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  “I don’t know their names, ma’am,” the old chief wiper said, “but I’ll never forget their faces.”

  “Captain, what say we get this man some faces to look at.”

  “My thinking exactly,” Jack said, and turned to Gunny. “I want the whole company over here. Reduce the admin watch to minimum on the Wasp. Full battle rattle and demolition loads.”

  Kris coordinated with Captain Drago. “I’m stripping my Marines for a rat hunt. Can your sailors keep an eye on the ship to make sure no rats make it off or across to you.”

  “I’m getting video of what you’re seeing, and even with life support on full boost, we’re getting some of what you’re smelling. I’ll have armed sailors looking out for anyone that you miss.”

  “Could your crew take care of these people?”

  “Cookie is preparing oatmeal and got the largest pot of coffee perking. Those that aren’t shooters are ready to help distressed mariners. Even some of the boffins are standing in line to help.”

  “You do the humanity thing. We’ll do the other stuff.”

  “Kick their butts good.”

  Kris brought Jack up to date. He nodded. “Give me five minutes to get everyone in place. Let them have more time to stew in their own juices. I don’t want to face desperate men with anything less than overwhelming odds. I don’t care how many of them die. All of them are not worth one of my Marines.”

  Kris gave him a thumbs-up.

  Sailors and boffins arrived to carefully tow out the former prisoners. The Marines aft, told there might be solid work for them forward, quickly cuffed and led up the engineering staff, still protesting their innocence to anyone listening.

  No one was.

  The LACs were launched again. The Compton had life pods. Their present position was a good four-year drift in a pod to an only marginally inhabitable planet. Anyone who tried to escape that way faced a long, slow death. As tempting as it might have been to let them try, the LACs had orders to corral in the life pods and head any pirate in them toward a date with a judge and a noose.

  At Jack’s orders, the Marines popped the hatch and started their way up the forward spine of the Compton.

  5

  The four-hundred-foot climb up the first forward spine compartment would have been arduous at one gee. In free fall, Kris went hand over hand. Ahead of her, Marines were already fanning out to secure the next compartment, the second of five.

  So far no weapons fire. No booby traps. Possibly these pirates had never expected to have to defend their own ship.

  The first resistance was in the forward-most compartment. The hatch leading out of it was dogged down and locked from the other side.

  “Shall we blow it?” Gunny asked. With a glance, Jack passed the question to Kris.

  She mulled it for a moment. Just coming into the space with the Marine rear guard was Chief Beni. Apparently, rage at the pirates’ behavior toward their merchant prisoners had overcome his usual desire to be wherever action was not.

  She waved him to her. He looked around to see if there might be anyone else but him that she wanted. She shook her head and waved him forward. He came.

  “I want to talk to those thugs on the other side of this bulkhead. Jack me into their net,” Kris said.

  His eyes lit up at the prospect of doing good without any unnecessary risks. A minute later he had spotted a cable conduit, had its cover off, and was rummaging around its innards.

  “You’re in, Your Highness,” he chimed through a grin a moment later.

  Kris considered for half a second what she wanted to say and chose a simple “This is Lieutenant Kris Longknife. We have come for you, ladies and gentlemen. You can survive the next few hours or not. It doesn’t matter to me and my Marines.”

  Around Kris, a few Marines pumped air. “Ooo-Rah.”

  Beni must have put Kris on a hot mike on the other side, or the damage Kris had done made all mikes hot. Her remarks raised a mumble of comments, most of which were obscene and biologically improbable. One was repeated several times. “Why don’t you just go away and leave us alone?”

  “I’ve considered leaving you alone,” Kris said.

  That got a lot of happy noise from the other side.

  “But I’d hate to leave this big hulk drifting as a hazard to navigation.” There was also the matter of prize money for the Wasp’s crew, but that didn’t sound like something that would move a pirate to repentance.

  “I could just blast the bow off the ship, leave it here, and tow the rest of this hulk to a port.”

