Kris Longknife: Tenacious (Kris Longknife novellas Book 12) Read Free Page A

head. Kris, however, had paid to have Nelly jacked directly into her brain. She removed the plug that had kept sand out and plugged a wire from Nelly back in.
    T HANK YOU VERY MUCH , were the first thoughts that formed in Kris’s head.I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT FORGET ME.
    N EVER, N ELLY.
    T HAT’S NICE TO HEAR , had more sarcasm in it than a computer should be allowed. However, Nelly had been upgraded way too many times to keep count since she had been given to Kris before the first grade. One of those upgrades had included a fragment of a storage device left by the three alien races that had built the highway between the stars 2 million years ago.
    Now, Nelly was just plain Nelly. Obstinate, outspoken, an atrocious joke teller, and the one item that could possibly rival Jack as the most important thing in her life. S HA LL WE GO SEE WHAT P E NNY HAS FOUND?
    I ALRE ADY KNOW, K RIS. M IMZY TOLD ME. I ’VE JUST BE EN WAITING FOR YOU T O FIND TIME TO LOOK INTO P ANDORA’S BOX.
    Which was Nelly’s none too gentle way of reminding Kris that she and her kids could handle a lot more data a whole lot faster than mere meat mortals.
    Kris settled Nelly in her usual place below her collarbone, eyed Jack, who gave a slight shrug, and together they returned to the veranda. Iizuka Masao had rustled up two more chairs from somewhere, and the four took their own corner of the table, Kris sat with Jack on her right. Masao settled on her left, leaving Penny the position directly across from Kris.
    That was a bit of a surprise. Kris had expected Penny to take the place at her left hand. Clearly, Penny wanted to confront Kris head-on. Mentally, Kris notched up the category of this meeting from Best Friends’ Get-together to Official Staff Meeting; maybe even Staffer has a Major Bone to Pick with Boss.
    Kris raised an inquisitive eyebrow and waited for Penny to start. It was, after all, her dime.
    “You sent me to search five or six systems and see if one of them might have the night sky that we’ve found on the overhead of all the alien ships we’ve examined. See if it might be the home of the alien raiders we’ve been fighting,” Penny said without preamble.
    “I know I got back just in time to see you win a hell of a fight with one more of those alien raiding clans. I know you’re busy. But I also heard that there were three alien warships watching your latest fight, and they’re likely observers from three more of those huge clans. You know and I know that there’s another fight coming. We don’t know how long it will take them to get their act together. Okay, fine, you have a lot on your plate. I can understand it. You’re one of those damn Longknifes, but you’re just a Longknife. Not God.”
    Penny paused for a moment. “But, Kris, I’ve seen shit that I really think you need to see for yourself. You need to see this stuff and dig deeper than I was able to with just one ship and me looking over my shoulders and ready to run if anyone or anything said ‘boo.’”
    Penny again paused in her pleading, and Kris considered what she’d heard. Yes, she’d sent Penny off in a knocked-together warship with half its lasers aimed aft so she could shoot while she ran. And yes, Kris had more questions about the aliens than she could catalog.
    The damn things would not say a word when hailed. Heaven knows, Kris had tried and tried again to open communications with them. Their response was to try to kill her every time, and when they failed, they made sure that every last one of them died.
    These aliens were frustrating Kris’s long-held belief that any problem could be talked out if you just tried hard enough. She knew that was Father, the Prime Minister, speaking in her head. As a politician, he firmly believed what he had taught his daughter at his knee.
    But the great politician Billy Longknife had never met these bug-eyed monsters who, very disappointingly, looked more like humans than any race we’d come across so far in