by David Drake
"I've compared site imagery with as-built drawings of the other ships available," Daniel said. "The Cutlass has too wide a footprint by several yards, but there's room for either of the Jewel Class cruisers to fit in the slip alongside the Cornelwood as she lies. That's the Chrysoberyl, or the Garnet, which I gather's due back from Yang momentarily?"
"Mister Leary," Peggs said, his tone quiet but full of amazement, "I couldn't possibly land Chrissie beside the Corny there without winding up on top of her in the surface eddies. I couldn't, God couldn't, and I very much doubt you could either."
"And even if you could," Molliman said, frowning but not angry, "the exhaust'd hammer the cruiser to a wreck. We've got enough problems already with water damage."
"We'd planned to have the lifting vessel in the next slip," Tooney said. "That way the quay protects the Corny from the blast."
"I believe the Chrysoberyl—" Daniel bobbed his head toward Peggs "—can be towed into the slip by liftoff tugs if you have them here—"
"We don't," said Molliman, "but—"
"—or winches, maybe anchored on other ships," Daniel continued. In the enthusiasm of the success he saw looming, he'd just cut off an officer three pay grades higher than his. Right now they were talking as peers, and the Port Commander was at least equally excited. "And then tie her to the Cornelwood and float her up gently instead of jerking her with the thrusters—"
"Wait, wait!" Tooney said. "It won't work, a patrol cruiser doesn't have enough excess buoyancy to lift a heavy cruiser. But—"
"We can get the top of the outrigger above the surface," Molliman said, drawing his engineering calculator from its belt holster. Daniel had already done the calculations. It'd be close, but still on the right side. "Patch the holes there, blow in air and lift to the next holes, then do the same. If we can return two more compartments to integrity, we've got it. We've got the bitch!"
A thrumming in the high sky made them all look up, slipping their goggles or—those who were wearing helmets—visors down to protect their eyes from the actinics in plasma exhaust. It was a moderate-sized vessel; Daniel reached up to boost his goggles' magnification, then caught himself with a grin and said, "A freighter? Or is this the Garnet?"
Molliman was talking over the radio, his voice blanked by his helmet's noise-cancelling feature. He raised his visor again and said, "It's the Garnet. I was just making sure they'd been assigned a slip at the east end of the harbor. They left for Yang three days before this happened—"
He nodded grimly to the Cornelwood.
"—and might just drop into their usual berth, Slip 12, right the other side of the cruiser."
"My Chrissie's up for the next run to Yang," Tooney said to Peggs with a grin, "but if we're going to be lashed to the Corny, I guess you'd better start plotting a course, Peggs."
"As if I don't have it memorized," Peggs muttered, shaking his head. "Well, your turn in the barrel'll come up soon enough, Tooney. Yang's not going to settle down any time soon. We ought to station a ship there permanently. Of course she'd have to stay in orbit the whole time, because otherwise the whole crew'd desert and hop freighters off-planet."
"I'd resign my commission if I got that assignment," said one of the lieutenants, speaking for the first time. "A week at a time's bad enough."
"What's so awful about Yang?" Daniel asked. "And besides, it's not a Cinnabar dependency, is it? What're we doing there?"
"Wasting our time, mostly," Tooney said. "Cinnabar citizens will go there—mostly citizens from client worlds here in the Cluster, but according to the Ministry of External Affairs they're owed the same protection as a Senator from Xenos. Only Senators have better sense 'n to go to Yang."
"And as for what's wrong," said another of the lieutenants, "you can take your pick. The women, the water, the food, the liquor—they'll all kill you, sometimes faster, sometimes slower."
His name-tape read Teiro, the name Daniel vaguely recalled for the First Lieutenant of the Cutlass. The Cornelwood's own officers must be aboard their vessel directing the sensitive internal aspects of the salvage while external matters were under the control of the Port Commander.
"I'd say they were all pigs on Yang," said Farschenning, "but my family kept pigs back on Cinnabar. The people on Yang don't measure up to pig standards. They got their independence from the Alliance eighty years ago and it's been downhill ever since."
