“I don’t know,” Abby said, applying herself to the hash Cookie had made with canned beef and dried potatoes. “For me, the worst will be when they tell us to quit taking showers or flushing the toilets ’cause they need to feed all the ship’s water into the plasma chambers. Plasma chambers, Cara, that’s where they blend the reactor feed with the reaction mass to power those big engines pushing the Wasp around space. The ignorant writer couldn’t even get that straight for their stupid movie.”
Poor Cara couldn’t react fast enough to all that was coming at her. She’d hardly gotten out an “Ew” at the thought of no flush toilets before she was torn between defending her movie or actually learning more about how a real starship worked.
She ended up sitting there more confused than motivated.
“My, my,” Penny said. “I thought you’d be fine with that. No doubt by then they’ll be serving free beer and wine with our supper. What with all the water having gone wherever it is that reaction mass goes, what else will there be to drink?”
“Beer and wine,” Cara’s eyes lit up. “Will I get to drink it, too?”
Kris put a quick stop to that. “I’ll make sure Cookie saves some water for all the underage folks aboard.”
“But I’m the only underage person aboard the Wasp!” Cara cried.
“Oh, right, so he won’t have to save a lot,” Penny said with a wide grin.
“You’re just pulling my leg.” When none of the grown-ups chose to respond to that, she focused on Kris. “You’re younger than Auntie Abby. What scary movies did you like to see when you were my age?”
It wasn’t movies that scared Kris when she was Cara’s age, it was real life. Would somebody kill her like they did her brother? Would Mother or Father notice how brandy was disappearing from their liquor cabinet? Could life between Mother and Father get worse than it already was? No, Kris didn’t have to go to a movie to feel she was in a horror show.
But she needed an answer. She found one ready at hand.
“My father taught me well before I was your age that there were more horrible things in real life than any movie could ever hope to create.”
“What was that?” Cara asked, breathless at the prospect.
“The most horrible thing in life, my father said,” Kris said, drawing out the line, “is some brainless, inexperienced politician getting his hands on the reins of government.”
Penny and Abby laughed.
Cara looked like her goat had been thoroughly skinned. “That’s not real horror.”
“Oh, yes it is,” Kris insisted. “Back then, I was sure Father was talking about someone in the opposition. Horror of horrors, I now know that it may include some of the people you most need to make the whole shebang work, ally or opposition.”
“That is a horrible thought,” Penny agreed.
“And what kind of people will we need to get things done when we get back with this little story of ours?” Abby asked, all serious in a flash.
“Any kind we can get,” Kris agreed. “I’ll be glad for anyone who will lend us a helping hand.”
“So you’ve figured out what we need to do when we get home?” Penny asked.
“Be ready to face these monsters when they come calling,” Kris said simply. “What else can we do?”
“Honey child,” Abby said, “you are way too old to think that human beings can’t think of a whole passel of things to do that have nothing to do with what they ought to do.”
That brought a sigh from all four of them. Even Cara.
50
The prospects of the Wasp becoming another Flying Dutchman increased as they whipped through the next jump at 500,000 klicks per hour and found another new-style jump in their next system. Sulwan headed the Wasp toward it, now at only half a gee, and forecast that they would be making somewhere between 650,000 and 750,000 klicks when they went through it.
Chief Beni announced they’d covered over three thousand light-years and that there was nothing of interest in this system. Kris stood down her gunners yet again.
Nelly sounded tickled pink that her estimate of how far they would jump and where was proven to be right. She gave out an official guess that at their speed and with a twenty rotation counterclockwise, the next jump should take them into the Norma Arm of the galaxy, well away from the outer rim and aimed toward home.
Of course, they’d be coming home right through the heart of the Iteeche Empire. Hopefully, they would either miss it entirely or, if they ended up meeting anyone, it would not cause a problem.
There was a lot of hoping and wishing in that course of action.
