by David Drake
“Are you a fool?” Menandros said, slapping the table with the flat of his hand. His cards jumped and several of them fell to the floor. “This treaty says that the Alliance won’t increase its territory by conquest! And that’s they’re trying to do, conquer my Tarbell Stars!’
Definitely not as fuzzy as he seems, Adele thought. Although Menandros hadn’t been the subject of her visit to the palace, she had learned something that neither Mistress Sand nor the 5th Bureau seemed to be aware of.
“I am not a lawyer or a diplomat—” she began.
“This isn’t law!” said Menandros. “This is honor! If Cinnabar doesn’t defend its honor, it is cowardly and all the world will know that Cinnabar is a coward!”
Adele stood up. She was here playing a part, but there was a point beyond which she could not go and remain believable. The president might not recognize that, but Dumouret probably did—and those to whom Dumouret reported certainly would.
“Master Menandros,” Adele said. She poured the rest of her wine on the floor and set the glass on the table. “You forget yourself. Nothing that happens in a place as benighted as the Tarbell Stars could affect the Republic’s honor.”
Adele walked out without looking behind her. She thought that Menandros might lift himself from the chair to follow, but he only mumbled protests. The three women chattered in low, piping voices like birds after sunset.
Tovera pulled the gate open, her face turned backward to watch the president and his servants. What would I have done if the door had been locked? Adele thought as she set a dignified pace down the hallway.
She smiled. Tovera could cut the ring off Dumouret’s finger, I’m sure. And if that wasn’t the key, it would at least encourage him to tell us where the key is.
“Do you think they’ll try to stop us?” Tovera asked in a low voice after they turned the corner.
“Dumouret has more sense than that,” Adele said. “I suspect Menandros does also, though you can’t be sure whether rulers in a backwater like this really understand how insignificant they are to the Republic. Still, Dumouret won’t let the president tell the guards to detain me.”
Tovera giggled. “A pity,” she said.
The doorman had changed while they were with Menandros. This one merely nodded with a vacant expression as they walked out. His mouth was slightly open.
“Dumouret is an Upholder agent,” Adele said. “I wanted to get a feel for him in his own element.”
“A job for me?” Tovera said. She opened the back of the Mignouris’ ground car for her mistress, then went around to the driver’s side.
“No,” said Adele. “Mignouri or his predecessors have planted a very thorough information-gathering suite on Dumouret. He’s harmless in himself, and I’m sure the Upholders—or General Krychek—would easily replace him if they had to. This way we know what the Upholders know.”
Tovera drove off, over-correcting as they turned into the street but managing to avoid the gatepost.
Adele was thinking of the new Headman of Karst, a boy and a fool. He had insulted Cinnabar’s representatives, Senator Forbes and Captain Daniel Leary, and he had insulted the Republic itself. He hadn’t realized how insignificant he was, but because of the war with the Alliance the Republic hadn’t been able to do anything about it.
The war is over now, Adele thought as Tovera got out to open the gate of the Residency.
* * *
As Daniel raised his hand to knock, Tovera opened the door. “The external security is pretty good,” she said with a grin—her version of a grin, that was. “The 5th Bureau brings in its own construction crews whenever it can. The plumbing may not work, but you’ll be able to watch visitors a block away in any direction.”
“I hope it’s all right for us to drop by here,” Daniel said. That aspect of visiting his friend at her new house hadn’t occurred to him before. “At a safe house, I mean.”
“Come in, please,” said Adele who had come up behind her servant. “It’s not a safe house, it’s the 5th Bureau Residency on Peltry and we’re not 5th Bureau.”
“Well,” said Tovera as she closed the massive outer door behind Daniel and Hogg, “I haven’t been for years, at least.”
Adele led them through the entrance hall into a drawing room with upholstered chairs and a table on which sat a vase of dead flowers. She glanced at the vase and said, “Perhaps I should’ve directed the wife to stay here. I’m not a skilled housekeeper.”
“There’s some fresh ones out front,” Hogg said, taking the vase by the neck in his left hand. “Come on, Tovera. Let’s see what we can find in the garden.”
