Daring

by Mike Shepherd

  “Thanks.”

  “Are we really just going to sit on our hands?” Jack asked.

  “Consider yourself lucky, old boy,” the colonel said. “The poor working stiffs of the Vulcan will be slaving away in a few moments, out to arm your little corvettes with monster killers. And the Greenfeld battleships will soon be tracking that jump point, their itching trigger fingers eager to blast anything that comes through the jump. Me, I’m curious, Your Highness.”

  He paused while everyone turned to give him their full attention. “Does that monstrous mother ship punch through the jump point with all her little monsters tucked in tight, or do they go charging through the jump ahead of her?”

  “A very interesting question,” Kris said. “It might make for a very disappointing ambush if the little monsters were out front. Phil, any idea how big the little ones that chased you were?”

  “Several million tons, according to our measurements of their gravity distortions. Their mass per cubic meter was not shabby either.”

  “Each one as big as a couple of the admiral’s battleships, huh.”

  “From what I saw, they don’t do anything small,” the Hornet’s skipper said. “But I can say this. They were all tied up alongside. They had no patrols out when I came across them. Admittedly, they were thirty-two hours away from their last jump and a good fifty hours away from their next one.”

  “Is it possible,” Kris said, “that they are hungry? If they’re heading for their next feeding frenzy, it may have been quite a while since they last gobbled up a planet. They may be conserving resources.”

  “You’re guessing,” Jack said.

  “I’m examining possibilities,” Kris said. “That’s all we can do until we get a look at who’s running that monster ship.”

  “Dear Lord,” Abby kind of prayed, “I hope the picture we get of those cusses are of little green ladies with twelve fingers.”

  “Amen,” said Penny.

  “We can hope,” Kris agreed.

  “Until then, we wait,” the colonel said.

  “I am good at twiddling my thumbs,” Ron said, and proceeded to do that with four hands and a whole lot of fingers and thumbs.

  “How do I top that?” Vicky asked.

  “You can’t,” Kris said. “Care for a bit of chow? I understand the wardroom is serving steaks tonight. It’s the last of the fresh meat, so we better get it while it’s good.”

  So, like old friends, the team decamped for chow. Even Ron. Jack and the colonel got behind his kind of chair and pushed it along to the wardroom.

  That left Kris to contemplate her fate. Could she really order an unprovoked attack on the huge mother ship? Would she have a second chance if she didn’t? Could she stand to live with herself if she stood by and let them massacre the avian people?

  A gal could go crazy letting her mind race through those questions time after time.

  But she had friends.

  And waiting out the possible countdown to war with good friends almost made it endurable.

  30

  The hurry up and wait lasted for eighteen hours.

  Which is to say that nothing horrible happened for that length of time although quite a few working people spent the time sweating bullets.

  Midway through her meal, in the middle of a long line of puns being bounced around the table like Ping-Pong balls, Kris sat bolt upright.

  “Something wrong?” Jack asked.

  “No, but I think I just figured how we can know whether the mother ship is coming through the jump with all her little monster ships tucked in or instead is sending out a swarm of monster ships to check things out first.”

  “How?” the colonel asked.

  Kris bopped herself on the forehead. “They are taking the jumps slow and easy. That means we can send through the periscope. Say we have one of the courier boats stand out up there, monitoring the view to the other solar system. We use the radio monitor first to let us know they’re coming. Then the visual one to see how they’re deployed.”

  “We might want to trade off,” the colonel said. “We don’t know if they’ll go to some kind of EmCon blackout.” At the blank stare he got from Vicky and Ron, the colonel translated himself. “Emission Control. A smart cookie goes silent on the radio and radar as you get closer to your target.”

  “We can balance using the radio and the light-frequencies spy,” Kris said.

  “Do we know if they can tell that the jump is in use, even a little bit?” Ron asked. “I know that we usually know something has jumped into the system by the roar of their reactors, but does the jump itself give off a clue?”

