Undaunted

40

The Wasp nuzzled into its usual pier at High Wardhaven station. This dock was reserved exclusively for ships involved in Admiral Crossenshield’s black ops.

Kris made a note to Nelly to remind herself to pick a fight with Crossie and make sure he understood the Wasp was not one of his black boats. The Wasp was an explorer. A scout.

Kris Longknife did not do black ops.

Usually.

There was no message traffic while they crossed the space from Jump Point Alpha to the station. Still, three Marine lieutenants were waiting on the pier. As requested, Jack was getting two more platoons for his company. The third first lieutenant would replace the slowly recuperating Lieutenant Troy. A hundred determined-looking line-beasts filed aboard with their duffels.

“Good Lord, they look so young,” Kris said softly to Jack.

“No, it’s just that we’re getting ancient. If it’s the miles, not the years, we are way overdue for retirement.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m still having fun.”

“Yeah. Right. You ready for that commander lurking on the pier?”

“What’s he doing here?” Kris asked.

“I have no idea, but I think you’ll find out soon enough.” The commander crossed the brow once the Marines had been led below. He saluted the flag and the JOOD before saying, “I’m Princess Kristine’s guide. Would you please have her report to the quarterdeck.”

“And whom should she bring with her?” Kris asked.

“No one. She’s to come alone with me.”

“Jack, get Penny and Abby up here, pronto. Ask Gunny to bring along four strapping Marines.”

“King Raymond said she was to come alone,” the commander insisted.

“All the more reason not to,” Kris shot back.

“Are you Princess Kristine?” the commander said, taking in her crutches but still not offering his name.

“I occasionally go by that name.”

“I was told you’d been injured, but that you had recovered.”

“The reports of my recovery may be a bit exaggerated.”

“Yes, Your Highness. I will call an electric station cart.”

“We would be grateful for that courtesy.”

“Your Majesty,” the guy was getting flustered, “I was instructed to make your travel as inconspicuous as possible. A batch of Marine goons and half your friends will be rather noticeable.”

“Commander, my Marines are never goons, and my staff is all of my friends who have survived the experience. Jack. Add the colonel.”

“I already did, Kris. I also told everyone to skip the uniforms. Commander, Her Highness’s security staff knows very well how to do inconspicuous even when she is damn near naked.”

“No need to bring that up, Jack,” Kris said, swallowing a grin. Clearly, the commander had been poorly briefed on her and the company she kept.

“Did Crossie give you your orders?” Kris asked.

“Admiral Crossenshield, Commander of Wardhaven Military Intelligence, did give me my orders, Your Highness,” the commander said, stiffening his spine.

“Next time you see Crossie, tell him that I do not work for him. Now, since I see that the thundering herd has arrived, and a cart as well, let’s get a move on.”

Kris took a seat in the rear, between Jack and Colonel Cortez. Penny settled into the front passenger seat. Abby expelled the driver from his station and took over his job.

That left the commander walking beside Gunny as the four Marines in neat civilian clothes failed to project any other appearance than that of four strong Marines out of uniform.

“The station trolley line,” the commander ordered, and Abby slowly rolled down the pier and took a left.

At 0200, this section of the station was quiet. The trolley was empty. At the space-elevator pier, the commander led them through a small door and to their own boarding station.

Kris had never seen this section on the ferry, and said so.

“Admiral Crossenshield added this entrance and travel cabin to the space-elevator ferries last time they were overhauled. It comes in very handy in these troubled times.”

Kris considered demanding that they join the rest of the passengers on the ferry, then reconsidered. She ought to wait until she was more recovered from the last bombing before she risked the next one.

They did have to walk the length of the ferry once it docked dirtside, but the commander had recovered. Two large black ground vehicles were waiting for them at a side entrance to the station.

“Where do we go from here?” Kris asked.

“My instructions are to take you to Nuu House to await your meetings.”

“And they are with?”

“I was not told,” the commander admitted.

“Jack, I don’t need the Marines at Nuu House. I was raised there, and if it’s not safe, we’re way past trouble. You can send Gunny and his Marines back.”

