Adele sat in the swivel chair that unfolded from the right side of the bow, comparing the atoll before her with the image projected from the little computer in her lap. The seat and the similar one across the deck were intended for sport fishermen; each was fitted with a rail and safety belt. Even now as the Ahura slid toward the shore on inertia alone, Adele felt better when she was strapped in.
Daniel was at the controls again. Cafoldi stood in the extreme bow, shading his eyes with an arm as he peered toward the water ahead. The Ahura had electronic depth-ranging equipment of the standard to be expected on a luxury yacht, but none of the navy men trusted it.
"Ease her right!" Cafoldi called. The Ahura rode a flat, crackling bubble of electricity. At this slow speed, the ozone which the system generated wasn't blown astern. Adele's nostrils wrinkled. "That's it, just a cunt hair!"
Lamsoe stood at the automatic impeller, scanning the shore. Most of the sailors were armed and on deck, some of them aiming toward the vegetation. Adele wasn't sure whether they were really concerned about a threat from the island or if they were just showing off with the armament they'd captured from Kostromans of various stripe. It seemed an empty exercise to her.
According to the satellite image, the atoll was comprised of a ring of eight islands connected by reefs. All Adele saw from the sea was a heavily overgrown hump against the lighter green of the water. Small birds flitted from the twisted shrubbery to the sea and back, dipping among the insects; their larger ocean-coursing brethren circled high overhead.
The Ahura glided toward the spill of tawny sand at the island's left end. Still farther left, water frothed in the currents and occasionally showed the teeth of the coral which combed just below its surface. The next island of the chain was a quarter mile beyond, shimmering like a mirage in the sea haze and the noonday sun.
The Ahura's static fields collapsed. She slid onto the beach, her hull grinding softly on the coral sand. Daniel threw switches in the cockpit, shutting down all the yacht's driving systems.
Adele felt enormous relief at the removal of the high-frequency tremble that had been a part of her existence for the day and a quarter of high-speed running. She'd become aware of the vibration only now that it stopped, but it had been present all the time—creating discomfort that she'd blamed on psychological factors.
"All right, let's get this cargo off-loaded!" Woetjans ordered. "Port watch, haul them up from the bilge; starboard watch stay on guard."
Adele put her computer away and unstrapped herself. Insects glittered silently in the air, sometimes lighting on her skin with a ghost touch. One brushed her eye; she grimaced and blinked rapidly in an attempt to wash it away.
Daniel came forward to join her. "Lovely, isn't it?" he said. "A real paradise. Of course, I don't suppose our prisoners are going to feel that way about it."
"I'm on their side," Adele said dryly. "Thus far it reminds me of the unsorted storage in the subbasement of the Academic Collections building, bugs and all. Mind, the lighting's a lot better."
She waved her hand in front of her to keep more of the minute insects from landing on her face. It was like trying to sweep back the tide.
Cinnabar crewmen were bringing the prisoners up from below. Ganser and his thugs looked sickly and gray. They'd remained trussed like hogs throughout the run with only minimal time on deck for sanitation.
"Of course," Adele added, "some of them may be smart enough to remember what the alternative was. I doubt it. People like that prefer to invent realities in which they're always in the right."
"Not only people like that," Daniel said with a smile.
Four sailors hopped to the sand. Four others on deck took the bound prisoners by the shoulders and ankles and tossed them over the side. Adele blinked in surprise. She'd wondered how the thugs would be landed, but she hadn't expected anything so brutally efficient.
Although . . . it wasn't actually brutal. The Cinnabars treated their captives like so many full duffelbags, but the sailors on the ground caught each flung body and lowered it to the sand brusquely but gently. Most of the sailors would have been willing to put Ganser and his killers over the side in deep water, but needless cruelty wasn't a part of their character.
The sea moved in long swells, licking the shore of the island and surging against the reef. The water of the lagoon stood still and jewel-like, unmarred even by diving seabirds. It was dark blue in contrast to the pale green of the open ocean.
"Where do you want to go now?" Adele asked Daniel quietly. Most of the prisoners had been unloaded; Hogg walked among them with a pair of wire-cutters, snipping the bonds from their wrists and ankles. The Kostromans remained where they lay, perhaps unable as well as unwilling to rise while their captors grinned at them over gunsights.
"We'll get over the horizon before I decide," Daniel said. "Probably on a completely different course. I think we're all right, but I don't care to test our luck needlessly."
Adele nodded. She'd set the base unit in the Elector's Palace to search message traffic, Alliance and Kostroman alike, for any reference to Cinnabar, Daniel Leary, or Adele Mundy. She then used her personal data unit to scroll through the literally thousands of references to Cinnabar. Neither of the individual names had rated a mention.
And no reference to Cinnabar involved Daniel's detachment. He and his companions, Adele included, had dropped out of existence so far as anyone else on this planet was concerned.
The captives were all freed. The sailors reboarded the Ahura, grabbing the chromed rail at the deck's edge and hauling themselves up with a quick kick against the side of the hull. Dasi got a hand from his mate Barnes, but only Hogg bothered to use the ladder attached to the vessel's side.
"Woetjans, toss them a carton of rations," Daniel ordered. He faced the Kostroman thugs, his hands on his hips.
"I'm leaving you a little food," he said. "After that, you'll have to make do with what you find. There may not be fresh water here, but there's fruit and several of these plant species excrete salt to store water in their trunks."
He smiled brightly. "I hope you're up on your native biota," he said. "It's a fascinating one."
"You can't just leave us!" Ganser said.
"Oh, I certainly could," Daniel said. "But in fact I'll let people back in Kostroma City know where you are in thirty days or so. Of course, I can't guarantee that any of them will care."
Two sailors pitched a case of rations to the sand at Ganser's feet. The wood broke and steel cans rolled out.
Daniel turned. "Prepare to get under way!" he ordered. "I'll take the helm."
"The nozzle's clear, sir!" called Dasi, leaning over the stern to peer into the crystalline water. With the bow well up on the shore, Daniel preferred to drag the Ahura backwards with the waterjet rather than try to tickle a sufficient charge into dry sand.
"Everybody who doesn't have a job move back to the stern!" Woetjans ordered, a sensible command and one Daniel should have thought to give himself. The ratings trotted aft, lowering the stern by their weight and so lightening the portion of the vessel that was aground.
Daniel slowly advanced the throttle. He'd rotated the nozzle. The jet spewed forward, making the hull vibrate as though a hose were playing on the vessel's underside. The Ahura slid back in a boil of water, scrunching for the first few feet of her motion and then floating free.
Daniel chopped the throttle, looking over his shoulder to be sure that they were drifting clear and weren't about to hit something. He couldn't see behind because the crew was standing along the stern rail, but somebody would have shouted a warning if there was a problem.
On shore, the Kostromans glared at the vessel with undisguised hate. Adele stood at the rear of the cockpit. Daniel caught her eye and said, "There's plenty of natural food on the island, but I wonder whether that lot isn't more likely to try cannibalism instead?"
Adele sniffed. "For people of their sort," she said, "I suppose cannibalism is natural."
The yacht had left the sand at a slight angle. She now floated parallel to the shore and was beginning to curve back on her remaining momentum. "Spread yourselves out," Daniel ordered. "I'm going to bring her up on the skids."
He engaged the electrofoils while the ratings were still spreading forward. They moved with less immediacy than they'd run to the stern. The skids shuddered, but Daniel didn't hear a grinding as he had the first time he'd deployed them. Scale and caked lubricant had loosened with use; the Ahura was in better condition than she'd been in some while, probably since she was laid up.
Daniel Leary was in better shape than he'd been in a long while too. There was no worse way to treat tools or men than to leave them to rust.
The yacht lifted. Daniel knew he could trust the mechanism now, so he brought her directly into dynamic balance on the skids instead of waiting until the Ahura was under way on the waterjet. They were alone in this sea. They didn't need to adjust their conduct to the comfort of neighboring vessels.
"Clear at the bow, sir!" Cafoldi said; rote, since there was no doubt of the fact. A good crew handled even the most cut-and-dried operations by the book, never cutting corners.
Daniel twisted the joystick slightly to port, then increased the throttle pressure minusculely. The yacht wobbled ahead. The bow angled seaward. They slid past the end of the island.
"Don't forget to write!" Lamsoe called, waving to the stone-faced Kostromans twenty feet away on shore.
Spray exploded toward the Ahura. A pair of hundred-foot tentacles arched from the interior of the lagoon. The flattened tips were each the size of Daniel's torso and covered with fine cilia. They crossed the reef and seized the Ahura's starboard skid.
The yacht tilted with a wrenching clang. The electrofoils and the giant sweep's own bioelectrical charge interfered with one another. A rainbow nimbus lit the air twenty feet from the vessel's every surface.
The tentacles retracted, pulling the Ahura onto her stern. Ratings shouted curses as they went overboard. The sweep was dragging the skids and hull through the coral heads. There were a few shots, their sound almost lost in the vessel's grinding, snapping destruction.
Somebody with a submachine gun punched three holes and a spiderweb of crazing in the windshield. The pellets missed Daniel's head by less than he had time to worry about.
He let go of the joystick because whatever input he had on the yacht's controls just made things worse. Adele was spreadeagled against the cockpit's port bulkhead, gripping two handholds.
The power board shorted in blue fire as salt water reached a conduit whose sheathing had been scraped away on the coral. An instant later a generator blew explosively; foul black smoke spewed up through hatches and the fresh cracks in the decking.
Lamsoe had gone over the side at the first impact, but the automatic impeller was still on its mount. Daniel grabbed its twin spade grips. The deck was no longer down; it sloped at sixty degrees as the sweep's powerful tentacles continued to contract. The creature was tipping the Ahura on her back, using the coral reef as a fulcrum.
Daniel braced his feet against a stanchion and one of the cockpit handholds. He thumbed the plate trigger between the impeller's grips.
The gun recoiled violently but the jury-rigged mount held. The first projectiles raked water empty except for the surge and bubbles stirred by the sweep's tentacles. Daniel shot the burst on, adjusting his aim by twisting his whole body and using the gun itself as a support.
The projectiles' kinetic energy blew the lagoon into an instant fog. He continued to walk the impacts toward the memory of his target: the point where the tentacles emerged together from the lagoon.
The Ahura was nearly vertical. Men and debris floated about her in the churning sea. Daniel's right leg twisted around the gun mount, but his left foot dangled in the air.
Bright yellow blood geysered in the steam at Daniel's point of aim. Chunks of flesh, some of them bigger than a man, spun in all directions. A tentacle writhed across the water like a beheaded snake, both ends free. The other tentacle contracted in its final convulsion as the impeller emptied its magazine.
The Ahura tilted over on her back, falling toward the lagoon where bloody, boiling water subsided. The impeller slipped from its mount and tumbled on its own course, taking Daniel with it in the instant before he let go.
He caught a glimpse of Adele in the air. Her face was set and disapproving. One of her hands gripped the computer sheathed along her right thigh; the other was in the left pocket of her tunic.
"Cinnabar!" Daniel shouted as he hit the water.
Adele supposed she ought to be thankful that the water at the edge of the beach was shallow enough that she hadn't drowned. She'd come down on her knees, though, and the shock of the water and then packed sand three feet below the surface had made her nauseated with pain.
Even now, ten minutes after Cafoldi brought her onto dry ground in a packstrap carry, she walked stiff-legged. She'd be surprised if she didn't have bruises to midway on both thighs and shins.
But she'd found her personal data unit worked perfectly despite the ducking. It was at least an open question whether or not she'd prefer to have broken her neck if the alternative was to be stranded on an island without access to civilized knowledge.
Now that Adele had the mental leisure to notice, she saw that the sailors were all at work. Apparently nobody'd been killed or even seriously injured. For the most part they'd rolled into the water before the yacht flipped in the monster's final convulsion.
Daniel stood in the shade of a tree with small leaves and ropy branches. From each tip hung a nut that grew to the size of a clenched fist. While Daniel talked to Woetjans he peeled the flexible shell of a nut with a small knife, popping bits of the white flesh into his mouth at intervals.
He broke off and grinned broadly when he saw Adele approaching. "You ran your data link through its paces?" he called.
"Yes, thank God," she said. "It's supposed to be sealed against worse than a bath in salt water, but until I tried it I wasn't sure."
Daniel flicked off another piece of nut meat. He held it out to her between his thumb and the knife blade. She shook her head; she was still doubtful whether her modest breakfast of crackers and meat paste was going to stay down.
"What I was more worried about than damage," she went on, "was that I'd lose it and not be able to find it under water."
The Ahura had fallen entirely within the lagoon. The yacht's stern lay on the reef so several feet of the inverted hull were above water. Sailors diving beside the wreck were coming up with stores and equipment.
The water was a sickly green, a combination of colors leached from vegetation on the surrounding islands and the blood of the creature that had destroyed the yacht. Adele assumed the low, gray mound floating a hundred feet from the shore was the sweep's corpse.
"It's huge," she said, looking from the lagoon to Daniel. She couldn't imagine how he'd been able to aim as the Ahura shuddered up on end. She'd barely retained her holds on the bulkhead.
"Yes," Daniel said with a smirk of fully justified pride. "It's not a new species, I suppose, but it still should get my name into the records somewhere, don't you think? Big game hunting if not zoology texts."
He laughed with the easy assurance Adele had come to associate with him. "It was too big to ever leave the lagoon. It certainly wouldn't have had any competition for food inside the ring of the atoll, but I'll be interested to learn just what that food could be."
Barnes sat on the vessel's stern, holding tarpaulins and rope knotted into a pair of saddlebags. They hung to either side of the hull. Cafoldi, one of the divers, came up from the foul water with a shout and a submachine gun in his hand. He splashed on three limbs to the vessel and thrust the weapon into the bag on his side.
Ganser and his Kostromans kept their distance, glowering at the Cinnabars. They weren't precisely under guard, but any attempt to rush Daniel would have to get past Dasi holding an impeller by the barrel as a club and Hogg, who was trimming a point on a sapling he'd cut down with a knife much sturdier than the one in his master's hand. As a spear it looked crude, but nobody who knew Hogg would doubt it was lethal.
Lamsoe and Sun sat cross-legged on a mat of leaves cut from a parasol-shaped shrub. They were each stripping a submachine gun to its component parts. Adele obviously wasn't alone in doubting that any locally manufactured electronics, electromotive weapons included, could survive immersion in salt water.
She wasn't sure what the sailors could do to refurbish the guns, however. Flushing in fresh water, sun-drying and prayer, she supposed, but she recalled Daniel's question whether there was any fresh water on the island.
"Do you want me to call Kostroma City for rescue?" Adele asked quietly.
Daniel looked at her in surprise. "Good heavens, no," he said. "That'd be the same as handing ourselves over to the Alliance."
His concern broke in a smile. "We've invested quite a lot in avoiding that already. I don't think we need to give up just yet."
"I, ah . . ." Adele said. She looked at the web of jungle, then behind her to the open sea. You could sail a thousand miles across that ocean without finding land more promising than this on which she stood.
She knew that. She'd just come that thousand miles and more.
"You think we can live here indefinitely?" she said. "Well, I suppose you're the expert. . . ."
Daniel laughed aloud. "Now, did I say that I'd rather leave us here forever to rot than wait in a camp on Pleasaunce for an eventual prisoner exchange?" he said. "This is a delay, Adele. But we needed to lie low for a time anyway so we're not really losing anything."
He nodded toward the Ahura's stern. Barnes was standing, holding one end of a line over which he'd strung the bags of salvage. A sailor stood in mud to her ankles pulling the bags to the shore. Two others waited nearby to empty the gear; the divers held on to the yacht and chatted while they waited for the bags to return.
"I don't think we'll be able to use the hull," Daniel said. "It's a one-piece casting and very tough, but when the integrity's breached the core of the sandwich starts to fray. Since we can't reheat the edges to three thousand degrees Kelvin, we're better off using wood. I'm pretty sure we can get the waterjet back in operation, though, and at least one of the solar sails."
"I see," Adele said, not that she did. She stared at the jungle, visualizing a boat made of that.
"You can access a forestry database from here, can't you?" Daniel said. "I've only got the once-over-lightly from the Aglaia's library. We don't want to learn that we're building the hull of a tree whose sap makes people turn blue and die in a week."
He laughed. In the lagoon the divers were back at work, bringing up objects so disguised by clinging mud that Adele couldn't guess their identity. The atoll's outer face was clean sand and clear water, but the lagoon-side shores were gray-black muck that the ocean currents didn't reach to scour away.
"I can access any electronic information that I could have found for you while we were in Kostroma City," Adele said, feeling disassociated from the cheerful bustle about her. It was as though a thick glass wall encircled her, keeping her apart from her companions despite her presence in their midst. "I suppose there are botanical files as well as the zoological ones we've used in the past."
"You know?" Daniel said, looking out into the lagoon. He'd finished the nut; he tossed the rind into the undergrowth behind him to decay into nutrients like those that stained the still water. "If the Ahura hadn't been an electrofoil, we'd never have learned about the sweep. They're quite harmless to humans, you know. Though—"
His grin.
"—I wouldn't care to have gone swimming with that one."
"Yes, that's probably true," Adele said.
The contrast between her dour feelings of defeat and the cheerful optimism Daniel shared with his sailors suddenly amused her. She chuckled also. Daniel was genuinely glad to have observed a creature of previously unknown size. It had almost killed him and his companions; it had almost wrecked his plans to escape Kostroma—
But "almost" was the key word with Daniel Leary. He didn't worry about things that were past; it was at least an open question in Adele's mind whether he worried about the future either. Though she wasn't about to call him a simple man. . . .
Daniel and Woetjans were discussing food and water. Daniel nodded to the sailor's queries and clipped another ripe nut as he listened.
Adele walked past Lamsoe and Sun, stepping carefully so that the wind didn't blow sand particles from her soles over the dismantled weapons. Hogg, cleaning sap from his knife with a fibrous leaf, nodded to her, then grimaced.
Hogg had a bad bruise on the right side of his head. A film of ointment closed the scrapes and the cut above his temple, but Adele was afraid he needed better medical attention than was available here.
She stepped between Hogg and Dasi, facing the group of former prisoners. They stopped their low-voiced conversations and looked at her with a mixture of emotions. A sort of bestial hunger was part of the brew she saw now in the thugs' eyes.
Adele smiled. It was her usual version, an expression nobody could mistake for good-humored.
"You'll have noticed that all the guns were soaked when the boat was wrecked," Adele said. "You may believe that they won't work until they're properly cleaned, probably cleaned better than is possible here on this island."
"Mistress!" Dasi blurted in horror behind her. In the corner of her eye Adele saw Hogg move, putting a restraining hand on his companion.
Adele drew her own pistol from her jacket pocket. She fired off-hand. A bell-shaped fruit exploded on a branch twenty feet in the air, spraying pulp and seeds down onto the Kostromans. Ganser shouted and covered his bald scalp with his hands.
"My gun was made on Cinnabar," she said. "It works quite well."
Adele slid the weapon back into her pocket. "And so do I," she added over her shoulder as she returned to Daniel's side.
Sunlight awakened Daniel. It filtered through the shelter of leaves and saplings his ratings must have built around him while he was asleep.
"Why didn't—" Daniel said as he sprang upright. Every muscle in his body, particularly the big ones in his thighs and shoulders, grabbed him simultaneously. It was like being attacked by a platoon of madmen with icepicks.
"Mary Mother of God!" Daniel cried tightly. His mouth would have been content to scream instead.
Overwhelming pain had made his eyes blink closed. Memory painted across the inside of his eyelids an image of himself forty feet in the air, wrapped around the shuddering gun mount.
Daniel Leary had done amazing things yesterday, he'd tell the world he had, but exertion like that came with a price tag. He was paying it now.
"We thought you could use your beauty sleep, sir," said Woetjans, seated with her back to the shelter's end post. She stood easily and offered Daniel her hand.
"I'm not proud," he muttered. He took Woetjans's callused grip as a brace to hold him as his legs levered him upright.
After the first instant, it wasn't too bad. The first instant felt like the madmen had exchanged their icepicks for flensing knives.
He laughed at Woetjans's concerned expression. "Remind me to get into shape before the next time I go out for trapeze," he said. "I'll be all right, I'm just stiff."
Very carefully Daniel stretched, locking his fingers behind his neck and arching his spine backward. He'd moved the detachment into a natural clearing formed by a protrusion of the igneous rock around which the island had grown. The ground cover was low-growing and soft. The hard rock wouldn't support larger vegetation, and the canopies of surrounding trees shaded but didn't cover the sky.
"Ganser's lot buggered off in the night," Woetjans said. "I don't guess that's much loss. They took a case or two of rations, but we had all the guns under guard with us."
"I wonder where they think they're going to go?" Daniel said with a frown. He didn't understand the situation, so it worried him. The Kostroman thugs had scarcely seemed the sort who'd be ashamed to take charity from a Cinnabar contingent which was obviously more competent at living rough.
"I told the crew to make sure they're always two together, even if they're just going around the next tree to take a leak," Woetjans said. "If anybody runs into a problem with the wogs, then I guess we'll finish things the way we could've done back on Kostroma."
Lamsoe and Sun, the detachment's armorer and armorer's mate by necessity, were in the clearing working on the guns. Daniel had seen enough of the pair to respect their competence but, like Adele, he very much doubted that the weapons could be safely reconditioned under the present circumstances.
"Where's Ms. Mundy?" he asked. He heard ratings calling from the forest, gathering food from the species he'd indicated before the sudden tropic nightfall of the previous day. They'd begun cutting wood besides. Rhythmic axe blows rang from deeper in the forest.
Hogg lay on a leaf mat, beneath a shelter like the one that had covered Daniel. At intervals Sun leaned over and mopped Hogg's face and mouth with a damp rag. Hogg was breathing hoarsely and, for the first time in Daniel's recollection, looked his age.
"She went back to the beach for a better line to the satellites she's using," Woetjans said, also a little grimmer for viewing Hogg. "There's six ratings there on the salvage detail, so no wog's going to catch her alone."
The big bosun's mate shook her head. "Mind, I'd bet her against the whole lot of them. She surprised the living shit outa me, she did."
"Yeah," said Daniel. "Me too."
He shrugged, loosening his muscles a little more. "I'm going to take her on a tour of the neighborhood," he said. "She can get me details on the wildlife through her computer."
Daniel grinned and added, "And she can be my bodyguard, so don't put on that sour expression, Woetjans. The rest of the detachment has its duties laid out, so I'm the party best spared for scouting."
Whistling and feeling better with every step—he still had a ways better to feel, he admitted—Daniel walked down the path to the beach. It was improved over the simple trackway they'd forced through the undergrowth the day before. The yacht hadn't carried machetes or axes, but the ratings had improvised.
Adele sat at the edge of the beach, her back to a tree with knobby joints in its trunk. Her legs splayed out before her instead of being crossed. As he'd expected, the personal data unit was on her lap and the wands in her hands. She didn't notice Daniel's arrival till Barnes shouted a greeting from the Ahura's upturned hull.
"I'm downloading everything I can find on Kostroman botany," she said by way of greeting. Despite the brusque opening, she'd smiled to see him up and about. "The files are an awful tangle. Everything on this planet is an awful tangle."
"That's why they need experts from Cinnabar," Daniel said cheerfully. "Let's take a walk and see if we can't do some untangling."
Adele shut her computer down and transferred it to its sheath with a stringent caution that any spacer could recognize and approve. Only then did she rise, using Daniel's offered arm as an anchor. It was like watching someone stand while wearing stilts. The two of them had stayed aboard the yacht until the instant it went over, so they'd had long dives into the water.
Daniel gestured to the left, past the salvage crew and along the lagoon side of the island. Fresh water was going to be a major concern when they left the atoll's fruit behind in their jury-rigged vessel, and barrel trees couldn't set their free-standing roots in ocean currents.
"A good thing we didn't hit the land," he said. He grinned. "Or the coral."
"When I got up this morning, I didn't think I could hurt any more than I did," Adele said as she fell clumsily into step with him. "My knees were the size of melons. By now some of the swelling's gone down and I'm almost glad that I wasn't killed."
Daniel blinked, then realized she was joking. He chuckled.
He supposed she was joking.
There was no path through the jungle anywhere on the island. Daniel would have been surprised to find it otherwise since large animals were unlikely to reach the atoll except if carried here by humans. It was fairly easy to move through the interior because the shaded undergrowth grew soft-stemmed and sickly, but to find the barrel trees they had to scout the margins.
He took the lead as they entered a thicket. The shrubs had thin, ropy stems with an explosion of green and yellow leaves at the peak fifteen feet in the air. Despite Daniel's weight, the plants resisted him like a human mob.
"How is Hogg?" Adele asked quietly from behind him.
"Not great," Daniel admitted, as he forced his way through to a less obstructive stretch of vegetation. He was sweating and breathing hard as he spread the last of the ropy shrubs for his companion.
"We can use these for fiber if we need to," he said to Adele. "Though there was plenty of spare line aboard the Ahura. That'll be simpler unless we can't locate it now."
Tiny insects shimmered about them, tickling as they drank human body oils and sometimes drowned in the droplets they craved. A wedge of lagoon entered the island here. Stalked eyes peered from the water, then vanished in bubbles and swirls of mud.
"They'll do nicely to expand our diet," Daniel said. "Crustaceans of some kind. There ought to be shellfish both here in the mud and on the ocean side."
He met Adele's eyes. "I'm worried about Hogg," he said. "He's got a concussion and there's not a damned thing we can do here except supportive treatment."
Adele gestured to her sheathed computer. "Any time you want . . ." she said.
Daniel shook his head. "No," he said. "I have responsibility for the whole detachment. Things happen in wartime."
Daniel took them inland to where they could step over the notch instead of trying to cross its original ten-foot width, even though that would have saved a hundred yards from their trek. He was sure that no major predator could have shared the lagoon with the giant sweep; but a day ago he'd have sworn that no sweep grew more than twenty feet in total length.
