Kris Longknife: Redoubtable

by Mike Shepherd

  Kris had listened patiently. She had sat on the one question that had haunted her since she first encountered the wreckage and flotsam of Greenfeld situation. She could sit on it no more.

  “Vicky, what’s the problem? What is going on? I know I’m a Longknife and the ancestral enemy, but God in heaven, girl, things are a mess, and I’m doing my level honest best to clean up after it. Don’t I at least deserve to know what is actually happening?”

  Vicky eyed her admiral. He couldn’t bear her question and focused his attention on the table in front of him. Kris was half-afraid that she’d shattered the growing trust between her and the young woman from Greenfeld.

  She hadn’t intended that.

  Just as Kris was about ready to take her words back, Vicky started talking. Her eyes didn’t rise to meet Kris’s, but she seemed unable to look up from her hands.

  “We are in trouble. The glue that held 103 planets together has come apart, and we don’t know how to fix it. With the aid of the fleet, we can hold this or that fragment together, but even our fleet is too small to hold it all.”

  Vicky looked up, met Kris’s eyes. “If you went down to St. Pete with a pocketful of Greenfeld marks, you couldn’t buy a beer. You couldn’t buy anything. St. Pete and half of our planets are back on the barter system. If you don’t have something to trade, no one will keep you from starving to death. If your mother or father was the wrong person, you can get killed right where you stand.

  “Half our planets don’t have a central government anymore. They’ve got three or six or a dozen situations running things. Usually a warlord with guns. Maybe the warlord is a black shirt. Maybe the warlord just managed to get all of State Security’s guns. At first, my dad and I made the mistake of thinking that we could wipe out the cancer of State Security and everything would be fine.

  “Big mistake,” Vicky said with a sigh.

  “Dad thought he had corporate vice presidents that he could trust to keep things going on this planet or that one. Nine out of ten of them have set themselves up as rulers. The smart ones call themselves princes or viceroys. The dumb ones claim to be kings. Dad’s taken care of all of them so far.”

  “It’s that bad,” Kris said in a whisper.

  “When you were talking about shipping famine biscuits to the Sooner planets that our refugees are flooding, I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking you to send them to twenty of our planets. St. Pete’s one of them.”

  “Why not?” Kris asked. “Why haven’t you asked for our help?”

  “And let Ray Longknife know we’re in this much trouble,” Vicky spat. “Hell, Kris, you know he’d invade us in a second. Kris, the Marines you’ve got on your little ship could probably take over a dozen of our planets. Worse, the people would greet you as liberators.

  “You know that Captain Thorpe guy that you chased away from that Sooner planet, what was it called?”

  “Panda,” Kris said.

  “If he’d landed the same bunch of roughnecks on St. Pete, it would be his. Kris, keeping this a secret is the only chance we’ve got.”

  Kris felt kicked in the gut. Here she was, busting her butt, risking the life of her Marines and sailors to get help where they thought it was needed . . . and the Peterwalds were hushing up just how bad the starving and dying was because they thought Kris’s grampa would take advantage of the suffering for some political advantage. Kris refused to meet Vicky’s eyes.

  Around Kris, the silence gathered and grew. No one said a word. Finally, Kris could be quiet no more.

  “Vicky, I can’t believe that you’d think that my grampa would do anything in the face of the suffering of your people but help them where he could.”

  “Oh, Kris, don’t give me that. Look at how King Ray is soaking up planet after planet.”

  “Planet after planet is choosing to join him,” Kris spat back. “No one’s been forced to join. It’s not our fleet that shows up in someone’s sky and proceeds to add it by force to our flag. Remember, I was there when your brother did his best to force Chance into your father’s hands. I did all I could to keep things peaceful, then fought side by side with volunteers from Chance when a fight was what your brother demanded. Admiral, you were there.”

  “She is telling the truth, Vicky. I have told you so before.”

  Vicky was on her feet, looking from the admiral to Kris and back again. She shook her head, rejected what they told her.

  Kris stood to meet her face-to-face.

