by David Drake
"Visors down, people!" Woetjans bawled as she swung open the inner airlock hatch. "Try not to drown yourselfs, because the rest of us are likely to be too busy to fish you out!"
Steam swept into the cutter's bay, mixed with ions dancing like miniature rainbows as they absorbed electrons to merge with the atmosphere. RCN commo helmets had filters that slapped in place at need when the visors were down. They weren't gas masks, but they removed particles and anything active enough to be trapped in a ceramic that mimicked the convolutions of natural charcoal.
"Remember you're a guard of honor!" Daniel said, bellowing but using intercom as well. The ping of cooling metal and the bubbling rush of water replacing what'd been boiled out of the moat might overwhelm even his unaided lungs, especially when the spacers were so keyed up. They filed out carrying sub-machine guns and stocked impellers. "Don't shoot till I order you, I don't care what the wogs are doing!"
RCN vessels had external speakers to allow those inside to reach work parties outside on the ground who might not be wearing radio helmets. Cutter 614's speakers began playing brassy music, startling Daniel as he put his hand on a spacer's chest in order to make a place for himself in the line of those leaving through the airlock.
"It's 'The Song of the Liberator Hwang,'" Adele explained on their two-way link. "It's the national anthem."
I suspect there're two people on the planet who know that, now that you've told me, Daniel thought. But it was the sort of detail he'd come to expect from Adele, and who knew? It just might help.
A short ramp connected the hatch to the port outrigger. Normally in port there'd be a temporary ramp from the outrigger to the quay or shore. There was no need of that here, so the twenty spacers Daniel'd picked to escort him were jumping to the ground to face the wall of the palace compound ten feet away.
Hogg waited for Daniel on the outrigger, the stocked impeller cradled on his left elbow. He looked worse for wear, but by no means as bad as he sometimes did after a night of partying. The goggles were up on his forehead now, but the kiss of the plasma had inflamed his cheeks and the backs of his hands.
"There's no fight in this lot," he said disgustedly, indicating the palace with a twist of his right thumb. "Dunno what I was so worried about. Mind, it's the sort of place you go whoring with a buddy so that her pimp don't scrag you from behind while you're anchored."
Nobody'd returned to the guard tower frowning down above the gate. That might be connected with the fact that Sun had aimed the cutter's twelve-rocket dorsal launcher straight at the tower. The warheads wouldn't have time to arm in the short distance they'd travel, but the impact of just one or two rockets would smash the yellow brickwork like so many wrecking balls.
Yang stank. Heavenly Peace stank, at any rate. It stank like a cesspool rather than with the normal swampy odor of decaying vegetation that landings on primitive planets usually brought.
The buildings across the moat from the palace had originally been of three or four stories, high enough to look down on the compound. In some cases portions of the walls still poked up fingers of masonry or wooden posts with rags of wickerwork remaining, but all floors above the first had been hacked or blasted away. Only at a quarter mile or so from the palace were buildings habitable to the original rooflines.
Habitable was a flexible concept, of course. From the look of the rickety structures, they'd be unsafe and uncomfortable even by the standards of spacers crammed aboard a starship.
The gate leaves were frames of angle iron wrapped with barbed wire. The mass was badly rusted, but fresh wire had been woven into it in the past month or so. Through the openings Daniel saw sheds straggling along the walls of the compound; in the center was a colonnaded building with stuccoed walls and a gilt dome. People were looking back at him through the pillars; they ducked out of sight when they caught his eye.
The national anthem cut off in the middle of the phrase, "To die is a fine thing!" In Adele's voice the speaker called, "The Republic of Cinnabar sends greetings to its respected brother, President for Life Shin!"
Eyes poked out from around pillars, then disappeared again. Was one of those nervous peepers President Shin himself?
"Adele, can you cut me into the loudspeakers myself?" Daniel asked.
"Done," Adele replied a heartbeat later. "Toggle it by saying, 'speaker.'"
