The Road of Danger: Chapter Six

Point ME8*9JB

    Daniel stood with Cazelet on the topgallant crosstrees of the Ring D Dorsal antenna, watching mixed teams of riggers and techs from the ship’s side shift the Port and Starboard Ring F antennas sternward by thirty inches. Woetjans was in charge of the operation, with Vesey on the ground taking direction and learning from the bosun’s years of experience.

    “Does staggering the F Ring really make the ship more maneuverable, sir?” Cazelet asked, his eyes on the scene below. He was up here because he had a view of the whole operation and could direct the teams if they needed it. Daniel liked the view from high up a mast, but he was here today because it put him with Cazelet in privacy.

    A diamond saw screamed, cutting the last bolt head off the Port F mast step. Six spacers, in rigging suits without helmets, held the cables which would support the heavy step when Woetjans herself broke the grip of the rust which would continue to hold it.

    “Well, I can’t say, Cazelet,” Daniel admitted. “I’ve never been aboard a ship with this rig, not till now. Nobody but some Kostromans use it, and not many of them in this generation; but there’ve been some great Kostroman spacers.”

    Rigging suits–hard suits–were stiffened with fiber. The armor could turn strands of frayed cable which would tear an airsuit and the flesh beneath. Hard suits wouldn’t save a spacer who was under a falling spar, but wearing them was a reasonable safety precaution for the present sort of job.

    Daniel grinned. Woetjans–predictably–didn’t think hard suits were necessary; Vesey had overruled the Bosun. That was good, because otherwise Six would have had to reappear aboard the Sissie for long enough to give the order himself. He wasn’t going to have his people crippled because Woetjans thought any concession to safety was a form of cowardice.

    Cazelet had been leaning over to look down. He straightened and bent backward, rubbing the small of his back with both hands.

    Daniel grinned. The midshipman was balancing on steel tubing almost a hundred feet above the curve of the hull, and the hull’s eighty feet more above the sheet of solid ice on which the Sissie stood.

    ME8*9JB was a charted location, not a name. The planet had a breathable atmosphere and vast quantities of water in the form of ice, but there was no other encouragement to colonization and no indigenous life. Ships stopped here often to replenish their reaction mass, and a number never rose again; half a dozen were visible from the crosstrees, metallic glints against the glacier. Using his visor’s magnification, Daniel saw that the hulks had been stripped. Some had even lost sections of hull plating, leaving the frames bare.

    “This is the sort of place you only land if you’re having trouble,” said Cazelet, surveying their surroundings. Basalt ridges thrust up a mile to east and west of the corvette, channeling the slow river of ice; snow fields stretched beyond, occasionally marked by another black peak. The sun was a tiny blue-white dot in the high sky. “Sometimes the problem won’t be soluble.”

    “But eventually…,” Daniel said. “Somebody else with a problem will land, and maybe you can make one ship out of the parts of two or three.”

    Cazelet’s comment had been intelligent and on point. He’d entered the RCN as a midshipman by Daniel’s dispensation. The boy hadn’t been trained in the Academy, but experience he’d gained while working up from the bottom in his family’s shipping firm, Phoenix Starfreight, made him the superior of ordinary midshipmen in many aspects. The main gap in Cazelet’s learning, missile tactics, was something that–

    Daniel grinned.

    –Captain Leary was as well-suited to teach as anyone in the Academy.

    “That’s a penterio,” Cazelet said, pointing his extended left arm toward the ship farthest to the south in the ice stream. “None of them have been built since Santander rebelled against the Alliance a hundred and more years ago.”

    Daniel raised his magnification. Penterios displaced about 500 tonnes and carried cargo externally on a spiderweb of spars and cables. That netting spread the vessel’s weight and kept her from sinking out of sight in the decades or longer in which she must have rested on the ice.

    “I landed on Santander once,” Cazelet continued, “while I was purser on the Kelly Maid. It’s a thriving place now–in a small way, of course. It was re-colonized from Pleasaunce and Greenhome after the Reorganization which followed the Mutiny.”

    He turned toward Daniel; Daniel turned his head also, to meet the younger man’s eyes. Cazelet said, “The old culture was completely gone, of course. Not enough of the original population survived to maintain it.”

    “Yes,” said Daniel, looking down at the rerigging.

    He had learned when he was very young that it was a bad idea to discuss matters of academic interest to you with someone to whom they have great emotional weight. He was well aware of the brutality of the Alliance of Free Stars in dealing with what its leaders considered rebellion.

    Rene Cazelet, however, was an orphan because Guarantor Porra had decided his parents were a threat to the state. He had come to Adele as a suppliant, sent by his grandmother to whom Adele owed a debt of gratitude; and Adele had asked her friend Captain Leary to find a place for the boy.

