The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  "You're sure they'd do that?" Greiner said, his eyes narrowing. "That would be suicide—literal suicide."

  Adele shrugged. "I know the captain believes Chewning'll do it," she said through a mouthful. "They're hardcore navy, as I said. Apparently they've got quite a reputation, or anyway they think they do. Death before dishonor and that sort of nonsense."

  She grimaced at the Alliance officer. "They're dolts like the farmers I work for," she said. "But I will say that they seem to know their business."

  "Yes," said Greiner without expression. "The Princess Cecile did indeed have a reputation when she was in naval service. And I'm inclined to agree that her crew know their business."

  He looked hard at Adele, holding his part-full wineglass but wholly concentrated on her reaction to what he was about to say. "So, Mistress. . . . The object you mentioned does appear to be a remarkable one. If not by force, then how do you plan to bring it into hands where it will be properly appreciated?"

  A steward offered a bowl of something starchy whipped with bits of onion. Adele nodded, then nodded again for a second spoonful.

  When the servant left, she said quietly with her eyes on her plate, "I told you my father was in shipping—he had seventeen vessels until the bloody war. He saw to it that I learned their systems back to front. If you'll give me fifteen minutes with your own transmitter, I'll set up a program that'll shut off all the yacht's power when you send the signal. If you do that at three in the morning, the worst there'll be is a shot or two from the sentries—if they don't throw their guns down when the lights go out."

  "I don't understand," said Greiner. He didn't raise his voice, but when a steward came by with a carafe of wine he waved the fellow away curtly.

  Adele grimaced. "Perhaps we can get out of here for a few minutes?" she said under her breath.

  Greiner glanced at the head of the table; Captain Bertram was entertaining the Klimovs with a story that required a great deal of hand-flourishing. A less arrogant fellow might wonder why a man whom he'd first cheated, then humiliated, was working so hard to be engaging, but not the Count. Arrogance wasn't the same thing as stupidity, but it tended to have similar results.

  "Yes," Greiner said, shoving his chair away from the table. It was bolted to deck rails that allowed it to slide six inches forward or back. "Follow me in a minute and I'll take you to the Signals Room. We won't be disturbed there."

  Adele ate her starch—which hadn't begun as potatoes, though she didn't know what the source was—in precise forkfuls, using it to sop sauce from the pork. She was nervous, but she'd spent many years poor to the point of starvation. Emotion might rob her of her appetite, but nothing took away her ability to eat.

  After a minute, neither more nor less, Adele rose, folded her napkin beside her plate, and walked out the hatch at her end of the compartment. Mr. Pasternak was coming the other way, guided by a discreet steward. The engineer's eyes brushed over Adele without focusing: whether or not Pasternak recognized the vintages, he'd certainly shown his appreciation of the Goldenfels' wine.

  The nearest rest room—the head, as she'd learned to call it in the RCN—was just outside the banquet hall, but Lieutenant Greiner gestured to her from the hatch of the companionway down the corridor instead. She followed him upward. The whisper of their boot-soles on the steel treads set up pulses in the armored tube that rushed back and forth like heavy surf.

  Greiner motioned her up alongside him; the Goldenfels was a much bigger ship than the Princess Cecile, and even her companionways were on a larger scale. "I was surprised when you signaled us as soon as we fell into orbit here, mistress," Greiner said under the cover of the echoes. "Not every rich man's secretary would know how to use a starship's communications gear even if it were left unattended."

  "I told you," Adele said. "The Klimovs pay me as their secretary, but my father trained me as an assistant engineer—his assistant. He shipped as engineer on a privateer before his share of a convoy of fullerenes let him buy his first vessel."

  Greiner looked at her in the green light of the glowstrips forming long circles up the companionway, but he said nothing till he opened the hatch marked A Level and led her out. At the end of the corridor to the left—directly above the banquet room—was the bridge. Its hatch was open, but a spacer with a sub-machine gun stood guard there.

