The quiet of Nuu House was shattered by their arrival, not that it had been all that silent. Two of Harvey and Lottie’s grandkids had come over for a play date with Kris’s kids. Mai had the duty today and had brought her own tyke with her. Soon, there were eleven wild pixies chasing each other through the halls, getting underfoot, and enjoying themselves immensely.
Mai and Cara did their best to keep up with the kids while their parents took their baggage upstairs. Kris was busy assigning rooms. She wanted all of them right next door to her, but that was impossible. Admiral Kitano got the suite of rooms down the hall from Kris’s. That left Abby and Amanda’s families making do with the single bedrooms and baths on the next floor up. At least kids would be right next to their parents.
Kris could only imagine what tonight would be like.
Reinforcements began to arrive. Gabby Arvind, the senior nanny who had replaced the one Kris lost while resolving the Peterwald civil war, arrived first, with her ten-year-old Sushama in tow. The agency’s two additional young women were not far behind. One of them was a qualified preschool teacher and brought enough computers to get the eight older kids interested in games that had them walking politely around the house looking for clues to something or trying to capture little what’s-its.
“So long as the kids are quiet,” Amanda said, “I don’t care if there are rats the size of elephants in your basement or spiders the size of water buffalos in your attic, let them hunt.”
Kris chose not to argue the sanitation of Nuu House. It was old enough to have a ghost or two, but she hadn’t seen a rat since she was nine and brought one home in a cage. Poor thing, it died after only a month and Kris gave up on pets.
Supper that evening was a fine affair. The kids settled down to something more age appropriate in the kitchen, leaving the grownups to a more leisurely meal in the dining room. In addition to the three couples, Kris saw to it that Cara got a seat at the grownup’s table and a bit of respect. Gabby was also invited to sit down; Kris needed to examine her child care options in an alien Imperial capital.
As the salad was passed around, Kris got down to business. “Gabby, are you interested in a job running a day care for an embassy all to hell and gone in Iteeche territory?”
The dusky-skinned woman studied her salad. Like O’Malley before her, she was a twenty-year veteran and arms qualified. “We’d heard that you might be a tiny bit bored with your desk job. We’ve kind of been examining our hole cards for when you got itchy feet. Most of us have had a go bag packed for a while. Can you find jobs for our husbands or is this going to be an unaccompanied tour?”
Kris glanced around the table at the new arrivals from Alwa. “I’m told I could get booted out of the capital in a couple of months, or it could be a five-year tour. I intend it to be accompanied unless someone objects to taking their kids deep into supposedly peaceful territory,” she said, eyeing her new arrivals.
“Hell, Kris, we’ve been living out in the bulls-eye for the alien raiders,” Abby drawled. “I figure me and mine can survive living high on the hog, or big fish, or whatever it is in Iteeche land. We’re in for the duration.”
“So are we,” Amanda said, exchanging a knowing smile with Jacques. “He’s been threatening to drag me and the kids off to the alien home world for a year of digging for artifacts. I was kind of glad to get your offer. Cracking the Iteeche enigma! How could we pass that one up?”
“You really want us to sign up for five years right off the bat?” Gabby asked.
Kris considered that for a moment, then shook her head. “No. How about a one year contract with options to mutually extend it for up to five years, at least to start with? If someone goes native, I guess we could find an ongoing job.”
“And if you get us kicked out after two or three months?” Abby hinted.
“Three months’ severance pay.”
Gabby nodded. “You want the new hands arms qualified just like we are?”
“Yes. It would be nice if the husbands at least knew which end of a gun to point away from anyone they didn’t want suddenly dead.”
Gabby smiled at Kris’s joke. “Okay. That’s pretty much what I told the agency an hour ago. As soon as I’m done eating, I’ll give them a call about the length of contract.”
“Okay, with the kids in good hands, it’s one down and several to go before I can drop business and we can get down to digging the dirt. Our embassy will include at least a thousand Foreign Service types from half a dozen planets and not a few folks from outside the US. I understand one of my four Chiefs of Mission will be from Greenfeld.”
“How are things there?” Abby asked.
“Much better. I’ll tell you about Vicky’s little civil war with her stepmother when we have some time. We haven’t had an assassination attempt on my life that could be traced back to a Peterwald in, oh, forever.”
“Must be nice,” Abby said.
“Yes, now it’s admirals who are standing in line to stick a knife in my back,” Kris grumped.
“Does that bring us to me?” Admiral Kitano asked.
“I might as well. I’m hoping you and Alice will be up to riding in with me to work tomorrow. I can start showing you the ropes, where the land mines are buried, you know, the easy stuff.”
“We’ll be ready,” Amber said.
“Amanda and Jacques, I figured you’ll want to put together a team to help deconstruct the economy and life-style of the rich and famously sporting too many arms.”
“We were making up a list on the trip here,” Amanda said. “It’s been six years since I talked with any of these people, so circumstances may have changed, but Jacques and I intend to get right on the selection process.”
“Let me warn you about one thing,” Kris said. “There are a lot of sharks circling this embassy. A whole lot of folks like my Grampa Al see money to be made. Obscene amounts of money. I need for your teams to be mine. To be looking under rocks and stuff for my purposes. I don’t want your team leaking stuff out early to just a few or them having some agenda that isn’t mine.”
