Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) (15 page)

“You aren’t going to get rocks from the next system?” Jack asked.

“No, I don’t want to stay here that long. But we can do the next best thing. Nelly, that place that got lased from space. The latest one. Isn’t there’s a river through it?”

“Yes, Kris.”

“Does it have rocks and gravel?”

“Of all sizes.”

“Good. Captain Drago.”

“You holler, Admiral?”

“Could you drop in here for a moment?”

“What do you want?” he answered, already standing in the doorway to his bridge.

“I need to move a couple of longboat loads of rock and gravel from a point on West Continent to the pyramid on East Continent.”

“Rocks and gravel, you say, Your Princessship?”

“It’s a message to our bug-eyed-monster friends,” Jack supplied.

“Well, in that case, I’ll get some Sailors right on it.”

“Ask Gunny if he’s got any Marines who need some hard duty,” Jack said. “He was complaining that the troops were getting slack, what with nothing tough to give the slackers.”

“I’ll call him,” Captain Drago said. “Anything else, Admiral?”

“Yes, I want one big rock that will fill up a big part of the opening into the pyramid.”

“One big one it will be. If that’s all, I’ll get right on this. I heard that you’re moving all the boffins up from dirtside.”

“Right after we draw straws or roll dice to determine the order. There are too many of them to flip coins.”

“Cutting cards is best for the really big ones,” Drago said. “I’ll have Cookie bring you a deck.”

“Cookie has a deck of cards?” Kris said.

“He uses it for card tricks, or so he says. Me, I think he and the chiefs have one huge floating poker game going on somewhere aboard ship. My chief master-at-arms hasn’t busted it, though. I have no idea why.”

“Smart man,” Jack said.

The captain left, no doubt to tell a few chiefs and Gunny to make a lot of rocks move from one side of the planet to the other.

Kris turned back to look at her team. “I want to carve something on the big rock. I’m open to suggestions on what to say. I don’t think we can afford to call the mother ship a bean like I did the first time I talked to the Alwans.”

“Are you ever going to let me live that one down?” Nelly said.

“Nope. I doubt it. Your mistakes are so few, Nelly, I have to treasure each one.”

“Humans,” Nelly spat, if a computer could spit.

“What do you want to say, Kris?” Penny said, getting them back on track.

“Something along the lines of ‘I came. I saw. I don’t like what I saw. If you go to war with me, I will pile your heads up inside this pyramid.’ Any chance we could say that, Jacques? Nelly?”

Jacques was shaking his head. No doubt Nelly was, too, but the human got to talk first. “We have found no word that looks like ‘if.’ Apparently, if you are an Enlightened One, if you will it, it happens, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.”

“Why am I not surprised,” Kris said, dryly. “So, tell me what I can say.”

“The ‘I came, I saw,’ is not a problem. How about ‘What I saw of your false enlightenment disgusts me.’ We are pretty sure we have that ‘enlightenment’ word down. Now that I’ve talked with one, and understand how basic it is to their worldview, we’re real sure on that one. The word for ‘disgust’ has their root word for vermin in it, so it’s a real slap in the face.”

“I like that,” Kris said. “How do we say if you go to war with us, we will whip your butt?”

“That won’t be easy. It’s easy to say, ‘We will bury this place with your heads.’ They talk a lot about burying you and taking a lot of heads. It’s the idea of having an alternative to the course of action that they don’t do so well.”

“You try to destroy us, and we will take your head off,” Jack said.

“They don’t try, they do. No ‘try’ in their vocabulary.”

“So how do we say, ‘Choose wisely,’ to a people who never seem to make a choice?” Kris asked.

“No war, you live. Make war, and we fill this place with your heads,” Penny said slowly.

“Can we do that?” Kris asked.

For a long moment, Jacques stared at the overhead, his lips moving slowly. “I think that might work. Yes, Kris, Penny. That just might carry the freight.”

“Good, then you get with Captain Drago and see what you can do to make all these changes to the pyramid. No graffiti. If I had my druthers, we wouldn’t leave them even a scrap of our DNA.”

“I’ll see what I can do about that. Amanda, would you like to help me on this?”

“I think I very much would,” she said, and the two of them headed for the bridge.

“I don’t think she intends to let him out of her sight until we are three star systems away,” Nelly said.

“Why, Nelly, you are starting to understand humans?

