by David Drake
That eunuch had vanished. The only place he—it—could have gone was into the wives’ suites.
I took the pistol out of the pocket where I’d let it ride throughout the assault. I didn’t need to be running and jumping while waving a pistol I wasn’t comfortable with.
The door was light, an ordinary interior panel. I measured the distance, judging where to kick with my boot heel.
Woetjans brushed past. She smashed the door to flinders with her shoulder and continued on through. She tripped on the bottom portion of the doorframe and therefore buried her head in the stomach of the eunuch who’d been waiting inside with a leveled carbine. I stepped over the eunuch’s flailing legs and rapped him on the skull with the butt of my pistol.
We’d entered the wives’ lounge. Furniture was overturned and various paraphernalia were scattered on the floor—cups, knitting, reading materials. The only person in sight was a maid who stood at the end of the corridor screaming her head off. Quite a lot of people were screaming. Since the doorways to the wives’ rooms had curtains rather than solid panels, the voices didn’t get much muffling.
To my left was another iron-strapped door, the entrance to the Admiral’s private apartment. Beyond that would be a staircase down to the common part of the palace, but the door there was just as solid.
I tried to jerk it open but it didn’t budge. The troops had brought a shaped charge in case we’d had to blow open the alley door—I knew where the drawbolt was and could have placed the explosive to chop it out of its hasp. I ran to the stairs to shout for somebody to bring it up soonest. Foliot—he was the third man—and his people had reached the top.
“Bring the explosives!” I shouted.
“Stay clear!” Woetjans wheezed. I spun to look back at her. Holding on edge the great marble-topped table from the lounge, the bosun stepped forward and smashed it into the center of the armored door. The stone broke into three great shards plus a spray of dust and gravel and the door burst inward.
Woetjans sat down in the rubble that she’d created, looking stunned. Even for her strength, that table must have been close to an overload.
Two Saguntines charged into the Admiral’s apartments before I could get there. I heard shots, then a long burst from a submachine gun.
The Colonel and I ran in behind his men. One of the troops was clutching his bleeding left arm with his right hand. The air was sharp with ozone from the submachine gun and gray with plaster dust blasted from the ceiling and far wall.
On the vast circular bed lay the wounded Admiral, trying desperately to raise his pistol for another shot. Azul sprawled across his legs. At least three slugs had hit her in the face as she tried to shield her master.
The wounded soldier had dropped his submachine gun; the other man was trying to load a fresh tube into the weapon he’d emptied by locking on the trigger. Foliot stepped past them, aimed, and put a short burst into the base of the Admiral’s throat.
Foliot turned. I think it was a moment before he recognized me.
“We’ve finished our business here,” the colonel said. “Let’s get back to the harbor and see how Leary’s getting on there.”
For several minutes I’d been hearing explosions that rattled ornaments. I suspected that meant Captain Leary and the naval contingent were getting on quite well.
CHAPTER 34
We went back down the stairs, gathering up the troops that Foliot had left behind at each stage. As I passed the second floor I sneezed at the sharpness of ozone and saw that a swatch of plaster had fallen from the wall at the far corner, exposing the bare bricks.
There were no additional bodies on the floor. If the shots had been unnecessary—or even accidental—at least the only damage was to the palace decoration.
The Saguntine troops had dropped their shawls when we entered the building. They carried their submachine guns openly, ready for trouble. I just hoped they weren’t going to provoke it: Several thousand people lived in Salaam, and a lot of them had a gun of some sort. The locals weren’t organized—and wouldn’t have been even if the Admiral were alive—but they could overwhelm the forty-some of us if they simply got the notion to try.
The wives’ garden was empty except for the men on guard. The maid’s body had been dragged to where it wouldn’t be further stepped on; not that she cared any more.
At the far end of the passage, a grizzled noncom checked the troops off as they entered the alley. He looked startled at me and Woetjans, but Foliot called, “There’s four more after me, Gridley.”
