by David Drake
“We could’ve locked the police patrol in the warehouse,” Daniel agreed. “And we could bull our way out the way we got in, more or less.”
He smiled to think about that. He’d treated the gate guards as he would have done a gang of recruits too raw to understand discipline of any but the most basic sort. An officer rarely had to use his hands on a properly manned ship, because the experienced personnel hammered insolence out of a cocky recruit during the first “lights out.”
“But you know, if the whole complex is looted while the guards are drunk,” Daniel continued aloud, “or better still by drunken guards, nobody will even know we existed. I prefer that to leaving a trail of bodies and pissed-off survivors behind. You take more flies with honey than vinegar, Hogg.”
Hogg snorted. “And what’s a fly’s pelt worth, young master?” he said. “For the things that are worth the trouble of skinning, I find a wire noose generally works best. But I take your meaning, sure.”
The three-barred gate, backlit by the pole lamp forty yards down the approach road, was closed again. There was a small light on in the brick guardhouse that formed the east gatepost.
Kostroman ratings moved to either side of the roadway as the vehicles approached. They lifted their impellers but didn’t point them.
Hogg downshifted and crawled the last hundred feet to the gate in the van’s bottom gear. The cab doors were front-hinged. Daniel unlatched his and let inertia swing it fully open as the van finally halted. He put his foot on the running board, swung the brandy to his shoulder—no problem, thank God—and stepped to the ground.
“Here you go, my friends,” Daniel said breezily as he walked toward a Kostroman. He deliberately chose the rating he’d choked unconscious when they arrived. “This case was broken in transit, you know the sort of thing.”
He hunched the brandy off his shoulder and swung it to the startled Kostroman. The man tried to take the gift while still holding his impeller. The weight was too much—the case was wood in addition to the glass bottles themselves—so he dropped the weapon to use both hands.
“I wouldn’t want you to think a gentleman of L’ven can’t be generous,” Daniel said avuncularly.
The other ratings converged on their fellow. One of the trio outside started to climb over the gate to get her share, despite the petty officer’s angry command.
Daniel put a hand on top of the case as Kostromans jostled for possession. “Let’s let me get out of here first, shall we?” he said. He dipped his left index finger toward the gate.
“Right!” bellowed the petty officer. “Open the gate and then we’ll see what we see about the other.”
“I’ll look after the brandy,” Daniel said with a paternal smile at the six ratings trying to hold the brandy. “Just set it down here.”
The Kostromans looked at one another. The one in the middle knelt and set the case on the brick pavement. Then as one they rushed to the gate, drawing it open with even more verve than they’d shown when they admitted the van in the first place. Daniel wondered idly if the ratings ever obeyed their own officers as well as they did him.
Well, from what he’d seen, there wasn’t much reason to obey Kostroman officers….
Hogg revved the engine when he thought there was clearance enough. Daniel waited in seeming leisure until the Kostromans returned, a little winded from their exercise. He nodded to them as he got into the truck.
“Gently, now,” he ordered Hogg. “We don’t want them to think we’ve just robbed the bank.”
Hogg grimaced, but he pulled through the gateway at a rate that didn’t, for a change, seem calculated to tear the transmission out of the van. The gun truck followed.
The ratings had begun trying to pry open the case with their impeller muzzles. Several of them cheered Daniel as he rode away.
* * *
The streets of Kostroma City were busier than Adele remembered them being earlier in the evening. Black and yellow bunting or a banner flew from every civilian vehicle she saw, but many of them obviously carried would-be neutrals who were leaving town with the most portable of their valuables.
There were still jitneys full of Zojiras and gangsters who wore Zojira colors for the time being. Some vehicles carried prisoners; others were packed with loot.
“The Alliance’s got people up on the rooftops already,” Woetjans muttered in obvious disquiet. She drove the gun truck with competence but no flair, gripping the yoke as if to hurl the vehicle into turns by main force. “We should’ve gone around the city instead of straight back through it.”
