Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella

by Mike Shepherd

  “General Trouble?”

  “Agent Foile, I presume.”

  “Please call me Taylor. I’m on leave for the next month.”

  The legend raised a questioning eyebrow, but said nothing.

  Before the silence stretched, Taylor asked, “May I come in and is there any place we can talk in private?”

  “I assume you’d prefer someplace less intimidating than the room we last met in?”

  “Please. You’re great-granddaughter Kris has asked me to talk with you.”

  The legend seemed to try to scowl, but there was too much of a grin for it to overcome. “You have to watch out for that girl. She’s trouble.”

  “Interesting, she gave me the same warning about you, sir.”

  “Then you’re twice warned,” the legend said, pointing Taylor to what the agent knew to be the library. The legend led him to a pair of sofas, facing each other before a fireplace that was large enough to play cards in.

  On the table between them was a platter with some delicious looking confections as well as a coffee urn and a thermos of hot water.

  “What would you like to drink?” the general asked.

  “Tea, please,” Taylor said.

  The general poured hot water into two delicately fine china cups of white with gold filigree and offered Taylor a box full of assorted teas. Taylor chose Earl Gray and began to steep his tea with purpose.

  “So,” the general said, dipping his own tea bag of Earl Gray, “Where is Kris?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I have many kids, grandkids, and more great-grandkids than I can hope to keep track of, considering that the last number keeps changing. No great-great-grandkids. That generation seems too busy to find time for kids.” He paused to stare at nothing far away before adding. “Their loss.”

  “I thought you had seen Kris only recently,” the agent found himself falling back into his professional form.

  The legend easily fell back into his own form. He sipped his tea and gave away nothing.

  “Pardon me. I shouldn’t have asked that,” Taylor said. “I am on leave, but it seems I’m to have a busman’s holiday.”

  That eyebrow went up, again.

  Taylor took that for a nebulous question and attempted to answer some of it. “Kris is, for the moment, safe on the Musashi battleship Mutsu. Unfortunately, she is in custody and headed for her day in court.”

  The grandfather across from Taylor frowned. “Musashi still has the death penalty, doesn’t it?”

  “Kris told me that she was aware of that before she surrendered herself.”

  “Hmm,” was all the grandfather offered.

  After taking a moment to weigh the general’s bland facade, Taylor went on. “Were you aware that Alexander Longknife had three of the upper stories of his tower ready to be flooded with Sarin gas?”

  That struck a nerve.

  The general scowled. “That man is going around the bend without a paddle,” he growled.

  “It seems so,” the agent in Foile agreed. “The question is just how far around whicht bend he intends to go?”

  The general eyed Taylor for a long moment. Taylor met him measure for measure.

  “What has my great-granddaughter shared with you?” General Trouble asked.

  Taylor told him in as few words as he could manage.

  When he finished, the general took a final sip of his tea, set it down and fixed Taylor with a level gaze. “You’re in a lot of trouble,” he said.

  “I’ll take that as a complement, coming from you,” Taylor said with an even grin.

  Trouble grinned right back. Tiger to tiger.

  “So,” the old general said, “what do you plan to do about this?”

  “I intend to find out if there is a Fleet of Fools intent on making all the mistakes Princess Kristine’s Fleet of Discovery did not make,” Taylor said.

  “That will be a tough nut to crack,” Trouble said.

  “I’ve cracked a few tough nuts in my time,” Taylor answered evenly.

  “I imagine that you have. An, no hard feelings on not getting to Kris before she made her try last night.”

  “I am glad that I failed,” Taylor admitted. “I haven’t blown it very often, but if there was ever a situation where I needed to do a face plant, this was the one.”

  “So, assuming that you are not here to arrest me, what can I do for you?” the general said, relaxing into his sofa.

  “If you were Alexander Longknife and sending out a treasure fleet, what ship or ships would you send? If we can identify the likely ships, I can begin to look for a weak link in the crew.”

  Trouble rubbed at his chin. “Ships, especially merchant ships, are not my area of expertise. You might want to talk to Kris’s brother, Honovi. He may be a politician, but he’s a good one. As of late, he’s been working on laws relating to merchant ship safety. He might know what you need to know. Then again, he might not.”

  “You’re the second person to suggest I have a talk with him,” Taylor said. “Kris did as well.”

  “Then let me get you an appointment to see a very busy member of parliament.” Trouble said, and began making the arrangements.

  Chapter 3

  Late that evening, Taylor Foile found himself ushered into a nursery where Member of Parliament Honovi Longknife was walking slowly back and forth, bouncing a tiny infant who seemed more colicky than happy with his father’s attention.

  “I’m sorry I could not see you sooner,” the young father whispered, letting his infant offspring grab his little finger and hold on tight. A burp brought a smile to its tiny lips and another one to the father’s.

  “A new, unhappy tummy?” Taylor asked.

  “Terribly so,” the father said. “The doctors assure us this is just a stage, but it cannot end soon enough for me.”

  Taylor raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “My wife and I are switching off nights. Tonight I have the duty. And yes, we do have hired help, but there are just some things a father and mother should do.”

