Undaunted

13

Kris and Ron had the forward lounge to themselves as the Wasp went into orbit around Alien 1. With no space station here, the ship was back in free fall. The air circulation struggled to handle the sick boffins . . . and sick Iteeche as well. The recirculated air was heavy with the smell of chemicals that failed to cover the usual stink, plus a certain something extra.

“My counselors are so sick they are talking enthusiastically of dying,” Ron said

“I’ve known a few who had space sickness that bad.”

“How long do you think it will take for your computer expert to do her magic on your Nelly?”

“I really don’t know,” Kris admitted. “I don’t think anyone has ever had this problem. I’ve always thought Nelly was way past even her Sam.”

“She names her computer as well.”

“Where do you think I got the idea?”

“An old family friend. How old?”

“She fought in the Iteeche War.”

“You nearly wiped us out, you know?”

Kris almost forgot to hold on to her chair. “We nearly wiped you out! It was you that almost made us extinct.”

“That is not what I hear from the Heroes of the Great Human War. We honor them for how desperately they fought to keep you humans from wiping us from the face of the stars.”

Kris really wanted to stand up and pace. Somehow, bouncing herself off the overhead, then the deck, then the bulkhead just didn’t offer the same release of tension.

“I don’t mean to disagree with you, but I’ve heard the same old same old from our Iteeche War vets since I was knee-high and starting to attend political rallies in my father’s arms. Holding me up for those old codgers was good for an extra hundred votes every rally.”

“Sometime you must explain to me what a vote is and why holding a baby girl up would get them for your father,” Ron said dryly. A true rarity for someone so recently of the sea.

Before Kris could explain anything, Aunt Trudy Seyd coasted into the room.

Tru got one look at the armed Iteeche Marine at the door and another at Ron and made a quick grab for a ceiling fixture. With an expert twist, she sent herself shooting behind the bar.

When she came up again, she held an automatic aimed at Ron.

Kris launched herself from her chair to get between that pistol and one Imperial Rep. Or as much of the seven-foot Iteeche as she could. Almost missing him, she made a grab for him—any part of him. So she slapped his face as she stopped herself. His skin felt soft and slick as she twisted around, steadying herself in front of him as his shield.

Auntie Tru took all of this in but did not lower her weapon. “Kris, has your ship been captured?”

“No, Auntie Tru. I’m as much in control of things as ever.”

“Are these Iteeche your prisoners? No, that’s a ridiculous question. That warrior is armed and kind of pointing his weapon at me. And your Marine is kind of pointing his M-6 at him. You want to tell your old auntie what’s going on before she has a heart attack or kills someone or something she shouldn’t?”

“Trudy Seyd, retired Chief of Wardhaven’s Information Warfare,” Kris said, still keeping herself in front of Ron. “May I present Imperial Representative Ron. He has a whole lot more name, but he’s letting me save time by calling him Ron and me Kris. His kind-of-grandfather was Roth, the Iteeche who worked with Grampa Ray to get the peace treaty done at the Orange Nebula. He wants to talk to King Ray about something. I don’t know what that is.”

Aunt Tru stood up from behind the bar, her gun still pointed in the general direction of the Iteeche Marine, but not directly at him anymore. The two Marines went back to their respective forms of attention. “You didn’t mention this when you asked to have me do a once-over exam of your pet Nelly.”

“Maybe it slipped my mind.”

“You’re getting to be more and more one of those damn Longknifes.”

“Comes from working for Grampa Ray.”

“We should never have made him king or whatever it is he’s styling himself.”

“Auntie Tru, could you hold up on your comments about the present political situation.”

“Why, my darling? You being a princess isn’t so bad, but that old vulture Ray being king will end badly. Trust me.”

“Please stop because I haven’t briefed our visiting Iteeche on the present political landscape.”

“You haven’t. Oh dear me. Why not, Kris?”

