Redoubtable

14

Lieutenant Commander Kris Longknife fully expected that cleaning up the mess would be at least as hard as winning the battle. But before the battle was over, a good portion of the mess was kind enough to clean itself up.

While the dust from the balcony explosion was still rising, cars and trucks were already gunning away from the big house, headed north. Kris let them go.

But she did make a quick call to the colonel. “There’s a lot of traffic headed your way.”

“No problem,” he said, cheerfully. “We’re ready for them. The smart ones will surrender when we tell them.”

Quite a few of them were too dumb to live . . . and died on the road out.

Kris made the calls that got medical gear and professionals flowing down from the ship. Despite the best efforts of Kris’s Marines, there were still a lot of bleeding civilians. Lander’s Rest had once had a good hospital, but its entire staff had fled. Calls to the farms downstream got some of them coming back in.

But travel took time, and people died waiting.

Kris needed a dirtside headquarters. The airport looked good, but too distant from a city where most people were reduced to walking. With a sigh, Kris settled into the rapidly vacated house on Tranquility Road that had been Her Terribleness’s headquarters. It put Kris in the middle of things as she buried herself in work to erase the memories of broken bodies and shattered lives.

There were mouths to feed. The landing boats emptied the Wasp’s supply of famine rations. She issued a call to any Squadron 10 ships nearby to help and started shipping down food from the Wasp’s own supplies.

Before all hell broke loose, Kaskatos had been a happy and invisible colony of about a half million souls. Then three million refugees showed up.

More arrived, but that group included Jackie Jackson, and one of the first things she did was end the population counting by confiscating the city’s computer net. Some of the computers went into setting up her security system around the big house. Most went into an entertainment and gambling net she set up for her henchman.

The city IT manager did succeed in making a final backup of the system before it got wrecked. His widow found it hidden in the back of their closet and brought it in to Kris the day after the shoot-out.

Between Nelly and Chief Beni, the city net was back up and properly employed within a few days.

That helped Kris figure out a rationing system and issue new IDs to both locals and transients.

But that was hardly a dent in Kris’s problems.

Despite the tendency of the gunslingers to go down shooting, Kris still ended up with a lot of prisoners. For now, she kept them in a hastily constructed stockade on the grounds of her command center.

That had at least one advantage. It assured that when trouble started over the prisoners, it quickly got dropped in Kris’s lap.

The sixth morning, Tranquility Road was suddenly filled with a mob of people with guns shouting their strongly held opinions about just how long the former holders of those guns should go on breathing.

Kris’s street had been a lovely, tree-lined lane. Now, most of those trees had ropes slung over their lower branches. A smoldering crowd of armed people screamed for people to dangle from the end of those ropes.

The job fell to Penny to interrupt Kris with the word on what all the commotion outside her window was about.

“I wonder how many of them have actually seen a hanging,” Penny muttered.

“None,” Kris said as she strode across the lawn, “and I’d like to keep it that way.”

Kris halted inside the iron fence from which the heads had been removed. A Marine sergeant brought Kris a bullhorn, a bit battered and scorched but still working.

“I am told that you use elected judges in your courts,” Kris said to the crowd, not quite yet a lynch mob.

“Yeah,” came back at her.

“Are any of them here? Can you bring some of them to me?” That bought Kris time, but not as much as she hoped for. Several of the judges lived within a couple of blocks of Tranquility Road and had sat out the recent unpleasantness in their basements.

An hour later, Kris was staring at four of the kindest-looking grandmother and grandfather types she’d ever hope to meet. “You’re the local judges?”

“We never got a lot of business,” one gray-haired grandmother said. “Most of the time, the constables were able to talk things down.”

“Though some divorces could get messy,” the bald man at her left elbow put in.

“We did have a serial killer once,” the other elderly woman added. “That was a sad case. We had to shoot him.”

“We need to hang these murderers.” “Rapists, too.” “Hang them all,” came from the growing crowd outside the iron fence.

