Kris Longknife: Mutineer

by Mike Shepherd

  “Hear! Hear!” rang out up and down the table, and Kris discovered that the mess had grown very quiet. Glasses were raised in toast. Embarrassed to share this sacrament of her hosts with seltzer water, Kris followed their lead, then flagged down a server. “Whiskey, please.” She’d be ready next time.

  “There’s a lot of gadgets in modern war, gizmos that can make a man think he’s a soldier when he’s not. The First Corps had them all, and if their people were none too sure how to work them, they could hold guns to the heads of technicians who would. There would be a bloody butcher bill for any and all who tried to invade their camp.

  “Never trust an enemy to play fair, and never trust a Longknife, period,” Emma said with a smile for Kris. “If he couldn’t beat them with new soldiering, he figured to take the bastards down the hard, old-fashioned way. So he came to the Ladies from Hell, and the fancy Marines that held the line beside us. He offered us a night black as the devil’s own heart, full of rain, thunder, and lightning. Then he added his own bolt from hades, an electromagnetic pulse that stripped a thousand years of contrivances from every soldier within fifty miles. Radar, radios, even night-vision goggles became just more dead weight for the poor booties to lug. With a will, Highlanders and Marines stripped their rifles of computers and vision gear. It was iron sights and cold steel for the rest of that night. So two hundred brave Highlanders and fifty dumb jarheads took off for a walk in Satan’s rock garden.”

  “Hear! Hear!” again rang out. Kris’s drink had just arrived. Glasses were raised all around. In proud blue and red, Colonel Hancock raised his glass high. “Dumb is right. Dumb as fence posts. Nobody smart would take the job.”

  Before the glasses were down, Colonel Halverson was on his feet. “To the bloody Marines. The only ones man enough to take the Ladies from Hell to that dance.”

  Kris raised her glass, and took no offense. Grampa Trouble had many a woman in his platoon on that hill. There were men, and then there were men.

  “In the teeth of the storm, we went up Black Mountain. The first line hardly knew we were there before they had to choose: fight and die or surrender and take their chance with a jury. The second line was warned by the flash of our guns. Machine guns spat and mortars belched. Cannon spoke…all blind. Men lived and men died by the throw of a demon’s dice. Here a platoon, there a squad moved forward across death’s ground. They found their way into fighting holes and trenches. Men fought and men died while the fiends piped their own wild jig until the second line was ours.”

  “Hear! Hear!” again was answered with a toast. Kris drank, but the warmth in her stomach could not dispel the chill that made her shiver. Emma’s words had transported her, the entire mess. They were there, in the lightning-streaked dark, in the shell-shattered rain. The troopers of the battalion that dark, distant night weren’t men but gods.

  “Our own cannon cockers applied themselves to their work with a will, lashing the second trench, then lifting for the third. Not a man of rifle and steel that night could help but bless the gunners who made the cowards duck and cry and throw their hands up at the first sight of steel or kilt.

  “But as we closed on that final goal, the gunners did not lift their brimstone fire. Our Colonel fired the agreed-upon flare, but the enemy was waiting and drowned his proper color in a shower of lying hues. The gunners looked in despair to fathom the bayonet’s intent. Runners were sent, but feet could not outfly bullets. Three men ran with the Colonel’s words. Three men died.

  “Then up stepped Color Sergeant McPherson, he whose twenty years were up, who carried his discharge papers in the pocket over his heart. ‘I’ll carry the message, Colonel. If an old fox like me can’t cross that ground, no angel in God’s heaven can.’

  “The Color Sergeant slipped out of the trench like a ghost. Like a mist on the moors, he flitted from shell hole to shell hole. When flares turned stormy night to tempest-torn day, he froze like a rock. Shells flew at him, bullets reached for him, the enemy grabbed after him—and missed. No minion of hell could touch that messenger of our God.

