Just in case, the chief had tapped into the vehicle registration database. “Just a light tap,” he insisted. He found a similar truck and quickly modified the rear and front license plates to match it.
“If we’re stopped, this won’t be the truck they’re looking for,” the chief said.
“Oh, good,” Kris said. “Can I say, ‘This is not the truck you are looking for’? I loved that classic movie, and I’ve always wanted to say that line.”
“You may get a chance,” the chief said, studying his black box, then making it disappear into what once again looked like a serious beer belly. “There’s a traffic checkpoint up ahead.”
“Keep your trap shut,” Jack snapped at Kris, then shouted out the window to where Abby and Gunny sat on the truck bed with three Marines. “Get ready to look hangdog and out of work.”
“Ooo-Rah,” came back softly.
Vicky had been right; Greenfeld’s military was way too white. Not a single Greenfeld Marine was dark enough to pass for any of the locals Kris had seen so far around Sevastopol. What was it about Greenfeld that caused it to draw its dominant power people from Earth’s old northern European stock? Before she was introduced to this mess on St. Pete, Kris would have guessed that the Peterwalds had only allowed immigration from certain sections of Earth. Now it was clear to Kris. Greenfeld only limited access to power to people whose great-grandparents came from those sections.
Now the devil was playing his own tune and demanding payment for years of bad choices.
As forecast, they rounded a corner and found themselves joining a small line of similarly dilapidated trucks, waiting their turn to be checked over and passed into a city that was just starting to emerge from the morning fog.
When they pulled up to the checkpoint, Kris confronted four men in civilian clothes, their only badges of office red armbands with LA GUARDIA embroidered in green. Oh, and the inevitable machine pistols slung over their shoulders and held at the ready.
Kris gave them the most empty-headed smile she could manage and kept her mouth shut.
Two of the men came around to Jack’s window to question him. He gave short answers in a language only half-English that seemed to satisfy them.
The other two guards stayed in front of the truck and spent a lot of time eyeing Kris and laughing among themselves at their private jokes.
Kris couldn’t translate a word of it. That didn’t mean she didn’t know what was going on.
She allowed herself a worried smile as she considered the men’s reactions if they found out the woman they were ogling had a Navy-issue automatic and could have plugged them both between the eyes before they got a shot off. Or could break all four of their arms and legs in anything close to a fair fight.
Kris held the thought of what she could do . . . and shyly edged closer to Jack and half hid behind his arm. He glowered back at their leers, but they ignored him and kept cracking jokes Kris did her best not to hear.
Abby was having her own problems in back. One of the guards supposedly checking the bags of corn they were carrying to market somehow managed to flip up her dress. She jumped to her feet and launched into a tirade that smoothly blended English Kris didn’t normally hear from her maid, Spanish Kris didn’t understand, and violent hand waving that left nothing to doubt.
The guards backed off, laughing, and waved them through.
“What are they saying about us?” Jack demanded as soon as he had the truck in gear and the checkpoint in his rearview mirror.
Chief Beni’s black box was out again. Gunny’s hat included an antenna he kept aimed, along with his smile, at the roadblock.
“They’re wondering why you’re taking so many pretty girls to market. You hear that, Abby? Girls! And they’re already complaining about the load of pigs behind us. I don’t think they’ve been alerted to look for anything in particular.”
“That would be nice,” Jack muttered. “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, kid.”
Jack had banned the use of ranks, titles, and any other honors until they got back upside. He seemed to be getting a kick out of calling Kris kid and girl. He’d called her other things in that language she didn’t speak.
KRIS, YOU WANT ME TO TRANSLATE HIS SPANISH?
NO, NELLY. I THINK IT’S BETTER IF I DON’T KNOW.
YOU’RE PROBABLY RIGHT, almost got Kris to change her mind.
Kris answered Jack’s put-down with a sniff while she regretted her decision in high school to take a computer language rather than Spanish.
“You will never use a computer language,” Nelly had told Kris, even then. “You humans are way too slow. Just tell me what you want, and I will make it happen.”
Nelly had been right; Kris never wrote a line of code during the whole course . . . not even in class. Nelly made a habit of answering any question before Kris could even get a start. It had been an easy A.
Now Kris was paying for it in so many ways.
“Vicky couldn’t come down here. Not one of her officers could pass for Hispanic. None of her Marines either. Who else could do this?” Kris said.
“Me. The chief here. Abby. Gunny. We. Don’t. Need. You.”
Jack had a point. The only response Kris had was stubborn denial. “I will come in handy when we find Maggie.”
“If we find that woman,” Jack snapped.
“We will find her,” Kris insisted.
They drove on in silence.
Cara was getting way too tired of the silent treatment. The grown-ups were just busy, busy, busy. Since they’d arrived at the station, they never had any time for her.
It was so boring!
Dada was nice; the computer made learning fun. But you could only take so much healthy learning before you wanted to choke on something.
The crew was pretty cool. They’d let Cara look over their shoulders and learn all kinds of things. Cara was pretty sure she could run the Wasp all by herself. The engineering watch had even let her stand a watch with them. She’d checked all the readings and made sure everything was in the green.
Course, it had been an in-port watch and the teakettles . . . that was what real ship engineers called the reactors . . . had been just maintaining minimum power.
Still, Cara had stood the watch.
She’d also followed the deck watch around as they did their duties. When the Wasp made port, the pier’s automatic tie-downs were activated by the bridge. If you just listened to the bridge crew, you’d think that was all there was to it.
The deck watch showed Cara just how wrong those prima donnas were. Each of the tie-downs had to be fully locked down by good old Swedish steam. That meant real sailors applying their backs to these huge cast-iron wrenches to lock down the ties. Once they finished, there was no chance that someone might accidentally sit on the wrong place on some bridge console and break the ship loose.
Before they undocked, the deck crew would have to “single up the line,” and use the same iron wrenches to take off the safeties. Cara was learning a lot about the ship that she would bet that even Princess Kris didn’t know. Probably even Aunt Abby.
Take, for example, the amidships tie-down. It wasn’t like all the others. Air, net, water, and sewage lines came over with that tie-down. That made it a whole lot bigger than the rest. “You could almost use this puppy as a gangway,” the chief told his new sailors. “If you don’t put the rat catcher up, those filthy beasties will.”
One of the younger sailors eyed the passageway, taking its measurements. “Cara wouldn’t even have to bend over to walk through there to the station,” he said.