Kris Longknife - Admiral Page 6

  “Really, Your Highness, your tradesmen must learn their place. I understand we had to force apologies from three of our own money grubbers. I am told that you don’t have the two human’s heads on spikes before your flagship.”

  “Ron, you know we don’t like messy stuff that attracts flies. As is our custom, I have them locked away and will return them to Wardhaven on the next ship.”

  “You humans are far too easy on dust mites.”

  “Be that as it may be, I can’t believe that you met me fresh from the ferry to banter about such a minor thing.”

  “No. My Eminent Chooser asked me to inquire just what you have in mind. How tall do you plan to make this addition to your palace?” Ron coughed softly. “It is rather close to the Imperial Palace.”

  “I did not plan on going any higher than the buildings around us. Is that a problem?”

  Ron took his time before he answered her. “It has always been a matter of pride that palaces were low affairs, spread over much land. High rises are places for the plebeians among us. Do you wish to humble yourself?”

  DIDN’T SEE THAT ONE COMING, KRIS.

  ME NEITHER, NELLY. GIVE ME A SECOND.

  Kris thought fast. Clearly, in her effort to accommodate the merchant princess who the Iteeche considered dust mites, she’d walked into a major cultural minefield. She’d have to put a particular human twist on her answer, one that her children would doubtlessly complain about loudly.

  “Ron, you know that we humans are a space faring people. I’ve spent most of my adult life in space,” except for some damnable staff duty. “My castle is a very human artifact, especially when you consider how much it looks like a space ship.”

  Ron eyed her sideways, with all four eyes. “Space ship, huh?”

  “Mad human castle and space ship.”

  “Lords of the Land and Deep, I hope you don’t start an architectural fad among the clans.”

  “Why would Iteeche Choosers choose to imitate us little humans?” Kris said, with a grin.

  “You are dangerous, Kris Longknife. Everyone I talk to tells me that you humans are dangerous. Sadly, they have no idea just how dangerous you are.”

  Kris was saved from having to form a response. They had arrived at the curb outside the ferry station. There, three black vehicles awaited them. One limo-like vehicle sported eight wheels. There were also two large, black gun trucks.

  “I came more prepared today,” Ron said, offering Kris a ride with the wave of both his right arms.

  “I came prepared today, as well,” Kris said, and glanced past Ron’s three rigs. Nine eight-wheeled vehicles in bright Marine red and gold made their way through traffic. Around them, traffic quickly made way for them. Four of the rigs mounted large caliber weapons in turrets that moved back and forth, sweeping the surrounding streets and buildings. Four more had twin mounts. The seven-barrel Gatling gun in one turret looked menacing enough. The other turret’s automatic grenade launcher only hinted at its deadliness.

  The final vehicle looked like a simple limousine. There was no need to announce to all comers that its Smart Metal programming would quickly turn it into a gun truck if the need arose.

  The tires on all nine vehicles showed they rolled heavy with armor.

  “It appears that you have,” Ron admitted.

  “And there’s more waiting outside the station, Ron,” Kris pointed out. “Tell those who talk to you that the next time someone tries to take a nip out of my ass, they had better come prepared for war.”

  “I shall warn them as such.”

  “Now, Ron, would you care to visit me and take the measure of what a Longknife castle presents to the world?”

  “I think I’d better.”

  Ron boarded his own limo. There was a bit of juggling around, and by the time the cavalcade pulled away from the station, his two gun trucks had taken over the lead and trailing slot. Kris had her Marine driver pull in behind Ron.

  “Nelly, have some fun.”

  “I’m having lots of fun, Kris. What more do you want?”

  “Doesn’t this limo seem a bit plain?”

  “Oh, that kind of fun!” Nelly said, and Kris’s ride began to change around her. Somewhere in Nelly’s busting innards must have been several records of lavish ways potentates got around. Kris found her seat rising until she was a good five meters up, traveling in a transparent bubble. Her driver now rode two meters down, with his own full bubble. The four pairs of wheels were no longer in line with the vehicle frame. The two center ones had reached out into the next lane over, giving Kris’s ride extra stability. The outer cover of her “Carriage of State” now showed as gold with jewel-encrusted banners dangling down the sides, as well as garish ornate workings wherever the royal banners weren’t.