We went back to the harbor in a ragged line. I heard several shots as we strode along as briskly as the pavement allowed. Because the path through the buildings was so irregular, we didn’t look like an army. I doubt that more than half a dozen of us were visible at any one time. That shooting could have been anything; at any rate, there were no signs of it being aimed in our direction.
When I came in sight of the water, a column of water shot up from the port outrigger of one of the pirate cutters out in the bay. I heard a shudder through my boots a moment before the bang! of the explosion arrived through the air.
The blast lifted the outrigger. The cutter rocked upward, then rolled onto its port side as the torn metal no longer supported it. The hull continued to fill slowly as it sank. The starboard outrigger wouldn’t be enough to support the whole ship, but it would settle to the bottom on its side.
I didn’t see any civilians on the waterfront. Not only was there no one under Etzil’s marquee, he’d drawn a grating over the front of the shop proper. Other businesses facing the harbor were closed and often shuttered.
One of the cutters I’d noticed when we landed was in water so shallow that about half the hull was still visible. Others must have sunk out of sight, but there were three sloops from Saguntum’s naval protection force that had arrived. They weren’t much bigger than the pirate cutters, but each was built around a single antiship missile similar to those in the defensive batteries here and in most harbors.
Their chemical fuel made them short-range weapons with nothing like the impact of a warship’s missiles at interplanetary distances. They accelerated much more quickly than High Drive motors could move the five-tonne warship projectiles, however.
Pirate cutters carried bombardment rockets to strip the rigging from prey and threaten the hulls—but not to do serious damage to the ships they were trying to capture. These sloops were armed to gut pirates and kill everyone aboard. There was a fourth sloop in orbit for protection, but these had landed when the Alfraz had captured the port defenses.
A large inflatable boat was making for the shore. Others were in the harbor around the remaining pirate cutters.
The inflatable ran up on the shore, near the local craft. Colonel Foliot carried his submachine gun slung right-side up under his arm with his hand on the grip—a patrol sling. He called, “We got the bastard, Leary! And you seem to be doing well yourself.”
The last pirate cutter in harbor spouted water from the side, then dipped and began to fill. An inflatable boat like Captain Leary’s had already left the pirate and was heading to shore, as were the two others in the harbor.
“It’s been a very satisfactory morning,” Leary said, hopping out of the boat. Hogg remained seated in the bow, his stocked impeller pointed skyward. His eyes scanned the buildings on the harborside, reminding me of a bird of prey on its perch. The coxswain and the other five armed passengers were in Saguntine battledress.
“Olfetrie?” the Captain said. “All the Sissies and I will return to Saguntum with you in the Alfraz. Colonel, you’ll load your people into the sloops like we’d planned. And we’ve got plenty of room”—he nodded to the west, where a line of ragged people were staggering to the shore on the other side of the town: prisoners released from the slave pen. They were guarded by troops in battledress—“for the freed slaves. We’ve brought along hammocks if there’s too many for the couches already in the hold.”
“Sir?” I said. “Will y
ou be taking command of the Alfraz?”
“Goodness no, Olfetrie,” the captain said with a broad grin. “She’s your ship, and as far as I can tell you’ve been handling her quite well.”
The inflatable boats would carry about thirty people apiece, but the line on the other side of the swale continued to come. The Saguntines who’d cleared that missile pit must’ve gone straight to the prison instead of waiting for support from the sloops as planned. Because they’d had more time, the troops had knocked in doors and taken any slaves who’d wanted to come.
That’d worked out all right—they hadn’t started a full-scale battle while deep into a hostile city. I didn’t like thinking about it, though. It was like somebody telling me I needn’t bother with a safety line in the rigging. Most times that was true, but why take a risk when there wasn’t any reason for it?
“Woetjans,” I said. “Go head the freed slaves over to the lighter we came to shore with. I’ll get the crew aboard and ready for you.”
