by David Drake
They didn’t wear safety lines. Most riggers didn’t bother with them, and additional lines made working on the rigging itself almost impossible. They got tangled with the cable you were reeving or replacing.
Schatt and Beauchamp were riggers in their forties. They had met in the RCN while serving on the battleship Revenge. When she was put in ordinary after the Treaty of Amiens, they had come to Danziger together and had been enrolled in the naval arm of the Upholders of Tarbell Freedom.
They were solid spacers, men Daniel would have been glad to have in any crew under his command. Longridge, another former RCN spacer, had assigned the three of them to get the balky fall working.
The cable had several splices, which Schatt had said was the problem. Beauchamp had backed his partner against Daniel’s opinion that the problem was in the block. When replacing the cable hadn’t solved the problem, Daniel had neither complained nor said that he’d told them so. He’d volunteered to cut through the strop of the original block to remove it—a bitch of a job in free-fall.
Schatt opened the forward ventral airlock and led the way in, then initiated the lock-filling process when Beauchamp had closed the outer lock behind them. Daniel started unlatching his helmet as soon as he entered the lock and, with the others, took the helmet off when the chamber had reached half-pressure. No rigger ever waited for full pressure to build; seven or eight pounds was perfectly comfortable.
Beauchamp paused the mechanism, shutting the pump off. He looked at Daniel.
Daniel nodded with a faint smile. He didn’t bother looking behind him because he knew he’d see Schatt watching at him with the same fixed grimness.
“Go ahead,” Daniel said mildly.
“A lot of the spacers on Upholder are ex-RCN, Green,” Beauchamp said.
“Right,” said Daniel. About 60% of the present crew had come from the RCN. It was Krychek’s way of hiding his—the Alliance’s—involvement in the scheme. “I am too.”
“The thing is…” Schatt said. His voice managed to sound grating even in the thin atmosphere. “Some of them say you look like Captain Daniel Leary. You’ve heard of him?”
“I have,” Daniel said. “Go on.”
“We been talking—you know, the crew; pretty much all of us,” Beauchamp said. “We asked the spacers you came aboard with what they thought about it. And what they said was that it might be true.”
“What do you say, Green?” Schatt said.
“I say that it might be true,” Daniel said, still calm. He wished that Schatt were standing in front of him. He would like to have his smile as well as his voice keeping the situation positive, but he didn’t think there would be a problem.
“Now,” Daniel said. “You fellows have been asking me questions. Let me ask you one: how much do you love the rebel government, the Upholders?”
Beauchamp stepped past Daniel to put himself beside Schatt at the back of the lock. Daniel turned to face them.
“They pay good,” Beauchamp said.
“Right,” said Schatt. “And that wasn’t always true with the RCN.”
“Admiral Vocaine was afraid if spacers had their full pay at the end of a voyage…” said Daniel, nodding in agreement. “That they’d manage to slip off-planet on a merchant ship instead of filling the next RCN slot Vocaine wanted them for.”
“Did he worry my wife was going to ship out too?” Beauchamp snarled. “Though that’s kinda what she did, left me for a chandler’s clerk with regular pay.”
“I wouldn’t say the Upholders were much government, though,” Schatt said. “Still, it’s nice to get paid.”
“What’re you doing here?” said Beauchamp; the rough tone from describing his marriage was still in his voice. “Green, Leary, whatever your name is!”
“I looked at the situation and decided there might be money in it,” Daniel said. He smiled more broadly.
“But you’re rich,” Schatt said, frowning. “Captain Leary’s rich, anyway, from all that prize money. Are you saying you’re not Leary after all?”
“What I’m saying…” said Daniel. “Is that there’s a lot more money out there. More for me and more for anybody who serves with me. There’s risk, too. You’re old spacers, you know about risk.”
“There’s a lot of us RCN,” Beauchamp said, choosing his words carefully. “But there’s a lot who were Fleet too. And a lot who weren’t either one. You know that, right?”
