by David Drake
"You want the car, wog?" he shouted.
And slammed the door with his foot.
* * *
CHAPTER 17: Port Dunbar on Dunbar's World
Daniel awoke in near darkness. In the instant it took for his eyes to begin working, Hogg whispered, "Wakie, wakie, young master. The fish won't wait."
"It's bigger game tonight, Hogg," Daniel said, pulling on the trousers he'd hung as usual on a chair by his bunk; his tunic waited under them. "Is Officer Mundy up?"
"Yes," said Adele from the hallway. "And I believe I heard Fallert speaking to the Councilor."
Daniel slid his feet into his soft-soled ship's boots. He'd been only a child when he got the trick of awakening at any set time without need for an alarm; he didn't know whether it was Hogg training him always to be ready on time for a fishing or hunting trip or if the training had simply uncovered an innate ability.
"Here you go, master," Hogg said, handing Daniel a stocked impeller. "You were never much use with a pistol, so I found you this instead of having you weight your belt down for no good reason."
"Thanks," Daniel said, turning the weapon over and trying the balance. It was a carbine, perhaps from Gendarmerie stocks. He didn't bother asking if Hogg was sure it worked: he wouldn't have given it to Daniel without testing it for function and accuracy.
Daniel also didn't ask how Hogg had 'found' the weapon. It didn't bother Daniel that the means were probably illegal—so were some of the ways Daniel had used to arm and equip the Princess Cecile the way she needed to be—but there were things that he'd object to if he knew about them. Hogg had fewer scruples or better focus on the task in hand, whichever way you wanted to describe the difference. Best not to explore the details.
"Commander?" said Corius, entering the cubicle where Daniel had slept. "I've decided that Fallert will drive. We've decided, that is; he suggested it."
Daniel snapped his equipment belt around him. The communicator, handlight, and first aid pouch were there, but the pistol in its flap holster and the extra magazines had been removed: Hogg had spoken literally. He generally did, a habit that would've made many people uncomfortable if they'd realized he wasn't exaggerating.
They'd eaten and slept in a warehouse belonging to a merchant who'd done business with Corius in peacetime. The man—Adele probably knew his name, but it didn't matter to Daniel—had fled to Sinclos when the fighting started, but the armed staff he'd left behind had made Corius and his entourage as comfortable as the circumstances permitted.
"It's your vehicle," Daniel said. He'd never thought about the snakeman being able to pilot an aircar; there was no reason why he shouldn't. He smiled: Tovera had learned, after all.
Woodson was technically as good a driver as you could ask for, but Daniel didn't trust him to push a reconnaissance as close to the enemy defenses as was necessary for it to be useful. Daniel hadn't been alone in that opinion, apparently.
He put on his goggles. He'd planned to wear his commo helmet, but he couldn't get a proper cheek weld on the carbine's stock if he did; he'd make do with the earclip communicator attached to the goggles' frame.
They walked into the main bay of the warehouse where the aircar was parked. The long translucent panels in the building's roof let in enough light through years of bird droppings and general grime that Daniel didn't need his goggles.
A mélange of rich odors filled the big room: spices, Daniel thought, but of course they might've been from exotic forms of decay. Two attendants talked in low voices near the waterside door, watching the foreigners covertly.
Corius frowned when he saw Daniel's impeller. "I'm not proposing to attack Arruns' base tonight," he said. "Just to get a look at it. I wouldn't think those guns were necessary."
"They might be necessary," said Fallert unexpectedly. "Therefore they are necessary, Councilor. Hogg informs me that his master is expert; that permits me to drive instead of keeping watch."
"All right, if you feel it's the right thing to do," Corius said with a shrug as he got into the aircar. Its roof panels had been removed, leaving the tubular framework they were ordinarily locked onto. Daniel wondered if they were sturdy enough to act as a roll cage, though as the car'd be over water on most of this patrol it probably didn't matter.
"To be honest," Corius added, "I wouldn't have guessed that the Cinnabar navy spent much time on marksmanship training."
"The RCN doesn't," said Daniel, deliberately taking a seat behind that of Corius. Tonight Quinn could ride with the Councilor; Daniel wanted to be able to concentrate on the terrain and the data feed Adele would be providing. "It's an accomplishment expected of a country gentleman, however, which in my younger days—"
He smiled to suggest he was joking. In all truth, his civilian life seemed a lifetime distant. Though seven years didn't seem like a long time even to him when he spoke the words.
"—I was."
Corius nodded. "Yes, of course," he murmured.
"Daniel," said Adele, standing beside the vehicle. "I can monitor the spectra just as easily if I come along with you. I linked my data unit through the car's radio on the flight from Ollarville, you know."
Daniel frowned as he tried to puzzle out what she was actually saying. "There's not an advantage to your being in the car, is there?" he said.
"Well, no, but I can be," Adele repeated.
