Free Vicky Peterwald: Target by Mike Shepherd Page B

have me garroted or not was made well above your pay grade. I also suspect that the General Staff does not want me dead. Certainly not if my dearest stepmom does. Have I guessed it right?”
    “You may be too smart for your own good,” Mr. Smith put in.
    Since the admiral stayed quiet, Vicky turned to Mr. Smith. “How so, dear mercenary? I was always told knowledge was power.”
    “Knowledge is power, but a little bit of power in the game you are playing can get you killed,” Mr. Smith said slowly. “Your stepmother wants you dead because she does not want to deal with the power you have and the potential power that may come to you. The Navy is playing a dangerous game and cannot afford to have a loose cannon careening around the gun deck. Am I wrong, Admiral? The Grand Duchess here has only one choice that leads to her staying alive for this voyage. She either throws in fully with the Navy, or she takes what little knowledge she has to her grave.”
    “I would not have put it that bluntly,” Admiral Gort said. “But you have the gist of it.”
    Which left Vicky sitting back in her chair, thinking. She chose her next words very carefully. They might well be her last.
    “I grew up around the palace,” she said slowly, “consigned to the shadows. Feeling much like a fifth wheel. Or a sixth. Certainly not important. Hardly wanted. Do you get my drift, Admiral?”
    “I believe so.”
    “Then my brother got himself killed, and, suddenly, the wind changed. Everything was blowing at me. It was like a tempest, and I went where it blew me. And it knocked me down quite a few times.”
    “Your file says that. Those were also Admiral Krätz’s observations.”
    “Yes they were. Last night I read his reports on me. They were not easy to read, but by the time I finished, there was nothing I would disagree with.”
    Admiral Gort raised an eyebrow at that admission.
    “My time with Admiral Krätz began as a pain and finished as the best experience of my life,” Vicky admitted with painful honesty. Her differences with the man who trembled in fear of what the alien raiders could do to his wife and children did not have to enter into this discussion.
    “Admiral, the Navy has been the best experience of my life. I don’t know what this Grand Duchess stuff will make of me, but I do know that I will always be Navy. I will always look back on my time with the fleet as the best and most formative of my life. Yes, I can be a loose cannon. I have been a loose cannon.” She allowed herself a chuckle at too many recollections of just how loose she’d been. “But, properly aimed and loaded, I can be a very powerful gun in someone’s arsenal.”
    Admiral Gort listened to her intently. His eyes seemed to pierce through to her soul. That was not something she really wanted perused, but she held his eyes with her own.
    Finally, he nodded. “I think you mean that. Or at least want to mean that.” He glanced around at the untouched meal. “I think we are done here. I would appreciate a report of the conclusions you draw about conditions in our beloved Greenfeld based on your assessment of all the data you now have. Shall we meet for supper? Just the three of us. Or four. I may include my chief of staff. He is a most observant man.”
    “As you wish, Admiral,” Vicky said.
    Once out in the passageway, Mr. Smith leaned close to Vicky’s ear. “You have a lot of work to do. If it is your wish, I will help. But first, I must get a decent breakfast in me.”
    Vicky allowed herself a chuckle at his joke, and happily left him heading for the wardroom. She herself needed to stop in her quarters.
    Her knees were so wobbly that she could hardly walk.

CHAPTER 8
    T HE day went fast. Too fast for Vicky. She had hardly gotten her knees under control . . . and her stomach . . . than Mr. Smith was back, and she was dumped into a school of hard knocks and computer wizardry.
    Victoria Peterwald had been educated to be a lightweight.