by David Drake
“Hogg is going to rent a ship for us if things work out,” Daniel said. He didn’t want to shout, so the three ratings at a distance probably weren’t able to hear him. “He says that the people we’re dealing with aren’t to be trusted, so keep a particularly close watch until we’re out of here.”
Adele sniffed. “I wouldn’t think anyone on Kostroma tonight is to be trusted,” she said. She didn’t sound concerned; just analytical.
“Except ourselves,” Daniel agreed.
Hogg left the harbormaster’s office after a brief conference. Daniel went to meet him, striding more purposefully now. Kostroman gunmen were climbing up to sit on the seawall instead of sheltering beneath it. A shouted summons brought them all into the office, even the trio manning the automatic weapon.
“There’s a twenty-meter yacht, the Ahura,” Hogg said as he met Daniel beside the van’s cab. It was a tribute to Cinnabar discipline that the ratings who’d moved away from the vehicle didn’t bunch closer to hear what Hogg was discussing with their commander. “Solar powered, electrostatic foils, a real beauty. They’ll let us have it for two cases of brandy and the trucks we come in.”
“It’s stolen?” Daniel said, squinting toward the harbor. He saw what he thought was the vessel, a trim craft tied up at a quay just at the edge of the lighted area. A yacht like Hogg described was at least as expensive as a luxury aircar.
“Next thing to it,” Hogg agreed. “The owners were on the wrong side when the Hajas took over, so it got confiscated along with their houses and all. Now that the Hajas are out, the survivors are going to come claiming their stuff. Ganser figures if the Ahura goes missing, nobody’s going to be able to prove it was his lot responsible.”
Daniel looked from the yacht to the office. With his goggles down he’d be able to see through the building’s windows, but identifying himself to this gang by using Cinnabar gear probably wouldn’t be smart. “It still seems too good a bargain,” he said.
“Yeah, I think so too,” said Hogg with a sour expression. “But I don’t see much choice but to keep our eyes open and go ahead.”
Daniel clapped his servant on the shoulder. “When we drive to the quay to unload, we’ll be on the back side of their automatic,” he said. “Without an edge like that, this sort won’t start anything.”
He waved to the scattered ratings. “Mount up!” he ordered. “We’ll transfer our rations to the ship over there, then we’ll take a little vacation.”
Daniel believed in planning if you had the time and information to do it; but if you didn’t, you acted anyway. There was only one thing worse than trying to imagine every possible occurrence when you were for all practical purposes flying blind: remaining frozen because you couldn’t imagine every possible occurrence.
“And if they do start something, Hogg,” Daniel said as he got into the cab beside his servant, “then we’ll deal with it.”
* * *
Adele had made a half-hearted offer to help load the ship. Woetjans had said, “No, mistress, you’re an officer,” in a tone that made it sound like, “You’d be more trouble than you’re worth.”
Adele didn’t take the implication as an insult since it was objectively true in her opinion. She stood at the top of the seawall, out of the line of traffic, and observed events.
Hogg had backed the van to where steps led down to the quay, but the distance from there to the Ahura was too great for the Cinnabar sailors to form a human chain. They carried the rations, one carton per trip.
Woetjans and three other sailors dismounted the automatic impeller from the police vehicle, then carried it and its case of ammunition to the ship also. The weapon had to be rigidly mounted to be of any use; the truck’s pintle was welded to the frame and couldn’t be removed. Either Woetjans thought she could jury-rig a mounting on the Ahura, or she was just making sure the gun wasn’t in Ganser’s hands while the Cinnabars were still in range.
The Kostromans hadn’t volunteered to help load the Ahura. Adele doubted that Daniel would have permitted them to become involved anyway. They stood watching and occasionally talked among themselves in low voices. She knew that she was imputing sinister motives to the gang members because of their appearance, but people who went to so much effort to look sinister probably were a scurvy lot.
