Kris Longknife: Redoubtable

by Mike Shepherd

  “Is Kris all right?” he asked, sounding sincerely worried.

  “I’m fine. My ankle got clipped, and it’s hurting a bit, but I’m okay. Honestly, do you have any other ideas?” she asked, trying to make it sound sincere.

  “I guess now we do it the easy way,” the admiral said. “Since she has resisted arrest, I don’t see any reason we can’t bring the full force of empire down upon her.”

  “The full force of empire?” Kris asked.

  “The Navy,” Vicky answered.

  “Oh no,” Kris said. “Marines, get down. Way down. Visors down. Go on internal oxygen,” she shouted.

  “What the hell?” Jack said, but he was locking his suit down and rolling across the bank floor looking for a solid pillar to get close to. Kris put her back up against a column and grabbed her knees, something not easy to do in battle armor.

  She also did her best to be small, something really not easy to do in armor when you’re a six-foot-tall gal.

  Once, Kris was dirtside when a corvette fired two 18-inch pulse lasers at targets near her position. Those had been only pulse lasers, weak things firing a short burst of power.

  Her ears had rung for the rest of the day, and her body had hurt well into the next from the noise and overpressure.

  Once, Kris fought a major space battle, defending her home planet from being bombarded by six killer battleships bent on blasting Wardhaven back into the Stone Age. A lot of Kris’s friends died defeating those battleships, but they protected their home from taking that beating.

  Now, Kris was just a thousand meters from the target of just the kind of battle lasers that had been intended for her home.

  She didn’t look. To look would be to die.

  Instead, she watched it secondhand, reflected in the polished marble of the bank’s inner wall. The N.S. tower was just a shadow, surrounded by the bright glare from sky and water.

  Then Kris’s visor went dark to protect her from blindness. Even as everything around her disappeared, a single bright light, straight as an arrow, made the tower shine.

  The top floors melted away in less time than it would have taken to blink. Then two, three, no, four more lines of light added their input to the halo of shining fire around the tower.

  Pulse lasers had power, but only for a second or two. Battleship lasers had more power, and they poured it out for long-sustained seconds. Battle lasers were intended to cut through six, eight, or ten feet of reflecting ice that shrouded other battleships. Battleships also spun along their long axes at twenty revolutions a minute. This allowed armor that was being boiled by a hit to rotate away from the slashing laser fire before it burned through to the ship below.

  Battleships were made to hammer and be hammered.

  The N.S. tower was not built with that kind of beating in mind. It had no ice shell. It was not spinning. It was on the receiving end of huge amounts of power and could do nothing but burn.

  Burn and collapse.

  Kris watched the fuzzy reflection on the marble in front of her as the tower got shorter and shorter and shorter. She wasn’t sure, but it looked to her like some of the laser fire went silent, only to be replaced as more cannons came online.

  The reflected tower on the wall shrank until it stood no taller than the ground around it, but still the lasers burned.

  While Kris’s eyes were locked on the reflected glory in front of her, her ears, even through the suit, were telling her the atmospheric pressure around her was going wild.

  The bulletproof windows of the bank had taken hits, hits shown by the line of stars across the windowpanes. The windows had withstood cannon and machine-gun fire.

  Now, the power of the sun was come to earth. The air twisted and roiled in torture and took its vengeance where it could.

  The windows above where Kris huddled bowed in, heated up, melted, and flew across the bank in less time than it took to think of it. Drops of flaming glass splattered into surreal patterns on the wall where just a second ago, the tower had been reflected.

  The air in the bank rushed out the void that had been windows, trying to fill the swirling tornado that now spun where the tower had once stood against the sky. Desks and furniture did their level best to follow the gale winds. One solid wooden desk smashed into the wall a handsbreadth away from Kris.

  Jack crawled back to throw himself over Kris. She pushed him back and slid herself under the desk. He backed himself in to cover the opening.

