Death's Bright Day: Chapter Fifteen

Benjamin

    Cory had lighted the thrusters as soon as Adele ordered the attack, but it was almost a minute before he was willing to tighten the sphincters. Adele felt the Princess Cecile lift as smoothly as if she had been on water. They rose vertically until they were comfortably above the lip of the swale which had sheltered the ship while Vesey’s party advanced.

    The message came from a laser emitter, but it was so weak and distorted that only a system as sensitive as the Sissie’s could have received and enhanced it: “Beta Six to Beta. Cazelet down, need Medicomp soonest, out.”

    Adele forwarded it as a throbbing purple text crawl at the bottom of Cory’s display. She didn’t think there was anything Cory could do about it, and maneuvering a starship at low altitude was more than most captains could have managed even without distractions. It was all Adele could do, though, so she did it.

    “Command to Barnes,” Cory said on the command channel. “We’re going to open up as soon as we get down. I want your crew in hard suits so you can lay the boarding bridge while the ground’s still hot. We’ll have a stretcher coming aboard and they won’t have suits, over.”

    “Roger, out,” said Barnes, the acting bosun while Woetjans was aboard the Katchaturian.

    “Ship, this is Command,” Cory said, keying the general push so that everyone aboard could hear him. “We’re going in hard, so brace yourselves. Command out.”

    The Princess Cecile was at a hundred feet. They had porpoised slightly when they lifted off, but Cory had held the ship steady as soon as it had built forward motion. They speeded up slightly as they slanted downward; Cory had adjusted the angle of his thrusters.

    Adele switched her display to a real-time panorama, reducing her communications duties to a sidebar. Benjamin in close-up was the same gray-dun blur it had appeared from a light-minute out. Small bushes wriggled in the Sissie’s bow wave, sometimes releasing a fluff of white seeds before the plasma exhaust incinerated them.

    The village — Beta — came in sight ahead. One of the huts was burning.

    “Ship, hang on!” Cory repeated. The ship bucked as he opened the throttles. The Sissie was beginning to slow when the outriggers touched, first toward the stern.

    There was a rending crash and one of the worst jolts Adele had ever felt aboard a starship. Automatic restraints clamped her about the waist, so that she wasn’t flung off the console. The only worse one was when a missile hit the Milton…and that wasn’t much worse.

    Sand and dust sprayed up, filling Adele’s display. The Dorsal A antenna, raised as a communications mast, carried away. The butt end rang on the Sissie’s bow on the way past, certainly hard enough to dent the steel hull.

    “Opening main hatch!” Cory warned. The dogs withdrew; their hammer-on-anvil chorus seemed muted after the landing itself.

    The ship shuddered. There was a muted shock and the hatch began to hum downward.

    Though only a few feet away from one another, Cory and Adele sat back to back. He looked at her face in his display and said, “I was afraid for a moment that the hull was so warped the hatch wouldn’t open. I don’t know what we’d have done then.”

    “We’d have found a way,” Adele said. “Anyway, the hull didn’t warp. You did a good job, a remarkable job.”

    “Six’ll have my commission for this,” Cory said. “I doubt either outrigger is watertight now, and the gods only know what damage the antenna did when it ripped loose.”

    “Daniel doesn’t care about problems that can be solved by money,” Adele said, deliberately emphasizing her personal connection with Captain Leary. “Neither should you.”

    The boarding ramp thumped into the ground. Three Sissies wearing gauntlets and the lower halves of rigging suits and one with just the suit bottom carried the boarding extension down the ramp at a dead run. The haze of dust and unquenched ions from the exhaust blurred them to ghost figures.

    In a normal landing, the harbor water dissipated heat and quenched plasma by conduction and boiling; this rocky soil would be too hot to touch for hours. Four figures with jackets wrapped over their faces were trotting out of the village. They carried a cloth-wrapped figure on a stretcher made from a tarpaulin and a pair of stocked impellers.

    Adele rose from her console. She squeezed the acting captain’s shoulder and said, “Cory, I’m going down to the hold. Handle communications, if you will.”

    “Yes ma’am!” Cory said. Over the years he had developed more skill with communications suites than anyone Adele had met besides herself. He already sounded brighter than he had while he was thinking about the damage he had done by skidding the Sissie in to save a comrade’s life.

    Adele started down the companionway. It was strange to hear her own feet on the steel treads without the sound of Tovera’s footsteps in counterpoint. It took her back to her days in the Academic Collections, though the staircases in the stacks weren’t in armored cylinders so the echoes weren’t as noticeable.

