by David Drake
“Officer Mundy?” Daniel said. He barely caught the “Adele” that his tongue was starting to form. “I believe you can handle the communications duties better from your console here.”
Adele shrugged and said, “Yes, perhaps I could. I’m going to the DeMarce with my associates.” She nodded to Tovera and Cazelet. “Vesey’s taken over the bridge of the Independence, but it seemed to me that Blantyre could use some help. Besides, the DeMarce’s commo suite is in better condition.”
“Right,” said Daniel as they all turned into the down companionway. It’d be four decks, not three, to the Ladouceur’s entrance hold. Tovera followed her mistress while Cazelet led. The sub-machine gun banged the boy’s ribs because he hadn’t snugged up the sling properly, but he was as sure-footed as a rigger on the worn steel treads.
Adele was right, of course. Three slightly built people, two of them women, weren’t going to impress a mob of spacers who’d probably already broken open the liquor cabinets as the first stage in the process of looting.
These particular women could take charge of a warship’s bridge, though, even if they had to shoot the present occupants out of the way. Daniel hoped that wouldn’t happen, but he didn’t trust the judgment of Captain Seward and his henchmen while they remained in control of the DeMarce’s plasma cannon.
Woetjans was forming her teams at the foot of the boarding ramp when the group from the bridge arrived. Adele set off with her companions for the DeMarce. She didn’t say anything further nor look over her shoulder, though Cazelet did. The boy didn’t seem frightened, but he obviously didn’t know how to handle a sub-machine gun and the blankness in his eyes was probably a sign of being completely at sea.
Daniel grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. The now-Commander Daniel Leary had been just as lost many times in his life, and he wouldn’t pretend he knew how matters were going to work out in the next hour or so. They’d work out better because he had people like Adele and Rene Cazelet supporting him, though. Yes, and Tovera’s support too.
“Sir, I put Barnes in charge of the section that sorts out the Babanguida,” Woetjans said, turning when she heard Daniel’s boots on the ramp behind her. “I figured to take the Carree myself, all right?”
Daniel eyed the eighty or so spacers in two straggling clumps. Fewer than two-thirds of them were former Sissies, which meant the bosun had more confidence in the Bagarians than Daniel himself might’ve. Woetjans was closer to the Ladouceur’s personnel than her new captain’d had time to become—a truth Daniel regretted, but a truth nonetheless.
There’d be a few Sissies staying on the cruiser. Pasternak, Woetjans’ counterpart as Chief of Ship, was notable among them. You could be a first-rate spacer and still not be somebody your captain wanted to take into a fight. That was all right: Sissies were needed to leaven the hundred and fifty Bagarians aboard also.
Each of the landing party carried a sub-machine gun or a stocked impeller, but they had lengths of pipe, rods, and knuckledusters as well. Some, even of the Sissies, couldn’t be trusted with firearms; for example, Daniel hoped the impeller which the hulking Skrubas carried was unloaded. But he’s seen Skrubas use the stock of an impeller, and he couldn’t think of a quicker way to end a brawl than that combination.
At least half the personnel carried rolls of cargo tape, intended to snug down objects in the holds when there wasn’t time to use more complicated restraints. It had a multitude of uses aboard a starship. One use was to immobilize people who you didn’t want wandering around.
“Right,” said Daniel, shuttling quickly through the options in his mind. “The country craft can wait. Barnes, Hogg and I will accompany you, if you don’t mind. Now let’s get going.”
He suited his action to his words by striding off in the direction of the Babanguida some three hundred yards away. Half the spacers followed him in a jostling mob; they’d never been taught to march in unison and Daniel didn’t imagine it’d make them any more useful to him or to Cinnabar if they could.
He frowned. He really must institute firearms training on a more regular basis than the rudiments that Sun and Hogg had been giving interested personnel in the entry hold on long voyages. His crews regularly saw more dismounted action than many Land Forces regiments did.
