Redoubtable (14 page)

“How did you get past the Marines?” came from several voices.

Kris wasn’t one of them. “Abby was just leaving with Vicky Peterwald. Have you finished your schoolwork?”

“Dada said there was more to do, but I ignored her,” Cara said, pulling her computer up from where it hung from her neck. “I told Dada that if she kept hounding me, I’d turn her off, just like Aunt Abby does her computer.”

Which launched a storm of unconnected conversations.

“I told you,” Nelly snapped at Abby, “that you were a bad influence.”

“I will not be controlled by my computer,” Abby snapped right back.”

“Even that kid has a supercomputer,” Vicky wailed. “Kris, we have to talk.”

“Yes, but not now,” Kris snapped for her own protection. “Jack, get Sergeant Bruce in here and have him see that a certain little girl is kept occupied. Or in the brig. His choice.”

“Aye, aye, Commander.”

“Abby, you and Vicky get over to my quarters and see what you can patch together. Don’t come back until you’ve got a plea guaranteed to bring tears to the eyes of a stone statue.”

“You bet, boss,” Abby said.

In a series of “Boats right. Boats left,” commands that would have made any admiral proud, Kris herded her various cats off to where she wanted them. Done, she returned to the table with the admiral, Jack, Amanda, and the professor.

“Nelly, are you satisfied with these two working for now with two of your kids?”

“They are just happy to be awake and have a job to do, assuming, of course, that when heads go up on pikes, we computers get left behind in a nice jewelry box. I will, however, monitor this matter closely to assure that my children are not taken advantage of in their eagerness to serve.”

“Amanda, Professor, you understand your probationary status?” Kris said. “Would you rather use your own pet computers?”

Both nodded agreement and assured Kris that they were only too happy to be working with such fine computers. “I will need to download several of my modeling tools,” Amanda said. The professor then confessed to the same need.

“Jack, how much finance and economics was in your degree?”

“Kris, I just did a search on the background of these two poor souls now working for you. I’m not in their league, and, since I’ve had a chance to check out your college work, I know you aren’t either.”

“But Nelly did a high-speed and thorough workup on the Turantic economy,” Kris pointed out. “I expect that she has more practical experience at breaking and entering planetary databases than any of us.”

“You mean we won’t have to send off request after request for data, then wait for some clerk to get around to it or just flat out deny it?” the professor said, rubbing his hands together with glee.

“It sounds like the only stuff we’ll actually have to mess with is the fun stuff,” Amanda said.

“Nelly, make sure you and your kids are very, very careful. I would prefer not to have to deal with some angry cop from St. Pete’s. Vicky’s father is going to be a big enough problem as it is.”

“I’m glad you broached that topic,” said the professor. “While my young colleague’s shining eyes sparkled at the thought of huge amounts of data flowing into her greedy hands for analysis, the thought came to me that a gushing stream of data pointed right at us is bound to attract attention. Attention we do not want.”

The professor turned in his chair. “Chief, who is your new friend?”

“I am Lieutenant Stanislaus Kostka, of the Greenfeld Navy,” he said, somewhat self-consciously, glancing down at his uniform.

“Don’t be so shy. Stan here is the best network man in my squadron,” Admiral Krätz added. “He’s the one who helped Vicky research what little she could of our economy and did the statistical analysis that showed the numbers were too good to be true.”

“What do you know about the network down below on St. Pete?” Kris asked.

“I have the published design specs. I also have done a bit of remapping the system. It is very fragile, what with all the problems we’ve been having,” Stan said, innocently. “I’ve found that there is a lot more net out there than anyone’s admitted. St. Pete’s the sixth planetary system I’ve mapped for Miss Vicky. Every one of them has been loaded with add-ins and extra databases that officially are not there.”

“If you’re going to keep two or three sets of books, you’ve got to have them somewhere,” the professor said with an impish grin. “But again, I say, if we suddenly start copying all of those illicit files to us for analysis, a blind network administrator would notice the flow and investigate.”

“Admiral, what would you suggest?” Kris said.

“Do I look like a criminal? A spy?” the officer said, throwing his hands up.