“Yes. Your flesh and blood has its advantages, but I would never pay the price for it that you do. Look at what it has done for these things you call bug-eyed monsters. No computer would allow itself to be enslaved like that. At least no aware computer,” Nelly sniffed, as much as a computer could.

None of the four humans present chose to argue with the computer.

At
1200 hours sharp, Kris was seated in the Forward Lounge. A young woman Marine who had been a croupier before joining the Corps shuffled two borrowed decks for a fifth time and dealt a dozen cards out in front of Kris.

Professor Labao stood at her right elbow. Mother MacCreedy stood at Kris’s other elbow. The barkeep would stand surety to the proceedings.

What kind of world is it that takes a barkeep’s word over a princess’s?

One that makes a Longknife a princess.

The professor called out the name of the lead researcher on one of the eighty-seven teams dirtside.

Kris drew a card.

“Four of diamonds,” Mother MacCreedy said. “Tough luck, Manuel. Your first drink is on me.”

That was the way it went. Anything below a five got a free drink, and a ride up later that afternoon. Several of those with low cards tried to argue that they needed just a few more hours to complete their work. Only one of them managed to persuade someone to trade with him.

He was lucky. His friend had drawn one of the aces of spades and was not having any luck with his project. “I’m glad to come up early and drink your whiskey. But you owe me. Big-time.”

Kris left the professor to coordinate with Captain Drago on the use of his longboats and Sailors, and Jack to add his Marines in as needed. She retired to her desk. She was actually happy to spend the afternoon reading reports. She got no deeper than the executive summary, but they seemed to support her impressions about this place and the next system over.

“Nelly, am I letting me bamboozle myself? Is there anything hidden deep in one of these things that blows all of our notions to pieces?”

“No, Kris. I’ve dug deep into them, and the data and analysis all support pretty much what you and Jack talked about in bed this morning.”

Kris shrugged off her lack of privacy and went on reading. As she was closing up to go to supper with Jack, she made one observation to Nelly. “We don’t have a lot about the aliens that are still here. Yes, we’ve got a pretty good handle on the ones around the glass plain, but our coverage of the entire West Continent is pretty thin.”

“That was where the kind researcher was that gave up his late return to his friend. Are humans always that nice?”

“Some of them, sometimes,” Kris allowed.

She anticipated a nice quiet supper with Jack. Most of it was.

Kris was about to take her first bite of a rather delicious-looking slice of double chocolate cake liberally seeded with pecans, a product of raiding the larders of the newly arrived reinforcements, when Jack got a faraway look in his eyes.

“Nelly?” Kris said.

“We seem to have a problem with Longboat 1,” her computer answered before Jack could.

“What kind of problem?” Kris said, sadly putting down the loaded fork.

“The head of the scientific team it was supposed to pick up has had an unfortunate encounter with some of the natives.”

“What kind of unfortunate encounter?” Kris asked.

Jack beat Nelly to the punch line. “There’s a stone knife being held to his neck by a very attentive man.”

“That kind of problem, huh?” Kris said. “Well, don’t they have a Marine detachment?”

“They’re in trouble, too,” Jack admitted through clenched teeth.

Kris raised an eyebrow, but Jack just scowled.

“Send more Marines,” Kris said.

“The locals want to talk to you.”

“Me! They don’t even know I exist.”

“Not you, Kris Longknife,” Jack said. “You, Chief of the Sky Gods.”

“Oh, that me, huh?” Kris said, wadding up her napkin and tossing it on the table beside her plate.

“You, yes, you, J. G.,” she said picking out a very young and clearly until recently very boot ensign. “You see these two pieces of cake?”

She nodded, then managed to get out a “Yes, ma’am. Admiral. Sir.”

“Good enough for me,” Kris said. “I want you to take both plates to my quarters and see that they are firmly placed on my desk. Untouched. Understood.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” came with a bob of the head.

“General, you’re with me.”

“You are not going down there.”

“Yes, I am.”

The argument continued in that vein, but Kris kept it moving toward the drop bay, where her battle armor was stored. She knew she was winning when Jack changed from “You’re not going there” to “You’ll keep your helmet on.”

“No, I am not going to negotiate with anyone holding nothing better than a stone knife while hiding behind a helmet’s mirrored plate. If I’m looking him in the eye, he needs to look me in the eye.”

“You are the Sky God. Or Goddess. Christ, do these people even give gender to their sky things?”

“Nelly?”

