Redoubtable

18

“YOU want us to do what?” was Admiral Georg Krätz’s response to Kris’s suggestion that they deconstruct the entire economy of the Greenfeld Alliance, starting with St. Pete.

“We’ve got clear evidence that the official reports are too good to believe,” Kris said, ticking her points off on her fingers. “Your Navy supply system shows there’s something not right about what your own computer reports,” brought down a second finger. “You’ve just had a run-in with someone using tech that only my Wardhaven gear could spot and some of it is even better than our stuff,” was good for two fingers, leaving Kris only a thumb out.

“Your Highness,” Chief Beni put in, “you may not have noticed when Da Vinci and I jammed the local network in the lounge. This thing really is the jammer that’s been hassling you.”

“Da Vinci,” Vicky said.

“Yeah,” the chief said, “my new computer.”

“He’s got one of the fancy computers?”

“Vicky, not another word out of you,” Kris snapped. NELLY, YOU KEEP QUIET, TOO.

I WON’T SAY ANYTHING IF SHE DOESN’T.

Kris wondered if all female bonding required going back to the sandbox. Then, come to think about it, male bonding sure seemed to be at that level. Oh bother.

“Staying on topic,” Kris continued, “something is clearly wrong. If anyone has any better ideas of how to tackle the problem that doesn’t involve taking a deep dive into Greenfeld’s economic databases, I’m all ears.”

The admiral was shaking his head before she finished. “I don’t know anything about finance and economics. What I do know is that here in Greenfeld territory, it is a capital crime to reveal economic secrets. If I sell you the plans for our newest battleship, I’d at least get a court-martial. If I gave out the true balance-of-payments figures for our planets, I’d be shot on apprehension. No doubt while trying to escape.”

“Is it that bad?” Kris asked.

“He has pretty much got it right,” Vicky said. “Of course, you would be doing what you did under my orders and with me at your elbow. That would make it legal, wouldn’t it?” she said, flashing the admiral a not-quite-confident smile.

“Maybe it would. But are you sure someone wouldn’t pass it along to your father with the tale twisted and torn in such a way that he wasn’t howling for your blood . . . and mine . . . before the guy finished telling his tale?”

Kris should have turned away. No one deserved to be under public scrutiny when they went through the awakening being forced on the young Peterwald woman. But Kris was held captive by the flight of emotions across Vicky’s face.

She began so innocent, so confident. She was Daddy’s little darling and had nothing to fear from her father. Slowly, reality seeped from her head to her heart. Slowly, realization dawned that she was indeed just a player in a hard and deadly game . . . and those who played it could indeed turn her father against her. Even to the death of her.

Intellectually, Vicky must have known all this beforehand. As Kris watched, knowledge roared out like a flash flood from a small corner of her brain until it soaked every fiber of her being.

The new, wiser, but infinitely older Vicky finished her coming of age by slowly nodding agreement. “You are right, sir.”

Then her face hardened. “But this is still something that needs to be done. If our beloved Greenfeld is not to be reduced to a mess of primal blood and gore, the truth must be sorted out and become the basis for our actions. We can’t just keep flailing away in the dark. Can we, Kris?”

The question posed so plaintively by Vicky was both amorphous and ambiguous. Even a hot potato in the lap had more form and structure. Still, Kris found the openness of the question more to her liking than she might have.

“Yes, in answer to the basic question,” Kris began, “I do think truth is a better policy than lies. It’s also a whale of a lot better basis for policy. And no, Admiral, it’s not my policy that a weak Greenfeld is the best friend a strong Wardhaven can have. As best I know from personal observation, it’s not my king’s preference either.

“Which leaves us gnawing at a bit of a problem. If getting to the truth is the way to go, how do we do it without being stabbed in the back? Right, Admiral?”

“I certainly find it easier to wash my back in the shower when there are no knives sticking out.”

“Who’d have thought he could tell a joke,” Vicky quipped.

“My senior officers often surprise me,” Kris said. “Sometimes even pleasantly. I may have a solution to your communication problem.”

There was a knock at the door to the lounge, and Abby poked her head in. “There’s a whole passel of Marines of various faiths and persuasion out here telling me that you do not wish to be disturbed. I told them that such plebeian rules never apply to the likes of me. Would one of you please say something before one of these fine young men rams a bayonet up some delicate part of my anatomy?”

“Let her in,” Kris said.

“What about these others?” came from the passageway.

