Kris glanced at Captain Drago and raised an eyebrow.
He shook his head. “I can’t recommend that the Wasp attempt any more jumps than it takes to get us somewhere where we can have some serious work done on her. I tend to agree with Jack that we are not headed into a good situation, but, like you, Your Highness, I can’t think of anything we can do but do what they want.”
He paused for a moment. “After all, what they want us to do is what I was desperately hoping we could do.”
The Wasp made the two jumps. As Kris expected, the FPB did not follow them.
However, two cruisers were waiting for them when they entered the Chance system. The Wasp immediately set a course for High Chance, and the cruisers, one in Helvitican colors, the other in U.S., followed them silently.
The lack of greeting and the total silence carried its own foreboding.
Alone, unacknowledged, the Wasp went where it was ordered.
62
The Wasp docked where it was told to, well aft on the station. No other ships were using a pier below the middle of the spaceport. The instructions to the ship had been short and forceful, and had called for no response.
That didn’t mean no one tried to talk to the Wasp.
The main screen on the bridge suddenly came alive. A civilian was staring wide-eyed at them. “Are you the Wasp? Did you fire on the aliens like you said you were going to? Where are the rest of the ships?”
“Cut that off,” Captain Drago ordered. “Communications, what just happened?”
“Sorry, sir. We’ve been intercepting something like that every couple of seconds. There are about thirty or forty people trying to call us. Some are newsies. Some I have no idea who they are. Anyway, I’m sorry, we’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
“Glad to know that we aren’t totally forgotten,” Vicky said. “Me not being under your orders, maybe I should talk to some of them.”
“Please don’t,” Kris said. “I don’t want to remind you, but you are presently under my protection. You really want to leave the Wasp and check into the local Hilton?”
“I wouldn’t last an hour,” Vicky muttered. “Okay, I’ve reconsidered. You stay my best friend forever. Wherever you go, I go. Only, without your Chief Beni, how safe are you going to be? Have you thought of that?”
“I’ll make you a bet,” Kris said. “Two seconds after we dock, I’m going to be under so solid a lockdown that a flyspeck can’t get in.”
Vicky made a show of thinking that over, then shook her head and smiled evilly. “No way I take that bet.”
A few minutes later, the Wasp tied up to its assigned pier. Moments later, fresh air, water, and other amenities began to flow into the ship.
“You better keep our sewage on board for a while,” Kris suggested. “No one has come down with the alien’s equivalent of Montezuma’s revenge from those two sweet kids, but you never can tell.”
“And it may buy us a bit of time before we’re crawling with newsies,” the skipper agreed.
“Skipper, there are an admiral and a planetary governor on the pier along with a Marine guard detail. Do I let them aboard?” came from Gunny on the quarterdeck.
“I’ll dispatch the princess to talk to them. Don’t open the hatch until she gets there. Your Highness, you want to get into a biohazard suit?”
“Great idea, Skipper. Jack, you want to come with me?”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
“Nelly,” Kris said on the way to her quarters, “is my report ready to download?”
“The short version and the middling-long version, I can squirt to anyone in a few seconds, Kris. But the warts-and-all version, that takes up a lot of bandwidth and time.”
“Could you load a copy of that on flash storage?”
“I’ll have a copy ready in your room.”
Back in Kris’s cabin, she found Abby laying out a set of khakis. “These are the least wrinkled and smelly. I tried to wash out a pair of panties and bra in the bathtub, but they stank worse afterward, and I have no idea how the ammonia and methane would have felt after you wore them for a few hours.”
Kris nodded. “Thanks for thinking about me.”
“I ain’t had much to do but think about you. And visit those cute kids down in the nursery. Cara just thinks they are the cutest things, even if they won’t let them out of the quarantine bubble to play with her.”
“She’s a good kid. You take care of her.”
“And you take care of you,” Abby said, adjusting Kris’s gig line.
Then she gave her a hug. A wide-open big one. “We’ll find you, Kris. No matter where they send you, we will find you, and we will come for you.”
“Don’t come too soon,” Kris said. “Take your time. Don’t play into anything they’ve set up to get you, too.”
“Gamma didn’t raise any dumb kids,” Abby assured her, and helped her pull on the blue moon suit.
Done, Nelly pointed out a tiny flash-storage cube. Kris palmed it before she left. Nice, these new suits had pockets.
Kris met Jack in the passageway, moon suited up himself.
“Let’s go see how they welcome the conquering hero.” Then Kris reconsidered her words. “Make that surviving broken-down sailor.”
Jack hummed something that sounded a bit like “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” but maybe wasn’t.
At the quarterdeck, the usual formalities were a bit awkward in the moon suits, but Kris made sure to follow tradition. Gunny opened the hatch just enough for Kris and Jack to slip through, then shoved it closed again.
Kris easily spotted Admiral Sandy Santiago. Governor Ron Torn of Chance came as a surprise.
Kris marched as smartly as the roly-poly suit allowed, presented herself to the admiral, and snapped a salute. “Lieutenant Commander Longknife reporting as ordered, ma’am.”
The admiral returned her salute and quipped dryly, “I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.”
Kris turned to the governor. “Ron, how’s the wife? The kids? They must be growing like weeds.”
“Don’t try to change the subject,” he demanded, then changed it himself. “What are you doing in those biohazard suits?”
“We’ve got aliens aboard,” Kris said with solid pride. “So far, there’s no sign that they have any bugs that like us, but we got them in quarantine, and I thought you might want to have us be careful for a while longer.”
“You’ve captured aliens!” both the admiral and governor exclaimed.
“Yep, two of them.”
“They’re talking to you?” Ron said.
“Yes, and no,” Kris said, letting a pained look cross her brow. “They’ve got teeth coming in, and I think what they’re saying translates into ‘Teething is the pits.’ You want to see a picture?”
Without waiting for an answer, Kris pulled a picture out of one of the pockets of her blue suit and waved it at Ron, proud as any grandparent.
Ron stepped back in horror. Then he focused on the picture and his horror turned to puzzlement. “They look just like my kids looked when they were babies.”
“That’s what Gunny said when he found them. The species will not talk to us, will shoot at us every chance they get, and they look just like us. How’s that for ugly?”
“We are not supposed to talk to you, Kris,” Admiral Santiago said. “My orders are very specific. You will only be debriefed on Wardhaven.”
“Those are not my orders,” Ron said. “Kris Longknife, you are under arrest for crimes against humanity. You will come with me.”