Kris Longknife: Defender

by Mike Shepherd

  Granny refused. “I will not arrive back home in my birthday suit. I might get too many proposals for my old heart to survive.”

  So Kris talked with the bosun in charge of the longboat, and the trip down took a bit longer but stayed lower on the gee meter. Even with that, Granny was sweating when they completed reentry and settled into normal flight.

  “That was easier than the ride up, but you’re right. Space is a young person’s game,” Granny admitted, taking a swig from Sergeant Bruce’s offered canteen.

  Then a monitor in the forward end of the cabin lit up. “Hey, that’s my planet,” Granny crowed.

  “Most Alwans like the wooded areas,” she said in full lecture mode. “They no longer nest in the trees, but they like lots of trees around their houses and usually leave them open to the air, at least in the temperate zones. They plant crops, but you’d never recognize them as farms. Mostly they tend to hunt and graze, so they don’t have large population centers. I don’t know how they avoid overpopulation. That’s one of those questions we don’t ask, and they don’t tell.

  “There, have the camera stay on that viaduct,” Granny ordered, and Nelly did. “That was the first project we worked on together with the Alwans. They’d never thought of bringing water to dry land. Our colony was growing, and we needed to put more land under the plow. We found a quarry and we all got together, cut the rocks, and used log rollers to get them where we needed. They’d never seen any of the engineering tricks we used to build the viaduct. We told them this was old stuff. Things we’d been doing for three, four thousand years.

  “They didn’t believe we could know what had happened that long ago. That was when we showed them some books, personal tablets, and readers. That sent them into a tizzy and got me a visit from a delegation from the Association of Associations.

  “We spent a good month explaining to them what we humans could do and explaining how we did it. Then the lead elder did a formal dance, feathers flying, and put the kibosh on us using most of our technology.

  “Of course, the same time I was having my ears talked off by the delegation, we were also getting visits from the folks that I think, if they’d given them half a chance, would have been their engineers and scientists. While I palavered with the delegation of old farts, my first husband this side, the Enterprise’s chief engineering officer, learned a lot from the other folks and vice versa.

  “That’s the way it’s been for eighty years. Some of their people attend our schools. We make sure our kids get the best education we can. It’s getting harder as more and more of the electronic devices give up the ghost, but we’ve invented paper and printing presses, and some of the Alwans have adopted our alphabet to their language and are reading their own books. All nonfiction, I might add.”

  Granny might have gone on, talking their ears off, but the shuttle was coming up on the large lake that had been chosen for Haven, the first human town on Alwa.

  “Ain’t she lovely,” Granny said. “We made it of adobe bricks and fired red tile for the roofs. Plenty of trees for shade. Wonderful in the cool of the evening. It’s home.”

  The longboat settled onto the lake with spray and a wake that set the pulling boats and sailboats out on it to bobbing. “I bet there’s some cussing going on,” Granny said with a grin. “We haven’t had landers for a month of Sundays. Make that a century of ’em.”

  Rather than accept the tow offered by a boat with twelve strong men at the oars, the bosun used the auxiliary motor to maneuver toward a long dock.

  “Are there many water weeds?” the bosun called on the ship’s PA system. Right, Kris grinned, this was the poor fellow who had stranded her on Kaskatos when he sucked weeds into his reaction-tank intake. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  “Some along the shore, but I don’t remember any in the middle of the lake. Not back when I could still swim out here.”

  “We’ll draw reaction mass out here, if you don’t mind,” came from the flight deck.

  The dock was a substantial affair. Waiting on it was an electric-powered jitney with a half dozen seats that two people could share if they were friendly. Kris, her team, and the scientists filled it up. The driver dismounted and offered the wheel to Granny Rita and started hoofing it back to wherever he’d come from.

  Baggage was light. Even Abby had only brought one steamer trunk. The Marines formed up and prepared to march wherever it was they’d be barracked.

  Except for the two who took the seat behind Kris when Jack gave them a curt nod.

