The Road of Danger

by David Drake

  “Can’t be done,” said West much more forcefully. “Can’t be done! Never heard of nobody doing that!”

  “Nonsense,” Daniel said in a brusquely cheerful tone. “We did it in the RCN every day. Well, every voyage, pretty much.”

  That was a flat lie, but it was closer to the truth than West’s denial. Any RCN Academy graduate should be able to bring her ship close enough to an intended point after seven straight days in the Matrix that she could at least find her goal after extraction.

  The problem was the human cost. People saw things after long immersion in the Matrix. Seven days was long enough for spacers to see a corridor where they knew there was a solid bulkhead; and sometimes to see someone or something approaching down that corridor.

  Daniel had once seen his mother. She had stared at him in horror, then walked on very quickly and disappeared.

  “You done that?” West said, but the words sounded like a prayer for absolution.

  “Many times,” Daniel said, truthfully this time. “Now, I’ve got the new course loaded. Hargate, I’ll need your suit for the initial watch. West, you and I will go clear the stuck antenna or whatever the problem really is. Hogg — ”

  He smiled at his servant. So far, so good.

  “ — I’ll bang three times on the hull with a wrench when we’re ready. When I do that, you push the red button.”

  He pointed to the Execute button on the console. At one time it would have been protected with a hinged cage, but that had been lost in the distant past.

  “Got it?”

  Hogg grunted. “Guess I can handle that, young master,” he said. “In between trying to learn how to pour piss outa a boot, y’know.”

  Hargate was stripping off the ill-fitting hard suit with enthusiasm. He might have doubts about seven straight days in the Matrix, but he was certain he didn’t want to wear the suit.

  Lindstrom, though, frowned and said, “Look, Pensett, we’re not RCN, you know, even if you are. I’m not sure — ”

  “What I’m not sure about, mistress,” Daniel said, “is what these yobbos on the Estremadura are going to do if they find an ex-RCN officer on a blockade runner. I don’t worry about a trip to Westerbeke, but instead it just might be a dive out an airlock without a suit. And if they space me, well — ”

  He shrugged.

  “ — they’re not going to leave witnesses, are they?”

  There was silence in the cabin for a moment. Then Lindstrom sighed and said, “Sunbright it is, I suppose. But I tell you, Pensett, we didn’t have any of this trouble before you came aboard.”

  “Don’t fret, mistress,” Daniel said as he started getting into the hard suit with Hargate’s help. “It’ll be a smooth run from here on out, and at the other end — ”

  He grinned at the glum-faced crew members.

  “ — we’ll all be able to get just as drunk on Sunbright as we could’ve done on Cremona.”

  Ashe Haven on Madison

  As Adele entered the bridge she felt the circulating pumps start, a necessary preliminary before testing the plasma thrusters. The big pumps in the stern throbbed a moment later, drawing water from the harbor. For the moment the draft would be wasted back into the slip, but when thrusters were lighted those pumps would replenish the reaction-mass tanks.

  Vesey had rotated the command console inward. When she saw Adele, she shrank her display so that their eyes could meet without a holographic veil between them.

  Adele felt a flash of irritation: she much preferred to be anonymous, a shadow ignored by the others present. She swallowed the reaction since it was manifestly unjust. Everyone aboard was faced by an uncertain situation, and they had to take their cues from Officer Mundy.

  “Carry on, Captain Vesey,” she said aloud as she settled onto her console. Her voice was no colder nor more clipped than it would be if she had just been given wonderful news. “I have some matters to discuss with our passenger, and I’ve chosen to do so here on the bridge.”

  The only wonderful news Adele could imagine at the moment was a report that Daniel was safe. A believable report, because she didn’t indulge in wishful thinking.

  “Yes, sir,” said Vesey and expanded her display again. Adele brought hers live.

  Sun had gotten up from the gunnery station beside Adele’s and was showing Master Osorio how to use the training seat which folded out from the back of the signals console; Chazanoff at the missile station had half turned to be able to look sidelong at Adele across the compartment, while Tovera watched the whole business with cold amusement from a jumpseat against the aft bulkhead.