  “But fortune is not mocked, and the devil must be paid. A stone’s throw from the first trench line, a rocket caught the brave Color Sergeant, picked him up, and flung him broken into the trench. With his dying breath, he passed the Colonel’s message to Private Halverson. Now the torch was his. Without a backward glance, the private raced. Like a fearless hind he crossed the shattered field to where the gunners plied their trade.

  “On the word of a private, the guns stood silent. At the word of the private, Black Mountain seemed split by quiet. And with a cheer we rose, each man and woman still able to slog through the mud. Those of the third trench who didn’t run died where they stood or lived with their hands grasping for the clouds. We, the Highlanders of LornaDo, with a handful of brother Marines, took down a division that storm-racked night.”

  Once more the cry of “Hear! Hear!” was raised, and the glasses held high and drunk deeply. Emma seemed exhausted, as if she’d climbed Black Mountain herself. She certainly had taken the mess there. When she began again, she was subdued.

  “In the morning, when those who boasted they led a corps saw our flag atop Black Mountain, they despaired. They say you could walk from one end of their cantonment to the other without touching the ground, the tossed-off uniforms were so thick. And those of you who know how mankind fought the long-tentacled Iteeche and know what a close-run thing it was, ask yourself if we could have held on until that last desperate battle if not for the weapons forged in the mills of Savannah? So when you gather for a drink, raise your mug with a thought to those fine Ladies from Hell who went dancing that night up Black Mountain.”

  The glasses were up and drained, and Kris immediately knew she’d made a mistake. There was no hearth in the mess to smash glasses that now were too sacred to ever be used for mere drinking. But as in so many things, the battalion would survive.

  Colonel Hancock cleared his throat in the silence. “When did you first hear that tale, Captain?”

  “At my grandfather’s knee.” She smiled. “I couldn’t have been as tall as his swagger stick. He was Regimental Sergeant Major, as my father is now after him.”

  “You took a commission.”

  “Yes, sir. Both Pa and Grandpa agreed the family had worked for a living long enough. This time they wanted an officer.” That brought snickers from along the table, louder at the lower end where Kris suspected Emma’s own platoon leaders found humor in the thought that they and she did not work for their pay. As silence returned, the Marine Colonel continued.

  “The day you pinned lieutenant’s bars on, I suspect your father had some advice for you. As misfortune would have it, there was no one there to perform that sacred duty for Ensign Longknife. Would you be kind enough to share with her what your father or grandfather gave to you?”

  “Sir, that would be telling, and the Regimental Sergeant Major is not one I would choose to cross. He might not forgive me.”

  The sober looks exchanged among the officers at the table showed agreement. The RSM was one few officers would cross.

  Colonel Halverson stood. “I think I can arrange the proper absolution for you from the Regimental Sergeant Major,” he deadpanned. The mess broke up in gales of laughter but quickly fell back to silence when the Colonel did not join in but stood, his demeanor most serious. “If the ensign who bears the weight of a name like Longknife has neither had the blessing nor the admonitions appropriate to her calling, I can think of none better than the words the Regimental Sergeant Major shared with you.”

  Emma nodded. She stood and turned to Kris with a solemnity that brought water to Kris’s eyes and a tremble that she had not felt at college graduation or Navy commissioning, or for that matter, even under fire. Kris found that to be the center of such intense attention made her skin burn. But that was not what made her tremble. To look into Emma’s eyes was to face a goddess; and there is nothing so frightening in the world as the face of absolute truth.


  “These are the words of the Regimental Sergeant Major,” Emma began softly. “The stories are true, I have not lied to you. Now you will command people, men and woman just as scared, hurt, tired, and confused as those in the stories. The difference between just anyone scared and tired and a soldier is you, the leader. It will be your duty now to help them find, deep within themselves, the courage and the will to go on, to do what you determine must be done.

  “Never abuse that power. Waste that, and you waste not just the moment, but a life, and all that life could have held for some trooper.

  “When that moment they have trained and lived for comes, you hold the power of life or death for your people. To earn that, you must be their servant. Are their feet dry? Is their food decent? Do they have a place to sleep? You answer for them before you seek an answer for yourself. You have been given authority over them. You waste it if you use it for anything that doesn’t prepare the both of you for that critical day when death is at your side.

