Kris Longknife: Daring Read online

  Kris let the thoughts sink in, then went on. “I suggest you draw a line in the sand for your people as soon as you can and get any reluctant tigers moving toward a billet where they can do your ship no harm.”

  The screen closed down, but before Kris could continue with a review of her plan, she realized she had forgotten to include Captain Drago and the Wasp in her line-in-the-sand offer. She quickly called the captain and brought him up to date.

  “Yes, that would be a good idea. We had a lot of young sailors brought aboard recently. I suspect some of them may be green and frightened. It would be better for the ship if they dropped out now. I’ll have Senior Chief Mong pass the word.”

  “He will understand this is a no-judgment offer?” Kris asked. Her experience of the old chief was that she would not want to be on his wrong side. She suspected the young sailors aboard had the same feeling.

  “This may surprise you, but Senior Chief Mong has teenage boys at home. I’ve found that he has a very good understanding of our younger hands. By the way, Your Highness, there is a personnel matter that I should discuss with you. Would you mind if I dropped down to talk with you.”

  “Certainly not, Captain. Feel free,” Kris said.

  What she thought was What now? Captain Drago and his initial crew were all civilian contractors, hired to run the Wasp in some under-the-table agreement with Wardhaven’s chief spy. Kris didn’t care if some young sailors took her up on the chance to go home to momma. However, if Captain Drago and his entire crew announced that they wanted to exercise their option to bolt and run now that things were getting hot, it would leave her with no one to run the Wasp.

  She would, of course, transfer her flag to one of the other corvettes. Still, to have your flagship run out on you just before the battle would be embarrassing.

  To lose one-quarter of her squadron might well mean defeat.

  Kris sighed and put that thought away in a pigeonhole marked Panic Later.

  For the moment, she turned back to Jack, the colonel, Penny, Abby, and Chief Beni. They had a battle plan to refine and options to develop, so Kris could be oh so brilliant in the coming fight and pull out just the right rabbit at the right moment when the approved plan fell apart.

  “Kris,” Nelly announced, “Lieutenant Song, skipper of the courier ship Hermes, would like to talk to you. She’s about to jump out of the system to check out the last system the Hornet was in. Do you have time to talk to her?”

  “I’ll make time. Lieutenant Song, what can I do for you?”

  “Commander, we just got the word that anyone who wants to go home can ask, and they’ll get a ride back on a courier boat or on one of the freighters. Is that correct, ma’am?”

  Kris nodded. “Yes. No one has to go into this fight who doesn’t want to.” Kris didn’t explain the full security thoughts behind what some might think of as a most magnanimous decision.

  “Well, ma’am, on the small ships, we’re wondering if some of us could transfer onto the fighting ships as replacements. I mean, if we’ve got sailors coming aboard, they might as well sail the Hermes and let us take their billets. Commander.”

  Jack and the colonel grinned at Kris, struggling to suppress open laughter. She’d expected one thing and gotten something totally different. Facing the screen, Kris kept her face a commander’s mask.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll see what I can do. Pass the word to the other courier boats that anyone on them can put in their names and rate and they can switch with anyone on the corvettes who wants to trade. The couriers will go back, and they have to be properly crewed. They’ll carry The Word to the U.S. of what we are doing here. Humanity has to know what we’ve done in their name and why.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I understand. The Word has to get back. But if there are folks who want to go back, let’s let them go and let the rest of us fight.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Pass The Word. Now, I have a battle to plan.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Signing off.”

  “Are you surprised, Commodore?” the colonel said.

  “No. Yes. Maybe,” Kris said, trying not to stutter.

  “You’re offering them a chance to fight for the right of an entire race to breathe the air God gave them,” Colonel Cortes said. “Drink their planet’s water. It’s a worthwhile fight. A good fight.”

  “We’re all going to die,” Abby muttered . . . to everyone in hearing.

