Undaunted

21

Outside, Jack used his new computer to tell the Iteeche Marines to rejoin the others. They quickly filed in.

As the door closed, King Ray looked up and down the line of Marines standing guard. Those who’d been inside were in formal red and blues. The outside ones were in full battle rattle. Ray’s back went ramrod straight as he faced the troops. “Marines, I don’t need to tell you that having Iteeche at Wardhaven, talking to me, is both an unusual and momentous event.” The Marines answered him with minimum nods.

“I also don’t need to tell you that it will complicate the life of an old soldier if this gets into the media. Even without pictures, I’m sure they’d all love to shout about this. I don’t want to have to answer those shouts. I need you to keep quiet. No talking to your wives. No talking to your girlfriends. No talking to anyone. Do any of you have a problem with that?”

“No, sir,” Gunny growled, followed only a split second later by the others.

“Good. Captain, you can dismiss most of these men. But if you will, double the quarterdeck watch. I don’t want anyone leaving this ship for a while.”

“Does that include civilians?”

“Civilians?” the king said, then corrected himself. “Oh, right, Kris has a batch of scientists aboard, don’t you?” he said, eyeing her as if it was all her fault.

“Yes, sir, but they all have reserve papers that I can activate and put them under the UCMJ.”

“Oh, I bet they’d love that,” Grampa Trouble said.

“They’ve already had their noses rubbed in those papers once or twice,” Jack said. “I can’t say they liked it, but they have gotten kind of used to it.”

“They should have known the danger of getting too close to a damn Longknife,” Grampa Ray said with a scowl.

“I’ve heard that bitch a time or twelve,” Kris admitted.

“Lock the boat down. No one goes ashore,” the king said.

“Thank God there are a few pubs in civilian country,” Sergeant Bruce muttered.

“There are!” the king said. “Good. Tell the barkeep that the first two pints for you Marines tonight are on me.”

“Better include the boffins,” Kris added, “or there will be hurt feelings. And maybe hurt jaws.”

Gunny picked off Marines to stand guard here and expand the quarterdeck. The rest left happy enough.

“Now, my princess, we need to talk. Me and you and maybe the rest of your team. And where is that little girl I saw quick-marched out of there?”

“I am not a little girl. I’m twelve and a half,” Cara pointed out.

“And getting quite an education it would appear,” the king noted. “What are the chances I could lock you up in a deep, dank dungeon somewhere on Wardhaven and throw away the key?”

Cara’s answer was a pouty face. Kris chose to verbalize one. “About the same as me having a full-fledged mutiny breaking out on my ship.”

“Oh, I see,” said the king. “She’s being spoiled rotten just like you were.”

“And for a whole lot better reason,” Kris added.

Grampa Ray tossed Kris a quizzical look, but she doubted there were enough hours left in the month to explain herself. The king shrugged, and asked, “Is there a place I can talk to you, and the rest of your team?”

“My Tac Room is just down that passageway,” she said, and led him there. A moment later, she found herself seated with her brother Honovi at her left elbow, her great-grandfather and king at her other elbow at the head of the table, and Grampa Trouble across from her. Jack, the colonel, Penny, and Abby arranged themselves along the table below her. Somehow, Cara ended up at the foot of the table grinning at the king opposite her. Which raised serious questions about whose end really was the head, but Kris decided not to address that point.

King Raymond began. “I was glad to get the word you were coming home, even if it did involve bringing an Iteeche with you. I’d just been thinking that I really needed your help.”

“Needed my help,” Kris echoed. “Something tells me that I’ve gotten too close to a damn Longknife.”

The chuckle from around the table came to a quick end as the king answered with a dry, “No doubt.”

Well, Kris had dumped an Iteeche problem on her great-grandfather. Maybe she should offer to pull one of his chestnuts out of the fire. “What kind of help do you need?”

“Trouble here remembered that you had a couple of friends in college from Texarkana. Robert and Juliet. Do you remember them?”

“Yes,” Kris admitted. “They were the only ones from that godforsaken planet, and when homesickness about killed them, they kind of came together. By second year, I never saw one without the other. It happened that way for a lot of kids at Wardhaven U who were far from home. Those two couldn’t be a problem.”

“They aren’t. Their folks are,” Grampa Trouble said.

“Isn’t it always the grown-ups?” Kris said with a theatrical sigh. “When will they ever learn to behave?”

“Not funny, Princess,” the king said. “Juliet’s a Travis, one of the five families that started up the planet. They were sick and tired of big cities and the city slickers who run them, so they set up Texarkana with a cadastral survey to start with. They based everything on a six-mile-by-six-mile-square township. A barony was thirty-six of those. A dukedom was thirty-six baronies. A duke had a seat in the House of Dukes and ran the place.”

Kris could still access Nelly on her local net. Nelly did the numbers for Kris, and also added that Crossie was not getting the Iteeche to say much to him. Kris started to smile at the admiral’s problem, then suddenly realized that the numbers didn’t mean anything. “Hold it, population size doesn’t matter?”

“Right,” Grampa Trouble said. “One township, one vote. One barony, thirty-six votes. The landowner voted the land.”

“Remember, these folks were tired of big-city ways. They figured the best way to make sure no one built a city was to give it no political say.”

“And it worked how?” Jack asked.

“Not all that well,” Trouble said.

“It worked fine,” Grampa Ray put in, “so long as the settlers were cattle ranchers and farmers from Earth’s Texas.”

“Space is big. How did Texarkana manage things for the cowboys?” Now Kris was remembering some of the hats and skirts and boots that Juliet had worn her first year. And she’d even talked a couple of girls into going horseback riding one weekend. The other girls were complaining for a month after that.

