When the Tide Rises

by David Drake

  The little predator stood on the edge of the desk, facing Daniel’s left hand. Daniel extended his index and middle fingers toward it, keeping the others curled into his palm. He twitched the index finger up and down twice, then twitched the middle finger.

  The creature twitched its right tentacle twice, then its left. Its body had been a dull mauve; it now flushed crimson in bands moving slowly from its head backward.

  Hoppler had disconnected the cabin display from the Ladouceur’s communications system. The cruiser didn’t have a large natural history database, and Daniel couldn’t access the one loaded into the Princess Cecile now. He was sure that Adele would’ve been able to circumvent the block, but that was Adele.

  He grinned. She wouldn’t have been able to set up a missile attack, though. Which, unfortunately, wasn’t a skill he needed at the moment.

  The creature rotated ninety degrees to face the flat-plate display; its tentacles twitched again. Am I supposed to turn with it or against it . . . ?

  The display itself worked. On the screen was a series of images and calculations involving the Castle System, the governmental hub of the Alliance. Pleasaunce was Castle Three, but Daniel’s interest was centered on the unnamed fourth planet.

  Well, now his interests was on the creature which shared his captivity; he had operations against Castle Four planned as well as he could at his present stage of knowledge. Daniel turned his hand so that his fingers pointed the same direction as its tentacles.

  The diameter of Castle Four was over 6,900 miles, but the gravity was only about half standard because it didn’t have a metallic core. Despite the thin atmosphere being low in oxygen, vast quantities of water ice were locked beneath the surface crust.

  The creature hopped almost an inch straight up, changing direction 180 degrees while in the air. It settled and its tentacles tapped, twice and twice as before. Daniel pondered, then tapped in answer but without moving his palm.

  Hundreds of ships were on or above Castle Four at any one time. It was easier to get landing rights on Four than on Pleasaunce, making it an ideal emporium for high-bulk goods which could be stored cheaply in a near vacuum until they were purchased and transshipped. Most ores and grains were carried to Pleasaunce by intra-system lighters. Tariffs on such items were rigged to favor the practice. Not coincidentally, the monopoly on such transit was in the hands of a favorite of Guarantor Porra.

  The creature hopped around, then hopped back and repeated its tapping. All right, I was supposed to turn with it, Daniel thought. He rotated his hand accordingly.

  He assumed this was a courtship ritual, but it was possible he was in the midst of a dominance battle. If so, the creature who’d challenged him was insanely brave. It would make a good mascot for the Sissie. . . .

  “All personnel on the IBS Ladouceur,” roared the ceiling speaker. Even through the sealed hatch, Daniel could hear the command rumbling in the corridor and from other compartments. “This is the Minister of the Navy, his Excellency Douglas Lampert. Captains Hoppler, Seward, and Leary are to report to the Ladouceur’s bridge immediately to confer with me. There can be no excuses!”

  The voice said it was Lampert, but there was no question that Adele was speaking the words. Daniel grinned and straightened his uniform, then checked the set of his cap. The RCN insignia gleamed neatly.

  “I repeat!” said the speakers. “Hoppler, Seward, and Leary will meet me as soon as I arrive or face immediate justice as traitors to the Republic!”

  How in the world was Adele able to do that from outside the ship? It wasn’t a surprise—she’d taken over the PA systems of hostile vessels and forts a number of times in the past—but to Daniel it was like spring or a sunrise: it didn’t become less magical by repetition.

  “You heard your orders!” Hogg said from the corridor, his voice harsh and forceful. He wasn’t shouting, but he clearly meant business. “What do they do to traitors on this anthill of a planet? On Cinnabar it’s the high jump, then your head nailed up on the Pentacrest, but here I’d guess they just shoot you. That what you want them to do to you?”

  “I can’t let him out!” whined the guard’s unfamiliar voice. “Look, if the minister wants him out, that’s fine, the minister can let him out. Right? I—look, here’s Lieutenant Blyth, talk to him. Lieutenant, this guy wants to let the Cinnabar admiral out!”

  “Well, let him out!” snarled the aide who’d drawn his gun on Daniel when Vesey called from the Princess Cecile. “And he’s not an admiral, you bloody fool!”

