by David Drake
The general push was locked in send-only mode so nobody could interrupt Daniel over the intercom, but cheers echoed from the destroyer’s compartments. He continued to smile.
“Now, some of you may wonder what happens if some of you don’t show up after liberty,” Daniel said. “That’s easy: you’re off the ship. I don’t come looking for you. I don’t need spacers who don’t have the balls for a fight, because if you serve with me there’s going to be fighting. Ask the nearest Sissie if you don’t believe me. Six out.”
Daniel took a deep breath, then said, “Ship, I’m opening the main hatch. Barnes, get the gangplank out.”
He pressed Execute. The dogs withdrew from their sockets and the hatch began to pivot down.
There were now a dozen desperate messages on Daniel’s display, but there was another call he needed to make before he talked to any of his officers. “Cazelet,” he said. “I want to talk to Officer Mundy. Can you—”
“Six,” Cazelet interrupted, “you’re connected. Signals out.”
“Adele?” Daniel said. Cazelet was showing off.
“Yes,” Adele said. “I’m looking at the report of the attack which Rene sent me. Can you track the pirates?”
Cazelet has a right to show off.
“No,” said Daniel, “not through the Matrix with that much of a head start. But we’re pretty sure they’re heading for Benjamin with their loot. I think with your help we’ll be able to locate them on the planet.”
Or even without. Adele’s identifications through electronic signatures were valuable, but Daniel’s own Mark 1 Eyeball ought to be good enough to spot the captured freighter among the ships the locals used in their asteroid belt—and for piracy.
“Are you up to join a live-fire exercise against pirates?” he said.
The destroyer rocked as the Sissie landed in the next slip, her thrusters thrashing the surface like eight miniature volcanoes. Daniel would make sure that Cazelet had sent the full report to Vesey, but he didn’t interrupt his discussion with Adele to make the order explicit.
“Yes,” said Adele. “Tovera and I will be with you in half an hour. Sooner, I suppose, if you need us.”
“I’ve given the crew six hours liberty,” Daniel said. “And I want to check the rig, though I don’t expect any real deficiencies. You’ve got plenty of time.”
“Daniel, my specialist equipment is aboard the Princess Cecile,” Adele said. “I can work from the Katchaturian, but it will be more efficient if I’m aboard the Sissie.”
“That’s fine,” Daniel said. “The ships will be operating together. Ah—will this be a problem for your other duties?”
“I’ll lock the doors of the Residency when we leave,” Adele said. “The flowers may suffer, but other than that the operation here will be as productive as it was when Mistress Mignouri was in charge. Doing a favor for the 5th Bureau doesn’t take precedence over my duties to the RCN. And to you.”
“I look forward to seeing you shortly,” Daniel said. He broke the connection, smiling even more broadly.
One light minute above Benjamin
“Benjamin is a mining world,” Adele said, speaking to both the Princess Cecile and by laser link to the Katchaturian, which hung in space next to the corvette. She wasn’t sure how good the destroyer’s commo suite was, but Cazelet and Cory were both aboard her. They would make something work so that the whole crew got the briefing.
“I suppose I should say that Benjamin is a metal processing world,” Adele said. “The residents haul metallic asteroids to the planet’s surface and process them with fusion plants. The work is easier for low-skill personnel to do in normal gravity and atmosphere, and they aren’t concerned about waste products because Benjamin is largely a desert with oases in which most residents live.”
“The residents live like rats in brush hovels,” said Daniel, the only person whom Adele had permitted to comment; all other helmets and consoles were locked out. “That’s another reason they don’t worry about wastes, over.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Adele said. She knew that she worried more about precise details than most listeners did; certainly she worried more than an audience of common spacers on a warship. In her heart though, Adele knew she was right and they were wrong, which made it very difficult for her to restrain the tendency.
She displayed a real-time image of the surface of Benjamin. Normally the necessary level of enhancement at this distance would have washed out details, despite the Sissie’s excellent optics. That wasn’t a problem with Benjamin, because there were no details.
