What Distant Deeps

by David Drake

  He shrugged. “I had access to Commissioner Brassey’s private accounts as well as his official ones,” he said, “so I went over those also. You may object that this was improper if you wish to.”

  “It doesn’t appear improper to me,” Daniel said with what he hoped sounded like sincerity. Actually, it probably was improper, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Nothing about accounting seemed to him worth caring about.

  “Well, anyway, I did,” said Brown. He’d opened his case; it contained a personal data unit and pockets to hold over a hundred data chips. “Brassey had a private remittance from relatives at home as well as his official salary. His outlays for wine almost perfectly balanced those sources of income, leaving very little overage for food and what I might call general maintenance. From the state of his quarters, the figures were accurate.”

  “Go on,” said Daniel, nodding. He’d learned not to anticipate the Commissioner, who appeared to be telling his story in an orderly fashion. If his hearer was still completely at sea as to where that story was going—well, the answer to that was to shut up and listen.

  “There’s simply no evidence that Brassey had any private venture on Zenobia,” Brown said firmly. “Or that he would have been able to manage it if he had. Gibbs did all such business as the Commission required.”

  He frowned. “Which I must say isn’t very much. Now, I admit that Gibbs says that the late Commissioner wasn’t as incapable as I believe and that he had secret meetings outside Cinnabar House, though Gibbs knows nothing of the purpose or the other parties involved. But—”

  Brown’s voice was animated. He had lost the diffidence and confusion with which he had begun the discussion. The accountant was very different from the embryonic Commissioner, let alone the husband.

  “—we have learned, that is, I learned, in the Audit Division to ignore verbal testimony when it conflicts with written documentation. I am almost certain that Resident Tilton’s suggestion about ‘Cinnabar private ventures’ was false. As false as one would expect any statement by a man of that sort to be.”

  He paused with what approached being a smug smile. Daniel had picked up on the key word. Suppressing a smile of his own—he found himself liking the suddenly competent Brown—he said, “ ‘Almost,’ Commissioner?”

  “Exactly!” said Brown. “Look at this item, if you will.”

  He typed quickly on the virtual keyboard of his data unit, but the display winked to life on the console at which he sat. With a quick adjustment, Brown moved an omnidirectional hologram to hang between himself and Daniel. It was a series of figures and legends.

  This was the sort of thing Adele did all the time. It was surprising to see a stranger—and one who until moments previously had been something of a joke—accomplishing the task with the same reflexive skill.

  “I normally work on my own unit,” said Brown, who had apparently understood Daniel’s expression. “I frankly don’t trust linked computers when I’m dealing with financial records. And, ah—I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve disconnected the reporting and export functions of the consoles in this room for the duration of our conference.”

  “Quite all right, Commissioner,” Daniel said. Smiling faintly—had Adele spent time with this fellow during the voyage? He didn’t think she had—he added, “There’s a separate recording function built into the lighting circuit. It’s part of the log. If you like, I can have my signals officer wipe it when she returns to the ship.”

  “Ah!” said Brown in surprise. “Ah. No, I don’t think that will be necessary, Captain. But I appreciate your candor.”

  He cleared his throat, then touched a point in the air. On the display Daniel was viewing, line items expanded while the background faded. The excerpt read:

  ITEM PN425-9901SJ:

  Requisitioned Regional Naval Stores 9-13-45. No Charge.

  Delivered Calvary Harbor 12-07-45.

  Installed 12-09/10-45 at 4PP10418653. Barge rental 100 florins. Casual labor (off-planet spacers) 100 florins plus 30 florins alcohol bonus.

  “The fund charged is the secret account,” Brown explained. “This is the only charge on the secret account during Brassey’s tenure as Commissioner. Do you have any idea what it could mean?”

  “Well . . . ,” Daniel said, turning to his own console and bringing it live. “I can find out what the item is easily enough.”

  Perhaps not as easily as Adele could. Regardless, it didn’t take long to find an RCN equipment catalogue. Indexing was almost instantaneous once he’d entered the item number.

