Kris Longknife: Resolute Page 3

  Penny was nodding, but a frown was growing. “And you want me to lease it. With what?”

  “Nelly, arrange a line of credit on my account.”

  Penny shook her head. “Kris, didn’t you learn anything from all the flack you got from the Navy for using your personal computer for official business. Just because they’ve given up telling you that you can’t have Nelly do this or that . . .”

  “I should hope so,” Nelly cut in.

  “But renting your own ship for Navy business . . .”

  “So we don’t tell them and it won’t bother them.”

  “What they don’t know won’t hurt us,” Jack sighed.

  “You’re catching on,” Kris said.

  “Lorna Do is the next port of call for the St. Pete?” Penny said, getting lost in thought. “I guess I could rent something.”

  “A six-month wet lease,” Kris advised. “Include a crew. From the looks of things, we’re going to need one.”

  “For buoy tending,” Penny said.

  “And other duties as I may assign,” Kris added.

  “Don’t tell them a Longknife is involved or no one will take the contract,” Jack added dryly.

  “You really think so,” Penny said, then seemed to think better of it and nodded. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t think I’ll mention who I’m working with.”

  “You going to send her alone,” Jack said, softly.

  Kris didn’t need the hint. Left all on her own, Kris wasn’t sure Penny would survive a long trip. “I’ll send Abby along to make sure no one hassles you,” Kris said. “I won’t need her to gussy me up for balls. Things ought to be pretty quiet here.”

  “Things are pretty quiet here,” the chief pointed out.

  “Wonder how long that will last?” Penny said.

  “At least five or ten minutes,” Jack said.

  “Folks, this is a backwater. Nothing ever happens at Chance. That’s why they gave me Naval District 41.”

  “Yeah. Right,” came from Kris’s three nominal subordinates.

  Kris watched on the station’s screen as the Pride of St. Petersburg boosted out of orbit. Abby had been hired by Kris’s mother to be a personal maid but she hadn’t complained about being sent off with Penny. Kris was no longer surprised by anything Abby did. Or didn’t do.

  “I wonder how many steamer trunks she’s got with her this trip?” Jack asked no one in particular.

  “She brought twelve aboard,” Kris said. “I was looking forward to seeing how many she rolled off the St. Pete.” For some strange reason, Abby always had a better idea of how much trouble Kris was headed into. The number of steamer trunks following Abby rather regularly . . . and accurately . . . foretold how many rabbits Kris would need to pull out of hats to get free of whatever mess she ended up in.

  Kris kept telling herself she needed to have a talk with Abby, but somehow the time was never quite right for such a sit-down. Maybe, if Naval District 41 was as quiet as claimed, she and Abby could finally have that heart-to-heart girl talk.

  Kris turned away from the screen, rubbed her hands together, and smiled, an optimistic little thing that she rarely got to use. “Let’s see what we have here.”

  Six hours later, she kind of wished she hadn’t.

  She started with the Patton. Or those parts of the ship not closed off with doors marked Do Not Open. Low Pressure Beyond. That eliminated a major chunk of the ship from review.

  On the bridge, Kris could only shake her head. “I was very glad to see the Patton and the rest of Scout Squadron 54 show up at Paris when they did. The reserve crew’s work to get her moving must have been nothing short of heroic.”

  “The Patton helped you?” Jack was one of the few people cleared to know exactly what happened when the Wardhaven and Earth fleets gathered at the Paris system to sign the de-evolution agreement that formally dissolved the Society of Humanity . . . and why they didn’t go to war over it. Kris’s part in that was still much debated by those in the know.

  “Yep, it turned out Grampa Trouble served on the Patton, a long time ago. He and Great-grandma Ruth honeymooned on it.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow. “Must have been in better shape.”

  “Not as Grampa tells it. They were attacked by pirates once. The skipper ordered a broadside and the ship did loop the loops instead. A system board had been installed backward.”

  Jack shook his head. “Well, it doesn’t look any better now. Your orders frock you up to commander if you commission her.” He arched an eyebrow.

  Does he really think I’m that rank happy?

  “I think I’ll live longer if I stay a lieutenant.”