“Sure,” said Daniel. “I said anybody who serves with me, I don’t care who their last enlistment was with. I want spacers with guts, that’s all. Do you two qualify?”
The riggers looked at one another. They were senior people, respected by their fellows. This had probably been arranged from the beginning, and Longridge wasn’t the only other member of the crew who was in the business.
Instead of answering directly, Schatt said, “What would we have to do? If we wanted to, I mean?”
Daniel shrugged. “Your jobs, that’s all for now,” he said. “And maybe talk to your friends without giving them details. Just hint that this could be a really good thing for everybody.”
“We don’t know any details,” Beauchamp said.
“That’s true, you don’t,” Daniel agreed. “Which is best, don’t you think? But you might just start wondering—”
His smile was as real as it was wide, because he was seeing his way clear to success.
“—about how much a heavy cruiser would bring in prize money, hey?”
He turned toward the inner hatch and restarted the pump.
The only possible problem was Captain Joycelyn, who struck Daniel as both smart and honorable. That was a job for Adele.
Or possibly for Tovera, which would be a pity; Daniel liked what he’d seen of Joycelyn. But people die in wars.
Above Ithaca
Adele forwarded the coded message to Commander Braun just as her watch ended. Tovera stood beside the signals console, her face expressionless.
“Commander,” Adele said on a two-way link. “I’m going off-duty. Over.”
Braun’s station was the astrogation console two places toward the bow from Adele in the port-side rank. He grunted in response. Because of the link Adele heard him, but she wouldn’t have prodded her superior for a proper acknowledgement regardless. She wasn’t very interested in propriety herself, after all.
Tovera seated herself at the console as soon as Adele rose. “I’ll be in my compartment,” Adele said. She began to maneuver herself to the bridge hatch using the overhead railing.
On the Sissie she knew where the handholds were and more or less how much force to use in free-fall as she pushed herself from one to the next. The Upholder was still unfamiliar territory after a week aboard the ship, and she wasn’t embarrassed to use the lubber line to navigate. She was a landlubber, for all that she had spent more time in space than some of the able spacers.
I have other skills.
The compartment Adele shared with Tovera and six spacers, none of them former Sissies, was midway down the Level 1 corridor. The other personnel were spacers striking for a warrant rating. The bunks, two racks of four each, covered the outer bulkhead. The small stations on the corridor side were uncomfortable with more than four people trying to use them.
Adele had just entered the compartment when the speaker in the ceiling croaked, “Communicator Bethel! Report to Commander Braun at once in Compartment 124! Repeat, Communicator Bethel report at once!”
One of the sleeping spacers turned on his bunk and glanced at her; the other two did not. Adele showed no expression, but her mind was smiling in triumph. She went out to the corridor and began pulling herself forward again.
124 was Braun’s own compartment, the size of the one Adele shared with seven other spacers. She tapped on the hatch, forgetting to hold on with her other hand. She was drifting backward as Braun jerked the hatch open.
He swore and tried to grab her by the wrist, but her feet touched the far wall of the corridor. She launched herself
toward the hatch of 124. Fortunately for both of them, Braun got himself out of the hatchway in time to avoid a collision.
“You bloody fool, Bethel!” Braun said as he dogged the hatch behind them. “How can you have spent so many years in space and be so bloody clumsy?”
Because I’m skilled at my real job, Adele thought. Aloud she said, “Sorry, sir.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter for now,” Braun said. “I want to know about this message from Coralville that you forwarded to me.”
124 was double the size of a signals officer’s compartment on a heavy cruiser. It held a fully functional console instead of a flat-plate display fed by a bridge console. The addition must have been made before Krychek turned the Upholder over to the rebels.
“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” Adele said, hoping that her lie sounded believable. “It appears to be a message sent by courier torpedo and downloaded to Harbor Control, then relayed to the Upholder when we linked with control when we returned to Ithaca orbit. It’s in a non-standard code, but I assumed it was one you had access to.”
