Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) (31 page)

General
Juan Montoya did one final check of his lead platoon. All were as ready as they ever would be.

The battle-armored space suits were primed and ready. Their weapons were locked and loaded.

Jack signaled the Sailor, herself in an unarmored space suit, and the hull of the pinnace opened up a hole in it the size of a double door, which sealed to the aliens’ hull. A Marine applied a laser torch to the revealed metal. In less than a minute, a huge chunk of plate drifted off where it was pushed.

Another Marine combat engineer put tape on the sharp edges of the cut. The battle suits were tough, but there was no reason to ding them unnecessarily.

Jack motioned, and a sergeant led the first fire team through the hole. As the last trooper of that four shot aboard the station, a second team followed.

Jack had promised Kris that he would not lead from the front. With eight Marines of his battalion aboard the station, he figured he would no longer be in the front, and slipped himself into line as the third fire team of the squad went in.

It was strange how a man trained to be a Secret Service Agent changed his idea of a man’s job when he spent all his time with combat Marines.

Well, them and a certain Longknife.

Jack forced his head back into the game and faced what he knew would be waiting for him.

Gunny’s warning was hardly enough for what he faced.

Bodies drifted, thick as seaweed on a kelp bed he’d swum in as a kid. There were men and women, elders, kids, and infants.

So many of the bodies were tiny.

Most stared at him with eyes frozen in some hard stare that the poison had brought. A few of the kids almost seemed asleep.

Jack wanted to puke.

Instead, he did his best to ignore what he saw and ordered a follow-up fire team to sling weapons and shove bodies forward.

What they were after was aft.

“Up here, sir. I think I’ve found what we’re looking for.”

Jack found a purchase and shoved himself off for the aftward bulkhead. It stretched far around, showing clearly that the station’s outer wall had been the floor when it spun. The bulkhead went high up for these people, a good fifteen meters.

Possibly they would have put in an extra deck as their population regrew. Apparently, they’d built large, expecting a lot of kids.

From the proportion of the dead, they’d had a population boom in the year since Kris had clobbered them.

Again, Jack had to force his mind to focus on what he had been sent here for.

Ahead of him was a hatch. A hatch with a wheel lock and a window that let you look in.

Jack peered in, shining a light to help him see all there was to see. It wasn’t much. Some two meters away was another hatch with a lock and window.

“Kris, I’ve found an air lock. I think they intended to keep this place airtight. It looks like hurried work.”

“Does that sound as much like a trap to you as it does to me?” came in the form of a question, but Jack doubted that Kris as an admiral or as a Longknife intended it to be taken as such. Certainly not Kris as a wife.

“I’m ordering up the air lock we brought along,” he said.

Did he hear a whispered “thank you,” in response?

Four Sailors came up, their suits equipped with jet packs. Each handled the corner of a large room equipped with airtight hatches. A combat-engineering type had been taking soundings of the bulkhead. He signaled the Sailors, and they adjusted their drift.

The temporary air lock settled into place, and the Marine with the welder quickly locked it down against the wall. As he did that, the Sailors expanded out the lock, tripling its size.

Two squads began filing into the lock. Jack included himself.

Only when the aft lock was sealed down did one of the sailors open up the Smart Metal
TM
of the forward bulkhead and turn aside for a Marine to put a long, thin bead of explosives along the station bulkhead. He covered it with armored cloth.

“Get ready to shout folks. I’m using the smallest explosion I think I can use, and the cloth should direct the force inward, but if your ears are precious to you, shout on three.”

The count was quick. All had taken themselves off net as Jack had. With the armored space suits, the overpressure was merely annoying, although Jack distinctly felt kicked where he preferred Kris to fondle.

The wall blew in, and the first rank of Marines rolled through the newly created hole.

Jack was in the second rank.

He joined the rest of his Marines, standing there, dumbfounded.

“Are you getting this?” he said, then remembered he’d killed his sound and video feed before the explosion.

