Audacious

by Mike Shepherd

  “Where is Victoria?” he demanded.

  “She is just leaving,” his house computer answered.

  “Tell her I wish to see her.”

  “I don’t want to see you” came in Vicky’s own voice a moment later. “I have business of my own.”

  “Which it seems also impacts my business and your father’s. You may either come to my study, or my men will carry you.”

  “I could drop them before they laid a hand on me.”

  “Then the armored security guards will collect you, and you can sample the hospitality of my lower basements until such time as your father asks about you. I expect that might be a very long time, all things considered.”

  A few moments later, Victoria Smythe-Peterwald stormed into his study, four security guards trailing her warily.

  “You don’t have the right to stop me,” she shouted after hardly crossing the threshold.

  “I imagine your brother told his mentor that about the time he tried breathing vacuum. It didn’t work all that well.”

  “It was that damn Longknife.”

  “So you were going to get her,” Grant said, trying his best to sound reasonable.

  “Her and that old bag, both,” the lovely girl spat.

  Grant sighed. This educational assignment was not going well. “That old bag was surviving Iteeche killer pods long before your father was born.”

  “And I caught her up like a blind cow at feeding time,” the young woman said proudly.

  “No doubt. However, your father and I cannot afford another kidnapping bandied about human space at the moment. Her husband, General Trouble, is not a man who takes offense well.”

  “He’ll never know what killed her. Her and that Longknife brat.”

  “Ah, but I know. And you just bragged about it in front of four security guards. That is not how your father or I arrived at our places in human space. If your right hand slits a throat, your left hand should know nothing about it. That is something you should meditate on.”

  The girl actually stomped her foot. “I don’t have time to waste doing that meditating thing of yours.”

  “I’m afraid you do.” Grant raised his voice slightly. “Ms. Rotterdame.”

  “Yes, sir,” Vicky’s personal maid’s voice answered immediately.

  “I am sending Miss Victoria up to her suites. She is to stay there, meditating on the meaning of security. I do not want her out of your sight for any reason. You understand me. Any. Reason!”

  “I understand you perfectly, Mr. Von Schrader. She will be under the personal observation of either me or one of my assistants at all times, no matter how personal or odoriferous her activity. And I will bring out the shock cane if she proves too headstrong.”

  “We understand each other,” he said, then scowled at his boss’s offspring. “I will also have guards at your door and on the grounds below your suite. You were quite good at slipping out of the nursery back on Greenfeld. Do not mistake my house for such a play area. You have created a problem that I must now solve. Go to your rooms while I do it.”

  Miss Vicky kicked an end table, that proved heavier than she thought, so she slapped the lamp on it. Since it was bolted to the table, all she did was knock the shade askew.

  “I would have expected better from a Peterwald,” Grant said, eliciting a primal scream from the girl. When he showed no reaction to the noise, she stomped out.

  Grant eyed the senior of the guards. “Had she told you where she was going?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And you knew nothing of this plan of hers.”

  Any answer would damn him. “No, sir,” the man said simply.

  “Inform your supervisor that someone in her guard detail must know what she planned and helped her plan it. I expect your company to investigate it and take appropriate action.”

  “Yes, sir” came quickly back.

  And Grant von Schrader turned back to his desk and fiddled with minor matters until he was once more alone. Only then did he tap his most secure commlink.

  “Major, I need a quick report on all the assets we have in place. I fear some of them may have been compromised. We should also assume that Operation Barbarossa may require immediate implementation.

  “That will involve more risk than we intended,” his old associate replied.

  “Report back to me in half an hour on how far we may have been compromised and then we will assess the risk.”

  At the sound of the link being cut, Grant called up his plan for Barbarossa. No doubt more time would reduce the risks. However, if the dolts who ran Eden finally pulled their heads out of the sand, more time might ruin everything.

  Grant smiled. With luck, he could still add another star to the Greenfeld banner…and return the boss’s daughter to him alive…if not educated.

  34

  Kris told Nelly to put off trying to decipher O’Heidi’s phone call when a report came in from the Tac Center.

  “Our tails have found something interesting.”

  A new location appeared on Captain DeVar’s tactical board. The target was a large warehouse in a district full of them. It was also under heavy and sophisticated security.

  “Approach will be tough without all kinds of unshirted hell getting in the way,” the captain muttered.

  “Nelly, have those new cars arrived?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Twelve cars ranging from family boxy to sporty to junkers are parked a block from the embassy.”

  “Way to go, girl.” Thirty minutes later, a major chunk of a Marine company descended from all points of the compass on a nondescript warehouse.

  Kris was in the backseat of a red sports car. Jack drove; Captain DeVar rode shotgun. Jack gunned the engine and did a very noisy circuit of the warehouse. Kris had her knees up around her ears; the back of the sports car was never intended for six-footers. Likely never intended for anyone.

  Despite the discomfort, Kris didn’t miss two human guards—one at the front and one at the back door of their target.

  And they didn’t miss the car. Lust for shiny, fast wheels filled their eyes.

  “Bet they can’t describe who was in the red sports car,” Jack chortled.

  “But they got the make and model of this little number,” Kris said. “Let’s go find Penny.”