  “Chance told my grampa to go jump and voted itself into the Helvitican Confederacy. I was there just recently. The Helvitican flag is what they fly.”

  “No. No, I’ve heard about how you people fight. Six super battleships went after Wardhaven, and you blew every one of them to bits. Don’t tell me you people don’t fight.”

  “Yes, Vicky, we fight,” Kris growled. “Remember who you’re talking to. I led that fight. I commanded twelve tiny patrol boats against them. I begged, stole, and scrounged anything I thought might help me. Somebody suggested that little system runabouts might confuse those battleships, be mistaken for our patrol boats long enough for us to get our shots off.

  “The worst mistake in my life was letting those little boats join us. Those civilian runabouts couldn’t dodge or jink as fast as a fighting boat. We hadn’t mounted chaff dispensers on them or given them any foxers. When the fight started, they died and died and died, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  “But let me tell you something. After the first attack, after we knew what it took to survive in that fight, there were these tugs that refueled my surviving ships. They’d watched the runabouts die; but every one of those tugs, everyone in their crews voted, insisted, that they join our attack. Do anything they could to give us a chance to get a killing hit on those battleships.”

  Kris found she was in tears. “The people on those runabouts were volunteers, not even reservists. A lot of those runabouts were crewed by families that had signed up for the Coast Guard auxiliary, to rescue idiots who’d bought more boat than they had brains to operate. I attended a lot of funerals after that fight. One was for a man and his wife, their son and daughter. They came because someone told them their little runabout might help keep Wardhaven free. They died fighting for that freedom.

  “Vicky, free men and women will fight to their last breath to keep their freedom. But don’t you ever mistake that fighting will for a willingness to take what isn’t freely offered.

  “I swear by every drop of blood that’s in me that my grampa, King Ray, will ship you food and medicine if that is what you need. Just say the word, and the ships drifting behind your station could be on their way to bring what your people are desperate for.”

  Kris finished, emotionally spent; she collapsed into her chair. Across from her, Vicky slowly settled back into her seat. She glanced at the admiral and raised a questioning eyebrow.

  The admiral took a deep breath. “Kris, I believe that you believe every word of what you just told us. Never think that I doubt your sincerity. But I cannot help but see an idealistic young girl before me. Maybe you are right, and your King Ray would not seek advantage. Maybe he would send food and other aid. Maybe I, too, believe that he would do as you say. But hear this old cynic out.

  “The cost of a few boatloads of famine rations is minuscule in the budget of 130 planets. But the massive amount of help that fifty planets would need is not a price to sneeze at. Are you even sure your granaries have that much to spare? And such an effort would strap even lush Wardhaven’s treasury. But even more to the point, is this a problem that your king needs at this time?

  “I’m guessing that he sent you here with your makeshift squadron in an effort to do a little good on the cheap. It looks good on the news. ‘Look at all the nice things we are doing in your name, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. So sad about those poor refugees. Now on to the next story.’ But if the cost zoomed through the roof?” The admiral shrugged and left the thought hanging for a moment before goin
g on.

  “But that is only the tip of the iceberg. If you really enter into the Greenfeld tragedy, where do you stop? You saw that on Kaskatos. You just wanted to deliver some food. Between sunup and sundown you ended up conquering the planet. Where is your Penny, the daughter of a cop? Or that colonel you picked up at Panda? Something tells me you left them behind to work with the locals on putting together a constabulary and a militia. I know I would have.

  “Do you honestly think that your Wardhaven would not be drawn into a morass even as you tried to do just a few good things?” Finished, the admiral leaned back in his chair, his hands limply upturned on the table in front of him.

  “So,” Kris finally said after the silence had stretched long, “the best thing I can do is help you solve your own problems your own way . . . and get out of Dodge as fast as I can,” Kris said.

  “Yes,” said the admiral. “A while ago, you said you were open to any suggestions for how we might solve whatever the problem was that we were talking about. No one came up with a better idea. Like you then, Vicky and I are all ears for something better. Something with less suffering attached. Neither one of us is sure that our little attempt at this solution won’t end up with our heads on pikes,” the admiral said, and even managed a chuckle.