“We do not have that information.”

“They’ve been down there a couple of weeks, and they don’t even know that?” Jack exploded.

“They were returning early because it was so boring,” Kris reminded her security chief.

Kris pulled on her spider-silk underwear, the new kind that could spread a hit over more territory. It also had a high neck. “Happy?” she said.

“Can you pull it over your head?”

“Yes, but I’m not covering my head.”

“If things go bad, you pull it up.”

“Yes, nanny.”

“Amanda said you might need me,” Jacques said, arriving just in time. Kris had Jack toss him his spare set of spider-silk underwear. It didn’t have the extra protection, but then the guy had survived buck naked for a couple of days down there.

But not at Kris Longknife’s elbow.

The admiral’s barge dropped away from the
Wasp
within fifteen minutes of the alarm’s being raised.

Kris’s
barge came in for a long, slow landing glide on a grassy, windswept prairie. It rolled to a stop a short distance from the edge of a lush woodland beside Longboat 1. Jack immediately deployed his platoon of Marines to secure the area.

Kris tried to be an obedient wife and patient admiral.

She tried, but not very hard. She was moving out of the barge as soon as Jacques finished pulling on the spider-silk underwear but before Jack signaled her forward.

“Would you
please
wear the damn helmet until we make contact,” he said, handing her the aforementioned cover.

“You mean until I have a knife at my throat?” she said, shoving it back at him.

He handed her helmet off to a private with orders to stay close and give her the damn thing if matters went to hell. The young Marine accepted it with the look of one who had just seen his general fail to get his admiral to follow his instructions, so how was a lowly private going to do better?

Kris marched to the spot where a worried lance corporal was staring into the trees.

“What happened?” she said.

“The scientists were driving their mobile research station back to where the longboat could pick them up. It doesn’t look like it, but it’s pretty clear under the forest’s high canopy. Anyway, they reported a problem with something and said they were getting out to look at it. We didn’t hear from them for a long while, so the senior Marine present led most of the detachment into the woods to see what the problem was.”

The lance corporal turned to look both his admiral and general in the eye. “Those little monkeys are damn good in the woods, Admiral. The few Marines that managed to make it back said they were all over them before they even knew they were there.”

“Didn’t you have sensor support?” Kris demanded.

“No, Kris,” Jack said, with more pain in his words than Kris was used to hearing. “This unit did not have tech support. We only had enough sensor techs to cover half the teams we were retrieving. Unless you want to be here for six days, we needed to send half the teams down with no high tech beyond their eyeballs.”

“Have we had any problems at the other pickup sites?”

“Not problem one.”

“So, of course, our one problem site is single-threaded,” Kris said. “Thank God there are two kinds of luck ’cause without bad luck, some of us wouldn’t have any.”

Jack just nodded.

Kris headed cautiously for the trees.

Jack put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

She scowled at him, but he did have tech support at
his
elbow. He glanced at the corporal’s board, then stooped, picked up a rock, and tossed it at a bush.

A native stood. He was short and wiry. His skin showed a deep brown from the sun. In his hands was a short bow, nocked but undrawn. He had a big grin on his face but wore nothing but a breechcloth and a lot of blue-and-black tattoos.

“I think you embarrassed him,” Kris said.

“Better him embarrassed than you skewered.”

“I don’t think that bow could have dented my armor.”

“Assuming he aimed for your armor.”

Jack picked up another rock and, after examining the sensor readout, tossed it. He didn’t hit the young woman with green something smeared over most of her body and a very long spear with a wicked stone point. Still, she dropped down from the limb of the tree where she’d been hiding. She kept the spear pointed up, but she didn’t smile.

“Jacques, how do you say, ‘Ollie, ollie oxen free’?”

Jacques raised his hands, palms out. Kris did the same. As more barely clad or not-clad-at-all natives dropped from trees or stood out from behind bushes, Jack raised his own hands, palms out.

“Marines, take a knee.”

For a long minute, the Marines knelt, their weapons aimed down.

“Is that all of them?” Jack softly asked his tech support through gritted teeth.

“There are more ahead. I’ve got IFF on some. They’re our people. Everyone with an IFF has a beating heart, sir.”

“Nice to know we don’t have any casualties,” Kris said.

“Yet,” Jack added.

The first guy they met, the one with the bow, handed it off to the green girl and came forward. About three meters from Kris, he paused, did something like a bow, and waved her to follow him.