    Adele’s smile was mostly in her mind; and mostly sad. She recalled a time when she had no problems except those of poverty, which really hadn’t distressed her very much.

    She opened the hatchway into the main hold and staggered. The shock of the hot atmosphere full of ozone and other ions. It was like being slapped in the face with barbed wire.

    Barnes’ landing crew had returned to the hold as soon as they had extended the bridge. A guard was still at the hatch, using her hands to shield her eyes as a sub-machine gun swung loose from her shoulder.

    The stretcher bearers stumbled aboard. Barnes opened the internal hatch to the chamber which held one of the corvette’s Medicomps. The main hatch was already rising; when it closed, it would at least stop the influx of air poisoned by the ship’s exhaust.

    People were shouting instructions. A half-suited crewman grabbed Dasi by the arm and guided him and his crew toward the Medicomp. The stretcher bearers were blind or the next thing to it; they would probably need medical attention also. Adele followed them into the inner chamber and closed the hatch behind her.

    Crewmen who’d remained aboard tossed aside the jacket which had protected Cazelet’s face during the trip through Hell; they loaded him into the waiting Medicomp. Adele was glad to see that Madringer was one of them; he was an expert in the unit. Like any other machine, there were better and worse ways to use a Medicomp, even though it was designed for the lowest common denominator.

    Cazelet’s right leg from mid-thigh was separate on the stretcher. Madringer arranged it carefully within the Medicomp, then closed the machine and let it get on with its business.

    Adele realized that Dasi was standing beside her. The big bosun’s mate’s hands were swollen, and his red eyes looked ghastly.

    “Dasi, you’d better get some help yourself,” Adele said.

    “Yeah, I’ll do that,” Dasi said. His words were slurred; fumes and ozone had obviously damaged his mouth and tongue even worse than they had the tough outer skin of his hands. “But I want to make sure the kid’s okay first.”

    “Yes,” said Adele. “I…”

    She paused because she wasn’t sure how to continue. “Feel responsible for him,” was what she had started to say, which sounded extremely foolish when the words formed in her mind. Rene was a thoroughly competent adult who knew the risks of RCN service as well as she herself did.

    “I was greatly indebted to his grandmother on Bryce, after I was orphaned,” Adele said. “She sent him to me when his parents were arrested for treason.”

    “Madringer!” Dasi croaked. “How’s he doing?”

    “I’ll tell you when I bloody know something, won’t I?” Madringer said, bending over the display screen and adjusting the roller control beside it.

    “Hell, he’s gonna be all right,” Dasi muttered. It was more a prayer than a prediction. He looked at Adele and said, “Half a dozen of us was just going up the ramp of the Roebuck, clearing her, you know? And some wog comes out of a hut and shoots at us, from behind, you see? And then he throws his gun down — the loading tube was jammed, Sun said afterward, but he got the one slug out and it took off Cazelet’s leg neat as a snapped cable.”

 

---

 

    Under the circumstances, the villager might as easily have missed the ship itself, Adele thought. And if he’d had time to realize how badly the attackers outnumbered them, he probably wouldn’t have shot at all.

    But probabilities didn’t change reality; and eventually everyone dies. Which Adele often found a blessing to remember.

    Madringer had blond, curly hair, but he was developing a paunch and he seemed wrung out. He turned from the Medicomp and said, “Okay. He’s stable and he’s going to make it. The leg, well, it’s knitting and chances are most of the nerve cells are going to come back. Thing is, he lost two inches of bone. The ‘comp’ll rebuild it, but that’s too bloody much for perfect, you know?”

    “Right, right,” Dasi said, bobbing his head. “Yeah, that’s okay. Good job, Madringer.”

    “Yes, thank you, Madringer,” Adele said, busy with her data unit. Rather than making a voice link, she sent a text to Vesey’s face-shield: Cazelet recovering.

    That was everything Adele knew with certainty, and she didn’t intend to speculate with Vesey about longer term prospects. Vesey could discuss matters with Madringer if she wished to.

    “Wouldn’t of took much and we’d have whacked all the wogs when we saw how bad the kid was,” Dasi said, now looking into the past instead of at Adele. “The leg lying there beside him. Vesey wouldn’t let us, you know? And Tovera backed her, not that anybody wasn’t going to take Vesey’s orders.”

    “Yes,” said Adele, wondering how she felt. She didn’t seem to feel anything.

