In the Stormy Red Sky-ARC
Page 9
"Adele, are you feeling all right?" someone asked.
Adele opened her eyes. She hadn't realized they'd been closed until the shock of light dizzied her. She blinked but put both palms on the console to steady herself.
Rene Cazelet had spoken over a two-way link from the astrogation station across the bridge. He must've been watching her through the camera in her own console.
"Tend to your own work, if you please," Adele said. She kept her tone neutral, but she cut power to her camera. Rene would take that as a sharp rebuke, which is exactly what she meant it for.
Oddly enough, Adele immediately began to feel better. The surge of adrenalin from her anger had apparently settled whatever biochemical imbalance was causing the headache.
She smiled faintly. Perhaps she owed Rene an apology. After the Milton had landed she'd give him one, but for now she had work to do.
Cory was handling ordinary communications with Paton Control on the ground in Hereward City, the regional capital. Paton didn't have either guardships in orbit or a Planetary Defense Array, a constellation of nuclear mines whose focused blasts could destroy even a battleship. There was nothing either to protect or to steal here.
Das, the Resident of the Veil, had thirty worlds under his authority, a larger number than most of Cinnabar's regional governors. That was only because none of the worlds was significant. The gross economic product of all thirty together was less than that of any of the five suburban boroughs of Xenos.
Normally Adele would've felt that her primary duty was to gather information from the ships in Hereward Harbor and from the Residency databases—particularly anything that Das and his cronies tried to keep secret. For now she left that to her equipment and, opening a shielded link to the command console, said, "Daniel, Senator Forbes has just entered the BDC. Lieutenant Robinson admitted her. So that you know."
"Umm," said Daniel. They didn't bother with protocol when they used a two-way link. In fact, Adele had difficulty remembering to use protocol at any time. "Well, I'd rather she were there than up here. I'll be interested to see if Robinson reports it, though."
After a pause he added, "And make sure she can't speak to anyone on the ground, if you please. Ah—you can do that?"
"Yes, Daniel," Adele said aloud. And I can count to eleven without taking off my shoes . . . but that she didn't say. She'd already snapped at one friend as a result of the headache which was fast fading to a memory.
She grimaced. Before turning her attention to the information which was flooding into her electronic nets, she repowered the camera and switched to the link with Cazelet. "I'm sorry, Rene," she said. "Extraction gave me a headache, but it seems to be gone now."
"I thought for a moment I'd lost the use of my legs," Cazelet said. "This was a bad one, all right."
After pausing again, he added, "I've drafted landing plans for every berth in Hereward Harbor; none of which will be needed, of course. If there's some data stream that you won't have time to review till later, I could look at it."
There's nothing on Paton for which I require help, Adele thought. She said, "All right. The Veil Protective Service is the closest thing to a military here. I'm particularly interested in any contacts between them and the Hegemony."
She didn't bother to tell Cazelet how to find VPS databases or how to enter them, nor did she tell him that contact with the Alliance was even more important than contact with the Headman Terl and his successor. Rene would ask for help if the information were unexpectedly well protected, but he was clever and had picked up specialist knowledge and tools from her in the past. There weren't likely to be any problems.
Cazelet's help wasn't necessary to her. That she apologize by permitting him to help was necessary.
Adele started with on the ships in the harbor. There were two Protective Service gunboats. The Cockchafer had been deadlined for repairs: three of her High Drive motors had failed on her most recent cruise, and the remaining three could go the same way momentarily. She was likely to remain in dock for the foreseeable future because her log listed the replacements as OUT OF STOCK/ON ORDER FROM XENOS.
Presumably more was going on than the log showed, since High Drive motors were more or less interchangeable. Still, the situation didn't constitute a threat to the Republic or to the Milton's mission.
The Moth had just completed a cruise touching seven of the worlds administered from Paton. She could lift again within a day or two if necessary, though it was hard to imagine any real need for that.