  “Finally, something we can agree on.”

  Nelly wanted Kris to power up the sensors on the boat, see if Kris could locate the putative extra jump point out of the system that the data on Nelly’s bit of rock from the Santa Maria mountains seemed to show. Most of the navigation instruments had red flags draped on them. Out of Order.

  GUESS WE’LL HAVE TO TAKE THAT LOOK ANOTHER TIME.

  Nelly wasn’t buying that answer. BUT DOES IT MEAN OUT OF ORDER OR JUST THAT THEY WERE PICKING UP MY JUMP POINT AND DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO READ IT?

  DOWN, GIRL. THE SHIP HAS NO POWER. THE STATION’S BARELY ON. YOUR TIME IS COMING. PATIENCE MY DEAR.

  PATIENCE MY NONEXISTENT ASS! Was Nelly’s unladylike response.

  Kris found herself biting her lip to control a laugh.

  “Want to let me in on the joke?” Jack asked.

  “No, just me and my insubordinate computer. Nelly is not behaving.” Jack accepted the explanation with visible doubt.

  The rest of the station was shipshape and empty. Kris checked an auto gun. It was locked down locally, ammunition belts removed. If she wanted to defend this station, she’d need them reactivated. And people to monitor their fire. The station had close-in defense lasers. Kris didn’t have the juice to power any of them up. So long as the station was on solar cells, it could operate. To become a going concern, it needed its fusion reactor on-line. Three people could not run a reactor even if they were trained to do it. Kris’s weren’t.

  “I could run it if you want me to,” Nelly offered. Jack and Beni both looked relieved when Kris declined the offer.

  Kris found her quarters as Commander, Naval District 41. Somehow in the quick turnaround of the St. Pete, Abby had slipped one of her steamer trunks up to Kris’s room. Just one, and it held only Kris’s uniforms and personal effects.

  Jack found a trunk in his quarters, or at least the quarters for the District’s never-used Deputy Commander across the hall from Kris’s. His trunk also had Beni’s duffel bag on top of it. The chief settled into the room next to Jack’s, a nice one officially designated for VIP guests. Jack and Beni arranged enough security along the corridor to satisfy themselves that neither needed to maintain a watch through the night.

  Kris left them to worry about that, set Nelly on watch, and slept the night through.

  She awoke early the next morning to find that the station had continued its routine journey around Chance, there was still air to breath and no cannibals had nibbled her toes. Finding a set of fresh khakis in the trunk, Kris showered, dressed, and went looking for something to eat. That last lunch on the St. Pete, while nicely cruise-ship huge, was a distant memory.

  She found a mess large enough to seat a hundred, a kitchen fit to feed a similar mob, and a pile of combat meals gathering dust. One had been opened. Apparently the chief, quick to point out he was a growing boy, had done a bit of culinary exploring yesterday. Kris got a small coffeepot going, and soon found Jack at her elbow. Showered, shaved, and in undress green slacks, khaki shirt, and field scarf, he frowned at Kris’s food choices.

  “No one ever died from field rations,” Kris reminded him, less he invoke some security regulation to leave her famished.

  “Yes, but no one ever called them food, either,” he said, filling a coffee mug from Kris’s first handiwork. “Hmm, Your Highness, y
ou can boil water.”

  “Suborn crews, steal armed vessels, and boil water. Not a bad résumé.”

  “Between just us, just how long will you keep this up?”

  An honest question deserved an honest answer. She decided the scrambled eggs could warm without her attention, took her own mug, and settled across the table from her Security Chief. Keeping a table between them was getting to be a habit. At the moment, if Jack decided to throw her over his shoulder and carry her off to someplace safe . . . there really wasn’t anyplace safe to go. Still, it was a good habit, and Kris maintained it.

  “I don’t know, Jack. Believe it or not, yesterday took me by surprise.”

  Jack nodded. “So you were making it up as you went along.”

  “Who’d have thought . . .” But Kris stopped herself before she rehashed their yesterday. Today looked to be a bigger problem . . . and they were going to have to face it.

  Jack seemed to be doing a good job of mind reading. Or maybe he’d been around her enough to know her usual pattern of problem solving. “So, what do we do today?”