  There was a long silence. Around Kris, Marines followed that option to its obvious conclusion . . . and grinned.

  It took those on the other side a bit longer to think it through. “Where would that leave us?” finally came from someone.

  “You would be left all alone.”

  “Until someone picked us up or we died.”

  “Considering how far out you are,” Kris said, thoughtfully, “I suspect you’d be long dead before anyone happened by.”

  “You’re just going to hang us anyway.”

  That was what Kris wanted to do, but that wasn’t the law in human space. “Few planets have capital punishment,” Kris pointed out, generating frowns from her Marines.

  “You going to take us to one that don’t?”

  “I will take you to the nearest planet with a recognized court system. Cuzco, I expect.”

  “Do they have capital punishment?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” NELLY, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW.

  YES, KRIS.

  The negotiations went on like that for the next hour. In the end, they all surrendered, and no shots were fired.

  “You didn’t want any of your Marines hurt,” Kris pointed out to Jack.

  He nodded, then shook his head. “Would have been nice to send a few of them to meet their maker.”

  “We killed the worst of them. The bridge crew was fifteen strong when the fight started.” Only parts of three bodies had been recovered from the wreckage.

  Every ship’s officer excepting the engineer had taken the brunt of a twenty-four-inch laser . . . and come up the worse for it.

  Which left a certain young Navy lieutenant with what the brass euphemistically called a few “leadership challenges.”

  She had forty-seven former prisoners that were in pretty bad shape. They needed medical care, and they needed it quickly.

  She also had thirty-two new prisoners, all of whom were loudly expounding on their innocence . . . to the no one who was listening . . . from the confines of a hastily expanded brig on the Wasp.

  And Kris had a very damaged hulk, which turned out to have a very full load of expensive cargo. Leaving her with a lot of questions about how that had come to pass.

  Her first two problems said get gone from here. The third left her reluctant to abandon what she’d done. There was also the problem of the Compton Maru being the scene of several crimes that were greatly in need of investigation.

  Kris was saved from the first problem. The health of the pirates’ prisoners improved as Doc did a couple of miracles. The Wasp’s corpsman, widely rumored to have been a board-certified MD before his alcoholism cost him dearly, stayed sober and did good. He racked up bushels of good karma as more and more legs passed from likely candidates for amputation to just in need of careful and tender care. Several of the tough old sailors recovered with amazing speed.

  Which led to the next challenge that Kris really should have seen coming.

  Onally MarTom slipped a meat cleaver from the mess and tried to use it to part the hair of one of the brig’s new denizens.

  Fortunately, a Marine interrupted him.

  Kris was there only a second behind Jack while the Marine was still struggling with a surprisingly strong and very distressed mariner.

  “He killed my captain,” the man screamed in frustration.

  “And he’ll pay for it,” Jack assured him.

  Outnumbered and overpo
wered, the man broke down in tears, but he still cursed them one and all for standing between him and his captain’s murderer.

  Gunny arrived to lead him off. “I’ll get him drunk on Doc’s ignored supplies. That’ll at least start the healing. When he sobers up, he’ll be glad he’s not a killer. He isn’t, you know.”

  “He showed a pretty solid commitment to making a go of it if you ask me,” Kris observed, still trying to parse some of the old sailor’s curses. And she thought she’d heard them all.

  “I’ll double the guard,” Jack said. “Keep the ones keeping the bad guys in where they are. But I’ll add a full team in the next compartment to keep the sightseers and hackers out.”

  Which left Kris wondering if she ought to do something about the pirates sooner rather than later. King Ray had dragooned a retired Wardhaven judge into joining Kris’s crew. Being a hobbyist astronomer, she was delighted to be aboard.

  Kris had assumed the Wasp might be called on to pass quick and efficient justice on some minor matters. Capital piracy, murder, and slavery went quite a bit beyond Kris’s plan.

  And there was the requirement that any court chartered in Wardhaven follow the Ordinance of Human Rights that had been the cornerstone of the now-defunct Society of Humanity.