  “Everyone dies,” the colonel said. “Not everyone gets to die for something worth dying for. Abby, my good woman, you have to quit thinking the old way. For years, the Navy took out the garbage and stopped this spat, that squabble. Now we’re facing something that doesn’t even consider us worth talking to. We try to talk to them. They try to kill us. That’s the way the conversation has gone. Now we’ll let Hellburners do our talking for us.”

  “Hellburners?” Kris asked.

  “The boffins can call them neutron torpedoes if they want. That’s a name to warm the hearts of some ice-water-for-blood scientist. Hellburners. Now that’s the name for a warrior’s weapon. That’s a name that will smash down the very gates of hell. I like that name.”

  “We’d better,” Jack said. “Because Kris here is leading us right down hell’s main boulevard.”

  “She’ll march us into hell, and she will march us back again,” the colonel said, “and we will all raise a glass at the memory when we’re old and gray.”

  “I surely hope so,” Penny said, looking slightly pale. “I certainly hope so.”

  “She’s a bloody Longknife,” the colonel said, grinning. “Who would you rather follow through hell?”

  “Me, I’d rather skip the hike,” said Chief Beni.

  “You going to apply for a ticket on one of the freighters?” Penny asked.

  “Of course not,” the chief said. “If Kris is going to lead us out of hell, she’ll need me to find the best route.”

  Kris chuckled. “Thank you, Chief.”

  Captain Drago entered the Forward Lounge at that moment, a thick pile of flimsies in hand. It looked thick enough to cover every man and woman of his contract crew. Kris swallowed hard, mentally packing her kit. A shrunken kit that might fit on the Hornet.

  “I have some personnel actions you need to sign, Commodore.”

  “What kind?”

  “Activating commissions, Commodore.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mine. All the other officers among our crew. Oh, and the enlisted swine want to be activated, too. If you’re going to fight a war, we’d prefer to fight it with good old Navy blue and gold on our backs.”

  34

  Kris took a moment to take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Once again, she’d expected one thing and was being handed another. Colonel Cortez was right; she needed a new mind-set. She reached for the top flimsy. It named a certain Edmond Drago and activated his reserve commission . . . as a lieutenant.

  “I thought you were a captain the last time your reserve commission was activated?” Kris said.

  “I was. But the last time we were at Wardhaven, with you promoted to lieutenant commander, I rearranged all our reserve commissions. My crew now are all lieutenants . . . or junior.”

  Kris glanced up at Captain Drago. Or Lieutenant Dragoto-be. “Why the cut in pay?”

  “None of us thought we should outrank you, Commodore.”

  “Outrank me.”

  “Yes, ma’am. You’re the captain of Wasp as soon as you sign those papers.”

  Kris put the papers down on the table beside her. “Sit down, Captain. What’s going on here?”

  “As I said, Kris, we’re going into a fight. Call us old-fashioned, me and my crew, but if we’re going to fight the king’s fight, we ought to wear the king’s colors. It’s been that way for several thousand years. This idea of taking the king’s coin and doing it as a civilian contractor just doesn’t have the right taste to it for me. Others may disagree. That’s their right. Me and mine, no, Your Highness. If we’re to
fight, give us our blue and gold.”

  “It’s not like these hostiles will follow the rules of war,” Kris said. “I don’t think it will matter all that much to them whether they capture you in uniform or in your underwear.”

  “Given my choice, I’d rather not be captured at all by these murderers,” Drago said. “However, as I said. We’re old-fashioned. This isn’t one of your not-quite-a-real-war things that you’ve taken us to. They were fun little parties. Fine way to pass the time of day when things were dull. This is the real thing. A knock-down, drag-out brawl.

  “We talked it over among ourselves. For this, we follow the flag, and we want our proper uniforms.”

  Kris nodded, leafing through the forms. One after another, lieutenant, lieutenant, lieutenant.

  Kris laid them out flat and rested her hand on them. “Captain, I can’t tell you that I don’t want to command the Wasp. This weird lash-up we’ve made of the chain of command has never been satisfying.”

