The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  As the Count paid the additional sum into one inspector's gloved hand bill by bill, his partner closed his helmet so he could use its microphone to speak to the crew of the other guardship. He spoke with animation, finally grasping his partner's hand with the money and holding it directly in front of his helmet camera.

  Nodding forcefully, he opened his visor again. "I made a mistake," he said. "Slip A-12 is open after all. We have assigned it to your fine vessel, Count Klimov. A pleasure doing business with you!"

  He turned and opened the airlock's inner door, the air behind him shimmering as his communications cable wound back on its take-up spool. His partner, patting the bribe away in his tool pouch, followed.

  As the airlock closed, everyone on the Princess Cecile's bridge except Adele grinned with satisfaction and began to chatter. Adele was listening to the scene on the Goldenfels' bridge where the other team of inspectors explained to Captain Bertram that his ship wasn't cleared for slip A-12 after all.

  She frowned with concern. If Bertram had been present, her hand would've been touching the pistol in her tunic pocket.

  * * *

  "Ship, this is the captain," Daniel said, lying back on the couch of his console with the surface of Todos Santos three thousand miles below on his display. "I'll be initiating landing sequence in two minutes and . . ." He waited for the digit to change. "Forty seconds. Prepare for landing, out."

  The Sissie's computer would land the vessel. A sidebar listed the already-programmed thruster impulse by seconds per nozzle. If Daniel chose he could add the actual course track, a skein of red lines, which would circle the planetary image until it terminated in slip A-12 (though the harbor itself wasn't visible at the present scale). He didn't bother, but when they entered the atmosphere he'd switch to direct visuals.

  Adele inset a red-outlined communications block in the upper left corner of Daniel's display. The text read laser signal from Goldenfels.

  "Vessel Princess Cecile," an unfamiliar voice said. According to the icons, Adele was routing the signal only to Daniel and the Battle Center. "The Goldenfels has been allotted slip A-12. Don't interfere or you'll regret it."

  A ship was lifting from the harbor, circled in yellow by the display. Daniel had caught the puff of steam as the Princess Cecile passed over San Juan. It was one of the country craft, ships of five or six hundred tons. They towed bulk cargoes which they picked up in orbit, carrying only high-value items within their hulls. Without external loads they were ideal for smuggling and for piracy.

  Daniel began to key in new course data; his face wore a smile. His fingertips hammered the virtual touchpad, but that was from the enthusiasm with which he always typed, not out of anger. He wasn't angry. . . .

  "Ship, battle stations," he said over the general push. The sidebar which showed braking impulse blurred, then sharpened to reflect the course changes. "There's an Alliance freighter which believes it can push us out of our landing site. The RCN is going to show them they're wrong this time too. Initiating landing sequence . . . now!"

  Over the roar of the thrusters on 80% flow he added, "Six out."

  Daniel was vaguely aware that he'd dropped back into naval parlance: in his mind, he was no longer the Captain but rather Ship Six. Very probably the crew had always thought of him that way.

  As for the Klimovs, well, they hadn't seemed like the sort who'd take to being pushed around either. If Daniel guessed wrong, he supposed it proved he hadn't been cut out to command a civilian vessel.

  "Todos Santos Control, this is Cinnabar registry vessel Princess Cecile," Daniel said, cueing both the ground control satellites and the Goldenfels. He noticed from the icons that Adele was sending the transmission by tight-beam microwave not only to the Alliance freighter but also to both orbiting guardships. "We are proceeding as directed by Todos Santos Control to slip A-12, San Juan Harbor. Please acknowledge, over."

  His words slurred slightly from braking impulse and the thrusters' vibration. Things were rattling adrift even on the bridge; God knew what was happening in the main compartments. The crew had expected to circle down at 1 g; instead they were dropping at twice that.

  Daniel hoped the Klimovs were strapped into their couches, but he didn't have time just now to check. An icon on the top of his display indicated they'd both have been talking to him if Adele hadn't blocked the signals. That meant at least they hadn't broken their necks.

