RCN 11: Death's Bright Day (eARC)

by David Drake

  Daniel, Hogg and Cazelet were in back, all of them somber though for different reasons. Hogg said—muttering, though in a voice meant to be heard, “I sure wouldn’t mind going in with you. You know, my ribs still hurt where that bastard broke my gun.”

  Tovera turned her head and grinned back at him. “What’s the matter, Hogg?” she said. “You don’t trust me and the mistress?”

  Hogg snorted. “I trust you fine,” he said. “I just want to come along.”

  “This is it,” said Adele. “Drop us here and park.”

  The buildings on this street were mostly three or four stories high: retail on the ground floor with offices or apartments on the upper ones. The Residency was an exception, the single floor above the local branch of Bank of Danziger. There were vehicles parked along the curb, all of them similar to Grozhinski’s van, but there was a space near the intersection ahead.

  Barnes stopped in the street. Tovera got out, looking in all directions in two quick seconds—a coldly pleasant expression on her face, not friendly but courteous. Only after she was sure the situation was clear did she step aside so that Adele could get out also.

  The guard inside the bank barely glanced at them as they went up the stairs beside the entrance where he sat. Adele led; Tovera followed with her attaché case held in front of her on the narrow staircase. Behind them the van’s diesel engine rattled as Barnes moved into the parking space.

  The door at the top of the stairs didn’t have an outside latch, but it was propped open at present. A man with naval tattoos had gotten up from his desk at the sound of the outer door and their footsteps. He looked down at Adele with growing puzzlement.

  “Mistress?” he said. “This is the Stanfleet Organization.”

  “Yes,” said Adele. She had her 5th Bureau credentials in her right hand: she held them up, though the doorman couldn’t see more than the fact of an open wallet in the light of the staircase. “I’m here to see Colonel Colmard.”

  The doorman backed out of her way. His expression ranged through half a dozen emotions; fear was prominent among them.

  “There’s no colonels…” he said, but he let the lie trail off, since he could see that it was pointless.

  The room at the top of the stairs was a bullpen with six desks, three of them occupied and the fourth near the staircase where the doorman must have been sitting. A corridor led into the back; beside it was a blank door.

  “Summon Colonel Colmard and Captain Passley,” Adele said, holding her credentials before the young woman whose desk was nearest the back door. “And don’t try to tell me that you’ll see if they’re in: they’re in to the Inspection Service.”

  The men at the other two desks were ordinary office workers. One was young enough and fit enough that he could have been a problem, but he wouldn’t be; the other looked older than his fifty-odd years and was too fat to get his bulk from behind the desk without more warning than he was going to have.

  The doorman backed another step away, keeping his desk in front of him. The visitors were officers. Physical threats wouldn’t have cowed that man, but Adele’s persona did.

  The back door opened inward. A man of forty with short hair stepped out, trying to straighten the jacket he had just put on. He wore civilian clothes, but he didn’t seem civilian.

  The younger man following him was blond, very handsome, and faultlessly tailored: a scion of nobility, a clever youth with all the advantages. He stayed a pace behind Colmard, moving to the side.

  Colmard’s eyes strayed to the credentials Adele held out in her right hand. He said, “If you’ll come into my office, Mistress—”

  Adele brought her left hand out of her tunic pocket and shot twice, aiming at the Colonel’s right eye.

  Colmard’s nervous system threw him backward in a spasm. He was dead before he hit the wall beside his door. His body sprawled forward, onto his ruined face.

  Passley was falling also, his blood spurting through the trio of holes in his upper chest. Tovera didn’t shoot for the heart but rather for the major blood vessels above it, allowing the heart to work at its highest efficiency as it pumped the blood out of his body.

  Movement—

  Another man shambled out of the hallway to the back, still fastening his fly. He looked at Passley, hesitated, and doubled up, spewing vomit. It smelled of alcohol.

  The doorman hadn’t moved from where he stood, not even when Tovera turned her sub-machine gun toward him. His hands clenched and unclenched.

