by David Drake
“So,” he said, “if you’ll call your officers together in half an hour in the entry hold of the Ladouceur, I’ll go over the detailed assignments for the assault.”
“Very good,” said Chatterjee, rising. “A bold plan is the best plan, I agree.”
He bowed and strode off to where the target practice was taking place. The rattle of shots and the howl of ricochets from stone had been continuous since they began.
“Well, Adele,” Daniel said quietly. “What do you think?”
“I think that if I can’t take control of the fire control computer for the plasma cannon on the wall,” Adele said, “that they’ll destroy us as soon as they realize we’re hostile. I’ll try to accomplish that.”
“Yes,” said Daniel. “I expected that you would.”
A branch hopper called very close to them. Daniel jerked his head around, but he wasn’t able to pinpoint the creature this time.
“I think they’re more active than they’d usually be,” he said, “because of our breath. Five hundred people exhaling in a close compass like this is going to raise the humidity a great deal in this climate. I think it’s a good omen, don’t you?”
“I’ll search under ‘Omens, finger-sized animals on Dansant,’ shall I?” said Adele with a deadpan expression. “But I’ll be frank, I don’t believe I’m going to be able to support your belief there.”
She didn’t laugh with him, but her smile was as broad as he’d seen it in a long time.
EN ROUTE TO CONYERS
Adele heard the voices pausing outside her room. When she realized one of those speaking was Woetjans, she noticed where her left hand was. Grimacing in self-disgust, she removed it and smoothed the pocket before calling, “Yes? Come in.”
The Zwiedam had carried six hundred immigrants at a time on long voyages. Adele couldn’t imagine where they’d all fitted, but regardless there was plenty of room for half that number of the soldiers and armed spacers who’d make up the assault force.
Adele and the other officers had private rooms—of a sort. What’d been a barracks for fifty in five-high hammock towers had been broken up into ceilingless compartments made from sail fabric stretched on tubing. The fabric was perfectly opaque: when energized, it reflected even Casimir radiation. It didn’t do anything about sound, though, so the voices, music, dice games, and snoring from the other nine cubicles came through unhindered.
The room was noisy, dank, and adorned only by chipping paint. At that, it was better than most of the places where Adele had roomed during the fifteen years between when her family was massacred and her joining the RCN. She didn’t care much about her physical surroundings anyway.
Woetjans opened the door panel by turning the double pivot that served as a latch. Instead of entering, she remained in the corridor with a Bagarian spacer whom Adele didn’t know by name.
Tovera and Rene Cazelet stood just behind the spacers. They had the cubicles to either side of Adele’s, and they appeared to’ve dropped whatever they were doing to join the party.
“Ramage found something back on Dansant, mistress,” the bosun said. “I told him we needed to bring it to you because you’d know what it was.”
She nudged Ramage. “Go on, show it to her, buddy,” she said. “You don’t have to be scared. We’re on her side. Right, mistress?”
“I usually don’t shoot people for asking me questions, Woetjans,” Adele said dryly. “Even when they’re not shipmates.”
She took the little pyramid which Ramage held out to her. It was about an inch high from any base to its apex and remarkably heavy for its size. There were carvings on all four faces, though Adele couldn’t tell the detail in this light. She moved it above the data unit and focused the display into a bar of white light.
Adele used to think that the spacers she served with considered her a monster; the thought had disturbed her. After a time she realized that people who’d just heard the stories might think she was a monster, but to the Sissies themselves she was a guard dog: very dangerous, but their dog.
That didn’t bother her as much. She basically agreed with the assessment.
“It was where we were shooting, mistress,” Ramage said. She’d heard the Bagarians call him Andy. “The Skyes’d painted targets on rocks. They’d shoot and we’d shoot, and after the paint’d been blasted off we’d go paint ‘em back again. I was helping paint, you know, and I saw this so I picked it up.”
“He thought it was a slug, you see, stuck in the rock,” Woetjans said. “But we scraped the rock away and it wasn’t.”
