Training daze, p.1
Training Daze, page 1
Ace Books by Mike Shepherd
Kris Longknife: Mutineer
Kris Longknife: Deserter
Kris Longknife: Defiant
Kris Longknife: Resolute
Kris Longknife: Audacious
Kris Longknife: Intrepid
Kris Longknife: Undaunted
Kris Longknife: Redoubtable
Kris Longknife: Daring
eSpecials
Kris Longknife: Training Daze
Kris Longknife
TRAINING DAZE
A novella
Mike Shepherd
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
KRIS LONGKNIFE: TRAINING DAZE
An Ace eSpecial / published by arrangement with the author
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Ace eSpecial edition / October 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Mike Moscoe.
Excerpt from Kris Longknife: Daring by Mike Shepherd copyright © by Mike Moscoe.
All rights reserved.
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ISBN: 978-1-101-56223-9
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Lieutenant Kris Longknife had almost finished her long to-do list.
She had attended the funerals of every man, woman, and, saddest of all, child who’d died following her into the battle to save their planet. The media, and everyone else, was calling it the Battle of Wardhaven.
She’d also visited the wounded in the hospital. A few more than once.
Now there was only one item left on her to-do list. She needed to apologize to Commander Mandanti for what she’d done, stealing his squadron . . . and his honor.
Nelly had arranged for them to meet at the “O” Club on High Wardhaven, a much-less-formal affair than the one dirtside. Kris arrived ten minutes early, to keep Jack Montoya, her Secret Service agent, happy. He arranged for her to have a quiet table in the corner, then settled against the wall between her and the door.
“How’s the commander going to find me with you hulking around between me and the entrance?” Kris grumbled.
“Don’t worry, he’ll spot you. I’m more worried about someone else’s spotting you. Whoever sent those battleships our way can’t be happy about losing them. I figure you’re near the top of their don’t-like list.”
“Jack, this is Wardhaven. Nobody’s going to try to assassinate me here,” Kris said, letting exasperation flood her voice.
“And exactly where was your little brother kidnapped?” Jack asked.
Kris was saved from having to answer that question when Commander Mandanti entered . . . and headed directly for Kris’s table.
“You called him!” Kris whispered.
“You don’t have to have a computer as smart as Nelly to tell somebody what table you’ve grabbed at the club.”
The commander’s arrival put an end to that debate as Kris stood to meet him.
Kris hadn’t seen the old commander since the battle; his gray hair seemed totally white. He’d been recalled from retirement to ride herd on the mosquito-boat squadron and its hooligan junior officers. As she took her seat, she asked him how his battle had gone.
“We damn near had to push the old Cushing away from the pier. Her engines picked that moment to remind us that she was a wreck and should have been sent to the breakers fifteen years ago with the rest of her class. Anyway, we managed to trail Santiago in the Halsey through most of the fight, but when she made her last charge, we kind of fell by the wayside. We did our bit, but it was hardly a glorious ending for the old boat. She’ll finally make her trip to the wreckers tomorrow. And not a moment too soon.”
Kris listened intently both for the story and any underlying feelings. He seemed content to have fought the first battle of his forty-year career . . . and to have survived it.
Kris took a deep breath and began her apology. “I’m sorry I took over the squadron from you, sir.”
“Is that why we’re meeting? You think I’m mad at you for taking the fast-attack boats out?”
“I did kind of take command of the squadron away from you, sir,” Kris said. What she’d done was not being examined in the media, nor formally discussed by the Navy. What was being whispered about at “O” clubs and cocktail parties was not something Kris was included in. No doubt, a lot of senior officers had their noses out of joint.
Commander Mandanti laughed. Still chuckling, he said, “Do you honestly think I planned on packing these old bones into one of those fast-attack boats and leading the charge, young lady? No way. That was why I’d been rotating the command of each division among you young bucks. I wanted that bunch of prima donnas to get a good sniff of how each of you did as a leader. I figured when the fecal matter hit the fan, one of you would be accepted as the clear leader.”
He leaned forward, resting both elbows on the table, and grinned. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“I wasn’t sure it would, for a minute, there,” Kris said. Having announced to one and all that she intended to take command of the squadron, there had been a rough couple of seconds when she thought two or three of the other skippers might object. Certainly Taussig, regular Navy back six generations, had not looked persuaded.
“Yeah, but then Captain Santiago sauntered in, and that was the end of doubt,” the commander said. “I guess it’s true what they say. Every Longknife needs a Santiago.”
Kris had finally found out the truth behind that story. Now that she’d seen it in action, she couldn’t agree more.
