So saying, Vicky made her way to the bar. Kris excused herself from the admiral, gave a worried Jack a nod to keep him in his chair, and followed Vicky.
“You have a nice collection of whiskeys,” Vicky said, eyeing the bottles behind the bar.
“This, and several of the restaurants on board are private concerns. The managers order their own stocks.”
“Private enterprise and free markets on even your warships. Wardhaven amazes me.”
“The Wasp is a rather unique blending of private and Navy,” Kris said.
“With a captain and part of the crew in black ops pay, I hear.”
“Something I’ve tried to change but can’t seem to. I suspect the problem goes all the way to my great-grandfather, the king.”
“Even a Longknife must find her power limited when she tries to apply it to another Longknife, huh?”
“If we’re going to talk about family, I may need a drink,” Kris quipped.
“In a way, it is family that I want to talk about. I need your help finding someone on St. Pete and bringing her safely to the Fury.”
Kris frowned. “Can’t you just make a phone call and send a shuttle for her?”
“If it were that easy, don’t you think I would have done it already?” Kris had never heard Vicky so frustrated.
“Sorry. What’s the problem?”
“St. Pete’s the problem. It’s a mess. People who live here and fled there. People there have had to move here or yonder. The net is down, or up, or not to be trusted. I’ve had to be careful in my search for her. So careful that I can’t find her.”
Kris found herself with too many questions to choose from. She waited to see which ones Vicky would answer on her own.
“Doc Maggie was my pediatrician when I was small. She was the one who showed up whenever I was hurting. She was the one person I found who listened to me when I talked. So I talked, really talked, to her. When I grew older, she was the only woman I really trusted with my problems.”
Here, Vicky tapped her right breast. “Would you believe these puppies were late coming out. Hank kidded me unmercifully, and the other kids followed his lead. It was Maggie’s shoulder I cried on, and it was Maggie who gave me the only decent advice I ever heard before landing in the admiral’s command.”
Vicky paused, as if still unsure how much to let Kris into that secret place. “Kris, you’ve made your own family. Jack’s more a brother to you than a security chief.”
When Kris made to reject that observation, Vicky shook her head insistently. “You can say whatever you want to, but what I see with my eyes is a brother. And Penny’s the sister you never had. I’m not sure where Abby and that colonel fit in. Aunt and uncle, distant cousins. I don’t know. But they’re as much family as staff.
“And I need something like them if I’m going to keep my sanity. What little of it we Peterwalds get by with. I really need someone like Doc Maggie on my staff to give me some big-sister advice. I was never so good for myself and others as when I had Maggie to bounce ideas around with.”
Kris found herself nodding. She might or might not agree with Vicky’s observations about her own staff. Definitely, Kris hoped Jack didn’t look upon her like a kid sister. No, that wasn’t what she felt when she caught him in his unguarded moments looking her way.
Kris waved that thought away. She didn’t have time for all the questions that brought up. And right now, it was Vicky who was asking for help.
“I still don’t understand why you don’t just send out a call. Offer a reward for help finding this Doc Maggie,” Kris said, getting back to the problem at hand.
“Kris, people disappear or die around me,” Vicky said, letting exasperation fill her voice.
“Well, it would help if you didn’t kill them,” Nelly interjected.
“Nelly, shut up,” Kris snapped. For the moment, she’d forgotten that what she was hearing, Nelly was in on, too.
“Well, it’s true.”
“Nelly, I know where that OFF button is, and if you don’t butt out of this girl talk, I’m going to use it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” wasn’t nearly as contrite as Kris wanted to hear.
“Nelly has a point,” Vicky said, “but what she doesn’t understand is that it’s always been that way. I was ten. My best . . . My only friend was eleven. Heather didn’t join in with Hank and the others teasing me. She was my first, my best friend. We were walking by a ballgame one afternoon. Not paying any attention. We weren’t there for the game.
“Some guy hit the ball. It hit Heather before we even knew it was coming. It killed her!” Vicky seemed to run out of words. Maybe there were tears in her eyes. Quickly, Vicky blinked them back. Even now, she wouldn’t let Kris see her shed a tear.
Kris knew that a poor little rich girl could have it tough. She’d lived that life. Somehow, she’d never felt that rule applied to the vengeful Vicky. The lovely Vicky.
Kris promised herself not to keep making that mistake.
“I had other friends growing up,” Vicky went on. “Somehow, their dads always got transferred away from the Palace. You’d think they’d write, but they never did. Those were all childhood tragedies. It’s in the last couple of years that it’s gotten bloody.
“One girlfriend was hit by a car. A boy I liked was shot in a ‘hunting accident.’ Another committed ‘suicide.’ It’s dangerous to get close to me, Kris.”
“And if you let on you wanted this Doc Maggie brought in?” Kris asked.
“I figure there are a half dozen factions that would race out to kidnap her for ransom or kill her. That’s why I’ve had to work so hard not to have any of my searches traceable back to me. I’ve used borrowed commlinks that my Marines swiped from sailors. Stuff like that.”
Vicky finished with a sigh that the dead Tommy would have called pure Irish. Which reminded Kris that Vicky wasn’t the only one dangerous to get close to.
Of course, Tommy had died at the helm of his fast patrol boat, fighting one of those unidentified Peterwald battleships. That was different. Right?
Fear showed in Vicky’s eyes as the silence grew between them. “You will help me?” she pleaded. “It’s not like you haven’t done this before. You rescued your friend Tommy when my dad’s friend Sandfire kidnapped him.”
“Yes, I did,” Kris said. “And yes I will help you find your friend Maggie. I expect that Jack will have kittens at the thought of us leading a rescue team down to St. Pete, but if I don’t give him kittens every so often, he’d get constipated.”
“I wish I had a Jack,” Vicky said, glancing over her shoulder at the subject of their conversation.
“Jack is mine, girlfriend. You have to find your own Jack.”
“I know,” Vicky said . . . and quit batting those long eyelashes Jack’s way.
Fortunately, Jack was deep in talk with the admiral, and they were both concentrating on something Chief Beni and the Greenfeld lieutenant had brought to their attention.
“So, what do we do?” Vicky asked.
“First we crack open the rotten egg that St. Pete has become and see what kind of a mess it leaves us. For that I’ll need Abby. Never underestimate that woman.”
“So our file on you warns,” Vicky said.
“I’m glad your intel people got at least that right about me and mine. Nelly, listen up. Get me Abby.”
“You squawking?” came right back at Kris a second later.
“Tell me, old lady of mystery, was there any accounting and finance in that college education you picked up in your wicked youth.”
“You keep calling me names like those, and I’m gonna suddenly forget I even have a name.”
“Is everyone around you like that?” Vicky asked.
“Only the best of them,” Kris admitted, then went on. “Abby, I need you in the Forward Lounge. We need to reverse engineer someone’s economic warfare. You think there’s anyone on board that might help in such a project?”