Undaunted

3

Kris would have much preferred a straight-up fight with a pair of Greenfeld cruisers. Tough odds, but manageable.

The Iteeche Death Ball was a greater threat . . . with the ambiguity of a ticking time bomb. It might go off now. Or later. The only certainty was that it would go off and make a mess of her entire day.

And she was facing the Iteeche without Nelly. She’d never headed into a fight with one arm and one leg in a cast. Or just flat cut off.

What a mess.

Well, few things didn’t get better when shared. Kris mashed her commlink. “Will the princess’s staff please report . . .” No, with the Iteeche in the mix, this was no time to call a meeting in her boring conference room. “. . . to her Tac Room.” There, that had the proper lethality for a council of war. It was the same room, but it had deadly all over it.

“You drop in, too, Captain, as soon as those cruisers are out of our sky,” Kris told Drago as she left him to his own and full devices.

“Will do, Your Highness,” Captain Drago answered, with just the right nod to her royal status from his aloof post as contract captain of this not-supposed-to-be warship.

Kris headed for her conference/Tac Room.

Chief Beni was there first. The wall to Kris’s left as she entered now matched the main screen on the bridge. At a glance, Kris could see how the dance was going as the Greenfeld cruisers made their way out, and the Iteeche Death Ball edged in close.

Kris breathed a sigh of relief even as a part of her brain screamed, What’s wrong with this picture?

“You’ve got to be nuts to be glad to see human cruisers leaving even as an Iteeche gets closer,” said Colonel Hernando Cortez, formally of several military organizations and at the moment Kris’s prisoner and employee. That combination, along with the display, pretty much summed up Kris’s efforts to be a good Navy officer.

“Oh if Father or General Mac could see me now,” Kris said.

“They’d laugh their heads off,” Captain Jack Montoya said as he followed Kris into the room and took a glance at the board.

As Kris’s former Secret Service agent, he’d sworn to take a bullet for her. Now, as the chief of her security detail and commander of a Marine detachment, his job was no easier or, with Kris’s attitude toward “secure,” any more survivable.

“What you folks gone and done to get me out of bed?” said Abby, presenting herself in a fluffy housecoat, curlers, and huge slippers with rabbit ears on them. Occasionally an Army Reserve intelligence officer, this early in the morning Abby was clearly filling the role of Kris’s maid and born-again coward.

“We got company,” Kris said.

“I hope they’re nice folks that their mommas taught to mind their manners,” Abby said, scowling at the strange symbol on the display. “What’s that?”

“An Iteeche Death Ball,” Jack said. “It followed the princess home.”

The colonel showed honest fear. Abby’s half-open eyes were suddenly quite open.

“Can we keep it?” came from the other pair of wide-open eyes, peeking around the Tac Room’s door.

“Cara, what are you doing up?” Kris asked the twelve-year-old softly. She was in a pink nightshirt that displayed the gyrations of the latest preteen heartthrob. At least the sound had been broken in the wash . . . or so Abby claimed.

“Well, there was all that noise,” Cara started, “And then you shouting Battle whatever, and people flying down the halls. I knew they wouldn’t let me on the bridge,” the youngster admitted, quite indignant, as she edged into the room. “But if something really fun happens, you always come here. So I waited, and you all came.” She ended with far too bright a smile for this ridiculous hour of the morning.

“The young woman is a first-class observer,” said Professor mFumbo, leader of Kris’s technical and scientific team. With no other observation, he settled into his place at Kris’s table, not at all surprised to be sharing it with a child.

Or . . . if the tenured professor was pressed to express an opinion on the matter . . . another child.

Kris glanced at Jack. He wore a poleaxed smile as he shrugged. How could a twelve-year-old girl have the entire ship eating out of her hand? Kris did not have fond memories of her twelfth year. She’d crawled into a bottle to escape the mourning that was tearing her family apart after little Eddy’s death.

It appeared that fate had decreed that Cara’s twelfth year be as good as Kris’s had been bad. Then again, Kris would not swap for Cara’s first eleven years.

