Though Hell Should Bar the Way

by David Drake

  Cory looked up from the compartment’s console when I rapped on the open hatch. “Reporting for duty, sir,” I said.

  He smiled back. “Not to me,” he said. “Until I’m told otherwise, half the crew’s at liberty, and it may as well be all of us. I don’t have a watch to put you on.”

  “Umm,” I said. “Is Sun around? I’d like to get my paperwork straightened out. I don’t know whether I’m listed as Run or if I’m due some back pay.”

  I’d been too busy with planning for the Salaam operation to ask about that when I’d landed after our escape. I wasn’t worried, but I had literally no money of my own at the moment. The thalers I’d drawn from Colonel Foliot had all been expended.

  “And also, I’d like to borrow a couple techs to clean the Alfraz up,” I said. “If I get paid myself, I’ll pay them—but it’s a volunteer job regardless.”

  “I don’t expect Sun back until 0800,” Cory said, “but Pasternak’s in the Power Room like you’d expect and—one moment, hey?”

  He adjusted his console display to omnidirectional and made an intercom connection. The holographic face of Chief Pasternak looked out at us from the air above the console.

  “Chief?” Cory said. “Olfetrie wants to borrow some of your people to clean his ship out. I gather the civilians made a real dog’s breakfast of it.”

  “I’ll pay them, Chief,” I called. “As soon as I can, anyway.”

  “You bloody well will not pay, sir!” Pasternak said. “I’ll have a crew over there in an hour. And glad I am to have something to do with them! Over.”

  “Thank you, Chief,” I said. “I’ll expect to meet you there. Over.”

  Cory broke the connection. I remembered the pistol and took it out of my pocket. “Say,” I said. “Can I leave this with you for Sun to put into the arms locker? I don’t want to leave it on the Alfraz.”

  “Sure,” said Cory, reaching over the console to take it. I nodded and was turning to leave the compartment when the console alerted us to an incoming call. Cory raised an eyebrow and gestured me to stay.

  “Sunray,” he said.

  “This is Mistress Foliot,” said Monica’s voice. Jacquerie’s commo net didn’t have bandwidth for visuals. “I’m trying to locate Officer Roylan Olfetrie and I was hoping you can help me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cory said, grinning. “I have him with me now. Would you like to speak with him?”

  “Monica?” I said, without bothering about a formal handover. “Are you all right?”

  “All right? Oh, of course,” she said. Well, maybe it was obvious to her. “My father and I would like to invite you to dinner at our house tonight. Is that possible?”

  “Ah …” I said. Cory nodded firmly from across the console. “Yes, I believe it will be. At your house?”

  “Yes, at eight o’clock,” Monica said. “Our time, that is.”

  The Sunray went on local time at each port according to RCN doctrine. No reason a civilian would know that, though.

  “I’ll be there,” I said. “Eight o’clock. Olfetrie out!”

  Cory closed our end of the connection when Monica broke hers. He grinned broadly, then got up and walked to a locker.

  “Two things,” he said. “First, take this communicator along.”

  He handed me a small unit meant to be clipped to an epaulette or breast pocket. “It’s netted in to the local system, but it’ll also communicate directly with the ship.”

  “What’s the range?” I asked.

  “It travels through the local system if you’re more than half a mile out,” Cory said. “I set up the link myself.”

  He then reached into his pocket. “And take this,” he added, handing over a fifty-florin piece as he had at our first meeting. “You’re going on a date, so you shouldn’t be broke.”

  “I don’t expect to need money tonight,” I said, maybe a little more stiffly than I meant.

  “You’re good for it,” Cory said. “Hey, you own a ship, don’t you?”

  “Thank you, Cory,” I said. “I’ll meet Pasternak at the Alfraz and be back to change in plenty of time.”

  I left, whistling “Don’t you remember sweet Alice …”

  * * *

  I got back to the Sunray about six o’clock. The local hour was a little longer than standard, so I’d have plenty of time to shower and change.

  The Alfraz was as clean as she had been since it came from the builders, who- or wherever they may have been. I’d insisted on working alongside the Sunrays, despite Pasternak’s protests. She was my bloody ship—apparently—and the old chief engineer wasn’t going to tell me how I could behave on her.

