The Road of Danger: Chapter Eight

Ashetown on Madison

    Daniel would be whistling if he felt like this, Adele thought as she pattered up the Sissie‘s companionway toward Level A and her console on the bridge. Tovera was ahead, though not even a paranoid sociopath like her servant wasn’t really worried about someone waiting ahead in the armored staircase to attack them.

    Adele didn’t regret her inability to whistle, but it pleased her that other people might have done so if they were as content as she was now. She wasn’t going to take off her clothes and dance up the stairs either.

    Though now that she thought about it, she had tossed “Principal Hrynko’s” gown behind her when she reached the entry hold. She probably ought to send someone back for it in case she was suddenly required to impersonate a Kostroman noblewoman. Well, one of the spacers would probably bring it up unasked; and if not, she would worry about it later.

    Adele had new data to pore over–and the promise of still more shortly. She planned to visit the Assumption Library this afternoon, as soon as she had set her systems working to harvest data from the Forty Stars Headquarters. She could justify going to the library–the Assumption was the colony ship by which Madison had been settled before the thousand-year Hiatus in star travel–on reasons of duty, but in truth she was hoping to find ancient documents which had been lost to scholars on other worlds.

    Tovera led her into the rotunda just aft of the bridge. The forward dorsal airlock opened onto it, as well as the companionways. Nobody on a starship, not even the captain, used the wrong set of stairs. That was true even–indeed, especially–in an emergency, when people tangled in the tubes which were the only ways to get from one level to another would make disaster certain.

    Until Adele entered Cazelet, sitting at the astrogation console, was alone on the bridge. He was checking the communications intercepts which Adele had set her equipment to make in her absence. She supposed that was as useful as anything else the watch officer could do under the current placid conditions, and it was more Cazelet’s taste than reviewing crew discipline records or the rate of water usage during the past thirty days.

    “Mistress?” he said. Cazelet wasn’t much better than Adele herself in following protocol when addressing his fellows aboard the corvette. Like her, he was a well-born civilian who had not gone through the Academy. “There’s something interesting going on in orbit.”

    At the same moment, a sidebar on Adele’s display pulsed with a message in purple from Cory in the Battle Direction Center: Communications sweep indicates freighter being attacked in orbit, with an icon which would take her to the same input as the icon Cazelet had put on her sidebar after alerting her verbally.

    Adele felt more frustration than amusement. The young men were not twins, but her training seemed to have turned them into the professional equivalent of that. She wasn’t a martinet who hammered every peg into a hole of the same size!

    She brought the incident–it was still evolving–up on the left half of her display while she finished arranging to download the files from every database in the Alliance HQ, save for those in the Fleet Intelligence bureau. Years before she had developed a template for that task, so executing it on a new target was only a matter of making sure that the software was working as expected.

    The Princess Cecile had spent less than twelve hours on Cinnabar between arriving from Zenobia and lifting again for Kronstadt with orders issued and signed by the Navy Board. That was a sufficient interval for Mistress Sand’s messenger to give Adele updates for Alliance codes. Because of how far Madison was from Pleasaunce, the latest codes might not have reached the Forty Stars Squadron itself.

    Only when Adele had set her console to work did she switch her attention to what had her disciples excited. It had taken her thirty seconds to complete the initial task; while that could be the difference between life and death, anything could be the difference between life and death. It was worth a good deal to her to avoid the irritation she felt at being interrupted, and the choice of which task to do first was random on the information she had thus far.

    Cazelet’s icon sent Adele to a Plot-Position Indicator centered on Ashe Haven; two beads in orbit were highlighted, red and blue. As soon as she started to adjust the range of the image, it shrank to the minimum size needed to encompass both vessels. That was a degree of automated helpfulness which Adele neither needed nor wanted, but it wasn’t important enough to discuss at this moment.

    The blue dot was out-sun of the red dot; about 60,000 miles separated the two according to the scale. The display would give Adele a figure accurate within inches if she queried it, but that wasn’t necessary for her present purposes.