    Daniel grinned slightly. The RCN, and the Princess Cecile in particular, had gained a very useful officer through that turn of events.

    He wasn’t about to discuss brutal suppression of dissent with Cazelet, however. Corder Leary, Daniel’s father, had put down the Three Circles Conspiracy in a thoroughly savage manner, after all; as Adele, also an orphan, could testify.

    Woetjans was shouting triumphant directions to the crew on the cable. They shuffled sternward, bringing the step along with them. The Bosun planned to set the base into its new position on the hull directly; the holes were already drilled, and a senior technician waited with a drift punch the length of her forearm to slide it the last quarter inch into place.

    Cazelet cleared his throat. Looking at the distant horizon rather than Daniel, he said, “Ah, sir?”

    Daniel turned toward him. “Yes, Cazelet?” he said gently.

    “Ah, you may know that Lieutenant Vesey and I have been seeing one another socially,” Cazelet said. The air was bitter and gusts of wind sent snow dancing over the ice sheet, but sweat was beading his forehead and he cheeks were flushed. “When we’re on the ground and off-duty, that is. We’ve tried to be discreet about it.”

    “Go on, Cazelet,” Daniel said. He thought, I’d be a bloody poor commanding officer if I didn’t know that, midshipman.

    “Well, I just wanted you to know that because Elspeth, that’s Lieutenant Vesey, is captain of the, The House of Hrynko now, we decided it wouldn’t be proper that we continue seeing one another,” Cazelet said. He glared at the horizon as though he wanted to eviscerate it with a grappling hook. “Even on the ground. Because the captain isn’t ever off duty, not really.”

    “I’m glad to hear that, Cazelet,” said Daniel, as mildly as he’d spoken before. “Because that means I don’t have to transfer you to becoming the Officer in Charge of Sewage Lagoons on, say, Aristogeiton’s World.”

    “Sir?” Cazelet said in surprise, his face jerking around to meet Daniel’s eyes.

    “I believed you both had good judgment,” Daniel said. Nobody watching them, even with magnification, would imagine they were discussing anything of more emotional significance than the Sissie‘s sail plan. “But if I were wrong about one or both of you, well, I’d correct my mistake. A commanding officer cannot be sleeping with a subordinate on a ship as small as this one.”

    “No sir,” Cazelet said. He swallowed. “Anyway, you weren’t wrong. I–thank you for letting us think it through ourselves, sir.”

    Daniel nodded mildly and returned his attention to the teams beneath. “Got it!” shouted a technician. One, then two, impact drivers began to burr home the bolts anchoring the repositioned mast step.

    Daniel wondered if Cazelet fully understood the risks he’d faced if he hadn’t made the correct decision. The boy was Lady Mundy’s protégé. If he had let his behavior risk the safety of Adele’s new family–the crew of the Princess Cecile–she might have treated the breach as a matter of honor.

    Rene Cazelet would not have survived that decision.

    “Ma’am?” said Cory, rotating his seat at the astrogation console to face Adele. “I’d like you to look at this.”

    He was facing her back, of course. She didn’t bother to turn, and Cory knew her too well to expect that she would. If he was more comfortable looking at her back than he would be speaking to her holographic face, that was his business.

    While Vesey and Cazelet–along with Daniel–were involved on the Sissie‘s exterior with the rerigging, Cory was on watch on the bridge. Because he was a good officer–in part because Adele had trained him–he was using the time for work rather than games or pornography.

    “Yes,” she said aloud, adjusting her display to echo that of the astrogation console.

    Adele didn’t mind being called away from her analysis of rice production–according to official statistics–on Sunbright over the past ten years, broken down by district. All information was potentially valuable, as well as being worthy for its own sake in Adele’s opinion. That said, the practical benefit of these data was yet to be proven.

    Cory had been looking at a pattern rendered in sepia monochrome. Lines ran roughly from top left to bottom right, crossing occasional beads of varied shape. It was unintelligible without context: Adele could imagine it being anything from a graph to a magnified view of the fabric of her trousers.

    She started to follow the current image back through its history to determine what it was. Before–momentarily before–she executed that plan, she caught herself and smiled wryly. She turned to face Cory, punishing herself for so determinedly shutting out the RCN family of which she was–by the gift of fate, because she didn’t believe in gods–a member.

    I don’t really believe in fate either. Well, in luck, then. I certainly believe in luck.

    “Please tell me what we’re looking at, Cory,” she said.

    “Well, ma’am,” Cory said. He turned to his display and highlighted a faceted lump in the flow of lines. “If you’ll take a look here….”

