The Road of Danger-ARC

by David Drake

  Daniel used the loose end of his shirt to wipe the bronze wheel. That also gave him a chance to get his breathing under control and calm down generally. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but crawling half a mile in a lightless steel tube had proven more stressful than he’d been aware of until he slowed down.

  He took the wheel in his hands, tugging with his left and pushing upward with his right palm against a crossbar. Nothing moved. He continued willing more strength into his arms. This wasn’t going to beat him, even if he cut his hand to the bone on the smooth rod.

  There was a tiny snap. The wheel began to move with a grinding shudder. He changed his grip and continued to push; when blood rushed back into his right hand, it felt as though he had plunged it into boiling water.

  The gear reached its stop. Daniel slammed the wheel with the point of his left shoulder, breaking the seal and swinging the port outward.

  Light flooded in and made Daniel sneeze. The relief he felt as he scrambled onto the platform shocked him in its intensity. I was a lot closer to the edge than I thought I was.

  Hogg joined him, puffing a little and with more red in his face than Daniel remembered seeing before. “I don’t mind being outa that thing,” he muttered as he sat heavily on the platform, his legs hanging over the edge. He leaned back against the pipe and closed his eyes.

  He grinned, looking at Daniel, and added, “And whatever I told that smart-ass city kid, I’m just as glad it wasn’t three miles. Though I’d’ve done it, I guess.”

  Next to the support pillar grew a tree that looked as though it had been made by sticking lengths of drinking straws together with lumps of clay. The bark was metallically smooth; sprays of purple-red leaves sprang out randomly from trunk and branches alike.

  Daniel leaned closer. What had seemed to be a scar on the nearest branch was a troop of tiny insects in a circular formation.

  If I were like Adele, I’d have a natural history database with me. I don’t, because I depend on her to supply me at need. For so many things.

  Daniel stood and swung the port closed, then locked it down by using his left hand alone on the wheel. His right was swollen, and there was still a white streak across the palm. He waggled the hand slowly to get the circulation back.

  “I’d as soon wait to go down the ladder till Grant comes for us,” he said.

  “You don’t see me moving, do you?” said Hogg. He had closed his eyes again. “Young master? What do we do when we get into Saal?”

  Water began to flow through the pipe again. The rush of its passage became higher pitched as the upstream valve opened fully, squeezing the resonating air into a smaller and smaller volume.

  “We stay low,” Daniel said, nodding. “If the leader of the rebellion can hide in the city for years, he shouldn’t have much trouble putting us up for a few weeks. I’ll send a message to Adele on Cremona. There’ll be ships going there, couriers if nothing else.”

  He grinned wryly. “Though there’s not so much official trade as through the blockade runners, I’ll admit,” he said. “But I don’t and didn’t want to risk a message from an RCN captain to an RCN warship being sent by a blockade runner, just in case the Funnel Squadron captures it.”

  Daniel paused, staring at the disk of tiny insects as he ordered his thoughts. The bark in the wake of their slow passage had a polished look.

  “We’re not enemy citizens, after all: our nations are at peace. But if I’m seen to be dealing with the Sunbright rebels, the Treaty of Amiens might not…well, let’s say that there’s been more war than peace between Cinnabar and the Alliance during my lifetime. I don’t want to be the cause of resumed hostilities.”

  “So Mistress Mundy brings the Sissie here,” said Hogg. “We sneak our young hero aboard, then we head for home?”

  He straightened though he remained seated; he was looking down the brushy slope below them. He was hearing something that Daniel missed, though Daniel sat up also.

  “That’s the general idea,” Daniel said, “but I’m not sure we could slip him aboard an RCN warship unnoticed. The Sissie will be watched and probably guarded.”

  He heard something and leaned forward. “That’s the car,” he said. “Well, it’s a car.”

  “It’s our boy,” said Hogg, rising and starting down the ladder with the jolting suddenness of a dog attacking. “He’d been flying, but I guess he put her down on the ground again when he turned off to get us.”