    A thin line the same color followed each dot, showing its track for the previous seventeen minutes; dotted lines–they hadn’t been visible at the original large scale–projected the vessels’ future courses, which were converging. Each dot was slugged with a full name rather than the usual three-letter identifier: blue was the Estremadura, red was the Sister Kate.

    “Estremadura, this is piracy!” said the Sister Kate. She was–full data on both ships had appeared twice on Adele’s sidebar–a 600 tonne freighter registered on Cremona, an independent world in The Funnel. It was the closest world to Sunbright in time of passage through the Matrix. “You have fired on a friendly vessel within a system belonging to the Alliance of Free Stars. You are pirates and I’m reporting this to Forty Stars Headquarters! Over.”

    The little freighter–from the timing, she was the ship which had lifted as “Principal Hrynko” was leaving the sector headquarters building–was using tight-beam microwave to transmit to the Estremadura and, through a separate antenna, to a communication satellite above Madison. That was to be expected as the captain hoped to be rescued by the Forty Stars Squadron.

    The Estremadura was also transmitting to Madison Control as well as to the freighter. That was a surprise, though Adele’s patch into the military observation constellation would have brought the details of the incident to the Princess Cecile even without the parties being so helpful.

    “Sister Kate, this is the Fleet Auxiliary Cruiser Estremadura,” the other vessel responded. The speaker was male and had what Adele thought was a Pleasaunce accent. “We have warned you to lie to. The manifest you filed before liftoff is false. We have a true manifest, showing that you are carrying arms and other contraband to the rebels on Sunbright. If you attempt to evade us by maneuver or by inserting into the Matrix, we will destroy you under authority of our commission as an auxiliary in the Funnel Squadron. Do not doubt me! Over.”

    The sidebar–twice, of course–gave the particulars of the Estremadura. She had been built eighty years before as an anti-pirate cruiser on Hallowell, a Cinnabar client-world in the Macotta Region. She was now registered on Sunbright and commissioned as a Fleet auxiliary.

    The cruiser displaced 3,000 tons compared with the Sissie at 1,300 under full load. It didn’t carry missiles because its intended prey was lightly-built pirate craft of a few hundred tons, but it mounted eight 4-inch plasma cannon in separate mountings.

    Adele scrolled back in time, running the verbal exchange between the ships as text at the bottom of her screen while she watched the business unfold. Madison was the second planet of this system. The Estremadura had been keeping station thirty million miles out-sun, in the orbit of the third planet. It had made a short hop through the Matrix, extracting a hundred thousand miles above Madison only minutes before the Sister Kate lifted from Ashe Haven.

    The Sister Kate rose to orbit and lighted her High Drive motors to accelerate. When she reached what her captain considered sufficient velocity, she would insert into the Matrix and slip through a sequence of bubble universes in which the constants of space and time differed usefully from those of the sidereal universe. While a ship could multiply its existing velocity in the Matrix, it could not accelerate until it returned to the universe in which it properly existed.

    The Estremadura had ordered the freighter to shut off her motors and lie to. When the freighter’s captain predictably ignored the challenge, the cruiser fired two plasma cannon at the smaller vessel. The range was too great for the bolts to seriously damage the freighter, but there was risk to the sails and to anyone on the exterior of the hull, even in a rigging suit.

    Perhaps more to the point, until the burst of plasma dissipated, the Sister Kate could not escape into the Matrix. In order to insert, a starship’s surface charge had to be in perfect balance, which couldn’t be achieved while loose ions were dancing on the skin and rigging.

    The freighter’s captain had yelped, complained, and transmitted bills of lading which indicated his cargo was tenth-megawatt fusion generators being carried to Cremona. That was the point at which Adele had begun observing in real-time. The cruiser continued to approach the Sister Kate, ignoring all protests.

    “Mistress?” said Cory. “Two separate guns fired at the freighter–they don’t mount them in twin turrets like ours. Both bolts were centered, just perfect. That’s RCN quality shooting; better than that even, for most ships.”

