This was one of Abby’s steamer trunks. Kris had always suspected she could fit her slim, six-foot frame into one of them. Now was her chance to find out.
Only she found herself sharing it with several canisters, cans, boxes and other stuff she couldn’t identify in the dark.
As Kris started wedging herself in she asked, “Where are you shipping me?”
“Out of system. You may be in a shipping container open to space for a while. Maybe a long while. Here are some pills. They’ll help you sleep. Try not to turn on any lights for the first twenty-four hours.”
“How will I know that?” Kris asked. It really was tight in there.
“I’ll tell you,” Nelly said. “Now hurry up. We can’t keep hiding this, and we’ve got a whole lot more invisibility spells to cast.”
Abby closed the trunk and latched down the lid.
Now Kris did discover the meaning of claustrophobia. She felt her panic rising, her pulse quickening. A need for light, space, freedom welled within her.
FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, KRIS, TAKE THE DAMN PILL! Nelly growled in Kris’s skull.
Kris took one of the pills, even as she wondered where Nelly was getting these latest additions to her vocabulary.
In a couple of heartbeats, she felt calmer.
Then sleepy.
The thought crossed her mind that she might never wake up. That she might find out real soon what awaited people after life . . . if anything. She wondered if Tommy would be there, his wide, lopsided grin welcoming her as he said, “I told you so.”
Even as the steamer trunk began to bump along on its way to who-knew-where, Kris was nodding off to sleep.
6
Kris felt the bright light even with her eyes closed.
So she opened her eyes. And blinked immediately. That light was really bright. Several blinks later, she started to make out a face.
It was smiling, and familiar.
It wasn’t Tommy.
“You’re dead,” Kris said. “Am I?”
“The reports of my death are much exaggerated,” came in a familiar drawl.
“Captain Elizabeth Luna, what do you mean you’re not dead? I saw your ship blown out of space,” Kris’s eyes were getting used to the light. That, and someone had finally quit shining it right in her eyes.
“Those bad actors did indeed do severe bodily harm to the old Archie,” Captain Luna agreed. “They also left a few vacancies in my crew, but, I will point out, not one for a captain.”
“I see,” Kris said, blinking rapidly.
“My owner had been complaining that the Archimedes III wasn’t nearly as palatial as his other corporate buddies’ yachts, so he wasn’t heartbroken to send the insurers a bill for a new boat. They howled, but by the time I got my old bones out of the fancy body-and-fender shop he put me up in on Wardhaven, the new Archimedes IV was ready for business. It’s never too hard to locate the right scoundrels for a ship like this, and I’ve been plying the space ways for several months while you were getting into all kinds of troubles.”
“That I have,” Kris admitted. “Say, is there a head anywhere handy? I threw up most of what I drank yesterday, but there are still a few drops that wants to exit the old-fashioned way.”
“Sailor, show this woman to our least-fancy head,” Captain Luna ordered. So it was that Kris found herself doing her business in facilities that made the master suite at Nuu House look downright poorly. Quickly done, Kris rejoined her hostess.
“Would you mind telling me how you managed to pull this off? You and Nelly and, oh, hi Penny. I see you made it as well.”
“Ms. Pasley has been my right-hand man for oh these last five years,” Captain Luna assured Kris.
“Gosh,” Kris said, falling into the down-home cadence of the captain. “And I thought she’d been my death-defying sidekick for all those five years.”
The topic of the debate joined them in a walk down a curving hallway whose decor would not have been out of place in a royal palace on Earth.
“I got the paperwork to prove my claim,” Luna assured Kris.
“So where is Lieutenant Pasley?” Kris asked.
“She never left High Chance,” Penny said. “Admiral Santiago found a place for me on her staff. But I was pretty run-down, after all the running around a certain damn Longknife put me through,” Penny said with a sly sideways glance at Kris.
