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  “A lot of competition, huh?” Jack said.

  “Everyone’s out of work. I even tried joining the Empress’s security specialists. They’re not that different from an army. They said I was overqualified. Can you believe it? I was too good!”

  Karl applied himself to his hamburger for a few bites as he tried to calm down.

  “Anyway, I’m getting desperate when this guy walks up to me outside a bar and offers to buy me a drink. I could sure use one, so yeah, I’m glad for it. We talk for a while, and he says he might know where there’s a job for someone who knows how to keep vacuum out of a hull if I’m not too particular about what’s going on outside the hull. I told him I could be real apathetic. So he gives me a card and leaves me enough to pay my way up the beanstalk to a boat landing.

  “Next thing I know, I’m on this old battleship, trying to get its ancient lasers up and able to hold a charge. I had to do my own scrounging around three other old tubs to get enough boards and cabling to get ’em up, and that was using spit and glue as much as solder. The gun cradles were all kind of herky-jerky, but nobody but me seemed concerned if I could train our lasers out at a target. If they hadn’t found a good old electrician who worked on these wrecks back in Iteeche War days, I would never have gotten as far as I did.”

  “Where is the old fellow?” Kris asked.

  “He stayed on the Typhoon. They were having the devil’s own time getting her lasers to work.”

  Strange, the death of the old Iteeche War vet seemed to make it all the more painful.

  “So, you have no idea what you were supposed to be doing?” Kris said.

  “Not really,” Karl said, finishing up his hamburger and starting on his stew. The guy really was hungry.

  DON’T YOU FEED THESE GUYS? Kris asked Jack on Nelly Net.

  THREE GOOD HOT MEALS A DAY. WELL, AS GOOD AS THE MEALS WE GET, ANYWAY. NO, THEY ALL CAME ABOARD THIN AS RAILS. THEY’D MISSED A LOT OF MEALS, KRIS.

  MORE TO THINK ABOUT.

  THAT’S WHAT I WAS THINKING.

  “There was this one night,” Karl said, studying his spoon after stuffing a huge bite into his mouth. Kris tried to avoid looking him in the face as he chewed and talked at the same time.

  “Zygfryd hooked me into going back to the station with him. I think most of the senior officers were drunk. Maybe. Or maybe he just wanted me around to answer questions about the lasers if that came up. Anyway, we ended up meeting with the skipper of the Typhoon and two of his crew at a bar. Then three other guys came along and sat down beside us. They wanted to know how we were coming along, getting those ancient tubs ready to answer bells.”

  He paused for a swig of bug juice and another spoonful of stew.

  “I started to tell them all it had taken to get the lasers up. Before I could say a word about what I needed to make them half-decent, I got cut off and asked if they would shoot. I said yes, and that seemed to make them happy. The Typhoon was having trouble with its reactors as well as its guns, but these three guys didn’t act as if they really cared, or maybe it was just that they didn’t understand. Those three cut them off, too. Then the fat one started talking to us, telling us how important our job was, how we had to get the boats out there and ready to shoot.

  “Zygfryd kicked my ankle and kind of eyed the bar. I took my beer and headed there. The other two followed right behind me, so the skippers and these three get to talking real quiet, but they don’t stay quiet. I hear the fat one saying, ‘We got to get that bitch good.’ The skipper shushed him down and got told they could replace him, but they were quieter after that. Me and the other two, we just shook our heads and ordered another beer. It was on their tab anyway.”

  Jack tossed Kris a glance, but she’d caught it. “So, you were supposed to ‘get that bitch good,’ huh?” Jack said.

  “Yeah, I don’t know who the bitch was but we were . . .”

  Karl’s eyes got big, and he blinked several times in rapid succession. His mouth fell open, half the last bite still in it.

  “Not very many women admirals in the Greenfeld Navy, are there?” Jack asked.

  Their captive gulped, not a good idea with such a full mouth. He was wracked by serious coughing. Jack pounded him on the back and was about to resort to more serious lifesaving efforts when the fellow spit up into his napkin.

  He gasped for breath for a long minute, then downed a glass of water that a helpful ensign had brought to Kris’s table. She thanked her with a smile and waited for Karl to return to those living and capable of carrying on a conversation.

  “Hello, young man. I’m Admiral, Her Royal Highness Kris Longknife, and I believe I’m that bitch you were sent out to get good.”

  “Oh, God. They sent us out in that old wreck to pick a fight with you. No wonder we’re all just about dead.”

  “Yep,” Kris said.

  “I mean, if they’d asked me to take that old battleship out to fight the Grand Duchess, I would have passed. Hell, I did. I know guys that got those old battlewagons out to St. Petersburg. Only reason they lived to tell about it was their tubs didn’t get in range of the Grand Duchess. Otherwise, she’d have toasted them the way she did the newer ships.”

  “Vicky’s got a battle fleet now?” Kris asked, backing it up with a questioning eyebrow.

  “Hell yes, she does. She’s won three, four, I don’t know how many battles. Some she won. Others were won by people on her side. Hard to tell which ones she was at. You listen to some people, and they’ll tell you she’s been at every damn shoot.”

