Furious

16

Throughout the voyage, Kris continued to go unnoticed by most of the crew. The one exception was a junior cook. After she complimented him on the chow, he started giving Kris a few extra tidbits from the kitchen. Maybe it was the junior cook’s low status among the Sailors that made him so eager to talk to her. Or the warts on his face. Or maybe he was just a man who appreciated compliments.

Kris’s stint as a serving girl gave the Nuu Enterprise’s trust-fund baby a whole lot of new things to think about.

When she wasn’t thinking about starting a war and losing her last command.

And finding Jack.

What had Gramma Ruth meant when she said she could help Kris find Jack? Get back to Jack? Kris was one jump away from Wardhaven, and she still had no plan for what to do when she got there. No plan other than to put one foot in front of the other and follow her nose.

Even to Kris, that didn’t sound like much of a plan.

It only got worse when they docked at High Wardhaven.

“Kris,” Nelly said, her voice almost quivering, “I can’t attach to the net.”

“Can’t attach?” Kris said, not expecting the Magnificent Nelly to have a problem on her home turf.

“Yes, Kris. All my certifications have been canceled. Even my secret backup ones. There’s a new security wall in place and it won’t let me in until I fill out a long list of questions, and they verify them. Kris, I’m toast.”

“Me too,” Mimzy added from Penny’s neck. “I didn’t have a whole lot of certificates, but none of mine are working, either.”

“Kris, I’ve tried all my children’s certificates,” Nelly said. “We are totally locked out of this network.”

“Since when?”

“I’m not sure, Kris. I was careful not to access Wardhaven while I wasn’t talking to you. I just used the Madigan’s Rainbow net there, and not a lot of it. Mimzy?”

“I used the Chance net, but once we started moving, I closed down pretty tight.”

“Hold it,” Kris said. “Jack’s on HellFrozeOver. His Sal must be attached to the Wardhaven net.”

“I’ve already tried it, Kris. The reply I got with his certificates was the same as I got from my own. Kris, they’ve isolated me and my kids from Wardhaven. I don’t know about everywhere else, but here, they’ve slammed the door in our face, locked it, and thrown away the key.”

Kris didn’t like the sound of that. “So Sal is just a stand-alone computer for Jack. No access to anything at all.”

“That’s horrible,” Mimzy said.

“That’s all of us now,” Penny said.

There was a knock at the door.

The screen immediately showed Captain Tidings. Kris took a second to make sure he was alone . . . she was coming down with a bad case of seriously paranoid after Nelly dropped that bomb . . . and then let him in.

“I have a message for you, Mrs. Travaford,” he announced.

“Who from?” Kris didn’t think anyone knew what name Penny was traveling under. Suddenly, she was not at all happy that someone did.

“There is no originator on the message,” the captain shrugged. “It’s also very cryptic. I almost trashed it, but I thought you might be able to make something of it.”

He handed it to Kris. The message was brief.

Meet me at My Old Haunt.

T

“Does that mean anything to you?” Captain Tidings asked.

It might, but Kris was not going to share it with anyone who wasn’t walking in her own footsteps.

“I’m not at all sure,” Kris said, folding the message to keep it out of sight.

The captain accepted Kris’s vagueness, and went on, “I strongly suspect that you don’t want to use your own credit chit here.”

“Captain, I’m not sure my credit chit still works here.” The discovery that Nelly, Mimzy, and Sal were barred from the net gave Kris a strong hunch that her money was no good either. Kris was none too happy to be going down to Wardhaven with no plan. Now she couldn’t even go down. She had no way to pay for her and Penny’s beanstalk tickets.

“I thought you might find yourselves in that situation. Here are some gift chits. They’re sold to encourage people to spend them on just what they cover. Here are several to pay your travel, elevator, bus, even taxi fares. These should let you eat for a while and these last two should cover a hotel room for a few days. These kind of things are popular in the travel industry. If you give people money, they’ll spend it just the way they want. Give them some of these, and they’ve got to take the vacation they need. Great idea.”

“It sure is,” Kris said, suddenly seeing options opening before her.

“Again, I want to thank you for saving my daughter. She’s married now, and I expect to see my first grandchild when this voyage is done. Her mother and I can’t thank you enough for all the joy we feel just now.”

What could Kris say to such gratitude? “I’m glad Jack and I were there and could do what we did.” Even if it had hurt like hell for the next couple of days.

With that, the captain took his leave.

“So, what’s the massage mean?” Penny asked, as soon as the door was closed.

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Kris said, unfolding the message and studying it.

“Could T be General Trouble?” Nelly asked. “Your Grandma Ruth hinted that she’d get him involved.”

“She did,” Kris agreed slowly, not at all sure she wanted any help that came from that branch of her family tree. The general was Trouble. Trouble to his enemies. Trouble to his troops, and double trouble to his superiors. What he’d been to Kris was a whole lot of trouble.

When Grampa Trouble suggested that she needed a good security team and hinted at Jack, Kris had drafted him into the Marines one very distinctive rank below her. Then Trouble took a very angry Jack out for drinks and showed him the new law that allowed the security chief of a serving member of the royal blood to countermand any order he considered dangerous to his primary’s survival.

Her survival, there being no other member of the royal family then on active duty. Then or now.

Kris had thought she had a great way to keep Jack just where she wanted him. Once Jack returned from Trouble’s briefing, it was an open question as to just who had who, where.

It had been fun, arguing with Jack over just which of her orders he could countermand. How Kris would love to argue with Jack just now.

Which reminded Kris of an argument she had with Jack. It was right after the Battle of Wardhaven. Election day, to be exact. Kris was so mad at her father that she’d refused to vote for him. She wasn’t willing to vote for the opposition, not after the mess they’d gotten Wardhaven into during their brief interregnum, so she’d just not voted. Besides, she’d been rather busy at the time, attending the funerals of all those who had died under her first command, of sorts.

It was Jack who dragged her out of her funk and took her down to a dive on the wrong side of the tracks from the space elevator. There she’d found Grampa Ray and Trouble. Them and a whole lot of folks like them.

Even the barkeep seemed like an old friend of Trouble’s.

That was the first time Kris didn’t wait for orders but insisted that she be sent out on training duty to teach other planets how to use their fast patrol boats. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Of course, after two assassination attempts, it had seemed like an even better idea for her to go someplace far, far away.

Which led to another set of problems.

But what was the name of the bar?

“Kris, I’ve searched my stored archives,” Nelly said. “There’s no place by the name of My Old Haunt on Wardhaven. Well, there is, but it only opened four years ago. I don’t think General Trouble could be talking about that one.”

“No, no I don’t think he means that. Penny, let’s get our game faces on. Thanks to the generosity of Captain Tidings, we are going down the beanstalk.”

“And then where?”

“I’ll know it when I get there.”