Local information confirmed the judgment of the Sailing Directions that there wasn't a problem with piracy in the Veil. The Cinnabar Residency didn't produce anything worth stealing, and the Hegemony had a small but very efficient anti-pirate squadron which enthusiastically exercised its treaty right of hot pursuit into Cinnabar territory. The Moth couldn't do more than show the flag, but that was all she would be required to do.
Most of the forty-odd vessels in Hereward Harbor were local traders: the largest was a little over 1,500 tons, and a number were well under a thousand. A hulk, formerly the 3,000-ton freighter Jinyo Maru, provided shops and accommodations for both ground and space elements of the Veil Protective Service. A slightly smaller freighter, the Sallie Murchison, had brought a semi-annual shipment of merchandise to the Residency's only off-world trading house, Cone Transport. The Cone factor in Hereward would break up the cargo and transship the smaller packets to outlying worlds.
The only unexpected vessel below was the Spezza, a Hydriote transport of 5,000 tons. Adele dug into her particulars; the commercial code "protecting" them could be opened by any halfway competent signals officer in the merchant service. To Adele's surprise, she found that the Spezza was under charter to the Ministry of Defense on Xenos.
Adele echoed Daniel's display in a quadrant of her own to make sure that he wasn't in the middle of a critical operation, then cued her link to the command console. This might be something to report openly, but when in doubt she preferred to keep their conversations private. Daniel could open it up if he wished.
"Daniel?" she said. "The transport in harbor is here to pick up a regiment of Cinnabar troops. Well, allied troops. But the ship's from Hydra, not one of the Republic protectorates."
"That is odd," Daniel said. He'd been examining the degree of wear on the Milton's thruster nozzles and the throats of her High Drive motors. He switched to real-time imagery of the transport with her specifications in a sidebar beneath. He didn't have to ask which of the ships below was the Spezza, nor did he fumble with the sensor controls: ships were to him what information generally was to Adele. "What's their itinerary?"
"The Spezza carried twelve hundred migrant laborers from Abraxis to Domedovo," Adele said. "It then proceeded empty here to Paton, that's three days, to pick up the troops. It hasn't logged a course as yet. That is, there isn't a course prepared on the Spezza's computer, not just that they haven't reported one to Paton Control."
As she spoke, she called up the summary section on Hydra from the Sailing Directions. The Hydriotes had quite a lot of the carrying trade in this sector of human space.
War between Earth and her oldest colonies had created a thousand-year Hiatus in star travel. For the first seven hundred years following the Hiatus, the Hydriotes had been pirates. Bases on Hydra's two moons provided a defensive screen that none of the neighboring worlds could breach.
With the appearance of major powers, first the Kostromans and even more when Cinnabar and the Alliance moved into the region, the Hydriotes had become traders with a reputation of rigid honesty. Hydra might have been absorbed by one or the other empires, but though the moon bases no longer conferred absolute safety, they did make the world an uneconomic mouthful to swallow.
Adele felt a flash of irritation at herself. She didn't have a list of all Ministry of Defense charters. She wasn't even sure that a list existed, but she probably could have compiled one back in Xenos. She hadn't thought to do so, and now she needed the information!
Aloud she said, "I don't have record of any other instance of Defense chartering vessels from outside the protectorate for carrying troops. There have been cases of foreign ships being bought into service and given Cinnabar officers, that's all. But I have only a small sample available, a very small sample. I'm sorry, Daniel, I'm not prepared."
To her surprise, Daniel laughed. "I don't know that you'll consider this to be real data," he said, "but speaking as a politician's son, I can't imagine any contracting officer letting a lucrative transportation contract to a foreign carrier and keeping his job. There's quite a lot of money in those contracts, Adele, and they don't go to firms which don't have senatorial support in one way or another."
After a moment's pause, he added, "How did the soldiers arrive here if the Spezza didn't bring them? They surely weren't recruited on Paton, were they?"
"No," said Adele, switching files to answer the new question. Data was pouring into her console from a score of sources, but she could only access one stream at a time. This answer came from Paton Control, not the log of the Spezza.