“There was this place, Itsahfine, not much of a planet, but the ancient aliens who built the jump points had left a lot of dusty ruins on it. Once upon a time, Penny and a guy she’d just met thought it would be great to spend a long leave bouncing around the place.” Penny’s voice took on a faraway quality at the recollection of what she and Tommy had never done because he’d gotten too close to a damn Longknife.
“Anyway, Mimzy spotted a lone woman tourist who had booked passage and rooms on Itsahfine and was my spitting image. Mimzy did a bit of this and that, and suddenly Lieutenant Pasley is taking sixty days of leave there and Third Officer Pasley is Captain Luna’s long-serving hand.”
“Will it hold up?” Kris asked.
“Itsahfine is pretty backward. Not much of a grid there to walk off of. It’s held up so far. Mimzy swears that she’s put in place a subroutine on the woman’s credit chit. Whatever she pays for: Hotel, food, what have you will show up on my credit report. Sixty days from now, it will all vanish, and the charges will go back to whom they belong. As I see it, we’ve got six more of my eight weeks’ leave to save humanity. That’s not usually too tight a schedule for a Longknife I know to pull off a miracle or twelve.”
Luna enjoyed a hearty belly laugh at that.
Kris nodded soberly, tasting the risk her friend was taking. “What about Abby and Cara? And how did you get me on this ship?”
“Getting you on wasn’t all that hard,” Luna insisted, and opened the door into quarters that made palatial look shabby. “This is the CEO’s suite. If you promise not to trash it, it’s yours for the trip.”
Kris took the measure of the place, as much as she could see from the door. “I’m more worried about me finding my way out of here when the time comes. You got a GPS or something?”
“I’ll make sure you don’t get lost,” Nelly said dryly.
“I figured Nelly would help,” Captain Luna quipped. “Otherwise, I would have dumped you in something smaller. I really want you to hide out here for this voyage. Nobody’s supposed to be in here. None of the crew will be coming in, and I don’t want to wave you around too much.”
“Are you afraid someone will turn us in?” Penny asked.
“Not bleeding likely. Several of my crew served with the princess here during that little dustup and all its fun around Wardhaven. Them that weren’t there all wish they’d had the honor . . . and survived it in one piece. It’s just that what’s out of sight is out of mind, and the less said, the better. Come, take a load off your feet. By my reckoning, I’m four or five answers behind your questions.”
Kris settled into a chair that would have fit right into any of the sitting rooms of Nuu House. Thick, rich, brocade upholstering didn’t keep it from conforming itself to her body. A low hum went through Kris as it gently began massaging her.
“So, Abby and Cara,” Kris said. “How are they not getting the short end of this stick?”
“I think I can answer that best,” Nelly said. “It’s good to be able to put all of me back to work again. Kris, I won’t apologize for giving you the silent treatment this last month. You were a pig and all that, but I really had to do it. They had sensors trained on us the whole time. Officially, I was just your average, run-of-the-mill, souped-up personal assistant. That’s what I made the records say. But if I started using a lot more electricity, or communicating with your brain and all, the jig would be up. So I lay low, did my planning slowly and in out-of-the-way places, then brought things together when Penny showed up with Mimzy.”
“Okay, nonapology not accepted,” Kris said with a grin, “but what about Ab
by and Cara?”
“You, Kris, are locked in your room,” Nelly said. “There is a small electronic device that is programmed to call in sick tomorrow and shout through the door at Abby and Cara that you don’t want to be disturbed anytime they try to disturb you. With any luck, we’ll be on the other side of this jump before anyone decides to knock down the door and see what’s really going on in that room.”
“And when they do?” Kris said.
“Abby and Cara will have, what do you call it, plausible deniability. The powers that be can think whatever they want, but your maid and niece have a story, and they will stick to it. You’ve vanished into thin air. By the way, Kris, I’ve checked into your family history. Vanishing into thin air is something no damn Longknife has ever done before. Congratulations,” Nelly finished.
“That . . . sounds . . . workable,” Kris said slowly as she measured the plan and found it, well, workable. Putting that worry aside, Kris turned to her next question.
