The Way to Glory

by David Drake

  "This is the Presidential Palace," she went on, increasing the magnification and highlighting a cluster of buildings. "It's in a walled and moated compound enclosing a total of three or four acres. We'll have to go there to see President Shin, since he rarely goes out. Also the prison where the Burdock mercenaries are presumably held is part of the same complex. We won't know their location for certain until I've spoken to the Consular Agent here, Mister Kwo."

  She pursed her lips. "Unless they've already been shot, of course," she added.

  "Hell," called Dasi, one of the senior riggers. "Me'n Barnes'll shoot 'em ourself if it means we go straight back outa here. We heard stories about this place on Sinmary, and that's no paradise port neither."

  There was general laughter. Dasi was joking, of course; but if Daniel'd asked them to, he and his partner Barnes would probably have done just that. They were hard men in a hard line of work. They trusted Captain Leary, and they didn't worry much about things they figured were officers' business.

  Daniel would never give such an order, of course. Several of those aboard 614 might carry out such a massacre without orders or even against orders, however. Hogg would beyond question kill any number of people if he thought it'd keep his young master safe.

  And so, Adele supposed, would Signals Officer Mundy. She wouldn't like herself afterwards; but she didn't like herself anyway, so saving Daniel by slaughtering innocents wouldn't have a real cost for her.

  "And where is Big Florida Island, if you please, Mundy?" Daniel asked with his usual public formality. "Since we're to avoid it on pain of being blown out of the sky, everyone tells me."

  "It's here, a hundred and seventy miles north of Heavenly Peace, just off the coast," Adele said. She drew the image back considerably to bring Big Florida into the frame with the capital, then shrank the scale again to focus on the rebel stronghold. "The Chrysoberyl made a low-level survey of the island seven months ago, before the missile batteries arrived, so we know the layout very accurately."

  The island was heart-shaped and about a mile across in either direction. The point was to the south, and on the heart's seaward lobe were something over a dozen sheds and buildings. A starship rested on the other lobe. The ground around it must've been soft, because a corduroy road—a track of tree boles laid side by side—had been built out from the center of the island to the vessel's main hatch.

  "The missile batteries are here . . ." Adele said, putting a red caret at the point of the heart. Her wands flicked two more carets to life, on the shore of each lobe. "Here, and here. We don't have closeups of them, of course."

  "One moment," Daniel said. "According to what I heard, the missiles are first-class weapons. The round that was fired at the Cutlass four months ago would've been fatal if it'd struck the center of mass instead of being decoyed above the hull because a jammed antenna hadn't folded properly."

  "Yes, that's right," Adele said. "The missiles appear to be recent manufacture from one of the industrial worlds of the Alliance, Gransby or DeLoit."

  "Why?" said Daniel. "Hypervelocity missiles cost a fortune. You could buy another junk courier ship—" he gestured "—like this Beacon of Yang for less than any one of those batteries cost, so what are the missiles intended to protect?"

  Adele cleared her throat. "I don't know," she said. "I'll . . ." She'd have continued, " . . . try to find out," but as her mind formed the words she realized she didn't have any idea where to begin researching the question. Instead she added, "I'll keep that in mind."

  "Switch back to the harbor, if you would," Daniel said, "and then return control of the imagery to me."

  "Yes of course," Adele said, shifting to a display in which the harbor filled half the image area. Ships winked like bubbles on a cup of hot cocoa. Most of the remainder was marsh, but she'd deliberately chosen a scale in which the edges of the city appeared as well.

  She wondered about his comment. Adele hadn't locked Daniel out of his own display—though she could've done so easily if she'd had a mind to. She wasn't sure whether he really thought she'd been that discourteous, or if he were instead delicately asking her not to interfere with the display while he was working with it.

  Using his virtual keyboard, Daniel ran a cursor across each ship in the harbor. They were mostly small freighters carrying plasma cannon for short-range self-defense. None had missiles nor the rocket batteries that were a pirate's favorite weapon. The only moderately large vessel, a 6,000 tonner built originally as a livestock carrier, had been a hulk for a decade.