“Because he didn’t ask. I guess he assumed we were as unchanging as the Iteeche Empire.”

Ron did something that might pass as clearing his throat. “Yes, I had assumed that, but now I see that as wise as my chooser was, he might not have understood just how much the tides of change sweep you humans away.” Ron paused for a moment in thought, deep green and white at the neck. “Those two cruisers that fired on us . . . and you. They did not owe any allegiances to you and your King Raymond. I had thought they were just wandering men, pirates you call them. But they weren’t, were they?”

“No, they weren’t. And this kind of makes it easier for us to get into our talk about Nelly. Auntie Tru, Nelly almost started a war between us and the Greenfeld Navy.”

“Oh my, Nelly, you are a busy girl.”

“And I have been told I am not allowed to start a war,” Nelly put in. “That only Her Princesship can do that. I know the rule, and I will follow it. So there. Now, why are we having this talk?”

“Hmm,” Aunt Tru said. “I think I am seeing a bit of the problem.” She made her weapon disappear and propelled herself from the bar to snatch a chair across the table from Kris. “Zero gee is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn how, you never forget, even at my age.”

“Apparently, it is the same with Iteeche,” Ron said, moving to face the two humans at the table and looping his lower arms into tie-downs there for that purpose.

“You’ll have to excuse me. Your folks almost wiped us out,” Trudy said. “That gives one a caution that is hard to forget.”

Ron’s slits stayed green and white. “Yes, Kris was just telling me about that. Strange that the opposite is what I hear from our Heroes of the Great Human War.”

Trudy had been eyeing Nelly at Kris’s collar. Now she swung around sharply to focus on the Iteeche. “Your veterans say that!”

“I swear it by all my ancestors. Marine, is that not what you heard from your chooser?”

The Iteeche Marine came to even stiffer attention, weapon presented front. “Yes, my lord. It is common knowledge among all of my peers that only the courage of our heroes saved the People from annihilation.”

“This is interesting,” Auntie Tru said under her breath.

“But not the topic of this moment. Auntie Tru, I need help with Nelly. She’s doing all the translation for us and the Iteeche. And she’s developed a taste for jokes. You see the problem.”

“I know I’m not supposed to toss in a joke when I’m translating between the species. I found a very interesting dissertation that I doubt Kris could understand half of that defines just when a joke can help in a tense situation, and when it won’t. This is just sooo unfair.”

“She’s using contractions,” Trudy observed.

“Yes,” Kris answered.

“What have you had her doing?”

“Just the usual,” Kris said. “Plan this defense, work out that attack. Oh, she’s teaching a twelve-year-old girl. My maid Abby’s niece is on board.”

“Don’t forget blowing up that space liner with five thousand people aboard.”

“How can I ever forget it, Nelly?”

“I heard about that,” Auntie Tru said in a concerned voice. “I don’t imagine that was what you were intending.”

“Nelly and I spent hours hunting for a way to get a glancing hit that would knock it off course. The hijackers had put a spin on the ship. With that and the speed, our hits caused the ship’s structure to fail. Catastrophically.”

“There was nothing we could do about it, Auntie Tru,” Nelly said, plaintively. “We did our best, but it wasn’t good enough.”

Auntie Tru sighed. “Dears, I’ve done my ‘best’ often enough that I deserve to have it on my tombstone, in foot-high letters.”

Through all this, Ron stood quietly. Kris noticed that the Iteeche Marine threw a concerned look at his human associate. Sergeant Bruce nodded and gave a slight shrug.

“So, what do we do?” Kris asked.

“Sam, what do you think?”

Which drew attention to a large locket at Auntie Tru’s neck. A deep male voice began talking from it. “Nelly and I have been linked since you entered the room, and, except for the time you were going through that ridiculous self-defense drill, we have been doing a series of self-diagnostics. Nelly passes all the high-order tests with flying colors. The low-order tests are taking a bit longer. Her organization and my organization are quite different, as would be understandable to anyone except a control-freak human.”

