by David Drake
Please. Please. Please.
Adele didn’t know who she was speaking to. Praying to, she supposed, though she didn’t believe in gods or Gods or anything at all except the working of blind chance.
Commander Leary held a sub-machine gun in one hand and a stocked impeller in the other. He raced toward the berm protecting the pit where ship-killing missiles were emplaced, using both weapons as he ran. For some reason the Alliance troops jumped out of their bunkers before they shot at him; they spun artistically and fell.
The gate into the emplacement was of razor ribbon stretched on a frame. Just like the real gate.
Commander Leary sawed through the obstruction with a burst from his sub-machine gun. Alliance projectiles hitting wires, hitting tubing; howling, ricocheting in neon colors. Occasionally a wire parting with a sickening jangle.
“Follow me, my heroes!” Commander Leary shouted as he ran through the gap in the gate. The corvette’s whole crew was with him. Bunched like that, a single automatic impeller would slaughter the lot of them. They’d be dead!
“Mistress, are you all right?” Cazelet said. His left arm was around her back; his hands were gripping her shoulders firmly. “Would you like to leave?”
There were bunkers inside the emplacement. Troops in Alliance uniforms—which was wrong, they’d been Pellegrinians, all but the communications detachment—threw down their weapons and stood, waving white flags.
“Victory!” boomed the voice-over. “And permanent safety for Dunbar’s World under the protection of the Republic of Cinnabar!”
“I’m sorry,” Adele whispered. “I’m all right.”
Light flickering from the firing slits of the bunkers, the traces of driving bands ionized by the charges that accelerate them up the gun barrels. Her holographic sights twitching as she fires two rounds and moves to the next target. The faces of the Pellegrinian soldiers are shadowed, but she sees every one of them clearly as they bulge under the impact of her projectiles.
The martial music resumed as the house lights came up. Adele closed her personal data unit and slid it back into its pocket. Cazelet had taken his hands away from her but he continued to watch with a concerned expression.
“We’ll return to Chatsworth Minor,” Adele said as she stood. She didn’t meet his eyes. “You’ll have a room in the servants’ quarters while I look into matters.”
“Mistress, I have a room already,” Cazelet said.
“It’s best that you stay at Chatsworth,” she said sharply. “That’ll prevent accidents. Some of them, at least.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cazelet said. Did he realize that she was worried about Mistress Sand, or rather what someone in Mistress Sand’s organization might do to prevent the compromise of an asset as valuable as Adele Mundy?
He touched the door latch, but he paused and looked at Adele until she met his eyes. “Mistress,” he said, “that last scene? Did Commander Leary really assault a strong point that way?”
“No,” said Adele, stepping past the boy to open the door herself. “I did.”
* * *
It occurred to Daniel, walking back to find a seat with the numbered chit in his hand, that the waiting room of the Navy Office was very like a cathedral. He grinned, a familiar expression on his broad features. There were probably more prayers—and certainly more sincere ones—offered here than in any religious edifice on Cinnabar.
Even the hall’s front five benches weren’t crowded, and the twenty or so beyond held only a scattering of suppliants. Most of those waiting were lieutenants, but there were some passed midshipmen hoping for their first assignment. On the other end of the continuum, several superannuated captains sat in stiff dignity with all the decorations they could claim, hoping the Republic’s need would bring them out of forced retirement.
All were well dressed. This morning Daniel had donned his best second-class uniform, his Grays, but a good number of senior officers and those with private incomes were in Dress Whites.
As Daniel prepared to sit some ten rows back, he noticed a familiar face across the aisle. “Why, hello, Christopher,” he said in a low voice, stepping toward the thin lieutenant seated there. “Haven’t seen you since the Academy.”
Christopher Cha continued to sit stiffly, gripping his chit between the thumbs and forefingers of both hands. Instead of looking up when Daniel spoke his name, he turned his face the other way as if he were searching for something farther down the empty row.
I didn’t go home with his girlfriend after a party, did I? Daniel wondered. He certainly didn’t remember doing so, but there were some nights during graduation week that were at best hazy.
