“I’ll take the front seat,” Penny said.
She slipped herself between Grampa Trouble and the driver, who turned with a grin, and said, “My, Krissy. The Navy life is not agreeing with you.”
It was Harvey! He’d been the chauffeur at Nuu House since before Kris was born. It was he who took her to games when she was too hungover to care, much less play decently. He was also the one who likely turned Kris in to Grampa Trouble and turned her life around.
“It’s so good to see you,” Kris said as she settled into the middle of the backseat, between Jack and Colonel Hancock. She snuggled next to Jack, letting the colonel have half the backseat of the big sedan.
“It’s good to see you too, little one,” Harvey said, the only one who still called a six-foot-tall Kris “little one.” “You had me and the missus worried there for a while, but I kept telling her, ‘That’s a Longknife they’ll find hard to kill,’ and you proved me right.”
“It was way too close, Harvey. Too many good troopers didn’t make it back.”
“They were soldiers, child. They knew the risks when they signed on to follow one of them damn Longknifes. Their words. Not mine.”
“Where are we going?” Grampa Trouble asked.
“An old war buddy of mine has a place in the mountains. We haven’t much kept in touch, just at the odd reunion or two, but his boy was on the Mercury, one of your courier boats, Kris, one that came back with the transports. The boy was furious to miss out on the fight, but his da told me he could hardly put in words how glad he was to get the kid back in one piece. Anyway, they are both fans of yours, youngster, and he was glad to give me the keys to the lodge; no questions asked and none answered. It will be a cold day in hell that anyone connects the two of us old farts.”
“What about this car?” Penny asked. “Can they trace it to the hills?
“Not bloody likely. Its GPS is back on the workbench in the garage. It needs adjusting. I’ve got one in the car that my grandkid got ahold of at a swap rally. This squawker has nothing to do with a Longknife.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say this car was full of people who weren’t very law-abiding,” Colonel Hancock said primly.
“That coming from you, sir.” Harvey growled, as only a disapproving noncom can to an officer. Still, he headed down the road.
“I will say now, and I will say it to the day I die,” Colonel Hancock said, “we were taking fire from the crowd. I saw one of my Marines fall. I don’t care what the record says about the farmers having no weapons and none of my Marines being hit. My eyes saw a different picture from what the court heard.”
“I believe you,” Grampa Trouble said.
“You do, sir?” Colonel Hancock clearly hadn’t expected that.
“We should have sent a regiment to cover the trouble on Darkunder,” General Trouble said. “The decision to cut the force down to a single battalion was made somewhere in Earth high command. Ask who did it, and you’ll get a vague runaround. That riot hit you at the height of the devolution debate in the Society of Humanity Senate. If your situation wasn’t politically manipulated, then no soldier has ever been hung out to dry for the benefit of a political agenda.”
“Hearing that from you, sir, a lot of stuff suddenly makes sense.”
Kris was glad to hear the relief in her old CO’s voice. She was gladder still to have time on her hands. She burrowed into Jack’s arms and found herself relaxing as she listened to his heartbeat. Just listened.
Very relaxing.
Except when a police patrol car passed them going the other way or overtook them. But the cops were going somewhere else and not interested in a shiny blue sedan with what looked to all appearances like a family out for a drive.
They skirted Wardhaven City on the beltway before heading out into the countryside. Kris remembered campaigning for her father among the farm communities. Usually they went for him and were delighted to see the young Kris out husking for her father. Then there had been the time someone poured a pail of milk over her.
Politics wasn’t always a gentle sport.
The drive stretched as the road climbed past foothills toward the snowcapped mountains, which first could only be glimpsed, then began to dominate the view when they crested one of the ever-higher ridges. The air took on the crisp taste of pines and open sky. Most of the trees were Earth transplants, but now and again, there would be a hearty stand of blue native hardwood, waving their now winter-bare limbs against the gray sky.
Kris had spent a summer hiking mountains like these. She told Jack. He shared that he’d been a counselor at a youth camp high up in these mountains. To her delight, she found they shared a love of high places and crisp, free air.
It surprised Kris that after serving beside Jack for so many years, she was only now discovering that about him. But, she told herself, she shouldn’t be. They’d spent their time plotting how to stay alive, or how to foil this or that attack. There had never been time to talk of less urgent matters.
Inside, Kris winced. This was only an interlude before both of them did some damn fool and deadly thing, like invading Grampa Al’s supersecure fortress past security he bragged was the best in the worlds. Considering how blocked Nelly was at the moment, he likely had a point.
The stray thought flitted across Kris’s mind. If she turned herself in on the condition that she and Jack be sent back to Madigan’s Rainbow, would they do it? Would she do it? If she had Jack with her, she certainly wouldn’t be tempted to crawl back into a bottle. Not with Jack handy and available for crawling into bed with.
But they’d had the chance to send the two of them into exile together, and they’d chosen to separate them as too dangerous a pair. Having escaped once, what were the odds they might reconsider their options?
Very likely they’d lock the both of them in the deepest dungeon they could find on planets as far away from each other as human space allowed. Kris found herself shaking her head.
“What are you thinking, honey? You look so serious,” Jack asked.
“I was wishing this drive would never end, but I know it must,” she said in half truth. Her dark and muddled thoughts could wait for some quiet walk through the woods and hills once they got where they were going.
They turned off the main road onto a gravel road that rapidly lost its gravel and gained potholes. Lots and lots of ruts and potholes. Harvey slowed the car down, but it still bounced from one rut to the next.
Kris didn’t mind. It gave her an excuse to hold on tighter to Jack.
Finally, they pulled into a small clearing. The lodge turned out to be a small A-frame structure with an attached garage. A huge stack of wood against the garage, three logs deep, promised that tonight’s fire would be real and likely critical to their not waking up tomorrow as icicles.
Harvey popped the trunk. “You’ll all need to lend a hand to get everything inside. I brought you a week’s worth of chow and some clothes for you, Princess. They should fit Penny as well.”
“Are we going to be left afoot?” the colonel asked.
“Nope,” Harvey said. “There’s a car in the garage. It belongs to the sergeant’s kid. He usually stores it here when he’s out spacing. They had the schooners that the princess used for courier ships going around to all the solar systems in human space, the ones we never use, dropping off minibuoys. Something drops into those systems, we’ll know real quick about them. Now the schooners are doing the same to the systems surrounding our space. If something comes visiting, we’ll know.”
“It sounds like Grampa Ray is at least paying a little attention to what we found out there,” Kris said with a scowl.
“Kris, Ray hasn’t spent a day since you got back without thinking about what you found,” Grampa Trouble said. “I know he’s not doing what you or I think he should. I’ve told him that enough times now that he heads somewhere else whenever he sees me coming. He is, in his own way, trying to get us ready for what we all suspect is headed our way.”