  “She does get around,” Jack said, eyes sparkling at Kris.

  “No doubt. Well, Karl, I think you’ve earned yourself some dessert, and maybe a few drinks at the Forward Lounge.”

  “Forward Lounge?”

  “Our restaurant and pub,” Kris said.

  Jack waved his hand ever so slightly, and suddenly there were two Marines at Karl’s side. “You boys take this fellow up to the Forward Lounge. We’ll call ahead and tell them what his tab can be for the night. You two get a couple of beers on us after you go off duty.”

  “Likely after we pour him back into his cell in the brig,” the corporal said.

  “Right, and tell Gunny to up his accommodations to guest. He’s just become the admiral’s best friend.”

  “Guest?”

  “Guest with escort,” Kris added.

  “Thank you. Thank you. No hard feelings? I mean, it was never personal.”

  “Karl, get out of here before I space you,” Kris snapped.

  Karl got out quickly with his Marine escort right behind him.

  26

  “Unidentified ships entering Greenfeld controlled space, state your name, registry, and intent,” blared from the screen. Kris’s squadron had come through the jump just six hours ago, and this was the Empire’s first contact.

  Just as Nelly had predicted, the fuzzy jumps had allowed them to take the long way around and do it faster than the direct route.

  “Nelly, get me Captain Ajax.”

  “Yes, Admiral,” came back a second later.

  “Am I wrong, or are our transponders working fine?”

  “Admiral, I’m reading the transponders on all seven of the battlecruisers behind us and I’m told by Captain Grayhorse that the Intrepid reads the Princess Royal just fine. Now we are still squawking as frigates. Don’t want to scare anyone by using a nasty word like battle. Oh, and we’ve got the Princess Royal announcing itself as a Royal diplomatic ship.”

  “Hmm, so maybe their equipment isn’t working?” Kris suggested with an impish grin for Jack.

  “I wouldn’t put it past the Empire’s gear to be on the fritz,” Captain Ajax answered.

  “I wonder if we should turn off our transponders and see what kind of reaction that gets us?”

  “I assume, Your Highness, that that is a rhe
torical question.”

  “I think she’s starting to get your number,” Jack said, hand over mouth to cover his quip.

  “I think you may be right,” Kris whispered back. “Okay, Captain, have comm give me a clear channel to High Anhalt Station.”

  There was only the briefest of pauses. “Admiral, you have an open channel to High Anhalt. We will record and log your communication.”

  “Thank you, Captain, but on second thought, I think this is something better handled at a lower level. Would you really get your boss out of bed to handle a sniping little message like that?”

  Ajax grinned. “Most definitely not. Comm, put me on visual.

  “Begin message,” the captain said. Nelly kept her message on the screen in Kris’s day quarters. “High Anhalt Station, this is Commander Ajax, captain of the United Society frigate Princess Royal. I am flag captain for the commander of Frigate Squadron 22 at your service. We are making a free transit of space on a mission approved by His Royal Majesty Raymond I pursuant to a request by your Imperial Majesty, Emperor Henry I. We are in compliance with the common traditions and regulations for free transit through open space.”

  “Sent, Captain,” comm reported a moment later.

  “Good, Captain,” Kris said. “Have your navigator lay in a 1.5-gee course for Greenfeld. Advise me of any further communications. Do you have an intelligence team aboard?”

  “We have a small science team,” Ajax reported. “We expected to take on more once we headed out for Alwa.”

  “Have your team listen in to all official traffic. Inform them that they should share it with our passengers’ technical support team and that my Nelly would enjoy working with them.”

  “Codes are so much fun to break,” Nelly said, not quite with a giggle.

  “I’ll warn my team what to expect, Admiral.”

  WARN THEM?

  DOWN, NELLY. THEY’RE NEW TO YOU. YOU MUST ADMIT THAT YOU TAKE A BIT OF GETTING USED TO.

  BUT I’LL BE NICE TO THEM.

  UNLIKE TO ME.

  OF COURSE.

  Nelly reported back an hour later. The sensor team had been sweeping up a lot of message traffic since the P. Royal first jumped into the Greenfeld system. With her help, and what they could borrow from the ship for serious number crunching, they had broken several codes and discovered some interesting bits of information.

  “You were not expected so early, at least by most,” Nelly reported. “No one expected you to jump in system from that dead-end jump, and at least one message was sent by someone who didn’t expect you at all.”

  “Who was that?” Kris asked.

  “That was not sent on the official net. Rather it was an independent radio net.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What’s most interesting,” Nelly said, and you could almost hear the grin on her nonexistent face, “was the reaction that brought from the receiver. They ordered the sender to shut down immediately and not send anything more until they updated their ciphers.”

  “Someone got sloppy,” Jack said.

  “And better yet,” Nelly crowed, “we were able to catch the recoded message when it was passed along and use that message to crack several other messages that were sent to and from some major players. At least one of those major players was seriously outraged that you’d made it here alive.”

  “Is there any chance we were listening in on the Empress’s most private net?” Kris asked.

  “Unfortunately, no one said anything that allowed us to identify anyone except by their call signs, and those were very much random generated.”

