The blowhard opened his mouth, but a young man was suddenly at his elbow. “Dad, the desert’s here. Mom was wondering where you were.”
Deftly, the youth maneuvered his father away from Trouble’s table and headed him off for other places to bluster.
Ray couldn’t help but notice the young man’s long, delicate fingers.
As the pair made their way out of Trouble’s space, the youth turned back. “I’m studying to be a concert pianist. I really want to make it before I’m too old. Please don’t draft me into some war.”
Trouble found himself nodding at the kid’s plea.
With them gone, he turned back to Ruth. She was applying a napkin to her lips.
“Lots of young people with lots of dreams that don’t involve toting a gun, humping a pack, or doing their level best not to get suddenly dead before they’re twenty-one,” was all she said.
They finished their meal in silence. Which encouraged them to skip desert. Or rather to save the desert for when they got home. Thus, they both enjoyed themselves that evening.
Trouble awoke the next morning feeling eager to tackle the evils of the day.
But when he arrived at the Royal Chambers, Trouble found himself assigned to work with Navy types to put their early-warning system in place. Although the squids hadn’t been admitted into the contents of Kris’s latest report, they seemed fully motivated by what they’d seen in Kris’s earlier report from before they sortied to intercept the alien invasion force.
The admiral Trouble drew to head up this effort had a good head on his shoulders. He already had an inventory of all jump buoys and automated communication stations available in storage. Schooners and buoy tenders would do the initial deployment of these.
It still left them with a whole lot of uncovered systems.
Which meant meeting with Procurement after lunch. These folks, mostly civilians, didn’t need to be told this was important. They turned to quickly, applying what they knew about procurement practices. In only minutes, they had called up their own data on who made what and what was the cheapest way to get them making more.
Just before the midafternoon break for coffee, Admiral Crossenshield dropped in and answered the question that everyone had but no one wanted to voice.
“I’ve got a funding source that we can tap for this,” he said with a canary-that-ate-the-cat smile.
“Good, I’ve got people who need that money,” Trouble said, and they set about spending it. The coffee break kind of got forgotten, but enough portable caffeine was delivered soon after, leaving Trouble to wonder just how much Crossie was playing him… and this entire exercise.
Done, Trouble tried to drop in on the king, but it turned out that he was out. So he did drop in on Mac.
They exchanged pleasantries; Trouble brought the field marshal up to date on the early-warning system, and he seemed happy.
“Do you have a better ETA on Kris?” Trouble asked.
“I’m told it will be tomorrow. I’m not sure when,” Mac answered vaguely.
With nothing more to say, Trouble called Ruth for a pickup and set out to enjoy the evening. Soon, they wouldn’t be enjoying evenings together for a while. She was due to leave for New Eden in a week, so they made the most of their time together.
Through eighty-plus years split between each other and the Corps, they’d learned to make the most of what they had.
Mac hated lying to Trouble. Then again, as Crossie said, it wasn’t exactly a lie. Crossie had told Mac that Kris would be arriving tomorrow. And since Mac already knew she’d actually be arriving tonight, it was not a lie to say he wasn’t sure when tomorrow she’d arrive.
Still, all faking aside, Mac hated lying to Trouble as much as he hated keeping the old warrior out of the meeting the king had set up with their mutual great-granddaughter.
But orders were orders.
As soon as Trouble was well gone, Mac abandoned the mess on his desk after extracting a few things he’d work on tonight. He’d been following Crossie’s efforts to keep the newsies away from the meeting. Somehow, a couple of them had gotten wind of Kris’s early arrival.
The meeting had already been moved twice.
A final check before leaving showed Mac that it had been moved a third time.
He called for his car and gave the driver only general directions. It was probably unnecessary cloak-and-dagger crap, but he’d save the actual address until the last moment.
It was raining. Raining hard. The night was as black as Mac felt. He was torn. He admired and respected Ray Longknife. Hell, the man was a legend.
He was also Mac’s king.
Still, this whole thing stank to high heavens. Damn it, Kris and her tiny band of survivors deserved a parade down every Main Street in human space. If not for themselves, then for those that hadn’t made it back.
Mac shook his head. That was not going to happen.
Certainly not if Ray had any say-so in the matter.
Had the legend gotten too old and too tired to tackle a new set of problems?
Mac hated to even think that.
Still, the thought had been trying to cross his mind a lot since that first message about Kris Longknife had come in. Would the legend of old have hidden from a problem of this size?
No, that wasn’t the right question. The king was not hiding from the problem. He was tackling it just as much as he could with the resources he had on hand.
That was it. He was limiting himself to what he had on hand. Why was the man unwilling to bring more people into this? They were the ones who would be dying in industrial numbers if one of those monster ships showed up overhead.
Did the people really need to be manipulated into doing something about the danger that could even now be headed their way?
But, of course, that was the problem.
Was such a menace headed their way?
And if it didn’t show up in a week, or a month, or a year, how long could the human psyche stay on guard for something that might never show, or could show up tomorrow?
Mac had been searching his memory for any other general who’d faced a leadership challenge anywhere close to this. So far, he’d come up blank.
The driver asked for further directions, and Mac gave them to him. He couldn’t help but notice that the woman was driving a good ten klicks below the posted speed limit. Between the rain and the dark, it was that bad.
That left Mac to muse, was even nature so opposed to what they were doing that it wept?
“You’re too old to be a poet, and too stuck in your ways to change that much,” he muttered to himself. Or maybe he was just too old for this kind of shit.
But his mumbling brought a question from the young woman driving, and he had to deflect her from his ruminations.
Fortunately, they were soon there. “There” proved to be a darkly lit mansion whose edges got lost in the surrounding gloom. Fortunately for Mac, the place came with a portico that allowed him to dismount the car without getting drowned. There were Marines about, most in full battle rattle, but the one who opened the door for him was in dress blue and reds.