“I’ll have Nelly look into that,” Kris said, then remembered Nelly wasn’t in any shape to look into anything. How was it that she hadn’t already moved heaven and earth to turn Nelly back on? The drugs were part of it; even if she tried, she could not work up a good worry about anything. Also, no one before tonight had let her get involved in anything that had her thinking about Nelly.
Was that intentional on her team’s part? Probably. How much longer would she stay down? When would it be time for her to get back on the horse?
It was kind of hard to ride any horse when she was tied to an electric set of wheels.
“You are quiet,” Ron said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No! No. It was me getting lost in thought. Something I do a lot of these days. What are you doing here? Spawning?” Kris said, trying to change the subject. “Do I need to warn the other girls about you swimming upstream?”
“Hardly. They use chemicals to keep this water so clear. The water is too harsh for anything to spawn, to live, to grow. But your water is so clear. One can swim in it without fear of being attacked out of the dark and deep. This is a joy to swim in. It is almost holy, this life is so, so . . .”
“Safe?”
“Yes. This water is safe. There is nothing to fear in it. Is all your water like this?”
“I could probably take you to a river stream. Most of them run fresh and clear. Of course, a bigger fish could be hiding behind a rock or in the shadow of a deep pool.”
“But if you had a child, you would hold its hand as it walked in the water.”
“I would hold its hand. I would teach her how to swim and be safe in the water. Yes, Ron, that is what a mother does.”
“That is why you take such care of Cara. Still, it was so strange for us to come across you in deep space out beyond the Rim with an immature one in your entourage.”
“She lost her mother and sister. Abby was all she had left. We took her in.”
“And her father?”
“I think he spawned and swam away.”
“So you are not always that different from us.”
“Don’t any of your adults keep an eye on their offspring?”
“That is an interesting question. Truly the Emperor and his consorts spawn in their own tidal pool. It would seem that anyone chosen from that pond would be of their own flesh, would it not?”
“I would guess so.”
“Others of the court have their spawning ponds. Of course, none of the court would spawn in the same water used by farmers.
“That is what I do not like about you, Kris Longknife. You humans make me question what a good Iteeche does not see. Never even thinks of questioning.”
“You’ll get no sympathy from me. Since meeting you, I’ve had to question way too much that I was told in school.”
“Is that good?”
“I think so. What about you?”
“My advisors are ready to cut their throats, to make amends for the words I have said to them and they have said to me.”
“All of them, the Navy officer, too?”
“No. He just looks at me like my chooser sometimes does. Looks at me as if he thinks I might someday be worthy of walking on four legs and not have been a waste of choice.”
Somewhere, a wolf howled. Ron jumped at the sound, went into a fighting stance. Kris remembered wolves crying to the moon at their summer cottage by the lake outside Wardhaven City. Even without the drugs, she would not have reacted that strongly.
“You are safe,” she said.
“Are you sure?” Ron asked, his eyes still searching the hills and mountains above the lodge.
“There are Marines walking the perimeter tonight. The Wasp will pass above us and scan the area. Yes, we’re safe here. Now.”
“But will your great-grandfather be able to offer us safety against the unknown that does not howl yet takes our lives?”
“That I don’t know.”
“You had a message from him.”
“Yes. Jack thought I ought to close down this mission, hike up my skirts, and run for the hills.”
“I think Jack was right.”
“Actually, we’ve learned that the man who threw the bombs was not aiming for me. His target was the guy I was with.”
“That is unusual, from what I have learned from Cara.”
“Yes, that is unusual.”
“Did your great-grandfather say anything about what he was doing about my problem when he messaged you about your problem?”
“No. But I wasn’t really expecting him to risk talking about it in a message.”
“It was coded, was it not?”
“It was coded using the very best cipher.”
Ron just looked at Kris. If he’d had eyebrows, she suspected he’d have raised one.
“I should be able to take a shuttle launch in a few days. We’ll head back then. You will get your report before too long.”
Ron stood to dive back in. “I wish you could swim with me.”
“I can’t even crawl at the moment.”
“Maybe someday we will swim together. Maybe, someday, even if we cannot spawn, we can still make something that will bridge the gap between our people.”
“Maybe someday,” Kris said. She wasn’t sure Ron heard her. He began his dive as soon as he finished speaking. He swam four fast laps, then climbed from the far end of the pool, gathered his robes, and left for his quarters.
Kris turned her chair away from the pool and started up the path to her cottage. She passed a Marine walking his guard route. He nodded at her. She smiled back at him.
There was no privacy for her or Ron. If it wasn’t a guard looking in on them while walking his rounds, it would be the photo coverage of the Wasp three hundred kilometers overhead. Someday she would get tired of living in this fishbowl.
Someday, but not today. Or tomorrow. Jack would make sure she was in a fishbowl tomorrow and every day he had a say in it.
That was what it meant to be a Longknife.
39
The trip back to Wardhaven was taken at a sedate .8 gee. It gave Kris time to heal and made it more comfortable for her to hobble around the ship on crutches.
The boffins enjoyed the change. The Marines didn’t grumble but added extra weight to their packs when they jogged.
The first night out, Kris slept with Nelly resting on her chest, next to her beating heart. The direct plug into Kris’s brain had been demolished by the bombs. The doctor removed the wreckage of the net hookup from the jack-in point at the back of Kris’s skull without doing more damage. No one on Texarkana was qualified to do anything beyond that, so Kris now had a bandage at the back of her neck rather than a network hook into Nelly.
The silence in Kris’s head was . . . different.
As Kris tried to doze off, she rambled on about her day, the week . . . anything that popped into her head. Nelly showed no recognition that she was being talked to, nor did she say anything.
The clock beside Kris’s bed showed 1:27 when Kris awoke to hear the sounds of crying.
There was no one in the room with her. No one but her computer.
“Is that you, Nelly?”
“Yes.”
“Does crying make you feel better?”
“No. No it doesn’t. It’s just a noise I’m making. It isn’t giving me any release or comfort.”
“Humans cry to get emotional release. I don’t really understand it, but somehow the tears and the shaking and the gasps that go with the breathing seem to get the bad feelings out.”
“It doesn’t work for me, Kris.”
“You want to try talking them out?”