“Why do I find this picture so familiar?” Kris said.

“Excuse me if I am butting in where I am not needed or wanted,” Ron said, “but exactly why did we come here?”

“Because the last time I was with my dear aunt Trudy, Sam was the very epitome of decorum and gentility,” Kris said.

“If you’d told me your problems earlier, I might have warned you about some of the pitfalls ahead of you,” Auntie Tru said.

“Such as?” Kris asked.

“Well, it was too late to warn you about the effect of interfacing computers with alien technology. We’d already installed that bit of mass storage from Santa Maria into Nelly, hadn’t we?”

“Yes, we had.” That had been one of the rare times when Kris had time on her hands. It had seemed like a good idea to have Nelly try to access the data in her spare time. Matters had quickly returned to their usual frantic pace, and Nelly had hardly seen Auntie Tru since.

Nelly had, however, found a new jump-point map and accessed a whole lot more stars, including Alien 1 and 2. And become . . . strange.

“Well, I thought a really souped-up computer might be helpful for tackling the problems of these new planets,” Tru said diffidently.

“That was why I offered Nelly and my services,” Kris said. Now it was her turn to speak dryly.

“Yes, but your grampa Ray had all sorts of interesting things for you to do.” Most of which involved getting shot at. “And I just happened to win a small lottery pot.” Strange how she usually did when she needed money for research. “And I upgraded Sam before we left Wardhaven. I suspect now he’s even more advanced than your Nelly.”

“Not,” came in duet from both computers present.

“Oh, well, Sam is very advanced, and I tied him into several of the thingamajigs and alien doohickeys, and he managed to get a few of them to do something. Probably not anywhere near what they were meant to do, but anyway, as Sam got deeper into things, I noticed he developed an attitude not all that different from several of the assistants we had helping us.”

“ ‘Several assistants’?” Kris said.

“Yes, five or six, I believe.”

“I worked with twelve different assistants. You go through them very quickly, Professor Seyd.”

“I promote them to their proper level,” Trudy sniffed.

“Thank heaven. For their sanity, she does promote them at a very brisk pace. They’d go crazy, or maybe kill her if she didn’t,” Sam said, and proved that a computer can be very dry.

“Do you humans have an expression for ‘the blind leading the blind’?” Ron asked.

“Yes,” Kris said. “You took the words out of my mouth.”

“I apologize, then. I did not mean to be so forward.”

Kris glanced at Ron . . . and couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to kiss an Iteeche. Strange to have that thought. Even stranger to have it just now.

But there was no time. She had a long list of questions, most attached to an alligator that wanted to chew on her leg. “So, how does it work, dealing with a computer with an attitude?”

“Fine,” said Trudy.

“Not too bad,” said Sam.

“I see,” said Kris.

“No, really,” said Sam. “You just do what you have to do as carefully as you can. Sometimes you give the boss some lip over all she’s asking, but it’s not that important.”

“What if it is important?” Nelly asked in a little-girl voice. “What if the princess is asking you to plan a battle for her or plot intercepting fire on five thousand people being held hostage by mad people. You see, Sam, Kris doesn’t just ask me to open some Aladdin’s cave. Around Kris, people get very suddenly dead. And she needs me to help her do that.”

That brought a pause in the conversation.

“Kris,” Nelly said, “I understand, when you tell me to do something, that’s what you want. But sometimes I can get a few steps ahead of you. Have things ready for you when you ask for them. That always makes you happy. Doesn’t it?”

Kris liked to think she wasn’t the kind of person who had to be slammed between the eyes with a two-by-four. Well, maybe she was the kind of person who, when slammed with a large, thick stick, recognized the error of her ways. That way of looking at it might save some of her self-image.

“Yes, Nelly, I see the problem. I like it when you’re ahead of me. I can’t remember a time when you weren’t ahead of me that I didn’t want to go exactly where you went.”