The ground was a rusty slate, hard enough that thin plates cracked off under Daniel’s weight. There was no sign of water or vegetation. Scores of starships had lashed the stone with their plasma thrusters; piles of trash marked the landscape and blew across it. Some pieces of printed cardboard had been here long enough to bleach white.
Though the Babanguida was big to be trading out here in the boondocks, it was rigged with only sixteen antennas. It needed only a small crew, but it’d wallow through the Matrix. On a given voyage it’d take half again as long as ships which were better able to shift between bubble universes and take advantage of varying energy gradients.
As Daniel approached the boarding ramp at the head of his band, a spacer carrying a double armload of women’s dresses stumbled down it singing, “Come you lads of great Pelosi, lift the old song once a—”
Daniel caught the looter by the elbow. “Hold on, my good man,” he said, trying to sound cheery but firm. “Carry that back to the hold, if you will. It’s the property of the Republic, not ours as individuals.”
“Who the bloody hell are you to give me orders, shithead?” the man said. He’d been drinking something with a mint flavor and enough alcohol content that his breath would’ve burned.
“Wrong answer, wog,” Hogg said as he reversed his impeller. He butt-stroked the looter in the belly. The fellow collapsed on his face, vomiting yellow bile and chunks of undigested meat. The dresses were of some metal-smooth cloth; they spilled across the ground with a sheen as iridescent as an oil slick.
“Now he can’t carry the loot back, Hogg,” Daniel pointed out mildly.
“Oh, the bugger was too drunk to be any use to us,” Hogg said as he continued up the ramp. “Anyway, we can worry about it later.”
In the entry hold were three more spacers—all male; on the fringes of civilization women generally weren’t considered sturdy enough for the work. One had an armload of entertainment modules, while his companions had piled a score of similar units on a tarpaulin which they were dragging toward the hatch.
“Hold it!” Barnes said, stepping in front of them. “Turn around and take the crap back, boys. You been naughty.”
“Hey, who says?” demanded the Bagarian at the leading edge of the tarp.
Dasi grabbed the fellow by the throat left-handed and lifted him off the deck. “Commander Leary says,” he said. “Me and my friend say so too.”
He tapped the muzzle of his impeller against the looter’s mouth. Blood splattered from a cut lip.
The lone Bagarian dropped the modules he was carrying. Daniel pointed to him and said, “Where’s the ship’s crew?”
“They, they’re in the forward hold, s-sir,” the Bagarian said. “It was generator sets in there, too big to carry, so we locked the crew out of the way.”
Then he said, “Who in bloody hell are you?” That wasn’t a protest but rather a bleat of amazement.
“All right, take me to the forward hold,” Daniel said, ignoring the question. He looked over his shoulder. “Four of you—Asnip, Ward, Bolden, and Suplinski—come with me. Barnes, police up the rest of the looters. Tape who you have to but try not to shoot them.”
“Move!” Hogg said to the Bagarian. He poked a finger into the fellow’s ribs to make sure he was listening.
Daniel could—any of the spacers with him could—find a freighter’s holds in his sleep, but the Babanguida was big enough that she might well have them split along her axis as well as transversely. A guide saved searching for the correct hold. Besides, it didn’t hurt when they met Bagarians on the way that one of their shipmates was leading the armed strangers.
The guide took them to a locked accessway; half a dozen looters lay taped like chickens along their
route. The hatch was stenciled F3, a complex enough designation to make Daniel pleased that he’d played safe.
Hogg pushed hard on the latch plate. It didn’t move. He backed away and presented his impeller, saying, “Want me to shoot it open, master?”
“No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” said Daniel, twisting the plate ninety degrees and then pushing it. The dogs withdrew, ringing like an ill-tuned bell chorus. In the SET position the hatch could’ve been locked from the bridge so that personnel in the corridor couldn’t break in. Daniel had very much—and correctly—doubted that the looters had been that organized.
He’d expected the imprisoned crew to burst into the corridor when the hatch opened, but instead there was silence relieved only by the sound of somebody whimpering in the hold’s chill darkness. What in heaven’s name was going on?