  That turned out to be a very interesting question. Several busy boffins said so when Kris interrupted them with it. Unfortunately, even the two scientists who had come up with the idea of the periscope had no idea if someone could know the jump was in use. Apparently, no one in the human race had yet succeeded in answering that question.

  Yes, it had been asked, but getting anyone with money to pay for the lengthy research to maybe get an answer had never been made to happen. Was one of the Longknife foundations interested in correcting that oversight?

  Kris allowed that it might be. “Write up a grant proposal when we get back.”

  Once the boffins were back to their work, her team got back to their guessing.

  “I hope no bug-eyed monsters ever asked that question, either,” the colonel concluded.

  “Even BEMs that have spent their whole existence bouncing around in space, hardly ever touching down?” Jack said.

  Kris’s crew fell silent.

  “Okay,” Penny said. “I’ve got to say this even if no one wants to hear it. I don’t have the moral certainty that you have, Kris. Maybe the rest of you see nothing wrong with dragging the whole human race . . .”

  “And the Iteeche race,” Ron interjected.

  “Into a war with God only knows who or what or how many of these BEMs.” Penny shivered. “I’ve got a problem with it. And doing it without a word exchanged between us! We’re firing the first shot in what could be a long hell of a war. Maybe worse, I think we’re all hoping that those neutron torpedoes will wipe the mother ship out. Doesn’t that kind of sound like genocide?”

  Done, Penny let out a long Irish sigh, one her late husband would have been proud of. For a moment, her words just hung in the air above the table.

  Kris reflected on them. Did she feel the moral certainty that Penny had accused her of?

  “Young lady,” the colonel said, “I respect both your words and the feelings from which they come. But I’m not sure it’s fair to accuse us of doing what we’re contemplating out of a feeling of moral superiority and certainty. There is the matter of what these people appear to have done to at least one other planet and its civilization and what they appear ready to do to another whole planetful of people. That also is genocide.”

  “Oh Lord,” Abby said, “I am so hoping for the professor to come galloping in here to show us home movies of that little green grandmother with twelve thumbs. I do dearly want to shake her hand.”

  “I, too,” Ron said, reaching out with all four hands and wiggling his fingers.

  “Can I go on record, with what looks to be the majority?” Kris said. “I’ll kiss the green cheeks of this proverbial little green lady.”

  Kris paused to take a deep breath. “Listen, folks, we all sat in the Forward Lounge for days, dissecting how my great-grandfathers and Ron’s chooser got us into the mess of the Iteeche War and kept it going even after it could have burned itself out.”

  The crew nodded, except for Vicky. She looked really puzzled, which even on her face, came across quite beautifully.

  “I’ll explain it later,” Kris said to her. “What I mean is that we really raked them over the coals in our hindsight.”

  “I was thinking about that,” Penny put in.

  “And now, here we are with a hot potato of nova temperature in our laps, and no one handy to toss it off to.”


  “More’s the pity,” Abby said.

  “And we don’t have a lot of time to decide what to do about it,” Kris said.

  “Shame that the universe won’t allow for a time-out so that we can call home and get advice,” Jack said.

  “Do you really think that endless debate from the dunderheads would give us a better answer?” Kris asked.

  “There is that,” the colonel agreed.

  “Aren’t we being a little arrogant?” Penny asked.

  That hung in the air for quite a while before Kris broke the silence.

  “Our cook at Nuu House had a saying. ‘Spit in one hand, wish in the other, and see which you get the most out of,’ ” Kris said. “We can think of a thousand reasons why we shouldn’t make a decision. We can wish all we want for the problem to go away.”

  Kris leaned forward and looked each of her friends in the eyes. “The fact still remains that we have a horrible choice to make. Stand aside and let genocide happen or do something about it and, by doing that, commit the whole of our species to a fight until someone can somehow convince all of those involved to stop the killing.”

  “Or we all end up dead,” Penny said.