“They’re with me,” Abby said, and ushered beauty and the beast into the Forward Lounge.

Beauty was a strikingly tall young woman with all the lovely assets that an aspirant movie star would kill for. Kris might not kill for that package, but she’d certainly commit several Class A misdemeanors to make those looks her own.

The man beside her could easily have been retrieved from under a bridge where he spent his time frightening horses and trying to eat children’s toes. Short, lumpy, and with a bent nose, he wore dungarees cut off below the knees and a sleeveless sweatshirt celebrating a jazz quartet.

“I’m Amanda Kutter,” the young woman said in what would have to be a magnificent contralto voice. “I just joined the scientists. My doctoral dissertation was on the economic tension between Earth and the Rim that brought about devolution. I was hoping to do research on the economies of the Sooner planets. If we could determine how they got started and maintained themselves in isolation, it might really tell us something.”

That sounded plausible to Kris. So why did she still have a hunch that Grampa Ray and Crossenshield had their fingers involved in moving Miss Amanda up to the top of the list of new boffins joining the Wasp. If I wasn’t so glad to see you, I’d likely space you. Good Lord but I hate it when my elders play me. Kris kept her thoughts to herself and a smile on her face as she shook Amanda’s offered hand.

Next she shook the gnarled paw of the beast. “Call me Scrounger. I make sure Captain Drago has what he suddenly discovers he needs. Usually a week before he needs it.”

Kris found the handshake firm and the eyes clear.

DON’T LET HIS APPEARANCE FOOL YOU, KRIS. HE’S GOT A PH.D. IN ECONOMICS. HE AND A COUPLE OF HIS PROFESSOR FRIENDS DEVELOPED THE ECONOMIC MODEL FOR RIM TRADE AND GROWTH THAT’S BEEN WORKING JUST GREAT SINCE EARTH TOOK ITS BALL AND WENT HOME. HE’D BE IN LINE TO SHARE THE NOBEL PRIZE IN ECONOMICS IF HE WAS STILL TEACHING AT PITTS HOPE U.

WHY ISN’T HE?

HIS FOUR EX-WIVES MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH IT. KRIS, I REALLY HAVE TO WONDER WHAT THE PAY LEVEL IS FOR THE CONTRACT CREW. IF THIS GUY’S WORKING FOR US, IT HAS GOT TO BE THROUGH THE ROOF.

For the moment, Kris was just glad Crossenshield had provided her what she needed.

Kris invited the three new members of the meeting to take a seat. “Abby, in a moment, Vicky and I are going to need your help on a communication problem we have. However, first I’d better brief you on our other problem. Vicky, why don’t you tell them what you found?”

In bold, clear brushstrokes, the young Peterwald woman outlined the economics of the Peterwald Empire. When she was done, there was dead silence.

Amanda spoke first. “So you are saying that every financial report, every government statistic is totally fake?”

“It looks that way,” Vicky agreed.

Scrounger took up the tale from there. “And you want us to hack into government and private nets, find out what’s actually going on, and build a model of the real Greenfeld economy.”

“While hopefully identifying where hardware is being si-phoned off to support the pirates and other illegal activities that I’m chasing,” Kris pointed out.

“But it’s a capital crime,” Abby put in, “and we could all lose our heads for doing any of this.”

“All too true,” the admiral answered.

“Is it too late for me to get out of here?” Scrounger said, making to get up. “You see, I have four women depending on me to keep them in the manner they’ve become accustomed to, and I really need my head if I’m to earn a penny for them.”

“Sit down, Professor,” Kris said, rebaptizing him. “The plan is to bring Vicky’s father in on our project quickly enough to grant us permission, or at least absolution. To date, nobody’s succeeded in killing this particular Longknife, and I don’t intend to let the Byzantine politics of Greenfeld succeed where so many others have failed.”

“And just how do you intend to do that?” Abby asked. “I’ve been involved up to my neck in keeping you alive for lo these many years. How many new gray hairs is this going to cause me?”

“Well, we need to get a message to my dear dad,” Vicky said. “It needs to get directly to him, and it needs to get there quickly. Oh, and it would be very nice if fifty-eleven different factions didn’t get to read it before he did.”

“Oh, just that,” Abby drawled. “I was afraid you’d want the sun, moon, and stars. Any idea how you’re gonna do that?”

