Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella

by Mike Shepherd

  “Are they asking you to figure out how much pumping you’ll need to redistribute weight on this rotating ship?” Taylor asked.

  “No. No one’s raised that problem. I wonder if I should.”

  “Please don’t do it tomorrow,” Taylor suggested, trying to sound as helpful as he might.

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “So, let’s see what have we have here,” Taylor reflected. “Merchant ships that are huge, and, unlike everything that was put forward for the last five years, have excessive power plants. They also are designed for higher gee and we have this RPM issue, but no thought of armor.”

  “No. We’re not putting ice armor on them, though I did overhear some folks at lunch from the Navy side of the yard talking about having the new Smart Metal do its own rotation thing. With this new stuff, we can get it spinning around on the outer skin of the ship without the crew inside having to spin with it. It will even redistribute itself as it takes hits. Fantastic stuff! Oh, you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Hear what?” Taylor said, allowing himself a small but friendly smile. “As a matter of fact, I haven’t heard anything.” Then he frowned. “Anything that I can connect the dots to.”

  Annie took another bite from her salad. “I think there is one more dot for your little puzzle.”

  “Yes.”

  Again she chewed her food. “There is a third ship we are working on. It’s small and has to be ready when the big two are launched.

  “A third, small ship?”

  “Yes, little, but not normally little. It has three smaller reactors. Normally, you try to fit the reactor to the ship. Small ship, small reactor. Big ship, bigger reactor. If you get big enough, you add a second reactor. That’s what is economical. You don’t ever put three of the smallest size ones on one ship.”

  “Redundancy?” Taylor guessed.

  “That’s all I can figure out. It’s also small, and not at all rigged for cargo. In fact, it’s not rigged for much of anything. The programmer working on the Smart Metal configurations of the ship has gotten huge bonuses, but other than him showing off pictures of his new sports car, he’s not saying a word about his work.”

  “A small ship but with redundant power plants so that if one went down on a long voyage you’d still have the other two. Is there anything else special about it?”

  “It’s getting the same sensor suite that the big ships are getting. That includes a Mark XII rangefinder.”

  “How is that special?”

  “It’s just the best, most expensive rangefinder on the market, and Westinghouse charges an arm and a leg for them.”

  “Just a second,” Taylor said, and called up the entry on the Wasp. “Yes, it got one of the first Mark XII rangefinders. It was installed just before Kris Longknife found those two planets loaded with alien artifacts out past Chance. There’s a tight control over who gets to go there and how they go. Strange, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and no one’s beating a trail there,” Taylor mused.

  “Strange, that,” was all Annie said.

  “I take it that you know a lot more than I do.”

  “Very likely, but it doesn’t involve what that Longknife girl is up to lately, so let’s not go there.”

  “Are you putting big lasers on these ships so that they need the best rangefinder?”

  “That’s just it. All three ships have no armament. As I understand it, there won’t even be a gun locker, although with Smart Metal, you can change that real fast.”

  “Stranger and stranger,” Taylor said. He glanced down at his notebook. He’d totally forgotten to take notes. He scrawled Mark XII and left it at that.

  “Well, I do have a date with my cat and some good TV tonight,” Annie said, applying a napkin to her mouth. “It’s been a ball sharing my ignorance with you. If you ever find yourself in my neck of the woods not knowing anything and wanting to know even less, look me up. You have my number.”

  Taylor chuckled at her joke, and stood like a gentleman as she left. He sat down and made some more notes. He reviewed several of the pages in his two databases, then slowly ate his sandwich. He obviously knew a lot of interesting stuff that related to each other in some rational way.

  The only problem was, he didn’t know enough about the entire puzzle to see how they fit together.

  Sandwich finished, he stood up, signaled a wandering trolley and bussed his own table. As he did so, he noticed a man standing in the doorway of the restaurant, eyeing him.

  “Computer, who is that man?” Taylor whispered.

  “There is a 97.382 percent probability that he is Arlen Cob, a senior investigator with Nuu Security, assigned to Nuu High Wardhaven Station Docks.”

  When Taylor reached the door, Arlen was gone. Midway to the space elevator station, and with no apparent tail, Taylor attached to the transient net and called Honovi, leaving a cryptic note that he hoped the busy young man would take for a request to meet with him again for some quality baby time. He also found a even more cryptic note from the number that was not in use at this time. A woman’s voice asked him to meet her at a place near his office. She used the unique name the regulars applied to it, something that brought a smile to cops, but meant nothing to most civilians.

  Taylor increased his pace towards the beanstalk station.

  Chapter 6

  The Atrium was many places, organized around a hollow square that rose nine floors to a clear ceiling. There were trees and vines twining green around stair wells and elevators between the floors. Every once in a while, it seemed to rain, but it was a fine mist and only fell where the plants needed it.

  A well-managed jungle, the cops called it. While people with too much money spent it among the greenery of the nine floors, the basement had several nice places were working folks might hang out. Government types with only the pay voters saw fit to give them.

  Taylor would bet money that his caller didn’t intend to meet him in the basement. The voice was too well manicured.

