by David Drake
* * *
Adele switched to the last of the six intercom channels and grimaced: no matter what she did, she couldn’t get rid of the 50-cycle hum. Fort Douaumont had an excellent communications system as installed, but it apparently hadn’t received maintenance since that installation.
She supposed the background interference resulted from moisture and failing insulation in a distribution node which also contained a lighting circuit. Now that four of the fort’s five sectors had surrendered to the Bagarians, she might escape the problem by going to another command center.
She’d decided not to move, at least for the time being. Something could go wrong with the process, and anyway—they’d paid for this location. She wondered if Woetjans was still alive.
“Captain Ringo . . .” Daniel said to the commander of Sector Two. “You’ve proved yourself to be a brave and loyal soldier. It’s time to lay down your arms as Governor Platt has ordered and spare your own life and the lives of your troops. I give you my word as an officer of Cinnabar that you’ll be treated with full military courtesy after your surrender, over.”
Adele was channeling all communications through her position, though it was obviously possible for Daniel in the Governor’s suite to speak directly to the Sector Two command center or anywhere else in Fort Douaumont. She felt better believing that she knew everything that was going on, and it allowed Daniel to use his RCN commo helmet instead of fumbling with Alliance equipment.
“Fuck you Cinnabar monkeys and fuck that pansy Platt!” Ringo replied. A burst from an automatic impeller rang off the Skye Defender’s hull. His troops must’ve manhandled the gun from its emplacement on the outer wall and aligned it to fire through one of the small-arms ports on the courtyard side of the rampart.
Most units of the Conyers garrison were nationalized planetary militia like the Maintenon battalion which the Bagarians had impersonated. There was one company of Home Office troops, however, sent to enforce discipline generally and Guarantor Porra’s will in particular. Ringo commanded them. It was Adele’s good fortune that she and her team had entered the fortress in Sector Three, not Two, though it might not’ve made any difference. Tovera was ruthless and a dead shot, and so was Tovera’s mistress.
An alarm sounded from Station B, the artillery emplacement above Ringo’s sector. Adele expanded the visual link to the site, a pair of 10-cm plasma cannon on a disappearing carriage which nestled behind an armored breastwork while they were at rest.
Though the weapons were fully automated, the designers had provided for manual control in an emergency. They hadn’t expected the emergency to be that a command post would be captured by a Cinnabar intelligence officer who understood the system better than the Alliance garrison had, though.
Six soldiers in field gray had come through the floor hatch and were trying to put the guns in action. They’d figured out that the Bagarians had taken electronic control of the installation, so two of them with chisels and heavy hammers were trying to cut the conduit. That wouldn’t actually free the guns as they hoped, but it showed a degree of imagination which couldn’t be permitted in an enemy.
“Daniel,” Adele said. “Captain, that is, there’re Alliance soldiers in Station B, trying to free the cannon. I don’t think they can unless they’re more skilled than I’d expect, but I thought you should be aware of what’s going on. Over.”
“Hold one, Signals,” Daniel said. After a few seconds’ pause, he resumed, “Roger, now link me to both the command group and the Ladouceur on the same circuit. Can you do that, over?”
“Yes, Daniel,” Adele said, too startled by the absurdity of the question to feel insulted. “I can do that.”
Rene Cazelet returned to the command post and sat at the desk
“Officers, this is Squadron Six,” Daniel said briskly. He probably didn’t realize he’d been out of line. “Lieutenant Liu, land in Grand Harbor as planned. When the Ladouceur’s down, Officer Sun and I will transfer to her. We’ll have to hike the half mile unless there’s another aircar that I haven’t found, but I guess we can handle that. A group of political troops’re dug into a section of the fort and won’t give up, so I’m going to let them die bravely.”
He paused without signing off, then continued, “Woetjans, I gather there’s a lot of unrest on Conyers. Since I don’t expect the rebels to introduce themselves and ask for our identification, Sun and I’ll need an escort of twenty or so Sissies. Over.”
“Captain . . .” Adele said. Her lips twisted as though she were sucking on a lemon, but the words were coming out all right. “Chief Woetjans has been wounded. You’ll need another detachment commander. Over.”
