Kris Longknife: Defender (12 page)

The
glass section receded into the deck. Mother MacCreedy had already expanded the open section of the Forward Lounge twice. Penny looked none too happy to be giving up armor, but the system was clear except what was tied up to Canopus Station.

Oh, and the two, still-unbalanced monsters doing their best to swing around each other two hundred klicks behind the station and wobbling all over the place as they tried again and again to balance themselves.

Kris did her best not to look at the jig those two were doing. It would not do to get the giggles in front of the king over something his regal decree had insisted was all well in hand.

No. Not at all. Not at all.

Between her discovering she could giggle and finding out how good it felt to make long, passionate, languid love under a palm-fringed tree, Jack was proving a very bad influence.

She dearly wished she could have some more of that bad influence, but Kris declared over this minivacation in her head, stood up, and began to brief the king, his staff, and more importantly, the frigate captions and their XOs, senior scientists, and Marine-detachment skippers of what were to be her new squadron.

The scientists surprised Kris. All of the frigates had a civilian contingent of fifty to sixty boffins, as well as a platoon of Marines reinforced with heavy weapons. Clearly, what she’d started with the
Wasp
was being adopted for the fleet. At least the fleet that volunteered for exile to the other side of the galaxy and a potentially suicidal fight.

“Your Royal Majesty, Admiral, Captains, skippers, ladies and gentlemen. We have defeated the enemy, but they are still sniffing around here. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they’re only sniffing, not massing for an assault. At least not within two jumps of Alwa. One of the things I hope we can do very quickly now that there are more ships available is extend our early-warning system to six, then twelve systems out,” Kris said, glancing at the king.

He nodded agreement. Admiral Crossenshield made a note.

The king nodded a lot during Kris’s briefing, and Crossie took a lot of notes.

Kris was left wondering in that tiny portion of her brain not taken up by the briefing how it happened that the king showed up with the chief of his security and intelligence agency at his elbow. Was Crossie that important, or was Ray not about to leave human space with Crossie not under his watchful eye?

Meanwhile, Kris kept talking.

“The aliens removed all their dead from the wreckage of the mother ship. However, our nanos found one boot with part of a leg in it. The aliens we’re dealing with are the same ones we ran into four other times, including the raped planet. Based on genetic drift, this group, however, has not had contact with the other groups for somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand years.”

“Brutish and solitary,” the king muttered. “Do you think they fight among themselves?”

“No way to form an opinion on that, sir.”

“What’s your defensive position here?” Crossie butted in.

“Rather simple for the
Wasp
,” Kris said as offhandedly as she could. “If a single three-to-five-hundred-thousand-ton ship shows up, we’ll fight it. If two come through the jump gate, we’ll assess our situation and try to fight them. If one of those monster base ships jumps in system with a fleet of two hundred of those huge ships, we run.”

“But now you’re reinforced,” a lieutenant commander, one of the frigate skippers, said.

K
RIS, THAT’S
C
AROLYN
S
AMPSON.
Y
OU MAY REMEMBER HER DAD.
H
E COMMANDED
A
TTACK
R
ON
S
IX WITH THE
T
YPHOON
IN IT AND ORDERED THE ATTACK ON THE
E
ARTH FLEET AT THE
P
ARIS SYSTEM.
H
E DIED OF A HEART ATTACK BEFORE THE INVESTIGATION WAS EVER STARTED.
S
HE’S THE SENIOR-MOST FRIGATE SKIPPER, LIKELY THE REASON YOU GOT PROMOTED TO FULL COMMANDER.
H
ER SHIP IS THE
C
ONSTELLATION
.

T
HANKS,
N
ELLY.

Kris would likely never forget Commodore Sampson. Because of his early death, the investigation that might have cleared Kris of mutiny had ended without a conclusion.

What are you doing here, Commander Sampson?

