by David Drake
It didn’t bother her in the least while she was doing it: she saw only a blur in her sight picture. The features didn’t appear until late into the darkness, when the dead came to speak with her again.
The DeMarce faded from the PPI; the Independence was already gone and so were most of the light craft. The Forsyte 14 suddenly reappeared within the display, but that was simply because it hadn’t had enough velocity in the sidereal universe to get any distance even with the help of the Matrix. It was accelerating at what appeared to be its maximum rate, now, and it didn’t reply to Adele’s attempts to raise it on short wave and laser. She didn’t imagine that any response the captain made would be a useful one, of course, but she thought she ought to try.
“Ladouceur, this is Squadron Six,” Daniel said. Adele thought he sounded weary, but that could be an artifact of the freighter’s commo system. “The Columbine is coming alongside. Mister Liu, have Captain Julian’s riggers ready to transfer back aboard, if you will. Six out.”
Adele’s algorithms caught the disruption of a ship extracting from the Matrix before the cruiser’s own did, but only moments before: the Ladouceur might be old, but she was a warship which’d been constructed and equipped to serve in the foremost navy of the human universe. Software had improved since then, but the real question has always been the skill of the person using the apparatus rather than the apparatus itself.
“Squadron Six!” Adele said. The Columbine certainly didn’t have the sort of electronics Daniel would need to deal with this, and she didn’t imagine there’d be time for him to reboard the cruiser. Could she transfer the necessary data to him using the freighter’s single-head laser transceiver? “A heavy ship’s entered sidereal space three hundred . . . and six thousand miles from Churchyard. It’s not one of our squadron. It’s—oh.”
She paused for a moment as she crosschecked the data cascading in from the new arrival; her data were entirely consistent. There hadn’t been time yet for an optical identification, but Adele trusted her signals intelligence farther anyway.
“Daniel,” she said, her voice clipped from embarrassment at having given a needless alarm, “the ship is the Zwiedam, a former immigrant transport now owned by the Free State of Skye. I believe this is—”
“Skye Defender calling Admiral Leary,” announced the new arrival over tight-beam microwave. Adele relayed the message to the Columbine over the laser link. “This is Colonel Raymond Chatterjee reporting as ordered, over.”
“Colonel, this is Squadron Six,” Daniel replied with a cheerful bounce that hadn’t been in his voice a moment before. “I’ll be aboard my flagship inside half an hour. We’ll shape course to some place we can discuss matters in greater comfort than I suspect you and your troops find in vacuum. Hold what you’ve got till then, if you don’t mind.”
In an even more ebullient tone he added, “I’m very glad of your arrival, Colonel. I think we’ll now be able to turn the present bag of lemons into lemonade! Six out.”
Chapter Fifteen
DANSANT
The bush above Colonel Chatterjee’s head shrilled like a steam whistle. He spun around, holding his briefcase in front of himself reflexively. His troops and the spacers mixing in the dry scrub weren’t carrying sidearms, but quite a number of them reached into pockets or under floppy jackets.
“Ah, very good!” Daniel said, stepping forward. He took a large checked handkerchief from the hip pocket of his utilities and spread it between his hands. With his attention focused wholly on the bush, he added, “I saw it this time.”
He snatched, enveloping a thin branch in the handkerchief, and pulled it carefully away. A lump in the fabric was kicking, and one of the shoots which’d angled from the branch a moment ago was missing.
“See?” Daniel said, carefully opening his makeshift capture net. A brown creature no bigger than his little finger writhed for a moment, then stood upright on the four tiny legs on its broader end. He could feel them gripping the palm of his hand beneath the cloth. “My, I don’t suppose there’s been a proper zoological survey of this place, has there?”
“There has not,” Adele said from where she was sitting twenty feet away. Her personal data unit was on the table; the air above it quivered with imagery that Daniel couldn’t make out from his angle. “Not that I can find, at any rate. I don’t even swear that the planet’s name is Dansant, since the Kostroman who located the place may not have been the original discoverer as he believed he was.”
