YOU BET, Kris answered.
OKAY. YOU’RE A BIG GIRL. DON’T GET YOUR THROAT SLIT.
~I am not from the days of old. I am from the stars,~ Kris said. ~We fight not for what the sunset saw but for what the sunrise will see. I say to all. Let her fight me for your path.~
That got a discussion going among them. It was apparent to all that the odds were pretty even if they all went at each other. It would be a long and bloody fight. Kris wondered how many families were split like the sick child’s mother and father. Did they really want to go at each other with stone knives?
The words flew fast and furious. Fists were shaken. For a while, Kris feared the two sides were going to split again into two different ones? Or into four camps?
Kris took the debating time to catch Gunny’s eye. “Bring me my totem stick.”
He grinned and brought her a puggle stick from the locker where the Marines stored their “playthings.”
The sight of a Sky God with a stick of her own might have gone a long way to settling the matter. Kris got the feeling that a lot of the natives wanted to see a fight between their wisewoman with her flint-armed totem and this strange brightly colored totem of the star walkers.
Finally, the graybeard stepped forward. ~We will do it after your way.~
The bald woman spat at him. ~You’re heart is blinded by a will you cannot surrender yourself to.~
~My heart turns its back on that will,~ he said, and turned his back on his wife.
The woman screamed and would have beaned him with her stick if Kris hadn’t gotten her puggle stick in between her rage and his head.
And took advantage of the woman’s blind rage to get a backhanded blow in that knocked the wind out of her.
The woman backed away from Kris.
Kris chose not to push her advantage. While her puggle stick was nicely padded, it had a major disadvantage over the woman’s stick. The bald woman could turn her stick into a long club. Kris’s stick was intended for thrust and parry in close.
This would not be a one-sided fight.
As Kris expected, once the woman caught her breath, she roared her anger, let the stick slip through her hand until she held it by the very bottom, and tried to club Kris over the head.
Kris sidestepped, angled her own stick to take the blow, and slide it down to the deck. Kris then stomped her shoe down on the club, careful of the sharp flint flakes, and almost knocked the stick from the woman’s grasp.
But the short woman used her diminutive size to drop to the deck and roll, thereby rolling the totem out from under Kris’s shoe.
“Ah, thank heavens for good Marine boots,” Kris said, and danced away before the woman could recover and take another swing.
“Good going, Admiral,” Gunny called. “You almost took it away from her.”
“If I get her stick, do I get to lead her clan?” Kris called to Jacques.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” the anthropologist answered.
The two women circled each other. The circle started wide, then got smaller.
The woman did what Kris expected. She charged Kris, holding the stick at its middle. She tried one quick hit at Kris’s head, then swiftly swung the other end low for Kris’s knees.
This kind of fighting was what Kris’s puggle stick was designed for. Kris parried both, easily, then took over the lead, going for the woman’s bald head, then her middle, then head again and middle, in rapid succession.
The woman struggled to keep up, but quickly fell behind. She lacked a modern diet and hours of practice at this. Kris crowded in, pushing from the middle as well as with the ends.
The woman fell back, but this time Kris pursued. Once, the woman landed a blow to Kris’s shoulder with her sharp flints, but Kris’s spider silks blunted it. Now Kris was landing blows. Hers were well padded. The Corps wanted its solders aggressive and well trained, not banged around and in the hospital.
Still, the woman felt the sting of the hits on her bare skin.
She also felt the sting as the crowd’s roar went up for Kris.
Kris finally got in a strong shove, and the woman sprawled backward. Her grip slipped on her totem, and it flew out of her hands.
Kris stood over her. ~Do you yield?~
The woman pointed at Kris. ~I hit her shoulder. The points did not cut her. She is a thick-skinned demon!~
The drop bay was dead quiet in a second.
OH, OH, came from Jacques.
HOLD ON BEFORE ANYBODY PANICS, Kris answered.
She dropped her puggle stick and went to the gray-bearded man. ~Do you have your knife?~
He produced it.
~Cut my finger,~ Kris said, offering her thumb.
~Cut her shoulder,~ the woman on the deck demanded.
That would not work. Unless . . .
Kris unbuttoned her khaki shirt, and slipped out of it. For what she had in mind, she’d have to ditch her pants.
~She is a woman!~ seemed to come as a universal surprise.
~As is your wisewoman,~ Kris said, and began to skinny out of her spider silks. When her second skin lay on the deck, she offered the old man her shoulder.
~Cut me here.~
He did. Maybe more than he needed to. She bled.
Kris wiped her hand in her own blood and held it up for all see. ~I bleed red just like you. The skin I wear that turns back a spear point is the craft of our makers. This is the path I walk with my soft skin. I open that path to you. Follow me or get off my ship,~ Kris said, and turned away.
Jack met her with a blanket.
Dr. Meade was also there to slap on a bandage. “I better take care of that. It could leave a nasty scar.”
Kris headed for the medical center, where the boy was still fighting his battle with man’s oldest enemy. Before she moved into the antiseptic field, the graybeard came up to her.
~Where you go, we will follow. All of us.~
~Good.~ The fight was worth the blood.