“Two years ago, I’d just put on my very best dress and barge in on Dad. Now, I’m a hundred light-years away, and all I’ve got in my closet are uniforms. I’m a big girl now, and I need a big-girl way of doing this.”

“But you ain’t never had to do it the big-girl way, so you’ve come to your auntie Abby for a little advice.”

“You got it in one,” Kris said.

“Why don’t we girls go over to some quiet corner and put our heads together? Ain’t no need to scandalize these men. They think they run the world, and we don’t want to let them in on the truth of it.”

Vicky motioned Abby to the bar, and the three of them headed that way. Abby took no time in laying out the problem.

“I got several good ciphers, guaranteed not to be broken by the average passing stranger. Problem is, your pappy is included in the passing-stranger category by the kind folks who sold me them. We’ll need someone at the other end to decipher your message and deliver it.

“Now then, as I understand it, Wardhaven now has an embassy on Greenfeld. Ain’t it wonderful that these folks are at least trying to make nice nice. I imagine I could find someone in the embassy who would figure out that the gibberish in their mailbox was a cipher that needed translating, but I don’t expect that anyone on my mailing list would be all that welcome at the Palace.

“Of course, I guess Kris here could have the ambassador deliver the message.”

“Not if we can help it,” Kris said. “Let’s keep the official people out of this, shall we? Vicky, do you have anyone that you trust in the Palace to take a message or letter to your father?”

Vicky thought for a long moment, then shook her head. “There’s no one I would trust with my life. Maggie, yes, but she’s not at the Palace.”

“Now that complicates things,” Abby said, eyeing the long line of potential drinks lined up in front of the bar’s mirror. “Do you have a specific net address for your papa? Something that is just for you or a few close friends?”

“My dad has no close friends,” Vicky spat. “But yes, I do have an address that is just for me. I was planning on using it, but I’m sure that, somewhere in the hundred light-years between here and there, it would be intercepted, and any cipher I have would be cracked.”

“No argument from me, baby ducks,” Abby said. “My embassy contact will have to do the decrypting, but I’m pretty sure no friend of mine will want to have his or her fingerprints all over a message to your papa. Likely as not, if their prints are on the ‘from,’ it ain’t gonna get to the ‘to.’ ”

“My net hub is still up in my room,” Vicky said in a rush. “I could give it to your friend and they could send the message to Dad from my own Palace address. Would that do it?”

Abby nodded. “Even better. One of the things you want your old man to understand is just how behind he’s let his tech support get. What better way to say you’re being bamboozled than to do a bit of bamboozling ourselves.”

“You’re sure you can keep our embassy’s fingerprints off this message?” Kris asked. “Any chance we’ve got to get permission for us here to do all this Dumpster diving in Greenfeld’s economic trash heap depends on boss Peterwald believing that it’s just his daughter and her musketeers doing it. If it looks like Wardhaven is launching economic espionage against him, we’re all going to be looking for which pike has our head on it.”

Abby eyed Vicky. “We’ve just come from a planet where a renegade State Security type stripped that metaphor to raw reality.”

“She was probably just taking a page from my great-grandfather’s book of pacification and prosperity,” Vicky said. “My dad hasn’t stooped to that level yet. I won’t be surprised when he does.”

“And on that fine thought,” Abby said, “I think I should take you to the princess’s cabin and record your plea for our life to your pappy.”

They stood. “Nelly,” Abby said, “I lent those two spare computers to Amanda and the professor. I figured they’d need them for whatever we were getting them into. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I wish you’d asked me first,” Nelly said, “but as I have learned from being around the princess, I am expected to grant forgiveness even if I never would have given permission.”

“You’ve given them new supersmart computers!” Vicky cried.

“For a while,” Nelly allowed. “They’re on probation. One screwup, and we’re out of here.”

There was a soft knock at the door, and it immediately opened to let a small head peer in. “I figured Aunt Abby would be in here,” Cara announced with all the pride of a twelve-year-old who had solved a Nancy Drew mystery a full five pages ahead of her hero.

“How did you get past the Marines?” came from several voices.

Kris wasn’t one of them. “Abby was just leaving with Vicky Peterwald. Have you finished your schoolwork?”

“Dada said there was more to do, but I ignored her,” Cara said, pulling her computer up from where it hung from her neck. “I told Dada that if she kept hounding me, I’d turn her off, just like Aunt Abby does her computer.”

Which launched a storm of unconnected conversations.

“I told you,” Nelly snapped at Abby, “that you were a bad influence.”