  The intelligence officer was in the parking lot of a drive-in, munching a hamburger as she studied a portable battle board.

  Kris leaned against her sporty wheels, filing her nails. The red short shorts and rhinestone-speckled tank top made her the perfect accessory for the car. No one noticed the amount of whispering she was doing with the car next to her.

  “How tight is the security?” Kris asked softly.

  “About as tight as it gets,” Penny answered. “Cameras on each corner of the building. More in the middle of the block. Human guards at the door. Nanos floating around the street both for attack and recon. If we storm that place, they are so going to know we’re coming.”

  “Anything inside yet?” Kris asked.

  “I cruised my standard probes around the building,” Penny said. “But all met defensive nanos and I pulled them back. No chance of anything normal getting in and out of there.”

  “Nelly, we could use something not normal,” Jack said.

  Nelly had been a half kilo of self-organizing computer matrix around Kris’s shoulders. But of late, Nelly had put on weight. About a hundred grams of extra matrix and Smart Metal.

  “I think Auntie Tru gave me just the right trick for this bunch,” the computer said softly. “Five or six recording bugs, and a dozen or so relay stations. The bugs conduct their own recon, then tight beam out a fast report by the relays.”

  “Do it,” Kris ordered.

  A gray junker pulled up on the other side of Penny’s blue sedan. This station wagon had Abby in the backseat with Bronc and Cara. The three tough-looking dudes in the front seat were Marines, though the one in the middle was a woman Marine.

  “Does any
one have a layout for the insides of that warehouse?” Kris asked softly.

  Bronc eyed Kris like she’d grown two heads. Once again, Eden was making it hard for Princess Kristine Longknife to pull the required rabbit out of a very locked-down hat.

  Jack ordered a hamburger and a malt for himself, and another set for Kris. She snorted, but accepted the atavistic requirement of the locale that she must belong to some male.

  “Don’t make this a habit,” she muttered under her breath.

  The hamburger wasn’t too bad, and while the malt didn’t match the quality of the milkshakes at the Smuggler’s Roost, it was quite decent. Kris was nursing the last few drops from the glass when Nelly said, “I am getting answers from my scouts.”

  “Show us,” Kris said. And watched DeVar’s battle board fill with the flight in of one of the scouts.

  Nelly merged the scout’s reports into one informative burst. Kris and her team got an overview of the lower floor of a very box-laden warehouse. Up on the second deck, down a hall, and into a back room showed Gramma Ruth, taped to a chair.

  Beside her, one man paced. Another rocked comfortably in a desk chair. At a table set up across the room, but near the entrance, six young punks were taking apart pistols, cleaning them, and putting them back together…very lovingly.

  There also was a monitor with its screen split into a half-dozen sections. Pictures from both inside and out flashed on it. The pictures didn’t always come up; some segments were blank, others showed a very hazy picture. It didn’t seem to matter, none of the men in the room paid it much attention.

  Maybe Kris had just gotten her first bit of luck. Maybe.

  “The two guys nearest the door are ours,” Penny reported. “The guy doing the tiger pacing act is the fellow that hired them. Don’t know who the others are.”

  “Nelly, how safe are your scouts?” Kris asked. The pacing guy regularly turned to the seated fellow and said something, but there was no sound.

  “I am getting noise from a few defensive units. Unless one of them stumbles into the line out, they should stay dumb. And when any of them get close to one of my active scouts, I put it to sleep for a while.”

  “I want to hear what’s going on between those two guys.”

  “Sound coming up,” Nelly said.

  “Where is that bitch?” the pacer snapped.

  “Which bitch?” the seated guy said. He didn’t look up from playing his handheld computer game.

  “The rich bitch.”

  “They are both quite a bit richer than me or thee, and I must once again ask you not speak of our employer like that.”

  “It ain’t like she’s going to sashay in on us unannounced. She’s got guns around her, and even your blind gate guards would have to notice that limo of hers.”

  “Quite likely. So sit down and relax like the rest of us.”

  In the background, the talk at the table centered lovingly on the guns the new hires had been issued and what they would do when given the chance. Every shooter was sure he could make head shots at fifty, no now it was up to seventy-five paces.

  For a few moments only that conversation came through as the pacer went back to pacing.

  Suddenly, he turned on Gramma Ruth. A gun appeared in his hand. “What do you say we pop her right now?”

  “What do you say you put that gun away,” the game player said, still not looking up.

  “Why not pop the old bag?”

  “Because our young bag wants the other young bag to be here when we pop the old bag. She’s the one paying. I don’t know about you, but I was taught to follow the golden rule. She’s got the gold. She rules.”

  “But she should be here by now,” the pacer almost shrieked.

  The calm one nodded at that. “She should be.”

  “Call her.”

  “Don’t make me add stupid to your long list of failings.”

  “I’m going to pop the old broad. I am if we don’t see that rich bitch real soon.”

  “She will come.”

  “Before the cops.”

  “Don’t worry about the cops. They are taken care of.”

  “Yeah, and you were so sure that rich bitch would be here what, half an hour ago.”

  “She will come.”