  Brown stared at the image and description blankly. “It’s a portable landing beacon,” Daniel explained. “Not something that you ordinarily need, but I suppose it might be more useful in the Qaboosh than in most regions, so it’s reasonable they’d have a few in stock on Stahl’s World.”

  Brown still looked blank. Daniel grinned. Now you know how I’ve been feeling, he thought. Aloud he said, “It’s for bringing ships in on ground control at a place where there isn’t a proper port installation. Colonies usually do it that way: send down a lifeboat with a portable rig, then bring the main ship or ships down on ground control.”

  “Ah,” said Brown. “Now I see. But why a colony?”

  “I don’t know that it is,” Daniel said. “That’s what came first to mind. As for where the beacon was placed—”

  He switched to a global display, assuming that the grid reference was to Zenobia. If it wasn’t, then all bets were off.

  “Here,” Daniel said, viewing the cursor which seemed to be pulsing in the middle of the Green Ocean, some six hundred miles east of Calvary. He expanded the display, hoping that something that made sense would appear. The detail wasn’t very good, but at high magnification the point appeard to be a marshy islet in a scattered archipelago.

  “What does it mean?” Brown said, frowning in puzzlement.

  “It means . . . ,” said Daniel, grinning as he keyed an alert signal to Adele’s personal data unit. “That I will make inquiries.”

  Just as soon as Adele returned.

  CHAPTER 12

  Calvary on Zenobia

  Adele stepped onto the bridge with Tovera behind her. There was a nearly full house, which was mildly surprising when the Sissie was at rest in a friendly harbor. Well, a reasonably friendly harbor.

  Cazelet was at the gunnery console, refining missile trajectories under the tutelage of Chazanoff from the missile station. Since Sun was on liberty, there was no reason the midshipman shouldn’t use a fully capable console instead of the training station at the back of the missile console. Cory, the watch officer until Vesey returned from liberty, was at astrogation, and Daniel had moved from the BDC, where he’d been when he summoned Adele, to the command console.

  Adele sat at the signals console. She was fairly sure that no one else would use her station in anything short of a serious emergency, though she wouldn’t have objected. She was quite sure that nobody could have accessed the files which she didn’t want others to see. Even so, it would have bothered her and seemed discourteous.

  The Sissies were a courteous group. Any newcomer who didn’t understand the group’s internal rules would be informed of them firmly. If the transgressor were one of the midshipmen, who were rated as Common Spacers though their duties were those of commissioned officers, and the person informing them were Woetjans, the process was likely to be very firm indeed.

  Adele brought her console live. Daniel’s image stared at her from the upper left corner of her display, an eyebrow lifted.

  “Ah!” Adele said when she figured out what had surprised Daniel. She looked down at her civilian suit, then back at the display with a slight smile. “I suppose technically I’m out of uniform. Your summons seemed urgent enough that I didn’t take the time to change.”

  Since she was speaking over a two-way link and their consoles had active sound cancellation, their discussion was as private as the thickness of the ship’s steel hull would ha
ve made it. Daniel grinned and said, “You’re only out of uniform if you’re acting officially, and I’m not sure that you are. At least, not officially on behalf of the RCN.”

  “Ah,” Adele repeated in a different voice. She knew that Daniel preferred not to discuss the work she did for Mistress Sand, though she had only intellectual understanding of his attitude.

  To Adele, information was important, but how one obtained that information was of no significance. She preferred written or electronic means over—her lips quirked with amusement at the anachronism—listening at keyholes, but that was simply because listening at keyholes was inefficient.

  Her face went hard. And of course, she preferred the means that most distanced her from human contact. Well, for many years human contact had been the cause of most of her considerable discomfort.

  “I have a map reference . . . ,” Daniel said, exporting the image from his display to Adele’s console. “Which Commissioner Brown found in his predecessor’s files. I can’t find any information or even good imagery about it, though. Can you help me?”