The surface of the planet was of a generally tawny color flecked with gray wedges downwind of smelter flues. No standing water was visible, though Adele knew that greater magnification would have picked up ponds at low points. The watercourses were underground, and only a light dusting of ice glittered at the poles.
“You’ll notice the bright smears at various locations,” Adele said, focusing down on one which was catching sunlight at an angle to display its metallic sheen. “The sharp end of each is a smelter. Ordinarily the settlement will be upwind of the smelter, though I have found exceptions.”
Daniel’s comments about rats living in hovels was unjust to rats. All rats would have moved out of the path of sulfurous fumes.
“That isn’t a concern with the two villages we’re interested in,” Adele said, shifting the display to place the adjacent sites—they were fifteen miles apart—in the same frame. Huts were merely irregularities at this magnification, but the ships were brightly visible: one large and two small ones at the village on the left and a medium-sized ship on the right.
“The nickel-iron which the smelters produce must be transported to other systems for use,” Adele continued. “It pays for basic food stuffs, generally processed algae. Higher value trace minerals are exchanged for luxuries from the small trading vessels which make periodic visits to Benjamin. All in all, it’s a pretty miserable existence, so it’s not really surprising that some miners have turned to piracy in neighboring systems.”
Under other circumstances, Adele might have hesitated before she used a laser communicator to link the two ships, since it was important that they avoid notice from the planet below. Passive observation of ships a light minute out would have been difficult from the surface even of a developed world, but when they were using active emitters detection became an order of magnitude easier.
That said, on Benjamin an order of magnitude didn’t raise the risk to the level of real danger. The only laser receptor on the planet was the one on the freighter whose capture had brought the Nabis Contingent here.
“This ship…” Adele said, highlighting the largest vessel, “is the Mezentian Gate, a three-thousand ton freighter out of Rosecrans, carrying a rolling mill to Peltry where she was captured in orbit. She is owned by her captain and in the past has carried a total of fifteen crew.”
She moved the highlight to the pair of small ships near the captive. “Neither of these ships has a name,” she said, “but one has the legend 16 painted on both sides of its bow. They are two of the ships which were loitering above Peltry. Captain Vesey—” as she was while in command of the Princess Cecile “—informs me that they are 600 ton general purpose craft configured to tow cargoes in the Matrix. Normally that means asteroids, but they towed a freighter full of water to the Peltry system. And this—”
Adele shifted the imagery to the other village and the vessel there. “This is the Roebuck, an eighteen-hundred ton freighter,” she said. “The third pirate vessel. The Roebuck mounts a basket of eight bombardment rockets and is the only armed pirate.”
“The Mezentian Gate was waiting for landing clearance and was taken unawares,” Daniel said, answering a question that Adele hadn’t thought to ask. “A rocket hit near the bow, starting seams. Captain Chidsey had the choice of landing a damaged ship without ground control, or surrendering to the pirates. The pirates put a crew aboard and brought the prize to Benjamin, over.”
/> “I have no evidence of where the crew of the captive is being kept,” Adele said. “I would be able to pick up radio signals at this distance, but I don’t find any evidence of such signals. Though both villages have smelters, neither seems to be using its fusion bottle to power electric lights. The residents are subsisting at a very low cultural level.”
She cleared her throat. “I believe that’s all I have to say,” Adele said. “Captain Leary, I’m turning the briefing over to you.”
“Spacers of the Nabis Contingent,” Daniel said. Adele noticed again his way of sounding both friendly and in charge. “I’m going to keep this short, because we’ll sort out the attack details on the ground. We’ll be setting down initially a hundred miles west of our targets. If we’re noticed there by locals, it won’t matter since planetary communication on Benjamin is at the smoke-signal level.”
He paused, his image on Adele’s display looking to right and left. Daniel had miniatures of the assembled crews on his screen, almost 400 faces. That was too many people to see as individuals, but the same would have been true if they were on a parade ground in front of him.
“When we go in, it’ll be hard and fast,” Daniel said. “In the best traditions of the Nabis Contingent. For now, dismissed!”