  Greiner stopped instead at an unmarked compartment on the left of the corridor, opening the hatch with an electronic key. "Go in, mistress," he said.

  There were three consoles, one of them occupied. The man on duty looked up as Adele entered.

  "I have some questions to ask the lady, Bandeng," Greiner said as he closed the hatch. "I'm not sure how she's going to react, so I'd like you to be prepared."

  The duty man gave Greiner a flat stare, then looked at Adele. He ostentatiously reached into a drawer of his console and withdrew a service pistol which he pointed toward the corner past her head. If Adele had been armed—she wasn't; the contingent from the Princess Cecile knew they'd be searched before they were allowed to board the Alliance vessel—she could've shot Bandeng through the eye before he realized a gun isn't a magic wand that you wave to make people do what you want.

  "So, Mistress Mundy . . . ," Greiner said. "How is it that you knew you were speaking to the Goldenfels? We identified ourselves as the Belle Ideal."

  "You did after you reached orbit," Adele said with a justified sneer. "When I pinged you half an astronomical unit out, a few minutes after you returned to sidereal space, your transponder was still saying you were the Goldenfels. When you changed the identification, I knew you'd be willing to help me get the Earth Diamond."

  Greiner's expression was becoming locked into frustrated surprise. "You queried our IFF when we were that far out?" he said. "How did you locate us so quickly?"

  Adele shrugged, a gesture that was becoming as habitual in this conversation as the Alliance officer's amazement. "The yacht still has its naval sensors," she said. "I suppose they wouldn't always have picked up your arrival while we were on the ground, but they did this time."

  That was a lie: the Sissie hadn't been aware of the new arrival until the Goldenfels announced herself—falsely. But it was a perfectly believable lie, one which fit all the facts at Greiner's disposal.

  "Wait in the corridor, Bandeng," he ordered without taking his eyes off Adele. Part of his mind was probably considering the fact that he hadn't bothered to reprogram the automated system while the Goldenfels was still in the Matrix. "Go on, now."

  Bandeng glared at him and ostentatiously stuck the pistol in the waistband of his fatigues before he obeyed; but he did obey. Greiner hand-locked the hatch behind him.

  The Alliance officer forced a smile. When the interview began, he'd believed the power was in his hands. Now that Adele had demonstrated Greiner's lapse in security—and had done so in front of a subordinate present because of Greiner's own decision—he was extremely vulnerable.

  She returned the smile coldly. Based on what she knew of the Alliance intelligence services, Mr. Bandeng would have to be careful if he were to avoid dying in a freak accident before the Goldenfels reached her home port.

  "You're obviously a resourceful person, Mistress Mundy," Greiner said. "If matters work out as you say they will, I'll arrange a career path for you more suitable than nursemaiding farmers. But just how is it you propose to hand the Princess Cecile and her cargo over to us?"

  Adele brought out her handheld unit. "I've built a program to modify all the yacht's control codes," she said nonchalantly. "I'll download them into your system."

  She gestured to the nearest console, the one where Bandeng had been sitting. In fact Adele hadn't had anything to do with creating the program: that was primarily Daniel, with input from Pasternak, Vesey, and even Chewning. The actual work was done by the ship's navigational computer, but devising the pathways by which to achieve the plan was the job of human minds. Very resourceful human minds.

  "When you send the program v
ia a signal to the yacht over the normal watch frequency," she continued, "everything including the fusion bottle will shut down. They won't be able to fire the plasma cannons, close their hatches, or do anything at all else. They have backup controls, of course, but it'll take minutes if not hours before the ship will be operable again. By that time it'll be in your hands—and the Earth Diamond with it."

  "It strikes me that if this doesn't work . . . ," Greiner said. His voice was completely expressionless, but his tongue clipped the syllables out like individual projectiles. "That the Goldenfels herself will be in a very dangerous position. Half her crew would be between the vessels, in what would turn into a killing zone if the Princess Cecile's cannon were not disabled."

