Intrepid Read online

  “Worse than when you were in those schools?” Kris asked.

  Abby just snorted. “And you thank Nelly for me. She’s a real good teacher.”

  I AM A REAL GOOD TEACHER, Nelly chortled in Kris’s head.

  YES, YOU ARE A REAL GOOD TEACHER, Kris agreed.

  AND YOU SHOULD CHILL OUT.

  GO TEACH THE LITTLE GIRL. YOU ARE NOT MY SHRINK, Kris snapped. Maybe it was time to quit upgrading Nelly every time something new came along. It seemed that every new addition to Nelly, no matter what it was supposed to do, just gave her more of an attitude.

  I HEARD THAT. AND IT’S ’TUDE. THAT IS WHAT CARA CALLS IT.

  Oh Lord, now my computer has a real live teenage girl to show her the ropes. What have I done to myself?

  Kris headed for the bridge. At least she’d get some respect there.

  2

  Kris didn’t make it halfway to the bridge before Professor mFumbo waylaid her.

  “When are we going to do some science?” he demanded in a deep bass voice that almost made the bulkheads vibrate.

  “I understand that pirates have this tendency to kill or enslave the crews of the ships they capture,” Kris said as matter-of-factly as she could. “Read it in the papers. Grampa Trouble says he even crossed paths with pirates once. Ended up one of their slaves.”

  “I believe it happened twice,” mFumbo said, scratching his chin. “One really must wonder how smart someone is who made that mistake twice,” he said, ambiguously, then smiled and moved to clarify his remarks. “I should have thought that any educatable man would learn quickly that Marines do not good slaves make.”

  Kris allowed a smile only when he finally got around to saying just who was lacking in smarts. “So you can see how I might put a higher priority on killing pirates even if I must leave some of the secrets of the universe to wait a bit longer.”

  “Regrettable. Very regrettable.”

  Kris managed to get three paces closer to the bridge, but the professor stayed right in step with her. “Ever wondered why we didn’t spot these fuzzy jump points before?”

  He raised an eyebrow as Kris came to a halt.

  “I have been kind of curious,” Kris admitted.

  “I have been very curious,” Nelly said.

  “I should expect you to be, Miss Nelly,” mFumbo said, with a slight bow toward Kris’s neck where Nelly rode. More of a bow than he’d ever afforded Kris’s princess status.

  “It seems that it was only five years ago that all our work with the alien technology on Santa Maria finally paid off with an improved atom laser.”

  “I hadn’t heard that we cracked any of their technology,” Kris said.

  “We didn’t actually. It was something we discovered ourselves while trying to unlock something of theirs. Anyway, we discovered different harmonics in gravity waves and a way to sense them with a tuned atom laser. It should lower the cost of atom lasers in time, but right now, they’re horribly expensive.”

  “But the Resolute just happened to have one,” Kris said slowly, wondering just who had been jobbing whom out at Chance.

  “Yes. Interesting, that,” mFumbo said.

  “So if we had fired up the Patton’s atom laser,” Kris said, a smile growing, “we would not have found the fuzzy jump points.”

  “It was an old Iteeche war-era cruiser,” he said, shaking his head. “No, not likely.”

  SO I WAS WRONG. YOU WERE RIGHT. SUE ME, Nelly shot back to Kris alone. Where had that come from? What had Kris set herself up for when she let one little twelve-year-old slip of a girl on board? That girl had to go.

  YOU WILL NOT SHIP HER OFF THE WASP. CARA IS MY FRIEND. CARA IS GOING TO STAY HERE AS LONG AS I DO.

  And was that a threat? Kris thought, careful to keep it to herself.

  But before Kris could say anything, Professor mFumbo apparently mistook the silence between them to mean he was free to go on to a different subject, “We’ve found out something interesting about these fuzzy jump points.”

  “Yes,” Kris said. “What?” Nelly demanded.

  “They don’t wander as much as the other ones do. Something about their harmonic nature allows them to stay closer to a single point. Either that, or the fuzziness around them helps us follow them more easily.”

  “That should cut down on bad jumps,” Kris said.

