Kris Longknife: Defiant: Defiant

by Mike Shepherd

  “You came up with one hell of a learning experience.”

  “Well, you are one of those Longknifes. Anything gentler, and it would have gone right by you.”

  Kris chose not to argue that point as Sandy dug in her desk drawer. “I have something here for you.” She handed Kris a paper form. It was a reference for an application to the Academy. “I told you my daughter’s applying this year.”

  Kris nodded.

  “I also told you that I didn’t want her getting another reference from Ray. Two generations was enough. It was time for a change.”

  Again Kris nodded.

  “I would be honored if you would provide my daughter with a reference. A new generation deserves a new generation.”

  Kris could think of several replies. She didn’t know the girl, but then neither did Grampa Ray. Grampa Ray was a king. Kris was just a Lieutenant. But Santiago knew that. And knowing it, she wanted Kris to sponsor her daughter. Kris replayed that last sentence and wasn’t sure which “new generation” deserved who. “I’d be honored, Captain.”

  The last jump brought news from Wardhaven. Kris’s plea for help from Olympia had brought it forth in legion measure. Ester Saddik hit the talk shows the night her ship docked. For those who liked their explanations full and complete, Ester, Kris’s first Olympia employee, gave them in her calm, pleasant voice, backed up by the warehouse foreman, that nice Quaker, Jeb Salinski.

  For those who preferred their input loud and contentious, Ester turned loose rancher Brandon Anderson and farmer Jason McDowell. Those two still had enough anger in them to scorch carbon steel. What they did to Lieutenant Pearson on the one show where she showed up to explain that her procedures for documenting the release of food aid were simple and easily applied left the woman and her rules hanging in shreds. And 3/c Spens, Kris’s stand-in accountant, had managed to arrange his discharge on Olympia . . . there was a local girl involved. He did an amazing job of holding people’s interest as he walked them through his simple accounting system for tracking aid, and Kris’s just-released tax return for last year.

  The opposition was on the ropes when suddenly it was found that the charges were technically in error, and therefore, based on that technicality, had to be dismissed.

  “Does that technically mean I no longer work for a criminal?” Abby asked.

  “I guess so. That make you feel better?”

  Abby seemed blasé. But Kris arrived at High Wardhaven feeling pretty upbeat. As she saluted and led her small detachment across the gangplank of the Halsey, she asked Nelly to check on where her family was. Quickly, her computer ran down most everyone’s present location, finishing with “. . . and your mother is at Madame Bovaine’s Bridal Boutique.”

  “What’s she doing there?”

  “Kris, Penny, do you mind if I go check on the 109?” Tom asked. Kris waved him away. Penny looked like she’d rather follow him, but she waited for Nelly’s answer, dread pouring off her like disease off a swamp.

  “She appears to be with Penny’s mother.”

  “Jack, Abby, you’re with me. Somehow we have to save Penny from my mother.”

  “Are we allowed to use deadly force?” Abby asked.

  Jack shook his head dolefully.

  Kris rode the beanstalk down, her gut in more of an uproar than it had ever been when she was going out to rescue Tom or recon Turantic. It hadn’t been this bad riding down to tackle the terrorists on Hikila when she had no idea how she’d cross the last one hundred meters under deadly fire.

  No. This involved Mother. Death was not an option.

  They flagged a taxi. The driver took one look at them and looked like he’d rather take any other fare, but he drove them to Madame Bovaine’s Bridal Boutique. “Wait here,” Kris ordered. “We won’t be long.”

  “I hope,” Penny whispered.

  Kris led her team in a quick march through the front doors. They advanced five paces into the store and froze.

  Mother was looking at a wedding gown.

  It was white, so it had to be a wedding gown. It had no veil, but a large floppy hat half covered the model’s face, as well she should want it. There was a front to the gown. And a back. No sides. The model was wearing white stockings and a white garter belt. No bra. No panties. Whatever borrowed or blue she had was right out there for all to see.

  “Mother, Penny is not wearing something like that.”

