The Road of Danger

by David Drake

  She admitted to herself that she didn’t mind the situation, however. She had been raised as a Mundy of Chatsworth, and the Sissies’ behavior fitted her instinctive sense of rightness as surely as it did the crew’s.

  “We did an all-spectrum scan of the region as we were coming in,” Cory said. “This is the valley on ground-penetrating radar, so it’s without the ice, you see. Ships show up — ”

  Beads expanded one after another, just long enough to be identified as shapes in steel before Cory shrank them back to scale.

  “ — on the surface. Where the ice flow has carried them into one wall of the valley or the other, there’s scrape marks in the rock.”

  His hands poised on his virtual keyboard, preparing to raise the magnification of striations upstream of the bead slugged HEPPLEWHITE, OUT OF KOSSUTH. Adele had already done that with her wands. She didn’t need to see the markings — that was equivalent to proving the existence of gravity, so far as she was concerned — but it was useful to remind Cory that she hadn’t become a completely helpless ninny.

  Aloud she said, “Yes, I see.”

  “Well, that’s all what you’d expect,” Cory said earnestly. “Except for this one.”

  He expanded the highlighted bead until it filled the display. It was a ball formed from pentagonal plates. “Ma’am, this is on the valley floor, under three hundred feet of ice. It displaces about three thousand tonnes, and there’s no ship in the Sissie’s database that looks anything like it.”

  “It sank through the ice, then?” Adele said, frowning. She restrained her reflex to sort for dodecahedral spaceships, because her conscious intellect assured her that Cory wouldn’t have made a mistake when he told her that. He had been well trained.

  “Ma’am, maybe,” Cory said, but the anguish in his tone meant that he was contradicting her. “But if you look at the scrape marks behind her — ”

  This time he didn’t try to magnify them. Adele’s wands flickered, expanding and following the track up the valley; a very long way up the valley.

  “If the ice has been moving at the rate it has for the last twelve years — figuring from the marks the Manzanita Maid left — and I know it maybe hasn’t, but anyway that’s a figure; it ought to get us into the right order of magnitude. . . .”

  “Yes, I see that, Cory,” Adele said. “Get on with it.”

  “Well, the track computes to about thirty thousand years,” Cory said apologetically. “Which the model says is about when the planet’s orbit got eccentric because a dark star passed through the system.”

  “In other words, the ice began pushing — ”

  She decided not to call it a ship.

  “ — the object as soon as the glacier formed thirty thousand years ago. That doesn’t tell us how long it had been sitting on the valley floor before it started to move.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Cory said in relief. “That’s what I thought too. But I don’t know how it could be.”

  Adele sniffed; another person might have laughed. “Nor do I, Cory,” she said. “It should be possible to answer some of the questions by melting the glacier with our plasma thrusters, as we’ll be doing to fill our tanks of reaction mass, though of course on a much greater scale. But — ”

  She rotated her seat to face the young lieutenant; he was staring over his shoulder at her.

  “ — I think that will have to wait until we have more time. At present, we have to find a rebel to repatriate to Cinnabar.”

  There was a clang against the hull and a cheer from outside loud enough to be heard even though the corvette was closed up against the bitter wind. It appeared that the Princess Cecile was now the House of Hrynko. They would be lifting shortly.

  * * * *

  “Fellow Sissies!” Daniel said from one of the star of five consoles in the Battle Direction Center. He was speaking to the whole ship, his image appearing on all displays and his voice coming through commo helmets and the loudspeakers in every compartment and corridor. “You’ve all known something was going on. This is what is going on.”

  Vesey would normally have been here in the armored BDC as first lieutenant, ready to take command if a missile destroyed the bridge. Now she was at the command console in the bow, and Cory, the new first lieutenant, had moved back.

  “I’m about to become Kirby Pensett,” Daniel said. “Formerly a lieutenant in the RCN but now on half pay and a passenger on this vessel, the House of Hrynko. That’s the story, and it’s bloody important that you remember it when you’re talking to outsiders. Talking even to each other, because we never know who’ll be listening in when we’re on the ground.”