“Anyway, it was too big,” Ramage said. He’d loosened up a good deal in the course of this short conversation.
“No, it’s not a bullet,” Adele said, hefting the pyramid in her palm. It was as dense as the osmium and iridium projectiles which heavy impellers shot, though. Her little pocket pistol fired ceramic pellets which lost most of their velocity in the first fifty yards.
Each face of the pyramid had an image; the edges were sharp, apparently carved instead of being cast. The base was marked with a symbol, a figure-8 or perhaps an analemma, beside two slanted diagonals. It meant nothing to Adele or to her personal data unit.
The other three facets showed heads in left profile. One was birdlike, though the beak was vestigial; the next was clearly reptilian, but the jaw was shorter than that of any reptile Adele had seen and the forehead bulged almost like a man’s; and the third was a slope-browed man, or at least something manlike.
Daniel will be interested in this.
“Where’d it come from, mistress?” Woetjans asked.
Adele stood, closed her data unit, and handed the pyramid back to Ramage. She’d started to put it in her pocket, but she realized the spacers would think she was appropriating it. They’d accept that, of course: she was Lady Adele Mundy, the Captain’s friend, and they were the dirt beneath her feet.
They thought that; she did not. She winced to imagine reinforcing their belief by accident.
“I’m not sure we’ll be able to tell, Woetjans,” Adele said, “but come with me to the Medicomp and we’ll analyze the thing in more detail than we can here.”
She strode down the corridor between fabric cubicles and then through the open hatch to C Deck’s central passage. In warships the automated diagnosis and care facility was usually on A Deck, but the builders of this immigrant ship placed it in the middle of the three decks given over to barracks. It was within fifty yards of Adele’s compartment.
No one was in the Medicomp at the moment, so Adele simply used the cabinet itself instead of everting one of the arms. When there were many to treat at the same time, the unit did so externally. After the assault on Mandlefarne Island, Adele had been one of half a dozen casualties in the corridor of the Princess Cecile.
She could easily have died there; but she hadn’t, so she was here to answer questions for Woetjans and Ramage. The spacers were pleased that she’d lived, and at the moment Adele supposed that she was glad also.
“The object, please,” Adele said, but Ramage was already holding it out to her. The cylinder would hold a large human lying flat. She set the pyramid in the center and closed the cabinet again.
“Why, that’s brilliant, Adele!” Cazelet said as he watched her program the Medicomp. “I never would’ve thought of that. Of course, it has full-spectrum analysis capability, but I just considered it a, well, a Medicomp.”
“One gets used to field expedients in the RCN,” Adele said, smiling faintly. “For example, a large wrench makes a very good club. Doesn’t it, Woetjans?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the bosun. “Though I prefer a length of high-pressure tubing.”
Adele scrolled the readout, using the Medicomp’s vernier control. She hadn’t coupled her personal data unit to it, and doing so now would be more effort than it was worth. The integral controls and menus were clear and simple, as befitted equipment intended for use by common spacers who might themselves be injured.
“It’s p
ure platinum,” Adele said. “Chemically pure, that is; it’d have to have been refined to achieve that degree of purity. And the angles are all within microns of 120 degrees, which also means it wasn’t bashed into shape by a savage with a rock.”
Not that she’d imagined it had been. She wasn’t sure of the temperature required to smelt platinum, but—
Adele settled cross-legged on the deck and brought out her data unit. A few twitches with the wands gave her the figure: 3164.3 degrees. No, not a temperature you got from a wood fire, even with three of your cousins blowing on it through cane tubes.
“Ah, Mistress Mundy?” Rene said, carefully circumspect. He’d embarrassed himself by blurting “Adele” a moment ago in front of the spacers. “If the object was really set in the limestone outcrop rather than dirt—”
“Hey, it was rock!” Woetjans said. “You think I don’t know what rock is, kid? When Ramage here showed me what was sticking out, I cracked it loose with my impeller’s butt that I’d been shooting.”