“Understood, Signals,” Daniel said calmly. “Break. Ashburn, alert twenty spacers as an escort. You can pick anybody you want. Six out.”
Adele rubbed her eyes, letting the chatter of the many detachments flow through her. She was as tired as if she’d been carrying another person on her back. She wondered if a drink would help her relax.
“Adele?” Rene said.
She looked up. He flinched from her unintended expression, but he seemed calm as he continued, “We got Woetjans to the Medicomp and she’s stable now. Barnes wanted to transfer her to the Ladouceur, but I’m familiar with the units installed here in the fortress. They’re quite satisfactory, a little different from the RCN type but of the first quality. And they’re newer than the cruiser’s.”
The image of Station B still held a quarter of Adele’s display. One of the men trying to cut the conduit leaped to his feet, flinging his hammer and chisel in opposite directions. Before his body’d collapsed, his partner lurched into the gun carriage and sprawled in a flag of blood. On the other side of his body, the projectile that’d killed him ricocheted as a bright purple streak from a trunnion.
“Thank you for taking care of that, Cazelet,” Adele said. She didn’t mean to sound so formal! “I wouldn’t have gotten around to it in time.”
She cleared her throat. “That is, if it’s in time now. I didn’t get much of a look at the wounds, but it’s clear the Chief was, ah, badly wounded.”
Another Alliance soldier dropped. Two more ran for the hatch and died in a tangle across it. The sixth man, rather than trying to outrun impeller projectiles fired from the roof of the HQ Building, huddled behind the plasma cannon. Hogg must be smiling . . .
“She’s stable, mistress,” Rene said with a lopsided smile. “It’s been my experience that if you get them to the Medicomp, you’ll probably be all right. Except for brain and spinal injuries. Shock kills more than trauma does, and she won’t slip off that way now that she’s hooked up.”
“Ladouceur Six-two to Squadron Six-four,” said a voice Adele didn’t identify instantly. “Mundy, this is Borries. Please reply, over.”
The Pellegrinian was using the laser communicator, not the microwave link through the planetary comsat system by which Adele’d netted the cruiser with the detachment on the ground. Because the Ladouceur was landing in a descending spiral, for part of the time she’d have been out of line-of-sight with the fort’s laser transceiver heads.
“Mundy to Borries,” she said. “Go ahead, over.”
“Mistress?” said Borries. He sounded tense. “Can you highlight where the holdouts are on a map of the fort for me, over?”
Adele frowned. “Borries,” she said, “there’re friendly troops holding the sections to either side of the target. I know that Captain Leary intends to displace them himself, over.”
“Mistress, I can do this,” Borries said in a tone of frustrated despair. “Six won’t let me but I can. Let me do my bloody job, mistress, over!”
Adele pursed her lips again. She’d already prepared the schematic with Sector Two in red and a pulsing cursor over the gun emplacement still in Alliance hands. “Borries,” she said, “I’m transferring the data now, out.”
Her wands flicked.
In her experience there were very few people who wanted to do their jobs. If the Pe
llegrinian missileer badly missed his aim, well, there weren’t many friendly personnel closer to the target area than Signals Officer Adele Mundy.
“Captain Ringo,” Daniel said, “I’m speaking to you as Commander Daniel Leary, RCN. Please, you have a last chance to surrender on honorable terms. You can see that with only small arms at your disposal, you can’t resist for more than an hour or two. Surrender and—”
A low-frequency rumble from the east was beginning to shake the fort. Dust which Barnes’ burst had smashed from the walls quivered in the air.
“Bugger you, Leary!” Ringo screamed. He must be spraying spittle into the microphone; perhaps he too had watched his men shot down. “Didn’t you hear me the first time? Bugger all of you bloody Cinnabar faggots!”
The sound of the cruiser in its final landing approach built to thunder. Through it Adele heard a shriller sound.
“Adele,” said Cazelet as he slid out of the seat built into his desk. “I think we’d better get down—”
The CRACK! was earsplitting. The Alliance warrant officer’s corpse bounced from the floor at Adele’s feet, spun on its axis, and flopped back face down.