  “Jack, for once I’m on a planet where nobody knows me. I’m safe.”

  “You just went on planetwide television and bragged that you were our war leader. Commodore Rita, tell me honestly, are there never any murders: Alwa on Alwa, human on human, or, God forbid, Alwa on human.”

  “We do have the occasional aberration. The Alwans carry out capital punishment in a most bloody and attention-getting way. And it’s been televised since they adopted that technology from us.”

  “I rest my case,” Jack said, arms folded across his chest, “You don’t go anywhere without me, and I don’t go anywhere without at least two Marines, one of them female.”

  Granny was in the jitney’s driver seat. Kris and Jack were snuggled in close beside her. With everyone aboard, she put it in gear, without letting the conversation lag.

  “He won’t even let you pee by yourself.”

  “Well, Granny, there was this one time on New Eden where they did their best to kill me in the ladies’ room,” Kris had to admit.

  “I remember this one time when Trouble got taken by slavers in the men’s room. Embarrassed the hell out of him. Do you know Trouble, a Marine when last I saw him?”

  “I have the questionable honor of having Great-grampa Trouble as a relative.”

  “How in God’s name did that happen? I mean him live long enough to have a kid?”

  “His first daughter married your little Alex.”

  “They did? Good God, what a match that must have been. How are they doing?”

  “She died in a car accident shortly after my dad was born.”

  “Accident?” Granny asked suspiciously.

  “My personal guess is that there was Peterwald money behind it, but the truck driver died of a heart attack a week after the accident, before the investigation was even close to done.”

  “Peterwalds and Longknifes. Is that feud still going?”

  Kris sighed, wondering how much to say. “Let’s make a long story short by just saying that King Raymond I and Emperor Henry I are not at war. At least not when I last heard.”

  “There are advantages to being all the hell and gone on the other side of the galaxy. Thanks for dropping in. You’re helping me remember why I so enjoy it here.”

  The jitney moved quietly and at a pace the Marines marching behind it had no trouble keeping up with. There was little traffic. A few other electric rigs shared the road with wagons pulled by beasts only slightly smaller than a house. Admittedly a small house, but still, Kris would not want to get into an argument with them over right of way.

  However, they moved along quite docilely.

  “Who or what are those?” Jack asked, apparently confident the answer to that question fell under the purview of his responsibility for Kris’s safety.

  “We call them oxen,” Granny said. “They are the closest things we’ve got to beasts of burden. The Alwans raised them for food. An entire flock of them might throw a celebration and eat an entire one. Live. Or live when they start. They think it’s great fun to race after the thing and strip a nice steak-size chunk off it with their beak.”

  That brought silence in the jitney for a long moment.

  “So they’re a bit more bloodthirsty than they’ve let on,” Penny said.

  “Where prey animals are concerned, yes. Among themselves, they are the most
courteous, kind, and gentle people you could ever ask to meet.”

  “So I keep being told,” Jack muttered.

  “Amanda, Jacques,” Kris called back. “I think your work is going to be more important than we thought. It’s just a guess, but I’ll bet that back in their past, Alwans were a lot harder on each other.”

  “That is a good supposition,” Jacques said. “They developed all this ritual display as a way to settle things without bloodshed. The flock that did it first would cut down on their internal losses and be stronger against the outsider. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.”

  “You two check it out and try to find out how close to the surface the old ways are. Amanda, do you and Nelly plan on passing vocabulary back and forth between you to grow Nelly’s dictionary?”

  “Yes, every night,” Amanda said.

  “How about adding a short report on anything you’ve learned?” Kris said.

  “That’s red with blood?” Jacques asked.

  “Or even hints of it,” Jack said.

  “Mais oui, mon Capitaine,” Jacques said with an informal salute.

  “Penny?” Kris said.

  “Read you loud and clear. Iizuka Masao and I will keep our eyes peeled for the snake in this paradise.”

