“The Wasp will begin accelerating to 1.25 gees now.”
“We’re done?” Ron said, opening his eyes.
“All over.”
“That was easier than I expected.”
“Your ships have a harder go of it?”
“Ah, am I giving away more state secrets?”
“Don’t really see how it matters much.” Well, maybe if we were shooting Iteeche coming out of jumps. “I thought you’d captured enough of our ships or their wreckage that you’d have learned anything from us that would benefit you.”
“Why would we want to change the way we do things just because you did something different?”
“Or better.”
“Those who call you monkeys could hardly admit you did anything better than the wise Iteeche.”
“Well, there is that.”
“And if something is good enough, we use it. We don’t like wasting effort on the odd chance we might make it better. Like my translation machine. It was good enough for my chooser, Roth. It should be good enough for me. Yet you wear your Nelly. Smaller, faster, more flexible. You humans keep pushing to see if something can be better. You know there are Iteeche who would say you make no sense and waste your resources for no good reason.”
“I’ve been told I’m crazy before. But I keep upgrading Nelly anyway.”
“And I keep getting better and better, so there,” Nelly said, in English to Kris and Iteeche to Ron.
Which reminded Kris that she needed to tell Ron about the little detour they were making on their way to the king. As acceleration grew, and they took on weight, Ron let go of Kris.
“Did we make a good jump?” he asked as if hunting for something to say.
“We are where we want to be,” Kris said. “Those three bright stars in a triangle. They’re supposed to be there. I had Nelly find out the check stars before we made the jump.”
“And, among my many duties, I found them for her.” Again, Nelly spoke English and Iteeche out of opposite sides of her mouth . . . or speaker.
“You could show me some respect, Nelly.”
“I am being respectful. If you want to see disrespect, I can show you plenty.”
“Is your machine always like that?” Ron asked.
“I am not a machine,” Nelly pointed out, bilingual again.
“Nelly’s a computer,” Kris put in when she could. “Machines are kind of like dumb animals to her. She’s smart as well as smart-alecky.”
“And I have to translate snide remarks like that,” Nelly added, again in both languages.
“Ron, this seems like as good a time as any to tell you that I feel a really strong need to take Nelly to talk with the one person who can help me with her present strange behavior.”
“This is strange behavior,” Ron said, showing green and pink again. He might even have added a chuckle, but Kris wasn’t sure.
“Very strange,” Kris agreed.
“You haven’t really seen strange until you’ve been around the princess for a while,” Nelly told them both.
“Who is this person?”
“My auntie Tru, not really a relation, but a friend of the family since before I learned to walk. She’s a computer expert and helped me with my homework and persuaded me that I just had to upgrade Nelly every time something new came along.”
“A really wise lady,” Nelly added in.
“Whom you chose, as much as she chose you,” Ron said, showing solid pink now. “Does she live in Wardhaven?”
“She used to, but she’s retired and when we found—”
“The princess found,” Nelly put in—”
“A planet loaded with alien artifacts and relics, she kind of headed there to help with the exploration. It will be only a slight detour from the direct course to Wardhaven.”
“A planet that really has items left over from the Ancient Ones.”
“It’s a bit of a jungle,” Kris said.
“But some of the animals in that jungle might be descendants of one of the three species. Oops, was I not supposed to say that?” Nelly added, having thought better of her run-on mouth.
“One of the Ancient Ones!” Ron said, showing more excitement than Kris had seen from him since he arrived.
“If they are, they’ve devolved terribly. They really are more like monkeys rather than intelligent folk. They were throwing their poop at us the one time I ran an exploration crew through their jungle.”
Ron stood. “I must tell my advisors. This delay is not good. But to see a planet with remnants from the Ancient Ones, maybe even shared with one of them. That is exciting.”
“It isn’t when they drop their poop all over you,” Nelly added.
“Nelly!”
“Well, if you hadn’t been in a space suit, it could have messed me up something terrible.”
“I’ll put you in a plastic baggie if I go for a walk on Alien 1.”
“Does that mean there’s an Alien 2?” Ron asked immediately, pausing in his turn to the door.
“Yes,” Kris had to admit. But she added nothing more.
“Do you think we will be visiting it?”
“No,” Kris said.
“May I ask why not?”
“Because when the Ancient Ones walked away from that planet, they forgot to turn it off.”
“It’s that complete!”
“Yes, it is. But remember, I said they forgot to turn it off.”
“So?”
“Included in the things they left on was their defense system.”
“Oh.”
“We haven’t been able to land on the planet. Last time I heard, we’d lost five ships and three full crews.”
“Oh,” Ron said, now white as a sheet.
Kris headed them for Iteeche country, the two Marines trailing them. Ahead of them went the two Royal Marines who had guarded the door while they were inside the lounge.
12
Kris was back in the forward lounge as they approached High Chance station. If she’d had her way, they would have headed straight for the Alien 1 jump. However, two cruisers now guarded the jump, one flying Wardhaven’s colors, the other from the Helvetican Confederacy.
The people of the planet Chance below had voted not to join Grampa Ray’s United Sentients but rather the smaller confederacy. Something about not wanting to be too close to one of those damn Longknifes. It really wasn’t Kris’s fault. She’d only commanded Naval District 41 on High Chance space station for a couple of months. Hardly time enough to make a bad impression.
And she’d spent a big chunk of that time hunting for pirates and discovering two alien planets. Oh, and she’d also helped them stop a Peterwald takeover.
Kris had given up on justice in this world. Actually, on most of the worlds she’d visited.
But Chance did have some nice memories.
Not two minutes after the Wasp locked down to its berth on the space station, one of them followed Admiral Sandy Santiago into the lounge.
The Longknifes and the Santiagos went way back, to that incident that the tyrannical President Urm of Unity did not survive. Ray Longknife got the credit for killing Urm. His good friend Captain Santiago died getting it done for him. Since that day, the Longknife family had done what they could to make it up to the Santiagos. And Santiagos usually did the bleeding when the Longknife legend grew.
The first time Kris met Sandy Santiago, she’d been a captain, intent on seeing that a certain family tradition stopped with her. Then she got involved with Kris. So far, it had only cost Sandy a few broken bones. She was now an admiral, commanding Naval District 41 and doing a great job of it.