(eng) Mike Shepherd - Kris Longknife 9.5 by Welcome Home Go Away

Author:Welcome Home Go Away [Away, Welcome Home Go]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Read an excerpt from

KRIS LONGKNIFE: FURIOUS

On sale October 30, 2012, from Ace Books!

Princess Kristine Longknife studied herself in the mirror above the bar. She didn’t look any different. Her Navy blues still sported the two and a half stripes of a lieutenant commander. Why did she feel so different?

She sat in her usual chair at the far end of the bar. The next eight chairs were empty, by mutual consent of both her and the small crowd at the other end. A few misinformed men had entered her space.

One look from Kris, and they fled.

At the other end of the bar, quiet chatter rose and fell. An occasional joke brought forth bleary laughter. A deathly hush resided at Kris’s end.

The emphasis was on death.

Kris lifted her nightly liter of Scotch and swirled the liquid around, studying it in the faint light. This faithful soldier was about half-gone.

Kris poured herself another shot of the fiery liquid. There was no tremble in her hands. No sign at all that she had polished off the first half of her nightly allotment in the three hours since she had come off duty.

She downed the shot without tasting it. Some people waxed lyrical about the warmth of good Scottish whiskey as it passed from lips to stomach.

Kris hated the stuff.

To her it tasted more like something for cleaning paint-encrusted brushes, something you’d punish yourself by imbibing.

“Punish.” There was that word again. It seemed to come up a lot in Kris’s thoughts.

“Punish,” as in they’re dead, and you’re alive, and you ought to be punished for that state of affairs.

Kris poured herself more poison and drank it down. The last time she had crawled into a bottle, after little Eddy died, and she survived the kidnapping, the liquor at least did its job. It wrapped her in cotton candy and made the days easy to forget and deadened the terrors of the nights.

Now her nightly self-medication did nothing to tame the nightmares.

Well, she’d managed to show up at the squadron with nothing worse than a dull headache from the night before. And no, so far, she hadn’t let herself partake of the hair of the dog that bit her the night before. The fast patrol boats were puny, but any warship, no matter how tiny, could easily turn and kill a handler who did not treat her with respect.

Kris had killed enough already. She would not add more to her list of slaughtered subordinates.

Kris poured another shot and eyed it like she might some hostile alien cruiser. She’d had quite a few of them in the crosshairs of her 24-inch pulse lasers. Those she knew how to handle.

It was what you did after you’d won the fight that had Kris defeated.

She reached for her punishment.

“Auntie Kris, please come home,” left Kris clenching an empty fist.

A glance in the mirror above her head showed a thirteen-year-old girl in a tee that shimmered through the faces of some popular band. Her swirling floor-length skirt showed every color of the rainbow, and sparkled as well.

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