by David Drake
The bow juddered with a quick rhythm that made Daniel more uncomfortable than he'd expected. The physical shock was slight, but a vibration at that frequency on a starship meant that something had gone seriously wrong with the High Drive motors. A problem in a system that involved matter/antimatter annihilation could get lethal in an eyeblink.
The helmsman—if that's what you called him—walked around the control lever so that he could push it into reverse instead of pulling. A squeal rose to a shriek as the ferry's inertia fought the torque of the big electric motor. At the very instant the barge slammed the outrigger and lost the slight remainder of its way against log bumpers, the soldier brought the control to neutral.
"He's not the most military fellow I've met," Daniel said to Adele in a lowered voice, "but he's done a professional job getting us here."
"I dare say your superiors have often made similar remarks," Adele said, her expression deadpan.
The lookout had jumped into the belly of the ship rather than riding the bulkhead into collision. Before he could get to the ladder again, Woetjans had scrambled up it while still carrying Platt. She set the lieutenant down and tied the coil of vegetable-fiber rope that Cory tossed her around a stanchion.
"Shall I pipe you aboard, cap'n?" the bosun offered with a grin. On her roughhewn face, the expression was ferocious.
"Bite your tongue, Mistress Woetjans!" Daniel said as he climbed, as easily as she had but no quicker for being unburdened. "I'll willingly leave the command of the Hope here to Lieutenant Platt."
"I'm not in command!" Platt said with frightened emphasis. "I just have first platoon of the guards, that's all!"
Everybody ignored him. That must've become a familiar experience during his military career.
Daniel strode across the catwalk connecting the outrigger with the main hatch. All—well, most—of the Hope's ports and hatches were open; those that weren't had probably jammed closed. Spacers sat on the coamings, looking down at the open barge. A man—Daniel thought it was Barnes—cried in delight, "By all the Gods and their buggering priests! It's Mister Leary!"
Daniel waved, but faces were already disappearing from the hatches. His face hardened into a frown.
Barnes and his friend Dasi were excellent spacers. If Daniel'd known what was going to happen when the Milton reached Cinnabar orbit, he'd have rated them as bosun's mates. The new regulations covered only common spacers, not warrant officers, and those two were due a chance to spend their accumulated pay and prize money anywhere they pleased.
Indeed, all the Sissies were due that—and so far as Daniel was concerned, the same was true for every one of the spacers putting their lives on the line for Cinnabar. Sure, most of them were going to blow their wad down to the last trissie in the bars and brothels fronting Harbor Three, but that was their choice to make.
Daniel's usual smile reappeared as he walked through the Hope's main hatch. Given that Commander Daniel Leary's tastes were pretty much the same as his crew's—albeit of a somewhat higher class now that he could afford better liquor and women—he wasn't about to take a moral stand on the matter.
In the entrance foyer were a squad of guards and a Land Forces clerk. The clerk's self-powered console and folding chairs the soldiers had brought themselves were the only furnishings. The internal hatches were dogged and locked, as were three of the four companionways that would've given access to the decks above and below.
The swinging grate that replaced the hatch of the remaining companionway was also locked, but there had to be some opening at the other end; the compartment echoed with the happy excitement of spacers shouting down the armored tube. The guards had grabbed their weapons and were staring nervously at the grate, while the clerk was shouting into the console's audio pickup.
The soldiers didn't notice Daniel until Woetjans bellowed, "Atten-shun!" in a voice that snatched their heads around. Several of the gun muzzles swung around also.
Platt had followed the bosun into the foyer. She grabbed the squawking lieutenant and thrust him in front of Daniel.
"Sir!" the clerk cried, jumping up from his console. "I've been trying to raise you! The packages've all gone crazy!"
"There's no problem," said Daniel. "Do you have a PA system?"
The compartment stank; he could only imagine what the rest of the hulk was like. The Hope hadn't had power since her fusion bottle was removed, so her environmental system and plumbling didn't work. The open hatches would circulate air to a degree, but they also let in rain every time it stormed. And with no officers present, there were inevitably going to be spacers who relieved themselves into the vessel's interior instead of hanging their equipment out a hatch.
Woetjans walked to the grating, secured with a padlock. "Pipe down!" she shouted. "All the Sissies are going home shortly, but keep your bloody mouths shut!"
"No, no," the clerk said, looking from Daniel to Platt and then quickly back to Daniel. "We go to the head of the stairs and call through the grill, but we can't do that when they're in a state like this. What got into them?"
Daniel glanced at the padlock; it wasn't substantial. He gripped the nearest stocked impeller and pulled it out of the guard's hands before she realized what was going on. "I'll borrow this if you don't mind, mistress," he said calmly.
"You can't!" she said, but of course he already had. Woetjans stood in front of her and walked the soldier back slowly.
Daniel raised the impeller, then brought it down in a crisp blow that cracked the steel buttplate into the lock's body between the arms of the hasp. The lock popped open.
