Here is the final treatment for Kris Longknife – Resolute, used for the sales staff meeting.

Lt. Kris Longknife finally has her own, independent command. But it isn’t long before Kris has her automatic out and cocked. After ten minutes of wandering Naval District 41's space station, it’s starting to look like Kris’s first independent command is also very solitary.

This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Naval District 41 is way out on the rim. So far out that the Society of Humanity left a mere lieutenant acting in an admiral’s slot for fifteen years. Now Lt. Steve Kovar has put in for retirement and Kris has his job ... with her father the Prime Minister probably hoping she’ll stay out here for the next fifteen years ... or finally get out of the Navy.

Undeterred, Kris heads down to Chance to meet the people who would risk leaving their space station unattended. She is quickly introduced to the local mayor who seems very interested in dinning and dancing her. However, that doesn’t make him any easier to negotiate with. Nobody has ever bothered Chance, and they don’t see that changing.

So Kris does a quick patrol to refuel warning buoys — and comes home with a batch of pirate prisoners and their heavily armed merchant ship in tow.

Now the folks of Chance meet to discuss their new situation. But the last person they want looking over their shoulder is a Longknife. And strange enough, Kris is willing to sign for two weeks leave ... and leave 

Getting her own independent command wasn’t the only reason Kris jumped at this job. Nelly, Kris’s pet computer, has been scratching at a bit of data storage left over from the three races that built the jump points ... and Nelly thinks she’s found something. Nelly’s stumbled across a star map with extra jump points on it. And one of those points is in the Chance system!

While Chance dithers, Kris heads off to do some exploring. The first jump leads to a dead system. But the next jump puts Kris listening to some sort of radio message from the nearest planet. Buried in the jungle is a soaring spire. Locked into armored space suits, and guns at the ready, Kris takes her crew for a trudge in the jungle that ends inside a huge dome with the spire at its center. And a map that points to where that last message came from.

Kris jumps into that system ... and almost doesn’t live long enough to look around. This system is still very much active. And someone forgot to turn off the defenses. Remote scouts keep vanishing! After a tantalizing glimpse of a fully preserved planet ... that she dare not get close to ... Kris heads for Chance with the most mementos news since humanity first found a jump point.

Only to find that Hank Peterwald, son of the Greenfeld dictator, has come calling on Chance with a squadron of Greenfeld cruisers. And Hank, who last time he dated Kris was a civilian, now sports the uniform of a Commodore!

The folks down on Chance are not interested in being the punching bag between two sparing powers. They quickly staffing the defensive positions on Kris’s space station. No sooner has Hank’s squadron docked than his agents attempt to take over the station. The take down efforts fails as Kris and friends knock the legs out from under every try.

Hank switches to social pressure ... and invites Lieutenant Longknife to share his barge as he goes down to the planet for an evening of galas. Kris trumps his commodore by showing up in full Princess mode, leaving Hank to pout.

The people on Chance try to turn this fleet visit into one big party, but the Greenfeld sailors are under no discipline and a riot is imminent. Kris heads one off by challenging several hundred sailors to work off their excessive energy in Highland Games ... and even tosses a caber herself ... while wearing a nifty little cocktail dress.

Rape leads to the inevitable riot, and Kris finds herself offering advice and assistance ... as well as spare machine guns ... to the rifle and hunting clubs of Chance. They’re prepared to die defending their jail, and their right to hold the several hundred Greenfeld sailors in it. Kris faces Hank and his thousand sailors and marines with bayonets fixed and rifles cocked. And talks him down from what would be a fearful slaughter.

Hank gets his sailors back and heads out. Kris breaths a sigh of relief.

Hank reaches the jump point, only to shoot out the buoy, closing down all communication out of the system. Now he heads back for Chance. He’s learned about Kris’s alien discovery and intends to present his father with this planet and the alien finds it leads to.

Kris faces battle with two small armed merchant ships and a cruiser that was old and worthless when her Grampa Trouble served on it as a first lieutenant. To make matters worse, Kris knows that a Longknife killing a Peterwald is about the worse thing that can happen in human space just now.

However, as cruisers trade broadsides, it doesn’t look like Hank has any aversion to a Peterwald killing a Longknife. Hard hit and desperate, Kris concentrates everything she has on Hank’s flagship. With luck, if she can put it out of the battle, his other ships will concentrate on rescuing their dictator’s spoiled brat.

It works much as Kris expected. Only Hank discovers as he activates his survival pod, that it’s not working. Hank is very dead when the pod is recovered.

When Kris reports to Wardhaven for her usual mission debrief, she finds that she has again managed to make a section of the rim too hot for her and worked herself out of a job. They leave it up to Grampa Trouble to tell her that her next job will be on New Eden, Earth’s first colony ... buying paper clips.