by David Drake
“No,” said Adele, “I will. I haven’t killed anyone for a few days.”
She looked critically at the Alliance submachine gun, then threw the lever on the back of the receiver to charge it. The mechanical clack within the weapon sounded like a dry chuckle.
She looked at Candace and said, “You’d best hope you don’t fall into the hands of the Alliance after I’ve killed the six officers in your charge. The head of the operation is a man named Markos, from the Fifth Bureau. He’s not a gentleman. The very best you can hope for is that you’ll be quickly executed.”
She smiled. Even Daniel felt his stomach clench to see the expression. Adele walked out of the bridge, holding the submachine gun in her right hand with the muzzle safely raised.
“Candace, I’m sorry as I can be,” said Daniel, shaking his head, “but I need you to talk your people out of the power room. I’ve got nothing against you or them—I’ll let you all go free before we lift ship. But if any of those Alliance officers die, God himself couldn’t save you if you get into Markos’s hands.”
He wondered if Markos was a real person whose name Adele had gotten from signals intelligence or if she’d simply invented the name. When she was doing her sinister act, she was scarier than Hogg with a drawn knife—and Hogg wasn’t acting.
“Leary—” Candace pleaded.
“Get out of the way,” Adele’s voice ordered from the wardroom. Her words clear and utterly calm. The bridge and wardroom hatches were both open. The noise of ratings inspecting and readying the vessel for space wasn’t loud enough to dull Adele’s perfect enunciation.
There was a mixed gabble of protest in Alliance accents. The examination team was a commander and two lieutenant commanders, with three midshipmen as aides. Daniel wondered if any of them had been present when Admiral Lasowski was murdered.
The submachine gun fired a short burst. Pellets disintegrated and spalled bits off the decking. A spark danced into the corridor to hiss on the lip of the bridge hatch. Alliance voices rose in screams.
There was a second burst.
The prisoners lay on the deck of the wardroom with their wrists and ankles taped. Daniel hadn’t decided what to do with them; they were simply out of the way for the moment.
He’d expected Adele to shoot into the couch or one of the wardroom chairs, but from the terrified cries she must be putting each burst into the deck within an inch or two of a prisoner’s ear. The carpet was glass fiber and nonflammable, but the stench of smoldering human hair indicated where some of the sparks were landing.
“Oh God oh God oh God!” Candace said. He’d squeezed his palms over his ears, but he still couldn’t shut out the screams from the wardroom. “Stop it! Stop it!”
“Cease fire!” Daniel cried. He returned his attention to Candace. Quietly he resumed, “Now, I hope that means you’re ready to help us, Benno. Because if you’re not …”
Adele walked back onto the bridge. Behind her a rating clanged shut the wardroom hatch, smothering the prisoners’ voices. The muzzle of her submachine gun glowed; heat waves shimmered in the air above the barrel shroud.
“I’ll talk to them,” Candace said. He wiped tears from his eyes, then lowered his hands and faced Daniel with an unexpected degree of dignity. “I’ll say anything you please. And I don’t care what you do then. You’re all animals!”
Adele draped the sling of her submachine gun over the seatback again. She looked at her right wrist. The skin was smudged with a black residue: metal from the pellets’ driving skirts, vaporized by the flux and redeposited on the shooter’s skin.
Candace turned his seat. He stabbed a button on the left wing of his console and said, “Bridge to power room. This is Lieutenant Candace. Whoever’s in charge of the power room, report now.”
Daniel shifted position slightly so that he could look over the Kostroman’s shoulder at the communicator’s holographic display. That wasn’t much help because though the display came alive, somebody had flung a shirt over the power room’s imaging pickup.
“Sir, what’s going on?” a male voice said. The words were a plea, not a demand.
Daniel nodded toward the console’s pickup and gave it a pleasant smile. The ratings in the power room could see him even if he couldn’t see them, so it was important to project an aura of friendly calm.