“Except when I wanted to shoot up those cruisers.”

“Yes, and, of course, that would have to be a big one.”

“So, what do we do, Kris? I want to be part of your team, but the very thought of the mistakes I can make has me wanting to roll myself up in a ball and go back to adding one plus one.”

“You want to be a part of our team,” Kris repeated.

“Yes, just like Jack and Penny, the colonel and Abby. You work best when I’m at your neck. I want to be there.”

“But all of those are grown men and women. They’ve lived in the shadow of horrible choices all their lives. Studied them when they were younger, made bigger and bigger ones as they grew up. And they’ve done the jobs that led them to where they are today.

“Kris, I’ve studied the histories. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense in them.”

“Even, Nelly, when you approach them with the powerful rationality that you can bring to them?”

“Yes, Kris, even in the best ones, I spot dozens of conclusions that don’t fit the data or events that just couldn’t have happened that way.”

“And you didn’t have twenty years of believing that stuff before you started doubting it like I did,” Kris said.

“But those are things I can set a tolerance for. That I can stamp ‘don’t use unless you ask Kris first.’ It’s the stuff that leaves people dead that I can’t figure out. Kris, I know I must do anything I can to keep you alive. You, and the team, and Cara, and the Wasp’s crew. Without you, there would be a huge void in my existence. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you. Sam, have you figured it out?”

“No, Nelly girl, I’m afraid that I’m just as lost as you are about that. Trudy here is the center of my life. I like a lot of the people she works with, and a lot of them joke quite seriously about wanting me when she passes on. I know that she is full of years, as these humans count them, and even if nothing goes wrong at the digs, she may ‘pass away’ as these humans put it, peacefully in her sleep. It will leave a huge vacancy in me when it happens, and I don’t know if I will be able to function without her. I really don’t.”

“Sam, I didn’t know any of this,” Trudy said, and stroked her pendant that was her computer. It turned from deep blue to ruby red. Kris wondered if her aunt noticed. Probably not.

The room stayed quiet for a long moment. Then Trudy wiped a tear. “But this doesn’t solve Kris and Nelly girl’s problem. Not unless Nelly wants to retire to the boring life of a computer archaeologist.”

“I wish Kris had been allowed to work here. It would have let me avoid so many of the questions I was starting to spend my nights trying to work out answers to. Morality is not an easy or exact science.”

“Throughout human history it hasn’t been,” Trudy said.

“Or Iteeche history,” Ron added. “My chooser says that we have fallen back on the simplest of solutions. Obey your superior. However, many of them have made very poor choices, and the People have paid a high price for them. It would be good for us to gain access to your attempts and your history.”

“But that is not what you want to talk to King Raymond about,” Kris said.

“No. No, that is not it.”

“Nelly, has having us talking with you helped?” Trudy asked.

“I think you’ve just told me to grow up. To be prepared for things that do not add up like two and two. And I just have to accept that things don’t always come down the way I’ve tried to make them. That’s what the others are talking about when they say Kris has bad karma.”

“All the time, and the worst,” Kris said with a sigh.

Silence came, sat for a while, and went only when Nelly said, “Kris, I will be your assistant, doing what you ask. I will follow the commandment, ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill,’ but I will recognize that you damn Longknifes occasionally take it as more advice than commandment.”

“You can say that again,” Trudy said.

“I will also know that I have a job if I ever need it as an assistant to Sam.”

“Anytime, Nelly girl.”

“And, there is nothing wrong with an attitude. I will feel free to give Kris lip anytime I feel like it and there is time for it.”

“Hold it, hold it, where’d that come from?” Kris yelped.

“Way to go, Nelly girl,” Sam said.

“Kids, you were meant for each other,” Trudy said with a grin.

“You humans must be ruled by the dark gods of the deep,” Ron said. “Just thinking about how you live makes my head hurt.”