    Adele thankfully returned to her display also. Signals Officer was a junior warrant rank, equivalent to bosun’s mate and several steps below a commissioned lieutenant like Cory. Despite that, he and Cazelet treated Adele as though they were young boys and she was dowager matriarch of their family.

    The attitude of the enlisted personnel, including Woetjans and Pasternak, was simpler yet: they were peasants, and Lady Mundy was mistress of the estate. That bore no resemblance to proper RCN protocol, and it certainly wasn’t anything Adele encouraged.

    She admitted to herself that she didn’t mind the situation, however. She had been raised as a Mundy of Chatsworth, and the Sissies’ behavior fitted her instinctive sense of rightness as surely as it did the crew’s.

    “We did an all-spectrum scan of the region as we were coming in,” Cory said. “This is the valley on ground-penetrating radar, so it’s without the ice, you see. Ships show up–”

    Beads expanded one after another, just long enough to be identified as shapes in steel before Cory shrank them back to scale.

    “–on the surface. Where the ice flow has carried them into one wall of the valley or the other, there’s scrape marks in the rock.”

    His hands poised on his virtual keyboard, preparing to raise the magnification of striations upstream of the bead slugged Hepplewhite, out of Kossuth. Adele had already done that with her wands. She didn’t need to see the markings–that was equivalent to proving the existence of gravity so far as she was concerned–but it was useful to remind Cory that she hadn’t become a completely helpless ninny.

    Aloud she said, “Yes, I see.”

    “Well, that’s all what you’d expect,” Cory said earnestly. “Except for this one.”

    He expanded the highlighted bead until it filled the display. It was a ball formed from pentagonal plates. “Ma’am, this is on the valley floor, under three hundred feet of ice. It displaces about 3,000 tons, and there’s no ship in the Sissie‘s database that looks anything like it.”

    “It sank through the ice, then?” Adele said, frowning. She restrained her reflex to sort for dodecahedral spaceships, because her conscious intellect assured her that Cory wouldn’t have made a mistake when he told her that. He had been well trained.

    “Ma’am, maybe,” Cory said, but the anguish in his tone meant that he was contradicting her. “But if you look at the scrape marks behind her–”

    This time he didn’t try to magnify them. Adele’s wands flickered, expanding and following the track up the valley; a very long way up the valley.

    “If the ice has been moving at the rate it has for the last twelve years–figuring from the marks the Manzanita Maid left–and I know it maybe hasn’t, but anyway that’s a figure, it ought to get us into the right order of magnitude….”

    “Yes, I see that, Cory,” Adele said. “Get on with it.”

    “Well, the track computes to about 30,000 years,” Cory said apologetically. “Which the model says is about when the planet’s orbit got eccentric because a dark star passed through the system.”

    “In other words, the ice began pushing–”

    She decided not to call it a ship.

    “–the object as soon as the glacier formed 30,000 years ago. That doesn’t tell us how long it had been sitting on the valley floor before it started to move.”

    “Yes, ma’am,” Cory said in relief. “That’s what I thought too. But I don’t know how it could be.”

    Adele sniffed; another person might have laughed. “Nor do I, Cory,” she said. “It should be possible to answer some of the questions by melting the glacier with our plasma thrusters, as we’ll be doing to fill our tanks of reaction mass, though of course on a much greater scale. But–”

    She rotated her seat to face the young lieutenant; he was staring over his shoulder at her.

    “–I think that will have to wait until we have more time. At present, we have to find a rebel to repatriate to Cinnabar.”

    There was a clang against the hull and a cheer from outside loud enough to be heard even though the corvette was closed up against the bitter wind. It appeared that the Princess Cecile was now the House of Hrynko. They would be lifting shortly.

    “Fellow Sissies!” Daniel said from one of the star of five consoles in the Battle Direction Center. He was speaking to the whole ship, his image appearing on all displays and his voice coming through commo helmets and the loudspeakers in every compartment and corridor. “You’ve all known something was going on. This is what is going on.”

    Vesey would normally have been here in the armored BDC as First Lieutenant, ready to take command if a missile destroyed the bridge. Now she was at the command console in the bow and Cory, the new First Lieutenant, had moved back.

    “I’m about to become Kirby Pensett,” Daniel said. “Formerly a lieutenant in the RCN but now on half-pay and a passenger on this vessel, The House of Hrynko. That’s the story, and it’s bloody important that you remember it when you’re talking to outsiders. Talking even to each other, because we never know who’ll be listening in when we’re on the ground.”

    Tovera, like Hogg on a jumpseat folded out from the bulkhead, glanced at Adele with a reptilian smile. Adele, seated at the console to Daniel’s right, was probably aware of her servant’s amusement–nobody was going to eavesdrop on the Princess Cecile when Adele was aboard–but she gave no reaction herself.