  “So, let me bring matters back to where we were before this little detour. How shall we go about finding out the truth of St. Petersburg’s economy and the real distribution of its military production?”

  19

  “How do you strip away a facade of lies?” Kris asked.

  “Without the cops hauling us off to jail . . . or worse?” Jack added.

  “I’ve heard tell,” Professor Scrounger rumbled, “that the truth will set you free. It’s been my experience that it can’t do much of anything without a helping hand or two.”

  Vicky nodded. “I know it’s not going to be easy. Just on the planet below us there are a half billion hungry people. The infrastructure is a mess. There are at least four major population centers, none of which is talking to any other, and none of them is really interested in seeing my sailors or Marines march through their streets. At least they aren’t shooting at us. Not lately.”

  Vicky glanced at Chief Meindl; he gave her an approving nod.

  “Nelly, could you give us a map, please?” Kris said. “I think better if I can see something.”

  A lovely seascape at sunset on the left bulkhead swiftly changed into a map of the planet below. Most of the human presence on St. Petersburg spread around an inland sea someone had aptly named the Middlesea. A large peninsula jutted out into that sea; the city of St. Petersburg was located about halfway down it. The whole thing reminded Kris of something.

  Then it came to her. While the peninsula looked nothing like the Italian boot back on old Earth, the blend of sea and land did have the look of the Mediterranean of humanity’s home planet.

  St. Petersburg was about where Rome was. Off to the west of the nonboot was a river about where the Rhone was in France. Here the city at the mouth of it was Kiev. Almost directly south of it, on the opposite coast, was Sevastopol. The mountains behind it were actually called the Atlas Range. Far to the east, where the Nile would have been on Earth, was the River Don, with a huge estuary and the city of Moskva.

  Behind each of these major cities were extended hinterlands of farms and mineral extraction that fed their industry. St. Pete and Kiev were connected by thin rail lines, as were Sevastopol and Moskva. Still, most trade between them had to be done by sea.

  “Can you superimpose the basic data net?” Kris asked. Lieutenant Kostka took a minute to work the interface between his commlink and Nelly.

  KRIS, THEIR GEAR IS KLUDGE CITY.

  YOU CAN TELL ME THAT, BUT DON’T YOU TELL THEM.

  DON’T WORRY. I AM LEARNING HOW TO LIE. I MEAN BE TACTFUL.

  Leaving Kris to wonder if a tactless computer had been less trouble than one that now could lie. Oh bother.

  “The official data repositories are located in the four cities. St. Petersburg is supposed to be the official one. The others are only supposed to be backups of that main one. However, the four systems have not been synched in over six months. God only knows what is going on,” Lieutenant Kostka finished with an expressive shrug.

  “I really don’t see a problem,” said Chief Beni. “We’re after the data that wasn’t there in the first place. I suspect we can ignore the official data. Do you have any idea where the other databases might be physically located?”

  “Or the databases involved in producing the 5-inch lasers that we’re capturing on pirate ships?” Kris added.

  “The Greenfeld Navy Yard is outside St. Pete,” the admiral said. “I sent a detachment down to secure it as soon as we arrived. It had been looted and stripped bare of everything that could be carried away. Trust me, nothing is coming out of that yard but weeds.”

  That left Kris with a puzzle to solve. “St. Pete’s closest to the Rim. I thought for sure it would be involved somehow in the pirate business.”

  “It probably was,” Vicky said. “That’s why we’re here. We’re not just keeping an eye on you, you know. The reports we were getting back said that St. Pete was still shipping a lot of stuff through this station, but we couldn’t find out where the ships were going. Once Admiral Krätz’s squadron showed up, the station’s business has halved. And we know where everything is going and what’s in every container,” Vicky said proudly.

  “Is that based on reading the bill of lading, or are you actually eyeballing the contents of the boxes?” Jack asked.

  Vicky wilted. “We are reviewing the bills of lading. But with battleships tied up to the station, who’d dare lie?”

  Kris didn’t say a word.