  The receptionist sneezed violently, probably a reaction to the ozone from Adele’s pistol being fired so close to her nose. Then she began to sob.

  Adele lowered the muzzle of her pistol, though it was too hot to drop it back into her pocket. She looked at the civilians. The fat man met her eyes, but none of the others did or could. The doorman seemed to be in shock.

  “You all know who you work for,” Adele said harshly. “You know how he feels about traitors. This pair seems to have forgotten. Do any of you care to join them?”

  Nobody spoke. The woman continued crying. The man on the floor was trying to vomit more from an empty stomach.

  “If not,” Adele said, “just continue coming to work and doing your jobs. Nothing has changed for you, you’ll just have a different overseer. Is that understood?”

  Tovera had entered Colmard’s office. She came out again, then put her sub-machine gun away in the attaché case. The outside door opened and several people began climbing the stairs—Daniel and Cazelet, and either Barnes or Hogg, depending on who was staying with the van.

  “I opened the back way,” Tovera said. “The clean-up crew is on the way.”

  Tovera glanced at the clerks, never letting her smile rest long on any of them. At the doorman she paused and said, “You can sit down, buddy. I’d like you to sit down.”

  The doorman sat without looking behind him to be sure where the chair was. He must have been a rigger. They developed their situational awareness in an environment when a missed step or handhold meant a—brief—lifetime drifting in a bubble universe which was not meant for humans.

  “Nothing has changed about your mission,” Adele said to the clerks. The harshness in her voice was only partly a result of the ions parching her throat. She dropped her pistol back into her tunic. “You have been providing support for the rebels in the Tarbell Stars. That will continue. When is the next shipment to go out?”

  She already knew the answer, but she wanted to calm the civilians by focusing them on their ordinary work. Colmard and Passley were the only 5th Bureau officers in the Residency. The others were merely clerks doing office jobs; the woman and the man on the floor had been hired here on Danziger.

  “The Flower landed yesterday,” the fat man said. “She’s to carry missiles from the embargoed stocks to Ithaca.”

  Adele nodded. “There will be twenty-two personnel also,” she said. “They’ll be processed in normal fashion.”

  Hale’s section arrived up the back stairs; Woetjans was in front swinging a length of pipe, but Hale with a carbine and four Sissies carrying sacks and cleaning equipment were right behind. Hogg led Daniel and Cazelet in from the street.

  “In there,” Adele said to Cazelet, nodding toward the office with the consoles. He stepped over Passley’s legs before Hale’s crew could stuff the body into one of their bags.

  “That’s Master Cazelet,” Adele said to the staring clerks. “You report to him now. And so long as you do your jobs loyally and efficiently, you’ll never see me again.”

  She started down the stairs toward Barnes and the van. Footsteps followed, Daniel and Tovera, but neither of them spoke.

  I need to load a fresh magazine, Adele thought.

  She walked by reflex. All she saw before her was the disbelieving face of Colonel Colmard, an instant before his right eye exploded.

  * * *

  Daniel stood with the other twenty-one Sissies before the boarding ramp of the Flower of Cortona, a 3,000 tonne freighter out o
f Piedmont—an Alliance world. It was in better shape than the Mezentian Gate had been—it appeared to have a full set of masts and yards—but there was nothing to set it apart from the better thirty out of a hundred tramp freighters.

  Captain Dreyer was angry, but from her attitude during Daniel’s brief observation of her, that was her normal condition. “There’s supposed to be somebody from the hiring office along with you!” she said. “You’re supposed to have been checked in by them and I just say that I’ve taken you aboard the Flower.”

  “This is what they told us to do, Captain,” said Hale, acting as the transit officer for the intake. Her file showed her as Midshipman Garrett, who had bewen a classmate of Hale’s at the Academy. “They said if we couldn’t find our way to the harbor, the navy didn’t need us, and if you couldn’t check us in, the navy didn’t need you either.”

  The rest of the intake was listed as warrant officers—Woetjans was a bosun’s mate—technicians, spacers, and a smattering of specialists. Adele was a Communicator 2, Tovera was a clerk, and Hogg—who absolutely insisted on being part of the group—was a cook. He was actually a pretty good cook, better than many Daniel had run into in the RCN.