  Each time the cursor touched a ship, a sidebar including name, registration, and officers, appeared at the side of his display. Adele smiled faintly. Did Daniel realize that this information came from his Signals Officer's digging rather than some piece of software installed on the equipment?

  Yes, probably he did. Daniel noticed things. When he got a moment, he'd even thank her for it. Now he had other matters to attend to.

  "How do people and cargo get from the harbor to the city proper?" Daniel said, reducing his field and shifting it around the belt of marsh. "There aren't any roads that I can see, and the port facilities don't seem to be operating either."

  "There's been no maintenance on the quays and slips since the Alliance left Yang eighty years ago," Adele explained. "There's no port control either, though I gather there'll be what call themselves customs inspectors coming aboard and demanding fees. Previous RCN vessels have sent the inspectors away with scant respect, though if I read the records correctly, a few years ago the Bayonet did make a payment. Her captain hoped the bribe would ease his way with the government."

  "Did it?" said Daniel, raising his eyebrows in wonder. "I suppose we could find a reasonable sum if . . ."

  "No, of course it didn't," Adele replied tartly. "There's very little connection between the various bureaucracies and whoever's President for the moment. Certainly no connection that works from the bottom up. Bribe President Shin if you like, but don't bother with the small fry."

  "Ah," said Daniel agreeably. "And the question of transport? If we don't choose to hijack the customs boat, I mean."

  Adele grinned. "I haven't ruled that out," she said. "The larger RCN vessels which've called here in the past carried aircars. We don't and couldn't have because of available volume. Freighters are met by barges from commercial houses in the city, either factors they already have an arrangement with or otherwise a mob struggling for the pick of the cargo. A warship won't have that option. I presume we can hire a barge after we've landed, however."

  "That's one possibility," said Daniel in a detached tone which Adele took to mean, "That's not going to happen." He moved his image field onto the Presidential Compound, still at the large scale with which he'd been searching for routes from the harbor.

  Daniel's dismissive attitude irritated Adele a trifle. Well, it irritated her a good deal, but without any justification. The decision wasn't one for Signals Officer Mundy—and it certainly wasn't one for Mundy of Chatsworth, which is how she'd been unconsciously viewing herself in her mind as she lectured the crew.

  "Do we have any information on the palace defenses?" Daniel asked, increasing magnification on one of the guard towers built onto the compound wall. "It looks to me like an automatic impeller here. Are the rest the same?"

  Adele's wands sorted data. She had the answer, but she hadn't expected to need it above any one of a thousand other bits of information about Yang, its government, and its foreign relations, so it took her longer to find than she'd have liked. As data poured across her display she saw on the quadrant echoing the command console that Daniel was working his focus around the walls. He stopped at each tower to make his own assessment.

  "There're six automatic impellers," Adele said sharply to draw Daniel's attention to her. "There's a three-tube laser in the northeast tower, but it was installed thirty years ago and wasn't used when President Shin—"

  She paused for a smile of sorts.

  "—Field Marshal Shin as he the
n was, when his forces stormed the Presidential Compound a year and a half ago. And there's a twelve-rocket launcher stripped from what'd been the Yang Navy before it sank in harbor. It's somewhere in the compound but apparently in storage."

  "That's good to know," Daniel said, shifting his image to examine the moat surrounding the compound. "Mind, an automatic impeller can put enough holes in a cutter's hull to make it unflyable."

  He slid his frame counter-clockwise, keeping the outer wall on the left of the image. Two keystrokes overlaid the moat with a scale ticked at one-foot intervals.

  "Sir?" said Sun, watching Daniel intently from the gunnery board. "If you just lift high enough above the harbor to give me a line, I can take out all three towers on the facing side with pairs of rockets. Then we can assault easy."

  "Come now, Sun," Daniel said with a broad smile. "We're not assaulting anybody. We're diplomats in uniform, come to clarify an unfortunate circumstance with the president of an independent world. Is that the correct terminology, Officer Mundy?"

  Adele shrugged. "I think we're permitted to remonstrate," she said. "Since President Shin admits that he's holding Cinnabar citizens, but he hasn't freed them on his own account."