“Surely that doesn’t matter, does it?” Colonel Chatterjee said with a slight frown. “It hasn’t been colonized and there doesn’t appear to be any reason it should be colonized. I thought we were just landing here to have firm ground under our feet while we held discussions?”
Yes, thought Daniel. And also so that Woetjans and Sun can assess how good your troops really are.
“Quite right,” he said aloud, returning the creature to its branch. He had to rub his handkerchief against the bark to get the little fellow to release and hop back where it belonged. There were times he wished he could put all his efforts into natural history; there were such wonders here among the stars!
But that’d mean giving up all that it meant to be a member of the RCN. No number of branch-hoppers and six-winged flyers and carnivorous flowers that crept onto their prey could make up for the thrill of seeing your missiles on a course converging with that of an enemy ship.
Several of Pasternak’s people had tack-welded an interior partition to a pair of empty cable spools to make a table. They’d brought three chairs out of the Laddie’s wardroom and set them all along one long side as Daniel had directed. Overhead, riggers had strung an awning of sailcloth between sections of beryllium shroud. Untensioned, the rigging would flex, but it was more than stiff enough to stand upright while supporting something as light as the microns-thin fabric.
“Take the chair to the right of Officer Mundy, Colonel,” Daniel directed, “and we’ll get down to business.”
Dansant, if that was really its name, wasn’t a very prepossessing place; that was no doubt why it hadn’t been colonized. The atmosphere was breathable but very arid. There was no standing water and no rainfall; the local plants used their fibrous bark to absorb minuscule amounts of condensate during the night, then closed up tightly at dawn to avoid drying out again.
That much from the discoverer’s notes which Adele had copied in the Kostroman archives while she was employed there. She’d brought the data out now, years later, because Daniel had needed a habitable world within twenty-four hours’ distance of Churchyard.
The Sailing Directions issued by Navy House didn’t have the information, but Commander Daniel Leary did. And not even Adele had known there was animal life on Dansant; that was Daniel’s own discovery.
He grinned as he seated himself to Adele’s left. The little branch hopper wouldn’t be what history remembered him for, but perhaps in a better universe it would be.
“I considered making a landing on Churchyard with your troops,” Daniel said as Adele threw up an omnidirectional image of Hafn Teobald from an apparent vantage point of a thousand feet in the air. “If we’d disabled the Rossarol or destroyed the missile launcher either one, I think that would’ve been a very workable plan. As it is, with a destroyer able to use its plasma cannon against us on the ground and ourselves unable to reply in kind, it doesn’t appear practical.”
“You’re not planning to return to Pelosi, are you?” said Chatterjee with a deep frown. “I won’t lecture you on Bagarian politics, Admiral, but the enemies you made when you raided Dodd’s Throne will crucify you if you do. It’s no good saying that a missile boat for a missile boat is a fair exchange; they’ll call it a disaster.”
“You’re right, Colonel,” Daniel said, feeling the curves of his smile become minusculely harder. “You shouldn’t lecture Speaker Leary’s son on politics. And no, I don’t propose to return to Pelosi until we’ve achieved what the meanest intelligence will regard as a major stro
ke against the enemy. If we act quickly and don’t slow down once we’ve committed, I believe we can capture the Cluster Headquarters on Conyers.”
Adele switched to imagery of the Conyers complex, a pentagonal enclosure with a surface area of twenty-three acres. Sloped concrete ramparts fronted by a broad ditch formed the boundaries. An expanded cross-section showed shuttered firing slits and a double monorail system inside for shifting the garrison quickly.
The angles of the pentagon were self-contained strongpoints. Two held antiship missile launchers, two had turrets equipped with twin 13-cm plasma cannon, and the turret on the fifth point sheltered a pair of 20-cm howitzers whose explosive shells could blast targets concealed from direct fire weapons.
“That’s the Cluster HQ?” Chatterjee said, leaning closer to the display. “There’s a thousand troops in the garrison. Aren’t there?”