Juliet had taken to wearing pretty much regular college clothes after she and Bob got together. Suddenly Kris saw where things were going.

“So long as Texarkana was just one little cow town after another, they didn’t have any problems,” Grampa Trouble said. “But when we dropped in a load of workers from New Cleveland, things got interesting. Not immediately.”

“Right,” Kris said. “There was a war to be won. Didn’t you evacuate New Cleveland right after the Port Elgin Massacre?”

“Immediately after it,” Trouble said. “People were frantic to get clear of a potential battlefront. They crammed themselves into ships and took turns breathing until they got someplace safe, and Texarkana was about as far from Iteeche space as you could go. They started with next to nothing, but one of the second-generation kids had completed the mineral survey. The new arrivals knew where iron was, and water power, and in no time at all, the Dukedom of Denver was a going industrial concern.”

“Using the workers from New Cleveland,” Kris said. “I can’t remember Bob’s last name.”

“DuVale,” the king said. “His father is a plant owner in the Dukedom of Denver.”

“Let me guess.” Kris sighed. “On Texarkana, a factory boss’s son would never meet a Travis girl.”

“Not in a million years. I was pretty shocked to see you show up with an Iteeche in tow. That was nothing compared to Juliet Travis coming off the shuttle hand in hand with a DuVale.”

“Grampa, I didn’t bring an Iteeche home. I just . . . well . . . brought an Iteeche home. You know. It’s not like I want him to meet my family.”

Grampa Ray lifted an eyebrow.

“The rest of my family.”

Her brother raised another eyebrow.

“The two of you are horrible. Just for that, I ought to . . .”

“What?” both said.

“Never mind. I just ought to.”

“If you three will kindly stop your dramatics,” Grampa Trouble said, “there’s a world here that needs saving.”

“I still don’t see the problem,” Penny said.

“I’m with you,” Jack agreed.

Grampa Ray leaned forward. “To join United Sentients, or whatever we call this thing, you have to have a single government on your world. There are a few other things, and the list seems to grow every month, but one united government is something we have all agreed on.”

“And,” Kris, Penny, and Jack said.

“The industrial dukedoms are threatening to withdraw from Texarkana’s central government and start their own.”

“And how is that any skin off your nose, Grampa?” Kris said. “If they want to mess around, let them mess to their hearts’ content. When they get it straightened out, they can join then.”

“John Austin Travis is Texarkana’s representative to the Constitutional Convention at Pitts Hope. He’s also the leader of the party that supports my position in the congress. If he gets tossed out of the convention, my faction could dissolve in a leadership fight, and the pending constitution I support may get amended into something I’d never support.”

“Hold it,” Kris said, coming half out of her seat. “I thought you weren’t taking a position on the constitution. What happened to letting the founding fathers give the people they represent the government they want?”

“He saw what some of the founding fathers and mothers wanted,” Honovi growled.

Kris sat back down. “Is it that bad?”

“It’s real bad,” Honovi said.

“I let them yammer on too long with no leadership.”

“He could have had exactly what he wanted a year ago if he’d just said the word,” Kris’s brother said. “But no, he had to do his ‘sit on the porch on Wardhaven and let them find their own way.’ You give some people enough time, and they’ll find all kinds of new ways to stab you in the back and get someone else’s fingerprints on the knife.”

“You weren’t this cynical the last time I saw you,” Kris told her brother.

“I hadn’t spent a year representing Wardhaven on Pitts Hope,” he answered.

Honovi had always been the big brother, ahead of her, confident, able to do just about anything. There had been times when Kris just about worshipped him. He’d even tried to keep her from climbing into a bottle after Eddy died. Now, for the first time, the idealistic optimist wasn’t there when she looked at him. And Grampa Ray had excluded him from the Iteeche plea for help. Maybe the king would bring him in later, but the ground was moving under Kris’s feet, and she wasn’t sure it would ever be quite the same again.

Kris considered asking Honovi for a full report on what was coming down on Pitts Hope, then decided she’d be hap pier not knowing. “What do you plan to do?” she asked.

“I’m going to Pitts Hope,” King Raymond said.

“Thank God,” Honovi said. Apparently, he left a lot unsaid, as the king frowned at him.

“I’m glad you’re going, Ray,” Trouble said. So her brother had an ally.

“But it won’t do me a damn bit of good if Texarkana blows up,” the king said, eyeing Kris.

“If I tackle Texarkana, will you see about the Iteeche problem while you’re at Pitts Hope?” Kris said, nodding toward the lounge.

“I’ll put out feelers on the matter,” King Raymond said.

Which left Kris wondering what that meant.

“If the king is going to Pitts Hope,” Colonel Cortez said, “who will take care of the Iteeche? Have I missed something? I thought we’d leave them here on Wardhaven under the king’s protection.”

“That was what I assumed,” Kris said, “but it doesn’t look like that’s an option.”

“No, it’s not,” the king said, leaving no doubt about that.

“Are we going to keep them with us?” Penny asked.

“It looks that way,” Kris said.

“Your crew knows about them,” Trouble said. “I think it best that you take the Wasp, crew, Iteeche, and all with you to Texarkana. You’ve got to keep them out of the media.”

“I’ll do my best,” Kris said. “Your Highness, is there anything else I need to know about Texarkana?”

“Just don’t start a war. Don’t let the word about the Iteeche leak out, and don’t lose me the leader of my coalition,” the king said. “That ought to just about do it.”

“Right,” Grampa Trouble said. “You’re a Longknife. It should be a piece of cake.”