I t took only a second for Abby to tell Kris that it was suppertime here at the embassy, and that her kids were eating their dinner with Gramma and Grampa Trouble in the central commissary.
Kris took the elevator up the castle. Her "castle" looked very much like the classic image of a starship, sitting on buttressed fins, then climbing high as it widened before narrowing again at the top. The top of Kris's embassy castle showed the antennae of a major sensor suite. The lasers were hidden.
No one was taking down Kris's embassy, not with her kids and so many other families in it. Then again, Kris had never expected protestors from the Iteeche.
As Kris's glass elevator rose up the castle, she got a very good view of the Imperial Capital. It was a blend of opulence and squalor. To her right lay the Imperial Palace, encircled by a wide moat and wall. From here, she could see the layout of its interior. It had its own forest and lake, but also several huge blocks of buildings. No one knew exactly which building was used for what purpose.
There was a lot not known about what went on among the Imperial Court.
Rays of wide boulevards spread out from the broad avenue circling the palace grounds. Here, close to the palace, were parks and trees that wealthy Iteeche strolled through. Here and there were other palaces. Like Kris's Pink Coral Palace, they were low-slung, five to seven stories high. Here, wealth was living in the seventh-floor penthouse.
There were several high-rises for the wealthy. Their lovely skyscrapers were swaddled in small forests or gardens. They rose tall, some in swirls, some in blocks, all using creative architecture to tell the viewer that important and wealthy Iteeche lived here.
Much farther away from the Imperial Palace, huge, stocky buildings rose row on row in their dreary sameness. Here, the average Iteeche dwelled. Kris had never been in one of those cell blocks, so she could only imagine what they looked like inside. She had been to bazaars, the tiny foothold of the independent merchants and craftsmen who, being clanless, struggled to eke out a living in the shadow of Imperial and clan power.
Strangely, these were the same merchants, working with the humans' independent family trading ships that alone had managed to start trade going between the two spacefaring species.
Kris took all this in with a thoughtful glance. This was the terrain where she would be waging diplomacy, or war by other means, for the next couple of weeks. That assumed she wasn't thrown out or murdered sooner.
With that happy thought, she got off at the castle's widest point. Here were family quarters and common use facilities. Here, the walls were armored. A sudden attack would find this area well protected even if it did get through the outer and active defenses.
Kris was past a brisk walking pace and only a bit below jogging when she entered the commissary. Quick glances told her nothing.
"Turn right," Nelly said. "They're about ten rows over."
Kris and Jack took off trotting. At the top of the tenth row they paused. Six tables in were Johnnie and Ruth, studiously eating their supper.
Well, maybe Ruth was, but there was the cutest puppy seated at Johnnie's feet, whose big eyes were looking up, woefully begging the five-year-old for a scrap.
It had not long to wait.
A morsel soon dropped surreptitiously from Johnnie's hand. From the way he kept his eyes forward, it was clear that what his hand was up to was not at all what it was supposed to do. However, considering that the morsel looked like Johnnie's favorite food forever, ham, it definitely was a sacrifice on the boy's part.
Now broccoli would have been another matter.
With stealthy steps, the two of them approached their kids. Kris's heart was filled with warmth and joy as she watched them go about their normal kid things. She had missed that so much.
It was Gramma Trouble that gave them away. Ruth spotted that her namesake had taken to casting smiles at something over her shoulder. The seven-year-old turned her head . . . then let out a squeal of glee.
In a scramble of arms and legs and a puppy dog tail, Kris and Jack were quickly on their knees, surrounded by eager hugs and kisses. Johnnie wanted everyone to know about his new friend, and told his parents so in the loudest, shrillest voice.
Ruth demanded to know all about where they'd gone and what they'd done, and did they bring anything back for her?
It was a riot, but such a wonderful, loving riot that Kris had no intention of calling in the Marines to quell it.