  “Ma’am?” said Daniel—or according to his chip, Able Spacer Green. “I think they’ve had some turnover in the recruiting office. The new boss is trying to get a handle on things, but he did say he was going to send our jackets to the ship’s system so you can access it.”

  This intake couldn’t be processed normally because about a third of the faces had been involved with taking over the Residency. The clerks might not suspect that the intake was working against the Upholders, but they would certainly know that something odd was going on.

  So long as the files which Cazelet sent to the Flower corresponded with those the intake carried, no alarm buttons would go off. Two of the party, Evans and Yarnold, a rigger, didn’t have files. That was normal too. They were holding paper identification sheets which Adele had run off before they lifted from Peltry.

  “Bloody hell,” Dreyer snarled, making a change in procedure into a problem. Daniel wondered how good her astrogation was. “All right, line up and board one at a time. Wessels, sign ’em in!”

  A wizened man stood at a workstation near the main hatch. When he moved, Daniel saw that he was missing three fingers of his left hand. Hale walked up the ramp; the rest of the intake followed in a leisurely procession.

  Adele looked back at Daniel and said, “I used to tell myself that it was necessary. I’ve stopped doing that.”

  What was necessary? Daniel thought, but the words didn’t reach his tongue. He said instead, “I think things are going pretty well at the moment.”

  “Yes,” said Adele. He knew the twitch in her lips was a smile. “And Colmard and his aide weren’t much of a loss, except to General Krychek’s plans.”

  That’s what she’s talking about. Because Adele didn’t react to things that happened—to things that she did—it was easy to assume that they didn’t touch her. It was easy even for a good friend to assume that, especially when he was trying to forget the things himself.

  Aloud Daniel said, “It was necessary. We had no way to imprison them on Danziger. All the infrastructure here has been penetrated by Krychek’s agents.”

  Adele shrugged. “Perhaps,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. It’s done.”

  The line was shuffling forward. Adele was in front of him and Hogg followed behind. Daniel reached the base of the ramp.

  Captain Dreyer came out of the ship and walked down to Tovera and Adele. “Which of you is the communicator, Bethel?” Dreyer asked. She was younger than she’d looked from a short distance; the gray in her frizzy red hair was premature.

  “I’m Bethel,” Adele said. “I was a Communicator 2 in the Fleet.”

  “Well, on the voyage to Ithaca, you can take a look at our commo, right?” Dreyer said. “It cuts out sometimes and it’s a pain in the ass.”

  “I won’t be able to do much if it’s a hardware problem,” Adele said.

  “The hardware all checks out but it’s something in the programming,” Dreyer insisted. “Can you fix it?”

  “I’ll take a look,” Adele said. “If it’s programming, I may be able to help.”

  The line moved forward, bringing Daniel to where Dreyer stood. He met her gaze with a smile.

  “And you are?” Dreyer said, more harshly than she had spoken to Adele.

  “Able Spacer Green,” said Daniel. “I’m a rigger.”

  Dreyer grabbed his left wrist and slid his sleeve up above the elbow. “You’ve got the calluses,” she said, fingering his elbow where a hard suit rubs against the bone. “You don’t look right, though.”

  “Try me,” Daniel said, treating the words as more of a joke than a challenge.

  Dreyer dropped his hand. “I guess we’ll do just that,” she said. “The first thing we do when we get you lot enrolled is load as many missiles into the Flower as we can pack. I turn you over to the recruit depot when we get to Ithaca, but till then you’re my crew. You’ll earn your meals, never fear!”

  “I’ve never been afraid of hard work,” said Daniel. He smiled again.

  His practice of conning his ship from the rigging had gotten him the right calluses. It’s been a long time since I helped strike down heavy cargo, though. Well, it ought to sweat some of the fat off my waistline, at least.

  CHAPTER 19

  Coralville on Ithaca

  Adele had examined imagery of Coralville from before it became capital of the Upholder Rebellion. It was a little place with only a thousand houses but extensive warehouses and grain elevators along the harborfront of Coral Harbor.