  “Oh, hello, Kristine darling, I was wondering when you might be back. But I was just telling Pamela here that it is all the rage in Paris this year.”

  “Paula,” Penny’s mother corrected.

  Brides on Nui Nui probably wore less and looked more modest. “Penny is not wearing that. Pick a dress, Penny,” Kris said, waving at a wide collection of traditional gowns.

  “But they’re all lace and frills. She’ll look more like the cake than the bride.”

  “I’ll tell Lotty to go easy on the icing,” Kris snarled.

  Penny and her mother edged their way into the lee of this verbal hurricane behind several mannequins of traditional gowns.

  “Well, if you’re going to insist on the bride dressing down into something plebeian, I can at least put the bridesmaids into something more appropriate to the moment. After all, this wedding is in my garden.”

  “It is Penny’s wedding. They’re my friends.”

  “It is my garden. Your father is running for his life.”

  After several repeats, which repetitions made sound only more childish, Kris gave in with a sigh she’d been only too well practiced in since oh, about thirteen. “Okay, Mother, bridesmaids’ dresses are supposed to look horrible. So what’s your entrance into this year’s competition? It can’t be any worse than the five I’ve already got in my closet.”

  Kris was wrong.

  The dress the modiste presented with such a wide smile was built very much like a daisy. Now all Kris needed was someone to think of as she plucked each petal, He loves me, he loves me not. Course, when she plucked the last one, it looked like she’d be wearing less than she had to Dance up the Moon.

  “Mo-ther.”

  “Daughter, you said I choose the dress. I’m choosing.”

  And a deal in the Longknife household took a revolution to break. The back of the dress started in the front with spaghetti straps that flared into a gossamer train, hopefully before the cheeks of Kris’s rear end were showing. I was more modestly dressed as a streetwalker on Turantic! And my own mother is doing this to me. Heather’s red hair and milk-white complexion would be breathtaking against the yellow of the dress. And Babs would leak out of it in all the right places. Then there would be beanpole Kris falling out of it in all the wrong places.

  Any chance I could talk Penny and Tom into believing that a Wardhaven princess could marry them by just putting their hands in each others’?

  Or maybe if I got my ship back. A ship Captain can marry couples. Could a very small ship’s Captain?

  No, Penny and her mother had spotted a wedding gown and were looking at it with happy eyes. Kris reached for her credit card. Penny had stood with her through hell and more. And Tom even more than that. They were her best friends and deserved the wedding they wanted. And who remembered what bridesmaids wore?

  Well, the society page. And Mother would have Adorable Dora covering this wedding. Kris sighed. She was a Longknife, and Longknifes did what had to be done.

  Even when it didn’t involve killing someone.

  7

  To Kris’s complete surprise—and immense relief—the wedding went off without a hitch. And Mother lived.

  Adorable Dora showed up, got her pics, jammed her mike in several faces for sound bites she wanted . . . then vanished. “The Pandoris have a barbecue this afternoon and The Rachael, Super Nova vid star, will be there.” Apparently a vid star’s face at a barbecue trumped two junior officers’ wedding in the Nuu gardens.

  Mother went ballistic before spiraling into a pout.

  So she missed Chandra�
��s darling five-year-old daughter, Klesa, doing cute perfectly as a flower girl. She walked solemnly down the aisle, taking two steps dutifully before casting each handful of flower petals over her shoulder. She waited until she reached the altar before turning to face the waiting audience, grinning like the angel she was . . . and upended the flower basket.

  Klesa’s brother succeeded admirably well as the ring bearer, only interrupting the ceremony twice to ask in his soft three-year-old whisper that carried from one end of the garden to the other, “Is it time for the ring, yet?”

  Father Mary Ann smiled both times and assured him in that soft, lilting, Irish-Chinese brogue of Santa Maria that “No, not yet. Wait a wee bit more.”