“Yes, having seven frigates does change matters. If seven huge alien ships jump in, we fight. If fourteen or so jump in, we fight. If that monster base ship with all her nasty kittens jumps in, boys and girls, we run.”

“And she’s supposed to be the best fighting commander we’ve got,” Sampson whispered, loud enough for the entire room to hear.

“Yes, Lieutenant Commander,” Kris said, intentionally not giving a ship’s skipper the usual courtesy of being addressed as a captain. “I do fight. I do not fight against suicidal odds. Not if I know it. Not if I can help it. Now that you are all here, we’ll look at our options and see if we can come up with some surprises for the bastards.”

Kris had Nelly fill the forward screen with the view of the alien mother ship huge and looming just after it had jumped into the next system. The view stayed as the Hellburners blew it apart. Then switched to the dead, twisting, and rolling hulk.

With hardly a flicker, three huge alien ships appeared. One of them lazed a small rock.

“We surprised them once. That
won’t
happen again. I’m open from the floor for a new suggestion as to how we sneak up on them and smash them with Hellburners. By the way, Your Majesty, did you bring out more Hellburners?”

“Each frigate has two,” the king said. “When the
Monarch
and its escort take me back, we’ll leave our four behind. Use them as you see fit.”

“Gladly, sir. By the way, I’m still open for suggestions from the floor on how we sneak up on a monstrous alien mother ship with two hundred huge escorts.”

The floor had nothing to say. It lay there, very quietly.

“Mr. Benson,” Kris said, “I’d like to off-load all the Hellburners from the frigates to the station. I see no prospects for a frigate surviving long enough to slip a Hellburner up the rear of a bastard’s base ship. We’ll need to think of some other way of doing the same.”

“Hellburners aboard my station?” The former admiral looked pained at the thought. “I guess I could store them along the centerline, where there’s no gravity.”

“And under guard. You do have a Marine detachment?” Kris asked.

“Most definitely under guard. Do you have a plan for using those things?” Benson asked.

“I’m working on something,” Kris said, and went on. “I’d like to say that our examination of the wreck has shown us their Achilles’ heel, but instead, we’ve drawn a lot of blanks. All the reactors have been stripped from the wreck. From the size of the cable leads coming off the reactors, the ones inside the ship were big enough to run a medium-size city. Of the lasers, nothing. The undamaged ones were salvaged. Even the ones we hit, most of the wreckage has been policed up and carted off. From the small scraps we did get, we think they’re at least 16-inch. Power and range are still unknown.”

“It doesn’t sound like you know much,” Sampson muttered lowly.

“Commander,” the king said, “stow it. You just got here. When you’ve been here six weeks, if you’ve survived, we’ll talk. For now, you’re bothering me.”

“Yes, sir,” Sampson said, bracing in her chair. She almost wiped the smirk off her face.

Kris sighed. She’d met a lot of leadership challenges in the last five years. Lieutenant Commander Sampson looked only too eager to offer her a new one.

“Sir, one question if I may,” Commander Sampson said.

“Make it a good one,” the king said.

“Yes sir. The old
Furious
is still in orbit. Could we salvage her reactors and put them to use powering the moon base? That might save enough reactors for another mineral exploring and extraction ship.”

“Good idea,” the king said.

“Bad idea,” Kris said.

“Oh?” said the king.

“The colonials on Alwa were trying to off-load those reactors. The Alwans don’t much care for burning forests for fuel or damming rivers. It’s bad for fishing. That space launch we caught back when was part of a major colonial and Alwan effort to get back to the
Furious
and bring down some new, low-impact power sources.” Kris paused.

“I’ve already promised the use of the
Wasp
’s longboats to help.”

“I thought from the report by the
Sakura
that the Alwans were preindustrial and happy to stay that way,” Admiral Crossenshield said.

“The answer to that, sir, is yes, no, and maybe. The Alwans never speak with a single voice,” Kris said.

“Sounds almost human,” the king rumbled.

