Intrepid (8 page)

10

“Shall we leave a jump buoy?” Captain Drago asked, as they halted in front of the jump between Xanadu and Pandemonium.

“We didn’t leave buoys at the jumps from Cuzco,” Kris said. She hadn’t wanted to make the Great Guides mad before she talked to them. Fat lot of good that had done. “We gave them a month. We can wait. Captain, take us through.”

“Aye, aye, Your Highness. Sulwan, make it so.”

With a quick shot of maneuvering jets, they were in another system. Drago put on one gee and boosted sunward even before sensors reported back on what the locals had shortened to Panda.

Passive sensors were the first to hint at trouble.

“I’m not getting any chatter on the communication circuits,” Chief Beni reported with a frown. “And I’m getting neutrino emissions from what looks like two ships in orbit over Panda.”

“We’ve never had more than one freighter show up a year,” Andy Fronour said from the jump seat he occupied on the bridge. “How could there be two now?”

“We’ll have to wait until we establish communications,” Kris said. “At this distance, there’s an hour lag time between us saying anything and them answering back.”

Thirty minutes later, the main screen on the bridge opened up with full visuals. Kris knew at first glance things were not good. Staring at her in the impeccable uniform of a merchant captain was Captain William Tacoma Thorpe, former commander of the Patrol Corvette
Typhoon
, and, given a choice between early retirement and a court-martial, formally of the Wardhaven Navy.

“What is he doing here?” was Kris’s first question.

Nothing good, had to be the first answer.

“Unidentified freighter, there is no business here for you. Sheer off and do not approach Presley’s Pride.”

Kris mashed the kill-screen button.

“Presley’s Pride?” Fronour said, leaping from his jump seat. “I don’t think there’s anyone on the planet with that name.”

“Apparently there is now,” Kris said, and filled them in on who was talking to them.

Captain Drago didn’t seem surprised. He did want to make sure he got it right “He was your first skipper in the Navy.” Kris agreed that he was. “And he ended up retiring out of the Navy in lieu of a full court-martial.” Kris agreed he did.

“Explains why I get such interesting looks at the bar when I admit skippering your ship,” Drago said, rubbing his chin.

“Stay on my good side,” Kris suggested.

“What happened?” Drago said, very serious now.

“You’re not authorized that information,” Jack told him.

“But I sure would like to hear the story,” Abby put in.

“If she told you, I’d have to kill you,” Jack said.

“You and what army?” Abby said, with a toothy smile.

“Me and my Marines.”

“Might be interesting to see who’d be the last one standing.”

“Folks,” Kris cut in, “I think we have a full to-do list for today. Could we put a rousing good intramural fight off until we have some free time?”

“We never have any free time,” Abby complained.

“Considering what you do with it, is it any wonder I keep you busy?” Kris said.

“Ah, folks, what do we tell this former associate of our princess?” Drago asked. “In about an hour we’ll be getting a new message from him, one showing his surprise at once more crossing paths with his well-remembered subordinate.”

“You’re the captain,” Kris noted.

“I feel a sudden case of laryngitis coming on,” Drago said.

“Take a pill, quick,” Kris said.

The captain shook his head. “Sorry, my princess, but this is not the part I signed on for. I and my crew will support you fully, but this,” he said, with an expressive shrug, “is a matter for ‘one of those Longknifes.’ ”

Well, gal, you did want to have all the fun, didn’t you,
that nagging little voice in the back of Kris’s head said.

Yeah, but I was so looking forward to exploring. Who’d have expected Captain Thorpe to be here ahead of me.

Afraid to face your old captain? Scared he’ll buffalo you like he did last time?
Kris took a deep breath. Yes, he’d run her ragged, but she’d come up for air. . . and then she’d changed everything. She was the one still serving. He was the one out.

Kris unsnapped her station-chair restraint and went to stand squarely in front of the forward screen.

“Chief, how long before something comes back from Thorpe?”

“Five, maybe ten minutes, ma’am.”

“Tell me before you put it on-screen.”

Captain Thorpe did not keep her waiting. Five minutes later, Chief Beni announced, “A new message is coming in.”