  “The other problem…” Daniel said, standing but waiting for Hogg to get clear before he swung onto the ladder. “Is that we, Cinnabar that is, have to be seen to have solved the problem. I think it’s necessary to get Governor Blaskett’s agreement before we act. Otherwise we risk having it appear that the whole rebellion was an RCN plot run from off-planet.”

  Hogg reached the bottom of the ladder; Daniel followed, gripping the rungs with his right thumb rather than his joined fingers in the normal fashion. His hand was going to be fine, but he didn’t think he would strain it any more than he had to for the next day or two.

  “Mind…” he said as the thrum of the aircar’s fans reached them; the vehicle was still out of sight through the brush. “I’m going to talk to Adele about this when she gets here. If she sees a better option, I’ll delighted to hear it.”

  Grant’s aircar nosed through a band of shrubs with thread-thin stems and foliage that could have been brushes of glass fiber. He swung around to point back downhill before he shut off his motors. Gossamer tendrils trailed from the car’s seams and threatened to clog the fan ducts.

  “Get the front, Hogg,” Daniel said as he pulled a handful of leaves out of the back intake. The car would probably pick up as much vegetation in the other direction, but at least they could start clean, or cleanish. “And then take the passenger seat.”

  “At the gate, the guards were all talking about a Cinnabar warship that just arrived in orbit,” Grant said. “The garrison has been put on alert. Do you know what this is about, Leary? Is it good?”

  Daniel lifted himself into the luggage compartment. He no longer noticed the ache in his right hand.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Did you learn what the ship is?”

  “Not a big ship,” Grant said. “It’s a destroyer named the Princess, the lieutenant thought.”

  “Ah,” said Daniel. It would require about four hours to go through procedures, then leave orbit and finally to cool down the hull enough to open the ship. That should be plenty of time to get the proper garments. “I suspect that’s the corvette Princess Cecile. And if that’s correct, it’s very good indeed!”

  ***

  Signals Officer Adele Mundy, wearing utilities and as inconspicuous as the console at which she sat, sorted information from Saal’s civil service databases

  with practiced skill. Now that the yacht had become the RCS Princess Cecile again, command had reverted to the ranking commissioned officer, Lieutenant Vesey. Principal Hrynko had dissolved back into the fog of fantasy from which she had briefly coalesced.

  That was as Adele preferred it. Her family had through the generations given the Republic many leading political figures and more than its share of Speakers of the Senate. She had found politics repugnant from age six when her father, Lucas Mundy, had paraded her before local organizers of the Popular Party at a dinner he gave for “influential supporters”—that is, the rank and file of the political process.

  Adele had found them uncouth, ill-educated, and frequently little better than brutes. She could not imagine why her father was willing to associate with such people.

  If he had answered her honestly, he would have said, “For the sake of power,” and she would still have been confused. What was the use of power if it didn’t permit you to avoid boors who ate with their mouths open, drank too much, and couldn’t have constructed a grammatical sentence for the greatest prize they could imagine?

  Which for most would have been a barrel of whiskey, judging from their behavior.

  Lucas had not be
en honest, of course. In all likelihood, he hadn’t believed that his little daughter could understand if he had been willing to answer frankly.

  Even a decade later, when Adele left Cinnabar to continue her schooling on Bryce and he planned the coup whose failure led to his death, he hadn’t really understood how intelligent she was. Lucas couldn’t allow himself to understnd, because his daughter came to such different results from his when they both analyzed the same data.

  Adele’s lips twitched; in another person, the expression would have broadened into a smile. She couldn’t even say that her analyses were correct and her father’s death proved that his were not. Lucas Mundy had been fifty-one when he was killed and beheaded; Adele was thirty-six. Given the events of her life since she joined Daniel, it seemed unlikely that she would survive another fifteen years.