  “Well,” Kris said with a shrug, “we can’t expect more than this, Nelly. Tell the team you were working with that I am very appreciative of their work and looking forward to anything they can give me in the future.”

  “Will do, Kris.”

  “So,” Jack said, “what do you think?”

  “I think it’s interesting,” Kris said. “A couple of times I got close to some Greenfeld types, and Nelly’s net collapsed. They can be very good. But apparently they can be pretty sloppy with the codes they use to send their own messages.”

  “They can dish it out,” Jack said, “but they can’t take it, huh?”

  “Pretty much,” Kris said.

  “So what do we do now?”

  Kris thought on that for a long moment, but there wasn’t really much of a decision to make. “We do what we came here to do, knowing what we know. Someone down on that planet hasn’t wanted me here since I got these orders. They’ve sent assassins and battleships. From listening to their mail, we really don’t know any more or less than we did when we sailed or after we blew away that pair of battleships.”

  “All too true.”

  “So we proceed cautiously, letting my paranoid security chief”—here Kris gave that security chief a peck on the cheek—“reinforce my own paranoia.”

  “I could get to like that.”

  “Now, let’s go visit our mediators and see what they have to tell us.”

  27

  Kris’s brain trust had taken over the Forward Lounge as a kind of club. They took their meals there and did most of their socializing. It had been interesting watching the three groups organize themselves. Initially, the three different agencies had each taken one corner of the lounge, leaving the fourth for the support group.

  Over the first couple of days of the voyage, they had stayed pretty much among themselves with their computers out and noses in them. Gradually, they’d mixed together as first one and then another shared a drink or meal. It seemed that many of the research papers that they were delving into had been written by someone on the other teams. One thing led to another, and pretty soon, they had formed combined groups to look into this or that possibility.

  One thing they had not done was invite Kris to join them. She found that . . . intriguing. So she scheduled a meeting with them after the squadron flipped ship to decelerate toward High Anhalt Station. She chose the Forward Lounge for the venue.

  The moment she stepped into the lounge, Kris found herself on familiar ground.

  The table in front of the larger screens was again reserved for her and Jack. Now it was Ensign Megan Longknife who held it for them as they made their way from the doors through four collections of tables.

  While Jack went around to sit down, Kris chose to lean against the front of the table and take the measure of the teams she’d be leaning heavily on in her search to find some way out of this mess that Vicky and the Empress had gotten themselves and their Empire into.

  Alfred Fu was the short, older man who had done the talking when Kris first met these people. As the chief mediator for Wardhaven’s Office of Mediation, he considered his age and stature a great help. “Those who are foolish enough to mistake gray hairs for senility often take my shortness for a lack of presence. That’s usually two strikes against them, and I’m home free before they figure out how I’ve swung their team members and the folks on the other side of the table to something reasonable.”

  Kris had found him easily likable the two times she had talked with him.

  I’ll have to be careful about that.

  William Pierce Gladsten was a tall, dour man. He did not look at all like his name. However, as senior arbitrator of the Wardhaven Bureau of Arbitration, he seemed to approach everything with deep gravitas whether it was his one discussion with Kris about the perils of civil wars that drag on overlong or the selection of desserts after dinner.

  The third member of Kris’s troika was Diana Frogmore. The woman appeared quite youthful despite her many years of service both as a child advocate and now as the seniormost judge in the Parental Conflict Resolution Division of the Family Court. She had been quite eager in her first meeting with Kris to point out the value of her perspective in this otherwise far-from-childish affair. “This entire civil war
may turn out to be as much a squabble between a man and his grown daughter as it is a grab for power by hungry interests.”

  “And the stepmother?” Kris asked.

  “If we view this civil war as a battle between two adults for the custody of the Empire, adding a fourth person to the mix does create a conundrum. Very messy, if I must say so.”

  Now Kris faced the four sets of tables, three with a mediation team of one sort or another and the fourth with an eclectic group of technical experts who, as Captain Ajax had reported, had been using every spare second of time they could get on the Princes Royal’s sensors to guzzle down data from the rapidly approaching planet.

  “Well,” Kris said, leaning back against the table and crossing her legs at the ankles, “what do you know now that we didn’t know before we jumped into this system?”

  With hardly a moment’s hesitation, and without glancing at notes, William Pierce Gladsten began. “Our colleagues from information management have collected quite a treasure trove of data. None of us is too sure it qualifies as information. It does appear that all that your friend Karl Spirelli told us is, within reason, accurate.”

  He cleared his throat. “It will come as no surprise. There is a civil war raging in the Greenfeld Empire.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Kris said dryly.

  Mr. Gladsten ignored her remark. “It has not touched Greenfeld. Most of the fighting is limited to planets out on the rim of the Empire. From several conversations we intercepted, the Grand Duchess appears to be doing quite well. Our support staff intercepted quite a few messages to and from people being recruited for the Empress’s Navy. Most declined. The general tenor of those declining the offer was along the lines of ‘No way in hell I’m going to let you get me killed,’ or some such.”

  “Maybe Vicky did learn a few things from her time with you,” Jack said drolly.