Jack did.

The heavy rig drove streets that had familiar names to Kris, but little else was the same. New buildings, taller and shinier, had sprouted where the smaller, older buildings of her youth had been. The Prime Minister was not letting the tense situation out among the stars slow down Wardhaven’s economy.

Nuu House had not changed. The vehicle came to a halt in the circular driveway. Kris and her people got out.

The commander did not. Did Kris catch him in a sigh of relief? She really couldn’t blame him. He should have been better briefed before his brush with one-of-those-damn-Longknifes.

Kris entered the familiar foyer, its unchanged spiral of black-and-white tiles still circling around to the center of the room. She and Eddy had walked those tiles, careful to stay on black, never a misstep to white.

Kris’s childhood seemed a million years ago.

For a moment, she wondered who had designed that floor. Who had ordered it built? Great-grampa Ray, the near-mythical Great-great-grampa Nuu, or maybe the forlorn Rita in the little peace she’d had before one war cascaded into another and another until it killed her . . . or sent her into a bad jump she never returned from.

“You’re late. What took you so long?” came in a gruff voice from the library off the foyer.

“We’re right on time,” Kris shot back to her grampa. “You know the beanstalk’s schedule better than I do.”

“If the king is here, and you are not, you are late.” Turning her crutches to the library, Kris made her way, one step at a time, into the room. It smelled of books and eternity. She’d loved to play hide-and-seek in here with Eddy, and after he died, she would set herself up in a corner with a good book and dream that he’d suddenly shout, “I see you. You’re it!”

Mother and Father weren’t the only members of the family locked in problem grief.

“I wasn’t told that you were still on crutches,” the king said as he pointed Kris at a chair across from him. Crossie and General Mac filled a couch at his right hand. Kris made for her chair, but first nodded her team to a long sofa across from the brass.

With poorly concealed reluctance, they went where she pointed.

“So much for a private meeting,” Crossie said.

“I don’t work for you,” Kris said. “What do I have to do to make that clear?”

“But you do work for me,” Mac said. “And your grampa, the king.”

“So I’ve been told,” Kris said, getting her legs comfortable on an ottoman that Jack brought over. He took her crutches and set them within easy reach before he took his seat on the sofa closest to her. It was kind of him to make it easy for her to stomp out if she chose to. She wouldn’t have to ask anyone to give her a hand up.

Jack was getting to understand her too damn well.

He was also taking very good care of her . . . when she let him.

Relaxed into her seat, Kris stared at the troublesome trinity across from her. They stared back at her.

No one seemed eager to say anything.

So Kris took the bull by the horns. “I settled your hash on Texarkana. Did you get the vote you needed?”

“We did,” the king said, showing none of the joy Kris expected. “I’m stuck in this job for the next ten years.”

“And if you are the king, I’m stuck being a princess,” Kris said, trying not to sound too bitter. She had made the princess thing work.

Once or twice.

And it hadn’t killed her.

Yet.

“You really shook things up on Texarkana,” the king said, changing the subject.

“And surprise, surprise, I lived through it. That place did need shaking up. There were a few things about it you didn’t mention when you gave me the job. Maybe they slipped your mind.”

“That’s possible,” the king allowed.

“How many more of these pipe dreamers from Earth do we have out here? How many groups of discontents from an odd corner of Earth all hot to trot to do things their way out on a blank slate among the stars? Grampa, can’t we do something to get all these planets settled down once and for all?”

“You have any suggestion how we straighten out New Jerusalem?”

“They’re not in your United Sentients.”

“But their problems have a way of seeping out to places like . . . What was that place, Colonel?”

“Pandemonium, Your Majesty,” Colonel Cortez supplied.

“They shortened it to Panda,” Kris put in.

“But rented muscle from New J almost ripped their heads off,” Crossie said.

“Locals didn’t do such a bad job of handling themselves. We helped a bit.”

“More than a bit, from my reports,” Crossie insisted.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you set me up for that one,” Kris growled.

The admiral raised both hands, palms out. “You walked into that one on your own. By the way, thank you very much for settling it for us.”