It wasn't as though they had a particular place to get to, after all. Daniel found two barrel trees on this side of the notch and saw another one across it. The squat trunk was hidden in the undergrowth but vast, billowing foliage marked the tree clearly.
Whenever he had a question, Adele squatted and brought out her personal data unit. When she'd come as close as she could from the parameters he gave her, she handed the miniature computer to him to refine the data.
The librarian's face as she parted with the unit was like that of a mother letting a drunken stranger hold her baby. She didn't protest, though, and only the perfect rigidity of her expression indicated the horror she must feel in her heart.
By midday they were only a few hundred yards from the sandy beach where they'd started their trek, but Daniel was even more confident that his plan of escape was practical. He could now point to the elements that would fulfill their needs instead of just being sure that he'd find them somewhere on the atoll.
"Time to head back, I think," he said. Before him was another notch into the island's fabric, this one only about five feet wide at the mouth. "I don't much like that sky."
Cumulus clouds had billowed into a wall across the western heavens. A thunderstorm had caught the Ahura on her first afternoon out of Kostroma. It was so violent that Daniel had shut down the foils, furled the solar sails, and ridden the waves for an hour and a half on waterjet alone.
"And besides, I could use some lunch," he added with a grin. "I could catch us each a mudhopper—"
He gestured to the shoreline. Eyes apparently floating on the water vanished in a swirl of mud.
"—but I'm not quite hungry enough to eat one raw."
Adele nodded. "I think I can live on stored body fat for long enough to get to the camp," she said.
She stepped aside to let Daniel lead on the way back as well. He turned—and as he did saw something in the corner of his eye.
"Ho!" Daniel said. "Oh, will you look at that? Yes, we will stop here."
He pointed down the narrow waterway to the clump of rough-barked trees some twenty feet away. On their branches grew fungus in stages of ripeness from white pimples all the way up to swollen yellow balls the size of a man's head. When fully ripe they dangled from a narrow umbilicus.
"Soap bubble fungus," Daniel explained. "It infects several species of nut trees. It doesn't seem to injure the tree seriously, so it may be a symbiotic adaptation."
Adele started to pull out her computer. "No, the Aglaia's database covered soap bubble fungus adequately," Daniel said. He spoke softly because of an instinct not to rouse danger, though at this distance he and Adele weren't in danger. "The only really important thing to know about it is that you don't want to come within ten feet of it, or twenty if you're the cautious sort."
"It's poisonous?" Adele said. Even though Daniel had told her not to bother, she was calling up information from the material she'd downloaded this morning.
Daniel grinned. The way Adele turned to her computer was instinctive too: she didn't own knowledge unless she'd seen it written. The same words from the same source had more effect written than they did spoken.
"They're delicious when ripe, I'm told," Daniel said as he continued to eye the infected grove. The fullest of the fungus bubbles seemed to quiver with internal life. That was actually possible. "They'd be eaten by every bird or animal within fifty miles before they could open, if it weren't for the beetles that live inside them."
He pointed to the darkest, ripest of the fruiting bodies. "Anything that breaches the rind is set on by a dozen or so insects with bites like red-hot pokers. There's nothing on Kostroma that deliberately opens the fungus, and animals that do so by accident can be bitten to death."
"Even humans?" Adele said, now looking toward the globular fungus. Her control wands were motionless.
"Especially humans," Daniel agreed. "There's a few cases every year, city folk having a picnic and children who haven't been trained to be careful."
He grinned broadly. "I am getting a first-hand look at Kostroman natural history, aren't I? Rather fortunate to have been wrecked here, don't you think?"
"I don't know that I'd go that far," Adele said with her dry smile, "but I'm willing to be happy for you."
The rain hit when they were halfway back. At least, Daniel noted, it did something toward washing the caked sweat from their clothing.
By the time Adele and Daniel staggered into sight of the salvage crew on the Ahura she was dizzy with . . . well, she wasn't sure where to assign causation. The pain in her arm and shoulder muscles from hanging on while the yacht thrashed in the monster's grip was a factor. Exhaustion from walking through a landscape that fought her, carrying at the same time several pounds of mud clinging to either foot, was certainly a factor also.
And she assumed that the oppressive heat and humidity were working on her as well. She'd never before been in a climate where sweat beaded and rolled down her skin because the air was too saturated to accept even the least further increment.
Adele hoped that fear of the unknown wasn't weighing on her also. She was lost in a wilderness of the mind, a place where she didn't know any of the rules. Daniel and his sailors seemed perfectly comfortable here. Perhaps they'd been trained for this sort of uncertainty, in which gunmen might walk into a library at any instant or an ugly-looking fruit could disgorge lethal insects.
It wasn't the physical environment that bothered Adele, but rather the randomness of her present life. She was used to the stress of grinding poverty and demanding work, but there'd been a sameness of existence until now. She desperately missed that predictability.
Woetjans was with the salvage crew. The bosun's mate wore a look of relief as she saw Daniel reappear from the jungle. Obviously the cycle of random disaster hadn't ended yet.
"Sir, we got a problem," Woetjans said before Daniel could catch his breath at not having to fight the vegetation for a while. "Last night those wog bastards must've got the lifeboat from the ship."
She nodded toward the Ahura. The stern seemed to have settled lower since Adele last saw it, but Barnes still perched there.
"I should've known there'd be one," Woetjans continued. "It's my own damned fault. It was in a compartment under the stern decking, but I'd never thought to wonder why the panel had a red stripe around it. Hafard found it hanging open when she was feeling around in the water this morning."
The sailors who'd been nearby on shore came close enough to listen. The pair who were diving in the lagoon paused, clinging to floats made from bundled reeds. They and Barnes looked shoreward, straining also to hear.
Woetjans handed Daniel a thin metal plate with rivet holes on either end. "This was pinned to the inside of the panel," she said. "The wogs must've known what was there all the time."
"Well, they can't go far in an inflatable boat," Daniel said. "And if . . . Oh, I see what you mean."
Adele leaned over Daniel's shoulder to read the legend on the plate. Its raised letters read:
EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT
RAFT (CAPACITY 10) AND MOTOR
SOLAR STILL
EMERGENCY RADIO
FISHING L . . .
"Oh," said Adele.
She took out her personal data unit and seated herself on the ground, using a case of rations as a desk. She crossed her legs reflexively. The jolt of pain from her bruises didn't hit before she'd started the movement and wasn't severe enough to prevent her from finishing it. When she was working, nothing short of decapitation was going to stop her.
Daniel and his sailors were talking and looking toward the next island of the atoll, across the line of reefs. Adele dropped into the universe of her holographic screen. The natural world sloughed from around her.
She quickly located the first mention of Daniel's detachment. It was a radioed note from an Alliance liaison officer with the port authorities in Kostroma City to his superior in the Alliance military government. Cinnabar pirates had marooned Kostroman citizens on a barren island but had been stranded on the same island themselves. The Kostromans would guide troops to destroy the pirates.
Adele smiled slightly as she noted the time slugs on that and the first followup. There'd been no action on the report for several hours. It had been received not long after midnight, and if anybody noticed it they'd put it in a class with sightings of angelic visitors.
An officer had probably come in at dawn. Shortly thereafter somebody had refined Ganser's original SOS, though the exchange wasn't recorded anywhere Adele could find it. The followup, now reporting Cinnabar naval personnel were operating on Kostroma, had been passed on to Blue Chrome Operations. The invasion force was wholly distinct from the Alliance military government here.
At this point things happened very fast and were fully recorded in electronic files from which Adele could retrieve them. The link to Ganser was still only the Ahura's emergency radio, but it and Kostroma's geopositioning satellites were adequate to the needs of the Alliance.
Adele finished her survey and leaned back with a sigh. She didn't shut down but her eyes were far enough back from the focal point that the display merged into a blur of mutually-interfering beams of coherent light.
Daniel and Woetjans were looking at her. "You've got something, Adele?" Daniel asked.
The whole detachment was now present, Hogg included. The servant looked worn, but the pupils of his eyes were the same size and he walked without help. The whole left side of his face was the livid purple yellow of a decaying bruise.
The sailors were armed, but the few who carried impellers held them by the barrel as clubs. Knives, spears, and clubs of the native wood predominated.
"Ganser is in radio contact with the Alliance military authorities," Adele said. She laid the information out as flatly and simply as possible so that she wouldn't be misunderstood. "The Kostromans are on the adjacent island, about three hundred meters from the shore nearest to this island. A platoon of Alliance commandoes in an armored personnel carrier will arrive at local midnight to kill or capture the Cinnabar naval personnel and to capture the Kostromans."
"Why so long?" Dasi asked. "An APC could make it here from Kostroma City by dusk, even if they just started."
"They want us to be asleep," Daniel guessed.
"Yes," Adele said. "Ganser warned them that we were armed. He said they should shoot us on sight and not take any chances."
"Wish we were armed," said Lamsoe. "Wish to fuck we were armed."
He looked wistfully at his impeller. A piece of flexible plastic dangled from the battery compartment. Lamsoe had disconnected the power pack so that there was no risk of his accidentally pulling the trigger and shorting the mechanism explosively.
Daniel looked at his chronometer, returned it to his pocket, and smiled purposefully to Adele and his sailors. "That gives us seven hours," he said. "Now, the first thing we'll need—"
Daniel swept the opposite shore slowly with his goggles set to maximum magnification on thermal imaging, then swept it again with the magnification backed off to normal. There was always the possibility that a glitch in the imaging software would mask a target when two systems were combined and pushed to their limits.
This wasn't a time Daniel could afford a glitch.
He took off the goggles and handed them to Woetjans, beside him in the undergrowth. The remainder of the detachment was a silent presence several feet deeper in the jungle, where the thick foliage would mask their body heat from any detection apparatus Daniel knew of. The Kostromans probably didn't have infrared equipment, but Daniel's margin of error was too slight for him to make things worse by any assumed "certainties."
"I don't see any sign of a guard," he said. "Keep watching, of course."
Daniel stretched to full height, bracing his paired hands on a treetrunk. He'd stripped to a belt, a sheath knife from one of the ratings, and his shorts. Woetjans held a long reel of fishing line whose free end was tied to Daniel's belt.
The shorts weren't for modesty but from a due concern for small swimming things that might nibble or sting in the darkness. A nipped toe wouldn't be disabling.
"I'll be off now," he said. He walked toward the water, feeling the gritty soil change to mud between his toes.
"Sir," said Woetjans as she stepped out of the undergrowth beside him. "I wish—"
"I'm the best swimmer in the detachment," Daniel said. "If there's a problem, Cafoldi's my backup. but you have to get a strike force to the Kostromans tonight. Now, go back to your duties."
At this moment Daniel wanted only to get on with the task, but he didn't let his nervous fury cause him to lash out at the petty officer. Woetjans was just as worried at being left in charge of a situation without clear orders as Daniel was at swimming the strait separating the islands. It ought to work out for both of them, but only a fool wouldn't wonder.
"Yessir," Woetjans said. She saluted and vanished into the jungle.
Daniel entered the water. It felt warmer than the night air on his naked skin. He began a leisurely breast stroke toward the distant shore, giving the wrecked yacht a wide berth.
Sundown was less than an hour past, but the night was so black that only by the pinpricks of starlight could Daniel separate the sky from the land and sea. Both Kostroma's tiny moons were up but they were scarcely more than bright planets even when full.
The tide was rising and currents flowed strongly through the reef from the ocean beyond. Daniel drifted farther into the lagoon; he changed his angle, stroking at a slant against the current in order to hold his intended landfall.
In a perfect world Daniel would have been making this swim between tides when the water was still; though now that he thought about it, in a perfect world there wouldn't be any need for him to swim at all. At least he didn't have to do it when the tide was going out and the rip pulled him toward the fanged reef closing the interval between islands.
Daniel still would have tried. The task was necessary, and the likelihood that it would be fatal wouldn't make it optional.
Something bumped him. He lost a stroke in frozen surprise. More things nudged him and slid off with rubbery persistence.
Unblinking eyes humped the water. Forms squirmed past Daniel into the lagoon like a bubble slick. The contacts were mindless, harmless; mere collisions in the night. An enormous shoal of soft-bodied creatures was entering the lagoon with the tide and darkness to feed.
All Daniel could see were the eyes. He couldn't guess the creatures' body shape from their boneless touch, but the largest were at least the length of his forearm.
Daniel continued to stroke, hindered by the creatures' presence. More serious were the jerks and tugs from behind as the shoal snagged the fishline as well. If the line broke, he'd have to do this all over again.
So be it. He'd take the process one stroke at a time, as he always did. At least he'd learned how the sweep had been able to feed itself to such monstrous size.
He swam with his head out of water so that he could see the shore at all times. There was nothing to see, and no likelihood that Daniel would be able to tell in this darkness if Ganser's whole band was waiting to spear him like a fish caught in the shallows.
His thigh muscles were hurting very badly. He felt an incipient cramp as he bunched for another frog kick; instantly he relaxed and lay in a dead man's float while he prayed that he'd been in time.
He had. The big muscles of his right thigh didn't wind themselves into a furious knot as they'd been on the verge of doing, but Daniel didn't dare risk them further tonight.
He swam on, using only arm strokes. His legs dangled behind him like those of a broken-backed dog.
Daniel had overstressed his thighs when he clung to the impeller mount, and he was out of shape. No point in lying to himself: Daniel Leary wasn't as fit as an RCN officer needed to be. If anything happened to the ratings he commanded, it was his fault in all truth as well as by regulation.
Daniel's shoulders weren't in any better condition than his thighs, but the back muscles were less likely to cramp from an inability to dispose of waste products. He was losing strength, though. He needed to reach land soon or he was going to find himself with no option but to float until somebody noticed him at daybreak.
Daniel Leary, floating with the corpse of a sweep the size of a yacht. Well, he hadn't let himself get so fat that there'd be doubt about which was which.
He chuckled, a mistake in that it put off his timing and he breathed water. Maybe a good thing anyway; humor was never out of place in a tight situation.
Besides, he was close to his goal. He could smell the mud, though the toe he dabbed down didn't find bottom. A few feet more—
Something whacked him in the chest. This was a real blow, not the squirming touch of a creature riding the currents. Daniel's head went under water before he could close his mouth.
Fear of someone on shore watching for a disturbance didn't check Daniel's deep lizard-brain fear of drowning. He rose, flailing and spluttering.
He couldn't see anything on the surface. Had he struck a submerged treetrunk? It'd felt solid enough.
Treading water carefully in hope that his thighs wouldn't pack up on him now, Daniel felt in front of him with his outstretched left hand. He didn't touch anything.
He stroked forward again. Something punched him on the left side. As he lurched, he took another underwater blow to the center of his chest.
Daniel knew what the problem was now, and he knew what to do about it. He just wasn't sure that he'd be able to do what was necessary in his present physical condition.
There was a colony of giant tube-worms on his side of the channel, harmless filter-feeders. They rose from their tunnels after dark to sweep the water about them with feathery gills which they withdrew into their bodies every few minutes to ingest the microorganisms trapped in the gills' netlike structure.
The problem was that though the worms lived in colonies, each protected its immediate hunting ground by butting away rivals which tried to tunnel into the mud too close. These worms thought Daniel was one of their own kind, and they didn't intend to let him settle in the territory they'd already claimed.
Daniel turned and paddled feebly parallel to the shore. He'd used a good deal of his strength fighting the tide when it tried to push him in this direction; now when he could use some help he was in quiet water.
He could really use some help. Well, so could his detachment. What Adele and the ratings had was Daniel Leary, and on his honor that would be enough.
Twice he turned toward shore again. Twice the clamped gill covers of an outraged worm prodded him back. He giggled: Kostroman tube worms had a sense of honor very similar to that of Cinnabar nobles. All this time he'd thought society on the two planets was very different.
He supposed the pain in his lungs and shoulders was giving him hallucinations. Well, his present reality had very little to recommend it.
Daniel wasn't fully aware that his fourth attempt to reach shore had succeeded until his left hand dug into mud. He collapsed, still in the water, and dragged sobbing breaths into his lungs. It was nearly a minute before he managed to crawl out of the lagoon and stand upright.
A bush rubbed him; its leaves felt like sandpaper. He ignored them and waved toward the shore he'd left a lifetime ago. Woetjans would be watching through the goggles.
Daniel tested the fishline. It still had the tension of its own full length. Slowly, careful not to snap it now against an unseen snag, Daniel began to hand in the line and the heavier cord that his ratings would by now have fastened to its end.
A bird whose wings were a meter across swooped over the lagoon with a coo-o-o, then vanished again in the overhanging trees. Adele jumped; the Kostromans across the twenty feet of water from her bellowed and sprang away from their campfire. One of them got to his feet and hurled a stone into the night when he was sure that the creature was gone.
The thugs settled again. One of them tried to build up the fire, but the wood he added was damp. The flames sank to a hissing glow and the rest of the gang snarled curses at him. They were very nervous.
They had even better reason to be than they knew.
Adele shivered. The air, though warm in any normal sense, cooled her by evaporation as it dried the salt water from her skin. She'd been too exhausted to eat when she and Daniel returned from scouting, and she hadn't eaten later because tension and the flurry of activity had masked her hunger.
Now she was cold and wet and alone in the darkness. She liked to think of herself as a creature of the mind, but her body was reimposing its own reality.
She'd know better the next time. The thought of there being a next time like this made her grin despite herself: Dangerous Adele, the Pistol-Packing Librarian.
She sobered. There probably would be a next time, if she survived this one.
The Kostromans subsided into glum speculation again. They were urban thugs, as unused to these sorts of conditions as Adele herself was, and they didn't have her self-disciplined willingness to deal with a situation as she found it.
Ganser had pulled into a notch midway along the lagoon side of this islet. He hadn't built a real camp. Open ration cans winked orange in the firelight; one floated near where Adele crouched on the opposite shore.
The inflatable liferaft was drawn up on the mud near the fire. Adele wondered if it was tied. The thugs probably didn't think they'd need the boat again, but the Cinnabar sailors certainly did.
She and the Cinnabar sailors. For the first time since the Mundys of Chatsworth were massacred, Adele Mundy belonged to a group.
Something plopped loudly in the lagoon. A thug cried out and turned. The rhythm of night-sounds shifted for a moment after the cry, then resumed at its previous level.
Daniel Leary stepped out of the undergrowth on the other side of the Kostromans' fire. He carried a wooden baton a meter long.
"Good evening," Daniel said. "Surrender quietly right now. You're surrounded."
The thugs bawled and scrambled away from the fire. One of them aimed a submachine gun at Daniel. Adele was no longer cold. She shot the gunman in the knee. The gunman screamed in rising pain and fell backward.
Ganser swung at Daniel. Daniel jabbed his baton into the thug's soft belly, then rang the wood off Ganser's scalp as he doubled over.
A Kostroman squatting at the edge of the light had a submachine gun also. Adele hadn't noticed it until the thug pulled the trigger. They'd retrieved guns from the lagoon, but unlike the sailors they hadn't even tried to wash the salt out of the circuitry.
The submachine gun blew up in a vivid green flash: its battery had shorted through the mechanism. Vaporized metal and globs of burning plastic casing splattered in all directions like the contents of an incendiary grenade.
Daniel shouted, but the thugs themselves caught most of the fireball. Woetjans and Barnes burst from the undergrowth to either side of their commander and joined him in clubbing every Kostroman still standing.
Adele didn't shoot again. She didn't have a safe target, and the three Cinnabars across the inlet didn't need her help.
The only rope the Cinnabars had that was long enough to span the strait between the islands was Kostroma-made and only a quarter-inch diameter. Daniel was unwilling to stress it with more than one person at a time crossing hand over hand to the other side. If there'd been more time the sailors could have braided a bark hawser; but there wasn't time, for that or much of anything else.
Three Cinnabars had crossed to join Daniel. Adele was the first, because of her pistol and her skill with it. Barnes and Dasi were supposed to follow, but Woetjans had come in Dasi's place.
The fight in the Kostroman camp, such as it was, ended. Daniel swayed, panting as he held his club by both ends. He looked across the notch of water and called, "Don't try to come around, Adele. We'll bring you over in the boat as soon as we've got this lot tied."
The four Cinnabars had worked their way up the shore from the island's tip until they found the Kostroman camp on the other side of this inlet. They hadn't been able to make a plan until they saw the location. Adele had been the one to suggest she stay here where she had a better line of fire than she'd have if she worked around with the others.
She'd felt alone as she waited for Daniel to strike. That wasn't a problem; she'd felt alone for most of her life.
A thug keened in a high-pitched voice that cut through the moans and sick-hearted curses of the others. The one she'd shot, perhaps; or the one who'd incinerated herself by pulling the submachine gun's trigger.
Adele had a good view of the camp from here, but it hadn't been good enough. If the submachine gun had worked, Daniel Leary would be dead. She didn't see any way the group could survive if they lost Daniel.
In rational moments she didn't see how they would survive under Daniel's command either, but it was surprisingly easy in the young lieutenant's presence to suspend disbelief.
Adele looked at the water, then tucked the pistol into the purse she wore on her waistbelt. "I'm coming across," she said. She walked into the inlet.
At midpoint the channel was deep enough that Adele had to splash in an awkward parody of swimming. There was no current; the bottom muck, though unpleasant, slid off her skin like thick oil instead of gripping her. A week ago—a day ago—she'd never have considered plunging into water foul with jungle decay, but her standards of acceptability had slipped.
Daniel gave her a hand out. "You shouldn't have done that," he said. "We can't afford to take unnecessary risks."
"Nor can we afford to waste time," Adele said tartly. That wasn't the real reason she'd walked across, though. She was punishing herself for missing the second gunner until it would have been too late.
Woetjans and Barnes were tying the prisoners with the same cord by which Adele and the two sailors had crossed the strait. The campfire had been trampled in the fighting, but it perversely burned brighter than it had under the Kostromans' leisured direction.
Adele took her pistol out of the purse. Daniel looked down at the prisoners. Several were conscious but they waited stolidly to be tied again. Blood still pulsed from where the club had laid open three inches of Ganser's scalp.
"I suppose I need to put a pressure bandage on that," Daniel muttered; but he didn't seem ready to do so quite yet.
Daniel was still breathing hard. A spatter of flaming plastic had blistered his right forearm; he hadn't dressed it yet.
He reached again into the first aid kit Woetjans had brought over. The horribly burned shooter lapsed into slobbering silence. Daniel put the injector back in its clamp in the kit.
"I already gave her three ampules," he said softly to Adele. "It's a waste of drugs, but it was that or knock her head in. I didn't want to do that, but if she hadn't shut up . . ."
"What about the one I shot?" Adele asked. She didn't know which Kostroman it had been. She'd seen the gun and fired, picking her target by instinct rather than design.
"On the end," Daniel said, nodding to the edge of the firelight. "I gave him a shot too, so he wouldn't go into shock. He'll be all right. He'll live, anyway."
"That's the lot, sir," Woetjans said as she straightened.
"Right," said Daniel. "Woetjans, you take the lifeboat back and gather up the others. It'll take two trips, I think, to bring them and the gear we'll need."
He smiled at his surroundings with what Adele thought was anticipation. "The rest of us'll get to work here, readying things for our friends from the Alliance."
The emergency radio was a flat box that hummed softly. Every ten seconds the output display beside the speaker spiked, indicating that the unit continued to send a homing signal.
"I hear 'em coming," whispered Woetjans. "Hear it? Like thunder a hundred miles off, that's the lift fans."
Daniel spread his hand for silence. The radio's integral microphone wasn't very sensitive, but they didn't need to take chances.
Eleven Cinnabars sat around the fire, wearing Kostroman civilian clothing with an addition of Zojira black and yellow. Woetjans was trying to use the excess in her trousers' waistband to make up what was lacking in inseam length; to say Ganser's clothes were a bad fit for her would be putting it mildly. Other ratings weren't much better off.
It probably didn't matter. The Alliance commandoes weren't coming to stage a fashion show. The blood that stiffened the shoulders and right sleeve of Daniel's shirt wouldn't surprise anybody either.
Barnes and Dasi were across the strait, tending the original camp on the other island. It was a dangerous job, but that description would cover most of what was going on tonight.
The eight other ratings guarded the prisoners. They were all neck deep in the water of an inlet eighty yards from the Kostroman camp. Overhanging foliage ought to block the remainder of the human heat signature, at least from a quick-reaction force that was trying to locate known groupings rather than searching for people who weren't where they were supposed to be.
"Zojira civilians," a voice rasped from the radio. The person speaking was male, but the single-sideband emergency signal and a degree of professional disdain almost concealed even his sex. "Give us a vector from your camp to the bandit position. Over."
The burned Kostroman had died, so Daniel hadn't been required to decide whether to put her in the water with the others. Both her hands had been charred off, and her heat-shriveled intestines writhed where there was no longer a ribcage to cover them.
Her death had been the best option for all concerned. Daniel supposed it was a failing of his as a man as well as an officer that he'd been unwilling to speed the result himself.
Daniel bent over the microphone. The emergency unit's poor sound quality was a blessing under the circumstances: it'd take a better linguist than most commandoes to notice a problem with his accent.
"Master, the pirates're east of us," he said in tones of breathy nervousness. "Maybe a little south, too, a little southeast. They're not half a mile away!"
Daniel could hear the deep bass note of an APC at speed now. The commandoes were coming in fast, despite the risk that the sound of their ducted fans would alert their quarry.
The power it took to lift and propel twenty-odd tons by thrust alone came at the price of a sonic signature, no matter how much you tried to minimize it. Quick and dirty was probably the better choice, as well as the option that would appeal to members of a strike force.
"On my signal," the radio voice said, "fire a flare straight up. I repeat, straight up. And stay off the radio! Out."