“Exactly, sir. Most of the old elders are against change. Some of the new, younger elders are more open to change. Many Alwans show up at the colony, ask for an education, and start working right alongside the colonists.”

“No central government, huh?” the king said.

“The survivors of the battlecruisers”—Granny Rita to be precise—“thought they had made contact with something like a central government. The Association of Associations. However, you have to realize two things. The
Furious
made orbit shot up pretty bad and on her last leg. Commodore Rita had to get the crew of the
Furious
and the
Enterprise
somewhere they could breathe and maybe find something to eat. Haven looked like a good target, and they went for it.”

Kris took a deep breath. “The
Wasp
is now doing the first methodical mapping of the planet, and we’ve spotted what look like six different major civilizations plus several minor ones. I can’t even swear that they’re all from the same gene pool. Some around the equator look very different from those in the temperate zones, and the polar regions are different again.”

“But they’re all confined to the planet,” Commander Sampson put in, “even the colonials, so what we do out here in the system is none of their business.”

This was supposed to be a Navy meeting. However, Kris noticed several tables filled with civilians, some in business suits, some in more hardworking gear. At the commander’s question, every head focused on her.

So much for a private briefing for the king and her officers.

Kris dropped the bomb. “As it turns out, that is not quite true. The Alwans have developed a taste for human technology. I was just recently interviewed by an Alwan TV medium. The camera needed a tripod to hold it and the mike they gave me weighed over a kilo and was about the size of a banana, but a lot of Alwans are watching TV. Modern transportation is catching on. Most involve animal-pulled wagons, but electric carts and trucks are gaining in popularity. They need to get the old
Furious
’s thermonuclear reactors dirtside and soon.”

Kris had everyone in the room hanging on her words, and everyone at the business tables were scowling her way. Enough lead-in.

“The Alwans have required royalties from the colonists to remove minerals. They want forty percent of the finished manufactured products.”

“That’s highway robbery,” Sampson exploded, climbing half-out of her seat.

The business types said much worse though in lower tones. Mother MacCreedy headed over to demand the tables comply with her rules or be cut off. Some of those not in suits were stomping around. Several gave Kris the universal hand signal of approbation.

Kris tried not to smile. Maybe she succeeded.

King Raymond stood up, and at last Commander Sampson sat down and shut up. “I can see we have a lot to discuss with the natives and the colonials. I think I’m about as fully briefed as I can stand. Commodore, do you have experienced bosuns for making the approach to, what are they calling it, Haven?”

“Yes, sir. Our bosuns have been flying the route two or three times a day.”

“We can skip the gig. I think we’ll need your biggest longboat. I’ve got a platoon of Marines traveling with me. I’m sure your staff will want to come along.” He glanced at Crossie. “If my staff gets too large, send the juniors along in the next boat.”

“Yes, sir,” Crossie said.

Kris nodded at Jack and Penny. N
ELLY, TELL
A
BBY TO COME ALONG IN THE NEXT BOAT.
S
EE THAT
S
ERGEANT
B
RUCE AND A COUPLE OF SQUADS OF OUR
M
ARINES ARE WITH HER.

I
’LL MAKE IT SO,
C
OMMODORE.

Kris hardly felt like she’d gotten comfortable in the frying pan. Now it was time to dive into the fire.

The
ride down had its own surprise. Grampa Ray arranged to have the aisle seat with Kris seated inboard of him. Crossie and Jack were across the aisle from them. Kris would have preferred to have these two dangerous old guys together and Jack next to her.

Halfway down, she found out why.

The king leaned over and shouted over the roar of reentry in her ear, “Kid, I hope you won’t mind, but in addition to Commander, Alwa Defense Sector, I’m naming you Vicereine and Governor General for the Alwa System.”

N
ELLY, RESEARCH AND BE QUICK ABOUT IT.