Kris squared her back, schooled her face to neutral, and said, “Put it on the main screen.” And found herself staring into Captain Thorpe’s confident smile.

“Long time no see, Ensign. Ah, so it’s lieutenant now. Tell me, what could bring you out here, so far from the nearest debutante ball? Over,” he said, signaling he was ready to yield the connection to her.

“I am Princess Kristine Longknife, commanding the exploration task force on the USS
Wasp
. We are exploring matters beyond the Rim, and thought we’d drop by Pandemonium for some fresh vegetables. Over to you, Captain Thorpe.”

Kris kept her voice even, allowing no special inflection to either “Captain” or “Thorpe.” She’d gone over that very carefully in her mind. Chief Beni cut the commlink.

“What do we do now?” Jack asked.

“Wait to see how he reacts,” Kris said. “He said Presley’s Pride. We said Pandemonium. With luck, he’ll explain the discrepancy. Meanwhile, Mr. Fronour, could you and Chief Beni please connect us with your family? We’ve got an hour before our next conversation with Thorpe, and I’d like to know something about things dirtside.”

“Lieutenant, I’m getting something from one of the ships in orbit,” Chief Beni put in.

“What kind of something?”

The chief’s round cherubic face looked pained. “Just a bit of backscatter from a very tight beam it’s sending down to the planet. Nelly, could you maybe make something of it?” It was the absolute first time he’d ever asked Kris’s pet computer for help.

“It is very weak, and very scattered. We are only picking up parts of the message. And it is very encrypted. I will need a lot more of the message to crack it,” Nelly said.

“Have at it, girl. It’s not like there’s a lot to do. But you, Chief, tell me what kind of noise that planet is making.”

The chief shook his head. “There is nothing down there. No power plants, no net. Not so much as a ten-watt radio.”

“You sound like Xanadu,” Kris told Fronour.

“Not us, ma’am. We had dams pumping electricity to lots of homesteads two years ago. There was a full net, voice and video. Where’s it gone?” he asked, voice breaking.

“Someone’s closed it down,” Jack said.

Kris liked the way Jack chose the gentlest option. The place was just closed down. In time, they would turn it back on. And the young man would hold his baby and wife.

“Jack, put your Marines on alert, just in case we need to help folks turn Pandemonium back on.”

“Our pleasure, ma’am,” Jack said, with a jaunty salute and a quick about-face. “Mr. Fronour, you want to come with me. The pictures from out here are a bit poor. We could use your help in figuring out the layout of the land.” The farmer went with Jack, eager to help. With luck, the Marines would keep him busy and his mind off of the many reasons why his home could be so silent.

Kris turned to Captain Drago. “Check out the lasers. I want the capacitors at full as we approach. Sulwan, could you arrange our final approach to orbit so that we’re behind Pandemonium’s largest moon for as long as possible?”

“I was about to make the same request,” Captain Drago said. “Do it, Sulwan.”

“And what other approach do you think I’d make to a former corvette captain’s unidentified ship?” Sulwan said with a harsh laugh. “Please, you didn’t hire any dumb officers.”

The chuckles around the bridge sounded relieved at that.

“Now, Chief, talk to me. Tell me stories about the ships ahead of us and the planet they orbit. So far, you’ve been way too quiet for my tastes,” Kris said, as she pulled her station chair over next to Beni’s.

“Ma’am, I regret as much as you that there is not all that much to talk about.”

And thirty minutes later, when the commlink flashed red, the chief still had said far too little for Kris.

Kris took a moment, as she stood before the main screen, to make sure that her undress whites were properly in place and her gig line was perfectly straight. She would not allow her former captain to pick at her before her command.

Satisfied, she waved at the chief. “Put him on.”

Again, Captain Thorpe’s face filled the screen. But it was the bridge behind him she studied. It, and the people on it.

Thorpe’s Merchant Marine uniform was impeccable. But those behind him wore a thoroughly ununiform mix of civilian clothes. Two were in mismatched khakis; one’s hat had a rated officer’s emblem on it, the other a chief’s.

