Kris Longknife: Defender by Mike Shepherd Read Free Book Online

gentlemanly, “Aye, aye, ma’am.”
    Penny rolled her egg after Kris. “I can lend a hand.”
    H OW COME THE A LWANS GET TO SEE YOU NAKED AND I CAN’T? Jack said over Nelly Net.
    B ECAUSE I SAY SO, AND LET’S SHUT THIS DOWN. I DON’T WANT TO SCANDALIZE THE COMPUTERS.
    K RIS, I FIND HUMAN SEXUALITY VERY INTERESTING, BUT HARDLY SCANDALOUS.
    N ELLY, SHUT UP. J ACK, SHUT UP. P ENNY, LET’S GET THIS OVER WITH.
    So they did. Kris found it interesting the way the Alwans looked anywhere else but at the naked humans who helped make their lives less claustrophobic.
    To no apparent question from Kris, Granny whispered, “I’ll explain later.”
    The sigh as the
Wasp
edged through the next jump had to be measured on the Richter scale.

6
    As soon as the
Wasp
made orbit around Alwa, the six observers demanded to be returned to the Association of Associations by the first shuttle. Granny Rita was expressly not invited to join them.
    Kris invited Granny Rita to the now-restored Forward Lounge, where the old gal could enjoy some well-aged Scotch, a luxury that had disappeared on Alwa too many years ago to count.
    “So, what’s up with the Alwans?” Kris asked, when they were both served. Kris was back to tonic water with a twist of lime.
    “I have no idea. They haven’t said a word to me since you refused to ‘crow’ to the lone survivor. Something about how we’ve strutted our stuff and flashed our feathers. ‘They can see you are superior. Now, they must bow their heads.’”
    “That’s what they wanted me to send?” Kris asked, incredulously.
    “That’s the way they do things, young lady. Be glad of it. It saved me and my crew from a lot of bloody fighting when we dropped in. Fortunately, they had some dry land that wasn’t much used, and it wasn’t too bad for farming.”
    “You were lucky in too many ways to count,” Kris said.
    Granny raised her glass in a silent toast to those like them but no longer present. “I’ve had more luck than any human being has a right to claim since I led the remnants of BatCruRon 16 into that jump at three gees and battle revolutions.”
    Kris nodded. Eighty years ago, that was a death sentence for the
Furious
,
Enterprise
,
Audacious
, and
Resolute
.
    Granny Rita’s eyes grew distant, and her words came low. “The Iteeche were implacable after my squadron blew up their invasion fleet. Any hope of taking our base had gone up in exploding gas, as well as an awful lot of their troopers, so when I took off, they came hot and straight after me. We went through the next three jumps at higher and higher speeds, adding on more revolutions to our spin in the hope of saving some of our armor from the hammering the Iteeche were giving us.”
    The old war fighter shook her head. “We fled, but they would not give up the chase. We were long past any planets claimed by the Iteeche Empire, and still the chase went on. First the
Resolute
faltered, fell behind, and died fighting a dozen Death Balls. They got her, but she got half of them. Then it was the
Audacious
’s turn. When finally
Furious
and
Enterprise
made a jump and discovered to our great joy that no Iteeche ship had followed us through, we were hopelessly lost.
    “And while I and the
Enterprise
’s young skipper were trying to figure out what to do next, our two ships shot through a jump point that wasn’t even showing on our sensors. We jumped three, four times farther than I ever thought a ship could go and found ourselves even farther from any help. That happened to us twice before we managed to change course real fast and dodge whatever it was that was doing this to us.”
    “We call them fuzzy jump points,” Kris said. “That was Nelly’s name for them, and it’s stuck. Our best guess is that the Three who built the jump points built the fuzzy ones last as some kind of expressway. They’re closer together, and they take you a whole lot farther. With fifty or so baby monster ships chasing the
Wasp
after this fight,