Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant Page 5

  “Not a Colonel found not guilty, but not innocent either, of using machine guns for crowd control,” Trouble said.

  “Oh, that Colonel Hancock,” Jack said and looked away. “Maybe you could arrange for him to praise Pearson.”

  Grampa Trouble’s silence said all Kris needed to hear.

  “I think there’s a good reason why he’s still on Olympia and probably will remain there until he sinks into the swamp. There are other folks who were on Olympia with me. There’s Tom. He was with me at the warehouse. He saw what was going on.”

  “The Tom who’s getting married at the house?” Jack asked. “Kitchen crew is real excited about baking the wedding cake.”

  Hmm, maybe Tom didn’t look all that unbiased at the moment.

  “Well, we’ve got a week,” Kris concluded.

  “Maybe not,” Nelly said. “I have been examining the news, Kris, and I think the media is engaging in what is called a ‘feeding frenzy.’ Would you like to sample some of the news?”

  Now it was Kris’s turn to glance at Grampa and raise a quizzical eyebrow. “Is it that bad?”

  “I believe the opposition intends to try you in the media and hang your father from your highest yardarm. Or something equally nautical.”

  Kris said a word princesses aren’t supposed to know and settled back into her seat.

  They dropped Grampa Trouble off at his town house, which was good, because the entrance to Nuu House was a media circus. News trucks and cameras besieged the entrance to the compound. Only the locking gate and eight-foot-tall brick wall . . . and the not-so-visible security systems above it kept the media outside. Kris faced straight ahead as she rode through the barrage, trusting the car’s armor to stop anything really dangerous.

  It was only as Jack drove the short distance to the mansion’s front entrance that she remembered Penny and Tom were supposed to drop by this morning to talk about their wedding plans. Poor Tommy, having to make it through that rabble. She hoped he hadn’t cut and run. She wanted to know how the rest of the squadron was taking her arrest.

  The doors to Nuu House opened automatically at her approach, leaving her facing the last person in the world she wanted to bother with at this moment.

  Father!

  William Longknife, Billy to his millions of intimates, stormed toward Kris, a hurricane in full blow, his face redder than Kris remembered it this early in the morning. Had he already been at the wine cabinet?

  Trailing Father across the spiraling black and white tiles of the foyer was his political shadow, Honovi. Kris pitied her older brother his chosen fate, though he seemed to be succeeding fairly well at following in their father’s political footsteps.

  For her part, Kris had run off to space to avoid the family’s business. If she could, she would have fled farther. At the moment, it looked like she hadn’t run nearly far enough.

  “What do you think you’re doing, young woman?” Father shouted, halting directly in front of Kris, unblinking eyes demanding an answer. He leaned into her, nose to nose, violating her personal space. Yep, he’s been into the wine supply already. Things are bad and headed for worse.

  Kris denied the urge to take a step back. Five years ago she would have. A year ago she might have. Not today. She’d faced battleships and assassins. What was a merely angry politician compared to that? But she didn’t want a fight. Not now. She weighed her options and chose a nonconfrontational one.

  “I think I’m looking for breakfast,” Kris said with as much good cheer as she could muster. “They didn’t finish booking me until after supper last night. I got sprung before breakfast. And, Father, you must look into the temperatures of your prisons. I almost froze last night.”

  “I’ll do that, Sis, when we get back in office.”

  “Don’t let her change the subject, Honovi. Kris, what are you doing to my reelection campaign?”

  “Nothing, Father. Remember,” Kris pointed at her shoulder tabs. “I’m Navy. We stay out of politics.”

  “Like hell they do. These charges leveled against you—”

  “Will be handled quickly and promptly.”

  “No they won’t, Sis.”

  “Why not?” Her brother had Kris’s undivided attention. Well, almost. From the open door to the Rose Parlor on Kris’s left she was catching snatches of conversation. The word wedding kept coming up. Mother was doing most of the talking, but Kris thought she heard Tommy or Penny’s voice occasionally trying to get a syllable in edgewise.

