by David Drake
“If you’d come two days ago,” the woman said, “you could have helped dig graves. In the evening, I mean. If you’d showed up any sooner, you’d just have been three more to bury. I decided we had to bury them, you know. But it didn’t help with the smell. I don’t think the smell will ever go away.”
“Coming through!” Hogg called from outside. “Coming through!”
“Clear!” said Daniel. He wasn’t the sort to blaze away at sudden movements. For that matter, he didn’t have a gun at present, though he supposed he might have found one. Anyway, Hogg was being careful in a difficult situation, which wasn’t something to complain about.
“There’s thirty-odd more in another barn,” said Hogg as he entered. He’d concealed his pistol, but he carried a shotgun in the crook of his elbow. “Kids and women, mostly.”
He nodded toward the seated woman. “No others as young as her, though. And some men, but they’re shot up pretty bad.”
“They thought I was dead, I suppose,” the woman said. “Maybe they were right.”
Turning to Daniel and sitting straighter, she said, “My name is Floria Post. Emmanuel Herrero, whom you carried in, is my grandfather. Thank you.”
She gestured to the barn’s interior; several small children had appeared out of the bins. She said, “I brought the younger orphans here.”
Grant entered the barn, looking stunned. “It was Colonel Kinsmill’s force,” he said. Daniel wasn’t sure whom he was talking to, or if he was really talking to anyone outside his own mind. “Two of the women in the seed barn said they heard men call their leader “King.” That’s Kinsmill’s nickname.”
“A blond man with moustaches?” Floria said, using both hands to mime a moustache that curved into sideburns. Her voice lilted as though she were about to break into peals of laughter. “Men offered him a turn with me, but he said he didn’t want sloppy thirds. More like sixth, I think, though I lost track eventually. King took my niece instead. She was ten.”
The lilt turned to sobbing. The woman bent over, her face in her hands. Daniel was afraid that she was going to sag onto the floor, but he thought better of putting an arm around her for support.
A pair of middle-aged women must have been standing near the doorway but out of Daniel’s sight. They entered silently. One held Floria’s shoulders; the other touched her companion’s elbow in frightened support.
“Kinsmill’s a cultured man!” Grant said. “He’s from Bryce. He was educated in the Academic Collections there!”
I wonder if he was Adele’s classmate? Daniel thought. I’m sure she would have something to discuss with him now. Briefly.
Floria had stopped crying. She raised her eyes to Daniel and said, “Captain? What do we do now? What can we do?”
Daniel nodded twice, giving himself time to consider the question. The elements were simple enough, and if he didn’t particularly like the answer, that didn’t change reality. A ship’s captain frequently arrived at answers he didn’t like, and the captain of a warship did so more often yet.
“Go to Saal,” he said. “You’ll have to walk, but you have carts to carry invalids and enough food for the journey. I’m sorry that we won’t be able to accompany you, but we have our own duties.”
One of the older women said, “We supported the revolt. We always sold our rice through the Provisional Government. Always!”
Until Captain Kinsmill decided there would be more profit if he cut out the middleman, Daniel thought. Which was true, in the short term.
“I’m sorry,” Daniel said. “We have to be going now.”
They would sleep rough tonight rather than shelter in the remains of Herrero’s Farm. They would get far enough away that no vagrant breeze would bring a reminder of the smoke and death of this tomb.
The old man’s eyes opened. They were blank for a moment; then he focused on Tomas Grant and sat bolt upright.
“You!” he said, pointing a frail hand. “You did this! It’s all your doing!”
The rebel leader turned and stumbled out of the barn. He didn’t speak.
Daniel cleared his throat and said, “Yes, well. We need to be going also. Come along, Hogg.”
“In a moment,” Hogg said; he held out the shotgun to Floria. He had removed the lockplate while Daniel and the others were talking, but the weapon was back together now.
“The contacts were corroded,” he said. “That’s why it didn’t go off. I cleaned them.”
