62
The Wasp docked where it was told to, well aft on the station. No other ships were using a pier below the middle of the spaceport. The instructions to the ship had been short and forceful, and had called for no response.
That didn’t mean no one tried to talk to the Wasp.
The main screen on the bridge suddenly came alive. A civilian was staring wide-eyed at them. “Are you the Wasp? Did you fire on the aliens like you said you were going to? Where are the rest of the ships?”
“Cut that off,” Captain Drago ordered. “Communications, what just happened?”
“Sorry, sir. We’ve been intercepting something like that every couple of seconds. There are about thirty or forty people trying to call us. Some are newsies. Some I have no idea who they are. Anyway, I’m sorry, we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“Glad to know that we aren’t totally forgotten,” Vicky said. “Me not being under your orders, maybe I should talk to some of them.”
“Please don’t,” Kris said. “I don’t want to remind you, but you are presently under my protection. You really want to leave the Wasp and check into the local Hilton?”
“I wouldn’t last an hour,” Vicky muttered. “Okay, I’ve reconsidered. You stay my best friend forever. Wherever you go, I go. Only, without your Chief Beni, how safe are you going to be? Have you thought of that?”
“I’ll make you a bet,” Kris said. “Two seconds after we dock, I’m going to be under so solid a lockdown that a flyspeck can’t get in.”
Vicky made a show of thinking that over, then shook her head and smiled evilly. “No way I take that bet.”
A few minutes later, the Wasp tied up to its assigned pier. Moments later, fresh air, water, and other amenities began to flow into the ship.
“You better keep our sewage on board for a while,” Kris suggested. “No one has come down with the alien’s equivalent of Montezuma’s revenge from those two sweet kids, but you never can tell.”
“And it may buy us a bit of time before we’re crawling with newsies,” the skipper agreed.
“Skipper, there are an admiral and a planetary governor on the pier along with a Marine guard detail. Do I let them aboard?” came from Gunny on the quarterdeck.
“I’ll dispatch the princess to talk to them. Don’t open the hatch until she gets there. Your Highness, you want to get into a biohazard suit?”
“Great idea, Skipper. Jack, you want to come with me?”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“Nelly,” Kris said on the way to her quarters, “is my report ready to download?”
“The short version and the middling-long version, I can squirt to anyone in a few seconds, Kris. But the warts-and-all version, that takes up a lot of bandwidth and time.”
“Could you load a copy of that on flash storage?”
“I’ll have a copy ready in your room.”
Back in Kris’s cabin, she found Abby laying out a set of khakis. “These are the least wrinkled and smelly. I tried to wash out a pair of panties and bra in the bathtub, but they stank worse afterward, and I have no idea how the ammonia and methane would have felt after you wore them for a few hours.”
Kris nodded. “Thanks for thinking about me.”
“I ain’t had much to do but think about you. And visit those cute kids down in the nursery. Cara just thinks they are the cutest things, even if they won’t let them out of the quarantine bubble to play with her.”
“She’s a good kid. You take care of her.”
“And you take care of you,” Abby said, adjusting Kris’s gig line.
Then she gave her a hug. A wide-open big one. “We’ll find you, Kris. No matter where they send you, we will find you, and we will come for you.”
“Don’t come too soon,” Kris said. “Take your time. Don’t play into anything they’ve set up to get you, too.”
“Gamma didn’t raise any dumb kids,” Abby assured her, and helped her pull on the blue moon suit.
Done, Nelly pointed out a tiny flash-storage cube. Kris palmed it before she left. Nice, these new suits had pockets.
Kris met Jack in the passageway, moon suited up himself.
“Let’s go see how they welcome the conquering hero.” Then Kris reconsidered her words. “Make that surviving broken-down sailor.”
Jack hummed something that sounded a bit like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” but maybe wasn’t.
At the quarterdeck, the usual formalities were a bit awkward in the moon suits, but Kris made sure to follow tradition. Gunny opened the hatch just enough for Kris and Jack to slip through, then shoved it closed again.
Kris easily spotted Admiral Sandy Santiago. Governor Ron Torn of Chance came as a surprise.
Kris marched as smartly as the roly-poly suit allowed, presented herself to the admiral, and snapped a salute. “Lieutenant Commander Longknife reporting as ordered, ma’am.”
The admiral returned her salute and quipped dryly, “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.”