“You’re blunt,” Jacques said, “but I can understand what you’re getting at. We’ll do our best to avoid anything like that, but we can’t hand out any guarantees. If you say there’s a lot of money on the table, it means there’s a lot of money to pass under the table.”
“I know,” Kris admitted. “I just want you aware of our potential problem. The Iteeche are a tough enough nut to crack without someone skewing the data to their own profit.”
“Understood, Kris,” Amanda said.
“You got any jobs for me and Steve?” Abby asked.
“Beside a thousand FSOs, we’ll have at least a battalion of embassy Marines. The plan is for Jack to be both the military attaché and my security chief. I don’t want him to have to juggle both those jobs alone. He’ll have a staff in his attaché office. A couple of dozen planets and alliances are clamoring to get someone in there. I want someone to coordinate my security under Jack. Handle the battalion, as well as liaise with what passes for the local police, palace guard, whatever. I’ve already got a good man for the police side. I’d like to have someone coordinating it all.”
“I’m your man,” the much-promoted sergeant said.
“Good. Now, Abby.”
“I knew you’d get around to me sooner or later.”
“A thousand diplomats and a thousand more Marines are only the start. I’m needing a support staff not all that much smaller for them. We’ll be completely detached from the local economy, at least to start with. All our food and other essentials, as well as luxuries, will have to be imported from back home. I’m working on getting a weekly resupply shipment. We’ll need something passing both ways for the diplomatic pouch. My question is how do I feed, clothe and entertain all these people?”
“You want something that combines both the supply division and the Forward Lounge on the old Wasp, only on steroids,” Abby said.
“Considering where we’re going, I figure we’ll need quite a few different places to eat, as well as a central cafeteria that’s cheaper, if not free.”
“I’d like a mess hall for my Marines,” Bruce tossed in.
“You can have one,” Abby said, “so long as it shares the same kitchen with my cafeteria.”
“Fine by me. I don’t want my Marines complaining that they get worse chow than the civilian pukes.”
“Will I need to staff a hospital?” Abby asked.
“I’m not sure. I know we’ll be getting a dozen doctors. That may sound like a lot, but they’ll also be studying the physiology of the Iteeche as well as our aches and pains. I’ll see if the Navy plans on covering the entire medical spectrum or if you need to provide contractors.”
“Fine. I assume you’ll want at least one and likely several stores that can provide everything from soup to nuts to a couch?”
“I don’t know,” Kris said. “We’re bringing our own furniture. You might want to include a shop that can cover everything from woodworking to slapping together some electronic gizmo for the researchers. Hopefully, we can buy some stuff off the Iteeche economy.”
“What we gonna use to pay for it?” Amanda, the ever-alert economist, asked.
“That’s another thing I need to talk to my friendly Iteeche emissary about.”
“You got an Iteeche here?”
“Sort of. Ron, the Iteeche you and I have met, was here with sixteen Iteeche battlecruisers and the request for me to be an emissary to the Iteeche court. Once he gave me the request, he and his sixteen battlecruisers set out to visit all the stations with Iteeche enclaves on them. He hasn’t come back yet, so I haven’t got a lot of my questions answered.”
“They needed sixteen battlecruisers to bring one guy here?” Abby asked, a deep frown forming her eyebrows into a V. “Is my paranoia acting up or does that seem like way too much overkill?”
“Grampa Ray intends to send me with thirty-two battlecruisers. It’s a king thing. I get the same escort and honor guard as he would take.”
Except for Abby, everyone else around the table seemed to think that was a good enough answer. Abby just shook her head and muttered something like “those damn Longknifes.”
Kris chose to ignore her. “So, I want you to pull some of your old strings and see what they think we need and who they think we should hire. Give them the same contract we’re offering the nannies. One year, mutually extendable to five years, with a new contract after that.”
Abby nodded. “I already checked. Your Grampa Trouble is in town. He knows the best people for burying the bodies.”
“Okay, now I move that all further business be outlawed. What have you all been up to? But first, Amber, have any aliens been sniffing around Alwa?”
“We’ve had problems here and there. The aliens won’t leave us alone and the cats are a handful and everyone on Alwa is, well, Alwan. Grand Admiral Santiago has handled everything pretty well,” the Alwa Battlecruiser Force commander replied.
“We’ve gotten some cold datums from ships running between here and Alwa. Nothing strong. Probably a small mining ship like the first one that attacked you. When we sent a task force out to check on them we find them long gone. We dropped those two routes off the approved list after that.” Admiral Kitano paused for a moment to think.
“The aliens are building some new ships with better lasers and reactors. We’ve run into them and had a few fights. Sometimes they fight, sometimes they just ran away. We think some of the young bucks think they can do better than their old man, but so far, no full wolf packs have shown up. Admiral Santiago is figuring the next big fight may be a whole lot tougher. As best we can tell, the aliens have gotten tired of being mowed down by you with nothing really to show for it and they’re hunkering down for now, thinking about it.”
“If they’re really smart, they’re doing a hell of a lot of thinking,” Abby said.
“Hopefully about how to negotiate a peace treaty,” Kris said without too much hope in her voice.
“More like working on something really bad,” Abby said.
“Okay, this is too close to work. Now, Abby, twins?”
“Yep, but I got a whole lot of foot rubs from Steve here for carrying the two hellions in my own very small womb.”
That got the first laugh of the evening. There were a whole lot more where those came from.