    “He’s going to be under at least six hours,” Madringer called. “Everything’s trending up, though.”

    “Thing is…” Dasi said, looking sidelong at Adele. “Tovera shot the fellow who did it. Just, you know, shot him. And then she slung her gun again. She said the Mistress would understand. Is that okay?”

    “Yes,” said Adele. “My skills don’t include bringing the dead back to life.”

    And even if they did, I’m not sure that I would want to do so this time.

    “I’m going up to the bridge,” Adele said aloud. “You’d better get your burns looked at, Dasi. You can use the unit on Level E.”

    She opened the inner hatch, wondering how well the environmental system had done in clearing the boarding hold. It was at worst a minor discomfort.

    Especially compared with walking for the rest of one’s life with a stiff, painful leg.

 

---

 

    Daniel stood on the ramp of the Katchaturian and viewed the prisoners. There were about two hundred and fifty of them, placed under guard in the open not far from Beta. Men were in one body, women and children in the other.

    On the horizon was a smudge of black smoke from the burning huts of Alpha. For the most part the wind whipped it off at an angle, but occasionally Daniel caught a bitter taste.

    He didn’t mind that. It was useful to remind the villagers exactly what their situation was.

    “Sir!” called a man in urban clothing. He stepped toward Daniel from the group of men. “I need to talk to the person in –”

    The nearest guard was Evans. There was a heavy wrench in Evans’ belt, but instead of bothering with a weapon he hit the prisoner in the belly with his bare fist. The prisoner flew backward onto the ground. He lay so flaccid that he didn’t even turn his head as he vomited.

    The prisoners were segregated by gender; minor children stood or squatted with their mothers. The male villagers edged away from the man who had been knocked down; their eyes were open and frightened.

    “You people have raided in the Tarbell Stars,” Daniel said. His voice boomed from the speakers on the Katchaturian’s spine. “You’re pirates, and hanging is the proper way to deal with pirates, right?”

    Everybody in the crowd who was old enough to understand the words began to speak; the infants bawled in response to the general outcry. A score of men and more women fell kneeling or threw themselves prostrate, but not even the ones who were blind with fear tried to rush forward. Evans had been a good teacher.

    Vesey stood to Daniel’s right; on his left was Chidsey, the captain and owner of the Mezentian Gate. The merchant captain was heavy and fortyish, with healing sores on his wrists where his bonds had cut. All the freed spacers had been spending time with the warships’ Medicomps, since the freighter herself didn’t have one.

    “I’m not going to hang you this time,” Daniel said, “but that’s for my own reasons. You deserve to be hanged. If the Tarbell Stars have to do this again, other people will be in command and I suspect they’ll take a different line.”

    There was a burst of ringing from the Princess Cecile, where Cory was overseeing the reattachment of the Dorsal A antenna. They were bolting a new mast step to the hull with an impact driver.

    The outriggers had come through better than Daniel would have expected, though Cory and Woetjans would need to check the undersides in space. He personally — as owner of the armed yacht — had gone down into the interior of both outriggers while teams resealed gapped seams with structural plastic.

    Cazelet was making a satisfactory recovery. If he’d had to wait another half hour to get into the Medicomp, the recovery would have been less satisfactory.

    Some of the villagers had begun shouting Daniel’s praises when he announced he wasn’t going to hang them. Others continued to wail, perhaps because they hadn’t been listening. Those who had lived in Alpha had lost everything; the smarter residents of Beta probably realized that their hovels were going to be next.

    “Six, we’ve got the ships rigged, over,” Pasternak reported. He was here at Beta, but he’d sent a team of techs to prepare the pirate ships at Alpha.

    Daniel started to cut the parabolic mike but instead grinned. “Blow the Roebuck at Alpha when you’re ready, Chief,” he said — to Pasternak and to the crowd below. “Hold off on these two until we’re ready to lift. Six out.”

    He expected a delay of perhaps several minutes before Pasternak executed the order. Instead a bright flash appeared at once on the horizon, swelling through the sooty blackness. The ground shock made the Sissie tremble noticeably before the dull thoomp! arrived through the air.

    Power Room techs had run the fusion bottle of the pirate ship to full pressure. At Pasternak’s signal they had vented the bottle into the Roebuck’s interior. The result was a fiery rupture, flinging molten bits of the hull in all directions.

    The villagers hadn’t stopped wailing since they began, but the sound changed tone. Chance or extremely powerful lungs brought to Daniel the cry, “We need the ships for mining!”

