Kris chose to ignore the confused place this was taking her. She had enough problems, and today was only forty-six minutes old.
“Ship’s computer, can you raise the Iteeche?” Kris asked.
“Contact is being attempted. The Wasp is sending the contact signal King Raymond I used that led to the initial talks at the Orange Nebula.”
“And?” Captain Drago asked.
“No reply.”
Captain Drago frowned for a second. “Ah, Princess, why are you talking to my ship’s computer and not your Nelly?” Nelly was notorious throughout human space for her superiority to other computers, personal or otherwise.
“I had to turn her off,” Kris admitted.
“Off?” Jack got out first. “You don’t ever turn Nelly off!”
“She had the Greenfeld cruisers sighted in. Was ready to fire on them. Something about protecting Cara. It was either let her start a war or turn her off.”
Kris eyed said cruisers as they reversed ship and began decelerating toward the jump point. They’d still be going at a pretty good clip when they passed through it. That was their problem.
“Nelly also was using ‘ain’t’ and ‘bastard,’ ” Kris added.
“You really need her to have that talk with your auntie Tru,” Jack said.
Kris sighed. “She’s way overdue.”
“Yes, Princess, but what do we tell this Iteeche? ‘Follow me’?” Captain Drago asked.
“No,” Kris said. “Not unless your ship’s computer knows the proper form of the pronoun ‘me’ or we might insult whoever that is and start a war on that alone. Nelly and I did a term paper in Iteeche just for fun my senior year of high school. Course, Nelly had to translate it for the teacher. We got an A.”
“We need a translator just now,” Jack said. “You willing to wake Nelly up?”
“Not while we’ve got Greenfeld cruisers in our sky,” Kris said. “Captain, can your computer say something like ‘Follow in our wake.’ ” Examination of shattered Iteeche cadavers had hinted that they were a lot more recent in their transition from sea to land. Grampa Trouble got away with saying that to the first Iteeche shipload of negotiators.
The ship computer found that line in some history and sent the message. There was no reply, but the Death Ball altered course and accelerated at one gee toward the sun.
Sulwan modified her course to swing her engines out of a direct line of fire from the cruisers and kept the one-gee acceleration.
Kris reached for a workstation and held on steady as her inner ear took a while to adjust to the twisting course, made worse by the occasional jinks up, down, or over.
Sulwan was not a trusting soul. Not with Chief Beni reporting that the cruisers had fully charged lasers.
Through all this, the Iteeche Death Ball followed the Wasp like a stray puppy followed a four-year-old kid dropping hot-dog bits of encouragement. Was it pure chance that its course also increased the distance between it and the cruisers?
And edged kind of behind the Wasp.
Captain Drago studied his board, seemed satisfied, and said, “Lieutenant Longknife, you are relieved as Officer of the Deck. Please get off of my bridge.”
“Captain, I’m your gunnery officer. If someone on the Wasp is to shoot at those Greenfeld cruisers, it should be a serving Wardhaven officer,” Kris said, turning to a vacant bridge station and tapping it in three places. It started lighting up as an offensive-weapons control station.
“One of the few things you and I agree upon,” the captain said, and mashed his commlink. “Lieutenant Pasley, please report to the bridge.”
Which Penny did, five seconds later. “I was already on my way,” she said as she slipped into the station chair at the weapons board before Kris could.
Kris scowled down at the other active duty Navy officer on the Wasp. “What’s that leave me to do?” she mumbled to herself.
“The hard stuff,” Captain Drago said, making a shooing motion with both hands. “I’ll handle the Greenfeld cruisers. They only outnumber and outgun us. They’ll never outclass us. You need to make friendly with your pet computer. I really feel the lack of her input. Oh, and there is that Iteeche. Screw matters up with them, and we’ll only wish the Greenfeld cruisers had blasted us out of space with their first shot.”
3
Kris would have much preferred a straight-up fight with a pair of Greenfeld cruisers. Tough odds, but manageable.
The Iteeche Death Ball was a greater threat . . . with the ambiguity of a ticking time bomb. It might go off now. Or later. The only certainty was that it would go off and make a mess of her entire day.
And she was facing the Iteeche without Nelly. She’d never headed into a fight with one arm and one leg in a cast. Or just flat cut off.
What a mess.
Well, few things didn’t get better when shared. Kris mashed her commlink. “Will the princess’s staff please report . . .” No, with the Iteeche in the mix, this was no time to call a meeting in her boring conference room. “. . . to her Tac Room.” There, that had the proper lethality for a council of war. It was the same room, but it had deadly all over it.
“You drop in, too, Captain, as soon as those cruisers are out of our sky,” Kris told Drago as she left him to his own and full devices.
“Will do, Your Highness,” Captain Drago answered, with just the right nod to her royal status from his aloof post as contract captain of this not-supposed-to-be warship.
Kris headed for her conference/Tac Room.
Chief Beni was there first. The wall to Kris’s left as she entered now matched the main screen on the bridge. At a glance, Kris could see how the dance was going as the Greenfeld cruisers made their way out, and the Iteeche Death Ball edged in close.
Kris breathed a sigh of relief even as a part of her brain screamed, What’s wrong with this picture?
“You’ve got to be nuts to be glad to see human cruisers leaving even as an Iteeche gets closer,” said Colonel Hernando Cortez, formally of several military organizations and at the moment Kris’s prisoner and employee. That combination, along with the display, pretty much summed up Kris’s efforts to be a good Navy officer.
“Oh if Father or General Mac could see me now,” Kris said.
“They’d laugh their heads off,” Captain Jack Montoya said as he followed Kris into the room and took a glance at the board.
As Kris’s former Secret Service agent, he’d sworn to take a bullet for her. Now, as the chief of her security detail and commander of a Marine detachment, his job was no easier or, with Kris’s attitude toward “secure,” any more survivable.
“What you folks gone and done to get me out of bed?” said Abby, presenting herself in a fluffy housecoat, curlers, and huge slippers with rabbit ears on them. Occasionally an Army Reserve intelligence officer, this early in the morning Abby was clearly filling the role of Kris’s maid and born-again coward.
“We got company,” Kris said.
“I hope they’re nice folks that their mommas taught to mind their manners,” Abby said, scowling at the strange symbol on the display. “What’s that?”
“An Iteeche Death Ball,” Jack said. “It followed the princess home.”
The colonel showed honest fear. Abby’s half-open eyes were suddenly quite open.
“Can we keep it?” came from the other pair of wide-open eyes, peeking around the Tac Room’s door.
“Cara, what are you doing up?” Kris asked the twelve-year-old softly. She was in a pink nightshirt that displayed the gyrations of the latest preteen heartthrob. At least the sound had been broken in the wash . . . or so Abby claimed.