  “Mistress, Flink, Tapfer, and Schuetze have been alerted and are recalling their crews from liberty,” reported Cory from the BDC. “The Scharf’s reaction tanks were emptied for recoating, and Commodore Pyne decided that it would take too long to fill her enough to lift safely. And the Sicher and Vorwarts in orbit, of course. Over.”

  Vesey had agreed that Cory and Cazelet were of more use mining the sudden flurry of message traffic for signs of Daniel than they were echoing the captain as she handled ordinary landing chores. She would have bowed to Adele’s unofficial authority even if she had not agreed.

  “All right,” said Adele. That seemed to her to be an absurd overreaction to the arrival of a corvette of a friendly power, but she found on reviewing Cory’s précis a copy of Governor Blaskett’s screamed order to Pyne, the squadron commander.

  The planetary governor had no direct authority over a Fleet officer; but if Pyne had ignored the demand and something had gone wrong, the aftermath for him would have been grim and probably unsurvivable. There was nothing unusual about an autocrat choosing to rule by fear, but Guarantor Porra was better at it—and more single-minded—than most.

  Adele had set Cazelet at the astrogation console to scanning the security force files for references to Daniel or someone who might have been Daniel. He would report when he had something to report. Beyond taking a quick overview of his progress, she left him alone.

  Adele found what she was looking for. She respected the skills of Cory and Cazelet or she would not have trusted them with the important tasks she had delegated. Indeed, Daniel’s location and safety were the most personally important questions on Sunbright to Adele Mundy.

  She was here as Officer Mundy of the RCN, however. Her duty came first, an attitude which Daniel would not only understand but approve; but she doubted that anybody else aboard the Princess Cecile would understand her ability to put human feelings behind duty.

  Well, Tovera would understand. She, of course, was a sociopath to whom feelings and duty were both abstract concepts and who operated on a strict basis of self-preservation.

  Tovera had decided that doing whatever Adele directed was her safest route through the thickets of human emotions. Adele understood the way normal people thought well enough to function among them, and Tovera understood very well how Adele thought.

  An icon winked in the upper left corner of Adele’s display. “Mistress,” said Tovera on a two-way link. “You’ll want to look at this.”

  Adele opened the icon without comment or expression. Tovera was seated in her usual location on the bridge: the training station at the back of the signals console. It was intended for a striker who could observe what the trainer was doing; if the trainer chose, the striker could carry out exercises under the trainer’s direction.

  Adele had simply turned the station into an independent unit. She could echo—or control—what was going on, of course, but she could do that with every station on the Princess Cecile, including the command console. That knowledge would have shocked and infuriated the Navy House bureaucracy and most senior RCN officers, but it simply amused Daniel.

  It was not common for Tovera—or anyone else—to break Adele’s concentration. She assumed her servant would have had a good reason.

  Tovera had been observing their surroundings, splitting her flat-plate display between a satellite view of the spaceport and a visual panorama through the corvette’s own sensors. Saal Harbor was a huge installation. Channels connected forty-eight separate pools, each big enough to hold a battleship or several lesser vessels. Less than half the pools were filled at present, and all but a skeleton staff had been withdrawn from the base after the signing of the Treaty of Amiens. Even so, from above it was more impressive than Harbor Three on Cinnabar.

  Tovera shrank the satellite image to expand the real-time view from the Sissie alone in her pool. Because of the size of the base, a network of trams were laid on top of the dikes so as to serve each pool. A company of Alliance troops in battledress had arrived in four armored personnel carriers and had set up checkpoints on the routes leading to the corvette.

  The steam of the Princess Cecile’s landing had dissipated. The surface of the pool still bubbled around the hull; the thick steel took some time to cool below boiling, even when immersed in a bath of water.

  A tram—a long flatbed with a cabin for six in front and space for cargo and supplies of virtually any dimensions in back—had arrived. Besides the driver it carried only a pair of port officials in brown uniforms. As Adele already knew from the message traffic, Governor Blaskett had decided not to extend diplomatic courtesies to the Cinnabar vessel, so she was being met by the same customs and medical team as any tramp freighter which happened to set down.