Around Kris, her Marines were getting edgy. Her guard corporal had added two more squads to the detail protecting her. The Marines guarding the stockade full of former henchmen eyed the growing mob and the milling prisoners and seemed none too sure who was the most dangerous to their princess.

Lieutenant Stubben passed down the guard line, and it resolved itself. Half faced in. Half faced out. All had their weapons on sleepy darts.

Kris decided that nothing was gained by stretching this out. “Your Honors, aboard the Wasp I have a retired judge. Francine Nola sat on the High Court of Wardhaven for many years and has handled all kinds of cases. May I suggest that tomorrow she join you in impaneling a court to resolve the legal problems the late occupation of Kaskatos created?”

“That sounds good to me,” from the gray-headed judge seem to settle the matter for the four of them. They stepped into the crowd, spotted friends or the children of friends, and began to either persuade them to their decision or scold them into accepting it.

Kris was glad to see that one off her plate.

Or so she hoped.

Over the next week, matters ground their way along slowly. Judge Francine had a strong distaste for capital punishment. She’d cited Kris’s father from the bench for his tactics that kept hanging on the table throughout the trial of the men who kidnapped and suffocated Kris’s kid brother Eddy. Still, she’d joined in the decision that saw them hang while swearing she’d never be a party to judicial murder again.

Yet her court found itself hearing truly horrendous cases, fully supported by witnesses and the best high-tech evidence that Kris’s Marines and Navy techs could provide. After one particularly gruesome case involving painfully young girls as the victims, Francine went looking for Kris.

“I’m supposed to be retired. I’m supposed to be stargazing. Instead, you’ve got me sitting on the bench fighting to keep down the coffee and toast I limited myself to for breakfast.”

“I’m sorry,” Kris said, throwing herself on the mercy of the court. “The locals need you.”

“God love a duck, but they do. These nice little old ladies never heard of anything so . . . rude. I think that’s the worst word they have in their vocabulary. Rude!”

“Thank you for helping them . . . and us. Do you want to go back to Wardhaven on the Surprise?”

“No, I do not, young woman. But I do want to get off this planet and go chasing stars. You hear me? I want some good time on the ship’s telescope to just lose myself in the stars.”

“As soon as this is over,” Kris promised.

They did have some luck. A potato crop came in early on the plantations down south. Nelly did the job of coordinating trucks to get most of the crop up north, where it was desperately needed.

Then, to Kris’s dismay, the Surprise showed up.

It did not have the improved body armor Kris was hoping for, but it did have container after container of famine biscuits . . . all wholesome and bland.

“But we’ve got something else as well. Five hundred million frozen fish embryos,” a very enthusiastic young woman gushed as she sat in Kris’s office. “They grow rice here, right. You drop these embryos in the rice paddies. They eat the bugs, slime, fertilize the rice with their droppings and when you’re ready to harvest the rice, you have a fish crop, too. These fish will eat anything!”

Kris eyed Captain St. Helens of the Surprise. “Where’d you get this woman?”

“She’s a fish biologist, hired by the Food for Millions Foundation. This is her first voyage out from Wardhaven,” St. Helens explained.

“They’ll eat anything,” Kris repeated.

“Yep,” came right back at her.

“And if they escape into the local streams?”

“That would be very bad,” the woman said, shaking her head. “You can’t allow that. They’ll outcompete the local breeds in nothing flat.”

The optimistic fish biologist still didn’t seem to get the picture. Kris spoke slowly. “We’ve got desperate people doing desperate things to get their next meal on the table for them and their families.”

“I’ve got designs for fish caging,” came back at Kris without even a pause.

“Penny,” Kris shouted, “will you take this woman out to a farm and let someone talk some sense into her.”

Penny’s head appeared in Kris’s makeshift door. “We need to talk, Your Highness. Could you have someone else take her out?”

If Penny was “Your Highnessing” Kris, they really needed to talk. Kris mashed her commlink. “Jack, could you detail a Marine to escort our new fish biologist out to a rice farm so she can get an education on what happens when everyone is starving. Make sure your Marine knows nothing about ecology. Otherwise, he’s likely to shoot her.”

