Though Hell Should Bar the Way - eARC

by David Drake

  I could see people watching past skewed shutters, but nobody called to us. We didn’t run into any patrols—police or military—either.

  Instead of going directly to the naval barracks, I had Wedell drive us to a Public Works motor pool which was more or less on the way. A frightened-looking watchman let us in, but the regular staff had fled. A dozen small tractors and scores of wheeled garbage hoppers were parked within a wire-fenced yard. The only permanent improvement was a small shed, but it had a connection to the government system.

  I connected my terminal while Wedell and the watchman fidgeted nearby. The barracks didn’t have active imagery, but the dart sloops floating in the harbor adjacent had sensor packs on their spines.

  The naval buildings and the frontage of the Military Harbor had always been fenced off from the rest of Jacquerie. The Alliance forces were reinforcing the woven-wire barrier with rolls of concertina wire at the base. Judging from the preparations going on, they planned to add more on top of the original fence.

  Instead of a single member of the Shore Police, a squad of Alliance troops in battledress guarded the gate. Teams of four were stationed at front and back of the naval barracks while Alliance engineers fenced it off from the rest of the enclosure. The invaders were apparently using the barracks as a prison, at least for the time being.

  “Well,” I said to Wedell, “it isn’t going to get easier. There’s room to park on Water Street near the gate. Let’s go do that.”

  The watchman stared as we went back to the car. It was a half mile to drive from the lot down to the harbor entrance; we could have walked the two short steep blocks more quickly. I preferred the look of arriving by vehicle, however.

  It would have been better yet if we’d had a limousine instead of a cramped little beater, though I figured we’d be all right. Maybe next time I could ask Hogg for an upgrade in case we had to do something like this again.

  We pulled up just short of the gateway. I’d been riding beside Wedell in the front; the back seats were all right for legroom, but the roof there brushed the top of my head even though I wasn’t much above average height—five foot ten inches if I got the benefit of the doubt.

  The guards watching us through the wire wore a uniform pattern I’d never seen before—green on green on green, all the shades dull—and carried stocked impellers of an unfamiliar pattern. These threw lighter projectiles than the standard-issue weapons I was used to. Dad had handled small arms, though it was a minor part of his business.

  “I’m Colonel McKinnon of the Karst security service,” I said to the officer on the other side of the wire. “We’re here to pick up one of my agents who was caught with the unit he was observing.”

  I held up the bifold from McKinnon’s effects, with text and photo on one side and a hexagonal platinum badge on the other. The picture looked as much like me as these ever do, and the text—which indicated I was fifty-three—was unreadable without concentration or a magnifier.

  “I haven’t had any orders about this,” the officer said. He frowned. His cap badge was an R on crossed lightning bolts. These must be local auxiliaries, the sort of unit Saguntum might provide if my survey was satisfactory.

  “Well, get them!” I said. “I don’t know who you report to. I talked to an aide to Major Wittgenstein of the 5th Bureau, and believe me, you don’t want him to have to sort this!”

  I pulled Wittgenstein’s name out of my arse; I didn’t figure a low-ranking reserve officer would have any better idea of who commanded the Alliance security detachment than I did. The threat was perfectly believable, though.

  “Just tell them that Colonel McKinnon wants to remove an agent from the general captured population before his fellows realize that he’s a traitor who’s been helping us,” I said.

  The officer had a portable phone the size of a shoe box. He dutifully began making calls, trying to get somebody to take responsibility for something he didn’t understand well enough to explain. He had no more luck than you’d expect.

  The other guards were staring at the man, which probably bothered him as much as Wedell and I did. After two minutes, which I’m sure seemed like more to the officer, I said, “Bloody hell, man! One wog more or less doesn’t matter, but if you get an agent killed and he’s working for the 5th Bureau, you might as well eat your gun now. It’ll be quicker and a lot less painful.”

  I’m pretty sure that a real Karst security official would be less overbearing with Alliance troops, but it seemed to me what the job required here. If this fellow had been a long-service regular, I wouldn’t have tried it with him…and I suspect I’d have been coughing up my teeth if I had.

