When the Tide Rises: Chapter Fifteen

Above Conyers

    "I can't get it to work," said the senior inspector. He withdrew the chip from his translator, rotated it end for end–which shouldn't make any difference–and inserted it again. His junior colleague watched with his mouth slightly open, an expression which Adele thought made him look like an imbecile.

    It didn't make any difference. "It still doesn't work," the fellow said.

    "It's the manifest we were given on Maintenon," Adele said, trying to sound bored. In order to impersonate the mate of a contract transport, she'd borrowed clothes from Tedesco, a small-framed Sissie. Because he was a motorman, the loose tunic and trousers were indelibly stained though clean in the sense that they'd been washed since their last wearing. "If you can't read it, that's your problem, not ours."

    "But don't you have the paper copy that's supposed to come with it?" the senior man said. "Look, I've got to certify that the manifest checks before we allow you to land. This may be listed as a cluster capital but it's really a hardship posting. We'd be under attack here if the clodhoppers had any weapons, you know."

    Adele'd thought the clothes might be a problem–why would the Westerdam's first mate have oil-blotched garments?–but the inspectors who boarded from the picket boat didn't appear to notice. The coveralls under their translucent airsuits weren't in any better condition.

    "Well, certify it, then!" growled Daniel from the command console. "You can read it on this display if you can't on your own."

    "Paper copies aren't controlling," Adele said. She spoke in an upper-class Blythe accent. It might cause speculation coming from the mate of a transport, but it wasn't suspicious. "Anyway, they didn't give us one. Do what he says, read it on our console."

    She'd had no difficulty mocking up a format for the manifest the Westerdam should be carrying. Unfortunately, the nearest equipment to burn that information to a chip was on Pelosi. It wasn't exotic, but it simply wasn't the sort of thing that ships normally carried themselves.

    Adele could wipe the Skye Defender's manifest, though. She could program the command console's database to throw the correct information onto the display when a blank chip was inserted into its reader.

    "Or you can send us back to Maintenon where we belong," Colonel Chatterjee growled. "We're militia. We should never have been taken away from our home planet. That's for emergencies only, and you can't tell me that holding the hand of some provincial governor is an emergency!"

    "Better not let Governor Platt hear you talk that way," the junior inspector said.

    "Or what?" Chatterjee said. "Or he'll send us to West Bumfuck in the Bagarian Cluster? I'm an important man on Maintenon, I'll have you know!"

    "Nothing on bloody Maintenon is important," muttered the official, but to his partner he said, "All right, Booth, we'll run it on theirs. But get that bloody reader over to the shop when we come in, right?"

    "Dunno why it don't work," Booth said as his senior handed the chip to Daniel, who in turn inserted it into the slot on his console. Unless his looks belied him, there were many things that Booth didn't know.

    Both inspectors leaned forward to stare at the information glowing on Daniel's display. The manifests of the Alliance's Transport Auxiliary Command were mauve, a strikingly ugly color for air-formed holograms and difficult to read besides. Adele had precisely duplicated the hue.

    "All right, you guys can land," the senior inspector said as he straightened. "But you better be careful when you open your hatches. The clodhoppers've been known to take shots at ships in Grand Harbor. This is a hardship posting, I tell you!"

    The Alliance officials sauntered back into the airlock, refastening the fittings of their air suits. When the hatch had closed behind them, Adele rose and strode for the companionway where Rene and Tovera waited. Tovera was carrying a full-sized sub-machine gun.

    "Adele?" called Daniel from the bridge. She turned.

    "Good luck," he said with a smile. "I wish we had an aircar, but the box should work well enough."

    "Yes," Adele said. "Good luck to all of us."

    A starship was merely a steel box, after all. Leaving a starship in a smaller steel box on wheels was unusual, but perhaps it was fitting. A coffin was just a box too, after all.

    "Ship," said Daniel. "All right–"

    His tongue caught momentarily. Great heavens, what to call them! Certainly not Sissies, not least because he wasn't going to cheapen that name by applying it to a battalion of pongoes, and foreign pongoes as well.

    "–comrades, we're going in. Remember your orders, obey your officers, and above all–when it starts, don't slow down till you've finished it. Six out."

    The Skye Defender's thrusters roared, squeezing Daniel back into the command console. Starships never had a high enough thrust to weight ratio to accelerate quickly. More power would be pointless, because hard acceleration would strip off the antennas and yards that the ship required to maneuver in the Matrix.