  Adele supposed it was amusing if viewed in the correct fashion: everyone was staring at the woman who preferred to be invisible. Perhaps at some later point she would actually be able to feel the humor instead of merely accepting it intellectually; for now, she was satisfied that nobody looking at her would understand what she was thinking.

  Pasternak announced over the PA system and the general intercom channel — the general push, as Adele had learned to call it in the RCN — “Testing thrusters one and eight!”

  A moment later thrusters roared. Shortly after that, steam and the sting of ozone drifted into the bridge through open hatches.

  She echoed Vesey’s display on her own. Cory was in charge of the liftoff, with Vesey overseeing the maneuver; Cazelet was ghosting it from the astrogation console.

  Adele allowed herself to compare the Sissie’s array of talent with what she knew of the officers on ordinary commercial vessels in the Macotta Region, or anywhere on the fringes of human settlement, for that matter. Most astrogators would be trained or half trained by apprenticing with people who were themselves without formal training. The exceptions were generally drunks or officers who for similar reasons had been driven from the core worlds. Only one or at most two people to a ship had even that training, with perhaps a spacer who knew how to program the computer to give a lowest-common-denominator solution.

  Adele’s present life was as close to perfect as she could imagine it being. She was a member of the most efficient ship of the finest navy in the human universe. Her friends and colleagues cherished and respected her, and they constantly displayed themselves worthy of her respect — and of her love, as she understood the meaning of the word.

  But to achieve this perfect — in Adele’s terms — life, it was necessary that the Mundys of Chatsworth have been massacred and that Adele have gone on to kill more people than she could count; people who often visited her dreams in the hours before dawn. Everything had a cost, she supposed.

  The image of Osorio at the top of her display seemed to be speaking, though Adele couldn’t have heard unaided speech over the thruster roar even if she hadn’t already raised the sound-cancelling field around her station. She felt a moment’s regret at her behavior: she didn’t like the Cremonan attaché, but it had been discourteous to bring him up here and then ignore him.

  She adjusted the cancellation field to encompass the console’s back as well as its front station, then said, “The crew is testing the thrusters, Master Osorio. There’ll be nothing to see until we lift, but — ”

  Adele used the override controls on her side of the console to provide Osorio with a panorama of the harbor as viewed from a sensor on the knuckle of the Dorsal A antenna, at present the highest point on the Sissie. As an afterthought, she added her own image to the top of his display so that he could look at her. He seemed to be completely at a loss with the console controls.

  “ — that shouldn’t be long. In the interim, you can explain how you sell the prizes captured by Cremonan privateers.”

  Adele had that information already from Forty Stars files, but she was interested in how Osorio would react. His willingness to be frank — let alone honest — would give her a gauge of his character.

  “Well, technically they’re not Cremonan privateers, they’re Sunbright Republic privateers,” he said, “but most of them are fitted out and crewed on Cremona, of course. The le
sser Names” — members of the Cremonan noble class — “own most of them, because that doesn’t require much capital. And they sell their prizes on Bailey’s Horn, an independent world but in the Forty Stars, you see?”

  “You personally own privateers, then?” Adele said — a question that she didn’t have the answer to. Osorio was surprising her positively. It was very probable, given her mind-set, that surprises would be positive ones.

  “I have shares in two or three,” Osorio said casually, “but the real profit comes from blockade running if you have enough capital to buy merchandise. And to accept the occasional run of bad luck.”

  His image shrugged. “Four ships in a row that I had half interests in were captured. Even so, with profits of five hundred percent on each successful cargo, it has been a very good investment.”

  Adele kept her brow smooth, but she was frowning mentally as she reviewed the data already in her files. “Are you and your fellows, your Friends of Sunbright, outfitting all the blockade runners, then?” she said.

  The Forty Stars records indicated there were about a hundred ships occupied in the trade at any one time. Though most individually were quite small, they and their cargoes added up to a very considerable outlay.