  “Oh, go get him, then!” the officer said petulantly, breaking his connection. He seemed to have been on hold anyway. Then, to one of his men, “Let them in.”

  Wedell and I sauntered through the pedestrian door. The way the barbed wire had been laid meant that they couldn’t have opened the vehicular gate if they’d wanted to.

  The quartet of guards at the front of the barracks watched us come. I said to the oldest, “We’re here to pick up a prisoner—Whitlake, goes by Red. The lieutenant”—I nodded toward the man who’d let us in. He was probably a lieutenant—“cleared it with your headquarters.”

  “We got a Whitlake?” the man I’d spoken to asked the fellow beside him who’d taken out a data unit.

  “Yeah, room three, ground floor,” that man said.

  Rather than go inside, the older soldier walked closer to the building and shouted, “Whitlake! Get your ass out here now!”

  The windows were open, but I still wasn’t sure how well that was going to work until the front door suddenly opened. Whitlake stepped out, looking worried and glancing over his shoulder.

  “This way, spacer!” I said. “And get moving!”

  “Sir?” Whitlake said, gaping.

  “No talking now,” I ordered bruskly. “We’ll discuss your assignment aboard El Cano.”

  I nodded to the guards. “Thank you, men,” I said. “I hadn’t counted on being in time.”

  With the Saguntine darter between us, Wedell and I walked down the quay to where El Cano was berthed. Some of the Alliance troops may have wondered about what was going on, but they didn’t say anything aloud.

  CHAPTER 42

  Whitlake started to say something as we strode along, but I snapped, “Don’t talk till we’re in the ship.” Nobody was nearby and I wasn’t sure there was even a parabolic microphone on the planet, but I wanted to have my discussion with the darter in a controlled—confined—space.

  The sloop’s boarding ramp felt solid after the quivering nervousness of the extension. As soon as we were in the hold, I used the local switch to start the hatch closing. On the bridge I brought the console up, glanced at the read-outs—reaction mass had been topped off; another mark in Lieutenant Smith’s favor—and started the internal pumps cycling.

  Then I rotated the couch inward and grinned up at Whitlake, who stood nervously beside Wedell. “Red,” I said, “you asked me for another chance when you funked it on Karst. This is your chance if—”

  “Yessir,” Whitlake said.

  “Red, you really do have a choice here,” I said. “I’ll put you off and act as my own darter unless you’re sure you can do it.”

  “Sir, I’m better than you’ll ever be,” Whitlake said, leaning forward. “I can do this. You said you were giving me a chance, so stop talking and let’s get bloody on with it.”

  “Yes, all right,” I said. “Take your stations. We’ll lift off, insert, and then extract to make our attack. We’ll all be in suits, but Red? You won’t be going out on the hull. Wedell and I will take care of the rig. And I’ll say right now: If there’s a bad problem with the rig, I’ll reprogram and keep trying till I’m happy about where we’re going to extract. We’re not in a rush to do this, but we’re only going to get one chance. Understood?”

  Wedell shrugged; Whitlake said, “Yessir.”

  “Then l
et’s get our suits on,” I said. We all went to the locker.

  The three rigging suits that Captain Leary had sent to El Cano—from commercial suppliers, I’d noticed—were still aboard. Wedell and I each donned one, but I was pleased to agree when Red asked if he could wear an air suit. He might be marginally less safe, but he’d certainly be more effective as a darter in less uncomfortable gear.

  I wasn’t ruthless enough to order Red to wear the lighter suit, but I didn’t try to argue him out of it. In all truth, I didn’t think any of us were likely to survive.

  El Cano had only four plasma thrusters. I tested them in diagonal pairs, bringing each set up to half power with the sphincter petals flared. The sloop rocked unpleasantly and the external view fogged to sparkling gray as the steam rose to blanket the sensors on the spine.

  “El Cano to Control,” I called on the local VHF frequency. “El Cano lifting to test new High Drive installation as scheduled. Over. Break. Ship, prepare for lift-off.”

