Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant

by Mike Shepherd

  “Of course he would, Mr. Lien,” came Chief Stanislaus over the ship’s net. “The Navy Way don’t include having no reindeer crap all over the front parlor when visitors might come calling.”

  At least the boat got a laugh. Off command net. To itself.

  “Well, now, you kids didn’t do too bad, even under the goals you set for yourselves,” came from the Commodore after a long minute. “Drone Five isn’t exactly rigged to measure what you were trying to do, but it looks like ten of your hits were pretty close in both time and space. Say you got five double hits. Call it enough to burn through a President-class battleship’s main belt. I definitely think I’m buying the beer tonight.

  “And you ladies and gentlemen by an act of Parliament leading the erstwhile boats of Division 1 and 2 who no doubt attended whatever conspiratorial den in which Div 3 hatched their plan, why didn’t you try the same instead of letting good old Drone Five and my fine bunch of gunners shoot you down like delicate butterflies pinned to a piece of cheap cardboard?”

  Kris tried to swallow a grin that seemed to infect her entire crew. Before the silence on net stretched too far, the Commodore filled it.

  “Never mind. You can all explain yourselves to me over beers tonight. All divisions, set course and speed to form on my flagship within the next three hours. We should be alongside the pier by seventeen hundred hours. Party starts at twenty-one hundred.”

  The net went silent. Beside her, Tommy tapped the central comm to take PF-109’s ship net off the main battle net, and cheers erupted around Kris.

  “You did a damn fine job, all of you,” Kris said into their happy noises. “Tononi, I don’t know how you kept the engines cool for the run-in, but you did it.”

  “I had ma pet goat piss on ’em when they got too hot, ma’am,” he said, alluding to one of the farm animals he was reported to keep penned up in the engine room.

  “Just so long as you get your space Shipshape and Bristol fashion to please the chief,” Kris said, “I don’t care how you kept your cool.”

  Chief Stanislaus, at his battle station backing Tom up on weapons, scowled, but his reputation as a hard-driving old chief was in serious danger, there being way too much up in evidence around the edges of that particular scowl.

  “You heard the Commodore. We only have four hours alongside the pier before he wants to throw that party, so let’s get the whole ship back to Bristol fashion now rather than later.”

  Kris leaned forward in her chair as it went from heavily inflated high-g station to a normal acceleration station. Feet on the deck, she turned to face the helm. “You have a course laid in for the flag?”

  “Flag has established a stately point eighty-five g course for the station,” Fintch reported. “Computer has generated a course that puts us in line aft of the flag in exactly three hours, ma’am.”

  NELLY? Kris asked her own computer through the plug that fed her thoughts directly to Nelly. There were risks in having too easy a connection, but when a gun was at her head, Kris didn’t want to be subvocalizing and trying not to move her jaw.

  NAVY-ISSUE COMPUTER IS DUMB AS A STUMP, BUT A ONE-HANDED MONKEY WITH AN ABACUS COULD SOLVE THAT BALLISTICS PROBLEM.

  I AM SO GLAD YOU DIDN’T SAY THAT OUT LOUD TO FINTCH.

  I AM NOT LACKING IN THE SOCIAL GRACES, PRINCESS. IT IS JUST THAT THEY—AND TRYING TO RESOLVE PROBLEMS WHILE DOING THE MINIMUM DAMAGE TO WHAT YOU HUMANS CALL FEELINGS—ARE JUST SO TIME-CONSUMING.

  THINK OF IT AS AN ART FORM. NOW, CHECK OUT THE SHIP AND MAKE A LIST OF DEFICIENCIES. BET YOU THAT YOUR LIST ISN’T MORE THAN HALF AGAIN AS LONG AS THE LIST THAT THE CREW SPOT.

  YOU ARE ON. AND IF I WIN?

  WE’LL TALK ABOUT IT LATER.

  I WOULD LOVE TO SPEND SOME TIME EXAMINING THAT PIECE OF ROCK FROM SANTA MARIA THAT IS STILL SITTING IN MY MATRIX. I BET I COULD INVESTIGATE ITS ALIEN CONTENTS AND NOT LOCK UP.