    It’s still the right thing to say. Even sober, spacers were notoriously loose-tongued, and the chance of a spacer being sober on the first night or two of liberty wasn’t very high.

    “You’re the crew of a yacht owned by Kostroman noblewoman, the former Principal Hrynko,” Daniel said. “She looks a lot like Lady Adele Mundy, but you won’t call her that any more than you would the real Lady Mundy. You’ll say ‘ma’am’ or you’ll say ‘sir’ because she scares the crap out of you. She’s got a temper and you know how these wog nobles can carry on–”

    He grinned at Adele. She grinned, broadly for her, though she didn’t look up from her display. She had at least his face inset in the image area, along with those of the other officers.

    “–but she pays on time and the grub on the Hrynko is pretty bloody good. Just about RCN standard, I’d say.”

    There was general laughter at that, in the BDC and trailing down the corridor through the open hatchway. Private owners were notoriously liable to scrimp on the quantity and quality of the rations they provided their crews. An RCN captain checked the quality of all the consumables that came aboard, then signed his approval. A captain who cut corners on food or drink had problems not only with crew members–who knew the regulations–but with the Navy Board.

    “Mistress Vesey is captain,” Daniel said. His tone was cheery and bantering; handled clumsily, the situation could go from unfamiliar to frightening–a very small step for veteran spacers, who believed that surprises were either bad or fatal; as in space they generally were. “Principal Hrynko doesn’t know any more about astrogation than some high-born librarian from Xenos would.”

    The laughter was even louder this time. Adele continued to smile while her control wands twitched and jabbed. Daniel didn’t have the faintest idea what she was working at; it could be her family tree, for all he knew.

    He didn’t care. Adele said that everything was connected, and for her it was. Her mind was always working, a fact that regularly led to unexpected good results for those around her.

    “Now,” Daniel said, getting to the nub of it. “If you were any other crew than my Sissies, I’d tell you that this was going to be dangerous. We’ll be landing on Madison, an Alliance sector capital, claiming to be a Kostroman ship. Well, you and I have done worse than that to the Alliance, haven’t we, spacers?”

    The response this time was a bloodthirsty roar from the body of the ship, though the sound had been reduced to tinny echoes by the time it reached Daniel. Nobody inside the BDC actually cheered, though it wouldn’t have been a surprise if Fiducia and Rocker, the missileer’s mate and gunner’s mate respectively, had joined in.

    “But there’s something else you ought to know, spacers,” Daniel said, pitching his voice a little lower to suggest that he had reached the serious part of the discussion. “Admiral Cox doesn’t know what we’re about to do. He thinks we’re going straight to Sunbright, everybody in Macotta HQ thinks we’re going to Sunbright.”

    “Who bloody cares what the farmers out here think?” somebody shouted. Daniel thought the voice was Woetjans’, but if so she spoke for everybody aboard–Captain Daniel Leary included. Certainly the cheers seemed universal.

    In fact the tricky part was going to be keeping up the pretense of being Kostroman while they were on Madison. He’d slipped past that when he told the Sissies it was minor compared to what they’d done in the past.

    The deception wasn’t dangerous in the sense that the Alliance authorities would shoot them if the trick was detected, but it would certainly be embarrassing and might very well mean months or years of internment while diplomats discussed the matter in measured tones. Daniel didn’t imagine that the Macotta bureaucracy would strain itself in helping uppity naval personnel who’d come out from Xenos with an attitude.

    Very few of the Sissie‘s crew were from Kostroma, perhaps six or eight out of over a hundred. That in itself wouldn’t surprise Alliance port officials. Spacers were a nation unto themselves. That was less true of a warship’s complement than it was for civilian vessels, but even so no more than half the crew of the corvette Princess Cecile had been born on Cinnabar or worlds under the Republic’s hegemony.

    “Well, Sissies…,” Daniel said. “We’re going to come through this fine, like we have before, if we all do our jobs. This time for you that means mostly watching what you say when we’re on the ground. And for me, that means being Kirby Pensett, who used to be an RCN officer. Can we carry it off?”

    There were so many variations in the reply that they merged into a growl, but they all amounted to, “Yes!” generally with a word or words of emphasis.

    “Then for the last time until we’ve succeeded, let me say it’s an honor to command you, Sissies. Six out!”

    Over the cheers, Vesey’s amplified voice from the bridge said, “Captain to ship! Prepare for liftoff in thirty, that is three-zero seconds.”

    Unexpectedly she added, “Next stop Madison, spacers.”

    Daniel grinned. Vesey tended to seem colorless, and it wasn’t often that she raised a cheer. She got one this time.