  I ran the thrusters at full, then reduced the sphincters to minimum aperture. The sloop paused in a ball of steam, then began to lift in her leisurely fashion. The six High Drive motors gave the sloops considerable agility in vacuum, but their thrusters were the minimum necessary to get them to orbit.

  I wondered whether the personnel in Saguntum Control were all from the Alliance or if the regular Saguntine crew was on duty with Alliance guards, The only ships in orbit at present were the two destroyers, so I wasn’t worried about an ordinary movement problem.

  It was possible that the missile batteries had been restored to function—I’d been afraid to check in case I called attention to them and to me. I hoped that if we sounded normal, nobody would panic and gut us on the way up.

  “El Cano, you are clear to lift,” Control responded through the RF hash from the thrusters. “Out.”

  We were already lifting, but that was good to know. So far, so good.

  I’d timed the ascent to avoid as much as possible the destroyers already above the planet. I hoped they would ignore us so long as we appeared to be ignoring them, but the Meduse hailed us as we rose through one hundred thousand feet, “Saguntine ship, this is Hegemony vessel Meduse. Return to Jacquerie Haven at once. No vessels are permitted to leave Saguntum during the present emergency. Acknowledge, over.”

  Instead of switching propulsion modes as I normally would at that height, I engaged the High Drive but left the thrusters running at maximum output. We had plenty of reaction mass for this operation. What we might not have was time.

  As our acceleration more than doubled, I switched to tight-beam microwave and said, “Meduse, this is sloop El Cano, now under Alliance control. We are cleared to test our High Drive motors which have been recently replaced. Repeat, we have clearance from Jacquerie Control. El Cano over.”

  Although El Cano was a naval vessel, its plot-position indicator was rudimentary compared to what I’d trained on at the Academy. The Koellner and Meduse were red and orange beads respectively at the head of thin tracks of the same color; but the console didn’t automatically predict those tracks in the future. We were higher than the Meduse and continued to rise, but her orbital course continued to close the distance.

  “El Cano, you must land immediately or you will be destroyed!” the Meduse ordered. “Respond and obey immediately! Over.”

  I focused my optical sensors on the Karst destroyer. She was under way, starting to lift out of orbit to pursue us. That was alarming enough, but even worse her dorsal turrets were rising out of their locked position. The Meduse had been prepared to land; now she was coming to action stations.

  “Roger, Meduse,” I said, ignoring the way Whitlake moved in his seat to stare at me past my holographic screen. “We are shutting down to return to Jacquerie Haven. El Cano out.”

  “You mean we’re not going to attack?” Whitlake asked through the console.

  Instead of replying directly, I said, “Ship, prepare to insert.”

  I shut down the thrusters and the High Drive. Both means of propulsion released ions which made it impossible to balance the ship’s charge to enter the Matrix.

  “Inserting!” I said as I executed.

  We made a smooth transition. I gave a great sigh of relief and set the rig to deploy. Heaven knew how much of it really would rise without human help.

  “Wedell,” I said, “you’ll need to go out by yourself for the time being. I sketched out a course while we were on the ground, but the Meduse forced us to insert way early, out of place, and with less sidereal velocity than I’d planned for.”

  “Roger,” she said, getting up from the bunk. She walked to the airlock with her helmet in her hand.

  “Red,” I said, “we’re going to attack just like we planned. I lied to the Meduse so they wouldn’t start shooting at us. Even a near miss would change our surface charge enough that we wouldn’t be able to insert until we’d rebalanced it. We’re safe as long as we stay in the Matrix.”

  I shrugged. “Now,” I said, “we won’t be able to move very far when we’ve started out at such a low speed. On the other hand, we don’t need to move very far. We’ll be extracting very close to where we inserted—but we’ll be coming back from a vector I hope they don’t expect. Right?”

  The Saguntine darter nodded to me. “Right,” he said. “I’ll be ready!”

  He was making an effort to sound enthusiastic. That was good enough. Certainly it was as good as I could manage myself right now.