“This may be none of my business, and I may really not want to know how you did it, but, Elizabeth, how did you do this?”
“’Tweren’t no problem.” The captain beamed. “The CEO I work for had been trying for some time to get his grandmother to retire to someplace where her phone wouldn’t reach him. When Penny came to me with the problem of springing you from the perfect prison, I suggested to Leopold that the old girl might love a seaside villa on Madigan’s Rainbow if she could take seven or eight of her favorite bridge cronies with her. He liked the idea. Granny proved willing, and off we and Penny went to save the princess.
“That was the easy part. Now, getting you off planet looked to be the hard part until Nelly here suggested a sleight of hands. We’d off-loaded the aging bridge bidders, lock, stock, and a whole lot of barrels. Nelly suggested maybe we off-load one too many crates. What if the fine silver and china from the Archie IV got sent dirtside by accident?
“I got to go charging down screaming for my missing treasure, and you just happened to ride back up in its place,” Captain Luna finished with a wide grin.
Kris considered the idea and found a flaw. “What happens when they find a box load of fine china and silver with the Archie’s address on it?”
“They won’t,” Captain Luna beamed. “Said items were all made of dumb metal that is, as we speak, dissolving and leaking out of a box from which all identification and addresses are likewise going away. They may find an empty box in the corner of their warehouse, but it’s not going to tell them a thing.”
“That’s good. Really good,” Kris said in awe at the chicanery.
“Coming from you, I’ll take that as faint praise,” the captain said, chortling.
“Where do we go now?” Kris asked.
“I’m told you need to get to New Eden,” the yacht skipper said. “I wasn’t told why, and that is as far as I can take you. My CEO has a party he wants to throw. I figure the less I know about what comes next, the better off we’ll all be.”
With that, Luna stood. “My boss has this place rigged so that it can record every breath anyone in here takes, or can, just as completely, record nothing during the slaughter of several innocents. I’ve got the system turned off. Nelly can vouch for that.”
“It is off, and I have the only key, for the moment,” Nelly said.
“So, there’s a buttery that I had outfitted for the grand dame and her bridge cronies. It should feed you two for the next week or three.” Captain Luna paused, eyed Kris, then went on.
“Kris, I can’t help but say you look like hell. Whoever’s been riding you has done it hard and put you away wet, girl. There’s a workout room right off the master bedroom. If you want to hang with those hardworking Marines I usually hear you like, you better look after yourself, girl.”
“You say it so eloquently, Captain,” Kris said, standing herself.
“That’s why I make the big bucks. Now, lock the door once I’m gone. Anyone coming by will knock. Oh, and if we get boarded in system, you know where the air lock is. Don’t make me space you myself.”
On that note, they parted.
7
Kris was too strung out to sleep, so she and Penny set out to survey the suite. Kris’s circumnavigation of the Milky Way had been a major voyage of discovery. Traipsing through the huge rooms of the suite was like some sort of safari. Kris half expected to stumble upon a pack of lions chasing a herd of elephants.
The rich and enormous sitting room had the master suite off to the right and two just-as-massive bedrooms with expansive baths off to the left. The master suite bath included not only a shower for six but also a small swimming pool for twelve, as well as sauna and the usual equipment, much of it in gold. All this furnished a room that took up only slightly less space than the drop bay on the Wasp.
A door beside the sauna led to a workout room. Its computer began counseling them the moment they walked in. The electronic trainer had the same opinion of Kris’s present physical state as Luna and began listing all the things it could do for Kris.
Kris quickly crossed to the door that led back to the sitting room.
After the verbose exercise room, the space behind the two other bedrooms was a bit of a puzzle. It was a silent and strangely vacant room. There were tables and several utilitarian chairs. And shelves. Lots of shelves.
It was Nelly who figured it out, spotting the hardwired plug-ins and the electronically secure power outlets.
“This would make a perfect computer command center,” she observed. “What was done here would stay here until it was ushered out.”
