The fellow went eagerly.
Until he spotted Jack and his Marines.
Jacques had led the alien quite a bit away from the others, downstream and out of the woods along the edge of a grassy meadow. They’d set three string traps and were working on the fourth when the Marines stepped out of the woods ahead of them.
The young fellow took one look at the humans in military gear and bolted.
Jacques got a handful of his ratty uniform, but that was all he got. The man pulled away, leaving Jacques with nothing but fabric.
The naked anthropologist took off after his erstwhile friend with the Marines hot on his heels, but it was a short chase.
The young fellow raced straight for the stream—and threw himself headlong from the bank into a rocky stretch of water.
Jacques got to the bank and came to a halt. Jack wasn’t much behind him. Kris got the feed off Jack’s helmet camera.
“Oh my God,” Amanda prayed beside Kris.
All Kris could do was grit her teeth in frustration.
There, the bank was a good two meters high. The alien had thrown himself headfirst from it. Right at the rocks below.
Now he lay in the stream, his head smashed in, his blood and brains being laved by the water and carried downstream.
“I guess that didn’t go as well as we’d expected,” Jack said.
“Now what?” Jacques asked.
Kris let out a long sigh. She didn’t like what she was going to say next. She hated kidnappers. With Father and Mother, without a moment’s qualm, she’d stood there and watched as Eddy’s kidnappers swung at the end of their ropes. Hell, she’d killed kidnappers without so much as a second glance every time one of them made the mistake of crossing her path.
Kris gritted her teeth and said the words that made her a kidnapper.
“Jacques, go back to the group. Separate one of the mothers with a babe at her breast from them. Jack, set a trap. Sleepy dart the mother. Bring both of them up here.”
“Kris!” came from both men. Jack of all men would know how much of her soul this was costing Kris.
“You heard me. I am going to talk to one of these aliens. A mother with a babe at her breast is not going to kill herself. Bring one of them to me.”
“But sleepy dart her just in case,” Jack said.
“Yes.”
“And how do I do this?” Jacques said.
Kris did not need more talk. “We’ve watched the mothers go off into the bushes with you,” Kris snapped. “Do it again. Only this time, take her someplace where Jack’s got you covered. Then distract her. If you think you can get her to fall asleep after your fun and save Jack the fuss of having to sleepy dart her, all the better, but I want her up here tonight.”
“Kris Longknife,” Amanda said at Kris’s elbow. “You are a bastard.”
“I second the notion,” Jacques growled.
“I come from a long line of folks that only entered the church to bark and bite at the preacher’s heels. Tell me something about myself I don’t know,” Kris snapped. “Now, you’ve got your orders. Make it happen.”
“Aye, aye, Admiral,” Jack said.
Amanda said nothing as she stormed out of Kris’s day quarters and slammed the door behind her.
20
Kris bounced the baby on her hip. The little girl had been cleaned up, had a diaper on for probably the first time in her life, and looked rather cute in an outfit taken off a teddy bear.
Kris hadn’t asked who had a teddy bear this big, but she’d suspected from the hushed conversation she’d partially overheard that it had been offered up by one of the guys who worked the reactor.
Kris was under the impression that the reactor crew had to pass the highest psychological tests. When things settled down, she might have to look into that.
The woman had also been cleaned up and dressed in civilian clothes donated by one of the contract cooks. She was still asleep.
Jack had had to sleepy dart her. Her capture had not gone well.
It hadn’t been allowed to go as bad as the young man’s attempted capture, but still she’d spotted the Marines moving in even though Jacques had been doing his manful best to distract her.
Now she slept on the couch in Kris’s day cabin. Kris had Gunny go over her day quarters to childproof them. He’d called in the help of several young women Marines who removed a lot of objects that Kris would never had considered a hazard to a baby.
That just went to show what Kris knew about babies.
Now childproofed, Kris hoped her quarters were also alien-suicide-proof.
Jack, Amanda, Jacques, Penny, and Masao rounded out the group eyeing the sleeping woman. The military were in uniform, khakis all. Jacques suggested that the earth tones might soften their impression. Jacques and Amanda were in tan shipsuits.
“When do you think she’ll wake up?” Kris asked. The baby was getting fretful. “I think she’s hungry.”
“Check her diaper,” Penny suggested. “Is it wet or dirty?”
“You check it,” Kris said, and passed the cranky child off to her intel officer.
She made the required checks.
“She’s wet. Do we have any spare diapers?”
Jack pointed to a pile of baby gear on Kris’s conference table. “When Musashi fitted out the Wasp, they equipped us for humanitarian missions, per their law. We have all we need to take aboard and care for hundreds of civilians for a month. I don’t even think they charged us for the package. All their ships come equipped for kids.”
Penny went to do her duty by the little one, with Masao right behind her. From the looks in both their eyes, Kris suspected that procreation was contagious. Whatever Penny’s fears might be of bringing death and destruction in her matrimonial wake, this baby was pulling the two caregivers closer together.
The woman on the couch started at the sound of her baby’s fussing. Still, she did not rouse. Kris settled into the armchair across from the woman’s head and waited.
At the conference table, with the baby dry again, Penny put formula powder into a bottle of water and offered it to the little one. It took the nipple hungrily, sucked heartily for a moment, then spat out the bottle and began to cry. It was a full-throated wail, not at all tentative.
“I don’t think their kids like our kind of milk,” Penny said.
On the couch, the woman stirred. This time, she fully surfaced. She glanced around, eyes wide, then spotted her child and was off the couch and racing toward the baby before anyone could stop her.
Not that anyone did. Penny handed the baby off to its mother without a bobble.
Baby in hand, the alien woman quickly opened the top of her borrowed dress and offered a breast to her child. The little one greedily began to pull down lunch.
Only when the child was settled did the woman look around, eyes going wider still.
~You are on a ship,~ Nelly said in the language Jacques had used among the dirtside. Those on Nelly Net heard it in Standard in their minds. Masao and Amanda heard it from their own computers.
~This is not the ship,~ the woman said, eyes narrowing as she took the room in.
~No,~ Kris agreed. ~This is our ship.~
~Vermin do not have ships,~ was spat more than said.
Jack edged around to cover the door, one hand behind his back where he carried his automatic. Masao put himself between the woman and Penny.
Jacques slowly approached the woman. ~You have shared food with me. I speak your words. I gave you food to eat. You know what all of me looks like,~ he said, running his hands down his side.
~No. No! NO!~ she screamed and began to sidle away, eyes searching the room like a trapped animal desperate for any way out. She paused for a moment, then charged Jack, her hands out, fingers reaching with their long nails for his eyes.