    “If you’d stuck to mining, you’d still have the ships!” Daniel said. “If you’d stuck to mining, you’d still have your houses! If you’d stuck to mining, you wouldn’t be hiking seventeen miles to your nearest neighbors with nothing but water and the clothes on your backs!”

    He cut the microphone with a raised finger. He said to his two companions, “You’d think they’d run out of breath. Heaven knows my throat’s dry enough and I’m not trying to shout over the wind.”

    “They’re shouting against fate, not the wind,” Vesey said. Her face looked as hard as Daniel had ever seen it. She’d been splashed with Cazelet’s blood when the bullet hit him. Dasi had slapped the tourniquet on the boy’s stump, but it had been Vesey who had the presence of mind to signal the corvette by bouncing a laser signal off the Roebuck’s hull.

    Plasma exhaust created so much radio frequency interference, especially at low altitude, that not even microwaves would have been certain of getting through. Laser communications were less affected, but they were normally very tight beam and the Princess Cecile had been moving. Spreading the signal from a reflective surface was a brilliant way to make contact — so long as you had Adele on the receiving end.

    Daniel cued the microphone again and said, “You’ll be given a meal –” from the villagers own stocks; the rest was being destroyed. “– and an inertial compass with a bearing to the nearest village. If you don’t get along with your neighbors, you should’ve thought about it before you became pirates. I figure they’ll be willing to take in slaves, but I won’t pretend I really care what happens to you after we lift off.”

 

---

 

    This time a woman carrying an infant did step forward, calling something unintelligible. A Sissie raised his impeller to butt-stroke her, but Wright — still a common spacer, but that would change as soon as the Katchaturian reached Peltry — caught the gun by the receiver and held it long enough for the woman to come to her senses and scramble back.

    “We ought to hang them all!” snarled Chidsey. “They killed my son! Shot him down!”

    “I’m sorry,” said Daniel truthfully, “but my family has presided over one massacre in my lifetime — ” the Proscriptions following the Three Circles Conspiracy ” — and I don’t choose to add a second.”

    Chidsey muttered curses as he watched the villagers marched off for the meal Daniel had promised them. The merchant captain had no more power at present than those villagers did, if the truth were told, but so long as he showed that he knew his place Daniel had no reason to jerk him to heel.

    Chidsey’s son had been the mate of the Mezentian Gate. He had either mouthed off or tried to take a weapon from the pirate boarding party and had been shot. It might have been possible to learn who the shooter had been, but it would have taken time. The Nabis Contingent wasn’t going to spend any longer on Benjamin that it took to re-step the Sissie’s antenna, and Daniel would have been willing to let that wait for Peltry if the job hadn’t been going so well.

    Daniel had never asked his father if he had any regrets over the Proscriptions. By the time Daniel was old enough to appreciate what it meant to send thousands of people to their deaths without trial, he was no longer on speaking terms with his father.

    He probably had the answer already. So far as Daniel knew, Corder Leary wasn’t on record as having expressed regret about anything.

    The villagers were marching off glumly to the swale where they would be fed. Spacers watched them, some of them obviously eager to use their weapons. The spacers didn’t have any particular malice, but this raid was the most excitement many of them had ever imagined. Daniel hoped that nobody would get trigger-happy, but this was war. Bad things happen in wars.

    Two men remained between the warships under the guard of Evans and Dasi, the latter with bandaged hands. The trigger guard of Dasi’s sub-machine gun was latched down as it would have been for use while wearing a rigging suit.

    “Let’s go down and take care of the rest of our business,” Daniel said to his companions. He started down the ramp, noticing as he did so that Woetjans had left the corvette’s spine and was coming over to join them.

    The bosun called, “The Sissie’ll be ready to lift by nightfall, Six. Sooner if we jury-rig it without a base section, but we can get the kink outa the base if we have a little time with it.”

    “I want to get off Benjamin,” Daniel said after a moment’s consideration, “but we’ll be here for that long anyway, refilling with reaction mass. The well here doesn’t have as much flow as I’d like, but unless it dries up completely I want to top off both ships.”

    The two prisoners were watching Daniel expectantly as he talked with his bosun, though the former Nabis spacer’s face showed a degree of nervousness as well. The city-dressed civilian had regained his composure, though handfuls of gravel hadn’t cleaned all the vomit from his tunic. He offered Daniel a bright smile and said, “Captain Leary, I –”

    “In a moment,” Daniel said, his eyes on the spacer.