  “Yes,” said Adele as her wands flickered. That she spoke at all was simply courtesy to a friend; in the old days—in the days before she had the RCN or friends, either one—she would simply have ignored the silly question.

  She’d echoed Daniel’s display on her own as soon as she sat down, so his attempt to send it to her was superfluous. There was no reason to point that out, of course.

  She first replaced the old, low-resolution image from the astrogation database with a composite of the surface images which the excellent optics of the Princess Cecile had captured while they orbited before landing. Over that she laid the global positioning grid, then cross-indexed the point with the data she had accumulated while preparing for the mission to Zenobia.

  “Diamond Cay,” she said with satisfaction. “Six hundred and twelve miles from the bridge of the Princess Cecile.”

  She smiled, though only someone who knew her well would recognize the expression. “More or less, that is.”

  “You know that you’re a magician, don’t you?” Daniel said, making her smile a little broader. Though it wasn’t true, of course. He expanded the image; it stayed bright and clear instead of fading to a muddy blur as the stock one had.

  “The island has the ruins of a Pre-Hiatus building,” Adele said aloud. “Nobody is sure what it was intended for. The structure is rock crystal, not diamond, but that’s how the island got its name. Some of the commentators claim that the so-called building is a natural outcrop, in fact.”

  Daniel continued to increase his magnification; the eight-digit designator indicated a square three feet on a side, directly in the center of the glittering mass.

  “That’s no natural outcrop!” he said in disgust. “Did whoever said that ever take a look at the site?”

  “Probably not,” said Adele. The image clearly showed a tower at one corner of a hollow square; not, as Daniel had said, anything that nature could have contrived. “There’s no reason to go there except the ruins, and they don’t repay close study, according to the three personal accounts that I’ve located.”

  Daniel chuckled, but his face fell back into crisply intent lines. He wore a smile, of sorts; but it made Adele think of a hunter waiting for just the right moment to squeeze his trigger.

  “There’s supposed to be a portable landing beacon here, Adele,” he said, “but I can’t see anything except the rocks. Can you . . . ?”

  “Would it be manned?” Adele asked as she began combing data according to new criteria. Daniel hadn’t finished his question, probably because he didn’t know how to go on, but he had provided her with sufficient information to make a start.

  “Umm,” he said. “Normally, yes, but I suppose it wouldn’t be necessary if the ships to be landed were already equipped with the code set. That isn’t safe—there’s a chance of a reciprocal, among other things. But you could.”

  “Star travel isn’t safe,” Adele said. “But I take your point. I asked because none of my imagery shows any visitors whatever to Diamond Cay in the past thirty days.”

  She fanned the images in two rows across the top of his display. They overlapped slightly: there were twenty-one of them. The quality ranged from fairly good to low-resolution black-and-white, but even the worst would show movement.

  “Where did you find these?” Daniel asked in delight. “Zenobia doesn’t have surveillance satellites, does it?”

  “No,” said Adele, trying to keep pride out of her voice. Otherwise she would be bragging. “But I’ve extracted imagery from the logs of all the ships in harbor that have recorders. Some of the smaller country craft do not, of course. The result isn’t comprehensive, but twenty-one random checks is a good basis for confidence. If there were a human crew, one of these would show signs of their presence.”

  “But there’s something . . . ,” said Daniel, expanding one of the videos. “And here, on this one too—what are these? They’re not people, but they’re something!”

  Adele brought up the zoological database she had loaded for this voyage. She had done it because of Daniel’s personal interest, not because she expected to need it in their mutual work. That they did need it provided further support for her belief that there was no useless information.

  “I have an answer to that too,” she said, smiling a little more broadly than usual.

  Daniel stared in delight at the image which Adele placed in the lower right corner of his display. He immediately expanded it to full size, save for the left sidebar on which the Sissie’s diagnostics ran. The latter weren’t going to show anything important with the ship on the surface and most of her crew on liberty, but he would have worried if he didn’t have them available.