  Kris rode, the master of all she surveyed, and from her seat, she was surveying a lot.

  On the sidewalk, a small Iteeche, one of four being towed along by an adult on a rope line, waved enthusiastically. Kris waved back. Soon all four were waving and the adult Iteeche leading them was standing stock still, its beak hanging open.

  The kids’ delight in seeing an alien human was contagious. Along the route, Iteeche pedestrians stopped and stared. Some waved, a bit more timidly than the kids, but Kris smiled and waved back.

  “Kris, what have you done?” came on Net from Ron.

  “Being majestic,” was Kris’s short reply.

  “I know, but . . .” kind of sputtered out. Ahead of her, Kris could see Ron’s head sticking out of his limo, staring back at her.

  She gave him a friendly wave.

  “Ron, your people travel around in sedan chairs and platform pavilions carried by dozens of bearers. Hasn’t anyone gotten themselves up in an overly ornamented touring car?”

  Kris detected a distinct gulp from Ron’s open mic. “We don’t . . . I mean, we . . . ah. Kris, when we travel, it’s for ourselves. The eyes of the last chosen matter nothing. What are you doing?”

  “I am representing my King to your Emperor. Among my people, an emissary is not only to the court, but also to the people. I’m not only here to speak to your Emperor, but also to support my esteemed business people in establishing trade with the tradesmen you dismiss as dust mites. We find that business grows the wealth of a nation and allows our people to live more comfortable lives. You come from your perspective. I come from mine. When we meet in the middle, we will both be enriched.”

  “You humans are so dangerous. Kris, people who see you will talk. The Lords of the Sky and Deep only know what they will say among themselves.”

  “Hopefully, they will say nice things about me,” Kris said, waving at a clump of adults who had pulled their small, three wheeled vehicles to the side of the boulevard and all gotten out to get a better view of Kris’s extravagant carriage and wave at her.

  “But what will they say of us, the Eminent Choosers?”

  “That is a thought.” Kris said, and left that hanging there.

  They were now in sight of the Pink Coral Palace. Rather, they were coming in sight of the spiraling shell of a castle that now soared high above the palace, although it did not exceed the height of the square high rises around it.

  “Nelly, were you smoking something when you came up with this?”

  “Me, smoke something? Of course not, Kris. But I was certainly enjoying showing off what I can do with Smart Metal when no one is holding me back.”

  From the looks of it, no one had held Nelly back.

  Four legs rose from the four corners of the palace. They didn’t meet until a good fifty meters above the central atrium with its gardens and ponds. Glass elevator cars climbed the legs until they disappeared into the bottom floor of a flamboyant structure.

  The castle itself was three thick strands swirling around a central hub. It started narrow, then swelled, until it was bulging out some three hundred meters up. Every floor showed plenty of glass windows or wide glass doors that opened onto small or large balconies that sparkled in
the sun. As the castle began to narrow, it spun off towers that shot up or spun around in a delicate confection.

  “Wow, Nelly. Just . . . wow,” Kris said.

  “I set the castle high on stilts with narrow lower floors so it won’t shade the gardens below, Kris. I’ve also set active reflectors on the balconies above to add to the light below. I’m looking at adding deflectors to the inner walls of the Rose Coral Palace to help with light redistribution. I don’t want any glaring lights that might blind people.”

  “No, we don’t want anybody complaining we blinded them,” Jack drawled, no doubt already thinking of a long list of people who couldn’t wait to voice their first complaint.

  “The towers aren’t just for the kids to climb up, Kris. I’ll put active and passive radars in them, covering the space around the palace as soon as more Smart Metal arrives. I’ve also set up receivers for every frequency we’ve found the Iteeche use, and a few we think might be in use. We’ll be able to record and study everything that’s happening around us.”