  To my surprise, there were six spacers in the Sunray’s hold in addition to the usual pair on watch. Dasi was in charge of them. The weapons were racked out of sight, but they included two stocked impellers as well as the submachine guns I’d more often seen dismounted spacers carrying.

  “What’s going on, Dasi?” I said to the bosun’s mate.

  “Dunno, sir,” he replied, looking up from the card game. “Six wanted us ready, but he didn’t say what for. You’ve got your communicator?”

  I reached into my tunic pocket and clipped the communicator to my lapel. I’d put it where it wouldn’t hook the hose while I was working on the Alfraz.

  “He hasn’t cancelled liberty,” Dasi said. “But everybody’s supposed to be on immediate recall.”

  I shrugged, though it disturbed me to hear. I headed up to the bridge, hoping to find Six there—or Lady Mundy, that would’ve been as good. Neither of them were aboard, according to Lieutenant Enery, who’d taken over as duty officer. She used the command console, the usual station.

  “There’s a Karst destroyer in orbit,” she said. “The Meduse. Maybe she has something to do with it.”

  “I wonder if I ought to go off to dinner?” I said.

  “There hasn’t been a recall,” said Enery. “I’d like to think that I’d have been told if we were about to be attacked, but I can’t swear to that. I’m not one of the inner circle, you know.”

  I cleared my throat. Enery didn’t seem to have been drinking, but, well, she shouldn’t have been talking that way. I’m not saying she didn’t have reason, but she shouldn’t have been saying those things.

  Aloud I said, “I’m going to shower and change, then.”

  I felt better after showering in the officers’ head and putting on a set of my civilian clothes. I was careful to transfer the communicator to the fresh suit, but I put it in my breast pocket again. This time I didn’t want it getting in the way of me being a civilian for the evening.

  I walked back to the bridge. It was still an hour till dinner and the Foliot’s house—I’d checked the route after I left the Alfraz—was an easy fifteen minute walk.

  Enery was still at the console, but to my surprise Tovera got up from a jump seat and came over to me. She said, “Can we talk for a minute in your cabin, sir?”

  “Sure,” I said, leading the way back down the corridor. “Does your mistress happen to be aboard?”

  “Sorry,” said Tovera. Pleasant as she sounded, I couldn’t think of anybody I less wanted to spend time with. “She and Captain Leary had business of their own, but since Hogg was along, I thought I could take a little time for something I know more about than most people.”

  She closed the hatch of my compartment behind her, then set her attaché case on the small table that hinged down from the inner bulkhead. “I took a look at the pistol you turned in to the arms locker today,” she said.

  “I bought it when I was a slave in Salaam,” I said. “I thought I might need it for the escape. As it turned out, I probably didn’t.”

  “You carried it when you went back to ben Yusuf, though,” said Tovera, opening her case. “You hadn’t reloaded the two rounds you’d expended there before.”

  I swallowed. “I didn’t need it the second time either,” I said. “Well, I knocked a guard over the head with it. Look, I don’t want
the gun even for a souvenir. The memories I’ve got of it”—Platt vomiting blood and falling over—“aren’t anything I’ll want to refresh.”

  “What you had was an Alliance service pistol,” Tovera said, bringing out a short, squat weapon and laying it on top of her case. “I thought of getting you a holster to carry the big one in the small of your back, but I decided this was a better choice for your tunic pocket. It’s lower velocity and has only a ten-round magazine, but it’ll be effective at any range you can hit things. Hogg has one just like it.”

  “I don’t want a gun!” I said. “I’ve seen what they do and I don’t want to do that!”

  Tovera smiled, but I couldn’t read the emotion behind that expression. I’m not sure there was any emotion.

  “There’s a Karst destroyer in orbit whose captain you personally pissed off on Benjamin,” she said. “There’s a Karst Residency here with nearly fifty people, many of them intelligence operatives. Now—if Karst agents knock off a Cinnabar spacer, we’ve got our cause of war and the rest of us can go home. But my mistress doesn’t want that, and Six really doesn’t want that. Have this gun on you any time you’re not on the Sunray.”

