Kris Longknife: Defender

by Mike Shepherd

  “Ooh-rah,” greeted his order.

  “Don’t beach the longboat,” Jack ordered. “If it gets nasty, I want you to be able to back out fast and get out of here,” he told the bosuns flying the shuttle. “Open the forward hatch when it shows a meter of water.”

  The longboat was fifteen meters from the beach, rocking in gentle swells, when the pilot applied reverse thrusters to take way off the boat.

  Gunny popped the hatch and ordered the first fire team out. Was it a coincidence that they were some of the tallest Marines in the crew? They splashed out and quickly waded ashore, rifles ready.

  The turtle thing fifty meters down the beach ignored them and continued on its slow path to water. Gunny ordered out the second team, then the third. Jack went with the fourth.

  Ashore, his Marines formed a perimeter, guns aimed at the trees for the most part though four were covering the lagoon behind them. In his helmet, Jack heard the lapping waves, the buzzing of small creatures, and an occasional grunt, snort, croak, or call.

  Animals all. Nothing human in the mix.

  “Sensors, talk to me.”

  The tech sergeant carrying the sensor pod strode across the sand, but even in space armor, Jack could see him shaking his head. “I’ve got biologicals all over the place, some whose heart function even matches some of our own critters. Of human cardiology, I got the Marines here on the beach; but other than that, nothing.”

  “Well, keep an eye out and give a holler the first time you see something.”

  “I will, Skipper, but there’s something in the soil or plants that’s cutting my range down next to nothing. You’ll likely see something before I get a heartbeat.”

  Jack did not like it when his technology funked out, but with forty-three Marines keeping careful watch, he could at least search with the Mark I eyeball. Jack ordered the last two of his ten fire teams to break out the medical supplies and food and form a chain to pass them to the beach. With that done, he waved the shuttle out to midlagoon.

  Jack checked out the beached shuttles with Gunny and five of the medics. They were stripped of anything that might help a struggling camp and now occupied by something like land crabs. “I wonder if you can eat those things,” Gunny muttered on net.

  “I’ll ask Phil Taussig when I see him,” Jack said.

  The longboats revealed nothing more. No arrow pointing inland, no cryptic note. The longboats were just as silent as the island.

  “There may be a trail over here,” Sergeant Bruce announced on net.

  “Show me,” Jack said, heading for the sergeant.

  “It’s not much of a trail,” Bruce added. “I can’t tell if there are footprints or just animal tracks.”

  What Jack saw was just as ambiguous as reported. He studied the beach; a high tide or two had washed the sand clear of prints. The shuttles were tied to trees. A close look at their hulls showed where they’d been tossed around on the beach, scraped against the sand, and knocked against trees. Clearly, this planet had weather, and just as clearly, that weather was doing its best to remove any marks men had made.

  “Let’s follow the trail. Gunny, you secure the beach with five fire teams. I’ll move inland with the other five.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper,” was solidly neutral. If Gunny thought an officer ought to leave rooting around in the jungle to enlisted swine, he wasn’t prepared to take a solid position. Jack reconsidered his order for a second. What lay ahead was way past unknown. Officers got the big bucks to lead into those dark places where monsters might lurk. He’d made the right call.

  Jack sent one fire team ahead of him, then followed with the other four behind him.

  The Marines, professionals that they were, spread out, letting five paces stretch out between them. Eyes and guns roamed the jungle ahead and above them. Alternate Marines concentrated to the right and left of the path.

  They moved through a jungle that quickly became deadly quiet.

  “Snake,” a Marine called on net, and the teams halted, taking a knee. Even through the faceplate, Jack could see the grin on a Marine’s face as she held up a headless, long, round something. “It tried to bite my boot. Hardly dented the shine, sir,” she said. The bayonet on her rifle dripped green goo.

  The sand gave way to marshy ground; the heavy Marines sank ankle deep into mud that slithered with things that made wakes in the water. A kind of sea grass waved in the wind around them, waist high. There were side tracks through the stuff, game trails that would let something with big teeth charge them without warning.

