The Road of Danger: Chapter Seventeen

Above Sunbright

    “Extracting in five seconds…,” Daniel shouted. Everybody was in the cabin, but he wanted to be sure that Edmonson and Blemberg could hear him even though they were wearing the hard suits.

    He mashed the button with both thumbs, a habit dating back to his first real insertion on the training vessel Ganges. He had been worried that the execute button would stick–as every cable and antenna in the ancient battleship’s rigging seemed to–and was determined not to allow that to go wrong. “Extracting!”

    The Savoy dropped into normal space with a suddenness that took Daniel by surprise, even though he had experienced it before. There were advantages to a yawl even over a relatively small warship like the Princess Cecile… though how he wished he were back in the Sissie!

    The Savoy‘s sensors were rudimentary, but her warship-class console processed the data instantly. Daniel had set the sensitivity to equal that of Princess Cecile, though of course that meant there was a great deal of electronic speculation at the higher ranges. For his present purposes, that was acceptable.

    They were 350,000 miles out from Sunbright. Kiki Lindstrom, leaning over his shoulder, crowed, “That is Sunbright below! Brilliant, Pensett! Bloody brilliant!”

    Daniel grunted. The only thing that pleased him at the moment was that the owner had remembered not to clap his raw, bruised back, as he had tensed himself to receive. But in truth–

    It really was respectable astrogation to bring the Savoy this close to the intended location after five–almost five–days of dead reckoning from their most recent observations in normal space. He would expect to do better–very much better–in any proper warship, let alone in the Sissie with the crew he had picked and trained; but he was in a yawl with a minimal sail plan and a maximum of two riggers available at any one time. He should cut himself some slack.

    Daniel grinned. Not likely. Not even a suggestion that anything short of perfect was really acceptable.

    A yawl much like the Savoy was 100,000 miles out from the planet, accelerating on herHigh Drive. The slug on Daniel’s Plot-Position Indicator abbreviated her name to Ell which, when highlighted, expanded to Ella 919.

    “That’s Captain Tommines’ ship,” Lindstrom said, pushing uncomfortably closer to the display. “But I think he’s on shares with a trading house on Cremona. I own the Savoy free and clear.”

    She peered further at the display and added, “Bloody hell. They don’t have a prayer, do they?”

    Daniel had been weighing the same question. The blockade runner was being pursued by a pair of Alliancegunboats, the Flink and the Tapfer. They had her boxed and were closing in. If the Ella shut down her motors for long enough to balance charges and insert, one or both of the gunboats would close and bathe her in ions before she could enter the Matrix. If the Ella didn’t shut down, they would catch her before long anyway.

    Unless Captain Tommines was a complete fool and had lifted directly into the path of theAlliancepatrols, he had probably been a little careless and a little unlucky. In combat, either alone could be enough for a disaster.

    To confirm his suspicion, Daniel said, “Tommines is a regular on this run, then?”

    “I should say so!” Lindstrom said. “Why, he must have made it a dozen times! He’d have retired long since, I guess, but he gambles on dog races and he’s got no bloody luck.”

    “Tommy gambles on anything,” Hargate said; he shook his head. “I’ve seen him bet on which rain-drop was going to run down the window of the bar first–and give odds if nobody’d take him on at evens. But a good skipper.”

    “Not a prayer,” Lindstrom repeated sadly as the gunboats continued to near. Flecks of static across the RF spectrum indicated that they were beginning to fire with plasma cannon. If they were equipped with the 5-centimeter popguns which were all their frames and scantlings could bear, they still weren’t within range–even to prevent their target from inserting.

    The commander of the Alliancepatrol must have recognized the Ella and made his plans based on information from her previous runs. Most captains let their computers handle liftoffs and landings; the machine didn’t make mistakes and it corrected faster than most humans could if something went wrong–a thruster failed, or an antenna broke its lashings under acceleration and swung violently.

    But computers always provided the same solution to the same question. The gunboats could hang well out from the planet and, when the Ella lifted, insert on a course they had refined for a week or more, and then extract close enough to their target to trap her.

    Unless the Alliancecaptains were extremely good, they had still been lucky to pinch the Ella so closely, but some captains were very good. All spacers knew how much luck their trade involved.

