The Road of Danger-ARC

by David Drake

  The high angle didn’t give my detail of the black van other than the presence of two figures in the cab. The driver stuck her head out and called something; very likely she had honked as well.

  The guard who had been dozing in the tower doorway got up and disappeared inside. After a moment, the gate opened slowly, jouncing on at least one flat roller. The truck pulled in, but the gate started to close before the driver and her assistant got out of the cab. That was surprisingly good procedure, given the slovenly fashion in which the guards seemed to behave in general.

  The pedestrian door into the building opened. Two guards, in khaki like the man in the tower, stood in the doorway; they held carbines, but the muzzles were lowered.

  The woman and the man from the truck wore nondescript civilian clothes. They walked around to the back of their vehicle and pulled out a boy of eight or ten. His wrists and ankles were bound, and he appeared to be gagged as well; the camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough for Adele to be sure.

  They carried the boy to the door, holding him by the elbows. He tried to kick, but he went limp when the driver clipped him over the ear with her free hand. They handed him to the guards, then walked quickly back to the truck while the door into the building closed.

  “Now, that’s interesting,” Cory said in puzzlement.

  “Yes,” Adele said. She paused, plotting her further course of action; plotting it all the way to the end. Because she was fairly certain how it was going to end.

  “Cazelet,” she said. “Learn what you can about who is paying for this operation. Cory, follow that truck to wherever it goes and learn everything about it and its crew.”

  She had no authority to give orders to RCN officers. She knew that; the two men knew that; and they would do as she directed.

  Adele got up from her console. She said, “Tovera and I are going to the Assumption Library. It’s what I had intended, and…”

  She paused, choosing her words. “I have spent much of my life in libraries,” she said. “I think well in that setting. And I have important thinking to do.”

  Lady Adele Mundy strode off the bridge of the Princess Cecile; Tovera followed her in grinning silence. What Adele contemplated was not the business of an RCN officer.

  ***

  The Savoy was the fifth and outermost vessel in the slip, but the fact she was tethered at a concrete quay rather than moored to a buoy made her royalty among the thirty or forty blockade runners in Ashe Haven. A suspension bridge crossed the twenty feet—more or less; the bridge dipped or tightened as the side moved—from the entry hatch to eyebolts on the quay, but Daniel paused to look at the vessel before he boarded her.

  Hogg had recovered well enough on the walk that Daniel wouldn’t have guessed that he’d come back from lunch staggeringly drunk. He grunted as he looked at the Savoy. “Not much to write home about, is she?” he muttered sourly.

  “Neither are the cowsheds at Bantry, Hogg,” Daniel said with quiet cheerfulness. “What’s important in a blockade runner is function, not a statement of national pride. That ship has made seven landings on Sunrise since the beginning of the rebellion and has returned a very handsome profit for her captain and backers.”

  The Savoy was a 600-tonne single-decked freighter. The hull was a rusty steel cylinder, floating just above the harbor surface on two pontoon outriggers; they were rusty also, at least the portion above water. The crew compartment was a capsule forward. The fusion bottle was in the hold; there was no separate the Power Room.

  She had four antennas spaced around the hull amidships. Astern a short jack was mounted at 45 degrees to the ship’s axis; there was probably a similar jack at 225 degrees, out of sight from the quay. The fixed jacks gave the astrogator leverage to slew the central antennas against the Casimir Radiation by which ships adjusted their courses in the Matrix.

  A light was on in the entrance hold, but no crewmen were in sight. Daniel could hear voices from within, though; a man and a woman. The words weren’t audible, but the angry tone was beyond question.

  “Hello the ship!” Daniel called pitching his voice to carry. “Hello Captain Kiki Lindstrom! Permission to come aboard the Savoy!”

  There was silence for a moment. A woman of forty-odd stepped into sight in the hatchway. She wasn’t precisely unattractive, but the first adjective which would occur to a man meeting her was “solid.” A man, younger but only dimly glimpsed, followed her from the crew capsule.

  “You’re Lieutenant Pensett?” she said. “Yes, come aboard.”

  Hogg would have started across, but Daniel held him back and took the lead. The treads were steel with non-skid perforations, while the suspension cables were woven from beryllium monocrystal.