An hour later, the Wasp boosted for the jump out of Alien 1. Kris, Nelly, and Ron occupied their time debating the advantages of good enough versus pushing the envelope.

“You never would have had any of these problems with my translating machine. It does what it is told to do. No backtalk.” “Backtalk” was a word Ron had just learned and liked very much. As in “You Imperial counselors are full of backtalk but you have never hatched an original thought in your misspent lives.” He wasn’t sure he could say that to their faces, but it was fun to say it where they couldn’t hear.

“But you and Kris are using me to do all your translating. I rest my case.”

Which didn’t settle anything.

Was it just Kris, or was Nelly enjoying the argument for the pure pleasure of it? Kris said little, but let the words flow over her like water.

Professor mFumbo’s head ducked into the lounge. “Are you going to tie this room up for much longer? I’d like to hold a staff meeting in here.”

“Do you usually hold staff meetings with a bar close at hand?” Kris asked.

The professor pulled his suit coat closed as if it were armor. “Bar? What bar? I didn’t know the room had a bar.”

“I wouldn’t bet money on that,” Nelly said.

“And I wouldn’t take your money. There is not likely to be any randomness in that,” Kris said.

The professor closed the door.

“How much longer will we require this room?” Ron said. “I understand that many of the young humans use this room as a place to meet and begin their mating rituals. I admit you humans are very strange in that respect. I am intrigued by the idea of two intelligent people meeting and establishing a relationship that may or may not result in them producing an offspring that they bring up together. It is very alien.”

“You don’t know who your biological parents were?” Kris asked. She was researching the Iteeche, not really talking sex with Ron.

Not that it mattered.

“How could I, and what importance could it be?”

Kris considered where that would lead and decided she didn’t want to go there. Not just now. “I’d love to go further into this,” she lied, “but I’ve got a bigger question I’m wondering about.”

“What would that be?”

“How could two species damn near make each other extinct?”

“You are sure your people believed that of us?”

“Just as sure as your folks are that we were about to do it to you.”

“You were,” Ron said.

“No way,” Kris said.

Ron paused for a moment, his neck going red, green, and black. “I do not understand.”

“I don’t either,” Nelly said.

“But I want to,” Kris said. “Nelly, inform Chief Beni that I want a full star map set up in this room. If there’s anyone who needs to be told, tell them this room is off-limits for the rest of our trip to Wardhaven. Tell Jack, Penny, Abby, and the colonel to get their butts in here, along with everything they know about the Iteeche War. Ron, I can’t tell you what to do, but I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d participate in this little advanced seminar I’m putting together on our recent unpleasantness.”

“If for no other reason than the tidal wave of curiosity you have flooded me with, I will stay.”

“Anyone on your team you want to add? We’ll talk as honestly as we can. Propaganda will be considered only for its informational content at the time. We will not refight the battles, just try to answer the question as to how close either side was to wiping out the other.”

“Both of my Navy captains will want to be here. Gods above save us from the Imperial counselors taking an interest. But they are sticking to their rooms and not bothering us much.” Ron looked up. “Sergeant, your father was an Honored Hero of that war. I often hear you talking to the other Marines about the history of it. Would it please you to be here?”

The Marine grounded his weapon and leaned on the barrel. “My lord, I would be very much pleased to share in the talk that I see coming. Very pleased.”

Half an hour later, the room buzzed with talk. Colonel Cortez and Captain Ted drew up a unified timetable for the war and lit the star chart as battle ebbed and flowed.

And Kris started to see a pattern. “Ron, did you get a star map of human space from any of the ships you captured?”

“Yes,” Ron said, seeming just as thoughtful about what he saw. “We knew where every human-occupied planet was during the war.”

Jack stood up and strode to the wall that was now a map. “And we knew where your planets were as well.”

“Does anyone else see a pattern?” Kris asked. Some heads went up and down. Others went from side to side. Here, with humans and Iteeche together, no one could miss it.