  Kris paused to shake her head. “However, I’ve got a problem with this. In the right here and now.”

  “Just one problem?” Captain Drago said, raising an expressive eyebrow.

  “Somewhere I heard that you train the way you’ll fight. Then you fight the way you trained. Did I get the expression right, Colonel?”

  “I can give it to you in the original Greek,” the colonel said. “It goes back quite a ways. Good idea, too.”

  The present skipper of the Wasp nodded. “I’ve heard it, too.”

  “If I take the captain’s seat, who takes my chair at Weapons?” Kris asked.

  “The lieutenant here,” the skipper said, nodding at Penny.

  Penny shook her head. “No way I and Mimzy can handle weapons as well as Kris and Nelly. Sorry. You order us. We’ll try. But we’d be kidding ourselves that I could do in a pinch as well as those two.”

  Kris let that hang in the air for a few moments, then reached for the form activating Drago’s commission.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” Kris said. “You’ve arranged that I can’t commission you or any of your crew as anything but lieutenant. I’ll do that,” Kris said, signing the order. “Wear the uniform proudly.”

  “And at a much lower pay,” Drago whispered under his breath.

  “But, here’s the way we fight the Wasp.” Kris went on. “You have the captain’s chair. I have the Weapons station. We’ve got a pretty good record of getting things done that way. I don’t see us having any problems doing things that way in the coming fight. Do you?”

  “I think we’re all used to doing it that way. I don’t foresee any problems we can’t handle.”

  “Good,” Kris said, and got busy signing papers. One brought her up short. “Cookie is an officer! The cook is at least a lieutenant?” She looked at Drago.

  “A very good officer, ma’am. I learned more about being a junior officer under his command than I thought was possible.”

  “What rank did he retire at?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. He swore me to secrecy when I took him on board.”

  “He’s a great cook,” Abby said, “whatever he did for the Navy.”

  “That he is, folks,” Drago agreed. “It was always a hobby of his. He promised me when he signed on that he’d do better than best for us, and he has.”

  “Cookie’s an officer,” Kris muttered as she signed the papers putting him back in a lieutenant’s uniform. She seriously doubted it would fit him. He was a wondrous cook, and he did enjoy what he baked.

  “And if anything happens to me, and he offers you a suggestion, Commodore, I’d take it under careful advisement.”

  “I think I will,” Kris said, signing form after form. No surprise, most of her enlisted personnel were senior chiefs. Done, she handed the stack back to the newly minted Lieutenant Drago.

  “Tell me, Edmond. What rank were you when you signed on to run this zoo?”

  The skipper of the Wasp grinned. “I’d just been selected for rear admiral. Had my orders, too. A desk. Ugh. A stranger took me out for a drink and offered me a chance to chauffeur a Longknife cub around the galaxy. You’d have to be crazy not to grab for that kind of a billet.”

  “You’d have to be crazy to take it,” Abby and Jack said at the same time.

  “That, too,” Drago agreed. “Anyway, there’s never been a dull moment, and there doesn’t look to be any on the horizon. Now, Your Highness, if you don’t mind, I have a ship to prepare for one hell of a fight.”

  “Whether it’s yours or mine, yes,” Kris said.

  “It may be mine in the fight, but it will be yours in the history books,” he said with a well-practiced salute. With a snappy about-face, he headed back to his bridge.

  35

  Kris turned back to examining all the things that could go wrong in the coming encounter with an alien they’d just met and never talked to. It didn’t take a lot of guessing to come up with a long list of them. The real problem was figuring out what to do when things did go south.

  Then Professor mFumbo sauntered in.

  “Your Highness, I need your permission to use two of the Wasp’s launches to take some of my boffins around the fleet.”

  “To do what?” Kris said. She suppressed a wince. She was echoing people quite a lot. Then again, her father always said it was better to echo something than to guess and guess wrong.

  “We scientists joined your Fleet of Discovery to, well, discover. I think we’ve found quite a few things that will make it into peer-reviewed journals. But the nature of the voyage has changed.”