  "Yes, of course," Adele said, as if unaware that Greiner was suggesting the possibility of her treachery rather than merely simple failure. She seated herself at Bandeng's console and brought it live. "We'll test it before we leave here. You can display the yacht in realtime, can't you?"

  As if the matter were already decided, Adele synched her handheld unit with the console's input port. Greiner opened his mouth to protest, then reverted to the vaguely superior sneer which he'd affected at the start of the conversation. "Yes, of course," he said, switching the standby milkiness of a second console's display to a three-dimensional hologram of the Princess Cecile, a hundred and fifty yards from the Goldenfels.

  Adele kept her expression blank as she worked, but her heart was singing in triumph. Like most of a librarian's triumphs, of course, it was completely invisible to everybody else.

  The results, however, would be quite evident. Of that she was sure.

  The sun had been setting when the Sissie's officers trekked across the smoldering meadow to dinner, a performance commanded by the Alliance vessel's vastly greater power. The Goldenfels had landed more than a mile upstream where she wasn't vulnerable to the corvette's plasma bolts while she was setting down. The Alliance captain hadn't been concerned about damaging the natives' weirs while his ship thundered a few feet off the ground toward a spot beside the Princess Cecile.

  At this hour the Princess Cecile lay in a darkness which the gleam of her many open hatches picked out. Four guards sat on upturned buckets under a tarpaulin stretched into a marquee from bitts above the main access port. One man—the image was crystal clear but too small to show facial features—was playing a harmonica or ocarina.

  "All right," Adele said, turning to Greiner; she held her control wands ready. "Tell me what signal you want for the trigger. I suggest something simple, but it's entirely up to you."

  Greiner frowned like thunder. "All right," he said abruptly. "RCN. Use that—the three letters, RCN."

  Adele's wands flickered. She looked up again.

  "All right," she said again. "I've entered that. Simply transmit the program at . . . fifteen point oh-five-oh kilohertz with enough power that the Princess Cecile can pick up the signal. As close as we are, that's less power than it takes to light a match."

  Greiner hesitated. "Go ahead," Adele said impatiently. "For the test it'll only shut them down for two seconds. When you've seen the demonstration, I'll set it to make the shutdown permanent the next time . . . which is for you to choose, but three or four in the morning seems to me to be suitable."

  "First show me," Greiner said. "Now."

  Adele set down her wands and crossed her hands in her lap. "No," she said. "Send the signal yourself, Lieutenant. RCN, you said. Send it."

  Greiner dropped heavily into the seat of the console he'd used before; with the virtual keyboard he brought up a communications display as a sidebar. The realtime visuals of the Princess Cecile remained the main image. He checked his setup, then locked eyes with Adele momentarily before stabbing the Execute button.

  The Princess Cecile's lights went out. Her hull gleamed faintly in the starlight. Battery-powered lights appeared, beads of illumination which emphasized the greater darkness. If there'd been an audio pickup, Adele and Greiner would've heard angry shouting.

  The corvette's lights came on again, generally with a rush; a few quivered for a time as overage exciters struggled to build the charge. Adele, smiling with satisfaction, made a further adjustment with her wands. She put her handheld unit back in its pocket and rose.

  "They'll be wondering where we are," she said. "And I'm sure Captain Leary is getting a panicked call from the duty officer, saying that a fault shut off the ship's power momentarily. He'll leave and probably recommend the rest of us leave with him. If I don't accompany them, there may be awkward questions."

  "Yes, we'll go back to the banquet compartment," Greiner said, unlocking the hatch. "There've been enough odd things happening already tonight!"

  * * *

  "Ah, Adele?" Daniel asked. "I know you have, ah, ways of listening. Have you learned anything about what's happening in the Goldenfels?"

  He spoke in a low voice, pitching his words to carry across the hum of the bridge consoles operating on standby. The Princess Cecile waited under a complete lockout of radio communication, ordered by Daniel and enforced by Adele through the Signals Console.