Adele’s display went monochrome for an instant, but the console had its own power supply. Dust lifting from the floor interfered with the projections and blurred the images, but there was nothing wrong with the computer itself. The quadrant showing the gun position went blank because the sending unit had vanished.
“Adele, get down!” Rene screamed. He started toward her but sprawled headlong when the second missile dealt the fort another hammer blow.
Adele strapped herself in and switched her display to a video pickup on the exterior wall of the HQ Building’s penthouse. It provided a 90-degree panorama of the rampart, including Sector Two. The gun emplacement was a smoldering crater where a few strands of wreckage poked out of the smoke. The angle beneath it, the precise middle of the sector, had taken the second hit. Blue sparks snapped and sparkled through the bitter gray whorls, showing that the missile had punched deep enough to cut power lines.
The third missile hit twenty yards to the right of the second, delivering the worst shock of all to Adele’s CP. Concrete shattered and steel—the missile’s nose, cast from a nickel-iron asteroid, and the wall’s reinforcing rods—burned white from the friction of impact. The fourth missile drove into the rampart on the left of the angle, a perfect pairing with the third.
The Ladouceur roared overhead as it dropped into Grand Harbor. Its magazines still carried two plasma missiles which hadn’t been launched on Churchyard, but Adele supposed Borries hadn’t had time to program them during the cruiser’s landing approach.
He hadn’t needed them, either. There was no question about that.
Smoke shot up from scores of gunports and ventilation shafts; occasionally a streamer of red flame licked like a snake’s tongue before sinking back into the foul blackness that was settling over the gutted angle. The barriers were already down, cutting the late Captain Ringo’s sector off from those which had surrendered to the Bagarians. The deepest bunkers may’ve survived, but all passages from them to the surface had been filled with rubble.
“Squadron, this is Squadron Six,” said Daniel. “Fellow spacers, don’t get cocky quite yet, but I believe we’ve completed the conquest of Conyers. Ashburn, I won’t need your escort after all. And Chief Missileer Borries—”
He paused, then resumed, “Mister Borries, I have some quibbles about your judgment, but your professional skill is on a par with that of the best people I’ve ever seen in action—myself very definitely among them. Congratulations, my fellow spacers, I’m proud to serve with you. Hip hip—”
“Hooray!” shouted Rene Cazelet. And Adele found herself shouting also.
Chapter Eighteen
FORT DOUAUMONT, CONYERS
When the Skye Defender had lifted thirty feet or so above the courtyard, the echoes hammering from the fort’s inner walls no longer multiplied the thruster roar. Though the noise was only just short of deafening, Hogg put his mouth close to Daniel’s ear and said, “I’m surprised you let the wog take it up himself, master. I thought you’d want to do that.”
“Oh, Captain Salmon’s quite competent,” Daniel said, turning his head sideways to follow the freighter through the bay window of the penthouse office. “Anyway, there’s no great trick to liftoff, even from hard ground. So long as you’re continually adding power instead of reducing it, a few coughs and stumbles from the thrusters aren’t going to do real harm.”
Salmon’d been trying to rise vertically, but there was enough wind to drift the transport west as soon as she’d risen out of the shelter of Fort Douaumont. That was all right: she was high enough that her plasma exhaust wasn’t a danger to those on the ground.
“Besides, I have other business to tend to,” Daniel muttered, embarrassed at his sudden desire to snatch the controls out of Salmon’s hands. He wanted to be in control of everything himself, which wasn’t proper. Most people did a perfectly adequate job of whatever they were doing, and a few—Borries for example—were exceptionally good.
The Skye Defender began to settle into Grand Harbor where she belonged. Troops came out of Douaumont’s bunkers where they’d sheltered during liftoff and crossed the courtyard, going about their business. Daniel turned away from the window just as Ashburn rapped on the jamb of the open door.
“We got everybody down in the second-floor conference room, sir,” Ashburn said. She’d been acting as chief of the ground detachment in place of Woetjans. “You want me to bring’em up here? It’s gonna be tight, but I guess that’s their lookout.”