The armed sailors stayed aboard the Ahura while their fellows made multiple trips with the cargo. Daniel must have decided that he wanted his available weapons concentrated aboard the vehicle on which the Cinnabars hoped to escape. He’d called Adele to him; she’d shaken her head and remained where she was.
The back of the flatbed truck was twenty feet away from her. The heavy sheet of armor welded behind the cab protected the gun crew from fire from the front, but because of the way the automatic impeller was mounted, it could only sweep an arc of about sixty degrees to the right or left of the direction the truck was pointing. So long as the truck stayed where it was, the gun didn’t threaten the Ahura.
Adele might not be any use in carrying boxes to the ship, but she was quite confident that the automatic impeller wasn’t a danger to the Cinnabars so long as she survived.
Daniel had vanished within the Ahura to check the hull. Only then did he reappear to examine the cockpit. Now that Adele thought about it, there was only a superficial similarity between a spaceship and a marine vessel. Daniel might be the only Cinnabar present who knew anything about craft like the Ahura, and that because he was raised on the coast rather than from any sort of training.
Five Kostromans came out of the harbormaster’s office and walked in Adele’s direction. They were talking among themselves with studied innocence, but the strands of “conversation” didn’t interweave: none of the thugs was listening to the others.
They were about to attack.
Three of the Kostromans, all men, went to the truck. The other two, a man and a woman, split off and stood on the seawall to Adele’s other side, only six feet away. They faced the harbor, but their eyes flicked sideways toward Adele every few seconds. The man was describing the Ahura; the woman talked about the leaking roof that made a pool in her room every time it rained.
Adele turned her back on the pair beside her and watched them as reflections in a window of the office. When the Kostromans thought their target was no longer able to see them, both tensed.
Two of the other group hopped onto the back of the truck and sat there with their legs dangling over the side. The third man got into the cab. The engine ground for a moment, then started.
Adele lifted her right hand and ostentatiously scratched the back of her neck. Her left hand dipped into her tunic pocket and brought out the pistol, hidden in her palm.
The gun vehicle pulled twenty feet forward in a curve, then stopped. Its transmission went into reverse with a clang. The men pretending to relax on the back stood up. A sailor on the Ahura shouted a warning.
Adele turned toward the thugs beside her. The man started to point his submachine gun. Adele shot him at the top of the chest. The pistol snapped like a mousetrap in her hand, but the sound of the pellet hitting the man’s breastbone was as loud as boards slapping. A muscle spasm threw the Kostroman backward over the seawall.
The woman lunged toward Adele instead of trying to use a weapon. Adele shot her in the throat. The pellet’s temporary shock cavity gaped as wide as the woman’s shoulders, nearly decapitating her. Most of the blood sprayed upward and back, but Adele felt droplets fleck her face. She turned, ignoring the touch of the dead woman’s hand as inertia tried to complete the intended movement.
The truck was backing with the steering yoke reversed to bring the automatic impeller to bear on the Ahura. Several weapons were firing behind Adele. An impeller projectile hit the truck’s armor and blew a glowing trench in the metal without penetrating.
The Kostroman gunners were behind their weapon; only their heads showed. They were thirty yards away from Adele. She aimed at the loader’s nose and hit within a finger’s breadth of that.
Something stung the back of her right calf. She ignored it. She fired at the truck driver. The windshield shattered but she doubted pellets from her little pistol had enough mass to actually penetrate normal glass.
The driver leaped out of the cab, screaming and covering his face with one hand. He held a submachine gun in the other. He was moving and the light was bad. She fired twice more with no better target than his upper torso. He went down, but she could hear him still wheezing and gurgling in the darkness.
Adele walked toward the truck; it had stalled when the driver bailed out. The barrel of her pistol glowed red from the rapid fire. Pocket weapons like hers weren’t intended for continuous use. The magnetic flux that accelerated pellets to 9,000 feet per second was dissipated as heat, and the light barrel didn’t have enough mass to be a good heat sink. In an hour she’d have blisters on the web of her thumb and the side of her index finger where it touched the receiver.
