“Yeah.”
“Nothing more on our wandering granddaughter?”
“Nothing.”
“Run along, good man. I’ll take the supper home to wait for you. I’ve had enough practice doing that the last eighty years or so.”
“Thanks, love.” He stooped to plant a kiss on her forehead. She rose to meet him, lips to lips.
“You come back, you hear? I got plenty of offers to replace you. You remember that.”
Trouble laughed. “I am irrepressible and irreplaceable.”
“And you know it, too, damn your loving eyes.”
Trouble took a cab to the Grand Hotel de Wardhaven. Ray had taken over the top three floors for his growing retinue. The Marines at the two elevators that were express to the top saluted him. He was well known to them.
The elevator was another thing.
It refused to move before it completed a retina scan, as well as scanned his full palm print and took a drop of blood for good measure. It began to rise even as the DNA test was still processing.
That it took him to the thirtieth floor was proof that his blood was still his own.
On the thirtieth floor, humans repeated the eye scan and checked both his handprints as well as took the temperature of said hands. A medic eyed her own DNA database and verified for herself that the machine had chosen correctly.
“You may go up, General,” a major finally said, and two armed men stepped aside.
They weren’t the ones who would have killed Trouble if he’d tried to crash the line; they were just there to die. The ones behind the sights of the autocannons were not even on this floor.
Trouble took the next elevator. This time it took him up to the thirty-third floor. He turned right, past Marines who saluted him, and headed for the door at the end of the hall.
Behind it was either a very worried or very angry man. With Ray Longknife, it was always hard to tell.
“How’s it going, Ray?” Trouble said, he being one of the few old enough to still address the king by his first name.
“Kris is back,” the king snapped.
“Yes, I heard. Have you heard anything else?”
“Not a damn thing. Not one damn thing! I get this high-priority message from Sandy at High Chance Station. All it tells me is that Kris is back, not where, not when, not on what ship, just that Kris is back. And it breaks in the news not five minutes after I get the word. How’d that happen?”
Trouble shrugged. The workings of the fourth estate had been a puzzle to him since before he was commissioned on that long-ago day.
“I take it that you’ve sent a high-priority message out to Sandy for more info,” Trouble said.
“Of course I have. But it will take a day, if not more, to get to her and back to me. What am I supposed to do, chew my nails?”
“Well, you have to admit, your setup here is a whole lot more comfortable than a lot of places you and I have squatted a while to chew our nails,” Trouble said, glancing around at the king’s digs.
The desk that separated the two of them was lovely, worked in wood and marble. The commlink was buried in the desk, out of sight. The walls were covered with red wallpaper with golden fleurs-de-lis. There were several bookcases and cabinets full of memorabilia from Ray’s days as general and president of the Society of Humanity. Place of pride was held by a signed original of the Treaty of the Orange Nebula, the paper that ended the Iteeche War before it ended the human race.
Ray had led an eventful life. And Trouble had been right there, making a lot of the events survivable.
There was a reason why the king had called for his old war buddy at a time like this.
Of course, Trouble was not the only one who had gotten the recall. Field Marshal Mac McMorrison, Chief of the United Society’s General Staff, came hustling in, just a few moments before Admiral Crossenshield, the Chief of Intelligence.
Trouble tried not to raise his eyebrows at the party forming up. He knew that Kris had taken to calling these three “the unholy trinity,” with good cause for the name.
Of course, she’d also come to realize he was Trouble… after he’d given her good enough cause.
Each new arrival was treated to the same greeting Trouble got. Each commiserated with the king as much as they were inclined to do. None of them, of course, knew anything more than the king.
“Ray, we’ve been here before,” Trouble finally put in. “This is not one of those silly faux events the media stages where everything you need to know is spoon-fed to you. This is real life like we’ve lived through before. We’ll just have to sweat it out like we always have.”
Ray did not take gracefully to being reminded that he was just as human as ever and subject to the limits of the human condition.
Trouble found a good place to sit and watched as first Mac, then Crossie, did his best to settle their king down.
They were no more successful than Trouble had been.
Then the commlink chimed. “A new message has come in from Admiral Santiago, Commander Naval District 41.”
“Well, give it to me,” the king demanded.
“It’s in a very tight code, sir. It will take us a few minutes to decode. There is some video included in it.”
“Get me the video as soon as you can.”
“Yes, Your Majesty,” and the duty code officer got to ring off.
Pity the poor kid, Trouble thought. Back in the old days, Ray had been a lot more concerned for the folks who worked for him. Not necessarily the ones he would get killed but those who worked close to him.
How times have changed.
They waited a good five minutes before the coding officer called back to say they still didn’t have the text decoded, but the attached video was ready.
“Send it, send it. Now if not sooner!” Ray said, and the screen on the wall next to his desk changed from a lovely south-sea-island sunset to blank.
Disembodied came the words, “Unknown ship in system, identify yourself,” then the screen split to show an earnest young lieutenant in a U.S. Navy blue shipsuit glaring from the command seat of a fast attack craft.
On the other half of the screen, Captain Drago waved a hand at the high-gee station that Kris was slumped into, dumping the honor of first reply to her.
Kris stood to stare from the screen. Her khakis were stained and rumpled as if she’d slept in them… for several days and nights.
Still, she stood proud and tall, and announced that she was Princess Kris Longknife, a lieutenant commander in her grampa’s Royal U.S. Navy and the woman who’d led the great Fleet of Discovery.