  Jack was taking a serious dislike to this place.

  “I found something,” the point Marine called. He held up a tattered piece of cloth, with foam still attached to it. “It looks like part of a longboat seat, sir.”

  Jack shook off his willies, and said, “Let’s keep going.”

  They came to a pond. Sergeant Bruce cut off a long, tough plant, the local equivalent of bamboo, and tossed it high. It came down and planted itself maybe a quarter of a meter deep in the “lake.”

  “This could have been a nice meadow before the last storm,” Bruce said.

  Jack ordered the Marines to slog through it. At least out here, they had a better field of fire at anything trying to take a bite out of them. They shot two snakes that didn’t get the word.

  SONIC BOOM. RIFLE FIRE, Sergeant Bruce said to Jack on Nelly Net. BUT NO REACTION FROM THE HORNET’S CREW. THIS IS EITHER CRAZY OR BAD, SKIPPER.

  Jack said nothing.

  On the other side, the trail wound uphill into the volcanic heart of the island, and the jungle grew thicker. Jack was about to order his Marines to hunt around for another trail leading off the pond when Sergeant Bruce pointed uphill. “Isn’t that a ration pack?”

  “I think you might be right,” Jack said, and led the way up the trail to its first twist. There, held down by a rock, was the foil wrapper for an egg omelet that was uniformly detested by boonie rats.

  “Sensors, talk to me.”

  “Nothing new to report, sir. I’ve got even worse reception around this rock pile.”

  “Well, stay close. Something human passed this way.”

  “Aye, aye, Skipper.”

  They started up the trail. There were broken limbs and branches on the trees and bushes, but it was impossible to tell if it had been done by man, animal, or wind. They came to a fork in the trail. One path led farther up, the other down the slope. Jack pointed down.

  Again, the trail was full of switchbacks. Under the thick canopy, the ground was covered with a mosslike purple stuff that was slimy and slippery. Marines paired up to help each other over rocks and fallen tree trunks.

  “Maybe we should head back,” Sergeant Bruce suggested. “Why would anyone lug their gear over this kind of ground?”

  Jack might have agreed, but on net, another Marine chimed in. “My old man is a guide in the mountains of Arkana. You’ll do a lot of stuff for good, clean water. That stuff we walked through looked stagnant. It would make you sick. I suspect these rocks have a spring in them somewhere.”

  Jack took the input under consideration and found it good. “We’ll keep following this trail.”

  Jack saw him before sensors reported a human outside the Marine line of march.

  He was a naked scarecrow of a man, heavily bearded and making slow, stumbling progress with the help of a crocked pole. He was on the switchback below them.

  “Corpsman, forward on the double!”

  It still took Jack a long minute to cover the ground to the wreck of a human being. In that minute, the man gave up the effort and collapsed into the mud. Jack saw why when he arrived. Diarrhea. Fecal matter dripped down his leg into the mud.

  “Medic, to me! We got a man down.”

  “Coming, sir.”

  “I knew you’d come. I kept telling the crew, Kris Longknife w
on’t leave us out here.”

  The living skeleton in Jack’s arms didn’t look anything like the ship captain Jack had known, but the voice said this was Phil Taussig.

  “What happened?” Jack asked as one corpsman arrived, followed quickly by another. They had trouble finding a vein, but it didn’t keep them from quickly getting a liter of water going into one arm and a liter of glucose into the other.

  “This planet is killing us,” Phil managed to get out. “The stuff we were eating tore up our guts. You had to be horribly hungry to eat it. But when you’re starved, and there’s nothing else, what can you do?”

  “We’re here, and we’ve got meds and food at the beach. Where’s the camp?”

  “Down the trail. At the pool. The only drinkable water we could find.”

  Thank God for a young Marine’s dad.