Of course Braun had access to it: it was the code he used to communicate with General Krychek, his immediate superior. The material which Grozhinski had provided couldn’t predict which sequence the First Diocese would be using, but it offered alternatives which Adele had been able to refine when she got into Braun’s console. She had done that as soon as Braun gave her access to the signals console.
“Yes, but when did it get here?” Braun said. “Get to Coralville, I mean. Can you tell that?”
“May I use this console?” Adele said, gesturing with her free hand to the unit she was holding on to so that she didn’t drift off.
“Yes, yes!” Braun said, but Adele was already onto the couch.
She strapped herself in and brought up all the messages which she had forwarded to Braun. She used the console controls directly instead of coupling through her data unit. That might concern Krychek’s agent, though he knew that was how she handled the bridge console. He probably thought that his own console was protected against external entry.
“This string of numbers here…” Adele said, highlighting the line in pale blue for Braun. “Indicates that the message was received at Coral Harbor seven days ago, that would have been just after the Upholder transited out of the Ithaca system on the training cruise just ended.”
What Adele said was true. In fact, however, she had downloaded the message with all its false routing data to Coral Harbor when the cruiser returned to Ithaca orbit.
“The origination data is this line,” she continued, moving her highlight. “I would want to check, but I believe this is the locator for Ravenna.”
The headquarters of the First Diocese was on Ravenna. Adele had added the qualifier because she might not have recognized the locator had she not added it to the counterfeit herself.
“Gods, gods…” Braun muttered. “A week!”
He was clinging to the back of the console so that he could look over Adele’s shoulder. She found the situation uncomfortable, but she supposed it was really ideal for her purpose. Being uncomfortable was too familiar an experience for her to remark it.
“Is there a problem, sir?” Adele said blandly. She wondered if she should turn to face Braun, but that would have been unusual behavior for her. She instead brought up a miniature of his face on the holographic display.
“Why did the timing have to break this way?” Braun said in the tones of a man accusing the gods. “They’ll think I’ve been doing nothing for a week and of course I haven’t, I couldn’t do anything. But are they going to believe that?”
“Who is going to believe that, sir?” Adele said. “You can’t act on information you didn’t receive, can you?”
The message was a directive under Krychek’s personal signature to take immediate action against six agents of General Storn among the crew of the Upholder. They were all Alliance citizens and had served in the Fleet before being recruited by the Tarbell rebels. Captain Joycelyn was the most prominent, but the list included two lieutenants, the Gunner, and two junior warrant officers on the Rig side.
They were personnel whom Daniel had decided were both loyal and capable—unlikely either to be turned or to be cowed by threats if the Sissies led a mutiny. They could be killed if necessary, but Adele had decided that it was simpler and even more effective to have the cruiser’s political officer remove them at what he thought was Krychek’s order.
“Look, you’ve probably guessed that I’m more than a signals officer,” Braun said. He flung himself into a chair bolted to the deck and twisted his foot around it to stay seated. “I’m actually an investigator. They should have given me a proper staff, but I’m supposed to be undercover!”
Yes, you certainly are supposed to be undercover, Adele thought. Instead of blurting this to a stranger whose very competence should have raised red flags. She had intended the message to shock Braun, but she hadn’t expected him to melt down like this.
Aloud Adele said, “Well, I think Selkirk and I have signals pretty well covered, so you don’t have to worry about that part of your duties.”
“I’m not worried about it!” Braun snarled. “I’m worried because—because my headquarters ordered me to arrest six criminals a week ago and I just got the message now! And how am I supposed to arrest six people anyway?”
“Well, surely you can call on the ship’s officers to help you, can’t you?” Adele said. Another person would have enjoyed the situation, but she found that Braun’s panicked incompetence made her queasy.