V
ICEREINE IS THE FEMININE OF VICEROY.
E
NGLAND RULED
I
NDIA FOR SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS WITH A VICEROY AND GOVERNOR GENERAL.
M
OST OF THAT TIME THERE WAS VERY LITTLE LOCAL PARTICIPATION IN THE GOVERNMENT BY THE PEOPLE OF
I
NDIA.

T
HANKS,
N
ELLY.

The roar was still pretty high, but lessening. Kris leaned over and shouted back. “You name me Viceroy, or you can forget the whole thing. And no way will I accept the appointment of Governor General. While it might help me ride herd on those vultures in orbit, the colonials have their own government, thank you very much, and there is no way I’ll take responsibility for the Alwans. Herding cats would be easier than getting them to do anything they don’t volunteer for.” Kris had said her fill, but added, “Respectfully, Your Royal Majesty.”

The king laughed. The high gees were slipping away toward something normal as he reached across to Crossie and held his hand out. The black-hearted security honcho reached in the pocket of his own blues and, drawing out a bill, handed it to the king.

As the king pocketed it, Kris got a look. The king had won a thousand-dollar bet!

Kris very much doubted it was for the vicereine part.

“What’s a viceroy do?” Kris asked, as the noise got low enough to allow normal conversation.

“Stand in for the king and other odds and ends.” The king paused. “I’ve seen a draft commission for you, Kris. Skipping the vicereine crap and the governor-general stuff, I think the big thing is that it empowers you to open negotiations with the bastards and sign draft peace treaties for submission to the U.S. Senate.”

“Peace Treaties?” Kris said to the king. “Aren’t you a bit optimistic?”

“If no one has the authority, then no one can,” he shot back.

Kris chewed on what the king and Nelly had said for a long minute. “Hold it, Grampa King Ray. You’re king over one hundred seventy-three planets. The constitution requires that every one of those planets have a single government in order to apply for membership. The Alwans are nowhere close to a single government, and I doubt the colonials would be all that interested in joining what the Alwans glued together. You can’t be king of Alwa, and if you aren’t king, this place can’t have a viceroy.”

“How many times have I heard that?” The king sighed. “But those fool loudmouths in Congress did agree to something new. The colonials can apply for
associated
membership in the U.S. Alwa is that important to us. And if they apply for associated membership, they can vote you in as viceroy. You and only you, I might add.”

“You’re telling me I have to run for election by an association I have to first persuade them to form!”

“You’re Billy Longknife’s bratty daughter. You’ve been hustling voters since before you started school. I don’t see a problem,” the king said with a huge grin.

“I ran away and joined the Navy to get out of politics!”

“Your sins will always find you out, my child.”

“Especially if my grampa leaves bread crumbs to help them,” Kris said, making a face.

The king really enjoyed a laugh at that one.

The longboat landed, but then had to thread its way carefully. Every pulling or sailing boat the colonials had was out on the lake waving flags of every color imaginable. A handful of banners were also up saying
WELCOME
and
HOWDY
.

They moored at the long pier. Ada was waiting.

Normally, the military has seniors exit a vehicle first. The king stood, taking up a major hunk of the aisle, and said, “You and Jack go first. You know these people. I’ll settle the order of my folks after you two.”

Kris led the exit, with Jack at her side. She found herself greeted with cries of joy from colonials she now recognized. She let them cheer for a bit, then raised her hand for silence.

Surprise of surprise, she got it.

“May I present to you, His Royal Majesty, Conqueror of the Iteeches, King Raymond I of the United Society.”

The cheering got even louder as Ray exited the shuttle, waving like an experienced legend. The cheering went on for quite a while before he also raised both hands. It took longer for them to quiet down.

“Thank you for your welcome,” he shouted into the final cheers. “I am glad to have a chance to reestablish friendship and relations with our long-lost shipmates and their children and grandchildren. I am delighted to see how you have prospered in adversity and persevered in the face of fearful odds.”

