The Far Side of The Stars

by David Drake

  "But not directly," he continued. "The Sissie can't bull through the base's outer defenses the way a battleship might, so we're going by way of Morzanga."

  CHAPTER 26

  "All Alliance personnel!" Adele said. "This is RCS Termagant, ordering you in the name of Admiral Arnold Plumly to surrender or face extermination. War has been declared between the Republic of Cinnabar and the Alliance of Free Stars."

  The Alliance castaways might have working sensors, and even a good telescope could distinguish between a corvette and a battleship in orbit. Daniel had decided that the Princess Cecile could pass for a light cruiser scouting for a powerful squadron, however. They were broadcasting the message on four different radio frequency bands which were or had been used by the Goldenfels. With luck, some of the castaways were monitoring the RF spectrum still, or at least were wearing their commo helmets. They must have hopes for rescue, after all.

  "Gather without your weapons in the center of the native village near the wreck of the Goldenfels," Adele continued. "Keep clear of the wreck itself: we will vaporize it from orbit before we land on Morzanga to collect prisoners. Anybody who doesn't surrender will be killed."

  The Princess Cecile's low orbit whisked her over the horizon from the nameless village where the Goldenfels lay on its side. Adele broke the transmission and straightened in her couch to meet the eyes of the others on the bridge.

  "I don't get it, sir," Sun said to Daniel in a troubled voice. "They must know that even if we really were a squadron big enough to rate an admiral commanding, we couldn't track 'em down in the bush. That'd take a regiment of ground troops with jungle training, not a couple hundred dismounted spacers. They're going to hide, not come traipsing out in the open to be thrown in a cage. Aren't they?"

  Daniel rotated the command console so that he could smile at the gunner while still keeping an eye on the Plot Position Indicator which told him what was in the immediate neighborhood of Morzanga. At the moment nothing was, but that could change in a heartbeat.

  "Quite right, Sun," Daniel said, grinning past him to acknowledge Adele at the Signals console. "They probably will run, most of them anyway. I suppose there'll be a few who prefer a Cinnabar prison hulk to living in the wilderness with a tribe of savages."

  Adele's sensors picked up scatter from emitters on three of the four Alliance bands. The signals were low power and unintelligible over the horizon; all she knew for certain was that her transmissions had stirred the Goldenfels' castaways to talk among themselves.

  "But my purpose is to get them away from the wreck itself," Daniel continued. "It's immaterial whether they hide in the jungle or stand in the middle of the village with their hands in the air. We'll be leaving them here when we lift off."

  He looked at Adele again. "Officer Mundy, how many orbits should we make before going in? I want to be sure they've heard the warning."

  "They're talking among themselves," Adele said. "I won't be able to tell what they're saying till we come over the horizon again, though, so perhaps you'll want to wait until I can pick up the content."

  Daniel's sunny smile brightened the bare steel walls of the bridge. "Oh, I think we can assume that they're not setting up to defend the Goldenfels when they reasonably believe that we're going to blast it with plasma cannon or a nuke, don't you? And after all, we're in rather a hurry."

  He switched to the intercom channel and continued, "Ship, this is Six. We'll begin braking to land in seven minutes. This'll be another dry landing and there's at least a chance that there'll be some Alliance spacers popping small arms at us while we're coming in, so be ready for whatever happens. Six out."

  Daniel turned his attention to his console. Adele echoed it momentarily on her own in case she'd be called on to act shortly. She saw nothing for personal concern.

  The command display kept the PPI on the upper left quadrant while the remainder was given over to engineering data—plasma thrusters, High Drive motors, machinery status, and the amount of reaction mass in each of the eight separate tanks. They'd topped off on Todos Santos—and had taken the time to lay in bulk provisions as well, since they'd been limited to on-board stores ever since the Princess Cecile left Tegeli.

  "It could get pretty exciting clearing 'em out of a warren the size of the Goldenfels," Hogg commented, standing to the right of the bridge hatch while Tovera stood on the left. Strictly speaking they should've been strapped into their bunks during landing because they didn't have ship-handling duties—but it didn't really matter, and neither of the pair were people to whom folk spoke strictly.