“I will not be controlled by my computer,” Abby snapped right back.”

“Even that kid has a supercomputer,” Vicky wailed. “Kris, we have to talk.”

“Yes, but not now,” Kris snapped for her own protection. “Jack, get Sergeant Bruce in here and have him see that a certain little girl is kept occupied. Or in the brig. His choice.”

“Aye, aye, Commander.”

“Abby, you and Vicky get over to my quarters and see what you can patch together. Don’t come back until you’ve got a plea guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes of a stone statue.”

“You bet, boss,” Abby said.

In a series of “Boats right. Boats left,” commands that would have made any admiral proud, Kris herded her various cats off to where she wanted them. Done, she returned to the table with the admiral, Jack, Amanda, and the professor.

“Nelly, are you satisfied with these two working for now with two of your kids?”

“They are just happy to be awake and have a job to do, assuming, of course, that when heads go up on pikes, we computers get left behind in a nice jewelry box. I will, however, monitor this matter closely to assure that my children are not taken advantage of in their eagerness to serve.”

“Amanda, Professor, you understand your probationary status?” Kris said. “Would you rather use your own pet computers?”

Both nodded agreement and assured Kris that they were only too happy to be working with such fine computers. “I will need to download several of my modeling tools,” Amanda said. The professor then confessed to the same need.

“Jack, how much finance and economics was in your degree?”

“Kris, I just did a search on the background of these two poor souls now working for you. I’m not in their league, and, since I’ve had a chance to check out your college work, I know you aren’t either.”

“But Nelly did a high-speed and thorough workup on the Turantic economy,” Kris pointed out. “I expect that she has more practical experience at breaking and entering planetary databases than any of us.”

“You mean we won’t have to send off request after request for data, then wait for some clerk to get around to it or just flat out deny it?” the professor said, rubbing his hands together with glee.

“It sounds like the only stuff we’ll actually have to mess with is the fun stuff,” Amanda said.

“Nelly, make sure you and your kids are very, very careful. I would prefer not to have to deal with some angry cop from St. Pete’s. Vicky’s father is going to be a big enough problem as it is.”

“I’m glad you broached that topic,” said the professor. “While my young colleague’s shining eyes sparkled at the thought of huge amounts of data flowing into her greedy hands for analysis, the thought came to me that a gushing stream of data pointed right at us is bound to attract attention. Attention we do not want.”

The professor turned in his chair. “Chief, who is your new friend?”

“I am Lieutenant Stanislaus Kostka, of the Greenfeld Navy,” he said, somewhat self-consciously, glancing down at his uniform.

“Don’t be so shy. Stan here is the best network man in my squadron,” Admiral Krätz added. “He’s the one who helped Vicky research what little she could of our economy and did the statistical analysis that showed the numbers were too good to be true.”

“What do you know about the network down below on St. Pete?” Kris asked.

“I have the published design specs. I also have done a bit of remapping the system. It is very fragile, what with all the problems we’ve been having,” Stan said, innocently. “I’ve found that there is a lot more net out there than anyone’s admitted. St. Pete’s the sixth planetary system I’ve mapped for Miss Vicky. Every one of them has been loaded with add-ins and extra databases that officially are not there.”

“If you’re going to keep two or three sets of books, you’ve got to have them somewhere,” the professor said with an impish grin. “But again, I say, if we suddenly start copying all of those illicit files to us for analysis, a blind network administrator would notice the flow and investigate.”

“Admiral, what would you suggest?” Kris said.

“Do I look like a criminal? A spy?” the officer said, throwing his hands up.

“No, sir,” Kris said, “but you do look experienced. You have survived in what appears to me to be a very dysfunctional system. More than survived; you, sir, have thrived.”

“ ‘Survived’ is the operative word,” he said. “Now, as my headstrong young assistant has pointed out, we of Greenfeld are behind you Longknifes, but we are not primitives. Greenfeld manufactures a very fine line of smart metal. We also are producing self-organizing matrices for computers. We haven’t had much luck making them work, have we, Lieutenant?”

The lieutenant quickly agreed with his superior officer.

“But you do have a supply of the matrices, and you are working with them, are you not?”

“Yes, sir. Miss Vicky has had me working on them in my spare time.”

“Of which my junior officers have way too much,” the admiral said, and avoided seeing the face the lieutenant made at the table in front of him.

