myself that I would not spend much time with you.”
“It was that bad, huh,” Kris said.
“Yes. I have sworn to go with you. To see what you see and to report back to my Emperor and chooser what you find. I am afraid that our quiet times of conversation will not be a part of this trip.”
Kris nodded, risking a tight smile. Just when she thought she might be getting to know a guy, wouldn’t you know his mom would tell him she wasn’t the kind of girl a nice guy like him brought home.
“I understand,” she said.
Ron stood aside for his Army officer to open the hatch and peer inside. Once he concluded the humans had no deviltry waiting for them, he waved the Imperial Representative into his rooms. In a moment, the hatch closed and was dogged down solidly.
Jack came up beside her as the door closed. “You want to talk?”
“About what?” Kris said with a sigh. “That another boy has been told he can’t play with me or that all human existence might depend on what I do tomorrow? And at the moment, I have no idea which side I should be on when I start playing one hell of a game of Ping-Pong tomorrow.”
Jack nodded, then went on. “For what it’s worth, this mess is way too complicated for me to figure out. Whatever you decide, I’ll support you.”
“Thank you, Jack. That’s about the nicest thing I’ve heard since we set out on this cockamamie trip.”
“I wouldn’t call it cockamamie,” Jack said. He gave the matter a serious moment of consideration. “Crazy. Yes. Wild. Maybe. Possibly even unusual. But not cockamamie.”
His lopsided smile came out to play as he finished giving her his opinion.
“Thank you for your unconditional vote of support,” Kris said, with a chuckle, and headed for her quarters.
16
Kris ordered a light breakfast brought to her Tac Center and told Nelly to invite all her key staff to report there by 0730. From the way they dragged in, it didn’t look like any of them had had a good night’s sleep . . . even the ones she hadn’t ordered to pull all-nighters.
“Okay, folks,” Kris said, as they gathered around the breakfast tray or filled cups of steaming coffee from the urn, “I need answers to a few simple questions. Who, what, why, how, and, most important, was that bomb last night aimed at me or at someone else?”
“It looks like our little girl just might be growing up,” Abby drawled as she sipped her coffee. “Finally, it’s got through her pretty little head that it isn’t always about her.”
“That last bomb hit me up beside the head pretty hard,” Kris said dryly. “It would be kind of hard not to be open to the idea that the world isn’t just one big gun aimed at my own little head.”
“I noticed that our little princess was kind enough to leave out ‘when,’ ” Penny said, warming up the cup of coffee she’d carried into the meeting. “That leaves all of the rest of them in my lap, thank you oh so much.”
The Navy officer took a seat at the table, yawned, then began crisply. “The what was a bomb. It was in a glass similar to those used in the Forward Lounge but not one of ours. We’ve recovered a lot of tiny glass globules. Most came from the Forward Lounge’s stock. Some didn’t. We expect those are from the bomb. The glass was not manufactured on Wardhaven. At the moment, we are not able to identify just where it did come from.”
“That would be nice to know,” Jack said.
“Of that I am most aware,” Penny said. “Forensics is chasing that down, but don’t hold your breath. There are a lot of glassmakers in human space, and this particular glass got remade but good in the explosion.”
“The glass was disguised to look like an empty and planted in the middle of a whole slew of other empties. The detonator was hidden in something that looked like an olive. Everything was perfectly machined to fit unobserved into a bar.”
“Do we have that on camera?” Kris asked.
“Nope,” Jack said. “Forward Lounge does not have any security cameras. The operator doesn’t want them. ‘Folks are there to relax. If there’s a problem, we’ll handle it the old-fashioned way.’ Besides, we liked that there were no cameras in there, remember. The king met the Iteeche Rep in there. No record. We also did all that history review with