29
Kris woke up the next morning, hurting in a lot more places than her shoulder.
Jack put an arm over her.
“Ouch. Be careful.”
“I avoided your cut.”
“That little woman was packing a lot of wallop in her hits. I don’t think the spider silk is quite calibrated to handle blunt-force trauma.”
“It serves you right for trying to be the hero. Single combat to resolve all our differences? I thought that was just a guy thing.”
“You enjoy watching two cute chicks going at it?” Kris shot back. With a grin.
“That mean old biddy is not a cute chick. And you, my love, are never cute. And never, ever, a chick.”
“I’m not?” Kris’s grin was long gone.
“No. You are lovely, drop-dead gorgeous, a stunning beauty, but cute is for our little daughter. And as for a chick. You are an admiral, viceroy, and most fighting captain in the king’s Navy. Chicks are for young things that don’t have any experience under their belts.”
Kris made a face at him. “I’ll give you a 3.9 out of 4 for recovery on that one.”
“Would you like to do something before we shower?” Jack asked.
“Love, I’d love to do something before we shower but I have a bad feeling that if I try, I’ll have a whole lot of bad feelings.”
“Where are the painkillers?” Jack asked.
Sal told him, and Jack headed for the bathroom to return with two white tablets.
“You don’t mind a rain check, do you?”
“I’ve got the shower changing into a nice warm tub of water for us to soak your aches and pains in,” Jack said. “Ain’t the Smart Metal app wonderful?”
They arrived for breakfast late, just as the wardroom was emptying of Navy and filling with scientists. Captain Drago was filling a cup of coffee to take with him, but he dropped into the chair across from Kris. Once again, Jack was getting her chow.
“That was quite a fight you put up,” the skipper said with a broa
d grin.
“You watched?”
“The drop bay is on the surveillance-camera system. I think the whole crew watched.”
“All of it?” Kris asked with a raised eyebrow.
“Right up to the where you started your striptease. Then I killed the feed. How did it turn out?”
“I’ve got a cut on my shoulder that bled very freely and very red. We now have twenty new recruits.”
“Hmm,” he said, and sipped his coffee thoughtfully. “How do you think they’ll take it when they find out that we’re at war with their Sky Gods or whatever they call the star walkers?”
“A good question. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
“Before we break orbit?”
“No. We need to educate these folks a lot more before we take them that far.”
“And after we’ve educated them, what if they want to switch sides?”
“I’ll blow up that bridge when I come to it.”
“Spoken like a true Longknife. By the way, how is that kid coming along? The sick one that started all this?”
“I’m waiting to hear from Doc Meade,” Kris said.
“Speak of a walking miracle and who walks in,” Drago said. “Good Morning, Doctor.”
“Yes, it is. I’m finally going to get some sleep.”
Kris turned to see a very exhausted woman stumbling toward the coffee urn.
“How is the young boy?”
“On the mend,” she said. “Otherwise, I would not see any prospects for sleep. His fever broke two hours ago. His other vitals are back in what is the normal range for these folks. I had him on double the dosage we tested on human kids of his weight, and that’s what it took to beat this. Those extra proteins must be doing something for them, but what it is, I have no idea.”
“So they’re a mystery to us,” Kris said.
“But becoming less of a mystery by the minute. I think you’ll find very interesting some news I was just told.”
The skipper made to leave.
“Hang around a bit. I think you’ll enjoy this bit of rumor.”
Captain Drago sat back down.
“One of my associates finished an autopsy on the woman who killed herself yesterday. No, day before yesterday. My hours are all messed up. Anyway, they are maddening. Very like us, but not, you know.”
“No I don’t, but I’m listening,” Kris said. Her body hurt, and she was hungry. Maybe she was a bit cranky.
“Their brain is so much like ours, but different,” the doc said. “So very different in some major ways and a lot of minor ways. I’ll keep this simple. There’s this part of the human brain where we think resides the ability to see yourself as part of something larger. Some people call it the ‘God Part’ of the brain.”
“I’ve heard of it,” Captain Drago said.
“Well, we found a portion of that woman’s brain that’s atrophied. Not used at all, and if I’m guessing right, I think it’s the part of their brain that does that.”
Kris puzzled that over for a few moments. “Could that be why what we see down dirtside is a lot of small groups?”
“With a strange lack of any concept of something bigger than themselves,” Doc Meade said. “Yes, they talk of the Sky Gods, but I don’t think they think of them the way traditional humans think of their God.”
“Their creation story even had their Sky ‘Gods’ as just like them until they chose to walk the stars,” Captain Drago said.
“You listened to the song?” Kris asked.
“No, I found it long and boring, but I did get Dr. la Duke’s executive summary. Did our researchers find any hint of a divine something down there?”
“It was conspicuous by its absence,” Kris said. “Even when looking at the potential death of her grandson, the woman with the stick could only talk about a ‘will’ that meant he must go down into the ground.”
“Nothing but fatalism, huh,” the skipper said. “What does that mean for us and the spacefaring raiders?”
Kris frowned and turned to the doctor.