  Just as quickly as it had come, the laser fire was gone. If that brought silence, Kris didn’t notice it; her ears still rang. If it brought calm, Kris couldn’t see it; her visor only slowly went from darkest to dark to not quite so dark.

  “You okay?” Jack asked over net.

  “Mostly. I think. Maybe,” Kris admitted to the possibility.

  “Admiral, if you’re still online,” Jack said, “would you do us a favor next time you do us a favor. Give us a bit of warning.”

  “I hope you will excuse me if I say that it seemed like a good idea at the time. If you can arrange to return to the Wasp, I understand that the Forward Lounge is a very good place to hold a victory party. There, with no recordings running, I think I can better explain what I intended to do, even if I didn’t quite manage to do it.”

  “If killing us was your intention,” Jack grumbled, “you didn’t quite manage to do it.”

  “I assure you, that was never my intention.”

  “Jack, we better get out of from under this desk. I think it’s starting to burn,” Kris said.

  Not only the desk, but the bank around them, it seemed. What wasn’t solid marble was indeed catching fire.

  Marines who’d spent the bombardment upstairs in the bank were hastily coming downstairs, many limping, others helping. Kris found that if she wanted to move, it involved limping along with Jack’s help.

  The street was littered with fallen trees, fallen building facades, and tossed cars and trucks. Kris stared for a second at the pleasant park that had once surrounded the N.S. tower. It looked like a moonscape, burned and blown clear of vegetation of any kind.

  Where the tower had stood, a new appendage of the bay now lapped. The water that had rushed into the hole in the ground boiled and steamed from the molten slag that gave the only hint that a building had once occupied the land.

  “I wonder how many people were in there with Ms. van da Fitz?” Kris asked.

  “We’ll likely never know. Unless someone had a backup copy stored off-site of all the data in that tower, I doubt there’s another place with a full list of who worked and lived there, or anywhere else on this entire planet,” Jack said.

  “I wonder who will run this place now, and how?” Kris said.

  “I may be wrong, but my money is on Admiral Krätz to have a definite plan for this place. And I don’t think it involves a chicken ranch. Not at all. Let’s go catch a shuttle. I want to talk to that guy.”

  “Remember, Jack, he’s our ally, for the moment.”

  “You know what they say about allies like him,” Jack said.

  “Who needs enemies?” they said together.

  41

  Kris wasn’t actually reduced to hobbling about on a cane again. Not actually. She could hobble very well on her own two feet after Abby applied a balloon splint to her hurting ankle.

  Abby was careful to select a clear splint.

  “That way everyone can see how black-and-blue your ankle is. You might actually get some sympathy from the psychopaths you hang out with.”

  “You, my fine feathered friend, are one of those psychopaths,” Kris shot back.

  “Guilty as charged and delighted to be. Oh, and I’m alive. I understand the head psychopath ain’t.”

  “Very ain’t,” Kris said with a shiver. She changed the subject. “How’s Cara?”

  “Safe. More quiet than a girl that age should be. Very, very contrite. If you got anything you want that kid to do for you, ask now.”

  “How bad was it for her?�
�

  “She insists nothing happened. When have you heard that from a teenager? The docs did a full checkup. She is okay, but it must have been hell wondering every second of every day if, no matter how bad it was, was it about to get worse?”

  Kris nodded. It went without saying that nothing like this should ever happen to a young kid like Cara.

  Or to anyone for that matter.

  Penny was still collecting evidence for the worst crimes they’d found, but the entire hellhole was a crime. How could justice ever be done for something like Port Royal?

  “Cara knows there are counselors on board,” Kris said.

  “Both of them were her friends before this happened. I think she’ll talk to them, friend to friend, then maybe for something stronger,” Abby said, then turned to Kris’s closet and returned with a brown skirt. No, it was a knee-length pair of shorts that were so wide and flowing that it easily passed for a skirt. Abby also held a loose, silk, off-the-shoulder top in gold.

  “This ought to let you show off your black-and-blue ankle in fine contrast to good Mother Earth tones.