  With five maid of honor dresses in her closet, Kris was getting to be an expert on weddings. Father Mary Ann and Commander Petrulio did a superb job of concocting a ceremony. Kris drafted the chaplain when Penny’s mother’s Reformed Methodist minister backed out at the last minute. Seems the Reformed Methodists were in negotiations with Rome for reunion, and doing a wedding two hundred light-years from Earth with a schismatic Santa Marian woman priest put all that at risk. But chaplains follow a different chain of command and, though Penny was willing at the last moment to give up, defy her grandmother, and do it all Tom’s way, Tom insisted on someone to hold up Penny’s end of the faith bargain. If ever two people deserved a long wedded life, these two did.

  With no loss of blood or other noticeable disaster, the padre and priest reached the end of the ceremony, the part that everyone watching surely took for the most important. The two ministers said, “Tom, you may kiss your bride.”

  He did. A nice kiss, enthusiastically returned by Penny.

  The chaplain cleared his throat. “May I present to you Lieutenant junior grade and Lieutenant Lien.”

  Penny put her arm lovingly in Tom’s, and the string quartet began the recessional. Kris would be next, on Phil’s arm. The padre and priest corralled the kids under their wings and showed evidence that they could indeed ride herd on them until the adults had left. Father Mary Ann had brought hard candy!

  Kris sighed as she put her arm in Phil’s. “Any wedding you can stagger away from,” she said.

  “No casualties so far,” he agreed.

  Penny and Tom made little progress out. Family on both sides of the aisle offered hands, cheeks, congratulations, advice, whatever it was you said to a young woman on her first day of wedded life. It was also quite possibly the first chance some had to meet Penny. Kris was glad to see Phil was in no rush to get out. He was demonstrating a solid grasp of things that had nothing to do with the Navy. Good man. Kris took the moment of the stalled wedding recession to lean against him. Nice. She wondered how many dances she could hold him to at the reception. In this getup, she ought to be able to attract a dead man.

  Mo-ther was that your idea!

  And Father’s phone went off.

  Actually, Kris was amazed that there had been no phone interruptions during the ceremony. With this many politicians in one place, and the elections at their present heat, it was amazing no one had felt the desperate need to interrupt for something or another. She really couldn’t fault Father for now pulling out his ear set. Mother shot him a glare that could have burned a battleship, but he failed to notice her.

  Father spoke softly for a moment, his words not reaching Kris, then turned away and walked down a garden path bordered by magnolias and lilacs. Other phones buzzed. In a moment, every politician present was distancing him- or herself from the affair and each other to talk to someone else, somewhere else.

  Kris frowned. Had the Prime Minister Pro Tem had a heart attack, fallen on a banana peel? It would have taken something like that to get all these politicians so excited in lockstep.

  “Nelly?”

  “Nothing on the regular net. There is a spike on the private net, but I don’t know the reason,” her computer admitted. Okay, the Prime Minister was still breathing. So what happened?

  Kris eyed the back rows where the other Navy contingent sat, the putative intelligence types. With the media circus in full blow, Penny’s friends had been advised not to take a prominent role, leaving all the bridesmaids’ dresses to the patrol boat skippers. Such luck. Now they were looking at each other, open questions on their faces, but no answers there.

  Seated over by herself, Commander Santiago was talking to someone. Kris pointed her out to the PF skippers. Groomsmen quickly, bridesmaids a bit more slowly lest they lose what little modesty Mother’s gowns allowed them, made their way to the Commander. On the way Kris passed three phone conversations. She picked up “warships,” “surrender,” and “orbital bombardment.” That was enough to hurry her along.

  Around the Commander, the men stooped close in, letting the women stand in their daisy getups and still see without showing too much. The intel types filled in behind them. No one interrupted Commander Santiago while she continued to listen.

  “Keep checking, XO,” she finally said. “I got a major contingent of JOs here from the PF Navy about to turn blue. Maybe a few intel weenies to boot who can’t stand to have a tin can sailor in the know when they aren’t. I better brief them before they get violent. I’ll monitor your traffic. Interrupt me if you get something.”

  The Commander looked around the small circle. “We’re in trouble. Six ships exited jump Beta doing a comfortable 1,500 klicks an hour. Their beepers and squawkers are throttled.”