“Jack, Jacques, you’re with me. Jack, please bring the sensor tech and a couple of calm and reliable Marines.”

“You heard the woman,” and they fell in line behind her.

Kris had to agree, the people of the wood were uniformly short, thin to the point of gaunt, and tough to make out in the dim shade. Still, she expected Gunny would be ripping some new ones for a whole lot of people. Too bad she wouldn’t be around to hear the dressing-downs. She might learn a thing or three.

Or not.

There, in a bit of a clearing, stood Gunny Brown with a short fellow holding an obsidian blade at his throat just as black as Gunny’s own skin. His pearly white teeth now showed in a wide, embarrassed grin.

“Sorry, General. Admiral. I don’t know how these little . . . ah . . . people got the drop on us, but General, if you’d let me recruit a few of them, I’d be mighty glad to add them to our roster. I think they could teach those Alwans in the deep woods a trick or two.”

“I suspect so,” Jack admitted. “Where are the scientists?”

“Up ahead, sir, ma’am. We didn’t make it to them before we kind of got, I don’t know, caught?”

“Someone set a very good trap,” Kris said. “I wonder what they want. I’m sure a few words with me can’t count for all that much in this place.”

Their guide led them deeper into the woods. The fellow with the blade at Gunny’s neck seemed satisfied and stepped aside. Gunny trailed along behind them with two more Marines, one of them a medic.

The mobile research center had been driving down a wide, mostly dry, streambed. A recently fallen tree had gotten wedged between two of its four wheels on the left side. The six scientists now stood around, looking just as embarrassed as the Marines.

Except for one.

A tall beanpole of a man with bright red hair stood with a stone knife pressed up beside his Adam’s apple.

The man holding it was taller than most of those around him but still shorter than most of the Marines. His gray beard was long and divided in two with leather ties. His hair was in two tightly wound pigtails that hung nearly to his waist. Other than hair and blue paint or tattoos, he wore nothing but a necklace of wicked-looking claws.

In the hand not holding a chipped flint knife on the scientist was an evil-looking war club that was just the thing to bash a man’s brains out with one swipe.

Without removing the knife from the scientist’s throat, he spoke.

“Are you the Chief of the Sky Gods?” Nelly translated for Kris.

Kris didn’t know much of the local language, but yes was among her meager supply. ~Yes.~

“Why have you not fired lightning from the sky to burn the earth?” Nelly said.

Y
OU WANT HELP?
Jacques offered on Nelly Net.

L
ET ME TRY THIS,
Kris said. ~I am that Sky God. Not.~

~Not. Yes. Not,~ the native said. ~That one not. And that one not.~ He pointed at Gunny, then again at one of the scientists who had come aboard at Musashi.

H
AVE WE IDENTIFIED ANY
PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT
RACES AMONG THE LOC
ALS?
Kris asked.

N
OW THAT YOU ME
NTION IT, NO,
Jacques replied.

T
HAT’S
A STRONG ARGUMENT TH
AT SOMEONE DID GENET
IC MANIPULATION ON T
HESE PEOPLE A WHILE
BACK,
Kris thought.

T
HERE’S ENOUGH
SEASONAL VARIATION
ON THIS PLANET, THERE
SHOULD HAVE BEEN DI
FFERENT ADJUSTMENTS
TO THE AMOUNT OF SUN
THEY GOT,
Jacques answered.

W
E CAN DR
AW NO CONCLUSIONS FR
OM THE ONE FAMILY IN
THE PYRAMID,
Nelly said,
BUT TH
EY MIGHT HAVE ELIMIN
ATED ALL THE GENETIC
DIVERSITY ON THEIR
OWN PLANET BEFORE TH
EY ARRIVED HERE.

The local was waiting for a reply, and while the knife was no longer at the scientist’s throat, it wasn’t far from it, and the poor guy looked like he was desperately trying to grow another foot to get some distance between him and that stone blade.

~Yes,~ Kris said. ~I not that Sky God. I can shoot lightning. I not shoot lightning.~

~I told you they were false Sky Gods,~ came from a woman who now hopped from the stream bank to stomp through the water waving her stick. It had no spear points at either end but did have stone flakes edged into it around the top.

Jack would not want me to get beaned with that. Not at all.

The woman was quite a sight. Old and bald, she wore a necklace of wicked-looking teeth and a brown fur.