  “Very likely.”

  “So what are we going to find behind these jump points? New territory opened up toward the end of the Three’s time,” Nelly said pensively, “or the center of their civilization, held together by the latest jump-point technology?”

  “A very good question that I can do nothing to answer while the princess here is busy chasing miscreants. Or maybe I can.”

  “Or maybe you can?” Kris asked, wondering what sort of trap the professor had set for her.

  “Since the jump points are more steady, we think we can send an automated probe to do an initial look behind them. You know there is a fuzzy jump point in this system?”

  Kris admitted that she did.

  “If we could send a remote probe to check out the other system, we could have it waiting here for us when we return and maybe save ourselves some wasted time.”

  “But merchant ships don’t launch probes. If a pirate ship enters a system and sees us and a probe in it, it will be a dead give-away that we aren’t what we’re trying to appear.”

  “Yes, but if you held off launching the probe until just before we jump out of this system . . .”

  “And since you’ve already readied the probe?”

  “Yes, there is that matter,” the professor admitted, his hands open, palms up, in polite supplication to Kris.

  “I’ll tell Captain Drago that you want to launch a probe,” Kris said.

  “Thank you very much,” Professor mFumbo said, and headed in the opposite direction from Kris.

  Kris watched his retreating back. New technologies. Not so much our cracking the secrets of the Three alien cultures that built the jump points, as our discovering this or that on our own as we bounced our heads off the lockbox of their still-unfathomable knowledge.

  Well, humans learned many ways.

  No, human scientists learned. Others, like pirates, might upgrade their equipment. But the pirates Kris hunted weren’t all that different from the cutthroats the Romans put down in the ancient Mediterranean Sea.

  “Two minutes to zero gravity,” the Wasp’s MC-1 announced as Kris entered the bridge.

  “Morning, Lieutenant,” Captain Drago said.

  “Morning, Captain, any unknowns in system?”

  “The answer is the same as it’s been the last two days. No, ma’am, though of course a hostile could have entered the system from the other jump point an hour ago, but we’ll be another half hour finding out.”

  Kris repeated the old joke. “Captain, you really should do something about that speed-of-light lag time.”

  Drago gave the same answer. “Isn’t that a more proper job for those unemployed boffins of yours rather than this only slightly reformed pirate?” And it was true that the bridge crew of the Wasp did look more like pirates than respectable sailors. From the captain’s purple coat, gold earring, and white bell bottoms to his navigator in cutoff shorts and tank top, the crew appeared delightfully reprobate.

  And the Wasp had started life as a pirate ship. She now smelled much better. The crew might be flamboyant, but hygiene was a daily concern. And being the best former sailors Wardhaven’s spy master had ever contracted for, they knew their job backward and forward.

  Especially the twenty-four-inch pulse lasers the Wasp didn’t officially have.

  “Ah, Professor mFumbo tells me the project is impossible. Something about relativity. Oh, speaking of the good doctor, he has a probe he wants to launch.”

  “So he told me,” the captain said. “I told him if it was okay with you, it was okay with me.”

  “Hm,” Kris said. “I told him about the same thing, but I don’t remember hi
m mentioning you.”

  “He must have been an impossible child to parent,” Sulwan Kann muttered from her place at the navigator’s station.

  “That assumes he had parents, a fact not in evidence,” the captain muttered.

  “Is there any problem with launching this probe of his just before we jump?” Kris said, trying to stay on topic. Despite the professor’s approach to getting their okay, if it was safe, the scientists deserved some research.

  Captain Drago nodded. “I’ve had my crew check out the probe. Separation should be no problem. It won’t get under way until we are far from here. We’ll do it.”

  “Weightlessness in ten seconds,” Sulwan announced. Kris scrambled for her station to the far left of the captain, where she could keep an eye on offensive weapons and sensors.

  At zero, the Wasp cut all power and did a flip to put the bridge head on as it drifted to a halt a thousand meters from where the jump point roiled in tortured space. To the naked eye, nothing was apparent, just a small section of space where the stars seemed to shine a bit strangely.

  “Sulwan, you got the nav beacon loaded?”

