Death's Bright Day: Chapter Eleven

Newtown on Peltry

    Adele stared at the text from Guy Mignouri, the 5th Bureau Resident in Newtown, for some seconds longer than the words themselves required: it is not suitable to meet now. i will inform you further in a few days.

    Adele cued the link to Tovera, who sat opposite her on the striker’s seat of the signals console. “Tovera, we’re going visiting. It’s possible this will involve forced entry.”

    “Should I bring something bulkier than the usual?” Tovera said.

    “No, it’s likely to be very short range if it comes to that,” said Adele. Neither she nor Tovera was skilled with long arms, and Tovera’s miniature sub-machine gun had always proven as satisfactory as one throwing heavier slugs could have been. “But now that I’ve thought about it, I should have backup. Break. Captain Vesey, this is Mundy.”

    Adele did not refer to herself as “Signals” or “Signals Officer Mundy” as she might have done at other times when she was being formal. Her present request had nothing to do with her RCN duties.

    “Go ahead, Mundy,” Vesey said. Though Vesey was in command of the Princess Cecile during Daniel’s absence, she chose to remain at her normal duty station in the Battle Direction Center in the stern.

    “I’m going to visit associates,” Adele said. “They didn’t respond as I expected when I informed them of my presence. It’s possible that there’s something wrong. I would like a squad to back me up at a short distance. Six should be enough. I hope to wave them off after the door is opened to me normally.”

    “Do you want Woetjans to lead?” Vesey said. “And what sort of tools? Over.”

    “I’ll have Hale to lead if you don’t mind,” Adele said, adding the junior midshipman and sending her the early part of the call. “She’s here at the navigation console at the moment. Woetjans is checking the A Ring antennas, and I don’t see that I need her for this.”

    That was true, but it was also true that Woetjans tended to act quickly and with great force, as a bosun was required to do. Hale was cool in a crisis, but she was much less likely to get physical.

    “And I don’t want to march through the city like an assault force,” Adele said. “I don’t want any weapons visible. I truly don’t expect serious violence.”

    “We’ve got collapsible handcarts in a locker,” Vesey said. “One of them will hold guns politely, over.”

    Hale was already alerting spacers for the duty, pinging them individually instead of using the general push. She was the kind of officer which the RCN needed.

    “That will be very satisfactory,” Adele said, rising to her feet. “I’ll inform you of the results on my return. Over, that is out.”

    “Sun is opening the arms locker,” Hale said. Sun was the gunner’s mate — the Sissie didn’t rate a Gunner — and doubled as armorer. “And I told Evans to bring a long-handled maul. That will fit in the cart also. We’ll meet the squad in the entry hold.”

    Evans was a short, broad Power Room technician who was good-natured and extremely strong. Almost as strong as he was stupid, Adele would guess.

    “There shouldn’t be any shooting,” Adele said as she strode quickly to the down companionway. “If there is, Tovera and I will start it.”

    Unless they’ve shot both of us in the head, Adele thought. She couldn’t help being precise, but at least she had learned not to say everything she was thinking. At that, she could imagine Tovera shooting back after being killed the way a headless chicken ran about.

    Barnes was still closing his boots as he stumbled into the boarding hold a moment after Adele. Dasi, his partner and fellow bosun’s mate, was helping Sun shift two sub-machine guns, two stocked impellers, and a carbine — Hale’s weapon of choice — into the cart which Evans and Bledsoe had assembled. The maul was already there.

    It was a remarkable performance. Aloud Adele said, “It makes me proud to be a Sissie.” Or at least it would have if she hadn’t already been proud.

    “Can you tell us what to expect, mistress?” Hale said. Other spacers were looking toward the group from hatchways and the quay; that was inevitable and not a problem.

    “What I’m afraid of,” Adele said, “though I don’t expect it, is that agents of the 5th Bureau have taken over the office of my associates.”

    She didn’t bother explaining that her associate was also a 5th Bureau agent. The details didn’t matter to the Sissies; all they needed was to be told the situation they might be facing.

    “It’s only three blocks,” Adele added. “And I hope just to knock on the door and be admitted. If you stay fifty feet behind me, you’ll be close enough to call if I need you.”

    Adele was wearing a civilian suit in light green, cut much the same as a set of utilities. Tovera’s suit was on the tan side of cream; her attaché case was brown and looked like leather even from quite nearby. The material was actually an expensive composite and would stop anything short of a slug from a stocked impeller.

