by David Drake
The soldier who acted as lookout had shifted to the other end of the ferry. "Get us under way!" said Blantyre, standing beside the helmsman; the fellow threw his weight onto the control lever. Adele found the rumble of wire cables circling the spools to be oddly soothing; the low frequency seemed to muffle the jagged edges in her mind.
The clerk hadn't done anything that made him worthy of shooting; but his like had been responsible for the worst of human behavior all through history. They were the ones who killed and brutalized not out of belief but simply because they were permitted to. Speaker Leary had ordered the Mundys to be exterminated for what he saw as the good of the Republic, but the soldiers who cut off the head of a ten-year-old child did so merely out of bestial whim.
The ferry grounded in the mud more gently than it'd brought up against the battleship. When Adele swayed forward, she found Dasi and Cory waiting to grab her arms and keep her on her feet.
"Take care nobody tramples Officer Mundy, Dasi," the midshipman ordered officiously as he scrambled up what was now the stern ladder.
"Aye aye, young gentleman," Dasi said, but he was grinning and speaking to his friend Barnes instead of making the irony bite. He and Barnes were both riggers; Adele thought there was a degree of affection in the way they watched Cory scampering along the gunnel to get to shore as soon as possible.
The spacers who'd just been released from the receiving ship weren't waiting for the ladder either. Making steps of their hands for one another and reaching down to help their comrades, they emptied the ferry in thirty seconds or less. Adele looked at Barnes and Dasi—her keepers—and said, "I think I can manage not to fall on my face in an empty boat, so shall we go?"
The riggers chuckled. Dasi led the way through the empty barge while Barnes followed Adele. "We don't mean no disrespect, ma'am," Barnes said with a hint of embarrassment. "It's just, you know, Mister Leary'd have our guts for garters if anything happened to you."
Dasi climbed—the word was too clumsy for the smooth grace of his motion—the bow ladder, then looked back down. "If you need a hand—" he said.
"Thank you, no," said Adele, taking each rung as she went but not slipping or making a fool of herself in some other way. She glowered for a moment, then smiled at her brief pet. In allowing for her awkwardness, Barnes and Dasi were doing the jobs Daniel and their shipmates expected them to do. She had no more right to be irritated at that than she did if they were careful while loading cases of ammunition for the ship's plasma cannon.
As Blantyre and Cory shouted directions, the Sissies boarded the first two tramcars. They carried their belongings in bags or occasionally in small lockers, hand-carved and inlaid: works of art rather than merely functional.
Their possessions were pitiably meager, yet they seemed as cheerful as any gathering of the rich and powerful Adele remembered from her father's day. Indeed, they were clearly ecstatic—because they were returning to service under a captain renowned for hard runs and hot fighting.
"Sir?" said somebody. Adele tramped toward the lead car, glaring at the muck she was stepping in. When they reached Bergen and Associates, she'd hose herself off. Being wet was better than being filthy.
"Sir?" the voice repeated.
"Ma'am, I think he means you," Barnes said diffidently. Adele jerked her mind out of its dark reverie and looked toward the Land Forces warrant officer standing in front of the guard barracks. He'd donned full utility uniform including rank tabs on his collar.
"Yes?" Adele said, suddenly cold again.
"Sir, you don't have an escort," said the soldier uncomfortably. He wasn't a spiritual brother to the clerk aboard the receiving ship after all. "Ah, usually replacements come in and outa the Hopeless under escort."
"Under guard, you mean," Adele said, feeling another wash of cold anger. "Your concern is misplaced."
She got into the lead car before she said—or did—something she'd regret. The problem was with Admiral Vocaine, not that soldier. Spacers made way for her to join Blantyre at the controls in the front of the car.
"Car Two ready, sir!" chirped Cory over the command channel. Blantyre raised an eyebrow, then stabbed execute on the control screen when Adele nodded. The vehicles lifted on their magnetic levitators and began to shake and rattle their way toward Daniel's shipyard and the Princess Cecile's berth.
"Can you tell us what this mission is about, sir?" Blantyre asked, speaking directly to Adele instead of using the helmet intercom. The other spacers were keeping their distance, and the sound of the car provided as much privacy as a white noise generator.
There was no need for privacy, of course.
"It's purely transportation," Adele said. Outside the blurry circular window, mudflats were giving way to factories. A canal paralleled the monorail track for a distance. Its surface was as black and still as bunker oil.
"Commander Leary's going to Ganpat's Reach as an envoy, Adele said, "and the Princess Cecile was his best available means of getting there. Navy House rated the Sissie an RCN Auxiliary for this purpose so you'll continue to accrue time in grade, but the same would be true on a provisions ship."
"Navy House" in this instance (as with most other things involved with support for Daniel's mission) meant Signals Officer Mundy, hacking into the system and changing entries to what they would have been if the bureaucracy was doing its job. Adele hadn't been indoctrinated by RCN specialist training to do things by the book, and the Mundys had never been known for obeying somebody else's stupid regulations.
Adele gave Blantyre a searching look. It didn't bother her to know that people she focused her eyes on this way thought she was angry, though in the present case she wasn't.
