Kris Longknife 13 - Unrelenting Page 13

  “I wondered why your heart rate was so elevated. Usually you wait for it to slow down before coming back in after making love to Jack.”

  “This morning never got to that point,” Kris growled.

  “How tacky of the shooter to interrupt you,” Nelly continued in her biting vein. “I am attempting to get situational awareness.”

  “Wait until the bastard shoots at us again,” Jack said, struggling into his tight spider silks.

  “How many rounds were fired?” Nelly asked with maddening calm.

  “Ten,” Kris and Jack said as one.

  “Then the shooter is likely out of ammunition,” Nelly said.

  “Out?” Jack demanded.

  “Most civilian hunters are only issued two stripper clips,” Nelly said. “The gun stolen last week from one hunter’s home had only two clips with it. I suspect we now know where the rifle went.”

  “Why didn’t someone tell me we had a rifle missing?” Kris demanded.

  “We were kind of out of pocket and busy with other matters,” Jack said, now grabbing his own Sal and putting on his skull harness. “Two more went missing last night,” he added.

  “I think our local problems just took a whole new turn for the worse,” Kris said.

  “Very likely,” Nelly agreed, dryly.

  Jack came up next to Kris. Both stayed in the shadows.

  “Can we call for backup?” Kris asked.

  “I’ve already got a fire team of Marines heading this way as fast as their electric cart will take them,” Nelly said. “Is that okay with you, General?”

  “How many trails are there off that headland?” Jack asked.

  “Only one,” the computer answered.

  “Tell them to head for the trail. And be careful. How many rounds went missing with those other two rifles?”

  “Ten rounds each.”

  “Thank heavens for small favors,” Kris said.

  “Or tight policies,” Jack added.

  “You safe in there?” was shouted in the voice of the resort’s owner.

  “Pretty much,” Jack answered.

  “I have a rifle, single-shot, black powder. I’m coming in, if it’s okay with you two.”

  “Move fast, and don’t point the rifle at anyone I know,” Jack answered.

  A moment later, Joe joined them. He ran fast and low and kept his long rifle pointed mostly at the ground.

  Inside, he handed the weapon off to Jack.

  “I thought I heard two kinds of shooting going on,” he said, glancing at their service automatics.

  “These are too short-ranged to hit much of anything that far away, but they can sure scare a first-timer who doesn’t know better,” Kris said.

  Jack took the long rifle and edged closer to the door; his eyes squinting as he studied the tree-covered point.

  “You think whoever this was isn’t a hunter?”

  “It’s a long shot from that point,” Jack said. “I’d have gotten closer, but he shot ten rounds and only grazed me.”

  “Oh,” the proprietor said, spotting the blood dripping down Jack’s back. “Let me get you our first-aid kit.”

  “You sure you want to risk going out there?” Kris said.

  “I came in and didn’t get shot at. I’m willing to try going back for some bandages.” With no further discussion, he dashed out the door and was gone.

  As Joe had predicted, no one shot at him.

  “The Marines are at the crossroads where the road goes here or to the point. They’re starting up the other road,” Nelly reported.

  “I think they can forget it,” Kris said.

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed.

  “Oh,” Nelly said. “Is that a boat?”

  “Yep,” Kris said, “and it’s heading across the bay for the mainland. Nelly, do we have any assets that can stop that boat?”

  “Sorry, Kris. All the aircraft are out on survey work, and none of them are armed, anyway. Same for the boats. Nothing is in port or heading back in.”

  “Everyone is busy putting food on the table,” Kris said, dryly.

  “Pretty much,” Nelly agreed.

  “It may be time for Alwa to get a police force that is good for more than collecting drunks and breaking up domestic disturbances,” Kris said. “Nelly, contact all the usual folks on Alwa, we need a meeting of the colonial establishment pronto.”

  Kris eyed Jack’s wound. “And a doctor waiting for us just as soon as we get back into town.”

  “It’s just a flesh wound,” Jack insisted.

  “I’ll tell you that when I get one.”