  “You and they will live, or you and they may die. Despite all the care that you put into your training, chance may call the time when the moment comes, but that is no excuse to leave anything more to chance than the laws of the universe demand.

  “Despite all you’ve heard in the stories, there is no room for heroes. You do not make yourself a hero. If you chase after glory, you waste your time and their lives. Glory will find you on its own. If you must spend time thinking of future glory, pray that you and yours will be ready for its heavy burden when it falls upon you in the heat of battle.

  “And lastly, remember, we tell the stories not to entertain or bask in others’ glory. We tell them because we must. We tell them to keep faith with the faces that haunt our nights and shadow our days. They gave up all they might ever have had—love, children, sunsets—not for a ribbon but for a faith. Not for a planet but for comrades. Not because they were ordered to but because they chose to.

  “If you choose this uniform, you enter into that faith, lived and died for by so many before you. Break that faith, and though you breathe, there will be no life within you.”

  Done, Emma folded into her chair as if some spirit were going forth from her. Kris sat in a silence more sacred than she had ever touched. Somewhere the Colonel called for the pipes. They marched in, but their skirling did not break the silence in Kris’s heart. Kris had gone through college graduation still in the heat of the words she’d passed with her mother and father over her Navy choice. She’d gone through OCS commissioning mad that her parents hadn’t bothered to find time in their busy schedules to come. Her thoughts both moments had not been on what she was doing but rather on where she was from. Those moments she’d been wrapped up in being one of those Longknifes.

  But here, these strangers with their traditions had kept alive something that brought her closer to what it meant to be a Longknife than she had ever touched. Yet, rather than making her smaller for it, it had grown her into something much more. Something was growing inside her, something she could not begin to fathom. Understanding would come with time. Time she had plenty of.

  No longer hungry, Kris sat, hands folded into her lap. Around her, the mess went about its celebration. Pipes played. At some point, Tommy did try his hand, or rather feet, at the sword dance, and did it, if not with grace, at least competently enough not to bring opprobrium on the Navy. Kris’s messmates left her in her silent bubble, like a child swimming in its mother’s womb. And as with such a child, sounds, feelings, actions impinged on her and were taken into her, not so much by eyes and ears and fingers but somehow grasped whole.

  When all was done and the pipes returned to march them from the mess and to brandy and cigars, Kris leaned close to Emma. “Thank you for sharing what you’ve treasured in your heart.”

  “I hold them there until it is time to pass them along to my daughter or son.”

  “I hope they won’t mind the loan of them to me.”

  “There’s something magical about them. Shared out, they’re just as strong.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Colonel Hancock personally drove Kris and Tom to the spaceport next noon. “Not exactly the way I arrived,” Kris said when he offered, thinking, He really wants us gone.

  “And this place ain’t anywhere near what it was when you showed up,” the Colonel said. “Is it always this way with Longknifes? Their bosses either charge ‘em with mutiny or give ‘em a medal?”

  “You tell me. I’m kind of new at this Longknife business,” Kris said, and realized that it was true. Twenty-two years old, and she was only just discovering what she was really about.

  The lander played the usual game of dodge potholes on its run out. As spacers and a handful of officers wound their way from shuttle to the buses Kris had hired, Colonel Hancock turned to her. “Give my compliments to Captain Thorpe. If he’s anything like the fellow he was at the academy, he’ll be happy to have a tiger like you on his boat.”

  “Hasn’t shown much appreciation.” Kris laughed. And if what the captain had been passing her way was his idea of happy, he was a very strange man.

  “You have to remember that fellows like your captain put on the uniform to be war heroes. Hasn’t been much call for that out in space. I tried to talk him into joining the Corps, but he wanted to command his own ship. Wonder if he regrets that?”

  “I’m not about to ask,” Kris said.