The older women shrank back. Floria took the weapon, giving Hogg a questioning look. He took three electromotive shells out of his pocket and handed them over also.
“They’re just bird shot, but they’re better than nothing,” he said. Then with a broad, terrible grin, he added, “If you don’t trust yourself with it, you could do worse than give it to the lad I took it away from. He’s young, but he’s got spirit, he does.”
Hogg looked at Daniel and said, “Much like another tyke I knowed once back t’ Bantry.”
“Come along, Hogg,” Daniel repeated. He strode out of the barn.
He had a lump in his throat.
Halta City on Cremona
The truck slewed left as it pulled up in the pall of steam hanging over the Princess Cecile. Adele grabbed the frame of the side window again. The angle of the massive front bumper had stopped within a finger’s width of the back of the car on which Dasi and a squad of spacers had been riding.
“Sorry, lady,” Brock said in genuine apology. “I didn’t realize I’d lost my hydraulics on the right side until those yahoos dropped anchor right in front of me.”
Pasternak had shut down the corvette’s thrusters as the truck and its escorting cars turned up the quay. Adele smiled in self-mockery. If it had just been spacers returning, Pasternak — and whoever warned him of the convoy’s approach — might have continued running the thrusters at low output.
Mistress Mundy — she was always that or “ma’am” to the Sissie’s crew — was known to be as awkward as a blind bear. Nobody was going to increase the risk of her falling off the gangplank into the plasma-heated slip. And every Sissie in sight would dive in to save her if it happened, even those who couldn’t swim. . . .
“No harm done,” Adele said as she stepped out into the dissipating steam. “Master Brock, I’ll do my best to see that you don’t regret this.”
“I don’t regret it now, lady,” the outfitter called after them; he was out of sight in the high cab. “But Mangravite’s going to.”
“Mangravite certainly will regret this,” said Cory as he waved Tovera across the floating walkway ahead of her mistress. “So will all the other gangs who contributed troops to the affair.”
So that he’s behind to grab me if I stumble, Adele realized. She smiled even more coldly.
He grinned and added, “We had most of them careted before I went off on my tour of the city. I’m sure Master Cazelet will have plotted the rest since then. The lairs, if you will.”
Adele crossed the gangplank and strode up the boarding ramp briskly with no difficulties — as she had expected. She felt a little miffed at this particular concern, though she would never let her shipmates know that.
Yes, she was clumsy; she would never deny that. But she had a great deal of experience in negotiating slotted-steel stairs and scaffolds which had been polished by the feet of generations of librarians. She didn’t slip on slick metal flooring.
But the Sissies were well-meaning in their concern. If they were also less observant than Adele might wish, well, that was true of most people. And as a general rule, she preferred to be a blur to whom no one paid attention. Still, she deliberately mounted the companionway at a pace that pressed Cory to match.
A Power Room tech was leaning over the railing to look down from the head of the stairs on A level. He vanished when he saw Adele. His voice echoed faintly down to her, however: “Five? The mistress is on her way!”
Vesey was now captain of the Princess Cecile, but she didn’t allow the crew to refer
to her as “Captain,” let alone “Six.” She remained in her mind — and in truth, in the minds of all the Sissies — Five, the corvette’s first lieutenant.
Adele walked onto the bridge while the main hatch was squealing upward and a score of lesser hatches were clanging shut. By pairs — two/four/six/and all eight — the thrusters resumed their burning; steam roared up from the harbor in response to their rainbow breath.
The signals console was already live. Cazelet must have overridden her lock. Adele didn’t think that he could have entered the Personal Access Only sectors, but — she smiled — she couldn’t be sure. She had taught Cazelet well.
“Ship!” said Vesey over the PA system and the general intercom frequency. She was handling the liftoff herself, because the junior watch-standing officers were otherwise occupied. “Prepare to lift!”