    Adele was pleased to see that though Cory was using a private intercom channel, he had opened it to Cazelet as well. The officers were young males with all that implied to anyone with a grounding in biology, but they were also courteous professionals who appeared to like one another personally.

    Adele shrank the PPI to an inset and used the bulk of the display for her own search. The two officers continued to watch the capture of the freighter, but that–though dramatic–wasn’t important. The important thing to learn was how it came to be captured.

    The Sister Kate either was or was not a blockade runner carrying a load of contraband. The RCN neither enforced the blockade nor wished to circumvent it, so what was happening in orbit did not affect the Princess Cecile or her crew.

    Adele didn’t smile, but she felt a touch of pleasure at the situation. She had gone to the heart of the problem while Cory and Cazelet were both lost in trivial side paths. On the other hand, that meant that there had been a flaw in the training they had received from Officer Adele Mundy.

    Adele let the smile touch her lips after all. Their education wasn’t over; it wouldn’t be over till they died, if they were the men she hoped and believed they were. And neither was her own education.

    She found the signal at about the time she expected it to have been sent, thirty-one minutes before the Estremadura had left its distant station to appear in Madison orbit. It had been transmitted by laser from a civilian comsat, though Adele used the military constellation to locate it. A signal beamed 30 million miles out had to be tightly focused, so there wasn’t any difficultly tracking it back to the sending head and in turn identifying the feed from the ground.

    The last stage of Adele’s search was to locate the terminus where the call had originated. Since she had given herself full access to the civilian communications system within hours of the Sissie‘s landing on Madison, that wasn’t very difficult either.

    As she expected, Cory and Cazelet were now echoing her search instead of wasting time on a freighter of no significance. She smiled, this time with complete justification.

    The call had come from a secure warehouse a few blocks from the harbor. The district was a mix of similar wholesale/storage facilities and tenements, saved from being a slum by the commercial activity bustling in it. Cory had already found real-time satellite imagery, so Adele decided to enter the site’s internal communications system.

    And failed. As best Adele could tell, the line by which the signal had been sent to the Estremadura simply did not accept incoming data. She didn’t doubt that there was a way to conduct two-way traffic from within the warehouse, but it was separate from the line which delivered information–or orders–to the waiting cruiser. At a guess, it was hardwired to a location at some distance from the warehouse.

    Adele touched her lips with the tip of her tongue, considering how to proceed. A flicker on her sidebar caught her attention–as Cazelet had clearly meant it to do. She called it up with her wands

    “Mistress?” Cazelet said, using the intercom to include Cory in his discussion. “I followed the money trail for the rental. It led to Forty Stars HQ; the only further information is the slug Platt/Restricted.”

    “Very good, Cazelet!” Adele said. “Could it have come from the Fleet Intelligence Bureau?”

    “Adele, there was no further evidence,” Cazelet said, with no more sign of irritation beyond the fact that he was repeating what he had already said.

    Adele grimaced. Cazelet had a right to be peevish: she had treated him as though he was one of the many who used words in a sloppy fashion when reporting to her.

    “But I then did a sort through general records for other files marked that way,” Cazelet continued, obviously working very hard not to sound smug. “I found references to the Estremadura had the same slug, and there was a further notation to refer all reports to the Intelligence Bureau and take no further action.”

    “Caz, that’s bloody brilliant!” Cory said.

    “Yes, Cazelet,” Adele said. “I agree.”

    She started to examine what Cazelet had found, though his oral report had probably covered everything of interest. She noticed Cory had put an icon on the sidebar also, to a very different location from Cazelet’s. Adele followed it, smiling as broadly as she ever did.

    The link took her to real-time security camera outputs; four of them. Two gave kitty-corner views of a walled courtyard; one was an exterior view of the street beyond the gate of that courtyard; and the last was toward the gate from the inside, from a camera mounted on the roof of the building which the courtyard served.

    This was the warehouse which Adele had viewed through satellite imagery. Cory had penetrated it after all.