Kris turned to the governor. “Ron, how’s the wife? The kids? They must be growing like weeds.”
“Don’t try to change the subject,” he demanded, then changed it himself. “What are you doing in those biohazard suits?”
“We’ve got aliens aboard,” Kris said with solid pride. “So far, there’s no sign that they have any bugs that like us, but we got them in quarantine, and I thought you might want to have us be careful for a while longer.”
“You’ve captured aliens!” both the admiral and governor exclaimed.
“Yep, two of them.”
“They’re talking to you?” Ron said.
“Yes, and no,” Kris said, letting a pained look cross her brow. “They’ve got teeth coming in, and I think what they’re saying translates into ‘Teething is the pits.’ You want to see a picture?”
Without waiting for an answer, Kris pulled a picture out of one of the pockets of her blue suit and waved it at Ron, proud as any grandparent.
Ron stepped back in horror. Then he focused on the picture and his horror turned to puzzlement. “They look just like my kids looked when they were babies.”
“That’s what Gunny said when he found them. The species will not talk to us, will shoot at us every chance they get, and they look just like us. How’s that for ugly?”
“We are not supposed to talk to you, Kris,” Admiral Santiago said. “My orders are very specific. You will only be debriefed on Wardhaven.”
“Those are not my orders,” Ron said. “Kris Longknife, you are under arrest for crimes against humanity. You will come with me.”
“I can’t do that, Ron,” Kris said. Once, the thought of going with Ron would have brought a rosy hue to Kris’s cheeks. Once, she’d thought that Ron might be the one man for her. But he’d gotten a good look at life around a Longknife, and he’d run, not walked, for the nearest exit. Next she heard from him, it was a wedding invitation that sadly lacked her name in the place of honor.
“Are you resisting arrest?” Ron demanded.
“No,” Kris said.
“Then explain yourself.”
Kris raised an eyebrow to Admiral Santiago and waited for her to do the honors of enlightening the governor of the planet below.
“What she means, Governor Torn, is that Chance never contributed a dime to the construction of this station. Wardhaven got it dumped on her when the Society of Humanity went poof. We’ve been defending it ever since. While she’s on High Chance, Princess Kristine is on sovereign Wardhaven territory. You can apply to extradite her, but it would be a waste of time. You’re way down the line of people demanding her scalp, and King Raymond I of United Society has staked his claim on the head of the line.”
“But my wife had a brother on the Triumph. What happened to him? That ship?”
“Last I saw of it, it was an expanding ball of glowing gas,” Kris said, making no effort to take the cruelty out of her words. “All our ships went out with a very big bang. I suspect they all blew their reactor containments to make sure the aliens didn’t have anything to examine.”
“Kris,” Admiral Santiago snapped, “you are under orders not to say anything.”
“Then, Ron, why don’t you head home. If you want, you can take the babies’ picture.”
He snatched it and stalked away. He had to pass a detachment of Marines to get off the pier, but the admiral did not order them to relieve him of his picture.
Kris waited until he was out of sight, up the escalator to the main deck, then began unzipping her suit. Jack followed her lead.
“Theatrics,” Sandy said.
“You got to dress the part,” Kris said.
“So those kids are not all that dangerous,” the admiral said, sounding like she’d need some serious persuasion.
“Penny’s taken the watch in the nursery. Her computer, Mimzy, has got a set of nano guards cruising that room that are guaranteed to let nothing in or out.”
“Mimzy, huh. I heard that Nelly got in the family way,” Sandy said. “Gal, who knocked you up?”
“I did it all by myself,” Nelly said proudly.
“It should be so easy,” Sandy drawled.
“She did have some help from my credit chit,” Kris said dryly.
“But you’ve been very glad I did,” Nelly shot back.
“We wouldn’t have made it back without her and her brood,” Kris said. “We lost three of them along the way. Chief Beni, you remember him?”
“Yes, brilliant, if somewhat weak in leadership traits.”
“We lost him and two others.”
“I’m sorry, Kris. From the looks of things, you lost more than just them.”
“I observed six of the battleships that came with me be blown to dust. The last two, Swiftsure and the Imperial Scourge, were running for all they were worth when we took our only chance to duck out of the system. The aliens chased down two of my ships and blew them to bits. Taussig on the Hornet led them in one direction, so I could go in the other. That did let us shake them.”
