Mike Shepherd: Welcome Home / Go Away

General Terrence Tordan reached across the table for the hands of his bride of eighty some years. Trouble to his enemies, Trouble to his superiors, Trouble to his friends, he had finally come to think of himself as just plain trouble.

Tonight, he was worried; something he rarely allowed himself to be. So he made gentle circles in both his wife’s palms.

“What’s worrying you, trooper?” Ruth, his wife, asked.

“I told you, I never worry. Worry is for the other guys.”

“Yeah. Some people believe that guff you spout off. Remember, I’m your wife, the mother of your kids, grandkids and great-grandkids, as hard as it is to believe. What’s eating you, Marine?”

“One of our grandkids,” Trouble admitted.

Ruth rolled her eyes at the ceiling for overly dramatic effect. “Lordy, which one now?”

“Kris.”

His wife sighed, then puffed out an “Oh.”

Shrugging, she said, “You, me, and anyone paying attention to the future of the human race. Has anyone heard from her?”

Trouble shook his head. “Not a peep.”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“Too long.”

“She was headed for the other side of the galaxy, you know, love.”

“But she kept a courier ship with her. We should have heard something by now.”

“Honey, she also kept eight battleships and her four corvettes had those… what-do-you-call-them?”

“How’d you hear about them?” Trouble demanded.

“Marine, I’m your wife. I know how to read between the lines, and I follow other sources than the crap that passes for mainstream media. You may have your secure net, but I go places that are just about as good as yours.”

“Likely better,” he grumbled.

“You said it, not me,” she said with that wonderful smile he had not gotten enough of in eighty years.

The waiter was finally headed their way. In a Greek restaurant, Trouble always let Ruth do the ordering. The menu made sense to her; it was all Greek to him.

His computer beeped at the same time Ruth’s did. Together, they both reached for their own trusted source of information on the world. Trouble took one glance at his report and raised an eyebrow.

Ruth’s eyebrow was up, too.

“You first,” he said.

“Kris is back.”

“Yeah. What else?”

“That’s all I got,” she said, ignoring the waiter at her elbow. They’d been here often enough that he knew who did the talking for this couple.

“What did you get?”

“Order, for gosh sakes, lady, before he walks away.”

She glanced again at the menu, and spoke in rapid fire, no doubt ordering what they’d had last month. When the waiter left, she put the menu down, and growled, “What else did you get?”

“You know I wouldn’t tell you if I had. It’s the secure news net.”

“Yes, but tell me you know more than just that Kris is back.”

Trouble let out a long sigh. “You know everything that I know.”

“She’s back,” Ruth exploded, but, after years of being a Marine’s wife, she kept her voice low. “No location! No information about the fleet! Just that Kris is back! You know that can’t be all. Even our darling Kris can’t make her way back from the other side of the galaxy without a ship. Is her Wasp back? Or is it just the courier ship and not even her?”

“Love, don’t get carried away. You know what I know. The secure net says Kris is back, so she must be. That would likely mean the Wasp is back, too.”

“But all those other ships, dear?”

“Don’t borrow trouble,” he said, and knew she’d take it for all its double meaning. “When there’s more to say, they will say it.”

“On your net, at least.”

“Yes.”

“And you won’t tell me a thing about what you get.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Eighty years a Marine’s wife, and I still can’t get used to this game of ‘I know something you don’t know.’”

“How much you want to bet me that your net tells you what comes out next before mine does?”

“General, you have a message of the highest priority,” a pleasing young woman’s voice announced.

“I thought you agreed to change that voice on your computer,” Ruth snapped.

“I don’t recall promising that,” the general lied.

“You’re getting senile. I swear I’m going to put you in for rejuvie one Saturday. You’ll go to sleep Friday and wake up three months later all shiny and new. And remembering what you promised me.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” he said as he glanced at his wrist unit. R EPORT TO THE R OYAL CHAMBERS SOONEST.

He stood. “Sorry, Ruth, I got to go.”

“Is Ray summoning you?”

“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.