“More than twelve hundred according to the pay records,” Adele said coolly as her wands rotated the image. “I’ve learned not to trust those, however, especially the farther one gets from the center, and this cluster is very far from Pleasaunce.”
She sniffed with displeasure. “It’s not a great deal better in Cinnabar service, I’m afraid,” she added.
The rectangular headquarters building was constructed of precast concrete slabs. Each of the three levels was stepped back from the one below it, making the structure look like a crude pyramid from the side. On top was a landing stage for aircars; armored cupolas holding automatic impellers were placed at the corners of the next level down.
There was room for small starships to land between the HQ Building and the northwest facet of the pentagon. A missile boat—perhaps the S81 that they’d destroyed on Churchyard—had been on the ground when the image was captured. Larger vessels, the freighters that supplied the garrison and the occasional warship visiting the planet, used a river-fed artificial lagoon half a mile to the west of the complex. A fence with guard towers surrounded that harbor, but it had no defenses capable of withstanding determined attack.
“It appears to me,” Chatterjee said, “that the base is stronger than that on Churchyard. A great deal stronger, as a matter of fact.”
He looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow.
Daniel laughed. “Yes, I quite agree,” he said. He was pleased that Chatterjee’d noted the problems instead of spluttering that the odds were impossible. “The great difference is that Churchyard is expecting us, and Conyers is not. I assume that Governor Platt knows most of what’s happening on Pelosi?”
Chatterjee snorted. “You’re certainly right about that,” he said. “Governor Radetsky and I sometimes speculate on which members of the Council of Ministers are selling intelligence to Platt. Personally, I’d give even money that all of them are.”
“So Platt knew that we were going to Churchyard,” Daniel said. “The corollary is that we weren’t going to attack Conyers. Furthermore, he’s expecting reinforcements to his garrison from Maintenon.”
“He is?” said Chatterjee, frowning. “How do you know that?”
“From the data banks on the S81,” said Adele. Her wands threw up a sidebar, though Daniel couldn’t have read it without squinting. The little data unit’s display was clear enough, but there were tricks to reading air-formed holograms against a natural background. Adele’d had occasion to learn those tricks; he hadn’t.
“I wouldn’t have been able to decrypt it if the ship’d been a real courier vessel with isolated storage for the messages being carried,” she went on, “but in this case they were simply held within the S81’s main computer. Which wasn’t shielded at all, at least from someone who knows what she’s doing.”
Daniel said, “I believe Officer Mundy can make the Skye Defender appear to be the ship from Maintenon—”
He nodded to Adele beside him.
“—can you not, Mundy?”
“Yes,” she said, bringing up three-dimensional images of four ships. At this scale they appeared to be identical even to Daniel’s eyes. “The Zwiedam and her sister were regarded as a successful design, so the Zaandam and Westerdam were built on slightly enlarged lines. The Alliance’s using the Westerdam as a transport at the moment. Though in the Ribbon Stars, nowhere near here.”
“I don’t think the Conyers’ garrison will be able to tell that a ship they’ve never seen before is three hundred tonnes smaller than the records say she should be,” said Daniel, letting his smile spread. “Not if the markings and especially the electronic signature is correct. The tricky part is that there’s a picket boat, and you’ll be boarded in orbit before you’re allowed to land. Colonel, can you convince the inspectors that you’re a militia battalion from Maintenon?”
Chatterjee frowned. He took out his own personal data unit but simply glowered at it instead of turning it on.
A burst of gunfire ripped the morning, thin and echoless in the dry air. Daniel jumped to his feet. Instead of reaching for her pocket pistol, Adele’s wands moved rapidly. That startled Daniel until he realized that she’d switched her display to the targeting screen of the Ladouceur’s dorsal turret. It gave her a much better vantage point than he had standing.
“Please, it’s all right,” said Colonel Chatterjee in obvious concern. “Please, I’m very sorry, Admiral. I told my officers to arrange a marksmanship demonstration while we were on the ground here. I felt that your spacers would be more comfortable if they could trust the infantry that was supporting them. But I should’ve spoken to you about my plans.”