Now the crowd totally lost it. In the following uproar, Ada stepped forward, introduced herself to the king as the Chief of Ministries for the Colonial government, and invited him to come with her to Government House.

She gave Kris a wink before she led the king toward the jitney that hadn’t gotten any larger than before. Kris and Jack used the warning to settle themselves in the second row, behind the driver, who turned out to be Ada. The king settled into the passenger seat and his staff members, now exiting the shuttle, found themselves scrambling for seats. Penny got onto the last row, facing backward and explaining to a commander that she was on the princess’s staff and needed to be where Kris was. Besides, a second jitney was waiting.

There were two more jitneys at the end of the pier, along with several wagons with seats pulled by those huge beasts. Kris would have loved to wait and see who chose to walk rather than be pulled along by one of them.

The crowd made way for the jitney with the king on it. The Royal U.S. Marines formed up and route-marched behind them off the pier before falling into step. It was quite a show.

A show that was missing someone.

“Where’s Rita?” Kris caught as Ray leaned over to softly ask Ada.

“She’s waiting for you at Government House. All this shouting and excitement wouldn’t have been good for her.”

Shouting and excitement? Granny Rita would lap it up.
But Kris kept on her game face and prepared to let it all play out.

The streets between the pier and Government House were lined with cheering people. The king got to do his royal thing, waving, waving, waving. Kris knew how much he didn’t care for this part of his job. She kind of pitied him.

She was also none too sure this was the proper lead-up to his meeting Rita.

They finally pulled into the round driveway of Government House. The trees shaded the drive, providing cool for a day that had become hot. The king’s gold-encrusted blues were showing sweat, and he seemed to breathe easier out of the sun.

Then he saw Rita, and his face went in all kinds of directions at once.

Rita was there, front and center on the veranda of Government House.

She sat smiling and waving . . . from a wheelchair!

Kris had a good view of the king’s face. She tried to catalog the feelings that chased themselves across it. Some managed to stop and homestead for a moment or two.

Ray was delighted and terrified at the same time. He looked worried, concerned, determined, and dismayed. Kris wondered if a normal man could have done this, or if she was once again seeing something only a legend of Ray’s stature could manage.

Ray leapt from the jitney before it came to a stop, not that it ever had been going that fast. “Honey, what’s wrong?” he asked, coming to kneel on the step below his long-ago wife.

“Nothing, Raymond, really nothing. I’m not as young and spry as you are and I got a bit carried away yesterday getting all this stuff ready for you and it seems I twisted my back. Those pills Kris gave me are making me feel great. I’m just not as great as I feel. Anyway, I think I could handle myself fine with a cane,” she said, brandishing a lovely wooden one, “but my bossy kids have got me in this thing, and my grandkid can’t wait to push me around in it.”

A teenager standing behind Granny Rita grinned, and said, “Vroom, vroom,” which did not encourage Kris to trust his driving.

Rita pulled Ray off his knees. “Come, come, most of the old surviving crew want to see you, and there are lots and lots of kids and grandkids. Do you know there’s a Raymond Longknife Junior family here on Alwa?”

If possible, the legendary Ray Longknife looked poleaxed. “No.”

“Remember that last good-bye, how we fought and made up, then fought and made up some more?”

The king nodded.

“Well, I’d been here about a month and started upchucking my toenails.”

“But all the women in the fleet were protected. You wrote the policy yourself.”

“Yep, best birth control on the market. Ninety-six-percent effective. But you were one hundred percent, my Raymond.”

“Good heavens, Rita, you didn’t have to fight for the survival of your crew while going through all that. I know pregnancies are hard on you.”

“Raymond, you keep forgetting. It wasn’t just the
Furious
’s crew, but also the
Enterprise
. If we hadn’t salvaged her ice armor for reaction mass, right now we’d be a lot of frozen bodies flying around the galaxy at very high speed. Also, building a colony was a lot easier with two thousand hands rather than just a thousand.”