Jack and Kris joined their children at the dinner table. The commissary was the general place to eat now that the embassy was shy of all its hangers-on and summer soldiers. It was also informal.
A command sergeant major, his wife, and their two kids ate at the table next over. Johnnie was friends to their youngest, and, more often than not, they ate together. The CSM might have had no problem eating with the admiral's kids and helping the legendary General Trouble ride herd on them, but when he found himself seated across the aisle from a grand admiral, he fell a bit silent.
Grampa Trouble made a point to see to it that Kris quickly found out about how helpful Sergeant Sanchez had been when it came to keeping Johnnie in line and towing the mark.
"He was also very nice to me," Johnnie put in, having no clue as to what his elders had said about his existence over the last four months.
"I’m sure he has been," Kris said, laughing, "and will be very nice to you the next time I have to go off, wandering the galaxy and knocking heads together."
"Begging the admiral's pardon, but next time I'd prefer to be with Your Highness, knocking heads," the sergeant said.
Kris caught the worried look his wife threw Gramma Trouble's way. That was the look that concerned wives had been sharing since time immemorial when their warrior husbands talked of going to see the widow maker.
"We'll see, Sergeant," Kris said. "Right now, I may have more interesting problems right here in our own backyard."
"Which does raise the question," Grampa Trouble said, "as to why we and the kids are getting to see your loving countenance."
"I've been ordered by the Emperor to give the child a full report on all I've accomplished and intend to accomplish."
"I hope none of that involves an apology," Gramma Trouble said, darkly.
"That is something I will have to determine before I stick my head into that lovely palace the Emperor has. Such sweet woods to walk in. Such lovely gardens."
"Can Johnnie and I go with you, Momma?" Ruth put in. "It's been forever since we've had a walk outside."
She lowered her voice, "This place smells funny."
"Now Ruth, you're breathing the same air as ship's air. It can't smell any better or worse than the air you smell on board the Princess Royal ."
"It doesn't smell as good as the air back home," Johnnie pointed out.
"And when we go outside the castle, pee-uuu," Ruth added.
"Honey, we are sharing this planet with fifty billion Iteeche," Kris said. "If we were on a planet with that many humans, I assure you, it would smell worse. Why, I remember the time I went to old Earth. If the wind was blowing from the wrong direction, there would be so much dust in the air that it would get in your eyes. I had to wear goggles."
"Wow, you've been to old Earth?" came from one of the kids at the sergeant's table.
"Just for a summer course I was taking."
"Mom got sent to summer school," Ruth put in.
Apparently, her understanding of the difference between summer learning programs and summer school was still in flux. Kris couldn't help but muss her daughter's hair. Ruth was still small enough to enjoy it.
No doubt, she wouldn't be for much longer.
Officially, the work day was over here in the embassy. Kris used that for an excuse to ask the kids what they'd like to do, and "Swimming!" was the shout from not only her brood, but from several tables around them.
So, Kris joined a group of families with kids from two to fifteen as they made their way down two floors to the huge water park. There were several different pools with everything from kiddie wading to lap pools with a wild slide and play area thrown in for those with more giggles than good sense.
For the next couple of hours, Kris and Jack watched their kids, bathing their war weary souls in the giggles and unabashed laughter of children. Not just theirs, but a mob of them.
Ruth could now swim like a dolphin. Johnnie could splash his way along as he kept his head above water. The water slides were their favorites. Kris and Jack rode down with their kids ahead of them. Other times, they waited for them in the bottom pool. Either way, the kids’ giggles and laughs bathed Kris and left her feeling cleaner than the water ever could.
Abby joined them with her family and the water party got even more fun as Abby regaled present company, including Ruth and Johnnie, with stories of what their mom and grand admiral had done in her youth. Nelly joined in, which made it even worse for Kris, since she had memories stored away from even before she became sentient.
"I didn't know you remembered that," Kris squealed at one particularly funny incident she'd had at the lake one year.
"Oh, there's a lot I remember," Nelly said, mysteriously.