  As Abby helped Kris dress, she went on. “Kris, I haven’t said thank you for letting me have Cara with us. I know a girl wouldn’t usually fit all that well on a warship, but Cara really needed me.”

  “You can still say that after what just happened?”

  “Kris, you didn’t see how the crew took to Cara’s coming back. This is her home, and Cara really needs to feel like someplace is home. Yes, something bad happened, but, Kris, growing up in Five Corners is just a long list of bad things happening. Here, she’s got a home, and I think seeing the long line of boffins and sailors waiting for her in the drop bay was the most healing experience she’s ever known.

  “She’d quit crying by the time the longboat docked. She was still going over a mantra of ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘I won’t ever do that again.’ But when she saw all of them waiting for her, she broke down crying again. And those were the happiest tears I’ve ever seen in my life. Happy and healing. I wish you could have seen them.”

  “I was kind of otherwise occupied,” Kris drawled.

  “Yeah, you usually are at times like those. Baby ducks, you really ought to set aside time for the good times.”

  “You can talk to my scheduling secretary.”

  “Yeah, I will,” Abby said, and turned Kris around to see how close to beautiful she’d managed today.

  Kris winced as she put weight on her bad ankle.

  “Well, I just wanted you to know how grateful Cara and I are for you having us around. I hope you’ll keep us.”

  “Um,” Kris said. Since next on her agenda was deciding what the Wasp would do in the future . . . and who would be going with it into the nasty unknown, Kris didn’t want to get too committal.

  In the next hour, Abby might be running, not walking, for the nearest exit.

  Abby seemed satisfied with the “Um.” She handed Kris one of her canes. “The doc said you ought to take some painkillers. But knowing you, I suspect this cane is the best I can offer.”

  The party was in full swing by the time Kris limped into the Forward Lounge. The last of the Marines had been lifted back to the Wasp. They now formed a sea of khaki, occupying the right-hand side of the lounge. Sailors’ whites held the left. A couple of tables remained open in the middle.

  From the farthest middle table, Jack raised a hand and signaled Kris to come. Marines and sailors on their way to and from the bar made respectful way for Kris as she wobbled her way to the table that usually had the best view of space.

  At the moment, with the Wasp nosed into the space station, Kris’s view was of pipes, bulkheads that needed painting, and other less interesting stuff.

  Jack seated Kris with her back to the view.

  There was a soft drink waiting for Kris as she settled into her designated chair. Jack cleared a second chair for her ankle, giving it a place of honor. “You know, that’s about the only casualty we suffered today. Two drop injuries, but you’re the only one due to hostile fire.”

  “I must speak to my security chief about getting me out of the line of fire more quickly next time,” Kris said.

  “I’ve already talked to him about not letting you do stupid stuff next time,” her chief of security snapped back, but Jack was grinning. “No doubt you’ll ignore his sound advice,” he said, raising his beer stein in mock salute.

  Kris raised her glass to clink against his.

  Jack swallowed his smile and left his glass in the air. “We saw some real evil today. And we sent it to hell where it belonged.”

  Lieutenant Stubben and Gunny Brown raised their beer mugs to clink against their captain’s. Kris added her own glass.

  “To hell with them,” they said.

  The toast caught on and swept around the room, Marine khaki and Navy whites raised their drinks to the same toast. “To hell with them.”

  A shiver went down Kris’s spine. This was a good ending to a horrible day. This was what these fine people lived for. They had seen evil in the face of which even the deepest pit in hell would blush. Their commanders had given them weapons release, and they had done what they were trained to do.

  The evil that was Port Royal was no more. Pure and simple, they’d wiped it from the face of this planet. A lot of it was dead and gone. Good riddance.

  Penny and her forensic squad would stay dirtside as long as it took to collect evidence for the part of the evil that had avoided death today. With any kind of luck, they wouldn’t avoid it very long.

  Kris sighed. No doubt it would be her job to decide how soon and how well the still-living minions got to keep breathing. She had a lot more work to do with her half-trained elephants.

