Daring

by Mike Shepherd

  Jack paused, then went on. “You and I need to find someplace private where we can talk.”

  “About what?” Kris asked, suddenly not sure she liked the idea that she had nothing to do, and Jack was going to have a talk with her. From the thunderclouded look on his face, he’d been saving this up for a long time.

  “Let’s find someplace we won’t be interrupted,” was all he said.

  They ended up back in the space they had occupied for the refueling pass. Everyone seemed to have gone elsewhere, leaving them a large, empty space all to themselves.

  Once there, Jack went to one side of the compartment. Kris found herself gravitating to the opposite end of the room, as far from Jack as she could get.

  The space still smelled of hot welding and Goo, along with human sweat and a bit of terror. There was no place to sit, and with the Wasp changing its course and acceleration at odd moments as it matched orbit with its containers, Kris found herself holding on to one of the tie-downs that still held its bottle of Goo.

  Finally, she turned to face Jack. “What’s eating you?”

  “This lust you have for getting yourself killed,” he snapped.

  “I didn’t have any good choices,” Kris said in her defense. “I couldn’t let the bird people die when I could do something about it. I thought you agreed with me.”

  Jack was shaking his head before she finished. “I didn’t say your enthusiasm for getting us all killed, I said your personal lust for getting your own little body slammed, smashed, and burned before my eyes.”

  “Oh,” Kris said. This was going to be personal. She would have preferred to argue about what she’d done for the whole human race. Talking about herself . . . now that could bring up a whole mess of snakes Kris preferred to ignore.

  “I haven’t done anything lately, Jack. Nobody has thrown a bomb at me or taken a shot at me. Vicky has more of that coming at her than I do of late.”

  “Quit changing the subject, Kris,” Jack snapped. “I’ve been biting my tongue and keeping my silence ever since we got ourselves stuck in a burning aircraft with a canopy that wouldn’t open.”

  “Oh,” Kris whispered. “That time I almost got us both killed.”

  “Yes, that time,” Jack said. “I woke up with the smell of smoke in my oxygen system and you not answering my calls and a canopy that wouldn’t budge. All I could think of was that you’d finally gone and done it, gotten yourself killed, and my heart was breaking.”

  “Heart?” Kris whispered. Was Jack really talking about something intimate to the two of them, not just a day in, day out job?

  “Don’t change the subject,” Jack growled. “You didn’t have to fly that mission. We could have given it to anyone. Hell, even a drone could have flown it.”

  “A drone would not have dodged those missiles the way I did,” Kris said, jumping to her defense. “And besides, I saved your precious Marines when I saw what they were heading into. I saved most of your company.”

  “There you go, changing the topic again.”

  “Well, damn it, what is the topic, Jack!”

  Jack took a deep breath before he went on. “I can’t stand to watch you going out day after day trying to get yourself killed.”

  “I’m not trying to get myself killed.”

  “Well, it sure looks that way from where I’m standing,” Jack snarled.

  “I do what I have to do,” Kris shot back.

  “You do not!” came right back at her. “Any reasonable person, with the sense God promised a billy goat, would find other ways to get what she wants done that didn’t involve her going out and sticking her head in every lion’s mouth that comes along.”

  Jack paused long enough to slam his hand against one of the metal patches they’d help weld to the Wasp’s hide. At half a gee, his feet lifted off the deck, and he had to force himself back down.

  “Kris, you do have choices. If I hear you say one more time that you don’t have any choice but to go out and nearly get yourself killed, I’m going to scream. You have choices. If you’d spend a few extra seconds thinking about what you’re about to do, you’d see those choices and maybe do something different.”

  “Do them instead of trying my hand at flossing some passing lion’s teeth, you mean,” Kris said, giving him the kind of look through her eyelashes that some actresses used to good effect.

  “Don’t you go trying to make me laugh,” Jack said, but a hint of a smile was creeping around the edges of his mouth.