"Well, remember, you're talking to little Longknifes. They'll come up with bad enough ideas on their own. They don't need any help from me."
That did not go well. Soon Johnnie and Ruth were hanging on her, begging her to let Nelly tell more stories about when their mommy was short like them. Jack, the traitor, voted with the kids.
"You never shared those last couple of stories with me," he said.
"Maybe I didn't because I'm still trying to live them down," Kris pointed out.
So, Nelly continued to tell stories, and the kids rarely held still for more than one before they were back, racing up the stairs to the top of the water slide that was their size. Johnnie tried several times to sneak up after his sister, but Jack caught him every time and pointed him toward the shorter ones.
Nelly did lend a hand. Johnnie and several of his friends wanted to ride the curlicue slide. It took its riders through a whole series of twists and turns on their way down to the pool. Nelly pulled Smart MetalTM up from somewhere and soon the smaller kids had their own curlicue slide. Kris's computer had gauged the turns to keep the kids slow, then used a curving straightaway to make sure they slid into the shallow pool just as fast as was safe for them.
The four to six-year-old crowd was delighted. They now had something like their big brothers and sisters.
"Ain't it nice to have a super computer around?" Abby drawled.
"You've got Mata Hari at your throat," Kris reminded Abby.
"Yeah, but I'd never consider using her just to get some squeals and giggles out of a few wild and ornery kids."
"You never asked me to," came from Abby's neck.
"Kris didn't ask Nelly," Abby snapped back, then added, "did you?"
"Nope. Nelly did it all on her own," Kris said, grinning.
Kris kept the conversation from slipping into work or the war. There would be time enough for that tomorrow. Now, the only thoughts were of her kids.
Gramma and Grampa Trouble filled Kris in on the various adventures and misadventures the kids had had while she'd been gone.
"They were well behaved, considering that their mom and dad headed off to war. Ruth sees the world in you, Kris. If I were you, I'd stay around to enjoy it. Kids only worship their folks for a bit. Then you develop feet of clay that go all the way up to your nose."
"Yes," Kris said. Maybe she should have stayed back at her desk and gone home every night right on time. Then again, who else would be in a position to save the neck of that poor kid on the throne? Life was full of hard decisions.
I hope I've made the right one.
Now it was Kris's turn to drag her mind back to the children.
Johnnie was the first to poop out. He ended up in Kris's lap, sound asleep. A half-hour later, Ruth was also clearly drooping. Jack corralled her, and they headed upstairs to their quarters. The kids were quickly tucked into bed.
That done, Kris and Jack found themselves sitting in the living room with Gramma and Grampa Trouble, talking about old times, kids, and, inevitably, the insanity that was the Iteeche mind. Abby and Steve came by with a bottle of Riesling and it was soon uncorked.
Kris allowed herself a quarter of a glass and sipped it slowly as she listened to what Gramma and Grampa Trouble remembered of their Iteeche War years. Abby threw in a few of the more interesting dealings she'd had with the locals.
"I can get the technical types to work for me," Abby reported. "They can build me just about anything that doesn't have a lot of electronics in it. They really are heavy into the labor-intensive side of things. They helped me set up the gardens we've got growing on the roof of the Palace. We can't eat their food, but they can help us get our own fresh vegetables."
"And the demonstrators never tried to break in?" Jack asked.
"I don't think that was written in their daily order book," Abby's husband, Major General Steve Bruce answered. "These four-legged types seem pretty much followers. Now, if some clan chief decides tomorrow to change the orders to the lead agitators on our doorstep, I expect that will change as fast as you can snap your fingers."
"Don't worry, Kris," Abby said, reaching out to rest a hand on her friend's knee. "Mata is constantly watching the perimeter."
"And my Chesty as well," her husband added naming the child of Nelly he wore at his neck.
"We have plans to clamp down on this place in a second. It doesn't matter whether it is for a crazy bunch of rioters, or sudden incoming rocket fire. We can fortify this place in a snap."