    Daniel checked both his calculations. There were risks involved, but he took a risk every time he rolled out of his bunk.

    He grinned. Actually, he’d clouted himself a good one on the temple with the stanchion when he slid into his bunk the other day. It had stopped bleeding, but the lump was still there.

    “Inserting in five seconds,” Daniel said.

    What?/Why?/Roger…. He ignored the last and similar acceptances as surely as he did the protests from Lindstrom and from Edmonson, who fancied himself as an astrogator. Edmonson could just about push Execute after the console had calculated a course….

    “Inserting!” Daniel said. His guts flip-flopped, but because he hadn’t lighted theHigh Driveafter extracting, the process was as painless as it could be.

    Safely back in the Matrix, he turned to face his companions. He smiled and said, “I thought we’d give Tommines and his crew a helping hand. And maybe–”

    His smile spread.

    “–we’ll remind whoever’s commanding those gunboats that it’s not just the Fleet that teaches its officers to maneuver.”

    Hogg grinned with pride. He knew even less than the spacers did of Daniel’s plans, but he knew the young master was about to stick it to the other fellow.

    Lindstrom and the crewmen looked blank–or blankly horrified, in the case of West. Still smiling, Daniel rotated his seat to face the display again. Three process clocks were counting down, but the PPI was blank: the Savoy was her own separate universe here in the Matrix.

    There were solid reasons why Daniel should not do what he was about to. The best were that he might fail–unlikely–or that some critical piece of the Savoy might break and leave them at the gunboats’ mercy. Beyond those material dangers was the fact that even if successful, he would be marking the Savoy and himself for special attention from the Alliance forces.

    Some–Adele, for one–might even have added that such boastful behavior was beneath a noble of Cinnabar.

    Others were entitled to their opinions. He was Captain Daniel Leary, RCN, and he saw nothing wrong with grinding an opponent’s face in the dirt when he saw the chance.

    “Extracting!” he called to his companions, and he pressed Execute.

Halta City on Cremona

    “Your Ladyship?” Vesey called over the crackles, hisses and pings which filled the boarding hold. Adele turned to see the slim blond woman emerging from the companionway, looking concerned.

    An instant later, the main hatch undogged in a clanging chorus which overwhelmed any attempt at speech. The hold was the corvette’s largest empty volume; echoes from its steel surfaces multiplied sounds a thousand fold.

    The ramp began to squeal down on the thrust of hydraulic rams, allowing steam and ions to curl into the hold. The bite made Osorio close his eyes and sneeze, though the spacers–Adele included–took the familiar unpleasantness without reaction.

    “Captain?” Adele said. She didn’t really expect Vesey to be able to hear her, but she cocked an eyebrow toward the younger woman to show that she had heard. What in heaven’s name is Vesey coming to me here for?

    Adele glanced at Master Osorio out of the corner of her eye, but he was too lost in the misery of the moment to be interested in what the Principal was doing. She nodded toward Vesey and moved to the back of the compartment, through the spacers who would be her escort.

    Adele didn’t care for commo helmets, but under ordinary circumstances she would have been wearing one now. They were short-range, but when their signal was piggybacked onto the local communications net–as Adele regularly arranged every time the Sissie made landfall–they could cover as much of the planet as the system itself did.

    It was acceptable–necessary, in fact–for Principal Hrynko to be eccentric. It would send the wrong signal if she were technically proficient, however; that might cause the Cremonans, or at least the more sophisticated elements of Cremonan society, to take precautions which wouldn’t occur to them while dealing with a blustering, arrogant noblewoman from a third-class planet.

    Mind, “third class” was more complimentary than any term Adele would use for Cremona, but the locals probably didn’t see it that way. Proving how benighted they were.

    “Your Ladyship!” Vesey said. Her lips were almost touching Adele’s right ear, but she had to shout regardless. “Since the Savoy wasn’t in harbor, I asked Lieutenant Cory to check local records of her. It doesn’t, that is, it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a problem, but I’m afraid there’s no evidence that she or a vessel that could be her has landed in the past five days.”

