The control stick began to rotate between Kris's legs.
That would be Tommy running tests. Still, the sight of it moving brought back good memories of some damn fine stick time of her own. She wiggled in her seat and felt the light craft respond to her movements. Bigger than a racing skiff but just as sweet.
Kris banished those distractions by replaying the drop plan in her mind as she waited. These kidnapping sons-a-bitches had a simple plan. They'd snapped up the Sequim General Manager's sole child during a school outing, then dragged the poor kid off to the northern wilderness before anyone knew what had happened. Ignore the child's name… much too familiar. Only pain there. Quickly Kris returned to tonight's problem. The approaches to the kidnappers' hideout were long, difficult, dangerous—and booby-trapped! So far, the bad guys had outsmarted—and killed—too many good people.
Kris ground her teeth; how had cruds like these gotten their hands on some of the most sophisticated traps and countermeasures in human space? She could understand the traps; humans now frequented planets with very nasty critters. And while she had never hunted big game herself, she was looking forward to this hunt for the most dangerous game. What frosted her was the legal bunk used by specialty stores to excuse their sale of measures and countermeasures that were only going to make her job damn dangerous tonight. Normal people didn't need electrocardiogram jammers. Why would any good citizen need a decoy device to simulate a human heat signature? Blast it, her suit was warm; sweat was already running down her back.
The day was so hot, the ice cream melted even as Kris trotted toward the duck pond. Kris paused just long enough to give both ice cream cones a quick lick, then felt guilty. ''Eddy, I've got your ice cream,'' she called as she hurried on. She hurried so much that she was well out of the trees and halfway across the vale to the pond before the wrongness of it got through to her. Kris came to a slow halt.
Eddy wasn't there!
The man with the com had fallen, half in the water. The ducks gathered around him to pluck at the fallen grain.
Two lumps of clothes doted the vale. In her nightmares that night, Kris would recognize them for agents who had been with her for years. But right then, her eyes were riveted on Nanna. She had fallen down. Her arms and legs splayed around like a rag doll. Even at ten, Kris knew that was all wrong for a real person.
Kris began to scream. She dropped her ice cream cones as she tried to cram her hands in her mouth, bite down hard on knuckles hoping the pain would wake her from this bad dream. Somewhere behind her, a voice shouted into a commlink. ''Agents down. Agents down. Dandelion is nowhere in sight. I repeat, Dandelion is missing.''
A flashing red light grabbed Kris's attention. ''You did it again,'' she growled at herself as she yanked her thoughts back to the problem at hand. Around her, the drop bay ran through decompression. Air gone, Kris and her troopers breathed only what their drop suits provided. Kris checked all her readouts. Her suit was good, as good as Navy issue got. So were all of her troopers. ''Good to go,'' she reported.
With a thump to Kris's rear, the LAC fell into silent, black space. Tommy let them drift for only the moment it took Kris to get a good look at the Typhoon, her smart metal hide stretched thin to give the crew individual rooms and spin gravity while in orbit. Her bow and stem was proudly painted with the blue and green flag of the Society of Humanity. Then the LAC came alive; the stick moved as Tommy guided both LACs into reentry.
Well, if Tommy was doing the work, Kris could use the time to check the ground situation once more. ''Nelly, show me the real time target feed,'' Kris subvocalized. The hunting lodge filled Kris's heads-up display. Several dozen human shadows showed on the infrared detection. Six or eight moved around the building… all in pairs. Per the guarantee provided with every human heat decoy sold, there was no way Kris was supposed to know that only five real humans were moving. Thank God the manufacturers had so far stuck to the pledge of silence the government had extracted from them.
For ten years, no bad guys had tumbled to the fact that 98.6 degrees was only the average human temperature. This late at night most people's body heat was slipping down into the 97s and 96s. In the six upstairs rooms of the lodge, the heat signatures of six little girls lay chained to their beds. Two gunmen sat at opposite ends of the hall, ready at the first sign of rescue to dash into the one room that held the kidnapped girl and kill her. Thanks to the sensors on the fifty-gram Stoolpigeon hovering 1,000 meters above the log cabin, Kris knew there was only one gunman—and which room held the terrified girl.
Terrified! Kris ground her teeth, then looked out of the LAC to rest her eyes on the planet revolving slowly below her. She tried to do anything but touch the nerve that took her again into her little brother's grave. At least these kidnappers had not buried their victim under tons of manure with a damaged air pipe the only lifeline to the world for a six-year-old kid.
At school, Kris had overheard other students talking, saying that Eddy was dead hours before her parents paid the ransom. She didn't know the truth of that. There were some reports she just couldn't read, some media coverage she could never sit through.
What could never be ignored for a moment were the what-ifs. What if Kris hadn't gone for ice cream? What if the bad guys had had to take down Nanna and Eddy and Kris? What would a wild ten-year-old girl have done to their plans?
Kris shook her head, willed away the images. Stay there too long, and tears came. A spacesuit was no place for tears.
Kris focused on the planet below. The day terminator lay ahead, changing the green and blue cloud-shrouded globe to dark—darkness and storms. A surprise night drop needed thunder to cover the sonic booms, darkness to hide their approach, night to make guards inattentive.
Kris smiled, remembering other planets she'd watched from orbit, a fast racing skiff under her. And her smile slid into a scowl as the memories she'd been struggling to hold at arm's length for a week came flooding back.
Father vanished from Kris's life the day after Eddy's funeral. Off to the office before she awoke, he was rarely home before her bedtime.
Mother was something else. ''You've been a little savage long enough. Time to make a proper young lady out of you.'' That didn't get Kris off the hook for winning soccer games for Father, or showing up for his political parties. But Kris quickly discovered ''proper young ladies'' not only went to ballet but also accompanied Mother to teas. As the youngest at any tea by twenty years, Kris was bored silly. Then she noticed that some women's teas smelled funny. It wasn't long before Kris got a chance to taste them. They tasted funny, too…but they made Kris feel better, the parties go faster. It wasn't long before Kris found what was being added to their tea…and how to raid her father's liquor cabinet or mother's wine closet.
Somehow, the drinking made the days endurable.
Kris didn't even care when her grades took a nosedive. It didn't matter; Mother and Father only frowned.
Other kids at school had fun things like skiff racing from orbit; Kris had her bottle. Of course, the bottle and the pills Mother's doctor prescribed to help Kris be more ladylike did not help her soccer game. The coach shook his head and sidelined her as much as he could. Harvey, the chauffeur who took her to all the games, just seemed kind of sad.