Woetjans smiled lazily and stood, holding the flare gun from the Ahura's emergency kit. She was obviously glad to have a task to occupy her while the others could only wait.
Adele sat on an upturned metal bucket. Her attention was seemingly a million miles away. Daniel grinned at her. She raised an eyebrow in question, realized Daniel was just being sociable, and returned to her reverie. Her hands slowly rotated the head-sized object she held between spread fingertips.
Lamsoe and Sun held submachine guns; the Kostromans had salvaged guns, so the Cinnabars taking their place had guns too. Lamsoe held his as if it were a bomb. Daniel wouldn't let him disconnect the battery because the APC's sensors might be able to tell the difference, but the safeties of both weapons were on.
The APC's thrum was louder now. A few minutes earlier the pulsing note could have been concealed in the night sounds except to ears that were searching for it.
"Zojira civilians," the radio ordered, "fire one flare now! Over!"
Woetjans walked two steps closer to the bank of the inlet, aimed the gun skyward, and sent up a flare as close to vertical as you could tell without a plumb line. Daniel hoped the process hadn't been too expert, but the commandoes would probably figure the wogs had just gotten lucky.
"Good, I'm already stiff from sitting here," said Hogg. He still looked like he'd been exhumed on maybe the third day. Daniel'd planned to leave his servant with the prisoners, but at the last instant he'd lacked the courage to say that.
Hogg would've ignored the order anyway. The fellow who'd changed your diapers wasn't going to kiss your boots just because you had "Lieutenant" before your name now.
The flare's tracer burst a hundred feet up in a brilliant blue dazzle. There was enough wind from the sea to push the sparks away from the campfire; not that the commandoes would've cared.
The APC came fast over the trees, heading east toward the first island. The downdraft drove the flare's falling particles into the lagoon as a hundred scattered steam vents. The hiss of quenching sparks was lost in the roar of the fans.
The big vehicle banked left. The plasma cannon in its cupola raked the original Cinnabar camp with a hell of stripped ions.
Steam and fire blew from the jungle. The vegetation was wet, but even stone burned when bathed in radiance as hot as a sun's corona.
A mushroom of soot and vapor erupted from the target area. Daniel heard the chatter of submachine guns as well, a sign of ruthlessness and bad fire discipline. Personal weapons had nothing useful to add to the plasma cannon's swath of destruction.
"Those bastards," Hogg said as he stropped his knife on his palm. "Kill us all while we slept, they would."
He spat, and smiled, and looked much more his old self.
The APC went into a reverse bank and swept back. The cannon fired again, its dense saffron beam ripping apart the pillar of smoke from the first pass. A glowing rock flew out of the impact area, dimming as it tumbled. It landed in the lagoon and exploded from thermal shock.
Daniel was white with cold rage. This was war: if it claimed Barnes and Dasi, well, that was a hazard they understood when they took their oaths. This Alliance commander wasn't alone in his willingness to shoot sleeping enemies without giving them a chance to surrender.
And it wouldn't change anything about what happened next; nothing except that Daniel Leary would take more pleasure in viewing the Alliance casualties he very much expected to see.
Apparently satisfied with what it had achieved on the neighboring island, the APC idled toward what it believed was the Kostroman camp. The muzzle of the plasma cannon pointed toward them as a white-hot oval, cooling slowly.
Daniel stood and raised his hands to shoulder height. A part of his mind was already composing the letters he'd write to the families of Barnes and Dasi, if that were required and if God preserved him to carry out that duty.
Adele watched the armored vehicle come toward her at a slow pace, thunderously loud and bigger than she'd expected even though she'd seen APCs before. She supposed it was because of the circumstances in which she was watching this one that it seemed to loom so large.
The APC was closed up; its driver and gunner used electronic imaging to view their surroundings. Daniel said that vehicles of this sort had sensor suites that could tell if a gnat farted.
The saving grace of the situation was that this jungle had many, many gnats. As in Adele's own proper job, the difficulty was to sort vast quantities of data for the single item you needed. No ordinary weapon was going to pass the electronic frisking, though.
The APC hesitated in the air, then dropped to the surface of the lagoon. Spray erupted in a screen that would have been rainbowed if there'd been any lights to refract within it. The vehicle resumed its leisurely progress, waddling up the inlet toward the camp. It didn't even show the minimal running lights Adele had seen on APCs in Kostroma City during the coup.
The sailors were all standing. They looked nervous, the attitude the commandoes would expect as well as the way Adele supposed they really felt. She didn't want to stand, but at last she got up awkwardly from the bucket so as not to look out of place.
Daniel spoke; sailors moved forward slightly. Adele, though not concealed, was now in the background.
She wasn't afraid. She was too detached to be afraid. She understood precisely what was required of her; if circumstances permitted, she would execute her task. There was very little uncertainty except about the outcome.
The APC's bluff bow slid out of the water, bulldozing a wedge of root-bound mud ahead of it. Spray doused the campfire and drove the sailors back, cursing and covering their eyes.
Adele turned away. She could scarcely be wetter than she was already, but the deliberate insult set her face coldly. Scorn a Mundy of Chatsworth, would they?
She turned again, smiling internally at her own reaction. She'd have laughed, but that would have been out of keeping with her pose as a small-time crook and smuggler. Instead she let her face muscles relax into a neutral expression. She'd never cringed, so she was afraid of an unsatisfactory result if she tried to fake it now.
The APC swung broadside to the eleven Cinnabars. Its stern shoved aside undergrowth and nestled there. The cupola rotated so that the plasma cannon stayed trained on the presumed Kostromans. Five submachine guns projected from miniature gunports in the armored side.
Realistically, the weapons weren't much danger because those threatened were close enough to the vehicle to duck under the cannon and flatten themselves against the APC's flank between the gunports. The muzzles would have a psychological effect, though, especially on the stupid thugs the commandoes thought they were facing.
The driver shut his fans down. The roar of air through the eight intake ducts stilled, but a high-pitched whine indicated various parts continued to spin in readiness for any need.
The plasma cannon twitched, aiming at Lamsoe's head. "You two with guns!" the Alliance voice shouted, this time through a conformal speaker somewhere on the vehicle's hull. "Throw them in the water now! And the six of you who have knives, you too! Now! We can see you!"
Daniel stood a half step in front of his sailors, waggling his raised hands and smirking in apparent terror. At the command he clawed into his pocket and came out with the little knife he'd used to peel nuts.
Lamsoe and Sun spun their submachine guns toward the inlet. Sun's splattered mud on the bank, but Lamsoe got rid of his with the enthusiasm owed a live grenade. It took longer for sailors to fumble folding knives out of their pockets, but they flew toward the water too.
Though Hogg threw his knife, Adele heard it thunk into a tree bole in the near distance. If the Alliance officer noticed the slight disobedience, he passed over it for now.
A hatch opened in the vehicle's side, just back of the cupola. The man who got out was barely taller than Adele but strongly built. He held the central grip of a submachine gun, a weapon both more compact and more deadly than the Kostroman equivalents the sailors had just thrown away.
"Now listen up!" the officer said. He spoke in an upper-class Pleasaunce accent.
The officer waved the submachine gun as though it were a conductor's baton. The hatch behind him was a pale rectangle; the vehicle's interior lights were faint, but they were brighter than the jungle now that the fire was dead.
"You wogs will go back under restraint," he continued, "or you'll stay here till you rot. And you can count yourselves lucky that my colonel has a softer heart than I do, or there'd be another burned patch of jungle and we'd be heading home without the trouble of tying you, do you understand?"
"But master—" Daniel whined. He sounded so much like a crying child that Adele felt her jaw clench.
The officer thrust his gun an inch from Daniel's face. "Shut up or I'll do it my way!" he said.
Daniel whimpered and bent away. Adele tossed her ripe soap-bubble fungus through the open hatch. The officer's eyes flicked sideways at the movement and Daniel caught his gun-wrist in his left hand.
Sailors dived for cover as they'd been warned to do. Screaming chaos broke out within the APC. A submachine gun raked the night.
Adele ignored the shots—they weren't aimed at her or, most likely, aimed at anything at all. She bent to tip over the bucket she'd used as a seat. Her pistol was beneath, concealed from sensors by the galvanized iron bucket.
She straightened with the gun in her hand. There wasn't anything she needed to shoot.
The plasma cannon pointed at a crazy angle as the howling gunner tried to free himself from his harness. A commando emptied a submachine gun through a port on the opposite side of the APC; pellets lit the jungle like a stream of fireflies, clipping foliage and sending up puffs of splintered wood. Other troops hammered the sides of their vehicle, but even a crash-bar hatch release required a little more coordination than these retained in their present puling agony.
Daniel held the Alliance officer between him and the APC. He had both his wrists, now. The Alliance officer twisted with a grace suggesting he was expert in unarmed combat, but the Cinnabar lieutenant was stronger and very angry.
"The men you squirted over on the other island, master?" Daniel said in a hard, precise voice.
The Alliance officer tried to bite him; Daniel had the leverage and kept the teeth away from his shoulder as his hand continued to grind together the bones of the officer's gun-wrist. "They were really warm stones wrapped in blankets to give the right heat signatures. I had two of my ratings tending the fire there, though, and I hope—"
The commando's wrist failed with a sound like that of stones rubbing. His eyes rolled up and he fainted in Daniel's arms.
"I really hope they heard you coming in time to cover up in their dugouts," Daniel concluded, his voice softer. He straightened—he'd spread his legs to brace himself during the struggle—and surveyed the situation, still using the Alliance officer's body as a shield.
"It seems to have worked," Adele said. She stood with her pistol at her left side. Two submachine guns still protruded from gunports, but their muzzles were tilted up. Their owners had dropped the weapons as they tried to fight off an enemy more insidious than poison gas.
A gun fired inside the vehicle. Sparks, pellets or metal spalled from the inner face of the armor, spun through the hatch.
A commando finally managed to release the latch that dropped the whole side of the troop compartment. Soldiers tumbled out, twisting and moaning. One commando shambled blindly into the undergrowth, clawing the air with her hands. The sailors let her go.
The soap bubble fungus had ruptured into fluffy tendrils on the compartment's deck. A single insect the size of Adele's thumb glittered in the lights, then settled on the neck of a commando.
Daniel took the submachine gun from the officer he held, then laid him on the ground and stepped back. There'd been sixteen troops aboard the APC. None of them were upright now. Some thrashed, but Adele could see at least half a dozen others were as still as death.
"I think we'd better get back a little farther," Daniel said in a voice wheezy with recent exertion. "They're not supposed to fly farther than a couple meters from the nest, but I don't want to be the one to prove that was as wrong as the data on how big sweeps get."
Adele put her pistol in her pocket. Together they walked slowly toward the sailors now appearing from the jungle. Hogg joined them.
"The beetles aren't supposed to live longer than ten minutes from when they leave the fungus, either," Daniel added. "But we're going to stay on the safe side there, too."
Behind them, tough Alliance soldiers moaned in mindless pain.
"Couldn't we come by boat?" Adele complained. She was acting for the benefit of the prisoner the two sailors were dragging through the jungle behind her and Daniel, but the peevish tone wasn't entirely put on. Feet had worn the trail to a narrow creek with muddy banks.
"Our Alliance friend might try to escape," Daniel explained. His voice was breathy with exertion. "Or drown himself, anyway, especially if he figures out what's waiting for him. Besides, it was your idea to get the information this way."
It actually had been Adele's idea, offered diffidently when Daniel wondered aloud how best to interrogate the prisoners about the Aglaia and her crew. Daniel and Hogg were enthusiastically sure that the plan would work, at least after they'd refined it. Adele found that hard to imagine; but her knowledge of what went on in other people's minds was not, she knew, to be trusted.
"I don't know anything," the commando said muzzily. "And if I did, I wouldn't tell you fuckers."
The Alliance prisoners had been stripped—Daniel wanted their uniforms, but Adele knew the psychological effect would be useful as well—tied, and held separately in nooks in the jungle. Any of them who tried to speak had been gagged as well. The interrogation had to wait till daybreak.
Their prisoner was a sergeant whose skin was startlingly white beneath a mat of black chest hair. His wrists were tied in front of him and a pole was thrust between his elbows and his back. Barnes and Dasi held opposite ends of the pole, forcing the sergeant to walk sideways, crab fashion, along the trail.
"Well, I hope you're wrong," Adele said in her usual coolly astringent tone. "The two soldiers we tried this on first didn't talk, and I'm getting tired of tramping through the mud."
"I got nothing to say," the prisoner repeated. His foot caught in a trailing vine, tripping him so that his weight fell on the pole. He gasped at a pain so severe that he staggered again.
Barnes and Dasi paused; they'd have to carry him if he blacked out completely. "Daniel," Adele murmured, halting the lieutenant. Sailors had improved the trail from the first time she and Daniel scouted it, but whoever was in the lead still had to force fresh growth aside.
A fungus beetle had bitten the prisoner on the right shoulder. His arm and the whole side of his chest were still lividly swollen. Pus oozing from the wound trailed a yellow crust as far as his elbow.
"Well, I tell you, Sarge," Dasi said with bantering menace, "I'd just as soon you didn't talk. I'd just as soon none of you talked. I was back at the other camp, you see, when you bastards had your fun shooting it up. I got blisters on my butt from that, and I guess I was still luckier than you planned me to be."
Barnes leaned over and pinched the sergeant's cheek. "You be just as tough as you want, boy," he said. "I really like to hear you fellows scream."
The prisoner didn't speak. He had his feet under him again. Dasi twitched the pole.
The party plodded the short remaining distance to the inlet where soap bubble fungus grew. Daniel and Adele stood to the side so that the sailors could bring the prisoner up to where he had a good view.
"Now, Sergeant," Daniel said with slightly patronizing formality, "this is the situation. We're going to tie you to one of those trees there—"
He gestured to the grove twenty feet away. Two naked commandoes were there already, seated on the ground with their hands tied around the trunks of the trees behind them.
They were dead and their bodies were swollen horribly. A red, two-inch beetle sat motionless on the protruding tongue of one of the corpses. Above each body were the tattered remains of a soap bubble fungus, its core everted from the yellow rind like trails of cotton batting.
"The fungus is quite tasty," Daniel said. He smiled. "Not that you'll have time to appreciate it, I'm afraid. As I said, we're going to tie you near your friends and walk a good distance away before we start asking you questions. If you answer all the questions completely, then we'll untie you and take you back to camp. But it has to be a `full and frank disclosure,' as they say."
"You can't do this," the sergeant whispered hoarsely.
"That's a remarkably silly thing to say," Adele commented. "Given that you can see we already have done it."
"He's woozy from the sting he got last night," Daniel said soothingly. "Poor man, I've heard that a bite from a fungus beetle hurts worse than being stuffed into a hot furnace."
He smiled at the prisoner. "But you see," he went on, "that's just one bite. If you're sitting under a nest when my friend here blows it open—"
Adele raised the pistol high enough from her pocket for the prisoner to see it, then let the weapon slide back.
"—you'll be bitten many times. And I'm afraid that's invariably fatal."
Daniel walked toward the grove. He moved as though he were stepping on eggs.
"Be careful, for God's sake," Adele snapped. The concern in her voice was real enough. She knew that Daniel didn't take risks he thought were excessive, but she wasn't willing to trust his judgment of "excessive."
With thumb and forefinger, Daniel picked the beetle off the corpse's tongue. He strode back to the others, moving much more quickly.
He offered the insect to the prisoner. Adele looked closely as well; she hadn't seen the creatures by good light before. The bright red wing cases were edged with cream. It was quite attractive in its way.
"They only live a few minutes after they come out of the nest," Daniel said in a friendly, informational tone. "Striking colors, don't you think? These aren't fangs, exactly, they're really modified antennae, but they certainly carry poison the way fangs do. I guess you know that better than me."
Daniel grinned. He wiggled the insect in the direction of the prisoner's swollen shoulder. The prisoner screamed and tried to twist away. Barnes cuffed him back; he screamed again and slumped.
Daniel tossed the insect into the lagoon. "Tie him to the tree between those other two," he ordered. He spit at the floating bug and spun it over in a swirl of bubbles. "And don't bump the fungus yourself, all right?"
"What do you want to know?" mumbled the sergeant. "I swear to God, I'm just a soldier, but I'll tell you what I know."
"Let him sit," Daniel said to Barnes, "but keep hold of the pole."
He looked at the prisoner and said, "Where's the crew of the Aglaia being held? The Cinnabar naval vessel that was in harbor when you landed, the Aglaia."
The prisoner's eyes were closed. "All those guys are locked up in the ship," he said through thick lips. "Not the officers, though. I think they're in the palace but I don't know, I never had that duty myself. They'll be taken off-planet as soon as the rest of the squadron lands, I heard."
Adele withdrew her data unit and seated herself cross-legged in the mud. She got out the wands and began to enter the sergeant's information.
"When do you expect the rest of the squadron?" Daniel was asking.
Kostroman birds and insects buzzed warmly in the grove, devouring the luscious fungus which Adele had shot open earlier in the morning. For the most part, the local creatures ignored the human corpses.
The Alliance soldiers were among the six who had been killed by multiple bites inside the APC, unable to escape when Adele flung the nest through the hatchway the night before.
Gambier and Barnes had endorsements on their paybooks indicating the RCN thought they could fly ducted-fan vehicles. Half a dozen other ratings had experience as well, either in civilian life or less officially in the service. Daniel didn't have to worry about who could fly the armored personnel carrier.
There was plenty else to worry about, of course, but right at the moment Daniel Leary was feeling pretty good. Pretty damned good.
The APC revved, then lifted. Gambier was at the controls. The sides were folded down as if for a quick insertion, so the ratings in the troop compartment were clearly visible. They and their fellows on the ground cheered as the big vehicle slid along the inlet. It rose slowly until the downdraft no longer exploded the water away to either side.
"Isn't it dangerous to have passengers aboard when you're testing the equipment?" Adele asked as she watched the APC at his side.
Daniel shrugged. "There might have been a problem getting off the ground," he said, "though it's all pretty automated."
Adele turned her head to look at him. "I suppose if you'd thought it was really dangerous," she said, "you'd have been aboard yourself."
Daniel grinned. "I didn't think it was dangerous," he said, avoiding the direct answer that would have made him sound like he was trying to be a hero. The ratings expected an officer to share their dangers; to avoid doing so would be unprofessional.
Likewise, it would be unprofessional for an officer to involve himself in the common dirtiness of naval life, washing dishes or scrubbing grease from hydraulic control systems. That was where the extreme democrats went wrong. Though . . .
He'd now gotten to know the surviving representative of the Mundys of Chatsworth, the family who according to Corder Leary were the life and breath of radical democracy on Cinnabar. Adele wasn't what Daniel would call a radical democrat.
Perhaps there'd been some misrepresentation on both sides of the question. That was pretty generally true in politics, he supposed.
Daniel glanced higher into the wedge of sky visible past the overhanging trees. "Someday I'd like you to help me with the constellations from here," he said. "The Kostromans do name their constellations, don't they? I guess I was just assuming they do."
"What?" said Adele. "I have no idea, but I'll find out."
She sat on the ground and brought up her little computer. Daniel hadn't meant Adele to dig into the problem immediately. "Someday" meant to him "when things have settled down."
Realistically, things weren't going to settle down while he was on Kostroma. Though for his own sense of well-being he had to pretend this was an aberration in the life of a naval officer, that the normal routine would soon return.
Daniel squatted beside Adele, his arms wrapped around his knees and his buttocks slightly above the ground. Not that he could get much muddier . . .
"The trick would have worked just as well if we'd done it in all truth," he said. "Tying live prisoners under a fungus bubble and letting the beetles kill the first one or two if they didn't talk."
The note of the APC's fans changed from a pulse to a whisper; the ratings had landed on the other island to retrieve items salvaged from the wreck. The APC had more carrying capacity than the little liferaft, and using it provided hands-on experience in a leisured environment.
"Perhaps," said Adele, "but we'll never know."
She put her wands down and looked over at Daniel. "People like us will never know. But our way worked."
A hand-sized crustacean scuttled from the muddy bank, extended a pair of tentacles to seize a ration can the Kostromans had flung down, and ran back the way it had come. Each segment of the creature's jointed back had a stalked eye at the midline. They twisted like flowers in a rainstorm to watch the humans.
The crustacean vanished into the water with its prize; the can gave a plop! as water filled it. The little creature was probably after a home rather than food, but Daniel didn't know enough about the local biota to be sure.
"There are constellations, yes," Adele said. "They seem to be named for geographical features of Topaz, where the colony originated. Would you like to see the display?"
She offered the data unit. Daniel shook his head, smiling his thanks. "Not right now," he said.
He pointed to the trail the crustacean's many feet had wriggled into the mud. "I was going to put the prisoners on a detail policing up the mess they'd made," he went on. "The local animals seem to be pleased with the chance to take care of it themselves. Besides, it's probably best to keep both lots hogtied until we're ready to leave. I don't want another slip-up."
The prisoners, Ganser's thugs and the surviving Alliance commandoes, lay like so many duffelbags at intervals along the opposite bank of the inlet. They were bound and anchored by the neck to rooted saplings. Two guards were with them, but the prisoners were visible to the Cinnabars on this side of the water also for additional safety.
They were gagged. A prisoner who moved more than a guard thought necessary was kicked, but that was a matter of casually brutal control rather than torture.
"You know," said Daniel, "if we'd dumped the gang off the end of the dock on Kostroma, we wouldn't have the APC and Alliance uniforms now. Funny how things work out, isn't it?"
Adele sniffed. "That had nothing to do with the decision," she said. "It shouldn't have anything to do with any similar decision either. Or are you suggesting that the Lord is with us because our hearts are pure?"
Daniel laughed loudly and got to his feet. "Your heart may be pure," he said, "but for my own part I've just been too busy. One of Ganser's little friends doesn't look half bad in the right light."
Adele rose beside him. He looked at her and, now that he'd defused her suggestion with a joke, said, "Adele, I don't think God will preserve Cinnabar. That's what the Republic has a navy for, after all. But I do think that the people with least on their consciences sleep better than others do. I like my sleep."
He thought about the little blonde with a snake's tail tattooed from her neck to reappear on her bare midriff, heading lower. In a return to his cheery tone, Daniel added, "And if God wants to throw us a bonus, that's all right with me."
Adele sat with her head out of the cupola as Barnes brought the overloaded APC down where the Cinnabar camp had been. Streams of plasma had considerably enlarged the clearing, but all signs of the shelters and goods salvaged from the yacht were gone.
Water sprayed as the vehicle settled. After the ions had burned long tracks of soil away, rain and seepage through the porous rock had filled the ruin.
Adele wondered if Daniel was dropping the Alliance soldiers here rather than on the beach to make a point. Daniel Leary was an extremely straightforward man, but she'd realized early after meeting him that he was quite subtle in his direct fashion—when he chose to be.
It was hard to remember that she'd met Daniel only a week before.
Barnes adjusted the drive fans to a whining idle. Without orders, Hogg and several of the sailors crammed into the troop compartment rolled the prisoners onto the ground. The Alliance troops were bound individually and roped to one another by their wrists as well.
Adele lifted herself up to sit on the folded-back cupola hatch. By leaning forward, she could see the Alliance troops as they writhed and splashed, cursing.
Daniel stood on the vehicle's side panel folded down into a ramp. He lifted a prisoner's face from the trench in which she spluttered and supported her until she squirmed into a position that was survivable if not necessarily comfortable.
"Shut the motors off for a moment, Barnes," Daniel said. "I want them to be able to hear what I have to say."
Sixteen of the Cinnabars, Adele included, wore commando uniforms including the communication helmets. She heard Daniel's voice clearly over the helmet intercom as well as a faint echo through the air.
The helmets were fine for now, but they'd have to switch off the radios well before reaching Kostroma City. Even if the Alliance forces were too busy to institute a comprehensive signals watch, chatter in Cinnabar accents over Alliance equipment would raise a red flag.
The rhythmic hum of the engines sank to a quiver. A squad of sailors dragged the prisoners, still linked, a few yards farther so they couldn't grab a landing skid as the APC lifted.
Daniel stepped to the ground and faced the naked prisoners. "There's enough food and water on this atoll to keep you forever," he said. "Also we're leaving most of the rations we brought from the naval stores, here and on the other island. If you don't like the division of supplies I've made between you and Ganser, you can go across and discuss the matter. Or you can join forces, of course."
He smiled at the Alliance lieutenant without humor. Adele knew Daniel well enough by now to recognize that he was angry; surprisingly angry, she thought, until she remembered what the plasma-ripped campsite meant to him.
"The last time I did something like this," Daniel went on, "I told the people I was marooning that I'd send them help in thirty days if they hadn't managed to get off the atoll themselves. I'm not saying that now. All you're getting from me is your lives . . . which is rather better than you were offering, isn't it?"
He stepped up into the troop compartment. "You can't leave us tied!" a soldier said. The one who spoke was the sergeant who'd first told what he knew about the Aglaia. "We can't survive unless you cut us loose!"
Daniel grimaced. "Hogg, throw him a knife," he said. "Barnes, take us up to a hundred feet and circle the area."
Hogg smashed a brandy bottle on the side of the hatchway. As the motors began to grunt under load, he tossed the jagged neck in the direction of the sergeant.
The sides of the troop compartment were hinged horizontally. They lifted halfway to form railings on either side while the compartment remained open to light and air. Adele slid back into the cupola seat as the vehicle rose.
Daniel touched her shoulder. "I'll trade places, if you don't mind," he said.
Embarrassed to have usurped his position—he was commander, of course; what had she been thinking of?—Adele squirmed out of the cupola and into the rear compartment. Sailors made way for her with quiet deference. She looked over the side.
At the specified altitude, the APC slowly circled the two islands and the reef joining them. An occasional pop in the helmet's integral headphones told Adele that Daniel was talking to one or more of the sailors on a separate channel. She could listen in if she wanted, but there wasn't any reason to do so.