“Ever hear,” Doc Meade said, “of a line that went, ‘All people are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights: the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’?”
“Father says it regularly,” Kris said, “although I think the original was ‘all men were created equal.’”
“I got it from my mom,” the doctor said, “whichever way it went, it says basically the same thing. People have the right to throw off a tyrant. It’s our God-given right. Now subtract God from that equation. Where do your basic human rights come from?”
“I know plenty of atheists who would take offense at that,” Captain Drago said.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to start a fight, but where do you get the right to freedom if the powerful have their boot on your neck, like that woman who killed herself? If there is no sense of something greater, beyond just us, some higher moral good, what have you got?”
“Ten thousand years of slavery before the folks from that planet below rose up in a killing rage,” Captain Drago said.
“And a hundred thousand years of zooming around the galaxy,” Kris said, “flattening anything that might become a threat to you, while everyone follows the ‘Enlightened One’ because he’s the enlightened one and has the Black Hats to throw you out on your ass if you don’t follow orders.”
“A horrible thought,” Doc Meade said.
“Any suggestion as to how we reactivate the ‘God Part’ of the aliens’ brains?” Kris asked.
“I’d like to convert this hypothesis to something closer to a theory, Admiral. I plan to run the little boy through a battery of tests today. Among the ones he needs, I’m going to slip in a full brain scan. After that, I intend to ask for volunteers for more tests. I’ve got legitimate reasons to build up a medical database for them. If they get injured or sick, I’ll need it to know what to do for them.”
“Do it, Doctor,” Kris said. “I never thought I’d be contemplating biological warfare through genetic manipulation, but it sure beats the idea of having to slaughter every last one of them.”
“And how do you propose to get close enough to them to apply this biological warfare?” Captain Drago asked.
“First, she confirms her theory, then I’ll drop the problem in the lap of my flag captain,” Kris said with a wicked grin.
Drago stood up. “Jack, you better feed this woman. She’s evil when she’s hungry.”
“She’s evil when she’s fed,” Jack said.
“She’s a Longknife,” the doctor said. “They are born evil.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Kris said, reaching for a bran muffin. “You say the nicest things to me.”
30
Kris was careful what she did that day. Despite the painkillers, she hurt. She checked on the retrieval of the scientific teams. More sensor pods had been knocked together and Sailors trained on them.
There were no more surprises.
Indeed, no one tried to surprise them.
The testing of the young boy, now well on the mend, caused no problems with his parents. Indeed, they wanted to be tested just like him. When Kris asked how the testing was going, the doctor who had replaced Doc Meade while she got some well-earned rest suggested the admiral look over someone else’s shoulder.
“You tend to your knitting, Admiral, and we’ll tend to knitting bones and muscles.”
Kris asked Nelly’s help to locate Jacques, and found him and Amanda combing through a huge list of research results, hunting for any reference to something like a divine being. So far, all it yielded was null data.
“You think Doc Meade is onto something?” Kris asked.
“We’ll know when we have more data,” the anthropologist said, giving Kris an answer she very definitely did not want to hear.
Kris headed back for the drop bay. She avoided the people standing around the med center, waiting to be tested, and edged over to the hatch that led out into
darkness.
There she found the bald woman, sitting cross-legged, staring at the moon.
“Nelly, could you make us a bench?”
One rose from the deck.
~You only say a word, and even the ground does your will.~
~It is a craft,~ Kris said. ~We have the craft to make all that you see. We can change it.~
~You do not make all that I see. Not the moon. Not . . .~ Here she paused, and glanced at the planet below. ~Is that what was beneath my feet all the days of my life?~
~We are very far away. That makes it small.~
~As when my husband walks to me from out on the great prairie. Far off, he is no bigger than the ant at my feet. He gets closer and grows.~
~But he is always the same.~
~Is he?~
Kris measured all the potential questions in those two words and didn’t try to answer any of them.
A longboat dropped away from the Royal above the Wasp. The old woman watched it intently. Another was on approach for the Wasp.
~Men, in them, like a cave that flies like a bird.~
Kris nodded.
~But not.~
~Yes, but not,~ Kris agreed.
~What heart beats in your chest?~
~One like yours,~ Kris said, bringing her hand up to her chest, then pointing to the woman’s. ~My blood is red.~
~Your blood is red,~ the woman agreed. ~The men, down there. What do they hunt?~
Unfortunately, in their tongue, “what” was not a word, but an inflection of hunt. Kris could find no way to answer that. NELLY?
I’M STUMPED, TOO, KRIS.
HOW ABOUT THAT, THESE PRIMITIVES STUMPED A COMPUTER.
KRIS, THAT’S NOT FAIR.
SORRY, NELLY, NO IT ISN’T. IT’S JUST FRUSTRATING ME.
~We hunt to see what we see. Why do men walk over a mountain?~ Kris tried.
~Men do not walk over a mountain. Other men live over the mountain. Men with clubs.~
~So we hide and look from between the leaves.~
The woman sniffed. ~You hide like little baby. We saw you. If you had taken one fish, one animal, we would have hit your head so hard.~
~So we ate our own food. You like our own food?~
Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Page 19