  Though the construct was strong enough to support an armored personnel carrier, it swayed, jiggled, and bounced like gossamer in a breeze. Even spacers with years of experience of starships’ rigging might be uncomfortable with the slack support and the wind coming off the sea.

  Daniel grinned. The catwalk took him back to his youth, when he clambered about every building and tree on Bantry, the family estate. He murmured over his shoulder, “Hogg, you never tried to keep me from doing things because they weren’t safe.”

  “And how much would ye have listened if I had tried to do something so silly?” Hogg growled. His greater weight joined Daniel’s on the walkway, their steps syncopating one another. “Besides, you needed to learn how to fall so that you’d learn to pick yourself up again. You mother told me to take care of you, didn’t she?”

  “I suspect she meant what I would’ve called coddling, Hogg,” Daniel said.

  “Well, that’s not what I bloody meant,” Hogg said. His tone of certainty put an end to the discussion.

  The man stepped forward to stand beside Mistress Lindstrom. He was taller than Daniel and perfectly proportioned, with broad shoulders and a trim waist; his hair was short and a blond so pale that at a distance in bright sunlight he would look bald.

  “We don’t need you!” he said, arms akimbo.

  “Petrov!” the woman said. “I told you this was my decision!”

  “You certainly don’t need me,” Daniel said, because it was as easy to be polite. “The Savoy’s record of success is all the proof of that one could ask for. I need you, though, and I’ll work my passage at any position on the ship. I can both rig and astrogate, and I took my Power Room training in the RCN Academy.”

  “We’ve got riggers,” Petrov said, speaking to Lindstrom now. He was trying to moderate his tone, but he was obviously angry and not well enough controlled to keep that out of his voice. “You handle the fusion bottle, we don’t need that, and I astrogate better than any pansy from Cinnabar. He’s not worth the food!”

  “I can bring my own rations,” Daniel said mildly. “And I’ve never been aboard a ship which couldn’t have used another pair of skilled hands when things got hairy. As they’re pretty sure to do now and again for a blockade runner.”

  He was beginning to suspect that Petrov’s problem wasn’t with Daniel as a rival spacer but rather with him as a rival man. There wasn’t any polite way for Daniel to say that he wasn’t interested in Mistress Lindstrom’s favors, regardless of the wishes of the lady herself.

  “You really can run a fusion bottle, Pensett?” Lindstrom said, her eyes narrowing. She glanced at Petrov and said, “Look, Peter, I’m all right with the bottle so long as everything’s running normally, but I’m not a trained tech. We could be deep in the muck if we’re over Sunbright with a cruiser bearing down on us the next time she starts running high so I have to shut down.”

  “We’ll be all right!” Petrov said. “We’ve been all right!”

  “A Power Room certificate is required for commissioning in the RCN, Mistress Lindstrom,” Daniel said. “As I’m sure you know. I’m not an engineer, but I can tease a fusion bottle back into the green without shutting her down.”

  “Look—” Petrov began.

  “No, you look, Peter,” L
indstrom said, turning toward her astrogator with a flash of anger. “We can—I can, this is my ship—use another hand with the rigging. There’s so many splices that we’re bound to have as many cable jams as we did on the last run. Besides which—”

  Petrov had opened his mouth again to speak. Lindstrom stuck a blunt, capable finger in his face and continued in a louder voice, “Besides which, I bloody need help with the bottle! Pensett ships with us and that’s final. Do you understand?”

  Presumably Petrov did, because he sneered and walked off the ship past Daniel. His soft boots—they were standard spacers’ boots, intended to be worn inside rigging suits—wouldn’t bang on the catwalk, but he certainly tried.

  “We’ll be lifting in forty-eight hours,” Lindstrom said, “but get your traps aboard tomorrow. I’ll introduce you to the crew then, and you can go over the setup. There’s nothing unusual if you’ve sailed in ships this small before.”

  “I have,” said Daniel, “and smaller. But one thing, mistress? My man Hogg—”

  Hogg had done a remarkable job of keeping his mouth shut. Now he straightened and seemed to be trying to stand at attention. Even sober and as cleaned up as he was ever likely to be, he would look like a rumpled countryman. The attempt was either sad or amusing, depending on the observer.