  All that still remained, but the original town was dwarfed by the prefab barracks extending to the south and along the west side of the harbor. In addition to the rickety quays which had loaded the ships which carried Ithaca’s produce across the Tarbell Stars, there were to the west extensive steel structures at which naval vessels were docked.

  The new imagery was of poor quality, supplied by the Flower of Cortona as she landed an hour earlier. Adele would shortly be in the files of the heavy cruiser Upholder, whose naval-grade optics would do much better, but that probably wouldn’t provide any additions that her work really needed.

  “How long is this going to take you?” Captain Dreyer asked. She was sitting on a bunk as Adele worked at the command console. Tovera stood beside the hatch, watching both the bridge and the work in the main hold. The spacers there were unclamping the missiles which were to be off-loaded by a travelling crane.

  “As best I can tell, Captain,” Adele said, “your communications system hasn’t worked at full efficiency for at least two and a half standard years. I hope to have it repaired in less time than that.”

  “You don’t have years!” Dreyer said angrily. “You should be at the recruit depot right now!”

  “My truelove is being ironic, Captain,” Tovera said. “And she is far too much of a lady to tell you that it will go faster if you don’t disturb her as she works.”

  “Look, Michels, you’ve got no business here at all!” Dreyer said, rising to her feet.

  “Tut,” said Tovera. “Do you think I’m likely to leave my truelove alone with a harpy like you? I don’t.”

  Adele didn’t know anything about Tovera’s sexual interests or even if she had any. Though Adele was generally curious about everything she encountered, she’d made the conscious decision to avoid that subject. She didn’t imagine she would learn anything that shocked her, but she might well learn things that would make it difficult to work with her servant—and Tovera had become a valuable asset. As valuable as the pistol in Adele’s pocket, and much harder to replace.

  Adele allowed her lips to quirk into a smile. She was fairly certain that Tovera did not have a passion for her mistress. That would be awkward.

  “What are you going to do if you’re not assigned to the same ship?” Dreyer said with a sneer.

/>   “I suppose I’ll waste away until I die,” Tovera said. There was no emotional loading to her words, but there never was. “I will be praying to the gods of my family that such a tragedy does not occur.”

  It wouldn’t occur, because Adele had just finished arranging for the entire intake to be sent to the Upholder. I wonder if Tovera’s family worships me? she thought.

  It was hard to imagine Tovera having a family. Knowing her well—and by now Adele did—one found it easier to imagine Tovera hatching with scores of siblings and slithering off into the grass.

  “I’ll be done very shortly, I think,” Adele said aloud. “As soon as the updates are configured.”

  “What was the problem, then?” Dreyer said. She was still standing, though her anger seemed to have been replaced by irritated frustration.

  “Incompetence,” Adele said. “Updates were applied randomly, sometimes in the dedicated communications sector but more generally in other sectors of the ship’s computer. There’s plenty of capacity, of course, but portions of the program couldn’t be accessed while the unit was working on course predictions. It probably didn’t help your astrogation either.”

  She wondered whether Dreyer herself had maintained the equipment or if it had been done by outside technicians when the Flower was in harbor. It didn’t affect how Adele answered the question; she just wondered.

  Adele had falsely implied to Dreyer that she couldn’t fix the commo problem during the voyage itself. In fact she needed to be in harbor in order to access the rebel databases. After arranging that the personnel department would sort all the Flower’s intake onto the Upholder, Adele began to siphon the contents of the databases so that she could examine them at leisure.

  She was storing the data on the Flower’s system for the moment. She would transfer it to one of the Upholder’s consoles once she was aboard and had examined the situation.

  It would probably have been safe to drain the information directly onto the cruiser, but if Adele wasn’t present at the time there was always the chance that somebody on the cruiser’s bridge would notice the anomaly. The Communications Officer, Commander Braun, was actually 5th Bureau instead of Fleet. Although that might mean that his familiarity with the equipment was lower than that of a real signals officer, he might also be more careful and paranoid.