"Independence?" Daniel repeated incredulously. "The Alliance doesn't let anybody go. Guarantor Porra's bad, but he's not much worse than any of his predecessors. The only way a planet leaves the Alliance of Free Stars is for Cinnabar to pry it loose."
He chuckled. "And we're not in the habit of letting our valued allies change their minds either, I'll admit," he added.
Captain Molliman grunted. "Yang was an exception," he said. "There's anywhere between twelve and twenty clans on Yang. They each think they ought to be running the planet, and the only thing they agree on is killing whoever says he's in charge. Usually that's whichever clan says it's on top, but so long as there was Alliance troops on the planet everybody shot at 'em. It didn't pay, not a tenth the cost. Things hadn't changed in a century and they weren't going to change in another century."
He shrugged. "Nor has it," he added. "Not in eighty years, anyhow."
Peggs nodded agreement. "There's money to be made on Yang," he said forcefully. "Not so much anti-aging compounds but other drugs. Which means you can always hire enough guns and shooters to say you're a popular revolution."
"The local hash'll lift the brain outa your skull and put it in orbit," Lieutenant Teiro said. Everybody looked at him. He wetted his suddenly-dry lips with his tongue and added, "That is, you hear that."
The Garnet settled into a slip at the far end of the harbor. The snarl of the thrusters merged with and smothered the thunder of steam lifting as an incandescent plume from the water. Talk paused while the low-frequency roar echoed over the harbor's surface.
"And of course nobody on Xenos has the faintest idea what the place is really like," Tooney said bitterly when it stilled. "As far as that goes, the Navy Office is as bad as External Affairs."
"Watch it!" said Peggs, looking past Tooney's shoulder toward the northeast. A large aircar had curved out over the open sea to avoid the Garnet; now it arrowed toward the Cornelwood's slip.
Catching Daniel's eye Peggs continued in a murmur, "That'll be Admiral Milne bringing some of her local friends to see how the job's coming. She spends a lot of time with the planters when the squadron's in Sinmary Port."
Peggs' tone was neutral, and the words weren't criticism on their face. Given that they came from an RCN officer talking about another RCN officer, the statement was implicitly damning. The rest of those present were nodding agreement.
The aircar landed twenty feet down the quay from the group of salvage officers; a gust of wind plastered Daniel's utilities against his body before the driver, an RCN enlisted man in Grays, feathered his fans. He was the only person aboard in uniform.
Daniel hadn't met Admiral Milne, a beefy, frog-faced woman in her sixties, but she was easy to identify from imagery even though she now wore a trousered suit with broad vertical stripes. Verticals were a good idea for the Admiral's build, but the lemon and fuchsia stripes were not.
The car's six passengers formed three couples, though the striking thirty-ish man in the middle seat with the Admiral certainly wasn't her husband. As the newcomers got out of the vehicle, Daniel whispered to the local officers, "Should I salute?"
According to regulations, the answer was simple: you didn't salute unless both you and the other party were in uniform. Admirals were likely to think their whims were the word of God, and in outlying stations like Nikitin there was nobody to tell them they were wrong. Daniel couldn't guess how Milne would react.
"I'll take care of it," Molliman muttered. He stepped forward, putting himself between the others and Milne's contingent. Raising his voice he said, "Admiral, good to see you. I think we
have an answer to the problem of raising the Cornelwood safely. Lieutenant Leary from the Hermes, here—"
He gestured.
"—has been quite helpful."
"I've heard of Leary," Milne growled, eyeing Daniel but pointedly not speaking to him. "I'd advise you to be careful, Molliman. The trouble with these lucky ones is that when their luck finally goes sour—and it always does!—you have to look sharp not to be caught in the same bloody smash."
Daniel kept his lips in a mild, slightly vacuous, smile. He had enemies in the service; anybody did if his career wasn't as bland and colorless as tapioca pudding. Daniel had never had contact with Admiral Milne, but she'd obviously met some of those enemies. There was nothing for it but keep his mouth shut and his face pleasant.
It was possible that the particular enemy Milne had talked to was Commander Slidell. Well, worse things happen in wartime. . . .
"The Tylers," Milne said, gesturing to the couple from the back of the aircar in a grudging effort at introductions on her part. The wife was half the age of her husband and dressed in what'd been Xenos fashion in the recent past.
