Redoubtable

8

Kris gave the Annams a minute to recover before she continued questioning them. She took the moment to squeeze down all feelings in herself. Gentleness, concern, anything that nurtured human warmth was something she could not afford today. Despite the sweat running down her face, the day would be a cold, cold one.

Done locking down her gut, Kris asked the first of many questions that would lead to rack and ruin. “Is there a football stadium in Lander’s Rest?”

Nelly had identified two large stadiums. Mr. Annam pointed out the larger one. “The smaller is for school contests.”

“Jack, Penny, to me, please. I think I’ve got enough information to plan an attack. Abby, Colonel, are you on net?

Both of them were.

“You heard about Jackie Jackson,” Penny said as she trotted up to Kris. “He’s one bad hombre.”

“One bad girl,” Kris corrected. “I think she’s Jacqueline, not Johnny.”

“Jacqueline; I thought we girls were supposed to be nice and gentle and good,” Penny insisted.

“Penny, you’re hanging out with a Longknife gal,” Jack said on net, still jogging toward Kris. “How could you possibly be that ill informed?”

“Okay, so I believe in that sugar and spice and everything nice stuff. A girl’s got a right to her illusions.”

“Sorry, folks, no illusions today,” Kris said. “We got ourselves some iron-hard facts. Ugly iron spikes with heads on them.”

“Ah, Princess, this is Shuttle 1. We finally got the weeds out of our intakes. We’ve taken on a full tank of reaction mass. Do you need a lift off planet?”

Jack joined Kris, hardly out of breath, but with the usual quizzical eyebrow raised. “That was the plan, as I recall,” Jack said.

“That plan didn’t work out. Change of plan. New plan,” Kris said.

Behind Kris, there was a gasp. She turned to see the Annams, mouth wide open. “But you are a Longknife. For Longknifes, things always go according to plan.”

“Yeah,” Kris agreed. “I read that in the history books, too. Trust me. It may have worked that way for my great-grandparents, but it doesn’t seem to ever work that way for me.”

Kris left the two locals to marvel at that revelation and turned back to her crew.

“You’re not leaving?” Jack said.

“No. Send the shuttles up to the Wasp. Abby, see that the shuttle loads are changed. Marines only the next trip down. No food. Ask Drago if he can put together a Navy landing party to back up the Marines. Shooters, docs, food, anything the squid can do to support the trigger pullers.”

“Got that, Kris,” Abby replied on net. “We go loaded for bear. All that talk about us not wanting to upset Vicky and her daddy is canceled. We’re back in the kick ass and take names business. Goody Two-shoes stuff will have to wait in line.”

Jack eyed Kris. He wasn’t actually questioning her decision. No, it was more like he wanted to make sure she’d weighed all her options and knew what she was doing.

“The situation here is a lot worse than I expected,” Kris said crisply. “The local warlord is a vicious killer. If we maintain a presence here, and are kind enough to let her live, she will repay us by sniping at us on every corner. No, folks. We’d better cut the head off this snake today. I’ll apologize profusely to Vicky next time I see her.”

“What is the target?” the colonel asked without skipping a beat.

“That’s my problem, Colonel, and I’d like your advice on it. I see two, no three, maybe four targets, and I got a bad feeling in my gut that if I go for all of them, I’ll spread myself too thin and fail to get any of them.”

“It’s been known to happen,” he said, noncommittal-like. “Talk to me.”

“Somewhere, down in this haystack, is a needle of a pirate captain. He may or may not have a whole crew. I want to catch that joker and find out what he or she knows.”

“After seeing the comedy routine that the Wasp encountered this morning, I think Captain Drago would heartily agree,” the colonel said.

“The nasty type running this setup is Jackie Jackson. She appears to have taken over the best houses in town for her minions and is here, on the totally misnamed Tranquility Road.”

“Yes. I earlier observed her taste in lawn decorations. She definitely has been breathing air much longer than I, for one, would care to share it with her,” the colonel said dryly.

“I figure the best place to nail her is at her headquarters, but I think there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance she’ll choose to beat it out of town. She’s sent her machete swingers and gunslingers up against us twice and lost both times. She could try us a third time, or she could take advantage of either of these two roads to beat it out of town fast.”

Here, Kris had Nelly back off from the map of Lander’s Rest enough to show the roads headed out of town. One led south to the Annam plantation, among others. “This southern road is the one first and second platoons will be taking into town. She might come out to meet us.”

“Not likely,” the colonel said. “She did that once, and it didn’t work all that well.”

“Yes,” Kris said, trying not to look around at the bloody results. “The other roads offer her two different options. This eastern one takes her to the hills. We could likely track her, but digging out her and her muscle could be a major bit of work.”

“Nothing my Marines couldn’t handle,” Jack said.

“Maybe, Captain,” the colonel said. “Do we have any count as to how many people this Jackie has working for her?”

“No estimate at all. In the past, it’s been fluid. If she wanted more heat, she’d recruit them by threatening their families. I’ll get to that in a moment.”

When no one said anything, Kris went on. “The western road out of town follows the river and leads us to a whole lot of large ranches and plantations. I’m afraid that if she gets in among them, she could terrorize the folks into giving her cover.

“ ‘Cooperate with me, and I’ll give you food. Help that Longknife woman, and your kids get their brains blown out.’ Who wins in that situation?”

“It does get messy,” the colonel agreed.

“And with her up the east road, she can strike back into Lander’s Rest. We’d have to garrison the place.”

“And she bleeds us,” the colonel said with a sigh. “No, we want to annihilate her and her ruffians in town or while they are out in the open fleeing. Now, what is this about her recruiting methods?”

“Nelly, show them the football field.”

The map of human-occupied Kaskatos was replaced by a close overhead of the larger stadium. The playing field was covered with humanity. Some huddled together under makeshift tents; others sat in the open. A few lucky ones were allowed in the first few rows of the bleachers.

Higher up the bleachers, people in black shirts or pants walked or lounged. Each carried one of the machine pistols that was standard issue to Greenfeld State Security.

“Are those weapons all they have for crowd control?” the colonel asked.

“I have been observing the stadium for fifteen minutes,” Nelly said, “and so far, that is the only means of enforcing their will that I have spotted. There are not even fences at the gates.”

“So if everyone decided to leave,” Penny said, “they’d either have to let them go or gun them down.”

“It looks that way,” Kris said. “A glance at the field in front of me will show you how loath they were to shoot at lightly armed civilians.”

“Not much reluctance that I noticed,” Jack said.

“So, let me see if I fully understand your tactical problem,” the colonel said. “You want to kill or capture one miscreant Jackie Jackson, preferably in the company of a pirate captain. You want to prevent her and her assorted band of terrorists from melting into the general population where they could continue to poison the civic life of this planet.

“And you would prefer to do all of the above while keeping the armed guards at the soccer stadium from slaughtering thousands of innocent people whose only crime is getting on the wrong side of said Jackie. Do I understand you?”

“Perfectly, Colonel.”

“And you hope to do this with the four Marine platoons our illustrious Captain Jack has at his beck and call.”

“Well, I was hoping the Navy might contribute a little something to back up the line beasts.”

“Yes, I forgot you mentioned that,” the colonel said.

Across from Kris, Jack made a nasty face. Squids helping jarheads. Unheard of.

“It is tempting to tell our audacious princess that the chances of pulling this off are somewhere between nil and zero. Normally, that would be so; but these are Marines we’re talking about, and I haven’t yet earned my paycheck for this month, so let’s see what we can do,” Colonel Cortez said.