  “I like you when you smile,” Kris said.

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  “Okay, I’ll stay on your topic. What does it matter to you whether I’m one of those Longknifes that dies young and gloriously? From the look of Grampa Ray, I’m not sure that living a long life is all it’s cracked up to be. He’s getting way too good at dodging his problems and ignoring his conscience.”

  “We are not talking about your relatives,” Jack said.

  “Then answer my question. What does it matter whether I splatter myself over the next gas giant we come to, trying to get reaction mass for the Wasp? You won’t be in the launch with me. You won’t have to take my bullet. It will be just me and Nelly.”

  “And I don’t get a vote on the matter, either,” Nelly pointed out.

  “You stay out of this,” both Kris and Jack said.

  “Fine. Okay. I’m just the computer, but when are you going to answer the girl’s question, Jack?” Nelly said.

  Kris raised an eyebrow to add her own emphasis to Nelly’s question.

  Jack scowled and looked at the hatch like he wanted to walk out on the both of them. Down in Engineering, they were having trouble maintaining the acceleration. They’d pop up to more than half a gee, then just as suddenly fall well below it. If it was the engines, they were in trouble. If it was the quality of the new reaction mass, they might survive it. Whatever it was, Jack risked falling flat on his face if he tried stomping out on her.

  He must have realized it about the time Kris did, because that tiny hint of a smile was back. Then he sobered up.

  “I’ve had to watch you die twice in the last couple of months. First when we peeled what that bomb left of you off the marble floor on Texarkana. I had to do it again when I woke up ahead of you after you crashed”—Kris started to object and Jack waved her back—“after you did that superb bit of flying that set us down so smoothly in the middle of a swamp. My heart won’t take much more of this.”

  “I’m sorry I’ve stressed you,” Kris said curtly. “It wasn’t all that much fun for me. And if I may point out, it was me helping you limp away from that Greenfeld pile of junk before it blew. My heart got a bit of a workout, too.”

  Jack shook his head ruefully. “Right. Heart. It pumps blood as Nelly would tell you. Kris, I don’t care what you do to my blood pressure or my pulse. That’s all part of the job.”

  He paused and took a deep breath. “Kris, I’ve made the worst mistake a bodyguard can make. I’m supposed to care for your body, but it’s you I care about. And you keep right on breaking my heart.”

  That wasn’t something Kris saw coming.

  Now it was her turn to talk, and nothing came to mind.

  Nothing at all.

  What she wanted to do was launch herself across the room at Jack. She had never wanted to bury herself in anyone’s arms like she wanted his arms around her.

  She didn’t, of course. Halfway across the room, Engineering was likely to hiccup and drop Kris on the deck. Hard. Probably put her back on crutches.

  Now wouldn’t that be a fun one to explain to the Wasp’s medical team?

  And even if she did get across the room with no harm done, it just wouldn’t do to have some sailor duck his head through the hatch to find the commodore and her Marine skipper locked in a romantic embrace.

  Especially with her being one of those damn Longknifes.

  Wouldn’t do at all.

  Damn!

  “I’m sorry you feel that
way,” came out sounding so lame.

  “No, that’s not what I mean,” Kris immediately countered her own words.

  “Jack, did you have to pick now to drop this on me?” came across way too argumentative.

  “You’ve been rather busy since you crashed into that mud bank, Kris. I haven’t been able to get a word in edgewise.”

  Kris chuckled wryly. “Yeah, you’re right. Way too busy saving the world or destroying it.”

  Jack shrugged.

  “Jack, when we get back, do you think you and I could have a quiet dinner. Candlelit, maybe. Could we try to talk this out, because, you see, I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t in my life.”

  “Oh,” sounded like Jack was as surprised to hear that as Kris was that it had slipped out.

  That one word hung in the air between them for quite a long time.

  Kris couldn’t tell if she was just starting to open her mouth, or Jack started first, but it didn’t matter.