The main hatch banged against its coaming. When the dogs shot ringingly home to seal it, they sounded like a volley of slugs hammering the outer hull. The thrusters’ bellow became a bone-deep shudder, and steam buffeted the ship like an enormous pillow.
The dorsal turret would normally be lowered and locked during liftoff or landing. Now Adele heard its metal-to-metal gaskets squeal as it rotated.
She hadn’t given orders, but she wasn’t completely sure that her orders would be obeyed if she tried to stop what was about to happen. Officer Adele Mundy was, by the ship’s table of organization, a very junior officer indeed.
However, the mistress, who had been attacked and insulted, was a person of veneration to the Sissie’s crew. They weren’t going to ignore that.
Not that Adele had any problem with her shipmates’ response. The main reason she hadn’t given orders about what to do next was that she knew she didn’t need to.
Instead of asking a question, Adele went straight to a preset she had prepared before the Princess Cecile had begun to break out of Cremona orbit. The harbor was protected by a pair of anti-ship missile batteries, and a third battery had been placed on what ten years before had been the edge of the city. That one had been swallowed by the northern suburbs which grew with the expansion of trade to the Sunbright rebels.
Adele didn’t want to use the plasma cannon on the emplacements, particularly the one surrounded by civilian tenements, but they had to be taken out of action if the Princess Cecile was to escape safely. Using the batteries’ own electronics to freeze the launchers in their safe position, locked horizontal to the ground, was just as good for that purpose as blowing them up would have been.
Someone had already locked the launchers. The missiles couldn’t be fired until the software had been wiped and reloaded, a day’s work for an expert — after somebody diagnosed the problem.
“Mistress?” said Cazelet over a two-way link. “I’d been ready to override the controls since you left the ship this morning, but I didn’t engage it until Captain Vesey ordered liftoff. I didn’t want to chance somebody noticing the problem and maybe coming up with a fix.”
“Very good, Rene,” Adele said. He just might be able to enter the personal sectors of her console. He had been very well trained indeed.
The ventral turret, offset to the stern as the dorsal installation was to the bow, cranked downward for use; it had been underwater while the ship was in the slip.
Ordinarily vessels rose through the atmosphere as quickly as their thrusters could lift them. A starship couldn’t be streamlined. Furling the sails and clamping the telescoped antennas to the hull prevented them from being ripped off, but they still created enormous turbulence in the airstream. The faster a ship moved near the ground, the more its crew bounced like dried beans in a rattle.
With Vesey at the controls, the Princess Cecile rose slowly, mushed out to sea, and began to curve back in a slight bank. A stylus would have rolled across the deck, but not quickly.
Adele’s communications intercepts showed the expected amount of chatter on Halta City’s emergency bands, but it was all concerned with the firefights which had rolled through the heart of town. Groups that hadn’t been involved were nervous and confused. Survivors of groups that had met either the truck or Cory’s relief force were in a shrieking panic. No one seemed to have noticed that the corvette had lifted off.
As a matter of reflex, Adele checked the displays on the Sissie’s other active consoles. Cazelet was splitting the commo board with the atmosphere controls. If Vesey had a sudden stroke, he was ready to act without hesitation.
Cory was in the Battle Direction Center. He preferred his familiar bridge station, but the Princess Cecile was in combat. As first lieutenant, his primary duty was to take over in the event that the corvette’s whole bow was destroyed.
Cory had the atmosphere controls on half his display also. Vesey would have set a sequence in which the junior officers would take over should she be incapacitated, but which of them would be first on the rota didn’t concern Adele. The remaining half of Cory’s display echoed the gunnery boards of Sun, controlling the dorsal turret, and his mate, Rocker, in independent command of the ventral guns.
“Gunners, you may fire as you bear,” said Vesey calmly. The last syllable wasn’t out of her mouth before a bolt slammed from each turret.
Two warehouses on the seafront erupted into mushrooms of flame. The plasma was literally as hot as the sun. Everything it touched which could burn, did: plastics, metals, even stone. A human who happened to be in the way simply vanished like chaff in a furnace.