  THAT BET IS NOT ON THE TABLE. NOW, MISS NELLY, IF YOU DON’T MIND, I HAVE A SHIP TO COMMAND. BUZZ OFF.

  AYE, AYE, YOUR SKIPPERSHIP.

  The Navy listed the crew size for PF-109 at fourteen. Kris counted fifteen. And that last crew member brought with her all kinds of advantages . . . and pains in the butt.

  Kris turned to Tom and the Chief. “I don’t know about you, but my head did an awful lot of banging around. Is my skull just kind of small, or do the high-g stations need some adjustment?”

  The Chief shook his head. “The stations are a problem, ma’am. Maybe we ought to fit all hands with brain buckets. But I don’t think that’s our worst problem. I was watching the laser fire from that old tub. I know the official Navy take is that the drone has the same defensive suite as a battleship, but I’m not buying that we got a full workout. And even with that, there were an awful lot of too damn close near misses.” The chief of the boat, an old man of thirty, shrugged. “If it was a real fight, we’d have to do better.”

  “Ah, man, that’s not what I was wanting to hear,” Tom said, his grandmother’s brogue leaking out.

  “Chief, you look into those helmets, and I’ll have Nelly adjusting each high-g station to personally fit each crewman, helmet and all.” Kris shook her head. “You know, after this one practice run, the idea of us taking on battlewagons with these splinters isn’t nearly as frightening as it sounded the day we commissioned the squadron.”

  “Not likely we’ll be defending Wardhaven from battlewagons,” Lien said. “Look at the size of the fleet your da has swinging around the station. Me, I’m surprised we haven’t been run down, turned into some battleship’s bowsprit.”

  “Figurehead,” both Kris and the Chief said together.

  “If you’ll excuse me, ma’am,” the Chief said, “I’ll be taking my falling arches off to see what’s happening in the rest of this rust bucket. I think you have the bridge as well under control as any captain can.”

  Kris let that rattle around in her head for a second . . . and decided it was as close to a compliment as a Chief could give a junior officer. “You do that, Chief.”

  She watched him leave, which left her eyes resting on the empty station directly behind her. “I see you got the intel battle station set up.”

  “And didn’t I say I would,” Lien said, getting up from his own gunnery station and slipping into the seat of the new one. “Having Penny on that intel station of that yacht that you, ah, borrowed off Turantic was a godsend. I got one set up here just as fast as I could find a spare station lying around the dock and no one paying too much attention to its ownership,” he said with his lopsided grin taking a most definite lean to port.

  “You stole it.”

  “Not all of us can have your petty change purse, Kris.” The smile made it almost a joke. Without the smile, it would have hurt. Still, the truth was, she could have bought the entire squadron out of her last year’s earnings and not touched the principal of her trust fund. There were some advantages to being one of those damn Longknifes.

  “Penny still coming for breakfast tomorrow?” Kris asked.

  Tommy’s grin got even wider, passing aft of his ears and probably meeting somewhere in back. Well, that was the way a guy was supposed to react when you mentioned his future bride. At least they always did around Kris. All the guys who Kris met and who ended up asking gals that Kris knew to be their brides. And brides who always asked Kris to be their maid of honor.

  Kris had given up trying to figure out what it was about her bubbling personality that was such a catalyst for other people meeting and falling happily in love. At least she told herself she was going to give up trying to figure it all out. Give it up by next Thursday.

  “Penny is so tickled you offered us the garden at Nuu House for the wedding. Her mom is living on Cambria now with her present husband. My folks are all on Santa Maria. We don’t have a place to call home. But to be married in the gardens where King Raymond and Rita were married. Kris, you’re wonderful.”

  There were many answers to that. Kris settled on “I’m glad to offer a
quiet place for your families to get together.”

  “Well, I think mainly it will be the squadron, unless there’s some cheap fares between Santa Maria and here for my family. Her da,” Tommy shrugged. “Penny sent out a chaser mail three days ago, but she doesn’t really know where he is. Probably just a quiet wedding among us sailors.”

  “You want crossed sabers?”

  “I think she would like it. You know, I’m not sure if she intends to wear a white dress or dress whites.”