  She chuckled. She’d spent time with the elephants today and time with the line beasts. There was no doubt in her mind who she preferred. Still, one left her with an aching leg and the other just made her sense of justice cringe.

  No question, she’d rather ache than cringe.

  There was noise at the back of the lounge. Kris twisted around in her seat. The sight was well worth the effort.

  Admiral Krätz was waving down those who would have rendered him formal honors. “This is a party. I came to party, not to disturb good fighting men and women at their play. Sit down, sit down, all of you.”

  Krätz was the admiral; his undress greens made that clear to all. But it was the lieutenant at his side who was getting most of the attention.

  Vicky was in a sedate, red cocktail dress. Kris had seen the dress in the online catalogues, and online it was in black and white. Sedate. Informal.

  With Vicky’s looks and figure, there was no way that sedate stayed staid. Certainly not when the dress was hot cherry red.

  Of course, Kris had seen Vicky in her wilder days on New Eden. Compared to the painted-on affairs Vicky wore then, this looked downright dowdy.

  But then, on New Eden, she hadn’t walked into a roomful of young sailors and Marines.

  It wasn’t the admiral who needed to order “As you were,” it was the lieutenant.

  With just a hint of a nod from Jack, the LT and Gunny were on their feet. Jack stood, too, to signal the admiral and his shadow toward Kris’s table. They smiled as soon as they saw Kris and made their way to her.

  The LT and Gunny stayed just long enough to be introduced to the admiral and Vicky, just long enough to accept his compliments on a day well done and for the young Marine officer and the old Gunny to thank the admiral for helping them avoid storming so well fortified a target . . . and for the admiral to insist it wasn’t anything big.

  The LT left to get drinks for the admiral and Vicky. Gunny went to join the table where Command Master Chief Mong held sway, and Kris was asked to explain how things had really gone down at the N.S. tower that noon.

  She did, making it clear to the Navy types present that being on the receiving end of 18-inch battle lasers should be reserved for other battleships that were designed to play in that league
.

  Not that they paid her any attention.

  The admiral laughed as Kris described hiding under a desk that had narrowly missed reducing her to jelly. “But you yourself admit that you were in armored battle suits. All you had to do was clamp down your visor, and you had plenty of air to breathe.”

  “So how come my ears were popping,” Jack pointed out.

  “You should talk to your Wardhaven procurement people,” the admiral said without pausing in his laughter. “Something must be substandard.”

  Kris had been at enough tables with high-powered politicians to know that the elephant here only wanted to hear how cunning he was and be thanked. Having survived the day, it was no skin off Kris’s nose to give him what he wanted.

  “Well, I admit to being glad that my Marines didn’t have to storm that tower with all its autocannons and machine guns,” Kris admitted. “Vicky, did you see the hole in the ground your admiral made. Someone’s going to have to remap that lake.”

  “No question about that,” Vicky agreed.

  Rear Admiral Georg Krätz beamed in satisfaction.

  “So, tell me,” Kris went on, “what happens next?”

  “That will be very interesting,” the admiral admitted.

  “Very complicated,” his lieutenant said, sipping her beer.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” her superior said. “Have you ever visited one of the Navy colonies?”

  Vicky shook her head.

  “There are two of them, I think,” the admiral said. “They are colonies set up by the Navy. When I retire, you don’t think I want to raise chickens with just any bunch of neighbors, do you. No, I want to know I’ve got people I can count on. People I like. My kind of people.”

  “So the Greenfeld Navy has set up planets for their own people to put down stakes on?” Kris said, more surprised than she wanted to admit. There was a lot Wardhaven didn’t know about Greenfeld.

  As far as Kris was concerned, if she was the only one who found out about it, Admiral Crossenshield could get comfortable living in the dark.

  “You got it in one.” The admiral laughed. “Who said Longknifes are dumb. Anyway, I think Port Royal will make a great addition to the collection of Navy colonies.”