"We're ready to repel boarders," Steve said, with a chuckle.
"And if worse comes to worse," Abby added, "we've even got a design in place to have the castle grow legs and walk out of here to the main boulevard. Then we'll add wheels and roll up the road to the beanstalk."
"What will you do then?" Kris asked.
"Well, we keep a watch on the ferries going up and down. We know which ferry just left. We'll merge onto its cable and take ourselves right up behind it."
"You're kidding," Jack said.
"Nope," Steve replied, through a grin.
Kris tried to think of her castle stepping over the palace walls and strolling down the avenue. Suddenly, she was laughing with the others.
"You don't have to be crazy to work for me," Kris finally managed to get out, "but it helps."
"And if you aren't so to start with," Abby added, "you will be soon enough."
When they sobered up, it was Grampa Trouble who asked, "So, what's going on out there and why are you really here?"
Kris had expected this question. If she couldn't report her war cruise to General Trouble, to whom could she report? She started talking.
It was a very sober group when she finished.
"So, you've captured some planets," Gramma Trouble said.
"With some pretty slick operations," General Trouble said. Kris felt his praise to the soles of her feet. A "well done," from the likes of the general was high praise indeed.
"But they've interrupted your campaign to yank you back here," Abby said. "Am I the only one here that thinks this is crazy?"
Heads shook. She clearly wasn't.
So, Kris shared Ron's suspicions that some people were getting cold feet about letting a human decide the fate of their Empire.
"Christ, woman," Grampa Trouble exploded. "You've got Iteeche rebels that you may or may not be able to tell from the loyalists. You've got the Iteeche who want you to save the Emperor kid's neck and are loyal, and then you've got the loyalists that aren't too happy with the way you're conducting business and are just as apt to stab you in the back as the rebels."
"That seems to be our situation," Kris said, "Part of me is of a mind to have this castle grow legs and we walk out of here and forget this."
"And the other half?" Gramma Trouble asked.
"Oh, the usual Longknife thing," Kris said, diffidently. "Charge up the middle while slipping around a flank and pulling a miracle out of my hat."
"Is it worth it?" Abby asked.
Kris had to meditate on that question for a long while. When she began to speak, her words were soft and low.
"There are some clan leaders and lordlings that aren't worth the powder it would take to blow them to hell."
"I've met a few of them," Abby said.
"Yeah," Kris said. "But I've also met quite a few nice Iteeche. Officers. Skilled technicians. The people who actually hold things together."
Kris took a moment to tell them how Megan Longknife had worked with a mixed crew of technicians to get the water, power, communications and sewage up and running when some very junior lordling sabotaged them.
Gramma and Grampa Trouble nodded along with her, well before she finished.
"That's the pain of it," Gramma Trouble said. "A lot of good people, or Iteeche, get a lot worse government than they deserve. It's very tempting to do something about it. I remember what you did on New Eden. You protected them from an even worse government, and ended up giving them a much better one. Quite audacious of you."
Kris nodded. "But the government at New Eden had only had a couple of hundred years to get that screwed up. Here, they've been screwing up, worse and worse, for ten thousand years."
"Or so they claim," Grampa Trouble said.
"What?"
"Kris, are you sure the Iteeche really have ten thousand years of history?"
"What?" Kris said, again. She hated to repeat a cliché, but it seemed to fit so well.
"We were both there in that Golden Whatever Satrap capital when we finally got some of their records translated," Gramma Trouble said. "It came as a hell of a shock. Our menfolk, great warriors that they were, were all out celebrating. Then a couple of cryptographers who had been feeding Iteeche records into their computer suddenly started getting translations out."
"That was the end of my celebrating, I tell you," Grampa Trouble said, "for a long, long time."
"Yeah," Gramma said. "Suddenly, we were faced not with a victorious campaign over our first alien contact, but the realization we'd just defeated one out of a hundred satraps."
