Undaunted

17

The Marine colonel led Kris and her detail to the basement of Main Navy, where three armored town cars waited for them. The drive back to the elevator station was quick and quiet.

The only break in the silence was no break at all. Kris, COULD I ORDER SOME supplies AND OTHER STUFF I NEED for MAKING THINGS like nanos AND The likes?

Go AHEAD, Kris thought, then settled back into her silence. She’d opened a lot more than she’d expected.

People don’t put their lives on the line unless something is worth dying for. For all her life, Kris had felt that stopping the Iteeche had been worth every drop of blood it took. As a daydreaming kid, she wished she’d been alive to fight the dirty Iteeche. She’d been shocked when Grampa Trouble, in a moment of surprising honesty, told her sixteen-year-old self that he was glad she hadn’t been there.

Of course you tell people that they’re fighting for the survival of their wives, their children, for all they love.

Who would die just so someone could get a word in edgewise?

But that was what the whole war had been about.

By the time reasonable people on either side got involved in the fighting, the slaughter had already begun, and massacre was all they could see.

Kris thought of all the Iteeche War vets she’d run into on Wardhaven, Chance, Panda. She remembered those who still mourned lost loved ones. Could she tell them it had all been a horrible mistake?

Not bloody likely!

If she wanted to build a bridge across the chasm between humanity and the Iteeche, it would just have to wait. I don’t know what your message is, Ron, but there are still too many alive who can’t hear it.

Which gave her a better understanding of why Ron had been saddled with the two green and whites, who seemed more bent on wrecking the embassy than helping it. Humans weren’t the only ones who still needed their truth sugarcoated.

They were halfway up the beanstalk and had just done the midclimb flip when Colonel Cortez stood up. “Excuse me if I’m interrupting any really important thoughts, meditations, or reveries. However, it has come to my attention that I’d rather spend the next couple of years in an honest-to-God jail than risk my fair skin bouncing from one Longknife situation to another. I’m am truly sorry, but is there any way I can get out of my contract and just go to prison?”

“Sit down, Hernando,” Jack growled. “You’ve made your deal with the devil, or a Longknife, whichever seems worse. She and her family own your soul.”

“Yep,” Abby said, “you’re one of us, now. There’s no going back.”

“But I had no idea what I was getting into!”

“I have to agree with the colonel,” Abby said, “I’d never have thought that King Ray could cry.”

“I saw him close, once before,” Kris said. “It was another time that his wife came up. Eighty years, and he’s still not over her.”

Penny seemed lost in thought. Kris suspected she must be thinking of her lost husband of three days and wondering if she’d still be hurting eighty years hence.

The colonel sat down, and the trip continued in silence.

Ron was waiting for Kris as soon as she crossed the quarterdeck and was out of view from the dock. “Did he talk to you?”

“Grampas Ray and Trouble met with us. He didn’t want to see you. He doesn’t think there’s any reason to talk to you. There is still too much blood in the water. Those were his words, probably a direct quote from your chooser. I asked him what he was trying to do, back in the war. Was he really out to exterminate your people or just get a word in edgewise?”

“And?” Ron said.

“We were right. He only wanted to get talks going. But the war was horrible, and people don’t march into that kind of hell to open communication lines. Your people, my people, all signed up to protect hearth and home. That’s what they’ve been remembering for eighty years. That and their dead. Ron, it’s not going to be easy to build a bridge between our two peoples. Maybe we’ll just have to wait another twenty years.”

“Kris, we don’t have twenty years.”

“What do you mean?”

“Will your great-grandfather meet with me?”

“Yes. Tomorrow night at ten o’clock.”

“Tomorrow night, then, you will know why we cannot wait twenty years. Maybe not even two years.”

“What is it, Ron?”

He turned back to Iteeche country. “Tomorrow night will be soon enough.”