Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Read online

  “Smart,” Amanda said.

  ~I do not know this word,~ Jacques said.

  ~Are you from the ship?~ the woman asked.

  ~Ship? I was born under this sky. My mother spoke of a ship, a world with no sky, but my father would have no talk of it and shushed her. Are you from a ship?~

  The woman seemed hesitant to go on, but finally admitted, ~Yes, I was born of the ship.~

  “Notice she said the ship, not a ship,” Amanda said. “I wish I’d taken more courses in sociology. It think that’s important.”

  ~I dream of being on the ship,~ Jacques said. ~Is that where the Enlightened One is?~

  ~Yes, he guides our ship. He guides us to the light. You guide us to food. Are you the Enlightened One under this sky?~

  “How’s he going to answer that question?” Kris asked.

  “Very carefully,” Amanda repeated.

  ~I am young. Aren’t Enlightened Ones full of years?~

  ~Yes, yes,~ the woman agreed. She looked back at the others, who waited expectantly. ~Are there young Enlightened Ones?~ she asked them.

  The others, Kris would not have put any of them much past thirty, had no answer for her. The young woman turned from Jacques and rejoined the others. They squatted down in a circle, and their talk was long and animated.

  “Nelly, are you getting this?”

  “I’m getting all the words, Kris. The meaning, not so much. There are a lot of allusions to people and places that I can’t connect. I don’t think any of them ever saw any Enlightened One except the one they always had. One of them thinks there is a ceremony for the death of an Enlightened One and the recognition of a new one. Oh, oh, that got him in trouble. They’re saying that it was his crazy ideas that got them dumped here in the first place.”

  On-screen, one of the men shoved two of the others away.

  “He’s saying that they did nothing to cause them to be dropped here. They’re here, oh, that’s a bad turn of phrase, but I think it means to impress the others and make sure they meet their work assignments.”

  “What were the actual words?” Amanda said. “That might tell us something.”

  “It’s not nice,” Nelly said. “I think it’s something like ‘we are made to eat shit so that the others will be happy with their porridge.’”

  “E-uw,” Kris said. “You’re right, Nelly. I’ll stick with your first translation.”

  “You take the nice words, Princess,” Amanda said. “I’ll stick with the original. They’re traveling in a bound space, recycling everything. After hearing that, I have to wonder how well it works. As well as who gets the shit and who gets the porridge. And who maybe gets the best available?”

  “You think you’re seeing fractures along class lines?” Kris asked.

  “This Enlightened One is clearly at the top. ‘May the king or emperor live forever,’ was a popular illusion back when we had potentates with divine pretensions. I’m thinking we’ve got something like that here.”

  Kris frowned as she let that bounce around in her head. “A hundred thousand years ago, someone pounded the living hell out of the next planet over. Someone abandoned this planet to go roving among the stars looking for any poor bastard that might rise up and do unto these as they were busy doing unto them.”

  Kris eyed Jack and Amanda. They nodded agreement back. She went on.

  “Somehow, these ships multiplied, but always, they kept the hate alive. No, let’s make that fear. It seems there is always someone to harangue the people. That must be the ‘Enlightened One’ we saw giving The Word to the folks in the first mother ship we blasted to bits.”

  Again, Kris only got agreement from the others.

  “It appears that this planet serves as some kind of dumping grounds for any problem children. If anyone won’t conform, get with the program, or maybe just voices doubts, they get a one-way ticket to here. Or maybe all you have to be is slow to get your work done if they don’t have enough examples to scare the others.”

  “I think you may have something there, Kris,” Jack said.

  “So how do we break into this chain of insanity and make them see that the whole universe isn’t out to get them? At least not if they aren’t out to get us?” Kris said.

  She got no answer from the other two. She let the silence stretch for a minute or more, then made her call.

  “Jack, would you please go down there and bring me back one of those men.”

  “They stink pretty bad, Kris.”

