The Road of Danger: Chapter Twelve

Ashetown on Madison

    The aircar had curved well out to sea, so Daniel had nothing but time and estimated speed to judge their location by. That was sufficient for him to guess that when they cut the shoreline again, they were about ten miles east of the harbor and therefore well beyond the settle fringes of Ashetown.

    Hogg could probably estimate a good deal closer than that, though it didn’t matter, because satellite tracking from the Sissie would give precise course data. Adele wasn’t aboard, but Cazelet and Cory were following events in real-time.

    Daniel bent over the seatback and said, “Are you a native of Madison, Watchly?”

    The driver glanced toward him, then back to her course. “Master Pensett,” she said uncomfortably. “The Chief will tell you anything he wants you to know. I have nothing to say.”

    Daniel leaned back on the cushions, smiling cheerfully. Adele would probably have known where Watchly had gone to grammar school, but even he could be confident that the driver’s accent meant she was from one of the Alliance homeworlds.

    She was no ordinary driver, either, though she did drive well. Watchly had the look and mannerisms of a senior aide; with near certainty, she was her “Chief’s” personal assistant.

    She brought the car around and dropped toward the yard of a disused farm. They had overflown a right-of-way which a dual-track railroad shared with a highway for self-powered vehicles; that was about a mile behind them now, providing another–unnecessary–data point.

    The car landed on the high grass behind a rambling farmhouse; Watchly shut off her fans. The aircar was out of sight from the main road as well as from the driveway leading to the house; Daniel had noticed as they approached that the gate was closed and chained.

    “I’m to take you in, then leave you alone with the Chief,” Watchly said. She glanced meaningfully at Hogg.

    Hogg raised an eyebrow toward Daniel. Daniel grinned and said, “I’ll scream for help if anyone attempts my virtue, Hogg. Until then, perhaps you could interest the fellows there in the shed–”

    He gestured toward the small outbuilding some twenty feet beyond where the aircar was parked. The door was ajar; there had been movement inside as the car came in to land.

    “–in a game of poker, do you think? You’ll be more comfortable here on the back porch, though, I think.”

    They both looked at Watchly; she flushed. “That’s Martensen, the caretaker,” she said uncomfortably. “I can call him out, if you like. We just–the Chief wants to see you privately.”

    “And so he shall,” Daniel said cheerfully. He gestured toward the back door. “I suspect I can find my own way, mistress,” he said. “But if you prefer to introduce me…?”

    “I’ll take you through,” she said, stepping onto the porch and opening the door. The hallway beyond was dark. She gestured Daniel inside–that was safe enough with Hogg waiting behind her with his hand on a pistol–and followed; a glowstrip lighted as soon as the door closed.

    She walked past Daniel again and tapped on the interior door. “Yes,” a muffled voice called.

    She opened the door and gestured to Daniel. “The Chief is waiting for you, Lieutenant Pensett,” she said.

    Though dim, the ceiling glowstrip was adequate to show all the details of the room beyond. That was in part because there was little to show. A figure faced the door from behind a desk; a distortion screen turned him and the holographic display he was watching into a grayed-out blur. There was no other furniture.

    Daniel wouldn’t have been sure even that the Chief was male had it not been for the bass voice in which he said, “How long ago did you graduate from the Academy, Lieutenant Pensett?”

    “Five years,” Daniel said. Pensett had been his classmate, though the physical resemblance between them was limited to height and gender. That should be enough out here in the Macotta Region. “I was on active duty until the Treaty of Amiens, so I’ve kept my skills up.”

    He hesitated, then added, “I assure you that my astrogation abilities are well beyond anything to be expected in the merchant service.”

    “Do you have any particular memories of your Senior Cruise on the Swiftsure?” the concealed figure asked. He seemed to have ignored Daniel’s answer to the previous question.

    “I bloody well do,” Daniel said. “Cinnabar orbit after we lifted off was the closest I’ve come to getting killed on duty and that was too close. A cable snapped as we were raising the rig. One end came near as near to taking my head off my shoulders!”

    The incident was true, though Cadet Pensett had been in the bow section and therefore not in danger. Cadet Leary, on the other hand–

    “How did that happen?” the Chief said. He continued to sound bored.

    “Ventral K Antenna had been cross-rigged,” Daniel said, his mind going back to a very vivid memory. “It was the crew ahead of ours–we’d just reached orbit, so this was the first time we had the rig up. As the antenna extended, one of the lines tried to tighten instead of running out. A battleship’s hydraulics have a lot of thrust, and even beryllium monocrystal has a tension limit.”

    He shrugged. “I saw strands popping on the cable and ducked just in time,” he said. “Colley–no, Colling his name was, Colling–he was looking the other way. The cable whipped like you wouldn’t believe. It cut him in two at the waist, rigging suit and all. I don’t think they ever did find where the leg half went.”

    Daniel licked his lips; they were suddenly dry. “There was blood all over,” he said. “I thought the right sideplate of my helmet was cracked because I couldn’t see out of it. It was Colling’s blood. That cable had slung it everywhere.”