Kris stifled a yawn and weighed the option of having the child banished to bed. She found the odds of her entire retinue joining Nelly in mutiny far too high.

So she concentrated her attention elsewhere. “We have about an hour before the Greenfeld cruisers exit the system. Call it a hunch, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that this Iteeche gets a whole lot more talkative once we’re alone.”

“Do Iteeche often get more talkative with you, Your Highness,” Colonel Cortez said, “when you are alone?”

“Don’t know all that much about Iteeche,” Abby said, “but I’ve known a man or two to act that way.”

“What do we know about the Iteeche?” Jack asked.

“A lot less than we knew an hour ago,” Kris said bitterly.

Jack raised a sympathetic eyebrow at that, but most just stared blankly. “I had to turn Nelly off,” Kris said plainly.

“Why?” came from around the table. Except for one twelve-year-old who jumped to her feet and began insisting at the top of her voice that, “You can’t do that. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.”

Kris waited until Cara stopped for a breath, then snapped, “I turned her off because Nelly had dialed our lasers in on the Greenfeld cruisers and was about to blast away. Not even Nelly can declare war on Greenfeld. We’ve all sweat and bled too much to keep that peace.”

Deep silence, even from Cara.

“Why?” Professor mFumbo asked softly in his deep voice.

“Nelly was afraid Cara might be hurt by their lasers,” Kris said.

Deeper silence.

“Just how much does Nelly know about the Iteeche?” Jack said, finally breaking the silence.

“She holds all the research I’ve done on the Iteeche since the fifth grade,” Kris said. “Oh, and she can speak Iteeche . . . at several levels. Imperial to equal. Imperial to inferior. Warrior to warrior. Warrior to superior, and merchant to superior, inferior, and equal.”

“The language is that hot on who you are?” Abby said in disbelief.

“And you better get it right, or you can get suddenly dead,” Kris growled. “Grampa warned that every Iteeche of any rank carries a sword and is only too quick to use it on anyone who flubs their grammar.”

“No trade pigeon or something like that?” Colonel Cortez asked.

“Several Iteeche and human prisoners served as translators for both Grampa and the head dude the Empire sent to talk to him. Several took sword strokes, and one lost an arm for blunders in grammar. Or maybe it was what they said. Hard to tell.”

“And Nelly knows the language,” mFumbo said.

“About as good as anyone in human space. Definitely better than anyone aboard this ship, Professor, unless you got a specialist I don’t know about.”

The ebony-faced man shook his head. “My understanding of our survey mission was that the Empire was one place we would steer clear of.”

“That was mine, too,” Kris said. “But it seems to have steered for us. So ignoring our linguistics problem for a moment, do you have anyone among the boffins who could run some diagnostics on my trigger-happy computer?”

The professor had both hands up, palms out, and was shaking his head well before Kris finished. “Miss Longknife, I have several computer experts who dream of being present when the real breakthrough in artificial intelligence finally comes. Many of them look upon you and your experimentation with your personal computer as a possible source for just that awaited day. But no, none of them would dare touch what you have around your neck. Several of my boffins are attempting to duplicate what you’ve done with your Nelly, but none of them have to date invested either the time or the money that you have. To put it succinctly, Nelly is your computer . . . and your problem.”

“But we need Nelly if we’re to avoid some Iteeche taking our heads off for a misplaced modifier,” Jack said with a wry grin. “Your Highness, you do have a tendency to open your mouth and start a war with anyone across the table from you.”

“Thank you so much for your vote of confidence,” Kris said, and finished with a most sincere, “I will try to avoid going down in history as the cause of the Second Iteeche War.”

“I’m just trying to keep you alive, Princess,” Jack said, denying her the last word.

“It seems we need to turn Nelly back on,” mFumbo said.

“But how do we keep the little darling from shooting from the hip the next time she thinks Cara’s in danger?” Abby added.

“I didn’t mean to cause trouble,” Cara said. She’d been sitting very quietly in her chair, doing her best to be small. What with her latest growth spurts, she was almost as tall as her aunt Abby. Small was not something she did easy. “Maybe if I said something to Nelly,” Cara offered.

