by David Drake
It was theoretically possible to talk between benches. Even in a luxury vehicle like this one, though, wind rush and the fan intakes acted as effective sound dampers unless you really worked to speak over them. Adele saw no need for that, nor for talk in general; she had work she could be doing on her personal data unit. Quinn apparently had a different opinion on the latter point, however, so—
"Yes, I'm Mundy of Chatsworth," Adele said. "I'm here as Signals Officer Mundy, however, assigned as Commander Leary's aide on this mission. My family has nothing to do with it."
My family has very little to do with anything since the Proscriptions, Adele thought. Her closest living relative was a second cousin named Rolfe, a harmless enough man who'd had the misfortune of marrying a bitch from a nouveau riche family.
"I'm a Cinnabar man myself, Xenos in fact," Quinn said, apparently thinking that it wasn't obvious in his accent. "Not like you, of course. I, ah. . . well, I'm Colonel of Volunteers for the Councilor here—"
He nodded to Corius on the bench in front of them, talking with animation to Daniel.
"—and Headman Ferguson called me Supreme Marshal when I was with him, but the truth is I put in my twenty years with the Land Forces of the Republic and got out as Sergeant Major. I figured I'd go off to the back of beyond and make easy money with the wogs."
He grimaced. "I made money," he said, "but none of it stuck to my fingers any better than it did back in the LFR. And as for easy, I'll tell the world!"
Quinn tapped his nose, then patted his ears. "These're false, you know," he said. "Ferguson had'em cut off and put me on a transport to Pellegrino, bleeding like a pig and with no more than the clothes I was wearing. Fortunately, I did have a bit owing to me on Pellegrino from a business transaction. I was able to get patched up, more 'r less, and even managed to fall on my feet with the Councilor there."
The region they'd been overflying for the past hour wasn't as populous as that nearer the coast, but small-holdings frequently showed up as regular lines against the smudged yellow-green of the natural landscape. Often a farmer—and sometimes the whole family down to babes in arms—stood in the fields to watch the aircar, shading their eyes with their hands.
Quinn shook his head. "Never work for wogs," he added. Pursing his lips in sudden concern he muttered in a still lower voice, "Of course, there's wogs and wogs, you know."
"I'll take your word for it," Adele said austerely. Corius seemed to be completely engrossed in his own conversation, so presumably Quinn hadn't compromised himself by speaking too freely—this time. "Why did Headman Ferguson expel you, if I may ask?"
"You know," said Quinn, nodded his head with enthusiasm, "I've often asked that very question myself. 'What did I do?' I ask myself, and what do I answer?"
He seemed to expect a response. Adele raised an eyebrow in interrogation; she wasn't willing to be drawn into a question and answer session like the straight man in some silly minstrel show, but she'd make a modest effort to accommodate Quinn's conversational style.
"Fuck all if I know!" Quinn said. "No reason in the world as I could see. The bastard just got up in the morning and said, 'Let's send old Quinn for the chop,' as best I could tell. No reason at all."
"Though you mentioned you were doing business. . .?" Adele said, not really stressing the point but nonetheless raising it. The Colonel had chosen to have a conversation; he couldn't legitimately complain if Adele listened to what he'd said and asked questions on the basis of it.
"Ah, well, that," said Quinn, fluttering his hand dismissively. "That was nothing, no more than was expected. Why, the wogs wouldn't trust a man who didn't have some fiddle, don't you see? They wouldn't think he was natural. No, that wasn't why—and in all truth, I don't believe there was a why, milady. Just the Headman getting up in the wrong side of the bed, that's all it was, I truly believe."
"Perhaps so," Adele said, wondering if she had a right to dislike the now-colonel as thoroughly as she found herself doing. "I dare say you were lucky not to have been treated worse, in that case."
Quinn's attitude toward foreigners was narrow, prejudiced, and factually wrong—as Adele knew by her studies and through personal observation. On the other hand, the colonel hadn't voiced any slur that Hogg or any of the Sissie's spacers might not've spoken as easily. Adele accepted it from them, making allowance for the uneducated culture in which they'd been raised; she filtered their words through a rosy cloud of trust and friendship.
Still, there was this difference: Hogg scorned foreigners without exception, but he served a Leary of Bantry. Quinn treated foreigners as sheep to be sheared in order to provide a comfortable nest for himself. Sneering at people you prefer to avoid was very different from sneering at your benefactors behind their backs.
A road—a broad dirt trackway—curled over the contours of the hills on the northern horizon. Farms were strung along the crude artery like tourmalines on a necklace, but Adele had seen very little traffic in all the time the aircar sped west parallel to it. Now a plume of dust much higher and broader than any she'd seem before waved from the road like a brick-red flag.
Quinn saw that she was looking through the window behind him. He turned and unfolded a flat plate into a pair of electronic binoculars which he focused on the plume.
That reminded Adele of the RCN-issue goggles strapped over her forehead; she hadn't worn them long enough for their use to become second nature to her, the way winkling out secrets with her personal data unit was. Still, now that she'd remembered, she settled the goggles over her eyes, locked their stabilizer, and raised the magnification by steps to x64.