    With a continued lack of emotion, the voice said, “Who was your classmate Cadet Halevy dating, then?”

    Daniel shrugged. “Hell if I know,” he said. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t know her well enough to care.”

    He paused and added, “She was bright, I give her that. But that’s all I’ll give her. She had trouble with her PT scores. I had the feeling that if she wasn’t so bloody bright, she’d have left at the end of the first year.”

    The figure across the desk shrank his display to look directly at Daniel. Until then it had been a rectangular sheen within the otherwise featureless blur of the distortion field.

    “Look,” Daniel said, letting his disquiet at the situation enter his voice; he hoped his tone would read as bored irritation. “Are you doing to get to the point? Because if you want to hear about my dear old schooldays, you can wait for my memoirs while I do something useful.”

    “I assure you that this is useful, Lieutenant,” the voice said. “I had to determine that you were not an imposter before I opened the matter to you.”

    The portentous tone struck Daniel as false, but it might well have been no more false than that of any other man pretending to himself that the fate of the nation was in his hands. There were no few of those, which Daniel had learned as a child in the house of Speaker Leary.

    Corder Leary himself spoke with the unemotional precision of an architect describing a housing block. Nothing in his voice ever suggested that there was more than casual importance to the order he was giving; though it might mean the immediate murder of some thousands of men and women; along with a number of children, inevitably gathered up in haste and error.

    “I need a messenger to carry dispatches to Sunbright,” the hidden man said. “They must be put into the hands of Freedom himself. There are any number of adventurers here on Madison, let alone Cremona, who would contract to carry them, but they would be venal or worse. You are an RCN officer, Lieutenant; you are therefore a man of honor and a patriot.”

    I wouldn’t say…, Daniel thought. But considering the context and the RCN officers he had met–before as well as since he entered the Academy–the statement was a pretty fair approximation of the truth.

    Aloud he said, “I hope I am a man of honor, yes; and I’m certainly a patriot. I don’t see how my patriotism is involved with the problems of scruffy foreigners here at the back of beyond, however.”

    The Chief laughed. “That is a matter for higher ranks than yours, Lieutenant,” he said, “but I assure you that my statement is quite true. All you have to do is to carry out your duties with the skill and determination to be expected of an RCN officer. Are you willing to do that?”

    “I was planning to look for, well, a position, after I reached Sunbright,” Daniel said cautiously. “Is this business going to affect my chances of doing that?”

    “It will not,” the other man said. “But this duty is a paid position also. Here are–”

    He slid his right hand through the distortion screen. His fingers were short, pudgy, and well manicured. He lifted and withdrew them to display ten high-denomination coins.

    “–a thousand Cinnabar florins. The fee is yours upon your oath as an RCN officer that you will use your best efforts to deliver the dispatches–”

    His left hand appeared, pushing a chip case, then withdrew.

    “–into the hands of Freedom. I depend on your honor; but the Republic also depends on you.”

    “A thousand florins?” Daniel said in surprise. He leaned forward to view the case more closely, being careful not to touch it. It was a standard RCN model, which meant that unauthorized opening would destroy the contents and probably the hands of the thief.

    “It will be a difficult task…,” the Chief said. He continued to sound like a recruiting spiel for an elite combat unit. “And an extremely dangerous one. You will earn your pay, Lieutenant.”

    Daniel chuckled. He dropped the coins into his breast pocket, then slid the chip case into the right cargo pocket of his utility trousers.

    “I was going to Sunbright anyway,” he said to the blurred figure. “For a thousand florins, I don’t mind looking up somebody on the ground there.”

    He took a step back and said in a challenging tone, “I don’t believe your story about this being my duty to the Republic. But that doesn’t matter one way or the other, since I’m on half-pay till notified. Are we done now?”

    “We are done, Lieutenant,” the Chief said. His voice had returned to the calm boredom with which he had begun the interview. “Watchly will take you and your man to the Savoy.”

    Daniel turned on his heel and walked out, trying to hide his delight. He didn’t trust anything the Chief had just told him–but it really didn’t matter.

    He couldn’t have given himself a better excuse to find Sunbright if he had planned the whole meeting.

    Tovera was wearing a loose gray sweater and darker gray slacks. The garments didn’t fit very well, but they probably hadn’t fitted the original owner either.

    Without glancing aside from her driving–Tovera was a very earnest driver–she said, “There’s another set in the back that will do for you. There’s plenty of time for you to get them on before we reach the warehouse.”

    Adele leaned into the back and found a sweater with broad horizontal stripes of blue and maroon–both colors originally dark but badly faded–and a pair of slacks indistinguishable from those Tovera was wearing. They were so loose that she pulled them on over the clothes she was wearing, then transferred her pistol to a trouser pocket.

    She didn’t ask about the boy; his condition wasn’t important at this moment. Tovera was one of the most consciously observant people Adele had ever met, however; she caught her mistress’ glance toward the rear of the van after she had finished dressing.