“You’re welcome, I guess,” Kris said, and noticed that she’d been deftly deflected from what she wanted to talk about. She fixed the king with a glare and put an end to that.

“Grampa, I did my part for you on Texarkana. What did you do for my Iteeche while I was gone?”

“Not interested in any more chitchat?”

“Nope.”

“Even if the king decrees it?”

“Nope. The king and I have this bargain, you see, Grampa. I pulled one of his chestnuts out of the fire. He keeps the whole damn forest of chestnut trees from going up in flames.”

“Glad to see you’re giving me credit for a tougher problem.”

“Can you honestly say yours was tougher when I’m the one on crutches?”

“You didn’t duck fast enough.”

“I ducked, but the bombs were coming from above.”

“You need to post more lookouts, Captain,” the king said to Jack. The general was talking now.

“Yes, sir,” Jack said, stiffening to attention and going into report mode. “My company is being reinforced as we speak. We’re adding two platoons and bringing the other two platoons up to full strength after the casualties they’ve suffered over the last three months. This should allow me to maintain a secure perimeter within an outer perimeter bubble, sir.”

“Very good,” the general said.

“Now, Grampa, King, Hammer of the Iteeche, what can I tell my friend Ron that he can expect human space will do for them and their problem?”

“Insistent, isn’t she?” General Mac said.

“Like everyone in her family,” the king agreed. “Kris, you will have to tell your friend Ron that I can’t offer him anything at this time. He can go back to Roth and tell that old buzzard that I need more time to prepare my people for this. It’s too big a change for me to make overnight.

“And besides, he doesn’t have anything really to tell me about the menace. Some ships have disappeared. Ships always go missing. How can I get humanity all ready to ride with nothing but a bit of dust on the horizon?”

“Grampa, you know as well as I do that when ships go missing, it’s random. One here. One there. Not four or five in the same chunk of space,” Kris put in.

“I need more evidence before I can go to the general public, Kris,” King Raymond insisted. “This is just a bogeyman under the bed, and it’s under an Iteeche bed at that.”

“Ron plans on leading a scout out to see what he can see.”

“That would be good.”

“No, it will be very bad. Lousy bad. He’ll probably just get himself killed, and we won’t know any more than we did.”

“What’s this Ron to you?” Grampa asked, an eyebrow raised.

“He’s a friend. A friend who doesn’t lie to me. And yes, Crossie, you’ll be getting a full report on the present situation in the Iteeche Empire. The real lowdown on who’s doing what to whom. Abby will send this report just to you. And we want a nice paycheck for letting you have it exclusively.”

“And she says she doesn’t work for me,” the admiral said, preening.

“Keep that up, and I’ll burn her disk to ash.”

The admiral got very quiet.

“Grampa, if Ron’s going out to stick his head into whatever maw is out there, I think I ought to go with him.”

“You can’t do it, girl.”

“I and my ship are the best for the job. We’ve got the new atom laser. We can spot the fuzzy jump holes. I think we could use them to get around the perimeter of this thing. See what it leaves behind it.”

“That’s assuming that it is traveling along and leaving something behind it, not expanding, expanding, expanding,” Crossie said.

“Either could be wrong assumptions,” the king added.

“All are guesses until we get some solid data,” Kris pointed out. “And as you just noted, you can’t get anything going here in human space with the little data the Iteeche have. The Wasp and its crew is the best we have. You need information. Let me get it.” Kris tried to keep her voice low. To strip her words of the frustration she was feeling. It was frustration she felt. Not anger. Not yet.

“Kris, you are not going out with Ron,” the king said firmly. “You’ve already got your next assignment, and it’s one I don’t think anyone else but you can do.”

Where had Kris heard that before? “Try to persuade me,” Kris drawled.

The king turned to General Mac.

“Kris,” the Chairman of the General Staff said, “the Peterwalds’ worlds are locked in a low-grade civil war. Their Navy is pretty much tied up at the pier providing muscle while the Peterwalds settle their scores with State Security.”

