The Price of Peace Read Free

later, the marines will dump someone in my brig. I'm in no rush." Lights dimmed again. The five lasers slashed through the pirate for a second, then where a ship had been was only an expanding cloud of glowing gas. In only a moment, that too was gone.
    "Yes!" Izzy crowed at her first kill... and immediately went back to work. "Comm. any distress signals, pods squawking?"
    "Quiet as a tomb, Captain."
    Izzy leaned back in her seat. "Helm, belay the spin. Take us back to one gee. Damage
    Control, report to the XO on anything needs fixing. And do an autopsy on that damn thruster. I want to know who, why, when, where and how it went bad."
    "Yes, ma'am" came with a familiar sigh from damage control. Chips had been doing postmortems on too damn much of the Patton’s hardware and software. The ship was a jinx. She'd spent the war as a yard queen, tied up waiting for parts. Postwar, the other merchant converts had been refitted back into freighters. Not the Patton . Nobody wanted her.
    Still, the Society of Humanity's Navy was now responsible for patrolling one hundred and fifty planets, not the forty-eight they'd had before the war. And what with war losses, there were even less ships to do the job. So cruisers like the Patton , that nobody wanted, were being given to people like Umboto , whom, if she was honest, nobody wanted. Girl, you should have asked for the gripe sheet on the Patton before you said you'd take her.
    Then she shrugged. The choice was between early retirement and the Patton . For Izzy, that was no choice, even if the peace-becalmed Navy Department hadn't included the promotion to captain that the skipper of a cruiser deserved.
    So the skipper of the good ship Patton ... whose every officer was drawing pay for one rank less than his or her job deserved ... stood. "Stan, have division heads report to my day cabin in fifteen minutes. Let's critique this while it's still hot."
    She headed for her cabin off the bridge, not turning back to acknowledge Stan's "Yes, ma'am." Only after the hatch closed behind her did she let out a yelp. "Hot damn, that was...
    " What? Scary. Fun. All of the above and a lot more.
    She'd outsmarted the bastard! She knew she had to be a better ship-handler than any jerk who didn't bother to shave in the morning.
    Her knees began to shake. He could have gotten lucky.
    Izzy shook her head. No way! Lord, that was good! She'd have to get these feelings out before the others reported. If Stan even half suspected how much she loved hanging it all out and winning, he'd get out and start walking for the nearest navy base—with most of the crew ambling along right behind him.
    Tigers get people killed. How often had Captain Andy warned her during the war that she needed adult supervision? Well, now the tiger had the conn . She almost pitied poor Stan: providing the mature judgment for this command was going to be a hell of a job for the guy. A light blinked on her desk. Mail must have come in during the shoot. Personal mail was rare; her navy career left little room for attachments. Izzy's sister Lora rarely wrote, but her kid Franny was writing regularly, grateful to Izzy for paying her college tuition. There had to be a way out of the slums that didn't mean putting on a uniform. Izzy had begged Lora to emigrate; there were planets begging for women, even a woman with a kid. Lora refused to leave Mom, as if the old drunk noticed her kids. Enough of that. Franny was fun, working hard to get out, getting close to husband-high. Izzy wouldn't mind paying for a wedding, or even the penalty for an unlicensed conception. Kids were cute, so long as they were someone else's to take home.
    Izzy tapped the mail button; her screen filled with a weeping Lora. " Franny's dead. I should have called. I should have kept closer tabs on her at school. But she was at school!"
    Lora's image broke down. Izzy took a step back from the vid as if she'd been slugged in the gut. Navy people died; you knew the job was