Cory had created a targeting grid to which Cazelet had made additions. Carets in blue-or red-marked buildings, equipment lots, and three modern gunboats. The Navy of Cremona owned a destroyer, but it was a hulk; the gunboats were capable of at least intrasystem voyages.
Sun was firing single shots. One bolt from a four-inch gun was sufficient for any ordinary frame or brick building at this short range, but Adele knew that the gunner was really showing off.
The paired guns in the turrets were designed to syncopate one another to put out a nearly continuous stream of plasma which nudged incoming projectiles off course. It took a delicate hand and a great deal of practice to fire a single round, but that considerably extended the life of the cannon’s bore.
Structure after structure disintegrated in balls of orange fire with flecks of iridescent plasma at their hearts. The corvette ambled in a slow arc around Halta City, uncovering additional targets as the angle changed.
The central police station was an old building — old enough that Adele felt a faint twinge of regret at the thought of Pre-Hiatus records which might have been stored there. But probably not, and anyway it was too late to worry. Rocker hit its ground floor twice. The stone walls survived to channel a roaring inferno three stories upward, lifting the roof and licking toward the clouds.
Each shot was a miniature thermonuclear explosion, shaking the corvette like a hammer blow. The shells were laser arrays aimed inward toward the pellet of tritium at the heart of each. When tripped, the lasers compressed the tritium to fusion and directed its energy toward the one missing tile in the thermonuclear furnace which was aligned with the bore.
The laser array directed the charge. The guns’ iridium barrels were necessary to reduce side-scatter caused by the inevitable atoms in the jet’s path in even hard vacuum. That problem and the resulting bore erosion were much worse in an atmosphere.
The gunboats were allotted to Sun, who put a bolt into the outside pontoon of each. The hull plating of even a small starship was several inches thick, but the outriggers were of much lighter material, and exploded in steam and white fire.
The gunboats tilted as they lost buoyancy, bringing open hatches in the hull proper underwater and listing further. Within a minute or two, each of the three vessels had turned turtle in its slip.
Rocker spaced four rounds the length of the naval barracks. The result couldn’t be called surgical, but it was thorough beyond question. Adele thought of the naval officer who had precipitated the firefight in Halta City; she felt her lips smile.
Smudgy fires were burning in scores of locations, covering the city in haze that blurred or even concealed the buildings underneath it. The carets continued to give the gunners aiming points until there was no surviving target to shoot at.
The Princess Cecile was some distance from the sea now, having described an arc beginning at Halta Harbor. Vesey had been holding them at two hundred feet in the air. Despite asymmetrical pounding from the guns and the pulsing irregularity of the thrusters, the ship’s altitude didn’t vary by as much as six feet up or down.
The corvette’s bank reversed, and they curved sunwise as they moved deeper inland. The turrets squealed again as they rotated to bear on the corvette’s starboard broadside instead of to port.
A forest of carets sprang up, pointing to every building in a large complex surrounded by a fence and watchtowers. Adele smiled coldly; she knew what the compound was without checking — but she checked anyway.
Master Mangravite had started a fight with the RCN.
The Sissie’s guns slammed, destroying a pair of guard towers. Why those? Adele wondered, but when she magnified a surviving tower — there had been eight originally — she saw the towers mounted automatic impellers. Their osmium slugs wouldn’t penetrate the corvette’s hull, but they could damage the thrusters and High Drive and might even put holes in the outriggers.
Not these weapons, though: tower guards, colorfully dressed in green uniforms, were abandoning their posts so quickly that one cartwheeled to the ground after missing a rung of the ladder. A fifteen-foot fall might mean a broken neck, but at least — Adele smiled — your family would have something to bury.
Rocker’s three rounds destroyed the gatehouse and the ground car racing toward it. Somebody trying to escape. Fragments of the car’s metal body sailed off like scraps of paper in a storm.