  "Remonstrate, then," Daniel said, nodding cheerfully, "but not to the point of blowing a hole in his little fortress. At least until after we've tried other forms of reason."

  He highlighted the moat on his display. "Fellow spacers," he said, raising his voice but not keying the intercom, "give me your attention. We'll be making another hop through the Matrix to bring us to within five thousand miles of Yang's surface."

  "Woo-ee!" called Barnes. Woetjans, standing before the hatch, shouted, "That's our Mr. Leary!" Captains who trusted their extra-sidereal navigation to within five thousand miles, even at intra-system distances, were rare even in the RCN. Crews who trusted their captains to be that accurate were even more rare.

  "Yang has no planetary or port control, so I don't intend to give the people on the ground time to wonder what we may have in mind," Daniel explained. "We'll go straight in. Rather than landing in the harbor—"

  His orange highlight pulsed. This was an informational briefing, Adele realized, but it was also a pep talk. 614's crew would follow their captain wherever he led, but they were all experienced enough to understand the risks in the present situation. Daniel was showing them that he understood the danger—also firing them up so that their obedience would be not only willing but enthusiastic.

  "—we're going to land here beside the palace. The moat itself isn't wide enough even a cutter can fit into it. We can straddle it, though, and it'll soak up our exhaust just fine. We can even refill our reaction mass when things quiet down. I know this'll be tricky—"

  "Not for you it won't, sir!" cried Raymond.

  "Yes, even for me," Daniel said, his smile spreading again. "But if I didn't expect to succeed, I'd have made a different plan."

  He sobered. "Now," he continued, "that leaves the problem of the guns in the towers. I don't expect the sort of guards President Shin has around him to be exceptionally alert or courageous, either one, but there's a risk nonetheless."

  "I can take care of them, sir!" said Sun.

  "Land with the outer hatch open and facing the place," Hogg called from the back of the cutter's bay. "Leave me in the lock with an impeller. A little steam and sparkling isn't going to keep me from making those towers real unhealthy for any wog who points a gun at us."

  Adele had been going over the list of electro-optical transmitters within the Presidential Compound. Earlier RCN vessels had recorded that information along with reams of other data that no one had looked at until she did just now. Gathering data was much easier than retrieving and analysing it.

  "I think," said Adele, "that I can clear the towers as we come in. Though I have no personal objection to having Sun and Hogg ready to act if I fail."

  "Ma'am," said Hogg. "If you say you can do it, then I'll take that to the bank. But I'll still be watching through my sights, because nobody's a problem when seventy grains of osmium've splashed their brains across an acre or so."

  Adele joined the general laughter. Her RCN family had a sense of humor that wouldn't have done at meals in the Mundy household, but Adele found that it suited her very well indeed.

  * * *

  Landing a starship in an atmosphere was always a tricky business, and Daniel found that despite his care 614 was buffeted particularly badly. A cutter's four thrusters had plenty of power, but they didn't give the captain the delicacy of control available from the Sissie's eight nozzles or the much greater arrays of large ships.

  Keeping 614 from shaking herself apart—or flipping on her back; the cutter had so little mass that a thruster could be misaligned badly enough to do that—gave Daniel something to do rather than worry about what was going to come next, but he'd never been one to worry once he'd made a plan. As he'd told the crew, if he hadn't thought he could pull this off he'd be trying something else instead.

  Though Daniel had to admit that if people told him that he was out of his mind and doomed to failure, he'd have agreed that they might have a point. What Daniel knew on the basis of this crew, the nimbleness of the cutter, and his own confidence in himself, was that they were going to come through at least the first part of the operation in fine shape. For the rest, well, they'd deal with it as it developed.

  The ship's computer had picked the point at which they'd entered Yang's atmosphere and had controlled most of their descent. At ten thousand feet Daniel took over, mostly to get a feel for how 614 behaved on the way down. He'd been pleased with the way she'd climbed from Nikitin; going the other way she was skittish but instantly responsive. That was good to know, though in ordinary circumstances a cutter had little cause to land under its own power.