He should never have been put in the field. Adele wondered if the choice had been made because it got Braun out of somebody’s office. Krychek isn’t being well served by his subordinates.…
“What if the ship’s officers are the problem?” Braun said. “What then, hey?”
Adele met the angry man’s eyes, wondering if he was about to explode into violence. Braun kept a pistol in a drawer of his console on the bridge, but he might well have one in his quarters as well.
“Well, we’ll be on the ground in a few hours, won’t we?” Adele said. “You can have the shore police waiting on the dock. You have some sort of authentication code to deal with the situation, don’t you?”
Would you like me to bring it up on the screen for you? Adele thought. But even to think that that meant that she was becoming really ill-tempered. She needed to be careful.
“Yes!” Braun said in sudden excitement. “So long as I’ve seen to the arrests before the, the criminals have gotten off the ship, it doesn’t matter that the message was late being delivered to me!”
He stood and gripped the console. “You may go back to your compartment now, Bethel. Remember, there’s a promotion in this for you.”
“Thank you, sir,” Adele said as she opened the hatch. Back in her quarters she would keep an eye on Braun’s communications.
She had already decided that she would have a company of the Capital Defense Regiment on hand to back up the Shore Police. It was possible that some of those being arrested would consider resisting. Having overwhelming force on hand to deter such heroics was a good idea.
Adele was sure that Braun would claim the idea as his own after the fact.
CHAPTER 20
Coral Harbor on Ithaca
The Upholder’s twenty-four thrusters roared at 75% output, beating the slip into steam and violence. The deck had a tilt serious enough that even Adele noticed it, indicating that the port/starboard thruster alignment wasn’t as good as it should have been.
I’ve been spoiled, Adele thought wryly as she ran through her checklist of things she had to do before the Upholder lifted to orbit. She had gotten used to having Cory and Cazelet to handle part of such duties. She had also gotten used to an Engineering crew run by Boris Pasternak, and overseen by Captain Daniel Leary.
“All personnel prepare for lift-off!” Captain Morseth announced. He had been commanding the destroyer Justice three days earlier. Hi
s sudden promotion and transfer to the heavy cruiser was in response to Captain Joycelyn’s arrest. This was Morseth’s first lift-off in his new command, so it was as much a shakedown cruise for him as for the Upholder.
“Initiating lift-off!” Morseth said. “Increasing thruster output to full!”
Adele carried out the last action on her list by locking out the anti-starship missile batteries which defended Coral Harbor. This was sure to be discovered within an hour or two, even under a rebel command which wasn’t as professional as would have been the case with an RCN installation. She had therefore waited to do it until the last instant.
Since Adele controlled the Upholder’s communications, it shouldn’t be possible for anybody aboard the ship to request intervention when the Sissies moved to take over the vessel. Even if a signal did get out, the commanders on the ground wouldn’t put a missile into the cruiser until they had spent a great deal of time trying to assess the situation.
Regardless, it was an easy precaution to take. Adele took it.
Cazelet was at present signals officer of the Princess Cecile, in orbit above Myrmidon, a nearby world now under rebel administration but too sparsely populated for that to matter. Cory was captain of the Fisher 14, which should be in what was supposed to be an uninhabited region of the surface of Myrmidon.
I don’t need their help for anything here.
“Lifting!” Morseth said.
The roar of the thrusters sharpened as the captain sphinctered down the petals of the thrusters, focusing the exhaust into narrow jets. The Upholder, already rocking from side to side on a cushion of steam, began to rise.
Adele continued to work, running through her checklist for the next stage of the operation. A starship’s acceleration was never abrupt, and the bigger the ship was, the more deliberate the process had to be.
The noise reduced. Though the console projected a sound-cancelling field, a ship vibrated violently even when its thrusters were perfectly balanced—those of the Upholder were not—causing the antennas and rigging to rattle against the hull. As soon as they had risen high enough that they were no longer buffeted by surface-reflected thrust, things smoothed out.