Adele had seen groups of two and three people watching the street from roofs as they passed, but she’d thought of them as spectators or owners guarding their homes. They were armed, but that was natural enough too. Woetjans’s experienced eyes had noted uniforms and equipment that meant something else again.
The Zojira clan was terrorizing its enemies; native-born Kostroman criminals were making fortunes. The Alliance of Free Stars was focused on control of the planet rather than such ephemeral affairs.
“Hogg didn’t have any choice,” Adele said soothingly. Woetjans was rightly nervous about the situation, but blaming Hogg might cause problems later. “All the roads on the island go through the city, at least here on the south tip. The whole planet was settled from this spot.”
“Yeah, well, I guess Mr. Leary knows what he’s doing,” Woetjans said. “Him being in charge’s the only good luck there is in the whole business.”
Adele didn’t see how Daniel could possibly know what he was doing, but she wasn’t going to say that now. Daniel seemed to be on top of the situation, that was true.
Perhaps that was all there really was to being a naval officer: you pretended that you knew what you were doing. It didn’t work that way in her specialty, information retrieval, though.
Hogg’s van slowed. Daniel leaned out of the cab and waved the gun truck forward.
A gang was looting a house, carrying furnishings through the smashed front door to a barge in the canal which ran down the center of this boulevard. Several members acted as traffic wardens, gesturing oncoming vehicles to reverse and cross the humpbacked bridge to the other side of the road.
“Look alive,” Woetjans said over her shoulder. The four sailors in the back were already aiming. The automatic impeller clanked as the gunner charged it to fire.
Adele wondered if she should unclip the submachine gun. She decided not to: if it came to shooting, she was probably better off with a familiar weapon.
Woetjans started to pull the gun truck around the van. The gangsters scattered to either side. Hogg accelerated again, brushing the end of a couch dropped in the haste of those who’d been carrying it. Inlays of ivory and mother-of-pearl splintered away like butterfly wings. The wheels bumped over a fallen cushion; then they were through.
“How many spaceports are there on Kostroma anyway?” Adele asked, deliberately casual to settle her stomach. A body beneath the wheels would have felt just the same.
“One bloody one if you mean starport,” Woetjans said grimly. “There’s some trade from other islands to the asteroids. The mining and manufacturing base on the asteroids, that does some direct out-of-system trade. It’ll be in Alliance hands too, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Leary figured to slip us up there by one of the provisions ships.”
She looked at Adele and added, “I don’t guess they’ll be expecting somebody to steal a ship from the asteroids, don’t you think?”
“That may very well be,” Adele said.
She felt hollow. What the exchange proved to her was that Woetjans, far more experienced than she was—or Daniel Leary was, if it came to that—didn’t see a way out of this system-wide trap. All they were going to accomplish by running in circles this way was to be shot down instead of simply being interned.
They were approaching a plaza dominated by the palace of a clan that had ruled Kostroma in the era before the Hiatus. The building remained an imposing mass of age-
darkened brick, but the rooms were now laborers’ apartments. The topmost—third—story had been split by an intermediate floor. The new ceiling ran like a horizontal bar across the banks of high windows.
The plaza’s two large fountains were dry. The local residents had converted them to rubbish dumps. Eight streets joined in a circle around the plaza. The van entered and slowed abruptly; because of the traffic, Adele thought, and then realized that an Alliance APC squatted in the middle of the plaza between the fountains.
Over a hundred armed Zojiras were checking every vehicle that entered the circle. Each local squad had an Alliance officer, and Alliance troops were in force on the rooftops.
The jitney ahead of Hogg’s van stopped and tried to back out of the plaza. The nearest Alliance officer spoke into his helmet’s integral microphone. At least six marksmen opened fire from the rooftops.
Impeller projectiles moved at the speed of meteors. They punched through the vehicle’s flimsy body and everything within, then shattered the pavement on the other side. Shards of brick pavers flew about like grenade fragments, but the projectiles vaporized when they finally hit something hard enough to stop them.