The Ahura's lifeboat floated in the lagoon, turning slowly in the still water. A slick of pollen and bits of foliage drifted behind the boat. The Alliance soldiers were barely visible past the treetops as they squirmed to free themselves, while on the other island some of the Kostromans were already standing upright.
"Starboard watch," Woetjans ordered over the intercom. "Aim at the liferaft."
Sailors jostled one another in cheerful surprise, thrusting submachine guns captured from the commandoes over the railing. Adele remained at the rail but she didn't bother to draw her pistol. Sailors on the other side of the compartment complained good-naturedly.
"Open fire!"
Water exploded in a spray that completely hid the little boat. The air filled with ozone and ionized aluminum even though the troop compartment was half-open. The crackling gun mechanisms echoed like logs splitting.
"Cease fire!"
The raft was a tatter of flexible red plastic in the center of foam which spread a hundred feet in all directions. The sailors weren't marksmen—some must be amazingly bad shots, judging from where their rounds hit—and the light pellets weren't intended for work at this range. Nonetheless the target had been completely destroyed.
The APC pulled through a figure-eight that reversed its direction. "Port watch," Woetjans ordered, "aim at the yacht."
There were loud cheers. Most of the remaining sailors had already bent over their railing, hunched and squinting in a variety of distorted notions about how to shoot accurately. One of them—inevitably—jerked his trigger an instant before Woetjans said, "Fire!"
The upturned stern didn't vanish, but it began to crumble like a sand castle in the rain. Again Adele saw water spout thirty yards from the intended target, but a submachine gun with a 300-round magazine didn't require a crack shot to be effective.
"Cease fire!" Woetjans ordered. "Cease fire, Dasi, or I'll take the fucking thing away and feed it to you!"
There was a moment's silence. The plasma cannon roared. What was left of the Ahura erupted into an iridescent mushroom cloud. The APC rocked with recoil from the one-second jet of ions, each of infinitesimal mass but accelerated to the speed of light.
Adele heard the cupola hum as it rotated. Nevertheless the second spurt of plasma startled her. Steam and shimmering fire enveloped the remains of the lifeboat.
The lagoon danced briefly with fairy light as ions recombined to their normal atomic state. That passed, but vari-hued fish, scalded by the manmade hellfire, floated to the surface.
Daniel stepped out of the cupola. "Barnes," he ordered on a general channel, "follow the programmed course and speed to Kostroma City. Gambier will spell you two hours out."
He grinned at Adele and said—not using the intercom, "Communications Officer Mundy, take over and make sure we're not getting into something we don't expect. What we do expect is bad enough, right?"
Adele shrugged. "So far," she said, "it appears that it's better to be on our side than against us."
She settled herself on the cupola seat. The vehicle's extensive sensor and communications suites were arrayed in a ring attached to the hull below the cannon in the dome. Adele logged onto the Alliance military net, using the codes of a cutter hanging out of service aboard a destroyer in the Floating Harbor. As soon as she had access, she searched for any sign that the Aglaia's officers had been moved from cells in the basement of the Elector's Palace where she'd located them the night before.
She smiled as she worked, her touch certain despite the unfamiliar system. Communications Officer Mundy.
Adele Mundy. One of us.
"Tarnhelm, this is Mike X-ray Five Three Nine," Adele said with the formality of a scholar reading a script. "Over."
She was a scholar reading a script, Daniel knew, but he controlled his desire to wince. Adele might not sound like an officer tired after a long, boring mission, but she could put on a Bryce accent that wouldn't set off alarms the way Daniel might if it were him on the radio.
"Go ahead Mike X-ray Five Three Niner," the Alliance harbor control authority replied. He sounded bored, which was good.
If the military command had gotten concerned about why its commandoes hadn't reported back from dealing with the reported Cinnabar sailors, it might have careted the APC's number and identification transponder with harbor control. Daniel preferred to be one of the day's several hundred indistinguishable movements through the air about Kostroma City.
"Mike X-ray Five Three Nine requests permission to land at Dock Twenty-Five to pick up a passenger," Adele said. "Over."
She didn't sound worried. She probably wasn't worried, which put her one up on Daniel Leary right at this moment. But he suspected Adele couldn't be less than precise if life depended on it.
It did, but they'd make out one way or another. The Alliance military probably had its share of officers who always sounded like they had a broomstick up their ass.
Daniel doubted that sort very often found themselves commanding special operations troops—or survived very long when they did—but the technician in harbor control might not even know what MX539 was. Unless he had some reason to care, the APC was merely a number and a radar track to be routed away from other numbers and radar tracks.
It was dusk. On the horizon lights moved through the air above Kostroma City and across the water at its margins. Both the Floating Harbor and the surface harbor were much brighter than Daniel had seen them in the past. The Alliance forces had brought in additional lighting, as well as much else.
"Roger, Mike X-ray," the radio voice said. "You're cleared at altitude twenty meters, vector two-three-one, I repeat two-three-one, degrees. Tarnhelm Control out."
Daniel had made sure the commo helmets were shut off so they wouldn't accidentally be used. "Keep the speed down to thirty, Gambier," he shouted toward the driver's compartment.
Gambier flew with his seat high to raise his head through the open hatch, but Barnes was beside him watching the instrument panel. Barnes tugged the driver's leg and repeated the command.
Adele looked down at Daniel. There wasn't room for two people in the cupola ring, so he squatted beside her in the narrow passageway from the troop compartment to the driver's compartment. "Was I all right?" she asked.
She had been worried, she just didn't show it. "You were fine," Daniel said. That was true: they'd gotten clearance. This wasn't an acting class where performances were graded on a curve. "If everything else goes as well, we'll be back on Cinnabar before my birthday next month."
That was true too. If Daniel'd been asked if he thought that was a probable result, well, that would have been a different question.
"More ships have landed," Adele said. Unlike Gambier she preferred to view her surroundings through electronic imagery. The vehicle commander's position had a panoramic optical display as well as a combiner screen which echoed all the driver's gauges. "And Alliance forces seem to have taken over most of the government departments, not just traffic control."
Daniel nodded grimly. "Three destroyers and I count six big transports; that's a brigade at least, with full equipment. People who ask for help from Guarantor Porra don't realize what they're really going to get. Though by now they ought to."
"Are you thinking of the Three Circles Conspiracy?" Adele asked without emotion.
Daniel felt his stomach tighten. "No," he said. "I wasn't."
If he'd been thinking about what happened fifteen years ago on Cinnabar he'd have had better sense than to say anything out loud. The last thing he wanted to do was to offend the woman on whom the detachment's survival had depended, and still depended.
Adele sniffed. "I was thinking about it," she said. She appeared to be observing the ships in the Floating Harbor on her display.
Daniel cleared his throat. "Cinnabar and Kostroma are very different," he said, because he was afraid he had to say something.
"Yes," said Adele. "And Corder Leary isn't a complete fool like Walter III."
She shook her head and continued, "My parents were very passionate people. I'm sure passion is a useful characteristic or it wouldn't be so general in the human population, but I've always thought it must get in the way of accurate assessments."
She met Daniel's eyes and offered her pale excuse for a smile. "Of course, my parents had friends," she said. "As I do not."
Daniel tapped her shoulder with his clenched fist. "You've got friends," he said.
And Daniel Leary had one friend more than he'd had when he arrived on Kostroma.
The APC's landing skids grated minusculely as it settled to the Aglaia's concrete dock. Adele, wearing the commando lieutenant's uniform, reached for the hatch mechanism.
Behind her Daniel called into the closed-up troop compartment, "Remember, nobody says a word except Ms. Mundy. Not if there's a gun in your face!"
Adele opened the narrow hatch beside the cupola and stepped out, remembering the Alliance officer doing the same thing the day before. She wondered if she ought to display hectoring anger as the commando had done.
Adele smiled slightly. So long as the guards on the Aglaia's landing stage didn't make the correspondence perfect by throwing a grenade through the hatch.
The ports and panels that had been open when the Aglaia was in Cinnabar hands were now clamped shut, except for the main hatch where six soldiers armed with stocked impellers waited. The guards wore tan, not camouflaged, uniforms, so they were sailors rather than soldiers, Adele supposed.
The guards watched with interest just short of concern as Adele and the commando-uniformed Cinnabars exited one by one. Dropping the sides of the troop compartment might have looked provocative, and there was just a chance that a guard would notice that the five Cinnabars still aboard wore Kostroman naval garments.
Adele strode across the unrailed catwalk to the landing stage. Waves lifted the ship and the pontoon in differing rhythms; when the sailors tramped onto the light-metal ramp behind her Adele's balance problem got even worse.
Adele kept her eyes focused on the face of the bearded petty officer commanding the guards. Her own visage was grim, perhaps a more suitable expression than she'd have been able to arrange had she not been afraid of falling into the damned ocean.
"We're the relief for Lieutenant Wozzeck's platoon," Adele said coldly as she reached the landing stage. It too rose and fell, but without the twisting vibration. Did dignitaries never fall in the water?
"Wozzeck?" the Alliance sailor said. He'd been born on rural Leon from his dialect; Adele's statement puzzled him, but not her Bryce accent. "Sir, the navy took over here ten hours ago. This is the prize ship Aglaia."
"Of course it's the Aglaia," Adele snapped. "Vishnu and his Avatars! Where's Lieutenant Wozzeck?"
The guards looked at one another in worried puzzlement. One of them—speaking toward her petty officer, not Adele—said, "Wozzeck was watch commander on the duty sheet before Glanz took over, but that was last watch."
"All right, where's your damned command post?" Adele said with an angry grimace. She slapped her left thigh to add to the effect. "I'll try to raise somebody who can tell me what's going on."
She looked over her shoulder. Daniel had reached the landing stage. The rest of the Cinnabar sailors were strung out along the walkway or still on the pontoon because Adele hadn't left them room to go farther. They were nonchalant; probably more nonchalant than real soldiers would have been.
"Leary," Adele said, "you come with me. The rest of you stand easy until I get back with some information. And keep your mouths shut! This is supposed to be a nondisclosure mission."
"Nondisclosure mission" didn't mean anything that Adele knew of, but she'd been in and around bureaucracies most of her life. Nobody in a large organization knew everything that was going on, and this hint of mystery gave the sailors an excuse not to betray themselves by their accents.
The petty officer reached for the radio in a belt sheath, then quailed before Adele's stony glare. "Nawroos, take them to the bridge," he ordered abruptly.
An Alliance sailor handed his impeller to one of his fellows, then crooked a finger for Adele and Daniel to follow him into the Aglaia. He led them into one of the armored staircases off the entrance lobby.
Adele noticed that Daniel had started for the opposite set of stairs; he caught himself, she thought, before the sailor noticed. Familiarity with the Aglaia's regulations as a Cinnabar ship had almost caused a problem.
"The ship seems pretty big for a sixteen-strong guard detachment," she remarked to the guide ahead of her in the echoing stairwell. "Is that enough for the job?"
They wound past a door open to the next deck. The guide lifted his hands in unconcern. "All the Merks we captured are in Hold Two, sir," he said. He didn't bother to turn around, so dialect and reverberation blurred his words to the edge of understandability. "No light, no running water, and no fucking trouble for us."
Adele's submachine gun hung beneath her right arm on a short-looped sling. Her hand lay on the receiver to keep the gun from swinging, but she didn't really think of it as a weapon.
Her weapon rode, as usual, in the left side pocket of her tunic.
The guide stepped through the next door off the stairwell and turned left. They were in a hallway of some sort, lighted by surface-glow paneling. Daniel was a half step behind Adele, his head swiveling to observe points of distinction in what was to her a featureless landscape.
Offices to either side of the hall had been ransacked messily; drawers had been turned over on the floor. There'd been no attempt to clean up after the search, if it was anything as formal as a search. Looting was, perhaps, more likely.
"Hey, Lieutenant?" the guide called to the open door at the end of the hall. "Here's some soldiers that think they've got the duty here. Blaney sent 'em up to you."
The guide waved Adele and Daniel on and headed for the stairs by which they'd come. Obviously he felt no need to get into a discussion with his commanding officer. Adele strode through the door before any of the occupants decided to come out to meet her.
There were six tan-uniformed people inside a room with a great deal of built-in electronic equipment. None of the Alliance sailors looked particularly interested to have company. Two were playing a board game, not chess; another poured herself a cup of coffee from a carafe on a hotplate, and two watched an erotic recording on a holographic display.
The sixth, an overweight man, put on a cap decorated with gold braid and rose from the swivel chair where he'd been sitting. The console behind him was live. It was of a standard pattern, one that Adele could operate in her sleep.
"Yes?" the Alliance officer said. He wasn't impolite but he wasn't welcoming either. Adele didn't know how their two ranks compared.
"I need to check with my commander," Adele said. She walked past the naval officer as though he were a doorman and sat at the console. The seat was still warm.
"Who the hell do you think you are?" the Alliance officer asked indignantly. "You can't just come barging in here and taking over!"
Adele locked the console and all outgoing communications links, the matter of a few quick commands. There was no certainty of what would happen in the next minute or two, and the guards couldn't be permitted to summon help.
Adele swiveled the chair around. "All right," she said to Daniel.
Daniel looked down the corridor, then closed the door. It was a massive, armored panel and took all his weight to swing it home.
"Hey!" said a sailor.
The door banged against its countersunk jamb. Daniel unslung his submachine gun. "All of you against the port bulkhead," he ordered with a nod.
The nearest sailor flung her coffee and jumped at Daniel. He stiff-armed her away with his free hand. Adele shot the sailor in the shoulder.
The sailor's clavicle shattered as the pellet whacked into it. She screamed and spasmed into the wall. The Alliance officer turned as though to grab Adele, saw the pistol aimed at the bridge of his nose, and backed carefully against the wall.
The sailors followed their officer. Two of them helped their injured fellow. She whimpered with pain, but the wound was survivable unless a bone splinter had nicked a major blood vessel.
Adele unlocked the console while Daniel held his submachine gun on the bridge crew. When she'd finished, she stood up and said, "There. You'd better take over now."
"I will," Daniel said as he traded duties with her, "but don't sell yourself short." He grinned. "The RCN lost a great officer when you buried yourself in a library."
To the ship's public address system he went on, "Mistress Woetjans, complete the transfer of authority at the landing stage and report to the bridge with two ratings to take charge here. I'm coming to take over the remainder of the detachment."
Daniel looked at Adele. "Are you all right with these until Woetjans gets here?" he said, nodding toward the prisoners. "I want to release our people below right away."
"Oh, yes," said Adele. The captured sailors were looking at her. "There's only six of them, after all, and I've got nineteen more rounds in my pistol magazine."
She smiled without humor, wondering which of these faces might be staring at her in dreams for the rest of her life. Probably none of them, because they seemed to be very frightened of her.
That meant they understood.
As Daniel led ten "Alliance commandoes" down the passageway toward Hold 2, he felt the Aglaia quiver in a sequence of constantly changing harmonics. Since her capture, the Aglaia had been shut down except for the minimal systems required by the guard detachment. Woetjans was bringing the ship to life again.
Hold 2 held bulk consumables when the ship was fully loaded. The voyage from Cinnabar had run the stocks down, and the quantities remaining had been off-loaded on landing to be surveyed and replaced if they'd deteriorated. The RCN didn't feed its crews spoiled food, and if corners ever had to be cut it wouldn't be on a communications vessel like the Aglaia.
Four Alliance ratings were on guard at the inner hatch. The hold opened on the hull side also, but at the moment the exterior hatch was under twenty feet of salt water. Hold 2 made an excellent prison, if you didn't care about the conditions of the captives within.
The guards had gotten up from their card table when they heard Daniel's detachment approaching. They were chewing kift, a plant native to Pleasaunce with a mildly narcotic effect on humans. When the stalks were reduced to a tangle of soggy fibers, the guards spat them onto the deck and bulkheads to cling and dry.
"Yeah?" said one of the guards. Impellers leaned against the bulkhead nearby, but the guards didn't even glance toward their weapons.
Lamsoe pointed his submachine gun at the guards. "One move and you're all dead," he snarled. "I wouldn't half mind splashing your guts across the passage after the mess you've been making down here!"
"Too fucking right!" Sun agreed. The whole detachment had leveled their weapons. The Alliance ratings couldn't have been more surprised if an archangel had materialized before them.
"Let's nobody get excited, shall we?" said Hogg. Unlike the naval personnel, his master included, he wasn't horrified by the filthy sty into which the guards had transformed the Aglaia. "If people start shooting, the ricochets gotta go somewhere."
Hogg gestured the Alliance ratings toward the end of the corridor with the coil of cargo tape he'd brought to secure them. "Sit down and hold your hands out, you dumb bastards, and you'll live through the day, all right?"
As the guards obeyed, Daniel examined the hatch mechanism. The hold could be padlocked, but only a simple rod now blocked the system. Daniel tossed that to the deck and activated the power latch, then backed out of the way.
"All right, Cinnabars," he called to the fetid darkness within Hold 2. "You're free now. Come out without noise or jostling. I want the senior officer to report to me immediately."
"It's Mr. Leary!" a rating called in delighted wonder. Daniel permitted himself the shadow of a smile, despite the tension and his anger at the stench in which his shipmates had been confined.
Discipline held. The first person through the open hatch was Domenico, the bosun. He braced to attention and saluted—an admiral's inspection salute, not the forehead tap of a fighting ship on service. "Sir!" he said.
Ratings poured out of the hold. Some hugged friends among Daniel's detachment or even kissed the deck in delight to be freed, but the process was as orderly as a barracks emptying at a call of General Quarters.
"I don't mind saying I'm real glad to see you, Mr. Leary," Domenico added with a smile that involved every millimeter of his craggy face. "The best we were hoping for was passage to Pleasaunce and maybe exchange in a year or two."
"I think we can do better than that, Domenico," Daniel said. "What's our present strength?"
He glanced around to be sure everything was under control, but there was really nothing to control: these were veterans, every one of them. The most junior rating could rig, work ship, or handle the armament without a petty officer's attention.
"A hundred and thirty, including me and Chief Baylor," Domenico said. "The rest is ratings. The commissioned officers they took someplace else, and there's forty of the crew killed or sent to hospital when the bastards took us over. Chief of Ship Nantes, she choked on her tongue."
The bosun scowled like a thundercloud. "Talk about catching us with our pants down, sir, they did that for fair!"
"Yes, well, we'll see if we can't surprise our Alliance friends in turn," Daniel said mildly. "We'll ready the Aglaia for liftoff while a party frees Captain Le Golif and his officers, then reach orbit and head for home before anyone realizes what's going on."
His stomach twisted to think of the casualties to the Aglaia's crew, though he supposed he should have known. The Alliance had used nonlethal gas in their takeover, but even so there were bound to be people who got an overdose or were allergic to the compound.
"Sir, it won't work," Domenico said miserably. "They didn't want us getting ideas about crawling out through a cable trunk or some damned thing, so they dismantled the High Drive. Had a detail of our own people do it so we'd know for sure that even if we got loose there wasn't any place to go."
"And they cleaned out the arms locker," said Chief Missileer Baylor, who'd joined them from the hold. He was a slight, sharp-featured man who looked as though he'd aged a decade since Daniel saw him a week and a half ago. "Primary and secondary armament's still in place, such as it is, because they didn't have time to offload it."
"Very well," said Daniel. "We'll have to do something else, then."
Learning that they couldn't escape in the Aglaia was a shock, but it passed in a few heartbeats. Shocks were always brief for Daniel Leary. His wasn't the sort of personality that thought it could plan for every eventuality. He did think, feel, that he could handle any crisis that arose, though. Thus far he'd been pretty successful at that.
The Aglaia's crew was sorting itself by watches and specialties in the corridor, each portion under the command of a petty officer or the senior rating if no petty officer was present. Daniel's detachment threw the four guards, bound with cargo tape, into the hold in place of the Cinnabars. The process was more violent than would have seemed necessary if the conditions for the former prisoners had been a little better.
"I think we'll take the Princess Cecile," Daniel said as calmly as though the idea had been at the top of his conscious mind for a week. "I don't imagine any of the Alliance vessels will be so poorly guarded as to give us the opportunity we need, but I've found you can generally count on the Kostromans to let things slide."
Daniel looked at what was his command, by God, until the Aglaia's proper officers came aboard. He gave the crew a pleased, professional smile and said, "Right. Warrant officers to the bridge with me, the rest of you to general quarters and await orders."
"Aye aye sir!" over a hundred ratings boomed as they scrambled to obey.
"Em Ex five three niner," said the controller's voice; a different person but as bored as the first one. "You're cleared to leave harbor. Maintain fifty meters altitude until you're three klicks out. Tarnhelm control out."
"Go ahead, Gambier," Daniel called from beside Adele. The APC slid off the pontoon and accelerated across the water's surface for several seconds in a trough of spray before rising to the prescribed altitude.
Daniel nodded approvingly. "Gambier's using surface effect till we build momentum," he said.
Adele started to climb out of the cupola; Daniel waved her back with a grin. "Stay there," he said. "We're more likely to need you on the radio than we are me on the cannon. I hope to God that's true, anyhow."
His grin broadened into his full-dress smile, an expression that made even Adele feel absurdly positive. "Besides," he added, "you could probably use the cannon too."
Adele sniffed. "About as well as you could handle the communications chores," she said. She permitted herself a tiny grin. "Which might be adequate. I've noticed that you have a very good ear."
Kostroma City had shrunk to a smudge on the horizon on Adele's panoramic screen. Gambier was following the programmed course, taking them well out to sea before curving southward toward the Navy Pool. The harbor and warehouse complex had Alliance detachments overseeing the Kostroman naval personnel on duty, but they weren't linked to Tarnhelm control.
Adele had listened to enough of their radio traffic to know that the standards at the Navy Pool were lax. Very nearly as lax as they'd been under Walter III, in fact.
"I'd like to use something less threatening than an APC," Daniel said as he scowled at the receiver of the submachine gun that was effectively part of his uniform. Adele had never seen Daniel fire a shot, now that she thought about it. "Our Alliance friends stripped airboats and anything else movable off the Aglaia as soon as they took over, it seems. The cutters too, though I wouldn't want to use a cutter."
"An Alliance APC will be an advantage," Adele said. "The Kostromans won't dare question us."
She didn't know whether she was being logical or merely soothing. She rather thought she was trying to be soothing, but that wasn't a familiar experience for her.
A dam crossed the jaws of a bayou to form the Navy Pool. It swelled in Adele's display, looking like a causeway supported by buttresses. The flap valves on the inner side formed a solid wall when the incoming tide no longer held them open.
The APC slowed mushily. Barnes stuck his head back between the drivers' seats to call, "Sir, there's a big aircar right slap in the center of the tender moored to the Princess Cecile. What do you want us to do?"
Adele glanced at the display before she remembered Daniel was the person who had to be able to see what was going on. She started to squeeze out of the way, then realized Daniel didn't need the display. He'd already echoed the image through his helmet's hologram projector.
She kept forgetting that though Daniel wasn't an information specialist, he was a professional trained to use state-of-the-art military hardware. Given a little time and experimentation she might be able to get more out of the equipment than Daniel could, but he handled it smoothly for its intended purposes.
The Princess Cecile was the cigar-shaped corvette Adele had seen in flight only a few days earlier during the Founder's Day celebrations. It was moored in the center of the bayou, at a distance from the rows of generally larger ships along the shore.
A flat barge was tied to the main hatch. Many of the corvette's other hatches and ports gaped also. The scene reminded Adele of the way the Aglaia had looked before she was captured.
The aircar parked in the middle of the barge's deck could carry at least a dozen passengers. The car's gray-enameled sides were marked with Alliance crests and stenciled government motorpool legends.
"Set us down on the tender's stern and pray we don't swamp her," Daniel ordered. "Keep the fan speed up in case it does."
He looked at Adele and shook his head. "If they'd landed on one end or the other, we could center our weight and there'd be no problem."
"If wishes hooked fish," Hogg put in tartly, "then you and I wouldn't have ate so much dried food when we'd go off camping."
Daniel's servant wore a commando uniform that couldn't be said to fit him even after he'd done some rough-and-ready tailoring to the sleeves, trouser legs, and waistband. Nobody'd suggested that the uniform should go to somebody who was more nearly the right size and age, however.
Adele was just as glad of that. At least some of the sailors were good shots, and their courage was beyond question. In the present business, however, she trusted Hogg's reflexes as she did those of no other member of the party.
Hogg carried a stocked impeller for choice. At Daniel's orders, so did Lamsoe, Sun, and Dasi. Adele hadn't understood why until Hogg explained to the sailors.
Submachine guns were lighter, handier and fine at short range. The light pellets were next to useless against vehicles or targets a hundred yards away, however. The group didn't know what they'd be facing in the next few minutes, and Daniel's desire for a range of alternatives was worth the extra weight.
Gambier dropped the APC to the surface of the water, then bounced up onto the tender. The inevitable gush of spray soaked the car already there. The driver jumped into her cab, shaking her fist at the APC.
Daniel smiled faintly. "Whoever's here ahead of us complicates things," he said, "but we'll handle it."
Adele nodded crisply. "I didn't do a cull and sort for messages referring to the Princess Cecile," she said. "It's my fault."
The APC settled. The tender rocked uncomfortably but finally stabilized with a slight list. When Gambier was sure it wouldn't turn turtle, he shut down the engines.
"It was your fault that time is finite and that I was in a hurry?" Daniel said. "No, I really don't think it was."
He turned to face the enclosed troop compartment. "Same drill as before: Ms. Mundy does all the talking until I give orders to the contrary."
Adele saw Daniel's jaw muscles twitch in a familiar smile. "Or the shooting starts, all right? But we don't start it."
Adele stepped onto the tender's quivering deck. The car's driver had gotten out again; she wore an Alliance naval uniform. "You there!" Adele snapped in upper-class scorn. "Who told you to land in the middle of this site? What are you doing here, anyway?"