    “But –” said the civilian. Evans grabbed the fellow by the shoulder to anchor him with his left fist and cocked his right.

    “Stop!” Daniel said, grabbing the big tech’s right wrist. “I need to talk to him, Evans. Just not now.”

    “Sure, Six,” Evans said equably. He smiled and let go of the civilian, who had lost the ruddiness of his cheeks again.

    “You’re Easton,” Daniel said to the spacer, “and you’re an engine wiper. Right?”

    “Yeah, port watch on the Katie,” Easton said, bobbing his head in agreement. “Look, I’m sorry about it all but I was drunk, you know?”

    “What I know at this moment,” Daniel said, “is that you’re a rapist. Right?”

    “If you say so,” Easton muttered, staring at the ground.

    “Not a lot a doubt about it,” Woetjans said. “I came over because she was screaming like a stuck pig and dragged him off. She can’t a’ been but twelve.”

    “Look, I’d had a couple tots of working fluid,” Easton said, snarling now but his eyes still on the ground. “I’m not a bloody soldier, and I didn’t like the notion of going out and getting shot! Anyway, I relaxed some when things quieted down, all right?”

    “No, not all right,” Daniel said calmly. “I think the best thing to do with you is leave you on the ground here where you won’t be tempted by engine-room alcohol.”

    “Hey, you can’t do that!” Easton said, looking up in horror. “What am I going to do here on this pisspot world?”

    “I’ll take him,” Captain Chidsey said. “I can use another tech. My boy handled most of the Power Room, and we’re short-handed besides.”

    “No,” said Daniel without looking at the merchant captain. “If you want to come back for him later, that’s your business; but not now.”

    “Look, I’m sorry,” Easton bleated, dropping to his knees. From his tone, that was true, as sure as sunrise. “You can’t leave me here!”

    “If you don’t chase after those villagers right away…” Daniel said. “Evans is going to hit you. And if he does that, you won’t be able to get up before the line is well out of sight. I’m not leaving another compass with you.”

    Easton blubbered for a moment, but when Evans raised his fist slowly — it wasn’t a threat; he was choosing the right target — the Nabie turned and stumbled off in the direction of the villagers. Daniel watched him for a moment.

    “What do you suppose they’ll do with him?” Vesey said quietly.

    Daniel shrugged. “They might marry him to the girl,” he said. “Or they might eat him because food’s short. I don’t really care, except that he’s off my ship.”

    He turned to the remaining prisoner, who had lost his previous bonhomie. “Now, what’s your name, fellow?” he said.

    “I’m an Alliance citizen,” the civilian said, “Charlie Platt, and I’m just here by accident. I’m sure –”

    “He’s the shipbroker,” said Chidsey. “He was bargaining for my Gate. He talked to the village chiefs on the bridge for privacy, that’s how I know for sure. He was cheating them too.”

    “Pretty much what I thought, Captain,” Daniel said, smiling faintly.

    “Look, there’s money in this for you!” Platt said. “Lots of money, more money than you can dream. All you have –”

    “Shut up, Platt,” Daniel said.

    “– is take a message to my –”

    “Hit him, Evans,” Daniel said.

    Evans smashed Platt instantly in the jaw; apparently he regretted not swinging in time to drop Easton. Platt flew backward. From the amount of blood, his tongue must have been between his teeth when the punch closed his mouth.

    “There are things I won’t do for money,” Daniel said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “Quite a lot of things, actually.”

    He took a deep breath, then turned to Chidsey and said, “Captain, you said you were shorthanded. Would you care to take aboard a landsman?”

    “How do you know I won’t put him out the lock as soon as we make orbit?” Chidsey said, his tone challenging.

    “I don’t know, Captain,” Daniel said, “and I don’t care. Though I’ll point out that Master Platt probably could make you very wealthy.”

    “Being rich wouldn’t bring my boy back, would it?” Chidsey said.

    Daniel smiled, for the first time warming to the merchant captain. “No sir,” he said, “I don’t believe it would.”

    He hooked a thumb in the direction of the moaning Platt. “I’ll send your crew down to you,” Daniel said. “You can get him to the Gate, I presume. I’ve checked, and you’ve got plenty of reaction mass for the run back to Peltry.”

    “Then I guess we’ll take ourselfs off,” Chidsey said. “I’d guess we’d lift to orbit in an hour at the outside.”

    “Then I’ll leave you to it,” Daniel said. He nodded to his companions and walked toward the ramp of the Katchaturian. He was whistling, “The Fair Maid of Xenos Town.”