The driver sprawled out of his saddle. There’d been someone inside the back as well; her arm flopped into sight when a projectile severed the door latch. Diesel fuel gurgled in a glistening dark circle beneath the jitney. It didn’t ignite, though an oil fire licked sluggishly from the riddled engine.
“Pull ahead of the van,” Adele ordered crisply. She stood in her seat, bracing herself with a hand on the top of the folding windshield.
“We can’t fight all these—” Woetjans said.
“Do as you’re told!” Adele said. She licked her dry lips and added, “We’re not going to fight anyone. I’ll talk us through.”
Woetjans rang the electric bell of the gun truck to warn Hogg she was moving past. Kostroman gunmen were already approaching the van from either side as the Alliance officer looked on. A Zojira leveled his submachine gun at Woetjans.
“Stay here,” Adele said as she got out and walked toward the troops. “You, sir!” she called to the Alliance officer.
“The navy doesn’t cut any weight tonight,” said a gunman. He reached for the handle of the van’s concertina door.
“Don’t touch that vehicle if you hope to see the morning!” Adele said, speaking Universal in an upper-class Bryce accent.
She pushed aside the pistol another Zojira rather diffidently pointed at her torso. Her nose wrinkled with the smell of diesel fuel and the feces the jitney’s driver voided when he died.
“I’ll handle this,” the Alliance officer said. He stepped forward to join Adele at the van’s front fender. “Yes, who are you?”
His accent was Pleasaunce, and he quite clearly realized that Adele didn’t sound like a local. He was a young man with a trim black mustache and a tic in his left eye.
“My name doesn’t matter,” Adele said. The officer was uncertain and she was not; she ruled the situation, even though a word from this boy could mean her life in an eyeblink. “The Kostromans in both these vehicles are operating under my orders. Call your superiors and tell them this is code Blue Chrome. If they find any difficulty in confirming my free passage, they are to ask Mr. Markos. Do you understand?”
The officer scowled at her. His tic was worse. “Step back, please,” he said. Adele sneered and stayed where she was.
The officer backed a slight distance himself and spoke into his helmet pickup. Adele couldn’t hear the words, but she saw his lips form “blue chrome.”
It was the code for securing Kostroma. She’d found it in the Alliance message traffic she’d browsed while she waited in the warehouse complex for the Cinnabars to load the van. Nothing in the messages themselves mattered to the escapees, but Adele’s knowledge of the code word gave objective proof of what her accent implied: that she was an Alliance agent working under cover.
Markos’s name didn’t mean anything to a low-ranking officer overseeing a checkpoint, but it would to his superiors. They would be no more likely to question Markos or delay one of his agents than they would stick their head into a hot furnace.
A hot furnace was, after all, a very possible end for anyone who got in Markos’s way.
The officer’s mouth opened silently as he listened to the response to his question. “Yes, sir,” he said loudly. He gave his head a reflexive nod. “Yes sir. Balthasar Three-One out.”
“Make sure we’re not bothered by any of the rest of this rabble,” Adele ordered without waiting for the officer to address her directly. She waved toward the next inspection post along the circle. “And don’t log this. Don’t even remember it, do you understand?”
“Yes sir,” the officer said. “You’re free to go, sir.”
“Go on ahead,” Adele said in a curt voice to the cab of the van. She strode back to the gun truck.
Hogg and Daniel looked as though they were in awe of her. She could trust them both to do a perfect job of acting when it counted.
* * *
Beyond the northern outskirts of Kostroma City the road became gravel and was in increasingly poor repair. The van was so overloaded that its rear springs were bottomed even before a wheel hit a pothole. Daniel supposed the jolts weren’t as bad in the cab as they were in the back, but they were bad enough.
“Okay, there it is,” Hogg said as their headlight swept the corner of a building through a screen of vegetation. “Now, I’m not telling you what to do, sir, but these are probably folks I know.”
“Yes, of course,” Daniel said. “You’ll handle the negotiation if the situation’s as we expect.”