  "Control to Princess Cecile," said a testy female voice. "You're cleared to land. If you children have a problem up there, make sure you solve it before you reach the ground or I swear we'll jug all of you! Control out."

  That was what Daniel'd expected and really the best he could hope for. The Sissie didn't need the locals to sort out an Alliance ship for her, but if Todos Santos had gotten involved it would've complicated a situation that was already complicated by the fact Cinnabar and the Alliance were at peace. . . .

  "Six, this is Six-two," Chief Missileer Betts reported. "Target acquired, courses set for first four missiles. Over."

  Daniel switched to the Plot Position Indicator as his main display; the attack board, commo, gunnery, and realtime visuals appeared at reduced scale along the bottom. Sun had the pipper for the dorsal turret's twin 4-inch plasma cannon centered on the Goldenfels, though at the present range the weapons would harm only the sails furled to the freighter's spars. The ventral turret, offset toward the stern of D Deck, was still aligned fore-and-aft, but Sun had unlocked it.

  "Cinnabar vessel, I'm warning you!" the voice from the Alliance freighter snarled. "We're landing in slip A-12. If you're underneath when we come down that's just too damned bad for you! Goldenfels out!"

  The fellow was still using a laser communicator, so the atmospheric buffeting and the haze of ions from his plasma thrusters interfered with reception aboard the Princess Cecile. Adele's software smoothed off the burrs of static, but if the Alliance officer hadn't been so angry he would've changed his mode of communication.

  The Princess Cecile was a warship with frames and bulkheads stressed to endure harder braking than any freighter could match. The Goldenfels had started its descent a few seconds earlier than the corvette, but there was no possibility that the Alliance vessel would reach the surface first.

  On the other hand, the freighter weighed some eight thousand tons empty. If her captain was serious about bringing her down on top of the Sissie—and he certainly sounded serious—then something needed to be done quickly.

  "Mr. Sun, lock the dorsal turret onto the Goldenfels' port quarter," Daniel ordered, expanding the gunnery screen to forty percent of his display. He was using the ship's common channel instead of the command push so that everybody aboard knew what was happening. "On the order I want you to walk your burst stern to bow along the line of her port thruster nozzles. Wait for the order! Over."

  On the display the Alliance freighter was a slender dark mass above the twenty bright flares of its plasma thrusters. The Princess Cecile was already twelve thousand feet below and to the east—up-orbit—of the Goldenfels. Sun shifted his pulsing orange crosshairs back and outward from the center of her belly, saying, "Aye aye, sir."

  "Adele," Daniel said as his fingers danced. "Transmit the image from our gunnery board to the Goldenfels. Break. Goldenfels, this is Daniel Leary of Bantry. If your vessel comes within a half mile of mine when we get below fifty thousand feet, I'm going to shoot away your offside thrusters. If you're very good, you'll be able to catch your pig of a ship before she turns turtle and augers in. Leary out!"

  Daniel shrank the gunnery screen back to the bottom of his display and breathed deeply. He was trying to get his muscles to relax so that they wouldn't cramp if he had to move quickly . . . as he very likely would.

  "Ship, this is Six," he said as red and blue tracks on the PPI marked the courses of the two descending vessels. "For those of you who don't have gunnery training—"

  By which he meant particularly the Klimovs, who had a right to be both furious and terrifi
ed at the way things were going.

  "—let me explain that the Goldenfels cannot use any ventral guns that might bear on us—"

  Daniel didn't know with certainty that the Alliance freighter was armed, but it'd be a common-sense precaution for any ship trading in the Galactic North.

  "—while her thrusters are in operation. Plasma from her own exhaust would distort her bolts if it didn't do worse. If the Alliance captain shuts off power this deep into his descent, he'll almost certainly crash regardless of what we do. Six out."

  Daniel licked his lips. A line of sweat had gathered at the brow of his helmet. He'd have liked to wipe it away before a drop fell into his eye, but he was afraid that'd send the wrong signal to those of the crew who were watching a feed of their captain's face.

  Beaded lines continued the astrogation computer's prediction of where the two ships would be in the next few minutes if one or the other didn't make a change. Both courses ended together in San Juan Harbor, though the scale was too small to identify slip A-12 precisely. The freighter's image swelled on the gunnery display, a distorted spindle half-hidden beneath an opalescent haze of charged particles.