  The hatch opened, and Colonel Cortez ducked his head in. “Oh, that’s where you two are. We’ve been looking all over for you. Did you turn Nelly off?”

  “No. I’m on. I’m just not taking messages,” Kris’s computer answered.

  “Oh,” the colonel said, clearly not understanding what this was all about.

  “Jack was just counseling me on my risk-taking,” Kris said. “As usual, he thinks I’m in way over my head. And, as usual, he’s right.”

  “We can continue this later,” Jack said. “Like you said. When we get back to human space.”

  “Good,” Kris said, through a dry throat and a pounding pulse. “I’d like that. You have some good points I should really take to heart.”

  Jack raised an eyebrow at that.

  “Engineering has solved the problem with the Wasp’s new reaction mass. We should be settling down to a reliable halfgee acceleration,” Sulwan announced to all hands. “Now you can safely get some serious repair work under way. Sorry about asking for volunteers when it was too hazardous to do anything. Now, if you really are interested in some messy work, let us know.”

  Jack eyed Kris.

  “I’ll pass on that,” she said.

  49

  The Wasp approached the next jump at over 150,000 kilometers an hour. She could have put on more speed, but she hadn’t; they’d been forced to spend time in free fall.

  Quite a few of the patches needed to be reworked. Several more hull sections showed strain. They had made it through the refueling pass, but Captain Drago feared they’d fail on him when he could least afford it.

  Likely at the worst of times and worst of places.

  But just as the Wasp was a good ship taking care of her crew, so she had a good crew to take care of her. Every day Kris realized that Captain Drago knew so much more about running a ship in space than she did.

  It was humbling.

  All Kris could do was be glad she’d made the right choice and not done what she oh so wanted to do. There were reasons why it took years of hard work to make a good ship driver.

  She hadn’t put in those years. She would be as big a fool as Hank Peterwald to think that she could fill those shoes just by tying up the shoelaces.

  The jump point was one of Nelly’s new fuzzy points. That meant that they didn’t have to worry about it taking a zig or zag at the last minute and making them miss.

  Or rather, they had less to worry about. A jump point was a jump point, and they all wanted to kill you.

  At least that was what Sulwan insisted.

  Kris was at her Weapons station as they took the jump. At Nelly’s suggestion, they reduced their rotation to the more traditional twenty revolutions per minute clockwise. The transition from one point in space to another point went smoothly.

  Then came the little matter of where had they gotten to.

  First things first. “The system is quiet,” Chief Beni reported. “All sensors report nothing but normal radiation. We’re sharing this system with a pleasant yellow dwarf.” Mother Earth had survived in the warmth of a pleasant yellow dwarf for several billions of years. They should have no problems as they transited the system.

  “Jump points, Chief?” the skipper asked.

  “Give me a moment,” he said, still concentrating on his instruments.

  “We went about nine hundred light-years,” Nelly reported. “We’re still going counterclockwise around the rim of the Milky Way, but we edged in a bit, just like I expected.”

  “Very good, Nelly,” Captain Drago said, but it was the chief he concentrated on.

  “Sorry, sir. For a minute there, I thought I was picking up something in the radio spectrum. If I was, I can’t get a bearing on it. Maybe it’s something from a nearby solar system. Da Vinci, make a note for future reference, there may be an intelligent species close to this system.”

  “It’s done, Chief,” his computer, a son of Nelly, replied.

  “Chief, I sure would like to aim this tub at a jump point, and I don’t have a lot of reaction mass to spare.”

  “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I kind of don’t want to get bushwhacked without warning, sir, but I understand where you’re coming from, sir.” The chief paused for a moment, ignoring the skipper’s scowl. Then he went on.

  “There are three jumps in the system. Only one of them is a new type. It’s also the closest. Sulwan, here come the coordinates.”

  “I got them.”

