The Road of Danger: Chapter One

Holm on Kronstadt

    Captain Daniel Leary whistled cheerfully as he and Adele Mundy turned from Dock Street onto Harbor Esplanade, walking from the Princess Cecile‘s berth toward the three-story pile of Macotta Regional Headquarters. Daniel had every right to be cheerful: he and his crew had brought the Sissie from Zenobia to Cinnabar in seventeen Standard days, a run which would have stretched a dedicated courier vessel. They had then–with the necessary orders and authorizations–made the run from Cinnabar to Kronstadt in eleven days more.

    The Sissie‘s fast sailing meant that Admiral Cox could get his battleships to Tattersall in plenty of time to prevent the invasion which would otherwise lead to renewed war between Cinnabar and the Alliance. Neither superpower could resume the conflict without collapse: forty years of nearly constant warfare had strained both societies to the breaking point. In a very real sense, preventing war over Tattersall meant preventing the end of galactic civilization.

    Not a bad job for a fighting corvette. Pretty bloody good, in fact.

    “That’s ‘The Handsome Cabin Boy,’ isn’t it?” asked Officer Adele Mundy. “The tune, I mean.”

    “Ah!” said Daniel with a touch of embarrassment; he hadn’t been paying attention to what he was whistling. “Not really the thing to bring into an admiral’s office, you mean? And quite right, too.”

    “If I had meant that…,” Adele said. She didn’t sound angry, but she was perhaps a trifle more tart than she would have been with a friend if they hasn’t just completed a brutally hard run through the Matrix. “I would have said that. I was simply checking my recollection.”

    She pursed her lips as she considered, then added, “I don’t think anyone who could identify the music would be seriously offended by the lyrics. Although the record suggests that Admiral Cox doesn’t need much reason to lose his temper. No reason at all, in fact.”

    Daniel laughed, but he waited to respond until a pair of heavy trucks had passed, their ducted fans howling. The vehicles carried small arms which had been stored in the base armory while the ships of the Macotta Squadron were in harbor.

    As soon as the Sissie reached Kronstadt orbit, Daniel–through the agency of Signals Officer Mundy–had transmitted the orders he carried to the regional headquarters. Admiral Cox wasn’t waiting for the chip copy to arrive before he began preparing to lift his squadron off.

    “Cox does have a reputation for being, ah, testy,” Daniel said. “That probably has something to do with why he’s here in the Macotta Region when his record would justify a much more central command.”

    Navy House politics weren’t the sort of things a captain would normally discuss with a junior warrant officer, but Adele’s rank and position were more or less accidental. She was a trained librarian with–in Daniel’s opinion–an unequalled ability to sort and correlate information. If necessary, Daniel would have classed her as a supernumerary clerk, but because Adele could handle ordinary communications duties, she was Signals Officer of the Princess Cecile according to the records of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy.

    Three blue-and-white vans stenciled SHORE PATROL over broad vertical stripes tore past; the middle vehicle was even ringing its alarm bell. Adele followed them with her eyes, frowning slightly. “What are they doing?” she asked.

    “Carrying spacers picked up on the Strip to their vessels,” Daniel said. “I’m sure that the wording of the recall order justifies it, but there’s no operational reason for that–”

    He nodded after the speeding vans.

    “–since it’s going to be 48 hours minimum before the majority of the squadron can lift off.”

    Coughing slightly, Daniel added, “I’ve found that people who enlist in the Shore Patrol like to drive fast. And also to club real spacers who may have had a little to drink.”

    He kept his voice neutral, but the situation irritated him. The Shore Patrol performed a necessary function, but fighting spacers–which Daniel Leary was by any standard–tended to hold the members of the base permanent parties in contempt. That contempt was doubled for members of the Shore Patrol, the portion of the permanent party whom spacers on liberty were most likely to meet.

    “I see,” said Adele. From her tone, she probably did.

    Daniel shivered in a gust of wind. In part to change the subject, he said, “If I’d appreciated just how strong a breeze came off the water at this time of day, I’d have worn something over my Whites. I don’t have anything aboard the Sissie that’s suitable for greeting admirals, but I guess I could’ve dumped my watch coat onto his secretary’s desk before I went through to his office.”

    He’d noticed the local temperature from the bridge when the Sissie landed, but it hadn’t struck him as a matter of concern. While he was growing up on the Bantry estate, he’d thought nothing of standing on the sea wall during a winter storm. I’d have been wearing a lizardskin jacket, though, or at least a poncho over my shirt.