Kris was more exhausted than hungry for whatever Cookie had managed to mix up from what was left in the ship’s drystorage supplies. Kris did wonder if there were any famine biscuits in the back of the larder and whether they’d be reduced to eating them.
She wondered but did not ask. Between Cookie and Captain Drago, she figured that more experienced heads than hers were thinking through those matters.
She needed to get a good night’s sleep. Sooner or later, she was going to have to face Grampa Ray, King Raymond I to most, and talk him into following through on what she had started.
She didn’t even want to think about what might happen if he wasn’t interested in backing her up. Did they still throw Christians to the lions?
For one of those damn Longknifes, they might bring back the good old days. Who could tell?
Kris had hardly gotten out of her clothing . . . it was amazing how much a princess could perspire while sweating through an unmapped and maybe hostile jump . . . when there was a knock on the door. Kris grabbed for an old Wardhaven U sweatshirt and opened the door a sliver.
Vicky Peterwald stood there. She had a half-empty bottle of whiskey and was sucking it well past half as Kris watched.
“They’re all dead,” Vicky finally said as she let the bottle fall from her lips.
Just the fumes left Kris wanting a drink. That was not good.
“Yes, Vicky, they’re all dead,” Kris said softly. “Most likely. Some might get back.”
“Quit lying. They’re all dead,” the grand duchess snapped bitterly.
A sailor hurried by, doing the weird thing that was neither a run nor a float that half a gee demanded. Clearly, this was not the kind of talk that two girls of Kris and Vicky’s stature needed to have where any passing crew member could pick up this or that snatch of conversation.
“Come in, Vicky.” Kris would have loved to ask her to leave the bottle outside, saving Kris from the temptation of taking a swig. She would have loved to, but she didn’t. Vicky looked more attached to that bottle at the moment than she was to life.
Kris settled on her bunk and offered Vicky her desk chair as far from Kris as she could get in the small room. Still, the compartment filled with the smell of whiskey as Vicky found her way to her seat. She was none too steady, even in half a gee. The grand duchess settled in, took another swig, and said it again. “They’re all dead.”
“Yes,” Kris repeated. She’d already tried to put a hopeful spin on the thought. This time she let the ugly words lie there in all their morbid glory.
“One minute they were there,” Vicky said, and snapped her fingers. “Then they were gone. They didn’t even have a chance to shoot back. That monstrous alien ship just blotted them out, and they were gone as if they’d never been. A battleship, Kris. The biggest, meanest ship in our fleet.”
“Yes, I know,” Kris said. “It happens that way in a war.” Kris didn’t add that she’d faced battleships just as mean and made them disappear herself. That was for yesterday. Tonight, there was a different long list of dead to mourn.
“And you should know, Princess Kristine Longknife. You’ve blotted out enough in your time, haven’t you?”
So, Vicky did remember. Kris let that jab fall to the deck and lie there.
Vicky waved the bottle. “And it, like, wasn’t even really a war. Not yet, anyway. They hadn’t said a word to
us. We hadn’t said anything but ‘Hi’ to them. Then suddenly, every laser on their ship is spearing the Fury, and boom, they’re all dead.”
“I took that for a declaration of war,” Kris said.
“So you could start killing them. How many do you think we killed, ten, twenty billion? You think that makes up for all my friends dying on the Fury?”
“Nothing makes up for the loss of friends,” Kris said softly. Not here and now. Not back then, either.
“But they weren’t your friends, were they, Princess Kristine Longknife,” Vicky said, taking another long swallow of the whiskey. “They were my friends. They were the only people who ever cared about Harry Smythe-Peterwald’s bratty little girl. They cared for me. They looked out for me. For the first time since I was eight, nine, I felt safe with them and their battleship wrapped around me. Do you know what that feels like? Do you know what that means?”
“Yes,” Kris said. “I think I do.”
“Yeah, you got this little tin pot to run you home as fast as they can make it. Run away. Nice way to go.”