  It was another thirty minutes to the camp. If Phil was bad, others were worse. Kris had been right to come as soon as she could. In another few days, they would have started dying in droves. Three had died already.

  A call to the Wasp brought more medics down on the next orbit. Most of the boffins who knew anything about planets were back on Alwa, but a pair of astrophysicists volunteered to do their best as analytical chemists. After they ran their first set of tests, they leaned back and shook their heads.

  “Aluminum. That and arsenic and a couple of other heavy metals. Every plant is poison. Slow poison, but poison nonetheless.”

  Phil choked on his bitter laugh. “We knew we couldn’t fight the big monsters on the mainland. We had to find some place they weren’t. They weren’t here.” He cackled again. “Now I know why.”

  “You survived until we got here,” Jack said. “That’s all that matters. You’d have never survived on the mainland. That’s for sure.”

  “Maybe I should have tried the other planets,” Phil said, his voice now reduced to a whisper. “But the Hornet was so beat-up. We killed the last three of those bastards chasing us, but they hit us good right back.”

  “They’re dead. You’re alive. We’ll have you back on your feet in no time,” Jack promised, hoping the docs could come up with a magic potion to get all the heavy metals out of Phil’s and his crew’s system.

  All his calls back to the Wasp that day were directed at getting more Marines and medical personnel flowing to the planet below. He didn’t ask for Kris, and she never came on the line. Jack wondered what she was doing with her day but didn’t bother her. He had his hands full.

  Still, he had to wonder, what was so important to keep Kris from giving Phil an immediate call. He hoped she wasn’t getting herself—and them—in trouble again.

  39

  Kris Longknife breathed a sigh when the word came back from Jack that he’d found Phil. But she kept her eyes on the reports flowing back from the wreck of the Hornet.

  Phil had fought her until she was fit for space no more. Kris thought the old Wasp was a wreck when they got her back to human space, but the Hornet was little more than a lump of metal with a bit of oxygen and pressure here and there.

  If the reports coming up from engineering were right, however, both of the Hornet’s reactors were in decent shape. Not something you’d want to power up and ride home, but still worth saving.

  The same was true of the forward 24-inch pulse lasers. They hadn’t been hit although the power lines to two were shot away somewhere amidships. Still, with some refurbishment, they would shoot again.

  The computers had been destroyed with thermite charges.

  The problem was, of course, how to get what could be salvaged back to Alwa.

  Kris called Captain Drago in. He called in a half dozen of his ship maintainers. Together, under Kris’s unbending pressure, they put their heads together and began to solve Kris’s problem.

  “You want us to swallow two huge chunks of that hulk, then kind of trash compact the rest of the wreckage, and swallow it into the Wasp as well!” This incredulous three-part harmony showed a certain lack of commitment to meeting Kris’s objectives. However, being a Longknife, Kris didn’t allow that to slow her down. Patiently, she explained again that she needed all that wreckage back in orbit above Alwa. That was her first guess as to how to do it. “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yeah, forget the whole thing,” the chief engineer grumbled.

  “Our princess rarely does that,” Drago said. “Now, how do we move that wreck?”

  Later that day, the Wasp pulled in closer to the Hornet. Then she began to very carefully apply her new 20-inch lasers to slicing certain portions of the hulk off the rest. First, the engines were cut away, then the reactors and the delicate instruments that made them work were sliced off. While the pinnace rounded up those stray parts before they wandered off, the Wasp turned her attention to the bow and its pulse lasers. Once they were free of the rest, the Wasp began dicing the hull into more digestible chunks.

  “I don’t mind having the pinnace kind of engulf the reactors and lasers,” Captain Drago muttered to Kris. “It’s the idea of using part of my beautiful ship as a trash compactor to squish the rest of the Hornet into a nice compact box that worries me.”

  “If the Smart Metal of the Wasp protests too much,” Kris said, trying to sound perfectly reasonable as she laid a charge on her flag captain that had never been ordered before, “we’ll call it quits. We can start with the rocket engines. They’re big and hollow. They ought to collapse easily.”

