by David Drake
“Hi, Ma,” one of them said, waving his hand side to side. “This is Bob Casey. I think he’s after your time—”
“Ma’am, I’m honored,” the second man said. They were both in their mid-thirties, as much alike as one sand perch to another.
“—but he’s got a battalion of two hundred militia in the Northanger District.”
“Right, only no guns,” Casey said. “Until just now, right, Leary?”
Daniel nodded pleasantly. He was structuring this discussion carefully, the way he’d conduct a battle. He’d get to the guns in good time.
“Fort Douaumont is the key to Conyers,” Daniel said. “If the Alliance recaptures it, your Grangers won’t be able to take it back, mistress. And—”
“We won’t let them recapture it!” Brandt said. “No fear on that score. Now that we’ve got it, we’ll keep it!”
“With respect, mistress,” Chatterjee said. “My troops have the fort, not yours.”
“Look here, Colonel!” Brandt said. “If you’ve got the notion your lot’s going to waltz in here and take over where Platt left off, I’m telling you you’re wrong! We—”
“Silence, if you please!” Daniel said.
“—can run our own—” Brandt said at a rising volume.
The aide seated to Chatterjee’s left started to get up, his face already crimson. Ashburn put her hand on the fellow’s shoulder and slammed him back in his seat.
“—government and collect our own—”
Daniel was poised to grip Ma Brandt and turn her forcibly to face him, but that had a danger of leading to real problems. Still—
Hogg gestured upward. Tovera nodded, grinned like a serpent, and fired a single round into the ceiling over Brandt’s head. The ceramic pellet punched through the molded plaster and pulverized itself against the concrete underlayer.
“What?” Brandt shouted, looking up just in time for a mist of finely divided paint, plaster, glass, and concrete to cover her eyes and open mouth. She lurched forward, trying to sneeze and cough at the same time.
“Thank you,” Daniel said calmly. “I believe that if we all remain courteous, we can arrive at a generally acceptable solution.”
He smiled. He wondered if Hogg and Tovera had planned this ahead of time or if they were just so much in tune with one another’s mind-set that a crooked finger was all the communication they needed.
Hogg’s stocked impeller was a very powerful weapon. Its discharge inside a room would’ve sounded like a bomb going off, and the osmium projectiles it fired would’ve ricocheted lethally instead of disintegrating.
Nobody tried to speak, though several people were sneezing. Daniel tightened his diaphragm to smother a sneeze of his own.
“The fort depends for its safety in the first place on its missile batteries,” Daniel said. “Unless they’re operational, the Alliance can reduce the position as easily as my cruiser destroyed the sector which refused to surrender to Colonel Chatterjee’s forces. Mistress Brandt—”
He nodded to the Grange leader again. She held a hand over her mouth, but that seemed to be a precautionary measure.
“—your personnel don’t have the skills to operate the missile system.”
“We could learn,” Brandt said, glancing toward Chatterjee with a wary look. She didn’t raise her voice, and she only partially lowered her hand.
“Mistress,” Daniel said before Chatterjee stepped in. “I’ve very frequently led forces into battle. If I were a man who lied about his own resources, I’d have been killed long since. Your farmers, properly armed and led, may well become the best infantry in the Bagarian Cluster, but they won’t learn to operate shipkilling missiles in your lifetime or mine.”
Brandt muttered something inaudible. Daniel turned to Chatterjee, who wasn’t perfectly successful in controlling his pleased smile, and continued, “Which brings me to the next problem. Colonel, your battalion can’t prevent the Alliance from landing out of the fort’s range and bringing anti-ship missiles close enough to blockade you. To be safe from being starved out, you need to control the planet, not just Fort Douaumont.”
He paused. “Go on,” Chatterjee said, wary also but smart enough to wait to hear the complete proposal.
“Because Conyers was a Cluster Headquarters,” Daniel said, “the bunkers beneath us here contained more than just Mistress Brandt and other prisoners. There are over ten thousand—”
“Over twelve thousand, if the inventory records are correct, Admiral,” Adele interjected.