    Adele turned to Vesey and forced a smile. “Thank you, captain,” she said, enunciating clearly but not trying to bellow over the ambient noise. “I’m sure that the appropriate parties are dealing with the situation in their usual able fashion.”

    Vesey was covering a tragic expression with professional calm. If Osorio hadn’t been present, Adele would have patted her hand–as a bit of theater for the younger woman rather than anything Adele herself found natural.

    As soon as The House of Hrynko reached orbit above Cremona, Adele had entered port records and the records of all the major trading houses in Halta City. Cazelet–and a moment later, Cory–had informed her that the Savoy wasn’t among the hundred-plus ships in Halta Harbor nor in any of the outlying anchorages scattered across Cremona.

    The yacht’s sensors were set to automatically search for starships on the surface of any planet they orbited. The information was not infrequently useful; and besides, it was always Adele’s goal to have more data rather than less.

    Vesey didn’t know that. She had always been an excellent astrogator and had improved her ship handling to a high degree of skill under Daniel’s tutelage, but she had no more concept of what an information specialist really did than Daniel himself.

    Daniel, however, assumed that Adele knew or could quickly learn everything. That wasn’t precisely true, but it was actually a better default option than Vesey’s subconscious belief that the only data Adele had were those things which Adele had explicitly stated she knew.

    It didn’t matter that Vesey had gone out of her way to provide Adele with unnecessary information. It did matter that she’d tried to help Adele and that she had come down to the entry hold in person to take the sting out of what she knew was bad news.

    Adele compromised between a coldly professional response and the pat–or even hug, though she never could have brought herself to hug another person in public–by adding, “I understand your concern, Captain Vesey, but I have trained myself to examine probabilities. In this case, the probabilities–based on the considerable information about the personnel that we’ve both amassed over the years–are overwhelmingly in favor of a good result.”

    The boarding ramp clanged against its cradle on the yacht’s starboard outrigger. Woetjans shouted, “Hup!” and led a team of riggers to roll out the pontoon-supported gangway which would reach the rest of the way across the slip.

    The dock had a floating extender, but now at high tide it had risen level with the concrete spine where a small aircar waited. Idling fans spun swirls from the steam which the Hrynko‘s thrusters had boiled up from the harbor.

    Adele joined Osorio as he recovered himself enough to turn and wonder what had happened to his hostess. She said, “Where is the transportation you promised?”

    “There on the quay,” the Cremonan said. He started down the ramp at a quickstep; arriving back on his home planet seemed to have revived his mincing arrogance. “Come, don’t you see the car?”

    “That little toy?” said Adele. “I have an escort of twenty, my man. My position demands it.”

    “Not here in Halta City,” Osorio said, too brusquely to have picked up on Adele’s tone. “This is merely a business transaction, you agreeing terms with me and my friends. It is better that you be alone. We don’t want to call attention to your presence, you see. We have rivals.”

    They reached the car, which was tiny. Instead of cushions, the back seat was cast out of the same thermoplastic as the body; the vehicle hadn’t been luxurious when new, and it was by now at least twenty years old. Adele restrained her reflex of bringing out her data unit to identify the car precisely.

    It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. But then, nothing really mattered against the certainty of the Heat Death of the Universe.

    Adele smiled faintly. Most people would not find that thought as reassuring as she did, so it was probably a good thing that she didn’t volunteer it often.

    “This is not acceptable,” she said dismissively to Osorio. “Bring proper vehicles for my escort and myself, or–”

    She turned her palms upright as though scattering trash on the wind.

    “–I will take myself off. To Sunbright, perhaps, to consult with the Governor there. Blaskett is his name, is it not?”

    Osorio and opened his mouth to shout what would probably have been an order couched in insulting terms. His glare melted as the full import of what Adele had said struck him. Enlightenment came just in time to prevent the Cremonan from making an uncomfortable mistake.

    Barnes and Dasi were in charge of Principal Hrynko’s escort. The very least Osorio could have expected was a punch in the belly with the tip of a truncheon. There was a better chance that the riggers–either could have managed it alone, but they were used to working in concert–would have tossed him into the slip.

    “Blaskett is a beast and a criminal, your Ladyship,” Osorio said, looking downward rather than meeting Adele’s eyes. “You would not be treated well by him and his, whatever they might say at first.”