“Lieutenant, take the Gunny and a four-Marine escort. Return to the Fury and bring back the full supply of exotic materials that you have. Also, I think Lieutenant Peterwald would like to have Chief Meindl join us over here. Bring him. You remember him, Commander. He was your prisoner on Chance. You gave him a tour of the trap you were setting for young Hank Peterwald and his military coup. My good friend Captain Slovo was able to use his input to stop the whole slaughter.”

“Sometimes you want a spy around,” Kris said. “I found him to be a good man, Chief Meindl.”

“He may help with a few things I have in mind; now, off with you, Lieutenant.”

The young officer fairly raced to obey his admiral. Kris waited until he was gone before asking the question on her mind.

“Care to share what you have in mind?”

“There is more than one way to acquire a data dump. You kids these days have it so easy. Just say a few words to your commlink, and everything is delivered to your fingertips.”

“Your idea of research is way oversimplified,” Amanda slipped in.

“You’re probably right,” the admiral agreed. “And, this may be just a dumb old sailor’s thought, but if you don’t want to leave footprints on the net, why not avoid hotfooting it around the net. Nelly, you spun off search bots faster than I could think of the idea. I’m sure you can use our fine Greenfeld glop to knock together some very nice bugs. Tell me where the databases are that you want to copy, and I can come up with some reason why a detachment of my sailors needs to march by there.

“Your bots will link into the net right next door to where the data is, copy it out, and fly back to one of my unsuspecting sailors, and bingo, we have the data, and any net manager has at best data going from somewhere to a node that no longer exists and never was on his system map.”

“And if one of my bots gets isolated and captured,” Nelly said, “it is made of your fine Greenfeld glop, as you so technically defined it. I can contrive bots that will self-destruct in that event, leaving just a smear of very costly material that tells no one anything. Kris, I like this man. He’s as sneaky as you are.”

“Then let us see what we can do,” Kris said.

Planning got under way. An hour later, Vicky returned; a moment after that, Lieutenant Kostka followed her in. A Greenfeld senior chief was with him.

“Chief Meindl, so good to see you again,” Kris said.

“I should have known that you’d be at the center of whatever was going on,” the chief said, offering a salute.

Kris gave him a hug. “I worry about you, Chief. People get killed around Peterwalds and Longknifes. I’m glad to see you have avoided the usual fate.”

“She never gives me a hug like that,” Chief Beni muttered.

“Be glad she keeps you at arm’s length,” Jack said. “It’s safer that way.”

“He’s stuck with a Peterwald,” Kris pointed out. “They’re even more dangerous to be around.”

The chief took a step back. “So it’s lieutenant commander now.”

“They’re new,” Kris said, glancing at her shoulder boards.

“You command this ship, then?”

“No such luck, Chief,” Kris said with a sigh. “I’ve still got a contract captain running the boat.”

“Some might call him the flag captain,” Jack put in. “Commander Longknife is officially the CO of Patrol Squadron 10.”

“Congratulations, Commander,” Admiral Krätz said. “I saw the extra stripe, but I had no idea it meant command of a squadron.”

“It’s not much of a squadron,” Kris said. “And I’ve never seen more than two ships from it together in one place. They’re all like the Wasp, corvettes converted from merchant ships with just enough guns to put a quick end to any pirate ship. We carry a full load of cargo containers, like you saw on the Wasp. They let us fake it as a merchant, suckering a pirate in close. And the containers are usually full of famine rations. It’s really bad out there, folks.

“My grampa Trouble used to tell the story that people were so desperate to get away from planets near the Iteeche that they’d overload ships until they had to breathe in shifts. I thought it was a joke. But I’ve answered distress calls from two ships that broke down before they made it to one of the Sooner planets. No food, no sanitation, little oxygen. You have to see it to realize how bad it is.”

There was a long pause in the conversation after that.

“Do the containers of rations slow you down?” the admiral asked, bringing the focus back to something nautical.

“Not so far,” Kris said. “If we ever needed to really boogy, chasing or running as the case may be, we can ditch the containers and attach a beacon. We’re pretty small. Any real warship we run away from.”

“But you’re loaded with food,” Vicky said.

“We carry out a load to a starving planet. On the way out, we try to get a pirate’s attention. Once we’re unloaded, we usually head back for Cuzco to refill on biscuits. Then repeat the process.