It occurred to me as I trotted off to the boatmen’s shelter that maybe I should’ve checked with Captain Leary, but it was the obvious thing to do. The lighter would carry the best part of a hundred passengers. That was better than shuttling them in inflatables.
The troops guarding the boatmen looked glum about missing the action, but their prisoners were sitting on their haunches, chatting and brewing coffee much as they would have been if we hadn’t arrived on ben Yusuf. I recognized the lighter’s owner and his boy.
We had the motor rumbling by the time Woetjans arrived with the head of the line of freed prisoners. Thirty or forty of the slaves were women, a complication that hadn’t occurred to me. The ex-slaves were from dozens of cultures and many of the individuals had been brutalized while they were held on ben Yusuf.
I said to Woetjans, “I hope we don’t have any problems with prisoners thinking the women aboard are fair game. I don’t assume all of those we’ve freed are saints, and the facilities in the hold are pretty basic.”
The bosun snorted. She still carried the length of pipe. She slapped it against her right palm and said, “I guess we can teach everybody to keep RCN discipline while they’re aboard. And anybody who gets notions after we’ve already warned him once, he doesn’t have to stay on board.”
Captain Leary joined me with Hogg and three motormen as the last of the freed slaves filed onto the lighter. He said, “Officer Mundy is in orbit on the Concha. The sloops’ commo suite isn’t all you might hope for, but she thought she’d be useful there if we got hostile visitors. We’re ready to go off whenever you are.”
“I think we’re ready to board, then,” I said. I checked my belt purse. It wasn’t nearly as heavy as it’d been when we landed, but there were enough thalers left to make the lighter’s owner happy that the Saguntines had come to town. I never expected to return to Salaam, but having the boatmen pleased if I did was worth more than ten thalers.
I gestured the RCN spacers to the rope ladder up the lighter’s bow. To Captain Leary I said, “You brought our techs to set the charges that sank the pirate ships, sir?”
Leary laughed. “Well, I’m pretty sure the colonel’s boys could’ve blown up the outriggers without specialist help,” he said. “What they might not have been able to do was set the fusion bottles to fail in about six hours. I didn’t want that happening while any of our people were still in harbor…but I don’t think it’ll prove a good idea for the locals to try raising their cutters after we’ve gone.”
Captain Leary and I were both laughing as we climbed aboard the lighter.
* * *
I returned to the cabin following my first excursion since the Alfraz had inserted into the Matrix. Captain Leary, seated in the striker’s seat, looked up and called, “Anything unexpected?”
The starboard watch was on duty. Three of the bunks were occupied. One of the empties was permanently mine, but two off-duty spacers must be in the hold with the passengers. I didn’t object. Captain Leary and the tech crew were berthed there already, and I figured that the presence of RCN personnel kept order without need for formal measures.
“I’ll adjust the course a little,” I said. “I can make two of the next three transitions a trifle gentler. To tell the truth, the main thing I’m doing is getting used to wearing a hard suit on the hull. We didn’t have one on the Alfraz when we escaped from ben Yusuf, and I got used to working the rigging in an air suit.”
Leary got up from the console and walked toward me. “I’ve been going over your course log,” he said, gesturing to the display he’d been studying when I came aboard. “There’s remarkably little deviation from the stages you programmed. It would be good for a full crew, but it approaches magical when I know that you and Lal were alone on the ship. And your record actually improves as you got deeper into the stage.”
I grimaced and bent my face away as though I needed to look at the torso catches I was opening. “Well, sir…” I said.
I looked up and met the Captain’s eyes directly. “Sir,” I said as calmly as I could. “I wasn’t in my right mind for a lot of that time. I thought, I felt, that I was part of the ship myself. I wasn’t eating much, and I wasn’t talking at all except to Lal on the hull with hand signals.”
I shook my head, smiling ruefully. “As best I can remember, I knew when something was wrong the way I knew to scratch my back if I was itching. And it worked, I guess, because we got there; but sir, I really don’t want to get that way again.”