  “I truly intend to never let you.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  27

  The drive back was as fast as Kris could make the electric car go. Jack’s “flesh wound” was bleeding through the bandage Joe had put on it.

  Still, Jack did what he needed to do. The Marines reported finding the place the shooter had used. He’d policed up his brass but left an empty stripper clip. They also found where he’d tied up the boat.

  Jack called up a team to find the boat. A search along the shoreline identified several small craft. None had rifles in them or showed evidence of a weapon. That left the local volunteer constabulary walking the beat looking for a colonial or Alwan toting a rifle.

  They stopped four coming back into town with one of those elephant-size things towing a cart with a half dozen large hunks of dead meat. A check of their ammunition allotment and the hits in the targets showed only two rounds not accounted for.

  With dead ends everywhere, Kris appealed to a higher authority. “Captain Drago.”

  “Yes, Your Highness?”

  “I’ve been shot at,” Kris said, without preamble.

  “Well, Alwa’s been a bit slow, but I see it’s caught up with every other planet you’ve visited.”

  “Thank you, Captain. Could you get a longboat full of forensic investigators, US and Musashi, down here pronto? What we’re facing is beyond the locals’ toolkit.”

  “They’ll be on their way. Expect them in, ah, about an hour. As luck would have it, we just passed over you a while ago.”

  “Just get them down here. Oh, and the best surgeon you can lay your hands on.”

  “Surgeon. Why?”

  “Jack has a ‘little flesh wound’ that won’t stop bleeding.”

  “It’s not bleeding much,” Jack shouted to get on net.

  “He’s not looking at it. I am.”

  “So you stopped one in the back, big fellow?”

  “I was between her and the shooter,” Jack answered back.

  “You think this wound will need more than the local sawbones can handle?”

  “He’s my Marine boss, husband, and father of my baby. I want him with a good arm when it comes to changing messy diapers.”

  “Most certainly, Your Highness,” Kris’s flag captain answered with too much of a laugh behind it. “Doc Meade has been notified and has a team moving.”

  That left Kris trying to get a few extra volts out of her car’s batteries.

  It was the longest hour of her life.

  As Haven came in sight, a Marine on an electric bike was waiting for her.

  “He’s signaling you to follow him,” Jack said, far too weakly for Kris’s tastes.

  She did. Haven had a hospital; she’d just never made its acquaintance. She followed the cyclist right up to the emergency room door.

  Doc Meade was waiting for her. “We’ve got to quit meeting like this. If it’s not one of you, it’s the other,” she said, but a young male doctor was already pulling Jack’s spider silks down and examining the wound.

  “Just a flesh wound,” Jack insisted.

  The young doctor’s, “Yeah, right,” didn’t sound at all right to Kris.

  She made to follow Jack into the emergency room, but Doc Meade intercepted her. “He’s the best cutter we’ve got. If I stop a bullet, I want him working on me,” she said, and steered Kris into the waiti
ng room.

  Kris let herself be steered but let her annoyance show. “If he’s so good, why are you here?”

  “Admiral, I’m here to keep you out of the operating room,” the doctor said, with more than a bit of twinkle in her eyes.

  “Am I that obvious?”

  “Yep.”

  “Am I that much of a problem?”

  “Oh, yes. You’re the admiral, and you’re a Longknife. It doesn’t come any worse. Now, I see a posse coming. My guess is they’re for you. Why don’t you mosey along and do some admiral and Longknife stuff and let us do our doctoring stuff?”

  Kris turned to follow the good doctor’s glance. Granny Rita, Ada, and a small collection of colonials and Alwans were heading in from one door. From the opposite direction came Penny and Masao with Brigadier Hayakawa of the Musashi Marines and now Jack’s deputy commander.

  Kris sighed. “Doctor, you tend to your knitting, and I’ll tend to mine.”

  In a moment, Kris was surrounded by a tidal wave of concerns. Half about Jack. The other half centered on the shooter.

  Kris raised her arm for silence and, surprisingly, got it.