She heard Hogg murmur in pleased appreciation.
The driver swallowed a lungful of protests in sudden fear. Greenish kift juice dribbled down her cheek.
"Look, I'm just driving Commander Strachan and the inspectors," she said as she backed toward the cab again. "Look, I'll move it, all right?"
She closed the hatch behind her before Adele could have replied if she wanted to. "They'll be examining the ship to take her into Alliance service," Daniel murmured into Adele's right ear. "Probably three officers and aides, but nobody looking for trouble."
The aircar's fans howled; it slid sideways clumsily. Adele strode toward the corvette's hatch, trying to ignore the way the deck hopped beneath her soles. She hoped the idiot driver wouldn't manage to fall off the tender and bring a rush of people out into the open.
The Princess Cecile was much more cramped than the Aglaia. Two Kostroman sailors were in the entrance lobby, standing beside mops and buckets of soapy water. They stopped talking when they saw the "commandoes."
"Where are the inspectors?" Adele demanded. She heard footsteps and a mixture of voices approaching.
The sailors looked at one another. A group of people wearing Kostroman and Alliance officers' uniforms walked into the entranceway from the hall to the left.
"What's this?" said an Alliance officer.
"Leary!" a Kostroman officer cried. Adele recognized him as one of the plump young peacocks she'd met at the Admiral's Ball. His name was Candace. "What are you—"
Adele had her pistol out butt-down at her side. It wasn't a magic wand; you didn't point it for threat the way sailors behind her were doing with their weapons. "Don't move or I'll kill you!" she said, her eyes holding those of the officer from Pleasaunce.
Paunchy, in his thirties . . . his light ginger hair would fluff out like a halo when the pellet penetrated his cranial vault through the light bones at the back of his eye socket. She could see it—
Hogg stepped forward and made a quarter turn of his upper body. He planted the butt of his impeller in the pit of Candace's stomach. Candace fell to his knees, then spewed his dinner on the unscrubbed metal decking.
All around Adele Cinnabar sailors seized Kostroman and Alliance personnel alike, forcing them to their knees at gunpoint with shouted threats. Teams scrambled down the halls in both directions from the entrance alcove. A submachine gun fired, a needlessly long burst that sent bits of pellet and chips from the walls sparkling all the way back into the entrance. Someone screamed curses in a Cinnabar accent.
"Sir, they've locked the power room!" a voice cried.
"The bridge is secured!" another voice called.
The Alliance officer's nametag read STRACHAN in black letters on a gold field. He hadn't moved except to close his mouth since Adele spoke. Two sailors caught Strachan by the elbows, kicked his knees forward, and began strapping his wrists behind his back with cargo tape. He didn't resist, but his eyes never left Adele's.
The vessel shuddered as a heavy door slid to a stop. Daniel returned to the entrance alcove from the left; from the bridge, Adele supposed. "That was the power room containment bulkhead," he said with a scowl. "There's no override from the bridge."
He glanced around. A dozen captives lay on the deck, trussed like hens for market.
Hogg returned from the tender and gave Daniel a thumbs up. "We've got an aircar now too, sir," the servant announced. "We're coming up in the world."
Daniel's usual grin replaced the scowl. "Well," he said, "we can't burn through the containment bulkhead even with the plasma cannon, so I guess we'll have to talk some Kostroman sailors out of the power room."
"I guess we will," said Adele Mundy as she pocketed her pistol.
"Look, Leary . . ." Candace said. The gray sheen of his face made him look like a death mask of his normally handsome self. His seat was swiveled to face out from the Attack Console.
Candace rubbed his forehead and went on, "I'm sorry I ever met you! Are you trying to get me killed? First you come to my house, my house for God's sake! And now you think I'm going to help you and a gang of pirates steal a ship? You must be out of your mind!"
Daniel sighed. He'd thought he could bring Candace around if he took the Kostroman to the bridge. There were no open threats—though Hogg was nearby, trimming his fingernails with a knife as he pretended to watch Adele at one of the bridge consoles. The captured Alliance officers were in the wardroom, nearby but out of sight. All that was happening was that Leary and Candace, friends from different planets, were talking over a mutual problem.
Candace didn't see it that way. Well, Daniel hadn't really expected he would; but neither did Daniel see any other practical way of getting the Kostromans in the power room to surrender. Adele was sure that they couldn't get a message out, but Daniel and his Cinnabar crew couldn't lift the Princess Cecile with an unknown number of hostile sailors in charge of her power room.
At the moment the vessel was running on standby power from the auxiliary power unit in a bow compartment. The APU's output wasn't enough to operate the plasma motors, much less the antimatter conversion system of the High Drive.
"Leary," Candace said, speaking with the desperate earnestness of a man in fear of his life, "I'm neutral in this, just like I told you before. I don't wish you any harm, but the Alliance of Free Stars is in power now, there's no two ways about it."
Daniel sat on a fold-down jumpseat on one edge of the console. Candace tried to rotate his seat to face away from Daniel. Hogg held the chair where it was.
Candace acted like a kid hiding his head under the blanket to keep the bogeyman from finding him, Daniel thought. Cowardice like that in a man, let alone a fellow naval officer, turned Daniel's stomach.
"You've got to leave me out of whatever you're doing," Candace said. "They'll kill me!"
"Sir?" said Hogg as he looked down at the Kostroman in disgust equal to Daniel's own. "It sounds to me like the problem is he's more afraid of what the Alliance is going to do to him than he is of us. Let me have him for a couple minutes and he won't think that anymore."
Adele turned her head toward the three men without expression.
"No need for anybody else to watch," Hogg added in slight embarrassment. "I'll take him down to the forward magazine."
Candace hid his face in his hands. He was shaking. It suddenly struck Daniel that the Kostroman's fear wasn't really for his physical well-being but rather because he was being asked to make a decision. Candace was more afraid to act than he was to die.
Daniel stood. He smiled at Hogg and Adele. "No," he said. "Benno here's a friend of mine and I don't want anybody to hurt him."
He paused to let Candace relax slightly, then continued, "The Alliance officers he was squiring about the ship aren't friends of mine, though. Remember how we killed those first two commandoes to get the others to talk, Lt. Mundy? Go next door and do the same thing to Commander Strachan and his staff, one at a time."
He paused. "Until Benno decides to help us."
Adele rose from the commo officer's console, still without expression. "Take your submachine gun," Daniel said, nodding toward the weapon she'd left hanging from the back of her seat.
"Yes," Adele said. "That's the better choice for this purpose."
Candace stared at the three Cinnabars in horrified amazement. Daniel wasn't sure that the Kostroman was really taking in what was going on.
"Look, sir," said Hogg. He looked at least as concerned as Candace did. Hogg had been unconscious when Daniel and Adele put on their charade with the commandoes, so he thought this was real. "This is, you know, more up my alley. I'll take care of it."
"No," said Adele, "I will. I haven't killed anyone for a few days."
She looked critically at the Alliance submachine gun, then threw the lever on the back of the receiver to charge it. The mechanical clack within the weapon sounded like a dry chuckle.
She looked at Candace and said, "You'd best hope you don't fall into the hands of the Alliance after I've killed the six officers in your charge. The head of the operation is a man named Markos, from the Fifth Bureau. He's not a gentleman. The very best you can hope for is that you'll be quickly executed."
She smiled. Even Daniel felt his stomach clench to see the expression. Adele walked out of the bridge, holding the submachine gun in her right hand with the muzzle safely raised.
"Candace, I'm sorry as I can be," said Daniel, shaking his head, "but I need you to talk your people out of the power room. I've got nothing against you or them—I'll let you all go free before we lift ship. But if any of those Alliance officers die, God himself couldn't save you if you get into Markos's hands."
He wondered if Markos was a real person whose name Adele had gotten from signals intelligence or if she'd simply invented the name. When she was doing her sinister act, she was scarier than Hogg with a drawn knife—and Hogg wasn't acting.
"Leary—" Candace pleaded.
"Get out of the way," Adele's voice ordered from the wardroom. Her words clear and utterly calm. The bridge and wardroom hatches were both open. The noise of ratings inspecting and readying the vessel for space wasn't loud enough to dull Adele's perfect enunciation.
There was a mixed gabble of protest in Alliance accents. The examination team was a commander and two lieutenant commanders, with three midshipmen as aides. Daniel wondered if any of them had been present when Admiral Lasowski was murdered.
The submachine gun fired a short burst. Pellets disintegrated and spalled bits off the decking. A spark danced into the corridor to hiss on the lip of the bridge hatch. Alliance voices rose in screams.
There was a second burst.
The prisoners lay on the deck of the wardroom with their wrists and ankles taped. Daniel hadn't decided what to do with them; they were simply out of the way for the moment.
He'd expected Adele to shoot into the couch or one of the wardroom chairs, but from the terrified cries she must be putting each burst into the deck within an inch or two of a prisoner's ear. The carpet was glass fiber and nonflammable, but the stench of smoldering human hair indicated where some of the sparks were landing.
"Oh God oh God oh God!" Candace said. He'd squeezed his palms over his ears, but he still couldn't shut out the screams from the wardroom. "Stop it! Stop it!"
"Cease fire!" Daniel cried. He returned his attention to Candace. Quietly he resumed, "Now, I hope that means you're ready to help us, Benno. Because if you're not . . ."
Adele walked back onto the bridge. Behind her a rating clanged shut the wardroom hatch, smothering the prisoners' voices. The muzzle of her submachine gun glowed; heat waves shimmered in the air above the barrel shroud.
"I'll talk to them," Candace said. He wiped tears from his eyes, then lowered his hands and faced Daniel with an unexpected degree of dignity. "I'll say anything you please. And I don't care what you do then. You're all animals!"
Adele draped the sling of her submachine gun over the seatback again. She looked at her right wrist. The skin was smudged with a black residue: metal from the pellets' driving skirts, vaporized by the flux and redeposited on the shooter's skin.
Candace turned his seat. He stabbed a button on the left wing of his console and said, "Bridge to power room. This is Lieutenant Candace. Whoever's in charge of the power room, report now."
Daniel shifted position slightly so that he could look over the Kostroman's shoulder at the communicator's holographic display. That wasn't much help because though the display came alive, somebody had flung a shirt over the power room's imaging pickup.
"Sir, what's going on?" a male voice said. The words were a plea, not a demand.
Daniel nodded toward the console's pickup and gave it a pleasant smile. The ratings in the power room could see him even if he couldn't see them, so it was important to project an aura of friendly calm.
"Gershon?" Candace said. "It's all right. We've been captured by the Cinnabar navy but I know the officer in charge. Everything will be all right so long as you open the power room with no trouble. They, they're . . . It's really very important that you surrender right away, Gershon."
He swallowed. "Really very important."
A last tear dropped from Candace's chin to the sill of the console. His hands were folded in his lap, but they were still shaking.
"Sir, what'll happen to us if we raise the containment bulkhead?" Gershon's voice asked. "Are they, you know . . . ?"
"You'll be confined aboard the Princess Cecile until just before we're ready to leave Kostroma, Gershon," Daniel said mildly. He rested his right forearm on top of the console in order to look even more relaxed than his voice projected. "Then we'll let you and all those with you go."
As a smiling afterthought he added, "Or you can join us, if you like. The Republic of Cinnabar Navy can always use brisk fellows who know how to act in a crisis."
"Christ help us," Gershon muttered miserably. The shirt slipped away from the pickup. The bald, gray-bearded Kostroman at the power room communicator looked as though he'd just volunteered to jump into vacuum.
"Open the bulkhead, Carney," he ordered. He pulled his shirt on to cover his scarred torso. A worm gear began to whine, hauling back the massive barrier intended to prevent a fusion bottle ruptured during combat from venting its contents through the entire vessel.
"We may as well give up," said Gershon. He was speaking toward Daniel, not Candace in the foreground. "We haven't got any rations or even water in here."
"You won't be sorry, I assure you," Daniel said. Commando-garbed Cinnabar ratings poured into the power room behind Gershon. They were securing the Kostromans without any serious roughness so far as Daniel could tell.
"Damn right," said Hogg, moving into the pickup's field for the first time. "And if you're smart, you'll sign up with Mr. Leary. You'll like serving under a real officer for a change."
Adele stood in the hatchway of the APC, waiting for Daniel to take his restraining hand off the coaming. She was so irritated that she'd have driven away while he was still talking, but Barnes was more respectful of his lieutenant.
The Alliance aircar approached the tender in a trough of spray, returning from the Aglaia with another load of sailors. Gambier was driving, but a Kostroman—Warrant Officer Gershon, the man who'd closed down the power room during the assault—sat beside him to provide an authentically non-Cinnabar voice for Tarnhelm Control.
"Look, Adele," Daniel said, raising his voice to be heard over the car's fans. "I think I'd better come along after all. It isn't proper for a civilian to be in charge of this. Freeing RCN officers is RCN business, and—"
"Mr. Leary," Adele said in a tone of very genuine cold anger, "in your company I have taken part in looting naval warehouses and in capturing not one but two naval vessels. There is no one in our mutual enterprise who knows the Elector's Palace as well as I do, nor whose accent can pass for that of an Alliance citizen. Your presence is necessary to ready the Princess Cecile for our escape. The twelve of us—"
She nodded toward Hogg and the ten sailors under Woetjans already within the vehicle. They and Adele wore commando uniforms.
"—can deal with the matter of the Aglaia's officers just as readily as we could if your presence made our number thirteen."
She wrinkled her nose dismissively. "I don't object to you coming on grounds of superstition," she said, "merely because it would be stupid."
The aircar landed, rocking the tender despite the APC's centered mass. Gambier idled the fans and the noise level dropped.
"Sir?" said Hogg. "Have this bitch of a wog ship ready to lift when we get back, all right? Because sure as shit, we're going to be ready."
"Too fucking true," agreed Woetjans.
"Yes," said Daniel. "All right."
The car was disgorging its load of sailors. "Hold for me, Gambier," Daniel called. "I need to prepare the Aglaia for when we lift."
He looked at Adele and smiled wistfully. "Odd that it's so much easier to do something dangerous than to ask friends to do so, isn't it? Good luck. And Hogg?"
"Yessir?" the servant called. Adele had already started to pull the hatch to.
"Ms. Mundy has all the skills desirable in an affair of this nature," Daniel said. "She does not have experience, however. Don't let anything happen to her."
"On my honor, sir!" Hogg shouted as Adele angrily clanged the hatch closed.
Barnes skidded the armored personnel carrier away from the tender. Adele's stomach churned as they dropped to the water, then rose.
She wondered how many officers really thought it was easier to take risks than to order others to do so. If Daniel was an example, perhaps all the good ones did.
The Aglaia's tactical operations center was an armored citadel at the opposite end of Deck E from the bridge. All the sensor inputs were routed here as well as to the bridge, through separate trunks.
Normally during battle the first lieutenant would be in charge of the TOC, while the captain commanded from the bridge and the Chief Missileer, a warrant officer, oversaw the missile launchers themselves. The weapons stations were entirely automated, but things go wrong with machinery even when nobody's shooting at you.
Daniel, in the TOC with the missileer, said, "To create a diversion when we lift to orbit, Chief Baylor, we're going to launch the Aglaia's missiles on radio command while she's here in harbor. I'll deal with the software prohibitions, but I want you and your crew to remove the mechanical interlocks. There can't be any slip-ups."
"Bloody hell!" said Chief Baylor. His small, foxy face tightened with wrinkles. "Launch in an atmosphere? It'll . . ."
Daniel hadn't had much to do with the missileer on the Aglaia's voyage out; Baylor kept to himself and his weapons, polishing the missiles' hulls and performing daily diagnostics on the launch and in-flight control systems. The other officers thought Baylor was strange, but he didn't cause trouble and he pulled his nonspecialist duties like anchor watch commander without objection.
A communications vessel was probably the perfect berth for a man like Chief Baylor. There was only a vanishingly low chance that the Aglaia would have to fire any of his beloved missiles—
But if she did, her crew could be certain the missiles would function perfectly.
"Yes," said Daniel harshly. "Launching in an atmosphere will certainly destroy the Aglaia. Depriving the Alliance of this valuable prize is a secondary reason for what we're about to do."
Missiles were miniature spaceships which had only High Drive for propulsion. High velocities were a requirement of interstellar travel, even when those velocities were multiplied by judicious use of bubble universes whose physical constants differed from those of the sidereal universe.
The High Drive was the most efficient way to boost a vessel to such velocities, but a certain amount of antimatter inevitably escaped the conversion process and was voided in the exhaust. When this happened in an atmosphere, antimatter and matter destroyed each other in a burst of pure energy just beyond the nozzle and wrecked everything in the vicinity.
Antiship missiles depended on kinetic energy and had no explosive warhead. Even a thermonuclear weapon would have been pointless in an object travelling at .6 c. Lack of atmospheric capability wasn't a handicap to the missiles because at those speeds, air was a solid barrier anyway.
Which didn't mean being hit by a just-launched thirty-ton missile was a love tap, however.
Baylor shook his head disconsolately. "Yessir," he said. "I've got my crew on alert, like you said, but I sure didn't figure you'd be asking us to do this."
The missileer's expression was similar to that Abraham must have worn when God ordered him to sacrifice his son. "I hate it, sir," he said simply. "I've served on a lot of ships in thirty-seven years, and this is the best of 'em. But we'll carry out orders."
Daniel nodded cold approval. "Make it so," he said. As Baylor turned to leave him alone in the TOC, Daniel said, "Chief?"
Baylor looked over his shoulder, expressionless.
"A ship is a tool," Daniel said. "It's all right to love a ship, but sometimes a tool has to be used, even if that means using it up."
He thought about the APC that was probably landing at the rear of the Elector's Palace about now. "Humans aren't tools," Daniel added. "But sometimes you have to use them up too. That's true for everybody who's taken the oath."
And for at least one librarian who hadn't.
The sides of the APC's troop compartment were lowered to give the big vehicle a less threatening appearance. Adele had examined the access restrictions for the palace. As she directed, Barnes idled them at surface level to the rear gate of the gardens instead of trying to overfly the wall and land close to the building.
The Alliance command had placed six posts of hypervelocity missiles on the palace roof and grounds to deal with vehicles which tried to evade the mandated entry checks. Properly designed layered armor could resist plasma weapons, perhaps for long enough to land a load of troops, but for defenders who didn't care about backblast, 500 grams of tungsten monocrystal moving at five kilometers per second was a good way to drill through anything short of a granite mountain.
The antivehicle batteries functioned automatically, irrespective of the target's Identification Friend or Foe signal. Adele had edited the control software to exempt their captured APC from the automatic defenses, but this wasn't the time to inform the Alliance forces of the fact.
Lamsoe was in the cupola. He and Barnes would stay with the vehicle while Adele led Hogg and nine sailors to the subbasement where the Aglaia's officers were held along with other important prisoners.
Woetjans eyed the guard post. A heavily laden surface truck was ahead of the APC. The guards had lifted the bed's canvas cover and were checking individual crates of bottled liquor.
"These guys are regular army, not commandoes," the petty officer whispered in Adele's ear. "We commandoes think we're hot shit compared to them, you see?"
She growled a chuckle. "None of 'em are worth a fuck compared to the RCN, of course," she added. "But it's going to be a lot trickier than it would be if the wogs was still in charge."
The truck moved on. Barnes pulled forward. The sailors tried to look relaxed, with more success than Adele would have expected.
Adele had no particular feeling. She'd found if she viewed her present activities as information searches—which in a manner of speaking they were, data in the form of five Cinnabar naval officers—she could maintain the detached skill which was the best hope for success. If she thought of herself as responsible for the lives of these sailors and the officers they came to rescue, she wouldn't know how to behave.
The gardens were brightly illuminated from ten-meter pylons among the trampled plantings. The prisoner pen had been dismantled, but the wire lay in untidy bales along the north wall.
"What're you guys doing here?" asked the head of the guard detail to Barnes in the cab.
Adele leaned forward from the troop compartment and said, "The password is Nike. Countersign?"
The Alliance guards carried stocked impellers. An air cushion vehicle squatted behind a stone planter, covering the entrance with an automatic impeller in a small turret. The soldier watching from the turret hatch looked bored, but his weapon tracked the APC as it slid forward.
The detail commander walked back to face Adele directly. The compartment's deck gave her a height advantage.
"I said what're you guys doing here?" the guard said in a rising voice. "This is our operation now."
Woetjans spit onto the ground. She missed the guard's foot by several inches.
"All you have to say to me, soldier . . ." Adele said. She looked at the guard as though she wanted to wipe him off the sole of her boot. "Is the countersign. And if you don't give it, you'll see just who's in charge."
The guard scowled. The other troops in the detail stood by the gatekeeper's kiosk. Two of them hitched up their equipment belts and walked closer to the APC. So far as Adele could see, there were no Kostromans present.
"Vinceremos!" the detail commander snapped. He stepped away from the vehicle. "Have you noticed," he called loudly in the direction of his personnel, "how commando pukes wear helmets smarter'n they are?"
"Drive on," Adele ordered.
Woetjans pumped her middle finger in the direction of the Alliance soldiers as the APC waddled forward. The vehicle was sluggish because Barnes was keeping the speed down. The gardens were full of parked vehicles, and the detachment couldn't afford a collision.
Though Barnes crawled up the drive, Adele had the uneasy feeling that she had stepped onto a patch of glare ice. The APC's bow swung very slowly toward the left. They continued forward but the vehicle's axis no longer aligned with its direction of movement.
"He's pretty good," Hogg muttered critically. "He's driven boats as big as this bitch before, so he knows where the back and sides are. But he's not allowing for how much the armor weighs. He needs to correct quicker and not use so much fucking yoke when he does."
Woetjans looked worriedly from Adele to the cab. Ahead, a luxurious aircar stuck out a foot from the line of parked vehicles. The APC's rear fender would rip the car's side off in the next moment.
Barnes dropped his right skid to the pavement. It shrieked in a shower of sparks, then lifted again. The contact had braked their drift and straightened the course.
"He'll do," Adele said. She hadn't been going to let Woetjans shout at the driver anyway. Trying to directly control the work of somebody who's already over his head couldn't possibly have a good result.
"Pull in here," Woetjans called to the driver. "Onto the hedge. We've got the weight and it won't scratch our finish."
The petty officer looked at Adele. "If that's all right, sir?"
"Yes," said Adele. She hadn't thought of herself as being in real command of the undertaking, but that was how the sailors viewed her. She had to keep reminding herself to make decisions with crisp authority.
The hedged squares where Adele had met Markos were battered, but civilian vehicles weren't massive enough to drive through the remains of the bushes. As Woetjans had noted, the APC was. Perhaps it was a good omen that the detachment was able to park close to where they'd be escaping from the subsurface levels.
But if you believed that, you could just as easily believe that Fate was giving with one hand in order to snatch the gift back with the other. Best trust to courage, discipline, and good marksmanship.
The APC shuddered as Barnes plowed the hedgerow with his side panel, then settled. When the driver cut the fans to idle, his own sigh of relief was audible over the sounds of the restive vehicle.
"Let's go," Woetjans said quietly. "Remember, company manners."
The detachment stepped down from the compartment in two ranks. Adele wiped her palms on her trouser legs. She'd thought she was perfectly calm.
Adele led the way up the ramp with Hogg at her side; Woetjans was one of the pair bringing up the rear. The Cinnabar sailors couldn't march in step and Adele didn't know what a military pace was, but Daniel assured her that they'd look out of place if they moved like parade-ground troops while wearing commando uniforms.
Despite the hour, lights were on all over the palace. The only time that was likely to have been true in the past was when the Elector was giving a party.
Adele saw the Kostromans for the first time since she'd entered the palace grounds: a group of low-ranking clerks, looking haggard and frightened as they left the building. She knew from her signals intelligence that the Alliance command was determined to take over every aspect of Kostroman life as soon as possible, but Kostroman bureaucrats were still necessary to the process. Their new masters were working them within an inch of their lives.
Or a step beyond. One of the messages Adele had skimmed was an order for the execution of a clerk who'd upset a glass of wine over a stack of account books while eating supper at his desk. The official charge was "treason against the Alliance of Free Stars." As the member of the Alliance military government had explained in her covering memo, the real purpose was to encourage other clerks to be more careful.
They entered the rear porch, covered by the overhang of the second and third stories. There was another guardpost, this time manned by troops whose rigid armor and opaque faceshields made them look like statues with only a rough resemblance to humans. Plasma cannon threatened from behind two semicircles of sandbags. Between the gun nests stood another soldier with an electronic reader.
Adele handed over the routing card she'd taken from the helmet of the commando lieutenant, a programmable chip in a rectangular polymer matrix. It had carried the commandoes' orders in electronic form that could be read on the helmet visors of every member of the unit so that complex operations could be executed without communications errors.
The faceless guard inserted the card in his reader. Adele had reprogrammed it so that it showed only a destination—the Elector's Palace—and reserved all other information under the highest security level of Blue Chrome operations.
The guard looked at the projected data, then returned the card to Adele and stepped out of the way. "Proceed," he said.
Or was it, "she said"? The voice was an electronic synthesis, just as were all sensory inputs the guard received. What sort of person could willingly live and function in a prison so strait that it touched their skin at every point?
But then, there were people who probably thought work in a library was a sentence to Hell. The universe had room for all sorts; though God knew, present events proved that many people weren't willing to leave it at that.
Adele turned left with the sailors sauntering behind her. Strip lights glued to the ceilings brightened the main corridor. People, two or three in a clot, stood talking in hushed voices outside the offices. Inside were Kostromans at tables made from shelving laid over furniture and stacked with paperwork, some of it from moldy boxes that must have come up from storage in the basement.
Each room had an Alliance overseer who looked tired but very much in command. The Alliance must have moved in a civilian administration as large as or larger than the invasion's military component.