They weren’t in the way, Daniel thought as the servants went out. But he was just as glad to be alone with Adele. He was feeling wrung out and—almost—overwhelmed, and he didn’t like to hint at weakness in front of his old servant.
“I’ve been put in charge of training the crew of an ex-Sverdlovsk destroyer,” he said as he let himself down onto a chair covered in deep red plush. “I can do it, of course, but it’s scarcely going to change the course of the rebellion unless the Upholders are a great deal less formidable that they’ve been made out to be.”
“I’ve downloaded full particulars on Nabis to the command console,” Adele said. “I don’t think there’s anything you need, but I wanted you to have the background. Would you like a drink?”
I didn’t say anything about Nabis. But she’s Adele.
Daniel closed his eyes. It was relaxing to chat with Adele. “I wouldn’t turn down a whiskey,” he said. “But a small one or I’ll fall asleep and Hogg will have to push me to the Sissie in a wheelbarrow. If you have a wheelbarrow here.”
“The house inventory doesn’t mention one,” Adele said. “I believe there’s a shed in back which you could check. Or Hogg could.”
Glass clinked on the table beside Daniel. He opened his eyes and saw the bottle and tumbler which Adele had set there.
“I don’t think the Mignouris had very elevated tastes,” she said, “but I don’t suppose it will poison you.”
As Daniel poured—more than the small one he had asked for, he realized—Adele continued, “Minister Robin is afraid of you. He’s an adventurer himself, and he can’t imagine that you don’t plan to displace him in running the government here.”
“Bloody hell,” Daniel said. “What would I want with the Tarbell Stars?”
Adele shrugged and took a sip from her own tumbler. “Minister Forbes was concerned that you’d want to do that.” she said. “Why shouldn’t a Kostroman quartermaster imagine that it’s the height of your ambition also?”
“I’d sooner go into banking,” Daniel said, setting down his tumbler. He’d finished the whiskey in it, more fool him.
“I’m going to go ahead with the training,” Daniel said deliberately, staring at the empty glass. “Split both crews between the two ships and pack in as many of the Nabis Regiment as I can. I’ve brought landsmen up to speed before now. I’m going to take them off to an uninhabited world where we won’t have distractions and get me a feel for the people.”
He looked at Adele and said, “Do you have a better idea?”
“No,” she said. She sat in the chair across the table from him. “I’ll look for a way around Robin’s concerns.”
Adele coughed. “I wonder, Daniel…” she said. “If you’d mind if I stayed in Newtown while you’re training?”
“What?” Daniel said, sitting upright again. “No, of course not. I was already doubtful about asking you to give the Nabies some pistol training, because I thought you’d frighten them.”
“If you don’t mind, then,” Adele said. “I’d like to look over the local files, which will take some time. There’s extensive video coverage of the palace and all the ministries. And though of course I don’t have any responsibility to General Storn in his official capacity, it would be courteous to have someone competent watching over the Residency until Mignouri’s official replacement arrives. The wife wasn’t
even keeping up with the correspondence in the areas within her capacity.”
Daniel eyed the bottle, then turned his tumbler upside down on the table. He rose. “I’ll sleep aboard the Sissie tonight,” he decided aloud. “Tomorrow we start training for real and I probably won’t be getting much sleep from there on out. Have fun with your files.”
“I will,” said Adele, the simple truth as Daniel well knew. She walked with him to the door.
Tovera opened it from the other side. Hogg stood with her, holding a vase refilled with flowers of a sort that Daniel’s mother had grown. He didn’t remember what they were called.
Daniel grinned. “And you know what?” he said. “I’ll have a good time with the training. Langland gathered up some decent material on Nabis before he made the mistake of trusting Karst.”
CHAPTER 13
Above Peltry
“Braking in five seconds,” Daniel announced over the ship channel, piping his voice through every commo helmet and every PA speaker on the Katchaturian. He watched the countdown clock and said, “Braking—now.”