  The yacht’s hatches were ringing closed. The rumbling which Adele felt through the fabric of the ship was a gear train raising the boarding ramp to become the main hatch. Osorio couldn’t identify the chorus of sounds and vibrations as normal and harmless, though. Instead of answering, he looked around in concern — because he was at the back of a console that would show him only the starboard hull — and said, “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes,” Adele said. “The crew is readying the ship for liftoff. I asked if the Friends of Sunbright owned most of the blockade runners.”

  The words were a verbal slap rather than a question this time around. Surely the man had travelled on a starship before, to bring him from Cremona to here if nothing else. And not so very long ago!

  “Ah,” Osorio said, nodding as he tried to raise his mind from a slough of fear. “No, no; that would be wonderful, but even together we could not support more than a quarter of the ships trading with the rebels. The trading houses outfit most of them, but even they take money from off-planet investors. From Cinnabar, yes, but from Pleasaunce too, I’m sure.”

  He shrugged, relaxing in the contemplation of profits — and apparent irritation at the fact that others were making most of those profits. “The biggest houses on Cremona are from Alliance planets,” he said, “and they all have correspondent firms on their homeworlds. They own as many blockade runners as everyone else together, or very nearly so!”

  Adele looked at his image, though that was merely a place to rest her eyes as her mind considered the avenues which the situation offered to their mission, the Sissie’s mission. If Osorio was being truthful and accurate, of course; but he was in a position to know the true situation, and he didn’t seem to her to be lying.

  “It isn’t fair that the foreigners make so much more of the money than we Cremonans do!” he added bitterly, as if to underscore her belief that he was honest.

  Adele continued to look at him. Alliance and Cinnabar estimates agreed that the Cremonan Names controlled ninety percent of the planet’s wealth. They also agreed that the Names paid no taxes whatever to the central government, which explained why Cremona’s government was even weaker than the norm of similarly benighted fringe worlds.

  “The universe has never appeared to me to be particularly fair,” Adele said at last. “I think some people should be thankful for that reality.”

  After a moment, she said, “Many more people should be thankful than appear to be, in fact.”

  Before Osorio could respond — if he even intended to — Cory’s voice boomed through the speakers in unconscious attempt to mimic Daniel, “Ship, this is Five! Prepare for liftoff!”

  The roar of the eight thrusters began to build. At full output they filled the world of all those aboard the House of Hrynko.

  The Matrix, en route to Sunbright

  Daniel waited in the Savoy’s airlock with his gauntlet on the pump housing. The panel was fitted with red and green lights to indicate whether the atmosphere within the lock was balanced with that on the other side of the hatch, but they didn’t work. Waiting until he could feel the pump shut off gave the same result.

  The vibration stilled. Daniel opened the inner hatch with one hand and lifted off his helmet — he had already unlatched it — with the other. Hogg helped his master step over the coaming. Daniel started to object, but a sudden, unutterable weariness stilled his tongue.

  Hogg walked him toward the owner’s bunk. Lindstrom got out of the way without objection.

  “I’ve seen you look this bad before, young master,” Hogg said, “but you’d been having more fun than you seem to be now.”

  Daniel sat heavily with his legs splayed out before him. He would have collapsed had it not been for Hogg’s support. West, who had the next shift on the hull, and Lindstrom herself began stripping off his hard suit.

  “I was going to set some course adjustments at the console,” Daniel said. He thought he sounded hoarse. His voice was so soft that he wasn’t sure the others present could make out his words. “I think I’d better get a little sleep first, though. Don’t let me sleep more than an hour.”

  Hogg snorted. “You’ll sleep longer than that,” he said, “and I’ll try to fix up some of the raw patches where these bloody suits’ve been rubbing you. They’re eating you alive, bugger me if they ain’t!”