Adele glanced to left and right in cold appraisal at those she passed. Bureaucrats, even Alliance personnel, avoided her gaze as she passed to the back stairs. No civilian wanted to know why a squad of commandoes had been summoned here.
Because of the bright illumination she noticed the corridor's murals for the first time. They showed scenes of Kostroman life during centuries past. The backgrounds were so varied that they must be of specific different islands. Fishermen cast hand lines from a sailing vessel; a farm family picked citrus fruit; a starship lifted from the water as a crowd cheered.
The artist had been skillful, but grime and the band rubbed by shoulders of those passing in the hall had reduced them to a shadow of what they must have been. Adele thought of her library. Was it perhaps enough out of the way that the palace's new masters had spared it, or had the books been treated with the same brutal unconcern that had tossed antique furniture from the windows of reception rooms to clear them for office space?
She should be worrying about humans, not books; but the books and their probable fate filled her mind anyway. She smiled at herself with wry humor.
The single soldier on guard at the narrow staircase down straightened when she saw a detachment of commandoes coming toward her. She carried a submachine gun and to Adele looked very young.
"Out of the way," Adele said with a curt nod. The Alliance soldier jumped sideways, knocking her weapon against the wall, pitting the ancient plaster.
Adele pulled open the door and led her detachment down the stairs in single file. Lighting had been improved even here: battery-powered lamps were stuck to the wall at each landing.
She hadn't expected the guard; there'd been no reference to a post at the stairhead in the electronic media Adele had examined. It would have been a mistake to try to explain what the detachment was doing, however. The guard must have been placed by someone of relatively low rank, so she was therefore best ignored by commandoes claiming to operate on the instructions of Blue Chrome Command.
Blue Chrome Command was Markos. Adele wondered if that would amuse him. He hadn't seemed a man with a sense of humor.
Adele smiled faintly. She was finding more humor in life herself since she became a Cinnabar pirate.
The door to the basement level was open. A guard stood there as well. He turned from watching workmen installing power cables to stare as the detachment trooped past down the stairs. Adele gave him a hard glance.
The subbasement was well lit also, but that was a doubtful virtue in a region so decayed. The brick flooring rippled like the face of the sea—a useful simile, because at least half of the surface was under water. The ceiling arches dripped condensate, and an apparent spring stirred one pool clear of the pale algae that scummed the others.
A pump rumbled disconsolately, and the generator at the far end of the building vibrated at a higher frequency. Workmen had drilled fresh holes through the ceiling to pass power lines to the upper stories. The air danced with brick dust.
Adele approved of the additional wiring in principle. The execution of the work was simple butchery, however. One might as well shear a book down on the upper and lower edges so that it fit your new shelving.
Her detachment had returned to double file; the only sound they made was the splash of boots in the foul water. The bays filled with the detritus of past generations looked like the wrack of a terrible storm. To Adele it was a sad reminder of the ephemeral nature of human civilization; but then, she saw most things that way. Hogg and the sailors probably had a different viewpoint.
The pumps were in four brick alcoves jutting from the lengthwise exterior walls, arranged in an X pattern with the outside entrance between the pair on the north side. The pumps were huge cylinders sunk beneath floor level and venting through ceramic pipes half a meter in diameter. They had more than sufficient capacity to keep the subbasement dry.
Only the southwestern pump still worked, and a grumble from it suggested not all was well with that one either. As Adele passed between the eastern pair of pumps, she glanced through the arch to her right. Workmen had recently removed the end cap of the big electric drive motor. The Alliance planned to put this portion of its house in order also.
The broad outside stairs were a continuation of the light well that provided natural illumination for the basement level. The sliding doors that could offer twenty feet of width for large objects—the pumps and the fusion generator were obvious examples—were closed and barred, but the pedestrian door set in one of the larger panels stood ajar.
The guard post covering this entrance was outside and up a level, at the basement landing. Through the door Adele heard a jig, distorted by reverberation in the stone-lined masonry pit of the light well. The soldiers were playing music that had been popular when Adele was on the staff of the Bryce Academy.
She'd never had a taste for music and she doubted that a connoisseur would have found the jig to have been of any particular merit, but it took her back to a time that was now forever past for her. She regretted its loss, as surely as she regretted the loss of her childhood.
The music shut off in mid-chord. Well, so had that stage of her life.
The fusion generator was in a masonry room on the western end of the subbasement. According to architectural files, the original plan had been to enclose the generator in all directions but one, a curtain wall to the west. That way if the Tokamak failed it would vent its plasma harmlessly into the open air.
Later Electors had added to the initial structure. The ionized plume would now envelop the west wing and everyone in it, but Adele had found no evidence in the records that this was viewed as a problem. Fusion bottles rarely failed; and if this one did, well, the west wing was given over entirely to servants' quarters and the offices of low-ranking clerks.
Alliance officials had used the three bays in the northwest corner of the subbasement as a high-security prison. The wall of the generator room formed the south side, and a mesh of barbed wire woven on a steel frame closed the open end.
Twenty Kostroman citizens—Walter III and members of his immediate family—shared two bays of the makeshift prison. The Aglaia's five officers were in the remaining one, brightly illuminated by floodlights in the vaulted ceiling outside the enclosure.
The prisoners had no privacy and no chance of escape, but Adele saw as she approached that the twelve Alliance soldiers on duty were a great deal less than alert. She and her detachment made no attempt to conceal themselves, but they were still within twenty yards of the post when a guard looked up, realized the splashing footsteps weren't condensate dripping after all, and shouted in surprise.
Guards jumped to their feet and zipped their uniform tunics closed. They'd appropriated furniture from the upper levels. The luxurious chairs, couches, and tables made a dissonant tableau among the utter squalor.
"Who's the officer in charge?" Adele demanded. She didn't raise her voice, but the tinge of scorn in her voice was proper either for the lieutenant she pretended to be or the craftsman she truly was.
A lanky soldier, the oldest in the squad by several years, stepped forward. Instead of identifying himself he said, "Sir, this is a restricted area."
He tried to sound forceful and threatening. His act wasn't nearly as good as Adele's.
"Yes," she said, "it is." She handed him the routing card. The codes Adele had implanted in the chip would direct the guards to turn over the five Cinnabar officers to the detachment of commandoes.
The chip wouldn't explain why: that was beyond the guards' need to know. The guards would have been sure something was wrong if Adele had included unnecessary information.
Some of the prisoners moved forward, drawn by hope of something to punctuate the boredom. The individuals weren't identifiable until they almost touched the wire mesh. Light glinting from the steel threw a haze over those beyond it.
Walter Hajas was in the middle bay. Captain Le Golif, whom Adele had seen during the Founder's Day Banquet, stood grim-faced with his four juniors. She didn't think either man would recognize her.
The sailors had bunched slightly when Adele and Hogg stopped. Woetjans suddenly pushed through her subordinates, put her lips to Adele's ear, and whispered tautly, "Sir! Two guys come down the side stairs and they're behind us!"
"You there!" someone called. The subbasement was so huge and multi-bayed that the words, though shouted, didn't seem loud. "What's going on here?"
Adele recognized the voice.
"Kill them!" she shouted, reaching for her pocket.
Hogg carried his impeller slung under his right arm with the muzzle forward. His right hand had ridden lightly on the grip from the moment he left the Princess Cecile on this mission. The guard commander's mouth gaped as Hogg's slug punched him mid-chest before Adele could complete the second word of her warning.
The soldiers were too startled to react. Hogg killed three of them standing before the rest of the survivors threw themselves toward cover. Brick shattered and a Kostroman prisoner doubled up with a cry: an impeller slug didn't stop when it hit its intended target.
The sailors had fast reflexes but they weren't trained killers. Only Dasi fired at the two figures who dived into the nearest pump alcove. He missed, though his impeller blasted a head-sized divot in the brick wall.
Adele didn't bother to shoot. The guards weren't worth her concern, and she couldn't get a clear shot past the members of her detachment before the real targets were under cover.
The voice had been that of Markos. He and his aide had decided to see the prisoners without giving electronic warning.
A volley of submachine gun pellets blew powder from the north wall and stuffing from the furniture. The sailors were trying to copy Hogg now that they understood what was required, but the surviving guards were mostly safe in a side bay.
A guard fired his submachine gun. Pellets slapped and scarred pillars on the other side of the vault, but the shooter couldn't hit the Cinnabars for the same reason they couldn't hit him and his fellows: at the present angle a three-foot-thick brick wall was in the way.
Hogg shouldered his impeller with more deliberation than he'd shown previously and fired one round through the seat of a red plush divan. The guard hiding there leaped up with a scream, then collapsed. The divan broke beneath her. The slug had smashed the frame on its way to her chest.
Civilian prisoners were screaming and throwing themselves into the back of their cells. Captain Le Golif pointed toward Adele and shouted, "Run for it! You'll be killed if you try to get us now!"
He was right in one sense: at least six of the guards were alive and armed. The open front of their bay was only twenty feet from the mesh barrier enclosing the Aglaia's officers.
The Alliance soldiers were shocked and frightened, but they were still capable of pulling a trigger. With a submachine gun, that's all it would take to chop to mincemeat anybody trying to break open the prisoner cage.
Adele had the pistol in her left hand. Her right elbow held the burdensome submachine gun to her side to keep it from flopping. For a moment, only her head and eyes moved.
Le Golif was half right. Adele and her sailors couldn't run, either, except past the pump alcove where Markos and his aide had taken refuge. Ruthless didn't necessarily mean skillful, but Adele didn't doubt that the pale sociopath could knock over human targets just as quickly as they appeared before her.
A submachine gun fired in the alcove. The burst wasn't directed toward the opening. Brick shattered and a few pellets rang on the steel pump housing.
"Sun, Polin, Hafard!" Woetjans roared. Like Adele, the petty officer had seen that there was no way out for the detachment except past Markos. "On the count of three, with me."
She pointed toward the front arch with her left index finger; the submachine gun was in her right hand, the stock extended to the crook of her elbow. The sailors she'd named were, like her, among the majority carrying submachine guns rather than impellers.
"One—"
A second burst within the alcove. The impacts sounded as though someone had thrown a case of glassware against the wall. A single bit of metal ricocheted through the arch, trailing a corkscrew of smoke.
"Stop!" Adele shouted. "Stop, she'll kill you all!"
Woetjans turned with an expression combining surprise and frustration. "Sir!" she pleaded. "There's no—"
Hogg pointed his impeller at the side of the alcove. "Dasi and Koop," he said. Those three—and Lamsoe, back in the cupola of the APC—carried stocked impellers. "It's just fucking brick after all. On the count, one, two, thr—"
The impellers fired a ragged volley. The slugs were aimed a few inches above the base course. Each impact blasted out thirty or more pounds of pulverized brick.
Adele turned away and coughed heavily. Blood gummed her right eyebrow. She threw an arm across her face, knowing she'd have been too late to save her eye if the thumbnail-sized chip had hit an inch lower.
Size was a great advantage in handling an impeller's powerful recoil. Dasi was a huge man and Koop was well above average. Hogg was the lightest by fifty pounds, but his impeller was back on target an instant before those of the two sailors.
As Adele turned, a guard stuck his head and the barrel of his submachine gun around the corner of the bay in which he'd taken refuge. Adele shot him, then shot him again in the ribs.
He'd leaped like a pithed frog when her first pellet blew a hole above his right eye. So long as the target was moving, she had to assume it was a danger to her and her detachment. She'd pay for what she did tonight in dreams or in Hell, but no one would ever say that Adele Mundy had skimped a task because of what it would have cost her.
The dead man thrashed in the pool of his own spreading blood. None of his fellows would follow his example in the next minute or two. Adele remembered the helmet visor. She pulled it down and returned to what Hogg and the sailors were doing.
Their impellers slapped. The sound of slugs smashing bricks was sharper yet, and echoes turned rapid fire into the rattle of automatic weapons. Adele guessed each man had fired about six rounds when a long section of wall fell into the alcove with a roar louder even than the gunfire.
The other sailors emptied the magazines of their submachine guns into the spreading dust cloud. Compared to the crash of the impellers, the lighter weapons sounded like the buzzing of insects.
"Cease fire!" Woetjans screamed. She charged with her empty weapon raised to use as a bludgeon. Adele, for reasons she couldn't possibly have articulated, was with the half-dozen sailors who followed the petty officer.
The commando helmet had nose filters Adele hadn't known about; the air she breathed was close but not chokingly full of peach-colored dust.
Bricks had collapsed into the drainage sump, burying Markos's aide there. Her right hand stuck out of the rubble. It held a pistol, not the submachine gun Adele knew the woman usually carried.
The output pipe was shattered just above the pump casing. The submachine gun lay on the floor beneath it. Markos's right foot, flailing wildly to find purchase to thrust him higher, stuck out of the hole he'd hammered through the ceramic pipe with submachine gun pellets.
"There!" Adele said. She aimed but didn't shoot because too many sailors were moving in the dust cloud.
Woetjans followed the line of Adele's pistol. She jumped to the motor housing and grabbed the spy's ankle. When Woetjans pulled, Markos slid out of the pipe. He was covered with ancient slime and his face bore a look of bestial rage. Woetjans hit him in the middle of the forehead with her gun butt.
"Bring him as a hostage!" Adele said, backing out of the ruined alcove. She lifted her visor because it made her feel trapped. Bricks continued to dribble from the top of the opening as gravity overcame the grip of old mortar.
"Mistress, we'll have to shoot our way out," Hogg said from beside her. "They may not have heard us upstairs, I'll hope they didn't, but they'll sure hell know something's going on when we turn up looking like we do."
"Oh," said Adele, considering a point she should have seen for herself. The brick dust had started to settle; a great deal of it had settled on the skin and uniforms of the Cinnabar detachment. Sailors who'd dived for the floor when the shooting started were blotched with muck and algae besides. As soon as they appeared in public, there'd be questions that would inevitably lead to shots.
Hogg was right. If there was going to be shooting, it was best for the Cinnabars to start it.
Woetjans tossed Markos to the floor beside Adele; a sailor quickly bound the spy's hands behind his back, using a belt stripped from a dead guard. Adele hadn't heard any order pass. The sailor simply understood and executed the task.
Adele felt her face quiver with the beginning of a hysterical laugh. Why couldn't Kostroma produce library assistants of that quality? She forced her cheeks into a frozen rictus until the fit passed.
"If it's all right to use the helmet commo now I can set things up with Barnes and Lamsoe," Woetjans said. "Unless you want to . . . ?"
A surviving guard fired a short burst from the bay where he and his fellows remained. A sailor fired back. Neither hit or could possibly hit anything but brick.
"Get out!" Captain Le Golif repeated.
He stood behind the wire, feet slightly spread. His arms were behind his back as though he were reviewing a parade. Pride in Cinnabar made Adele flush, despite the cold awareness that the men who cut her little sister's throat might have been personally brave as well.
Adele hadn't seen an armored personnel carrier until a week before. Among other things she had no idea of what might be the rate and duration of fire of the heavy weapons involved.
"No, you have a much better appreciation of the factors," she said.
The petty officer glanced down at Markos. "And you want him along?" she said without emphasis.
"Yes," Adele said. "I do."
Markos was useless as a hostage: trying to negotiate their exit from Kostroma would simply alert the Alliance command to their presence. The detachment might escape in a rush; if the Alliance had time to set up, every Cinnabar on the planet would die or be captured.
Adele had called Markos a hostage because the only other alternatives were to kill him in cold blood, or to let him live. She'd meant it when she said she wouldn't be party to a cold-blooded execution.
But she'd pull the trigger herself if it was that or setting free the monster she knew Markos was.
"Message received," Daniel said, speaking into the integral microphone at his console in the Aglaia's tactical operations center. Domenico was in charge at the Princess Cecile. He'd used his initiative—against Daniel's orders for communications silence—to relay the warning from the detachment in the Elector's Palace. "We're on the way. Leary out."
Chief Baylor looked at Daniel with concern. The missileer had just arrived to report his team was done with the starboard installations, Missile Tubes One and Three, but that there'd been damage to the port-side handling controls when the Aglaia was captured. It'd take an hour to clear, and the Cinnabars hadn't had an hour even before the wheels came off for the palace detachment.
Daniel keyed the general communicator. "All personnel to the main hatch and begin loading," he said calmly. "Bridge out."
He'd hoped to make the final transfer from the Aglaia to the Princess Cecile in two stages, but the car could carry the nineteen Cinnabars so long as Gambier stayed low and used surface effect. That was an easy problem. If Daniel'd thought it would have helped the palace detachment, he'd have swum to the Navy Pool pulling the missile crew on a raft.
Chief Baylor didn't leave the TOC. Daniel felt a surge of rage—did the man think orders weren't meant for him?—but suppressed it instantly. Baylor didn't need to guide his people to the main hatch. Daniel was jumpy because he held himself responsible for allowing the palace detachment to take a vain risk.
He touched the switch opening the hatch of Hold Two, then keyed the general communicator, audio only. Video required more bandwidth than might be available during combat. Trained naval personnel ought to have their eyes on their tasks anyway.
"You're free to go," Daniel announced to the former Alliance guard detachment. They'd be jumping up in their prison as light entered through the opening hatch. "We've left an inflatable liferaft tied to the mooring pontoon for you. I strongly recommend that you use it to get away from the Aglaia as fast as you can. Bridge out."
Daniel swung out of his seat and headed for the door. Baylor followed in his wake, frowning again. It was a familiar expression on the little man's face.
"We might've left them where they are," Baylor said over the clash of his boots and Daniel's on the metal stair treads. "Though I don't guess a bunch of groundhogs're going to reprogram the targeting computer in the time they'll have to try."
"I don't guess they are," Daniel agreed, feeling his irritation rise again.
As Baylor said, the Alliance personnel were from the ground forces rather than the navy. If they even knew where the TOC was, the chance they could reset the programmed sequence was less than the possibility of them flapping their arms and flying to the Princess Cecile ahead of the aircar.
Besides, leaving the prisoners locked in the Aglaia was a sentence of death by fire or suffocation. Daniel didn't hate anybody that much. He hoped he'd never hate anybody that much.
He hit the Deck C landing and sprinted down the corridor toward the hatch. The Chief Missileer ran at his side.
"It sounds like Woetjans is really in the middle of it," Baylor said. He talked out of nervousness. Also, he was displacing his fear rather than acknowledging that his real concern was the certain doom of the Aglaia and his beloved missiles with it.
A rating stood in the main hatch with a submachine gun. When the officers reached the concourse he shouted, "Here they come!" over his shoulder to the aircar quivering in dynamic balance on the pontoon.
"They're professionals," Daniel said to Baylor. He was out of the Aglaia's hatch for the last time, into warm salt air and a sky not far short of dawn. He crossed the catwalk and paused, gesturing Baylor and the rating into the vehicle ahead of him.
They were professionals, Adele and Hogg as surely as the Aglaia's crewmen. They would do the best they could under the circumstances.
And by God! so would Daniel Leary and the contingent directly under him.
"Remember," said Woetjans to the detachment, "shoot anything you please but don't shoot the fucking APC, right? And keep moving but help your buddies. We don't leave nobody behind even if their head's blown off. Ready?"
The general murmur of assent sounded to Adele like feeding time in a bear garden. She smiled faintly. Everyone in the immediate area would shortly prefer that a pack of bears had rushed up from the depths of the Elector's Palace.
Woetjans keyed her helmet. "Barnes, get moving," she said.
Two clicks on Adele's helmet intercom signaled wordless agreement. The APC was going into action two high levels above the poised detachment.
"Remember," Woetjans said. She sounded peevish, like an adult trying to control unruly children. "I fire the first shot."
She nodded to Dasi and Koop; the big sailors put their whole strength into sliding the equipment door sideways so that the detachment could exit as a group rather than dribbling one at a time through the pedestrian doorway.
The door's rattle drew the attention of the entire detachment on the landing twenty feet above. The Alliance troops stared in amazement at the squad of commandoes starting up the broad stairs toward them.
Woetjans was on the left end; Adele was beside the bosun's mate, holding only her pistol, and Hogg was to Adele's right with her submachine gun in his hands and the impeller slung across his back. Three more sailors completed the first rank; Dasi and Koop fell in behind with the two men supporting Markos by the elbows.
"Buddha!" cried an Alliance soldier. He pointed toward Markos, pinioned and groggy. "They've got—"
Faces—angry, surprised; none of them frightened, not yet, because they didn't have time. They were lighted from above by a glaring fixture the Alliance had bolted to the wall. Ten soldiers, perhaps a dozen.
Woetjans may have squeezed her trigger first, but Adele doubted there'd been a heartbeat between any of the five weapons firing. Only Hogg of the five shooters failed to empty the 300-round magazine of his submachine gun. The guard detachment melted like frost in a torrent.
Adele ran up the stairs. A mist of dust and blood pulsed in the floodlight. She didn't know why she was shouting. Her foot slipped and she did know why, but she didn't look down to make sure.
Gunfire and screams echoed in her mind. A soldier lay on the landing, pounding the bricks with his remaining hand. Hogg finished him as he passed; probably a waste of ammunition, but because it was Hogg only three or four rounds.
An Alliance official looked over the carved stone coping of the light well. Adele shot him. His peaked hat flew off and his face jerked back with a red smear where his forehead had been.
Adele was winded already, gasping to breathe brick dust but wishing that dry smell could mask the stench of bodies sawn inside out by hypervelocity pellets. She thrust her hand against the wall where the stairs switched back. The surface was cratered and sticky.
Powerful drive fans howled. A bolt of plasma ripped overhead, dimming the banks of light and setting off a bloom of ionized fire that must have been one of the Alliance gun nests in the entryway.
Barnes and Lamsoe were doing their part, all of them were doing their part. Nothing else mattered now.
Adele tripped. A sailor caught her. They were at the top of the staircase. The APC turned on its axis in front of them, bunting civilian vehicles into crumpled ruin. The right side panel was raised but the left one was still locked down so that the detachment could leap aboard.
Adele stopped. She fired, aiming at white blurs that were faces. Plasma lit the sky. This time the plume carried with it the skirt of the gun vehicle at the garden entrance, devouring the flexible fabric in orange flames that were a shadow in the iridescence.
Any blur, any face, any soul within them if men have souls.
Woetjans caught Adele around the waist and leaped into the troop compartment. The APC lifted on the full screaming thrust of its fans.
Adele twisted on the hard deck. Hands gripped her to keep her from sliding out of the vehicle. She slid a fresh magazine into the butt of her glowing pistol, and the victims in her mind shrieked louder than the fans.
Daniel fiddled at the Princess Cecile's command console, trying to get the adjustable seat positioned properly for him. The controls were reversed from those on similar Cinnabar equipment; he kept getting a hump in the upholstery where he wanted a dip and vice versa.
The ship's systems were live: the telltales were green or amber, with the only red warnings those for the open main hatch and the enabled armament switches. The Princess Cecile was fully crewed with some of the most experienced ratings in the RCN. There was only one commissioned officer, but that wasn't unheard of for a vessel as small as a corvette.
The single officer shouldn't have been a junior lieutenant on his first cruise, but that wasn't a problem that Daniel could find it in his heart to really regret.
Lt. Daniel Leary, Officer Commanding the RCS Princess Cecile. That was a fact forever now, even if he died in the next ten minutes or the RCN cashiered him after he reached Cinnabar.
Dying in the next ten minutes was actually quite probable, because the Bremse, an Alliance cruiser/minelayer, was in orbit over Kostroma.
Daniel's main display was a Plot-Position Indicator for the region above the planet to an altitude of 100,000 miles: near space by interstellar standards, but if the Princess Cecile could get through it alive she'd have a very good chance of making it the rest of the way home. The Commonwealth of Kostroma's automatic defense system hadn't been a joke, not quite, but the Alliance had come prepared to update the defensive constellation to a level of protection comparable to that over Pleasaunce.
Alliance cruiser/minelayers were built on the hulls of large light cruisers, but their large magazines were configured to accept either missiles or thermonuclear mines like the ones the Bremse was deploying now above Kostroma. The ships were fast because their mines could interdict hostile planets as well as defend friendly ones; and even though the Bremse would be heavily loaded with mines, Daniel was sure she could out-slug a Kostroman corvette by a considerable margin.
The options available to the Princess Cecile were guile or incredibly good luck. And disaster, of course. Disaster was far the most probable option.
"The Mundy section is beginning extraction," said Domenico from the console to Daniel's right. That was normally the navigator's position, but Daniel had put the bosun there for now because he needed someone trustworthy handling communications.
Navigation and attack were Daniel's own responsibilities until he handed the Princess Cecile over to somebody better qualified. He switched the main display to an attack screen which echoed data from the Aglaia's sensors. The PPI shrank to a holographic fifty-millimeter cube, one of a series of similar displays at the upper edge of the projection volume.
"Understood," Daniel said. He tried to keep the gleeful excitement out of his voice. He didn't want the crew to think he was insane. . . . "Alert the ship."
Domenico passed the report over the general communicator in a rasping tone with as little emotion as he'd have put into a drinks order. These were good people, and they were depending on Daniel Leary.
"Holy shit!" said Dorfman. She'd been gunner's mate aboard the Aglaia—a communications vessel didn't rate a warrant gunner—and was seated at the remaining bridge console with responsibility for the corvette's defenses. "All the missile batteries at the palace just fired!"
"Yes," said Daniel as he transmitted preprogrammed commands to the Aglaia. "We're fortunate to have a communications officer of Ms. Mundy's skill. She said she'd trip the automatic defenses to create a diversion as they departed the target area."
Daniel pressed the red Execute switch with the full weight of his thumb. "And now," he added with satisfaction, "we're going to create a diversion of our own."
Fifty feet below the APC, a line rippled through three blocks of housing in the center of the city. Buildings crumbled. A pall of dust spread up and outward. Where the hypervelocity rockets hit something harder than brick an occasional spark flew into the night, but the flames growing slowly in the projectiles' wake were for the moment unimpressive.