His bridge looked about as Navy as Kris’s did. Was it his reality. . . or only appearance like Kris’s?
Good question, gal. Do you see any answers?
Kris didn’t.

One thing was apparent. To the right of Thorpe were two stations. Navigation and helm? To his left were two more. Offensive and defensive weapons? No question, there were too many stations on that bridge for an honest, working freighter.

No doubt, Thorpe had done his own check around Kris’s bridge and identified too many stations for a simple exploration ship.

“Well, Princess,” he said, twisting her princess status into some kind of crime, “as you can see, this is not the Pandemonium you are looking for but a just-started new colony, Presley’s Pride, dutifully registered under Iberium regulations on Cuzco.

“You have no business here. If you do not have enough reaction mass to reverse course and boost out of this system, you may divert to the nearest gas giant and refuel.

“If you approach this planet, I will assume that you are hostile and take appropriate actions. Be aware, my ship is not unarmed,” he ended, giving Kris a stern, captainly scowl.

Apparently, his sensors had not yet advised him of the size of the lasers Kris was now powering up on the
Wasp
. She would love to see the reaction on his face when they did, but strongly suspected it would fall between their brief talks. From the way Chief Beni was working his boards, he would soon have a report on Thorpe’s guns. Kris could wait on that.

NELLY, WHAT ABOUT HIS CLAIM ON PRESLEY’S PRIDE?

ALREADY SEARCHING THE DATA DUMP WE GOT ON CUZCO. YES, THERE IS A PRESLEY’S PRIDE. HOLD IT! THAT SYSTEM IS ALL THE WAY OVER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ASSOCIATION. THEY HAVE NO CLAIM ANYWHERE NEAR HERE.

Nelly opened a small window on the main screen. It showed where they were, the six planets in the Iberium Association, and, some fifty light-years from Pandemonium, Presley’s Pride.

Kris allowed herself a deep scowl. “Captain Thorpe, not for the first time, you seem to have a problem telling the truth to me. Maybe even to the crew you are skippering. Presley’s Pride is a long way the other way from Cuzco.”

Kris paused to let that sink in on those who would be listening to it a half hour from now on Thorpe’s command.

“The
Wasp
has aboard her the grandson of the founder of Pandemonium, as well as fifty containers of cargo purchased for this planet. We are going to make delivery. I suggest you cause me and my ship no trouble as we go about our lawful business.”

With that bombshell, Kris cut the commlink.

The ship’s clock said it was noon, and Kris was hungry enough to be glad of it. “I’m headed for chow. Captain Drago, call me if we get any more message traffic from my old friend. Chief Beni, you’re eating with me in officer’s country.”

Putting her best smile on, Kris headed for the wardroom.

11

Captain Drago would have preferred one galley and mess for the
Wasp
. However, Gunnery Sergeants have definite ideas about propriety. Kris did not make the mistake of disagreeing with Gunny when he said, “This ship needs an enlisted mess.”

Having lost that argument, she was in no position to disagree when Professor mFumbo insisted his boffins needed their own lounge for professors and pub for technicians.

On the
Wasp
, there were plenty of places to get a hamburger.

Kris settled at an empty table in the wardroom after selecting a light lunch. It didn’t stay empty for long.

Captain Drago took a seat across from her. “What do you think is going on down there?”

Kris tested her salad. The lettuce was showing its age. She had not been willing to take anything on board from Xanadu and really was hoping to buy some fresh produce and meat here.

“I could only guess,” Kris said. “What say we wait for more to go on before we start shouting ‘ready, aim, fire.’ ”

“That’s nice to hear,” Drago said. “Rather startling coming from a Longknife, but nice to hear.”

“Kris, is this a ‘filibuster expedition’?” Nelly asked.

Kris chuckled. “I don’t know what one of those things are, so how can I accuse anyone of doing one”?

“I found it in my research,” Nelly said. “Back in the nineteenth century on Earth, freebooters and mercenaries would put together an armed expedition in a wealthy country and go off to a poor one and take it over, loot it, and either leave it or keep running it. Could that be what Captain Thorpe and company are doing here?”