  Central to that was the ban on capital punishment.

  But not every planet had signed the Ordinance. Kris’s father had almost lost his chance to be Wardhaven’s prime minister when he’d used every stalling tactic in the politician’s handbook to keep Wardhaven’s signature off the Ordinance. Not forever, only long enough to hang the kidnappers whose mishandling of Kris’s little brother, Eddy, caused his death.

  With luck, the nearest planet would also not have signed the Ordinance. Longknifes did not like kidnappers.

  So while Doc healed the freed, and Jack kept alive the not yet dead, Kris led a scratch salvage-and-repair team through the wreck of the Compton Maru. Most were borrowed from the Wasp’s crew, but the boffins supplied their own techs, and the Marines also provided their electronics and engineering specialists.

  And Kris donated most of Nelly’s time after the computer demanded a go at the mess Kris had made.

  Kris’s well-aimed twenty-four-inch lasers had made quite a mess of the Compton’s bridge. Even when they patched the holes and glued an airtight bubble over the bridge, they also had to set up a string of lights.

  Anything that required electrical power was fried, right down to the smallest lightbulb. “Oh, can I have the ship’s computer?” Nelly said, as soon as pieces were identified.

  “You think you can get something out of this?” Kris said.

  “Everyone else on board has a hobby. Jigsaw puzzles are all the rage among the scientists. Pretty lame from my perspective. But that looks like it might be a challenge.”

  “Take all the pieces we find,” Kris ordered, “to the electronics lab. Maybe Nelly or one of mFumbo’s experts can make something out of it.”

  “Maybe a watch that runs slow,” Chief Beni muttered, but he gathered the scattered shards and boxed them up for transport.

  It was when they got their first look inside the shipping containers that matters got serious again.

  They were full.

  Since all documentation on them was in the now-defunct computer, that left folks to speculate on why a pirate ship had a full cargo.

  “Could they have winched the cargo containers off the ships they boarded?” Sulwan mused.

  Jack shook his head. “In zero gee, with only makeshift gear? It would be a whole lot easier to send the cargo off to wherever you were selling the ships.”

  Captain Drago nodded. “These pirates started off as mutineers. So where are their officers?”

  “They were pretty quick to murder the officers of the ships they took,” Kris pointed out.

  “Someone needs to answer us some questions,” Jack said.

  But all questions were met with sullen silence. Even the reactor snipes suddenly took to studying their fingernails.

  No one objected when Gunny suggested that, what with them in zero gee, and none of the prisoners able to exercise, maybe they’d all be a lot safer if they were cuffed to their bunks. And when ex-pirates suddenly turned space lawyers demanded their rights, Marines overruled then with a few quick butt strokes.

  “We need to get this show moving,” Kris concluded.

  With the Compton’s bridge unable to command anything, the techs went looking for a backup. As expected, the first spine compartment forward of amidships had plug-ins for an emergency bridge, but like most merchants, it had no stations. There should have been a few in the spares locker, but, to no one’s surprise, there were none. Six were salvaged from the 4.7-inch lasers and reprogrammed as needed. Three more were brought over from the Wasp’s spares locker.

  In a week, with a mixed crew from the Wasp and former hostages, both ships were ready to get under way.

  And the time hadn’t been a total waste.

  Professor mFumbo’s techs hadn’t launched their probe given all the excitement over the Compton Maru’s arrival. Once things calmed down, they modified it for high acceleration and sent it off at two gees.

  It ducked through to the next system and reported back six hours later that there were two old jump points in that system and three fuzzy ones. And two planets in the inhabitable zone.

  Kris had to quell a budding mutiny among the scientists. “We will get back here,” she assured them.

  6

  A week later, the Wasp led the Compton toward the space station above Cuzco. “The stationmaster regrets that he only has two docks unoccupied,” Captain Drago reported. “One can offload containers. I told him to put the Compton in it. That leaves us with only one place to go.”