The other couple wore matching jumpsuits of shiny aquamarine fabric. Milne nodded to them. Daniel couldn't imagine where the outfits came from, though the effect rather pleased him. "And the Vallevas. And this is Master Mondreaux, of course."
The young man at her side gave Daniel, presumably the only stranger, a nod that was almost a bow. Mondreaux dressed like a fop, with ruffs at throat and wrists; but he moved gracefully, and the muscles under his even tan were firm.
He looked to the side and said, "Ah, I see that Lady Raynham has decided to come after all. She and her daughter Geneva both hoped to meet you, Lieutenant Leary—"
Mondreaux bobbed slightly to Daniel. The surface of his expression was a bland smile.
"—but the lady's companion Master Buscaigne thought they had more pressing business than to greet the great hero from Xenos."
Another aircar was approaching from the north, smaller than the first but very well appointed. A slick-looking man was driving. The woman beside him was middle-aged and too big to fit comfortably into the garments she was wearing, but the girl alone in the back seat was very nice indeed.
The car settled next to Admiral Milne's. During the moment it hovered, Lieutenant Farschenning leaned close to Daniel and said through the thrum of the fans, "I won't say anything against Lars Buscaigne, but I don't recommend you play cards with him."
Daniel nodded. He knew the type. Master Mondreaux was another of them. . . .
Violent activity alongside the heavy cruiser drew everybody's eyes. A pair of spacers using atmosphere suits as makeshift diving apparatus shot to the surface, sloshing violently.
"What is that?" Mistress Tyler shrieked on an ascending note. Staring at the commotion, she grabbed her husband with one hand and Mondreaux with the other.
A man in the stern of the nearer barge hurled a gallon bucket into the water beside the risen spacers. The container started sinking, then burst in a gout of steam shot through with white fire. A ripple that looked like water out of a sluice peeled from one of the divers and merged with the churning slip.
Mister Tyler had been detaching his wife's hand from Mondreaux. The younger man stood impassively, unaffected by the nearby violence and seemingly unaware of the lady's grip.
"Bloody hell!" Tyler said, shocked in turn. He looked at Admiral Milne and said, "Quicklime, I suppose? Is that safe with the men right there?"
"Safe enough," Captain Molliman replied instead. "Caustic won't harm the suits, and usually the lime doesn't splash the fabric directly."
He looked at Daniel and explained, "There's big one-celled animals here. Blobs, we call 'em. In the harbor where they've got garbage and sewage to eat, they get to the size of bed quilts. If there's not a crack in your suit, they're not dangerous—but nobody likes to have one crawling on him, either."
"The water around the islands's very acid from decaying algae," added Lieutenant Farschenning. "It's not the heat so much as for making the water basic that we drive them away with quicklime when they show up."
"I once saw a ship being raised from a swamp," Mondreaux said, looking out toward the Cornelwood. "A tank of reaction mass was empty though the gauge read full, and a bank of thrusters failed on liftoff."
The water of the slip still stirred, but for the most part the lime had slaked itself to quiescence. For the time being the divers continued to cling to a net over the side of the barge.
"The swamp was full of great carnivores," Mondreaux continued, turning again to his companions. Everyone but the trio coming from the second aircar was looking at him. "They were cold blooded, I gather, but they certainly weren't sluggish. There were more people defending the salvage crew than there were raising the ship. It was a constant battle, and the stench of the corpses rotting was beyond belief."
He chuckled. "Maybe they should've tried chasing them away with quicklime instead of killing them with impellers and plasma cannon," he added in a light tone. "I think after the first day or two, it was the smell of meat that drew the creatures more than the workmen around the ship."
The older of the women from the second aircar stepped out in front of her companions. The man with her, Lars Buscaigne, laid a hand on her arm to rein her in; she jerked herself free.
"Hello!" she said, holding both her hands out to Daniel, palms down. "I'm Celia Raynham, Lady Celia, but that's only because my dear late husband had a title of sorts on Lindesfarne before he came here and made so very much money. You must be the Daniel Leary we've heard so much about!"