    “The exterior guard posts aren’t shielded the way whatever’s going on inside is,” Cory said with quiet pride. “I thought it might be that way.”

    “You’ve both done very well,” Adele said. And if your teacher were a third party, I would say that she has done well also.

    The sliding gate in the courtyard wall was steel and wide enough to pass a full-sized truck. To the left of it, a cylindrical tower peeked over the high wall. There were firing slots on the tower’s inner side, but the armored door was open for ventilation; a guard with a carbine lounged in it.

    The front of the single-story building was pierced by four roll-up vehicular doors and a pedestrian door in the middle. There were gunports in the doors, though none in the masonry itself. Whatever the building might have been originally, it wasn’t a simple warehouse now.

    “There’s a vehicle…,” Cory said. “Yes, it’s turning in. It’s a delivery truck.”

    Adele didn’t expand the image from the gate camera beyond its present quadrant of her display. That scale was sufficient, and something of even greater interest might be about to happen in the field of one of the other cameras.

    The high angle didn’t give my detail of the black van other than the presence of two figures in the cab. The driver stuck her head out and called something; very likely she had honked as well.

    The guard who had been dozing in the tower doorway got up and disappeared inside. After a moment, the gate opened slowly, jouncing on at least one flat roller. The truck pulled in, but the gate started to close before the driver and her assistant got out of the cab. That was surprisingly good procedure, given the slovenly fashion in which the guards seemed to behave in general.

    The pedestrian door into the building opened. Two guards, in khaki like the man in the tower, stood in the doorway; they held carbines, but the muzzles were lowered.

    The woman and the man from the truck wore nondescript civilian clothes. They walked around to the back of their vehicle and pulled out a boy of eight or ten. His wrists and ankles were bound, and he appeared to be gagged as well; the camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough for Adele to be sure.

    They carried the boy to the door, holding him by the elbows. He tried to kick, but he went limp when the driver clipped him over the ear with her free hand. They handed him to the guards, then walked quickly back to the truck while the door into the building closed.

    “Now, that’s interesting,” Cory said in puzzlement.

    “Yes,” Adele said. She paused, plotting her further course of action; plotting it all the way to the end. Because she was fairly certain how it was going to end.

    “Cazelet,” she said. “Learn what you can about who is paying for this operation. Cory, follow that truck to wherever it goes and learn everything about it and its crew.”

    She had no authority to give orders to RCN officers. She knew that; the two men knew that; and they would do as she directed.

    Adele got up from her console. She said, “Tovera and I are going to the Assumption Library. It’s what I had intended, and….”

    She paused, choosing her words. “I have spent much of my life in libraries,” she said. “I think well in that setting. And I have important thinking to do.”

    Lady Adele Mundy strode off the bridge of the Princess Cecile; Tovera followed her in grinning silence. What Adele contemplated was not the business of an RCN officer.

    The Savoy was the fifth and outermost vessel in the slip, but the fact she was tethered at a concrete quay rather than moored to a buoy made her royalty among the thirty or forty blockade runners in Ashe Haven. A suspension bridge crossed the twenty feet–more or less; the bridge dipped or tightened as the side moved–from the entry hatch to eyebolts on the quay, but Daniel paused to look at the vessel before he boarded her.

    Hogg had recovered well enough on the walk that Daniel wouldn’t have guessed that he’d come back from lunch staggeringly drunk. He grunted as he looked at the Savoy. “Not much to write home about, is she?” he muttered sourly.

    “Neither are the cowsheds at Bantry, Hogg,” Daniel said with quiet cheerfulness. “What’s important in a blockade runner is function, not a statement of national pride. That ship has made seven landings on Sunrise since the beginning of the rebellion and has returned a very handsome profit for her captain and backers.”

    The Savoy was a 600-tonne single-decked freighter. The hull was a rusty steel cylinder, floating just above the harbor surface on two pontoon outriggers; they were rusty also, at least the portion above water. The crew compartment was a capsule forward. The fusion bottle was in the hold; there was no separate the Power Room.

