Daring

35

Kris turned back to examining all the things that could go wrong in the coming encounter with an alien they’d just met and never talked to. It didn’t take a lot of guessing to come up with a long list of them. The real problem was figuring out what to do when things did go south.

Then Professor mFumbo sauntered in.

“Your Highness, I need your permission to use two of the Wasp’s launches to take some of my boffins around the fleet.”

“To do what?” Kris said. She suppressed a wince. She was echoing people quite a lot. Then again, her father always said it was better to echo something than to guess and guess wrong.

“We scientists joined your Fleet of Discovery to, well, discover. I think we’ve found quite a few things that will make it into peer-reviewed journals. But the nature of the voyage has changed.”

“It certainly has,” Kris agreed.

“Now we find that we are serving as witnesses to history being made. We are, by our nature as scientists, impartial observers of what we see. All of us are respected in our fields of endeavor. We believe that humanity will benefit greatly from our unprejudiced reports when we return to human space.”

“Assuming you live through the experience,” Abby said dryly.

“There is that,” the professor agreed.

“So why do you need the ship’s launches?” Kris said.

“One of the painful realities of this war-fighting business you are in, Your Highness, is that you can never tell who will survive it. The dogs of war are notoriously fickle as to whose tree they bark up and whose leg they chew on. We boffins have come to the conclusion that we should distribute ourselves through the fleet. That way, we can witness the coming events from different perspectives, and, no matter which ships survive the coming battle, some of us will be available to bear witness to what we saw.”

“And you all decided this together?” Kris said. Her observations of the boffins as a subspecies of Homo sapiens sapiens was that they could never agree on anything that wasn’t empirical in nature. The contents of the periodic table, yes. Where to eat supper, not so quickly done.

“I did suggest this to my associates. After discussion, they came to agree with me. I was one of the first volunteers. I’ve arranged to join the Fury along with Dr. Teresa de Alva and six others.”

“Are any of them taking the freighters back?”

“Almost a score. Most of them are people who have papers ready to publish. Others feel that they best serve humanity by commenting immediately on what is about to happen. The economist Amanda Kutter will be a strong witness.”

“She’ll at least be a beautiful one,” Abby drawled.

“She has a large heart and strongly believes in our going to the assistance of the avian people. I would not want to be on a talk show trying to espouse an opposing view from hers,” the professor said.

“That I can agree on,” Kris said. “Okay, you can have the use of two launches. Nelly, advise Captain Drago of this.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Nelly said. “It’s done, and he’s glad to have the boffins off his hands.”

“Tell him they’re not all going, so no dancing for joy in the passageways,” Kris said.

“He says that once the boffins sort themselves out, he’ll want to detach as many of the extra containers as possible,” Nelly went on. “He said something about clearing the decks for action.”

“You may be more comfortable on the Fury,” Colonel Cortez said.

“He can have my quarters,” Vicky said. She’d been quiet as a mouse for the longest time.

“You’re not going back?” Kris said.

“I’m sure you’ll be in the thick of the fight,” Vicky said, “but at least I won’t have to watch my back on the Wasp.”

“You sure you wouldn’t be just as safe on the Fury?” Kris said. “Paid assassins are notorious for wanting to live to spend their pay. I’d expect anyone sent here to kill you would be on the first freighter to jump out of this system.”

“That sounds logical,” the colonel said, “but what are the chances that the Fury won’t survive this battle? Better yet, what do you think the odds are that the Fury will even fight? They could turn tail and run after we leave this system.”

Kris shrugged. “I told them my battle plan. But you’re right, Colonel. There’s nothing that says any of these ships will fight my plan. Something like this never made it into the history books.”

“Not the recent history. Now, back in the Middle Ages,” the colonel said, getting into lecture mode, “whole flanks of an army might switch sides at the sound of the charge. Must have made for some interesting squabbling after the battle was over. Who got what spoils?”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Abby drawled. “We will all sleep so much better tonight.”

“The young lady here hired me to provide some historical flavor to your ruminations,” he said cheerfully.

“Yes, Colonel,” Kris said, “but while we’re talking about people boarding the launches and getting rides to this ship or that, we really need to talk about one in particular.”

“No you don’t, Your Princessship,” Abby said.

“Cara needs to be on one of the freighters out of here,” Kris said.

“Ain’t gonna happen,” her maid shot right back.

“We’re going into battle. She is not a combatant.”

“Happens all the time. Some strong type like you throws a battle in some civilian’s backyard. You don’t have to be no combatant to attend a battle. Just unlucky.”

“She doesn’t have to be here,” Kris insisted.

“She’s got no place else to go.”

That brought a pause in the rapid-fire exchange of disagreeableness.