    The ground floors of the buildings facing the harbor were ship chandleries and bars, while the upper stories were spacer’s lodgings, brothels, and pawn shops. The next block inland was inexpensive shops below civilian apartments. By the third block back from the water, the buildings were duplexes and private residences, many of them with a ground vehicle parked on gated driveways.

    The Residence looked like a single-family residence — and probably was that as well as containing communications equipment. The walls were of dark blue brick, fired from a local clay, and the curtained windows seemed normal unless you recognized the frames as being much wider than the outer glass alone would have required.

    Tovera pushed the button on the call plate and said, “Mistress Simmons and her secretary to see Master Mignouri.” When she got no response, she rapped sharply on the panel — and still got no response.

    Adele was holding her data unit. She keyed the Execute button to signal the door’s electronic latch. There was an internal clunk and the panel swung open. It was five centimeters thick and made of armor plate.

    Both Adele and Tovera had their weapons out, but beyond was only a second door, this one opening inward. It had a latch but no visible lock. The handle rotated easily, but the panel rattled against a bolt on the other side when Tovera shoved against it.

    Adele turned and called, “Evans!” The squad of spacers was only ten feet back instead of fifty, but there hadn’t been much traffic on the street — and anyway, it didn’t matter.

    Hale had removed the tarpaulin covering the handcart, but Evans didn’t bother to reach in for his maul. He rushed to the door, lowered his shoulder, and slammed into it. The panel broke lengthwise in the middle.

    The halves dangled — one side by the hinges and the other by the bolt near the top edge of the panel. Evans’ mindless straight-ahead smash had been the best way to deal with the problem, which Adele found disturbing.

    A cabinet had been slid against the inside of the door, but Evans rolled it back — it was on casters — in the same rush that had taken him through the door panel. Beyond was a reception room with chairs against the walls and a small table holding a vase of flowers probably picked in the front garden. A woman leaned on the table, weeping into her hands.

    “Don’t shoot!” Adele shouted as Barnes and Dasi rushed past her brandishing weapons. Evans was picking himself up from the floor when the cabinet — a musical instrument, Adele now saw — rolled back.

    Tovera took the weeping woman by the hair and shouted, “Who else is in the house?” while looking up the staircase. The woman continued to sob.

    “Bledsoe, with me!” Hale said and started up the stairs, holding her carbine forward in both hands. The tech following her had one of the sub-machine guns.

    “Don’t shoot my husband!” said the woman who had been crying, the first intelligible words she had spoken.

    “Hold up, Hale!” Adele said. “Tovera, let her go.”

    Tovera released the woman’s hair and stepped against the wall. She kept her weapon raised, but she had stopped pointing the muzzle at the stairs when Hale started up.

    “Who are you, mistress?” Adele said. “And who is your husband?”

    “I’m Yvette Mignouri,” the woman said. She closed her eyes and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She was younger than Adele had guessed — probably mid twenties — and would be attractive after she washed her face and calmed down. “My husband is Guy Mignouri. Please, why have you attacked us? There’s nothing here to steal!”

    “Call your husband down,” Adele said. “Tell him not to carry a weapon.”

    “He can’t come!” Yvette cried. “He can’t move! He’s had a stroke! Please leave us alone!”

    Ah!

    “I’ll check!” said Tovera as she slipped past the spacers on the stairs. The other spacers were backing to the nearest wall and pointing their guns upward — with the exception of Evans, who didn’t have a weapon. He was scratching his crotch with a puzzled look.

    “I was directed to call on Guy Mignouri, the 5th Bureau Resident in Newtown,” Adele said. “When I didn’t get a satisfactory reply to my queries, I came to view the situation for myself. Why didn’t you report that your husband was incapacitated?”

    “He’s here all right,” Tovera called from the stairhead. “Hooked up to what I’d call a first aid machine. It seems to be keeping him alive, but he’s not going to get better any time soon. If he ever does.”

    “Guy will get well!” Yvette said with a quaver that suggested she might be about to resume crying. “He’ll be removed if they learn and this is his first field posting. He’ll never get another if he’s removed now!”

    He can’t do his job so he has to be removed, Adele thought. She didn’t say that out loud. She had learned long before Mistress Sand recruited her that other people didn’t see the obvious as clearly as she did.