“Kris, are you getting this?” he repeated after clicking himself back onto the net.

“My God, Jack,” Kris breathed.

The scene was enough to make even a Longknife resort to prayer.

In front of Jack, an old, gray-haired woman stood. She held a knife to her throat as if ready to drive it up into her skull.

Behind her, over a dozen children, ranging in age from maybe twelve to at least three, stood. Each of them held a knife at his or her throat, just like the woman.

Some of the bigger kids helped the smaller kids hold their knives.

There were tears running down the cheeks of the kids.

There were no tears in the old woman’s eyes. The face she presented Jack overflowed with rage and vicious hatred.

~Vermin will never touch us,~ she spat in a dialect that was just barely understandable.

Jack struggled to remember what Kris had said. What she’d say in this situation.

He signaled his Marines to hold their ground, chinned his mic to the speaker in the suit and thought. S
AL, YOU AND YOUR MOM BE
TTER HELP ME GET THI
S RIGHT.

W
E’RE ALL ON
IT.

W
E ARE NOT VERMI
N,
Jack began thinking and Sal translated and spoke. W
E ARE TALKING TO
YOU.
W
HAT VERMIN CAN
USE YOUR OWN WORDS?

The woman actually seemed surprised, but that did not stop her rage. ~Vermin may mouth the enlightened words of the people, but it is still an animal,~ she spat.

Y
OU HAVE FOUGHT US
IN NUMBERS FAR MORE
THAN WE EVER HAD, BUT
IT IS YOU WHO HIDE
HERE, LICKING YOUR WO
UNDS.

The woman’s eyes grew wider, but the knife never wavered from its place at her throat.

“This is getting us nowhere,” Kris whispered softly on net. “Marines, prepare to fire sleepy darts on my word. Keep going, General.”

I
T IS WE WHO H
AVE COME TO SEEK YOU
OUT.
I
S THAT THE PAT
H THAT VERMIN WALK?

“Fire,” Kris ordered.

Jack felt the pressure from the volley of sleepy darts. Maybe some of the soft pop did come up through the soles of his feet.

Now the old woman showed shock. She tried to drive the knife up into her skull, but her arms would not obey her.

Obey her full will.

When the knife tumbled from her grasp, there was blood on the tip.

One or two of the older children tried to follow their elder, but they were less ready to kill themselves, or maybe less enthusiastic at the prospects. All of them collapsed on the floor, with no blood on their knives.

“Kris, we need a doctor here. Doc Meade, how fast can you get in here?”

“I’m on the outside waiting,” came the woman’s soft voice. “Can I use this hatch?”

“Have a combat engineer check it for booby traps.”

A minute later, the doctor was in the room, checking one patient after another. She extracted the sleepy darts from the youngest children. Marines had already policed up the sharp stuff and bound the hands and feet of the older kids and the old woman.

The children were evacuated, youngest to oldest, in survival packs that looked like nothing less than an oversize beach ball, one Marine towing a pack.

Doc Meade came to the elderly woman last. She checked her vitals, then left the darts in her and checked her bindings. “This one is very vexed, even under sedation. Keep an eye on her.”

“They will all be on suicide watch,” Jack said.

“If we can, try to get some of the youngest kids off to another ship. We don’t want them running into any of the older ones. The big kids might kill the little ones.”

“You think it’s that bad?” Jack said.

“I think she had a lot more she wanted to spit at you,” the doc said. “I think you interrupted her grand exit. I suspect she and these kids were intended to send us a message that you interrupted. By the way, I guess our grasp of their language is as good as we thought.”

“Thank Nelly and her kids for that,” Jack said.

“You’re welcome, my mother says,” Sal said.

“Well, let’s get the kids where they’re safe; and then let’s get the hell out of here,” Doc Meade said. “This place gives me the willies.”

Kris
shivered as she studied the pictures Jack was sending from the station. She’d would never succeed in wiping them from her mind’s eye.