  “You have a message,” her brother said, “from the Navy Judge Advocate General listing the charges and telling you that your initial hearing has been delayed two weeks.”

  “What!” Tired, hungry, mad, Kris barely suppressed a shout. But then she didn’t know who to shout at: her brother for opening her mail or the Navy for slowing down her tribulations.

  Or Mother insisting Penny must have eight bridesmaids. “Nothing less will do. It simply will not do,” Mother said with a theatrical flair that would grate chalk off a board.

  “I’m sorry,” Honovi said. “The letter came to the house, and I felt I’d better open it.”

  “You see,” Father said, talking over his son, “they’re playing you into the election news cycle. They’ll hang you out there, day after day, attacking me through you. There’s nothing for you to do but resign from the Navy and come work for us.”

  “No!” And this time Kris did shout. She used the voice her DIs had taught her at OCS. Her “no” carried through the house, reverberating off walls that still echoed with years of history.

  Then Kris took the two extra steps that put her in the door of the Rose Parlor and repeated, “No.”

  “Mother, you are not taking over Penny and Tom’s wedding.” She spun back to face her father. “And Father, I am not one of your political hangers-on that you can order about. I’ve got my own career, and I will do what I have to do to keep it.”

  Having made her position clear, Kris listened for a very long minute while Mother and Father told her how wrong she was. Kris had little argument with her father. No doubt, this was probably the most important election since Wardhaven freed itself from the yoke of the Unity thugs eighty years ago with the help of Grampa Ray’s assassination of President Urm.

  Oh yes, that lie again.

  However, she failed to see that she had any role in this massive political theater of his. As for Mother, even when she attempted to tie a major spring wedding “in the garden where King Ray and Rita wed” to the election as worth a hundred thousand votes, Kris still refused to budge. Then Mother played what she thought was her trump.

  “How can you expect me to stand idle while there are preparations to be made for a wedding in my own home.”

  “Your. Home.” Kris spat. Kris had had Nuu House to herself since she moved out of the Prime Minister’s official residency to go to college. Father had immediately converted her bedroom to office space for two new deputy under assistants for something or other. Mother hadn’t seemed to notice at all.

  “Yes, Sis. We kind of had to leave the residency in a hurry last night. The Pandoris insisted on moving in this morning. We didn’t bother your suites, but we did move back in.”

  The idea of living under the same roof with Mother, Father, and God bless her poor brother and his new wife was not something Kris needed to think about.

  “I’m moving out.”

  “You can’t,” Father and Mother said together.

  “Where to?” Abby, Kris’s maid of four months, asked. Kris hadn’t noticed the tall, severely dressed woman at the foot of the stairs. Jack, who might take a bullet for her but wouldn’t get between her and her father, had gravitated over to stand beside her.

  “I can and I will move out. I am a grown woman and a commissioned Naval officer. I can afford my own apartment.”

  Father just snorted at the idea. Mother raised her nose in the air. “Where would you find anything appropriate to your station on such short notice?”

&nb
sp; Wrong question, Kris thought.

  Kris had gotten an education when she recently rescued Tom from kidnappers on Turantic. It wasn’t Tommy’s fault; he’d been taken as bait to trap Kris. But busting him loose had involved a walk down the seamier underside of Turantic, leaving Kris with questions about whether Wardhaven had some places just as ugly . . . just as empty of hope. Home, she did a search. It was easy; she just looked for the places where Father never sent her to campaign.

  Yes, Wardhaven had its slums, and a diligent search by Nelly through ownership records, and records of who owned those who owned the ones who owned the ones who . . . Anyway, several layers of deniability up from the poor sods who collected the rent, Kris found Grampa Al and her own trust fund getting wealthy on way too many of them. She fired off a letter, with plenty of attachments, to Grampa Al, asking him to look into this. And got no reply.

  What better time than now to do something about it.

  “I’m sure there are several vacant apartments in Edgertown that I could rent today.”

