“Some along the shore, but I don’t remember any in the middle of the lake. Not back when I could still swim out here.”
“We’ll draw reaction mass out here, if you don’t mind,” came from the flight deck.
The dock was a substantial affair. Waiting on it was an electric-powered jitney with a half dozen seats that two people could share if they were friendly. Kris, her team, and the scientists filled it up. The driver dismounted and offered the wheel to Granny Rita and started hoofing it back to wherever he’d come from.
Baggage was light. Even Abby had only brought one steamer trunk. The Marines formed up and prepared to march wherever it was they’d be barracked.
Except for the two who took the seat behind Kris when Jack gave them a curt nod.
“Jack, for once I’m on a planet where nobody knows me. I’m safe.”
“You just went on planetwide television and bragged that you were our war leader. Commodore Rita, tell me honestly, are there never any murders: Alwa on Alwa, human on human, or, God forbid, Alwa on human.”
“We do have the occasional aberration. The Alwans carry out capital punishment in a most bloody and attention-getting way. And it’s been televised since they adopted that technology from us.”
“I rest my case,” Jack said, arms folded across his chest, “You don’t go anywhere without me, and I don’t go anywhere without at least two Marines, one of them female.”
Granny was in the jitney’s driver seat. Kris and Jack were snuggled in close beside her. With everyone aboard, she put it in gear, without letting the conversation lag.
“He won’t even let you pee by yourself.”
“Well, Granny, there was this one time on New Eden where they did their best to kill me in the ladies’ room,” Kris had to admit.
“I remember this one time when Trouble got taken by slavers in the men’s room. Embarrassed the hell out of him. Do you know Trouble, a Marine when last I saw him?”
“I have the questionable honor of having Great-grampa Trouble as a relative.”
“How in God’s name did that happen? I mean him live long enough to have a kid?”
“His first daughter married your little Alex.”
“They did? Good God, what a match that must have been. How are they doing?”
“She died in a car accident shortly after my dad was born.”
“Accident?” Granny asked suspiciously.
“My personal guess is that there was Peterwald money behind it, but the truck driver died of a heart attack a week after the accident, before the investigation was even close to done.”
“Peterwalds and Longknifes. Is that feud still going?”
Kris sighed, wondering how much to say. “Let’s make a long story short by just saying that King Raymond I and Emperor Henry I are not at war. At least not when I last heard.”
“There are advantages to being all the hell and gone on the other side of the galaxy. Thanks for dropping in. You’re helping me remember why I so enjoy it here.”
The jitney moved quietly and at a pace the Marines marching behind it had no trouble keeping up with. There was little traffic. A few other electric rigs shared the road with wagons pulled by beasts only slightly smaller than a house. Admittedly a small house, but still, Kris would not want to get into an argument with them over right of way.
However, they moved along quite docilely.
“Who or what are those?” Jack asked, apparently confident the answer to that question fell under the purview of his responsibility for Kris’s safety.
“We call them oxen,” Granny said. “They are the closest things we’ve got to beasts of burden. The Alwans raised them for food. An entire flock of them might throw a celebration and eat an entire one. Live. Or live when they start. They think it’s great fun to race after the thing and strip a nice steak-size chunk off it with their beak.”
That brought silence in the jitney for a long moment.
“So they’re a bit more bloodthirsty than they’ve let on,” Penny said.
“Where prey animals are concerned, yes. Among themselves, they are the most courteous, kind, and gentle people you could ever ask to meet.”
“So I keep being told,” Jack muttered.
“Amanda, Jacques,” Kris called back. “I think your work is going to be more important than we thought. It’s just a guess, but I’ll bet that back in their past, Alwans were a lot harder on each other.”
“That is a good supposition,” Jacques said. “They developed all this ritual display as a way to settle things without bloodshed. The flock that did it first would cut down on their internal losses and be stronger against the outsider. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.”
“You two check it out and try to find out how close to the surface the old ways are. Amanda, do you and Nelly plan on passing vocabulary back and forth between you to grow Nelly’s dictionary?”
“Yes, every night,” Amanda said.
“How about adding a short report on anything you’ve learned?” Kris said.
“That’s red with blood?” Jacques asked.
“Or even hints of it,” Jack said.
“Mais oui, mon Capitaine,” Jacques said with an informal salute.
“Penny?” Kris said.
“Read you loud and clear. Iizuka Masao and I will keep our eyes peeled for the snake in this paradise.”
“Kids, I can understand where you’re coming from, living with all the politics of humans. Remember, I survived the Unity War. I used my pregnancy with little Alex to help get Ray through security so he could kill himself and President Urm. Thank God it didn’t go down that way. Trust me, I’ve lived with these folks for eighty years, and you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I think the folks on Santa Maria lived in harmony with the planet three hundred years before the all-controlling computer noticed them. If Ray and his former Marines hadn’t stumbled on them at the same time . . .” Penny let the oft-told tale drift off.
Granny sighed. “And we do have the aliens out there hell-bent on killing us all. That’s bound to ruffle a few feathers in the Associations. Not everyone is a ready-to-be-stuffed elder. Some of the newly chosen elders are surprisingly young and open to thinking outside their tried-and-true ways. Okay, okay, kids. You do what you do best. Just be sure to copy me on any reports you send to Kris or Jack. I may have a perfectly logical explanation for what you think is a bloody red hand.”
“Offer accepted,” came from a half dozen human voices.
The two Marines maintained a stoic silence . . . and a watchful vigilance.
9
They came to a halt in front of a two-story adobe building surrounded by a wide, red-tiled veranda and a grove of trees.
“This is Government House,” Granny Rita said. “I do not live here despite the opinions of both of my late husbands. They have let me maintain an office, however. I must admit, though, that of late, before those nice pills you gave me, I was feeling kind of puny and not raising nearly the hell that I had been accused of.”
She grinned broadly, “I am so looking forward to getting back to normal.”
A delegation of a dozen humans and five Alwans filled the veranda. One middle-aged woman stepped forward and offered Kris her hand. “Please tell me that you haven’t turned back the clock for Rita. I can’t tell you how hard we’ve worked to run it down.”
“Kris, this is Ada, my best friend and constantly disgruntled coworker. She’s the new official chief cook and bottle washer. If you need anything, and I’m in the head, ask her for it.”
“I’m the elected Chief of Ministries,” Ada corrected. “Everyone except Rita treats me like I’m the boss,” she said with a sour grin that edged up around the ends as she let go of Kris’s hand.
“It sounds like your chain of command is as much a Gordian knot as mine,” Kris said.