  "We haven't had any excitement for a long time," Tovera said. She gave Hogg a slow smile. "Too long, perhaps."

  "There's that," he agreed, adjusting the bandolier which held reloads for his heavy impeller. "There is that."

  Adele listened to the by-play as she made a final check of her own responsibilities. She didn't understand either Hogg or Tovera; but then, she didn't understand most people, herself included. At least you could predict with assurance what Hogg and Tovera would do in a given situation. If more people were like them, life would be simpler—albeit much more dangerous.

  Daniel had planned the details of the operation with his officers on the brutal five-day voyage to Morzanga, all of it spent in the Matrix without the usual drops into sidereal space to check their position and to provide the crew with a brief taste of normality. Time was very short, especially if they ran into trouble here—and they were almost certain to run into trouble.

  Adele's job was to update the imagery of the Goldenfels and the cannon-ripped country craft overturned in the jungle. The Princess Cecile had only made one pass in low orbit, but thanks to Mistress Sand the corvette's imaging equipment was of even higher quality than normal for an RCN warship.

  She transferred the new visuals into a suspense file available to all the command group. Daniel and Pasternak were wholly involved in the landing, but she noticed that the officers in the Battle Direction Center opened the imagery at once. They were backup for the landing, but when Mr. Leary had the conn nobody else worried much.

  "Ship, prepare for braking!" Daniel ordered. The thrusters roared to life, dropping the Sissie into the deeper atmosphere.

  Adele pored over the visuals as they rocked and shuddered toward the ground. There were no differences she could see between these shots and the file images taken when the Princess Cecile lifted from Morzanga a matter of weeks, bare weeks, before. It certainly seemed longer than that. . . .

  The jungle still covered the ancient wreck. That didn't prove that the Goldenfels' crew hadn't been working on her, but there was no sign they had. Of course if the Alliance spacers had already carried the High Drive motors to their own vessel, it'd save the Sissies some time.

  That was unlikely, though. They probably didn't even know the older wreck existed.

  "Prepare for landing!" Daniel ordered. "Prepare for landing!"

  The thunder redoubled. The corvette bobbled like a ball in a waterspout, then touched: the stern outriggers feather-light, the bow an instant later and minusculely harder. Hatches started to open immediately.

  "Laying down covering fire!" Sun announced. The cannon in the dorsal turret fired a burst of four high-intensity plasma discharges just short of the Goldenfels, which was on its side only a hundred meters from where the Sissie'd landed. The guns' directed thermonuclear explosions made the corvette ring like a struck anvil and dug fiery scoopfuls out of the earth. Fans of glass and blazing humus sprayed against the Goldenfels' hull.

  Adele had a 360-degree panorama at the bottom of her display. She didn't see any Alliance spacers in it, but through the crash of plasma blanketing the RF spectrum she heard panicked squeals on the two frequencies the Goldenfels had used for short-range communication.

  "Daniel, they're running!" she said into the two-way link. Should she have used the general channel? And she should've called him Captain or Six or something else, but she was monitoring multiple simultaneous transmissions a
nd that was bloody well enough to worry about! "Everybody on radio's running for the jungle or telling other people to run."

  Valves squealed open. Steam roared from the ground beneath the Princess Cecile as Mr. Pasternak dumped reaction mass to cool the plasma-heated soil. Heavily-armed Sissies leaped from the D Deck ports, staggering blindly toward the Goldenfels until they'd gotten far enough from the corvette to open their eyes again.

  Daniel rose from his console and took the sub-machine gun Hogg handed him. He was already wearing his equipment belt from which now dangled several clusters of grenades as well as the holstered pistol. "Mr. Chewning, you have the ship!" he ordered as he started for the door. "Six out."

  Adele had gotten up also. She was directly behind Daniel when he reached the companionway.

  "You've got no business here!" Daniel shouted over his shoulder. "I need to see what condition the freighter's control room's in!"

  "And I need to see their commo suite!" Adele replied tartly. "Which I suspect is more important to our accomplishing your intention than anything in the control room!"