  “It certainly has,” Kris agreed.

  “Now we find that we are serving as witnesses to history being made. We are, by our nature as scientists, impartial observers of what we see. All of us are respected in our fields of endeavor. We believe that humanity will benefit greatly from our unprejudiced reports when we return to human space.”

  “Assuming you live through the experience,” Abby said dryly.

  “There is that,” the professor agreed.

  “So why do you need the ship’s launches?” Kris said.

  “One of the painful realities of this war-fighting business you are in, Your Highness, is that you can never tell who will survive it. The dogs of war are notoriously fickle as to whose tree they bark up and whose leg they chew on. We boffins have come to the conclusion that we should distribute ourselves through the fleet. That way, we can witness the coming events from different perspectives, and, no matter which ships survive the coming battle, some of us will be available to bear witness to what we saw.”

  “And you all decided this together?” Kris said. Her observations of the boffins as a subspecies of Homo sapiens sapiens was that they could never agree on anything that wasn’t empirical in nature. The contents of the periodic table, yes. Where to eat supper, not so quickly done.

  “I did suggest this to my associates. After discussion, they came to agree with me. I was one of the first volunteers. I’ve arranged to join the Fury along with Dr. Teresa de Alva and six others.”

  “Are any of them taking the freighters back?”

  “Almost a score. Most of them are people who have papers ready to publish. Others feel that they best serve humanity by commenting immediately on what is about to happen. The economist Amanda Kutter will be a strong witness.”

  “She’ll at least be a beautiful one,” Abby drawled.

  “She has a large heart and strongly believes in our going to the assistance of the avian people. I would not want to be on a talk show trying to espouse an opposing view from hers,” the professor said.

  “That I can agree on,” Kris said. “Okay, you can have the use of two launches. Nelly, advise Captain Drago of this.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Nelly said. “It’s done, and he’s glad to have the boffins off his hands.”

  “Tell him they’re not all going, so no dancing for joy in the passageways,” Kris said.

  “He says that once the boffins sort themselves o
ut, he’ll want to detach as many of the extra containers as possible,” Nelly went on. “He said something about clearing the decks for action.”

  “You may be more comfortable on the Fury,” Colonel Cortez said.

  “He can have my quarters,” Vicky said. She’d been quiet as a mouse for the longest time.

  “You’re not going back?” Kris said.

  “I’m sure you’ll be in the thick of the fight,” Vicky said, “but at least I won’t have to watch my back on the Wasp.”

  “You sure you wouldn’t be just as safe on the Fury?” Kris said. “Paid assassins are notorious for wanting to live to spend their pay. I’d expect anyone sent here to kill you would be on the first freighter to jump out of this system.”

  “That sounds logical,” the colonel said, “but what are the chances that the Fury won’t survive this battle? Better yet, what do you think the odds are that the Fury will even fight? They could turn tail and run after we leave this system.”

  Kris shrugged. “I told them my battle plan. But you’re right, Colonel. There’s nothing that says any of these ships will fight my plan. Something like this never made it into the history books.”

  “Not the recent history. Now, back in the Middle Ages,” the colonel said, getting into lecture mode, “whole flanks of an army might switch sides at the sound of the charge. Must have made for some interesting squabbling after the battle was over. Who got what spoils?”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Abby drawled. “We will all sleep so much better tonight.”

  “The young lady here hired me to provide some historical flavor to your ruminations,” he said cheerfully.

  “Yes, Colonel,” Kris said, “but while we’re talking about people boarding the launches and getting rides to this ship or that, we really need to talk about one in particular.”

  “No you don’t, Your Princessship,” Abby said.

  “Cara needs to be on one of the freighters out of here,” Kris said.

  “Ain’t gonna happen,” her maid shot right back.

  “We’re going into battle. She is not a combatant.”

  “Happens all the time. Some strong type like you throws a battle in some civilian’s backyard. You don’t have to be no combatant to attend a battle. Just unlucky.”