“Over twelve thousand, that is,” Daniel said with a spreading smile, “stand of arms. That’s small arms, no automatic impellers even, but sufficient to make Conyers a deathtrap for any force landing on the planet without the good will of the local populace. My people—”
“My people” was precisely true, Sissies whom Daniel was certain he could trust completely.
“—are distributing those arms to members of the United Grange of Conyers even as we speak.”
Chatterjee started to jump up, then started to speak. He restrained himself both times, but the smile he gave Daniel was at best wry.
“With the military aspects of planetary defense settled,” Daniel went on, “I’ve fulfilled my obligations with one exception—making arrangements for command of the defenses. I’m appointing Colonel Chatterjee as Military Governor of—”
“Now just—” Brandt said.
Hogg pointed his left arm, index finger extended, toward her face. He held the heavy impeller like a pistol, its butt resting on his right hip.
“If you’ll please wait, mistress,” Daniel said crisply in the renewed silence. “Military Governor, as I said, to coordinate with the civilian government through the mechanism of a Council of Twelve chosen by the citizens of Conyers.”
He nodded toward the local men down the table from Brandt.
“Masters LaPlant and Casey inform me that this corresponds to the subdivisions of the United Grange.”
“That’s right, Leary,” Bill LaPlant said. “And let me tell you, if Platt and his pansies think they can take things over now we’ve got guns, we’ll teach him different!”
“I don’t believe Governor Platt will be in a place where what he thinks affects anybody else, Master LaPlant,” Daniel said. “But I agree with your larger point: So long as the Skye troops and the United Grange cooperate, there’s no chance at all of Guarantor Porra reconquering Conyers.”
Dasi and Barnes stood against the wall on either side of Adele; they grinned at one another over her head. There was no need to make a point of it, but either man could’ve convinced the Granger that who you screw has nothing to do with how well you fight.
“Right,” said Daniel, rising from his chair. “My spacers and I will leave you here to work out the details for the government of Conyers. I very much hope you all understand that this requires consensus among the parties, but—”
He smiled around the room. From the tightness he felt in his facial muscles, he suspected his expression was merely a broader version of Tovera’s before she shot into the ceiling.
“—when all’s said and done, I’m an RCN officer. My responsibilities don’t include the governance of planets which aren’t enrolled in the Friends of Cinnabar. Good luck to you all, ladies and gentlemen.”
As Daniel spoke, he strode toward the door on the other side of the room. Hogg, his impeller slanted across his body, made sure the path was open. As they stepped through the door, Adele leaned close and murmured, “How long do you think this will last?”
Daniel shrugged. “I give it a good chance,” he said as they walked toward the stairs. His next order of business was to go aboard the Ladouceur and see to matters there again. That meant a hike, but at least they wouldn’t need an escort.
“Ma Brandt herself may be a problem, but I think the people who’ve been running the Grange since her imprisonment are reasonable. As is Chatterjee.”
He grinned. “And anyway, speaking as Commander Daniel Leary,
RCN,” he concluded, “I think it’ll last long enough to take the pressure off Admiral James. The rest isn’t really any of my business, right?”
Daniel laughed. Shortly he’d be back in command of a warship, where he belonged. What could be better than that?
* * *
Pasternak lit the first pair of thrusters. The Ladouceur rocked gently, not from the negligible lift but because the rhythmic pulses of ions rippled waves in the surface of Grand Harbor. Adele began to recheck her display.
“Mistress?” said Rene on a two-way link from the console beside the one she was using. “I’d thought of Commander Leary as a, well, a fighting naval officer. After watching him settle the government of Conyers, well . . . he’s really a politician, isn’t he? Over.”
Adele smiled wryly. “I assure you, Rene,” she said, “Captain Leary is a fighting naval officer. Any Alliance commander who’s faced him will vouch for that. The survivors will, that is.”