"The troops are from Thebes," she said. "They're the Brotherhood of Amorgos; some sort of religious order, apparently. Two small freighters registered on Sundog brought them to Paton from Horizon last month, then returned to Sundog with a cargo of dried fish. They, the regiment, lived in a Cone Transport warehouse until the Spezza arrived a week ago."
"Gods above!" Daniel said. "The Brotherhood? Adele, they're crack troops. I know, most allied units aren't to the standards of the Land Forces of the Republic, but the Brotherhood's an exception. We must've stumbled into some sort of secret operation. Though I can't imagine what it could be around here."
Adele could very easily imagine an operation that required a first-class regiment: a swoop onto Karst, detaining Headman Hieronymos in his palace on Angouleme, and using him as a spokesman for directives framed by a senior RCN advisor. There was absolutely no evidence of that or other secret activities in the region, however, and there was no chance that Mistress Sand wouldn't have warned Adele about such matters even if her organization weren't involved in them.
Aloud Adele said, "That would explain why I'm not finding information about the regiment's past or intended route, certainly. I'm not sure it's the correct answer, however."
"Six, this is Three," said Robinson over the command channel. "We have clearance to land in Hereward Harbor. Will you be taking her down, sir, over?"
The image of Daniel's face went professionally neutral. Then he said, "Mister Robinson, I'd appreciate it if you landed our Millie today. I found her to run a few degrees nose-down when we lifted off, but she's not tender as I'd feared she might be. Six out."
"Aye-aye, sir!" said Robinson. "Ship, this is Three. Prepare for landing sequence in one, I repeat one, minute, over."
To Adele, Daniel said, "He should have a chance to shine in front of his aunt, don't you think? I'm very pleased with him as an officer, you know."
Adele brought up an image of Hereward Harbor. It wasn't real-time because the Milton's orbit had her on the opposite side of the planet, but it was only ten minutes old.
"Daniel, why wouldn't he let the automatic systems bring us down?" she said. "There's nothing in a landing like this that requires human involvement, is there?"
Daniel's smiling image nodded. "That's correct," he said. "It's an open harbor. But it will give Robinson a chance to get the feel of the ship before he has to, say—"
His face grinned. There was more than humor in the expression.
"—land her in the middle of an Alliance fortress, you see?"
"Yes, Daniel," Adele said. She thought of Fort Douaumont. Woetjans' body flying backward with blood splashing the plastron of her rigging suit; the face of an Alliance soldier filling the sights of Adele's pistol. His mouth was open, shouting in blind terror, as her trigger released . . .
"Ah, Adele?" Daniel added. "I think we'd better leave the Brotherhood's course alone. We might call attention to matters that aren't our business and complicate another department's operations."
"Beginning landing sequence—now!" said Blantyre's voice from the BDC.
The thrusters' roar and vibration doubled in intensity as the Milton began braking to land. The real buffeting wouldn't start till the cruiser dropped into the lower levels of the atmosphere, but this was enough to draw a reasonable end to the conversation.
Adele settled back in her acceleration couch. She was glad to have an excuse not to reply to Daniel's statement. It hadn't been a real order, after all.
And she wouldn't have obeyed it regardless. She was going to learn what brought the Brotherhood of Amorgos to Paton, if it was humanly possible to do so.
CHAPTER 7
Hereward on Paton
"You can lower the ramp now, Woetjans," Daniel called. He straightened the sleeve of his best second-class uniform and mused aloud, "I wonder if I ought to have worn my Whites?"
Hogg snorted. "To meet the governor of this pisspot?" he said. "I don't bloody think so, master."
One side of Daniel's mouth twitched toward a grimace, but Senator Forbes and her aides didn't seem offended. The pair of burly males carried a trunk large enough to hold a body; they didn't bother to set it on the deck while they waited for the hatch to open. It would've been a problem to maneuver so bulky an item down the companionway of the Princess Cecile; Woetjans might've had to winch it out of an A Level access port.