“I think every Wardhaven school kid had ecology in the sixth grade,” Jack said back. “But I got one or two that never learned a thing in school who will probably do.”

“Take our optimistic fish girl to the Annam plantation. They’re Buddhist and very patient.”

“I think I’ll go make sure my drop ships aren’t having any problems delivering food,” Captain St. Helens said, and dismissed himself back to the Surprise.

“Penny, tell me why we need to talk, and keep in mind, it’s been a very bad day in a way-too-rough week.”

“And it will get worse,” Penny said, slipping onto the couch in Kris’s dirtside office.

“Then let me go first,” Kris said. “Talk to me about the pirate captain we captured.”

“He wasn’t a pirate captain, just a wannabe,” Penny said, cutting in.

“A wannabe?”

“His logbook shows he was third officer on a tramp freighter coming in horribly overloaded with refugees. And yes, we checked his papers out with St. Pete, and they verify them as accurate.”

“Can we trust any Peterwald records?”

“Probably not, but we got the query off and the answer back fast enough that I don’t think anyone had a chance to change the main record. The crew are all singing the same songs, hired by the locals to run a ship they didn’t have to bring in cargo they didn’t own. The one thing missing in this picture was the ship.”

“Somebody had to know what they were going to do with the ship.”

“Belou said Jackie knew just the person to set him up . . . but she wasn’t telling him anything until she needed to. I get the feeling she didn’t trust her pinky finger to know what her thumb was doing.”

“Do you have Chief Beni going over her computer?”

“Yes, Kris, but you know that old story about the deputy being saved by his big belt buckle taking the bullet.”

“My grampa Trouble has a buckle he claims did that very thing for him.”

“Well, the computer around Jackie’s neck took a direct hit from one of the rockets. Trust me, computers don’t do the belt buckle bit all that well. There were parts of her computer all over. Parts of her body all over, too. Wasn’t much to bury.”

“I hear it wasn’t much of a funeral,” Kris said dryly. “So, we still don’t know anything.”

“Sadly, that is all too true.”

“Kris,” Nelly said, “have you ever thought of asking Vicky Peterwald?”

“I was hoping to put that off until I had to meet her,” Kris said.

“You may not be able to put it off much longer,” Nelly said. “I just got a message that she’s arriving at St. Pete next week, and she’d like to see you there.”

Kris rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “I thought I had every problem I could have. Nelly, you’ve just added another. Have Abby compose a note responding in the affirmative to Vicky’s message and have her ask Vicky for any information about the local pirate activities hereabouts. Tell her I’ve come up blank.

“And tell Abby she can give Vicky a full report on everything I’ve been doing since I arrived here. No need to hold anything back.”

“I’m doing it, Kris.”

“Kris, I’m supposed to get my time,” Penny said, not moving from the couch.

“It’s not already bad enough?”

“We have worse problems here on Kaskatos.”

“It can get worse?”

“The cops, Kris.”

“Solve it.”

“Do you really mean that?” Penny asked.

“I don’t know. Your dad is a cop. You’re the closest thing I have to a cop on staff. Is this planet in such bad shape that you can’t patch it back together in a week or two?”

“Try ten or twenty years.”

Kris eyed her subordinate, but it was clear she was not joking. “You have my attention. Talk to me.”

“I take it that you know how simple the local judicial system is?”

“Judge Francine filled me in. We don’t have any problems, so we don’t need no stinking solutions. Right?”

“Same with the cops. There’s a dozen that got bit by the police bug and learned the business from training tapes and stuff. Most are just well-meaning locals who put on a badge a couple of hours a week and show up for the odd juvenile high jinks or domestic disturbance. It’s a small-town attitude.”

“So they can go back to being a small town now that we’ve gotten rid of the wicked witch,” Kris said, hopefully.

“You ever hear that story about the first two people on Earth taking a bite out of an apple?”