  Tovera, like Hogg on a jumpseat folded out from the bulkhead, glanced at Adele with a reptilian smile. Adele, seated at the console to Daniel’s right, was probably aware of her servant’s amusement — nobody was going to eavesdrop on the Princess Cecile when Adele was aboard — but she gave no reaction herself.

  It’s still the right thing to say. Even sober, spacers were notoriously loose-tongued, and the chance of a spacer being sober on the first night or two of liberty wasn’t very high.

  “You’re the crew of a yacht owned by a Kostroman noblewoman, the former Principal Hrynko,” Daniel said. “She looks a lot like Lady Adele Mundy, but you won’t call her that any more than you would the real Lady Mundy. You’ll say “ma’am’ or you’ll say “sir’ because she scares the crap out of you. She’s got a temper and you know how these wog nobles can carry on — ”

  He grinned at Adele. She grinned, broadly for her, though she didn’t look up from her display. She had at least his face inset in the image area, along with those of the other officers.

  “ — but she pays on time and the grub on the Hrynko is pretty bloody good. Just about RCN standard, I’d say.”

  There was general laughter at that, in the BDC and trailing down the corridor through the open hatchway. Private owners were notoriously liable to scrimp on the quantity and quality of the rations they provided their crews. An RCN captain checked the quality of all the consumables that came aboard, then signed his approval. A captain who cut corners on food or drink had problems not only with crew members — who knew the regulations — but with the Navy Board.

  “Mistress Vesey is captain,” Daniel said. His tone was cheery and bantering; handled clumsily, the situation could go from unfamiliar to frightening — a very small step for veteran spacers, who believed that surprises were either bad or fatal; as in space they generally were. “Principal Hrynko doesn’t know any more about astrogation than some high-born librarian from Xenos would.”

  The laughter was even louder this time. Adele continued to smile while her control wands twitched and jabbed. Daniel didn’t have the faintest idea what she was working at; it could be her family tree, for all he knew.

  He didn’t care. Adele said that everything was connected, and for her it was. Her mind was always working, a fact that regularly led to unexpected good results for those around her.

  “Now,” Daniel said, getting to the nub of it, “if you were any other crew than my Sissies, I’d tell you that this was going to be dangerous. We’ll be landing on Madison, an Alliance sector capital, claiming to be a Kostroman ship. Well, you and I have done worse than that to the Alliance, haven’t we, spacers?”

  The response this time was a bloodthirsty roar from the body of the ship, though the sound had been reduced to tinny echoes by the time it reached Daniel. Nobody inside the BDC actually cheered, though it wouldn’t have been a surprise if Fiducia and Rocker, the missileer’s mate and gunner’s mate, respectively, had joined in.

  “But there’s something else you ought to know, spacers,” Daniel said, pitching his voice a little lower to suggest that he had reached the serious part of the discussion. “Admiral Cox doesn’t know what we’re about to do. He thinks we’re going straight to Sunbright. Everybody in Macotta HQ thinks we’re going to Sunbright.”

  “Who bloody cares what the farmers out here think?” somebody s
houted. Daniel thought the voice was Woetjans’, but if so, she spoke for everybody aboard — Captain Daniel Leary included. Certainly the cheers seemed universal.

  In fact the tricky part was going to be keeping up the pretense of being Kostroman while they were on Madison. He’d slipped past that when he told the Sissies it was minor compared to what they’d done in the past.

  The deception wasn’t dangerous in the sense that the Alliance authorities would shoot them if the trick was detected, but it would certainly be embarrassing and might very well mean months or years of internment while diplomats discussed the matter in measured tones. Daniel didn’t imagine that the Macotta bureaucracy would strain itself in helping uppity naval personnel who’d come out from Xenos with an attitude.

  Very few of the Sissie’s crew were from Kostroma, perhaps six or eight out of over a hundred. That in itself wouldn’t surprise Alliance port officials. Spacers were a nation unto themselves. That was less true of a warship’s complement than it was for civilian vessels, but even so, no more than half the crew of the corvette Princess Cecile had been born on Cinnabar or worlds under the Republic’s hegemony.