  “No, don’t. It would ruin the effect of the fitness report I’ll be forwarding. I suspect it may change the way he looks at you now that he knows he’s got a tiger and not some debutante pussycat.”

  Kris could hope.

  The trip back to Wardhaven was good for catching up on sleep and news…and what Kris had been putting off. She and Tommy studied the news feeds with scowls. As far as the media was concerned, what they’d been doing on Olympia didn’t exist.

  “And we could have been killed,” Tommy snorted.

  “Not a happy thought,” Kris said, knowing that someone had been killed. How could she tell Willie Hunter’s folks that he’d died for something important when the media ignored it? Kris had Nelly research all the final letters home recorded in literature. Feeling guilty, Kris cobbled some words together from the better ones and sent it off, telling herself it was better for the parents to have a good letter now than something better later.

  But nothing in the media prepared Kris for what happened as she hiked though the crowded arrival hall at the bottom of the space elevator. A young woman walked up to Kris and Tommy, looked them up and down, then spat at them.

  “You come to kidnap some little girl, you Earthy scum,” she screamed even as she dodged back into the crowd before Kris could grab her arm, yell at her, The Navy had rescued the last kidnapped little girl, and damn it, I did the rescuing. While Kris was still shaking with unspent rage, Harvey appeared.

  “Sorry. I thought after you rang off that I should have told you to wear civvies. There’s a lot of bad blood around.”

  “And if I get my hands on that young woman, it will be flowing out her nose,” Tommy growled.

  Kris, surprised, gave Tommy a silent raised eyebrow.

  “I mean it. I didn’t go through losing your signal on that drop and chasing around in Olympia’s mud with people shooting at me for that kind of treatment.”

  Unbidden, Kris saw again Willie lying in the mud, reddening the puddle with his blood, then the woman. Choking, she tried to find words to say to both. Maybe a poet could; she couldn’t. “How bad is it?” she asked Harvey, willing him to talk, fill her head with anything but what was coursing through it.

  “The PM’s keeping Wardhaven in the Society, almost by his fingernails. It’s going to break his heart when he finally has to give in. The opposition has demanded a vote. So far, he’s managed to postpone it. Your pa wants Earth to call it quits first. That would give Wardhaven more leverage putting together some kind of follow-on organization out here on the Rim. There’re fifty, sixty, maybe more planets that wo
uld join Wardhaven in some kind of confederacy. But so far, everybody’s secceeding from the Society. Nobody’s going to anything.”

  “Fifty, sixty planets,” Kris said, doing the numbers in her head. There were over 600 planets in the Society. True, the newer colonies were only associates, but there were 500 voting members. “What are the rest up to?”

  The old chauffeur shrugged. “Lot will just be happy to be rid of the Society. Greenfeld seems to be pulling a lot into some kind of federation, maybe forty, fifty, the ones they’ve colonized or hold the mortgages on. Wardhaven’s got its own bunch; most were our colonies or places we helped. Savannah, Riddle. Pitts Hope is making noises like it might toss in with us. Big shock for Earth. They figured they could go back to the Society’s original fifty and tell the rest of us to go to hell. Not that easy when some that fought Unity decide they like the Rim ways more than old Earth.”

  “Sounds confusing,” Tommy put in.

  “Ever tried juggling five, six hundred eggs?”

  “Not eggs,” Kris countered, remembering that Greenfeld was run by the elder Peterwald. “Try six hundred hand grenades. And why do I suspect the pins are out of a few of them?”

  “And aren’t you starting to talk like me?” Tommy grinned.

  “Only on a bad day. Harvey, I’m going to need to run some errands. You busy?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I need to see Tru.”

  “Might be a problem. And speaking of eggs.” The car was waiting where Kris expected. There was a new secret service agent riding shotgun. Kris remembered him from trailing brother Honovi at the reception. The agent was out, peeling a sticker off the side window. The windshield was spattered with eggs.

  “Bunch of kids ran by,” the agent explained as he slowly pulled off something declaring, Earth—Keep Your Hoods at Home.