RCN 11: Death's Bright Day (eARC)

by David Drake

  Daniel met her eyes. His first thought was to say something reassuring, but that would be an insult to someone as smart as Vesey was.

  “Vesey,” he said. “If you have to command in battle, you’ll do everything that study and experience can provide. That puts you ahead of nine out of ten captains in the RCN.”

  He swallowed. “Killer instinct is an important thing to have in a fight, sure,” he said, “and Tim Dorst—”

  Who had been Vesey’s lover until an 8” plasma bolt stuck his cutter.

  “—had that in spades. But luck is even more important than instinct for a successful commander, and Midshipman Dorst was terminally unlucky. I’d rather have you as captain of the Sissie in my absence than Dorst, because I trust you to bring her safely home if anybody can do that.”

  The final two missiles rumbled into the corvette’s magazines. The last lowboy began to crawl away, and Hale stepped out of the way of the delivery gondola.

  Daniel squeezed Lieutenant Vesey’s shoulder and let her get on with her job.

  * * *

  Adele was in her library, not so much cleaning up details before she left as making sure that every scrap of information which might bear on the Tarbell Stars was coming along with her. She could study files during the voyage, but a log book or a personal reminiscence which was still in Xenos would do her no good on Peltry.

  She could never be sure she had everything possible. She could never be sure she had done her job: even if the Princess Cecile and her complement returned successful, that didn’t mean that Adele Mundy hadn’t missed some datum which would have made it easier or cheaper.

  The library door was ajar so Adele probably could have heard the whispering outside in the hallway, but as usual she was lost in her task. A fingertip tapped on the panel; then Tovera pushed it open enough to look in.

  “Mistress,” Tovera said. “Miriam Dorst is here to see you, if that’s possible.”

  Adele looked at the remaining pile of chips which she was copying to her base unit. They were the office copies of logs from a shipping consortium based on Twig in the Alliance. None of the ships she had viewed thus far had traded into the Tarbell Stars, and she saw no likelihood that any of the others would have done so either.

  “Yes, all right,” Adele said, rubbing her eyes. “Tovera, have them get us something to drink, will you?”

  The door closed, then reopened for Miranda’s mother. Adele nodded, wondering if she ought to get up. She decided not to. Miriam had arrived without invitation, so merely agreeing to see her was being sufficiently courteous.

  Besides, I’ve been sitting in so cramped a posture that I might fall back if I tried to get up abruptly.

  “I’m sorry to disturb you when you’re so busy…” the older woman said, holding her hands lightly together. She was more heavy-set than her daughter, making Adele wonder if Miranda would fill out similarly as she aged.

  “I said I would see you,” Adele said, hoping she didn’t sound as peevish as she felt. “I’ll never be able to finish what I’m doing here—” she gestured “—so the interruption doesn’t really matter.”

  No matter how long Adele worked, there would be information she hadn’t copied into files where she could access it off Cinnabar. She was probably foolish in considering that a goal, but she didn’t see any reasonable point short of that to draw a line on her efforts.

  Unexpectedly, Miriam smiled. “Miranda told me that you didn’t do small talk,” she said. “Well, I was going to explain that I was here to apologize again for the way I accused you when we were going to the reception, but that would be silly on my part.”

  “Yes,” said Adele. “I heard you the first time.”

  She realized that Miriam was still standing and said, “Sit down, please, I think there’s a chair—”

  There wasn’t.

  “—well, move the pile on the one beside you to the floor and sit down. Please.”

  When the other woman hesitated, Adele stood; she’d been working her legs beneath the table since she realized how stiff she was. Before she could act, however, Miriam had set the pile neatly out of the way and seated herself.

  “What I really wanted to do,” Miriam said, “was to ask you to help my daughter if she needs it. She will be—”

  Her voice caught. She swallowed and resumed, “Miranda will be the only civilian on a shipload of RCN personnel. I realize that you’re RCN yourself—”

  Adele gave an almost-smile. “Not really,” she said when Miriam paused. “I’m not a spacer, and I certainly haven’t internalized the forms of military discipline. Or the need for it, to be honest. But continue?”