  He took a seat at a finely worked cast iron table and pulled out his reader. He was way behind on his comic strips. Mostly, he stayed to the strips that did their jokes in a day. He could never count on following a storyline that covered a week, much less a month. He caught up on the last week of his favorites, then turned to the one long plotted comic he enjoyed. He had to flip back through six weeks before he could find the beginning of this particular story ark and follow the jokes. Taylor was smiling happily at a particularly good running line of jokes when the woman who had sent him here entered.

  At least, he hoped she was looking for him.

  Likely, well over half the eyes in the Atrium followed her, hoping she had come to meet them. While engineer Annie had fit in, using light makeup and a shirt and pants that were nearly the uniform of the civilian workforce, this woman stood out.

  Her dress was clearly professional, but the tight sheath of several competing shades of gray drew the eye and made every step she took a celebrating of several million years of female evolution and locomotion. Her makeup turned a lovely face into something striking and unforgettable.

  Clearly, today she’s not afraid to be remembered. I wonder what she looks like when she doesn’t want to be so memorable? the professional in Taylor thought.

  As she passed his table she spoke softly, “Agent Foile, will you walk with me?”

  He pocketed his reader and rose to follow her. In a moment, he was beside her. “No agent today. I’m on vacation.”

  “I am rarely asked to go fishing,” the woman said. “I really doubt you are on holiday.”

  Taylor chose not to press the point.

  They entered an elevator and the woman pressed for nine. Taylor had staked out a few stores on that level. Most of them sold the most expensive works of art on Wardhaven. However, she led him to a small restaurant.

  “Your usual, Mademoiselle M?”

  “Certainly, Charles.”

  “It’s ready for you,” was all the maître d�
�� said.

  Without looking back, Mademoiselle M led Taylor to a small room with a table and chairs. She held the door open for him to enter, then closed it firmly behind her. The room was something Tailor had only heard of. Art work in gold frames, rich cream wallpaper with gold filigree running through it in a flower pattern, and a plush blue carpet enveloped his shoes.

  “Clear,” the woman said and suddenly all the falderal vanished. The walls were spartan white and bare of anything. The table, chairs and carpet were still there, but Taylor had seen interrogation rooms with more warmth than this room now exuded.

  He took a chair. She settled into the chair across from him. From her small purse, she removed a compact and began to check her makeup. She was careful to keep the mirror out of Taylor’s line of sight.

  The agent would bet money that the “compact” was doing a far more thorough check of the security of this room than Annie’s pink box had done.

  “So, how is your vacation going, Mr. Foile?” she said. The tone was chit chat.

  Taylor chose to return the soft ball with an equally easy pitch. “So far, I’m just in the decompression stage. I usually need a week just to shake off the stress of the job. I was catching up on the last month of comics when you walked by.”

  She put the compact away.

  “So why are we here?”

  “Trouble sent me.”

  “He only sends me trouble. What kind of trouble are you, Mr. Senior Chief Agent in Charge? You still licking the wounds from your chase after Kris Longknife?”

  “I didn’t know that made the news.”

  “It didn’t. I rarely bother with the official version. No, I was following you and her antics on your Bureau net. You would have had a better chance of catching her if you knew where she was headed.”

  “Ah, but I didn’t. My orders to ‘Find her before she gets herself and others killed,’ was rather vague.”

  “Which leaves one to wonder if you were intended to fail?” she said, raising a perfectly arched eyebrow.

  “If I was to fail, why send me?”

  “Yes.” she said. “So, why did Trouble send me to you?”

  “It seems that the logs of the Wasp’s last voyage, it being the princess’s flag, were brought back to Wardhaven and buried under an entirely new security level. ‘Burn before Reading,’ or some such thing. The question posed to me by a good friend was whether or not we can trust the access logs of the data, or have the travels of our wayward princess been read more widely than the Prime Minister would prefer.”

  The woman shook her head. “If you don’t want data read, don’t put it on the net. Back in the ancient days, the only way to access some data was to place an order to have the tapes hung on the computer. You did what you wanted then put them back in a locked box, or so my old grandmother insists. It wasn’t that way in her day, but in her great-grandmother’s day, no doubt, when the dinosaurs stomped the Earth.”

  She paused to enjoy Taylor’s smile at her humor. “Who has these logs?”

  “I don’t know. They are Navy property, I would suspect that the Navy has custody of them.”

  “Hmm.” Now Taylor observed that even a frown looked good on her. “That could definitely complicate my job. The Navy types are notoriously untrusting. They insisted on being trained up on this new security system and then tweaked it to their liking. I could likely walk into the Prime Minister’s personal files without him twitching to the visit. Navy, ah, not so much.”

  She paused to study her fingernails for a long moment. They were a most stunning shade of lavender, and matched her eyeshadow. Taylor had seen the combination on teenagers and been tempted to ship them off to the morgue.

  On her, it was strangely alluring.

  Or was it that, on her, even death would be alluring. Taylor closed down that line of thought. Hard.

  “To get somewhere, it often helps to know where you are coming from. Do you have any guess who these pairs of unauthorized eyes might belong to?”

  “Some of Mr. Alexander Longknife’s associates,” Taylor said.