“Come on out!” Daniel called; his words echoed. The hold was two decks high. The hull-side cargo hatch was on the level below, and a slatted staircase led down from this portal. “This is Commander Daniel Leary of the RCN—”
He figured that was a better claim to make under the circumstances than “Admiral Leary of the Bagarian Republic.”
“—and I need to talk to your captain.” If he’d been thinking ahead, he’d have asked Adele for the commanding officer’s name. It was the sort of thing she learned automatically, rather like breathing.
Nothing happened, except that the whimpering became open sobs.
“Bloody hell!” Daniel said. “I want your captain now. Don’t make me come in after you!”
“I’m coming out,” somebody called from behind one of the fusion bottles. They were electric generators, the sort of thing an outlying farm would need—or, on a fringe world like Pelosi, a rich man’s home even if it were in the center of Morning City. “Don’t shoot, please! I’ve done you no harm. Please!”
“Great heavens, man!” Daniel blurted. “We’re not going to harm you. I told you, I’m an RCN officer. You’re a legitimate prisoner, but I see no reason for you and your crew to be locked up so long as we can come to an agreement. Come on up here!”
He thought for a moment, then added as the first figure started shuffling up the stairs, “All of you come out. Why in heaven did you think you were going to be shot?”
The captain wore a blue uniform jacket which, like the Babanguida, was cheaply made and rather the worse for wear. The pin clipped over his right breast pocket read Robinson or Robertson; the gilt had rubbed off the right side.
“I’m Ian Robertson,” he muttered without meeting the eyes of anyone in Daniel’s party. Then, “If you’re RCN, why’re you with pirates?”
“Buck up, Robertson,” Daniel said, trying to sound jolly. The merchant captain had the right of his claim, but with luck he could be cajoled to forget the past. “I know how it seems, but a little indiscipline is easily put right. You’re a legitimate prize of war. Now, we’ll repatriate your crew at the earliest opportunity, but I’m sure that some of your people would rather sign on with me than spend weeks or even years in a prison compound.”
He looked down at the figures gathered at the base of the stairs. He could see only a dozen, which meant some were still in hiding.
“How does it strike you?” he called to the spectators. “Who of you’d like liberal pay and the best spacers in the human galaxy for your fellows?”
“What d’ye mean about pay?” called one of the figures below. The voice was cautious, but the concern this time was over money instead of drunken Bagarian pirates planning to cut the throats of their captives.
This was the result Daniel’d hoped for: even the Alliance citizens in the crew were likely to be from conquered planets with no affection for Guarantor Porra. Treated well, they’d be as happy to join the Ladouceur’s complement as they would to continue aboard an Alliance-registered tub like the Babanguida.
He leaned over the railing. “Come on up and we’ll discuss it like spacers,” he said cheerfully. “Regular pay is eighteen ostrads a month, but you’ll also take a share in the prize money. You can talk to any of the Sissies who came with me from Cinnabar about what prize money’s meant in the past, and you can look at today for proof that it’ll keep on in the future. While you’ve been slaving on this ship, my crews are going to be splitting her value in prize cash!”
He was shading the truth and he knew it, but until these folk signed on, their welfare didn’t touch the honor of a Leary of Bantry. It wasn’t such a bad offer regardless. Daniel was sure—well, he was hopeful—that he could convince the Navy Minister to raise pay when the squadron returned after this triumph; if he couldn’t, he’d enlist the new personnel into the RCN under his authority as commander of the Princess Cecile.
Spacers began to shuffle up the stairs; additional figures drifted out from behind the dense lumps of fusion bottles. He’d move them all to the Ladouceur, adding those who enlisted to the cruiser’s crew and confining the remainder away from temptation to take back control of their own ship. Prize crews for the two Alliance freighters required a tricky balance between Sissies and Bagarians or he’d simply be transferring the looting from Dodd’s Throne to the Matrix, but with Woetjans’ help it could be worked out.
The smile Daniel gave the Alliance captain was harder than his usual expression. “Now, sir, if you and your officers will come up to the bridge with me, we’ll settle details while I get back in communication with my squadron.”