The conversation might have gone longer, but Ada signaled the teenage motor, and the wheelchair turned and headed in the doors of Government House. The large foyer had been expanded by opening all the doors so that people in several huge halls could flow in and out of the central area.

Somehow, a receiving line got set up. If Kris had thought she had it bad meeting half of Granny Rita’s family, this was nothing to the mob scene of old codgers being wheeled in by their old kids or younger grandkids to see the man they’d fought for so many years ago.

Despite several attempts to detach herself from the king, Kris got nailed to his elbow, and every time Ada passed someone to Kris, it was with, “and here’s Her Royal Highness, Kristine Longknife, whom King Raymond has appointed our viceroy.”

Kris had tried to get a few disputing words in edgewise, but Ada wouldn’t listen. It seemed that the idea of their having a permanent representative of the faraway king was catching like wildfire.

It also appeared that the king had somehow managed to skip a few details about Kris’s appointment as viceroy. All the colonials flowing by seemed to think that a viceroy was a warm and fuzzy thing and just what they needed for the winter that was coming.

Kris smiled and shook hands and left tomorrow’s evil to tomorrow.

Kris smiled and shook hands until her face hurt and her arm was screaming in pain.

Kris kept smiling and kept shaking hands, but she couldn’t help but throw Jack a questioning glance. Where was a security chief when she was clearly at risk of bodily harm, as in her face falling off and her arm crippled for life?

Jack’s return look was pure helplessness.

Then Granny Rita, of course, saved the day. In a voice that could still echo through a huge hall, she announced, “Folks, it’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve had a chance to say a few words to my Raymond here. So, if you folks would be so kind, I’d like to duck out early on this shindig and find a place we can sit and talk.”

A wave of assent moved through the gathering. Granny gave Kris the high sign. Kris replaced the speed-demon teenager at the handles of Granny’s wheelchair.

“Out the front door. There’s a handicap incline to the left. It will get us down near the path you should remember fondly.”

Kris followed directions. King Raymond followed, with Jack at his elbow. The king waved off most of his staff, but he couldn’t wave off his Marine platoon. They followed him with full intent and purpose.

At the bottom of the incline, Kris found herself facing a dirt path and wondering how the wheelchair would take to its uneven surface. Granny Rita settled that. “Stop, child. I’m getting out of this contraption.”

And she did. The cane gave her a help up, and she hobbled down the path, leaning a bit more on the cane than Kris liked. Apparently, the wheelchair had not been a ruse.

“Honey,” the king said, “we brought a rejuvenation clinic. It’s not big, but it’s on Canopus Station a couple of thousand klicks above your head.”

“Raymond, I’ve already had two shuttle rides between here and the
Wasp
in a whole lot lower orbit than that. Talk to your kid there. She’s the one that won’t let me on a shuttle again. No shuttle-assisted suicide, right, honey?”

“Yes,” Kris said firmly.

“Besides, look at all those old codgers that just came out to shake your hand. How many of them do you think could survive a shuttle launch?”

The king acknowledged the obvious with a grimace. “I guess we can pack the clinic up and bring it down here. There are plenty of drugs that would help your old shipmates. Assuming you don’t insist on doing cartwheels when you hear I’m coming.”

“It wasn’t cartwheels I was doing, buddy boy. I gave up cartwheels years ago, after my fourth or fifth child.”

“The two kids we had, the third you had on this side, and . . . ?”

“Six I had with my two husbands on this side, God rest their souls.”

“I guess children were essential to the survival of the colony,” the king muttered, not at all happily.

“Raymond, don’t go giving me that survival excuse. You know our marriage was over before I took that suicide mission.”

“I still loved you. I didn’t want you to take the mission. That was what we were arguing about.”

Kris found herself in the middle of an argument she suspected had begun long before she was born. She stopped to let the two of them walk ahead. Get some distance. Get some privacy.