  “Just be glad we’re keeping this whole affair a secret from my mother. If she got ahold of it ...” Kris shivered at the mere thought of Mother planning a wedding.

  Maybe that was the best reason for staying single. “So,” Kris pointed at the intel station. “Any idea who might crew it?”

  “How about Penny?” Tom said, almost sounding serious. “She knows just about all there is to know about the warships a Wardhaven fleet might face. She has a full range of intel skills. You can’t keep holding her duty of interrogating us ‘mutineers’ against her.”

  “Don’t even use that word as a joke,” Kris said, blanching.

  “Then you hire a PR firm to come up with a nice short term for what we did on the Typhoon,” Tom said. “Anyway, we’ll need someone with all Penny’s skills, so why not ask for Penny? She’s done enough desk time. She’d love some ship duty.”

  And Tom would love to have his wife stationed right behind him. And the minor fact that Penny had held her Lieutenant rank for a whole year longer than Kris shouldn’t cause any trouble in the chain of command of a ship as tiny as PF-109.

  Yeah. Right.

  But Penny had done fine work on Turantic when Kris had needed some very fine work if she was to stay alive. She could do worse than have someone like Penny backing her up. The chief might be right; any real targets they went up against might well be shooting back with a whole lot nastier stuff than the antiques that the Commodore had them training against.

  But PF boats defending Wardhaven! Who was kidding who? If they were lucky, they’d all be shipped off to some backwater planet. Ordered to defend some place that no one thought needed all that much defending when things changed suddenly and . . .

  Hmm, maybe having a full intel officer and a full intel report might not be a bad idea for wherever they ended up having to show that these toys could fight.

  Three hours later they were all tucked right in behind the flagship, tiny ducklings following in the wake of the Cushing, an antique destroyer, the last of her class not yet sent to the breakers, kept around only to nursemaid this harebrained idea that you could use penny boats to blast dollar bill battleships.

  Stan brought Kris the list of ship deficiencies. It was long. Nelly’s list was longer, but fell four short of exceeding the Chief ’s list by half. “Nelly, pass your list to the Chief.”

  Stan looked at the longer list, pursed his lips, then went to check it out.

  “So I don’t get to mess with the rock chip,” Nelly said, sounding as sad as a computer could. “Auntie Tru would be so happy if I discovered whatever secrets of the Three races that built the jump points that might still be recoverable on that data source. She might even cook you up a batch of chocolate chip cookies.”

  “Nor can you bring up the topic for a month,” Kris said, ignoring the rest of the blandishment.

  “A week,” Nelly countered. “You didn’t specify a length when we made the bet.”

  “Two weeks,” Kris said. Nelly went quiet in her head. It’s really weird when you can tell your computer is pouting by just the way your skull feels.

  “Is that the way it works?” Tommy asked.

  “What works?”

  “Keeping Nelly under control?”

  “She is never under control.”

  “You got that right, Your Skippership.”

  “Sorry I asked,” Tommy said, swallowing something halfway between a snarf and a chuckle.

  “Nelly, I want you to research the best helmets for the crew to reduce brain damage and neck strain when we’re whipping around at high-g’s on evasion. Then reprogram the battle stations to secure the head and neck supports tightly on the helmets so our heads don’t take as much battering as we did today.”

  “If you’d just let me run the ship, you could all stay home,” Nelly said.

  Fintch at the helm did a double take.

  “Yes, Nelly, but the Navy Way is old-fashion about that. So you just do what I tell you, and we’ll get along fine.”

  The rest of the cruise back was quiet as all hands turned to make right as many of the deficiencies on the Chief’s list as they could without a dock to help. The list was noticeably shorter when Kris ordered all hands to pier detail.

  Kris watched over Fintch’s shoulder as she brought the boat smartly alongside the pier, caught the bow lockdown on the first try, and followed it as it smoothly pulled the boat to the pier.

  “Well done,” Kris said, giving Fintch a well-earned pat on the shoulder.

  “Power line passed to the pier,” the chief reported from his special space detail station at the quarterdeck amidships. “Air, comm, and water connected. The hatch is opened.”

  The pressure in the boat changed the tiniest bit. No ship ever managed to maintain the same atmosphere as the station, even for only a one-day out and back in.

