burning aircraft with a canopy that wouldn’t open.”
“Oh,” Kris whispered. “That time I almost got us both killed.”
“Yes, that time,” Jack said. “I woke up with the smell of smoke in my oxygen system and you not answering my calls and a canopy that wouldn’t budge. All I could think of was that you’d finally gone and done it, gotten yourself killed, and my heart was breaking.”
“Heart?” Kris whispered. Was Jack really talking about something intimate to the two of them, not just a day in, day out job?
“Don’t change the subject,” Jack growled. “You didn’t have to fly that mission. We could have given it to anyone. Hell, even a drone could have flown it.”
“A drone would not have dodged those missiles the way I did,” Kris said, jumping to her defense. “And besides, I saved your precious Marines when I saw what they were heading into. I saved most of your company.”
“There you go, changing the topic again.”
“Well, damn it, what is the topic, Jack!”
Jack took a deep breath before he went on. “I can’t stand to watch you going out day after day trying to get yourself killed.”
“I’m not trying to get myself killed.”
“Well, it sure looks that way from where I’m standing,” Jack snarled.
“I do what I have to do,” Kris shot back.
“You do not!” came right back at her. “Any reasonable person, with the sense God promised a billy goat, would find other ways to get what she wants done that didn’t involve her going out and sticking her head in every lion’s mouth that comes along.”
Jack paused long enough to slam his hand against one of the metal patches they’d help weld to the Wasp’s hide. At half a gee, his feet lifted off the deck, and he had to force himself back down.
“Kris, you do have choices. If I hear you say one more time that you don’t have any choice but to go out and nearly get yourself killed, I’m going to scream. You have choices. If you’d spend a few extra seconds thinking about what you’re about to do, you’d see those choices and maybe do something different.”
“Do them instead of trying my hand at flossing some passing lion’s teeth, you mean,” Kris said, giving him the kind of look through her eyelashes that some actresses used to good effect.
“Don’t you go trying to make me laugh,” Jack said, but a hint of a smile was creeping around the edges of his mouth.
“I like you when you smile,” Kris said.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Okay, I’ll stay on your topic. What does it matter to you whether I’m one of those Longknifes that dies young and gloriously? From the look of Grampa Ray, I’m not sure that living a long life is all it’s cracked up to be. He’s getting way too good at dodging his problems and ignoring his conscience.”
“We are not talking about your relatives,” Jack said.
“Then answer my question. What does it matter whether I splatter myself over the next gas giant we come to, trying to get reaction mass for the Wasp? You won’t be in the launch with me. You won’t have to take my bullet. It will be just me and Nelly.”
“And I don’t get a vote on the matter, either,” Nelly pointed out.
“You stay out of this,” both Kris and Jack said.
“Fine. Okay. I’m just the computer, but when are you going to answer the girl’s question, Jack?” Nelly said.
Kris raised an eyebrow to add her own emphasis to Nelly’s question.
Jack scowled and looked at the hatch like he wanted to walk out on the both of them. Down in Engineering, they were having trouble maintaining the acceleration. They’d pop up to more than half a gee, then just as suddenly fall well below it. If it was the engines, they were in trouble. If it was the quality of the new reaction mass, they might survive it. Whatever it was, Jack risked falling flat on his face if he tried stomping out on her.
He must have realized it about the time Kris did, because that tiny hint of a smile was back. Then he sobered up.
“I’ve had to watch you die twice in the last couple of months. First when we peeled what that bomb left of you off the marble floor on Texarkana. I had to do it again when I woke up ahead of you after you crashed”—Kris started to object and Jack waved her back—“after you did that superb bit of flying