Kris Longknife's Bloodhound, a novella

by Mike Shepherd

  Taylor had always envied the way his wife was able to quiet their children. A glare that would silence the most hardened criminal went right past his crying offspring.

  Life is not fair.

  The Member of Parliament was in his small home office. The butler knocked, announced him merely as Taylor and left. After a “come in,” Taylor opened the door and entered. The room, if anything, was more disheveled than last night. The politician had several readers open on the desk and was intently studying an old fashion monitor.

  “I hope your day was better than mine,” the Member of Parliament said curtly, not taking his eyes from the screen.

  “Mine was interesting,” Taylor answered with intentional vagueness.

  “Don’t call Annie again,” Honovi said, turning his chair to face Taylor. “She’s spooked. Do you know she passed a Nuu Yard security type on the way out of the Lost Dutchman?”

  “Yes, I saw him too. However, he was gone by the time I left. I suspect that it is his job to hang over the door like a vulture to scare anyone who might be considering anything not in his boss’s interests.”

  “Well, whatever he was doing there, he scared the bejesus out of her. If you need to talk to anyone at the dock yard, I’ll give you another contact.”

  “Do you have a date for the launching and fitting out of the Pride of Free Enterprise?”

  “No, and that bothers me. Usually, I get invitations to attend those things. Maybe it’s because I’m a shareholder. More likely, they want to get photos of a Member of Parliament at one of their shindigs. Anyway, I’m always told two months in advance. I can’t believe it will take them more than two months to finish those ships. There are Navy ships spinning out at the yard that are taking less time than these.”

  “What do you know about the redesign of these ships?”

  Honovi leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and gave Taylor a blank stare. Taylor spent the next couple of minutes describing how the ships now had double the reactors and likely double the Smart MetalTM.

  Taylor concluded by saying, “I’ll bet you my pension that the Kris Longknife maneuver at jump points involves high accelerations, high speeds and high rotation on the hulls, something that is anathema among safe and rational star travelers.”

  “Say much more and I’ll have to slit your throat,” was the Member of Parliament’s quiet response.

  So Taylor mentioned the Mark XII fire control system that had no lasers to call the shots for and the small tender that was also due to complete at the same time as the other two.

  “A small ship?” said a surprised shareholder.

  “Made of Smart Metal and with three small reactors when anyone worried about making a profit would have gone for one large one.”

  Honovi leaned back in his chair and eyed the ceiling. When he spoke, it was soft and thoughtful. “The Wasp almost wrecked herself trying to cloud dance for fuel. Their tanks were just about bone dry by then and if they couldn’t get more reaction mass, they were not coming home. Really bad time my sis got herself into.”

  “And a Smart Metal tender,” Taylor went on, “might be just what they’d need to refuel the big ships.”

  “Yep. That pretty much settles it. Those two oversize freighters are not headed for any planet’s space station.”

  “And the Mark XII rangefinders?” Taylor asked.

  “You really are asking me to slit your throat.”

  “Your father gave me crumbs to chase down Kris Longknife. I found her, too late to stop her from invading your grandfather’s tower, but just in time to keep her from stepping off an elevator into a room full of Sarin gas. I would prefer to solve this mystery in time for you to stop these ships from leaving human space.”

  The Member of Parliament nodded along with Taylor as he made his case. When he finished, Honovi sighed.

  “You make a strong argument for yourself.”

  “I make the only case I can.”

  “Okay, it’s your funeral,” and he quickly told the special agent what he already had figured out. “The Mark XII is the final argument that Grampa Al wants to go way off the reservation. It’s the only system sensitive enough to spot what Nelly names ‘fuzzy jumps.’ You go through one of them just right and you’re guaranteed a long jump.”

  “And the small tender will refuel them when they are far from the proper facilities a freighter has come to need,” Taylor concluded.

  “Yep. My grandpa is up to no good. Way far away up to no good.”

  “Now the question is: when and where? It would help if we knew who he was going to use to crew those ships and what he planned to take with him,” Taylor mused.

  “Who may be a function of how, which we know. Kris has insisted on surrounding herself with a young bunch and Grampa Ray has gone along with her. Or I should say her crews are young or very fit. She tends to honk her ships around a lot, and I suspect this high rotation through a jump at high acceleration is bound to be hard on anyone who’s settled into a sedate middle age.”

  “So those with a beer-belly paunch need not apply?”

  Honovi nodded.

  “I’ll have to get a list of potential sailors and check them out for physical fitness.”

  “That would be my first cut,” the Member of Parliament agreed.

  “I’ll get back with you when I have something to report or need more information from you,” Taylor said coming to his feet, “but for now, I think it’s time for this man to take his holiday off to the fishing pier.”

  “You fish?”

  “Metaphorically, always. As a matter of real hook, line and sinker, not nearly enough.”

  “Then good fishing to you. I wish I could go along. I don’t remember the last time I took a real holiday. Father is a slave driver.”

  “And politics is a game without time-outs or decent rules,” Taylor said.

  “What I’d give for a referee or umpire.”

  On that shared laugh, they parted ways.