"I was surprised," she said, "to learn that you and Midshipman Cory had signed on with Commander Leary, as a matter of fact. There won't be opportunities for promotion aboard the Princess Cecile. I've been assured that with your record during the fighting in the Bromley system, you could easily find berths on a larger vessel with a good chance of an acting lieutenancy during a long voyage."
Blantyre's face stiffened; she looked out the porthole. The tram was juddering past a squatter camp; children and adults stared at the gray vehicles with listless expressions.
"Look," she said, turning sharply. "Can I talk to you straight?"
"Yes," said Adele. She didn't bother to dress the truth in empty protestations.
Blantyre cleared her throat and looked down again for a moment. She was a solid woman, muscular rather than fat. She was certainly no beauty, but Adele had seen her spiky drive make an impression in gatherings of other women who were better looking in a merely physical sense.
"Look, sir," she said. "Cory and I were aboard the Hermes with Dorst, right? He'd served with Mister Leary his whole time after Academy."
"Yes," said Adele again. "And Lieutenant Vesey as well."
"Sure," Blantyre agreed, "but Vesey's sharp. I didn't have an instructor at the Academy who could navigate better'n Vesey does, not to notice, anyway. But Dorst was thick as two short planks."
"Go on," Adele said. She thought of adding, "And if you use that phrasing in Vesey's presence, she'll probably shoot you without the formality of a duel," but she didn't bother. Blantyre had made it clear that she was talking to Officer Mundy, not to the world in general.
"But if Dorst hadn't been killed, he'd have been the first of his class to make captain!" Blantyre said. "When he gave an order, spacers jumped. Not because of anything the regs said but because he was an officer. And Vesey too, sure, but she'd have had that anyway, like enough. Though she herself says that it's Mister Leary who taught her astrogation."
"Commander Leary says the credit is Vesey's alone," Adele said. She'd almost said, "Daniel says," but a discussion with Daniel's subordinates could never be allowed to become that informal. "Personally though, I suspect Vesey has much of the right on her side of the argument."
"So sure," Blantyre continued, "Cory and I could've shipped aboard the Zoroaster and had a go
od chance of making lieutenant, assuming we pass our boards. Which we will. But we talked it over and decided we'd be better off learning to be officers under Mister Leary than get our pips on a battleship and not know how to use them."
Adele sucked at her lips for a moment. "I see," she said.
"And if you're thinking, well it didn't work out for Dorst in the long run," Blantyre added fiercely, "well, that's what the job is. That's what being an RCN officer is, you take chances like that or you shouldn't have requested a commission!"
Adele gave the midshipman what was for her an unusually broad smile. "I don't usually consider the chance of death to be a determinative factor, Blantyre," she said. "It's a matter of historical record that every other member of my immediate family has died, and I don't expect to be the exception."
"What?" said Blantyre. Then the words penetrated and she blanked her face in surprise. "Oh. I didn't mean. . . ."
"I apologize for shocking you," Adele said. "My sense of humor asserts itself at inappropriate times, I'm afraid."
She smiled wryly. "We seem to be approaching the Harbor Three reservation," she said. "Let's keep an eye out to make sure that nobody poaches the best-trained spacers in the RCN, shall we?"
CHAPTER 3: Bergen and Associates Yard near Xenos
Adele settled herself at the Princess Cecile's signals console and adjusted the familiar seat restraints. It was a good six months since she'd been aboard the corvette. In the interim she'd served on cutters, the smallest craft capable of interstellar travel, and on cruiser-sized vessels with vastly more room than the Sissie. More room by naval standards, that is: to a landsman, quarters on even the 12,000-tonne Scheer would've seemed a cramped steel prison.
The Sissie felt right. That was an emotional judgment but—Adele smiled wryly—all human judgments are based on emotion, even those of librarians who conceal their emotions under a thick curtain of intellect.
The bridge had five consoles: the captain's toward the bow, with the signals and gunnery officers along the starboard hull and missileer and astrogator to port. Each console had a jumpseat and duplicate display on the back side, intended for a striker being trained to carry out the officer's duties in an emergency.
At present, Adele's servant Tovera sat on the other side of the holographic display. She was a thin, colorless woman, a sociopath who acted the part of a responsible member of society out of an intellectual concern for the consequences of anti-social behavior.
"Ship, this is the Captain," said Lieutenant Vesey over the Sissie's PA system. "Prepare to lift in ten, I repeat ten, minutes. Close all hatches now, out."
Vesey's presence at the command console was the only discordant note in Adele's homecoming to the Sissie. Daniel was a passenger being transported to Ganpat's Reach, and he'd insisted that Vesey take command in fact as well as in name. He was astern in the Battle Direction Center, the duplicate control room. Signals Officer Mundy was on the bridge to demonstrate to the world and to Vesey both that this, her first command, was a real one.
In a way Daniel was fully present, of course, since to Adele virtual reality was more comfortable and familiar than the thing itself. Keeping her commo data as a sidebar, she shifted her display to a real-time image of the BDC. Commander Leary was explaining something on an astrogation screen to Cory and Blantyre.