“No, sir,” Kris said, “but you do look experienced. You have survived in what appears to me to be a very dysfunctional system. More than survived; you, sir, have thrived.”

“ ‘Survived’ is the operative word,” he said. “Now, as my headstrong young assistant has pointed out, we of Greenfeld are behind you Longknifes, but we are not primitives. Greenfeld manufactures a very fine line of smart metal. We also are producing self-organizing matrices for computers. We haven’t had much luck making them work, have we, Lieutenant?”

The lieutenant quickly agreed with his superior officer.

“But you do have a supply of the matrices, and you are working with them, are you not?”

“Yes, sir. Miss Vicky has had me working on them in my spare time.”

“Of which my junior officers have way too much,” the admiral said, and avoided seeing the face the lieutenant made at the table in front of him.

“Lieutenant, take the Gunny and a four-Marine escort. Return to the
Fury
and bring back the full supply of exotic materials that you have. Also, I think Lieutenant Peterwald would like to have Chief Meindl join us over here. Bring him. You remember him, Commander. He was your prisoner on Chance. You gave him a tour of the trap you were setting for young Hank Peterwald and his military coup. My good friend Captain Slovo was able to use his input to stop the whole slaughter.”

“Sometimes you want a spy around,” Kris said. “I found him to be a good man, Chief Meindl.”

“He may help with a few things I have in mind; now, off with you, Lieutenant.”

The young officer fairly raced to obey his admiral. Kris waited until he was gone before asking the question on her mind.

“Care to share what you have in mind?”

“There is more than one way to acquire a data dump. You kids these days have it so easy. Just say a few words to your commlink, and everything is delivered to your fingertips.”

“Your idea of research is way oversimplified,” Amanda slipped in.

“You’re probably right,” the admiral agreed. “And, this may be just a dumb old sailor’s thought, but if you don’t want to leave footprints on the net, why not avoid hotfooting it around the net. Nelly, you spun off search bots faster than I could think of the idea. I’m sure you can use our fine Greenfeld glop to knock together some very nice bugs. Tell me where the databases are that you want to copy, and I can come up with some reason why a detachment of my sailors needs to march by there.

“Your bots will link into the net right next door to where the data is, copy it out, and fly back to one of my unsuspecting sailors, and bingo, we have the data, and any net manager has at best data going from somewhere to a node that no longer exists and never was on his system map.”

“And if one of my bots gets isolated and captured,” Nelly said, “it is made of your fine Greenfeld glop, as you so technically defined it. I can contrive bots that will self-destruct in that event, leaving just a smear of very costly material that tells no one anything. Kris, I like this man. He’s as sneaky as you are.”

“Then let us see what we can do,” Kris said.

Planning got under way. An hour later, Vicky returned; a moment after that, Lieutenant Kostka followed her in. A Greenfeld senior chief was with him.

“Chief Meindl, so good to see you again,” Kris said.

“I should have known that you’d be at the center of whatever was going on,” the chief said, offering a salute.

Kris gave him a hug. “I worry about you, Chief. People get killed around Peterwalds and Longknifes. I’m glad to see you have avoided the usual fate.”

“She never gives me a hug like that,” Chief Beni muttered.

“Be glad she keeps you at arm’s length,” Jack said. “It’s safer that way.”

“He’s stuck with a Peterwald,” Kris pointed out. “They’re even more dangerous to be around.”

The chief took a step back. “So it’s lieutenant commander now.”

“They’re new,” Kris said, glancing at her shoulder boards.

“You command this ship, then?”

“No such luck, Chief,” Kris said with a sigh. “I’ve still got a contract captain running the boat.”

“Some might call him the flag captain,” Jack put in. “Commander Longknife is officially the CO of Patrol Squadron 10.”

“Congratulations, Commander,” Admiral Krätz said. “I saw the extra stripe, but I had no idea it meant command of a squadron.”

“It’s not much of a squadron,” Kris said. “And I’ve never seen more than two ships from it together in one place. They’re all like the
Wasp
, corvettes converted from merchant ships with just enough guns to put a quick end to any pirate ship. We carry a full load of cargo containers, like you saw on the
Wasp
. They let us fake it as a merchant, suckering a pirate in close. And the containers are usually full of famine rations. It’s really bad out there, folks.