“Yeah. I never like the way one of us girls took the fall for the guys.”

“Me neither, but Kaskatos has taken a bite out of one nasty apple and, Kris, I don’t think these folks can ever go back to the way it was.”

Kris sighed. “Enough with the stories, tell me what’s happening.”

“There are a lot of guns floating around now. Lots of them. Longtime locals don’t much care for the new kids on the block, but they’re outnumbered six or seven to one. The first three million new kids really don’t like the last arrivals. Not all of them were gunslingers for Jackie, but a lot of them are really bad apples. And now all three groups have guns and think they ought to be the police.”

“So suddenly these people need a real police department,” Kris said.

“Yes. Honest cops. Fair cops, but the original locals don’t have any idea how to form a police force. The new kids’ only experience with police is in the Peterwald police state. Not a good reference point. Kris, if Greenfeld State Security arrests you, everyone assumes you’re guilty of something. People that are arrested never come back. They don’t need prisons, just mass, unmarked graves.”

“That’s not good,” Kris said.

“But that’s the way things have been for the last hundred years. Keep your nose clean, don’t ask questions, and you can live to a nice old age. Get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time . . .” Penny shrugged.

Kris leaned back and stared out the window. Rolling hills were green with trees and crops. It looked like a lovely paradise. Maybe it had been . . . once. Maybe it could be . . . with a lot of work by the right kind of trained people.

“So,” Kris said, thinking out loud, “I need to call my brother, Honovi, and ask him to send a couple of thousand of Wardhaven’s experienced cops, judges, law professors, lawyers, and civil liberty advocates out this way. Am I missing anything?”

“Nope. Other than they’d better plan on spending the next couple of dozen years here.”

Kris pushed her chair back from her desk, leaned back, and studied the ceiling. “How do I explain all that to Vicky? No, sister, I’m really not taking over a planet in your sphere of influence. But yes, I’m shipping in a whole lot of civil-affairs experts to set up a full political and legal system that is anathema to you and your old man.”

“I believe the original idea was that we’d just deliver some famine biscuits and get the hell out of here,” Penny said.

“No good deed goes unpunished.” Kris sighed. She stood and walked over to stare out the window. Of late, she’d spent a lot of time staring out that window. Thinking about what she’d do once she was done chasing pirates.

There was a big hole in the star map several thousand light-years away. A big unknown space that had recently taken to eating starships. Kris wanted to explore that hungry void.

But whatever or whoever lurked in that space might very well eat her . . . and any of her friends she took on that voyage of exploration.

Kris turned back to Penny. “What if it was just you hanging around here for a year or so? You probably wouldn’t even be noticed. Haven’t you been talking to the Speaker of the City Council of Elders?”

“Yes,” Penny said. “He’s a nice guy, and he likes a lot of what I talk about, Kris. But just me?”

“I could leave you the colonel. Kaskatos needs a militia. I think I could trust Colonel Cortez to train a local self-defense force for this one little planet. And besides, he’s been begging to get off my staff . . . preferably before the next time we see Grampas Ray and Trouble.”

“He has that, and I admit that I’ve considered what I could do here all by myself, but, Kris, have you thought this through?”

Actually, Kris had thought this and a whole lot more through time and time again.

If Kris took the Wasp out into deep space to see what was chewing up Iteeche scouts and swallowing them whole, how many of her friends deserved to be dragged along to that potential death.

Kris wouldn’t really need Penny to go looking where she wasn’t wanted. Or the colonel. Or Abby and Cara. Chief Beni might come in handy.

What about Jack? That was a tough one.

Kris realized she was letting the silence stretch.

“Penny, you and Colonel Cortez look into what you can do here while I’m gone. I’ll go find out what bee Vicky has in her bonnet and see what she’ll let me do for the people running away from the Greenfeld Workers’ Paradise. We ought to have a better idea of our problem in a couple or three weeks.”

Kris put a hopeful look on her face.

It didn’t squelch the sour glare Penny shot her way.