  Kris hadn’t heard that from any of the politicians she’d passed, but then, none of them would understand the implications of that simple statement. Every ship able to do star jumps was built with a transponder that reported its name, owner, and most recent ports of call. The buoys that tracked traffic through the jumps noted the transponder number and used it to control the traffic and by exerting such control, avoiding head-on collisions in the jumps between stars.

  For someone to mess with, much less silence, a transponder was a major offense against the transportation regs of the Society of Humanity. At least it had been for the last eighty years. Someone was taking major risks. Someone was willing to take those risks to make sure people didn’t know who they were.

  To a naval officer, this little said a lot. To the politicians talking on their phones around Kris, it was very unlikely any of them understood what it meant.

  “The ships are now in line ahead,” the destroyer skipper went on, “doing a constant one-g acceleration. Assuming they flip at midpoint, they will arrive over Wardhaven in ninety-six hours.”

  “Battle line ahead?” Kris asked.

  “They’re acting like a battle line,” Commander Santiago said. “Sensors report the power plants on all six are dual reactors, GE-6900 class.” That brought out a low whistle around the circle. Large passenger liners used dual reactors for safety, never larger than 2200-class output. Six ships with twin 6900-level power generators meant plasma for accelerating a lot of mass and for generating a lot of electricity for lasers.

  “Battleships,” an intel analyst said. “President-class.”

  “Or Magnificents.”

  “Those are all Earth ships.”

  “Earth ships wouldn’t use the Beta jump point. We would have had a report of a squadron of Earth battleships boosting around the Rim worlds,” an intel Lieutenant insisted.

  “Well, someone with six very big ships just came through Jump Point Beta and is demanding we surrender,” Sandy said.

  “Surrender,” echoed around the circle. Kris’s mind boggled at the word. Wardhaven didn’t surrender! Couldn’t surrender.

  “And here’s something interesting,” Sandy went on. “My XO’s a history bug. He noticed something familiar about the message they’re sending, so he did a search. I bet you intel folks would have spotted it real soon,” she said, smiling, “but the words they’re broadcasting to demand our surrender are nearly the exact same words we used to demand Turantic’s surrender the last time we fought them before Unity put an end to the Rim’s squabbling.�
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  “They’re taking us back to the bad old days of Rim worlds attacking Rim worlds for reparations?” Kris said. That was a Dark Age, when worlds fought worlds for no better reason than that they could.

  “I said nearly,” Santiago pointed out. “The language is the same up to the point where we ordered Turantic to surrender and pay reparations. They demand we surrender, renounce all alliances, and accept occupation.”

  Kris took a moment to digest that. Phil whistled. “They want us. Lock, stock, and barrel,” Kris concluded.

  “Looks that way,” the destroyer skipper said.

  KRIS, I HAVE SOMETHING.

  NOT NOW, NELLY.

  “What are we going to do about it?” Phil asked.

  “What can we do?” Sandy said. “I’m the only warship in port. Your patrol boats, assuming you could take on a squadron of battleships, are cold steel. Even if the interim government was to order something, I don’t see what they could.”

  “How long to get the fleet back?” Phil asked.

  An intel type shook her head. “Can’t do it fast. The Boynton situation isn’t good. If our fleet starts running for here, they risk losing one planet only to get here and find Wardhaven bombarded back to the Stone Age.”

  “What can we do here?” Kris said, her mind spinning through a hundred different options—none good.

  “That empty suit.” Her father’s bellow carried across the garden. Then again, he hadn’t been all that loud. Sometime during the Commander’s briefing, the string quartet had fallen silent. Even Tom and Penny had abandoned their families and joined the rear of the Navy crowd around the destroyer skipper.

  “That gutless collection of old women in petty coats. I always said the opposition hadn’t had a new thought since their grandmothers were born, but Pandori didn’t have to prove me right before the entire planet.” Kris wondered how much of Father’s yelling was for relay to his political base and how much of it was him blowing off steam. From the look of Father’s rising red complexion, maybe all of it was for his own blood pressure.