  “Still,” Kris muttered, “we don’t know anything about what’s really going on. Nelly, we really need to hack their network.”

  “No can do, Kris. We’ve got the secure fiber optic network in the Rose Coral Palace that the previous owner left behind. The problem is, they cut it off at the inner guard house. From the looks of it, they poured a solid concrete plug into the conduit. We can’t get anything out of it.”

  Kris turned to Lieutenant Longknife, “That affinity you have to access networks that you mentioned a while back. Are you picking up anything from the Iteeche?”

  “No ma’am. I can’t get anything from them but hash. However, I’ve never been able to rest my head against their net, either.”

  “Are you suggesting we knock Ron over the head?” Jack asked. “You want to put your head against his commlink?”

  “No. What I’d like to do is get my forehead against that concrete plug. I may end up with one hummer of a headache, but it was Grampa Ray resting his head against a stone of the old Santa Maria alien computer that started things off. I think it’s at least worth a try.”

  Kris nodded, then said, “Let me see what I can do with Ron. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll give us access to the net. Maybe the plug was someone else’s idea.”

  The look Jack tossed Kris was not encouraging.

  “Just saying.”

  Kris’s ego mobile had to shrink back down to its original size to drive through the double gates into the courtyard of the palace. It was a small parking lot, with little room for large armored vehicles. No sooner had one stopped and the crew climbed out, then the vehicle reduced itself to a nice cube of metal on wheels.

  “That’s one way to cut down on parking,” Jack observed dryly.

  Kris was more interested in the gates. Her Marines held half of a double bastion gate; two curtain walls connected it across the moat to the second half occupied by Roth’s borrowed guards. Each bastion had a turret on either side of the access road with fire ports pointing both out and into the murder hole that would be created when the gate was slammed shut on anyone trying to force entry.

  It was a decent defense, unless someone had a couple of rockets or a 200mm cannon. Then, maybe not so much.

  It would, however, keep out a crowd of unarmed civilians. No doubt the spies or ninja assassins would come in by another route.

  Once Kris’s armored vehicles had finished converting themselves to blocks and rolled themselves into storage and the Marines had formed ranks and marched off, Kris turned to Ron.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you. You mentioned some battles the Imperials have had with the rebels. Can you provide me with after-action reports and the saved data from the survivors’ battle boards?”

  “Ah, I don’t have any of that, Kris. I asked my Eminent Chooser for that sort of data but he hasn’t gotten back to me with it.”

  “How long ago did you ask?” Kris asked as gently as she could.

  “Ah, I asked before I left the Empire to get you to come here.”

  “That long ago?”

  If an Iteeche could hang his head, Ron looked ready to try.

  Kris went on. “That admiral we met outside the Imperial presence, Coth, Admiral of the First Grand Order of Iron,” Kris said as Nelly dredged up his name. “He said he’d like to help me. Do you think you could arrange a meeting with him?”

  “Ah, yes, Admiral Coth. He has been ordered off planet and I cannot find out when he will return.”

  Kris eyed Ron. She might have only half the number of eyes, but she was pretty sure the two she was using were giving Ron a mighty sharp look. “Do you detect a pattern here, old friend?”

  Ron huffed out a breath. “A very clear pattern. You have been given command of our Battle Fleet and no one is giving you the support you need to do your job.”

  “Exactly, Ron. How insidious is this rebellion? Are people right here in the capital already turning coats?”

  “Kris, it is not like that. Though, I admit, to an outsider like yourself it must very likely look like that.”

  Kris nodded agreement.

  “You have to understand. In the capital, people live or die by politics. Families have memories that go back a thousand years or more. They remember which of their ancestors was forced to taste the cup of poison and who twisted the path to get them there. Or it may just be a long remembered petty slight. Who was not invited or who was seated too low. It is a game I have not been trained to play. I was raised up to deal with you humans. You were hard enough to fathom. I could not play in both games, and, just between you and me, I prefer you humans to the silly games my siblings play.”

  Kris did not like the sound of this. The bureaucratic infighting she’d endured for the last five years at Main Navy had been frustrating. It had not been deadly.