"Madame," Daniel said, bowing low to forestall the hug with which he was pretty sure Raynham was about to enfold him. She'd gotten an amazing amount of information out in the form of a simple greeting. An interesting woman, but not in the least interesting to him as a woman.
"Yes," said the younger woman with a bright, cruel smile. "Poor Mommy would be quite alone now in her later years if it weren't for darling Lars here. He's in constant attendance on her, aren't you, Lars?"
She held out her hand to Daniel, drawing demurely back but managing to place herself in the direct line between him and her mother. "I'm Geneva Raynham," she said sweetly, "but please call me Ginny. It's enthralling to read of such heroic exploits by a man not much older than I am myself."
Geneva turned to her mother, keeping the same smile. "I'll bet it reminds you of back when you were young too, doesn't it, Mommy?" she added.
Daniel didn't expect Geneva Raynham would age any better than her mother had, but that wasn't a present concern. She couldn't be much over twenty standard years old, though she was obviously quite sure of what she wanted.
Which seemed to be the same as what Daniel wanted. The future wasn't going to be an issue. Repairs to the Hermes would be complete in five days probably, eight at the outside. The tender'd go off to her assigned station among the Burwood Stars. With luck Daniel would never see the lady again. That'd probably suit Geneva as well, but that wasn't a question he need ask himself once he'd lifted off in the Hermes.
"Very good to meet you both, ladies," Daniel said, bowing again. He didn't have to look at Admiral Milne to know how their fawning would affect her. "We of course have work to do here, but perhaps at a later time we can pursue the acquaintance."
"I wonder, Zita?" Mondreaux said unexpectedly. It was only by checking the direction of his glance that Daniel realized that he was speaking to Admiral Milne. "Of course I'm only a civilian, but it doesn't seem to me that one recently arrived lieutenant is really necessary for this business. Perhaps Lady Raynham and her daughter could show Leary the sights of our charming planet? I notice that there's a seat open in their aircar."
"That would be quite impossible!" said Lars Buscaigne, his face flushing dangerously. He was a good ten years older than Mondreaux, though he'd been to considerable pains to disguise the fact. "The extra weight—"
"Really, Lars," Celia Raynham said. "I'm sure the c
ar will carry four. And if it can't—"
She threw Daniel a broad smile.
"—perhaps the Lieutenant can replace you as driver. You can drive an aircar, can't you, Lieutenant?"
In fact Daniel couldn't, but there was no danger of the situation arising. "No, no, I will drive, of course!" Buscaigne said. "It was only your safety that I was worried about, Celia. My skill is equal to the challenge, I am sure."
Mondreaux was whispering in the Admiral's ear. Milne snorted and said, "Well, why not? Do you need Leary here, Molliman?"
"No sir," said the Port Commander, "but I do want to emphasize that it was Leary who showed us the way to get this business done fast and safely."
"Yes, yes, I heard you before," Milne said peevishly. "Get along with you, Leary. I'll square it with Commander Slidell. And try to stay out of trouble, if you can manage that!"
Celia Raynham seized Daniel's right hand. "Come, Lieutenant," she said. "We'll show you the Grand Gallery. And I'll ride with you in the back of the car to point out sights."
Her daughter gripped Daniel's other hand. "I wouldn't think of tearing you away from dear Lars, Mother," she said. "I'll ride with the Lieutenant. Daniel—may I call you Daniel?"
Buscaigne didn't speak as he stomped toward the aircar on Celia's other side. Daniel had been eight years in the RCN and a regular visitor to his uncle's dockyard for a decade before that. A glimpse at Buscaigne's expression suggested that if the fellow had spoken, Daniel might still have heard some new curses.
* * *
There were various ways for Adele to have gotten from the Hermes to Squadron House. She was on Navy Office business, so she could even have summoned an RCN aircar from the base establishment.
Instead she chose to walk. Tovera followed a pace behind her mistress, like a modest and dutiful servant.
Adele smiled faintly. She supposed Tovera was modest, at least in the sense that she'd never brag or claim more than her due, and she was dutiful to a fault. One had to be very careful what one told a sociopath who'd been trained to kill: a word to Tovera was very like pulling the trigger of a pistol. In neither case would another's conscience override your expressed will.