KRIS LONGKNIFE: FURIOUS
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / November 2012
Copyright © 2012 by Mike Moscoe.
Cover art by Scott Grimando.
Cover design by Annette Fiore DeFex.
Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
ISBN: 978-1-101-61213-2
ACE
Ace Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
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Contents
Praise
Also By
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
About The Author
1
Princess Kristine Longknife studied herself in the mirror above the bar. She didn’t look any different. Her Navy blues still sported the two and a half stripes of a lieutenant commander. Why did she feel so different?
She sat in her usual chair at the far end of the bar. The next eight chairs were empty, by mutual consent of both her and the small crowd at the other end. A few misinformed men had entered her space.
One look from Kris, and they fled.
At the other end of the bar, quiet chatter rose and fell. An occasional joke brought forth bleary laughter. A deathly hush resided at Kris’s end.
The emphasis was on death.
Kris lifted her nightly liter of Scotch and swirled the liquid around, studying it in the faint light. This faithful soldier was about half-gone.
Kris poured herself another shot of the fiery liquid. There was no tremble in her hands. No sign at all that she had polished off the first half of her nightly allotment in the three hours since she had come off duty.
She downed the shot without tasting it. Some people waxed lyrical about the warmth of good Scottish whiskey as it passed from lips to stomach.
Kris hated the stuff.
To her it tasted more like something for cleaning paint-encrusted brushes, something you’d punish yourself by imbibing.
“Punish.” There was that word again. It seemed to come up a lot in Kris’s thoughts.
“Punish,” as in they’re dead, and you’re alive, and you ought to be punished for that state of affairs.
Kris poured herself more poison and drank it down. The last time she had crawled into a bottle, after little Eddy died, and she survived the kidnapping, the liquor at least did its job. It wrapped her in cotton candy and made the days easy to forget and deadened the terrors of the nights.
Now her nightly self-medication did nothing to tame the nightmares.
Well, she’d managed to show up at the squadron with nothing worse than a dull headache from the night before. And no, so far, she hadn’t let herself partake of the hair of the dog that bit her the night before. The fast patrol boats were puny, but any warship, no matter how tiny, could easily turn and kill a handler who did not treat her with respect.
Kris had killed enough already. She would not add more to her list of slaughtered subordinates.
Kris poured another shot and eyed it like she might some hostile alien cruiser. She’d had quite a few of them in the crosshairs of her 24-inch pulse lasers. Those she knew how to handle.
It was what you did after you’d won the fight that had Kris defeated.
She reached for her punishment.
“Auntie Kris, please come home,” left Kris clenching an empty fist.
A glance in the mirror above her head showed a thirteen-year-old girl in a tee that shimmered through the faces of some popular band. Her swirling floor-length skirt showed every color of the rainbow, and sparkled as well.
Kris closed her eyes against the glare; teenagers were going to go blind before they reached twenty if all those riotous colors stayed in fashion. The Navy officer turned to face her latest truant officer. “You can’t come in here. You’re under age.”
Cara, one of the few survivors of Kris’s company, gave her a short teen shrug . . . whatever . . . and shot the barkeep a quick, easy grin. He went on doing what he was doing at the other end of the bar, and Cara flounced over to sit next to Kris.
“It doesn’t seem that anything is really illegal on Madigan’s Rainbow so long as it doesn’t mess with one of the shareholders.”
The thirteen-year-old had gotten that right. The hired help could do just about anything on this benighted planet. Anything but upset one of the old farts who owned a share in the place. Inconvenience one of them, and you’d be on the next ship out.
Maybe inside with oxygen to breathe if you didn’t piss them off too much. Otherwise, maybe outside with not so much to breathe.
“You know, the day after I arrived, I tried to buy a share in this . . . place,” Kris settled for. Cussing in front of a thirteen-year-old girl seemed undignified. Besides, considering Cara’s background on New Eden, she likely knew far worse than Kris had picked up in her sheltered upbringing and years in the Navy.
“You did?” Cara answered, wide-eyed. “What happened?”
Warming to a conversation with someone who would let Kris ramble where she chose, the princess and major shareholder in Nuu Enterprises went on.
“I plunked down a credit chit worth two shares, dared them to say I wasn’t rich enough to buy into their little hideaway.”
“Wow,” was Cara’s innocent reaction.
“Then the planet manager let me in on a little secret. You don’t just have to have money; you got to be liked.”
“Oh,” Cara said. Even a teenager from New Eden knew the reputation Longknifes had in human space.
“Yep, any shareholder could veto any new applicant.”
“What happened?” was more a space holder than a question.
“An hour after the general manager sent out my application, she had a list of vetoes that was longer than her stockholders list.”
“How’d that happen?” Now there was honest puzzlement, rare in a teenager.
“Some people vetoed me twice. Didn’t want to risk their first veto getting lost on the net.”