“Besides,” the commander went on, “I’d never have thought up your idea of using the tugs to reload and recock the fast-attack boats. We never would have gotten those battlewagons without that second attack. Brilliant.”
“Somebody else put the tugs out there, sir. I just figured out an additional use for them.”
“The tugs had to be out there. You have no idea how cranky civilians can get when hunks of wreckage crash down in their living rooms. It’s standard to have tugs out to pick up the larger pieces, but to use them to recharge your lasers and refuel your antimatter engines, that one wasn’t in the book. Trust me, Lieutenant, it will be in the next edition. You bet it will.”
“I’m glad to know that there are no hard feelings, sir. Still, if there’s anything I can do for you, all you have to do is ask.”
“There is one thing,” the commander said in a conspiratorial whisper as he leaned across the table.
“If that princess gig of yours ever takes you to a party where Adorable Dora is reporting, could you smack her in the mouth for me? Preferably on camera. Tell her it’s from the Navy.”
Kris laughed; the commander was not the only one whose nasty list was headed by Dora Evermorn of Galactic News and Entertainment. “I wanted to shoot her,” Kris said.
“Better idea,” the commander agreed.
“But Jack, my Secret Service agent, takes a dim view of his primary carrying. It’s kind of hard to shoot anyone when you’ve been disarmed.”
At the taking of his name in vain, Jack interrupted his vigil—checking diners, doors, and more—for a second and flashed the two a smile. One fast smile, then he was back on guard.
“Good man,” the commander said.
“Most of the time,” Kris admitted with a sigh. She liked having Jack around. Now, if she could just get him to do what she wanted.
But Mandanti was back on Dora. “I can hardly argue that it was bad, us losing so many in the fight, but to say, on the air, that the career and reserves who died didn’t matter, we were just doing our job!” Mandanti le t out an exasperated breath. “None of us signed up for anything like the one-sided battle that was. Yes, we needed all hands on deck and more hands than they left in port. Yes, it’s a shame that so many of the civilians died. And yes, we couldn’t have pulled it off without the rag, tag, and bobtail collection that you put together, Your Highness.”
“But I should never have brought in the system runabouts. The Coast Guard auxiliary were massacred,” Kris said, shaking her head. “And a couple of those runabouts, they had mom and dad, sister and brother on board. I know. I attended the funerals.”
The commander leaned across the table and rested his hands on Kris’s. “Is that what’s eating at you?”
“Doesn’t it bother you, sir?”
“You haven’t seen the tapes, have you?”
“Tapes? What tapes?”
“Van Horn taped his battle board. So did several other ships. A couple survived. I’ve watched them. I don’t care what the media say, the Navy’s going to get its history books right this time. But it’s the massacre of the runabouts that you need to see.”
“I don’t think I could stand it, sir.”
“Kris, they knew what they were doing. We all knew that the only ships out there that could do a damn thing against those battleships were the fast-attack boats. I knew it, and so did the coasties on the runabouts. The tape shows when the first one got blown out of space, and the next, and the next. What it doesn’t show is anyone flinching. Not one of them tried to break away. They saw their power-squadron mates being swatted like flies, and they kept right on charging in.”
Kris had no words for that kind of courage.
“And then you recovered with the tugs. They knew no runabouts had made it through the first attack. Half their crews were made up from volunteers who liked hiking around the moon in space suits. Knowing what they knew then, they still volunteered. Man, woman, teenager, they were for joining you in your final charge.”
Commander Mandanti paused to take a deep breath. “I’ve come to believe in the fast-attack boats, but I tell you true, your boat would not have made it in for the final shoot without the tugs and yachts complicating the firing solutions for those bastards.
“Forty years I served this man’s Navy. Not a shot fired through it all.” He paused to finger the Wardhaven Defense Ribbon, now taking pride of place among his decorations. “That day, we few, we band of brothers, lifers or reservists who just kept the coat in the back of the closet, or civilian volunteers who got The Word and came, we all sacrificed more than the rest of them that stayed home can ever know or repay. Some sacrificed everything. Those of us who got off with only losing a chunk of our soul owe it to the others to never let them be forgotten.”
A tardy waiter finally arrived; they ordered. The meal was half-eaten before the words began to flow again. When they did, it was the funny things they remembered. Mandanti told about getting the call from fleet headquarters that Kris and her helmswoman had planted a skiff racer on the golf course. “Did you know you missed four admirals? Damn near more stars in that foursome than in the sky.”
