The admirals nodded in various shades of noncommittal.
“How many of them were there?” Vicky asked.
“So far we’ve recovered all or major portions of 132 bodies,” Kris said. “Men, women, children. Elderly and babes in arms. There might be a few more out there. We’re still hunting.”
“How big was that ship?” Vicky asked. From the open mouths, she’d only beaten the admirals to the question by a moment.
“About the size of one of our courier ships,” Kris said.
“What have you got, ten people on those?” Admiral Krätz asked.
“Yes. When they were pirate schooners they used to cram twenty-five or thirty into them.”
“For a couple of weeks. Have you found any living quarters down on the moon?”
“Nothing,” Kris said. “All that’s down there are some digging and smelter gear. They were blown individually. But there’s nothing that looks like housing.”
“So they were living crammed into that ship,” Vicky said.
“Having babies and growing old together,” Kris added.
“Aliens,” Admiral Krätz said, shaking his head. “They are aliens even if they do look the most like us of any aliens we’ve found.”
“Will the contents of this ship be shared with our home governments?” Admiral Kōta asked.
The politician in Kris’s upbringing spotted the hot button in that question, but the fleet leader in her just shrugged. “I’m sending this cargo back to human space. Then I plan to continue my voyage of discovery. I expect to have more on my mind than who gets what of this mess.”
The Navy officers drifted up to a window that looked into an isolated room organized like an operating center. On one table a lone body was strapped down and laid out. Its chest had been opened and its organs removed. They now floated in glass jars.
“They’ve got everything we’ve got,” Kris said. “Different arrangement. Our guess is that they started walking upright about six million years ago, too. Give or take a few months,” she half joked.
“Can we go in?” Admiral Krätz’s head doctor asked.
Kris nodded. “We’re using level-three biohazard suits.”
The three doctors who had accompanied their admirals so far took their leave and headed into the operating room.
“Have you run a DNA check?” Admiral Channing asked.
“Yes,” Kris said. “They have DNA, but their base molecules are different from ours. My biologists are very excited. And no, they doubt there can ever be any interbreeding. Even if our plumbing can be made to rendezvous, the genetics just aren’t going to let it happen.”
“Kris, we need to talk,” Admiral Krätz said, waving his hand, “about all of this. Who gets what? Where do we go from here?”
“Yes, we need to talk,” the other two admirals agreed.
“Well, sirs, we have gravity on the Wasp. May I invite you to the Forward Lounge?”
12
Kris was halfway back to the Wasp before she noticed that it wasn’t alone. A new courier ship hung just off where it swung in space with the Intrepid. A large shuttle from the Wasp was just departing from the stranger and heading back to Kris’s ship.
“Nelly, get me Captain Drago.”
“I got him, Kris.”
“Hello, Your Highness,” he said cheerfully. “I was expecting a call from you.”
“What’s a strange ship doing off our bow?”
“There’s nothing strange about the Sandpiper. She’s here to replace the Mercury. The king thought we might need another courier boat.
“What’d it bring?”
“Who said it brought anything?”
“Admiral Crossie would not pay for a fourth courier ship if it didn’t carry something twisted and sneaky and, I don’t know, special for him.”
“See for yourself. Longboat 2 will be reeled in right after you.”
Kris was seated right behind the two bosun’s mates running the show. She watched over their shoulders as they attempted the new maneuver it took to land on the Wasp. Usually when a ship was in orbit, a longboat just nestled into a docking bay. But a ship wasn’t usually doing flips with another ship while both of them zipped along in orbit.
Now they did.
As it turned out, it wasn’t all that hard.
To watch.
The Wasp let out a long line with a loop at the end.
The longboat snagged the loop with a hook it now dropped from its nose. The hook was retracted once it had the loop solidly in hand.
Then the Wasp reeled in the longboat.
Easy.
If you didn’t have to do it yourself. Though neither of the youngsters piloting the boat said a word of complaint, Kris noticed both of them wiping sweat from their brows.
“Well done,” she told them.
“Piece of cake, Commander,” the senior of them said.
Kris waited while the admirals exited her launch. They were admirals, and she was a lieutenant commander, so seniors go first even if it is your flagship and you are a princess. Once aboard, she had Penny lead them to the Forward Lounge while she waited to see what surprise the unholy trinity had popped on her.
The next longboat docked with no more difficulty than the last. Some people were spending a lot of time in the simulator, no doubt. It took a while for the hatch to open, but when it did, who should clop out but Ron, Kris’s favorite Iteeche.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded, unsure whether to offer a hand to shake or see if she could actually manage a hug for something with four arms, four legs, and a whole lot of elbows and knees.
She did get both her arms around the trunk of her friend though it was a bit of a problem bending over his four-jointed pelvis. An Iteeche was not like the human’s mythological centaur. His body trunk rose from somewhere closer to his center of gravity, as befits a creature that swam for a lot longer in the sea and owed its ancestry more to something like a squid than to a quadrupedal land critter.
Ron hugged back, doing something that almost sounded like a human laugh.
“I could ask what you are doing here,” he said through the translator Kris had given him the last time he’d dropped by human space.
“I’m hunting for whatever’s eating up your scout ships,” Kris said.
“You are a far distance from where they went and did not return.”
“Well, yes. We call incidents like exploding scout ships a hot datum. They draw attention. We don’t want to draw any more attention to those spots. Anyone who comes nosing around them might keep nosing and bump into you. I want to come at them from the other way around and draw their attention this way.”
“You humans are very twisty in your minds. I think I like that.”
“Well, you arrived just as I and some of the fellow voyagers were about to hash over something that happened to us in this system.”
“Nothing bad I hope.”
“It’s me you’re talking to, Ron. I’m a Longknife. Bad things happen around Longknifes.”
“The way they do around Chap’sum’We,” he said, giving the ancient name of those who chose his chooser.
He paused to introduce Kris to those who had come with him. Teddon’sum’Lee Kris already knew. He still wore the gray and gold of the Imperial Iteeche Navy. The other wore black and red. Kris missed his name on the first fly, but Nelly promised that she caught it. He was from the Imperial Iteeche Army.
“No green-and-white advisors this time?” Kris asked.
“I do not speak for the Emperor,” Ron said. “Officially, I and my associates are still on an Iteeche scout ship. Depending on the outcome of this voyage, we will be welcomed with praise, or the Cup of Apology.”