  Hogg glared at Lindstrom, who didn’t look up. Working in concert with West, she wriggled the lower half of the hard suit down and off Daniel’s legs. He felt sudden relief, followed as suddenly by jabs of pain as the compartment’s cooler air touched the sores which the ill-fitting hard suits rubbed in him. He could wear either suit, but they merely punished different portions of his skin.

  Lindstrom and West — Hargate and Blemberg were asleep, and Edmonson was still on the hull — unlatched the upper portion of the suit.

  Hogg began daubing Daniel’s left ankle with salve from the medical kit. “Wish I had proper lanolin salve like I would back at Bantry,” he growled in a savage tone.

  “It’s not just what the suits cost,” Lindstrom muttered defensively. She was careful not to meet the eyes of either Hogg or his master. “It’s volume. You see how tight it is with two hard suits. This isn’t a luxury liner here.”

  The remainder of the suit came off. This particular one scraped Daniel’s collarbones instead of his elbows like the other. Hogg lifted away the folded rags which at least absorbed the matter leaking from the sores and got to work with the salve again.

  “Oh, well, it’s a cheap price to pay for Sunbright’s liberty,” Daniel said cheerfully.

  Lindstrom snorted. “Liberty?” she said. “Is that what you call it?”

  “More like rats in a pit,” said West, sitting on the deck to slide his legs into the suit Daniel had relinquished. “With no food.”

  He looked up at the shipowner. “Nothing against you, mum,” he said, “but I might not’ve made the run this time without Petrov promised us a bonus if we’d . . .”

  He must have been very tired to have said that, Daniel thought as West stopped speaking with his mouth open. He seemed frozen, afraid to turn his head for fear of seeing either Daniel or Hogg.

  If West had been in any doubt regarding what kind of reaction was possible, Hogg dispelled it by saying, “I’ll give you a bonus, boyo. I won’t cut your balls off just now — if you’re lucky.”

  “That’s all water under the bridge, Hogg,” Daniel said. Necessity allowed him to chuckle pleasantly, which he found helped considerably with the discomfort of his long hours on the hull. “West, you’ve shown yourself an able spacer, and I’d be glad of your presence in any crew I commanded.”

  That was stretching the truth somewhat, but the old fellow did know his way about the rigging. The pr
opulsion system was a closed book to him, even for so simple an operation as polishing the throats of the High Drive motors with emery cloth. On a ship of any size, however, there would be riggers and techs, neither of whom would be expected to know the others’ job.

  Daniel bent and straightened the fingers of his left hand while Hogg worked on his right shoulder. Neither set of gauntlets was comfortable, either, but at least they were overlarge rather than pinching.

  “What do you mean about rats?” he said aloud, smiling as he looked at West. He didn’t want him being so frightened of Hogg that he missed his hold out on the hull and went drifting into oblivion with half the Savoy’s inadequate stock of rigging suits. “From what I’ve seen — ”

  In Adele’s typically excellent briefing materials.

  “ — the Alliance governor is brutal and grasping even for, well, out here. It’s not my fight, but I can certainly understand the locals deciding they’ve had enough and trying to do something about it.”

  He’d almost said, “. . . even for this far out in the sticks.” Which was true but was impolitic, since everyone aboard the yawl apart from himself and Hogg was from the Macotta Region.

  “I don’t know about the governor,” Lindstrom said. “I didn’t get involved on Sunbright till I started these runs, and I wouldn’t be the sort to get invited to the governor’s palace anyhow.”

  She stepped away from West, who now had the suit on. He got up with the slow care of a spacer whose suit fits badly.

  “But what it is now . . . ,” she said, sitting down on the other side of Daniel from Hogg. She reached across and took the liter-sized tube of salve. “is a bloody shambles.”

  Lindstrom began salving Daniel’s right shoulder. She was used to the work; her hands were no firmer than they needed to be when they covered the sores themselves.

  “It’s easier work taking rice from the gang in the next vestry,” she said, “than it is going up against the Naval Infantry and the Alliance Guards that’re sitting in any place big enough to rate a garrison. And it’s easier still to loot civilians who don’t have a garrison or a local gang claiming to own them already.”