“Yes, Chief Woetjans,” Cazelet, stiffening his back and clipping his syllables slightly into an upper-class Pleasaunce accent. “If it was limestone, as I said, then it should be possible to use radiation dating on the particles still caught in the grooves of the carving. Should it not?”
“Can one carbon date stone?” Adele said, but she was already typing the commands into the Medicomp’s keyboard.
“Limestone’s carbonate rock formed by living creatures,” Cazelet said. “In the sea. Use the ratio of oxygen isotopes.”
“If there was a sea there, it was the gods’ own time ago,” said Ramage with a puzzled frown. “I never been no place so dry as that.”
“Yes, it was a long time ago,” Adele said, staring impassively at the readout. Her fingers typed. “Sixty-two thousand years before present, plus or minus seven thousand. That seems an excessive range of error, but I don’t suppose it matters from our viewpoint.”
“Mistress, that must be wrong,” Rene said. “Try another facet. The sample must be contaminated.”
“I don’t see how it can be correct either,” said Adele, intent on her work. “And I am sampling another side, of course. But I’m less sure than you are that it has to be wrong.”
She cleared her throat. “This time it’s reading sixty-two thousand, plus or minus five point five,” she added.
Adele opened the cabinet and removed the little pyramid. After bouncing it twice in her palm, she handed it to Ramage again.
“I think Commander Leary would like to see this,” she said. “Perhaps he’ll be able to offer a better explanation than I can.”
“Mistress?” said Woetjans. A frown furrowed her brow like a freshly-turned field. “There weren’t people that far back, was there? I mean, sixty-odd thousand years?”
Adele reached for her data unit. Before she could call up an answer, Cazelet said, “There were people of a sort, Bosun, but they weren’t making art from platinum. And they weren’t here.”
“There’s no reason to assume humans created this little thing anyway,” Adele pointed out. “Just that someone who’d seen humans did it.”
Cazelet looked at Adele and said harshly, “Mistress, for this to be true would require a star-traveling race sixty thousand years ago. There’s no evidence of that!”
Adele gestured toward the pyramid in Ramage’s hand. “No previous evidence that you’d seen, you mean, Rene,” she said with a faint smile. “I’ve seen some odd things since I began traveling widely.”
She was always puzzled to learn that the most avowedly skeptical people took things on faith. Adele believed data, but only until better data appeared; as for analyses and explanations, they were no better than the intellect of the person making them. Rene’s certainty was a matter of blind faith.
“Do you mean there was?” Rene said, raising his voice without intending to. “That there was a race that was sailing the stars when human beings thought fire was high technology?”
“I mean that Ramage found a platinum pyramid on Dansant,” Adele said calmly. She let a slow smile spread a little wider than was normal for her. “I won’t speculate about it or about most things; I don’t care for the paths my mind sometimes takes when I speculate.”
“Guess I’ll show this to Six,” Ramage decided aloud. “That all right, Chief?”
Woetjans nodded without expression.
“He might want to buy it, d’ye think, mistress?” Ramage said. Before she could nod agreement, he added, “But you know, I might give it to him anyways. Tell the truth, it makes me feel kinda funny.”
“Yes,” said Rene Cazelet, “I understand perfectly, spacer.”
He looked at Adele, shook his head, and said, “What does it mean, mistress?”
“It means we were on Dansant and Ramage found a platinum pyramid,” Adele repeated. “If you mean that question in a broader sense—”
She smiled again.
“—I’m really the wrong person to discuss the meaning of life, Master Cazelet. Because you see, I don’t think life has any meaning.”
After a pause Adele added, “Though Commander Leary would disagree, I suspect. And anyone who’s served with Commander Leary will tell you that he’s generally right.”
Chapter Sixteen
ABOVE CONYERS
“I can’t get it to work,” said the senior inspector. He withdrew the chip from his translator, rotated it end for end—which shouldn’t make any difference—and inserted it again. His junior colleague watched with his mouth slightly open, an expression which Adele thought made him look like an imbecile.