The entrance hold echoed as the dogs locking the hatch withdrew in a quick series of clangs. Daniel grinned as it creaked down to become the boarding ramp. He wasn't sure he'd have been able to tell the sound from that of slugs from an automatic impeller raking the hull.
He'd been aboard ships taking ground fire a number of times in the past; he probably would be again, unless human beings suddenly adopted a philosophy of peace. That seemed slightly less probable than Governor Das and his aides opening fire on the Milton.
Hydraulic rams drove the ramp down with controlled determination. The opening sucked in whiffs of steam and the occasional sharp glitter of plasma, tendrils of exhaust which the atmosphere of Paton hadn't quite reduced to a resting state.
Hereward Harbor was an embayment that would've required artificial moles to be safe in a storm from the east. Presumably those were rare here. In any case, the sea's unhindered flow flushed away the residues of starship landings more quickly than an enclosure would've done.
Adele had put her little data unit on the attaché case which Tovera held out flat like a portable table. She turned her head toward Daniel and tapped her right wand twice. "The governor's waiting for us," she said.
The holographic display above the unit had been a blur to Daniel; it suddenly resolved into imagery of the harborfront. Adele had switched it to omnidirectional, giving everyone around her an opportunity to see what she was seeing.
An all-terrain truck with eight large tires waited at the land side of the quay. The crest on the driver's door meant it was as close to a limousine as the Cinnabar Resident in the Veil was authorized. Governor Das wore his diplomatic dress uniform of scarlet frock coat with black stove-pipe trousers. His boots, waistbelt with shoulder strap, and transverse bicorne hat were all of gilt leather. He was a pudgy little fellow and looked as uncomfortable as he did silly.
Behind him were two aides, a middle-aged woman and a youth who couldn't be older than twenty. Both stood rigidly, but the woman kept shifting a flat datafile from her right hand to the left.
"Mistress, the hatch is opening," Tovera said. She wasn't exactly showing emotion—Daniel was pretty sure the little two-legged viper didn't feel emotion—but her tone hinted at stress. The reaction would have puzzled a stranger who didn't know that Tovera was as paranoid as she was lethal and that her sub-machine gun was in the case which she couldn't open while it was Adele's table.
&nb
sp; Das looked over his shoulder and said something unheard to his aides. They started up the pier, marching in better time than Daniel's class at the Academy had generally been able to manage. Was that something the foreign service taught its recruits?
"In a moment," Adele said sharply, but even as she spoke she shut down the data unit. Tovera unlatched the case and turned, putting herself between her mistress and whatever waited beyond the lowering hatch.
Daniel smiled faintly. Because of his interest in natural history, he sometimes found himself thinking of human beings as though they were simply animals. They weren't, of course, not simply; but other species weren't simply animals either.
While Adele was unquestionably the dominant member of her small pack, there was a good deal of give and take between her and her servant. As there was—Daniel's grin grew broader—between him and Hogg.
The hatch was horizontal but continued to whirr slowly downward. The crews at Bergen and Associates had done an exceptional job in straightening the Milton's frames, warped by her collision with another ship during her final battle under Alliance colors. Part of Daniel's duties as the vessel's first captain after a rebuild was to assess the quality of the work which had been done on her. He'd be able to give it an enthusiastic recommendation.
An honest recommendation, but that went without saying for those who really knew Daniel Leary. He was an RCN officer first, and he wouldn't have hesitated to shut down his own dockyard, no matter how profitable, if it hadn't been doing work he could be proud of.
"Well, they keep a cleaner harbor than some," said Hogg, eyeing the shore a hundred yards away. He stood with his hands in his pockets—probably gripping a pistol and his big folding knife—but managing to look sloppy rather than belligerent.
Daniel gave Hogg a sharp glance. He was trying to be nice. He was probably a little embarrassed to have spoken his mind in a fashion that could've caused his master difficulties with Senator Forbes, though that appeared to have gone unnoticed.