“Gershon?” Candace said. “It’s all right. We’ve been captured by the Cinnabar navy but I know the officer in charge. Everything will be all right so long as you open the power room with no trouble. They, they’re … It’s really very important that you surrender right away, Gershon.”
He swallowed. “Really very important.”
A last tear dropped from Candace’s chin to the sill of the console. His hands were folded in his lap, but they were still shaking.
“Sir, what’ll happen to us if we raise the containment bulkhead?” Gershon’s voice asked. “Are they, you know …?”
“You’ll be confined aboard the Princess Cecile until just before we’re ready to leave Kostroma, Gershon,” Daniel said mildly. He rested his right forearm on top of the console in order to look even more relaxed than his voice projected. “Then we’ll let you and all those with you go.”
As a smiling afterthought he added, “Or you can join us, if you like. The Republic of Cinnabar Navy can always use brisk fellows who know how to act in a crisis.”
“Christ help us,” Gershon muttered miserably. The shirt slipped away from the pickup. The bald, gray-bearded Kostroman at the power room communicator looked as though he’d just volunteered to jump into vacuum.
“Open the bulkhead, Carney,” he ordered. He pulled his shirt on to cover his scarred torso. A worm gear began to whine, hauling back the massive barrier intended to prevent a fusion bottle ruptured during combat from venting its contents through the entire vessel.
“We may as well give up,” said Gershon. He was speaking toward Daniel, not Candace in the foreground. “We haven’t got any rations or even water in here.”
“You won’t be sorry, I assure you,” Daniel said. Commando-garbed Cinnabar ratings poured into the power room behind Gershon. They were securing the Kostromans without any serious roughness so far as Daniel could tell.
“Damn right,” said Hogg, moving into the pickup’s field for the first time. “And if you’re smart, you’ll sign up with Mr. Leary. You’ll like serving under a real officer for a change.”
* * *
Adele stood in the hatchway of the APC, waiting for Daniel to take his restraining hand off the coaming. She was so irritated that she’d have driven away while he was still talking, but Barnes was more respectful of his lieutenant.
The Alliance aircar approached the tender in a trough of spray, returning from the Aglaia with another load of sailors. Gambier was driving, but a Kostroman—Warrant Officer Gershon, the man who’d closed down the power room during the assault—sat beside him to provide an authentically non-Cinnabar voice for Tarnhelm Control.
“Look, Adele,” Daniel said, raising his voice to be heard over the car’s fans. “I think I’d better come along after all. It isn’t proper for a civilian to be in charge of this. Freeing RCN officers is RCN business, and—”
“Mr. Leary,” Adele said in a tone of very genuine cold anger, “in your company I have taken part in looting naval warehouses and in capturing not one but two naval vessels. There is no one in our mutual enterprise who knows the Elector’s Palace as well as I do, nor whose accent can pass for that of an Alliance citizen. Your presence is necessary to ready the Princess Cecile for our escape. The twelve of us—”
She nodded toward Hogg and the ten sailors under Woetjans already within the vehicle. They and Adele wore commando uniforms.
“—can deal with the matter of the Aglaia’s officers just as readily as we could if your presence made our number thirteen.”
She wrinkled her nose dismissively. “I don’t object to you coming on grounds of superstition,” she said, “merely because it would be st
upid.”
The aircar landed, rocking the tender despite the APC’s centered mass. Gambier idled the fans and the noise level dropped.
“Sir?” said Hogg. “Have this bitch of a wog ship ready to lift when we get back, all right? Because sure as shit, we’re going to be ready.”
“Too fucking true,” agreed Woetjans.
“Yes,” said Daniel. “All right.”
The car was disgorging its load of sailors. “Hold for me, Gambier,” Daniel called. “I need to prepare the Aglaia for when we lift.”
He looked at Adele and smiled wistfully. “Odd that it’s so much easier to do something dangerous than to ask friends to do so, isn’t it? Good luck. And Hogg?”
“Yessir?” the servant called. Adele had already started to pull the hatch to.