Kris knew it was the whiskey talking. Kris knew she should just lie back and take it. That tomorrow when Vicky sobered up, she’d be all apologetic. Kris knew what she ought to do, but those were her friends and crew that Vicky was calling coward.
“You wish you’d stayed on the Fury? Died with them rather than being left alive to run away with me?”
As Kris expected, that brought Vicky up short. She took another long swig and seemed to think about it, as much as her alcohol-clouded brain could.
“No. Yes. I should have been there. I should have been with them, but I was afraid some damn assassin would put a bullet in my brain, so I ran away over to the nice Wasp full of strangers that most likely hadn’t been offered a kazillion dollars to kill me. Who’d have thought something this puny would be the safe place to be in a fight with something as huge as that mother. But then, this little twirp has Kris Longknife, princess extraordinary, and she looks out for number one. Don’t Longknifes always?”
Kris was getting sick and tired of being the butt of this woman’s survival guilt. She had enough survival guilt of her very own, thank you all very much. And it covered a whole lot more dying than that last battle. Eddy, Tommy, all those hopeful volunteers who’d followed her into battles and died, much to their surprise.
“You can take your survival guilt, Vicky, and shove it in that bottle, or anywhere else you care to put it, but don’t you dare lay it on me. I’ve got plenty of my own, damn it. You’re sorry you’re alive, and they’re all dead. Well, there are plenty of airlocks on the Wasp, and you can walk out any one of them if you please. I’ll even modify my report to show that you died fighting with all the brave souls on the Fury. You want that?”
“But they didn’t die fighting,” Vicky screamed. “They didn’t get a shot off. They were there one minute, edging out of laser range, and the next minute what looked like all the lasers ever made were cutting them to pieces, and they just blew up!”
Vicky broke down sobbing. “They didn’t even get a shot off. I watched them practice. All those sailors looked so brave and sure of themselves racing to their battle stations. They earned a fleet E for gunnery, Kris. They deserved a fight. Really, they deserved to go down fighting. Not swatted like some fly on a wall.”
Kris risked the fumes to cross the distance between her and Vicky. She knelt so she could put her arms around Vicky, hold her, and rock her gently as she sobbed.
Kris chose her words gently.
“It was just the luck of the draw, Vicky. It could have just as well have been Admiral Channing’s Triumph there as Admiral Krätz’s Fury. The battle squadron had marched and countermarched with first one, then the other in the lead position. I imagine Georg was tickled when the luck of the draw gave him the lead when they charged for the jump. But when they did the turn away, all the ships reversed at once, and that put the Fury in the trailing slot. There’s a reason that position is called coffin corner, and the aliens took advantage of it.”
Kris pulled Vicky’s face up to put the two eye to eye. The smell of the whiskey was overpowering and giving Kris a hunger that had claws in it. She ignored the craving in order to finish what she had to say.
“Admiral Krätz knew the chances he was taking. He took them willingly, like the fighting sailor he was. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. When we get back, the story of BatRon 12 will be told, and told truly. That is the debt of honor that we owe the people who loved and protected you.”
Vicky sobbed on for a few moments longer, then wiped her nose on her sleeve, and said, “But why did we live, Kris? Why did we live?”
Kris shook her head. “I don’t know. Yes, we were making like a bunch of rocks. But we were only ten, fifteen thousand klicks from the jump. If I was half as paranoid as those aliens seem to be, I’d have shot up anything anywhere close to my space. That’s a mistake I don’t think they’ll make twice. At least I won’t expect them to.”
It took a moment for Kris’s words to pierce the whiskey fog of Vicky’s thoughts. “So the luck of the draw got the Fury blown to bits and we got lucky and lived. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Show me on your birth certificate where it says anything about fair. I’ve searched mine, and I can’t find that word on the front or back.”
Vicky laughed at that. A besotted thing that spewed as much phlegm and tears and used whiskey as sound.