"Mistress," said Tovera, "neither of us can use long arms well enough to be useful tonight. Rather than add weight to the car, why don't you stay in the warehouse office as planned while I defend you against Pellegrinian infiltrators."
"And cockroaches," Hogg said from the front bench beside Fallert. "Some I saw tonight could carry away a rat."
"Officer Mundy?" Daniel said now that he understood the question, "I'd prefer that you be in a place where you can concentrate on keeping us alive, rather than worrying about being thrown out of the car if we have to maneuver. I'm fairly confident that there'll be other occasions soon on which you can demonstrate your manly courage."
"Yes, of course," said Adele. "I'll get up to the office right now."
She cleared her throat and added, "That was very foolish. Sorry, I'll be more careful."
"The RCN," Daniel said softly, "has built its reputation on the habit of taking the more dangerous course unless some other method could better achieve the desired result. In this case, I'm ordering you to stay on shore because you'll be more effective. But no, that wasn't foolish, Mundy."
Fallert fluffed the car's ducted fans, four of them in pairs forward and aft. "We are prepared, Councilor," he said over the intake noise. Dust whirled and eddied among the crates and bales.
"All right, open the door!" Corius shouted. When the attendants didn't act for a moment he waved violently. Finally they started shoving the heavy panel sideways. Fallert lifted and slid the car forward before the opening was sufficient; the attendants shouted and put their backs into the job.
Accelerating and with no more than inches to spare on either side, the aircar shot out over the barge dock. They skimmed the water for a moment before Fallert rose ten feet so that they no longer kicked up an obvious plume of spray. Mandelfarne Island lay ahead.
* * *
Adele stepped into the warehouse office and communications center, a small room on the flat roof. Under other circumstances you could call it a penthouse, but she didn't suppose the word applied here.
Under other circumstances, Adele Mundy could be called a librarian. Not now.
She glanced at the modern equipment. It was operating properly, just the way she'd left it four hours ago before she went to sleep. She hadn't thought she'd be able to get her eyes to close, but she'd been wrong. She'd learned a great deal since Daniel brought her into the RCN.
Instead of sitting at the console, Adele turned abruptly and walked toward the end of the roof overlooking the barge dock and the harbor beyond. There was no railing, and fitful breezes flicked across the water; she stopped a full pace back but even then felt uncomfort
ably close.
She smiled. Daniel would've gone to the edge without thinking about it.
"Is something wrong, mistress?" Tovera asked. She'd been standing just outside the office; she'd to step aside quickly when Adele reemerged.
"No, nothing," said Adele, looking out to sea. "Some people prefer seeing things with their own eyes, you know. I find that much less informative than my instruments."
An automatic impeller to the east pecked out short bursts. Even without her goggles, Adele could see the haze of light from the discharges; the gun was within the Pellegrinian lines, firing into the city.
Dust spurted skyward; several seconds later Adele heard the rattle of masonry collapsing. Another building had been reduced to ruin, or more complete ruin. She couldn't imagine that result aided anyone at all in the human universe, but that wasn't a question she'd been asked to answer.
Mandelfarne Island was in the direction she was looking, but it was under the horizon even though she was thirty feet above the water. The mast-mounted antennas behind her had a direct line on it, though. And somewhere out there in the darkness was an aircar heading out in a wide arc that would eventually carry it around the back of the Pellegrinian base.
Tovera didn't say any more. Did she understand why Adele was standing here?
Adele sniffed. She herself didn't fully understand, so it was unlikely that Tovera did. She returned to the office and closed the door between her and her servant before sitting down at the console and getting to work.
She'd been surprised at the quality of the commo suite, not least because government electronics on Dunbar's World had proven old, shoddy, and in poor repair. This wasn't the government, however. Though the Merchants' Guild collectively ran the planet much as was the case on Bennaria, the individual houses were in fierce competition with one another.
The office here—and presumably the similar offices in Port Dunbar's other warehouses—was set up to communicate by laser and tight-beam microwave with ships both in orbit and while floating in the harbor. Neither method was completely safe, but coupled with a good encryption program either would protect commercial information from rivals long enough to retain a competitive advantage.
Tovera had disconnected the identification transponder from Corius' vehicle. A transmitter could call enemy attention to the car whose best chance of survival would come from being ignored. Sensors sensitive enough to keep a laser beam aligned with a ship in orbit, however, were easily capable of tracking the electromagnetic signature of an aircar's motors a few miles away. All it took was the correct software, and Adele's personal data unit provided that.
Adele placed the car as a blue dot in a display centered on Mandelfarne Island; the scale changed as she watched, decreasing as the car neared the base and the image area shrank accordingly. Pellegrinian emitters—communications, range-finding, targeting, and even recreational—were red dots with brief legends indicating their type and intensity. Full data would appear as a sidebar if the computer determined the threat to the aircar had increased or if Adele moved her cursor over a particular dot.