Daniel really looked at the impeller for the first time and noticed that the LED on the back of the receiver was green: it was ready to fire. He thumbed the safety on. He doubted that the slug would've penetrated a battleship's decking if the bloody thing'd gone off, but there'd have been about a hundred grains of osmium ricochetting hypersonically around the compartment.
"You can't go up there!" a soldier said. None of them wore insignia but the speaker was older than the rest and so probably a noncom. "Bleeding hell, sir! If they get loose like this they'll have us for breakfast, guns or no guns!"
"My gun!" protested the guard he'd taken the impeller from.
"Don't act a bigger fool than God made you, pongo," Woetjans said contemptuously as she stepped into the companionway. "But I'll lead, sir. Just to make sure everybody hears it's Mister Leary."
"You can have your weapon in a moment, soldier," Daniel muttered over his shoulder. "Right now I need to unlock the other end."
"Wait!" cried the clerk. "How'll we close it again if you knock the bloody lock off there too! Here, take the key!"
"I have it," said Adele, plucking the chip-implanted tab from the clerk's fingers. "Shall we go?"
She was smiling as much as she ever did, but Daniel noticed that she'd taken the key with her right hand; her left was in the pocket of her tunic. He was sure Adele didn't expect to need her pistol, but she was a very careful person.
"Right," Daniel said, nodding Adele ahead just in case some of the soldiers tried to push in and crowd her. There was small chance of that, but—well, Adele wasn't the only careful person present.
Woetjans' bellowed threats seemed to have brought a degree of order if not silence to the crowd outside the hatchway on E Deck. Dasi was on the other side of the grating. Daniel didn't see Barnes, but he didn't have much of a view between the bosun's legs and past Adele's torso. Kumara, a Power Room tech, was there, though.
"Back up!" Woetjans said. "Give me'n Mister Leary room to stand, damn your eyes! D'ye expect us to stand here in the bloody companionway tight as bloody maggots in a corpse?"
"Back, give the cap'n room!" shouted half a dozen Sissies on the other side of the grating; not all in unison, but close enough. A space opened.
The shift in the bodies in the corridor probably took physical effort beyond just words, but there wasn't anything like a brawl taking place. The Sissies would work as a team, whereas the other
spacers had nothing to organize them. As short as the RCN was of personnel, they at least wouldn't have to be in this tubular steel latrine for very long.
Adele reached past; Woetjans then jerked the grill open. Instead of hanging the padlock from its staple, Woetjans dropped it on the deck as she led Daniel's delegation out of the companionway. Daniel suspected she'd have preferred to knock the lock apart; in any case, she didn't feel a need to make it easy for the soldiers to keep fellow spacers in what amounted to prison.
"Atten-shun!" Woetjans repeated, making fittings rattle. "Listen up for Mister Leary, damn you!"
Daniel stepped forward to give Pasternak and the two midshipmen room to get onto the deck proper. "Fellow spacers!" he said. He didn't have lungs like the bosun, but everybody up and down the corridor could hear him. "I'm here with a draft for the crewmen who arrived with me on the Milton. I'm taking only those personnel, but I'm taking all those personnel. If there's any Sissies who aren't in earshot, I want you who are to go fetch them now. We don't leave shipmates behind, spacers!"
"Sir?" said Claud, a rigger. "Hergenshied and Borjaily're up on K Deck with fever. The medicomp here don't work and the pongoes won't take 'em off to shore, saying they's faking."
"Which is a bloody lie!" somebody shouted from too far back in the crowd for Daniel to be sure who she was. The only light in the corridor came from hatches open on compartments whose inner hatches were open also. "There's a hundred and fifty down with the crud and three died since we been here!"
"Yes," said Daniel, a placeholder while his lips smiled faintly and his mind fantasized about standing on the spine of the battleship and hurling Admiral Vocaine into the slough. "Midshipman Blantyre, take Claud and a party to K Deck and bring the sick personnel down immediately. The medicomp of the Princess Cecile is functioning, I assure you."
"Sir, we're going back to the Sissie?" Kumara said. "Oh, bless you, sir, bless you for a saint!"
"Sissies get moving," Daniel said. "We've got trams waiting. The sooner you're in the barge, the sooner we can get back to a job that'll benefit ourselves and the Republic. And Kumara?"
"Sir?" said the tech who'd bolted for the companionway.
"Don't talk like a bloody fool, if you please. Otherwise I'll leave you here to your religious exercises!"
* * *
"Six," said Midshipman Blantyre in the entrance foyer. "We've got a full load down here for the barge. Shall I take them across and Cory catch the rest as they come down, over?"
Adele nodded approvingly: though Blantyre'd addressed Daniel directly—Ship Six, the Captain—she'd used the general channel so that everybody involved in the operation could hear her. Adele wouldn't claim she'd warmed to Blantyre during the months they'd served together, but both midshipmen had absorbed what Adele felt were correct communications principles.
That didn't necessarily mean what the RCN considered proper commo protocol: Adele herself was very poor at that. It did mean passing on information to everybody who might need it, without saying anything that wasn't necessary. That required a degree of intelligence, Adele supposed, which was praiseworthy as well.