Kris wiped her face and fought the urge to ask for a swig from Vicky’s bottle, which was down to just a bit of slosh.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Kris said, and was relieved to see Doc Maggie poke her head in.
“So this is where you got to,” the good doctor said. “I thought you and I were supposed to be having a wicked game of Scrabble. That nice man, Scrounger, has promised to bring around another fellow to join us. Are you going to make me stand up the best date I’ve had in months?”
“No,” Vicky said, struggling to her feet and letting the bottle fall as gently to the deck as half a gee allowed. When it became clear that the grand duchess would need help negotiating her way out of Kris’s cabin, Maggie came over and offered a hand.
Kris gave the doc a thankful smile. With any luck, the woman would have the two men to herself, and Vicky would spend the game sleeping her whiskey binge off. As the doc guided her patient into the passageway, Kris whispered a thankful prayer. At least one of Vicky’s friends had survived the sudden death of the Fury.
Kris closed the door, waited a moment, and said, “Did you put out a call for her, Nelly?”
“Yes, I did, Kris. From the looks of things, there was a fifty-fifty chance that you two would soon be burning any bridges that you had so far built between your two families. It was either call for Maggie or order up some hot dogs and marshmallows to roast. Since I lack the facilities to enjoy hot dogs and marshmallows, I thought the doc was the better of the choices.”
Kris had to chuckle at Nelly’s joke. “Thank you, Nelly.”
“Now, Kris, if I had hands and feet, I’d empty what’s left in that bottle down your sink, but I don’t. Should I call Abby to come in and do the honors?”
“No,” Kris said, with a long sigh. She paced off the distance to where the bottle lay, with more trepidation than she’d felt in any of her firefights. Holding the bottle at arm’s length did not reduce any of its aroma or allure.
Kris hardly dared to breathe until the last drop had gone down her sink. “Now what do I do with the bottle?” she wondered.
“If you leave it in the trash can, it will smell up the place all night,” Nelly said. “And you don’t need that.”
Kris noticed that the blower was on high, circulating the air in the compartment at an accelerated pace.
“You could leave it outside in the passageway. Some sailor on cleanup detail would take it away.”
“And what are the odds that any sailor who took it, or emptied my trash can, woul
d pass the word that the princess is drinking again.”
“Better than fifty-fifty,” Nelly agreed.
Kris pulled on a pair of gym shorts and went looking for a public disposal to get rid of the evidence.
Sleep came slowly when at last she was able to lie down.
Why am I alive when so many others are dead?
Kris had done as good a job of dodging that question as anyone else. She dodged it for the simple reason she had no answer for it.
People beside her took bullets and died. She took a bomb or two and kept on breathing. Was that a blessing or a curse?
Kris had no answer. She doubted that even Grampa Trouble had a good comeback that he could share with her. Next time they met, she’d have to ask him, anyway.
The luck of the draw was a lousy answer, but it was all she had.
With that very little comfort, she drifted off to sleep.
51
The question of who would go into the reactor, or the reaction-mass plasma-mixing chamber, or whatever, came quickly to mind as the reports came in on their next jump.
The solar system was blessedly empty of life and hostilities.
It was roughly on the path Nelly said would take them back home.
The system was also very sparse. All it boasted was a small yellow sun and a few rocky planets too close to the sun to support life.
Other than that, the system was dust, some asteroids, and a few passing comets.
“There are some jumps out of here, aren’t there, Chief?” Captain Drago asked as the long litany of nothing went on.
“There is one of Nelly’s fuzzy jumps not too far away. It won’t take us long to get there at our present speed.”
“Sulwan, set a course for it,” Captain Drago ordered. “Use as little reaction mass as you can.”
“Understood, sir. I’ll use a quarter gee to aim us at that puppy, then close down the engines. The chief is right, with the speed we have on the boat, we’ll be seeing what’s on the other side of that jump in half a day at most.”
“And I don’t want to hear any quips about a Flying Dutchman from anyone of the bridge crew, you hear me?”
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