  Heavenly Peace was in sight so Daniel expanded the image to cover the main part of the command display. The thruster data—output, flow, temperature, erosion, and reaction mass remaining—became a sidebar, balancing the flight information—air speed, speed over ground, location, and attitude—on the other side. If something went badly wrong—if a nozzle fractured, for example—the thruster data would fill the display again, though in that case Daniel would be concentrating on the feel of the ship in his hands rather than figures.

  Along the bottom of the display crawled a block of text, the message that Adele was broadcasting through every medium available in the city below: missile attack! get to shelter. missile attack! get underground or you'll die. She'd explained that every radio, telephone and computer, especially the National Command Net, would be shouting the same panicked warning.

  614 approached from the southwest, thundering over natural vegetation and the farms of peasants who harvested bark but also grew their own food. At low level Daniel could see that each dwelling was a fortlet, and the small towns where the local magnate processed the bark into hallucinogenic drugs were fortified on a larger scale.

  Occasionally somebody'd shot at 614 on the way down—the cutter's sensors could pick up the RF discharge of an impeller—but those appeared to be the ordinary vandalism of louts with guns rather than serious attempts to harm them. Nothing had pinged on the hull, at any rate.

  Daniel'd chosen this approach because it didn't bring them close to Big Florida Island northwest of the city. The Cutlass had started a low-level pass to see just what was happening on Big Florida. They'd been rather too successful in learning, and in fact had been extremely lucky to survive.

  The rebels' missiles could engage any vessel in orbit, and during its descent the cutter remained in range until it was within a mile of the surface. Daniel assumed that the rebels didn't waste missiles against ships that didn't look like a threat, so he'd plotted the course to be non-threatening.

  Daniel didn't care about who ran—or claimed to run—the government of Yang. He had enough problems with the current president that he didn't need to bring in his enemies.

  614 was coming in over the city p
roper, which Daniel hated to do—the citizens of Heavenly Peace might be individually reprehensible but as a group they were human beings even if they had a terrible government. There was no choice, though, since the palace was right in the middle of the built-up area.

  When they were only a thousand feet above the surface, Daniel started braking at nearly 4 gravities. A larger ship couldn't have sustained that deceleration without breaking up. He didn't dare hover to a landing in normal fashion, but neither did he want to come in like a meteor. Four lobes of rainbow thruster exhaust bathed the cutter, curling over the hull to merge some distance back along their track.

  The ground swelled abruptly. Daniel trusted his judgment. He'd calculated the burn and in addition to the figures the deceleration felt right, but despite that it never looked right at this stage of a descent.

  It was bad enough when there was only water beneath, beginning to sparkle under a gust of ions. This time people ran screaming in the streets or threw themselves flat on the roofs of three-story buildings. Daniel'd known 614's passage would do some damage, rattle dishes and maybe singe clothes drying on the parapets of the houses closest to touchdown, but until this moment it hadn't occurred to him that folks might break their necks fleeing from the thundering apparition.

  Death by violence was probably common in Heavenly Peace. The thought that he might be accidentally increasing the risk bothered Daniel, though.

  The wall of the palace compound flashed by to port. The guard towers were empty. Daniel didn't see even the backside of one of Shin's gunmen abandoning his post. Apparently Adele's warning had taken effect as Cutter 614 plunged toward the city.

  Which was just as well for the gunmen. Hogg was in the airlock, just like he said he'd be. Daniel was sure he'd have been able to nail his target despite buffeting, the goggles he wore to protect his eyes, and the sting of plasma wherever it touched his unprotected skin.

  The cutter squelched down in an enormous plume of steam. The feel was completely different from either a conventional water landing or the more dangerous set-downs on hard ground where reflected exhaust was likely to unbalance the vessel in the last few feet of descent. The moat's muddy banks gave under the cutter's weight initially, then baked firm and held the vessel without the usual bobbing. The water flowing through the channel directly beneath the vessel continued to dissipate the plasma for the several seconds it took before Daniel was sure that they were safely on the ground.