“Leary!” said a lieutenant commander in the fourth row. He was making an effort to mute his voice, but the resulting husky whisper could be heard for a dozen places in every direction. “Come tell me about the hero’s life, bold fellow!”
Daniel went back and slid past the slanted knees of four strangers, all lieutenants, to get to Scott Morgan. They’d been classmates at the Academy. Morgan had run with a faster crowd than Daniel, estranged from his father, could afford to follow, but they’d gotten on well enough during such contact as they’d had.
“Pretty, eh?” said Morgan, tapping the pip-in-a-circle on the epaulette of his Dress Whites. As Daniel slid onto the backless bench beside him, Morgan touched the solid rectangle of a full commander on the collar tab of his Grays and went on, “Of course, they’re not nearly as pretty as these, Danny-my-boy. Congratulations, and further congratulations for still being alive. I’d say the rank is pretty much a given if you do the sorts of things you’ve done and manage to survive.”
“I think you’re overstating things, Scott,” Daniel said, “but I appreciate your congratulations.”
Without being really conscious of what he was doing, he glanced back at Lieutenant Cha. Morgan caught his expression and laughed. “Little Chrissie is afraid that if the Chief learns that he knows you, it’ll hurt his chances of an appointment. As if Admiral Vocaine cares two pins about him! If we’d given a class award to the Least Likely to Be Promoted, it’d’ve been engraved Christopher Cha!”
“You think that’s it, Morgan?” Daniel said. He smiled, but it was a little lopsided. He’d always gotten on well with others, and it disturbed him to think that people he’d known for the best part of a decade would shun him because of his difficulties with the Chief of the Navy Board.
“Of course that’s it!” Morgan said. “But I have to correct you on one point, laddy: I’m not Morgan, I’m Fanshawe—as in the son and heir of Senator Fanshawe. My uncle, that’s the one with the money in the family, adopted me last month.”
He grinned widely and added, “I’d still sit with you, Danny; you’re good company and no bloody admiral is going to tell me who my friends are. But under the circumstances, I don’t care whether the Republic chooses to keep me on half pay.”
“Ah!” said Daniel. “Then hearty congratulations to you too, Fanshawe!”
He’d always believed that Morgan’s birth parents had quite enough money as it was, but no doubt there were as many gradations at the higher levels of these things as there were with poverty. Corder Leary would probably understand better than his son did.
A green light blinked on the desk of the functionary who guarded the gate between the benches and the clerks beyond the railing. He glared at the screen before him, then called, “Number twenty-two!” in a stentorian voice.
A lieutenant of forty rose so abruptly that she almost overbalanced and fell backward over the bench. Her second-class uniform was clean but nearly threadbare. She bustled to the gate, her face in a rictus of mingled hope and terror.
It would’ve been possible—and a great deal more practical—to’ve left the whole process to technology. Officers between assignments could’ve been paged electronically to report to a given office at a given time. For that matter, their orders could’ve been delivered without human involvement. Not only would the process be more efficien
t, it would avoid awkwardness and embarrassment for those waiting day after day in the echoing hall.
Daniel doubted there was an officer in the RCN who would’ve preferred that cold, impersonal world. Certainly he wouldn’t have.
He looked again at his chit: the numerals 414 were inlaid in black on the ivroid. Or was it . . . ?
“Why, look at this, Morgan!” Daniel said, too excited to remember his friend’s current name. “This is one of the originals, I’m sure of it! It’s not a synthetic at all, it’s cut from a moonfish eye.”
“Sorry, I don’t follow you, laddy,” Fanshawe said. “Is it valuable, do you mean? There’s a plum assignment waiting for you if you draw this chip?”
“Well, not that,” Daniel said. It’d be easy to mistake Morgan, now Fanshawe, for a buffoon. He’d never been that: his scores at the Academy ranged from good to remarkably good, and he’d come as close as anyone in their class to matching Daniel Leary in astrogation. “Though it’s a prize in its own right. Only the original run of chits were cut from the natural substance. They date from when Navy House was opened a century and a half ago! And the moonfish has been extinct for, well, for very nearly that long.”