Hogg—Hoggs had been retainers of the Learys ever since they settled at Bantry long before the thousand-year Hiatus—watched with a sleepy expression that convinced most people that he was a harmless rural bumpkin. In fact Hogg viewed his surroundings with a poacher's constant alertness, and his baggy garments were likely to conceal more weaponry than a squad of Shore Police carried.
Adele switched back to the transmissions within the Bergen and Associates office and those from ships and equipment operating in the small basin shared by three private yards. For an instant the holographic curtain parted in a flash of Tovera's face; she looked faintly amused, as perhaps she was. She studied human beings with an unusually concentrated intelligence.
Tovera had no conscience; indeed, she didn't even understand what other people meant by the word. Nevertheless she considered her every deed and never acted out of anger. She was just as safe to be around as the pistol in Adele's pocket, which didn't fire unless Adele pulled its trigger. Because of the training Tovera'd gotten as a member of Guarantor Porra's personal intelligence agency, however, she was a great deal more deadly than that pistol.
Sun, seated beside Adele at the gunnery console, looked over to her and grinned. "Good to be back on the old girl, isn't it? Mind, I'm looking forward to the Milton when they get her into service. She'll rate a real gunnery officer, but I figure Mister Leary'll tap me for turret captain on a pair of them twenty-see-emma guns. Don't you think?"
"Ah, if the circumstances arise. . .," Adele said. There were so many variables behind the gunner's question! It was like being asked the date of the first frost of two years in the future. "I, ah, assume from the fact Commander Leary continues to employ you that you have good efficiency reports, but a commander wouldn't usually be given so large a ship, would one?"
"Oh, they'll give Six the Millie!" Sun said cheerfully. "You know they will!"
Adele didn't know anything of the sort, but neither did she see a reason to argue about something so speculative. Pasternak's warning, "Lighting thrusters one and eight," provided an excuse to end the conversation.
The pumps had been circulating reaction mass—water—through the plasma thrusters for some minutes with a deep thrumming. Now two flared nozzles buzzed, gushing plasma into the slip in which the corvette floated. Rainbow ions mixed with steam, swathing the image of the Sissie on Adele's display.
"Two and Seven," said Pasternak. The buzz grew louder but the hull's vibration damped noticeably. "Three and Six, Four and Five. All thrusters lighted and performing within spec, over."
Rather than turn her head to look, Adele brought a panorama of the Sissie's bridge across the top of her display. No one was at the consoles intended for the Chief Missileer and the Astrogator.
Daniel had generally acted as his own missileer, and the Princess Cecile wasn't carrying missiles on this mission anyway. Likewise there was no need for a separate astrogator since Vesey was skilled and Commander Leary was aboard as a passenger. Nonetheless, the empty places reminded Adele that the Sissie had normally operated with a complement of a hundred and twenty, while the entire crew for this voyage was seventy-five.
She looked at Sun, turning her head this time instead of switching her attention electronically. He noticed the movement and raised an eyebrow. The gunner had as little to do as the riggers during liftoff.
"Sun," she said, keying a separate channel so that they wouldn't disturb personnel who had duties. They couldn't talk without the intercom; the thrusters were running up and down, making every object aboard the ship rattle against its neighbors. Instead of finishing the question she'd intended to ask, Adele said, "Why is there so much noise? There isn't usually, is there?"
Sun grinned. "The Chief's checking mass flow and the nozzle petals, mistress," he said. "The Sissie's been rebuilt since we last ran her, you see. That oughta be good, but it's not the sort of thing you take a chance on. At any rate, you don't if you serve under Mister Leary, right?"
"Ah," said Adele. "Thank you."
She didn't say, "Of course," as another person might've done, because it hadn't been obvious to her. She'd known the corvette's modular hull had been tightened since she'd been sold out of service to Bergen and Associates, but she hadn't realized that Daniel'd replaced the plasma powerplants.
"And the High Drive too?" she said to Sun.
"Motors and antimatter converters both," Sun agreed with an enthusiastic nod. "D'ye suppose Six knew he'd be needing the old girl for a run like this?"
Adele considered the question. "No," she said, "I don't. And I don't even think it was a case of Mister Leary being careful. I think he loves the Princess Cecile, and he spent on her all t
he money he thought she could use simply because he could afford to."
I love the Sissie too, Adele realized, though I'd never say that out loud. Even as the thought formed in her mind she realized that it wasn't true. What she did love, as much as the word had any meaning, was the community of which the corvette was the symbol. The RCN was the first real family she'd ever known, and the son of the man who'd had her blood kin murdered was her first real friend.
"Ship, this is the captain," Vesey said. "The hatches are sealed and environmental systems are operating normally. All personnel proceed to their liftoff stations. Repeat, take liftoff stations, out."
"Well, we're lucky he did," Sun said with a chuckle. "And I'll tell the world, Mister Leary isn't just the best officer I ever served under, he's the luckiest too! Wouldn't you say, mistress?"