 

---

 

    Today Daniel wore his 1^st Class dress uniform, since he was reporting to the Macotta Regional Commandant. Anything less would be viewed as an insult, even though technically his 2^nd Class uniform–his Grays–would be proper. As he had said, Admiral Cox had the reputation of not needing an excuse to tear a strip off a subordinate.

    “We’ve been aboard the Sissie so long,” Adele said, “that I’d forgotten how the wind cuts, too. At least it’s not sleeting, and we don’t have to sleep in it.”

    She glanced toward him with a raised eyebrow. “At least I hope we won’t have to sleep in it,” she said. “Poverty provided me with many experiences which I would prefer not to revisit.”

    Daniel hoped Adele was being ironic, but it was just as easy to treat the comment as serious–as it might be. He said, “I don’t think we’ll be sleeping in a doorway tonight, but I may have Hogg bring us heavy coats before we walk back to the Sissie.”

    They’d reached the line of bollards that protected the front of the regional headquarters. The two guards at the main entrance wore battledress, and today their sub-machine guns weren’t for show. Unsmilingly, they watched Daniel and Adele approach; the alert must have made everyone on the base a little more jumpy than normal.

    Adele shrugged. “I did think that Admiral Cox might have sent a vehicle for us,” she said. “Or his Operations Section, at any rate, but perhaps they’re too busy dealing with their new orders to worry about courtesy toward the officer who brought those orders.”

    Adele did wear her Grays. They weren’t tailored as closely to her trim body as they might have been, so that the personal data unit along her right thigh and the pistol in the left pocket of her tunic were less obtrusive. There wouldn’t be a problem about that: formally, Signals Officer Mundy was a junior warrant officer on the corvette Princess Cecile, accompanying her commanding officer. As such she was beneath the notice of an admiral in the Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Informally….

    Daniel wasn’t sure that his friend even owned a set of Whites. When Adele deemed that a situation required formality, she wore civilian garments of the highest quality. By birth Adele was Lady Mundy of Chatsworth, head of one of the oldest and once most powerful families in the Republic. When she chose to make a point of it, no one doubted that the Mundys retained a great deal of power.

    The headquarters building was of yellow stone, not brick as Daniel had thought when he started down the esplanade. The corners, and the cornices above the windows on each of the three floors, were of a slightly darker stone than the walls. In all, very skilled workmanship had gone into a building which nonetheless had no more grace than a prison.

    Three officers wearing utilities but saucer hats with gold braid came out of the door in a hurry; one clutched a briefcase to her chest. A light truck with six seats in back pulled up beyond the bollards. They got into the vehicle and rode off. The tires of spun beryllium netting sang on the pavement.

    “Captain Daniel Leary, just landed in the Princess Cecile,” Daniel said to the Marine sergeant who seemed the senior man; both guards had relaxed when the strangers sauntered close enough to be seen as harmless by even the most paranoid observer. “Here to report to the regional commander.”

    “It’s to the right just inside the door,” the sergeant said, gesturing. “But we got a flap on here, so don’t be surprised if some clerk checks you in.”

    Daniel nodded pleasantly. It wasn’t the proper way to address a senior officer, but Marines weren’t in the same chain of command as spacers until you got up to the Navy Board–which was a very long distance from Kronstadt. The other guard pulled open the door for them, though the gesture was marred when two more officers came out, talking in excitement and taking only as much notice of Daniel and Adele as they did the line of bollards.

    The lobby must have been larger originally. A splendid crystal chandelier hung in line with the door, but a waist-high counter now stood a full ten feet out from where the right-hand wall must have been.

    A clerk under the eye of a senior warrant officer acted as gatekeeper to the several officers who wanted to get through. Beyond the counter were six consoles occupied by clerks.

    Across the bullpen was a closed door marked Admiral Aaron J Cox in raised gold letters. The door of the office beside it was open; the commander seated at the desk there wore utilities. It was unlikely that a regional headquarters operated on a combat footing normally, so she must have changed out of her dress uniform as a result of the signal from the Princess Cecile.

    The commander got up when she saw Daniel enter and approach the counter. Instead of greeting him, she tapped on the admiral’s door and stuck her head in. After what must have been a few words, she turned and called across the room, “You’re Captain Leary?”

