Kris Longknife: Redoubtable

by Mike Shepherd

  “You heard the commander,” Jack ordered his Marines, “strip these dudes. Put what you can on over your armor and find something that looks like you’re hauling loot.”

  The Marines responded with strange looks, but they did as ordered.

  Penny got back with a lovely treasure chest just as the lieutenant colonel who commanded the Greenfeld Marine battalion arrived with his own Marines to take over the prisoners . . . many of whom were now stripped down to nothing since they’d failed to put on underwear that morning. Maybe any morning.

  “You Wardhaven Marines have strange proclivities,” the colonel said darkly.

  “Anything that will get us across the killing grounds without us getting killed is fine by us,” Jack said, firmly defending his own.

  “You are weird people,” the colonel said, shaking his head. “We would charge across, guns blazing, rockets going off. We’d have this place in a blink of an eye.”

  “When we get finished,” Kris said, “this station will still be holding air and ready to go back to work tomorrow.”

  “Hmm, there is that,” the colonel admitted.

  “Okay, crew,” Kris said, raising her voice. “Let’s go get ourselves one pirate port.”

  “Ooo-Rah,” came back at her.

  The Marines moved out behind Kris in general mob formation. They lugged boxes and crates alone or in pairs. Several of them waved empty whiskey bottles they’d retrieved from the several pubs in boffin country.

  At least Kris assumed the bottles were empty.

  The way to the command post led along the station’s main deck and past several grog shops. The early-morning denizens of those dives waved their own bottles and mugs at them as they strode by, but saw nothing amiss.

  They also lacked the wherewithal to get up and join Kris’s little parade . . . thank heavens.

  Kris spotted the tail end of one similar mob. She suspected it was Kitano’s team going for the reactor. She wished her the best of luck but concentrated on her own target.

  The command center controlled the station. It also must have any records that existed that would tell Kris what captured human cargo had passed through the station and where it was sent.

  Kris needed the station computer intact and cooperating. Not shot up and blown apart like the Greenfeld colonel had offered.

  Still, it was going to take a lot of luck to get the controls and computers in pristine condition.

  A glance at Nelly’s feed from the command center showed four still playing cards and one wandering around, glancing at different stations. He didn’t look all that interested in doing watch-standing duties. Maybe he’d just lost all he had to lose.

  Kris raised the delightful-smelling treasure chest of skin and facial products that Penny had given her and waved it above her head.

  Yep, the guy in the command center had been looking at the monitors. He turned to the others, and the game quickly broke up as others came to look at the pictures from the main deck.

  Kris’s legs wanted to hoof it; she held the urge in check. That would be totally out of character. Instead, she shouted, “We’re rich! Richer than God,” and the Marines behind her shouted their own claims to wealth, too.

  The organized mob behind Kris got rowdy. A couple of Marines hammed it up by starting a fight. They came to the ramp up to the command post. The two fighters managed to slip away into a side passageway and set up to cover the rear of the team.

  The steel doors up ahead looked designed to withstand a full-on assault. To its right and left were autocannons ready to mow down just that attack.

  Kris reached up. Her right hand waved the fake treasure chest with its sparkling plastic jewels and gold coins at the watching camera. With the other fist, she pounded on the steel portals for admittance. That wasn’t necessary; the bombproof doors began sliding open before she gave it her first good rap.

  Proving bombproof wasn’t necessarily boobyproof.

  “You wouldn’t believe what we found,” Jack shouted.

  “Make us believers,” came back as the doors slid open wide.

  Four pirates stared at Kris’s service automatic . . . and a whole lot more.

  The fifth guy was farther back.

  He had time to react.

  He bolted for the command console. Kris busted through the four pirates standing dumb as oxen and put three darts into the fifth one’s backside. He went down with his hand still reaching for the controls.

  Kris checked him out, then turned back to the silent four.

  “Gentlemen, you have three choices as I see it. You can step outside and see how good you are at breathing space. We can turn you over to the Greenfeld Marines for what passes as justice in these parts, or you can start working for the Wardhaven Marines and make us happy. Don’t think too long. That last offer is on a short fuse.”

  Not surprising, they quickly accepted Kris’s job offer.

  Nelly and Chief Beni went through the center’s workstations, checking them out, determining that they were safe to work and that they did do what the enthusiastic new employees said they did.

  There was only one bad moment.

  One of them sidled up to a station when he thought no one was looking and tried to activate something. A Marine spotted him, yanked him away from the station, and put him to sleep upon Jack’s orders.

  Three out of five cooperating wasn’t a bad score.

  Kris went down her to-do list quickly. The reactor control center reported itself under new management and operating in the capable hands of the Royal Navy.

  Kris ordered the agreed-upon signal sent to the jump buoy. Admiral Krätz and his crew were welcome to join the festivities.

  Then Kris turned to Chief Beni. “Tell me what you now know about the planet under us. Also, is there anything in this computer about a twelve-year-old girl being sold recently?

  Cara cried herself to sleep. She didn’t want to; it upset her bunkmates, the twenty young women she shared a hut with. “We all have it tough,” growled Betty, the hard-as-nails one who claimed the right to speak for the rest. “Quit bawling like a baby.”

