Jack was getting to understand her too damn well.
He was also taking very good care of her . . . when she let him.
Relaxed into her seat, Kris stared at the troublesome trinity across from her. They stared back at her.
No one seemed eager to say anything.
So Kris took the bull by the horns. “I settled your hash on Texarkana. Did you get the vote you needed?”
“We did,” the king said, showing none of the joy Kris expected. “I’m stuck in this job for the next ten years.”
“And if you are the king, I’m stuck being a princess,” Kris said, trying not to sound too bitter. She had made the princess thing work.
Once or twice.
And it hadn’t killed her.
Yet.
“You really shook things up on Texarkana,” the king said, changing the subject.
“And surprise, surprise, I lived through it. That place did need shaking up. There were a few things about it you didn’t mention when you gave me the job. Maybe they slipped your mind.”
“That’s possible,” the king allowed.
“How many more of these pipe dreamers from Earth do we have out here? How many groups of discontents from an odd corner of Earth all hot to trot to do things their way out on a blank slate among the stars? Grampa, can’t we do something to get all these planets settled down once and for all?”
“You have any suggestion how we straighten out New Jerusalem?”
“They’re not in your United Sentients.”
“But their problems have a way of seeping out to places like . . . What was that place, Colonel?”
“Pandemonium, Your Majesty,” Colonel Cortez supplied.
“They shortened it to Panda,” Kris put in.
“But rented muscle from New J almost ripped their heads off,” Crossie said.
“Locals didn’t do such a bad job of handling themselves. We helped a bit.”
“More than a bit, from my reports,” Crossie insisted.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you set me up for that one,” Kris growled.
The admiral raised both hands, palms out. “You walked into that one on your own. By the way, thank you very much for settling it for us.”
“You’re welcome, I guess,” Kris said, and noticed that she’d been deftly deflected from what she wanted to talk about. She fixed the king with a glare and put an end to that.
“Grampa, I did my part for you on Texarkana. What did you do for my Iteeche while I was gone?”
“Not interested in any more chitchat?”
“Nope.”
“Even if the king decrees it?”
“Nope. The king and I have this bargain, you see, Grampa. I pulled one of his chestnuts out of the fire. He keeps the whole damn forest of chestnut trees from going up in flames.”
“Glad to see you’re giving me credit for a tougher problem.”
“Can you honestly say yours was tougher when I’m the one on crutches?”
“You didn’t duck fast enough.”
“I ducked, but the bombs were coming from above.”
“You need to post more lookouts, Captain,” the king said to Jack. The general was talking now.
“Yes, sir,” Jack said, stiffening to attention and going into report mode. “My company is being reinforced as we speak. We’re adding two platoons and bringing the other two platoons up to full strength after the casualties they’ve suffered over the last three months. This should allow me to maintain a secure perimeter within an outer perimeter bubble, sir.”
“Very good,” the general said.
“Now, Grampa, King, Hammer of the Iteeche, what can I tell my friend Ron that he can expect human space will do for them and their problem?”
“Insistent, isn’t she?” General Mac said.
“Like everyone in her family,” the king agreed. “Kris, you will have to tell your friend Ron that I can’t offer him anything at this time. He can go back to Roth and tell that old buzzard that I need more time to prepare my people for this. It’s too big a change for me to make overnight.
“And besides, he doesn’t have anything really to tell me about the menace. Some ships have disappeared. Ships always go missing. How can I get humanity all ready to ride with nothing but a bit of dust on the horizon?”
“Grampa, you know as well as I do that when ships go missing, it’s random. One here. One there. Not four or five in the same chunk of space,” Kris put in.
“I need more evidence before I can go to the general public, Kris,” King Raymond insisted. “This is just a bogeyman under the bed, and it’s under an Iteeche bed at that.”
“Ron plans on leading a scout out to see what he can see.”
“That would be good.”
“No, it will be very bad. Lousy bad. He’ll probably just get himself killed, and we won’t know any more than we did.”
“What’s this Ron to you?” Grampa asked, an eyebrow raised.
“He’s a friend. A friend who doesn’t lie to me. And yes, Crossie, you’ll be getting a full report on the present situation in the Iteeche Empire. The real lowdown on who’s doing what to whom. Abby will send this report just to you. And we want a nice paycheck for letting you have it exclusively.”
“And she says she doesn’t work for me,” the admiral said, preening.
“Keep that up, and I’ll burn her disk to ash.”
The admiral got very quiet.
“Grampa, if Ron’s going out to stick his head into whatever maw is out there, I think I ought to go with him.”
“You can’t do it, girl.”
“I and my ship are the best for the job. We’ve got the new atom laser. We can spot the fuzzy jump holes. I think we could use them to get around the perimeter of this thing. See what it leaves behind it.”
“That’s assuming that it is traveling along and leaving something behind it, not expanding, expanding, expanding,” Crossie said.
“Either could be wrong assumptions,” the king added.
“All are guesses until we get some solid data,” Kris pointed out. “And as you just noted, you can’t get anything going here in human space with the little data the Iteeche have. The Wasp and its crew is the best we have. You need information. Let me get it.” Kris tried to keep her voice low. To strip her words of the frustration she was feeling. It was frustration she felt. Not anger. Not yet.
“Kris, you are not going out with Ron,” the king said firmly. “You’ve already got your next assignment, and it’s one I don’t think anyone else but you can do.”
Where had Kris heard that before? “Try to persuade me,” Kris drawled.
The king turned to General Mac.
“Kris,” the Chairman of the General Staff said, “the Peterwalds’ worlds are locked in a low-grade civil war. Their Navy is pretty much tied up at the pier providing muscle while the Peterwalds settle their scores with State Security.”
“It’s not really that simple,” Crossie put in. “There are all kinds of scores getting settled. The Peterwalds built their empire by importing people from Earth who had hundreds, thousands of years of bad blood between them back there. They played them off against each other while using the iron grip of State Security to keep the blood from flowing in the streets.”
“So when you pop the head of State Security,” Kris said, “all kinds of bloody things come out to play.”
“You’ve got it,” Mac said.
“But we don’t interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states,” Kris pointed out. There was no job for her in anything they’d said. So far. And this rambling around was moving her frustration closer and closer to a full-fledged mad.
“Spoken so sincerely by the woman who offed Hank Peterwald, the thirteenth, the heir apparent, and then saved Harry Peterwald the twelfth, the reigning nonemperor,” Crossie said, giving a quick review of Kris’s last nine months.