"Speaker," said Daniel. In a thunderous voice he continued, "President Shin, if you're all right, please admit us to your compound. Otherwise we'll have to attach a grapnel and line to your gates and pull them open with our winches so that we can bring aid to you if you're incapacitated. Speaker."
"Hell, we don't have to do that, sir," Woetjans growled from Daniel's left side. "I can shin up that and open the gate from the inside. It looks like just a bar to pull outa the staples."
"I think we'll wait a moment for our host to admit us properly, Woetjans," Daniel said mildly. He didn't add—because Woetjans would've taken it as a challenge—that if she started climbing the latticework, she was likely to draw fire from the darkened interior of the palace. Daniel neither wanted to lose the bosun on whom he depended nor to start a full-scale war—which that would do, since if anything happened to Woetjans he'd order Sun to put the whole sheaf of rockets into the palace facade.
Armed men and a few women—also armed, and with the left side of their faces painted red—began to appear from the palace, taking a few tentative steps beyond the colonnade. Daniel waited, wearing a false smile and gleaming Dress Whites with all his medals. It'd been hard to carry the uniform on a cutter without getting it soaked with oil, and he knew it'd be the worst possible costume if the negotiation turned into a gunfight. It was necessary, though, if the mission were to have any chance of success.
The soldiers came forward in a tight, chattering group, reminding Daniel of a flock of chickens rushing toward grain spread on the ground. They wore khaki uniforms, though different dye-lots gave them a motley appearance. Well, many things gave them a motley appearance. Their weapons were a mix of electromotive and chemically fueled types. Some of the latter were so new that splotches of packing grease still blackened the receivers. Daniel wondered if the bores were clear.
The woman in the center had gold rings with bangles the length of both forearms; she wore a bicorne hat covered with gold braid. Daniel would've thought of her as ridiculous despite the sub-machine gun and the half dozen long knives stuck through her belt if it weren't that he noticed her three-strand necklace was of human teeth.
"I'm Captain Ding-wei!" she said in an angry singsong. "You got no right coming to Yang and giving us orders! Go away back to Cinnabar!"
Daniel saluted. "We're not giving orders," he said calmly. "We're here to greet our brother President Shin. The rocket launcher—"
He gestured.
"—is locked in that position. We have no intention of blowing the palace off the face of the planet with it."
"Now that we've made nice-nice, Captain," Hogg said loudly. He rapped the gate frame with the muzzle of his impeller. "How about you get this open so we can come in and all have a nice civilized drink? Eh?"
The iron continued to ring off-key. Ding-wei scowled, then noticed that the impeller was now aimed up her left nostril. She cried, "Wau!" and jumped back, colliding with one of her coterie. He dropped his automatic rifle with a clatter. It didn't fire. Judging by the rust on the bolt and receiver, it might not be able to fire.
"Captain Ding-wei," Daniel said in a stern voice, "the sooner you do your duty and take us to see the President, the better off we'll all be. There could very well be an accident out here!"
He rather wished that weren't so true. Some members of his escort were good shots, but even they were spacers carrying powerful weapons instead of soldiers who'd been trained in gun safety as well marksmanship. It'd be very bad if one of Daniel's escort blew a guard's brains out accidentally. It'd be even worse, at least from Daniel's viewpoint, if one of them blew his brains out—and that could certainly happen.<
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"Corporal Jing!" Ding-wei snapped. "Open the gate at once. Now! Now! Now! you dirty little man!"
That was a fair description of Jing, who looked at the captain in terror before jumping to the gate and sliding the bar from its staples. His khaki trousers had been cut into shorts with the left leg six inches longer than the right, but Ding-wei wasn't anything to brag about either. She must've been eating when she ran outside, because her face and both hands were greasy. Her hair was a mat of its own oils and the dull yellow dust blowing along the city's streets.
As soon as the bar dropped clear, Barnes and Dasi shoved the leaves open with the soles of their boots. The hinges protested shrilly, but the riggers were big men and determined. They strode on, their impellers pointed forward. The remainder of the escort followed, driving the Presidential Guards before them like wind-blown thistle-seeds.