  “Well, Sissies,” Daniel said. “We’re going to come through this fine, like we have before, if we all do our jobs. This time for you that means mostly watching what you say when we’re on the ground. And for me, that means being Kirby Pensett, who used to be an RCN officer. Can we carry it off?”

  There were so many variations in the reply that they merged into a growl, but they all amounted to “Yes!” generally with a word or words of emphasis.

  “Then for the last time until we’ve succeeded, let me say it’s an honor to command you, Sissies. Six out!”

  Over the cheers, Vesey’s amplified voice from the bridge said, “Captain to ship! Prepare for liftoff in thirty, that is three-zero seconds.”

  Unexpectedly she added, “Next stop Madison, spacers.”

  Daniel grinned. Vesey tended to seem colorless, and it wasn’t often that she raised a cheer. She got one this time.

  CHAPTER 7

  Ashetown on Madison

  Daniel walked down the Harborfront wearing mottled-gray utilities without any markings. A veteran might recognize them as RCN in cut and color, but in dim light they would be indistinguishable from the fleet’s gray-green or from similar garments worn by spacers all over the human universe. The clothing wasn’t a statement of allegiance, though it did imply his profession.

  That would have been a safe bet anyway. Most people at the waterside of a spaceport were spacers or had been spacers.

  “Ah, young master,” Hogg said in a falsely righteous tone as he viewed the storefronts. “What sinks of iniquity! How I long for the good clean air behind the pigsties back at Bantry.”

  “You’re being unjust to the establishments, Hogg,” Daniel said, pursing his lips judiciously. They were looking for the Miltiades Hotel, where the offices of Calpurnius Trading were located.

  The Grand Hotel Pleasaunce was to their right, a three-story establishment with a ship chandler and a jewelry store on the ground floor. “They’re quite upscale, it seems to me. Now, if we were to wander down an alley, that might be another thing altogether.”

  Though the air did have an unpleasant pong; indeed, Daniel would almost call it a texture. It didn’t have anything to do with depravity, however. At a guess, the algae on the surface of the harbor included something that fixed sulfur, which became hydrogen sulfide at the touch of plasma exhaust.

  The patches of virulent yellow which floated among the greens and browns were a good candidate for the culprit. Chances were it was an off-planet species which had travelled through the Matrix on a starship’s floats and now was adapting to Madison. Viewed in the right way, it was an uplifting story of triumph over adversity.

  “Well, anyway it don’t half stink!” said Hogg, completing the thought which his master hadn’t spoken aloud. Daniel chuckled.

  Small boats lined the seafront. The naval harbor had concrete slips, but the commercial side of Ashetown Haven used floating walkways and docks — the House of Hrynko was tied up to one — or, for the majority of traffic, anchorages at pilings in the open roadstead with lighters and water taxis to reach dry land.

  “And here we are, I believe,” said Daniel, nodding to the building across the intersecting street — Fifth Street, according to the sign suspended on cables in the middle of the intersection. The wicker railing of the second-floor balcony was woven to read MILTIADES HOTEL in brown letters against cream; above the tile roof were steps to a miniature widow’s walk.

  The wall of the building’s ground floor was pale orange stucco with CALPURNIUS TRADING in florid black letters, and CONTRACTORS AND PURVEYORS in smaller script beneath them. There were no windows, only a heavy door which was held open by a doorstop in the form of a bronze dog.

  As Daniel started across the street, a handful of ragged boys rushed toward him, crying, “Spare change, Captain, spare change!”

  “Sorry, lads, I’m on the beach my — ” Daniel started to say. There was a loud whap! and a cry behind him. He looked over his shoulder to see another boy staggering away, bent over and holding his left ear.

  Hogg picked up the shears the boy had dropped; he had been reaching out to cut the straps of Daniel’s belt wallet. Hogg clenched and opened his other hand, working feeling back into his fingers; he’d slapped the boy instead of using his fist. From his own youthful experience, Daniel knew that such blows felt like those of a wooden bat.