“Have you at least talked with her about this?” Kris asked.

“We’ve talked, once or twice.”

“And?”

“Growing up in Nuu House, you may not have been in the lap of love, but you knew where you lived, baby ducks. Cara and I, we grew up in Five Corners. You never went skipping off to school one morning and came home to find the family had up and moved, and no one told you where.”

Abby paused for a moment. “You think the worst thing that can happen to us is to wind up dead next week. For me and Cara, there are a whole lot worse things that already done happened. Kris Longknife, you let us live our life, and I’ll let you do what you’re gonna do.”

Abby stood up, looked like she was ready to take a walk, then paused. “ And if you got any ideas about sending a platoon of Marines to my quarters late one night, you warn them. I wake up cranky, and I wake up armed. You hear me, Jack?”

“I hear you, Abby. And let me officially go on record that this is a problem between you and Her High-Handedness here. My troops may be dumb jarheads, but we are smart enough to stay out of anything you two women got going between you.”

“Good,” Abby sniffed, and stormed out of the room.

“So,” the colonel asked, “anyone think now would be a good time for coffee? I don’t know about you youngsters, but I need to visit the gentlemen’s facilities.”

“I could use some coffee,” Jack agreed, and headed for the urn standing in the middle of the Forward Lounge’s bar.

Kris and Vicky followed him.

“You know,” Vicky said, “this has been quite an experience watching you go about planning an operation. I’m not sure how you got all these strong-willed people running along with you, but it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life. I can wrap a man or three around my little finger, but none of them would follow me into hell like these people are marching off to do.”

“I’m glad you’re learning it here. If you didn’t learn it at your father’s knee, you have to learn it somewhere,” Kris said, her mind still half on how much she did not understand her maid.

“I don’t think there was any chance of my learning this from Dad. I remember stopping in the hallway outside a meeting he had with one of his admirals. That admiral was mad. I’d never heard anyone talk like that to Dad. Not talk like that and live to tell of it, anyways.”

“An admiral was mad at your dad?” Jack said.

“Yes. I got to thinking about it as you were planning how to deploy your ships. Admiral Krätz’s Battle Squadron 12 originally had a division of cruisers and a squadron of destroyers with it, but they all were left at home. A cruise this long was considered too much for the smaller ships. But here you are, running around with corvettes thousands of light-years from any port. And you’re planning on using them in ways no battleship could possibly match.”

“And the admiral was mad how?” Jack asked. His voice was suddenly devoid of any tint of emotion.

“The admiral was shouting that six big battleships had been wiped out by a bunch of mosquito boats because Dad ignored that admiral’s professional judgment that battleships needed a decent escort.”

At Kris’s elbow, there came a shudder. Kris turned just in time to see Penny shiver and turn pale. The look she gave Vicky would have fried a more sensitive person in place.

The young lieutenant’s mouth opened, then clamped shut. Penny turned and fled the room.

“What’s wrong with her?” Vicky asked.

“I commanded those mosquito boats, Vicky, and the skipper of my flag was Penny’s husband of three, four days. He died saving her life.”

Kris paused to see if she’d gotten any reaction from the Peterwald scion. Her mouth actually did fall open, a bit. Her eyes widen, a little.

Kris went on. “Our mosquito boats were hurriedly built, using dumb metal. You know, the Smart Metal^TM that can only change its shape two, maybe three times. Our fast patrol boat was venting its air to space, holed in I don’t know how many places. I ordered Nelly to seal the boat. If we’d had more time, we might have also arranged to have the metal unpin Penny’s husband, but there wasn’t any time.”

“A hard choice,” Vicky whispered.

“The kind of choices we’ll be making a lot of in the next few days.”

“You knew this, but you, your crew here, still saved my dad.”

“There was no way for us to know for sure that Peterwald was behind those battleships. And the assassins had arranged for it to look like I was involved in their plot to kill your father,” Kris said, her words flat as she spat out the story of how even the supposed powerful could find themselves trapped by duty into doing what they’d never do by choice.

“Imagine if humanity were all balled up in a vicious war,” Kris went on, “Greenfeld against Wardhaven. Nobody winning, everybody dying. And then imagine these horrors popping out of some jump point. A fine mess we’d be in.”

“Yes. I guess so. I ought to go apologize to Penny.”

“I wouldn’t do that just now,” Kris said. “Unless you know some magic words that will raise the dead and make it all better, I really don’t think there is anything you can say to Penny at the moment. Why don’t you and I go see if Cookie has any fresh-made bread? Maybe we can wheedle some old sea story out of him that will tell us who he really is.”

“You have the strangest people around you,” Vicky said.

“Yes,” Kris said, eyeing the young woman beside her, “and I’m only now learning the half of it.”