    She had four antennas spaced around the hull amidships. Astern a short jack was mounted at 45 degrees to the ship’s axis; there was probably a similar jack at 225 degrees, out of sight from the quay. The fixed jacks gave the astrogator leverage to slew the central antennas against the Casimir Radiation by which ships adjusted their courses in the Matrix.

    A light was on in the entrance hold, but no crewmen were in sight. Daniel could hear voices from within, though; a man and a woman. The words weren’t audible, but the angry tone was beyond question.

    “Hello the ship!” Daniel called pitching his voice to carry. “Hello Captain Kiki Lindstrom! Permission to come aboard the Savoy!”

    There was silence for a moment. A woman of forty-odd stepped into sight in the hatchway. She wasn’t precisely unattractive, but the first adjective which would occur to a man meeting her was “solid.” A man, younger but only dimly glimpsed, followed her from the crew capsule.

    “You’re Lieutenant Pensett?” she said. “Yes, come aboard.”

    Hogg would have started across, but Daniel held him back and took the lead. The treads were steel with non-skid perforations, while the suspension cables were woven from beryllium monocrystal.

    Though the construct was strong enough to support an armored personnel carrier, it swayed, jiggled, and bounced like gossamer in a breeze. Even spacers with years of experience of starships’ rigging might be uncomfortable with the slack support and the wind coming off the sea.

    Daniel grinned. The catwalk took him back to his youth, when he clambered about every building and tree on Bantry, the family estate. He murmured over his shoulder, “Hogg, you never tried to keep me from doing things because they weren’t safe.”

    “And how much would ye have listened if I had tried to do something so silly?” Hogg growled. His greater weight joined Daniel’s on the walkway, their steps syncopating one another. “Besides, you needed to learn how to fall so that you’d learn to pick yourself up again. You mother told me to take care of you, didn’t she?”

    “I suspect she meant what I would’ve called coddling, Hogg,” Daniel said.

    “Well, that’s not what I bloody meant,” Hogg said. His tone of certainty put an end to the discussion.

    The man stepped forward to stand beside Mistress Lindstrom. He was taller than Daniel and perfectly proportioned, with broad shoulders and a trim waist; his hair was short and a blond so pale that at a distance in bright sunlight he would look bald.

    “We don’t need you!” he said, arms akimbo.

    “Petrov!” the woman said. “I told you this was my decision!”

    “You certainly don’t need me,” Daniel said, because it was as easy to be polite. “The Savoy‘s record of success is all the proof of that one could ask for. I need you, though, and I’ll work my passage at any position on the ship. I can both rig and astrogate, and I took my Power Room training in the RCN Academy.”

    “We’ve got riggers,” Petrov said, speaking to Lindstrom now. He was trying to moderate his tone, but he was obviously angry and not well enough controlled to keep that out of his voice. “You handle the fusion bottle, we don’t need that, and I astrogate better than any pansy from Cinnabar. He’s not worth the food!”

    “I can bring my own rations,” Daniel said mildly. “And I’ve never been aboard a ship which couldn’t have used another pair of skilled hands when things got hairy. As they’re pretty sure to do now and again for a blockade runner.”

    He was beginning to suspect that Petrov’s problem wasn’t with Daniel as a rival spacer but rather with him as a rival man. There wasn’t any polite way for Daniel to say that he wasn’t interested in Mistress Lindstrom’s favors, regardless of the wishes of the lady herself.

    “You really can run a fusion bottle, Pensett?” Lindstrom said, her eyes narrowing. She glanced at Petrov and said, “Look, Peter, I’m all right with the bottle so long as everything’s running normally, but I’m not a trained tech. We could be deep in the muck if we’re over Sunbright with a cruiser bearing down on us the next time she starts running high so I have to shut down.”

    “We’ll be all right!” Petrov said. “We’ve been all right!”