  “It’s in Drop Bay 3. The scientists’ gadget is in 4.”

  Kris didn’t ask about Drop Bays 1 and 2. If Jack was half the Marine she expected him to be, two Marine assault crafts were standing by. Fully manned and ready . . . and armed.

  “Launch the beacon,” Captain Drago ordered.

  There was a slight rumble through the hull, and then the nav buoy came in view on its way to the jump point. Bigger, blockier than a government beacon, this one looked like fifty-year-old technology. Just what a merchant skipper might use to probe a strange jump point and not damage a slim profit margin.

  The jump buoy held station off the jump point for a few moments while a few more tests were run, then powered up and disappeared through the jump. Sulwan started a clock. At two minutes she’d take the Wasp through after the buoy had announced to anyone listening that they were coming through.

  In nearly four hundred years, there had only been one instance of two ships using the same jump point at the same time, coming from opposite directions. The resulting mess had cured humanity of ever wanting to do that again.

  Inside human space, every jump point had two buoys assigned to it. Out here, Kris and Captain Drago were improvising as they went along.

  “Ten seconds until we jump” Sulwan announced.

  And the jump buoy reappeared before them. “A ship will be coming through the jump in fifteen seconds,” it announced.

  “That wasn’t the message I put on the buoy,” Sulwan said.

  “Nav, reverse thrusters. Maximum power.”

  “Reverse. Maximum. Captain,” Sulwan answered, jamming the reverse thrusters knob all the way back.

  “Nav, steer right fifteen degrees, down thirty degrees.”

  “Right fifteen. Down thirty degrees, aye, Captain.”

  And Kris’s inner ear started doing slow rolls as her gut was slammed hard against the buckle of her seat belt. The Wasp shed all forward momentum and took off backward. But even as her body went through the required contortions, Kris kept her eyes on the forward view port. The screen stayed blank for the longest time.

  Then a ship twice the size of the Wasp materialized as if from out of nowhere to loom over them.

  3

  “Engineering , give us everything you’ve got for reverse,” Drago said into his commlink. “Nav, keep us backing, but do not reverse ship. I will not give them a shot at my engines.”

  “Aye sir. Get out of here but protect the engines.”

  While Captain Drago handled his ship, Kris eyed the other. On-screen, it looked like a medium-size merchant. A bit big for a tramp freighter, doing catch-as-catch-can business between the small ports on the Rim and beyond. Still, its long, central spine was loaded with containers. Forward, it broadened into a bridge and housing arrangement for the crew. Amidships was a disk containing whatever cargo didn’t do well in vacuum, and possibly some passengers. That was where the Wasp had its twenty-four-inch pulse lasers. Aft were the engineering spaces, a rectangle for the fusion reactor, plumbing for the magnetohydrodynamics generators, and huge bell-shaped plasma engines.

  “Sensors, is that a single reactor?” Kris asked Chief Beni, her own man, who was running that station just now.

  “Looks that way, ma’am,” he muttered, then did something to his board. “But I’m still looking.”

  Kris slaved her board to his. Beni might be leadership challenged on liberty, but with anything electronic he was a wizard. Just now, he used only passives, listening but making no noise that would tip a pirate’s hand that the Wasp was anything but a soft, defenseless carrier of wood and drawer of water.

  Then again, a pirate would be doing its own best to look as innocent as a lamb . . . and hide the wolf within. At the moment, they were even in the lamb department. Or one might actually be what it claimed.

  “Hmm, ain’t she a mite bit underpowered with a single Westinghouse 1500 series reactor?” Chief Beni mused to himself, and jacked up the gain on a couple of his short-range sensors. “Seems like there’s a whole lot more neutrinos coming out of that single reactor . . . and they’re spread out over a whole lot more space. Those engineering spaces looked a bit luxurious for just one teapot. Skipper, I make two Westinghouse reactors. And expect they’re 2200 series at that. You got a wolf trying to fake it in woolies.”

  “Damn,” Captain Drago said.

  “Straight,” Kris added.

  “Your orders, Your Highness.”