“No, I don’t suppose you would,” Leary said. “There are times when I’m on the hull in the Matrix that I know things.…”
His serious expression vanished into a smile as bright and cheery as the sun coming out after a spring rainstorm. He said, “But it’s not Daniel-Leary-the-human-being who knows those things, if you see what I mean. Which I suspect you do.”
Leary’s expression changed again. He cocked his head and said, “Olfetrie, have you thought about staying on Saguntum? Colonel Foliot speaks very highly of you, and his daughter seemed—”
“Sir!” I said. Does he want shut of me? “Sir, I’m a citizen of Cinnabar and I dreamed of becoming an RCN officer, That didn’t work out and maybe it can’t work out, but I’ll die a Cinnabar citizen!”
“Then stop taking your suit off,” Leary said, smiling again. “I’ll put one on myself, and you can show me the course as you see it.”
He chose one of the hard suits that wasn’t in use at present. Then he reached into the locker and brought out the sling with a sheath from which one of his brass communication rods hung.
Obediently, I began doing up my catches again. I didn’t know what was going on, but at least it no longer seemed that the captain was looking for polite ways to get me out of his crew.
Aloud I said, “Sir? Monica Foliot and I became close during our escape from Salaam, but we haven’t had any contact since we arrived on Saguntum.”
The ambient noise in the cabin was considerable, even in the Matrix. In particular, the pumps and gears of the rigging set up a constant racket in the hull. I was sure that nobody any farther than me from Captain Leary could hear my words.
“Well, you weren’t on Saguntum for very long before we lifted for this operation, were you?” Leary said. He’d gotten on the lower half of his suit, boots included, in a fraction of the time it would have taken me. “Which Mistress Foliot knew about, since her father was leading it. A sensible and perhaps shy girl wouldn’t have bothered you.”
“I guess, sir,” I said, following the captain into the airlock as he did up the torso of his suit.
I didn’t know what I really thought about Monica and me. I’d told myself that “we” were over as soon as she got home to her wealthy family. I still figured that was true…but I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to shrug off her absence the way I’d expected to do.
The captain didn’t say anything in the airlock. Getting used to the rigging suit meant developing calluses at different points than where the air suit had
rubbed. I’d been looking forward to a little sack time after I tweaked our course.
I wasn’t complaining, mind. Captain Leary was choosing to talk to with me in private, the only truly private place on a starship: outside the hull.
We tramped into the far bow. Two riggers were adjusting the dorsal mainyard. The sail wasn’t set at the moment, but I knew from experience that the gears that rotated the yard sometimes stuck.
For a moment Leary looked up at the Matrix: the whole cosmos. Ours to sail through for as long as the Alfraz held together; ours to vanish into forever if she came apart.
He took out the half-meter-long brass rod. The bulbous tips were engraved with three leaping fishes; I looked at the design for a moment before putting my end firmly against my helmet.
“That’s the Bantry crest,” Leary said. “The tenants had a set made up for me in the shop there.”
His voice was thinned but clear. I wondered what the rods were filled with. They gave better sound quality than touching helmets would have, and they were much handier.
“Sir?” I said. “Why doesn’t the RCN make them standard equipment?”
Leary laughed. “You’d have to ask somebody else about Navy House policy,” he said, “but if I had to guess I’d say that very few captains feel a need to communicate privately with members of their crews. And also that it’s not a practice that our lords and masters would want to encourage if it were brought to their attention.”
He cleared his throat and went on, “Most captains don’t have someone like Officer Mundy in their crew, of course; which brings me to why we’ve come out here.”
He waved his free arm in a broad gesture ahead of us.
“Besides getting a look at the most beautiful sight in the universe, of course,” he said. “The universe itself. Besides that, I say. Olfetrie, you’ve never commented on what you were told just before you were shanghaied: that Lady Mundy and I were part of an intelligence operation to bring about a war with Karst.”