“It’s not really that simple,” Crossie put in. “There are all kinds of scores getting settled. The Peterwalds built their empire by importing people from Earth who had hundreds, thousands of years of bad blood between them back there. They played them off against each other while using the iron grip of State Security to keep the blood from flowing in the streets.”

“So when you pop the head of State Security,” Kris said, “all kinds of bloody things come out to play.”

“You’ve got it,” Mac said.

“But we don’t interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states,” Kris pointed out. There was no job for her in anything they’d said. So far. And this rambling around was moving her frustration closer and closer to a full-fledged mad.

“Spoken so sincerely by the woman who offed Hank Peterwald, the thirteenth, the heir apparent, and then saved Harry Peterwald the twelfth, the reigning nonemperor,” Crossie said, giving a quick review of Kris’s last nine months.

“Both seemed like a good idea at the time,” Kris said with the best innocent shrug she could manage.

“Well, while the cats are scoring their own points, the rats are getting out of hand. We’ve got problems with pirates,” the king said. “Pirates and refugees.”

“Pirates and refugees?” Kris said. “That’s the strangest combination I have ever heard. Any chance you’ll explain it to little old me?”

The king seemed about to choke on that, but said, “People are fleeing the internal strife on more and more Peterwald planets. They’re heading out to Sooner territory, setting up refugee camps there or on totally new planets. Horrible conditions. Some have even ended up on pirate planets. We think there are at least two planets that have become pirate bases. People there are no better than slaves.”

“Our reliable sources tell us that a couple of new designer drugs that have recently shown up in human space are coming from them,” Crossie said.

“There’s one more thing, Kris,” Mac said. “These refugees are grabbing whatever they can lay their hands on and cram ming themselves into any ship that can risk space. Not all of them get where they are going, Lieutenant. You’ll need to be ready to take on refugees as well as knock heads in your next job.”

“What next job?”

“We’re giving you command of Patrol Squadron 10, Kris,” Mac said. “It isn’t much, just a couple of armed merchant ships like the Wasp. We want you to patrol the open border of Greenfeld territory looking for pirates, drugs, whatever.”

“What does Peterwald think about this?”

“We haven’t asked him,” the king said. “And I don’t intend to. That why I’m sending you. He owes you his life. You seem to have gotten along with his daughter, Vicky. I’m hoping that they won’t take you for a poacher in their space.”

Kris leaned back in her chair. She wanted to be mad. She wanted to let her frustration rage at them for not letting her do the job she wanted to do. And yet, there was no question that if the U.S. sent a squadron of cruisers to patrol along the Greenfeld border, there would be all kinds of hell to pay . . . maybe even war if one horrible misstep led to another.

Kris let out a sigh. A couple of converted merchants with their lasers carefully hidden might not cause the same problems.

And Vicky. Well, if the two of them got together, they might have a few minutes of good time. And take a little bit of the heat off the situation.

Once again, they’d gotten to her. One more time, they’d found the job that she just might be the only one who could do. The first time it happened, she’d been swept off her feet. Delighted to be the only one with the right finger to fit in the dike. It was amazing how fast that lost its luster.

Or maybe she was developing her own opinion as to which dike she wanted to put her finger in.

Kris sighed. “I’ll take the job. But how’s a lieutenant supposed to command a squadron, even of converts?”

Mac pulled out an envelope and poured its contents on the table in front of him. Two shoulder boards fell out. Shoulder boards with the two and a half stripes of a lieutenant commander.

“Congratulations, Commander,” General Mac said. “You just made it into the window for double-deep selection. I’ve arranged to have all the paperwork cut so that you’ll have about ten minutes’ seniority on all the other lieutenant commanders in your squadron.”

“This is going to be so much fun,” Kris grumbled.

The king stood. It was clear to all that he’d done what he had come for and was eager to go. Kris levered herself out of the chair. The others stood, and he made his exit.

Admiral Crossenshield followed in the king’s footsteps up to the door, then paused. “Your plug-in for Nelly to your brain got slagged by that bomb?”

“It very much did,” Kris admitted.