The road turned ninety degrees; Hogg slowed. As the van wallowed through the deep rut on the outside of the curve, its headlight painted a sizable waterfront community of two- and three-story buildings.
“Why, these are real houses,” Daniel said in surprise. For the past several miles the only dwellings he’d seen along the roadside were shacks with roofs of sheeting and walls of scrap wood. “I hadn’t expected …”
“Smuggling’s a pretty good way to get rich, sir,” Hogg said. “A pretty common one, too.”
The buildings had shops on the ground floor and housing on the upper stories. The brick used to build them had a rustier shade than the peach and pale yellow general in Kostroma City. The broad pavement between the buildings and the harbor was brick also. Goods were stacked there, sometimes under tarpaulins, but the only permanent structure was an octagonal brick office for the harbormaster.
The harbor sheltered at least a hundred vessels. Small boats were in the majority, many of them racked three and four high in roofed sheds. A number of barges and yachts lay along the quay.
The community built around this little harbor wasn’t as abjectly terrified by the coup as Kostroma City. Windows were shuttered, but lights were on inside as the residents waited for the next act in the drama. The harbormaster’s office was lighted also. It seemed to be the headquarters for the twenty-strong garrison.
Daniel assessed the guards coldly: thugs, few of whom had taken the trouble to pin on Zojira colors. Much as he and Hogg had expected.
The headlights had warned the garrison of company coming. Each had a submachine gun, and many wore pistols or knives to look even more threatening. In addition to personal weapons, there was a six-wheeled flatbed truck with an automatic impeller pointing out over the cab.
The heavy weapon was aimed at Daniel and Hogg. That was as expected also.
“Okay,” Hogg said softly as he slowed the van to a stop twenty yards from the harbormaster’s office. The armed flatbed was parked alongside, while most of the thugs used the seawall as a trench and aimed their weapons over it. “It’s Ganser’s lot, okay. I’ve done business with him, but he’s not one I’d ever want to turn my back on.”
“All right,” said Daniel. He and Hogg opened their doors together, slowly and smoothly. “You deal with him and I’ll brief the detachment.”
/> “You bastards turn around and go back where you come!” a male voice called from the office. “This is ours, do you hear?”
“It’s me, Ganser,” Hogg called. He stepped in front of the van so that the headlight fell across him at an angle. Hogg had a big Kostroman pistol shoved under his belt, but he kept his hands clearly in the open. “Time for us to do some trading, that’s all.”
Hogg sauntered toward the office. Daniel nodded in acknowledgment to the garrison, then walked to the back of the van and opened it. He didn’t need to have seen the jitney riddled to know what a burst from the automatic impeller would do to everyone in the back of the van.
He smiled pleasantly to reassure any watching thugs who might have itchy trigger fingers. “Get some distance between you,” he said to the ratings poised tensely within. Sun now had the pistol Woetjans had given up when she moved to the gun truck. “If anything happens, run for the marsh.”
Whistling, his hands in his trouser pockets as he mimed carefree innocence, Daniel walked to the gun truck. Woetjans had stopped twenty yards away. She’d switched off her headlights so that they didn’t silhouette the van if shooting started.
The ratings with stocked impellers had spread out from the vehicle; one of them watched the road behind in case the garrison’d had sense enough to set an outpost there. Daniel doubted they had, but it was a professional concern that spoke well of his personnel.
Woetjans remained in the driver’s seat. Lamsoe, the gunner, had his automatic weapon aimed not at the garrison’s truck but at the harbormaster’s office. A burst would disintegrate the small brick building. Adele Mundy, looking more like an officer than anyone else Daniel had seen in a Kostroman uniform, stood slim and disdainful beside the gun truck.
Daniel’d been amazed at the way the librarian had breezed them through the checkpoint. He’d been counting on the confusion to get his Cinnabars out of Kostroma City. The Zojiras weren’t organized enough to freeze all movement, and Daniel’s story of being on a personal mission for Grand Admiral Sanaus was both believable and impossible to check in the present chaos. His accent was a danger, but this wasn’t a night they could hope to survive without danger.