Leaving the future of her ship and its crew, along with the rest of humanity, in the hands of a kid did not make Kris’s bunny jump. Not even a little.

“Let’s think about that for a while,” Kris said, and changed the subject. “Without Nelly, what do we know about the Iteeche?”

“Not much,” Colonel Cortez said, “except they are very good at killing humans.”

“Were, eighty years ago,” the professor corrected.

“You think they’ve gotten less efficient?” Cortez asked.

“I know we’ve gotten better at killing our fellow humans,” Jack said.

“On that topic, may I toss in something?” Chief Beni asked.

“Toss away,” Kris said.

“As I go over their ship, I’m not getting anything in the higher frequencies where our Smart Metal™ gives off a kind of background hum. The Iteeche are doing a very good job of jamming almost everything, just like my grandpa said they did back in his war, but they’re not jamming up there, and they are not humming themselves in those frequencies.”

“Are you telling me that they don’t have Smart Metal™?” Kris asked. “Can we score one for us hairless monkeys?”

“Seems that way,” the chief said. “And there’s something else, Your Highness, and I hope you won’t be upset with me.”

“Why?” Kris asked. She’d learned long ago with this team that it was unwise to dispense general absolution too quickly. They were oh so good at coming up with interesting variations on what other people thought impossible.

Almost as good at it as her.

“When we jumped into this system and our buoy like vanished immediately,” the chief started.

“Yes,” Kris said, wondering how long this story would take.

“I had a visual on the Iteeche, and a gravity bearing from our new atom laser. But they didn’t agree. You being kind of busy, I chose the gravity bearing since it put the Death Ball off our bow, but the visual said it was dead ahead.”

“That might explain why the cruisers were shooting our way,” Kris said.

“And missing the Iteeche,” Jack added.

“That’s what I thought,” the chief said. “Anyway, when we got our laser- and radar-range findings, they supported the visual. I didn’t change the board.”

“During the war, our ships had the devil’s own time,” Kris said, “hitting the Iteeche ships. They never seemed to be where our sensors said they were.”

“I hadn’t heard about that,” Colonel Cortez said.

“The Navy wasn’t all that interested in sharing its problems with its sister service,” Kris said.

“But you can’t hit something you can’t range properly,” Jack pointed out.

“You can if you fire full broadsides carefully spaced,” Kris said. “That’s what they did in the later fleet actions, firing carefully organized salvoes to cover everything. And we finally started hitting things in all the wrong places.”

“And this never got out?” Abby said.

“You want to tell all the folks back home,” Kris said, “that your Navy is firing blind ’cause the Iteeche can do magic tricks and make their ships disappear?”

“I see the problem,” the colonel said.

“It wasn’t exactly secret after the war,” Kris said, “but it didn’t make it into any of the popular history or vids, where most people got their education. But our new gravity sensors, the ones we’re using to find the fuzzy jump points, can find them,” she said, with a grin.

“Meaning that the Iteeche are maybe seven feet tall, not ten,” Abby said.

“Ma’am,” Colonel Cortez said, “the Iteeche are seven feet tall. My daddy measured quite a few of their bodies after he’d killed them.”

“But we’ve got Smart Metal™ and a new gravity sensor in our atom laser. We can go places they can’t even see, and we’ve got a whole new metal to protect our hides,” Kris said. “Abby, dump all this to a message pod. As soon as the Greenfeld cruisers get out of my sky, send it back to the jump. Use your best codes, ’cause the cruisers will likely intercept the message when it’s broadcast across the next system.”

“Right, Your Highness. I imagine Admiral Crossenshield will be a mite bit delighted to hear about this. Might even up my pay if I kind of forget to include this in my general report on what you’re up to,” Abby said, heading out and wrangling an arm around Cara. “Come on, Baby Duck, I will not have you falling asleep no matter who’s your teacher tomorrow.”

“But this is exciting, and you never let me have any fun.”

