“And if one of my bots gets isolated and captured,” Nelly said, “it is made of your fine Greenfeld glop, as you so technically defined it. I can contrive bots that will self-destruct in that event, leaving just a smear of very costly material that tells no one anything. Kris, I like this man. He’s as sneaky as you are.”
“Then let us see what we can do,” Kris said.
Planning got under way. An hour later, Vicky returned; a moment after that, Lieutenant Kostka followed her in. A Greenfeld senior chief was with him.
“Chief Meindl, so good to see you again,” Kris said.
“I should have known that you’d be at the center of whatever was going on,” the chief said, offering a salute.
Kris gave him a hug. “I worry about you, Chief. People get killed around Peterwalds and Longknifes. I’m glad to see you have avoided the usual fate.”
“She never gives me a hug like that,” Chief Beni muttered.
“Be glad she keeps you at arm’s length,” Jack said. “It’s safer that way.”
“He’s stuck with a Peterwald,” Kris pointed out. “They’re even more dangerous to be around.”
The chief took a step back. “So it’s lieutenant commander now.”
“They’re new,” Kris said, glancing at her shoulder boards.
“You command this ship, then?”
“No such luck, Chief,” Kris said with a sigh. “I’ve still got a contract captain running the boat.”
“Some might call him the flag captain,” Jack put in. “Commander Longknife is officially the CO of Patrol Squadron 10.”
“Congratulations, Commander,” Admiral Krätz said. “I saw the extra stripe, but I had no idea it meant command of a squadron.”
“It’s not much of a squadron,” Kris said. “And I’ve never seen more than two ships from it together in one place. They’re all like the Wasp, corvettes converted from merchant ships with just enough guns to put a quick end to any pirate ship. We carry a full load of cargo containers, like you saw on the Wasp. They let us fake it as a merchant, suckering a pirate in close. And the containers are usually full of famine rations. It’s really bad out there, folks.
“My grampa Trouble used to tell the story that people were so desperate to get away from planets near the Iteeche that they’d overload ships until they had to breathe in shifts. I thought it was a joke. But I’ve answered distress calls from two ships that broke down before they made it to one of the Sooner planets. No food, no sanitation, little oxygen. You have to see it to realize how bad it is.”
There was a long pause in the conversation after that.
“Do the containers of rations slow you down?” the admiral asked, bringing the focus back to something nautical.
“Not so far,” Kris said. “If we ever needed to really boogy, chasing or running as the case may be, we can ditch the containers and attach a beacon. We’re pretty small. Any real warship we run away from.”
“But you’re loaded with food,” Vicky said.
“We carry out a load to a starving planet. On the way out, we try to get a pirate’s attention. Once we’re unloaded, we usually head back for Cuzco to refill on biscuits. Then repeat the process.
“Admiral, Vicky, I know you have to be unhappy about having a strange Navy on your rim, but I assure you, PatRon 10 is spending more time in the shipping business than shooting. I think Campbell on the Dauntless is the only one of us to actually shoot up a pirate.”
“Didn’t you capture a pirate off Kaskatos? I seem to have heard something about that,” the admiral said, careful not to directly contradict Kris.
“It was just a system runabout,” Kris said. “It had a balloot full of reaction mass and bounced off the Wasp. No lasers, just personal weapons. Half of them only had machetes to wave. When the Marines in full armor went out the locks, it kind of let the air out of them.”
“But there are pirates out there. We are losing merchant ships,” Vicky said. “It’s not like there’s a lot of trade. I think part of the reason so many ships are laid up like those around St. Pete is the fear of being captured.”
Kris had listened patiently. She had sat on the one question that had haunted her since she first encountered the wreckage and flotsam of Greenfeld situation. She could sit on it no more.
“Vicky, what’s the problem? What is going on? I know I’m a Longknife and the ancestral enemy, but God in heaven, girl, things are a mess, and I’m doing my level honest best to clean up after it. Don’t I at least deserve to know what is actually happening?”
Vicky eyed her admiral. He couldn’t bear her question and focused his attention on the table in front of him. Kris was half-afraid that she’d shattered the growing trust between her and the young woman from Greenfeld.
She hadn’t intended that.
Just as Kris was about ready to take her words back, Vicky started talking. Her eyes didn’t rise to meet Kris’s, but she seemed unable to look up from her hands.
“We are in trouble. The glue that held 103 planets together has come apart, and we don’t know how to fix it. With the aid of the fleet, we can hold this or that fragment together, but even our fleet is too small to hold it all.”
Vicky looked up, met Kris’s eyes. “If you went down to St. Pete with a pocketful of Greenfeld marks, you couldn’t buy a beer. You couldn’t buy anything. St. Pete and half of our planets are back on the barter system. If you don’t have something to trade, no one will keep you from starving to death. If your mother or father was the wrong person, you can get killed right where you stand.
“Half our planets don’t have a central government anymore. They’ve got three or six or a dozen situations running things. Usually a warlord with guns. Maybe the warlord is a black shirt. Maybe the warlord just managed to get all of State Security’s guns. At first, my dad and I made the mistake of thinking that we could wipe out the cancer of State Security and everything would be fine.
“Big mistake,” Vicky said with a sigh.
“Dad thought he had corporate vice presidents that he could trust to keep things going on this planet or that one. Nine out of ten of them have set themselves up as rulers. The smart ones call themselves princes or viceroys. The dumb ones claim to be kings. Dad’s taken care of all of them so far.”
“It’s that bad,” Kris said in a whisper.
“When you were talking about shipping famine biscuits to the Sooner planets that our refugees are flooding, I had to bite my tongue to keep from asking you to send them to twenty of our planets. St. Pete’s one of them.”
“Why not?” Kris asked. “Why haven’t you asked for our help?”
“And let Ray Longknife know we’re in this much trouble,” Vicky spat. “Hell, Kris, you know he’d invade us in a second. Kris, the Marines you’ve got on your little ship could probably take over a dozen of our planets. Worse, the people would greet you as liberators.
“You know that Captain Thorpe guy that you chased away from that Sooner planet, what was it called?”
“Panda,” Kris said.
“If he’d landed the same bunch of roughnecks on St. Pete, it would be his. Kris, keeping this a secret is the only chance we’ve got.”
Kris felt kicked in the gut. Here she was, busting her butt, risking the life of her Marines and sailors to get help where they thought it was needed . . . and the Peterwalds were hushing up just how bad the starving and dying was because they thought Kris’s grampa would take advantage of the suffering for some political advantage. Kris refused to meet Vicky’s eyes.
Around Kris, the silence gathered and grew. No one said a word. Finally, Kris could be quiet no more.