He pressed the Execute button, which on this Sverdlovsk-built destroyer was a real button instead of being virtual like that of the Sissie. The twelve plasma thrusters roared in unison.
The ship shuddered—of course—but with a little more violence than Daniel thought was proper. He eyed the readouts, then used the vernier scale to adjust the attitude of both bow nozzles on the port outrigger. The vibration smoothed noticeably.
He grinned. Noticeably to him, at least.
“Power,” Daniel said, keying a two-way link to Chief Engineer Pasternak. The 2 g braking thrust would be uncomfortable to walk in, but it didn’t seriously affect anyone’s ability to speak. “Chief, I think you solved the problems when you blew out Tank Three. “Good call, over.”
When Daniel moved to the Katchaturian, he had brought the Sissie’s chief engineer with him. The corvette’s propulsion systems were in blue-print condition, but he hadn’t been confident that the same would be true for the destroyer.
In fact neither the thruster nozzles nor the High Drive motors of the Katchaturian had excessive hours on them. On the voyage out to 5L13TTF—the uninhabited world Daniel had chosen for training—there had been niggling stumbles in both systems, however.
Pasternak had finally decided that the problem wasn’t in the power units themselves but rather was debris in one of the destroyer’s reaction mass tanks. The Power Room crew had blown out the tank and the lines it fed while Daniel and his officers conducted training either on the ground or on the Princess Cecile.
“Six, I don’t think that tank had been drained in years,” Pasternak replied. “That bloody Riddle—” the Katchaturian’s chief engineer when Daniel took over the Nabis Contingent; Pasternak had cashiered him on his first inspection of the destroyer’s Power Room “—was a lazy scut besides being a drunk, which was why I fired him. The ship made only short hops, and Riddle didn’t rotate the draw so that they all got used. Over.”
“Six out,” Daniel said, smiling faintly.
The stutter in the thrusters as he brought the Katchaturian down on a rocky shoreline on 5L13TTF for the first time had been unnerving. The problem could have been in the ship’s electronics—or worse, the wiring harness. The notion that trash in the reaction mass lines was randomly starving the thrusters of fuel hadn’t occurred to him, because it was so easy to prevent.
Atmospheric buffeting began when the destroyer braked into Peltry’s stratosphere. It grew worse as she dropped lower.
A starship couldn’t be streamlined. Even with the antennas and yards telescoped and lashed firmly to the hull, a ship was a mass of irregular protrusions. At the speeds a starship entered the atmosphere, you could only hang on and hope that nothing—well, as little as possible—carried away.
The Sissie and Katchaturian had proceeded to their destination in a series of hops through the Matrix rather than the single insertion which was all that so short a distance really required. Daniel was not only giving the new personnel as much experience as possible, he wanted his Sissies to get a feel for people who would revert to being officers if they worked out.
Most of the Nabis officers had done pretty well, or anyway well enough. An infantry captain—formally, the ground troops had been the Capital Regiment on Nabis—was probably a decent officer in his original slot, but he had proven unwilling to take orders from warrant officers or from women. Minister Robin might well have a use for him; Daniel Leary did not.
The Katchaturian handled well on reentry; better than the Princess Cecile if the truth were told, though Daniel didn’t think he would ever say that aloud. They were actually slanting in short of his intended path to Newtown Harbor, so he angled the thrusters to emphasize lift over braking. The buffeting increased, but not seriously.
5L13TTF had a breathable atmosphere and a temperate climate at the equator. It had never been settled because there was no soil and plenty of more suitable worlds in this region, but it was a perfect place for firearms training.
“Marksmanship training” would have been overstating the process, because at the end of it most of the spacers—Sissies as well as the Nabis recruits—still couldn’t be expected to hit a man-sized target much farther than they could have thrown the weapon.
They were less likely to be afraid of an impeller, however, and they were probably less likely to shoot things by accident. A technician had blown off his own big toe, but spacers regularly lost digits and even limbs. Daniel thought the fellow would be all right in the Katchaturian’s Power Room once he’d healed.