  That silenced the discussion for a while.

  “You want to know one thing that really pisses me off,” Kris said into the silence.

  “Just one thing, baby ducks?” Abby said.

  “Well, the biggest thing from today.”

  “I’m all ears,” Jack said.

  “That neither I nor Phil Taussig was able to get these BEMs to talk to us.”

  “And for that, we may well have a war,” Colonel Cortez said, with a sigh any Irishman would have respected.

  After a respectful pause, Kris turned to Penny. “Would you mind if I went back to examining our options?”

  “You might as well. I’m pretty sure the hand I’m looking at only has hope in it. Your hand, at least, has something substantial.”

  That got a laugh.

  “Nelly, if we find that a whole swarm of huge warships are heading for us ahead of the mother ship, can we break off and duck through another jump point before they get to us?”

  “I don’t think so, Kris.”

  “What’s the problem?” the colonel asked.

  “I assume that you intend to establish your roadblock in either the system with the bird folk or the next system out,” the computer said.

  “That’s my thinking,” Kris said. “We need time to prepare, then time to get there. I doubt we could get there any sooner.”

  “Your problem,” Nelly said, “Your Highness, is that the jump point that the hostile aliens will be using is a dozen hours or more from any other way out.”

  “That long, huh,” the colonel said.

  “Yes,” the computer said.

  “So if we station the three corvettes say ten thousand kilometers out from the jump and the battleships at thirty thousand, there’s no place to run to if things go bad.”

  “It looks like that to me, Kris.”

  NELLY, ARE THERE ANY OF THE NEW FUZZY JUMP POINTS IN EITHER OF THOSE TWO SYSTEMS?

  KRIS, NO FUZZY POINTS IN THEM OR THE NEXT SYSTEM OUT. THERE ARE A FEW TWO JUMPS OUT, BUT YOU WON’T GET ANY HELP THERE.

  “So,” the colonel summed it up. “If we go, we’re pretty much committed. I know if I was in charge of that mother ship, I’d never go through a jump point without ordering a couple of scouts through first and wait until at least one of them comes back to report all clear.”

  The rumblings around the table pretty much agreed with him.

  “Of course, I’m a human,” the colonel went on. “I’ve been raised on wars. I wonder how long it’s been since any of those BEMs met any real resistance?”

  “I don’t think that’s a question we can answer,” Kris said, “but from what we’ve seen both in the ship that attacked us and the planet that somebody, person or persons unknown, I admit, Penny, massacred, it didn’t look like anyone was breaking a sweat.”

  “An army gets slipshod if it doesn’t go up against a first-class fighting force every once in a while. At least human armies do. Lots of ways to get sloppy,” the colonel said.

  “But that’s not something we’ll find out anytime soon,” Penny said. “Not before it’s too late.”

  With that, they adjourned to the sundae bar. The Mess President had laid out all the trimmings to go with the steaks.

  That brought a series of jokes about fattening the calf and last meals. Which ended when Kris noticed the looks her team was getting from the other officers dining in the mess.

  Eighteen hours passed like eighteen endless days.

  31

  Kris continued to use the Forward Lounge for her Tac Center. It had room for Ron and his two advisors as well as Vicky and Maggie. The doctor was shocked to discover the topic of conversation and tended to sit one table away from them and look on with only slightly controlled horror. She would join in when Penny said something against the idea of going to war. Mostly, she just watched.

  The Iteeche took over a corner and had their own long and occasionally loud argument. Nelly offered to eavesdrop, but Kris told her not to. They needed their privacy. When Ron was ready, he’d tell them what he and his advisors had agreed upon.

  When the Iteeche meeting was done, the Army officer stomped out of the room, and Ron and Ted, his Navy officer, rejoined Kris’s team.

  “You don’t have to tell us what that was about if you don’t want to,” Kris said.

