The Road of Danger: Chapter Eleven

Ashetown on Madison

    “I look forward to hearing from you soon, Your Ladyship!” said Osorio as they settled to the quay beside the Princess Cecile. The aircar’s running lights gleamed from the water of the slip and the wet aluminum surface of the catwalk.

    “Thank you,” Adele said, opening the door and getting out. Because the passenger compartment was enclosed, the Cremonan could no longer see her face. She preferred the anonymity, because her mind was far away from Osorio and his problems. “I will inform you of my decision.”

    She started across the floating catwalk to the corvette’s boarding ramp. She sniffed. Indeed, her duties to the ship and to the Republic itself were far from her mind. Well, there would be time for them later, if there was a “later.”

    “Hail to Lady Principal Henkow!” shouted Gildas, a Technician and one of the spacers on guard in the entrance hold. He was willing and good-hearted, but she had met spaniels whom she thought were of greater intellectual capacity.

    This was a typical example of Gildas overdoing a task out of enthusiasm and stupidity. Dasi, the chief of the watch, had been talking on the internal communicator mounted beside the hatch. He turned and snarled Gildas into silence.

    The business helped Adele back into what passed for normalcy with her. There was no harm done: the real Principal Hrynko would have stupid, ignorant spacers in a crew she hired also. The aircar purred away behind her.

    “Ma’am?” Dasi said. “Six is on his way down here. Ah, Lieutenant Pensett is, you know?”

    At least he didn’t shout loudly enough to be heard three slips over, Adele thought grimly. Well, she and Daniel had known all along that most spacers weren’t skilled at deceit; and besides, it was unlikely that anyone was looking for evidence that the Sissie and her crew were not what they pretended to be.

    “Why–” she began aloud.

    Her question was interrupted–and answered–by the speaker above the main hatch. In Vesey’s voice, it announced, “Ship, this is the captain. In a moment our passenger, Kirby Pensett, will address us from the entry hold. Those of you who do not have access to a good display may either go to the bridge or to the BDC, or join Pensett in person in the hold. Captain out.”

    Daniel strode out of the companionway, talking over his shoulder to Hogg. He was wearing mottled RCN utilities without insignia, typical garb for an officer on half-pay who didn’t have family money to fall back on. He caught Adele from the corner of his eye and brightened beyond his normal infectious enthusiasm.

    He makes even me happier. Well, less grim.

    Daniel bent close to her ear and murmured, “Adele, I’ll be travelling to Cremona and I hope Sunbright as captain of the Savoy. I worked out the details with the owner this evening.”

    Hogg, standing close, grunted. Though he wasn’t looking at them, he was certainly listening.

    “That is, Hogg and I are going,” he said with an affectionate grin toward his servant.

    Spacers were coming down the companion way with bangs and chatter; others pushed in from the axial corridor to the stern. The hold was filling up.

    “Excellent,” Adele said. “A Cremonan backer of the rebels wants me to carry him home to meet his consortium. They hope to hire the House of Hrynko to attack an Alliance privateer that is capturing blockade runners leaving Madison.”

    Twenty-odd spacers were within the compartment, so she and Daniel were scarcely talking in private. Boots on the steel deck and echoing conversations in a score of hoarse whispers were too loud a backdrop for any crewman to overhear them. It was equally unlikely that it would matter if one of them did.

    Daniel pursed his lips. He said, “Do you expect to accept the offer?”

    “I wanted to hear your opinion,” Adele said austerely.

    No additional crewmen were joining those already in the compartment, though the audience had spilled onto the upper edge of the boarding ramp. It must be about time for Daniel to make his address.

    “Yes,” he said, a placeholder as he considered the situation. “I recommend that you take this agent to Cremona and listen to the proposition. It’s likely to give us–”

    He grinned broadly.

    “–to give you, that is, an opportunity to get information that we couldn’t get any other way. Beyond that–”

    He shrugged.

    “–we don’t have enough data to make a decision. Decide as seems best to you at the time; with, one hopes, more information.”

    “I agree,” Adele said. She tried to clear her throat of the lump there. “I hope we’ll meet on Cremona, then.”

    She nodded toward the loudspeaker. There was an audio/video pickup in it, though they had to be switched on from the bridge.

    “Yes,” Daniel repeated, facing the speaker and letting his face settle into his usual cheerful grin. “Fellow spacers!” he said. He waited for the cheers of his immediate audience to die down.

    She and Daniel had come to the same conclusion after viewing the data. That was scarcely surprising: it was the correct conclusion, and Daniel rarely made mistakes in the professional arena.

    Her lips quirked slightly in the direction of a smile. Since he had met Miranda Dorst, he had been less often involved with mindless young women in his private capacity, too; though Adele wasn’t sure that he had yet come to view those bimbos as mistakes.