  El Cano rang as Wedell closed the outer hatch of the airlock. I got to work plotting our new course through the Matrix.

  The sloop’s limited rig—four antennas, with only main and foresails—meant there was less to go wrong than a more maneuverable ship would have, but the dorsal antenna wasn’t fully vertical and the port mainyard hadn’t even begun to rotate into place. I considered joining Wedell despite what I’d said, but then the telltale indicated that dorsal had locked. The hydromechanical indicators were touchy; the antenna itself may have been fine all along.

  I resumed work on the course. I’d planned to attack the Meduse, but I couldn’t predict her location. The likelihood was that when El Cano disappeared, the Meduse had stopped accelerating outward. She might be anywhere in a sphere of too large a volume for me to plot an attack.

  That left the Erich Koellner. There was a reasonable chance that she would hold her orbit, in which case putting El Cano in an attack position would be just a question of my skill.

  Though the Koellner was she only option as a target, there were several downsides. The Alliance destroyer mounted heavier plasma cannon—quite heavy, in fact, 12.5 centimeter weapons. In addition and probably worse, the Alliance crew would show a higher state of training than that of the Karst crew, and they were more likely to be alert.

  There wasn’t any choice. I worked on my course.

  We shunted through four separate bubble universes. At each transition I rechecked the course according to the actual sail plan as it varied from the intended plan. The rig seemed to be loosening up with use. There were no serious misalignments after we made the final shift, so the attack should go in as I planned it.

  If my calculations were right. And if the Koellner had held its same orbit.

  I called Wedell in from the hull. I felt bad about not having gotten out to help her, though she clearly was capable of handling the job. My calculations had been more complex than I’d expected, both because of the initial problems with the rig and because I was so very aware of the fact that I had to get it right this time.

  Rechecking wouldn’t necessarily catch my errors; it hadn’t when we attacked Karst. It was the only thing I knew to do, however, so that’s what I did.

  Wedell reentered the cabin, holding her helmet under her arm. “It’s all solid, sir,” she called. “I was worried about the port mainspar, but it only hung up the first time. It’s been right as rain since.”

  “Ship,” I said, using the PA system though with the propulsion system
s shut down in the Matrix I wouldn’t have had to. “We’ll extract in three minutes. Red, launch when you bear. Over.”

  Wedell nodded and settled onto her bunk. Whitlake, running the console’s simulation of the Erich Koellner, nodded but didn’t speak.

  For want of anything better to do, I began plotting a course to Benedict. Succeed or fail, El Cano couldn’t very well land again on Saguntum. It made very little sense to plot so distant an escape course, but I preferred doing that rather than watching a clock read down.

  When my screen pulsed pink to alert me, I switched the console to current sensor data—there was none, so the display was an opalescent cloud—and said, “Ship, prepare for extraction in five seconds. Extracting—now.”

  We extracted into normal space. I felt my bones freezing as the display came into sharp focus: The Koellner was exactly where the console had predicted it would be if I’d done my astrogation correctly.

  I was reaching to engage the High Drive motors when a plasma bolt hit the starboard antenna. The mainsail diffused it slightly, but the heavy steel tubing caught most of the energy and slammed El Cano. We lurched; the second bolt hit the ventral topsail and yard.

  The Koellner had registered the disruption to sidereal space caused by a ship extracting from the Matrix. She’d begun firing before El Cano even existed in the normal universe. Four of her heavy cannon could be brought to bear on our predicted location, and the last two bolts met us when we appeared.

  My display fogged; vaporized metal from the rig had recondensed on the sensor pick-ups. If the first bolt hadn’t jerked us out of our original alignment, the second would have struck us straight on in the bow.

  A jolt and a roar, not another plasma bolt but El Cano’s weapon launching. “Dart away!” Whitlake shouted. “We got the bastard!”

  The third bolt hit the underside of our port outrigger and spun the sloop like a flipped coin. The Koellner’s big guns were slower firing than the four-inch weapons which the RCN standardized for destroyers, but she got in that one additional round.