth. It should be good enough for me. Yet you wear your Nelly. Smaller, faster, more flexible. You humans keep pushing to see if something can be better. You know there are Iteeche who would say you make no sense and waste your resources for no good reason.”

“I’ve been told I’m crazy before. But I keep upgrading Nelly anyway.”

“And I keep getting better and better, so there,” Nelly said, in English to Kris and Iteeche to Ron.

Which reminded Kris that she needed to tell Ron about the little detour they were making on their way to the king. As acceleration grew, and they took on weight, Ron let go of Kris.

“Did we make a good jump?” he asked as if hunting for something to say.

“We are where we want to be,” Kris said. “Those three bright stars in a triangle. They’re supposed to be there. I had Nelly find out the check stars before we made the jump.”

“And, among my many duties, I found them for her.” Again, Nelly spoke English and Iteeche out of opposite sides of her mouth . . . or speaker.

“You could show me some respect, Nelly.”

“I am being respectful. If you want to see disrespect, I can show you plenty.”

“Is your machine always like that?” Ron asked.

“I am not a machine,” Nelly pointed out, bilingual again.

“Nelly’s a computer,” Kris put in when she could. “Machines are kind of like dumb animals to her. She’s smart as well as smart-alecky.”

“And I have to translate snide remarks like that,” Nelly added, again in both languages.

“Ron, this seems like as good a time as any to tell you that I feel a really strong need to take Nelly to talk with the one person who can help me with her present strange behavior.”

“This is strange behavior,” Ron said, showing green and pink again. He might even have added a chuckle, but Kris wasn’t sure.

“Very strange,” Kris agreed.

“You haven’t really seen strange until you’ve been around the princess for a while,” Nelly told them both.

“Who is this person?”

“My auntie Tru, not really a relation, but a friend of the family since before I learned to walk. She’s a computer expert and helped me with my homework and persuaded me that I just had to upgrade Nelly every time something new came along.”

“A really wise lady,” Nelly added in.

“Whom you chose, as much as she chose you,” Ron said, showing solid pink now. “Does she live in Wardhaven?”

“She used to, but she’s retired and when we found—”

“The princess found,” Nelly put in—”

“A planet loaded with alien artifacts and relics, she kind of headed there to help with the exploration. It will be only a slight detour from the direct course to Wardhaven.”

“A planet that really has items left over from the Ancient Ones.”

“It’s a bit of a jungle,” Kris said.

“But some of the animals in that jungle might be descendants of one of the three species. Oops, was I not supposed to say that?” Nelly added, having thought better of her run-on mouth.

“One of the Ancient Ones!” Ron said, showing more excitement than Kris had seen from him since he arrived.

“If they are, they’ve devolved terribly. They really are more like monkeys rather than intelligent folk. They were throwing their poop at us the one time I ran an exploration crew through their jungle.”

Ron stood. “I must tell my advisors. This delay is not good. But to see a planet with remnants from the Ancient Ones, maybe even shared with one of them. That is exciting.”

“It isn’t when they drop their poop all over you,” Nelly added.

“Nelly!”

“Well, if you hadn’t been in a space suit, it could have messed me up something terrible.”

“I’ll put you in a plastic baggie if I go for a walk on Alien 1.”

“Does that mean there’s an Alien 2?” Ron asked immediately, pausing in his turn to the door.

“Yes,” Kris had to admit. But she added nothing more.

“Do you think we will be visiting it?”

“No,” Kris said.

“May I ask why not?”

“Because when the Ancient Ones walked away from that planet, they forgot to turn it off.”

“It’s that complete!”

“Yes, it is. But remember, I said they forgot to turn it off.”

“So?”

“Included in the things they left on was their defense system.”

“Oh.”

“We haven’t been able to land on the planet. Last time I heard, we’d lost five ships and three full crews.”

“Oh,” Ron said, now white as a sheet.

Kris headed them for Iteeche country, the two Marines trailing them. Ahead of them went the two Royal Marines who had guarded the door while they were inside the lounge.