    In context the statement was self-serving, but Adele knew it was basically true. “You will arrange for proper transportation to my meeting, then?” she said coldly.

    “Please, your Ladyship,” Osorio said. “Too public an appearance will really cause the wrong kind of attention. We Cremonans are civilized, but it is true that there are gangs here in Halta City who could be hired by unscrupulous opponents. For your own sake, please–you come with me alone to meet my fellows. The car will truly not hold more than you and me.”

    And the driver, Adele thought. She turned her head slightly and said, “Tovera, can you drive this car?”

    “Certainly,” Tovera said. “But if it stays in ground effect, it’ll carry four. Master Osorio is a cute little butterball, so I don’t mind sharing the back with him.”

    Grinning, she pinched the Cremonan’s waistline. He yelped and jumped back, but that may have been outrage rather than pain.

    Osorio looked toward the aircar, then back at Adele. The driver was watching the proceedings with obvious amusement. Now he volunteered in a Pleasaunce accent, “Room’s maybe a problem, but the weight of all you three isn’t. I can hug the ground if you like, but it’s quicker if we fly.”

    Grinning, he added, “Besides, it’s nigh three weeks since the last good rain, so the streets are filling up with garbage. I don’t need to be down in it.”

    Osorio started to speak but paused; started again but looked at first Adele, then Tovera. He had probably been wondering if he could ask Adele to get in the cramped back seat with her servant because she would fit better than his rotund form.

    At last he sighed and said, “All right, all right, let’s get going. We’ll fly and I’ll squeeze into the back with your secretary, if she must come.”

    “She must,” Tovera said. “Cheer up, cutie. It might be more fun than you think.”

    She giggled.

    “Ma’am?” said Woetjans as Adele stepped into the passenger compartment of the vehicle. The Bosun wasn’t a member of the intended escort, but she’d reached the quay to lash down the boarding bridge ahead of Adele and her companions.

    “Yes?” said Adele.

    “Look,” said the Bosun, “if you figure it’s all right for you to go off with just Tovera, then I guess it is. But you know all you gotta do is holler and we’ll come for you. Right through the heart of this city, and burn it down behind us if that’s what it takes.”

    “Thank you, Mistress Woetjans,” Adele said calmly. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary, but if it were–”

    She gave Osorio a smile, of sorts.

    “–there’s no one I would rather trust with the business than you and your shipmates.”

    She seated herself in the bucket seat beside the driver. Osorio was wheezing behind her. Perhaps that was just because he fit so tightly into the available space.

Above Sunbright

    “You’ve killed us!” Edmonson shouted to Daniel in amazement. “What were you thinking, Pensett?”

    He reached for the controls, apparently believing that Daniel–that Kirby Pensett–had blundered and was frozen in horror. The yawl had extracted between the two Alliance gunboats.

    Normally the first thing captains did on extracting was to engage the High Drive to gain velocity in normal space before they reentered the Matrix. Daniel hadn’t done that for a bloody good reason.

    He slapped Edmonson’s hand away. He didn’t bother to bellow, “Keep away from the bloody board when I’m on it!” because Hogg had already caught the spacer’s wrist and twisted it up behind his back to move him away from the young master.

    “Wait for it, all of you,” Daniel said pleasantly.

    The gunboats were on courses that would eventually converge with the Ella 919. The Savoy had extracted dead astern of the other blockade runner, but on a reciprocal; she was headed directly toward the Alliance ships. Daniel grinned tightly. That had been a very neat piece of maneuvering, if he did say so himself.

    The Flink, then no more than a heartbeat later the Tapfer, rotated to bring their ventral surfaces–with the High Drives and plasma thrusters–in line with their present course. Both gunboat captains were reacting identically to the information, though they hadn’t had enough time to coordinate their maneuvers. The Ella was a probable capture; the just-appeared Savoy was a certainty if they could brake to come aboard her.

    “Inserting…,” Daniel said, “now!“

    He pressed Execute. The Flink‘s captain must have understood what was happening, because the gunboat began firing. The range was too great for anything less than a heavy cruiser’s 15-centimeter cannons to be effective.

