Nelly showed two systems within twenty light-years. “Neither one is occupied,” she reported.
“And from those systems?” Kris asked, really, really wishing she could keep her mouth shut and do something stupid for a change. Hadn't her friends paid enough for the Longknife legend this trip?
More systems lit up. “Several of them have large Iteeche colonies,” Nelly said.
THIS IS FROM THE MAP I DON'T HAVE, KRIS.
No one on the bridge asked for clarification. If Nelly said it, it had to be true.
In all her life, Kris had never more wanted not to say something, but words tumbled slowly out of her mouth. “So what we have here is an alien scout ship. She did a big jump to a base system, and now she's likely going to nose around. And if she does, she'll find a large chunk of the Iteeche Empire.”
Kris paused, then went on. “Question for the class. If she does get back, how long before a mother ship like the last one we just saw follows? But if she doesn't get back, will they just write her off, or will they immediately send another scout?”
“There's no way for us to answer any of your questions, Your Highness,” Captain Drago said. “So, Commodore, what are your orders?”
Once more, it came down to what could a Longknife pull out of her hat. Kris suppressed a sigh. Her hat was empty. Her pot of gold was drained. Everything she had or ever had been had been poured out in the last few weeks.
Wasn't there anyone else to take responsibility for this mess?
“Sulwan, if I did want to take a potshot at that alien, how could I do it?”
The navigator had been working with her board at a furious rate since Kris came on the bridge. Now she looked up, seemed startled by the use of her name, and blinked groggily at Kris.
“I figured someone would be asking for my opinion,” she said. “Our 24-inch pulse lasers are good for forty thousand klicks. Our 5-inch long guns can reach out maybe a bit longer, but I have this wild suspicion that they wouldn't do much damage to anything bigger than a torpedo. Anyway, the direct course from Jump Point Alpha to Jump Point Beta won't put that ship anywhere close to within range.”
Kris liked what she was hearing, but her mouth had a mind of its own. “What kind of activity could put us within range?”
“I knew you'd ask, and it all depends.”
“You want to explain that?” her captain asked.
“Not really. Did any of that silly metal you used to hold on to the balloot come back with you?”
“We did not lose that much,” Nelly put in. “You had lost a lot in the fight, but there's still about half of what you started with.”
“Well, then I guess we can try making like a rock again,” Sulwan said. “Two orbits from now, if we were to make a hard, 3.5-gee burn, while we're behind this noisy ice giant, we could go from a nice round orbit, if I do say so myself, into a rough slingshot course that would put us headed out in the general direction of the alien.”
Sulwan paused for a breath. “If they are real dumb, and don't notice that no asteroid flew into a pass at this ice giant, but just take for granted that one came out the other side, they might let us drift up close to them. We'd have to stay real, real quiet, and we'd have to use the armor for a disguise, but we could close to thirty-eight thousand klicks of them.”
The navigator sighed, a long-winded one that would make any Irish mom proud.
Captain Drago frowned at his navigator's work, then eyed Kris. “It might work. Now, one question for you, Princess. Are you going to try to open communications with them before you shoot them in the back? Because if you do, and they shoot on sight like they did the
Fury
, all this ain't going to be worth a bucket of warm spit.”
“You have a good point,” Kris said. “I'll have to think about that.”
Then it was her turn to ask a question. “Captain, Sulwan's course calls for us to break out in two orbits. Have you heard or seen anything from Launch 3?”
“Nothing,” the skipper said. “And Chief Beni of all people will know that we can't afford for them to talk to us.”
“Yes,” Kris said. “I'll be in my cabin if you need me.”
“I'll try not to need you, Commodore,” Captain Drago said.
58
Kris made it to her quarters without having to say another word. Once there, she stretched out, floating a few inches above her bed, and just stared at the ceiling.
“Nelly, what went wrong with Launch 3?” she finally asked.
“Kris, we weren't monitoring each other's boats. We were using just about all the capacity we had to manage the cable.”
“Did Petty Officer Moreno's being unconscious contribute to the situation?”
“Maybe, Kris, but Scrounger was also in trouble. He'd lost his lunch, and the colonel was trying to do what Jack did for poor Maria. Launch 3 was the last one to fly into the jet stream. The pilot may have flinched, or tried to slow down a bit, or maybe changed his angle of attack.”
Nelly paused, most uncomputer-like. “I do not have the data to reconstruct the incident. I am very frustrated. How do you humans stand such limitations?”
“We get used to it, or we go crazy. Nelly, you just can't think too much about it.”
“Not think about something. That is not easy for one of us.”
“I suggest you figure out how to do it.”
There was a knock at the door.
Kris ignored it.
There was a second knock. “Kris, are you in there?” came in Jack's soft voice.
“Go away.”
“And let you sulk in your tent?” he asked.
“I don't know what I'm doing,” Kris said. “Just leave me alone.”
“Not a good idea. Now, you have two choices. We can conduct this talk through the door, or you can invite me in. It's not like I've got anywhere else to go, or I'll get tired of hanging out here in midair.”
“I ought to let you hang out there.”
“But you'd miss my lopsided smile,” he said.
“Who told you I liked your lopsided grin?” Kris snapped. She sat up in bed, which, under zero gee, would have bounced her head off the overhead, but she caught herself.
“I know that I have a lopsided grin,” Jack continued, with his grin in evidence even through the door, “and you just told me you liked it. Thank you, by the way.”
“Nelly, open the door. At least if he's inside, I can throw something at him.”
The door clicked open.
Jack floated in, shoved off the door, and came to a stop above Kris's desk chair. He settled into a sitting position, six inches above it. Every minute or so, he'd use the chair's arms to recenter him as the air currents or his movements caused him to drift.
Or when Kris hit him with a fluffy little teddy bear, a gift from Cara.