  “Is there a conference room we can take over?” she asked.

  “Follow me,” Ada said, and everyone did. Down the main hall, up a flight of stairs, and around another turn took them to a large room decked out with training aides. Several tables accompanied by uncomfortable-looking chairs faced a blackboard.

  “Form the table in a square,” Kris said, and willing hands quickly made it happen.

  “Choose anyplace you want,” Kris said when it was done, and she found the Navy and Marines at her elbow, Ada and her people filled up two sides, and Granny Rita, Iago, and an Alwan Kris couldn’t remember meeting sat with her.

  “Now, for the record and my sanity, will someone let Dr. Meade know where we are so when they are done using Jack for a cross-stitch class, they can tell me. We Longknifes are known for juggling a lot, but they’ve got a very big part of me, and I want to know everything as soon as they know it. Okay?”

  Iago bolted from the room.

  “Okay,” Kris said, taking over the meeting by the simple step of not sitting down when the others had. “I see three problems. Someone tried to kill me this morning and did wing Jack. Who did it? Why? How do we catch them and bring them to justice?”

  That got nods around the tables. Kris went on.

  “Second, rifles are being stolen. Who’s doing it? Why? How do we recover what’s gone missing and how do we keep any more of our hard-won goods and gear from walking out?”

  That drew grim looks.

  “Lastly, I’ve been saying that the times, they are a changing here on Alwa. Are we now witnessing changes that we don’t want? Are they out of our control? Are they taking us down a rabbit hole that we don’t need to see the inside of?”

  “Yeah,” Granny Rita said.

  “The first two are practical problems,” Kris said, finishing up. “The last one represents a major difference in philosophy between us and some people. Ada, are there colonials in that possible camp, or is it just Roosters?”

  “You sure it couldn’t be some of your dragooned workers up topside?” Granny Rita put in. “Remember, Admiral, you’ve already had one mutiny from that Sampson woman, and I was there when some really disgruntled folks backed you up against the wall demanding passage home. Sometimes, we command types make pretty harsh demands on folks and expect them to deliver. I know. I done that in my misspent youth.”

  Kris could only shrug at the question. “It’s possible. I don’t see that we have a lot of choices in the matter. If we want to keep breathing, both us and the Alwans have to keep fighting.”

  “I don’t think Granny Rita is saying that we should stop fighting, Viceroy,” Ada put in. “I am wondering if we are maybe feeding the cow too little for all the milk, or defense, we expect it to produce.”

  “You too, Ada?” Kris said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know why someone took a shot at you and hit Jack instead,” the colonial prime minister was quick to say. “Whoever did it is not talking to you, to me, to anyone. I’m just wondering if we’re pushing everyone too hard to get ready for something that isn’t here. That for now, isn’t even on our radar.”

  Kris scowled at the woman.

  Ada did not give ground. “I mean, three times you fought them. Three times you beat them. We have only the ravings of that old woman that more are coming. Can’t we celebrate? Throw a party or two? I’m just asking.”

  “And if she’s asking,” Penny put in, “some folks must be way past asking. Closer to demanding.”

  “Have you picked up anything?” Kris said, turning to her intelligence officer.

  “Kris, I haven’t been listening for anything, so, of course, I haven’t picked up anything. Maybe I should have brought Amanda, or Jacques, or Pipra. They’re more likely to have their finger on the pulse of civilian things.”

  “And you, Ada?”

  “I know our folks have been working nonstop since your ships showed up in orbit. Working nonstop and without much of a beer ration. Don’t get me wrong. We’re eating better than we have in anyone’s memory. We look to eat a whole lot better in a few more weeks. I sure want to throw a harvest festival when we’re done. We’re working harder, sunup to sundown on more things than I ever thought we could. Yes, folks are tired. Dog tired.”

  She paused to take the measure of her subordinates. “We can’t tell you how grateful we are that you’ve thrown back one attack on our star system. That you’ve gone out and stopped those damn suicide attack ships. Don’t ever fail to hear our thank-you in there, but Kris, you’re driving my folks mighty hard. I suspect you’re driving your industrial workers hard. Could it be possible that you’re driving even your Sailors and Marines too hard?”