    “I’ll be leaving the Sissie this evening,” Daniel said. He had obviously decided to drop the pretence of “The House of Hrynko” for the time being. Though the hatch was open, sound propagation out of a crowded compartment would be extremely poor. “I hope to rejoin her and you after we’ve reached our destination separately. Now–”

    He had been speaking toward the pickup. He lowered his eyes to sweep them over the audience with him in the hold.

    “–I need not tell you that I expect you to do your duty by Captain Vesey and by the RCN. You’re my Sissies; of course you’re going to do your duty!”

    There was another babble of cheers and laughter. Daniel smiled until it cleared, then said, “Until we meet again, fellow spacers!”

    As the crew cheered, Adele leaned closer to Daniel and lifted onto her toes to speak into his ear. “May I address them?” she asked.

    “Of course,” he said with a raised eyebrow. He turned toward the pickup again and raised his hands. “Fellow spacers!” he cried.

    The audience quieted; at first slowly, but then with a rush to near silence.

    “Her Ladyship wishes to address you,” Daniel said, sweeping his right hand toward Adele. He was grinning, probably at his pun on her civilian rank and the persona she had adopted for this mission.

    Adele fixed her eyes on the pickup. She was used to communicating through electronics; used to the process and comfortable with it.

    “Fellow spacers,” she said. She would never be an orator. Her father had been a brilliant speaker, a man whose verbal skills had carried him high in the Republic… though ultimately to the top of Speaker’s Rock.

    “Captain–Six, that is, Six–is depending on us,” she continued, picking the words carefully. She could not afford to be mistaken. She knew that people often heard tone, not words; but they had to hear, to believe, her words; for Daniel’s sake and for their own. “He has put Captain Vesey in command of the ship, because he has implicit confidence that she is the best suited to support him.”

    Adele coughed into her hand. She knew that Vesey wouldn’t like what she was about to hear, but Adele was going to say it anyway.

    “Now,” she said aloud, “I know that everyone in a crisis would do anything Six ordered without hesitating. But some of you might think, ‘That can’t be right,’ when Captain Vesey tells you to jump. Don’t let that happen, on your lives.”

    Daniel was watching her, his face unusually quiet. There was no disapproval in his expression; just a sort of alert calm.

    “If members of this crew endanger the life of Six–”

    Adele nodded toward Daniel.

    “–by hesitation or inattention to orders,” Adele said, “they will answer to me. It will be a very short meeting, and their last. On my oath as a Mundy.”

    There was silence in the compartment for a moment; a literally breathless hush, because the spacers seemed literally afraid to breathe. Suddenly Dasi shouted, “Count on us, ma’am!”

    To Adele’s utter amazement, Sissies started cheering. All of them were cheering! What was there to cheer about? She had just warned them that she would kill anybody who failed Daniel–and they knew she meant it.

    Daniel touched her arm, then bent close. “They had been told that Vesey speaks for me,” he said. “Now they really know it, more clearly than they would from anything I could say.”

    Adele grimaced. She didn’t understand human beings, probably because she wasn’t one herself. Even when she got it right–as she appeared to have done this time–she did so for the wrong reasons.

    “Ma’am?” said someone. She looked up. Dasi had stretched out his hand, but he’d stopped short of touching her sleeve.

    Before Adele could snap harshly because of her discomfort at the situation, she saw that the rigger’s other hand pointed out toward the quay where a black utility vehicle had just pulled up. Tovera was driving.

    Adele glanced at her outfit. She had intended to change into something gray or blue, but this dull russet would do.

    “Daniel,” she said, “I have business which doesn’t concern the ship.”

    Without waiting for a response, she walked down the boarding ramp and across the gangplank without a slip or a wobble. She was in a different mindset now.

    She walked around the van and got in the passenger side. It was a ground vehicle whose small wheels were mounted on four trucks. From the singing of the motor, it was a diesel. As soon as she got in, Tovera made a hard turn and started off.

    “This looks very much like the van we saw,” Adele said, comparing the present vehicle with the imagery of the one which delivered the street children.

    “Yes,” said Tovera. “I thought that was the best choice. The former owners don’t need it any more.”

    Adele nodded. She looked over her seat into the rear compartment. A ten-year-old boy lay on the bare floor. Tovera had cinched him to both sides of the vehicle with elastic cords so that he wouldn’t bounce around too badly, but he wasn’t bound. She must have drugged him.

    “I believe we have everything we need,” Tovera said.

    “Yes,” said Adele. She didn’t bother to tap her tunic pocket. She could feel the familiar weight of her pistol without checking.

    Daniel heard the aircar dawdling down the Harborfront. It was fifty feet in the air, high enough that the downdraft wouldn’t do damage. The throb of the fans would be unpleasant to anybody beneath it, though.

    The hatches on the Princess Cecile‘s bridge were open for ventilation. Now that Cory had been promoted to First Lieutenant and gone aft to the BDC, Daniel was using the astrogation console as a passenger and supernumerary. He got up from it and looked out the port hatch.

    “Suppose it’s the mistress coming back?” said Hogg, voicing the unstated hope that had brought Daniel to his feet. “Do you know where she was going?”