  Woetjans and fifty of the Sissie's crew were dodging between the smoking craters the cannon had just blown. Daniel had brought the corvette down beside the Goldenfels' belly rather than her dorsal spine. Her ventral turret was still retracted, but the marooned crew had removed access plates on her underside. Ladders lashed together from saplings served them. Adele supposed that initially the crew had climbed out by ropes after antimatter detonations flipped the freighter onto her starboard side.

  An Alliance spacer appeared at a hatch with a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle that seemed too heavy for her to handle easily. She dropped it to the ground fifteen feet below, then noticed the oncoming Sissies as she turned to put her feet on the ladder.

  "Ship, don't shoot!" Daniel ordered. Adele had set one of the Princess Cecile's main transmitters to rebroadcast low-powered signals from his helmet, but none of the boarding group seemed to be trigger-happy.

  The Alliance spacer tried to change her mind, but she'd already committed to coming down. She lost her grip and swung out of the hatchway, hitting the ground not far from her bundle. She twitched but didn't try to get up.

  The Goldenfels had mounted twelve High Drive motors on her underside. Normally the outriggers carrying the plasma thrusters would've been withdrawn against the hull before the vessel shifted to matter/antimatter annihilation. Since the ship had been in landing mode this time, the tops of the outriggers were slightly pitted—but only slightly, because the High Drive had failed almost instantly, melting not only the motors but portions of the surrounding hull plates as well.

  Sissies climbed the steep ladders into the Goldenfels with their legs alone, leaving their hands free to point their weapons ahead of them. Nobody appeared to give them a target before they swarmed aboard the freighter. Most of the boarding party were riggers since the hull-side crewmen were needed during landing. Rigging suits weighed more than the guns and munitions they were carrying now, and they were well-practiced in scrambling up antennas to clear balky winches and fouled cables.

  Adele struggled to keep up with Daniel and Hogg as they pounded heavily across ground the Princess Cecile had burned bare the first time she landed on Tegeli. Running wasn't a skill she'd learned in youth, nor had poverty trained her in it. She wondered about navigating the corridors of a vessel lying on its side. She didn't suppose the spacers cared, since they were used to maneuvering in weightlessness where all directions were the same.

  "Sir, there's some gone out the dorsal hatches!" a spacer called, using the alert channel instead of the general push that was full of pointless, excited chatter. "They're getting away! They're getting away!"

  "Let 'em go, Raymond!" Daniel replied. Adele could've checked the transmitter number, but Daniel didn't have to. "We want them to escape. Don't shoot! Don't—"

  A burst of shots rang from the Goldenfels' interior, multiplied by echoes into a pitched battle. A single pellet, a drop of crimson fire, zipped from what had been the entry hatch.

  "—shoot!"

  There were six ladders into the ship's belly. Barnes and Dasi waited at the bottom of the one which Daniel started climbing. Hogg followed him muttering curses, but Hogg cursed a great deal. He couldn't have really believed that Daniel was at any real risk with fifty Sissies ahead of him.

  Adele reached for the ladder. The stringers were curving lengths of vine, woody and four inches in diameter, but the rungs were splits from straight sections of trunk; some oozed sap.

  "We got you, mistress!" Dasi said. He took her right hand and led it over his shoulder as he turned his back to her. "Just hold tight."

  "Woetjans told us t' wait, ma'am," Barnes said, gripping her under the arms and lifting her to where her legs clamped instinctively around Dasi's waist. "Don't 'cha worry, they'll hold us!"

  Dasi started up the ladder at what would've been a dead run on the level. Barnes followed, his hands planted in the seat of Adele's utilities to support at least half her weight. She was too shocked to be angry—not that her fulminating would've changed what anybody was doing.

  And besides, Woetjans was right, as Adele realized when she allowed herself to think about what was happening. Signals Officer Mundy wasn't going to be much use to her captain if she lay sprawled at the foot of the ladder like that Alliance spacer.

  The two riggers deposited Adele in the hold. The auxiliary power unit still operated so the Goldenfels' systems were live, but there'd never been many lights here in the freighter's belly. Three spacers wearing bits of Alliance uniform, and a red-haired native woman shivering with terror, lay on the deck with their hands on the backs of their necks. Lamsoe guarded them with a sour expression.