"Captain, lead us to President Shin, if you would," Daniel said. He made a shooing motion with his left hand. He'd have taken Ding-wei by the shoulder and turned her around, but her tunic looked like it'd been used to swab out an abattoir.
The captain flinched from the almost-contact and moved back into the building at a quickening pace. Daniel and his spacers followed closely, while the remainder of the guard detachment seemed to melt into the shanties to either side of the courtyard.
The hallway was covered with ceramic tiles whose glazing formed murals. Oversized figures led armies or addressed crowds of people only half their size. The giants had been defaced: gunfire had erased their heads and blown craters in their groins. The underlying walls were reinforced concrete, but in several places the shots had smashed through into the next room.
"What the Hell's that?" Hogg muttered, elbowing Daniel and nodding to the damaged murals.
"A political statement, I presume," Daniel murmured. "I'm as glad I wasn't here when it was happening, though. The ricochets would've terrified anybody who wasn't crazy. Or crazy drunk, of course."
Ding-wei gestured to a door of bronze filigree over velvet in a tall archway, then stepped out of the way. "Through there," she muttered. She wiped her face with her left hand, smearing the red paint. "He's in there. Go on, then."
"Right," said Daniel, striding forward. Hogg grabbed the vertical handle and dragged the door open, but Daniel stepped through first. He wasn't sure what he'd find on the other side.
The reality was a hall sixty feet high to the top of the palace dome, filled with several hundred armed women painted the same way as the captain. Sunlight coming through dome and clerestory windows slanted across their grotesque faces and made the scene look like the throne room of Hell.
The only man in the hall sat on a high dais in the center. He wore a purple robe and a chaplet of gilt flowers bound his hair.
The man called something but his words were lost in the cries of the women, a snarling, squealing surf of noise. Those nearest the door pointed their weapons at Daniel; at his side Hogg, his sub-machine gun slung, reached into a pocket and came out with another concussion grenade.
The smell of anger, sweat, and female hormones filled the crowded hall. Daniel blinked, but there was no help for it. With his left hand he pushed away the muzzle of the impeller aimed at his Kostroma Star, pointing it toward the ceiling instead. He bellowed, "Make way so that the Republic of Cinnabar may greet his excellency President for Life Shin!"
He doubted many of the women could hear him, but affecting those to his immediate front would help. "Woetjans, Hogg," he said. "Start forward. We don't want a brawl, but get the mob moving aside."
"For the honor of the Democratic Republic of Yang!" shouted a public address system so crackly that it was a moment before Daniel recognized the voice as Adele's. He hadn't been sure the hall had a PA system, and from the sound of this the speakers were in doubt themselves. "Make way for the respectful envoy of the Republic of Cinnabar! Make way for the envoy to greet his excellency President for Life Shin!"
The women between Daniel and the throne seemed more startled than obedient, but at least they didn't actively object when Daniel's escort began shoving them aside. He felt a little embarrassed to be carried through the crowd like a doll in tissue paper, but neither his uniform nor his pose as the plenipotentiary of a great power would survive the scrum.
Besides, the spacers were having fun. The smallest of them were bigger than all but a few of the painted women, and those few were fat, not large. The opportunity to push around obnoxious little people might be morally questionable, but beyond doubt spacers as aggressive as those Daniel'd picked for his escort found the activity spiritually fulfilling.
As the spacers advanced Woetjans stepped aside and let Barnes take her place at the point of the wedge. She leaned close to Daniel and rasped in a voice that probably wouldn't be overheard in this cacophony, "Hey, Cap'n? You know, if this lot's the royal guard or whatever, we don't need to talk to anybody. If we go back out in the hall and toss a few grenades in, the ones that're left'll likely keep outa the way while we get the prisoners out. They're supposed to be here too, right?"