  “You know,” the chief went on, “is it just me, or don’t the new points seem to be closer together than the old ones? Do you think the Three alien species that built them figured out they were wasting a lot of time traveling from one jump to the next and did something about that with the new jumps?

  “I tend to agree with Chief Beni,” Nelly said. Kris’s eyebrows shot up, to be quickly joined by all those around the bridge at this unusual agreement between the two rivals. “However, I don’t yet think we have a sufficiently large test sample to be too confident of that conclusion, but it’s a good possibility.”

  “Thank you, Nelly,” the chief said.

  “I have adjusted our course,” Sulwan reported. “If we maintain one-gee acceleration, we can expect to jump in fifteen hours. We should be close to three hundred thousand klicks an hour by then.”

  Once they were sure they had the system to themselves, Kris secured the Weapons Division to a minimum watch and dropped down to the wardroom for chow. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to run into Jack or had better avoid him.

  He cares for me. Maybe as much as I care for him. What did that mean? Did it mean anything that mattered?

  Kris was no high-school kid walking the halls blinded by her first puppy crush. She was the commander of PatRon 10, or at least what was left of it. She had a report to make to the king concerning the death of billions of aliens, the loss of just about all of her first command and the likelihood that the whole human race was now at war with an alien race they knew nothing about.

  Yes, that was all true. Still, it was wonderful to know that someone in general, and Jack in particular, cared about her.

  Kris scrupulously avoided even thinking the word “love.”

  Until she heard more from Jack about the actual extent of his feelings for her, that word was strictly off-limits.

  But it was nice to think about the possibility that the word had some application to the present situation.

  Down, girl. Remember, that word is strictly out of your vocabulary. Not available for usage. He said he is glad you’re still alive and wants you to stay that way. That doesn’t necessarily mean that L word.

  Kris was saved from further ruminations on that word when Abby, Cara, and Penny joined her for dinner. It turned out, Cara had her own problem to share with them.

  Once she was settled at the table, she leaned toward the three adults, and whispered, “Is it true? Could we become another Flying Dutchman, just like in the vids?”

  “Which one?” Penny asked. “I’ve seen three remakes of that horror s
how.”

  Kris knew the classic story of the Flying Dutchman, back when he sailed a windjammer on Earth’s oceans. Clearly, Cara was all wound up about the recent adaptation of the story to starships and jump points.

  “I don’t know,” Cara gushed. “We’ve got enough alcohol on board. I guess no one would have to go into the reactor without something to numb them.”

  “No one is going into the reactor,” Kris said. “Drunk or otherwise.”

  “Which version of the movie do you like the best?” Cara asked the three women.

  Kris hoped this topic of conversation would go nowhere, but unfortunately, Penny did have to encourage the girl.

  “I loved the one where the actress, what was her name, bravely went into the reactor herself, after she’d fed in the body of her boyfriend who died when, oh, what was the accident that killed him?”

  “You clearly remember the movie very well,” Abby said dryly.

  “Well, it was a while back,” Penny admitted. “I was an impressionable young thing, and it seemed oh so romantic.”

  Kris suppressed a groan at the word, but kept her silence.

  Cara made that easy. “I saw the latest remake of it. Where part of the crew has been infected by the brain-eating bugs, and they’re chasing everyone who isn’t brain-dead so they can stuff them in the reactor.”

  Abby sighed. “As if the brain-dead ones would know how to set a course for home once they had dumped enough flesh and blood into the reactor. That story makes no sense.”

  “But it’s scary as all get-out,” Cara said.

  “That’s today’s kids,” Penny said with a full-fledged Irish sigh. “Forget about romance, just scare the willies out of them. What’s the latest generation coming to?” She finished with the question elders had posed to every next generation for, oh, the last five hundred.

  Cara sniffed, very much the imitation of her aunt. “Don’t you find the idea of being stranded in space with nothing left to feed into the reactor but your own blood just the worst thing that can happen?” she demanded of her elders.