She smiled faintly. And after all, she didn't warm to many people.
Daniel turned to face Adele before answering. He was using an earclip communicator since while he was in Whites he couldn't wear a commo helmet. The Hope was enormous, and without a PA system it was taking a considerable while to get word to Sissies in distant compartments.
"Blantyre and Cory?" he said, holding Adele with his eyes as he spoke to the midshipmen on the deck below. "I want the two of you to cross with thirty of the lot you have and run them to the Sissie in two tramcars. I'll come down and take your place as a catcher, and I'm sending Officer Mundy along with you. In case there're any questions along the route. Over."
He raised an eyebrow to Adele; she nodded and put away her data unit. She hadn't been using it—there was no need to sit on the slimy floor of the corridor—but the familiar presence in her hands was comforting.
She understood perfectly why Daniel wanted her to accompany the midshipmen. The tramline was dedicated to RCN traffic until it got to the other side of Harbor Three. There was a good chance that an officer—perhaps a senior officer—would try to snatch some of these picked personnel on the way. Signals Officer Mundy only technically outranked the midshipmen; but Mundy of Chatsworth had a presence that would make even an admiral hesitate before crossing her.
Daniel turned. "Woetjans and Pasternak?" he said to the chiefs who were sorting spacers as they pushed forward in the corridor. "Carry on here. When all the Sissies are accounted for, follow the last one down to me below."
"Please, Commander?" said a spacer who must've been in his sixties as he tried to slip past Woetjans. "I served with your uncle on the Beacon."
The bosun shoved the fellow back contemptuously. "If you're not a Sissie, it don't matter that you served with God Herself!" she said. Switching her attention to someone farther back in the corridor—Adele wasn't tall enough to see who—she went on, "Yermakov, bring your ass forward! Do I have to go fetch you myself?"
Adele went down the companionway with one hand on the railing—not gripping it, but ready to grab if her boots went out from under her. That'd happened often enough in the past, and the filthy patina covering all the hulk's interior surfaces meant it could happen again.
She grinned mentally. She'd spent too many years in poverty to be overly concerned about embarrassing herself, but she wasn't going to embarrass the RCN in front of Land Forces personnel.
Cory, a middling youth in all senses—average height and weight with sandy-blond hair—was facing the guards at Parade Rest, his back to the happy spacers coming out of the companionway and crossing to the open hatch. In a verbal description he'd sound similar to Daniel, but nobody seeing them could possibly mistake one for the other. Cory was earnest, whereas Commander Leary was as vivid as raw flame.
"Join Blantyre in the barge, Cory," Daniel said as he followed Adele from the companionway. "I'll take your place here. Oh, and Mundy'll be going back with you."
The clerk, seated at his console by the entrance hatch, called, "You know, I'm supposed to be checking off every one of them packages before they're passed outa here."
Adele walked to the console. Her anger was an icy thing. Record keeping was a necessary prerequisite for civilization, but this pismire was using it as a club to bully others. "Keep a civil tongue in your head while addressing an officer of the senior service, sirrah!" she said.
"You watch your own tongue, spacehead!" the clerk said. He was covered in rolls of flesh that must've made the muggy heat unbearable. "You don't rank me and—"
Adele slapped him. Her left hand was in her tunic pocket. She felt rather than saw Daniel's presence at her side, but he was no longer part of what was happening.
"I'm Mundy of Chatsworth," she said without raising her voice. She never raised her voice. "In the future you will address me as Officer Mundy or as Your Ladyship. I will not warn you again."
The fingers of her right hand throbbed. The clerk's cheek was bright red and already beginning to swell.
The clerk's mouth worked but he couldn't get words out; his eyes were wide and staring. After a moment he managed to nod.
Adele turned and strode through the hatchway. Behind her Daniel said something to Cory, but she didn't hear the words.
She felt sick with reaction to the surge of adrenalin that hadn't been burned off by action. If the fellow'd said the wrong thing—if he'd said almost anything—Adele would've fired a shot into his console. She'd considered but rejected—initially at least—the plan of shooting him, because with soldiers present that could easily have led to a massacre. She'd considered that sequence all the way to the end before she'd confronted the gross bully—
And she'd done it anyway.
"Here you go, mistress," Dasi said, offering Adele a hand down the ladder. She'd walked all the way to the ferry with her mind filled by visions of
possible futures, most of them bleak.
She chuckled. "Ma'am?" said the big spacer, walking her down while stepping only on the edges of the treads himself.
"There was a long period in my life," Adele said, "when what I now consider a bad result wouldn't have made my situation worse. There are philosophers who would say that I was better off then."
"Then they're bloody fools," said Dasi after a moment to parse what she'd just said.
"Yes," said Adele, "they are. Or rather they would have been if they'd really believed what they were saying."
The barge wasn't crowded now, but doubling the number of people in its belly would be uncomfortable if not dangerous. Cory freed the hawser from the bitt on the battleship's outrigger and tossed it into the ferry, then jumped to the gunwale and walked along it before dropping into the barge at a relatively clear spot. He was bragging Adele supposed.