  “Kids, I can understand where you’re coming from, living with all the politics of humans. Remember, I survived the Unity War. I used my pregnancy with little Alex to help get Ray through security so he could kill himself and President Urm. Thank God it didn’t go down that way. Trust me, I’ve lived with these folks for eighty years, and you don’t have anything to worry about.”

  “I think the folks on Santa Maria lived in harmony with the planet three hundred years before the all-controlling computer noticed them. If Ray and his former Marines hadn’t stumbled on them at the same time . . .” Penny let the oft-told tale drift off.

  Granny sighed. “And we do have the aliens out there hell-bent on killing us all. That’s bound to ruffle a few feathers in the Associations. Not everyone is a ready-to-be-stuffed elder. Some of the newly chosen elders are surprisingly young and open to thinking outside their tried-and-true ways. Okay, okay, kids. You do what you do best. Just be sure to copy me on any reports you send to Kris or Jack. I may have a perfectly logical explanation for what you think is a bloody red hand.”

  “Offer accepted,” came from a half dozen human voices.

  The two Marines maintained a stoic silence . . . and a watchful vigilance.

  9

  They came to a halt in front of a two-story adobe building surrounded by a wide, red-tiled veranda and a grove of trees.

  “This is Government House,” Granny Rita said. “I do not live here despite the opinions of both of my late husbands. They have let me maintain an office, however. I must admit, though, that of late, before those nice pills you gave me, I was feeling kind of puny and not raising nearly the hell that I had been accused of.”

  She grinned broadly, “I am so looking forward to getting back to normal.”

  A delegation of a dozen humans and five Alwans filled the veranda. One middle-aged woman stepped forward and offered Kris her hand. “Please tell me that you haven’t turned back the clock for Rita. I can’t tell you how hard we’ve worked to run it down.”

  “Kris, this is Ada, my best friend and constantly disgruntled coworker. She’s the new official chief cook and bottle washer. If you need anything, and I’m in the head, ask her for it.”

  “I’m the elected Chief of Ministries,” Ada corrected. “Everyone except Rita treats me like I’m the boss,” she said with a sour grin that edged up around the ends as she let go of Kris’s hand.

  “It sounds like your chain of command is as much a Gordian knot as mine,” Kris said.

  “I don’t quite get your meaning, but our org charts look very logical and methodical,” Ada insisted.

  “No they aren’t. They don’t have any place for me on them,” Granny Rita grouched.

  “Hi, I’m Iago,” said a thin, young man with blond hair. “My job is to coordinate with Rita. Trust me, it’s a full-time job.”

  “I find that easy to believe,” Kris said. “I know I’m going to end up meeting all of you, but I’ve got some working folks here who are eager to get working. Amanda Kutter specializes in strange economic systems. She’s quite interested in what you developed and how it interfaces with the Alwans.” Kris knew she’d given only half of the young economist’s subject of study, but something told her she needed to pull her punches.

  Amanda stepped forward, all smiles, and said not a word in disagreement.

  Ada turned to a young woman. “Baozhai, you’re the closest thing we have to someone who handles the economy, or what we have of one. She kind of collects taxes and figures out ways for us to pay for the common things, roads, bridges, and the like.”

  “I wrestle people into donations and volunteering, you mean,” the woman said.

  “Just people?” Kris asked.

  “If I can persuade the Alwans there’s something in it for them, I get them.”

  “That television camera that they used to interview me didn’t look like something volunteers knocked together,” Kris led carefully.

  “Oh, then you also want Kuno,” Baozhai said. “He’s coordinator of Mining and Industry. He’s the one that works real close with the Alwans. Until recently, they’ve been death on anything like heavy industry or intrusive mineral extraction.”

  “Yeah, I’m glad their attitude is changing,” Kuno, a tall, middle-aged man said as he took up the story, “because about all the nano miners we knocked together eighty years ago for low-impact leaching of metals are gone. You don’t happen to have more mining nanos with you, do you? It would make my job a whole lot easier.”