“No, I’ll come down,” Daniel said. He looked around the room to see if he was leaving anything behind.
And who’d replace Woetjans as the Ladouceur’s bosun? Riley, he supposed, though he suspected Woetjans herself would say Harrison. Daniel was almost of a mind to give the job against his better judgment to Harrison—who’d twice been broken back to ordinary spacer for being drunk on duty—in deference to the opinion of a comrade who was comatose and might not recover.
Hogg offered the sub-machine gun, keeping the heavy impeller for himself; Daniel brushed the suggestion aside more harshly than it deserved. Hogg functioned quite well in civilized society by acting like a dimwitted rube, but he wasn’t really a part of that milieu. Daniel could get along in a state of nature better than most could, but he wasn’t comfortable in it. He treated even battle as a civilized contest.
He preceded Hogg down the stairs; Ashburn had gone on ahead. Governor Platt had an elevator behind a curving door in a corner of his bedroom. It was keyed by his retinal pattern, but that would’ve been child’s play for Adele to modify. Daniel hadn’t asked her to do so; stairs weren’t a hardship for him, and the less he had to do with a pig like Platt, the more comfortable he was.
His boots whisked on the treads. Ashburn opened the door and a babble of voices echoed in the polished stone corridor beyond. “Clear the bloody way, will you?” Ashburn snarled. “Make way for Six!”
Hogg belonged in the natural world, his master belonged in a civilized one. And Lady Adele Mundy? Adele was Adele, no more part of any world than a pearl was part of the oyster which formed it. She was a pearl beyond price, no doubt about that . . . but it must be a very lonely place to be. As her friend, Daniel wished he had a better existence to offer her.
The conference room had seats for twenty-five but at least a dozen additional people were standing. Colonel Chatterjee sat at the foot of the long table opposite the empty chair left for Daniel. He started to rise at Ashburn’s announcement, but Daniel waved him down and strode quickly through the milling standees.
Adele and Cazelet were on chairs in the corner nearest the door; her servant stood in front of them with her miniature sub-machine gun in her hand instead of being discreetly concealed in her attaché case. When a stranger—one of Chatterjee’s aides— backed too close, Tovera pinched his earlobe between her thumb and forefinge
r and pulled his head around so that the muzzle of the little gun was within an inch of the fellow’s right eye.
He squealed; Tovera let him jerk away. Daniel didn’t exactly approve, but the Bagarian had been discourteous to a lightly built woman. And he had to smile at the sheer professionalism of Tovera’s response: an amateur would’ve prodded with the gun and might’ve lost it if the fellow were well trained and very fast.
Though it was unlikely that anybody in this room was fast enough to disarm Tovera.
“Ladies . . .” Daniel said, nodding to the heavyset woman seated to his right. She was Lee Brandt—Ma Brandt. Her past year of imprisonment in a bunker under Sector Four had left her hard as the stone walls of her cell.
“And gentlemen,” nodding this time to Colonel Chatterjee. “As the highest-ranking official of the Independent Republic of Bagaria who’s now present on Conyers, I’ve gathered you to discuss the settlement I propose.”
“Who are you to be discussing anything?” Brandt said. “And what’s the Independent Republic of Bagaria when it’s at home?”
“I’m Admiral Daniel Leary, mistress,” Daniel said mildly. “And since we’re doing introductions—Colonel Chatterjee, Mistress Brandt was Chairman of the United Grange of Conyers until her arrest for sedition. She led the opposition to Governor Platt’s autocracy. Mistress, Colonel Chatterjee commands the troops which captured the fort here to free you and your fellow prisoners. He’s an officer of the worlds which’ve rebelled successfully against Alliance misrule in the Bagarian Cluster.”
“I’m an officer of Skye,” Chatterjee said. His words were a trifle too forceful for the pleasant tone. “Which is a member of the Bagarian Republic, yes.”
“There are delegations from all over the planet on the way here, Mistress Brandt,” Daniel said, settling back in his seat to look less threatening than he would if he weren’t careful. “Some of them are here now—”
He gestured to a pair of men whose clothing had been cut out of canvas. They leaned forward to look past the people between them and Brandt.