He halted the destroyer in a hover, then slid her sideways into position a hundred feet above her slip in the naval harbor. Flaring the thruster nozzles manually, Daniel set her down. Just above the surface their descent slowed. The ship wallowed for a moment, cushioned by steam licked upward by plasma exhaust. When the outriggers touched the water, Daniel chopped the throttles.
It had been a good landing, though a slight drift to port suggested that either thruster alignment or the sphincter balance wasn’t as good as it could be. He and Pasternak with all the original Nabis officers would go over the propulsion systems in the next day or two.
It was also true that the Katchaturian’s greater length to breadth ratio than a corvette emphasized Daniel’s sloppiness. Schnitker—the Nabis and later Tarbell captain, now Daniel’s striker—would have said that the landing had been perfect.
Daniel grinned. When I start judging my performance by the standards of an officer from Novy Sverdlovsk, now working in the back of beyond, it will be time to retire. Though in fairness, Schnitker was a decent astrogator and a better shiphandler than most recent Academy graduates.
The Katchaturian pinged and crackled as she cooled. The pumps in her stern throbbed, sucking harbor water to replenish the ship’s reaction mass through fat hoses. For human use the water would be distilled, but inlet filtering was sufficient for the thrusters and High Drives. Any working fluid was adequate for the propulsion systems, but using water had benefits for the crews.
Daniel checked his read-outs and found no red lights. Barnes, the bosun, and his crew wouldn’t be able to check the rigging until the ship had cooled considerably, but at least they hadn’t lost a whole antenna. The hull’s integrity was as good as you could expect of a ship which had seen more than twenty years service, and only one of the High Drive motors was showing excessive wear. In all, a very satisfactory—
Cazelet was the Katchaturian’s acting signals officer. The slot was ordinarily that of a junior warrant officer, but Daniel had become used to having a signals officer who did more than pass messages.
Neither Cory nor Cazelet were the equal of Adele, but she had trained them to do many of the things she did—and more important, to think the way she did. When Cazelet sent an alert message to the command console, Daniel opened it immediately and scanned the contents.
“Cazelet,” he said, opening a link. “What has the govern
ment reaction been, over?”
“Sir, there hasn’t been one,” Cazelet said. “Not to mention, I mean. Port Control alerted the Alfonso, the destroyer on standby, but the captain queried the Ministry of War and the Ministry hasn’t responded. That was five hours ago, over.”
“Do we know who the pirates were?” Daniel said. He called up the recordings of Katchaturian’s Plot Position Indicator when they extracted above Peltry an hour ago. The hulk which held reaction mass for the pirates remained where it had been, a million miles above the surface, but the three smaller vessels had vanished.
There were several alerts on the command display—Barnes was ready to open the main hatch, Vesey was bringing the Princess Cecile down, and Pasternak had a detailed report on the propulsion systems. They could all wait until Daniel had sorted out Cazelet’s report.
“Sir, Harbor Control reported that it was the pirates from Benjamin that we saw before,” Cazelet said. “They’re probably right, but I won’t be able to confirm that until I’ve checked their records. Ah, sir? Do you suppose Officer Mundy might know, Over?”
“I’ll never bet against what Officer Mundy knows,” Daniel said with a broad grin. “But I think we can go with common sense for now. Break. Lieutenant Cory, do we have two weeks’ stores aboard, over?”
“Six, we’ve got thirty days of everything but dairy and fresh fruit,” Cory replied. “Is there anything in particular you’re worried about, over?”
“Negative,” said Daniel. “Break. Ship, this is Six. I expected to give you all a day’s liberty. That’s not going to happen after all.”
He was using the general channel, so everyone aboard the Katchaturian heard him. Though the Nabis personnel would be upset, Daniel suspected that the announcement made the Sissies within the crew hopeful, because they had a notion of what would come next.
“Instead, all the Nabis personnel are released for six hours,” Daniel said. “Former Sissies get three hours, port watch first. Starboard acts as anchor watch, then switch. When the crew has reported back aboard, we’re going to see some action. Probably not a lot of action, but we’ll be earning our pay.”