“Very good research,” Kris said, knowing full well that her computer was going far beyond what usually passed for a computer search. . . and doing it after setting up the search conditions herself. Nelly was a growing girl. And a surprising one.

Did this come from teaching a twelve-year-old?

No way to tell.

“They’ve got an ex-Navy captain running it,” Captain Drago said. “And I’d bet money that tight-beamed message to the deck was to trigger pullers. Sure fits the bill.”

Kris nodded as the piece easily fit into the jigsaw puzzle Pandemonium had suddenly become. “And no doubt Chief Beni will have a full report on the armament of Thorpe’s command.”

“Yes I do,” the chief said, setting a hugely loaded tray down at Kris’s left elbow.

“He’s in zero-gee orbit,” Beni started, only after stretching his mouth around a mightily stacked hamburger. “He’s only running a trickle off his reactors. Yep, he has two reactors though he’s doing his level best to hide one of ’em.”

“And guns?” Captain Drago and Kris asked as their patience wore out. “Has he got anything charged?” Kris finished.

“Full capacitors for two pulse lasers and a long popgun, size on either unknown,” the chief said.

Drago let out a low whistle. “Your former captain sounds like someone eager to do unto others before they do unto him.”

“Something I noticed before,” Kris breathed softly.

“Will we have to fight our way into orbit?” Drago asked.

“Too early to tell. Captain, please launch two probes, one for the jump to Xanadu, the other for this system’s other jump.”

“Load on them a report on what we’ve found?” Drago asked.

“Yes,” Kris answered.

“But there are no buoys for them to pass a message along to on the other side,” the chief pointed out.

“Thorpe won’t know that, will he?” Kris said.

“Sneaky, just like a Longknife,” Drago said, then started muttering into his commlink.

“What’s our sneaky Longknife up to?” Jack asked as he joined the table, taking the space at Kris’s right elbow. Their passenger, Andy Fronour, took the seat on his right.

Kris quickly brought Jack up to date on Thorpe’s armament.

“So he’s hot and loaded. Sure you wouldn’t like to come back in a few weeks with, say, a half dozen cruisers?”

“Nelly found a word I’d never heard of,” Kris said. “What does filibuster mean to you?”

Jack took a bite from his club sandwich and studied the ceiling for a moment. “In politics, that’s what the minority party does to slow down your old man. Or, on old Earth, it’s a bunch of jolly optimists with too much time and firepower on their hands going down and helping the poor stay poor.” Jack swallowed his bite. “Let me guess, the last one applies here.”

Drago shook his head. “This Presley’s Pride thing. It’s off to hell and gone the other side of the Iberium Association. Are they planning on stripping this place and setting up there?”

“The pilgrims who settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Earth, thought they were heading for Virginia,” Nelly said.

Kris shrugged. “Whether they rechristen Panda to Presley and say ‘oops, we took a wrong turn,’ or haul everyone over there, it’s not going to be very much fun for them.”

“What are you going to do?” Fronour asked, not looking all that interested in what little food he’d put on his plate.

“That is something we’ll have to think about carefully as we do this approach,” Kris said. “Having you here, however, gives us a lot more options when it comes to calling Thorpe’s bluff. The real question is, can we do it without getting a lot of people killed in the process?”

“But if you run for help,” Fronour said, his voice shaking, “there may not be anyone here when you get back.”

“Yes,” Jack whispered softly, eyeing Kris.

Kris weighed all she’d learned so far. Then added in all she’d done to complicate her former captain’s own tactical situation. . . and decided it was still too soon to make a call.

“What does Panda look like?” Kris asked. “Chief, you have any good planet pictures yet?”

“We’re learning more by the moment, but it’s only starting to take shape. Nelly, could you show what we have?”

The computer heliographed a map onto the top of the tablecloth, but it left much to be desired. Was that a terrain feature or a drop of soup left behind by a previous diner?

Kris applied her finger to said item and found it soup. Even with that knowledge, it was none too easy to get her spinning gray matter to factor out the blob.