“Did you get the mother ship you were aiming for?”
“We chewed up the stern half of something that made a moon look dinky. I don’t know if that kept them from launching an attack on the avian race we were trying to protect. I need to go back,” Kris said.
“Not until you’ve seen the king.”
NELLY, SQUIRT SANDY THE TWO SHORT VERSIONS.
DONE.
The admiral’s eyes widened as the quickest read of Kris’s report came through to her. Kris reached over and slipped the tiny data cube into the admiral’s pocket.
Sandy’s hand slid in as Kris pulled out.
“What are you doing to me?”
“Read the whole report. Take special note of the DNA we took off the kids’ parents. The aliens that plundered the planet and the ones that first shot at me hadn’t intermarried for, say, ten thousand years. The kids’ folks haven’t met the other two populations in the last hundred thousand years. There are a whole lot of big uglies out there.” Kris paused to let her words sink in.
“If you want to after you read that, you can destroy it. I don’t think you will. If you can see your way through to it, deliver a copy to Winston Spencer. He won’t be able to use it, but it will help him know where to snoop.”
“You are going to get us into those adjoining cells in that deepest dungeon.”
Kris changed the subject. “Is it as bad as Ron makes it sound? Am I already being declared a war criminal?”
“Oh yes,” the admiral said. “Now, I’ve heard a whole lot more than I was supposed to, but then I’m a Santiago, and we’re used to getting the bloody end of the Longknife legend. I’ve got orders to put you on the first fast courier ship available. They yanked the nearest one off its run when they heard you were here, and it’s due to dock in five minutes. Right across from the Wasp.”
“I’ll need to take Jack with me.”
“Sorry, girl, your orders are to go alone and say nothing to any of the crew.”
“Jack’s my security chief. He’s kept me alive I don’t know how many times.”
“Kris, these courier ships are manned by people with the highest clearances. They carry packets that no one trusts to transmit in the securest ciphers. That, and you are ordered to go alone. Sorry, Jack, you stay here.”
Jack seemed to mull that claim over . . . and find it very lacking in substance. But several of the Marine guards were eyeing him with serious intent. Kris figured Jack could take them, but what would they do next?
With no good options, Kris let out a sigh. “Okay, Jack, you come along when the Wasp does. Or the Wasp’s crew. I’m none too sure the old girl has another trip in her.”
“I’ll get to Wardhaven as quickly as I can,” Jack assured her.
Across from Kris, a port opened, and a small young woman ducked out. “I’m supposed to pick up a Kris Longknife, whoever she is. I got a tight schedule, so let’s get a move on.”
Suddenly there was no more time. Jack stood there, arms at his side.
She stood there, arms with nothing to do.
And Jack raised his hands to her, and suddenly she was in his arms, holding him holding her.
For the moment nothing mattered. Not the war, not the politics, not the confusion and hatred.
She held him and he held her and there was nothing but the warmth of his embrace and the beating of their two hearts.
Jack’s fingers brushed her throat, sending shivers through her. She looked up at him. His lips trembled, soft and waiting. She kissed him.
Or maybe he kissed her.
All the wasted years and months and hours plunged into the seconds they had here and came away full of wonder.
“Pardon me. I’ve seen this kind of thing before, folks, and I understand, really I do, but I got my orders, and one of you needs to get his or her ass on my boat, pronto.”
The words of the skipper of the courier boat were insistent . . . and apparently well practiced.
The urge to tell the young woman what she could do with her orders was on Kris’s lips, but she didn’t want to break from the warmth of Jack’s kiss.
The thought of her refusing her orders came to mind, quickly followed by the vision of Sandy ordering her Marines to pick Kris up and toss her in the boat.
She had her service-issue automatic. She could shoot it out right there on the pier. She’d likely end up dead or sleepydarted.
None of her prospects looked good.
She opened her eyes and gazed up into Jack’s. The same agony was on his face that must be on hers.
“Damn, I wish we’d done this sooner,” he said.
“Me, too,” Kris said, and took a step back.
His hands refused to let her go, but held her even as she took a second and a third step away from him. Finally, only their fingers were touching.
Another backward step broke even that contact.
“I will find you,” he whispered.
“I will wait for you,” she whispered back.
Then she turned, every fiber of her being in agony and rebellion, and marched the short distance to where the courier pilot waited.
“Let’s do what you have to do,” Kris said.