  He smiled at himself. Besides, if the fusion bottle suddenly lost its magnetic field or an outrigger strut cracked, he wanted to know about it instantly.

  “The local name for them is seadragons,” Adele said. “They’re only found on Diamond Cay, so they’re not very well known even by Zenobians. They’re supposed to get as long as thirty feet.”

  “Oh, this is very interesting . . . ,” Daniel murmured, speaking more to himself than to Adele. “This is remarkable.”

  The seadragon had a lizardlike body. Its head was long and broad, and the eyes were on the extreme sides of the skull. The creatures had four stumpy legs with paddles instead of feet; imagery showed that they could make quite good speed over soft ground. From the base of the short neck sprang a pair of arms barely long enough to transfer items to the jaws with prehensile fingers.

  According to the written description which sprang to life when Daniel highlighted an icon, the seadragons spent most of their lives in water but came out to breed and hatch their eggs. The adults shared the work of guarding the clutch.

  “The only thing they eat are pin crabs,” said Adele, adding another image—also in the lower right, from which Daniel had expanded the seadragon. “And those live only in the shallow water around the cay. The dragons might be able to cross deep water, but the crabs can’t.”

  Daniel expanded the new image to the right half of his display. The “crabs” looked more like toy balls, slightly underinflated and covered with spines which pivoted at the base but didn’t bend.

  Video showed a crab the size of a pomelo staggering across the sea floor while spiking bits of food—both weed and smaller animals—which it transferred toward its mouth at the front with rhythmic pulses of its spines. When the morsel reached the vicinity of the mouth, the crab’s gullet everted around the food, then withdrew to digest within the protection of the hard shell.

  “Adele,” Daniel said, scrolling through further information on the biota of Diamond Cay, “please connect me with Commissioner Brown. And you’ll loan me Tovera to fly the Commission aircar, will you not?”

  In past years, he might have said, “Can you connect me?” as though there were doubt as to whether Adele could enter the civil
ian telecommunications system from the Sissie’s bridge. What would pass unnoticed as a figure of speech with another signals officer struck Adele as an insult—albeit an unintended one.

  “Tovera can drive the vehicle, yes,” Adele said tartly as her wands moved. “But it appears to me that if there’s a piece of electronics hidden on Diamond Cay, my skills are better chosen for finding it. As well as the matter being more within the scope of my duties.”

  Switching to a clipped, almost disinterested, tone, she said, “Commissioner Brown? Hold for Captain Leary, if you will. Go ahead, Captain.”

  “Commissioner?” Daniel said, keeping his tone buoyantly cheerful. “My officers appear to have the rerigging well in hand. I was hoping you could lend me your aircar to do a little exploring and maybe even some hunting. I’ll get stale if I don’t take a break away from the ship for a day or two, you see.”

  “Why, my goodness, Captain,” Brown said. “I didn’t realize that this terminal was linked to the communications net. But yes, certainly. Would you like Master Gibbs to drive it? I’m afraid I can’t myself. And to tell the truth, I’m more comfortable in an office than I would be in the wilds.”

  “That’s no trouble at all,” Daniel said heartily. “We’ve got a number of drivers aboard the Sissie who’d like to get some fresh air also. Ah—could we pick the vehicle up as early as six hundred hours tomorrow, do you think?”

  “Why, yes, certainly,” Brown said. “I’ll tell Gibbs to make sure that the batteries are fully charged.”

  He paused, then added, “He’s really a very able man, you know, Gibbs is. But I can’t imagine what he’s doing in his present position in Representation.”

  “I can only assume that our lords and masters in the ministries had their reasons, Commissioner,” Daniel said. “At any rate, thank you again. I’m really looking forward to getting away.”

  He felt a tiny twinge as he broke the connection. Should he have told Brown about Gibbs’ background? But it wasn’t as though Clothilde Brown couldn’t spot and deal with a womanizing scoundrel without her husband’s help, assuming that she wanted to; nor that the Commissioner would be much help. Warning Brown would just make him uncomfortable without changing the result.