    “Where’s the station?” Adele said aloud.

    “In the basement, but the files are all locked,” Yvette said. “I have the key to the communications console, though.”

    “Thank you,” Adele said. The electronic files wouldn’t have been a problem even if Grozhinski hadn’t given her the keys, but there was no reason to tell the wife that. “Hale, I’ll take a look at the equipment. Then I’ll probably have you stay here while I return to the Sissie and discuss the matter with Daniel. Oh, and I’ll have an ambulance sent here to pick up Mignouri. Mistress Mignouri, you’d better pack a case. Whether you go with your husband or not, you can’t stay here any longer.”

    “Right, mistress,” Hale said. She braced to attention unconsciously.

    “You can’t walk in here and do that!” said Yvette.

    “Mistress,” said Lady Mundy, speaking with the icy certainty that her mother would have displayed in similar circumstances. “I am here at the behest of your husband’s superior’s highest superior. You have nothing to say to me but ‘Yes sir!’ And if you’re wise, you might add, ‘And thank you for not shooting me for treason, sir.'”

    Yvette’s mouth fell open.

    Tovera had opened the door under the stairs. Adele strode to it.

    Behind her Evans said plaintively, “Bledsoe, are we supposed to shoot this lady?”

    “Good evening, gentlemen,” Daniel said, speaking clearly and without the need of amplification to be heard by his audience of the forty-odd officers and non-coms. “I am Captain Leary. The Minister of War has put me in command of the Nabis Contingent of the Forces of the Tarbell Stars.”

    Daniel had changed into clean utilities with RCN rank tabs and his saucer hat for this introduction. It was the garb he would have worn on the bridge of the Princess Cecile when she was in RCN service, though on larger ships officers were expected to be in 2nd Class uniforms.

    All the officers before him were men, which was the usual case in the military on planets at such a distance from the centers of civilization. Gender discrimination wasn’t unheard of even on lesser worlds in the Cinnabar and Alliance spheres. It was one more excuse for residents of Cinnabar and the core worlds of the Alliance to consider their subjects from the fringes to be higher animals rather than real human beings.

    “Minister Robin put me in charge because he wants the Nabis Contingent raised to the level of the RCN,” Daniel said, keeping his tone informal. His audience had been nervous at the start, but there was nothing in his delivery to worry them further. “That’s going to be a change, as some of you have already learned.”

    He smiled gently as he looked across his ranked audience. A dozen of those facing him were not in full uniform, and one was wearing pajamas. Further, some were the worse for drink. They hadn’t all been on duty at the time Daniel called the meeting; but most had, or should have been.

    “Now, a spacer is a spacer,” Daniel said. “There’s good ones and bad ones, but the RCN isn’t great because our crews come from Cinnabar — which mostly they don’t. What makes a military force great is the quality of its officers, commissioned and warrant both. That means you.”

    He smiled again. This time his expression wasn’t so friendly.

    “You’re going to come up to RCN standards,” Daniel said. “Then you and I together are going to turn the Nabis Contingent into the finest fighting force in the Tarbell Stars.”

    Only two of the commissioned officers and half a dozen of the non-coms — warrant officers and sergeants depending on the service — had been at their duty stations or in their official residences. The spacers’ ground billets and the Regiment’s barracks were filthy.

    The reason the personnel were here facing Daniel was that Cory had located them using a console on the Princess Cecile. Adele had apparently connected the databases and communications networks in Newtown — and probably throughout Peltry — to the Sissie. Knowing that wouldn’t have helped Daniel himself very much, but to Adele’s protégés it was as good as a street map to the missing officers. Teams of military police backed by two or three Sissies each had brought the officers to the parade square between the Nabis barracks and the Katchaturian’s berth.

    Angry bluster probably wouldn’t have gotten Nabis citizens very far with military police, none of whom were from that until-recently independent planet. It got nowhere at all with the Sissies, nor did any claimed rank that wasn’t in the RCN.

    “You’re going to train…” said Daniel, raising his voice slightly to override the sudden buzz of voices. “By performing as common spacers under officers of the RCN. On Cinnabar, RCN spacer is a respected position. That’s because every citizen knows that the RCN is a collection of the best.”

    Vesey and Major Berners, the Minister’s representative, stood to Daniel’s left. Woetjans was on his right, but a pace back out of the bosun’s own sense of decorum.