  Now, Grampa Ray had sent her here for one thing, and the Emperor or some of his advisors were intent on using her to solve their rebel problem. The rebellion looked more like a symptom than the cause of the trouble. Kris suddenly felt like a Band-Aid that had been slapped on a gaping head wound.

  She’d have to consider this later. It was time for Plan B and a change of topic. She nodded at her aide de camp, Lieutenant Longknife. The young officer answered with a nod of her own and slipped quietly away.

  Now, to change the topic.

  Kris led the way to where a tree-shaded pond was fed by a trickling waterfall. There were two stone chairs fit for Iteeche, and Kris offered Ron one of them. Rolling out from where the shrunken main battle tanks had gone into storage, a small block scooted toward Kris. Even as she watched, it converted itself into a stone bench, complete with cracks and moss. As it rolled up to behind Kris, the wheels melted into the stone and it froze in place.

  She sat down without dusting her seat off.

  “I can’t get used to what your Nelly does with this smart metal,” Ron said. “For us, it’s a ship. For you, it is magic,” he said, looking up at the castle that loomed over them.

  “Nelly is having fun,” Kris admitted.

  “You bet I am. Wait until you see some of what I’ve already done in the castle. And I’ve got a whole lot more planned when the extra Smart Metal shows up. Kris, do you think they would mind if I dead-stick glided the Pride of Free Enterprise right into the garden of the Pink Coral Palace? That’s the easiest and quickest way I know of to get the reactors down here.”

  “Down, girl,” Kris said, but, on second thought, what Nelly had just done was a good lead in to what she wanted to talk about next.

  “Ron, when you were with us on the old Wasp while we were circumnavigating the galaxy, when we went to high gee acceleration, you and your team went into waterbeds.”

  “Yes, Kris, I know that you humans used those high gee stations. I don’t know how you humans can stand to be confined in them.”

  So, it was not just the warrior spirit that wanted to stand, it was also the Iteeche not wanting to be confined.

 
; Was the entire species claustrophobic?

  “Ron, you know I ordered Evasion Plan 3 prior to that little live fire exercise that I didn’t schedule.”

  “Was that what you were doing? It looked more like your ships had lost their minds and become unchoosable mad tadpoles.”

  “It’s something we do to dodge out of the way of targeted lasers. I’m not at all sure the Princess Royal would have survived if we hadn’t been jinking.”

  Ron just eyed her. She paused to breathe in the cool scent from the waterfall. This was not going well.

  “Ron, don’t you have any seats on your bridges? On your ships? Don’t you have anything to help you sustain high gees and radical maneuvering?”

  “Of course not, Kris. Iteeche warriors stand tall when we go into battle. Warriors don’t sit when we fight.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to sustain the gees of acceleration if you were sitting down? Maybe even reclining in a chair?”

  Ron looked at Kris like she was a particularly obnoxious bug that needed squashing.

  “Thank you, Ron,” Kris chose to say as she stood. “Won’t you come back tomorrow when I should be able to give you a complete tour of my embassy castle? Sometime around midnight, we’ll glide down the Smart Metal and reactors we need to finish the castle. Could you arrange for it not to be shot down?”

  “Kris, normally the airspace around the Imperial Palace is closed to any air traffic. I will talk to my Chooser. Maybe he can make an exception for you.”

  “I do command the Imperial Fleet,” Kris pointed out.

  “Yes, you do. Yes, you do.” Ron said vaguely as he stood, bowed low to Kris, and headed back to his car.

  Kris did not walk him to the gate. She sat, staring into her pond. She needed to do some serious thinking.

  9

  Lieutenant Megan Longknife had always had a pretty good idea of where she wanted to be. She’d wanted to be back among the rest of humanity, so she’d applied to the Wardhaven Naval Academy and knocked the dust of isolated Santa Maria from her shoes. She’d wanted to meet the renowned Kris Longknife, so she’d accepted the job as Kris’s aide de camp fresh out of the trade school.