  Betty had also warned Cara that she didn’t have it as bad as the others. None of the overseers had taken her out behind the barn.

  Not yet.

  Yet, it was bad. The work was sunup to sundown. Cara was sunburned and blistered. The food left Cara just as hungry after she ate it as before.

  But there was something else. Back on New Eden, people were dirt poor. Cara had often gone hungry when Gamma Ganna was too busy to cook or broke between men. Still, people looked out for each other. What little they had, they’d share with a skinny kid left to run the streets.

  Not here. What did Betty call it? “Dog eat dog.”

  Cara tried to stifle the sobs that started deep in her empty belly and seemed to wrack her whole body on the way out.

  She tried, and she prayed silently.

  Please, Aunt Abby. Please, Aunt Kris. Come and find me. Come and get me. If I can just go home to the Wasp, I promise I’ll never do anything you don’t want me to do. Never talk back. Never skip my homework.

  Please find me. Please, please, please.

  36

  Kris gritted her teeth. The screen in front of her showed Dry Tortugas below. The morning sun had just brought light to Port Royal. It woke people up and brought calls from the ground. Calls that Kris did not have answers for.

  Once she had complete control of the High Dry Tortugas space station, Kris started hunting for the boss of the station.

  It turned out she already had him.

  He was the big fellow with a bad heart and the worst kind of allergic reaction to Colt-Pfizer’s best sleepy darts. When Kris first heard about an overweight guy with an allergic reaction to sleepy darts, she’d wondered why he was playing at pirate.

  Now she’d discovering that he was the big guy. Boss of the station. Head pirate among pirates.

  What he thought he was doing taking a night out for a little
personal rape and pillage would never be answered. He died despite the best effort by the docs on the Wasp.

  It was morning . . . and calls were coming in . . . and Kris had no way to answer them.

  She tried. Or Nelly tried. Assuming the most solicitous tone, Nelly assured the caller “Big Bill is not available. May I take your message?”

  That worked the first couple of times. But apparently Big Bill wasn’t as big as Carita. When the big gal ordered them to throw whatever whore Billy was in bed with out and get him on the phone, all that was left for Nelly to do was switch to a buzz tone and announce that “This line is not in service at this time.”

  Which left Kris with a bad set of choices. Was it better to leave the folks dirtside stewing in their own juices, wondering what was wrong up on the station? Or should she let them know the jig was up. Royal and Imperial Marines were getting ready to drop down and demand they surrender or die?

  Kris figured she could dither for a while. Admiral Krätz and his battleships were due to dock shortly after noon.

  “Nelly, Chief Beni, can you find anything out about Cara?”

  “Kris,” Nelly began softly. Not a good sign. “They don’t list people by name. They just give them numbers. I don’t know if they chipped them or tattooed them or what, but whether you look for Cara or just a twelve-year-old girl, there’s nothing. So many women and so many men went down per shuttle. That’s it.”

  Kris and Abby looked at each other. This was not good.

  “Chief,” Jack said, “do you have access to the databases dirtside?”

  “We’re getting some access. We’ve cracked the cipher for the last couple of days, though I think they just changed the dirtside code midmorning and didn’t tell us.”

  “That’s not good,” Penny said.

  “We’re running out of time,” Kris said. “Who was sold six, seven, eight days ago?”

  “About eighty people,” Nelly said. “No names, just their ID numbers, prices, and destinations.”

  “Which tells us nothing,” Abby said.

  “No, hold it,” Jack said. “A twelve-year-old girl can’t be worth much. She’s too young to be useful as a bed warmer. Too inexperienced to be a good house slave and too weak to be worth much as a field slave.”

  “What girl was sold for the lowest price?” Kris and Abby asked at the same time.

  “Three of them, all to this same location,” Nelly said.

  “A Seebrook Plantation,” Chief Beni said, beating Nelly to the final punch.

  “Show me Seebrook Plantation,” Kris ordered.

  Nelly flashed a map on the nearest screen. It showed a huge plot of land stretching into the foothills south of Port Royal. Several streams ran through it from the distant mountain range.

  “What do they grow there?” Jack asked.

  Nelly overlaid their initial survey. It grew the crop that didn’t fit into any of the established food stocks.

  “One huge drug plantation,” Abby whispered.

  “Captain, prepare the Wasp’s Marine company for a drop mission. We’re going loaded for bear.”

  “Two questions, Commander,” Jack said formally. “Are we taking prisoners?”

  Kris knew what she wanted to say. Pirates, drug lords, slavers. She saw no reason to share the same air with them.

  Still, there were rules about these things. And on a practical note, dead men tell no tales.

  Or answer questions, either.

  Still, Kris could not help herself. “Let’s hope they resist,” she said. “Please, dear God, let them fight us.”

  “I’ll tell the men. If they shoot at us, we can shoot them. Second question, Kris. We?” the Marine captain asked, raising one eyebrow.

  It hit Kris like a kick in the gut. She so wanted to get her hands around the throats of the people who’d done this to Cara. This was not something she’d read about. This was up-front and personal. This was her Cara.