  Hogg twisted the shears till the steel snapped, then dropped the pieces behind him. “Cheeky little sods,” he growled. “Did they think I’m blind? Or my arm’s crippled?”

  The other boys had vanished like mist as the sun rose. “Not anymore, I’m sure,” Daniel said, and he stepped into the premises of Calpurnius Trading.

  Three young male clerks were at desks behind the counter to the left. A capable-looking middle-aged woman sat to the right of the doorway. Her console had come from a starship, probably a passenger liner of the previous century. Even as old as that, an astrogation computer was more than sufficient for any planet-bound task. The back wall was wooden with two doors; both were closed.

  “Yes, gentlemen?” the woman said. Daniel hadn’t seen her send a signal, but an interior door opened and two men came out.

  “I’m Kirby Pensett, late of the RCN,” Daniel said, withdrawing an identification chip from his belt pouch. “That name doesn’t mean anything to you, but I’m here as representative of Bernhard Sattler, whom you do know. I’m to speak either to Mistress Sysco or Master Bremington.”

  “Why has Bernhard sent an agent?” said the older, better dressed of the two men. His companion looked like a stevedore. “Are you here to inspect us, is that what you mean?”

  “Master Bremington?” Daniel said. “I’m here to inspect Master Sattler’s investment. Which is significant enough to justify inspection — in my opinion, but much more importantly, in his. Do you have a problem with this?”

  “He’s who he says he is, Picque,” said the woman, who had inserted Daniel’s chip into her console. “Look, we’ve got nothing to hide. If Bernhard wants to look things over, I guess I don’t blame him.”

  Bremington made a sour face. “Well, I suppose I can’t complain that Sattler didn’t give us warning,” he said. “And of course, we don’t have anything to hide. That is . . .”

  He paused and gave Daniel a concerned look.

  Daniel spread his hands. “I’m here on Master Sattler’s behalf,” he said. “If it may be that some port duties or the like didn’t get paid, that’s something for a government to worry about — not me. I would say that so long as the profits are being shared properly, then anything that benefits the company, benefits Master Sattler.”

  Bremington gave Daniel a slight smile, the first break in hostility since he entered the lobby. “Come on back to my office,” he said, “and after we’ve talked for a moment, I’ll set you up with a console and full
access codes.”

  He cleared his throat and added, “We’d have gone bust seven years ago if Bernhard hadn’t raised our capitalization. I’d cheat my mother before I’d cheat him.”

  “Thank you, Master Bremington,” Daniel said with a half bow. With a deeper bow to the woman, he added, “And thank you, mistress.”

  “I’ll just wander around, if that’s all right with you, sir,” said Hogg. The words were more respectful than the tone in which he spoke them.

  Daniel followed Bremington down a short hallway. Before the door behind him closed, he heard Hogg said, “I wonder, mistress, if there’s a place nearby that a poor man might find a drink and a game of poker?”

  * * * *

  The pale russet robe Adele wore in her guise as Principal Hrynko felt unfamiliar but not uncomfortable. She wore khaki utilities beneath it, and the rigger who had run it up for her had placed long vertical slits along the sides as directed. Through them she could reach her pistol or her data unit as easily as she could have normally.

  “Hallelujah, I’m a bum!” her escort chorused. She wasn’t sure how the Alliance staff would to react to the details of her escort, but she suspected no one on Madison except her had more than a passing acquaintance with Kostroman nobility. “Hallelujah, bum again!”

  Techs had built Adele’s litter from high-pressure tubing and bats of insulation. Covered with ribbons and bunting from the ship’s stores, it was flashy enough to appeal to any real Kostroman. Spacers felt that the more decoration, the better; a taste shared by most cultures once you got past the sophisticates of Xenos and Pleasaunce City.

  Adele’s data unit was already operating in passive mode, gathering inputs according to the instructions Adele had programmed before she left the ship. She didn’t suppose she’d need the pistol at Forty Stars Sector Headquarters, but there had been unpleasant surprises in the past. They had been less unpleasant because she had been able to shoot her way out of trouble.