“No, sir,” Kris said through a bite of club sandwich. “If I’d known those four old duffers were admirals, I’d have taken the stick and landed closer.”
“Would have served them right.”
Kris was in a much better mood when she shook the commander’s hand good-bye.
“Glad that’s over?” Jack asked her, as they headed down the space elevator.
“Gladder that I did it,” Kris said.
Kris caught a quick bite on the fly that night as Abby got her gussied up for a ball. The Benefit for the Arts had been scheduled six months ago, but it would be the first time the beautiful people met after nearly getting their hides nailed to the wall.
Kris chose to wear her dress uniform. For once, Abby didn’t argue.
The uniform seemed to put Kris in a bubble. She moved among the chattering class, catching snippets of conversation, finding nothing she wanted to stop and join. And none of them seemed interested in her.
Unusual for a Longknife.
There was an exception. A man, in full evening tucker and drunk as a deacon, though it was barely nine in the evening, made a beeline for Kris. His fist was balled up, and his intent was clear. Without so much as a blink, Jack stepped forward and coldcocked the guy, grabbing his elbow to keep him from dropping to the floor. Jack glanced around and spotted two waiters already headed his way to take the problem off his hands.
That was when Kris realized the drunk was only the distraction. Unnoticed behind him, a slip of a woman stepped around him and Jack, a glass jar in hand full and sloshing with something white and stinking. She moved to splatter its contents on Kris.
Kris barely had time to recognize the threat, much less turn to run.
But Jack was sidestepping into the woman’s path. One arm still on the drunk’s elbow, he reached out to grab her hand, jar and all.
And the contents of the jar ended up in Jack’s face.
“Yuck!” Jack exclaimed.
“You should have let me douse her good,” the woman shouted. “Tell your dad his farm policy stinks!”
“And now I do,” Jack muttered to himself, trying to shake the spoiled milk from his tux while keeping a solid hold on both troublemakers.
Reinforcements arrived. First, two strapping waiters took over the problem children. One offered Jack a towel while making a face at the stink. Then two plainclothes cops showed up, one of each gender, to officially take charge of the disturbers of the peaceful ball.
In hardly a minute, the show was over, leaving Jack still toweling himself and muttering something about the princess’s detail needing more backup, so he could absent himself at times like this to clean up in the nearest bathroom. Or go home.
The show was just winding down when, much to Kris’s relief, she spotted Grampa Trouble, resplendent in his dress red and blues, coming her way.
“That was well-done,” he said to Jack. Quickly, the bubble of silence engulfed the two. The retired general didn’t seem to mind. So it was left to Kris to find something to talk about.
“How come you guys get to look so good in your dress uniforms, and we gals just look frumpy?”
“We could hardly let you look sexy, like the rest of these half-dressed mannequins.”
“Yes,” Kris agreed, as all good junior officers should when addressing a five-star. “But there has to be something between this and that,” she said, letting her right hand sweep from her dinner dress uniform to a woman whose dress left nothing to the imagination.
“Earn a couple of stars, young woman, then you can try your own hand at uniform design. You’ll likely have to. Every ten years, need it or not, somebody always comes down with the uncontrollable urge to change the uniforms.”
Again, conversation between them came to a halt. They stood, waiting to see if anyone would feel compelled to talk to either of them. No one did.
“It’s hard to believe that a fight for all these people’s lives took place not two weeks ago, just fifty thousand klicks above their heads.”
“I doubt if most of them even know there was a war,” Grampa Trouble said with a grim smile. “Kind of makes you wonder why we did it.”
“Chandra Singh knew what she was fighting for, her husband and her kids.”
“There’s a story in the Bible, Kris, you really should read it sometime. It seems God was browned off with some particular chunk of real estate and decided to nuke the place. This guy, I don’t remember if he was from the place or not, but he tried to talk God out of it. If there’s just a hundred good people there, would you wipe them out with the bad? So God agreed to spare them all if just a hundred good people could be counted. The guy negotiated God down to five or ten, as I recall. Problem was, there weren’t even that many decent people in the place.”
Grampa Trouble paused to take a sip of his drink. “Different people take a lot of different things away from that story. Me, I keep hoping that we can find enough good people to keep the rest of us from going up in flames.”
He handed his drink, less than half-gone, off to a waiter. “We found enough this time. Thank whatever God was keeping count. Now, it seems to me that we’ve spent enough time playing duck in this shooting gallery. What do you say that we blow this place? I didn’t get a chance to eat, and I know this great burger place that won’t hold it against us that we’re overdressed and in uniform. Or smell a little funny,” he finished with a grin in Jack’s direction.