  But she had an admiral leading in a battle fleet. She had calls from bad guys and gals that needed to be creatively fielded. As much as she wanted to be part of the landing force, duty said she belonged here.

  Kris gritted her teeth. “Take Abby with you, Jack. Oh, and Sergeant Bruce. You may need his computer.”

  “Aye aye, ma’am,” the Marine said with a formal salute.

  She could see in Jack’s eyes that she’d passed a test. Maybe passed something more than that.

  Kris was the commander, now. It was both her job and duty to lead troops. But her place was no longer at the front, leading by example. Now her job would grow harder. Now she would lead from the rear by the power of her presence.

  From here on in, Kris would have the much harder job of staying in touch with her troopers’ needs not by sharing their blood and sweat but by giving them the support and guidance that let them bleed less in a fight.

  Kris sighed; that extra small stripe on her shoulder board, the one that named her a lieutenant commander, meant more than a little extra pay. More than a little extra respect.

  It meant she had a whole new set of challenges to face.

  Kris sucked in her gut and let out a long sigh. Then she gave her first order from her new, lofty position. “Go get our Cara, Jack. I’ll take care of the elephants on this end.”

  37

  Cara hoed the weeds.

  That was her job. Hoe the weeds and be sure not to kill any of the yellow bugs. The yellow bugs, both as cute, furry caterpillar things and as butterflies with lovely multicolored wings, somehow made the drug plants grow.

  Or maybe they turned the plants that stood in rows nearly as tall as she was into drugs. Cara was not sure exactly how it worked. She doubted any of the people standing by with ready whips understood things better than she did.

  What Cara did know was that she was supposed to hoe down the weeds and never touch one of the plants, and never, ever squish a bug. If one of the whip-wielding overseers spotted her squishing a bug, she’d get a beating.

  In even the short time Cara had been here, she’d seen lots of whippings. One of the new girls had died from her beating. The ones that had been here longer warned the new folks that you really didn’t want to screw up when Oli was around.

  It would have been nice if they’d passed along that warning before that poor girl got whipped to death.

  For now, Oli was working in the barn, processing the leaf into the powder that was exported. For a whip, that was a kind of punishment.

  So Cara kept her head down, and hoed the weeds, and dodged the bugs.

  Some of the older girls said you could eat the caterpillars. They didn’t taste like much, but they kept you alive.

  Cara was hungry, but not that hungry.

  At least not yet.

  Cara kept her head down and her hoe moving carefully, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t aware of what went on around her.

  Behind her, at the end of the row she was slowly backing down, three of the whips had gathered.

  That was strange.

  In all the days Cara had worked here, the overseers usually roved the fields alone. The only time they talked was to occasionally yell at a worker. Most often, they didn’t say a word, they just cracked the whip.

  But today, three were clumped together and talking.

  Cara didn’t slow her work, but she listened.

  “The boss lady is not happy,” one said.

  “That’s not good. What kind of bee does she have up her ass?”

  “Something’s wrong at the space station.”

  “Something’s always wrong at the space station. Remember that fire they had in the comm center? We still got five guys in Hardy’s gang working off their thirty days for that one.”

  “Well, they’re not talking again. Word is that Carita’s gonna fire up one of the shuttles and run it up there even if it doesn’t have a cargo to bring down.”

  “Carita don’t never waste a penny.”

  “Well, she’s getting ready to waste a bundle on a shu
ttle launch to find out what’s happening up there. And if Carita’s spending money, something’s wrong, and our boss gal ain’t liking it.”

  They paused for a while. One of them cracked the whip on Betty, who had paused to lean on her hoe and listen to them. Betty cursed them but went back to her work.

  There was a boom. No, a double boom.

  “What’s that?” one of the overseers asked.

  “Sounds like a sonic boom. I guess Carita has done launched a shuttle.”

  “Sounded awful far off.”

  It had sounded far off to Cara. And it was followed by two more booms, then a third pair.

  “That’s a lot of booms for one shuttle,” a whip observed with more wisdom than he knew.

  Cara smiled. She kept her head down and her hoe going, but she knew what would cause six booms in that kind of a pattern.

  Uncle Bruce, Sergeant Bruce to his Marines, had shown Cara a video of the landing the Marines made on Texarkana. It was homemade video, not as clean as the stuff you saw on the news, but three assault boats in battle formation made just that pattern of booms on approach.

  Uncle Bruce told Cara that Marines liked to drop from orbit well away from the target area, glide in close, then make the final jump.

  They found me! Abby and Bruce and maybe even Jack and Kris are coming for me!

  Cara wanted to throw down her hoe and tell those stupid men with the whips just what was headed their way.

  Oh, she wanted to.

  She kept her head down, did her best not to smile, and kept hoeing. The Marines would be here soon enough.

  And the Marines would have guns. It was going to be so much fun watching those whips guys tell a Marine in full battle rattle what they should do.

  Cara finished that row and managed to switch to another right under all three overseers’ noses without getting their attention.

  She’d hoed another row and was working her way back toward them again when one of them shouted, “What’s that?”

  Cara risked a glance at the three. One of them had his hand up, pointing. The other two were shading their eyes with one hand, staring up into the sunny sky.