  “Captain, we’ve got—” was cut short.

  “Chief, do we have a problem?” Kris demanded as her eyes went over the board. All lights were green. There was nothing wrong with the boat. Nothing showing.

  NELLY?

  “I’m being jammed,” the computer said, surprise flooding its voice. “I’m trying to . . .”

  Kris turned in her command seat as five MPs in Army khaki marched onto her bridge, a major in the lead.

  “Are you Lieutenant Kristine Anne Longknife, sometimes styled Princess?” he demanded.

  There are some moments in your life that you know are coming for you. Moments that, when you are just a kid, you know will happen to you before you die. It’s probably different for different kids. If your folks are farmers, maybe it’s a plague of locusts at harvest time or that one great crop that will never be equaled. If you’re an army brat, you know that somewhere out there is a battle, a fight for your life, that will find you.

  Kris was a politician’s daughter; somehow she knew that they would come for her one day. As a kid of nine, she’d watched a vid of Marie Antoinette and wondered what it had been like to face that first arrest, to walk those final steps to the guillotine.

  All her life, Kris had wondered how she’d handle this moment, so it both surprised her . . . and failed to.

  She stood, faced her accuser, and answered simply, “I am Kris Longknife.” Strange, at the moment, how all titles fell away.

  “I have orders to relieve you of your command and place you under arrest. Sergeant, cuff her.”

  Kris’s mind raced. What to do next? She turned to Tom. “You have the conn,” she said. The command had to be transferred clearly. That was the Navy Way. Then she turned back to this Army invasion on her bridge.

  “May I ask what for?” Kris said, keeping her hands at her side. Resistance was futile . . . worse . . . undignified. But she’d be damned if she’d help them.

  An Army Sergeant, no Marines or Navy in sight, whipped out a pair of cuffs and shoved Tom aside. The Navy Lieutenant reached for the ruffian.

  “Stand down,” Kris ordered.

  Tommy did, though tiny Fintch took a step forward and slowed down the other Sergeant charging in on Kris’s other side.

  The major whipped out his sidearm as did the two MPs behind him.

  “Stand down,” Kris ordered, louder. “Neither I nor my crew are under arms. We cannot nor will we offer you any resistance. Fintch, let the men through, even if they are barging around on our ship without so much as a by-your-leave.”

  Kris had dreamed this scene asleep and awake too many times. Sometimes it ended peacefully. Other times not. She kn
ew how she wanted it to end.

  The MPs had their guns out; they nervously eyed the bridge crew. “Major, the only people on this bridge armed are your people. No one is going to resist you, so relax.” Kris tried to make that last sound like an obvious invitation. “But would you mind telling me what this is all about?”

  “Lady, I got my orders. It says arrest you, and it don’t say why. Some of us do what we’re told, see. Now, are you coming with me, or do we carry you?”

  Mac had warned Kris that not everyone was happy about the way she’d been stopping wars of late. Apparently, this party had not been recruited from among her fans.

  Okay, the idea is to live through this day, girl. From the looks of the goons beside her and behind the Major, they dearly wanted to carry her. And once they got their mitts on her, she’d just happen to resist arrest and just happen to deserve the maximum application of force and restraint allowed by law.

  “I may be Navy, Major, but I do know how to walk.” The Sergeant with the cuffs had grabbed both of Kris’s hands and locked them down behind her back. She felt vulnerable. Terribly vulnerable. Still, she could walk.

  Kris stepped forward, two guards behind her; two fell in ahead of her. They turned to head back the way they’d come, and the major bounced his skull off the overhead. PFs were not designed with six footers in mind.

  “Watch your step,” Kris said. “Tom, call Harvey at the house.”

  “Yes, Your Highness,” her XO answered. They knew. This was political theater; each had their part. If they played it right, they’d all live to tell their grandkids about it and laugh.

  The climb down to the quarterdeck was none too easy, but Kris made it before her knees started shaking. A firefight with a gun in her hand and an enemy to run at was one thing. Being cuffed and shoved around by guards was something else entirely. At the hatch, the Chief and the special detail stood at their stations. Stan was developing what looked to be a real shiner.

  “Sorry, ma’am.”