He pursed his lips. “I wonder how many of the originals remain in use?”
“For now, my lad,” said Fanshawe, “I suggest you forget about natural history and hand the thing back to Cerberus at the bar, there. He’s just called your number.”
“Thanks, Fanshawe,” Daniel said as he rose and slid past the lieutenants again. “Thank you indeed.”
The thanks were for much more than telling Daniel that he’d been paged. Wealthy connections had doubtless created an interest furthering Fanshawe’s promotion, but the RCN would be fortunate if all its lieutenant commanders were his equal.
The attendant at the gate examined Daniel’s chit with sour thoroughness, as if he thought it might be a counterfeit. The clerical staff of Navy House were not members of the RCN and tended to view themselves as superior to the serving officers who came to them as suppliants. Daniel understood the mechanism—his study of lower animals as a hobby had given him more than a few insights into human society as well—but it didn’t make him like it any better.
The attendant replaced the chit in the hopper from which it would be dispensed to future generations of waiting officers, perhaps over another hundred and fifty years. “Office 12B,” he said, swinging the gate open with his right hand.
“Pardon?” said Daniel. He’d been expecting to be sent to the desk of one of the clerks on the other side of the bar, but “office” meant—
“Through the door and ask the guard for directions,” said the attendant peevishly. For the first time in the process, he looked up at Daniel’s face. “Or have him guide you, if you don’t think you can find your way to the second floor!”
“Ah,” said Daniel. He reached into his pocket—an advantage of Grays over Dress Whites was that they had pockets—and dropped a florin on the attendant’s desk. The coin rang clearly. “Thank you, my good man.”
The attendant was still spluttering in amazed fury when Daniel reached the door at the back of the hall. He heard snorts of laughter from officers in the waiting area, and he himself was smiling.
There were two guards, RCN warrant officers whose lack of collar insignia meant they were from the provost marshal’s division. They could probably handle themselves if push came to shove, but neither they nor anybody else expected trouble. When they retired in a few years, the white enamel on their sheathed batons would still be unmarked.
“I’ve been directed to 12B, Sauter,” Daniel said, taking the name from the tag over the taller guard’s breast pocket. He gestured toward the steps at the end of the corridor. The runner of blue carpeting was worn to the weft in the center of each tread, but the brass rods holding it in place were brightly polished. “Upstairs, I believe?”
“And to the right, Commander,” Sauter agreed, “about midway down. That’ll be the Liaison Office with Captain Britten.”
Daniel pursed his lips as he dredged out a memory. “Britten,” he repeated. “Was he perhaps in the Ten Star Cluster a few years ago?”
Sauter frowned. “The very man,” said Leckie, his partner. “But promoted since then, I believe.”
Daniel climbed the stairs two at a time. He wasn’t in a particular hurry, but he was used to going up that way. Taking the treads normally would feel as awkward as mincing down the hallway instead of taking full strides.
The doors along the right-hand corridor were closed, though a clerk—an RCN rating, not a civilian—carried a file folder out of one as Daniel reached 12B. She seemed to look through him as she strode past in the direction he’d come from.
He knocked on the frame beside the panel of frosted glass. “Come in, dammit!” boomed a voice. Daniel swallowed his smile as he obeyed. Yes, this was the same officer whom he’d met on Todos Santos, all right.
Daniel closed the door behind him. The room was long and narrow. There were cabinets for paper files along one sidewall, and a desk—unoccupied at present—beside the door for a clerk. At the far end was another desk, so wide that it only fit the long way.
Captain Britten, built like a fireplug with cropped gray hair, sat at the big desk and typed on a virtual keyboard. He slammed the holographic keys as though he thought he could hammer out the answers he wanted. Daniel smiled; Adele had accused him of doing the same thing.
“Sit down, Leary,” Britten said as he glared at his display. “I gather you’ve been making trouble again.”
“Ah . . .” said Daniel. “Well, only for the enemies of the Republic, I believe, sir.”