On the Sissie’s command channel, Vesey said, “Ship, prepare for insertion. We’ll extract in Benjamin orbit. Out.”
Benjamin
The Captain’s Great Cabin on the Katchaturian embarrassed Daniel because it was, well, great. It wasn’t just that the destroyer was almost twice the size of a corvette like the Princess Cecile. The Katchaturian had been built on Novy Sverdlovsk, where the distinctions between commissioned officers and everybody else were extreme. A Cinnabar-built destroyer would have applied half this cabin’s volume to crew accommodations.
Daniel looked around the table at his officers and smiled. Reforming the social structure of Novy Sverdlovsk was no part of his duties to either Cinnabar or the Tarbell Stars, and the cabin was extremely useful for Daniel to address all his officers in privacy and comfort.
“Fellow Sissies,” Daniel said, and his grin softened: everyone in the cabin now was former RCN. “We’ll be attacking the two villages simultaneously. The ships will lift from here, take curving courses and keep low, then land a mile from their targets. The Katchaturian will take the village we’re calling Alpha where the captured ship is, the Sissie’s party will take Beta. The locals themselves don’t have names for the villages, as best Officer Mundy can tell.”
“Which means the locals don’t have names for them,” Cory said. Daniel joined in the chorus of chuckles around the table.
Adele was the only RCN officer not present in the flesh. She had said she could join in if needed through the cabin’s display and that she didn’t want to leave her console on the Sissie’s bridge. Daniel had deferred to her opinion, though it would have led to a short discussion if anybody else had said that to him. Nabis officers provided the anchor watches and were assembling the combined crews on the ground between the two ships.
“Six?” said Woetjans, her forehead wrinkled with the effort of getting her mind around a concept. “Why so far out? I mean, I don’t mind a hike, but you and Vesey could drop right in the middle of the places, right? Or a hundred feet out so we don’t burn ’em up, anyway.”
“We don’t want to burn the huts up, that’s true,” Daniel said, “because we don’t know where the prisoners are being kept. We’re all spacers, and the worst these poor bastards from Rosecrans did was sign on with a captain who was more concerned with making port than he was of being ambushed by pirates.”
Nods and grunts of agreement greeted the partial explanation, but Cory and Hale remained still-faced. They clearly realized there was more to come.
“The mile is a compromise,” Daniel continued. “It’s far enough out, especially if we stay low, that it probably won’t alarm the locals, but it’s close enough for the assault parties to hoof it without being too winded by the time they get into position. Remember, we’re landing on sand over rock, not water. Our exhaust will heat the ground molten. It’ll be a good half hour before we can disembark.”
Everybody nodded this time. Cory and Hale wore broad grins besides.
“The assault parties will include all our Nabis personnel and all the Sissies except an anchor watch,” Daniel said. “I’ll be leading Alpha Party, Cory will lead Beta. We’ll—”
“Sir, why you?” said Cory. “I mean, we all know you’re not afraid, but I think I speak for everybody—”
“You bloody well do!” from Dasi; nods and murmurs of agreement around the table.
“—when I say that if some drunken wog gets lucky and blows your brains out, this whole cluster wouldn’t be a fair exchange.”
“Thank you, Master Cory,” Daniel said, “but you’re missing the point. Our current task is to train the Nabis Contingent, particularly the officers. That means demonstrating what leadership means. I’m confident that there are already sufficient officers in the Tarbell Stars who can demonstrate sitting on their butts and sending other people out to die.”
“Sorry, sir,” Cory muttered, jerking bolt-upright and meeting Daniel’s eyes. “Very sorry, sir.”
As well you should be, Daniel thought, but he forced his lips into a smile and as usual his mind followed after a moment. He wanted his people to be cocky and sure that they were the best in the world, but bragging couldn’t get in the way of doing the job. When you parsed out what Cory had said, he was bragging.
“Six,” said Vesey. “I should lead Beta Party.”
Bloody hell, she’s right.