 

---

 

    Yes, which makes me your superior officer, Daniel thought. Aloud he said pleasantly, “Yes, commander. My aide and I are bringing orders from Navy House.”

    Adele held the thin document case in her right hand; she didn’t gesture to call attention to it. Her face was absolutely expressionless, but Daniel could feel anger beat off her like heat from an oven.

    With luck, Admiral Cox would ignore Adele during the coming interview. With even greater luck, neither Cox nor his aide would manage to push her farther. Daniel had the greatest respect for his friend’s self-control, but he knew very well what she was controlling.

    “Come on through, then,” the commander said. “The admiral has decided he can give you a minute. Casseli, let them both in.”

    The warrant officer lifted the flap. The three officers on this side of the counter watched the visitors with greater or lesser irritation.

    Adele smiled slightly to Daniel as she stepped through. “I’m reminding myself that there are fewer than twenty present,” she said in her quiet, cultured voice. “So there’s really no problem I can’t surmount, is there?”

    Daniel guffawed. The commander–the name on her tunic was Ruffin–glared at him.

    I wonder what she’d say, Daniel thought, if she knew that Adele meant she had only twenty rounds in her pistol’s magazine? Of course, she normally double-taps each target….

    Admiral Cox’s office had high windows with mythological figures–Daniel wasn’t sure what mythology–molded onto the columns separating them; the pattern continued, though at reduced scale, along the frieze just below the coffered ceiling. The furniture was equally sumptuous, which made the admiral’s mottled gray-on-gray utilities seem even more out of place. The regional command seemed to be at pains to demonstrate how fully alert they were, but changing uniforms wouldn’t have been one of Daniel’s operational priorities.

    Daniel took two paces into the room and saluted–badly. He was stiff with chill, and he’d never been any good at ceremony. “Captain Leary reporting with dispatches from Navy House, sir!” he said.

    The admiral’s return salute was perfunctory to the point of being insulting. He said, “They’re the same as what you signaled down, I take it?”

    “Yes sir,” Daniel said. Adele was offering the case–to him, not to Admiral Cox. “I had been warned that time was of the essence, so we took that shortcut to save the hour or so before we could get the Sissie–the ship, that is, down and open her up.”

    “Navy House was quite right,” Cox said, as though the decision had been made on Cinnabar instead of on the Sissie‘s bridge. He was a squat man whose hair was cut so short that it was almost shaved; he looked pointedly fit. “Hand them to Ruffin, then, and I’ll give you your orders.”

    “Sir!” Daniel said. He took the chip carrier from Adele, who hadn’t moved, and gave it to the smirking Commander Ruffin.

    “Indeed I will, Captain,” the admiral said. His smile was that of a man who is looking at the opponent he has just knocked to the floor, judging just where to put the boot in.

 

---

 

    Adele Mundy liked information–”lived for information” might be a better description of her attitude–but she had learned early that she preferred to get her information second-hand. Life didn’t always give her what she wanted, but she had tricks for dealing with uncomfortable realities.

    At present, for example, she was imagining that, while seated at her console on the bridge of the Princess Cecile, she was viewing the admiral’s office in hologram. That way she could treat what was being said simply as data, as information with no emotional weight.

    For Adele to display emotion here would compromise her mission and would–more important–embarrass her friend Daniel. She therefore avoided emotion.

    “Maybe you think I don’t know why your noble friends at Navy House sent the information by your yacht instead of a proper courier ship?” Cox said. His face was growing read and he gripped the edges of his desk hard enough to mottle his knuckles. “Is that it, Leary?”

    The phrase “noble friends” settled Adele’s data into a self-consistent whole. Cox’s father had been a power room technician and a member of a craft association which provided education for the qualified children of associates. Cox had excelled in astrogation training; then, at a time of great need during the Landsmarck War thirty years ago, he had transferred from merchant service to the RCN.

    That Cox had risen from those beginnings to the rank of admiral was wholly due to his own effort and abilities. It wasn’t surprising that he felt hostile to a highly regarded captain who was also the son of Speaker Leary–one of the most powerful and most feared members of the Senate. Cox had no way of knowing that Daniel had at age sixteen broken permanently with his father by enlisting in the Naval Academy.