  “—is an important part of my researches for Master Sattler. I’ll pay—”

  “Is he a spacer?” Lindstrom said curtly.

  “Sure, I am!” Hogg said.

  Daniel would have backed the lie if he’d thought there was any chance of it succeeding. Starting with Hogg’s heavy boots, he was as unlikely a spacer as he was a striptease dancer.

  “No, mistress,” Daniel said firmly, “but he’s a bloody useful man to have around for any number reasons. And Master Sattler will pay passenger-liner rates for bare food and passage.”

  Lindstrom shook her head. “No,” she said. “Having you aboard is stretching accommodations, but it’s short runs to Cremona and then to Sunbright. I won’t have another body, though, and that’s flat.”

  Daniel had seen Lindstrom angry, and he didn’t intend to turn her anger on himself pointlessly. He wasn’t going to change her mind—and he didn’t really disagree with her. A small blockade runner wasn’t a place for extra bodies.

  Hogg must have reached the same conclusion, because there was desperation in his voice as he said, “Look, ma’am, you won’t know I’m there! I swear, I’ll be as quiet as the ship’s cat, I swear it!”

  “Got anything on for tonight, Pensett?” the woman said as though Hogg hadn’t spoken. “I’ve got a room in the Criterion; I don’t sleep on the ship while there’s a choice. I thought we might have dinner and a drink, then go over your duties?”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Daniel with false enthusiasm, “but I have preparations to make tonight. Perhaps another time, though!”

  He grinned brightly. He thought, But no time in this lifetime, I hope.

  He touched his servant on the shoulder, then used firmer contact to turn him away. “Come on, Hogg,” he said. “Let’s get outside of a drink or ten, shall we.”

  Hogg shuffled across the catwalk like a sheep in the slaughter chute. When they had reached the other side, Daniel guided the older man toward one of the smaller, darker taverns on the other side of the Harborfront.

  Hogg turned to look at Daniel. “Lad,” he said quietly. “I didn’t try to wrap you in gauze, you know that. But I wouldn’t have let you try to fly from the top of a cloudscraper pine either.”

  “Now, it’s not as bad as that, Hogg,” Daniel said, trying to sound cheerful.

  “Yes, it bloody well is!” Hogg said. “You and that Petrov won’t both reach Cremona alive. Since you won’t stab him in the back, that means betting on you to survive is a sucker’s bet.”

  “I’ll look different when we’ve wet our throats, Hogg,” Daniel said.

  But in his heart, he wasn’t finding much wrong with his servant’s assessment.

  CHAPTER 9: Ashetown on Madison

  Daniel raised his hand to the barman and pointed to the beer pitcher. It wasn’t empty, but he took care of that problem by splitting the remaining contents between his mug and Hogg’s.

  “It tastes like dog piss,” Hogg muttered. He lowered the level in his mug with a series of deliberate gulps.

  The barman nodded to Daniel, but he was waiting with a quart of whiskey in his hand while the trio of locals at the bar agreed on which of them would pay for the round. Hogg and Daniel were at the rearmost of the four small tables; the pair of hookers at the front table had made a desultory try, but Daniel’s curt, “Not now!” and a glance at Hogg’s face had stopped them in their tracks.

  “Well, I don’t know, Hogg,” Daniel said. “It’s not up to our Bantry Brown Ale, I’ll agree, but it seems to me to have plenty of kick.”

  He took a swig and rolled it around his mouth. In a judicious tone he went on, “I don’t have any experience with dog piss, of course. That I remember. I’ll admit that there’ve been mornings that I woke up and really wondered what I’d been drinking.”

  Hogg half-lifted his mug to drain it again, then set it down. He looked fiercely across the table.

  “Look!” he said. “We can joke and tie one on, even on this dishwater the wogs here sell for beer, and we can say it’ll all be fine. But it won’t be fine, young master. Unless you’ve figured out a way not to sleep for what? Seven days running? Maybe ten? If you go to sleep, you’re not going to reach Cremona alive and that bastard Petrov won’t even pretend it was an accident. Why should he? And you know I’m right!”