  “We swam in the same waters you muddied up during your feeding,” Ron said. “The Army advisor does not see that we have the will of the Emperor in what you are thinking to do. He is opposed to our riding along with you and insists that I either command you in the name of the Emperor to halt this plan or that we at least leave in one of your courier boats and return to the Empire.”

  “Do you want to?” Kris asked.

  “No. I do not like the choice of fish swimming upstream any more than you do, but it is the choice that has been given to us. We cannot turn away from it. Besides, these bird folk may be a helpful ally in the war ahead. Are we so plentiful that we can allow those who may swim with us to be eaten already?”

  “A good thought,” Kris said.

  “So we have a very unhappy Iteeche aboard,” Jack said. “Kris, would you mind if I check in on him?”

  “Please do.”

  “Captain Drago, an Iteeche just left the Forward Lounge.”

  “Yes, our security team noticed him stomp out. We don’t have any experts at alien body language, but the betting up here is that he is not a happy camper.”

  “Sad but true,” Jack said. “You know how our princess affects some people. Could you keep an eye on him?”

  “Already doing it, Marine. Our disaffected Iteeche just locked himself in Iteeche country. If you’ll post some Marines as an honor guard there, we can make sure he stays there.”

  “Done, and thank you, Captain.”

  Jack’s next call was to his Marine duty officer. A watch was quickly posted.

  An hour later, Captain Drago dropped down to check with Kris on the load for the 12-inch high-acceleration torpedoes.

  “Load antimatter,” Kris said.

  “How much?” the captain asked.

  “How much?”

  “I’ve been talking with some of the professor’s boffins, and they think we can double-load them. Maybe even quadrupleload them.”

  “Is that safe?” Jack asked.

  “Not for any length of time, no,” the captain said. “The containment systems in the warheads are lightweight, and that means limited strength and duration. However, if we load the antimatter just before we fire the warheads, they should be good for fifteen minutes. Maybe double that.”

  “You’re taking a great risk,” Jack said.

  “If Your Highness here has us hunting BEMs, I think antimatter warheads popping off early may be the least of our worries.”

  “Do you disag
ree with us taking on the bug-eyed monsters, Captain Drago?” Kris asked. He was the contractor captain hired by her king. While Admiral Krätz’s threat to shoot the Wasp out of space seemed unlikely, Captain Drago could put an end to any of Kris’s plans by simply locking her in her stateroom and heading the Wasp off in any direction that pleased him.

  So long as the captain didn’t do Kris any bodily harm, she sincerely doubted Jack would do anything to stop the Wasp’s skipper from doing something that probably would cut down on her likelihood of ending up suddenly dead.

  The captain took in a long breath and let it out slowly. “I suspect your grampa may have me keelhauled for following you on this mission if you order us to take on the bug-eyed monsters. However, there are times when people do what they have to do. If you say it is war, I and my crew will follow you. If you say go home, I think we will all breathe a long sigh of relief and go home. However, if we abandon that planet of bird people to the tender mercies of those space raiders, I don’t think any of us will sleep all that well. Probably for the rest of our lives. Hell of a choice you have there, Your Highness. Glad I don’t have to make it myself.”

  He snapped to and saluted her. He didn’t wait for her to return the honor but turned for the door of the lounge. “Let me know when you make your final decision,” he called over his shoulder.

  “I wondered how he’d take to it all,” Penny said. “I guess that settled whether or not you find yourself locked in your room tomorrow and the Wasp headed for home.”

  “I was wondering about that, myself,” Kris said, her voice not rising above a whisper.

  Actually, she’d been wondering about it for several years. When would this governor sent by her great-grandfather rise up to take her down? At first, that was what she expected, someone to cut her off and substitute his mature judgment for her youthful exuberance.

  Of late, as Captain Drago followed her orders more and more, she began to wonder if there ever would be a time when he would cut her off, or had she come into herself? Come to her command?

  That time had come, and, for better or worse, the crew of the Wasp would follow her through hell and, with any luck, back out again.