    “No idea at all, Hogg,” Daniel said with an appearance of calm. Hogg had been drinking off and on all day. The alcohol had apparently affected him enough that he apparently hadn’t noticed Adele’s expression when she strode off the ship.

    Daniel had seen his friend’s face change when she saw Tovera driving the van which had just pulled up. He didn’t question Adele about her business anyway, but nobody who’s seen her eyes at that moment would have chosen to speak to her.

    The aircar cut the corner over the adjacent slip and slanted down as it drove along the quay toward the Princess Cecile. The vehicle had a windscreen but not a roof. The driver was a middle-aged woman in a business suit, a stranger to Daniel, but her passenger was Kiki Lindstrom.

    “Come along, Hogg,” Daniel said, scooping up the barracks bag which held the personal effects of Kirby Pensett. “It isn’t Adele, but it seems to be our business somehow.”

    He started toward the companionway. The only others on the bridge were Sun and a rigger named Wesley who was striking for gunner’s mate; they were practicing deflection shots on the gunnery console.

    “You hook ‘em for us, sir!” Wesley called. “And you can count on us to set the gaff!”

    “The lad was raised a fisherman,” Hogg explained over the echo of their boots on the companionway treads. “On the east coast where it’s nothing like the seas we get off Bantry; but he’s got promise, I do believe.”

    Daniel reached the entry hold as Lindstrom started across the catwalk. He dropped his bag on the deck–it was little beyond toiletries and a spare set of utilities–and said over his shoulder, “Watch the gear, Hogg. And come when I call you.”

    The guard had changed since he’d addressed the crew; Barnes, Dasi’s partner, was in charge now. He bobbed his head as Daniel went past, an acknowledgment somewhere between a salute–which spacers didn’t attempt on shipboard–and a tenant’s bow to the squire.

    Daniel grinned as he started down the ramp, waving Lindstrom back toward the quay. Nobody was going to touch his bag, but he didn’t want Hogg with him while he learned what the shipowner wanted.

    The trouble with Petrov had keyed up Hogg and had also supported his jaundiced view of the operation. Nothing he added to the coming discussion would be helpful.

    Lindstrom frowned for a moment, but her face cleared and she stepped back onto the concrete to wait. Daniel judged the period of the catwalk’s wobble–three pontoons supported the surface; the structure was safe enough, but it certainly wasn’t stable–and hopped to the quay as it rose.

    “I hadn’t expected you to come for us, mistress,” Daniel said with an engaging smile. “Though I suppose we’re ready to go, if that’s what this is.”

    “Not ‘with me,’” Lindstrom said, “and not your man–”

    She nodded toward Hogg, standing in the hatchway with his hands in his pockets.

    “–this time either. There’s a man wants to talk to you, one of our backers. He sent the car and driver to take you to him. And bring you back.”

    “I see,” said Daniel, who was sure only that he didn’t see. His tone was mild. “Who is this man, precisely?”

    “Look,” Lindstrom said in frustration. “It doesn’t matter who he is. We just do what he says. You were Cinnabar navy, right?”

    “Yes,” said Daniel.

    “Then he’s a friend of yours, that’s all you need to know,” she said. “That’s all I know. I don’t know his name and it doesn’t matter. His money’s good and he supplies stuff we get top dollar for.”

    Daniel considered the situation. “All right,” he said. “I’ll go, but Hogg will accompany me.”

    He gestured. “There’s enough room in the car.”

    “No,” Lindstrom said, irritation showing in her voice and scowl. “He said you were to go alone. I told you that.”

    “Yes,” said Daniel. “And I’m telling you that anonymous strangers don’t get to set the terms for a meeting which they want and I see no need for. I think that’s simple enough.”

    “Are you afraid?” Lindstrom said. “Is that it, you need that yokel to hold your hand?”

    “Master Petrov used the term ‘hobby’ to describe Hogg,” Daniel said, grinning in the direction of his servant. “That turned out to be an unfortunate choice of words.”

    His humor dropped away. “I’ll be clear: I am your astrogator and shipmate, mistress. I am not your flunky, and I am certainly not a dancing monkey to entertain your unnamed friend.”

    The shipowner snorted, then let her expression soften. “I’ll make a call,” she said.

    She walked back to the aircar and got in. After a few words with the driver, she unclipped the handset of the communicator and touched a preset. She spoke into it, paused, then closed the connection and returned to Daniel.

    “Have it your way, Pensett,” she said. She looked tired and a little disgusted. “And you might as well take your traps along. Watchly says she’ll take you both to the ship when you’ve had your talk.”

    Daniel looked at the driver, presumably named Watchly, and nodded. “All right,” he said.

    He waved toward the Sissie‘s hatch. “Bring our bags, Hogg,” he called. “We’re travelling in style.”

    He watched the shipowner trudging down the quay toward the Savoy. He wondered why she didn’t want a ride back with them. Maybe despite her protestations she wasn’t really sure what kind of a meeting was planned.

    And maybe she did know….