The Road of Danger-ARC

by David Drake

  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.

  CHAPTER 18: Kotzebue on Sunbright

  “All right, open the hatch!” Daniel called toward the entry hold. The Savoy had no method of internal communication beyond the unaided human voice, so he had to shout if he didn’t want to walk into the hold himself. That would have meant leaving the console, which was the only way he could view their surroundings until the hatch was down.

  Instead of the carillon of hydraulic pumps withdrawing the dogs securing the Sissie’s main hatch, the yawl provided a squeal, a metal-to-metal screech, and finally a clunk. A moment later steam, ozone, and the stench of burned organic matter puffed from the hold into the crew capsule.

  They’d landed in a former rice paddy. It was obvious that manure had been used to fertilize the crop.

  “Well, that’s bloody pathetic,” Hogg said. He stood to the left of the console, holding a carbine for himself and the other for Daniel if the occasion warranted. He could have been referring to any one of several things and been correct.

  The yawl’s exterior sensor was a low-resolution optical lens. It was supposed to rotate fully but instead stuck within ten degrees of ninety. Daniel hoped that was the most important wedge to see, since it showed anybody approaching the hatch. He couldn’t help wondering, though, if there was a bloody great plasma cannon aimed at their port side.

  A small flatbed with seven floatation tires and a much smaller road tire was angling toward the yawl’s hatch. Two men rode in the open cab and two more—holding carbines—in the back. The paddy’s thin mud formed an undulating wake, but the tires weren’t sinking to the wheel disks.

  “That’s Riely,” said Lindstrom, who had been leaning over Daniel’s right shoulder to view the display. She straightened. “It’s all right, then.”

  Hogg snorted, but that was probably true. Lindstrom was already walking toward the hatch. Daniel rose and said, “If you’re leaving the cabin, we’ll need somebody on the console.”

  “There’s no need,” said Lindstrom. “We’ll still be aboard.”

  Daniel had landed close enough to a dike that one could enter or leave the Savoy without necessarily sinking to the knees in muck, but it was a quarter mile to a cross-dike which led to the town straggling along the unflooded slope. The four crewmen were watching out the main hatch, waiting for a ride in the truck.

  Each man clutched a purse of Alliance thalers, payment for the outward run. Spacers preferred coins to credit chips in the dives that serviced them. They could still be cheated when they were given change, but it wasn’t quite as easy. There was a Sunbright currency, but apparently nobody used it.

  “Hargate, watch the display for now,” Daniel said as though the owner hadn’t spoken. “The lens is higher than we’re going to be, so if somebody comes toward us and you’re not sure they’re friendly, give a shout so we’re ready to discuss it with them, all right?”

  “Hey, I’m looking forward to a proper drink, you know,” the spacer complained, but he went into the crew capsule as directed anyway. He glanced at Lindstrom, but she pretended not to see him.

  “If there’s a proper drink to be had up there,” Hogg said to Daniel, nodding to the lights of the town, “then I’m a choirboy. But there’s some sort of popskull, and I figure he’s no fussier than I am.”

  “Are you expecting trouble, Pensett?” Lindstrom said as the truck slowed to turn parallel to the dike across which the ship waited. The paddies were scarred by perhaps a hundred previous landings. They were no longer in production, as best Daniel had been able to tell from orbit with the yawl’s sensors, but continued irrigation made them a safe if messy place for blockade runners to land.

  Three craft similar to the Savoy were already on the ground. A hopper car of pink rice waited beside a cutter two fields out, where half a dozen stevedores manhandled the inbound cargo onto trailers. The tractor pulling them mounted an automatic impeller on a ring on the roof.

  Daniel let his wrist brush the document case in his cargo pocket to reassure himself. “No,” he said truthfully.

  He was pretty sure the Savoy had outrun anybody who might have sent a message to Sunbright about what he was carrying. “Still,” he said, “the situation here is fluid—and if that turns out to mean there’s a gullywasher on the way, I’d rather know it sooner rather than later.”

  Riely’s truck pulled up with a final slosh of mud. A slender, bent-looking man wearing knee boots stepped from the driver’s seat onto the dike. He was probably in his early thirties, but his slouch made him look decades older in the poor illumination from the yawl’s hold.

  “Master?” Hogg said quietly, pressing the butt of the extra carbine into Daniel’s thigh to remind him of it. Instead of speaking, Daniel waved off his servant with his open left palm.

  Riely hopped onto the yawl’s ramp; his companion, a dull-looking, heavy-set, man, followed with a thump. The guards remained on the vehicle.

  “I got the manifest you radioed down from orbit, Lindstrom,” Riely said without enthusiasm. “If it checks out, I’ll be able to fill your hold with the rice and there’ll still be some on account. If, mind you.”

  “The lasers are there,” Kiki said. “When can you start loading? Because I don’t want to spend any longer here than I need to.”

  “Neither do I,” the agent said, shaking his head in dismay. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand this. It’s worse—”

  Gunfire crackled from the town: a short burst, probably a sub-machine gun. Daniel’s head turned, but there was nothing to see in the darkness; Hogg started to present the carbine in his right hand, but he lowered it again before he’d gotten the stock to his shoulder.

  “It was too far away for a pellet to even reach us,” Daniel said mildly. “Even if it’d been aimed this way.”

  “Bloody buggering hell,” Riely whispered toward his boots. He looked up, suddenly sharper, and said to Daniel, “You’re the courier to Freedom?”

  “Yes,” said Daniel. “You transmitted my message to him?”

  He had sent the message, as directed, in a standard Alliance administrative code—the sort of thing that would be used for personnel records, but with a
few changes which would prevent an unmodified receiver from translating it. That said, an experienced signals officer could decode it quickly, and an expert—let alone Adele—could do it in his sleep. It kept complete outsiders from reading the contents, but little more.

  “I sent it on through the missile battery,” Riely said, gesturing vaguely toward the town. “They’ve got a link to the system, I don’t. Look, come back to my office with me. I want to talk with you.”

  “Not before you’ve checked the cargo,” Lindstrom snapped.

  “Mayer can do that,” said the agent. “Mayer, you and Mistress Lindstrom go over the manifest. I’ll send the car back for you as soon as I’ve gotten to the office.”

  “I’m coming,” said West.

  “And me!” said Hargate, joining the others in the compartment.

  “Hey!” said Lindstrom. “You’re not leaving me here alone. And Hogg, hand over those guns. They stay with the ship.”

  Daniel thought briefly. “Hogg,” he said, “give Mistress Lindstrom one of the carbines. Mistress, we’ll return the other as soon as we’re able to find something of our own, which I don’t think will be hard in this environment.”

  As if to underscore his remark, there was a single gunshot and the Crack!whee-e-e of a ricochet from the south end of town. Daniel grinned.

  “And Edmonson, you stay with her till she releases you,” he added.

  “Who do you think you are to give orders to me!” said the outraged spacer.

  Hogg straightened his left arm and tossed Lindstrom the carbine Daniel had refused. Facing Edmonson he growled, “Who he is, boyo, is the fellow who’s going to kick your balls up between your ears. Just like he did your buddy Petrov. Remember?”

  “Oh, screw you both,” the space muttered, but he said it as he turned and hopped into the crew capsule quickly enough to dodge a boot if Hogg had decided to aim one at him. Instead Hogg smiled, though Edmonson’s quick retreat had probably saved him a kick—or a jab with a buttstock.

  “I never checked in a cargo by myself,” whined Mayer.