  “Is there a problem?” Kris asked, knowing from the way Drago was drawing this out that she was asking a needless question.

  “We’ll be across the way from a Greenfeld light cruiser.”

  “They’ve got a Greenfeld cruiser in port.” Jack grinned. “I hope we’re not interrupting anything,” did not sound at all like the Marine meant it.

  “What ship?” Kris asked.

  “The light cruiser Surprise,” Drago said, with his own tight smile at the appropriateness of the name.

  “Does Georg Krätz still command her?” Kris asked.

  Sulwan looked up from her board. “Harbormaster’s records say he does.”

  “Good, I’ve had several fine dances with the man,” Kris said, beaming. “He’s the father of several girls, all interested in naval careers, just like their father. I suggested that he and they would have far more successful careers in the Wardhaven Navy than they could ever hope to have in anything controlled by Greenfeld. I’m looking forward to continuing our conversations.”

  Jack rolled his eyes.

  Kris sniffed. “If you Marines can think of war as a continuation of politics by other means, why can’t a princess continue politics by socializing?”

  Next day, Kris got her chance to socialize or politic or maybe fight a very small war.

  A handsome—one might say dashing—young Greenfeld lieutenant approached the Wasp’s quarterdeck, offered his captain’s compliments, and asked if his captain might have the pleasure of Princess Kristine Longknife’s company at dinner that night.

  Kris would have turned down an invitation to the Surprise’s wardroom as too risky, but Krätz was wise enough to choose the most expensive . . . and neutral . . . restaurant on the space station. After only a minor argument with Jack, Kris sent her acceptance down to the JOOD, and the deal was done.

  “I’m going with you,” Jack muttered.

  “I expected you to. Jack, you dance as well as he does.”

  Kris politely did not hear Jack’s answer to that.

  “I gonna have to gussy you up all princesslike?” was Abby’s only question.

  “Nope,” Kris said. “Formal Navy dinner dress. Small medals. Skip the Wounded Lion. He’s seen my ribbons. I’
ve seen his. We know who we are,” Kris said, with a smile.

  “I better tell Jack to tone it down,” Abby said, and headed off to do just that. Four hours later, Kris almost regretted going Navy standard tonight. Surely, there was no uglier evening dress than what the Navy put its women in. The skirt hung like a burlap bag. The blouse was uncomfortable.

  “You’re wishing you were in a nice set of petticoats and crinolines,” Jack whispered beside her.

  “Security officers are not authorized to read my mind no matter what the latest new law may say,” Kris shot back, and moved forward. Jack opened the door for her, resplendent in his dress red and blues. A sword and issue sidearm hung from his belt. No such allowance was made for the women, so Kris had her automatic hidden in the usual place.

  Kris was three steps into the restaurant when she spotted Captain Krätz standing up from his table. He was accompanied by a young ensign. She wore formal Greenfeld Navy evening dress that managed the impossible. She looked worse in it than Kris did in hers. Clearly the women haters in Greenfeld’s military had bested their kin on Wardhaven.

  Distracted by the uniform, it took Kris an extra moment to identify the woman in it.

  She almost missed a step.

  Beside her, Jack’s nostrils flared, but he manfully suppressed a snort.

  Kris took a quick glance around the room. It was early, still well lit, and almost empty. But around the captain’s table were four occupied ones. The men at them were in civilian clothes, but there was no mistaking the hard bodies under those clothes, the close haircuts, and the steely look to their eyes.

  Were any of them hers? Kris spotted two women Marines she knew only too well from their doing bathroom guard duty for her. Four Wardhaven Marines, four others.

  Krätz had observed the niceties.

  Kris allowed herself one more second for a glance at the room, not to take in its expensive decor, but rather to note the right-hand corner of the room, where the few other customers were huddled over their food, meticulously not making eye contact with those on the left side.

  Very likely, it would be a quiet dinner. No, very likely the fireworks would be reserved for the main table.