  “Eat first, I hope,” Chief Beni said from the door. He hadn’t shaved and was still in a worn sweat suit proclaiming Go Navy. “If you can call that eating. Remember, Your Princessness, I joined the Navy cause they ate better.” He scowled at the meal warming. “So why are we eating grunt food?”

  “Cause it’s all that’s available,” Kris pointed out.

  Beni drew his own cup of coffee, and sat down. “This station has twelve different restaurants. Everything from New Chicago Pizza to Retro Cantonese.”

  “All closed,” Jack reminded him.

  “Yeah. How do we fix that?” Kris asked.

  “If you feed them, they will come?” the chief asked.

  “More like if we have work for them, they will come, and then they have to eat,” Jack corrected.

  “So why ain’t there nobody working here?”

  “If I knew the answer to that,” Kris said, getting up when Nelly suggested her eggs might be done. “I’d be a whole lot happier commander.” They ate, dumped the leavings in a trash bin that would need emptying soon, and were no closer to a solution to their problem.

  “Well,” Kris finally said, “if there’s no one here to answer our questions, I say we go where someone is. Three hundred klicks down there’s plenty of folks. Must be someone willing to talk to us. Tell us the local score.”

  “There’s a bit of a problem, boss,” the chief said.

  “There’s a shuttle. Nelly checked before I marooned us here.”

  “Yes, ma’am, there’s a shuttle for us, maybe a dozen.”

  “We’ve got reaction mass,” Jack said.

  “Yes, sir. St. Pete quit fueling when they got a look at the price. Said they’d fill up at Lorna Do.”

  “So.”

  “There’s just enough antimatter in the shuttle’s motor to boil the reaction mass we need to land.” The chief grinned. “Unless we can fill up dirtside, if we go down, we stay down.”

  Kris took a moment to absorb that before turning to Jack. “I really want to meet this Lieutenant Steve Kovar. I have got to thank him for the wonderful condition of the command he’s turned over to me.”

  2

  An hour later, they boarded a small Boeing shuttle. It was in standby mode drawing from the station’s power to keep juice flowing to the antimatter containment pod. Kris had just enough power to break out of orbit and glide to the port outside Last Chance. She set those coordinates into the nav computer and let herself grin. “Landing this will be no strain.”

  “Assuming we don’t run into traffic on the way down,” Jack said, slipping into the copilot’s seat and bringing up a report on traffic into and out of Last Chance.

  “Looks like they’re coming up on a solid hour of no business,” Kris said.

  “Assuming there’s no one else dropping in unannounced,” Beni said, standing between the two of them. “My old man would whap me horrid if I flew into some place with no flight plan.”

  “Yes,” Kris agreed, “but where’s the fun of telling them we’re coming. They might bake a cake.”

  “Order out the antiaircraft defenses,” Jack muttered. “You’re really going to surprise them?”

  Kris knew the rules, but she was tired of being on the receiving end of all the surprises this trip. If there was going to be another, she would do it. Besides, with all her skiff racing, no question she could put this puppy down just fine. A glance at Last Chance’s airport showed plenty of fields around it. Kris measured the risk she was taking, found it low enough for her, if not for Jack, and checked the rest of her board. Everything showed green. “Strap in, Chief, we’re headed down.”

  “Is it too late for me to get out and walk?”

  “It was already too late when you said, yes, you’d work for this woman,” Jack said, cinching his seat belt in tight.

  Fifteen minutes later, Kris had the shuttle on final approach. No one at the port had called her, but she decided she’d better check in. “Last Chance Space, this is Navy shuttle 41, I’m on final approach for a dead-stick landing on runway 090. Is there any traffic I should be aware of?”

  “Navy shuttle 41, you got power for a go around?”

  “Negative on that.”

  “Then I guess we better not have any traffic in your way. You’re lucky we’re in an after lunch slump in business. Give me a minute while I redirect a freighter.”

  “Thank you, Last Chance Space.”

  Exactly one minute later, the tower came back on, and gave Kris wind, temperature, and barometric pressures.