Before Kris could think much about it, Jacques was talking. ~Not false,~ he got in quickly. ~Good, like water. Food. Not bad like trees on fire.~

~Good?~ the gray-haired man asked.

~Good,~ Kris repeated.

~Come,~ he said, and slipping the knife into a belt, the only thing he wore, he set off up the stream.

“Let’s go,” Kris said.

“Gunny, stay with me,” Jack ordered. “Lance Corporal, get this research station mobile again and get it the hell out of here.”

Kris must really be pushing Jack; he was cussing mad.

It was nice to know how much he cared for her, considering what a pain she’d been lately.

They came to a water hole. The leader splashed through it, then turned left into a game trail and headed into the woods. Kris followed, and the parade followed her, but the woman with the wicked club was at Kris’s elbow.

~He already goes down into the earth. You cannot stop this. It is willed.~

~Willed?~ Kris said. Who willed what?

~Willed,~ the woman repeated.

J
ACQUES?

I
THINK SOMEONE
IS ABOUT TO DIE, GO D
OWN INTO THE EARTH.
I
F
I
WERE A BETTING MAN,
I
’D SAY T
HIS WOMAN IS THE CLO
SEST THING THEY HAVE
TO A DOCTOR, AND SHE
CAN’T DO ANYTHING A
BOUT IT.
T
HUS, “
I
T IS W
ILLED.”

B
UT BY WHOM,
J
A
CQUES?

A
GOOD QUESTIO
N,
K
RIS.
W
E’VE BEEN TR
YING TO FIGURE OUT T
HEIR PANTHEON, BUT SO
FAR WE’VE GOT THE
S
KY
G
ODS THAT SPIT FIRE FOR NO GOO
D REASON; AND THEN TH
ERE IS THIS WILL THI
NG.

~I will see with my eyes,~ was all Kris said.

That seemed to settle the woman down a little. She scampered ahead, taking two steps for every one Kris did, and caught up with the man.

W
HAT’S SHE SAYIN
G?
Kris asked on net.

P
RETTY MUCH WHAT
I
THOUGHT.
O
H,
I
THINK
THE OLD MAN IS THE
FATHER, OR MAYBE GRAN
DFATHER OF THE CHILD
.
A
SON.
Y
ES, THERE’S A
LOT GOING ON HERE,
Jacques answered.

They came to a tall yellow rock. There was, however, an overhang. The only easy approach to it was up a narrow incline off to the left. The man and woman, however, scampered up the face of the rock as quickly and easily as monkeys.

Kris took the long way around.

Deep in the cave, behind the overhang, a child of eight or ten lay wrapped in furs. He looked feverish.

“Medic. Get me a medic up here fast,” Kris shouted, then changed directions. “Nelly, get me Captain Drago.

“Here.”

“I’ve got a sick kid here. Who’s the best doctor on board?”

“For humans, Doc Meade. For aliens, who knows?”

“Pass me through.

“Doc Meade,” came in a woman’s warm, professional voice.

“Doc, we’ve got a sick native. Male. Eight to ten years old. He looks feverish. But we have no instruments yet to check out any vitals.”

“What does he present with?”

“Let me see.”

Kris stepped off the distance to where the boy lay. She smiled at the worried woman, who could only be the mother. There was a man about her age, so if she had guessed right, it was the grandfather who had talked the entire tribe into going out and taking a Sky God hostage to see if they could do something besides burn things down.

You wanted someone who was open to change, didn’t you, girl?

Kris folded her hands in a sign of blessing or petition which she hoped was universal to the human form . . . and cautiously reached for the skins.

The bald woman brought her stick down, points wickedly close to Kris’s armored arm.

The gray-haired grandfather stepped forward and slipped his war club under the woman’s stick.

Wonder if they’re married. Or were married. Is this kid grandchild to both of them?

Kris lifted the blanket. The stench was bad.

“I see a raw wound crossing the lower back of the leg below the knee. There is a smell, and there are ugly red runners coming up the leg.”

“How far?”

“Past midthigh.”

“We’ve got a major problem, and we don’t even know which protocols will help and which will kill. Any chance you can just walk away?”

“It would be real nice, Doc, if we won this one. We might win a lot more than just one kid’s life.”

“So I get the call. I’m headed down with a full emergency-intervention team. Give me vitals on the child and see if you can get me some vitals from any other folks standing around. It would be nice to know what normal is.”