Intrepid by Mike Shepherd

a familiarity that a junior officer of her rank had no call on. “How many Greenfeld naval officers have as great a love of daughters as you have?”
    The captain had started to frown at the familiarity. After all, he was trying to break one trillionaire daughter to junior-officer status and needed Kris to help, not hinder. But now he smiled.
    “I don’t think there’s a captain in the fleet who’s resigned himself to enjoying, maybe I should say, surviving, feminine surroundings as much as I have.”
    “Your oldest,” Kris went on. “She should have graduated from college by now. Did she join the Navy?”
    Now it was the captain’s turn to ruefully shake his head. “Commissioned in the Nursing Corps on her graduation day.”
    “Is she on the Surprise ?”
    “I would have gladly had her here, but there is a boy.”
    “Isn’t there always?” Kris interjected.
    “Sad to say, yes. He comes from a good family, and he is on a battleship. So she asked for orders to that battleship.”
    “Do you trust him?”
    The look Kris got from the captain was a puzzle she could not fathom. He almost smiled as he started again. “I will let you in on a state secret, Longknife girl. In Greenfeld, a loyal wife, be she wealthy or poor, will take nine months to present her husband with a fit little baby. However, blushing brides, in their eagerness, almost always do it in six or seven months. Strange that, no.”
    The security guards behind the captain relaxed into their seats. Kris had no doubt that had the captain begun to reveal a more technical detail, they would have dragged him away. But from the smirks on their faces, a few of them might well be married and already beneficiaries of that bridal miracle.
    “And your daughter?”
    “Has been courted for almost six months and is still on active duty.”
    Kris’s confused frown at that brought a dry “Get pregnant, get discharged” from Vicky.
    “How medieval,” Kris said.
    “I mentioned that to my father,” Vicky said, her voice desert dry. “Let’s say we agreed to disagree. Thank God I know where to get birth control.”
    “Not on my ship you don’t,” her captain said.
    The ensign wisely filled her mouth with her salad.
    Kris stepped in to redirect the conversation. “When I asked why you are here, Vicky, I didn’t mean in the Navy. What I was really asking was why you aren’t back on Greenfeld. You cost your father a lot when he sent you to Eden, and I doubt your stay in the Navy will be any less expensive.” The way Captain Krätz rolled his eyes cut Kris’s doubt by half. “But what I really wonder, girl to girl, is why you aren’t tending to your knitting quietly back home?”
    “I don’t knit, and I never do anything quietly,” Vicky shot back. “And I could ask you the same question. Why aren’t you doing something”— Vicky seemed at a loss for words. . . and settled for—“back on your lovely Wardhaven?”
    “Why am I not on my lovely Wardhaven?” Kris said, beginning to move rather tasty but probably horribly fattening croutons out of her salad and into a row. “I don’t want to be any closer to my mother or father than I have to.”
    That got a snort from Vicky and a thoughtful look from Krätz.
    “I’m committed to a naval career and for some strange reason, the fleet can’t find any job for me near my father, the prime minister.” That got a third crouton into rank and a dry chuckle from the ensign.
    “I refuse to become involved in politics. . . and every time I get too near Wardhaven, I get sucked into that mess again, and my father gets even madder at me. How am I doing?”
    Vicky now needed the napkin to suppress her laughter.
    Captain Krätz eyed Jack and got a serious nod of validation. Then he shook his head. “Your file is making better and better sense.”
    “And if you report all this,” Kris said, “do you think it will make better sense to your intelligence analysts?”
    “They wouldn’t believe a