  “I’m gonna pop this old bag.”

  The conversation looked ready to go into a repeat loop. One Kris did not like.

  “Captain, I do not think we can wait for the other ‘rich bitch’ to show up.”

  “Looks that way,” Captain DeVar said.

  “So, how do we take down the two guards at the doors without them raising a stink?” Kris said, a smile growing on her face. These fellows had shown themselves easily distracted by a flashy car. Kris suspected she knew another way.

  In the car, Jack nudged Captain DeVar. “I hope you have some ideas on this, because if you don’t get ahead of that woman, we’re all going to be racing to catch up, and I’m not at all sure we’ll like what we’re racing into.”

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” the captain muttered, then called out the window. “Becky, Trish, I think we’re going to need that decoy stunt you’ve been talking about for so long.”

  “Whoopee” came from the next car, as a white T-shirt came off and a knife came out. A moment later, the shirt was back on, a door opened, and a woman Marine wiggled her way out of the car. Not much of the shirt was left, what with the sleeves hacked off, the neck now much more open, and a whole lot gone from the bottom.

  A second later, the redhead pulled her bra out from under the remnant of the shirt. To wolf whistles from the Marines in the cars around her, she wiggled, showing she had the right curves in all the right places. She held every male eye.

  Well, maybe she shared those eyes with the short blonde who joined her.

  “As you were,” the blonde growled under her breath. That brought laughs.

  “What we women do in the line of duty.” The redhead sighed.

  “Abe, Hamma, trail the girls. You know what to do when the guards get distracted.”

  Two of the shortest members of the company, in white tees and baggy slacks of the latest fashion: one plaid, the other checkered, sauntered after the women as they sashayed off.

  “They big enough to take down those guards?” Kris asked.

  “They’re Marines, ma’am,” Captain DeVar said. “The guards will go down. And if their eyes are where I suspect they’ll be, they won’t even know what hit them. Now then, my fabulous Nelly, I know those guys are not paying a lot of attention to the monitor, and the pictures on the monitor regularly go blank, but is there anything you can do to encourage it to be on the fritz when I want it on the fritz.”

  “Fritz,” Nelly said. “Interesting word. And yes, while most of you were watching those poor girls turn themselves into sex objects, I was launching new nanos.”

  Kris found herself staring at two wide-eyed Marine officers. It looked like Nelly was entering a feminist stage of her development. Just what Kris needed, more interesting behavior from her pet computer.”

  “What kind of new nanos?” Kris said, keeping the discussion on what would help Gramma Ruth.

  Jack shook his head. We need to talk, he mouthed silently.

  “My new nano will access the feed line from the cameras. They are protected and alarmed against just such an intervention, but, if Auntie Tru and Sam are as smart as they think they are, I just may be able to get in there.”

  “Please leave me alone for a moment,” Nelly ordered.

  Kris turned back to Captain DeVar. On his battle board he was lighting up cars, giving them assignments to the front or back door and the order for their arrival. “First go in troops that your maid gave spider-silk undies to. The very first have ceramic plates. The unarmored go in last.” He tapped his board. “Drivers, stay in the rigs. Move them out of the way for the next one coming. I don’t want to see a stack-up of unloading or empty rigs at the doors.”

  No reply came back, but around
the drive-in, heads nodded to the orders.

  “What about me?” Kris asked. “I’m fully armored.”

  “Last,” DeVar spat. “If I thought I could make you.”

  Kris shook her head.

  The captain glanced at Jack. “Can you make this woman see reason.”

  “She’s a Longknife,” Jack said with a shrug. “Reason is not something they’re noted for.” He did lean over to look up at Kris. “For God’s sake, woman, do not try to be first in. So help me, God, I will personally trip you up if you try.”

  “You’d have to be ahead of me to trip me,” Kris said.

  “I am so glad that she’s not in my chain of command, or I in hers,” the Marine captain said with a groan.

  “Where will you be in the assault order?” Kris asked the company commander.

  “If I wasn’t in the same car with you, I’d fit myself somewhere in the middle.”

  “Sounds like a reasonable place for me,” Kris said.

  Jack eyed her in open shock. “Who are you, and what have you aliens done with my primary?”

  “My two women are about to walk past the doors,” Captain DeVar noted. “Drivers, start you engines. Let’s make this look good and not do anything that will get the neighbors talking.”

  Kris edged around the door, DeVar leaned his seat forward a bit, and she slid into the back.

  Around Kris, some cars took off in a squealing of tires and similar teenage panache. Others left at the sedate pace you’d expect of a respectable family car. Two old hulks chugged and smoked, but got under way. In a moment, the lot was empty.

  “Jack, are you going to stay with the car?” Kris asked, just as Jack backed the sports car out…squealing tires burning rubber. Gears ground as he changed into drive and took off like a rocket.

  Once Kris had recovered from being thrown hard against her seat belt, and then deep into a seat way too small for her…or anyone for that matter…he grinned at her in the rearview mirror. “Wait until you see what I have planned, honey cakes.”

  What was it about bright red sport cars that cut the male IQ in half? Kris thought, but didn’t say. Jack was getting her to Gramma Ruth.