  The young lieutenant on defense looked pale as he programmed his hull material to spread out, then squeeze together . . . with huge rocket motors in between. The moaning of the motors . . . or the hull . . . or both, rang through the Wasp.

  However, both reports from the ship’s skin and eyeball assessments from Sailors on the outside said that the process went surprisingly smooth. The pinnace, with the lasers and reactors kind of lashed to one side, used the other side to nudge wreckage toward the Wasp.

  Together, they made it happen.

  When they were done and the Wasp’s pinnace was merging back in, there were a lot of bumps and bulges on the Wasp, enough to move her captain almost to tears.

  “Almost to tears doesn’t count,” Kris said, scolding him good-naturedly.

  “But my beautiful ship!”

  “Will be beautiful once more as soon as we get this junk back to Alwa.”

  Captain Drago didn’t look all that convinced.

  Longboats were coming back as Kris finished her housekeeping chores, so she drifted down to the docking bay. She thought by now that she’d seen it all. Still, the shock of the starved Sailors had her kicking herself for not launching her search sooner. She thought of all the time she’d wasted while this poor crew was having their guts torn apart by poison, and wished some people, like Grampa Ray and Admiral Crossenshield, could see what she saw.

  Politicians who called the tunes should have to physically face the price good men and women paid for their shenanigans. Kris swore if she ever found herself in their place, a risk all Longknifes ran, that she’d remember these faces when she was calling the shots.

  Then Jack arrived, drifting along with a stretcher. He waved Kris toward him, and she shoved herself away from the bulkhead and floated in his direction.

  “Kris,” Jack said, “Phil Taussig wants to thank you, personally.”

  Kris looked down on a man whose face she couldn’t recognize. It wasn’t just the bush of hair and beard or the gaunt, sunken eyes. There was nothing here of the ready smile or the confident commander that she’d known. Kris wondered if that man could ever reinhabit this broken body.

  “Thank you, Kris. I knew you’d come for us. I knew you wouldn’t desert us. Thank you,” Phil gushed, with tears running down his face. The water and glucose bags above his head had 3 written on them in grease pencil. She suspected that the poor man could cry only because they’d pumped six liters of liqui
d into him.

  “I came as soon as I could,” Kris told him, taking his hand. “Now, you rest. We’ll be heading back to Alwa as soon as we can.”

  “Alwa?”

  “Yes. The planet we saved. It also has a human colony on it that we didn’t know about when we fought off the invaders. I found my great-grandma Rita Longknife.” She’d explain the full family dysfunction later.

  “We saved the planet. They didn’t wipe it out.” Now Phil really was crying, though these were tears of joy. “Crew.” Phil managed to raise his voice. “We saved the planet.”

  Around the landing bay, people strapped to stretchers muttered as much joy as their broken bodies could express.

  “Then it was all worth it,” Phil whispered as he sank into a stupor.

  “How bad?” Kris asked in a whisper to Jack.

  “We won’t know for a while. We think it’s all heavy metal poisoning, but there may be other things as well. They’re creating an isolation sick ward just off the landing bay. As soon as we get them all moved in, we’ll douse down the bay and our suits to kill anything we can. You do realize you may be contaminated?”

  “Why didn’t somebody hand me a moon suit?” Kris wasn’t the only person in the landing bay protected by nothing more than the cotton in their shipsuit.

  “I guess the message didn’t get across. Sorry about that.”

  “So we set up quarantine for us, too,” Kris grumbled.

  “We’ll see how long it takes,” Jack said. Inside his faceplate, he didn’t look any happier about having Kris on one side of quarantine and him on the other.

  Fortunately, the docs did blood cultures and took samples of the mud on the Marines’ boots and found nothing that looked dangerous to humans. The heavy-metal contamination seemed to be the only problem.

  Twelve hours later, Kris was out of quarantine. Which was a good thing, since half an hour later, an alien ship jumped into the system.