“You’ll need to get that fixed.”

“I’ll see what I can do about it before I sail.”

“I’ve got you scheduled with the best brain surgeon on Wardhaven for nine tomorrow morning.”

“He’ll need to see my medical records.”

“I had them sent from Texarkana. You took a slow boat home, darling. She finished studying them last week. You go in. She’ll do a quick check. If there are no surprises, she’ll fix you up before you leave.”

“I don’t work for you, honey,” Kris snapped, returning a “honey” for his “darling.”

“But isn’t it nice having me look after you once in a while?”

Kris said something evil that only made Crossie laugh as he followed the king.

General Mac paused beside Kris in his own exit. “Here is a list of the ships in PatRon 10. Taussig has the Hornet. Jack Campbell has the Dauntless. You don’t know him, but he’s good people.”

Kris glanced down the flimsy. Skippers’ names were matched with ships and their types, but it told her very little. What fighting capability did the Hornet or Dauntless have? A supply ship was named the Surprise. That . . . was not encouraging. “Thank you,” she told the general.

Once the elders were gone, Kris and her team collapsed into their seats. “Kris,” the colonel said, “I don’t mind fighting your fights, but attending your senior staff meetings. It’s taking years off my life.”

“What’s the matter with you wimps? Can’t handle a little family get-together with my grampa?” Kris said, relaxing deep into her chair.

“Maybe I could,” the colonel said, “if there were fewer stars in the room.”

“Maybe I could,” Penny added, “if you didn’t always turn them into fights. I love my grandpop!”

“Lucky you. Penny, can you run up to the Wasp and let Ron in on the secret. I don’t think he’ll be surprised. Tell him we’ll be headed out for the demilitarized zone in a couple of days. Until then, he can use my library card at Wardhaven U.”

“You going to the doc tomorrow?” Jack asked.

“Yeah, I kind of miss having Nelly bouncing around in my head.”

“You sure you can trust any doc Crossie hired?” Jack whispered.

“Nelly, can you do a thorough check for a bug.”

“Yes, Kris.”

Nelly was kind of quiet these days. Kris found she liked the quiet, too, and missed the lip, both at the same time.

Weird.

The others left to find the rooms prepared for them. Kris stayed until all of them were gone.

“Nelly, is this room secure?”

“Yes, Kris. They swept it for the king, and he didn’t leave anything behind. Not even Crossie did.”

“I thought now might be safe. Nelly, I’m mad.”

“I noticed that your pulse was up. Are you okay?”

“No more than the usual pain. I got a ringing in my ear that sounds like an out-of-tune brass band. But mainly, I’m mad. Mad that Grampa Ray isn’t helping Ron. Blast it, Nelly, he didn’t tell me a single thing he did to help the Iteeche. As far as I can tell, I damn near got myself killed doing what he asked of me, and he didn’t do a single thing to help Ron.”

“You don’t know that, Kris. He could have done things. He just didn’t tell you. It was a very brief meeting.”

“He made sure it was short. They arranged it so I never got to ask him anything specific. I could really hate that man.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, Kris.”

“Nelly, you are not my shrink.”

“No, I am not, Kris, but you told me once it is important to talk things out. I am willing to listen.”

“Thanks, Nelly, but the person I really need to talk with is someone who has experience dealing with us damn Longknifes. Gramma Ruth or . . .” Kris ran out of people. “Wouldn’t be any good to talk to Father or Honovi. They’re in the middle of it.”

“Would Admiral Santiago be one you could talk to?”

“Yes,” Kris said. “She and her family have had a lot of experience dealing with us damn Longknifes, but she’s at Chance.”

“Not right now, Kris. She’s making a report or attending a meeting or something right here on Wardhaven.”

“Message her, Nelly. Ask her if she could come by Nuu House at 1900 tomorrow—2000! Anytime she wants.”

“I’ve done it. She hasn’t answered, but I will tell you when she does.”

“Good, Nelly. Good. I should have realized sooner. I don’t need to talk to Longknifes about how to survive us. I need to talk to people who have survived us. Sandy’s just the one.”