  She smiled again. Her face suddenly looked hungry, and not for food.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll get the war even if you don’t get killed.”

  I put the pistol in the right-hand pocket of my tunic. “Thank you, mistress,” I said.

  I certainly wasn’t happy about this. But Tovera was clearly acting in what she took to be my best interests.

  And as she’d said, she was an expert.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Barnes was in charge of the emergency squad in the hold when I left. “Good luck, sir!” he called. “You’re seeing that cute blond you brought back from Salaam, right?”

  “Right,” I said, smiling but a bit embarrassed. “And seeing her father. I’m expecting a very quiet evening.”

  The major streets of Jacquerie ran parallel to the harbor, like contour lines along the side of the mountain. They were curvy but basically flat.

  The problem was that Colonel Foliot’s house was two streets higher than the waterfront. The up-and-down streets were short, but they were steep enough that several had steps in the middle and were pedestrian only.

  That was fine while the sky was still bright—the steps were painted white on the edges—but it wouldn’t be good in pitch darkness. I planned to come back along one of the sloping streets, and I wouldn’t be drinking much at dinner. Well, that was true regardless.

  Foliot’s house was set behind a five-foot wall of the same dense gray limestone that the two-story house was built out of. Probably the same material as what it rested on. The gates were wrought iron and guarded from inside by two men in tailored dark-green uniforms and saucer caps. They carried carbines instead of the submachine guns I’d seen in the hands of the police commando on ben Yusuf.

  “I’m Roylan Olfetrie,” I announced as I approached the gate. “I’m invited for dinner with Colonel Foliot and his daughter. Ah—I may be a trifle early?”

  I wondered if they were going to search me. I was very aware of the pistol in my jacket pocket, though it wasn’t obvious through the loose, heavy fabric, a brown tweed.

  “The Director told us to expect you, Master Olfetrie,” the older guard said, drawing a gate leaf open with a squeal.

  I walked up the walk to the front door. The house wasn’t exactly a palace, but it was big for Jacquerie and on a prime piece of land. It was a good half acre and naturally flat, unusual here. The Councillor’s Palace had been at a considerable distance west of this, the old residential area.

  The door was solid, but there were narrow stained-glass sidelights to right and left with small clear sections at eye height. As I raised my hand to the knocker in the middle of the panel, the door opened inward. Instead of a servant, Monica said, “Oh, Roy! What a nice suit!”

  The tweed was as close as I came to formal wear and wasn’t—as I knew my mother would have said—very close at all. I looked at Monica and said, “You’re lovely!”

  I’d planned to say something politely bland, but seeing Monica in a black jumpsuit with a translucent wrap over her shoulders startled the truth out of me. We’d been, well, close during our voyage here from Salaam, but she’d blossomed in a combination of freedom and proper clothes.

  The harem outfits were designed to make the wives look childish and vulnerable. Monica as an adult companion in hard places was a long sight more attractive to me.

  She took my hand and led me into a parlor where the colonel was rising from an upholstered chair. I’d noticed on the way past that the door’s sidelights were backed by a panel of clear thermoplastic thick enough to stop a carbine slug.

  “Glad you could make it, Olfetrie,” Foliot said, pointing to a well-stocked sideboard. “Will you have a drink?”

  “Ah, sir?” I said. “I’d happily take a beer if you had one, but I’m not a drinking man.”

  Foliot’s face twisted with anger. “Did my daughter tell you to say that?” he snarled.

  I stiffened, shocked and furious. “Colonel,” I said, feeling my voice tremble, “I thought I was being asked a question. Since it appears that it was a test and I failed, I’ll leave now and find my own dinner.”

  “Roy?” said Monica in a false tone. “Will you take me to dinner with you? Since my father doesn’t seem to be in a mood to behave in a civil fashion tonight.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off the colonel. I learned while I was a kid that you don’t turn your back on somebody that angry.

  Foliot’s flushed face went pale. In a ragged voice he said, “Olfetrie, stress sometimes makes me an idiot. This was one of those times. Will you shake my hand?”