Laymen were amazed to see what information Adele could draw from the simplest electronic signatures by matching them against the information in her database. A search radar with a particular pulse frequency and amplitude was a standard fitment for the command unit of Alliance ground batteries of 5-cm plasma cannon; the same weapon but with a different radar armed Alliance airborne armored personnel carriers.
Arrruns' troops used both types of radar. Twelve cannon in gun pits guarded the perimeter of Mandelfarne Island, and five APCs escorted the barges ferrying supplies from the island to Arruns' fortified camp in the east of Port Dunbar. From personal experience as well as her data banks, Adele knew that the APCs were very lightly armored; even empty they weren't nearly as fast or as nimble as Corius' aircar.
But an aircar couldn't outrun a plasma bolt. Even the small guns the APCs mounted could turn an aircar into a fireball and memories from hundreds of meters away.
The blue speck moved outward, skirting the northern tip of the island at a distance of ten miles. It moved slowly, keeping close to the water so that only the most careful radar operator could separate it from the clutter of wave tops.
Adele would know when the Pellegrinians noticed the car, if they did; then she would warn Daniel. Until then she remained silent, doing her job with professional skill as she did all things.
She didn't pray. A prayer by someone who didn't believe in God would be hypocritical. She knew Daniel believed in an amorphously benevolent Being somewhere, however.
Adele hoped that Daniel's prayers would be answered.
* * *
Daniel could see scores of lights across Mandelfarne Island. A few were on moving vehicles. More were area lights on poles erected in front of pre-fab buildings—operations rooms and officers' quarters, presumably; Daniel's goggles easily picked out the details. The largest number were low-wattage incandescents which snaked on jury-rigged lines from the fusion plant on the north shore of the island and through the tents of the enlisted personnel.
From the lack of visual security at the base, one got the impression that the Pellegrinian garrison didn't think it was at war. To a degree they were right: the Federal troops had no long-range artillery, and an air attack would be quick suicide against plasma cannon. The sloppiness still made Daniel frown.
Though of course they're the enemy, he thought. He'd forgotten that. His face broke into a familiar smile.
Fallert was stooging along at thirty miles an hour so that he could keep the car's underside close to the wave tops without lifting spray. They'd raced northwest across the sea till they were out of sensor range of Mandelfarne, then dropped low and returned slowly to avoid notice.
Daniel wasn't sure what Corius and Quinn intended by this reconnaissance, but for his own part he wasn't particularly interested in what he saw at the present. The goggles, however, were gathering and storing multi-spectral data which he and Adele would analyze at leisure. They'd be just as useful with Hogg wearing them, and very nearly as useful strapped to the aircar's frame.
"Leary?" said the Councilor, leaning over the back of his seat. "The Colonel here thinks there must be a thousand personnel on Mandelfarne. What do you think?"
Daniel adjusted his goggles as he eyed the speckles of light. They weren't going to tell him more than they already had, but the activity gave him a moment to consider.
"At least that, I should think," he said. It depended on the size of the tents and how densely Arruns packed his troops into them, but allowing for a similar number of lights on the other side of the island. . . at least a thousand. "We don't have to guess, though. I'm confident that Officer Mundy will have an accurate figure by the time we return."
"How's she going to do that?" said Quinn. "I thought she was waiting for us back at the warehouse."
Daniel shrugged, though he didn't suppose the gesture was visible in this light. "Pay records," he said. He'd worked with Adele long enough to have an idea of her methods, though in truth it still seemed like magic to him. "Movement orders. The location of unit HQs coupled with their tables of organization."
"She can do all that from the warehouse?" Quinn said. He sounded plaintive. "I thought she was just a signals officer."
"She's a signals officer," Daniel said dryly. "But no, she's not only that."
He switched his goggles to infrared; Pellegrinian equipment showed up as bright blotches on the cooler land. To see details he'd have had to raise the magnification higher than he could hold on target without engaging the stabilizer, but the four plasma cannon in pits near the shore were obvious. The psychological effect of plasma bolts would be as crushing to an assault as the bolts themselves—and those would blast any aircraft or troop-laden fishing boat into flaming debris.
"Check with her now, Commander," Corius said. "It'd be helpful to know the numbers immediately. You do have a link, don't you?"
"No sir," Daniel said
. In strict honesty he did have a link, but he had absolutely no intention of using it for pointless chatter. "We'll have the data before we start the actual planning on our return, I'm sure."
"The Rainha is beginning her approach," said a voice in Daniel's ear. He knew it was Adele speaking only because it had to be; compression and the distortion-correcting algorithms in the laser communicator stripped all the personality out of the words. They were at the very limit of line-of-sight communication here.
Daniel picked out the shimmer of plasma thrusters in the western sky. The ship was still high enough that the atmosphere blocked the dangerous actinics, so the goggle filters didn't deploy.
He bent forward and said, "The Rainha's coming in. If we can get closer to the island, I'd like a good view of their landing procedures."