Adele stared in horrified amazement. She'd had no idea that the rockets would penetrate so far. All she'd intended was to add to the confusion by destroying vehicles parked in the palace gardens.
"It is very important that you preserve my life," said Markos. "Your superiors will punish you severely if anything happens to the information I bring them about my nation's intelligence operations."
Adele turned. Sailors stared in disbelief at the hostage, still bound, who sat upright in the middle of the compartment.
"That woman is a spy," Markos said, nodding toward Adele with a malevolent expression. "Her real name is Adele Mundy. She was recruited on Bryce."
"Why you lying bastard," Woetjans said. She punched Markos in the face. He fell against Dasi. The sailor knocked him upright again with an elbow.
"I do not lie," Markos said, dripping blood from a cut lip. "There's proof of what I say in the data unit that looks like a communicator on my belt. I'll give your superiors the key to the information inside as soon as they guarantee my safety."
He turned his gaze on Adele again. "She's a spy," he repeated. "She provided the information that permitted us to capture the palace and your ship so easily."
Adele was detached. It was as though she were listening to the history of an alternate reality in which events transpired in a fashion slightly skewed from those in which she had participated.
But only slightly skewed: the reality would be enough to hang her. She thought of the Three Circles Conspiracy and the Cinnabar traitors betrayed in turn by their Alliance paymaster.
Adele Mundy didn't belong in this world; or any, she supposed. She'd briefly thought otherwise, but she'd been wrong.
She smiled. A sailor swore under his breath.
"That's a lie, right, sir?" Dasi said. He was pleading. "It's all bullshit that he's talking!"
The APC was over water now. To the north behind them, fires burned in Kostroma City and weapons fired at nothing.
Adele continued to smile. There was no way out. She could lie, but the sailors wouldn't forget Markos's words. She was quite certain evidence would be found to implicate her. Markos would have arranged that, so that if she balked at some demand he could threaten her with exposure to the Cinnabar authorities.
As he was exposing her now, to save himself and punish her with the same stroke.
The sailors stared at Adele in stricken horror. They'd seen her shoot. But she couldn't fly an armored personnel carrier, and she couldn't kill the sailors who'd risked their lives for her and with her in the past. The only family she'd known since the proscriptions; and in a real sense, the only family she'd ever known.
"I'll handle this," said Hogg. He raised the flap of Markos's jacket and unclipped the belt communicator.
"Be careful," the spy warned. "If you try to retrieve the data without the codes you'll destroy it instead. But I will tell all to the proper authorities."
He sneered at Adele in bloodthirsty triumph. His lips and left cheek were swollen from Woetjans's blow.
Hogg weighed the false communicator in the hand that didn't hold a submachine gun. "You know," he said conversationally, "the master wouldn't believe a word of this. He's a honest sort himself, my master Daniel, and he thinks the whole world's like him. But there's a lot of people back on Cinnabar who would believe it."
He grinned at Adele. "Right, mistress?" he said.
"Yes," said Adele.
Hogg shot Markos in the temple. The spy's head jerked sideways, losing definition as hydrostatic shock violently expanded his brain tissue.
Hogg thrust his right leg straight, shoving the corpse out the open side of the APC. He tossed the communicator after Markos. He fired a burst from his submachine gun as the little object spun off in the vehicle's wake.
"Missed," Hogg said. "When my eyes was better I'd have blown it to shit in the air, but I guess we'll have to trust salt water to do the job."
He looked around the troop compartment. Everyone was staring at him. "What the fuck's going on?" Barnes demanded plaintively from the front cab.
"It's like this," Hogg said to the sailors. "The master told me to take care of Ms. Mundy, there."
He nodded to Adele. The submachine gun was still in his right hand, pointed toward empty night sky through the open side of the vehicle.
"Giving her to this guy and his sort—and they're all the same sort, I don't give a fuck what color uniform they wear," Hogg continued. "That wouldn't be doing my job. Besides, you can't trust them even if they do happen to tell the truth."
"Too fucking right," said Woetjans. To Adele in a respectful voice she went on, "You got a bad burn on your hand there, sir. Better be sure to get it looked at the next time you get a chance."
Adele looked at the throbbing blisters on the thumb, web, and index finger of her left hand, her gun hand. She held her hand out to Woetjans.
"Yes," she said. "Perhaps you'd do it now. I believe we have a few minutes before we reach Lieutenant Leary and our new vessel."
"The APC's approaching at speed!" Domenico said. The bosun's console displayed the region centered on the Navy Pool at a scale small enough to include Kostroma City miles to the north.
"Direct the crew to their stations, Mr. Domenico," Daniel ordered without looking around. "Ms. Mundy takes over the commo desk, and you head up the emergency team until we're out of the system and in one piece."
A computer-generated model of the Aglaia was at the center of Daniel's display; the remainder of the imagery was that gathered by the Aglaia's sensors and transmitted to the Princess Cecile.
The Aglaia launched missiles across the Floating Harbor.
The first round lifted at a flat angle from a bath of steam and plasma. The harbor surged as though it'd been bombed. Nearby pontoons rocked violently, breaking their tethers and grinding against one another like blunt concrete teeth.
The second missile exited with less immediate disruption because its predecessor had blown a hard vacuum in the sea about the Aglaia's flank; water pressure hadn't had time to fill the man-made event. The missile trailed a corkscrewed line of fire as bright as the sun's corona, matter and antimatter annihilating one another in its wake.
Antiship missiles were intended for use over stellar distances. Even accelerating at twelve gravities, the first round was only travelling at 800 feet per second when it nosed over toward the Alliance destroyer moored a dozen berths away in the Floating Harbor. The ball from a flintlock musket moved faster than that.
But the missile weighed thirty tons.
It hit the destroyer on the upper curve of the hull, a third of the way back from the bow. Heavy plating crumpled. The warship rolled ninety degrees on its axis, then rolled back and gulped water through its open hatches. Steam and smoke from electrical fires swelled about the injured vessel.
The missile ricocheted skyward as a point of light. It swelled as it mounted toward orbit because its drive devoured ever more of the missile's own fabric as it rose. A rainbow bubble marked the final dissolution.
The second missile was intended for another destroyer, but the guidance system was marginal at such short range and might have been damaged by the previous round. It hit the harbor's surface short of its target and bounced out of the spray at an angle flattened by friction with the water. It cleared the destroyer by what looked to Daniel like less thickness than you'd use to shim a bearing.
The missile was beginning to tumble when it collided three berths distant with a big transport that had arrived with a battalion of Alliance troops. For a fraction of a second the two merged like a log and a giant buzzsaw; then antimatter from one or the other turned the immediate area, tens of thousands of tons of metal and sea water and flesh, into a plume of light.
Daniel split his main display between the PPI and an attack screen. The remote targeting screen shrank to a cube of vivid light in a corner. At its center, the Aglaia was sinking, gutted by her own missiles.
The Bremse orbited twenty-nine thousand miles above Kostroma's surface. She was in the sky above Kostroma City now; on the PPI a point moved away from the blue icon that was the Alliance cruiser—another mine, making the present total 131 according to the sidebar at the edge of the display.
Daniel keyed the guard frequency, the universal emergency channel, and cried, "Commonwealth ship Princess Cecile to all vessels, emergency, emergency! Ships are blowing up in the Floating Harbor! Do not land in the Floating Harbor! All vessels on the planetary surface, lift at once to escape the explosions!"
The Aglaia had managed to launch a second pair of missiles. If ships had souls . . .
But humans do have souls, and humans who depended on Daniel Leary would die unless he focused on the next step of the road to safety. He opened his mouth to blurt another dollop of simulated panic to justify the Princess Cecile lifting. Before he could speak, a voice from the console demanded in a guttural accent, "AFS Bremse to Princess Cecile. What is going on down there? Over."
"Emergency!" Daniel repeated. He heard a bustle beside him, figures moving at the right-hand console. "Ships are blowing up, Bremse! We must lift to save ourselves. All ships on the surface must lift!"
"Bremse to Princess," the harsh voice spat back. "Negative on lifting, Princess Cecile. Stay where you are and provide a full imagery link on commo channel twelve, no encryption. Over."
"Emer—" Daniel said. An amber bar slashed across the green telltale on his display, indicating that the channel was locked to him. He turned his head in surprise.
Adele sat at the console to his right. Her uniform was splotched with blood, brick dust, and substances Daniel couldn't even hazard a guess at.
He'd thought his own was the master unit and couldn't be overridden. That wasn't true, at least with Adele working in the same system.
"Princess Cecile to Bremse," Adele said. Her voice was perfectly calm. Anyone who'd had experience with people reacting to crises would assume she was in shock. "We are transmitting data now as we lift off. I repeat—"
She pointed a bandaged left hand to Daniel. He nodded; he was already initiating take-off sequence. Domenico had sealed the Princess Cecile as soon as the palace detachment boarded, so it was just a matter of bringing up pressure to the plasma motor feeds and unlocking the outriggers so they could be brought in as soon as the vessel left the water.
"—we are lifting off for safety. Princess Cecile out."
The motors rumbled beneath them. The Princess Cecile shuddered on a bubble of steam and plasma, then began to rise. She was shorter than the Aglaia and therefore wobbled at a higher frequency as she found her balance, but she was a lot steadier than Daniel had expected.
He grinned at Adele, then settled into his seat. His fingers moved across the console's keyboard as he set up the next step on the corvette's targeting display.
One step at a time, until they got home or went off the end of the final cliff.
Adele coughed wrackingly, doubling over in her seat to bring up orange phlegm. Her first thought was that she'd had a lung hemorrhage, but the color came from the brick dust she'd breathed as they shot their way out of the palace. It and the ozone generated by electromotive weapons were irritants, but she didn't think either of them would kill her.
She wiped the sputum on her sleeve and went back to work. The fabric couldn't be much filthier than before anyway.
Starships weren't stressed for high acceleration. The Princess Cecile lifted at less than two gravities, making flesh a burden but nothing worse. Sailors moved about, albeit a little slower than they had in Adele's library; and as for Adele, she noted with a cold smirk that many of her plumper contemporaries carried as much weight every day of their lives.
Daniel, instead of using the ship's communication system, turned his head to say, "Adele? The Bremse up there's laying a defensive array. Can you find the command node so we can destroy it?"
Adele put down her wands. "The constellation hasn't yet been activated, but I'm changing our identification codes to mimic those of the Goetz von Berlichingen. That way we'll be safe if they switch it on."
"Yes, but can you spot the command node?" Daniel said. "We can destroy it with cannon or even a missile if you can just locate it."
Adele heard in his tone the ingrained irritation of a male trying to get information from a female too dense to understand a simple question. She didn't say: "Yes, if you're stupid enough to want to commit suicide that way I can help you do it."
Instead Adele said, "If the command node is destroyed each unit of the constellation will react to any ship within range except the Bremse. The command node is—"
She twitched a control wand without taking her eyes away from Daniel. An object on Daniel's visual display changed from an icon distinguished only by number to a pulsing ball as red as murder.
"—here."
"Ah," said Daniel. His face was blank as he assimilated what he'd been told: all the things he'd just been told, including the fact that he'd acted like a fool. "Adele—Ms. Mundy. My concern isn't so much for our own safety from the defenses, as for the safety of the Cinnabar force that retakes Kostroma."
His expression was momentarily that of an older man and a very hard one. "As one most certainly will."
He swallowed, settling into a calmer state. "Is there a way we can disable the constellation before we leave the system? Even if it means risk for us. Though not suicide, if you please, not at this point."
Adele's subconscious responded with a surge of pleasure to Daniel's engaging grin. She'd frequently called people fools to their faces. She didn't recall ever before meeting someone who analyzed the criticism, then accepted it because it was valid. Certainly no men had done so in the past.
"If you can put me aboard the node," Adele said, "I can disable it. I can make it change sides, if I've the time."
"Bremse to Kostroman vessel Princess Cecile," growled the communicator. "Orbit at thirty thousand kilometers. Do not leave that assigned level or we'll destroy you. Over."
A different officer was handling the Bremse's communications now. This one was female and had an upper-class Pleasaunce accent. Senior personnel had been recalled to duty when chaos broke out in Kostroma City.
Daniel bobbed his head as he considered. "Tell them we acknowledge but we're having trouble with our reaction mass shutoffs," he said.
He waggled a finger toward his console. The four quadrants of the main display were now split into separate screens which he kept in the corner of his eye. "Actually, the fuel feed's about the only part of the drive system that seems to be working to spec. Three of the plasma nozzles should have been replaced a couple maintenance cycles ago."
"Princess Cecile to Bremse," Adele said. "We acknowledge your orders. We'll orbit at thirty thousand kilometers as soon as we've repaired the reaction mass shutoffs. Princess Cecile over."
The Bremse was laying a defensive array at 44K kilometers above Kostroma's surface, geosynchronous level. Adele didn't doubt that the cruiser was willing to destroy a Kostroman vessel that disobeyed its orders, but there were other things going on that might well seem more pressing to the Alliance officers.
Killing a ship was a complicated business. Very different from squeezing a trigger and seeing a face swell, eyes bulging and the first spray of blood from the nostrils . . .
"Bremse to Princess Cecile!" the communicator said. "You'd better stabilize where we tell you, you wog morons, or you'll be lucky if enough of you gets home that your families can breathe you! Bremse out."
Daniel's expression was one that Adele wouldn't have liked to see had she thought it was directed at her. "The node is big enough to board?" he asked. His left hand on the keyboard was making corrections to the targeting display.
"Big enough for a dozen technicians at once," Adele said. "I've checked the design drawings. There'll be a programming crew aboard it at least until the whole array is deployed. A boat can take me there using the codes that the shuttles for the work crews use."
"How big a party do you want?" Daniel asked. "We don't have combat suits, though."
Adele sniffed. "There'll be three or four Alliance programmers," she said. "Give me somebody to drive the boat and another sailor or two to keep the programmers out of my way."
Daniel nodded. His finger touched the general call button. "Woetjans, Barnes, Dasi, and Lamsoe to the bridge," he said, his voice syncopating itself through speakers in every compartment.
Adele noticed distortion. The Princess Cecile, though clean and fit-looking, wasn't as tight a collection of systems as it might have been if its present crew—communications officer included—had longer to work on the vessel.
"And the Bremse?" Daniel asked. "Can you . . . ?"
"I doubt it," Adele said. "As a safety feature there's a lockout chip common to the Bremse and every mine of the constellation. It's an infinite nonrepeating sequence, not a code I can break. The system won't even permit me in the node to command a mine to attack the Bremse so long as the lockout's in place."
The four sailors came at a shambling run. The weight of continued acceleration showed in the taut lines of their faces, but not in the speed of their arrival. Woetjans didn't even look strained.
"You're to take Ms. Mundy in the cutter to track Kay-Kay One-Four-Three-Oh," Daniel said with perfect enunciation and economy. "That's the command node of the defensive constellation under construction. There'll be Alliance personnel aboard, but they shouldn't expect trouble. In any case, you'll protect Ms. Mundy and provide her with any assistance she requires. Do you understand?"
Woetjans grinned broadly. "Yes sir," she said.
"You'll launch when we're opposite the planet from the Bremse," Daniel said to the bosun's mate. "That's about seven minutes, so don't waste time."
Adele raised herself from her seat, trying not to stagger under the strain of her added mass. Without comment Barnes and Dasi stuck hands under her elbows and lifted her with easy grace.
Lamsoe murmured, "Proud to be chosen, mistress. There's always something happening where you are."
"It's an occupational hazard for librarians," Adele said with a feeling of amusement that surprised her.
They started down the corridor to one of the circular stair towers. The sailors continued to carry Adele though she dabbed her feet to the deck in stubborn determination not to seem completely helpless.
"Baylor to the bridge," the general call ordered in Daniel's voice.
"I've never worn an atmosphere suit," Adele warned. "I'll need help putting it on."
She'd need help with more than that, and she'd need luck as well. Thus far she'd had both.
And the greatest luck in Adele Mundy's life was that now for the first time she did have help.
Chief Baylor entered the bridge. He'd barked his left knuckles; his right arm to the elbow was a black smear of congealed lubricant; and his expression was furious enough to face down a fox terrier.
"Sir," he said, "I've got fucking work to do so I'd really appreciate you getting to the fucking point!"
"You've become Attack Officer," Daniel said calmly. "That's your console."
He pointed to the navigator's console, empty since Adele's departure. "I've programmed the first two missiles but you'll launch any others. There are others, I hope?"
"Oh," said the warrant officer. "I—"
Baylor seated himself. He typed with the power of somebody driving nails expertly: far harder than necessary for the job but absolutely precise. The PPI switched to a targeting screen, similar in gross essentials but vastly different in detail and the keyboard functions associated with it.
"Well, not so very different from ours," he said with something short of approval.
Baylor looked back at Daniel. "Sir," he said, "we've got ten missiles aboard, all of them in the ready magazines now and I think they'll at least launch. Those wog cretins just let them sit in the grease they got them in from the factory. I swear! They're Pleasaunce built, though, and they seem to power up all right."
He shook his head. "They're low-acceleration models. Seven gee max. I wish to God we could've transferred some of my babies from the Aglaia before, before . . ."
The Princess Cecile was over Kostroma City at this point in its orbit. A quadrant of Daniel's display showed an enlarged view of the scene below. Dawn had broken over the capital, but fires blazed beneath trails of smoke. Explosions flashed in the Floating Harbor.
A warship on the surface fired plasma cannon in quick, nervous flickers. So far as Daniel knew there was no real enemy for the bolts to engage.
"Yes," Daniel said. "I regret that too."
If he'd been wishing for things, he'd have started some distance beyond a chance to transfer missiles between ships. That was an all-day job and they didn't have the heavy equipment to carry it out besides. He knew, though, that Baylor was mourning the loss of what were "his babies" in every sense but the biological.
Baylor gave him a faint, thankful smile. "I guess worse things happen in wartime, sir," he said. He reached for the commo key as he added, "I'll put Massimo in charge at the tubes. She's a good man. I got a good team."
Message traffic was passing from the Bremse to the ground at an increasing level of frustration, and from the ground to the Bremse with frequent contradictions caused by a complete collapse of the civilian communications net. Since the Alliance forces hadn't yet built an alternative net, commo was unit to unit rather than through a multilateral system which could analyze the data from all points simultaneously.
Locking bolts withdrew with a clang. The cutter spurted clear of the hold. The Princess Cecile shuddered in reaction. Bolts rang again to reseal the corvette.
Daniel wondered if the confusion in Kostroma City was a result of something Adele had done but hadn't bothered to mention, or if it was a chance result of the burgeoning disaster. People talked about the fog of war, but the truth was a much harsher thing. In war a fire swept across all sources of information. Equipment failed and humans, trying to balance dozens of competing crises, lost them all in crashing shards.
"I thought you'd be handling the Attack Board, sir," Baylor said. His hands were spread across the virtual keyboard. He faced the display with an expression as solidly determined as the nose of one of his beloved torpedoes.
Daniel looked at him. The missileer was setting up course data based on possible locations of target and tube. The courses would have to be refined when it came time to actually launch, but having a setup in the computer made that simpler by a matter of seconds or even minutes.
"If shooting starts, chief," Daniel said, "I'm going to have my hands full with the ship. If things go better than I expect, we'll just wait here for the cutter to return."
A particularly bright flash lit Daniel's display. When he turned to view the image directly the Floating Harbor was completely shrouded by steam. The fusion bottle of one of the moored vessels had failed catastrophically.
"They didn't do so bad, did they, sir?" Baylor said with a wistful smile, looking at the display over Daniel's shoulder. "My b— Our missiles from the Aglaia, I mean."
"No, chief," Daniel said. "They taught some wogs what it means to go up against Cinnabar."
He said the words to console the missileer, but as they came out Daniel felt his own pulse surge. It was childish and for that matter uncivilized to feel this sort of murderous patriotism. That didn't make the reaction any the less real.
The Aglaia's missiles were of the twin thruster design with dual antimatter conversion systems. They were the only type in first-line use in either of the major navies.
Kostroma had purchased single-thruster missiles to equip its warships. These were much cheaper, since the High Drive was the system's only expensive component. Guidance was loaded before launch. Complex sensors and terminal guidance equipment would have been a waste of money due to the high velocities involved and the fact that missiles were ballistic at normal engagement ranges.
The Princess Cecile's missiles were the same size and would reach the same velocities as those of the Aglaia—or the Bremse—but they did so at a leisurely rate by comparison. This was a particular handicap at short ranges; and if it came to a fight with the Alliance cruiser, it would be very short ranges indeed by the standards of interstellar warships.
"What do you think our Alliance friend has to send us, chief?" Daniel asked. "If it comes to that."
Baylor wrinkled his nose. "Four tubes only," he said. "The fire director's the same type they fit in the Krestovik class with twice the tubes, though, so they can keep rounds coming at ten-second intervals as long as there's anything in the magazines."
He spread his small, muscular right hand above his keyboard without touching it. "The magazines, though, that's a guess, but carrying a full defensive constellation I'd guess thirty-six missiles. Maybe thirty-eight if their missileer knows his business, and maybe only twenty if some dickhead with a lot of braid thinks, `They're not coming to fight, so let's use the stowage for something useful like fancy rations.' "
Baylor cleared his throat in embarrassment. "Not meaning to insult you, sir," he added.
"I wouldn't feel insulted even if I had a lot of braid, chief," Daniel said. "Which I most certainly do not."
"Thing is, sir," Baylor said, "they'll be high-acceleration types and ours aren't. There's no getting around that."
"Bremse to unidentified vessel at thirty-nine thousand kilometers!" the communicator snarled. The Alliance cruiser had noticed the cutter at last. Too bad, but Daniel had expected it. "Cut power and identify yourself immediately or we'll destroy you. I repeat, identify yourself immediately! Bremse out!"
Daniel touched a console button whose protective cage he'd flipped back even before the Princess Cecile reached orbit. The vessel's general alarm, sets of three treble pulses, sounded in all compartments.
He lifted his finger from the button and said over the communicator, "General quarters. Prepare for action."
To Baylor Daniel added, "Well, chief, let's see what we can do with the present equipment, shall we?"
Covering a mind full of doubt with a tight smirk, Daniel stroked the firing toggle to launch the corvette's first pair of missiles.
"—repeat, identify yourself immediately or we'll destroy you!" said the voice from the communicator. "Bremse out!"
"You'll do wonders," Woetjans muttered reflectively, glaring at the cutter's minimal display. "Put us in the shadow of one of the mines they been dropping, Lamsoe. If you can, anyhow. I'd say put the command node between us, but we're too fucking far."
Here aboard the cutter, Adele had no feeling whatever for distances or even directions. Because of space restrictions the Plot-Position Indicator was projected on a concave combiner lens in front of Lamsoe, the pilot, rather than as three real dimensions in the air above the console. Adele wasn't even sure whether the cutter was one of the points on the curved display or if they were instead the center of the display's lower horizon.
She turned to Dasi, strapped into the fold-down seat beside her, and said, "Will they fire at us?" It didn't occur to her until after she spoke that the sailor might think she was frightened.
Dasi shrugged, though the loose-fitting atmosphere suit barely quivered. "They can try, but I don't guess they're going to do much across forty thousand miles. You know how plasma spreads."
The cutter had a single thruster. The deck quivered as the nozzle gimbaled around. When the thruster fired at its new heading Adele found herself hanging from the strap as the bulkhead tried to accelerate away from her. The plasma flow's high-frequency vibration made dust shimmer in the air.
Adele tried to settle herself. That was impossible while wearing an atmosphere suit. The suits were meant for transfer in vacuum, not work. They were awkward, uncomfortable constructions of rubberized fabric with stiffening hoops. One size fit all—in Adele's case, fit very badly. The gauntlets separately clamped to the cuffs came in three sizes, though for Adele a pair marked SMALL wasn't.
The helmets were plastic castings shaped like the bottoms of test tubes, clear on the front and with round lenses like miniature portholes on either side. Aboard the cutter the Cinnabars wore the helmets open on the hinge at the back of the neck. They had no communication equipment, nor was the plastic clear enough for piloting a spacecraft.
"Think we're worth a missile?" Barnes wondered aloud. Neither of the men seemed concerned, either by the situation or by Adele's state of mind.
"A little tub like this?" Dasi scoffed. "No! Though she handles pretty good, don't she?"
"The captain's launching," Woetjans said. Adele couldn't place the emotion she heard in the petty officer's voice. "He's taking the cruiser away from us, I guess."
"God have mercy!" Lamsoe muttered over the plasma whine. "That big bastard'll eat them alive."
His fingers moved on his control keys. The flow cut abruptly. The thruster pivoted again, then resumed firing. In a tone of professional detachment Lamsoe went on, "One minute thirty to docking."
All four sailors stared at the display. Woetjans stood beside the control console, gripping attachments because she wasn't strapped in. Barnes and Dasi, facing one another in jump seats, leaned forward for a better view.
Adele could see the display past the pilot's shoulder, but it meant absolutely nothing to her. The full-sized console aboard the Princess Cecile had been simple to understand. When three dimensions were flattened to two, they became an alien world. It horrified her to realize that Barnes and Dasi, who (not to be unkind) between them might approximately equal her intelligence, watched with full appreciation the data which passed before her in a cascade of gibberish.
"Missed!" Dasi said. "Shit, they weren't even close!"
Barnes shook his close-cropped head in dismay. "Well, the captain's young," he said. "Not everybody's born to be an attack officer."
Woetjans turned toward them in fury. "How about shutting the fuck up, will you?" she said. "Did you ever think he just spit a couple missiles out in a hurry because our asses was in a sling?"
"That Alliance bastard didn't even maneuver," Dasi said in disappointment. "Missed 'em clean, and there's only ten missiles aboard."
"Eight now," Barnes agreed sadly.