  “Ah, that’s not what your automatic station is broadcasting,” Kris said, adjusting her instruments.

  “Everyone local knows that station is off, and makes their own adjustments. You being Navy, I figured you might not know.”

  Beside Kris, Jack studied the heavens as if they might hold some hidden wisdom. What Beni was muttering wasn’t fit for a princess’s ears. But an experienced Navy princess found it rather mild compared to what she wanted to say.

  “Thank you for the update. We’re two minutes out.”

  “We’ll get a tow for you. Have your credit card handy.”

  Now Kris did say a very unprincess-like word.

  She set the shuttle down smoothly; the brakes were uneven, but they slowed to a stop just past a bright yellow tug. Halted, Kris opened the window and waved the tug in. It came, but stopped in front of the shuttle and did nothing. Kris waited for a minute to be hooked up to power and a tow. Then another minute. Outside, nothing happened.

  “Ah, I think they’re waiting to be paid,” Beni stuttered.

  Kris snapped off her seat belt and headed for the hatch, aft. Jack followed, whether concerned for her safety . . . or the tug crew . . . he didn’t say. Kicking the hatch open almost made Kris feel better. She quick marched into a dazzling sunny afternoon. The two fellows lounging in the tug’s front seat seemed to be enjoying it. “You planning on parking me right here in the middle of the runway?” she demanded.

  The younger of the two, a long, tall drink of water with an unruly shock of blue hair and sporting worn coveralls, looked about ready to run. The other fellow, bald, scruffy white beard, and more substantial if not downright round, held on to the steering wheel of his tug and fired right back. “We don’t move you until we run your credit card. Navy credit’s no good. Operations Chief says she’s got enough unpaid chits from the Navy.”

  “Just how much has the Navy been ignoring this place?” Jack muttered softly. Which gave Kris pause enough to eye the well-worn tug, overdue for a paint job. She scuffed the concrete runway. It was solid, but in need of recovering. This is Naval District 41’s territory. Not Wardhaven, Lieutenant Longknife, she reminded herself.

  Reassessment over, Kris reached for her wallet, went past the official Naval District 41 charge card she’d been required to oh so formally sign for and pulled out her own. When Kris signed for the District card, s
he’d asked what her limit was. The procurement agent 3/c said that depended on the appropriations approved for her District. All effort by Kris or Nelly to find out what that magic number might be had failed.

  Kris offered her personal ID and credit chit to the tug driver. He fed it into a remote on his rig without even looking at it. At least he didn’t until the remote beeped happily and approved the charge. Once the card popped back out, the driver did give it a solid look. “You this Kris Longknife?” he asked.

  “Usually. On my good days,” Kris answered.

  “Boss, you know who she is. Don’t you ever watch any vids but racing and football?”

  “Nothing else worth watching,” the boss said and elbowed the kid out of his seat. “We don’t have all day. Let’s get this thing off the duty runway.”

  “But she’s . . . She’s . . .” The tall fellow seemed to have developed a stutter.

  “Just another flyguy.”

  With the shuttle hooked to the tug, the two piled back into their seats. “Is there a crew truck coming for us?” Kris asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Can we ride in with you?”

  “Nope, seats are full.”

  “Can an old chief hitch a ride in on your back bumper?” Beni asked, not interested in a long hike to the facilities.

  “Suit yourself, Chief,” the driver said. “If you’re not too proud, the rest of you can share the bumper. Or walk.”

  Jack offered Kris a hand up, not that her six feet needed all that much of an up. Still, it was nice of him. It also reminded her that she was a princess and serving Commander of Naval District 41 and it would be undignified to screech at a tug driver. And might upset the locals if she killed him.

  The drive to a tie-down slot was sedate. Their shuttle was exiled to one well away from the terminal. After making sure it was secure, the driver offered them a ride to the operations center, a dilapidated building with a very threatening windsock hanging limply in the center of a patch of brown grass.

  “You better settle up your bill with the port manager,” the driver warned as he dropped them off. Inside Kris found flies, a desultory ceiling fan, and a middle-aged woman behind a counter. Kris approached, then cooled her heels while the woman finished a game of solitaire on her old-fashioned computer.