    During the landing approach, the transport was a sitting duck for the pods of ship-killing missiles in Fort Douaumont. Well, if the Alliance garrison figured out they were hostile, it wouldn't require missiles to turn the assault into a massacre of the would-be attackers. A missile would have the virtue of being quick.

    The Spring is come! Daniel whistled, I hear the birds–

    The mate's position had a flat-screen display rather than a holographic tank, though it should be possible to carry out all the functions of star flight from it. Captain Chris Salmon, the officer who'd commanded the Skye Defender until Daniel took over, sat there now. He seemed an adequate officer, but Daniel would much rather've had Vesey–or even Blantyre–on that couch. He knew how people he'd trained would react after the shooting started.

    Indeed, Daniel'd thought of making Cory his XO, despite the implied insult to Salmon, but Cory was probably better off handling signals from the minimal controls in the captain's office just astern of the bridge. Cory was a brave officer who never gave less than his best, but ham-handed would've been a generous description of his piloting skills.

    –that sing from bush to bush, Daniel whistled.

    Captain Salmon hadn't complained when Daniel supplanted him. Chatterjee backed Daniel's plan. Besides being of higher rank in the Skye service and a friend of the Governor, the Colonel had two hundred and fifty armed soldiers to enforce his orders. Nobody'd mentioned that, but Salmon was certainly aware of it.

    The violence of the descent increased as the Skye Defender carved deeper into Conyers' atmosphere. The navigation laser was focused on the misnamed Grand Harbor, the fenced lagoon to the west, but Daniel had keyed in an offset so that the transport was really landing in the interior of Fort Douaumont. He doubted that the garrison would've noticed the laser beam–it was below the optical range–but he preferred not to take unnecessary risks. The necessary ones were bad enough.

    Hark! Hark! I hear them sing.

    He wished Adele was sitting in the adjacent console to update him on what the fort's defenses were doing, though she'd have to use the transport's electronics. There hadn't been time to transfer high quality naval hardware from the Ladouceur. He was sure she'd have managed, though; she always did.

    Daniel grinned. Well, so had Daniel Leary, if it came to that. And Adele had a much more critical task to perform than to warn the captain that a missile he couldn't avoid was aimed at the ship.

    There was a blat of static as someone tried to call the transport using short wave. The thrusters' exhaust, oxygen and hydrogen ions roaring across the RF spectrum as they changed state, smothered the attempt at communication. Adele wouldn't have let the white noise through to him, but Cory caught it quickly enough. Cleverness wasn't required in an RCN officer, but steadiness was; Cory was steady.

    "Westerdam, this is Conyers Control!" snarled a female voice who'd belatedly switched to laser communication. "What in the bloody hell are you playing at, you fool! Sheer off, you're supposed to be landing in Grand Harbor, over!"

    "Roger, Conyers Control," Daniel said, trusting Cory to route the transmission properly. He had enough on his plate to fight the controls through the thickening atmosphere. "This is Westerdam, Captain Schaffer speaking. Your orbital control, Officers Isaac Richards and Lloyd Booth, warned us that Grand Harbor is under attack. We're landing within the fort to disembark our troops, over."

    "You bloody fool, Schaffer!" screamed Conyers Control. "Sheer off! Sheer off now! You can't fit a ship that size on the courier pad! You'll wreck and do the devil's own damage to us! Sheer off now, damn you, over!"

    "Conyers Control, this is Schaffer," Daniel said in a tone of mindless insouciance. "We cannot change angle now, we are committed. Don't worry, little missie, this will all be all right. I, Schaffer, promise you, over."

    He was grinning as he spoke. His words and tone would send the control officer right around the bend, he figured, but she wouldn't imagine that he was a threat.

    Daniel wasn't worried about the controller warning of an attack, though she should be sending out a landing alert to keep people from sauntering across the courtyard while a ship was coming in. At worst a ground control officer wouldn't have authority to order the batteries into action. By the time she contacted someone who did have that authority, the ship would be cooling on the pad.

    At a hundred and thirty feet in the air the Skye Defender, temporarily Westerdam, slowed its descent to the rate of molasses dripping. Daniel had never controlled the ship on landing before; to his pleased surprise, she was remarkably well-balanced and responded smoothly to throttle inputs.

    He dropped lower. Reflected thrust pummeled the hull, but even that was in the form of twenty-Hertz vibrations rather than the violent surges he'd been afraid of. He'd cut the complementary angles of the central building and the rampart's inner face so perfectly that the transport only drifted outward slowly instead of pivoting around her vertical axis.