“Admiral, Vicky, I know you have to be unhappy about having a strange Navy on your rim, but I assure you, PatRon 10 is spending more time in the shipping business than shooting. I think Campbell on the Dauntless is the only one of us to actually shoot up a pirate.”

“Didn’t you capture a pirate off Kaskatos? I seem to have heard something about that,” the admiral said, careful not to directly contradict Kris.

“It was just a system runabout,” Kris said. “It had a balloot full of reaction mass and bounced off the Wasp. No lasers, just personal weapons. Half of them only had machetes to wave. When the Marines in full armor went out the locks, it kind of let the air out of them.”

“But there are pirates out there. We are losing merchant ships,” Vicky said. “It’s not like there’s a lot of trade. I think part of the reason so many ships are laid up like those around St. Pete is the fear of being captured.”

Kris had listened patiently. She had sat on the one question that had haunted her since she first encountered the wreckage and flotsam of Greenfeld situation. She could sit on it no more.

“Vicky, what’s the problem? What is going on? I know I’m a Longknife and the ancestral enemy, but God in heaven, girl, things are a mess, and I’m doing my level honest best to clean up after it. Don’t I at least deserve to know what is actually happening?”

Vicky eyed her admiral. He couldn’t bear her question and focused his attention on the table in front of him. Kris was half-afraid that she’d shattered the growing trust between her and the young woman from Greenfeld.

She hadn’t intended that.

Just as Kris was about ready to take her words back, Vicky started talking. Her eyes didn’t rise to meet Kris’s, but she seemed unable to look up from her hands.

“We are in trouble. The glue that held 103 planets together has come apart, and we don’t know how to fix it. With the aid of the fleet, we can hold this or that fragment together, but even our fleet is too small to hold it all.”

Vicky looked up, met Kris’s eyes. “If you went down to St. Pete with a pocketful of Greenfeld marks, you couldn’t buy a beer. You couldn’t buy anything. St. Pete and half of our planets are back on the barter system. If you don’t have something to trade, no one will keep you from starving to death. If your mother or father was the wrong person, you can get killed right where you stand.

“Half our planets don’t have a central government anymore. They’ve got three or six or a dozen situations running things. Usually a warlord with guns. Maybe the warlord is a black shirt. Maybe the warlord just managed to get all of State Security’s guns. At first, my dad and I made the mistake of thinking that we could wipe out the cancer of State Security and everything would be fine.

“Big mistake,” Vicky said with a sigh.

“Dad thought he had corporate vice presidents that he could trust to keep things going on this planet or that one. Nine out of ten of them have set themselves up as rulers. The smart ones call themselves princes or viceroys. The dumb ones claim to be kings. Dad’s taken care of all of them so far.”

“It’s that bad,” Kris said in a whisper.

“When you were talking about shipping famine biscuits to the Sooner planets that our refugees are flooding, I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking you to send them to twenty of our planets. St. Pete’s one of them.”

“Why not?” Kris asked. “Why haven’t you asked for our help?”

“And let Ray Longknife know we’re in this much trouble,” Vicky spat. “Hell, Kris, you know he’d invade us in a second. Kris, the Marines you’ve got on your little ship could probably take over a dozen of our planets. Worse, the people would greet you as liberators.

“You know that Captain Thorpe guy that you chased away from that Sooner planet, what was it called?”

“Panda,” Kris said.

“If he’d landed the same bunch of roughnecks on St. Pete, it would be his. Kris, keeping this a secret is the only chance we’ve got.”

Kris felt kicked in the gut. Here she was, busting her butt, risking the life of her Marines and sailors to get help where they thought it was needed . . . and the Peterwalds were hushing up just how bad the starving and dying was because they thought Kris’s grampa would take advantage of the suffering for some political advantage. Kris refused to meet Vicky’s eyes.

Around Kris, the silence gathered and grew. No one said a word. Finally, Kris could be quiet no more.

“Vicky, I can’t believe that you’d think that my grampa would do anything in the face of the suffering of your people but help them where he could.”

“Oh, Kris, don’t give me that. Look at how King Ray is soaking up planet after planet.”

“Planet after planet is choosing to join him,” Kris spat back. “No one’s been forced to join. It’s not our fleet that shows up in someone’s sky and proceeds to add it by force to our flag. Remember, I was there when your brother did his best to force Chance into your father’s hands. I did all I could to keep things peaceful, then fought side by side with volunteers from Chance when a fight was what your brother demanded. Admiral, you were there.”