She expanded the inset of Daniel’s face on her screen. Another person might’ve turned around instead, but Adele had an instinctive preference for information recorded and therefore distanced from her.
“But yes,” she said, “he’s a politician too. He comes by that honestly, of course. His father was—is—a very successful politician.”
“Lighting Three and Four,” Pasternak’s voice rumbled on the command channel. When discussing the ship’s propulsion system, he always spoke with the gloomy assurance that something was going to go wrong.
“Do you suppose he could take over the Bagarian Cluster, Adele?” Rene asked. His face had a taut lack of expression, like that of a tennis player awaiting his opponent’s serve. “Give them a real government, I mean?”
Adele let the question tumble in her mind for a few moments. She called up a series of data fields in quick succession, not really to view them but to remind herself of their contents and to revisit the questions they’d raised when she compiled them.
“He . . . might be able to do that,” Adele said slowly. She frowned and went on, “I’m not putting it that way to be mealymouthed, I’m honestly not sure that anyone could unite the cluster without a powerful fleet behind him. But if it were possible, Daniel would certainly be the one to do it.”
The Ladouceur had come fully alive. All sixteen thrusters were alight, though their nozzles were flared to keep lift to a minimum. A pump was running at full capacity to replenish reaction mass through a hose lowered into the harbor. Hatches were sealed, necessary systems were running in the green or—because this was the reality of a starship in service, not an ideal from a training manual—the operators had found satisfactory workarounds.
One of Adele’s stern quadrant of microwave dishes no longer sent or received, but she’d found that at full extension the installations on either side could provide coverage for any target more than two hundred feet out from the cruiser’s hull. That’d do till Pasternak had leisure to assign a team to trace the fault.
“The Ladouceur’s the most powerful ship in the cluster,” Adele said, musing aloud. “The only real warship, barring that Alliance destroyer whose captain apparently isn’t willing to fight.”
“They were badly outnumbered, Adele,” Rene objected quietly.
Adele sniffed. “Imagine the odds were reversed,” she said. “Ask Vesey what she’d do. Or Blantyre, or Cory. Or Sun for that matter, though I’m not sure that he’d be able to program a course on the astrogation computer. They’d still fight. The only difference between them and Commander Leary is that he’d do a better job of it.”
She called up the lists of military organizations in the cluster: the Presidential Guard, individual planetary forces, the private militias in the pay of a local merchant or landowner. Numbers and quality, both slippery fish to pull out of the morass of corruption and incompetence which underlay every revolutionary movement Adele had seen. You wondered how any of them succeeded, until you looked at the governments they opposed.
“The spacers would support him,” Adele said. “We’d have to arrange to pay them, but that could be done by nationalizing a bank. Nationalizing all the banks, perhaps. The present government doesn’t do that because the ministers either own the banks or are in the pay of those who do. Daniel wouldn’t be constrained. Further—”
She pursed her lips. She was speculating in a fashion she normally did only in the silence of her mind. She could argue that if Rene was smart enough to understand what she was about to say, he was smart enough to figure it out for himself . . . but the truth was that she felt like telling him. Adele didn’t pretend that she fully understood the workings of her own mind, but she didn’t lie to herself.
“—I think it’s probable that he could float a loan from Cinnabar sources to enable him to become overlord of the cluster.”
Daniel could obtain money from the Shippers’ and Merchants’ Treasury, owned by his father and sister; or from the Chancellery itself, with his father pulling the necessary strings in the Senate. Oh, yes: Speaker Leary was a very effective politician.
“Ship, thirty seconds to liftoff,” Daniel said. He sounded pleased. He had every reason to be, of course: he’d successfully completed his mission on Conyers, and he was going back into space. To Daniel, either was cause for celebration.
“With control of the navy, it’d just be a matter of finding allies on the individual worlds who’d support him for leadership of the cluster. That wouldn’t be difficult.”
Adele smiled faintly. “He has me, after all,” she said. “If there’s a data bank in the Bagarian cluster that I can’t enter more or less at will, it’s kept itself well concealed thus far.”
