As the door closed, King Ray looked up and down the line of Marines standing guard. Those who’d been inside were in formal red and blues. The outside ones were in full battle rattle. Ray’s back went ramrod straight as he faced the troops. “Marines, I don’t need to tell you that having Iteeche at Wardhaven, talking to me, is both an unusual and momentous event.” The Marines answered him with minimum nods.
“I also don’t need to tell you that it will complicate the life of an old soldier if this gets into the media. Even without pictures, I’m sure they’d all love to shout about this. I don’t want to have to answer those shouts. I need you to keep quiet. No talking to your wives. No talking to your girlfriends. No talking to anyone. Do any of you have a problem with that?”
“No, sir,” Gunny growled, followed only a split second later by the others.
“Good. Captain, you can dismiss most of these men. But if you will, double the quarterdeck watch. I don’t want anyone leaving this ship for a while.”
“Does that include civilians?”
“Civilians?” the king said, then corrected himself. “Oh, right, Kris has a batch of scientists aboard, don’t you?” he said, eyeing her as if it was all her fault.
“Yes, sir, but they all have reserve papers that I can activate and put them under the UCMJ.”
“Oh, I bet they’d love that,” Grampa Trouble said.
“They’ve already had their noses rubbed in those papers once or twice,” Jack said. “I can’t say they liked it, but they have gotten kind of used to it.”
“They should have known the danger of getting too close to a damn Longknife,” Grampa Ray said with a scowl.
“I’ve heard that bitch a time or twelve,” Kris admitted.
“Lock the boat down. No one goes ashore,” the king said.
“Thank God there are a few pubs in civilian country,” Sergeant Bruce muttered.
“There are!” the king said. “Good. Tell the barkeep that the first two pints for you Marines tonight are on me.”
“Better include the boffins,” Kris added, “or there will be hurt feelings. And maybe hurt jaws.”
Gunny picked off Marines to stand guard here and expand the quarterdeck. The rest left happy enough.
“Now, my princess, we need to talk. Me and you and maybe the rest of your team. And where is that little girl I saw quick-marched out of there?”
“I am not a little girl. I’m twelve and a half,” Cara pointed out.
“And getting quite an education it would appear,” the king noted. “What are the chances I could lock you up in a deep, dank dungeon somewhere on Wardhaven and throw away the key?”
Cara’s answer was a pouty face. Kris chose to verbalize one. “About the same as me having a full-fledged mutiny breaking out on my ship.”
“Oh, I see,” said the king. “She’s being spoiled rotten just like you were.”
“And for a whole lot better reason,” Kris added.
Grampa Ray tossed Kris a quizzical look, but she doubted there were enough hours left in the month to explain herself. The king shrugged, and asked, “Is there a place I can talk to you, and the rest of your team?”
“My Tac Room is just down that passageway,” she said, and led him there. A moment later, she found herself seated with her brother Honovi at her left elbow, her great-grandfather and king at her other elbow at the head of the table, and Grampa Trouble across from her. Jack, the colonel, Penny, and Abby arranged themselves along the table below her. Somehow, Cara ended up at the foot of the table grinning at the king opposite her. Which raised serious questions about whose end really was the head, but Kris decided not to address that point.
King Raymond began. “I was glad to get the word you were coming home, even if it did involve bringing an Iteeche with you. I’d just been thinking that I really needed your help.”
“Needed my help,” Kris echoed. “Something tells me that I’ve gotten too close to a damn Longknife.”
The chuckle from around the table came to a quick end as the king answered with a dry, “No doubt.”
Well, Kris had dumped an Iteeche problem on her great-grandfather. Maybe she should offer to pull one of his chestnuts out of the fire. “What kind of help do you need?”
“Trouble here remembered that you had a couple of friends in college from Texarkana. Robert and Juliet. Do you remember them?”
“Yes,” Kris admitted. “They were the only ones from that godforsaken planet, and when homesickness about killed them, they kind of came together. By second year, I never saw one without the other. It happened that way for a lot of kids at Wardhaven U who were far from home. Those two couldn’t be a problem.”
“They aren’t. Their folks are,” Grampa Trouble said.
“Isn’t it always the grown-ups?” Kris said with a theatrical sigh. “When will they ever learn to behave?”
“Not funny, Princess,” the king said. “Juliet’s a Travis, one of the five families that started up the planet. They were sick and tired of big cities and the city slickers who run them, so they set up Texarkana with a cadastral survey to start with. They based everything on a six-mile-by-six-mile-square township. A barony was thirty-six of those. A dukedom was thirty-six baronies. A duke had a seat in the House of Dukes and ran the place.”
Kris could still access Nelly on her local net. Nelly did the numbers for Kris, and also added that Crossie was not getting the Iteeche to say much to him. Kris started to smile at the admiral’s problem, then suddenly realized that the numbers didn’t mean anything. “Hold it, population size doesn’t matter?”
“Right,” Grampa Trouble said. “One township, one vote. One barony, thirty-six votes. The landowner voted the land.”
“Remember, these folks were tired of big-city ways. They figured the best way to make sure no one built a city was to give it no political say.”
“And it worked how?” Jack asked.
“Not all that well,” Trouble said.
“It worked fine,” Grampa Ray put in, “so long as the settlers were cattle ranchers and farmers from Earth’s Texas.”
“Space is big. How did Texarkana manage things for the cowboys?” Now Kris was remembering some of the hats and skirts and boots that Juliet had worn her first year. And she’d even talked a couple of girls into going horseback riding one weekend. The other girls were complaining for a month after that.
Juliet had taken to wearing pretty much regular college clothes after she and Bob got together. Suddenly Kris saw where things were going.
“So long as Texarkana was just one little cow town after another, they didn’t have any problems,” Grampa Trouble said. “But when we dropped in a load of workers from New Cleveland, things got interesting. Not immediately.”
“Right,” Kris said. “There was a war to be won. Didn’t you evacuate New Cleveland right after the Port Elgin Massacre?”
“Immediately after it,” Trouble said. “People were frantic to get clear of a potential battlefront. They crammed themselves into ships and took turns breathing until they got someplace safe, and Texarkana was about as far from Iteeche space as you could go. They started with next to nothing, but one of the second-generation kids had completed the mineral survey. The new arrivals knew where iron was, and water power, and in no time at all, the Dukedom of Denver was a going industrial concern.”
“Using the workers from New Cleveland,” Kris said. “I can’t remember Bob’s last name.”
“DuVale,” the king said. “His father is a plant owner in the Dukedom of Denver.”
“Let me guess.” Kris sighed. “On Texarkana, a factory boss’s son would never meet a Travis girl.”