It didn’t make any difference. “It still doesn’t work,” the fellow said.
“It’s the manifest we were given on Maintenon,” Adele said, trying to sound bored. In order to impersonate the mate of a contract transport, she’d borrowed clothes from Tedesco, a small-framed Sissie. Because he was a motorman, the loose tunic and trousers were indelibly stained though clean in the sense that they’d been washed since their last wearing. “If you can’t read it, that’s your problem, not ours.”
“But don’t you have the paper copy that’s supposed to come with it?” the senior man said. “Look, I’ve got to certify that the manifest checks before we allow you to land. This may be listed as a cluster capital but it’s really a hardship posting. We’d be under attack here if the clodhoppers had any weapons, you know.”
Adele’d thought the clothes might be a problem—why would the Westerdam’s first mate have oil-blotched garments?—but the inspectors who boarded from the picket boat didn’t appear to notice. The coveralls under their translucent airsuits weren’t in any better condition.
“Well, certify it, then!” growled Daniel from the command console. “You can read it on this display if you can’t on your own.”
“Paper copies aren’t controlling,” Adele said. She spoke in an upper-class Blythe accent. It might cause speculation coming from the mate of a transport, but it wasn’t suspicious. “Anyway, they didn’t give us one. Do what he says, read it on our console.”
She’d had no difficulty mocking up a format for the manifest the Westerdam should be carrying. Unfortunately, the nearest equipment to burn that information to a chip was on Pelosi. It wasn’t exotic, but it simply wasn’t the sort of thing that ships normally carried themselves.
Adele could wipe the Skye Defender’s manifest, though. She could program the command console’s database to throw the correct information onto the display when a blank chip was inserted into its reader.
“Or you can send us back to Maintenon where we belong,” Colonel Chatterjee growled. “We’re militia. We should never have been taken away from our home planet. That’s for emergencies only, and you can’t tell me that holding the hand of some provincial governor is an emergency!”
“Better not let Governor Platt hear you talk that way,” the junior inspector said.
“Or what?” Chatterjee said. “Or he’ll send us to West Bumfuck in the Bagarian Cluste
r? I’m an important man on Maintenon, I’ll have you know!”
“Nothing on bloody Maintenon is important,” muttered the official, but to his partner he said, “All right, Booth, we’ll run it on theirs. But get that bloody reader over to the shop when we come in, right?”
“Dunno why it don’t work,” Booth said as his senior handed the chip to Daniel, who in turn inserted it into the slot on his console. Unless his looks belied him, there were many things that Booth didn’t know.
Both inspectors leaned forward to stare at the information glowing on Daniel’s display. The manifests of the Alliance’s Transport Auxiliary Command were mauve, a strikingly ugly color for air-formed holograms and difficult to read besides. Adele had precisely duplicated the hue.
“All right, you guys can land,” the senior inspector said as he straightened. “But you better be careful when you open your hatches. The clodhoppers’ve been known to take shots at ships in Grand Harbor. This is a hardship posting, I tell you!”
The Alliance officials sauntered back into the airlock, refastening the fittings of their air suits. When the hatch had closed behind them, Adele rose and strode for the companionway where Rene and Tovera waited. Tovera was carrying a full-sized sub-machine gun.
“Adele?” called Daniel from the bridge. She turned.
“Good luck,” he said with a smile. “I wish we had an aircar, but the box should work well enough.”
“Yes,” Adele said. “Good luck to all of us.”
A starship was merely a steel box, after all. Leaving a starship in a smaller steel box on wheels was unusual, but perhaps it was fitting. A coffin was just a box too, after all.
* * *
“Ship,” said Daniel. “All right—”
His tongue caught momentarily. Great heavens, what to call them! Certainly not Sissies, not least because he wasn’t going to cheapen that name by applying it to a battalion of pongoes, and foreign pongoes as well.
“—comrades, we’re going in. Remember your orders, obey your officers, and above all—when it starts, don’t slow down till you’ve finished it. Six out.”