“Vicky, I can’t believe that you’d think that my grampa would do anything in the face of the suffering of your people but help them where he could.”
“Oh, Kris, don’t give me that. Look at how King Ray is soaking up planet after planet.”
“Planet after planet is choosing to join him,” Kris spat back. “No one’s been forced to join. It’s not our fleet that shows up in someone’s sky and proceeds to add it by force to our flag. Remember, I was there when your brother did his best to force Chance into your father’s hands. I did all I could to keep things peaceful, then fought side by side with volunteers from Chance when a fight was what your brother demanded. Admiral, you were there.”
“She is telling the truth, Vicky. I have told you so before.”
Vicky was on her feet, looking from the admiral to Kris and back again. She shook her head, rejected what they told her.
Kris stood to meet her face-to-face.
“Chance told my grampa to go jump and voted itself into the Helvitican Confederacy. I was there just recently. The Helvitican flag is what they fly.”
“No. No, I’ve heard about how you people fight. Six super battleships went after Wardhaven, and you blew every one of them to bits. Don’t tell me you people don’t fight.”
“Yes, Vicky, we fight,” Kris growled. “Remember who you’re talking to. I led that fight. I commanded twelve tiny patrol boats against them. I begged, stole, and scrounged anything I thought might help me. Somebody suggested that little system runabouts might confuse those battleships, be mistaken for our patrol boats long enough for us to get our shots off.
“The worst mistake in my life was letting those little boats join us. Those civilian runabouts couldn’t dodge or jink as fast as a fighting boat. We hadn’t mounted chaff dispensers on them or given them any foxers. When the fight started, they died and died and died, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“But let me tell you something. After the first attack, after we knew what it took to survive in that fight, there were these tugs that refueled my surviving ships. They’d watched the runabouts die; but every one of those tugs, everyone in their crews voted, insisted, that they join our attack. Do anything they could to give us a chance to get a killing hit on those battleships.”
Kris found she was in tears. “The people on those runabouts were volunteers, not even reservists. A lot of those runabouts were crewed by families that had signed up for the Coast Guard auxiliary, to rescue idiots who’d bought more boat than they had brains to operate. I attended a lot of funerals after that fight. One was for a man and his wife, their son and daughter. They came because someone told them their little runabout might help keep Wardhaven free. They died fighting for that freedom.
“Vicky, free men and women will fight to their last breath to keep their freedom. But don’t you ever mistake that fighting will for a willingness to take what isn’t freely offered.
“I swear by every drop of blood that’s in me that my grampa, King Ray, will ship you food and medicine if that is what you need. Just say the word, and the ships drifting behind your station could be on their way to bring what your people are desperate for.”
Kris finished, emotionally spent; she collapsed into her chair. Across from her, Vicky slowly settled back into her seat. She glanced at the admiral and raised a questioning eyebrow.
The admiral took a deep breath. “Kris, I believe that you believe every word of what you just told us. Never think that I doubt your sincerity. But I cannot help but see an idealistic young girl before me. Maybe you are right, and your King Ray would not seek advantage. Maybe he would send food and other aid. Maybe I, too, believe that he would do as you say. But hear this old cynic out.
“The cost of a few boatloads of famine rations is minuscule in the budget of 130 planets. But the massive amount of help that fifty planets would need is not a price to sneeze at. Are you even sure your granaries have that much to spare? And such an effort would strap even lush Wardhaven’s treasury. But even more to the point, is this a problem that your king needs at this time?
“I’m guessing that he sent you here with your makeshift squadron in an effort to do a little good on the cheap. It looks good on the news. ‘Look at all the nice things we are doing in your name, Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer. So sad about those poor refugees. Now on to the next story.’ But if the cost zoomed through the roof?” The admiral shrugged and left the thought hanging for a moment before going on.
“But that is only the tip of the iceberg. If you really enter into the Greenfeld tragedy, where do you stop? You saw that on Kaskatos. You just wanted to deliver some food. Between sunup and sundown you ended up conquering the planet. Where is your Penny, the daughter of a cop? Or that colonel you picked up at Panda? Something tells me you left them behind to work with the locals on putting together a constabulary and a militia. I know I would have.
“Do you honestly think that your Wardhaven would not be drawn into a morass even as you tried to do just a few good things?” Finished, the admiral leaned back in his chair, his hands limply upturned on the table in front of him.
“So,” Kris finally said after the silence had stretched long, “the best thing I can do is help you solve your own problems your own way . . . and get out of Dodge as fast as I can,” Kris said.
“Yes,” said the admiral. “A while ago, you said you were open to any suggestions for how we might solve whatever the problem was that we were talking about. No one came up with a better idea. Like you then, Vicky and I are all ears for something better. Something with less suffering attached. Neither one of us is sure that our little attempt at this solution won’t end up with our heads on pikes,” the admiral said, and even managed a chuckle.
“So, let me bring matters back to where we were before this little detour. How shall we go about finding out the truth of St. Petersburg’s economy and the real distribution of its military production?”
19
“How do you strip away a facade of lies?” Kris asked.
“Without the cops hauling us off to jail . . . or worse?” Jack added.
“I’ve heard tell,” Professor Scrounger rumbled, “that the truth will set you free. It’s been my experience that it can’t do much of anything without a helping hand or two.”
Vicky nodded. “I know it’s not going to be easy. Just on the planet below us there are a half billion hungry people. The infrastructure is a mess. There are at least four major population centers, none of which is talking to any other, and none of them is really interested in seeing my sailors or Marines march through their streets. At least they aren’t shooting at us. Not lately.”
Vicky glanced at Chief Meindl; he gave her an approving nod.
“Nelly, could you give us a map, please?” Kris said. “I think better if I can see something.”
A lovely seascape at sunset on the left bulkhead swiftly changed into a map of the planet below. Most of the human presence on St. Petersburg spread around an inland sea someone had aptly named the Middlesea. A large peninsula jutted out into that sea; the city of St. Petersburg was located about halfway down it. The whole thing reminded Kris of something.
Then it came to her. While the peninsula looked nothing like the Italian boot back on old Earth, the blend of sea and land did have the look of the Mediterranean of humanity’s home planet.
St. Petersburg was about where Rome was. Off to the west of the nonboot was a river about where the Rhone was in France. Here the city at the mouth of it was Kiev. Almost directly south of it, on the opposite coast, was Sevastopol. The mountains behind it were actually called the Atlas Range. Far to the east, where the Nile would have been on Earth, was the River Don, with a huge estuary and the city of Moskva.