  Chapter 8

  Taylor actually got to spend time with his own children the next morning. He let his wife sleep late and got them off to school himself. After an even later morning breakfast with her, he made his way to the fishing pier.

  He invited her to come, as he always did, and she declined, as she always did. “If you catch anything, you clean it before you set foot inside this house.”

  At the pier, he rented a tackle box and reel from a small shop run by retirees. They seemed to be more in the business of talking about fishing and the weather than in making money. Taylor often considered that he might work at the shop one day a week when he retired. His wife would likely appreciate the break.

  For the next hour, he cast his lot to the sea, and got little back in return but empty hooks. He suspected the fish around the pier were getting too smart for the usual lures. He was just starting to consider using something from the bottom of his tackle box, something with an official suggestion that it be used in fast running mountain streams. After all, why was it in the box in the first place, and how many fish around the pier had ever passed through a fast running mountain stream?

  “Hey, boss, I got something for you,” said Special Agent Leslie Chu as she came up beside him and leaned on the rail.

  “A fish?” he said, not looking her way.

  “Nope, you’re supposed to be the fisherman today, how’s it going?” she said, her own eyes on the water lapping the pier supports.

  “Not a bite.”

  “Sorry about that. I’ve got a few things that might interest you.”

  “In return for that autographed picture of Princess Kris Longknife?”

  “Partial payment, at best. Did she really mean that she was sorry she missed me?”

  “With a sparkle in her eye as she wrote it.”

  “Damn, I wish I could have been there,” one of the charter members, no doubt, of the Kris Longknife fan club said with a sigh.

  “It might was better that you were not,” Taylor s
aid. “She was not having one of her better days.”

  “Yeah. Sarin gas for God’s sake.”

  As they talked, Taylor had been changing his lure from the official ocean one to the not recommended mountain stream one. He tried a fly fisherman’s toss to get it well away from the pier and saw it drop nicely between waves.

  “You said you had something for me?”

  Leslie held her wrist unit close to his left hand where his own computer sat. He heard a very soft series of tones as their two computers shared access codes and then synced. “There are those merchant marine types you asked about. All of them have worked for Nuu shipping lines but are on the beach at the moment.”

  “Did you include their height, weight and age?”

  Leslie made a face at the ocean. It would not make a dent in her cuteness quotient for the day. “I know Kris Longknife. I know how she knocks her boats around. She damn near disability retired an entire planet’s Navy when she was in Training Command and getting folks up to speed on the fast attack boats. Of course I gave you that stuff. I don’t know what you’re up to, boss, but if it includes ships trying to keep up with Kris Longknife, they better be crewed for a fast and wild ride.”

  “Very good of you, Agent, but please limit your speculation as to what I’m up to, if you will. It’s bad enough that I am risking my pension. I do not want you risking yours.”

  “Understood boss. By the way, I’ve put a tracer on most of the folks on that list. I skipped the older types, anyone over forty. Let me know when you lose interest in any of them or decide some old fart like yourself can keep up with my princess.”

  “Youngster, you are impertinent, and are staying at least one step ahead of your mentor. Yes, I want to know if any of these folks stop by Alex’s Tower of Insecurity or the shipyards topside.”

  “You going to fish tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know. It all depends on how my other lures and hooks are working.”

  “I’ll drop by when I have something. I might even rent some gear and give you a run for your fish.”

  “I’m sure they would find you far more attractive than I,” Taylor said, with a fatherly smile.

  “You bet they would,” she said, and headed up the pier without looking back.

  Why do you young agents make me feel so old? Taylor thought as he turned back to the ocean. For a long moment, he meditated on it, enjoyed drawing in deep breaths of the ocean air. Certainly, his ancestors must have been people of the coast. Someday he must check on his roots, but just now, all his investigative skills were fully occupied.

  He retrieved his now unbaited hook, added a pair of cubed bait that the box assured him was just the thing to lure half the ocean’s fish out of the sea. He checked the area around him to make sure he had it all to himself, then made an even longer cast.

  A few minutes later, he became aware he was not alone on the pier.

  As he first walked out on the pier, he had taken stock of those on it today. There were the usual collection of fishermen and women. Some plied their rods alone, others in groups that were talkative or silent as was their wont. There were the usual young couples, more interested in each other than the scenery or the fishing whether they had gear or not.

  He had spotted Leslie the moment she set foot on the pier, though he had ignored her until she spoke to him. That was no easy thing for an old man to pass up such a lovely sight.

  There was nothing lovely about the man now making his way slowly out on the pier. His eyes took the measure of every person on the pier as if they might be secret assassins waiting for his next footstep to strike.

  Taylor did not have to task his computer with identifying the man. He remembered him from The Lost Dutchmen’s doorway.

  For someone undercover, the man had poor spycraft. He had not even bothered to stop and rent fishing tackle.

  Taylor took all of this in out of the corner of his eye, and proceeded with his fishing.

  Right up to the time that Arlen Cob rested his elbows on the pier’s handrail beside Taylor and said, “You catch anything?”