Captain Drago retrieved a roll of plastic flimsy from beside a stack of readers next to the wardroom couch. Unrolled, the meter-by-meter square quickly became a map of the entire planet.

“Where’s the populated section?” Kris asked.

Andy pointed, and Nelly zoomed in the map to show a bay off a large ocean in the northern temperate zone and a river running inland. Beyond that, it was hard to tell yet.

Andy began to fill them in. “The place we settled in is covered with what we call ‘broom trees.’ Tall things, fifty to a hundred meters, with thick bare trunks and all their foliage at the top. It’s not much use, trunk is tougher than steel. Can’t mill it. And what passes for leaves can’t be eaten. We burn them out, as well as the swamp bush on the ground below, and plant it with bramble berries. Nasty stuff the local animals won’t touch but the goats love. After a few years of the berries and goats, we’ve got the beginnings of a human-usable topsoil, and we seed it with microbes and worms and plant it in a base crop not all that different from what you saw on Xanadu.”

“Let’s see what I can do with that,” Nelly said. “All this greenish purple sounds like your broom trees.” A huge block of the map leading up to an inland mountain range took on a light crosshatching, and the map zoomed in closer on what was left.

Along the river leading in from the landing bay and its various tributaries, several holes in the crosshatching showed clear, with a surrounding set of short black lines.

“Those are the burned but still-standing trunks of the broom trees,” Andy supplied. “It must be late in the day, you can make out their shadows.”

Jack nodded, his lips getting tight. “Not the place I’d want to set a lander down.”

“The homesteads are in the clearings,” Andy said, fingers going over the very centers of the arrangements.

“What about towns?” Kris asked.

“Not many. Landing hasn’t grown a lot, ’cause we’re mainly moving away from it. Grampa has picked up sticks three times since we first got here, selling out to folks that had more money than patience for building a place. Most of us Fronours are out here,” he said, pointing at one of the tributaries that wandered off to the northeast, a low ridge between it and the rest of the slowly growing population of Pandemonium. Its northernmost boundary was marked by a long line of smoke from a fire.

“You still expanding?” Kris asked.

“I’d imagine so. We’re not the only ones.” Andy’s finger roved over the western and southern boundaries, where fires still burned, as well as several large broom-tree areas that had been left behind bordering cleared land. “It’s fall, and that’s when we burn.”

“How long does a fire usually take, from the time you set it until it burns out?” Kris asked.

Beside her, Jack nodded as his fingers traced over the fire line, then searched the terrain features beyond it. They came to rest on a small lake several klicks north of Fronour holdings.

Andy blinked in thought, then spoke slowly. “The broom trees store a lot of water in their trunks. You light the scrub under it for ten or twenty yards wide, say a mile or two long, then see how hot the fire gets. On a normal dry day, the fire catches and spreads for forty or fifty yards before it dies down. Usually, you can get two, maybe three, strips of that before the rains start and the fire goes cold.”

“How long between lights?” Kris repeated her question in a different way.

“Three, four days,” Andy said, then finally understand what Kris was getting at. “Three or four days ago, things were normal on Pandemonium and people were going about setting fire lines.”

“So if we’d gotten here four or five days ago,” Captain Drago said slowly, “Captain Thorpe would be the one doing the approach under our guns.”

“We still wouldn’t know what he was up to,” Kris said, “and probably be even less prepared for the first broadside.”

“There is that,” Drago said.

“So what are you going to do?” Andy pleaded.

“Find out more about this picture,” Kris said, turning to the man. “If I turn my Marines loose on your planet, it will quickly become a small vestibule to hell. Let’s make sure we’re visiting Hades on the people who deserve it.”

Andy looked at Jack, then back at Kris, his face draining of color as he took in the cold heat of their meaning. “I meant for you,” he said, stumbling, “I mean, I thought you’d help us.”

“We will, Mr. Fronour,” Kris said. “But you must realize, the help we bring is never cheap.”

While the farmer gnawed on just what was coming in answer to his cry of need, Kris decided lunch was over. She folded her napkin and rose. For the questions she had now, the bridge was the place to find the answers.