That'd mean slaughtering hundreds of people out of hand! Daniel thought. But the bosun knew that too, so rather than state the obvious Daniel said, "We'd have to march the prisoners through the city, I suppose to the harbor, Woetjans. Then we'd have the further problem of what to do next, because 614 can't carry two hundred extra bodies to Nikitin."
He smiled, adding in an understatement that Woetjans certainly wouldn't understand, "And there might be political problems also. With Admiral Milne."
And with Admiral Anston. And with some three-quarters of the Senate, though Daniel knew from comments his father had snarled when he was Speaker, there were Senators whose view of foreign relations was just as simplistic as the bosun's.
"The respectful envoy of Cinnabar brings greetings to his excellency President Shin!" the PA system shouted through its pops and sizzles. The single working speaker seemed to be on the dais with the President. He'd jumped to his feet and was staring at it in frightened anger with his hands over his ears.
Shin's chaplet was disarranged. Daniel's helmet damped the sound down to safe levels, but it must've been very uncomfortable for the locals who didn't have similar equipment.
One effect of the snarling racket was to move the female guards away from the dais. Daniel stepped into the cleared area and saluted the President. He made a better job of it than usual, but Shin probably wasn't a good judge.
"Your excellency!" Daniel said brightly. "I greet you in the name of the Speaker and Senate of Cinnabar. May you reign long in the friendship of the Republic!"
Shin was in his late thirties. Though he was getting soft he remained a handsome man except for a broad pink scar starting at his right eyebrow and trailing diagonally into his scalp. His chaplet now hung from his right ear, and he wore an expression of petulant disgust.
"Why are you here?" Shin demanded. "And why are you shouting like that? You know, I could have my Death Virgins kill you all! I could have them kill you with their teeth!"
"Your excellency," Daniel said with a broad smile as though he thought the threat was a joke between friends. "If you mean, 'why is your own equipment behaving like that?', I'm sure I don't know. And as for why the Republic sent me, I'm here to arrange the repatriation of the Cinnabar citizens you gathered up for us. I believe there's about two hundred of them? We'll get them off your hands at once and send them back to Burdock where they belong."
President Shin sat down again. He tried twice to straighten his gilded chaplet, but it slipped off each time he removed his hands. Perhaps it'd originally been held in place with a hairpin which he'd lost in covering his ears. He flung the ornament to the floor.
"Send them where they belong?" Shin said in a high, angry voice. "I'll send them where they belong, never fear. They were fighting me! I'll burn them all alive in Shin and Hwang Stadium on Liberation Day next week!"
"Personally I share your sense of humor, your excellency," Daniel said, continuin
g to smile, "but I'd greatly regret if some of the hotheads in the RCN heard you say you were planning to murder Cinnabar citizens. Why, the very commander of my squadron, Admiral Milne, would insist on blasting Heavenly Peace to a glowing crater. Such a terrible thing to happen simply because a woman didn't understand that you were making a joke."
"They were fighting me," Shin said indignantly. "Fighting me."
"Yes, your excellency," Daniel said. "They'll be punished for their interference in Yang's affairs. But they're Cinnabar citizens, so the Republic will punish them."
In all truth, he suspected the mercenaries wouldn't be punished; that was at the discretion of the Civil Administrator of the Burdock Stars. They might even be allowed to hire a transport to Yang and rejoin the rebels on Big Florida Island. It wasn't fair or proper, but that wasn't the business of an RCN officer.
Daniel rather doubted that "fair" and "proper" were concepts that President Shin thought much about either. Perhaps the universe was displaying a certain rough justice.
Shin stared at Daniel, his expression suddenly calculating. He bent and picked up the chaplet, toying with it as he continued to watch and think.
Daniel waited, his back straight and a friendly smile on his face. That was his usual expression, and it did as well in this place as any other would.
He didn't press for a reply. Judging from what he'd seen of Shin, the fellow's reflex was probably to order his Death Virgins to murder the Cinnabars out of hand. Anything requiring more thought than that was a good result. The result might not please Admiral Milne, but that was a matter to sort out weeks and light years away.