  Mademoiselle M uttered a nasty word. “Why should I risk my neck, as well as my street cred on some intramural dust-up between that family?” she snapped, and glanced at the door.

  Taylor suspected that she might allow him one more sentence. Maybe two.

  “The life of all humanity just may be weighing in the balance.”

  “Says who?” she snarled.

  “Kris Longknife. And Trouble seems to agree with her.”

  “That girl. Maybe. Him? Damn. Start talking, Mr. Taylor. I might have bought your pig in a poke for just an ordinary problem. This has got foul smelling stuff all over it and very likely several pounds of explosives thrown in for a joke.”

  Quickly, Taylor ran the woman through the runaround the Longknifes had subjected him to, from chasing Kris Longknife for her father to the daughter charging him to get to the bottom of why the grandfather was so allergic to talking to his offspring.”

  “He popped Sarin gas in his own office and ran away, long dress hauled up to show his bare ass,” the woman snapped as Foile ended his story.

  “I was told about the Sarin and did not have the opportunity to observe him in full retreat,”

  “I would have done this just for just the pictures of that,” she said. “Why are these logs suddenly so interesting to the old man?”

  “They may contain just how Kris Longknife managed to make long jumps. Jumps of thousands of light years.”

  “Right. I wondered how she managed to get there and back again before the onset of menopause. And if he has read the method to her madness?”

  “He may dispatch a trade fleet full of all the best goodies we make to see if he can be more successful in opening negotiations with these aliens.”

  The lovely lady said another, nastier word. “Some men just never understand that ‘no’ means ‘no’, and ‘no way in hell’ means ‘no, you can’t,’ really.”

  The two could easily agree on that.

  “Okay, if Trouble sent you, then he shares the same fear that Kris Longknife does. You said you were on vacation. I take that to mean that I can’t send a bill to that nice slush fund that the WBI usually pays me out of when they need my services.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “And if I am hauled in sporting handcuffs, no one is likely to loan me a key when no one is looking?”

  “If we succeed, there is likely to be a nice plaque attesting to the gratitude of a grateful nation. Otherwise, we may both rot in jail for the rest of our lives.”

  “Which won’t be long, because the monsters will come and kill us all.”

  “I like working with an optimist,” Taylor said, smiling.

  She reached across the table and removed a small bit of lint from his coat and crushed it between her fingers. “I wonder how long that has been there?” she said.

  “I have my standard issue bug detector in my pocket,” he said.

  “Standard issue,” she made sound like an even nastier word.

  “Has someone been listening in to our entire conversation?”

  “Of course not. I squelched the transmitter on that puppy before I said hello. I was wondering whether it might be worth my while to let you continue passing worthless stuff to whomever is interested in you. I just decided I don’t want to.”

  “How long has it been there?” Taylor asked, not at all liking the taste in his mouth left by the idea of him being a pawn in someone else’s chase.

  “Hard to tell. We can make them so tiny, but they still need power. The smaller they are, the shorter the time they can transmit anything. Then, of course, they might record and only send late at night. Who knows. Where have you been?”

  Which was an easy way for her to get a list of just who was playing in this game. He tried to stay vague, but she got the gist. “The Prime Minister’s residence is no big show. They really need to hire me to clean up their act. Nuu house is fine. I check their security on
ce a month. Sooner if I think they need it. The engineer you met up on the station. What did her box look like?”

  Taylor used his fingers to give the measurements of the device. “Pink with a light green button. More than that, I cannot say.”

  “It sounds like a Private Eyes Only, which can mean nothing at all if you don’t actually set the thing up.”

  “She seemed security minded,” Taylor said.

  “We shall see.” She rummaged in her purse, muttering softly to herself. “No, not the compact, it would take too long to train the poor fellow. Oh, right,” she said, and pulled a small ball from her purse. Besides being round, it swirled with a rainbow of colors, ever changing, like a miniature gas giant planet.

  “Here, keep this in your pocket.”

  “What is it?”

  “A talisman. A magic charm. Call it what you will, but it should ward off the evil electronic bugs for the next week.”

  Taylor held it up to the light and watched the eddies and swirls within it. “Will it jam my own system? I’m not totally ignorant of modern life. I don’t eat with my toes.”

  “No doubt that you are and no doubt that you don’t,” the woman said, seeming to enjoy his joke. “Now, you go your way and I will go mine. I’ll get back to you when I have something to share with you.” Mademoiselle M rose from her chair.

  Taylor rose too, as a gentleman should and said, “Then I may just go fishing until I have something to share with you.”

  “Oh, where do you like to toss in your hook?”

  Taylor chose to ignore the double entendre and answered the simple question. “The long pier where the Severn meets the ocean.”

  “Oh, I often fish there. We might run into each other.”

  “I’ll look forward to meeting you again.”

  “Let’s hope you’re not getting my one phone call from jail,” she said and let him leave the room first.

  Chapter 7

  That evening, Taylor found himself knocking on Honovi Longknife’s door, again. The butler let him in and ushered him upstairs. He passed the open nursery door; tonight, the wife was doing troubled tummy duty. The infant seemed less fussy in his mother’s arms.