Mike Shepherd - Welcome Home / Go Away

“I’ll make it happen, Your Highness,” Mac said, coming to attention and saluting, like a good field marshal.

“Now, Trouble, you and me have some time on our hands. Kris is coming back at 3.5 gees, so she’ll be here in two or three days. We need to plan what we want to talk to her about and what we want to do about this hot potato she’s dropped in our lap.”

“Yes, we do,” Trouble said.

They spent the rest of the day looking at the political and military options. That involved sitting through the video take from the battle several times. Each time they watched it, Trouble was left shaking his head.

“Kris went up against that!” was the frequent refrain from both of them.

As a ground pounder, Trouble found himself especially moved by the huge force that deployed from the mining head in the system one out from the one where they faced the huge mother ship.

“Kris really saved some serious Marine bacon that time,” Trouble said. Ray seemed quite impressed with Kris as well, but he was falling more and more silent. By the end of the day, Trouble was happy to leave him to brood over thoughts he seemed reluctant to share.

Since he escaped feeling less run through a wringer, Ruth and he enjoyed a fine dinner at a new steak house his wife had read a review on. Trouble was halfway through a delicious sirloin when a hulking fellow came up to their table, put both his hands on it, and leaned into Trouble’s face.

“You the general who wants us all to go to war?” came with hundred-proof breath and too much spit.

Trouble had met his kind before. Now he was older. He chose to ignore him and cut another bit of steak.

“I’m talking to you,” the interruption blustered at full volume. “I saw you on TV. You want to draft my kid into some war for your greater glory, right?”

Ruth rested a restraining hand on his arm. Trouble gave her a quick smile and put down his knife and fork, the better to make sure he didn’t apply them to deflating this buffoon.

“I’m retired, fellow, so I doubt I’ll be fighting in the future,” he said with deadly calm. “However, I didn’t notice a lot of glory facing waves of Iteeche in that war.”

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.