  “Edgertown,” Mother huffed.

  “Why would you rent something there?” Father asked, his eyebrows coming together like two woolly caterpillars, unsure whether to fight or mate.

  “Because we own them, Father. Or rather, your father owns them, through the necessary intermediaries to avoid embarrassing questions.”

  “Kris, this is not a good time to think about doing something like that,” Brother said.

  “Who’s thinking? As soon as I can call a cab, I’m out of here.”

  Jack stepped forward. “I’ll drive you, Kris.”

  “Young man, I forbid it,” said Father.

  “Sir, I don’t work for you. Even when you are Prime Minister, I’m under civil service rules.”

  Kris would not bet her career that such rules would hold when the full cyclone of her father’s anger stormed down on them.

  “Besides,” the vacationing agent said, “your daughter seems quite intent on going apartment hunting on the wrong side of town. Wouldn’t you want someone with my credentials”—here he opened his coat, giving everyone a flash of his service automatic—“seeing that she gets out okay?”

  “We are not finished, young woman,” her father stormed, but Kris had done a fast about-face and was headed for the door, Jack and Abby hurrying to catch up.

  Outside, Kris took two quick steps and found that her knees were again filing for nonsupport. She collapsed on the stone steps she’d sat on after school so many years ago. Then, she’d used them as an excuse not to go in, not to face her mother and father. Now she sat there recovering from them. No difference.

  “You hungry?” Jack asked.

  “Starved.”

  “Let’s get some decent food into you while I find a well-armored car that doesn’t look the part.”

  Kris glanced down at herself. Her shipsuit looked like she’d sweated through an attack on a battleship, slept through a bad night in a brig, and survived a family get-together of the worst kind. “You don’t mind being near me?”

  “Wasn’t planning on getting closer than ten feet, and that upwind,” Jack said. “Remember, I’m on vacation. Any bullets that have a date with you today, it’s just you and them, kid.”

  “Thanks for the reminder,” Kris said and looked up at Abby. “And why are you going with me?”

  “You’re headed into hoods like where I grew up, girl, and you gonna need someone who knows the way things hang. If you don’t want to end up hanging upside down. You get my meaning?”

  As usual where her maid was concerned, Kris was none too sure exactly what the woman’s meaning was. That it usually worked out for the best was the sole reason Kris shrugged and said, “Fine.”

  “Which also explains why Momma Abby took a few moments when she heard you were coming home to put together a survival kit for her chick.” With a flourish, Abby opened what for her was a purse totally out of character, huge . . . with multicolored stripes. A glance in showed Kris a powder blue sweater and brown slacks . . . and a body stocking.

  “Armored?”

  “Why wear one if it ain’t, baby ducks.”

  “Do you wear armored underwear?” Jack asked.

  “I do better than that, love. I lead a nice quiet life of desperation, one that no one would want to end violently.” Her smile for Jack almost looked honest.

  Jack’s personal car got them to the Scriptorum, one of Kris’s old college haunts. By the time they’d eaten and Abby had helped her do a quick cleanup and change, Jack had wrestled up a car.

  Abby got wide-eyed as she took in the wreck. “You’re driving a beater into my hood. You’re risking the princess here having to thumb her way out when this thing goes white belly up in the middle of the road.”

  “Abby, you’re not the only one who wears your camouflage well. Get in. By the way, Miss Nightengale, my latest request to redo the background check on you just came back from Earth.”

  Jack took the driver’s seat, Abby the backseat across from him, leaving Kris to open her own door. Kris was used to her princess status going less than far where these two were concerned. After all, she’d been promoted from Prime Minister’s brat to princess less than a year ago, and it was more often a nuisance than a help. Well, it had helped a bit on Turantic.

  But Abby’s background. That tickled Kris’s curiosity. “What did it say?”

  “Nothing. Perfect support for what she said about herself. Not even the tiniest hole in her résumé.”

  “Well, I should expect so,” Abby sniffed, arranging the fall of her severe gray skirt just so. Kris wondered how much heavy weaponry it hid today.