  “Yes, I think that’s what I was trying to say,” said Miriam. “Miranda won’t really fit in, so I hope that you’ll be able to appreciate that and, well, look out for her.”

  “From all I’ve found,” Adele said, reflexively bringing up the file into which she had transferred all the data she had on their destination, “Jardin is a pleasant world with very little crime. The government is an oligarchy and autocratic. Potential troublemakers are denied entry or are shipped off immediately, and if they do manage to break the law they’re put to forced labor.”

  She tried to execute a smile. She was probably no more successful than she usually was, but she hoped Miranda’s mother would give her credit for the attempt.

  “It appears to me,” Adele said, “that Miranda will be safer on Jardin than she would be in Xenos. I’ll further add that she is an extremely capable young woman and in as little need of watching over as anyone I know of her age.”

  The girl’s mother sighed and seemed to hug herself more tightly. Looking toward a stack of file boxes on the floor to Adele’s right, she said, “Timothy, my husband, used to talk about Jardin as though it were paradise. He was only there once, when he was a midshipman on a replenishment ship. I thought we might visit—before Miranda was born, or even later as a family. We never did.”

  “It’s an expensive landfall, I suppose,” Adele said when she realized she ought to say something to show that she was listening.

  “We could have managed something while he was alive,” Miriam said, meeting Adele’s eyes. “After he died, things became—well, you know how things became. But until then we could have gone. I always suspected that he was afraid of ruining his memories of Jardin by facing the reality. The reality—”

  Her voice became forceful, almost harsh, and the muscles in her cheeks drew tighter.

  “—was that Timothy wouldn’t have been twenty-two with a career ahead of him if he had gone back to Jardin. But he always kept a hologram of the port on our wall. I’ve kept it in the living room after his death.”

  Adele had the data unit out anyway. She picked up the wands and brought an image live in the room between them, using the larger display of her base unit. They were looking out to sea from a moderate vantage. A city—probably Cuvier, the capital—of red roofs and white walls was scattered up the slope toward them from the shore below. The broad natural roadstead had been improved with stone moles which narrowed the entrance considerably.

  The harbor accommodated forty-odd starships as well as a number of good-sized surface vessels. One of the starships was noticeably plainer and larger than most of the others.

  Daniel would be able to identify it by eye, Adele thought, whereas she had spent her time learning other skills than memorizing ship profiles. Her wands isolated the ship, then ran it through a sorting protocol. She remembered that Miriam had referred to ‘a replenishment ship,’ so that saved a fraction of a second—Adele smiled mentally—from the search.

  “A Leaf Class vessel, probably the Orangeleaf,” Adele said aloud. That was bragging, but she was proud of her skills.

  “Yes,” Miriam said. “Your ladyship? How did you do that? How did you bring the picture on my wall to here?”

  For a moment the tension in the older woman’s voice surprised Adele. She said, “The base image is resident on your apartment’s con
trol system. I simply—oh.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Adele that there might be reason to conceal what she had done. She wouldn’t have concealed it anyway, of course, but she might have explained in a more—

  No, she wouldn’t have tried to sound more apologetic either. She was who she was.

  “Mistress Dorst,” Adele said. “Your daughter is important to Captain Leary, and he—Daniel—is important to me. And to the RCN, I suppose. As a matter of course I set up links with Miranda’s residence in case someone attempted to put pressure on Daniel by threatening his fiancée.”

  She coughed. “Now that Miranda has moved out, I can remove the links,” she said. “I should say that Daniel had nothing—knew nothing—about my precautions. I didn’t bother to waste words on something in which I trusted my own judgment.”

  “Yes, of course you trust your judgment,” Miriam said as she relaxed. “As I do, Adele. It startled me, but it shouldn’t have.”