  Taylor suspected that the Great Billy Longknife had had little to do with his own children’s upbringing. Here was a new father in rebellion against the pattern. Maybe not as vocal and public as the young princess’s, but cut from the same family tree.

  The father switched to Member of Parliament as he turned his gaze from child to agent. “Grampa Trouble said you’ve talked to Kris and him and needed to talk to me. I’m sorry I couldn’t cut some time out sooner for you, but . . .” the young man shrugged.

  The movement of his shoulders was easily subsumed into this walking and bouncing of the infant, but Taylor caught it. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Your sister and the General think you can,” Taylor said and began again to spin out the tale Kris had shared with him, cut now to the absolute fewest words. Before he was done, the scion to the Longknife throne interrupted him.

  Honovi was shaking his head. “Grampa Al would never do that,” leaked out in more of a yelp than a whisper. The infant, who had been starting to doze off opened his eyes to take in his surroundings, but a huge yawn of tiny proportions led to drooping eyes again.

  When the infant again slept in his father’s worried arms, the Member of Parliament went on in a firm whisper. “I was there the night when Grampa Al swore off politics and demanded Father do the same. Grampa Al would never get involved in politics. Certainly not off-planet.”

  “At least one off-planet president thinks he has, and I believe your sister has come to that conclusion as well.”

  The frown on the young father’s face did not seem convinced, but Taylor went on with Kris’s tale.

  “Serin!” came out as a whispered yelp. “My grandfather rigged that Palace of Insecurity with Serin?”

  “So I am told,” Taylor said. “And when your sister left the building with a shuttle launch, there was no chance for me to check the story.”

  “Al had a shuttle there, too!” thoug
h whispered, lacked nothing in incredulity.

  “I saw it with my own eyes. Your sister launched it to take her up to the Musashi battleship Mutsu where she surrendered herself to their justice.”

  “They still have the death penalty,” sounded more like a request for him to deny the statement.

  Taylor nodded. “Still. They use the axe.”

  “Oh, Sis, what have you gotten yourself into now?”

  “Whatever it is, she did it with full knowledge.”

  “My sister has a death wish.”

  “I do not know her as well as you do, sir, but I would not agree with you.”

  “True. Maybe it’s not a death wish. But I sure don’t know what else it could be.”

  Taylor was dearly tempted to offer an opinion of, “A strong sense of duty,” but he could see where that would take the conversation, and that was not the reason he was here.

  “The general suggested that your recent work on revising the Merchant Marine Laws might give you insight into our next problem.”

  “There’s more?”

  Taylor told Honovi of Kris’s fear that her grandfather was preparing to launch a Fleet of Fools.

  The young father stood for a long moment, gently swaying with his babe in arms. The child seemed to be lost in the sleep of the innocent . . . who are well burped.

  Kris’s brother settled his new son into a bassinet, checked to make sure the child monitor was working, and motioned the agent on leave to lead him from the nursery. With one backwards glance, the Member of Parliament led Taylor down the hall to a small office.

  The tan walls were in need of paint. The desk was chipped gray metal. The wall in front of it was covered with pigeon holes overflowing with data storage chips The two chairs also deserved replacement.

  “Merchant ships, huh?” Honovi muttered.

  “Merchant ships loaded with every good thing we make.”

  “Have you read the logs of the Wasp? Kris’s ship.”

  “I have not heard anything about the logs of that ship. Why?” Taylor asked.

  “I’m not surprised you haven’t,” the Member of Parliament said. “They were confiscated and shipped immediately to Wardhaven on the same courier that brought Kris back. I think Dad invented a new security classification for them. ‘Slit your throat before reading’ or something.”

  “Without divulging the content, could you tell me why they are so special?”

  “They tell how Kris managed to get the jump gates to throw ships a thousand light years or more,” her brother said.

  The agent whistled. “I thought most jumps took you twenty or thirty light years. Fifty is considered a long jump.”

  “Yes,” Honovi said.

  “So anyone wanting to get to the other side of the galaxy before they died would need to know what Kris did,” the agent said.

  “Exactly.”

  “So, who has read those logs?”

  “Very few. Access is restricted. You have to have a ‘need to know,’ and not many meet Father’s very restricted idea of needing to know.”

  The agent in Taylor stared at the ceiling. “Didn’t we just install an entirely new security system for Wardhaven’s net?”

  “I believe so,” the young man, frowning at this turn of the conversation. “Word is that it’s tighter than a drum.”

  “Very tight. I understand that even you sister’s famous Nelly was locked out.”

  “Serves Sis right,” the brother who stayed home almost crowed.

  “Who sold us this marvelous system?” Taylor asked, knowing the answer all too well.

  The smile on the Member of Parliament grew grave. “My grandfather Al,” he whispered through a scowl.

  Taylor canted his head to study the flow of emotions racing across the young man’s face. It finished with a soft groan and a muttered, “How much do you want to bet me that the access log on that file is missing one or two entries?”

  “No bet,” the agent said.