"We'd had a hard enough time beating this bunch," Grampa said. "Imagine how it felt to discover we were just scratching the surface of our problem."
"I can't imagine," Kris said, then rethought herself. "No, I think I've had a few samples of whiplash like that. Not as bad, but still."
"Yeah, I bet you have. Like those alien space raiders and their moon-sized motherships," Grampa agreed.
"So," Gramma went on, "while the generals were puking up their beer with our latest development, I and the cryptographers had dragooned several techs into taking over the job of feeding everything available into the computer. That left us free to read what was coming out. No doubt, you've heard a lot about our Iteeche library."
"I studied it in high school," Kris said, "for a special project my senior year. I found it fascinating. They seemed so . . . alien."
"And then some," Gramma Trouble added.
"Yeah, I've used the official Iteeche library for class assignments. What none of you kids could know was that the public library was about a tenth of what we ended up translating."
"Only a tenth?" Kris asked. "What happened to the rest of it?"
"You have to understand," Gramma said, "we translated hundreds of zettabytes worth of material. Some of it was just your average crap. Letters, bills of sale, contracts. There was no need to bore the general public with that even if it did help us get a handle on translating all the rest. We selected a good collection of informative material, writings that told us who and what the Iteeche were, and sent it back to Wardhaven. Then we came across a small personal library that was under lock and key."
Gramma paused, as if to collect her thoughts. "Whoever had collected all these books might pass for an anthropologist or historian in human society. Maybe it was his hobby. He was clearly a major power in some clan. Anyway, we started translating that collection of books and got very excited."
"So excited," Grampa Trouble growled, "that I damn near had to drag the woman off the planet when the counter-attack came, and it became clear we needed to beat feet."
"I managed to carry off most of what hadn't been digitally captured," Gramma said, grinning.
"She had me and my guards carrying the books instead of her," her husband grumbled.
Gramma sniffed at the general. "I took all the data we had, the books as well, then tossed a thermite grenade into the library and ran."
"Why burn the place?" Jack asked.
"I'd been sent to collect my wife and the data capture gear she had. She said burn the gear and carry off the books." Grampa Trouble shrugged. "When you get an order from your great-grandmother, Kris, you obey it."
Gramma leaned over and gave Grampa a peck on the cheek. "Isn't he smart? Now you see why I've kept him so long."
"Dumb, but trainable, like a bear riding a tricycle," Grampa muttered.
"Anyhow," Gramma Trouble said, going on, "we ended up with an adjunct to the official library. It got passed around to a few people, but mainly it got classified and buried."
"How come?" Kris asked.
"Too much information, I think," Grampa Trouble said. "The official library had everything 99.99% of what the Iteeche know. Ten thousand years of unbroken glory. Ever onward and upward. The best of all possible worlds. Right?"
"Do you by any chance have a copy of this expanded library in your possession?" Nelly asked.
Gramma Trouble grinned. "As a matter of fact, I did hunt it up before we departed Wardhaven."
"Could I access it?" Nelly asked.
"I think I can have my computer access it as soon as we get back to our rooms. Nelly, you should have it within the hour."
"Thank you, professor."
"Now," Grampa Trouble said, "Kris, you don't look at all surprised to hear any of this."
Kris nodded. "No. The admiral who came down the beanstalk with me was an assistant to a professor at their war college. His boss was a fifth son of a clan chief or something. Anyway, the low-born Navy officer got assigned to do research in a forbidden section of his library. Once he produced his report on how rebellions had been ended for almost five thousand years, the lordling took it off to hush-hush discussions with his betters. The captain suddenly found himself in command of a battlecruiser. His ship was one of the few to survive one of those two battles where both sides fought to near annihilation."
Kris paused to eye the old general. "I doubt if he was intended to live through that battle."
"The story is as old as David and Bathsheba," Gramma said. "Put your problem at the head of the battle line, then pull back and let the enemy do your dirty work. What did he have to say?"