  She gestured to the hologram. The projection was omnidirectional, clear to her as well as to Adele. She went on, “Yes, that’s the Orangeleaf. It was Timothy’s first cruise. We were married the day after he graduated from the Academy.”

  Miriam was smiling, but her eyes weren’t focused on Adele or even on the image of Jardin. “He was so full of dreams,” she said. “We both were. And we had two wonderful children. Promotion wasn’t quick, even in wartime. Timothy wasn’t a lucky officer like…”

  “Like Daniel,” Adele said to close the embarrassed silence. “He’s been very fortunate.”

  That was true, of course, but it was also true that Daniel made a great deal of his own luck. Very few junior lieutenants would have turned a disaster like the Kostroma Revolt into a triumph and a springboard to greater triumphs.

  Miriam nodded apologetically to Adele. “And that’s very fortunate for Miranda,” the older woman said. “For me as well, of course. But I recognize that my daughter is always going to be…well, Daniel Leary is a very dominant person.”

  “I’ve found that to be the case with most RCN officers,” Adele said. “Haven’t you? The successful ones in particular.”

  She shrugged. “If you mean that Daniel will continue to make decisions for himself,” she said, “yes, I think and hope that will be true. He’ll often ask advice, but I’ve never known him to take orders except from someone who has the right under RCN regulations to give him those orders.”

  And even then we’ve been known to cut corners, Adele recalled. She didn’t suppress her smile as she normally would have, since she thought it would have a good effect on the tone of the discussion.

  “Yes, of course that’s right,” Miriam said, stiffly again; perhaps the smile hadn’t been a good idea. “Life isn’t fair, after all.”

  “I don’t know how to define ‘fair,’” Adele said, feeling sudden anger at the situation, at life. “I’ve killed many people, I don’t know how many. And some of them were doubtless as innocent as my little sister Agatha.”

  For a moment she saw again the crowd blocking their way as they broke out of the cells beneath the Elector’s Palace in Kostroma City. They were civilians who happened to be in the way of Adele Mundy and her new friends, so she shot as many of them as she could to panic the rest. There was no time to do clear the way in any other fashion.

  “At the time I did it, at all those times…” Adele said, hearing the harshness in her voice. “I thought it was the best available option. Given the same situations, I would again shoot men, women and children. I’m sure there were children in the crowd in Kostroma, and even if I didn’t shoot them some must have been trampled in the panic that I caused. So that we could escape. It wasn’t a bit fair, it was necessary.”

  She was on her feet, though she didn’t remember standing; Miriam had risen also. Adele hoped she hadn’t raised her voice, but the courtesy Esme Rolfe Mundy had instilled in her children should have prevented that.

  Miriam stepped forward and hugged her. Adele tried to step back by reflex, but the desk caught her at the upper thighs.

  “Lady Mundy, Adele,” Miriam said. She was apparently crying, though Adele couldn’t be sure. “Thank you. My little girl couldn’t have a better protector in the life she’s chosen. Thank you for being her friend.”

  Miriam moved away, snuffled, and wiped her nose and cheeks with a handkerchief. “I’d better go now. Thank you so much.”

  Miriam closed the door quietly behind her. A moment later Tovera looked in but didn’t speak.

  I didn’t say I was Miranda’s friend, Adele thought. But I suppose I am, everyone aboard the Sissie is.

  She looked at Tovera and said, “I believe Miranda is fortunate. In her friends.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Bergen and Associates Yard, Cinnabar

  Adele settled comfortably at the signals console of the Princess Cecile. Because the ship was well overstrength, every seat on the bridge was taken. Tovera would normally have been in the striker’s seat on the back of the signals console; for this voyage she was on a jumpseat against the aft bulkhead and Midshipman Hale shared Adele’s console.