  The gunnery display went almost white as the freighter's plasma thrusters increased power. For a moment the image flared there; then it shrank, seeming to draw upward. In fact it was the Sissie dropping away while the Goldenfels braked and shifted course minusculely. The Alliance captain was heading for slip D-73, Daniel supposed. At any rate, Daniel wouldn't want to be the officer who tried to lift a ship back to orbit after so rapid a descent.

  "Ship, this is Six," he said. He lifted his helmet and mopped his forehead with the sleeve of his tunic. "Prepare for touchdown, spacers. And welcome to Todos Santos!"

  CHAPTER 11

  Adele's taxi clanked to a halt in front of a building larger though no better kept than the rest of those on the twisting street. The driver switched off the turbine of her little tractor; it slowed with a ringing sound that might've been normal and with an unpleasant keen of rubbing metal that probably wasn't.

  "The palace of Lord Purvis!" the driver said to Adele with a flourish of her arm. A dozen men and a few women squatted in the strip of shade against the front wall of the building. One of the women appeared to be a tailor with a hand stitcher; she was sewing cuffs of contrasting material on the shirt of the fellow waiting bare-chested beside her.

  The location agreed with the address given for Commander Adrian Purvis in the Admiralty Records in Government House . . . to the degree that The palace of Prince Pedro Sforza, in the Timber Merchants' Quarter was an address. It was a better address than the Cluster's Admiralty Records were records, certainly. Good God, these people's idea of a filing system was the electronic equivalent of throwing papers in a drawer! If Adele hadn't been very good at information retrieval, she'd never have been able to—

  Adele slid the data unit away in its pocket as she got out of the wagon, shaking her head in self disgust. She was very good at information retrieval; and if she hadn't been, that would be her fault and not that of whatever passed for archivists here on Todos Santos. Besides, from what Daniel had muttered as he surveyed the Cluster fleet, the Admiralty was all of one sad piece with its records and the addresses of senior fleet officers.

  "Twenty-five Cinnabar florins, gracious lady!" the driver said, getting off the bucket seat of her vehicle and bowing low. She ignored Tovera who stood at the back of the wagon, covering both traffic in the street and the idlers in front of the palace with alternate quick glances. "A pleasure to serve so great a personage as you!"

  Adele hadn't seen any aircars in San Juan. Ground transport was eclectic and mostly of off-planet manufacture. The taxi she'd hired was a tractor running on continuous belts, which pulled a wooden cart whose pair of high wheels were almost certainly meant for a bicycle.

  There were any number of other styles and ages of vehicles, often with a body of wood or wicker on ancient running gear. The closest thing to public conveyances were larger versions of the tractor-drawn cart Adele had ridden in, but though they followed more-or-less fixed routes, they didn't appear to keep any schedule.

  "The correct charge is thirty piastres," Adele said, withdrawing a coin from the dispenser in her belt pouch. "A Cinnabar florin is worth about fifty, but I recognize that you'll have to exchange the coin for your local scrip; and there's the matter of the tip as well, so I won't require that you give me change."

  When Adele called her cousin to set up the meeting, she'd asked what the proper fare from the harbor was. She'd refused his offer of an escort. While she wasn't hiding her presence in San Juan, neither did she want the sort of pomp that would convince even ordinary Alliance merchants and spacers in the city that she was more than a casual visitor. Letting people mistake her for a spy would be as damaging—and as dangerous—as if they identified her for valid reasons.

  "What!" shouted the driver. "You insult me—"

  She turned to engage the idlers in her harangue.

  "—and you insult my planet!"

  The palace was a courtyard building with three stories and a further false front along the street. The ground floor had no openings except a gate. The small windows of the second story and the larger ones of the third had iron lattices which seemed more functional than ornamental. The walls were mostly brick from which cream-colored stucco had flaked in large patches, but every six feet or so there was a tie course of pinkish stone.