  So King Ray didn’t know these people nearly as well as Kris did. And this bunch had no problem following this Longknife into the mouth of hell. In a fast countdown to a fight, Drago wasn’t looking to Abby, he was asking Kris.

  She swallowed the first thing that came to mind . . . Let’s kick some pirate butt. Instead, Kris muttered a much more sedate, “Let’s make sure someone like Helvetia isn’t also trolling for pirates. Wouldn’t want Grampa Ray faced with a media blitz ’cause two good guys shot each other up.”

  Someone on the bridge snickered at Kris’s familiarity with a man everyone else knew as King Raymond of the United Sentients.

  And somewhere on net came a “Damn, one of those Longknifes can grow up.” It sounded familiar.”

  “That you, Jack?” Kris asked Captain Jack Montoya of the Royal United Sentient Marine Corps, who now commanded the rump company aboard.

  “Not me, ma’am, not a chance. Though I do admit sympathy for the conclusion.”

  Further discussion was suspended as the ship looming over them opened communication channels. “Hello, stranger, this is Compton Maru out of Orama. What ship are you and where you from? Where you bound?”

  Captain Drago took the commlink. “This is the Lucky Seven Horse out of Hampton, and I’ll tell you where I’m bound when you tell me where you been.”

  That elicited a laugh, much as Kris expected. Profits were razor thin out here and a good way to go broke was to follow in the wake of another ship, trying to sell your cargo in an already satisfied market or buy up cargo that had already been shipped.

  Kris might be Navy and Drago . . . whatever he was . . . but they’d spent enough time in bars among merchant captains to learn that much of the trade.

  The laughing voice became serious. “You tell me something interesting, then I’ll tell you something more interesting.”

  “Sounds fair,” Drago said. “Our last stop was Magda’s Hideaway.” It really had been. “They took all our agricultural implements and were still hungry. They didn’t touch our heavy machinery. Somebody got there first.”

  “That little burg ain’t growing anywhere near as fast as its founding fathers thought it would. If they ain’t careful, they’re going to get overextended on their loans,” the voice from the larger freighter observed.

  Kris let them ramble, and took the ship above her apart layer by layer—as much as passive sensors allowed. If the ship had lase
rs, no capacitors were charged. Dead in space, the ship was no longer running plasma through its engines. Its only power source was a trickle off the racetrack of hot plasma. That kept the ship’s main battery charged.

  “Could you power a laser directly from the main storage battery?” Kris asked the chief.

  “You shouldn’t be able to, ma’am,” was the answer she expected. “Power cables aren’t designed for that surge. However, a small three-incher might dribble something out. Couldn’t pierce much ice armor, but then, we’re just a thin-skinned merchie,” he said, with a wicked grin.

  A knife might not be much, but in a fistfight, it could run the table. But a guy pulling a knife in a gunfight was in for a surprise. A big one.

  “Where you been?” Captain Drago asked.

  “We’re just coming back from Xanadu,” the other claimed.

  “Trying to trade among those crazies?” Drago asked.

  They’d already learned about Xanadu, the supposed home of the Abdicators. They were a bunch of nuts who insisted all humanity had to go back to Earth and hide from the coming alien hordes that would wipe us out. They’d been noisy forty years ago, then had gotten kind of few and quiet. Kris now knew why.

  By some twisted logic, the leader of the Abdicators had moved all his followers far out beyond the Rim. Supposedly to hide. Considering how insanely crazy their beliefs had been before, Kris was none too sure she wanted to know what they’d become out on their own for half a century.

  “They may be crazy, but they have money. They bought everything I had. I’m hauling my containers home empty except for some with wines and proto-pharms they sold me. If you got the range, they’re a good place to drop by. Where you headed?”

  But whoever was doing the talking over there must have figured he’d done enough babbling to distract the captain of the Lucky Seven Horse.

  On Kris’s board, a capacitor appeared, going from green to yellow to red as it sucked power from the ship’s main battery.

  “Evade,” Kris shouted, but Nelly had already activated a jinks pattern in the helm. The Wasp danced left, right, up, down, and a feeble three-inch laser burned empty space.