“Ms. Mundy has all the skills desirable in an affair of this nature,” Daniel said. “She does not have experience, however. Don’t let anything happen to her.”
“On my honor, sir!” Hogg shouted as Adele angrily clanged the hatch closed.
Barnes skidded the armored personnel carrier away from the tender. Adele’s stomach churned as they dropped to the water, then rose.
She wondered how many officers really thought it was easier to take risks than to order others to do so. If Daniel was an example, perhaps all the good ones did.
* * *
The Aglaia’s tactical operations center was an armored citadel at the opposite end of Deck E from the bridge. All the sensor inputs were routed here as well as to the bridge, through separate trunks.
Normally during battle the first lieutenant would be in charge of the TOC, while the captain commanded from the bridge and the Chief Missileer, a warrant officer, oversaw the missile launchers themselves. The weapons stations were entirely automated, but things go wrong with machinery even when nobody’s shooting at you.
Daniel, in the TOC with the missileer, said, “To create a diversion when we lift to orbit, Chief Baylor, we’re going to launch the Aglaia’s missiles on radio command while she’s here in harbor. I’ll deal with the software prohibitions, but I want you and your crew to remove the mechanical interlocks. There can’t be any slip-ups.”
“Bloody hell!” said Chief Baylor. His small, foxy face tightened with wrinkles. “Launch in an atmosphere? It’ll …”
Daniel hadn’t had much to do with the missileer on the Aglaia’s voyage out; Baylor kept to himself and his weapons, polishing the missiles’ hulls and performing daily diagnostics on the launch and in-flight control systems. The other officers thought Baylor was strange, but he didn’t cause trouble and he pulled his nonspecialist duties like anchor watch commander without objection.
A communications vessel was probably the perfect berth for a man like Chief Baylor. There was only a vanishingly low chance that the Aglaia would have to fire any of his beloved missiles—
But if she did, her crew could be certain the missiles would function perfectly.
“Yes,” said Daniel harshly. “Launching in an atmosphere will certainly destroy the Aglaia. Depriving the Alliance of this valuable prize is a secondary reason for what we’re about to do.”
Missiles were miniature spaceships which had only High Drive for propulsion. High velocities were a requirement of interstellar travel, even when those velocities were multiplied by judicious use of bubble universes whose physical constants differed from those of the sidereal universe.
The High Drive was the most efficient way to boost a vessel to such velocities, but a certain amount of antimatter inevitably escaped the conversion process and was voided in the exhaust. When this happened in an atmosphere, antimatter and matter destroyed each other in a burst of pure energy just beyond the nozzle and wrecked everything in the vicinity.
Antiship missiles depended on kinetic energy and had no explosive warhead. Even a thermonuclear weapon would have been pointless in an object travelling at .6 c. Lack of atmospheric capability wasn’t a handicap to the missiles because at those speeds, air was a solid barrier anyway.
Which didn’t mean being hit by a just-launched thirty-ton missile was a love tap, however.
Baylor shook his head disconsolately. “Yessir,” he said. “I’ve got my crew on alert, like you said, but I sure didn’t figure you’d be asking us to do this.”
The missileer’s expression was similar to that Abraham must have worn when God ordered him to sacrifice his son. “I hate it, sir,” he said simply. “I’ve served on a lot of ships in thirty-seven years, and this is the best of ’em. But we’ll carry out orders.”
Daniel nodded cold approval. “Make it so,” he said. As Baylor turned to leave him alone in the TOC, Daniel said, “Chief?”
Baylor looked over his shoulder, expressionless.
“A ship is a tool,” Daniel said. “It’s all right to love a ship, but sometimes a tool has to be used, even if that means using it up.”
He thought about the APC that was probably landing at the rear of the Elector’s Palace about now. “Humans aren’t tools,” Daniel added. “But sometimes you have to use them up too. That’s true for everybody who’s taken the oath.”
And for at least one librarian who hadn’t.