  Adele turned to look at him, past Sun and Betts at the gunnery and missile boards respectively. The holographic displays, though blank, shed a pearly luminescence over the compartment. There was plenty of light to see by.

  "I haven't tried," she said. "I won't try. Too many things could go wrong."

  "Yes, of course," Daniel said. "Forgive me. Part of me keeps thinking of the Goldenfels as a freighter, and of course it's not."

  The Alliance vessel could be, must be, presumed to have electronic defenses and countermeasures equal to the material armament which Daniel could deduce from structural hints. The only visible plasma weapons were the twin 10-cm guns in the forward turret, comparable to the Sissie's own guns. No freighter would voyage the North with less.

  Two double-opening hatch covers on the Goldenfels' port side, toward the corvette, and similar ones to starboard, were of the correct size to cover twin 15-cm guns, however; or, less probably, individual 20-cm plasma cannon, weapons whose single bolt would at this range vaporize half the Princess Cecile.

  Daniel assumed that the Alliance vessel had a missile armament as well, though that wasn't a matter of immediate concern. If things went as wrong as they might soon do, the Goldenfels wouldn't need missiles to destroy the Sissie utterly.

  Daniel chuckled. Sun looked over at him. "Sir?" he said.

  A sub-machine gun hung from the back of the gunner's seat, though his primary task was to operate the plasma cannon if necessary. If things went as everyone hoped and expected, there wouldn't be shooting of any kind tonight.

  "If we think of this as a children's game, Sun," Daniel said, "us hiding in the shadows waiting to jump out and surprise our friends, then it doesn't seem so frightening, does it?"

  "Sir, I was raised in a tenement that looked out at Harbor Three," Sun said. "It was a tough place, I grant. But I don't recall having any friends with six-inch guns."

  After a moment he chuckled at the thought; a moment later, Betts guffawed. Daniel smiled with appreciation. They were a good lot, a good crew for hard times.

  And this was a very hard time.

  A bell chimed through the ship. Machinery purred or hissed according to its needs, but the vessel's human environment remained the same. The watches would change at the next bell, but not now; this was the last hour of sleep, the last hour of watching silent gauges or the alien night before giving the boring duty over to your relief.

  If it was going to happen, it wouldn't be long; and it was certainly going to happen.

  Daniel had issued small-arms to half the crew. He'd chosen from among the solidest personnel, but he'd also picked men and women who'd used guns in the past and were comfortable using them again—on human beings.

  That eliminated many otherwise suitable members of the crew. A man wasn't necessarily a coward because he wasn't willing to kill another person; a woman wasn't necessarily a
monster because she was willing.

  He glanced at Adele, who was doing something at her console—the only unit on the bridge which was active. He, Betts, and Sun sat quietly at their posts, ready to act when the balloon went up but electronically silent till then.

  Normally at this hour only the duty officer would have a live console; they had to assume that the Goldenfels could tell whether or not that was so tonight. Adele said hers needed to be operating, and Daniel assumed she had a reason. She always had in the past.

  The Klimovs were in shock cradles in their own quarters, not in the bridge annex. "For your safety," Daniel had told them; but in all truth, to keep them out of the way when he and his Sissies had to react instantly and possibly in unplanned fashions. The Klimovs weren't fools, but they were sometimes willful. Survival tonight required discipline.

  And skill. And not a little luck. . . .

  Daniel's eyes fell on Tovera, sitting on the deck with a sub-machine gun where she couldn't be seen through the open access hatch. She was smiling faintly. Sometimes, of course, people willing to kill other people are monsters.

  Though Hogg, prepared to fire his stocked impeller from the hatch beside her, wasn't inhuman: he was just a countryman who killed as a normal part of life and in the full knowledge that he too would die in his time. It didn't seem to make much practical difference; but it made a difference in Daniel's mind.

  "They're about to move," Adele said. She didn't sound tense, but she spoke very precisely. "They're passing orders—by voice only. They're being careful."

  "For what we are about to receive," Betts said, voicing the warriors' ancient joke, "the Lord make us thankful."