  After a bit of a pause, Vicky went on. “So, we should have sailors and Marines actually break the seals and look in the containers.”

  “Starting tomorrow,” Admiral Krätz said.

  Kris got up and walked over to study the map. “So, where might 5-inch lasers be coming from? You said somebody wrecked St. Pete’s industry. Do any of these other cities have heavy industry?”

  Vicky joined Kris at the map. “Kiev and Moskva don’t have easy access to minerals. Sevastopol has some mining going on in the Atlas Mountains. It also has several mines located down the coast of the Great Ocean. It’s set up a colony in Georgia. In the two weeks we’ve been watching, we’ve seen several ships make port at Sevastopol loaded with raw materials for the portside factories.”

  “Is anyone beside me wondering how come Sevastopol is still up and running, and St. Pete took it on the chin?” Jack asked.

  “Most likely it was our mistake,” the admiral said. “Once General Boyng suffered his nine-millimeter stroke, it was thought necessary to take down State Security everywhere and very quickly. I believe a cruiser was ordered to St. Pete. The Aurora had a skipper who was young and very enthusiastic, if not all that experienced. He landed at St. Pete in the middle of the night, rounded up all the black shirts, and dispatched them before dawn. By sunset that day, the city was totally out of control. Need I say more?”

  Kris shook her head.

  “You know, when all this is over, someone must write a book,” the professor drawled, “on how to conduct an effective coup de main. Amateurs trying their hands at it for the first time could really use some educational advice.”

  “Amateurs aren’t the only ones who are out of their depth,” the admiral said, raising an eyebrow at Vicky.

  She laughed. “My dad is no better than an amateur in the present situation. He’s run things the way his father and his father did before him. Then he wakes up one morning, and the same old same old isn’t there to do his bidding. Dad’s muddling through. We’re muddling through. Please, Professor. Write your book. I promise you that I and my friends will make it a best seller.”

  “I will definitely think about it.”

  “Well,” Kris said, returning to the topic, “if St. Pete was a disaster, why wa
sn’t Sevastopol?”

  “There is a city manager there,” Vicky said, as if repeating what she had memorized from some report. “He is young. Eager to learn. Eager to serve. We think Manuel Artamus is his name.

  “He woke up one fateful morning to find that all his black shirts had hotfooted it out of town. I imagine he rejoiced in that for all of five seconds. Then the thought must have struck him: ‘How do I run this place now?’ ” Vicky said with a lovely shrug of her shoulders.

  “I guess he was smarter than the average city manager. Most know they have a black market operating in town. Every city does . . . at least here in Greenfeld territory. He either knew who headed the gangs running things or knew how to get in touch with them. By noon, he’d recruited all the smugglers and black-market types to take over the guns the black shirts had left behind. He kept his town going under new management, with hardly a hiccup.”

  “And you think he may have made a deal with the pirates?” Kris said.

  “Or at least with someone who knew someone who knew what the pirates needed and could match the need with a supplier.”

  “And you haven’t sent your Marines to visit this guy?” Jack said.

  “It didn’t seem wise,” the admiral said. “This goose is still laying eggs, even if they are of unspecified type, and it’s not like I have enough Marines that I can afford to lose a lot of them even if it is in a winning fight. And then, as you learned on Kaskatos, if I broke the place, I’d have to run the place. No thank you.”

  “So we need to slice Sevastopol open and take a long, hard look at their books. Only we can’t just walk in, or even walk by and send a little bug to do it,” the professor said.

  “Yes, I believe you have it right,” the admiral said.

  “Kris, could we talk for a moment?” Vicky said, and drew Kris out of hearing of the others.

  “Dr. Margarita Rodriguez is on St. Pete. As you can tell from the name, she comes from old Earth’s Spanish roots. In the mess that followed the shooting of the State Security troops, it didn’t pay to be a different shade of white from those around you. Her apartment house in St. Petersburg was burned, and she fled. The last report I have on Doc Maggie is of her taking passage on a small fishing vessel for Sevastopol. I don’t know if she made it, but if she’s still alive, she’s somewhere around there.”