    “Sir…,” Daniel said carefully. He would have probably have preferred to remain silent–there was nothing useful he could say, after all–but Cox’s phrasing didn’t permit him that option. “I believe the Board may have taken into account that the Princess Cecile was fully worked up, having just made a run from Zenobia. I honestly don’t believe that a courier–the Themis was on call–which hadn’t been in the Matrix for thirty days could have bettered our time from Xenos.”

 

---

 

    Adele wondered if commissioned officers could be charged with Dumb Insolence or if the offense was only applied to enlisted spacers. She would like to look up the answer with her personal data unit.

    She would like very much to escape into her personal data unit.

    “I’m supposed to believe that it was all for practical reasons?” Cox said in a hectoring voice. The design inlaid on his wooden desktop showed men with spears–and one woman–fighting a giant boar. It was very nice work. “That your father didn’t have dinner with Admiral Hartsfield and say that his son should be sent to the Macotta Region to burnish his hero image?”

    “Sir,” said Daniel stiffly. His eyes were focused out the window over the admiral’s shoulder. “I truly don’t believe that my father has any connection with the Navy Board. I myself haven’t spoken with him for years.”

    For a ship to make a quick passage between stars, it had to remain in the Matrix and take advantage of variations in time-space constants varied from one bubble universe to the next. Most vessels returned to the sidereal universe frequently, in part to check their astrogation by star sightings but also because humans do not belong outside the sidereal universe. The pressure of alienness weighed on crews, affecting some people more than others but affecting everyone to a degree.

    Daniel had spent nearly all the past month in the Matrix, and most of that time out on the Sissie‘s hull. That had allowed him to judge every nuance of energy gradients and adjust his course to make the quickest possible passage.

    It was discourteous for Cox to abuse a man who had just undergone that strain. It was dangerous to do so in front of the man’s friend, who had undergone the same strain and who had killed more people in the past few years than even her own fine mind could remember.

    Admiral Cox drew his head back slightly and pursed his lips. The new expression wasn’t welcoming, but Adele found it an improvement on the angry glare which he had worn until now.

    “Well, that doesn’t matter,” Cox said gruffly. “The orders say that you’re to put yourself and your ship under my command during the operation. That’s correct, isn’t it?”

    Perhaps he had recognized how unjust he had been. And perhaps he had considered some of the stories he’d heard about Officer Mundy.

    Daniel took a needed breath. “Yes sir!” he said brightly. “If I may say so, I believe Officer Mundy’s–”

    He nodded toward Adele with a smile.

    “–information gathering skills–”

    “That’s enough, Leary,” Cox snapped, returning the atmosphere in the office to the icy rage of moments before. “I’ve heard about your tame spy–”

    He made a dismissive gesture toward Adele. His eyes followed his hand for a moment but as quickly slid away from Adele’s still expression. She had been sure that her face was expressionless, but apparently she had been wrong about that.

    Where did he get the idea that I’m tame?

    “Anyway, I’ve heard about her,” Cox said more quietly, looking at Daniel and then to the holographic display skewed toward him from the right side of his desk. “In my judgment, my regional Naval Intelligence Detachment is quite capable of sweeping up these supposed plotters on Tattersall without help from outside. I’m therefore–”

    Commander Ruffin was grinning.

    “–going to assign you and your corvette to a matter of great diplomatic concern, Leary. I’m sending you to Sunbright in the Funnel Cluster to remove the Cinnabar citizen who’s reported to be leading a revolt there. Ruffin will give you the details.”

    “Sir?” said Daniel in more surprise than protest. “Sunbright is an Alliance base, isn’t it? Why–”

    Cox slammed his left palm down on the desk. Papers and small objects jumped; Adele noticed that the display became an unfocused blur for a moment. Even a ground installation should be better insulated against shock than that.

    “I said, Ruffin will take care of you!” Cox said. Less harshly he continued, “Ruffin, brief them in your office and then get back here. We’ve got a lot of work to do on this Tattersall business.”

    “Sir,” said Daniel. He saluted and turned to the door, reaching it before Commander Ruffin did.

    Adele followed. She decided to feel amused, though she didn’t allow the smile to reach her lips.

    She had started to pull out her data unit when Cox referred to Sunbright. That would have been not only discourteous but even an offense against discipline, likely to cause trouble for Daniel as well as herself. She had therefore controlled her reflex.

    But that restraint made it all the harder to avoid using the other tool which Adele used to keep the universe at bay. It would have been even more troublesome to have drawn her pistol to shoot dead the Regional Commandant and his aide.