  “I’m not taking him to bed, Jack.” That got her a laugh from the other two. “You can douse him in the brig’s head, but I want to talk to him. Nelly has a vocabulary now. We need to find out just how bad this thing is. There’s got to be a way to reason with them.”

  “I think you’re an optimist,” Amanda said.

  “No doubt. The alternative, however, is just too bloody to contemplate.”

  That got nods from the other two.

  “I’ll be back for supper,” Jack said.

  “I’ll see that the wardroom has some good chow for you and Jacques,” Kris said.

  “They’ll need to keep it warm for later,” Amanda said. “Jacques is all mine.”

  19

  Kris watched on the screens in her day quarters as Jacques led the youngest man away from the group. Ostensibly, he was going to show the fellow how to set traps to capture a bunch of the foxlike things for a feast.

  The fellow went eagerly.

  Until he spotted Jack and his Marines.

  Jacques had led the alien quite a bit away from the others, downstream and out of the woods along the edge of a grassy meadow. They’d set three string traps and were working on the fourth when the Marines stepped out of the woods ahead of them.

  The young fellow took one look at the humans in military gear and bolted.

  Jacques got a handful of his ratty uniform, but that was all he got. The man pulled away, leaving Jacques with nothing but fabric.

  The naked anthropologist took off after his erstwhile friend with the Marines hot on his heels, but it was a short chase.

  The young fellow raced straight for the stream—and threw himself headlong from the bank into a rocky stretch of water.

  Jacques got to the bank and came to a halt. Jack wasn’t much behind him. Kris got the feed off Jack’s helmet camera.

  “Oh my God,” Amanda prayed beside Kris.

  All Kris could do was grit her teeth in frustration.

  There, the bank was a good two meters high. The alien had thrown himself headfirst from it. Right at the rocks below.

  Now he lay in the stream, his head smashed in, his blood and brains being laved by the water and carried downstream.

  “I guess that didn’t go as well as we’d expected,” Jack said.

  “Now what?” Jacques asked.

  Kris let out a long sigh. She didn’t like what she was going to say next. She hated kidnappers. With Father and Mother, without a moment’s qualm, she’d stood there and watched as Eddy’s kidnappers swung at the end of their ropes. Hell, she’d killed kidnappers without so much as a second glance every time one of them made the mistake of crossing her path.

  Kris gritted her teeth and said the words that made her a kidnapper.

  “Jacques, go back to the group. Separate one of the mothers with a babe at her breast from them. Jack, set a trap. Sleepy dart the mother. Bring both of them up here.”

  “Kris!” came from both men. Jack of all men would know how much of her soul this was costing Kris.

  “You heard me. I am going to talk to one of these aliens. A mother with a babe at her breast is not going to kill herself. Bring one of them to me.”

  “But sleepy dart her just in case,” Jack said.

  “Yes.”

  “And how do I do this?” Jacques said.

  Kris did not need more talk. “We’ve watched the mothers go off into the bushes with you,” Kris snapped. “Do it again. Only this time, take her someplace where Jack’s got you covered.
Then distract her. If you think you can get her to fall asleep after your fun and save Jack the fuss of having to sleepy dart her, all the better, but I want her up here tonight.”

  “Kris Longknife,” Amanda said at Kris’s elbow. “You are a bastard.”

  “I second the notion,” Jacques growled.

  “I come from a long line of folks that only entered the church to bark and bite at the preacher’s heels. Tell me something about myself I don’t know,” Kris snapped. “Now, you’ve got your orders. Make it happen.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral,” Jack said.

  Amanda said nothing as she stormed out of Kris’s day quarters and slammed the door behind her.

  20

  Kris bounced the baby on her hip. The little girl had been cleaned up, had a diaper on for probably the first time in her life, and looked rather cute in an outfit taken off a teddy bear.

  Kris hadn’t asked who had a teddy bear this big, but she’d suspected from the hushed conversation she’d partially overheard that it had been offered up by one of the guys who worked the reactor.