    A nice job if I do say so myself.

    "Ship, prepare for landing!" Captain Salmon announced.

    The Skye Defender touched down along the length of her starboard outrigger, dead level axially but with a half degree of yaw. The ship rang like a steel drum, every plate and bulkhead at a slightly different frequency. Daniel kept a firm grip on the controls, neither adding nor reducing thrust.

    The port outrigger touched and the main hull squealed on the oleo struts. Daniel flared his thruster nozzles and only then chopped the mass flow to zero.

    The Skye Defender/Westerdam was down. Outside the concrete and soil–the transport was far too big to fit on a pad poured for vessels a quarter of her size–shimmered with heat they'd absorbed from the flaring ions. Metal pinged as it cooled.

    A port clanged open. Not the main hatch; that'd remain closed for ten minutes even after a landing on water which dissipated the thrusters' impulse much more quickly than solid ground did. This was the Power Room access port in the far stern. It was designed so that a crane could swing the fusion bottle off its bed and onto a waiting barge or lowboy.

    Daniel's console was rattling with the fury of Conyers Control and several levels of officialdom above her. Hogg offered a sub-machine gun; as usual, he carried a stocked impeller himself.

    "Handle the discussion if you would, Captain Salmon," Daniel said. "I have other duties. I'm going to join Colonel Chatterjee in the entry hold right now."

    His face was settled into sterner lines that it usually wore. Adele needed to be in one of the distributed command centers of Fort Douaumont in order to take control of the heavy weapons. Her skill with protected information systems was critical to the success of this mission.

    But she and her companions would probably have to shoot their way into that command center. Again, Adele's remarkable skill would be required….

    It seemed to Adele that the roar and vibration of landing were concentrated in the aft companionway. The tube around the helical stairs wasn't armored the way it would've been on a warship, but it was nonetheless heavy-gauge steel. The cylinder, the treads, and the square-section stringers rang at different frequencies. Occasionally they struck a harmonic which made her teeth hum.

    The G Deck rotunda was dim. When she followed Tovera through the Power Room's heavy hatch–open now; she wondered if it should have been–she found the long compartment was hot, muggy and darker yet because of the fog swirling around the catwalks and machinery.

    She paused for a moment. Rene muttered something from close behind; he must've nearly walked into her when she stopped abruptly.

    The hiss of escaping steam was a pervasive background. Adele supposed it was coolant from the fusion bottle or its auxiliaries, though she restrained the urge to pull out her data unit and check.

    She smiled slightly. Or she could ask Pasternak, watching from his upper-level office in a blister cantilevered from the forward bulkhead; he waved when he saw her look up. Instead of being glazed, the windows were guarded by heavy mesh.

    That's not what I'm here for, thought Adele, nodding in reply as she walked on. Why was she here? Well, she could give an answer to that for the short term: to penetrate Fort Douaumont and disable its heavy armament, enabling a combination of Cinnabar and Bagarian forces to capture the bastion. In the more general sense, as she'd told Rene on the voyage out, she was the wrong person to ask.

    She wondered if the steam was radioactive, then smiled. It would have to blaze like the blue heart of a sun before it was likely to reduce her present life expectancy.

    Three spacers in rigging suits waited beside a battered nickel steel container; their helmets were slung. The box was about six feet by four; it was 30 inches high, but it'd been mounted on a missile trolley that lifted it a foot off the ground. The lid was open.

    Adele stepped close to the bosun and said in a loud voice so she could be heard, "Woetjans, I told you two spacers only, you and one other. We can't afford to let this look like an attack."

    "Yes ma'am," Woetjans agreed. "But I'm bringing Barnes and Dasi both."

    The riggers must have heard their names; maybe they'd learned to read lips while working on the hull? They nodded, smiling like a pair of clowns.

    "This waste can's going to be a pig to maneuver even if the ground's hard," Woetjans said, banging the container with her gauntlet. It was intended for wiping rags and other solid trash, but the strong smell of lubricant suggested that oil had been dumped into it at some point. "And besides, mistress…."

    The bosun grimaced with embarrassment, an unfamiliar expression and one that made her craggy face look even more grotesque than it usually did.

    "Well, it's like this. Six'd never forgive me if something happened to you, and he'd be right. I see where you're coming from, but I'm still taking Barnes and Dasi both to back me. That's how it is."