  One of the iron-bound gate-leaves was open. Guards lounged in the shade of the tunnel beyond, silhouetted against the bright courtyard where servants were hanging up laundry.

  "Do you foreigners think you can come to Todos Santos and rob her hardworking citizens?" the driver cried.

  Vehicles were moving slowly enough in the narrow street that passengers turned their heads to listen. The idlers were interested also. One man got to his feet, glowering. The woman beside him dug a stone out of the packed dust before she rose. Tovera shifted slightly.

  Adele strode briskly to the half-open gate. An idler whose striped garment had been sewn from one piece of cloth shifted to block her, then saw what glinted in Adele's hand half out of her pocket. He jumped back and muttered to his fellow without taking his eyes off Adele.

  "A Mundy is threatened!" Adele called to the lounging guards. Her voice rang through the arched tunnel and into the courtyard beyond. "Will a Purvis let her be beaten at his doorstep?"

  The guards jumped to their feet, their equipment clattering. There were six armed men wearing scarves in the orange-and-blue Purvis colors. A dozen others, mostly women, were either spouses or house servants relaxing with the guards. A boy cooked skewered vegetables on a miniature gas grill in the corner of the closed gate leaf and the wall.

  "What's this?" demanded a man with pistols holstered on crossed bandoliers instead of a shoulder weapon like the other guards. From his accent he'd been born on Cinnabar, a crewman from the Aristoxenos. The rest of the guards appeared to be locals.

  "I'm Mundy of Chatsworth, Commander Purvis' cousin!" Adele said. "This scum and her henchmen—"

  She pointed at the taxi driver, now standing open-mouthed with a blank expression. She'd backed against the saddle of her tractor.

  "—have attempted to rob me!"

  "Clear 'em away!" the guard commander said, drawing his pistols. "Bloody hell! Clear 'em away now!"

  He stepped into the street but waited beside Adele against the gate leaf. His men rushed out, swinging impeller butts at anybody they could catch. The hangers-on followed, wielding belts, staves, and what looked like a pair of circular knitting needles.

  The victims fled instead of trying to resist. Adele presumed that the guards would've opened fire as blithely as they clubbed their weapons if anybody'd been fool enough to object to a beating.

  The driver lay sprawled in the street. Tovera had remained on the other side of the wagon, out of the way. Now she leaned over the tractor and grasped the driver by the collar. With a strength surprisin
g in her slight form to anybody who hadn't seen it before, she dragged the woman over her saddle and left her dangling there.

  Blood smudged the yellow dust; an impeller butt had smashed the driver's nose and cheekbones. Twenty-five florins—twenty-four, really—wasn't so very much, but the honor of a Mundy was worth life itself. . . .

  Tovera switched on the tractor's turbine, then dropped it into gear and stepped back. The vehicle trundled awkwardly away, down a street which had emptied when the trouble started. Tovera walked over to Adele, the attaché case under her left arm and her right hand resting lightly on it.

  The commander of the guard holstered his pistols, then wiped his brow with the corner of his neckscarf. His men and their entourage were trooping back into the gateway, chattering merrily. One woman was showing her companion a necklace of perforated coins and uncut stones that Adele remembered the tailor having worn.

  "Sebastian!" he said to a soldier wiping the butt of his impeller clean on his shirt tail. "Take Lady Mundy to see Himself. And don't be daft enough to ask her for a tip or you'll get worse than the dogs just did."

  "With me, mistress," Sebastian said, bowing low. His finger was through his impeller's trigger guard; the muzzle waggled in a broad sweep that would've included Adele's head if she hadn't ducked. He turned and swaggered into the courtyard.

  "Very nicely done, mistress," Tovera murmured in Adele's ear as they followed the soldier. "If I'd dealt with them myself, they'd probably have declared us enemies of the state and had the army kill us."

  She giggled. "Not that I care, of course," she added. "But you would."

  "Yes," said Adele. "I suppose I would."

  They crossed the courtyard. A balcony screened by a carved lattice projected from the upper—the second—floor of the wing directly opposite. Guards sat beneath the woven mat strung over the base of the outside staircase. They got up as Sebastian and his charges approached.