He ought to salute and report formally, but he was quite certain that Britten’d tear a strip off him if he did. Given that Daniel’s salutes rarely rose to a level of minimal competence, he decided just to sit down as he’d been ordered to.
Britten snorted, then collapsed his display into a quiver of electrons and met Daniel’s eyes. “Well, you stick to your story, Leary,” he said. “Maybe one day you’ll find somebody to believe it. For now, though—”
He stretched his arms sideways, then lifted them over his head. Britten’s scowl of frustration was probably his normal expression, but he looked tired and a decade older than he had two years before on Todos Santos.
“—the problem is the Bagarian Cluster. My problem, and about to become your problem. What do you know about the place, eh?”
“Well, very little, sir,” Daniel said, “though I can rectify that quickly, if you like.”
The Sailing Directions which Navy House provided for all regions of the galaxy, both in and out of the Cinnabar Confederation, would give him everything an RCN officer was likely to need. Adele and her sources could provide much greater detail if for some reason that were necessary.
“The cluster’s been part of the Alliance for over three hundred years,” Daniel said. “Some heavy metals, a fair amount of agricultural produce; nothing of real importance. Frankly, the Bagarian Cluster’s what you’d point to if you wanted to give an example of the boondocks. Ah, and there’s a revolt going on there at the moment, I’ve been told.”
“Right, I’ve been told that too, Leary,” said Britten. “In fact the Independent Republic of Bagaria has requested the help of the RCN to organize its navy and put it in a state to defeat Alliance attempts to retake the cluster. It’s my job, so now it’s your job, to provide that help.”
“Ah,” said Daniel. “Ah, sir. . . . If I may ask, sir, is this a decision that’s been made in Navy House, or has it been imposed by, ah, political elements?”
“Like the business in Ganpat’s Reach that you just got back from, you mean?” Britten said. “No, this was our idea. My idea, Leary, not to put too fine a point on it. You know what’s happening in the Jewel System?”
“Well sir,” Daniel said, very carefully. “I know Admiral James only by reputation, but a very good reputation it is, sir.”
“A bloody good reputat
ion, couldn’t agree more,” said Britten. He brought up, then collapsed his holographic display again; a nervous tic that made him frown like a thundercloud when he realized what he was doing. “But he’s got two battleships and the Lao-tze is eighty years old. Eighty, Leary, and don’t tell me that she’s still well found. For an eighty-year-old ship she is well found, but eighty bloody years take a toll. The Alliance squadron has two modern battleships and a pair of battle cruisers that can outsail anything in the RCN. Plus supporting forces in proportion.”
Daniel tried not to frown, but given the direction his thoughts were headed, that was a losing proposition. “Ah, sir,” he said. “Are you hoping that the Bagarian Republic will be able to reinforce Admiral James?”
Britten stared at him in disbelief. “May the Gods bugger me with a flagpole!” he said. “Have you lost your mind, Leary?”
“Ah, sorry sir,” Daniel said in relief. He thought for a moment, then decided that with Britten he’d be better off to voice the rest of his thought. “No sir, I haven’t; and I’m glad to see that you haven’t either.”
Britten laughed. He opened a drawer of his desk and brought out a quart of rye whiskey. The brand was a good one—Breen’s Reserve—but not so exceptional that people would remark to see it on their host’s sideboard.
An upended water glass covered the open bottle. “I’ve got another . . .” Britten muttered. He rummaged further, then chortled as he plunked a second glass onto the desktop.
“There’s water down the hall,” Britten said doubtfully as he slid a generous two fingers of liquor toward Daniel. “No? Well, I can’t say I think it needs it either.”
He set down his glass and resumed, “All I want you to do, Leary, is to give Fleet Command on Pleasaunce something to worry about besides reinforcing Admiral Guphill in the Jewel System. I want—we want, the Republic wants—somebody to make enough scary headlines about the Bagarian Cluster that Guarantor Porra scrapes up all the ships he can spare and sends them to recapture Pelosi, that’s where the government is. Instead of worrying mines out of the Diamondia defenses even quicker.”