  The hatch swung back. David Blyth was toying with the flap of his holster again, but he hadn’t drawn the pistol. He was a trim little man with a pencil moustache and a nervous tic in his left cheek.

  “Good evening, Lieutenant Blyth,” Daniel said pleasantly. He was glad that the guard—standing aside and holding his carbine by the muzzle end—had used the officer’s name or he’d have had to peer at the corroded nametag to recall it. “What’s going on?”

  Daniel thought of the creature he’d left on the desk behind him. He felt a pang of regret, but he could tell the little fellow from personal experience that romance was a tricky business. Less so now that he was the famous Commander Leary with a chestful of medals—which he wasn’t above using in his dealings with the fair sex; but even so, he too had disappointments.

  “Look, just get . . .” Blyth said. He made a sour face; he must’ve realized that the situation had just changed and he didn’t know what was happening. He resumed, “C-Captain Leary, will you come with me to the bridge, please?”

  “I’d be pleased to, Lieutenant,” Daniel said, stepping toward the bridge; it was adjacent to the space cabin, after all.

  An aircar flew low over the cruiser. The whine of fans and downdrafts from shifting directions bounced through the many open hatches.

  “Master,” said Hogg, matching Daniel step for step, “you need to change into your Whites. It’s not proper to meet the minister—”

  An armed spacer stood at the bridge hatch, goggling at the procession. Daniel entered. Hogg followed.

  “—dressed like that.”

  “There’s no time!” Lieutenant Blyth said, his voice becoming shriller with each syllable.

  The poacher’s pockets sewn into Hogg’s baggy clothing could conceal a whole covey of game birds—or an arsenal. He’d just entered the bridge unchallenged.

  “Leary, you’re behind this!” said Hoppler, standing arms-akimbo beside the command console. He’d obviously noticed that Minister Lampert had called him “Captain Hoppler” instead of “Admiral” and he wasn’t sure what that implied.

  Seward and two aides were between the signals and gunnery consoles to starboard of the perhaps-admiral Hoppler. They glanced keenly from him to Daniel and back. They appeared concerned, but they weren’t showing the degree of anger that Hoppler was. They hadn’t been verbally demoted, after all.

  “With respect, Admiral,” Daniel said cheerfully, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve been locked in my cabin, you’ll recall. What is going on?”

  “Which, is a, bloody good, question!” Minister Lampert said between wheezes as he clomped out of the companionway. He must’ve run all the way from the entrance ramp, five decks below. A guard with a sub-machine gun preceded him; Adele, Tovera, and three more armed guards followed him out of the armored tube.

  “And you’re going to, answer it,” Lampert continued as he entered the bridge. His medals jangled with his gasping breaths. “Right now!”

  “Of course, Your Excellency,” Daniel said, walking between Hoppler and Seward before turning to face the minister. “Whatever you’d like to know.”

  Hogg was wearing a glove of metal mesh on his left hand; Tovera took a writing stylus from her breast pocket. Behind them, Adele gestured Lieutenant Blyth aside and closed the bridge hatch.

  “For myself . . .” Daniel said, putting his arms around the shoulders of the two Bagarian captains. “I’d like to discuss my plans for an attack o
n Castle Four.”

  ***

  While everybody—all the Bagarians, that is—stared at Daniel, Adele stepped to her right so that Lieutenant Blyth could move past her to see better. Seward grimaced and reached toward Daniel’s hand to remove it like a piece of lint from his shoulder.

  “Leary, have you gone insane?” Minister Lampert said, his tone that of a real question rather than an insult.

  Adele nodded. Daniel banged Hoppler’s and Seward’s heads together with a hollow thwock! Adele had seen him demonstrate his strength before, but this was a remarkable reminder. She drew Blyth’s electromotive pistol left-handed and pushed the safety at the front of the trigger guard forward, off-safe.

  Lampert’s young guard staggered forward. His mouth was open but the pain was too great for him to force words out. The last inch or so of a writing stylus projected from his lower back; it slanted upward, so most of it had been rammed through his kidney. Tovera twitched the sub-machine gun from his nerveless hands.