    “A Power Room certificate is required for commissioning in the RCN, Mistress Lindstrom,” Daniel said. “As I’m sure you know. I’m not an engineer, but I can tease a fusion bottle back into the green without shutting her down.”

    “Look–” Petrov began.

    “No, you look, Peter,” Lindstrom said, turning toward her astrogator with a flash of anger. “We can–I can, this is my ship–use another hand with the rigging. There’s so many splices that we’re bound to have as many cable jams as we did on the last run. Besides which–”

    Petrov had opened his mouth again to speak. Lindstrom stuck a blunt, capable finger in his face and continued in a louder voice, “Besides which, I bloody need help with the bottle! Pensett ships with us and that’s final. Do you understand?”

    Presumably Petrov did, because he sneered and walked off the ship past Daniel. His soft boots–they were standard spacers’ boots, intended to be worn inside rigging suits–wouldn’t bang on the catwalk, but he certainly tried.

    “We’ll be lifting in forty-eight hours,” Lindstrom said, “but get your traps aboard tomorrow. I’ll introduce you to the crew then, and you can go over the setup. There’s nothing unusual if you’ve sailed in ships this small before.”

    “I have,” said Daniel, “and smaller. But one thing, mistress? My man Hogg–”

    Hogg had done a remarkable job of keeping his mouth shut. Now he straightened and seemed to be trying to stand at attention. Even sober and as cleaned up as he was ever likely to be, he would look like a rumpled countryman. The attempt was either sad or amusing, depending on the observer.

    “–is an important part of my researches for Master Sattler. I’ll pay–”

    “Is he a spacer?” Lindstrom said curtly.

    “Sure, I am!” Hogg said.

    Daniel would have backed the lie if he’d thought there was any chance of it succeeding. Starting with Hogg’s heavy boots, he was as unlikely a spacer as he was a striptease dancer.

    “No, mistress,” Daniel said firmly, “but he’s a bloody useful man to have around for any number reasons. And Master Sattler will pay passenger-liner rates for bare food and passage.”

    Lindstrom shook her head. “No,” she said. “Having you aboard is stretching accommodations, but it’s short runs to Cremona and then to Sunbright. I won’t have another body, though, and that’s flat.”

    Daniel had seen Lindstrom angry, and he didn’t intend to turn her anger on himself pointlessly. He wasn’t going to change her mind–and he didn’t really disagree with her. A small blockade runner wasn’t a place for extra bodies.

    Hogg must have reached the same conclusion, because there was desperation in his voice as he said, “Look, ma’am, you won’t know I’m there! I swear, I’ll be as quiet as the ship’s cat, I swear it!”

    “Got anything on for tonight, Pensett?” the woman said as though Hogg hadn’t spoken. “I’ve got a room in the Criterion; I don’t sleep on the ship while there’s a choice. I thought we might have dinner and a drink, then go over your duties?”

    “Thank you, sir,” said Daniel with false enthusiasm, “but I have preparations to make tonight. Perhaps another time, though!”

    He grinned brightly. He thought, But no time in this lifetime, I hope.

    He touched his servant on the shoulder, then used firmer contact to turn him away. “Come on, Hogg,” he said. “Let’s get outside of a drink or ten, shall we.”

    Hogg shuffled across the catwalk like a sheep in the slaughter chute. When they had reached the other side, Daniel guided the older man toward one of the smaller, darker taverns on the other side of the Harborfront.

    Hogg turned to look at Daniel. “Lad,” he said quietly. “I didn’t try to wrap you in gauze, you know that. But I wouldn’t have let you try to fly from the top of a cloudscraper pine either.”

    “Now, it’s not as bad as that, Hogg,” Daniel said, trying to sound cheerful.

    “Yes, it bloody well is!” Hogg said. “You and that Petrov won’t both reach Cremona alive. Since you won’t stab him in the back, that means betting on you to survive is a sucker’s bet.”

    “It’ll look different when we’ve wet our throats, Hogg,” Daniel said.

    But in his heart, he wasn’t finding much wrong with his servant’s assessment.