What must it be like for Jack? She’d need to hold him tight tonight.

So she was a bit surprised when Jack called and said she needed to come down to the brig. “The old woman’s awake. At least as much as we’re willing to let her wake up. She’s babbling a lot. It’s hard to make out, but I think she wants, no demands, to talk to our Enlightened One. Or as she puts it, ‘the vermin with pretenses of enlightenment.’”

“I’m on my way,” Kris said, and, unbuckling from her desk chair, launched herself at the door.

The
Wasp
was back at Condition Able, big, roomy, and easy to get around in. Assuming you knew the latest configuration.

Nelly directed Kris, and today, she directed her correctly.

The brig, however, was nothing like it had been. Now it consisted of several annexes, with no admittance from one to another.

Kris took the grand tour.

Lieutenant Commander Sampson had her own wing of sorts. It was more like a hospital than a prison. She was still in bed, sedated, and slowly recovering from her brain surgery. Kris might have ordered her to sick bay, but she had no idea what the new normal would be for that woman.

Sampson would stay in the brig until a new baseline for her behavior was established.

Another annex had the youngest children that had been brought aboard. There were five of them. They were likely somewhere around age seven down to three. Now they were bouncing off the walls, literally, in one large room under the close supervision of five young Sailors and Marines and one surprisingly matronlike chief.

The children didn’t know it, but the standing orders for their guards was to spoil them rotten. No surprise, the kids were enjoying it and going along solidly with the program. Presently, they were having a pillow fight with the grown-ups and burning all kinds of energy that they had from a lunch mainly of cookies and ice cream.

No doubt, a nap would be next on the schedule.

Jacques and Amanda had been put in charge of designing a program for the seduction of these children from the dark side into the light.

Kris allowed herself a smile. The gray-haired alien woman would gnash her teeth if she knew what was being done to the children she’d intended to have drive knives into their own brains.

The bigger kids, eight to twelve years old, were getting a different approach, one closer to what Jacques was using for the kids from the tribe Kris had rescued, drafted, enlisted, whatever.

The brig for these five kids had been divided into five roomy cells. Each kid shared it with a young Marine or Sailor who came from a large family and had been their age not long ago.

Each room had one young alien, one young human, and two computer games. The human had started off playing the game by him or herself. Inevitably, or at least in four of the five cases, the kids had come to look over the player’s shoulder.

Two of the boys were now lost in games involving racing around tracks or over wild country while the animal drivers or passengers tossed fruit at each other. The boys were laughing uproariously.

Two of the girls had joined their guards playing something involved with directing different sparkly things into forming a wall. Then they’d wreck it, if possible, with one swing of the wrecking ball, and do it all over again.

The oldest girl was the one holdout. Instead of coming to look over her guard’s shoulder and get involved in a game, she’d launched herself at the bulkhead, headfirst.

The guard had not been so lost in a game she’d grown out of years ago that she missed the move. She intercepted the girl on the fly. Now the girl was cuffed to her bed.

On the wall directly ahead of her, a coyote chased a roadrunner, with hilarious results. The guard laughed on cue with the video.

As expected, the alien girl opened one eye to see what was so funny. As Kris watched, the girl succumbed to watching as one vermin repeatedly tried and repeatedly failed, to get the other.

“I was betting on the roadrunner to drag her out of herself,” Jacques said, drifting up to watch with Kris.

“It she the hard case?”

“Among our kids, yes. I understand from the
Royal
that they have two hard cases. Both older. Doc Meade wanted to spread the kids out among all the ships, but I told her solitary confinement would be the worst thing we could do to the youngsters. As it is now, we and the
Royal
are the only ships with nurseries.”

“And most of them are coming around?”

“All the youngsters are moving, at one speed or another. This young woman, hard as she appears to be, is like putty compared to the diamond of the old lady’s personality that you’re about to meet.”

“What are our chances of turning the woman?” Kris asked.