  “No bet,” the young man echoed. “But it won’t do him all that much good,” he said, with a chuckle. “Al has been pushing us to cut the regulations and red tape that affect the merchant fleet. He’s been hammering on us for the last five years to lighten up on the power requirements for ships. Shippers can make more money if their ships have only the reactors and motors they need to make .85 gees acceleration or deceleration. Cut down on the deadweight of the ship and it can carry more cargo at a lower price. Also, if we change the laws so the ships don’t have to carry extra reaction mass from port to port, again he makes more money.”

  Hanovi paused, then added. “Of course, you have a damn thin safety margin if things go sideways.”

  The agent raised a questioning eyebrow.

  The Member of Parliament leaned back and eyed the ceiling as he explained. “Most major shipping lanes begin and end at space stations with reaction mass for sale. ‘Why should ships have to lug around more hydrogen for more jumps than there are between their scheduled ports? Weight costs money,’ Al kept yammering at me. ‘Let ships get by with no more reaction mass than they need and no more power plant than is necessary to get from port to port. We can build ships for specific trade routes and cut the price to the bare minimum’.”

  “But,” Taylor was quick to point out, “that will make the ship very dependent on ports and very specialized for that route.”

  “Exactly,” Honovi agreed. “Planets that don’t provide enough trade for their own specially built fleet will be sloughed off to general ships at a higher price.”

  “And if you wanted to go jumping around the galaxy using this new technique your sister discovered . . .?”

  “You’d need a whole different bunch of ships. Totally new design with more power and a whole lot more storage tanks for reaction mass. Probably stronger hull scantlings, too, though I can’t tell you why without having to slit your throat.”

  The two men stared at each other, a tight smile growing on their faces.

  “So,” Taylor said, “What type of merchant ships are they building at the Nuu yards up on the station at this very minute?”

  “Very specialized ones, if you believe what my grandfather tells me. But,” Honovi said, raising a finger, “I don’t believe everything Al tells me. I have my contacts at the yards and among the merchant skippers. Let me make a few calls tomorrow.”

  “And I do not doubt that someone I know knows someone who is very good at getting around this new net security,” Taylor said.

  “Who?” Honovi asked.

  “Your sister did not get as high as she did in Al’s tower without knowing something about the layout. She had just arrived back on Wardhaven. Someone must have provided her with her intel.”

  “Who?” the brother repeated.

  “I will be talking to General Tordon again tomorrow morning.”

  “Who else but Grampa Trouble?” Honovi agreed, a loving scowl on his face for his rascal of a great grandfather.

  Chapter 4

  At 8:30 Foile was again knocking on the front door to Nuu House.

  Without so much as a request for identification, the legend himself answered. “I was expecting you. Care for breakfast?” he asked.

  They adjourned to the kitchen where Taylor found himself sharing a breakfast of huge and wide-ranging proportions.

  “Do you do this everyday?” Taylor asked.

  “Of course not,” Trouble chuckled. “But a brunch starts at 0930 for an immense number of Honovi’s closest friends. Fortunate for us, we can mooch before them.”

  The breakfast was quite enjoyable. It turned out that the cook’s husband was a veteran, invalided out of the service after the Unity War nearly ninety years ago. He and Trouble began swapping war stories that couldn’t possibly be true, but raised the hairs on the back of Taylor’s neck, nether the less.

  Only when the cook and her husband began setting up the brunch did Taylor have a moment to pose a question to Trouble of how he might gain a better grasp of who had ac
cessed the Wasp’s logs.

  “And you think I might know of some such wizard just why?” the legend said, eyeing the agent in a fashion that likely would have a normal human crawling under the table.

  Taylor ignored the urge, but did take the time to consider how he might broach the topic without becoming an accessory after the fact to Kris’s little breaking and entering expedition. Failing to find a way around it, Taylor chose to ignore it.

  “Let me simply say, without laying a basis for my suspicion, that I think you know someone with the prerequisite skills.”

  “Spoken like a cautious man who knows his way around the law,” the old general replied with a chuckle. “Let me contemplate a few of my sins and see who I might recommend to you. Recommend to you without any surety of success since, I, no doubt, have never used their services.”

  “No doubt at all,” Taylor said, lying through his teeth with just as much feigned innocence.

  A moment later, the cook returned but didn’t head for the stove. “Honovi slipped this to me and said to see that you got it. How’d he know you were here?”

  Taylor shrugged. He was getting way too good at avoiding saying what he knew. When I get back to the office after this vacation, I will need another one to regain my reputation for probity?

  When they were again alone, Taylor opened the note. It had a number scrawled across it

  that had just the right numerics to be a phone number.

  The general raised a questioning eyebrow as Taylor had his computer run the number in a reverse search. It was the personal number of a structural engineer working for Nuu Yard up on the station.

  The general allowed Taylor a smile. “Good kid, Honovi is. Add this number to your list,” he said and slipped a phone number across the table.

  Again, Taylor ran the number through the directory. This time the reaction was Number Not in Use.

  “Surprised?” Taylor asked.

  “None at all,” Trouble assured him.

  “It seems that I have my work cut out for me,” Taylor said, pushing back from the table.

  “Or at least a start,” the general said, raising to his feet and offering Taylor his hand.