  There was also a dusty, dark blue panel van with the legend Water Department stencilled on the side. The troops had passed it through the cordon so it must have the correct papers, but what in heaven’s name was it doing here?

  The driver and the two men with him on the bench seat wore coveralls, stained and faded but roughly the same blue as that of the van. The passengers got out carrying tool boxes and trudged toward the platform at the edge of the pool where the port officials already waited for the Sissie to open up.

  Tovera increased the magnification on the passengers’ faces by ten, then by a hundred times. She must have done that earlier for herself as the van proceeded through the checkpoint.

  “Right,” said Adele, rising and shutting down her console. She had been using her data unit to control the console her usual fashion; as she strode for the companionway, she slipped it into her pocket.

  The personnel on duty on the bridge didn’t appear to notice that Adele was leaving. Tovera swung in behind her mistress, holding her attaché case and smiling like a satisfied viper.

  “Opening ship!” the PA system announced before Adele reached the companionway’s Level D hatch. Vesey’s words were blurred by echoes.

  Pasternak, the Chief Engineer, waited in the entry hold with the four spacers who would be the guard detachment. Pasternak was Chief of Ship by virtue of his position as the bosun was Chief of Rig. Vesey had delegated the duties of meeting the local officials to him, while she as captain remained on the bridge.

  Adele hoped that Vesey would have made a different choice—put Woetjans on the bridge and gone to the hold herself—if the governor or other senior official had arrived to greet the Princess Cecile. Vesey hadn’t asked if she could take Cory or Cazelet off the duties Adele had set them to, which showed clearly what her priorities were.

  “Ma’am?” said Pasternak in surprise when he saw Adele. “Are you taking over here?”

  The Chief Engineer was sixty standard years old, greatly overqualified to serve on a mere corvette and, as Adele knew, extremely wealthy. Unlike most non-commissioned spacers—and no few officers—he didn’t drink and whore away his earnings; and, as senior warrant officer under the most successful captain since Anston, his shares of prize money had been enormous.

  “Carry on, Chief,” Adele said. The guards had riot sticks, not sub-machine guns as they would have on a friendly or a hostile planet. That was another sign of Vesey’s
good judgment. “I’m just here to meet the men from the water department.”

  “Very good, ma’am,” Pasternak said, making a half-bow and straightening just as the main hatch clanged into its cradle on the starboard outrigger. Technicians back in the harbor offices had already extended the gangplank from its housing on the quay to mate with the outrigger from the other side.

  Adele had never asked why Pasternak continued to sail with Daniel; he certainly wasn’t a man who craved excitement. The Princess Cecile and all those aboard her were fortunate to have so skilled and solid an officer, though.

  The guards trotted down the ramp four abreast and onto the gangplank in pairs, determined to be as threatening a barrier as they could to the minions of Guarantor Porra. Adele didn’t smile as she, Pasternak and Tovera followed at a more sedate pace. These guards and the whole RCN had been just that for decades: a barrier between Cinnabar and her great enemy.

  Adele wasn’t naive enough to believe that planets controlled by the Republic of Cinnabar existed in a Golden Age. She had seen enough of life in the so-called Alliance of Free Stars, however, to know that for ordinary people it was much better to be ruled from Xenos.

  The pair of Alliance officials waited with increasing concern as the Sissies trotted toward them, clubs swinging in their belt sheaths. Adele suspected the locals were more concerned by the cordon of their own troops than they were by the spacers. If shooting started, they were clearly in the middle of it, and neither—from their badges, an elderly doctor and a very young customs inspector—appeared to be the hero type.

  “Chief,” said Adele. “Lead that pair to the side until I get the men from the water department on board.”

  “Ma’am?” Pasternak said, blinking as he tried to make sense of the order. Then his face cleared—it wasn’t his job to understand—and he said, “Yes, mistress.” He strode toward the waiting officials, gesturing them imperiously to the side.