She drew the Kostroman pistol with her right hand and dropped her own weapon into the empty holster. The leather would scorch but it wasn’t likely to burn the way her pocket lining would. If she tossed the little pistol onto the bricks it might not be at hand the next time she needed it.
Nobody was paying any attention to her. All her opponents were dead. With the truck between her and the office, Adele looked over her shoulder.
Three bodies sprawled on the pavement. A sailor and a Kostroman thug wrestled for the latter’s weapon. A Kostroman stepped out of the harbormaster’s office and sprayed both indiscriminately with his submachine gun. An impeller slug fired from the Ahura tore the shooter’s left arm off and flung his body sideways to thrash in a widening pool of blood.
The gang members had run into the brick office to join their leader when the shooting started. All the living Cinnabars were on the vessel or hidden beneath the lip of the seawall. The Ahura was far enough back that those aboard it could see over the seawall to a degree, but only the upper half of the building was visible to them.
Adele tried twice to climb onto the truck, using a back tire as a step. Finally she laid the service pistol on the truck bed to free both hands. She was still awkward but she got up.
The gunner had rolled off the vehicle. The loader still lay there on his back, his hands clawing spasmodically. Her pellet had cratered the left side of his face, but his right eye remained. It was open.
She’d never used an automatic impeller, but this one had a grip and a trigger like a pistol’s. Adele depressed the weapon as far as it would and pulled the trigger.
The gun cycled three times before she could let up. The heavy projectiles cracked like thunderbolts, making the truck shudder violently from recoil.
The rounds blew platter-sized openings in roofing tiles as they hit; on exit they smashed even larger holes through the brick wall on the other side. A cloud of glowing gas slowly dissipated in front of the muzzle. It was the vestiges of the projectiles’ aluminum driving skirts, ionized by the dense magnetic flux.
Without backing the truck, she couldn’t lower the muzzle enough to hit the people sheltering inside the building. There was nothing more she could do.
“All right, Ganser!” Daniel Leary shouted from the Ahura’s bow. “That’s your warning! Come out unarmed with your hands up or Lieutenant Mundy will blow you all into a crater in the street. Now!”
Adele retrieved the Kostroman pistol. If the gangsters tried to fight, she could at least use it.
“How do we know you won’t just shoot us?” Ganser called from inside the office. He began to cough; a rosy haze of brick dust swirled from the shattered walls.
“You know we will shoot you if you don’t give up!” Daniel said. He jumped from the ship.
“Master!” Hogg cried. Daniel ignored the servant and walked up the seawall’s slope in plain sight of anyone looking out a window of the office. He was still unarmed.
“Last chance, Ganser,” Daniel said cheerfully.
Somebody threw a submachine gun out the door. More guns followed. Sailors looked over the edge of seawall, some of them aiming weapons they must have taken from Kostromans in the initial confusion.
There was a long pause before the first of the thugs scuttled through the doorway, her hands raised and her eyes closed. Others crept behind her.
Adele felt her muscles relax without her conscious volition. She sat down in the truck bed because otherwise she would have fallen.
* * *
Daniel watched as Woetjans and Dasi finished tying the Kostromans with wire stripped from the back garden of one of the nearby houses. Daniel was willing to pay if the owner complained about the ruin of his snap beans, but nobody came from the house.
Daniel wasn’t in a mood to volunteer anything.
Munsford and Olechuk were dead. Whitebread’s belly looked like a rat had chewed her, but the wounds were superficial. The pellet had hit the carton she was carrying. It sprayed her with terne plate and fish stew instead of disemboweling her as direct impact would have done.
“You said you wouldn’t kill us!” said Ganser, desperate to keep the question in his mind out of his voice. He was a fat man and already half bald despite being younger than Adele.
“Yes,” said Daniel, thinking of Munsford and Olechuk. “I did say that.”
Lamsoe was in line for an armorer’s warrant. He and Tairouley were cutting down the Ahura’s flagstaff to mount the automatic impeller.