The door closed firmly behind the two, and Kris found herself smiling along with the rest of the team at the familiar dialogue from her youth.

Kris turned from the screen and eyed her team. “It’s nice to know that we may have a few surprises up our sleeves,” Kris said.

“Considering that we only have two sleeves, and they have four,” Professor mFumbo said, “don’t bet too much on that.”

“Good point, Professor,” Kris replied. “Now, does anyone have any idea about who we are dealing with? Are they representatives of the Empire, or Wandering Men who have broken all allegiances? And is there any way for us to tell between the two?”

Eighty years ago, that had started the trouble between the two species. The Iteeche’s first contact had been with human pirates who accepted no law. Our first contact had been with Iteeche Wandering Men, who accepted no rule and were under a death sentence upon capture by any Imperial forces. There was a lot of shooting first before anyone thought of asking questions.

By the time the Society of Humanity realized the mess it was in, the bad blood between the two species didn’t invite conversation. No one who was part of that war wanted to think about all the years of bloody massacre and prisonerless battles that it had taken before cooler heads were finally allowed to attempt negotiations.

In the end, both sides agreed to ignore the other. At the time, the No Go Zone seemed large enough to assure the necessary separation.

It had worked for eighty years.

Why had the Iteeche come out now? Did they feel it was time to examine the standoff between them and the humans? If so, it hadn’t started out all that well.

“It’s not as if they violated the No Go Zone,” Colonel Cortez said. “We are light-years from it. They might just be doing the same thing we’re doing. Looking around for worlds they could settle.”

“Kind of close to us,” Jack pointed out.

“Only because we’re getting kind of close to them,” mFumbo pointed out.

“Chief, put up a star map,” Kris ordered. “Iteeche red, human blue, No Go Zone purple.”

It appeared in place of the solar system map that showed the Greenfeld cruisers no more than five minutes away from their jump point. Human space spreading out in all directions, but here it squeezed to the right and left of Imperial Space, flanking the No Go Zone. Human planets had grown from 150 to over 600 in the last eighty years. Still, the Empire had claimed over 2,000 planets eighty years ago. Even if the Empire had grown at its usual slow, dignified pace, humanity was still way outnumbered.

“So, folks, what do you think?” Kris asked. “An Imperial ship, exploring like us? An illegal, looking for a place to hide from justice? Or something else?”

Around the table, Kris was greeted with shrugs. Jack pulled a coin out of his pocket and offered to flip it.

“You’re a lot of help.”

“Who’s a lot of help?” Captain Drago asked as he entered.

“My brain trust,” Kris said, standing.

“Well, the system is ours. I’m willing to bet this fellow gets more talkative real soon.”

“Right, but is he one of their pirate types or an explorer ship like us?” Kris asked. “Jack was about to flip a coin.”

He did. “It’s heads. What’s that mean?”

“That your coin is no better at guessing our future than the rest of us,” Kris said.

“Well, if you ask me,” Captain Drago said, “whoever is over there is a smart ship handler. There haven’t been a lot of course changes. He’s got a good set of sensors, knows what we’re doing, and does what he wants to do. No bobbling the course. We’ve also got some visuals on him. Good paint job. Not a lot of dings and dents in his hull. Somebody knows how to drive a ship. Or at least cares enough about his boat to keep someone working to make it Ship-shape and Bristol fashion.”

“Not something pirates are known for,” Kris said.

“If you want my money, I’d bet on an Imperial,” Captain Drago said.

“And I’d never bet against you,” Kris said.

“Captain, we’ve got a message coming in from the Iteeche,” Sulwan announced over the captain’s commlink.

“Where do you want to take it, Lieutenant?”

Kris considered her options: here, or the bridge. Of course, she could offer him a glass of wine and a chance to share a bubble bath with her naked body.

Come to think about it, that had never been tried during the long and bloody effort to stop the fighting . . . and the Iteeche were supposed to be partial to water.

“The bridge,” Kris snapped. “It was where I turned Nelly off, and if I’m going to risk turning her back on, there’s no better place than there.”