"That matters were not as they appeared to be," Kris answered. "That there have been quite a few rebellions. That there are standard ways to resolve the problem. Ways that don't involve serious difficulty for clan chiefs. That tens or hundreds of billions of common Iteeche die doesn't matter."
"Yeah," Gramma Trouble said. "That was something that we got from this library, but there was more. Some of the books went way back. There was also correspondence between this fellow and other people of like interests. Their best guess is that the Iteeche government was originally something like a republic with the clans treating each other as equals. About half of the Iteeche colonies date from that time."
"A republic," Kris said. "You're kidding me."
"Sorry, I don't know what you'd call a republic. In place of a Senate, they had a General Assembly of clan chiefs. There was something else before that, but they could only guess at what that was."
"How'd the General Assembly get replaced by an Imperial throne?" Jack asked.
"The usual," Gramma said. "Misgovernance. The wealthy got too wealthy. The poor sank deeper and deeper into cruel poverty. Something had to give, and the clans started playing one bunch of thugs against another, then stabbing their allies in the back, and starting it all over again. After several rounds of civil wars and assassinations, one clan chief was left standing, so he took the Imperial crown."
"How many times have we humans gone down that pavement to hell?" wasn't a question from General Trouble.
"Yeah. So tell me, Gramma, how far back does this Imperial system go if it isn't ten thousand years?"
"Two and a half thousand years, Kris, if I've got the right of it. Maybe plus or minus a few hundred. The republic seemed to have lasted about the same amount of time. When it started, the Iteeche already had three hundred or so colonies."
"Which means," Kris said, "that some political system got them off their home world and out into as many planets as we had a hundred years ago during the Unity War."
"Yep," Grampa Trouble agreed.
"So," Kris said, thoughtfully, "The way things are is not the way things were, and it doesn't have to be the way things will be."
"That does seem a possibility," Abby agreed.
"Abject obedience is not a genetic mandate," Jack said.
"It is, however, a social imperative," General Bruce said.
"How much would it take to change the system?" Kris mused.
"A body at rest tends to stay at rest, baby ducks," Abby drawled.
"But we've already got change stampeding down around their bald white heads," Kris pointed out.
"Were you called back here," Gramma Trouble said, "to make sure that you resolve this civil war in the traditional Iteeche fashion?"
"A fashion that assures that the Empire and Clan systems are not threatened," Grampa Trouble added.
Kris got a grin on her face that must have been several million watts strong. "Have I mentioned to you that I own a battle fleet of several thousand ships?"
"You command the Combined Fleets," Grampa pointed out.
"Yeah, I've got a lot of ships reporting to my flag, but as a victorious admiral, I have somewhere around a thousand battlecruisers awarded to me for prize money. I can sell them back to the Emperor, or, being human, I could take them back with me to human space."
Kris paused for only a second. "Or I could do something else with my fleet.”
"Oh, shit," the old general muttered. "I hadn't heard anything about prize money."
"What's it worth?" Abby asked.
"I get one in seven ships that we capture, and I've captured a whole lot of ships. I also control three planets that are building somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty new battlecruisers each month."
"Hail, Caesar," Abby said, sarcastically.
"No wonder they want to talk to you," Gramma said.
"You've got people scared," Grampa contributed.
"Yep," Kris said, through a yawn. "Folks, what do you say that we continue this staff meeting tomorrow when we've all had a good night’s sleep on everything that has come our way today?"
Now it was Abby's turn to yawn. "I can't say I disagree."
Kris's former maid stood up, crocked a finger to beckon her husband, and headed for the door. General Bruce followed quickly.
"If we're going to be up with the kids, we better get some sleep, too," Gramma said, and the two old vets were soon out the door.
Kris headed for her night quarters, happy that Jack followed right behind her. She fell into bed, which was easy to do. She hadn't dressed since the swimming pool this evening.
Jack quickly curled up to her back. Kris considered a response to that, but was asleep before she could even turn over.