    Hogg stood at the side of the square along with common spacers from the Sissie and the Katchaturian; both ships were moored in the same slip. Hogg had wanted to be closer to Daniel, but the whole point of this address was to create a dichotomy between the military and civilians.

    The best way to weld the two crews into a single fighting force was to give them third parties on whom they both could look down: mere civilians. Daniel wasn’t a philosopher. He didn’t try to reform human nature, he just used whatever aspects he could when they helped him toward a goal.

    “Now, you’re going to train as hard as you need to come up to RCN standards,” Daniel said. “It’s not going to be a picnic. You’ll take orders from whoever your officers — my officers — put in charge of you, and you’ll learn to jump when you do it. That means –”

    “How dare you?” said a man as he pushed his way forward from the third row. “How dare you, you Cinnabar ponce!”

    “You’re Lieutenant Feilson, I believe,” Daniel said pleasantly. He adjusted his stance slightly.

    “I bloody well am!” Feilson said. He was properly dressed — but in a civilian suit of good quality rather than the uniform he should have worn as the duty officer of the Katchaturian. “I’m an officer of the Fleet and a gentleman of Pleasaunce. If you think some yob from Cinnabar is going to give me orders, you’re bloody wrong!”

    “Get back in line, Master Feilson,” Daniel said, his voice still friendly. “You’re on duty and I’m your commanding –”

    Feilson was a little taller than Daniel and in good condition; he swung for Daniel’s jaw. Daniel blocked the fist with his open left hand. Instead of counter-punching as he normally would have done, Daniel shoved the Pleasaunce officer backward.

    “An officer of the RCN doesn’t brawl with his crew,” Daniel said, trying to sound a little bored. He wanted to shake the sting out of his left hand, but he controlled the urge; Feilson had been stronger than Daniel expected. “Master Feilson, you have –”

    Feilson cocked his arm to swing again. Woetjans caught him by the neck and jerked him aside. Feilson got out a one squawk before the bosun slapped him with her right hand. She could drive nails with her callused palms.

    Feilson’s eyes glazed; Woetjans tossed him to Barnes and Dasi. They dragged the unconscious man away.

    “As I was about to say,” Daniel continued to the remainder of his audience, “Master Feilson has chosen to resign rather than become a real officer. At this moment you all have the option of resigning. I don’t know or care what your obligations to the Tarbell Stars may be. If you’re not willing to become an officer who I can respect, I want no part of you.”

    “Does she beat the crap outa us if we quit now?” said a scarred, wiry man of fifty in the front row. He wore utilities but the rank tabs were on the underside of his collar.

    Daniel didn’t recognize the fellow by name from the briefing materials, but he didn’t need to. “No, she doesn’t,” Daniel said, “but I hope you don’t quit anyway. Senior warrant officers with the balls to speak up aren’t thick on the ground around here. What’s your specialty, spacer?”

    The little man braced to attention. “Gunner Gabriel Wright, sir!” he said. “Late of the Fleet, late of a lot of other places that needed somebody who knew how to make a plasma cannon sing!”

    “At ease, Wright,” Daniel said. “Do you know how to take orders too?”

    “Yes sir,” Wright said. “Even if I think the guy giving ’em is about two brain cells short of being a moron. As I did Lieutenant Feilson, sir.”

    “I’ll hope I measure up to your standards when the time comes, Wright,” Daniel said.

    His expression sobered as he looked at his audience again.

    “Gentlemen,” Daniel said, “I’ve told you that you’ll learn to be officers under me, and that’s important. But this is your chance to learn something even better. I’m giving you a chance to be part of an elite combat unit. Until you’ve felt that, you can’t imagine what it’s like. You trust your fellows and they trust you, because you know every one of you will do his job.”

    Daniel felt his throat getting husky as it always did when he thought about this. He continued, “You’ll have trained with the Sissies and you’ll be as good as the Sissies, and there’s no better in the human universe than my Sissies.”

    Daniel swallowed. “Gentlemen, I’m going to dismiss you for an hour,” he said. “After that, you’ll assemble again and we’ll enroll you in the new Nabis Contingent, all of you who’ve got the balls.”

    He grinned and said, “Which I hope a lot of you do, because we’ve got a real fight ahead with the Upholders. Dismissed!”