    “He’ll have a headache when he wakes up,” Tovera said. “And a hundred pesetas in his pocket. He’ll be fine so long as things go well. If they don’t–”

    She shrugged, smiling.

    “He takes his chances with the rest of us,” Adele said without concern. They hadn’t asked the boy’s opinion, because they didn’t care. They needed bait of a particular type, and the boy had been drawn from the bait bucket.

    Why would a Mundy of Chatsworth care what a feral youth thought about a necessary action? In the longer term it would benefit him and his fellows, but that had very little to do with Adele’s fierce determination either.

    I couldn’t save my sister Agatha.

    Adele reached for her data unit to check how far they were from their destination; the borrowed trousers covered the unit’s pocket. She pressed her lips tightly together, more in irritation at herself than because she couldn’t get the information.

    She had the information: when she looked out the window, she saw that they were turning north off the Harborfront and onto the street where the former warehouse was located. A repair garage on the corner was unmistakable: it had walls of pinkish-beige.

    I have to be willing to accept information directly though my eyes and ears. I’m nervous, and I’m letting reflex rather than intellect control my behavior.

    She looked at Tovera and said, “I’m not an animal! That is, I’m not only an animal.”

    Her servant raised an eyebrow but didn’t turn her head. “No, mistress,” she said.

    She was smiling. She was a sociopath without true emotions anyway.

    Tovera turned the car toward the gate in the brick facade and stopped in the street. The wall was a little lower than Adele had guessed from the imagery, closer to nine feet than ten; the guard tower projected another four feet above it. The guard had a window of armored glass. The three gunports below it were flared to provide full coverage of the street.

    Theoretical coverage, that is. Adele doubted that anybody could hit a target from the port while aiming through the glass panel. Certainly not with a carbine.

    After waiting a moment with no response, Tovera depressed the van’s attention signal, which turned out to be a high-pitched bell. No one appeared at the window; Tovera rang again.

    Adele grimaced. The bell was unpleasant, and Adele of course could open the gate herself with a moment’s business with her personal data unit.

    She didn’t need to do that; she was just impatient. She should be thankful that the guards were somnolent.

    The gate slid sideways, jerking and squealing on its track. Tovera drove in, scraping the van’s left fender on the post because she was concentrating on the gate itself on the right side. There were enough dents and scratches in the vehicle’s finish that this wouldn’t arouse the guards’ suspicion.

    There were four surface cars in the courtyard; there had been only three nondescript sedans when Adele had last checked satellite imagery. The new vehicle was a small three-wheeler with flowers stencilled onto a bright yellow background.

    The gate banged shut and a heavy crossbar slid into place. Adele got out her door and walked to the back of the van where Tovera met her. Tovera wasn’t carrying her attaché case.

    The door in the back of the gate tower was open, as it had been on the imagery. The guard, a paunchy man, stepped onto the landing. He hadn’t bothered to bring his carbine.

    “We didn’t get a call about you this time?” he said. There was doubt in his voice.

    “Well, we’re here anyway,” Adele snapped without looking up at the fellow.

    Tovera opened the back of the van. Adele waited a moment for her to unhook the elastic cords holding the boy in place, then leaned in to help pull him out. He was as limp as a half-full bladder of water.

    “How come he’s not tied?” the guard said. “Say, did you drug him? Why’d you drug him?”

    “Don’t worry about it,” Adele said. “He’ll scream just fine when the knife goes in. Now, tell them to open the bloody door so that we can get out of here, okay?”

    Her back was to the tower. She brought out her data unit under cover of her body. When she heard the door into the one-story building start to rise, she switched off the security cameras.

    Tovera held the boy up by the collar with her left hand. She had taken the sub-machine gun from her waistband where the sweater had concealed it. Two guards stood in the doorway; they didn’t step into the courtyard

    Leaving her data unit on the floor of the van, Adele turned to the tower. The guard had gone back inside. The staff knew what went on here. At least the man at the gate tonight was squeamish about it.

    “Hey, fatty!” Adele shouted. “Come give us a hand, lard-ass!”

    The guard stepped onto the landing again. He shouted, “Who the bloody hell do you–”

    Adele shot him twice in the throat. She didn’t aim at his head silhouetted against the evening sky for fear that her light pellets would hit the cranial vault instead of the eyesockets and perhaps not penetrate.

    The tower guard grabbed his throat with both hands, gagging in blood. His feet twisted under him so that he fell back on his side. His legs kicked for a time as his body ran down.

    Tovera’s weapon had snapped out two short bursts. When Adele turned, one of the two guards in the doorway was sprawled limply while the other one had stiffened like a mannequin. The sub-machine gun’s muzzle glowed red.

    Adele and Tovera stepped over the bodies; they didn’t need to discuss the plan.

    The drugged boy lay on the pavement at the back of the van. From any distance he would look identical to the three guards. The difference between life and death might be no more than a faint breath–or a few ounces’ pressure on a trigger.