  The flicker of light to the starboard side of the compartment was a length of beryllium monocrystal—deep-sea fishing line—snaking out on the end of a two-ounce sinker to wrap the neck of the chief guard. Hogg jerked back hard, cutting the man’s throat to the cartilage. Bright blood sprayed for yards. If it weren’t for the protective glove, the thin line would’ve severed Hogg’s fingers as well.

  Adele shot the guard to her left; Lampert had called him “Darrell.” The borrowed pistol was a full-sized service weapon; she hit him in the temple as she intended, but the butt recoiled hard into the web of her hand and the slug—osmium instead of the light ceramic beads she was used to—punched through the skull and whanged into the hull plating beyond.

  The last guard, “Bill,” grabbed for the charging handle of his sub-machine gun; he hadn’t switched the weapon live when he came aboard. That’d probably been a safety measure, since an accidental burst of gunfire in a spaceship—a series of steel boxes—could kill a dozen people in a heartbeat.

  Adele swung the pistol onto the new target. The pistol’s unfamiliar weight meant she’d overcompensated to bring the muzzle back after the initial heavy recoil. Her shot hit the sub-machine gun’s receiver, blasting out a spray of aluminum, copper, and the transformer’s iron core. The slug wobbled through to take the guard at the top of the breastbone as blue sparks flared, melting the remainder of the receiver stamping.

  A scoring computer in Adele’s head sneered, Center of mass, not a safe stopper on a real opponent. It’d been good enough. As Bill lurched against the bulkhead behind him, she shot him again. His head was tilted back, so the slug took him in the throat and exited through the top of his skull.

  All the aides wore sidearms, but only one besides Blyth seemed to be aware of the fact. He dabbed his hand down toward his holster, his eyes wide and staring.

  Adele swung. Tovera’s sub-machine gun ripped a burst and another burst, toppling the spacers in the corridor. Hogg saved the aide’s life by kicking him in the crotch and, as the fellow doubled up, chopping him on the back of the skull with the pommel of the knife in his right hand.

  “What?” said Lampert. “What? Wha—”

  The minister dropped to his knees. He gulped, then spewed vomit over the corpse of the guard thrashing at the end of Hogg’s fish line. Adele couldn’t tell whether Lampert was still trying to speak or if his grunts were simply those of mindless nausea.

  Adele looked at the pistol she held. The pressed-steel barrel shroud had faded back to the dull gray of its phosphate coating, but heat still made air passing through the ventilation slots tremble.

  “Cease fire!” said Daniel, rubbing his knuckles. Lieutenant Blyth lay faceup on the deck. The side of the aide’s jaw was angry red and already beginning to swell. He hadn’t been a threat, so Adele hadn’t been aware of his presence after she took his pistol.

  The aide who remained standing was trying to unbuckle his pistol belt, but his fingers fumbled as uselessly as so many sausages. His face was blank and he couldn’t look away from the muzzle of Tovera’s sub-machine gun. He’d lost control of his bowels, but he didn’t seem to be aware of the fact.

  Daniel slid onto the command console and switched fields with forceful keystrokes nothing like Adele’s dancing wands but every bit as precise. The ship trembled as machinery worked, though Adele didn’t understand what was happening until hatches began to clang shut.

  Adele’s first shot had blown a bright divot out of the bulkhead beyond the guard; a film of osmium drew a soft luster over the cratered steel. Around it was splashed a much wider circle of blood and brains.

  She rotated the power switch, turning the pistol off instead of merely putting it on safe; then she dropped it onto the guard’s corpse. At point-blank range, the powerful slug had scooped out his skull like the remains of a soft-boiled egg.

  “Ship, this is Admiral Leary,” Daniel said over the PA system. “All personnel, prepare for liftoff in one hour’s time. All leave is canceled. All personnel should be at their stations. Six out.”

  Hoppler and Seward were coming around, though the former’s pupils weren’t the same size. He’d need the Medicomp or there’d be danger of coma and death. Lampert had taken off his gold sash and was using the back of it to wipe his mouth.