“Should we do our planning in here?” Penny asked.
“I don’t think we need to,” both Nelly and Mimzy said at the same moment.
Nelly went on. “The entire suite is quite self-contained. Your captain friend was not kidding. What goes on in here stays in here. It’s just that this particular room is prepared to power and support a major server farm. It could take a data stream from the outside, mash a whole lot of numbers inside, and send them on their way in a most secure manner. You remember when you asked us to do a full analysis and forensic work-up on the St. Petersburg economy? And do it without getting caught?”
Kris allowed that she did.
“This place is set up to do that. Fully loaded, I bet this place could do it every day for a different planet’s worth of data, day in and day out. I’d love to command a place like this,” Nelly finished with longing in her voice.
“Who knows, maybe you will,” Kris said, with no commitment. She’d never considered Nelly as anything but her own computer. Yes, Nelly was great at playing all kinds of dirty tricks on other computer systems, look at what she’d done tonight. The thought of Nelly cracking the whip over a farmful of less flexible but no less powerful computers left Kris . . . strangely uncomfortable.
Penny broke the stretching silence with a challenge to Kris. “Let’s see what that workout room can do.”
Kris really didn’t want to, but it was either let the workout room show what it really could do, try the buttery, or go to bed.
Kris wasn’t hungry or sleepy, so PT won.
But Kris didn’t have to let it win without some complaining. “What is it with everybody? I don’t look that bad to myself in the mirror.”
Penny said nothing more but challenged Kris to a game of handball. The room quickly organized itself as a court even as it provided the two young women with suitable clothing, and, at Penny’s request, private facilities for each to change.
Penny left Kris flailing and out of breath in the first minute of the game.
“Okay, okay, you win,” Kris said, hunched over and struggling to catch her breath. “I’m out of shape. So, what are you going to do about it?”
The trainer computer said it had just the thing for Kris. While Penny worked out on a contraption that looked like the results of mating a ski machine with a bike with a rowing shell using all the jigs and presses that you normally only found in a spaceship-fabrication doc
k, Kris was offered a box.
It was a big box that opened up for her to sit in comfortably with only her head sticking out. When it closed, strange things started to happen. Initially, it was little more than a pleasant massage, not unlike the chair in the sitting room.
Then it got more physical.
Kris found she could be made to stand, as well as lie down, inside the box, as it went through the business of seeing that every muscle in her body got a workout.
On Chance, Kris had tossed a caber and strained some muscles she hadn’t expected to discover until she gave birth to her first child. This box put even those muscles through a workout.
Thirty minutes later, thoroughly wrung out, Kris stumbled into her lavish shower. Much to the shower’s disappointment, Kris demanded and got, “Just a simple shower. Nothing fancy. Water. Warm. Soap.”
Quickly done and toweled dry by herself—“Thank you very much”—Kris tumbled into a suddenly inviting bed.
“That was a good beginning,” the training computer assured her. “You should be up to three-hour-long workout by day after tomorrow.”
“Shut up. Lights out,” Kris ordered.
As wrung out as she was, Kris expected sleep to be waiting for her. It wasn’t.
What kept going over in her mind as she waited for sleep was the thought of Nelly and her command center of obedient and pliant supercomputers. And the trainer with its attitude toward human flesh. All these and God only knew what else that lurked in the future of the human race left Kris wondering if Grampa Al was really the problem she ought to be risking her neck to foil this month.
Given the choice between wasting her night chewing on that problem versus sleeping, Kris chose sleep.
But her last thoughts were of Jack and a prayer that she might meet him in her dreams.
8
Next morning, Kris found a soak in a warm tub essential before stumbling out to breakfast. A breakfast that was another matter.
The buttery turned out to be as obstreperous as the gym. Penny had to resort to physically searching the pantry for honest food. In a pout over Kris’s and Penny’s refusal to breakfast on pate foie gras or a salmon soufflé, the kitchen closed up.
Kris Longknife: Furious Page 4