  Kris was under the impression that the reactor crew had to pass the highest psychological tests. When things settled down, she might have to look into that.

  The woman had also been cleaned up and dressed in civilian clothes donated by one of the contract cooks. She was still asleep.

  Jack had had to sleepy dart her. Her capture had not gone well.

  It hadn’t been allowed to go as bad as the young man’s attempted capture, but still she’d spotted the Marines moving in even though Jacques had been doing his manful best to distract her.

  Now she slept on the couch in Kris’s day cabin. Kris had Gunny go over her day quarters to childproof them. He’d called in the help of several young women Marines who removed a lot of objects that Kris would never had considered a hazard to a baby.

  That just went to show what Kris knew about babies.

  Now childproofed, Kris hoped her quarters were also alien-suicide-proof.

  Jack, Amanda, Jacques, Penny, and Masao rounded out the group eyeing the sleeping woman. The military were in uniform, khakis all. Jacques suggested that the earth tones might soften their impression. Jacques and Amanda were in tan shipsuits.

  “When do you think she’ll wake up?” Kris asked. The baby was getting fretful. “I think she’s hungry.”

  “Check her diaper,” Penny suggested. “Is it wet or dirty?”

  “You check it,” Kris said, and passed the cranky child off to her intel officer.

  She made the required checks.

  “She’s wet. Do we have any spare diapers?”

  Jack pointed to a pile of baby gear on Kris’s conference table. “When Musashi fitted out the Wasp, they equipped us for humanitarian missions, per their law. We have all we need to take aboard and care for hundreds of civilians for a month. I don’t even think they charged us for the package. All their ships come equipped for kids.”

  Penny went to do her duty by the little one, with Masao right behind her. From the looks in both their eyes, Kris suspected that procreation was contagious. Whatever Penny’s fears might be of bringing death and destruction in her matrimonial wake, this baby was pulling the two caregivers closer together.

  The woman on the couch started at the sound of her baby’s fussing. Still, she did not rouse. Kris settled into the armchair across from the woman’s head and waited.

  At the conference table, with the baby dry again, Penny put formula powder into a bottle of water and offered it to the little one. It took the nipple hungrily, sucked heartily for a moment, then spat out the bottle and began to cry. It was a full-throated wail, not at all tentative.

  “I don’t think their kids like our kind of milk,” Penny said.

  On the couch, the woman stirred. This time, she fully surfaced. She glanced around, eyes wide, then spotted her child and was off the couch and racing toward the baby before anyone could stop her.

  Not that anyone did. Penny handed the baby off to its mother without a bobble.

  Baby in hand, the alien woman quickly opened the top of her borrowed dress and offered a breast to her child. The little one greedily began to pull down lunch.

  Only when the child was settled did the woman look around, eyes going wider still.

  ~You are on a ship,~ Nelly said in the language Jacques had used among the dirtside. Those on Nelly Net heard it in Standard in their minds. Masao and Amanda heard it from their own computers.

  ~This is not the ship,~ the woman said, eyes narrowing as she took the room in.

  ~No,~ Kris agreed. ~This is our ship.~

  ~Vermin do not have ships,~ was spat more than said.

  Jack edged around to cover the door, one hand behind his back where he carried his automatic. Masao put himself between the woman and Penny.

  Jacques slowly approached the woman. ~You have shared food with me. I speak your words. I gave you food to eat. You know what all of me looks like,~ he said, running his hands down his side.

  ~No. No! NO!~ she screamed and began to sidle away, eyes searching the room like a trapped animal desperate for any way out. She paused for a moment, then charged Jack, her hands out, fingers reaching with their long nails for his eyes.

  With one hand he used his automatic to put a sleepy dart in the terrified woman’s belly, then used the other to reach out and catch the child as she collapsed like a pricked balloon.

  “That didn’t go as well as I had hoped,” Kris said.

  “We’re vermin to her,” Jacques said. “And their idea of vermin is a lot uglier than ours, considering the way she said that.” The anthropologist shook his head.