  “You saying one of them shot at me,” Kris growled. Then answered her own question. “No, if a Marine got his sights on me, I’d be dead.”

  Granny Rita accepted that answer with two raised eyebrows.

  Kris scowled. “I thought we just had an agreement with the Alwans on the six-month plan for their work and their rewards.”

  “No, Kris,” Granny Rita said, “they accepted what you promised them. There’s a big difference. You offered them more nice stuff. They accepted. Would they like to have even more nice stuff? You didn’t ask them that.”

  Kris swallowed her scowl. “No, I didn’t.”

  Ada turned to Kuno, her coordinator for Mining and Minerals. “What are you hearing from our friends among the Alwans?”

  Kuno paused before saying, “They’re grateful for the rewards they can earn. But they do think we’re skimping on the rewards and asking a lot for what we give them. They know a lot of production goes to the Navy. I don’t know how they know it, but they do. The ones that have been with us for a generation or three tell me that the Roosters just out of the trees are lazy and want too much for too little work. No question in their minds about that. Still, I’ve had at least one of them ask if they aren’t sucking hind teat. Strange phrase for a bird, but I’m sure they picked it up from some human, no doubt,” he said, eyeing Granny Rita.

  “No doubt,” the old girl said, as innocent as a former Longknife could manage.

  “We know there is all-out opposition among some of the older birds. Even among the new-line birds, there are a lot of undercurrents out there, and they haven’t been looked at.” Kuno took a deep breath. “I’d say we’ve got some issues that we need to look at real hard in the coming months if we’re to hold everything together.”

  He turned to one of the Alwans at the table, but she was carefully keeping her eyes on the table, obviously uncomfortable in the presence of human disagreement. And clearly uncomfortable with our way of handling it.

  Kris wanted to spit out, “If we’re going to still be here, we better reinforce the fleet,” but she held her tongue. The cow analogy was a good one. You could only get so much milk out of one o
f those things. When she’d campaigned for Father in the farm belt, she’d been shown one, and even given a chance to milk it.

  She still had nightmares about that.

  The basic point was clear. She had to feed them if she wanted to get anything back. And maybe she was being too stingy.

  Kris sat down. “Okay, you have my attention. I see that we need to examine our distribution of production again, but first, can we look at the two initial problems I identified? Who took a shot at me? Can we capture them? Who is stealing weapons, and how do we stop that loss?”

  “I think we can definitely do that,” Ada said.

  Beside Kris, General Hayakawa breathed a sigh of relief as they got down to practical matters.

  28

  An hour later, General Hayakawa was smiling as orders went out to recover all rifles and store them in four armories around town and the colony. Marines would be in charge of securing the weapons lockers and would use all available tech to see that the weapons stayed put.

  Which wasn’t to say that anyone who wanted to couldn’t go hunting—they just had to sign for the rifle and the ammunition, and had to turn it back in when they said they’d be back.

  “That’s a good idea,” Anyang, the man coordinating Public Safety, said. “If any of our hunters get lost or run into major trouble and miss their return date, we can turn out the guard for them. I’ve been worried about folks going deeper into the woods. Game’s starting to get scarce close to the settlements. We’re going to lose a hunting party sooner or later. This might make it later.”

  “Will we have any problems with this change?” Ada asked.

  “No,” Anyang said. “The three guys who had their rifles stolen took a lot of ribbing, and no one wants to be the next joker to have his gun stolen. If we have problems, I’ll let you know.”

  “Admiral,” General Hayakawa said, “I’ve got a report from the forensic teams that went over all the boats that were tied up along the shore.”

  “All the boats?” Ada said.

  “There were only five, ma’am, that the shooter might have used,” the general answered. “Four are clean. The other has gun residue on it. There is strong evidence that a fired rifle and spent brass were in it sometime today, but no longer.”