A huge tractor with caterpillar treads and a coal-fired steam engine pulled a train of six boxcars on puffy all-terrain tires. A bin in the back of the tractor held coal; there was a conveyor to load the firebox, but a human stoker watched the process with a shovel in his hand. The tanks swelling the sides of the vehicle carried water to replace steam losses.
"Army recruits," Quinn said. "Going off to Port Dunbar to learn about war. They don't give 'em any training, you know. They've got bugger all in the way of a cadre who could train 'em."
He made a disgusted sound in his throat; Adele feared for a moment that he was hawking to spit. Instead he went on, "They'll get their belly full soon enough, I'll tell you. Too soon for most of 'em. Fucking wogs."
The doors of the boxcars were slid fully open; men sat in the doorways, their bare legs out in the breeze. They looked like farmers being hauled to a harvest.
A few days ago they'd been farmers; the guns stacked in the cars' interiors didn't really make them soldiers. And even without Quinn's disgusted comment, Adele had no doubt that they would indeed be harvested in the near future when they were sent against Arruns' trained troops. They'd take a few of the Pellegrinians with them, though, and there were more farmers being born every day in the interior of Dunbar's World.
Adele understood the mathematics of the equation quite clearly. That didn't make her like it any better, but it wasn't necessary that she like it.
"You see the women?" Quinn said.
"Yes, of course," said Adele. They rode on top of the boxcars; there were even a few children with them, infants too young to be left behind.
"They're the commissariat," Quinn explained. "When the train stops to take on water, they'll get out and fix meals for their men. Ash cakes and whatever vegetables they can buy in the farms along the way, I'd guess. None of that lot'll run to the price of a chicken."
"I see," said Adele. She lifted the goggles up onto her forehead again. The train and its broad flag of dust had fallen far behind the speeding aircar; and besides, there was really nothing more to see.
The quicker this war could be ended, the better it would be, and Commander Daniel Leary was on Dunbar's World to end the war. Adele smiled faintly. She'd do her duty—and Daniel would certainly do his duty—regardless.
But it was nice to feel that your mission might actually do some real good.
CHAP
TER 16: Port Dunbar on Dunbar's World
Daniel slid back the aircar's roof panel as they cruised slowly down the center of Southern Boulevard. They were only thirty feet in the air and the apartment houses on the right side of the street were mostly five or six stories high. He wanted to be able to see their roofs.
"I wouldn't do that," Corius warned sharply. "Those tents down there and the buildings're full of refugees from the northern part of the city. You don't know how they'll react to a limousine. They might start throwing things."
"And they might start shooting," said Hogg. He was standing beside the driver to watch the left side of the boulevard. He held his impeller across his body, ready to shoulder it. "Which is why the master and me're keeping an eye out. Sir."
"I'm afraid he's right, Councilor," Daniel said apologetically. "If it were only the chance of a flower pot or a roof tile, it wouldn't matter; but people can get very angry when their lives've been turned upside down. And there could be Pellegrinian agents, you know."
Daniel'd seen enough of mobs during his own short lifetime to appreciate the risks. He'd taken his service pistol from its holster and laid it on his lap, ready for use. He wasn't under any illusions about his pistol marksmanship, but if worse came to worst he thought he could come close enough to disconcert a sniper.
He thought of suggesting to Adele that she take over the duties with his heavy pistol; her own wasn't intended for use at the hundred feet or so of slant distance to the rooftops. She was lost, though, in whatever flood of information she was gathering as the aircar proceeded toward the Emergency Ministry building. It was a converted secondary school, from what they'd been told in Ollarville.
Besides, Tovera and Fallert were standing in the back of the vehicle: she with her sub-machine gun and the snakeman holding a wide-mouthed weapon with a drum magazine. Daniel didn't know just what Fallert's gun did, but he was confident that it'd be adequate for whatever purpose he put it to. Tovera obviously respected him, which was as high a recommendation as you could give a conscienceless killer.
Corius grimaced. "Woodson, can't you get us up a little higher?" he said to the driver. "Over the roofs, I mean."
"Best not to, Councilor," the sergeant replied. He was a bearded man with a bland expression; a native of Pleasaunce from his accent, Adele said, but apparently happy to serve under a former Cinnabar officer. "They've got plasma cannon on Mandelfarne that'd eat us right up if we gave'em a shot. I'm keeping low so they don't."
Daniel was wearing his RCN helmet. He brought up a topographic map of the region as a 30% mask through which his eyes continued to search for potential snipers. The coast of Mandelfarne Island was a good ten miles away.
While cannon the size of the Sissie's—it was unlikely the actual guns were that big—might do lethal damage to an aircar at that distance, there was only the most remote chance of any gun crew managing to bring its weapon on target in the fraction of a second which a moving vehicle offered. Woodson was skillful and he'd managed the full ten-hour drive without relief, but he obviously wasn't a man to scoff at risk.
Daniel shrugged mentally. That was how a lot of old soldiers managed to have lived to become old soldiers, of course.
