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KRIS LONGKNIFE: UNDAUNTED
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Ace mass-market edition / November 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Mike Moscoe.
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eISBN : 978-1-101-14891-4
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If what they say is true, and a wise warrior must know her enemy, then it may follow that the only person whom you understand . . . and who really understands you . . . is your enemy.
Acknowledgments
No book finds its way into a reader’s hand without a lot of dedicated work from wonderful people. Ginjer Buchanan deserves special thanks for all the support she gave a writer through the ups and downs of the writing life. The gang at Ace has been wonderful, balancing their standard formats with my insistence that it doesn’t work that way inside the perimeter fence. Jennifer Jackson is all the agent that a writer could hope for. And there is no better first reader than my wife, Ellen.
I’d like to give special appreciation to Edee Lemonier and Debbie Lentz, who volunteered to be second readers and comb the final manuscript for those nits that these old eyes let slip through. I hope those of you who find them particularly painful have less cause for painkillers during Kris’s latest adventure. I’d also like to thank the folks at The Anchor Inn in Lincoln City for giving me a home away from home to write. Their fine care and great food kept me putting in twenty pages a day, day after day. Thanks, Kip, Candi, Misty, and Ron.
1
Lieutenant Kris Longknife sat in the captain’s chair of the Wardhaven explorer ship Wasp, the unquestioned commander of all she surveyed.
Of course, she had the conn on the midwatch, and there was very little to survey; most of the Wasp’s crew were sound asleep. Far from her sight, the scant midnight watch went about their duties, keeping the air cool, the lights on, and the ship decelerating at one gee on its established course. The only person in Kris’s sight was Chief Beni. He studied the instruments at the navigator’s position.
Most of the time, he fed his sensor data to the navigator. Just now, he took advantage of the quiet midwatch to see what she did with his input. He was also weighing his options to go to OCS, trying on an officer’s shoes to check the fit.
All in all, it looked to be a very quiet and comfortable midwatch. HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN, NELLY?
HOW LONG HAS WHAT BEEN? Kris’s pet computer, worth several ships like the Wasp, asked on the direct hookup into Kris’s brain.
Nelly was usually ten steps ahead of Kris’s own thoughts, ready to answer any question before the Navy lieutenant posed it. Kris put the surly reply down to attitude. Or, more correctly, “ ’tude.”
Kris still had a twelve-year-old girl on board. Or, more accurately, a certain girl held a ship, its crew, and one very uppity computer in thrall.
Content not to break the dim silence, Kris continued the conversation via the private link between her and Nelly. HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN SINCE ANYONE TRIED TO KILL Me?
OH, THAT. SIXTY-THREE DAYS. DO YOU WANT THE HOURS, MINUTES, SECONDS, AND NANOSECONDS, YOUR HIGH-HANDEDNESS?
THAT WON’T BE NECESSARY, Kris said, to cut off more ’tude. It had been a nice two months without the occasional potshot or heart-pounding race for life.
Kris could get to liking this.
Of course, the whole time had been spent far beyond the Rim of human occupied space. Far enough out that she hadn’t stumbled on even one Sooner world. Sooner farmers, artisans, and generally cantankerous folks saw no reason why they should obey distant Earth and not push out beyond the boundaries set for humanity by old men in suits. Kris found them kindred spirits to her own desire to have as much space as possible between herself and her closest relatives.
Still, where the law hadn’t gotten to, often thievery, pirating, and slavery had.
Kris had spent the first two months of this cruise putting down a few of those problems. Done with the intrepid side for a while, she’d spent the last two months expanding the chart of mapped and usable jump points and letting her scientists research to their hearts’ delight.
And not been shot at once.
Nice, that.
“How’s our approach to the next jump point coming?” Kris asked Chief Beni.
He shook his head. “It just took a zig away from us. I make it about fifteen thousand kilometers farther away. I would suggest . . .” He tapped the nav board several times, frowned at the results, and said, “. . . we reduce deceleration to .84 gee. That should put us there in twenty-two minutes . . . give or take one of Nelly’s nanoseconds.”
Apparently, the chief and Nelly were back to open hostilities.
Kris ignored that and worried her lower lip. Each of the jump points created by the aliens a million or two years ago orbited two, three, or more stars. That meant their apparent orbit around any one star was anything but smooth. And caused the occasional deadly bad jump.
Kris hoped this little wiggle meant only that the Wasp would arrive a bit late for the next jump. Actually, with everyone asleep, it really wasn’t a problem at all.
Kris glanced at the star map on the main screen. The Wasp had been working its way across the front of Wardhaven space . . . or to put it more politically correct . . . the 136 planets now negotiating to establish some kind of association under the leadership of Grampa Ray, King Raymond I to anyone not his great-granddaughter.
To the right of the Wasp’s search sweep was Greenfeld space, and the less said about that, the better for Kris’s day. To the left was the Helvetican Confederacy that, if Kris remembered something that had come across her desk, now included her friends on the proud planet Chance.
Above them on the star map, looming like a black hole, was the No Go Zone. Nobody in their right mind went into the buffer between humans and the Iteeche. The fight to set that zone between “us and them” had almost driven the human race extinct.
Kris doubted any Sooner or pirate would dare violate that precinct of space.
Of course, the Wasp was getting closer to that zone. Kris would have to decide soon just how close she’d go. She chuckled to herself . . . putting a buffer around a buffer. But the price for a mistake along that boundary was too high, both for her crew and the whole human race.
Maybe it was already time to go farther out rather than any farther over.
For the next few minutes, Kris did the job that Officers of the Deck did, checking to make sure that very competent people did their job as well as they always did. The reactor was well in the green. Reaction-mass tanks were still over 65 percent, so it would be a while before Captain Drago, the true monarch of this small chunk of space called the Wasp, would skim the surface of a gas giant to scoop up mass, or take the more sedate approach of heading for a space station to buy the water they heated in the reactors.