“Yeah,” came back at her.
“Are any of them here? Can you bring some of them to me?” That bought Kris time, but not as much as she hoped for. Several of the judges lived within a couple of blocks of Tranquility Road and had sat out the recent unpleasantness in their basements.
An hour later, Kris was staring at four of the kindest-looking grandmother and grandfather types she’d ever hope to meet. “You’re the local judges?”
“We never got a lot of business,” one gray-haired grandmother said. “Most of the time, the constables were able to talk things down.”
“Though some divorces could get messy,” the bald man at her left elbow put in.
“We did have a serial killer once,” the other elderly woman added. “That was a sad case. We had to shoot him.”
“We need to hang these murderers.” “Rapists, too.” “Hang them all,” came from the growing crowd outside the iron fence.
Around Kris, her Marines were getting edgy. Her guard corporal had added two more squads to the detail protecting her. The Marines guarding the stockade full of former henchmen eyed the growing mob and the milling prisoners and seemed none too sure who was the most dangerous to their princess.
Lieutenant Stubben passed down the guard line, and it resolved itself. Half faced in. Half faced out. All had their weapons on sleepy darts.
Kris decided that nothing was gained by stretching this out. “Your Honors, aboard the Wasp I have a retired judge. Francine Nola sat on the High Court of Wardhaven for many years and has handled all kinds of cases. May I suggest that tomorrow she join you in impaneling a court to resolve the legal problems the late occupation of Kaskatos created?”
“That sounds good to me,” from the gray-headed judge seem to settle the matter for the four of them. They stepped into the crowd, spotted friends or the children of friends, and began to either persuade them to their decision or scold them into accepting it.
Kris was glad to see that one off her plate.
Or so she hoped.
Over the next week, matters ground their way along slowly. Judge Francine had a strong distaste for capital punishment. She’d cited Kris’s father from the bench for his tactics that kept hanging on the table throughout the trial of the men who kidnapped and suffocated Kris’s kid brother Eddy. Still, she’d joined in the decision that saw them hang while swearing she’d never be a party to judicial murder again.
Yet her court found itself hearing truly horrendous cases, fully supported by witnesses and the best high-tech evidence that Kris’s Marines and Navy techs could provide. After one particularly gruesome case involving painfully young girls as the victims, Francine went looking for Kris.
“I’m supposed to be retired. I’m supposed to be stargazing. Instead, you’ve got me sitting on the bench fighting to keep down the coffee and toast I limited myself to for breakfast.”
“I’m sorry,” Kris said, throwing herself on the mercy of the court. “The locals need you.”
“God love a duck, but they do. These nice little old ladies never heard of anything so . . . rude. I think that’s the worst word they have in their vocabulary. Rude!”
“Thank you for helping them . . . and us. Do you want to go back to Wardhaven on the Surprise?”
“No, I do not, young woman. But I do want to get off this planet and go chasing stars. You hear me? I want some good time on the ship’s telescope to just lose myself in the stars.”
“As soon as this is over,” Kris promised.
They did have some luck. A potato crop came in early on the plantations down south. Nelly did the job of coordinating trucks to get most of the crop up north, where it was desperately needed.
Then, to Kris’s dismay, the Surprise showed up.
It did not have the improved body armor Kris was hoping for, but it did have container after container of famine biscuits . . . all wholesome and bland.
“But we’ve got something else as well. Five hundred million frozen fish embryos,” a very enthusiastic young woman gushed as she sat in Kris’s office. “They grow rice here, right. You drop these embryos in the rice paddies. They eat the bugs, slime, fertilize the rice with their droppings and when you’re ready to harvest the rice, you have a fish crop, too. These fish will eat anything!”
Kris eyed Captain St. Helens of the Surprise. “Where’d you get this woman?”
“She’s a fish biologist, hired by the Food for Millions Foundation. This is her first voyage out from Wardhaven,” St. Helens explained.
“They’ll eat anything,” Kris repeated.
“Yep,” came right back at her.
“And if they escape into the local streams?”
“That would be very bad,” the woman said, shaking her head. “You can’t allow that. They’ll outcompete the local breeds in nothing flat.”
The optimistic fish biologist still didn’t seem to get the picture. Kris spoke slowly. “We’ve got desperate people doing desperate things to get their next meal on the table for them and their families.”
“I’ve got designs for fish caging,” came back at Kris without even a pause.
“Penny,” Kris shouted, “will you take this woman out to a farm and let someone talk some sense into her.”
Penny’s head appeared in Kris’s makeshift door. “We need to talk, Your Highness. Could you have someone else take her out?”
If Penny was “Your Highnessing” Kris, they really needed to talk. Kris mashed her commlink. “Jack, could you detail a Marine to escort our new fish biologist out to a rice farm so she can get an education on what happens when everyone is starving. Make sure your Marine knows nothing about ecology. Otherwise, he’s likely to shoot her.”
“I think every Wardhaven school kid had ecology in the sixth grade,” Jack said back. “But I got one or two that never learned a thing in school who will probably do.”
“Take our optimistic fish girl to the Annam plantation. They’re Buddhist and very patient.”
“I think I’ll go make sure my drop ships aren’t having any problems delivering food,” Captain St. Helens said, and dismissed himself back to the Surprise.
“Penny, tell me why we need to talk, and keep in mind, it’s been a very bad day in a way-too-rough week.”
“And it will get worse,” Penny said, slipping onto the couch in Kris’s dirtside office.
“Then let me go first,” Kris said. “Talk to me about the pirate captain we captured.”
“He wasn’t a pirate captain, just a wannabe,” Penny said, cutting in.
“A wannabe?”
“His logbook shows he was third officer on a tramp freighter coming in horribly overloaded with refugees. And yes, we checked his papers out with St. Pete, and they verify them as accurate.”
“Can we trust any Peterwald records?”
“Probably not, but we got the query off and the answer back fast enough that I don’t think anyone had a chance to change the main record. The crew are all singing the same songs, hired by the locals to run a ship they didn’t have to bring in cargo they didn’t own. The one thing missing in this picture was the ship.”
“Somebody had to know what they were going to do with the ship.”
“Belou said Jackie knew just the person to set him up . . . but she wasn’t telling him anything until she needed to. I get the feeling she didn’t trust her pinky finger to know what her thumb was doing.”
“Do you have Chief Beni going over her computer?”
“Yes, Kris, but you know that old story about the deputy being saved by his big belt buckle taking the bullet.”
“My grampa Trouble has a buckle he claims did that very thing for him.”
“Well, the computer around Jackie’s neck took a direct hit from one of the rockets. Trust me, computers don’t do the belt buckle bit all that well. There were parts of her computer all over. Parts of her body all over, too. Wasn’t much to bury.”