A snarl like giants ripping metal made Daniel hunch reflexively. The quick WHAM/WHAM/WHAM/WHAM/WHAM three seconds later was reassuring. The impacts were over a mile away, in the city's northern suburbs.
The Pellegrinians had launched a salvo of bombardment rockets at the Federal positions; it had nothing directly to do with the aircar. Black smoke rose beyond the buildings but quickly dissipated: residue from the warheads, not a secondary explosion.
"They've increased the number of shells they fire every week since the invasion began," Corius said, frowning. "By now half the Rainha's cargo on each resupply run is more rockets."
"I've never understood why. . .," Daniel said.
He paused, his attention drawn by something suddenly stuck over the cornice of a building they were approaching. It turned out to be a wooden pole. A woman began hanging diapers on it to dry.
"Right," Daniel muttered. "I don't understand why people seem to believe that filling the streets with broken rubble makes a city easier to attack. You could scarcely ask for a better place to conceal your enemies than a jumble of bricks and timber. Even an old woman with a wooden spear can be dangerous in a mess like that."
"I suspect Arruns is getting desperate," Corius said. He chuckled. "I'd certainly be desperate if I were in his shoes. But—"
He sobered as quickly as he'd laughed.
"—I will be in his shoes if I commit my troops to the fighting in the city itself. The only way I can really be effective is to turn their flank, it seems to me."
Daniel switched his visor display to imagery the Princess Cecile had captured from orbit; the Pellegrinian positions were highlighted in red. He didn't really look at it, though, because he'd absorbed the relevant details while he was waiting for the Bennarian ships to arrive above Dunbar's World.
"The Pellegrinians have brought heavy equipment," Daniel said. "There're earthworks around their entire position. Their flanks are on the sea. It seems to me that their supply routes are the only place they're vulnerable. Either destroy the barges they're using to ferry supplies from Mandelfarne to the mainland, or prevent them from bringing supplies from Pellegrino itself by threatening the Rainha."
"Can you do that?" Corius said sharply. "Keep the Rainha from landing on Mandelfarne?"
"Not so long as she's escorted by a cruiser," Daniel said. "At least not while the Sissie is the closest thing to a warship that I have to work with. I'm second to none in my belief in what the RCN can achieve with limited resources—"
He smiled to emphasize the humor of what he was saying, but it was the flat truth as well.
"—but I won't throw away my ship and the lives of my crew for a gesture on behalf of the Federal Republic of Bennaria."
Corius grunted and said, "Then we'll have to find another way to do it, won't we?"
The median strips on Southern Boulevard were as wide as the traffic lanes on either side. Originally they'd been grassy and dotted with flower beds, but now shanties made from scrap wood and plastic sheeting covered them. Downdraft from the aircar's fans ruffled the flimsy structures, though none actually collapsed.
Refugees looked up, their expressions unreadable. A surprising number were men of what Daniel thought of as military age.
Well, he wasn't here to help the Bennarian government reform its military recruitment policies. Though he was beginning to wonder why he was here at all, given the general lack of enthusiasm for his mission on Bennaria and the absence of resources on Dunbar's World.
"I think this is the place, sir," said the driver in a raised voice. Without waiting for direction, he eased back on the yoke and curved the aircar down toward a complex of two-story brick buildings ahead on the right. The complex filled much of a city block whose perimeter was bounded by chain link fencing. Vehicles, mostly ground cars, were parked inside the fence. The sandbagged blockhouses at each of the three driveway entrances were newly built.
Daniel laughed cheerfully. Corius gave him a wary look and said, "I'm not joking, Commander. I intend to defeat the Pellegrinians."
"And so do I, Councilor," Daniel said, "so do I. Because if we don't do that, why, the only reason I'd have for being here would be to keep me out of the way of Admiral Vocaine. I have too much confidence in the leadership of the RCN to believe in anything so cynical."
He laughed again as the car landed, but the Councilor's expression became even more guarded.
* * *
As Adele stretched, working out stiffness from the long ride, Hogg called to Tovera, "You want to stay with the car or shall I?"
"You're the sturdy outdoorsman, Hogg," Tovera said. "Besides, that great clumsy impeller wouldn't be nearly as useful inside a building as my attaché case."
She tapped the case of pebble-grained black leather that she always carried. The
small sub-machine gun nestled inside wouldn't show up even under a fluoroscope.
"Yeah, right," Hogg said, but he wasn't arguing the decision. "I could maybe kick one in the crotch, don't you think, mistress?"
Corius turned in surprise and mild irritation. "You can both come in if you like," he said. "Woodson will stay with the car."
"That's all right, sir," Hogg said. "I'll keep him company."
The front entrance was up three broad, concrete steps. The uniforms of the two guards there didn't fit; the men themselves were very young and looked younger. They straightened as Corius, his bodyguard, and Quinn a step behind strode toward them.
Daniel leaned close to Adele and whispered. "Did you notice Fallert's throat sack? It's flushing. If he were a real lizard, I'd say it was a courtship display."
"And what makes you think it isn't?" Adele said, settling her data unit into its pocket as she and Daniel followed the Bennarians.