* * *
The sides of the APC’s troop compartment were lowered to give the big vehicle a less threatening appearance. Adele had examined the access restrictions for the palace. As she directed, Barnes idled them at surface level to the rear gate of the gardens instead of trying to overfly the wall and land close to the building.
The Alliance command had placed six posts of hypervelocity missiles on the palace roof and grounds to deal with vehicles which tried to evade the mandated entry checks. Properly designed layered armor could resist plasma weapons, perhaps for long enough to land a load of troops, but for defenders who didn’t care about backblast, 500 grams of tungsten monocrystal moving at five kilometers per second was a good way to drill through anything short of a granite mountain.
The antivehicle batteries functioned automatically, irrespective of the target’s Identification Friend or Foe signal. Adele had edited the control software to exempt their captured APC from the automatic defenses, but this wasn’t the time to inform the Alliance forces of the fact.
Lamsoe was in the cupola. He and Barnes would stay with the vehicle while Adele led Hogg and nine sailors to the subbasement where the Aglaia’s officers were held along with other important prisoners.
Woetjans eyed the guard post. A heavily laden surface truck was ahead of the APC. The guards had lifted the bed’s canvas cover and were checking individual crates of bottled liquor.
“These guys are regular army, not commandoes,” the petty officer whispered in Adele’s ear. “We commandoes think we’re hot shit compared to them, you see?”
She growled a chuckle. “None of ’em are worth a fuck compared to the RCN, of course,” she added. “But it’s going to be a lot trickier than it would be if the wogs was still in charge.”
The truck moved on. Barnes pulled forward. The sailors tried to look relaxed, with more success than Adele would have expected.
Adele had no particular feeling. She’d found if she viewed her present activities as information searches—which in a manner of speaking they were, data in the form of five Cinnabar naval officers—she could maintain the detached skill which was the best hope for success. If she thought of herself as responsible for the lives of these sailors and the officers they came to rescue, she wouldn’t know how to behave.
The gardens were brightly illuminated from ten-meter pylons among the trampled plantings. The prisoner pen had been dismantled, but the wire lay in untidy bales along the north wall.
“What’re you guys doing here?” asked the head of the guard detail to Barnes in the cab.
Adele leaned forward from the troop compartment and said, “The password is Nike. Countersign?”
The Alliance guards carried stocked impellers. An air cushion vehicle squatted behind a stone planter, covering the entrance with
an automatic impeller in a small turret. The soldier watching from the turret hatch looked bored, but his weapon tracked the APC as it slid forward.
The detail commander walked back to face Adele directly. The compartment’s deck gave her a height advantage.
“I said what’re you guys doing here?” the guard said in a rising voice. “This is our operation now.”
Woetjans spit onto the ground. She missed the guard’s foot by several inches.
“All you have to say to me, soldier …” Adele said. She looked at the guard as though she wanted to wipe him off the sole of her boot. “Is the countersign. And if you don’t give it, you’ll see just who’s in charge.”
The guard scowled. The other troops in the detail stood by the gatekeeper’s kiosk. Two of them hitched up their equipment belts and walked closer to the APC. So far as Adele could see, there were no Kostromans present.
“Vinceremos!” the detail commander snapped. He stepped away from the vehicle. “Have you noticed,” he called loudly in the direction of his personnel, “how commando pukes wear helmets smarter’n they are?”
“Drive on,” Adele ordered.
Woetjans pumped her middle finger in the direction of the Alliance soldiers as the APC waddled forward. The vehicle was sluggish because Barnes was keeping the speed down. The gardens were full of parked vehicles, and the detachment couldn’t afford a collision.
Though Barnes crawled up the drive, Adele had the uneasy feeling that she had stepped onto a patch of glare ice. The APC’s bow swung very slowly toward the left. They continued forward but the vehicle’s axis no longer aligned with its direction of movement.
“He’s pretty good,” Hogg muttered critically. “He’s driven boats as big as this bitch before, so he knows where the back and sides are. But he’s not allowing for how much the armor weighs. He needs to correct quicker and not use so much fucking yoke when he does.”