  The bartender started filling a fresh pitcher. Daniel sipped, then drank deeply and met his servant’s eyes. “Hogg,” he said, “there’s risk and I know there’s risk. But I don’t know a better way to carry out my orders. It’s my duty.”

  “Well, it’s not bloody worth your life!” Hogg said.

  Daniel shrugged. “Maybe you’re right,” he said. “Maybe I ought to settle down on Bantry and be the squire. I could buy the estate through Deirdre, I’m sure. I don’t have any better use for my prize money. Is that what you want me to do, Hogg?”

  “What bloody difference does it make?” Hogg said angrily. “You’re not going to do that, whatever I tell you. And you’d go off your chump in six months with just a bunch of yokels to talk to.”

  He snorted. “Same as I would,” he added, “after all we’ve seen these past years.”

  Four spacers came in the front door. “I’ll be with you in a moment, gents,” the bartender said. He set down the fresh pitcher and swept up the three local coins—pistoles with square holes in the center—which Hogg had set out. Daniel had realized ruefully when they sat down that he had only Cinnabar florins in his purse.

  “Look, maybe if you work on Lindstrom—” Hogg said.

  The spacers in front of the bar carried lengths of tubing or steel reinforcing rod. Another man entered from the back alley and stood in the doorway. Peter Petrov, and he’s carrying a solar-charging laser from the Savoy’s cargo.

  “No, Hogg!” Daniel said, grabbing his servant’s right wrist and pinning it to the tabletop. His eyes were on Petrov. “No, no trouble now.”

  “That’s right, no trouble,” Petrov said. He was holding the laser waist-high as though it were the nozzle of a fire hose. “Our little Cinnabar friend here has decided he doesn’t want to go to Cremona after all, and he’s coming into the alley with us so that we can explain why.”

  The bartender had tensed to get back behind the bar where he probably had a weapon. He would have had to push through the spacers with clubs to get there; instead he moved into the back corner behind the tables. The whores had retreated to the other corner.

  “And if anybody gets bright ideas, I’ll toast him good with this!” Petrov said, his voice rising as he slapped his weapon’s eight-inch lens with the palm of his left hand. “You better hope I don’t trigger it in here, because it’ll light this whole place like a pi
le of straw!”

  The business end of the laser was a foot-long cylindrical mirror array which multiplied the pulse twelve hundred times before releasing it toward the target. The charging panel unfolded from the stock. The lasers were better for hunting than for military use, but their power and the fact that they didn’t need to be supplied with ammunition made them useful for sniping and the sort of hit-and-run attacks that rebels were likely to make.

  “I’m sure we can discuss this like officers and gentlemen,” Daniel said, keeping his fingers on his servant’s wrist as he stood up. “Hogg, stay here till Captain Petrov and I sort this out, please.”

  He tried to sound casual, but he could hear his voice tremble. That was all right, because Petrov would take the rush of adrenalin as meaning Daniel was afraid.

  “That’s right, hobby!” Petrov crowed. “You stay right where you are or you’ll be a real crispy critter!”

  The four men with clubs were presumably the Savoy’s crew. They seemed hesitant, but Daniel didn’t doubt that they’d pound him within an inch of his life—or beyond—if only because they were afraid of Petrov’s laser.

  He walked toward the door, smiling pleasantly. Keeping the laser aimed at Daniel’s midriff, Petrov backed ahead of him into the alley. He didn’t appear to be concerned by his victim’s attitude. The crewmen followed, bumping over an empty table.

  The alley was paved, but the surface was covered with filth which had accumulated since the most recent rainstorm washed the previous load into the harbor. None of the businesses on this section of the waterfront bothered with a latrine. There was no street light, but illumination scattered from the Harborfront and quays where vessels were loading made it brighter than the bar’s interior.

  “Now you just stand there, kiddo, and—” Petrov said.

  Daniel stepped forward, grasping the laser just behind the mirror array. Petrov pulled the trigger; nothing happened.

  “Hey!” Petrov said.

  Daniel kicked him in the crotch. Petrov doubled up in pain, and Daniel pulled the weapon away.

  Taking the stock with both hands, Daniel clubbed Petrov over the head. There was a loud bong! and the laser array deformed. The mirrors were polished metal, but nobody was going to be using this weapon again except as a club.