  Crude steps gave access to the hatches into the compartment on the next deck; sets of companionways led on from there. Two of the armored tubes were close enough to what was now the deck that Adele didn't need help to follow Daniel and Hogg. Tovera brought up the rear.

  They continued horizontally toward bridge level, crawling on the edges of the treads. Adele smiled faintly. She'd worked in stacks where access wasn't a great deal better, so she didn't have difficulty keeping up. The hatches at every deck were open. The corridors echoed with excited shouts, but there didn't seem to be fighting. Though the air-circulation equipment was working, the air smelled of wood smoke and human waste; neither the galley nor the heads would function with the ship at this angle, but some people had decided to make their homes in the vessel anyway.

  Adele scrambled out onto A Deck. The riggers' airlock in the same compartment was open to the jungle beyond.

  "Sir, we've got all the major spaces!" Woetjans said to Daniel. The bosun had stuck a pickup on a hatch coaming and flexed it to her helmet. That turned the ship's steel structure, otherwise a Faraday cage blocking helmet radio, into a giant antenna. "There wasn't any fighting, just one 'a the boys tripping with his finger on the trigger. No harm done, just some bits of slug in his butt that the medicomp'll get out no sweat."

  She grinned in embarrassment. "Ricochet, you know."

  "Get all the prisoners outside, Woetjans," Daniel said as he headed down the corridor bulkhead toward the bridge. "We'll have to build some sort of holding cage, I suppose. Dammit, I was hoping they'd all run but they just weren't organized enough!"

  Adele checked the hatch of the Signals Room. It was closed and therefore automatically locked. She punched in the twelve-letter code she'd abstracted when Lieutenant Greiner allowed her to enter the Goldenfels' computer. The mechanism whined as hydraulic pumps lifted the armored panel open.

  Adele climbed in, ducking so that her head cleared what was meant to be the left side of the hatch coaming. The air of the compartment had a lived-in smell. The now-deck was littered with things that'd flown from their proper locations when the freighter blasted itself onto its side.

  Adele switched live the nearest console, the one she'd used before. Rather than try to do more with a keyboard that'd now be vert
ical, she got out her handheld unit to synch it with the ship's system.

  Bandeng, the tech whom she'd met, rose from where he'd been hiding behind the second console. He was aiming his pistol at her.

  "By God, there is some justice!" he snarled. "Now, bitch, you're going to get me out of here or I'll blow your head off!"

  "I'll be glad to get you out of the ship, Mr. Bandeng," Adele said. She wanted to put her little data unit away but she was afraid that might look threatening to a man who was obviously on the edge of blind terror. "Neither you nor your fellow crewmen are at any risk from us."

  "You say!" Bandeng said. "You say! I know you can't carry prisoners on that sliver of a corvette. You're planning to shoot us all! In fact, maybe I'll—"

  Adele felt rather than saw Tovera behind her. Bandeng's eyes shifted right to follow the movement. Six pellets from Tovera's sub-machine gun blew his face apart.

  Bandeng convulsed backward, voiding his bowels. His pistol clacked off the ceiling and dropped. His heels were thumping a tattoo on the deck.

  Adele turned. Her ears rang with the series of lightning-sharp cracks. The muzzle of Tovera's little sub-machine gun shimmered white. Ozone from the high-voltage discharge mingled with the stench of the dead man's feces.

  Tovera smiled. "Shall I get a couple of the spacers to clear that out of here, mistress?" she said. She nodded to where Bandeng had ceased to spasm.

  "Yes," Adele said. She seated herself on the deck with her data unit on her lap, and began to check the status of the Goldenfels' signals and code suites. Her work was critically important if the attack on Gehenna was to succeed.

  And besides, if she managed to concentrate on her task as fully as she usually did, she would forget for the time the way Bandeng's right eye had splashed as the first pellet struck it.

  * * *

  "The truck's back again," Hogg shouted down from the dorsal hatch where he'd kept watch most of the four days they'd been on Morzanga. "Looks like Pasternak's come back with it."