Daniel forced a smile and settled onto his chair again. “That would’ve been helpful, yes,” he said mildly, “but I’m sure it’s good for me to get my heart rate up. Now, as for the inspection party, Chatterjee?”
“I’m sure we can do that,” Chatterjee said. “Yes, I’m sure. I used to be an Alliance officer, you see?”
He paused on a rising note, lifting an eyebrow in synchrony. He obviously thought the information would be a surprise—and feared it’d be an unwelcome one.
“Yes, we were aware of that,” Daniel said, smiling internally. “We,” meaning Adele had learned that and had immediately passed it on because it was potentially important. “But you’re a native of Skye. If Governor Radetsky trusts you, that’s good enough for me.”
“Ah!” said Chatterjee. “Well, there isn’t much uniformity among the planetary militias in Alliance service. If we were Alliance militia, we’d look about the same. It’ll just be a matter of making sure the troops the inspectors are allowed to see all have patches saying Maintenon.”
He snorted. “Or at least that they don’t say Skye Volunteers. Though I don’t think many of the men got around to having patches embroidered on their uniforms before we lifted for Churchyard. We boarded in haste, you see.”
A branch hopper—not the one Daniel had caught—shrieked nearby. A third little creature answered it from much farther away. The high-pitched sound traveled well.
“Are we to assault the headquarters complex when we’ve landed?” Chatterjee said, frowning at the image of the fortress again. “I suppose if we have surprise, that should be possible. Surprise and a way to cross the ditch and climb the wall, that is.”
“Yes,” said Daniel, “surprise of course. And as for the rest, we’ll be landing inside the compound.”
“What?” said Chatterjee. “Leary, Admiral, that is—there’s no room! Look at that little boat in the picture. The Defender isn’t huge, I don’t mean that, but she’s far too large to land there.”
“The Westerdam, as we’ll be calling her, is 381 feet between perpendiculars,” Daniel said. He flexed his spread fingers as he considered the approaching test. “If I keep her centered between the headquarters building and the rampart, I’ll have over five hundred feet to settle onto. The 53-foot beam is no problem. Now, it’ll be tricky because it’s concrete and not water, but I don’t foresee serious problems.”
He beamed, a wholesome, cheery expression that he figured was the best way to give a lie the gloss
of truth. The combination of angles and hard verticals would reflect the transport’s exhaust in unpredictable fashions. The Ladouceur’s landing simulation program didn’t have software to mimic such terrain: it was too far beyond what the designers had imagined anyone would want to do.
Granted, missile boats and couriers obviously managed it, but the task was going to be an order of magnitude more difficult for a vessel the size of the, well, Skye Defender. On the other hand—
Daniel’s smile became completely real.
On the other hand, he figured he was an order of magnitude better than the captains of minor elements of an Alliance cluster command.
“Ah, one thing that I’ve only implied, Colonel,” he said. “I’ll be taking charge of the Skye Defender myself. I’ve landed ships her size on dry ground, of course.”
Daniel’d landed one ship that size on dry ground, and that’d been a controlled crash which wrote off the vessel. This had to look like a real landing, not the vertical assault it really was, if it had a prayer of succeeding. Well, he’d manage it.
Chatterjee shook his head in amazement, but he was grinning broadly. “All the stories we heard were true then, Admiral,” he said. “We’ll do as you wish, of course; what else can we do when so famed an officer leads?”
His expression became speculative. “And you will be leading, of course?” Chatterjee said. “You will be putting your life on the line with ours?”
“Not only my life, Colonel,” Daniel said, nodding to Adele, “but the life of the finest signals officer in the RCN. I assure you that I wouldn’t be risking Officer Mundy if I weren’t confident of success.”
Adele looked at him without expression; Daniel laughed to make a joke out of it. It wasn’t a joke, not really. All he was really confident of was that they wouldn’t have a prayer of succeeding if Adele weren’t in the ship that made the landing.