  “I’d be honored to, sir,” I said, doing so. When I leaned forward, the inertia of my tunic pocket made it swing. It wasn’t a big thing, but Foliot noticed it. He didn’t comment, but I saw his eyes flick down and a little something in his expression.

  “We’re still on for dinner, then?” he said with a rueful smile. “My daughter thinks I’ve been drinking too much—”

  “You have been drinking too much!”

  “—and she’s probably right, so I’m prickly,” Foliot said calmly, nodding to his daughter. “Monica, will you fetch two—”

  He looked at me and said, “Ale or lager?”

  “Either.”

  “Two lagers for me and my guest and bring them into the study for us? I’ll show him some of the things there.”

  Monica nodded brightly and disappeared through a doorway in the back. Foliot gestured me to follow him across the hall into a room with two desks—one large, one small, and both supporting consoles. There was egg-crate shelving along the wall across from the door.

  A man in his thirties stood up behind the smaller desk when we entered. He was very neatly dressed in dark gray. “Sir?” he said.

  “I’m just showing Olfetrie my trophies, Samuels,” Foliot said. “You can either stay or go home. Olfetrie, Samuels is my secretary.”

  “If you don’t mind, sir,” Samuels said. “I’m reconciling the accounts from the Orne property.”

  “Suit yourself,” Foliot said, walking past the secretary’s desk to get to the shelves of curios. I followed silently. The colonel clearly wasn’t a man to mouth meaningless words. If he’d meant for Samuels to get out, he would have said so; when he said he didn’t care, he didn’t care.

  He reached into a cell and brought out an irregular, cream-colored chunk of plastic about the size of my palm. There was a threaded eight-millimeter cavity in one side.

  “Know what this is?” Foliot said, plopping it into my hand.

  “It’s a Alliance cluster bomblet,” I said. “Unfused, which is good because”—I hefted it—“from the weight, it’s still got its explosive filling.”

  We—Dad—didn’t handle cluster bombs as a regular thing, but there’d been some passing through our hands. The comparab
le Cinnabar munition would’ve been khaki. And while I wouldn’t have kept a live bomb on the shelf of my office, the cast explosive was about as stable as the frangible plastic casing unless initiated by a fuse with a very high propagation rate.

  “It was good for more reasons than that,” Foliot said as I returned the bomblet to him. “It knocked me silly instead of blowing my head off. It was a friendly round: I commanded an Alliance light infantry company on Breisach. I didn’t find it very bloody friendly.”

  Monica came in with a pair of frosted beer mugs which she set on coasters on the large desk. “I’ll leave you men to talk,” she said.

  Foliot’s eyes followed her out of the room. “She’s the image of her mother,” he said quietly. “Sometimes when I see her when I’m tired, and I think I’m back thirty years ago.”

  I coughed. “Sir,” I said. “Monica is a very solid girl. Woman.”

  Foliot looked at me. In the same soft voice he said, “I’m not a heavy father, Olfetrie, don’t worry about that. But if you ever hurt my daughter, I’ll come looking for you.”

  “Sir,” I said, nodding agreement. “I don’t want to hurt anybody, certainly not Monica.”

  After a moment Foliot said, “Glad to hear it,” and resumed describing fragments of his life from the objects on display. Not all of them had anything to do with his military career. Careers, really: with the Alliance; on Garofolo, where he’d risen to become head of state; and finally on Saguntum, where he was the Director of Public Safety, the title the guard at the gate had used.

  “Sir?” I said. “The guard called you ‘Director.’ Do you prefer that or ‘Colonel’?”

  Foliot’s smile was as firm as his handshake had been. “I prefer Gene,” he said. “From people I like to see. Which I hope includes you, Olfetrie.”

  “Roy, sir,” I said. “That is, Roy, Gene.”

  He took down a pin in the shape of a crescent moon. “I’d just been appointed a captain in the Army of Saguntum,” he said. “This was my cap badge. I had some money with me from Garofolo, but I didn’t like the idea of sitting around. A company command would give me something to think about besides—”