“Somewhere between none and nil,” the anthropologist said. “But Jack had us reduce her sedation so you could talk to her. He thinks it’s important that you hear what she has to say.”

“Is it safe to do that?”

“Jack wants it. We’ve got a pump in her. We’re ready to put her back to sleep at the first sign she’s dangerous to herself. Why don’t you come see for yourself?”

Kris left the girl. Her guard had just brought a pillow to support her head so she could watch the video more comfortably.

The next room was not much larger than the one Kris had just watched. Here Jack stood, wearing only the sweat-stained liner to his battle armor. On the bed, the gray-haired woman was tied down with padded restraints. Her head lolled gently back and forth in zero gee.

Jacques opened the door but stayed outside when Kris entered. He locked the door behind her.

~Our Enlightened One is here,~ Jack said, as Kris came to float beside him.

The woman opened her eyes, took in the scene with a lazy glance, and laughed. It was a harsh, dry cackle.

~Vermin, your false enlightened one is a
woman
,~ she spat.

~I led the ships that blasted your other ships into tiny pieces,~ Nelly translated for Kris.

The woman turned her face to the wall. ~Yes, yes, yes, the vermin have chewed our toes. You said that before. But you are fools.~

She turned back to face Kris. ~You are a fool. You shot me with your false guns before I could tell you why I chose to live and see the fear in your eyes before I die like my worshipped one, the truly Enlightened One.~

~What will bring fear to my eyes?~ Kris asked.

~They have sent the torch to all the ships. Your luck may have led you to be there when we stumbled, but your luck cannot save you from what is even now moving to obliterate you. We will swim in your blood. We will pile your heads in our Holy of Holies. You will have no children to share the wine of your remembrance.~

She stared hard at Kris. As hard as her drugged state allowed.

~No one will know you ever lived.~

N
ELLY, SHOW HER THE CRYPT
UNDER THE PYRAMID.

W
I
TH PLEASURE,
K
RIS.

The wall to Kris’s right came alive with a holograph of the hall of horrors under the pyramid.

Even drugged, the woman’s face took on shock. Horror.

~You cannot have been there.~

~I have walked your horror of horrors,~ Kris said through Nelly. ~I have spat on it. This is the message I left for all of you to read.~

Now the stone Kris had used to block the entrance to the pyramid filled the wall.

~You make war on us,~ Kris said, ~we will bury your pyramid under a pile of your skulls. We will flood your plain of glass with your blood.~

~No. No! NO!~ the woman screamed. ~You are wrong. All the ships will come now that the torch has been sent to them. It is you that will be buried in a flood of ships. We have more ships than you can count. Our women are most fruitful. We will destroy you.~

“Jacques,” Kris said aloud, “are you listening in?”

“Yes,” came from a small grill in the door.

“Put her to sleep. I think she’s said all she came here to say.”

“Her vitals are way up. I was about to do it anyway.”

“Do it.”

The woman’s head lolled back on her bunk, and, in a moment, she was snoring.

“They fled here right after the first fight,” Kris said to Jack. He nodded agreement.

“I don’t see any way that this group could have sent any ‘torch’ to the other ships.”

“It’s not likely,” he said. “However, there may be some sort of precedence for them rousing the tribes with a torch.”

“And she’s assuming someone among the others has done that.”

“Like the three ships that observed our last fight?” Jack pointed out.

Kris winced. “Yeah.”

“Any suggestions what we do next?”

“I wonder if there is a library on the station,” Kris muttered to herself. “Someplace that has the history of these people.”

“The only way to find out is to search it,” Jack said.

“I hate to order your Marines into that place.”

“It’s ugly,” Jack agreed.

“You’ll want scientists in the search, too,” Jacques said, joining them.

Kris heaved a sigh. “Captain Drago, lay the
Wasp
alongside the station, then please join me on the flag bridge. Have the other skippers come, too.”

“Aye aye, Admiral. The Word is already sent to the squadron.”

Kris squared her shoulders. It was bad and would, no doubt, get worse.