  “Kris, I suspect that did not meet your definition of a talk with the aliens,” Jack said.

  “Not even close,” Kris agreed.

  “So, what do we do next?” Amanda asked.

  Kris rubbed her scalp. The tension was getting unbearable. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  Penny took the child from Jack. It continued to voice its hunger for all to take note of. “Jack, does the equipment we’ve got include a breast pump?” Penny asked.

  That got her a lot of blank stares.

  “Okay, folks. The baby is hungry, and you just decked her meal ticket. I also suspect that her breasts are full. Jacques, do you remember the last time she nursed the child?”

  The anthropologists gave her the manly shrug of one whose interests in that portion of the female anatomy did not extend to sustenance.

  “If she goes too long without emptying her milk, we risk her breasts drying up. And then what will we do about food for the child?” Penny said, exasperated. “Nelly, do you have the schematics for a breast pump?”

  “Yes, I do,” the Magnificent Nelly said. “You’ll find one on the table next to the diapers now.”

  And there was one.

  Amanda went for it. “I watched my mom express milk for my youngest brother,” she said. “I don’t know how it will work with her knocked out and having sleepy dart in her blood, but let’s see how this works. Would you strapping men mind lift her back onto the couch?”

  Masao and Jacques did. Jack stayed close, automatic in hand. The alien mom was an easy lift. As soon as they had her back on the couch, the men hastily withdrew to behind Kris’s desk, about as far from the women as possible.

  “Note how our strong men get skittish at the sight of a woman’s working breast,” Amanda said, attaching the breast pump and activating it. “They just love to get their mitts on our boobs,” she said, aiming a scathing glance at the men, “but let a woman put her mammary glands to the business God intended, and they run.”

  “I thought you women might want your privacy,” Jack offered, lamely.

  “Thank you,” Kris said. Her brain failed to suppress a sudden question. Might she actually develop some mammary glands, as Amanda so professionally put it, if she was nursing a child of her own? Their own.

  How would Jack take to that?

  Damn, this re
productive thing is contagious.

  The breast pump worked. The bottle attached to it slowly filled. Kris left the woman and child in Penny’s and Amanda’s capable hands and turned to the men.

  “Okay, guys, I’m open to suggestions. How do we get this woman to talk to us?”

  They stared at her. She stared at them. There was a lot of staring and not a lot of ideas being verbalized.

  Penny joined them, jostling the baby on her hip. It sucked at one of her fingers.

  Kris eyed the quieted child.

  “I swiped one of those sugar packets from the mess,” Penny said. “I put a bit of it on my finger. The kid may not like our milk, but it sure likes our sugar. Maybe we should try putting some sugar in our formula. Or chocolate.”

  “But would it actually get any benefit from the food?” Jacques asked.

  “You ate their food. Did you starve?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “We need another bottle, or two,” Amanda said. The first one looked full.

  Two bottles appeared on the conference table, and Penny took them to Amanda.

  “Nelly, spin out a small sample bottle. Amanda, if you’ll fill the small one, we’ll get the boffins to do their thing. We’ll know exactly what’s in mother bug-eyed-monster milk in no time.”

  “Doing it,” Amanda answered, as Penny retrieved the small bottle, and Amanda switched it onto the pump. After that one was full, they switched breasts and began draining the other one.

  Kris turned back to the guys. “I have a problem. You guys are not helping.”

  “We’ve tried everything that I can think of,” Jacques said.

  “How do we get her to sit still and talk to me?” Kris repeated, with more than a tinge of irritation.

  Again, the men came up with only silence.

  Kris turned to Penny, now feeding a very hungry child from the first bottle. It seemed happy enough now.

  The mother wants the baby, Kris thought. We have the baby.

  “If we show her that the baby is fine,” Kris said slowly, and half to herself, “and tell her that she can’t have the baby until she talks to me . . .”

  “You’re a hard woman, Kris Longknife,” Penny said.