  The Sissie’s bridge was more of a home to Adele than the library of Chatsworth Minor was…though when she thought about it, she didn’t think of anyplace as “home” in the sense that other people seemed to do. She lived in her own mind.

  That had been as true while Adele was growing up as the child of a powerful Senator Lucas Mundy as it was now as a respected member of the crew of the Princess Cecile. In the years between she had lived hand to mouth as an orphan and a penniless scholar. During that time her ability to ignore external reality had been a valuable survival tool.

  “Testing thrusters One and Eight,” a voice from the Power Room announced over the PA system and the general channel of the ship’s intercom. Adele didn’t think Pasternak himself was speaking, but the sound quality was too poor for her to be certain.

  Two of the eight thrusters lit, shaking the ship and blasting iridescent plasma into the water of the slip. Their nozzles were flared open to minimize impulse; even with the leaves sphinctered down to minimum aperture, two thrusters weren’t enough to lift the corvette from the surface.

  Adele brought her display up and began sorting communications inputs. There wasn’t any reason to do that here and very little benefit to the practice anywhere else, but it was Adele’s habit to know as much as possible about her surroundings. Not because of possible dangers, but simply because she liked to know things.

  A tell-tale showed her that Hale was echoing Adele’s display. That wasn’t a problem—if Adele had wanted privacy, she would have enforced it—but it reminded her for the first time that her console mate was a colleague who in theory she might be training.

  Adele pinned a small real-time view of her face to Hale’s display; the top register of her own display already had images of all the personnel seated at consoles. On a two-way link to Hale she said, “I intercept signals as a matter of course and put them through a mechanical sort. If we were on another planet, even if it weren’t a potentially hostile one, I’d give a quick look at the findings in case I saw something that the algorithm didn’t.”

  The Power Room continued to announce thruster testing, working in pairs through the set. The big pumps in the stern throbbed, replenishing the reaction mass tanks from the harbor. The same tanks would be distilled to provide drinking water: impurities mattered very little when the fluid was being stripped to plasma and spewed through the thrusters.

  The impurities mattered even less when the mass was being converted to anti-matter before being recombined with normal matter in the High Drive motors. The High Drive was more efficient and provided much higher impulse, but it could only be used in the near vacuum of space: in an atmosphere, the inevitable leakage of antimatter which had escaped recombination flared violently and devoured everything nearby, including the hull.

  “Do you have any information about Jardin beyond the Sailing Directions which might be useful, ma’
am?” Hale said. Though their faces were only about forty inches apart on opposite sides of the immaterial barrier of a holographic display, only the intercom made it possible for them to communicate without shouting. “I don’t mean restricted information, just…anything that would let me do my job better.”

  Since they were able to see one another, there was no need for the ponderous communications protocols which the RCN drummed into its signals personnel. Adele had no training: she was in civilian life a librarian whose skills fitted her for far more subtle uses of electronics than remembering to mutter “Over” and “Go ahead” and similar procedures.

  “Yes,” Adele said. She brought up an image of Cuvier and Cuvier Harbor on Jardin; Hale could manipulate the scale and orientation on her own display if she chose to. The harbor would have been an open roadstead, dangerous in a storm from the west, had it not been narrowed by moles from each headland. There was a passage through which surface vessels could enter.

  “We’ll be landing here at the capital?” Hale said.

  “We’ll land at Cuvier because it’s the only starport on Jardin with proper facilities,” Adele said, highlighting twenty-one points in and around the city; she had to increase the scale slightly to capture two outliers. “It’s the capital by convenience, but Jardin really doesn’t have a government, just a management reporting to the First Families who own the planet. Each family has a house near Cuvier though many of the principals live on distant estates. Here they are.”

  “Closing main hatch,” Vesey announced. She was in charge of lift-off from the armored Battle Direction Center in the stern. Personnel at the duplicate controls there could control the ship if the bridge were out of action; or as now, when Daniel Leary at the command console was explaining procedures to his bride in the striker’s seat.