  Two spacers sprawled in the corridor. One lay on his carbine and the other, face-up on the deck, gripped his weapon to his chest like a funeral lily. They probably wouldn’t have interfered, but they’d been armed and Tovera had decided not to take a chance. Adele would’ve made the same decision if she hadn’t been busy killing other people at the time.

  She walked over to the communications console. Hogg was carefully cleaning his razor-thin line on the jacket of the guard he’d nearly decapitated. She stepped around him. It was time for Signals Officer Adele Mundy to resume her duties.

  ***

  Daniel started to connect with the Princess Cecile himself, then realized he needed to talk to Vesey privately and didn’t know how to be certain he’d really locked out everyone else. He didn’t want even the veteran Sissies to know everything about the present situation. Besides, his right hand hurt from the punch that’d decked Lieutenant Blyth.

  And besides that, he was trembling. A lot of it was adrenaline that he hadn’t burned off but, well, his eyes’d happened to be on one of the fellows with sub-machine guns when Adele blew his head off. He’d seen that sort of thing before, but not quite so close or so clearly.

  He flicked a blob of something off his left sleeve. Very close indeed.

  “Officer Mundy,” he said, pleased that he sounded unconcerned. The cruiser’s systems were on standby, so he didn’t need to use the intercom to be heard without raising his voice. “Connect me with Captain Vesey personally, if you will. Ah, privately, that is.”

  “All right,” said Adele, though Daniel was guessing at what the faint words were. Her wands flickered; though in truth, that was a regular thing when Adele had her data unit out, and having the data unit out was a regular thing when Adele was awake.

  “Hogg, lend me your knife,” Tovera said. Hogg thrust his right hand into his pocket and tossed her the weapon, then resumed coiling his line.

  Daniel couldn’t pretend he liked Adele’s servant or even liked to be around her, but at times like the one just past Tovera was more valuable than a squad of armed spacers. And she was perfectly loyal to Adele, a virtue that by itself would justify even a poisonous reptile in Daniel’s mind.

  He’d feel better when the wounded were taken to the Medicomp and the bodies—including the parts of bodies—had been removed. He didn’t want to do that until he had a cadre he could trust aboard the Ladouceur, though.

  “Six,” Vesey said. “This is Sissie Five. Go ahead.”

  Daniel smiled. Vesey was the Princess Cecile’s captain in fact as well as by title, but she insisted on using the call sign of a first lieutenant. That was a completely unnecessary display of humility, and if it’d been any other ship Daniel would’ve pu
t a prompt end to it.

  It was the Sissie, though, Daniel’s first command and the foundation of his present success. He wouldn’t insist on that deference, but under the circumstances he wouldn’t protest Vesey’s behavior either.

  “Vesey, I want you to send me twenty of your top people, strikers and leading spacers,” Daniel said. “Especially send Harrison to me as bosun.”

  Tovera was kneeling beside the gunman she’d stabbed with a stylus. He’d fallen on his back. His eyes stared upward; his mouth opened and closed without any words coming from it. He might recover if they got him to the Medicomp, though.

  Daniel continued, “As soon as we’re off-planet I’ll trade you a dozen ordinary spacers to make up the watches, but I need people who can put some backbone into—”

  Tovera cut the injured man’s belt and started to slip his trousers down. Was she going to give him first aid?

  “—the Ladouceur’s present company. They came off both the Independence and DeMarce, so I’ve got enough—”

  Tovera gripped the Bagarian’s member with her left hand. She gelded him with a quick slash of the knife in her right.

  “Bloody hell!” Daniel shouted, bounding to his feet. Hogg shifted sideways and body checked him back onto the console.

  “It’s not her, master!” Hogg said. “It’s for Her Ladyship! It’s not our place to interfere.”

  Tovera stuffed the severed genitals into her victim’s gaping mouth. He stiffened and fainted; his eyes were still wide open.

  Adele rose from her console and looked at the carnage with eyes as cold as the hull in deep space. “Tovera,” she said without raising her voice. “You and Hogg get this man—”

  She gestured with her toe.

  “—to the Medicomp. Now. It should be able to save him.”

  “I’d rather wait to open the bridge hatch till a draft from the Sissie boards, Officer Mundy,” Daniel said.