“She is telling the truth, Vicky. I have told you so before.”

Vicky was on her feet, looking from the admiral to Kris and back again. She shook her head, rejected what they told her.

Kris stood to meet her face-to-face.

“Chance told my grampa to go jump and voted itself into the Helvitican Confederacy. I was there just recently. The Helvitican flag is what they fly.”

“No. No, I’ve heard about how you people fight. Six super battleships went after Wardhaven, and you blew every one of them to bits. Don’t tell me you people don’t fight.”

“Yes, Vicky, we fight,” Kris growled. “Remember who you’re talking to. I led that fight. I commanded twelve tiny patrol boats against them. I begged, stole, and scrounged anything I thought might help me. Somebody suggested that little system runabouts might confuse those battleships, be mistaken for our patrol boats long enough for us to get our shots off.

“The worst mistake in my life was letting those little boats join us. Those civilian runabouts couldn’t dodge or jink as fast as a fighting boat. We hadn’t mounted chaff dispensers on them or given them any foxers. When the fight started, they died and died and died, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

“But let me tell you something. After the first attack, after we knew what it took to survive in that fight, there were these tugs that refueled my surviving ships. They’d watched the runabouts die; but every one of those tugs, everyone in their crews voted, insisted, that they join our attack. Do anything they could to give us a chance to get a killing hit on those battleships.”

Kris found she was in tears. “The people on those runabouts were volunteers, not even reservists. A lot of those runabouts were crewed by families that had signed up for the Coast Guard auxiliary, to rescue idiots who’d bought more boat than they had brains to operate. I attended a lot of funerals after that fight. One was for a man and his wife, their son and daughter. They came because someone told them their little runabout might help keep Wardhaven free. They died fighting for that freedom.

“Vicky, free men and women will fight to their last breath to keep their freedom. But don’t you ever mistake that fighting will for a willingness to take what isn’t freely offered.

“I swear by every drop of blood that’s in me that my grampa, King Ray, will ship you food and medicine if that is what you need. Just say the word, and the ships drifting behind your station could be on their way to bring what your people are desperate for.”

Kris finished, emotionally spent; she collapsed into her chair. Across from her, Vicky slowly settled back into her seat. She glanced at the admiral and raised a questioning eyebrow.

The admiral took a deep breath. “Kris, I believe that you believe every word of what you just told us. Never think that I doubt your sincerity. But I cannot help but see an idealistic young girl before me. Maybe you are right, and your King Ray would not seek advantage. Maybe he would send food and other aid. Maybe I, too, believe that he would do as you say. But hear this old cynic out.

“The cost of a few boatloads of famine rations is minuscule in the budget of 130 planets. But the massive amount of help that fifty planets would need is not a price to sneeze at. Are you even sure your granaries have that much to spare? And such an effort would strap even lush Wardhaven’s treasury. But even more to the point, is this a problem that your king needs at this time?

“I’m guessing that he sent you here with your makeshift squadron in an effort to do a little good on the cheap. It looks good on the news. ‘Look at all the nice things we are doing in your name, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. So sad about those poor refugees. Now on to the next story.’ But if the cost zoomed through the roof?” The admiral shrugged and left the thought hanging for a moment before going on.

“But that is only the tip of the iceberg. If you really enter into the Greenfeld tragedy, where do you stop? You saw that on Kaskatos. You just wanted to deliver some food. Between sunup and sundown you ended up conquering the planet. Where is your Penny, the daughter of a cop? Or that colonel you picked up at Panda? Something tells me you left them behind to work with the locals on putting together a constabulary and a militia. I know I would have.

“Do you honestly think that your Wardhaven would not be drawn into a morass even as you tried to do just a few good things?” Finished, the admiral leaned back in his chair, his hands limply upturned on the table in front of him.

“So,” Kris finally said after the silence had stretched long, “the best thing I can do is help you solve your own problems your own way . . . and get out of Dodge as fast as I can,” Kris said.

“Yes,” said the admiral. “A while ago, you said you were open to any suggestions for how we might solve whatever the problem was that we were talking about. No one came up with a better idea. Like you then, Vicky and I are all ears for something better. Something with less suffering attached. Neither one of us is sure that our little attempt at this solution won’t end up with our heads on pikes,” the admiral said, and even managed a chuckle.

“So, let me bring matters back to where we were before this little detour. How shall we go about finding out the truth of St. Petersburg’s economy and the real distribution of its military production?”