Kris settled on her bunk and offered Vicky her desk chair as far from Kris as she could get in the small room. Still, the compartment filled with the smell of whiskey as Vicky found her way to her seat. She was none too steady, even in half a gee. The grand duchess settled in, took another swig, and said it again. “They’re all dead.”
“Yes,” Kris repeated. She’d already tried to put a hopeful spin on the thought. This time she let the ugly words lie there in all their morbid glory.
“One minute they were there,” Vicky said, and snapped her fingers. “Then they were gone. They didn’t even have a chance to shoot back. That monstrous alien ship just blotted them out, and they were gone as if they’d never been. A battleship, Kris. The biggest, meanest ship in our fleet.”
“Yes, I know,” Kris said. “It happens that way in a war.” Kris didn’t add that she’d faced battleships just as mean and made them disappear herself. That was for yesterday. Tonight, there was a different long list of dead to mourn.
“And you should know, Princess Kristine Longknife. You’ve blotted out enough in your time, haven’t you?”
So, Vicky did remember. Kris let that jab fall to the deck and lie there.
Vicky waved the bottle. “And it, like, wasn’t even really a war. Not yet, anyway. They hadn’t said a word to us. We hadn’t said anything but ‘Hi’ to them. Then suddenly, every laser on their ship is spearing the Fury, and boom, they’re all dead.”
“I took that for a declaration of war,” Kris said.
“So you could start killing them. How many do you think we killed, ten, twenty billion? You think that makes up for all my friends dying on the Fury?”
“Nothing makes up for the loss of friends,” Kris said softly. Not here and now. Not back then, either.
“But they weren’t your friends, were they, Princess Kristine Longknife,” Vicky said, taking another long swallow of the whiskey. “They were my friends. They were the only people who ever cared about Harry Smythe-Peterwald’s bratty little girl. They cared for me. They looked out for me. For the first time since I was eight, nine, I felt safe with them and their battleship wrapped around me. Do you know what that feels like? Do you know what that means?”
“Yes,” Kris said. “I think I do.”
“Yeah, you got this little tin pot to run you home as fast as they can make it. Run away. Nice way to go.”
Kris knew it was the whiskey talking. Kris knew she should just lie back and take it. That tomorrow when Vicky sobered up, she’d be all apologetic. Kris knew what she ought to do, but those were her friends and crew that Vicky was calling coward.
“You wish you’d stayed on the Fury? Died with them rather than being left alive to run away with me?”
As Kris expected, that brought Vicky up short. She took another long swig and seemed to think about it, as much as her alcohol-clouded brain could.
“No. Yes. I should have been there. I should have been with them, but I was afraid some damn assassin would put a bullet in my brain, so I ran away over to the nice Wasp full of strangers that most likely hadn’t been offered a kazillion dollars to kill me. Who’d have thought something this puny would be the safe place to be in a fight with something as huge as that mother. But then, this little twirp has Kris Longknife, princess extraordinary, and she looks out for number one. Don’t Longknifes always?”
Kris was getting sick and tired of being the butt of this woman’s survival guilt. She had enough survival guilt of her very own, thank you all very much. And it covered a whole lot more dying than that last battle. Eddy, Tommy, all those hopeful volunteers who’d followed her into battles and died, much to their surprise.
“You can take your survival guilt, Vicky, and shove it in that bottle, or anywhere else you care to put it, but don’t you dare lay it on me. I’ve got plenty of my own, damn it. You’re sorry you’re alive, and they’re all dead. Well, there are plenty of airlocks on the Wasp, and you can walk out any one of them if you please. I’ll even modify my report to show that you died fighting with all the brave souls on the Fury. You want that?”
“But they didn’t die fighting,” Vicky screamed. “They didn’t get a shot off. They were there one minute, edging out of laser range, and the next minute what looked like all the lasers ever made were cutting them to pieces, and they just blew up!”
Vicky broke down sobbing. “They didn’t even get a shot off. I watched them practice. All those sailors looked so brave and sure of themselves racing to their battle stations. They earned a fleet E for gunnery, Kris. They deserved a fight. Really, they deserved to go down fighting. Not swatted like some fly on a wall.”
Kris risked the fumes to cross the distance between her and Vicky. She knelt so she could put her arms around Vicky, hold her, and rock her gently as she sobbed.
Kris chose her words gently.
“It was just the luck of the draw, Vicky. It could have just as well have been Admiral Channing’s Triumph there as Admiral Krätz’s Fury. The battle squadron had marched and countermarched with first one, then the other in the lead position. I imagine Georg was tickled when the luck of the draw gave him the lead when they charged for the jump. But when they did the turn away, all the ships reversed at once, and that put the Fury in the trailing slot. There’s a reason that position is called coffin corner, and the aliens took advantage of it.”
Kris pulled Vicky’s face up to put the two eye to eye. The smell of the whiskey was overpowering and giving Kris a hunger that had claws in it. She ignored the craving in order to finish what she had to say.
“Admiral Krätz knew the chances he was taking. He took them willingly, like the fighting sailor he was. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. When we get back, the story of BatRon 12 will be told, and told truly. That is the debt of honor that we owe the people who loved and protected you.”
Vicky sobbed on for a few moments longer, then wiped her nose on her sleeve, and said, “But why did we live, Kris? Why did we live?”
Kris shook her head. “I don’t know. Yes, we were making like a bunch of rocks. But we were only ten, fifteen thousand klicks from the jump. If I was half as paranoid as those aliens seem to be, I’d have shot up anything anywhere close to my space. That’s a mistake I don’t think they’ll make twice. At least I won’t expect them to.”
It took a moment for Kris’s words to pierce the whiskey fog of Vicky’s thoughts. “So the luck of the draw got the Fury blown to bits and we got lucky and lived. It doesn’t seem fair.”
“Show me on your birth certificate where it says anything about fair. I’ve searched mine, and I can’t find that word on the front or back.”
Vicky laughed at that. A besotted thing that spewed as much phlegm and tears and used whiskey as sound.
Kris wiped her face and fought the urge to ask for a swig from Vicky’s bottle, which was down to just a bit of slosh.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come in,” Kris said, and was relieved to see Doc Maggie poke her head in.
“So this is where you got to,” the good doctor said. “I thought you and I were supposed to be having a wicked game of Scrabble. That nice man, Scrounger, has promised to bring around another fellow to join us. Are you going to make me stand up the best date I’ve had in months?”
“No,” Vicky said, struggling to her feet and letting the bottle fall as gently to the deck as half a gee allowed. When it became clear that the grand duchess would need help negotiating her way out of Kris’s cabin, Maggie came over and offered a hand.