Adele felt cold. If Woetjans was correct, it was an even more damning indictment of Lt. Daniel Leary that he hadn't used the available time to set up his initial attack on the cruiser/minelayer. She couldn't believe that: she'd watched Daniel updating his launch sequence throughout the time they were on the bridge together.
No, Daniel wasn't slack. He just wasn't very good at that part of his job. He'd told her that his Uncle Stacey hadn't been a fighting officer for all his courage and skill in other aspects of spacefaring. Apparently Daniel had that part of the Bergen heritage as well.
It was unfortunate that they were all learning this in the middle of a battle. Though perhaps that didn't matter. The sailors obviously thought the battle was unwinnable to begin with.
"Docking!" Lamsoe warned. He lifted his hands from the controls and swung his helmet into place.
Automatic systems took control of this final portion of the journey. Adele felt the cutter rotate minusculely under the impulse of the maneuvering jets, steam rather than plasma. Even for the experts she assumed this Cinnabar crew were, the process of manual docking would be a maddening, time-consuming task.
She reached for her own helmet. The hinge was at the back of her neck so she couldn't see what she was doing. Dasi's big hand gently brushed hers away.
"Hunch a bit, mistress," the sailor said. Adele tried to obey but the edge of the helmet still grazed her forehead as it pivoted down over her head.
There was a click and a cool pressure as the helmet sealed. The oxygen bottle switched on. Simultaneously Adele felt the rasp of the cutter's docking mechanism interlocking with its mate on the command node's surface.
The sailors drifted in the weightless cabin. Heavy wrenches dangled from their belts. They couldn't carry real weapons because the programmers wouldn't open the airlock's inner hatch to an obvious threat, but burly sailors with wrenches should take command of the situation without difficulty.
Woetjans was opening the cutter's hatch. Adele tried to get up. She couldn't. Dasi—or was it Barnes?—reached down and released her safety strap.
The hatch released and pivoted inward. The gush of cabin air into vacuum would have carried Adele with it if Dasi—she was almost certain it was Dasi despite two distorting layers of faceshield—hadn't gripped her.
The node's airlock was three feet away, hard to see because of the flat lighting. Woetjans spun the wheel and pulled the lock open, using the cutter's hatch for purchase. She entered; the sailors launched themselves after her. Dasi and Barnes each held one of Adele's hands in the process, and Lamsoe clamped the outer lock shut behind them.
The chamber's interior was illuminated. Adele could tell that atmospheric pressure was building by the way the figures of her fellows filled out as air molecules began to scatter the light.
The sailors unlatched their helmets. Adele struggled with hers for a moment before Dasi did the job for her. The air was thin, frighteningly thin for a moment, but the sailors didn't seem to mind.
The hatch to the node's interior had a small window with a speaker plate directly beneath it. An eye showed through the window and the plate demanded, "What the hell are you doing here?" in a tinny voice.
"We're from the Katlinburg," Adele said in her Bryce accent. "She exploded in the harbor. Let us in."
"You don't belong here," the voice said in a mixture of anger and puzzlement.
"For God's sake, let us in!" Adele said. The Katlinburg was one of the Alliance transports; very possibly she had exploded by now. "We can discuss what we're doing here then!"
The eye vanished. For a long moment Adele was afraid that this was the end: the frightened programmers simply weren't going to let strangers into the command node.
The inner lock rang as bolts withdrew. The hatch pivoted into the station.
Four worried-looking technicians were in the node's central concourse. They were unarmed. From their dark complexions and hazel eyes they were natives of Willoughby, a world the Alliance had conquered less than five years earlier.
The technicians were probably political prisoners. At any rate the Alliance authorities obviously didn't trust them because there was also a detail of four uniformed soldiers with them on the command node.
The soldiers had submachine guns. They were pointed at the Cinnabars.
Daniel Leary sat at the command console of the Princess Cecile, as integral a part of the corvette as the sensor suite or the High Drive that responded to his touch.
He was braking at 1.8 gravities, the most strain he was willing to put on the corvette's structure. Even that was harder than he'd initially intended, since he knew the hull was modular and had been maintained by personnel with lower standards than the RCN would accept.
Daniel had been unjust to the Princess Cecile. Liftoff had proved the craft was as tight as a unit-built Cinnabar hull. Whatever else you said about Kostroma, they knew how to build starships here. The Princess Cecile would be a prized command in Cinnabar service, a handy little vessel whose crews would love her. All she needed was a once-over to make right a decade of neglect.
And of course she needed to survive to reach Cinnabar. Daniel wasn't concerned about that ultimate result now, because every thread of his being was focused on the actions that would make it possible.
Personnel shouted on the bridge and over the commo net. The crew wasn't worked up on this vessel, and because of the missing officers there was a degree of confusion that wouldn't normally have occurred with veterans like these.
A part of Daniel's mind was aware of what was going on around him, but the chaos touched only the surface. The core of him was the Princess Cecile, feeling her skin grow hotter as the Bremse lashed her with plasma cannon.
It was almost unheard of for a starship to use its secondary batteries as offensive weapons in space. Even now, though the Bremse and Princess Cecile were too close and slow for missiles to be really effective, the distance between vessels orbiting at different heights and orientations was beyond the range at which plasma cannon were a serious threat.
A sensor suite amidships degraded thirteen percent at the stroke of the Bremse's directed ions. For the moment Daniel ignored the problem. The Princess Cecile's processors could compensate for the loss. If he needed greater precision, he'd rotate a replacement suite into place.
Conformal sensors in a ship's outer hull always suffered mechanical wear when a ship was in service. Alliance cannon had done nothing that a week cruising in the solar wind from Kostroma's Type O sun wouldn't have equaled.
Daniel's braking thrust meant the Princess Cecile in effect dived toward the planet, spiraling around Kostroma in an increasingly tight orbit. As the corvette approached the surface, Kostroma and the extended volume of the Kostroman atmosphere subtended a greater portion of the Bremse's orbit.
The Princess Cecile passed into Kostroma's shadow. The Bremse's cannonfire ceased; a better commander would have ended the vain process long before. Shooting at the Princess Cecile degraded the cruiser/minelayer's own sensors and eroded the bores of weapons meant for the Bremse's defense.
Of course the Bremse's captain probably didn't think he had much to fear from the Princess Cecile's low-acceleration missiles. He might well be correct.
Chief Baylor launched a single round. Daniel's control inputs went to the Attack Board and were automatically figured into the launch commands. What the Attack Officer had to do was to calculate, with the help of his sensors and AI, where the target would be when his missile arrived.
This was a relatively simple—"relatively" being the key word—process when the vessels were at normal engagement speeds and ranges. A ship moving at a significant fraction of light speed, attacked by a missile at its terminal velocity of .6 c, had no time to maneuver.
Since the missile's course was based on sensor data that was several minutes old, the chances were very high that the target had done something in the interim that would cause the attack to fail. You didn't have to worry about the target reacting to your missile, however, except with point-blank slugs of ions in an attempt to decelerate the projectile by converting its substance to gas and forward thrust.
At these cislunar ranges, the target could see a missile in realtime from the instant of launch. The Princess Cecile's low-acceleration weapons weren't a serious threat to the Bremse unless the cruiser/minelayer's entire bridge crew was asleep; even then the automatic avoidance system, meant for maneuvering in the constricted space over a major harbor, would probably get them out of the way.
The Bremse's missiles, though . . .
"Blue vessel is launching!" Dorfman said. Daniel was already aware of the dot separating from the icon highlighted blue, the traditional hostile designator in Cinnabar service. "Defensive batteries are live!"
Daniel released a control key, reducing the Princess Cecile's thrust by a fraction. Three more dots appeared at ten-second intervals, the shortest period at which missiles could be launched without the exhaust of preceding weapons damaging those that followed.
The missiles accelerated at a full twelve gees, but the corvette would be a thousand miles away when they reached the calculated impact point. The Princess Cecile handled beautifully, and with Daniel Leary at her controls she was safe until she was too close to Kostroma to continue maneuvering.
The trick wasn't merely to stay alive till then, however. Daniel was trying to pilot two vessels, his own and the Bremse. He was dragging the cruiser/minelayer behind him like a dog on a leash. If the corvette was here, the Alliance captain would strive to put his vessel there.
The process would continue in infinite sequence until there was a point Daniel had calculated before the Princess Cecile lifted from Kostroma; or until the Princess Cecile and her Cinnabar crew disintegrated in a gush of molten metal because her young captain had cut things a little too close.
"You're not authorized to be here," said the older female soldier who seemed to be in charge of the guard detail. "This place is top security!"
"We were just lifting off to launch a message cell," Adele said. "The ship blew up and damaged us, so we had to dock here. We need to contact the Bremse so they can send down aid to the surface."
She picked at the cuffs of her gauntlets. She couldn't see them clearly because of the way the sleeve ballooned, and she hadn't paid any attention to the method of closure when Woetjans sealed them for her.
"Somebody help me off with these damned gloves," Adele said peevishly. She held her hands out to Dasi, ignoring the guns pointed at her and her fellows. The node was weightless, but everyone aboard it was floating within thirty degrees of the hatch's alignment.
"How did you get here?" asked a technician; a man in his sixties, at least twice the age of the other Willoughbies. "Only the supply vessels are supposed to be able to dock without being destroyed by the defenses."
Willoughby was a center of electronic manufacturing and had provided a haven for disaffected Alliance citizens. The latter had been both a thorn in the side of Guarantor Porra and the key to the recent Alliance capture of the planet: feigned refugees had subverted Willoughby's automatic defense array when the Alliance fleet arrived.
"Of course we weren't destroyed!" Adele snapped as Dasi drew her gloves off. The sailors were keeping silent, waiting for her to tell them what to do. "We're the Katlinburg's cutter, I told you."
Another Willoughby opened her mouth to speak. The senior technician shushed her with a quick gesture.
The technicians understood that friendly or not, the cutter shouldn't have been able to approach the command node without setting off the close-in defenses mounted on wands projecting from the node's hull. These would blast a hail of faceted tungsten pellets in the direction of any object that tried to approach without the proper codes. Only the cutters bringing supplies from the Bremse should have had those codes.
Dasi removed the right gauntlet and started on the other. The Bremse sent not only supplies but changes of guard: Adele could see that by the relatively good health of the soldiers compared to the sallow puffiness of the technicians.
The cruiser/minelayer maintained gravity by constant acceleration. Its High Drive used water molecules for conversion. A ship in station above Kostroma could replenish its tanks by dipping down to the surface for an hour every few days.
The command node was a satellite with only maneuvering jets. Those aboard her would feel the effects of weightlessness within days; the technicians had been in this high-technology prison for the full two weeks since the Alliance invasion.
"Paltes, call the ship and see what the fuck we're supposed to do about this," the Alliance noncom said. "You lot—"
She waggled her submachine gun toward the Cinnabars and drifted slightly back in reaction. Unlike the sailors, the Alliance guards weren't used to weightlessness.
"—get into the airlock again till they tell us what to do. I shouldn't have let you in."
Dasi removed the other gauntlet. He was between Adele and the guards. She reached into the pouch on her equipment belt with her left hand. "All right," she said calmly to the noncom, "but you're going to be in trouble—"
As Adele's hand came clear of the pouch, she shot the noncom through the bridge of the nose. Recoil—even the pistol's slight recoil—spun Adele sideways. She fired twice more as she rotated.
The guard whose right forearm Adele had shattered with a pellet meant for his upper chest jerked the trigger. His gun pointed toward the far wall. Pellets raked a programming alcove. Faint gray smoke drifted from holes punched in the structural plastic.
Adele bounced off the airlock. She turned desperately to see what was happening. Barnes and Dasi had the uninjured guard between them; Dasi was bending the man's gun arm over his knee to break it. Woetjans held the guard who'd fired by the throat with one hand as she hit him an unnecessary second time with the wrench in the other hand.
There was no need to worry about the noncom, nor for the soldier whose blood spurted one final time before his heart stopped for lack of fluid to pump. When a pellet hit the soft tissue of a human throat, the wound it tore looked more like a bomb crater.
Adele returned the pistol to her tool pouch. She pushed herself carefully toward a programming station. She reached a different alcove than the one she'd intended but that didn't matter, they were all the same.
Her leg, red with the globe of body fluids she'd brushed on the way, couldn't be allowed to matter either.
The Princess Cecile's quartet of plasma cannon roared like a swarm of bees. They were four-inch high-output weapons with a hundred times the flux density of a thruster nozzle. The corvette's maneuvering jets fought to keep the vessel in alignment. Dorfman had his finger on the armament override, keeping the weapons on continuous fire even though he was burning their throats out.
There wasn't any point in saving the cannon for further use if the ship itself was a shower of meteors hitting the Kostroman atmosphere.
A space battle at these short ranges was a dance in which either party moved in conscious relation to her opponent. Computers determined the maneuvers; two battle computers given the same data would come to the same "best" result.
Daniel was poised over the controls. Before the battle started he'd directed the Princess Cecile's AI to follow an extremely complex set of parameters. The corvette continued on a ballistic course for three long seconds despite the oncoming missiles. She had to hold the setting in order to lead the Bremse to where Daniel wanted the cruiser to be.
The parameters were beyond computation to a greater than fifteen percent probability of success, but that was a much greater chance of survival than Daniel saw in any other course. Next time perhaps Fate would hand him a cruiser to hunt down some poor bastards in a second-class corvette.
He laughed, to the amazement of the other bridge personnel. An Alliance missile grazed the Princess Cecile.
The impact may not have been the missile itself but rather the ball of vaporized metal surrounding its ion-pitted head. It slapped the corvette, flexing the hull and shutting down all the vessel's electronics for a momentary self-check. The hull whipped three times more before it came to stasis, and even then nerves as trained as Daniel's could feel the tingle of harmonics which took longer to damp.
Emergency lighting went on; at least part of it did. That seemed to be an area where the Kostromans had skimped maintenance. Daniel's console came up again. A ship status display filled the main screen; the PPI had shrunk to a sidebar.
The Princess Cecile was tumbling faster than the maneuvering jets could handle. Daniel fed in thruster input more by feel than in response to his readouts.
They'd lost atmosphere and were losing more, but the leak wasn't serious and the rate was decreasing. There was severe damage to the port quarter between frames 79 and 92, but the inner hull wasn't penetrated and Daniel suspected, felt, that the outer hull might not be either. Plating had crumpled and the whipping had opened hull seams. That was where the air loss was occurring.
Domenico's emergency team had already started rerouting a severed data trunk amidships. Two ratings lugged a cannister of sealant up the bridge corridor and thrust the nozzle against a deck joint. The High Drive was running hot, but that was because the Princess Cecile was getting into the fringes of the Kostroman atmosphere. Have to make a decision soon, but first—
Daniel switched his display to the Attack Screen. The two missiles he'd launched at the start of the action were on it, heading back at terminal velocity.
Daniel had programmed the missiles to rotate three minutes into their flight, brake to stasis, and return to a target above Kostroma. The course reversal wasted fuel, but single-thruster missiles had the same conversion mass as their high-acceleration cousins and only half the rate of usage. Because of the additional distance this pair of projectiles had travelled, they were at .6 c when they crossed the point where the Bremse might have been and almost was.
Almost.
The missiles were a streak on the Bremse's sensors. They passed within a mile of the cruiser/minelayer; one of them might have been closer yet.
The missiles hit the Kostroman atmosphere and mushroomed into fireballs that ignited the sky above an entire hemisphere. The same conversion of mass and velocity into thermal energy would have turned the Bremse into a ball of gas.
If.
Baylor's console was still out. The missileer had an access plate off and was shouting into a communicator he'd laid on the floor to free his hands as he worked. There was only one missile left in the corvette's magazines, so the temporary lack of an Attack Officer wasn't serious.
Dorfman still had his electronics, but the gunner's mate had already burned out his guntubes. That section of Daniel's status display was red and pulsing, warning of catastrophic failure if the weapons were used again.
Dorfman stabbed his keyboard with blunt fingers, removing the software interlocks that would prevent the guns from firing. A plasma cannon exploding when its barrel split would do damage to the ship, but not as much damage as a hit by an Alliance missile.
In their present condition the four guns would provide very little protection, but you do what you can. Everyone aboard the Princess Cecile was pulling his weight in the best tradition of the RCN.
Daniel replaced his Attack Screen with the Plot Position Indicator. The near misses had rattled the Bremse's captain: the Alliance vessel was accelerating at over two gravities on a course skewed from any she'd been following to that point.
In a minute or two the Alliance commander would realize those missiles had been a one-off chance which the Princess Cecile couldn't repeat. The cruiser/minelayer would turn onto a following course and run down a quarry which could no longer use the planet as a shield.
Daniel rotated the corvette and increased thrust, climbing up from Kostroma's gravity well. They'd head out of the system for as long as they could. He felt his cheeks sag under acceleration. A fifteen percent chance of success had really been pretty good, given the odds he and his crew were facing.
They had no chance at all now.
Adele ran the system architecture a third time, searching for the lockout that protected the Bremse from its own mines. She was sure that the safety device was a separate chip, not software within the main command and control unit.
She was sure of that, but she couldn't find any place within the design for the chip to reside. And the lockout wasn't in the software either!
The living guards were bound with wire and floating in the middle of the concourse. One had bandages on his arm and forehead; the other's broken limb was taped to his chest. The technicians from Willoughby were unharmed but as silent as the two drifting corpses.
The four Cinnabar sailors clustered around a programming alcove which they'd set to display the planetary environs. Adele glanced toward them out of frustration. She was doing something wrong. She hadn't been sure she could remove the lockout, but she hadn't expected any difficulty in locating it.
Woetjans looked grim in stark contrast to her ready cheerfulness as the cutter approached the control node. All the sailors looked grim.
"Mistress?" the petty officer said as she caught Adele's eye. "Is there anything we can do to help Mr. Leary? They're going for the high jump if we don't."
"If you can find the damned lockout chip that prevents the mines from engaging the ship that laid them, then we can do something," Adele said in a voice so savage that she wouldn't have recognized it herself.
"Mistress?" said the eldest of the programmers. "That's part of the sensor receiver, not the control system. It's in the third chassis slot and has a blue band across it."
"Where?" said Woetjans.
Another programmer turned to the console beside him. "This one!" he said.
The cover panel had quick-release fittings. The programmer was fumbling with them when Lamsoe, Barnes and Dasi arrived together. The sailors brushed him out of the way with as little concern as Woetjans showed for the floating corpse with which she collided on her way to the unit.
Lamsoe stuck his prybar beneath the edge of the cover. He twisted. The plate lifted enough for Barnes and Dasi to reach under it. The plate flew up, accompanied by fragments of broken fasteners.
Adele checked her own work. If the lockout was eliminated, she shouldn't have to do anything more. But because she was who she was, Adele entered the main database for a schematic of the sensor control system.
Woetjans reached over the shoulders of her subordinates. Her hand came up with a component from which the locking screws dangled, along with bits of chassis.
A relay clicked somewhere within Adele's console. Two icons vanished—one minusculely before the second—on the display the sailors had been watching.
Adele wouldn't have been sure what had happened if Woetjans and the others hadn't begun to cheer.
Daniel's first thought was that a fault in the system caused the change in the Plot Position Indicator. It was too good to be true.
He still switched to a direct imagery of the cruiser/minelayer and scrolled back five seconds before the event. There wasn't a great deal he could do that was more useful, after all.
The Bremse was a blunt-nosed cylinder of eighteen thousand tons or so loaded. Her present attitude toward the Princess Cecile was three-quarters on, so foreshortening made her look tubby. Had he wished Daniel could have rotated the image on his display to show the Alliance vessel's full 780-foot length, but he didn't need a schematic.
At the five-second mark the cruiser/minelayer expanded on a line intersecting the vessel's long axis. A sleet of atomic nuclei had just ripped through her at light speed.
Plasma weapons weren't effective against starships because the bolts lost definition in the vastness of astronomical distance. A charge that could be safely generated on one vessel was unlikely to harm a similar ship across tens of thousands of miles.
A mine was under no such restriction as to the size of the charge. Its external structure only had to survive the first microsecond of the thermonuclear explosion in its heart so that its magnetic lens could direct the force of the blast toward the target.
In practice, lens efficiency was on the order of sixty percent. Sixty percent of a thee-kiloton explosion, even attenuated somewhat by distance, was enough to gut a dreadnought.
It opened the Bremse like a bullet through a melon. The forty or so mines still undeployed in the cruiser/minelayer's hold went off in a series of low-order explosions that turned the wreck into a gas cloud, but that was an unnecessary refinement.
Daniel cut thrust to one gravity, then hit the alert button. "All hands!" he said. "All hands! The Bremse has blown up! I repeat, the cruiser chasing us is gone!"
He thought for a moment about the five hundred human lives lost with the starship. There was no triumph in the thought, but there was no pity either. They'd died in the service of their state as Daniel Leary expected someday to die in the service of Cinnabar. So be it.
Dorfman had stood to hug the rating who held the sealant cannister. Baylor's console was live again, but the missileer gaped instead at Daniel's display. By now the image was only a haze that would soon be indistinguishable from any other volume of cislunar space. Voices elsewhere cheered, but some shouted doubtful questions. Not everybody aboard the Princess Cecile could believe they were alive and likely to remain that way for the immediate future.
Come to think, if there was a heaven it would be a lot like this. At least for Daniel Leary . . .
Daniel switched back to the PPI. For what seemed forever he'd been focused on the relative location of three points: Kostroma, the Princess Cecile, and the Bremse pursuing her. The intricate dance had ended and Daniel's mind was suddenly as clean as that of a baby starting a new life. Now he had to bring the corvette into orbit, ideally in close alignment with the command node so that the personnel who'd saved his life could return to the Princess Cecile.
Domenico entered the bridge. He looked wary and exceptionally calm. He threw Daniel a salute that proved not all combat sailors were slack about ceremony and said, "Chief of Rig reporting for orders, sir!"
It was his way of asking, very professionally, if the emergency was over.
"Yes, it's real, Domenico," Daniel said. "Mind, let's not have a bulkhead blow out now that we think we're safe. We'll pick up Ms. Mundy's detachment, then see what shape the ship's in and—"
Domenico's face went stiff. "Sir, check your display!" he said.
Daniel turned. There were three new dots just within the present fifteen-light-second boundary of the PPI. As he watched, two more dots appeared. They were starships dropping out of sponge space and proceeding the remainder of the way toward Kostroma at maximum braking effort.
Daniel touched the attention signal and called, "General quarters!"
Four more dots joined the five recently added to the display. The nine ships couldn't be said to be in tight formation, but for vessels which had just left sponge space they were in remarkably good order. The admiral in charge must be pleased with her subordinates.
Because there was no question at all that this was a naval squadron, not some sort of merchant argosy returning to Kostroma.
The repair crews were back at work; apart from them, there was a hush over the Princess Cecile. Domenico leaned over Daniel's shoulder to peer more closely at the display. "Does that read Tee-Ay-En One-Four-One-Eight?" he asked.
The Princess Cecile's PPI would assign an all-numerical designator to an icon if the object didn't provide one. Starships normally broadcast an alpha-numerical identification signal, however, the pennant number for naval vessels and a similar designator for merchantmen.
Daniel nodded. "Yes," he said. TAN1418 didn't mean anything to him.
"That's the Rene Descartes!" the bosun cried. "By Vishnu's dong, sir, I served on the old bitch for three years, I did! She was guardship over Harbor Three when we left Cinnabar, I swear to God!"
Daniel started to say, "Are you sure?" but caught the words just before they made him sound like a fool. He didn't know what else to say. Except—
He chimed for attention and announced, "All hands. I believe the vessels inbound are an RCN squadron, which will be very welcome. Continue repair work until further notice, but don't forget where your action stations are."
Daniel almost rang off, but a further thought struck him. "And fellow citizens?" he said. "Thank you. Your performance has been to the highest standards of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy."
There were cheers all over the ship. Daniel was choking. He knew he'd be replaced on the Princess Cecile as soon as the regular navy arrived, and he might never command another ship. But no captain, ever, would have a better crew than he did!
The icons on the PPI continued to reform as the newcomers approached Kostroma. The last four were probably transports: they remained two light-seconds behind the leaders. The five warships were arrayed flower-fashion with the battleship in the center.
They'd noticed the Princess Cecile as well. Because Dorfman still had a gunnery display on his console, the interrogatory was routed to Daniel: "RCS Vessel Rene Descartes, Captain Lairden commanding, carrying the flag of Rear Admiral Ingreit. Vessel signaling Are-Em Six-Nine-Three, please identify yourself. Over."
It took Daniel an instant to realize that he was RM693. He'd never had occasion to check the Princess Cecile's pennant number.
He took a deep breath, then hit the general communicator switch as well as the intership hailing channel. What he was about to do was worthless braggadocio that was bound to irritate the senior officers on the other end of the line.
But he was going to do it anyway. He was a Leary of Bantry; and the crew, still for the moment his crew, would appreciate it.
"This is RCS Princess Cecile," he said, "Lieutenant Daniel Leary commanding. You are authorized to orbit within our automatic defense array."
He cleared his throat and went on, "Allow me to say that your squadron is a welcome addition to the RCN forces on station here. You'll be very useful in helping mop up the remaining unpleasantness on the ground. Princess Cecile out."
There was as much laughter as cheering in the corvette's compartments this time. "By Vishnu!" the bosun said in delight. "By Vishnu, sir!"
Daniel smiled faintly. He could imagine what Admiral Ingreit would say when he heard the message. On the other hand, he could imagine what Speaker Corder Leary might have said in similar circumstances. In that, at least, father and son were more alike than different.
Daniel switched to the channel dedicated to communication between the Princess Cecile and Adele's detachment. He'd better inform the command node promptly, or Admiral Ingreit was going to find his squadron in range of a hostile and demonstrably lethal defensive constellation.