  “Not so much as a bite,” Taylor answered reeling in his line. He held up the hook. “Empty. The little beggars here must be very good thieves.”

  The security man refused the bait to talk of thievery. “Good thing, you not catching anything. It would be an even better idea if you kept you fishing out here on the pier. You know, not dropping your hook in waters where it’s not wanted.”

  Taylor rebaited his line again. This time he put three cubes on the hook. “I doubt if the fish really want me dropping my line in their faces,” he said as he whipped the line out, casting it further than before.

  “Nice little girl you got running around with you,” the security man said.

  “Leslie is a special agent of the Wardhaven Bureau of Investigation. She’s nobody’s little girl.” Taylor allowed himself a scowl, but aimed it at the wine dark sea.

  “You being on annual leave and her chasing out here to spend her lunch hour with you, people might talk. People might talk even more if two dead bodies were found in the same bed of some cheap hotel, with them in no condition to talk back to them’s that talk.”

  “The Bureau does not take kindly to their agents being killed.” This time Taylor aimed his scowl at the man.

  His smile was cruel. “Not everyone at the Bureau is as good as you. If a case gets handed off to someone just putting in their time to retirement, it might stay open for a very long time. Especially if, finding the answer might be inconvenient, even embarrassing, to people who don’t like to be embarrassed. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Are you threatening a Bureau agent?” Taylor said, keeping his temper. Barely.

  “Threatening? No, of course not. We’re just taking fishing, man. You being on holiday, you wouldn’t be recording anything. Me, being on my lunch hour, I left my recorder running. You know what it would show. Just you and me talking about fishing and the weather, and what a nice couple those kids are over there. People would be amazed at your vocabulary, Senior Chief Agent Foile. Amazed. Best if my recording is never called into court, don’t you think?”

  Foile could tell when he’d been put in check. “Yes,” he hissed, like a steam kettle desperate to let off pressure.

  “Good. Good that we understand ourselves. Now, I’m going to leave, and you go on fishing. And, oh, by the way, there’s some of us that really don’t like you. If you hadn’t warned that Longknife brat, she’d have charged right out of the elevator and into something she really wasn’t ready to play with. No, that kid is definitely not ready to play with the big boys. But you spoiled all that. Shame,” Arlen said. He paused, eyeing Taylor to make sure he was following the conversation.

  Taylor fumed but said nothing. He’d definitely have something to say. Later.

  Through a twisted smile, Arlen went on. “Now some folks down at the office might be holding that against you. Me? I’m not. You just kept missing her, time after time. So sure, you’re hot to get your oar in the water when you get a chance. You shoot off your mouth where it’s not wanted. You make a habit of that and it could get you in trouble. You know what I mean.”

  “I think I do,” Taylor said. Calmly. Oh so calmly.

  “Good, now you enjoy the fishing. I’ll be seeing you. Or maybe it would be best if I didn’t see you. Ever again.”

  The man turned and sauntered away. Once in a while he’d look back over his shoulder and chuckle. He really seemed to be enjoying himself.

  Taylor reeled in his hook and baited it again. He let his muscles get lost in familiar movement, although he did put the hook through his thumb.

  Fortunately, it was only through the outer layer of skin. It was more embarrassing than painful.

  Hook cast back into the sea, he let his eyes rove the ocean. With intent, he loosed his lips and his nostrils, forcing them to give up the tension they held.

  “You knew this job was dangerous when you took it. Everyone warned you. You�
�re a big boy now. There are no surprise here,” he said out loud, trying to believe it.

  Oh yes there is. The threat against him, his agent, even against Kris Longknife was a bit more than he usually ran into in his Bureau work.

  “They warned me that getting too close to one of those damn Longknifes was dangerous,” he said to reminded himself, and, what was he close to, three of them. No! Four when you tossed in the father and five if you included Trouble for his proximity to the family. He was way too close to a whole pot full of Longknifes.

  “So, Taylor, would now be a good time to fold your cards, toss in your hand and call it quits?”

  He thought for a moment. He watched one wave chase another towards the near beach sands.

  Suddenly, his line took off running. His mind was so far from the pier that he almost dropped his pole. That was something he hadn’t done since he was a boy and his dad took him fishing the first time. He got control before he embarrassed himself for the second time in one noon hour. He let the fish run a bit, then pulled in enough line to make sure the hook was well set, then let him run some more. The fish jumped, trailing the line behind it.

  “Hey, that’s a big bugger,” came from the three old codgers fishing thirty feet further out on the pier. “Ain’t seen a core that big for quite a few years.”

  The three of them gravitated down to him, one offering advice that was usually contradicted by one or both of the others as soon as it was spoken. Taylor did feel that the pressure on the line was letting up and began to reel the fish in.

  The core got its second wind and Taylor had to give it more line, but soon enough it he was reeling it up to the pier. One of them offered a long handled net and caught it up. Taylor reeled in the last few feet as the net man hauled it up, hand over hand.

  One held the fish while another expertly removed the hook from the fish’s mouth.

  “She’s been hooked a few times,” he said. “Just look at her mouth. But this time, you ain’t getting away, are you baby.”