“Well, there was all that noise,” Cara started, “And then you shouting Battle whatever, and people flying down the halls. I knew they wouldn’t let me on the bridge,” the youngster admitted, quite indignant, as she edged into the room. “But if something really fun happens, you always come here. So I waited, and you all came.” She ended with far too bright a smile for this ridiculous hour of the morning.
“The young woman is a first-class observer,” said Professor mFumbo, leader of Kris’s technical and scientific team. With no other observation, he settled into his place at Kris’s table, not at all surprised to be sharing it with a child.
Or . . . if the tenured professor was pressed to express an opinion on the matter . . . another child.
Kris glanced at Jack. He wore a poleaxed smile as he shrugged. How could a twelve-year-old girl have the entire ship eating out of her hand? Kris did not have fond memories of her twelfth year. She’d crawled into a bottle to escape the mourning that was tearing her family apart after little Eddy’s death.
It appeared that fate had decreed that Cara’s twelfth year be as good as Kris’s had been bad. Then again, Kris would not swap for Cara’s first eleven years.
Kris stifled a yawn and weighed the option of having the child banished to bed. She found the odds of her entire retinue joining Nelly in mutiny far too high.
So she concentrated her attention elsewhere. “We have about an hour before the Greenfeld cruisers exit the system. Call it a hunch, but I’d bet dollars to doughnuts that this Iteeche gets a whole lot more talkative once we’re alone.”
“Do Iteeche often get more talkative with you, Your Highness,” Colonel Cortez said, “when you are alone?”
“Don’t know all that much about Iteeche,” Abby said, “but I’ve known a man or two to act that way.”
“What do we know about the Iteeche?” Jack asked.
“A lot less than we knew an hour ago,” Kris said bitterly.
Jack raised a sympathetic eyebrow at that, but most just stared blankly. “I had to turn Nelly off,” Kris said plainly.
“Why?” came from around the table. Except for one twelve-year-old who jumped to her feet and began insisting at the top of her voice that, “You can’t do that. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t.”
Kris waited until Cara stopped for a breath, then snapped, “I turned her off because Nelly had dialed our lasers in on the Greenfeld cruisers and was about to blast away. Not even Nelly can declare war on Greenfeld. We’ve all sweat and bled too much to keep that peace.”
Deep silence, even from Cara.
“Why?” Professor mFumbo asked softly in his deep voice.
“Nelly was afraid Cara might be hurt by their lasers,” Kris said.
Deeper silence.
“Just how much does Nelly know about the Iteeche?” Jack said, finally breaking the silence.
“She holds all the research I’ve done on the Iteeche since the fifth grade,” Kris said. “Oh, and she can speak Iteeche . . . at several levels. Imperial to equal. Imperial to inferior. Warrior to warrior. Warrior to superior, and merchant to superior, inferior, and equal.”
“The language is that hot on who you are?” Abby said in disbelief.
“And you better get it right, or you can get suddenly dead,” Kris growled. “Grampa warned that every Iteeche of any rank carries a sword and is only too quick to use it on anyone who flubs their grammar.”
“No trade pigeon or something like that?” Colonel Cortez asked.
“Several Iteeche and human prisoners served as translators for both Grampa and the head dude the Empire sent to talk to him. Several took sword strokes, and one lost an arm for blunders in grammar. Or maybe it was what they said. Hard to tell.”
“And Nelly knows the language,” mFumbo said.
“About as good as anyone in human space. Definitely better than anyone aboard this ship, Professor, unless you got a specialist I don’t know about.”
The ebony-faced man shook his head. “My understanding of our survey mission was that the Empire was one place we would steer clear of.”
“That was mine, too,” Kris said. “But it seems to have steered for us. So ignoring our linguistics problem for a moment, do you have anyone among the boffins who could run some diagnostics on my trigger-happy computer?”
The professor had both hands up, palms out, and was shaking his head well before Kris finished. “Miss Longknife, I have several computer experts who dream of being present when the real breakthrough in artificial intelligence finally comes. Many of them look upon you and your experimentation with your personal computer as a possible source for just that awaited day. But no, none of them would dare touch what you have around your neck. Several of my boffins are attempting to duplicate what you’ve done with your Nelly, but none of them have to date invested either the time or the money that you have. To put it succinctly, Nelly is your computer . . . and your problem.”
“But we need Nelly if we’re to avoid some Iteeche taking our heads off for a misplaced modifier,” Jack said with a wry grin. “Your Highness, you do have a tendency to open your mouth and start a war with anyone across the table from you.”
“Thank you so much for your vote of confidence,” Kris said, and finished with a most sincere, “I will try to avoid going down in history as the cause of the Second Iteeche War.”
“I’m just trying to keep you alive, Princess,” Jack said, denying her the last word.
“It seems we need to turn Nelly back on,” mFumbo said.
“But how do we keep the little darling from shooting from the hip the next time she thinks Cara’s in danger?” Abby added.
“I didn’t mean to cause trouble,” Cara said. She’d been sitting very quietly in her chair, doing her best to be small. What with her latest growth spurts, she was almost as tall as her aunt Abby. Small was not something she did easy. “Maybe if I said something to Nelly,” Cara offered.
Leaving the future of her ship and its crew, along with the rest of humanity, in the hands of a kid did not make Kris’s bunny jump. Not even a little.
“Let’s think about that for a while,” Kris said, and changed the subject. “Without Nelly, what do we know about the Iteeche?”
“Not much,” Colonel Cortez said, “except they are very good at killing humans.”
“Were, eighty years ago,” the professor corrected.
“You think they’ve gotten less efficient?” Cortez asked.
“I know we’ve gotten better at killing our fellow humans,” Jack said.
“On that topic, may I toss in something?” Chief Beni asked.
“Toss away,” Kris said.
“As I go over their ship, I’m not getting anything in the higher frequencies where our Smart Metal™ gives off a kind of background hum. The Iteeche are doing a very good job of jamming almost everything, just like my grandpa said they did back in his war, but they’re not jamming up there, and they are not humming themselves in those frequencies.”
“Are you telling me that they don’t have Smart Metal™?” Kris asked. “Can we score one for us hairless monkeys?”
“Seems that way,” the chief said. “And there’s something else, Your Highness, and I hope you won’t be upset with me.”
“Why?” Kris asked. She’d learned long ago with this team that it was unwise to dispense general absolution too quickly. They were oh so good at coming up with interesting variations on what other people thought impossible.
Almost as good at it as her.
“When we jumped into this system and our buoy like vanished immediately,” the chief started.