Was that bragging? Perhaps, but it was also part of a dispassionate analysis of the question. And besides, she felt like saying it. To Rene.
“The present government is a cabal of Pelosian magnates,” Adele said. “They aren’t really united, and with the exception of Madame DeMarce, they don’t have any real support outside of Pelosi. Overthrowing them wouldn’t be a problem, but uniting the separate worlds afterward would take considerable skill.”
The thruster note changed from an omnipresent hoosh to a snarl which built to thunder as the petals sphinctered down. The rocking motion stilled, replaced by a purposeful hammering. The Ladouceur started to lift.
“The sort of skill Commander Leary showed on Conyers, you mean?” Rene said. Commo helmets had active sound cancellation, and the thrust rising quickly to 3 g didn’t show in his voice. He had more experience of space travel than the Bagarians in the crew, after all. “Over.”
“Putting the cluster together would require an order of magnitude greater ability than the settlement on Conyers did,” Adele said, watching data cascade past her. A real-time panorama of Grand Harbor showed at the top of her screen, but the roiling, rainbow-shot mist was by now too familiar to be interesting. “But I don’t believe Daniel considered Conyers a serious test of his capacity. So, as for your initial question . . .”
Adele weighed probabilities with her lips pursed. She knew what she felt, but she didn’t trust feelings—though she’d acted on the basis of feelings and might do so again. The answer to a question asked by someone else had to be based on data and reason.
“I believe Commander Leary would have a reasonable chance, a better than even chance, of taking control of the Bagarian Cluster by coup,” she said. “I don’t gamble, but I assure you that the spacers who’ve served with Daniel in the past would certainly bet on that outcome. Bet their lives.”
The noise softened as the Ladouceur rose into thinner levels of the atmosphere, but the thrusters’ vibration was worse for lack of air to dampen it. Daniel would be switching to the High Drive shortly, Adele supposed.
“Adele,” said Rene. “Will he do that? Take over? He must know that the cluster would be better off under his leadership than under the present government, over.”
“I’m sure even the current ministers know that Daniel would rule the cluster better than they do,” A
dele said, feeling a smile quirk her lips. “They won’t offer him the position, though, because the well-being of the cluster isn’t their primary concern. And Daniel won’t take the position by force, because the cluster isn’t his primary concern either. Remember, he’s an officer of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy.”
“Ship, we’ll be switching to High Drive in fifteen seconds,” said a half-familiar voice. Adele checked: Ashburn was speaking. She’d forgotten she was a Power Room tech. “Switching now.”
The thrusters cut out. For several seconds the Ladouceur was in free fall save for a late burp from a nozzle toward the stern; then the ship quivered with the harder, higher frequency note of matter-antimatter conversion. Renewed acceleration kicked Adele back into her couch.
“Mistress,” Rene said, “when the present ministers—when people of their sort—are afraid, they could do anything. And they’ll never believe that Commander Leary doesn’t plan a coup, because they’d plan a coup in his position. He . . . I’m sure he knows that, over?”
“Yes, Commander Leary knows that,” Adele said. Daniel would’ve known that even if she hadn’t warned him herself. He was, after all, Corder Leary’s son. “I’m sure he’s factoring that probability into his plans.”
Daniel reduced thrust to one gravity now that the Ladouceur was clear of Conyers’ gravity well. People were moving in the corridor outside the bridge, riggers preparing to go out on the hull and set the sails.
“I don’t see what he can do if he doesn’t launch a coup,” Rene said softly. “I just don’t see what other choice there is, except giving up.”
He coughed and as an afterthought added, “Over.”
Adele almost laughed. “Daniel will do what he believes is best for Cinnabar,” she said primly. “And I very much doubt that means giving up.”
The forward airlock sighed open for the riggers to enter. In a few days the Ladouceur’d be back on Pelosi. Things would happen then.
Adele absently patted the left pocket of her tunic. She didn’t know what those things would be; but like Daniel, she’d deal with anything that arose.