    "Thank you for your honesty, Woetjans," Adele said. She wouldn't know who was present as soon as the lid closed over her, so the bosun could have offered a fait accompli. It wasn't as though Adele could prevent the riggers from doing anything they pleased, even now that they'd explained their intention. Short of shooting them, she had no means of compulsion.

    Adele stepped onto the trolley and gripped the sides of the box to swing herself in. It already held two sub-machine guns, a stocked impeller, and packets of plastic explosive in slick green wrappers.

    "Here you go, ma'am," Dasi said. He took Adele's waist in his gauntlets and lifted her; when she kicked her legs out, the rigger lowered her into the container. His grip was as firm as a vise but he didn't squeeze enough to cause discomfort. His size and strength belied that degree of delicacy.

    Tovera swung herself in and looked coldly at Rene. "It's going to be tight with him too," she said. "He's scarcely necessary."

    Instead of snarling a reply, Rene used the length of his legs to step into the container. Nothing in his expression suggested that he'd heard. He had a sub-machine gun, but the sling bound it so tightly across his chest that he'd have to detach it from one of the swivels to use it.

    He wore one-piece coveralls of dark gray-green fabric. It struck Adele for the first time that the garment might have been a uniform of some kind: the color was similar to that of Alliance infantry utilities.

    She squatted in the box. Her head was above the rim, so she lay down on her side, ignoring the slick filth which coated the bottom. She still had Tedesco's jerkin on, but she'd changed into a pair of RCN fatigue trousers. The cargo pockets of the motorman's slops had tie fasteners; Adele wanted the familiar ease of press-seals over her personal data unit.

    Tovera and Rene curled up beside her. The boy's boots bumped her neck; he tried to draw his legs up more tightly, but that wouldn't–couldn't–last through the landing and what would come after.

    "Just relax, Rene," she said sharply. "This is going to be uncomfortable no matter what we do, but there's no reason to contort ourselves into worse shape."

    "Mistress?" said Woetjans, looking down in concern. "It's going to be a couple minutes before we land, but I can't rig the hoist without the lid's on. I mean, not if we're going to put the lid on ever, if you see what I mean. Is it all right I put the lid on?"

    "Yes, of course," Adele snapped. "For heaven's sake, Woetjans, we're not crystal figurines! Do what's necessary!"

    The lid clanged over them. The sudden darkness made her cramped posture worse. A hoist squealed; loops of chain clanked and rattled against the sides of the box.

    Adele felt Rene shifting. He's trying to keep the sub-machine gun from jabbing him now that he's lying on his side, she thought. Instead a light winked on, only a tiny penlight but enough to show the whole glistening interior. She relaxed and found herself smiling.

    The ship's vibration changed note. "We'll be on the ground in thirty-five seconds," Rene said unexpectedly. "Judging from Captain Leary's previous landings. He's as regular as an automated system, but he does it by being very smooth instead of by switching the thrusters on and off quickly the way the computer does."

    The roar redoubled. Adele tried to brace herself against the container, but the ship crashed down in a chorus of deafening clangs and the shriek of meter-thick struts compressing. The box lurched to the right, then banged back to the left when the other outrigger touched. The lift chains jangled against the sides.

    The box jerked again and swung freely. Adele heard a deep ringing sound, followed by the squeal of hinges: that would be the access port pivoting out from the hull. The container with her and her companions crawled sideways, swinging back and forth on the short loop from the hoist.

    Adele wanted to take out her data unit. How long is the crane? If I knew that, I could determine the number of  seconds at the present rate it'll take us to reach the end and–

    They banged to the end of the run-out. Almost at once the hoist began to clank downward. Adele found herself anticipating the trolley ringing against the bottom long before it actually happened. She'd forgotten that the transport was on solid ground instead of floating on the yielding surface of a slip.

    They hit concrete in a lesser edition of the landing itself, the wheels on one side clanging momentarily before those on the other. The chain loops fell away in cheerful dissonance, though the trolley bumped over them as the suited riggers began to shove the container forward.

    Even in the enclosed box, the air  became noticeably hotter and laced with ions of several distinct tangs. Adele's nose quivered and Tovera began to sneeze violently. She muffled each one, but Adele knew her servant well enough to imagine her boiling fury at being unable to control her body.

    Adele stroked the pocket holding her personal data unit; she'd need it soon.

    She was already gripping her little pistol. She might need that even sooner.