  “Perfect match. Too perfect for even the guys doing the background search. They say they’ll do more checking. I got the impression that you intrigue them. You want to be their hobby?”

  “No,” Abby huffed. “I am what I am. Doesn’t a poor working girl have the right to some privacy?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “once you tell me who you’re working for.”

  “Kris’s mother hired me.”

  “And I suspect she’s firing you as we talk,” Kris said. “Mother was probably so looking forward to having me around to torture for the next six weeks. She will not be happy if you help me get out from under her thumb, knee, and elbow.”

  “Well, honey, getting you dressed to go apartment shopping is a long way from seeing you sign on the dotted line. No offense, Your Princessship, but you aren’t serious about moving into a slum, are you?”

  “She’s serious,” Jack said. “You want to have Nelly pass me some addresses for places to look at?”

  “Nelly, do what Jack asked.”

  “All of them. I’m not sure this bomb can handle the half of them.” Kris took in her ride; it looked bad. The seat covers were slashed where they weren’t worn through. She fingered a cut place in the leather. Nope, not cut. Painted on. She eyed the dashboard; under all that dust was solid-looking electronics.

  “Nelly, interrogate the car’s computer.”

  “Interro . . . wow. Now that is one smart computer. Jack, where did you get this car?” Nelly asked.

  Which left Kris out of the loop and a bit annoyed that her pet computer was going straight from finding out what they were riding in to asking Jack all kinds of questions. Questions Kris would much rather be asking herself.

  “Friend of mine, retired from the force, runs a jack-up service to up-gun, up-armor, up-tight the usual suspects. But he keeps a few ringers for special folks. Stakeouts, other stuff.”

  “Nice to have decent wheels,” Abby said, unimpressed. “Baby cakes, you better tell Nelly to sort the vacant apartments by pairs. Your maid’s gonna have to live next door to you.”

  “She does not.”

  “She does, too, Princess, for at least two reasons. One, I don’t want to have to walk the streets after staying up late to undress you after you come back from some fine ball all gussied up. Two, you’re going to need someone close by to pull your
hind end out of the trouble you’re going to get it into when you’re lost and doing everything wrong in my side of town.”

  “Jack,” Kris said, for what she immediately realized was no good reason. Still, he ought to give her some support.

  “Nelly, do a search for triple vacancies.”

  “Triple!” came from both women in the back.

  “I do not need to be nursemaided. I’ve been shot at. I know how to shoot back,” Kris snapped.

  “Wrong attitude,” Abby said. “You expecting to be shot at, you gonna be shot at. You smile, make friends with the folks down the hall, on the floor below, then you got folks to help you out, young woman.”

  “It looks like the folks down the hall and down the stairs are going to be folks I know. Jack, what are you trying to do? You don’t have to be next door to me. You don’t work for me.”

  “I should say not,” he snapped.

  “In fact, Jack, you’re not going to have a job for too much longer if Father doesn’t win. Maybe even if he does.”

  “So a cheap flat becomes kind of appealing,” he said. “Nelly, what have you got?”

  “Well, here are some triple vacancies. I don’t know that they are all that good of an idea, but they should do while you people sort out all these human issues. Kris, you will make sure that I am not stolen or damaged.” Nelly sounded worried.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Kris said. Nelly said nothing back.

  The first place was a fourth-floor walk-up in need of cleaning, painting, plumbing repairs, and the services of several kinds of exterminators. The second place was worse. Jack parked in front of the third; it looked no better from the outside. He turned to Kris; she could read in his eyes, You ready to call it quits yet? She glanced at Abby. How long you gonna keep up this harebrained stunt? was all over the woman’s face.

  “Kris, you have a message from King Raymond,” Nelly said as Jack’s wrist computer buzzed softly. Kris raised a quizzical eyebrow at him.

  Jack glanced at his wrist. “I am requested and required to present myself to King Raymond at my earliest convenience.”