    The last thing Daniel noticed on his display was that the Ella 919 had shut down her High Drives as she prepared to insert. “Good luck, Tommines,” he said under his breath. “But you’re on your own now.”

    Transition from the sidereal universe froze Daniel’s spine into a column of ice. The sensation spread outward along his nerve endings, then passed. The Savoy was safe within the Matrix.

    “What did you do there, Pensett?” Lindstrom said in the calm which immediately followed their insertion. She didn’t sound angry or frightened, just… intrigued would be the best word, Daniel decided. “I don’t pretend to be an astrogator, but I know you did something.”

    “I thought he’d killed us,” muttered Edmonson. Hogg continued to glower in warning at the fellow though he had released him after walking him back to the bunk tier.

    The spacer looked at Daniel and said, “I did, sir, I thought you’d screwed up and they’d catch us sure, then put us out the lock without suits. I’m sorry, but I’m still not sure how you did it.”

    “It was a matter of timing,” Daniel said. Speaking of which, he needed to keep an eye on the process clock still running. There was plenty of time available for a full explanation, though. “We didn’t–”

    Meaning “I didn’t,” but there was no advantage in rubbing the others’ noses in the fact that they were completely under his control.

    “–dare chance anything that involved a rigging change, because that could stick. But we knew what the present conditions in the Matrix were because we’d just extracted, right? A timed in-and-out–and in again, of course–would put us anywhere we wanted to be in the Sunbright system with just using our current sail plan. As we did, to the benefit of Ella 919.”

    He grinned at Lindstrom, then at the gaping spacers. She simply accepted what Daniel said at face value, but the crewmen had learned enough misinformation in the past to think what they had just heard was impossible.

    “You can ask Captain Tommines to buy you all drinks the next time you see him,” Daniel added. “Actually, I suspect he’ll volunteer to do that without you asking.”

    It really had been as simple as he’d described it being, but an astrogation computer by itself couldn’t have planned the maneuver: what the Savoy had done wasn’t within the parameters loaded into the unit. Someone who knew his way around the software, however, could exceed the preset options by orders of magnitude.

    Spacers crewing small craft here in the Macotta region–or even in the heart of Cinnabar territory, like as not–would never have met an officer who really knew how to wring out the best of his computer. That led to the common human mistake of believing that because you’d never seen something done, it therefore couldn’t be done.

    “They’re going to be laying for us when we extract,” said Edmonson darkly. “It’s not just the Ella got away, it’s you made monkeys out of ‘em with all this school-trained nonsense. I shouldn’t wonder they brought up the whole gunboat squadron and we’ll play hell trying to get down!”

    Daniel smiled at the spacer. That was the ill-tempered bitchiness of a poseur who now couldn’t even convince himself that he was good as Daniel. That Edmonson had ever imagined otherwise was proof in itself that he lived in a fantasy world.

    But bitchy or not, the point was valid.

    “I don’t think there’ll be a problem,” said Daniel mildly. “We’ll extract quite close in above the planet in a little under a minute.”

    In forty-three seconds from the word “minute,” to be precise.

    “The Alliance forces won’t have time to react, and I very much doubt that either of those gunboats would be willing to transit to within seventy-five miles of the surface anyway.”

    Edmonson opened his mouth as though to speak, then closed it. West, in a tone of puzzlement rather than objection, said, “Sir, can you do that? I mean, I’d always heard….”

    “If we didn’t have an excellent console here,” Daniel said, patting the unit as he spoke, “and if I hadn’t had plenty of time to judge the Matrix, it’d be risky operating so close to a gravity well, yes.”

    And also if he hadn’t put the Savoy in a situation where the risk of not cutting a few corners was greater than that of a close approach through the Matrix.

    “As it is, we’ll be fine,” he concluded, beaming at his companions.

    He returned to the display. Raising his voice, he said, “Hargate and Blemberg, you’d best get onto the hull as soon as we extract. We’ll need to get the rig in for a very fast landing at Kotzebue. Anything that sticks and you can’t manhandle into place is going to come off in the stratosphere.”

    The third clock reached zero. “Extracting!” Daniel called.