“My grampa Trouble used to tell the story that people were so desperate to get away from planets near the Iteeche that they’d overload ships until they had to breathe in shifts. I thought it was a joke. But I’ve answered distress calls from two ships that broke down before they made it to one of the Sooner planets. No food, no sanitation, little oxygen. You have to see it to realize how bad it is.”

There was a long pause in the conversation after that.

“Do the containers of rations slow you down?” the admiral asked, bringing the focus back to something nautical.

“Not so far,” Kris said. “If we ever needed to really boogy, chasing or running as the case may be, we can ditch the containers and attach a beacon. We’re pretty small. Any real warship we run away from.”

“But you’re loaded with food,” Vicky said.

“We carry out a load to a starving planet. On the way out, we try to get a pirate’s attention. Once we’re unloaded, we usually head back for Cuzco to refill on biscuits. Then repeat the process.

“Admiral, Vicky, I know you have to be unhappy about having a strange Navy on your rim, but I assure you, PatRon 10 is spending more time in the shipping business than shooting. I think Campbell on the
Dauntless
is the only one of us to actually shoot up a pirate.”

“Didn’t you capture a pirate off Kaskatos? I seem to have heard something about that,” the admiral said, careful not to directly contradict Kris.

“It was just a system runabout,” Kris said. “It had a balloot full of reaction mass and bounced off the
Wasp
. No lasers, just personal weapons. Half of them only had machetes to wave. When the Marines in full armor went out the locks, it kind of let the air out of them.”

“But there are pirates out there. We are losing merchant ships,” Vicky said. “It’s not like there’s a lot of trade. I think part of the reason so many ships are laid up like those around St. Pete is the fear of being captured.”

Kris had listened patiently. She had sat on the one question that had haunted her since she first encountered the wreckage and flotsam of Greenfeld situation. She could sit on it no more.

“Vicky, what’s the problem? What is going on? I know I’m a Longknife and the ancestral enemy, but God in heaven, girl, things are a mess, and I’m doing my level honest best to clean up after it. Don’t I at least deserve to know what is actually happening?”

Vicky eyed her admiral. He couldn’t bear her question and focused his attention on the table in front of him. Kris was half-afraid that she’d shattered the growing trust between her and the young woman from Greenfeld.

She hadn’t intended that.

Just as Kris was about ready to take her words back, Vicky started talking. Her eyes didn’t rise to meet Kris’s, but she seemed unable to look up from her hands.

“We are in trouble. The glue that held 103 planets together has come apart, and we don’t know how to fix it. With the aid of the fleet, we can hold this or that fragment together, but even our fleet is too small to hold it all.”

Vicky looked up, met Kris’s eyes. “If you went down to St. Pete with a pocketful of Greenfeld marks, you couldn’t buy a beer. You couldn’t buy anything. St. Pete and half of our planets are back on the barter system. If you don’t have something to trade, no one will keep you from starving to death. If your mother or father was the wrong person, you can get killed right where you stand.

“Half our planets don’t have a central government anymore. They’ve got three or six or a dozen situations running things. Usually a warlord with guns. Maybe the warlord is a black shirt. Maybe the warlord just managed to get all of State Security’s guns. At first, my dad and I made the mistake of thinking that we could wipe out the cancer of State Security and everything would be fine.

“Big mistake,” Vicky said with a sigh.

“Dad thought he had corporate vice presidents that he could trust to keep things going on this planet or that one. Nine out of ten of them have set themselves up as rulers. The smart ones call themselves princes or viceroys. The dumb ones claim to be kings. Dad’s taken care of all of them so far.”

“It’s that bad,” Kris said in a whisper.

“When you were talking about shipping famine biscuits to the Sooner planets that our refugees are flooding, I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking you to send them to twenty of our planets. St. Pete’s one of them.”

“Why not?” Kris asked. “Why haven’t you asked for our help?”

“And let Ray Longknife know we’re in this much trouble,” Vicky spat. “Hell, Kris, you know he’d invade us in a second. Kris, the Marines you’ve got on your little ship could probably take over a dozen of our planets. Worse, the people would greet you as liberators.