Vesey was seated to Daniel’s immediate right; he stared at her without expression. She didn’t flinch, which showed—Daniel’s smile was internal—that she had guts. That hadn’t been in doubt.
“Yes, you’re right,” Daniel said. “Cory—”
Across the table from Vesey.
“—you’ll still transfer to the Sissie, but you’ll remain in command of her. I want somebody experienced there, because Officer Mundy is our communications and intelligence base.”
“Sir, may I request to accompany Beta Party?” Cazelet said. “I know I’ve had problems pulling the trigger in the past, but I’ll be carrying a length of pipe this time instead of a gun.”
Somebody chuckled. Woetjans glowered and said, “Bloody useful piece of kit, a pipe.”
In the bosun’s hands, that was certainly true. For the slightly built Cazelet—probably less so, but that wasn’t the point. Cazelet didn’t have the military indoctrination which trains its subjects out of the normal human hesitation to kill another human. He’d failed to shoot an enemy during a deadly struggle on Corcyra and he might fail again, but he could lead an attack just as well with a club as with an impeller.
Likewise Vesey. Daniel had been thinking of Vesey as the person whom he could best trust to take care of Adele and the Princess Cecile. He’d ignored the fact that she was an RCN officer—and a human being, who had the right to resent Captain Leary’s unintentional insult on her ability to lead.
Daniel smiled, relaxing his audience. “Yes, all right, Cazelet,” he said. “That means I’m going to put the Katchaturian under—”
His pause may not have been noticeable to his officers, but it was very real in Daniel’s mind. Cazelet’s request had surprised him, though it shouldn’t have: Rene wouldn’t have been much of a man if he hadn’t asked to accompany into danger the woman whom he was seeing when they were both off duty. He and Vesey had been together for nearly two years now.
“—Captain Schnitker, who commanded her in Nabis service. He’s got a good deal of dry landing experience and has shown himself generally competent. What I don’t know about him yet is how he behaves when bullets are flying. For that reason—”
Daniel grinned at Hale, seated beside Cory.
“—Acting Lieutenant Hale will be on the Katchaturian’s bridge during action at the navigator’s console. Hale, if yo
u believe at any point that the mission or the personnel on the ground are being endangered by Captain Schnitker’s behavior, you are to shoot him and take over. Can you handle that?”
“Sir!” said Hale. “Yes sir!”
“Draw a sidearm, then,” Daniel said. Normally personnel turned in their weapons when they returned from detached duty. Not only were guns unnecessary, the steel bulkheads made ricochets from an accidental discharge a particular nightmare.
“If that’s all our business here…” Daniel said. He waited a few beats to make sure that it was all the business. “Then we’ll go outside and inform the crews of the plan.”
He rose, bringing his officers up with him. Daniel gestured them out of the cabin so that they could join the ordinary spacers before Captain Leary addressed them from the main hatch of the Katchaturian.
“How much trouble do you think the wogs are going to give us?” Hogg asked over his shoulder as he led his master down the companionway. He carried his own stocked impeller and had slung a sub-machine gun for Daniel.
“I doubt there’s half a dozen guns in either village,” Daniel said, speaking over the echoes of boots on steel treads in a steel tube. “At Beta there might be a problem if somebody’s awake enough to use the rockets on the Roebuck.”
“Hey Hogg?” Tovera called from behind Daniel. “You want to switch duty? A slug from that cannon of yours would take out the rockets. Maybe set ’em off, even.”
“Naw, I’ll stick with the master,” Hogg said. “If the wogs get their fingers out in time, which I don’t figure’ll happen, then it’ll show this Nabis lot that life has risks, right?”
True enough on all counts, Daniel thought. But he really hoped that it wouldn’t happen. He’d be able to hear eight-inch bombardment rockets detonating even from fifteen miles away.
Reed and Nagata, both techs, were on watch in the boarding hold, standard operating procedure when the hatch was open. They muttered greetings as Daniel and the servants stepped to the top edge of the hatch. Gusts from outside whipped their clothes.