“You've got a good pitching arm,” Jack said. “Maybe your staff ought to form a baseball team to take on the
Wasp
's other divisions.”
“We'll be missing three players,” Kris said to shut off the flood of cheer.
“If anyone can find his way back to the
Wasp
, Chief Beni is the man. Do we know anything about the launch's condition when it broke away from us?”
“Nelly tells me they weren't monitoring things on each of the boats. The pilot may have tried to slow his entry into the jet stream.” Kris rattled off the facts, trying not to touch any of the feelings they might raise. “Old Professor Scrounger appeared to be in trouble, and Colonel Cortez was trying to help him. Imagine if you'd been taking care of Maria by yourself when we hit that wall of air.”
Jack let out a low whistle. “Worse luck for them.”
“So they clobber in, and we make it back,” Kris muttered.
“We won't be breaking orbit for a while. That gives them time to get back.”
“They've only got so much reaction mass and so much antimatter. They can't hang out there forever.”
“A couple of hours is not forever.”
“Boy, Jack, you just will not let me get a dour word in edgewise. Next thing you'll be telling me is that we ought to pray for them.”
“Penny is,” Jack said. “I said a few prayers, too. There's nothing wrong with praying at a time like this. Didn't your family ever take you to church?”
“Every Sunday,” Kris said. “It was a mandatory photo op. The loving family of the prime minister paying their respects to God. Course, Father usually picked a church that had nothing much to say and didn't take up too much of his Sunday saying it.”
“So all you've got is yourself to hold on to when things a whole lot bigger than you come calling,” Jack said.
“You going to try to have me change my way of living?”
“Nope. The priest at our parish always said it was God's job to get you in the door. It was our job to give you a reason to come back. So, Kris, what do we do about this?”
“I think we get to keep breathing. Has Engineering said anything about the quality of what we picked up on that one pass we did?”
“The engineers are delighted. We got the usual hydrogen and helium, but we also picked up ice, ammonium, and methane. It's a real mess in the tanks, but they're doing what they can to separate it out.”
“Quietly, I hope.”
“The captain made a trip down to Engineering to get that message across in person. By the way, Nelly, Kris, if you haven't gotten the word, nothing electronic gets used that we don't have to use. Poor Cara is stuck playing chess with Sergeant Bruce.”
“How did Cara take the trip?”
“Abby says she did rather well. Good spacer stomach, none of the problems the other ships had. The three of them may have taken up the slack for the rest of us.”
“For a while there, that was true,” Nelly said.
“So, what do we do about this stranger in the system?” Jack asked.
“We'll likely have to kill it,” Kris said. “It's not one of ours, and Ron says it's definitely not one of theirs, so it's likely one of those. They tend to shoot first and not answer any questions later. Unless you got an idea on how we can get this one talking, I won't risk the
Wasp
trying to talk to them again.”
“Who says the
Wasp
has to be the one doing the talking?” Jack said, his lopsided grin in full evidence.
“Who could? We can't leave anyone behind. Once we get out there, we've got to start accelerating for the next jump point if we want to make it out of Iteeche space.”
“We've got a holdful of jump buoys,” Jack said.
“Right,” Kris said. “I knew there was some reason I kept you around.”
“Actually, it was Penny's idea. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're headed for a fight, and we don't want to repeat the
Fury
's fate. She came up with the idea of leaving a buoy in orbit and having it issue demands for the alien to stop decelerating and drop its reactor immediately.”
“And it's going to understand what we are saying?” Kris said.
“They jumped into the Iteeche Empire. They've been blowing up Iteeche scout ships. They ought to have acquired some Iteeche.”
“And we just happen to have our own Imperial Representative right on board,” Kris said, sitting up carefully so as not to show Jack how gracefully she could bounce off the overhead.
“What is it with you, Jack?” she demanded. “All I want to do is sit here, chewing on how much life sucks, and you come barging in here like some muscle-headed Pollyanna, demanding I smile and get back on the horse and give it the spurs.”
“That's just the advice my grandpappy gave me and my old man. Just because he came back from the Iteeche War missing an arm and part of a leg was no reason to cry about it. Gimpy leg and all, he managed to run down Grandmama.”
“So he never let his problems get him down.”
Jack sobered. “It got him down, now and again, but he got back up, he always said. At least he did until the day he ate his old service revolver.”
“I'm sorry, Jack,” Kris said, very aware that she wasn't the only one with problems.
“I take it as a warning. At least that's what my old man said to do. Grandpappy was fine as long as he kept busy. What do you say we drop down to Iteeche country and record Ron saying, âStop in the name of the Emperor.' ”
Kris nodded. Jack held the door open for her. She gave him just a bit of a hug as she went by him. “Thanks for coming for me.”
“Thanks for opening the door and letting me in.”
59
Kris was at her battle station as the
Wasp
prepared to discover if she could handle a jackrabbit jump to 3.5 gees.
Behind them, a buoy trailed, timed to go live with demands in Iteeche and several human languages that the intruder drop everything and declare its intentions. Since the demands would be coming from the ice giant's orbit, and the alien would be over a million klicks away, Kris doubted there would be any shots fired.
The alien would either reply, or it would be fair game.
Of course, there was no way to tell if its reply was, “Die, you slimy aliens,” or, “We come in peace for all bug-eyed kind.”
Just once, Kris would like a plan that didn't have all kinds of holes in it.
Ready or not, Sulwan mashed the deceleration button, and the
Wasp
began a dive toward the ice giant that had fed it enough that they hoped they could make it home.
The plan called for them to take full advantage of the giant planet's size. First, they would decelerate into a grazing orbit, then they would pour on the acceleration and come out from behind the planet, ready to blaze a trail across the system, and just miss diving directly into the sun.