Hogg and the bulk of the detachment were on a scrounging expedition through the harbor’s other vessels. The Ahura was in generally good condition, but she’d been laid up without maintenance for long enough that there were a few problems. Daniel’s quick check had convinced him that the batteries wouldn’t hold enough of a charge to keep the vessel under way long by themselves. The last thing they needed was a ship that was a sitting duck except in bright sunlight.
“Sir,” said Woetjans quietly. Air-hardening ointment sheathed her right forearm to replace the skin she’d scraped off in diving over the seawall to safety. “They must have some friends at least in the houses here.”
She nodded toward the facades. Stray projectiles had blown holes in the bricks; curtains fluttered behind a shattered windowpane. “If we leave them alive, they’ll be free before we’re out of the harbor. And the right man with an impeller can nail something as big as the boat from here to the horizon.”
“You promised!” Ganser cried. “You promised—”
Dasi bent down and slapped the Kostroman with a hand as hard as a boot. Ganser screamed, spraying blood from lips cut against his teeth.
“Shut up,” Daniel said in a quiet voice, “or I’ll have your mouth taped.”
If the tape covered Ganser’s nostrils as well, the thug’s face would darken until it was almost black; and then he would die. Like Munsford and Olechuk.
It’d be simpler just to tie a boat anchor to Ganser’s ankles and those of the ten surviving members of his gang before dropping them into the harbor. There’d be nothing to watch but bubbles in that case, however.
“I didn’t promise them anything, sir,” Woetjans said. “Come on, Dasi, let’s get this lot over the seawall.”
Several prisoners began to scream or plead, but to Daniel’s surprise most of the Kostromans continued to lie in numb silence. They’d been sure they were going to die from the moment they’d surrendered. It was the only sensible course for their Cinnabar captors to take.
And Daniel couldn’t do it.
Woetjans rolled Ganser over on his belly and gripped the wire that bound the prisoner’s wrists and ankles behind his back. She walked toward the harbor, hunching as she dragged her burden over the slick, wet bricks.
Adele Mundy walked out of the office. She’d been cleaning the pistol she’d used to end the attack almost before it started
.
“No,” she said. “Put them down.”
Woetjans slacked the wire and looked at Daniel. “Sir?” she said.
Dasi stepped back from the two thugs he’d started to lift. They babbled in high-pitched voices. He kicked them to silence, one and then the other, as he waited for Daniel’s response.
“I watched your other delegates executed earlier today,” Adele said. “I don’t want to see anything like that again. And I’m certainly not going to be a party to it.”
She returned the flat pistol to her tunic pocket. She apparently carried it all the time, though Daniel hadn’t had the least notion of the weapon’s presence. He’d been surprised, but not nearly as surprised as the majority of the Kostromans who’d died here tonight.
“No,” said Daniel Leary. “I’m not going to be party to it either.”
He stood. “Woetjans,” he said, “the Ahura isn’t particularly spacious but there’s room for more ballast. We’ll carry this lot in the bilges and off-load them on an island when we’re a good ways out.”
Daniel smiled. A door in his mind had closed. He was very glad not to be looking at what lay behind it anymore.
“I wonder how well the bilge pumps work?” he added cheerfully.
* * *
Adele sat cross-legged on the yacht’s bow, out of the bustle of sailors carrying equipment aboard and striding back for more. She tested the system once more, then switched off her data unit with a sigh of relief. She’d hoped she would be finished long before the Ahura left harbor. She’d made that personal deadline, but the business had taken nearly an hour longer than she’d expected.
Her expectations had been unrealistic. She should’ve known that Kostroma’s comsat switching protocols would be as ineptly designed as the government data network had been. It was harder to overcome incompetence than it would have been to defeat deliberate protection.
She stood up with the care that her cramped thigh muscles required. She slid the little computer back in its pocket. She’d changed into her own clothes as soon as she’d finished cleaning her pistol. This way she didn’t have to worry about the computer falling over the side unless she was going with it; in which case she didn’t think she’d care.