  “I’ll have that checked on,” Kris said.

  YOU NOT GOING TO TELL THEM ABOUT ME, KRIS?

  NO, NELLY, FROM NOW ON YOU’RE MY TOP SECRET. IF GRANNY GIVES YOU AWAY, OKAY, BUT OTHERWISE, IT’S NOT HAPPENING.

  AYE, AYE, YOUR TYRANTSHIP.

  The gaggle of folks began to break up enough so that Kris’s team could circulate freely among them. Amanda and Jacques added to their circle of friends an Alwan who was something like Watcher of Wisdom and Traditions of the People. Penny and Masao latched onto Anyang, the Coordinator for Public Peace, as well as an Alwan who was styled something like Bringer of Harmony between The People and the Heavy People. Masao got to talking to the human who was the Historian of the Colony, and the Alwan Watcher of Wisdom. Through it all, Penny and Masao managed to not quite lose bodily contact in one way or another.

  “I got to talk to those folks about scheduling a wedding,” Granny Rita whispered to Kris.

  “Granny, it’s the modern age. Holding hands and even sharing beds does not mean a wedding has to be scheduled. We don’t have shotgun weddings anymore.”

  “Honey, I told my great-granny the same thing, and she laughed and told me that she’d said the very same thing to her great-granny. You ask any bunch of kids, and they’ll swear to you that they’re the first generation to discover sex. And insist their parents never, ever had sex themselves.”

  “Well, Granny, there are the fraternization rules.”

  “Yes, that’s something I keep meaning to talk to you about. But correct me if these old eyes are totally shot, but isn’t that couple in civilian clothes?” she said, nodding at Amanda and Jacques.

  “Yes,” Kris agreed.

  “Now that other lass, Penny you call her. The guy who can’t take his eyes off her and vice versa are in uniform, but his ain’t quite the same as hers, is it?”

  “He’s Musashi Navy. That’s where the Wasp fitted out. We didn’t become the USS Wasp until a bit later. Long story. We’ve got Sailors and Marines from Musashi and Wardhaven, contract personnel and civilian scientists aboard the Wasp, and a couple of re
staurateurs subcontracted to the main contractor.”

  “Child, how did you get yourself into a command structure like that?”

  “Trust me, Granny, she had to work hard to do it,” Jack cut in.

  “And where do you fit into this lash-up, if you think my old brain can follow it?” she asked Jack.

  “I was Kris’s Secret Service Agent,” Jack started. “Grampa Trouble suggested Kris draft me into the Marines so I might provide for her safety when she was off planet.”

  “Trouble, you say?”

  “Yes, Granny,” Kris said, eyes sadly downcast, “I have learned that Trouble means Trouble even if he is my nice old grampa.”

  “I warned her,” Nelly whispered, “but would she listen to me?”

  QUIET, NELLY.

  Jack continued. “As you may have noticed, she outranks me, and is a princess and all that. However, by law, I can countermand any order she gives that, in my opinion, could lead her into bodily harm.”

  “And his opinion of what could hurt me is huge. Just huge.”

  “This has the smell of Raymond wanting to make up for some of the more stupid things he did as a JO,” Granny said.

  “Eighty years away from him, and you still can peg him on one,” Kris said.

  Granny looked around. “Everybody looks awful busy. Let’s take a walk out among the trees.”

  Kris checked around; all her team were busy. Even Abby and Sergeant Bruce had cornered a mixed trio of humans and Alwans and were deep in some conversation, helped along by Nelly’s kids using the translating app. In fact, a check of the group showed Nelly’s translation app was going over like the best thing since sliced bread.

  No one seemed to need Kris Longknife for the moment. Granny was already leading Jack down a shady path. Kris hurried to catch up and got there just as Granny fixed the two of them, and asked, “So, are you two sleeping together?”

  “Granny, what kind of question is that?” Kris answered, doing her best not to blush. Still, she felt her face go warm.