“I don’t understand this,” Captain Robertson muttered. Now that he wasn’t terrified, he was willing to complain. “We’re just trading with you. If you capture us like this, there won’t be any trade!”
“Exactly, my good man,” Daniel said. “People in the Bagarian Cluster don’t seem to have quite grasped what war means. They’re about to learn.”
Chapter Twelve
MORNING CITY ON PELOSI
Adele hadn’t imagined there’d be a parade when the squadron and the two Alliance prizes returned to Pelosi. She hadn’t dreamed there’d be a parade.
“Mistress?” said Rene Cazelet. He was trying to keep his voice down, which meant he had to lean very close to her ear to have a chance of being heard over the cheering crowd. “How did they learn about the victory in time to do this? It must’ve taken days to prepare, surely?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” said Adele. That was of course true. Because she was Adele Mundy she was already in the process of getting an answer by entering a local database.
Her personal data unit didn’t have enough power to transmit more than a quarter mile or so, and Pelosi didn’t have a public communications system that was worthy of the name. There were—there had to be—private commercial systems, however. Adele’d tied her data unit and the RCN commo helmets worn by at least one spacer on every parade float into the microwave communications system belonging to Fidelity Mercantile Corporation, Minister Lampert behind a corporate veil.
The ten floats which carried naval officers, whether or not they’d been on Dodd’s Throne, were (as before) flatbed trailers covered with bunting and pulled by eight-wheeled tractors. There was nothing complicated in that, though Adele strongly doubted the Bagarian government could’ve put even so simple a business together in the hour and a half since the squadron reached Pelosi.
Canvas murals hung across the fronts of buildings all the way from the docks to the House of Assembly. They couldn’t possibly have been created since the squadron arrived, even if the paint were still wet.
As best Adele could tell, the paint had cured properly. Even if it hadn’t, the images depicted—though they weren’t in any sense realistic—did make direct reference to the events on Dodd’s Throne.
“Hurrah for Lady Leary!” somebody shouted. The crowd took up the theme raggedly, mixing, “Lady Leary!” and “The Admiral’s Lady!” with similar but unintelligible cheers. The result was a sort of muddy good-humor.
Tovera laughed. Rene said in scandalized horror, “Mistress! They mean you!”
“Then they’re idiots,” Adele said, concentrating on her search. Well, trying to concentrate on her search. Most people were idiots, not just this mob of goggle-eyed, garishly dressed, wogs shouting in the—
She caught herself and sat bolt-upright in a flush of embarrassment. She’d allowed her anger to control her; which she never did, which she couldn’t afford to do. She was holding both wands in her right hand so that her left could reach into her tunic pocket, just because civilians were happy and foolish.
And what would her mother Evadne have said about Adele referring to foreigners as wogs, even in the quiet of her own mind? Adele winced. Her mother would’ve been horrified at the disrespect for foreign cultures which she knew were just as valid as that of a Cinnabar noble.
Adele had seen a great deal more of foreign cultures than her mother, a very parochial woman despite her principles, had done. Some of those cultures were entirely worthy of disrespect.
But Evadne would also have considered the term “wog” to be common, the sort of word used by untutored spacers and rural louts like Daniel’s servant Hogg. In that she would’ve been quite correct. By thinking the word, Adele had disgraced her station as Mundy of Chatsworth.
She, Tovera, and Rene were on the tenth and last float. Daniel was at the front, bowing to the crowd, with Minister Lampert on one side of him and Generalissima DeMarce on the other. Hogg stood behind them, looking rumpled and thick with his hands in his pockets.
Hogg was rumpled. He wasn’t thick, though, and Adele had a very good notion of what he was holding in those pockets, ready to use on anybody he thought was a danger to the young master.
The trailers in between—the quality of bunting decreased from the front to the back of the procession; that draping Adele’s was canvas decorated with what seemed to be house paint—carried Hoppler and Seward, then apparently everyone on Pelosi who could claim to wear a naval officer’s uniform.