In the Stormy Red Sky-ARC

by David Drake

  Daniel grinned. Capturing Bolton had given him an appreciation for the problems that Admiral Petersen had faced when he unexpectedly took New Harmony. Though the conspirators who'd aided the Alliance were now the planetary government, they had many personal political enemies in addition to the portion of the populace who supported Cinnabar or opposed the Alliance.

  It wasn't safe to imprison thousands of RCN spacers on New Harmony: they would become a shock force of counter-revolution if one party or another managed to arm them. The high RCN officers—Admiral Ozawa and his staff, and all surviving ships' captains—had been sent to Pleasaunce, proof of and an ornament to the triumphant victory which they announced. Quite a number of common spacers had no national allegiance; Petersen simply enlisted them in his squadron.

  The remainder—the officers, warrant officers, and Cinnabar citizens—had been sent to the nearest Alliance base where the civilian authorities and the Fleet's rear echelon would deal with them. They were a serious problem on Bolton, but they'd stopped being Petersen's problem.

  Though that might be about to change. Daniel smiled more broadly.

  "With any luck, it'll be some time before Admiral Petersen gets word of the change of government here, Commander," Daniel said. "No ships left the system during the attack, and with the exception of the two prizes I'm sending to Cinnabar, none will lift for another few days until I've got cargos together for them. The planetary defense array is just as useful to enforce an embargo as it is to fend off a hostile fleet, you see."

  The Hydriotes who were bringing in the Fonthill Militia weren't going to be happy about the situation, but that couldn't be helped. They'd be paid for the unexpected delay in harbor—the volume of Alliance stores captured here would make even the Millie's common spacers rich for the months it took them to carouse it away—but nobody was going to get a fat reward for bringing Admiral Petersen word of the disaster in time to retrieve it.

  "The PDA is still in place?" Haugen said. He blinked three times, trying unsuccessfully to get his mind around the concept. "How the bloody hell did you get through it, Leary? I don't understand!"

  "It was a matter of good luck and very careful timing," Daniel said, a truthful if incomplete explanation and as much as Haugen was capable of absorbing. Daniel thought of the child facing calculus again.

  "Well, I'll be buggered," Haugen said. He shook his head carefully, apparently hoping the information he'd just been given would sort itself into a form he could understand. "I will be buggered."

  Senator Forbes was talking about the debt which the Republic owed her brave spacers and Forbes' own pride at being the person who was joining with Captain Leary to pay that debt. Daniel would just as soon that she didn't use his name so frequently in material which she planned to spread all over Cinnabar, as it wouldn't make him any friends in Navy House. On the other hand, even his worst enemies in the RCN knew not to take a politician's blather seriously.

  "Cargos, though, you said?" Haugen went on. "Ah—Captain? I know your record and of course—"

  He patted his laboriously created rank tab.

  "—it's not my business to question a senior officer. But, ah—you're a young man, Leary. I know things go on, I've seen things go on. But it might be best to be careful about what you say to a stranger. There are officers who, well, might not be as broadminded as I about captains engaging in trade."

  Daniel laughed in delighted amazement. I hadn't thought of that interpretation!

  "Your concern does you honor, Commander," he said, speaking quickly so that Haugen wouldn't think he was being mocked. "But these cargos are very much proper RCN business. Besides you and your fellow prisoners—"

  Daniel gestured toward spacers crowding about the rows of shimmering tents to get closer to the dignitary on the aircar.

  "—Admiral Petersen put his hostages here on Bolton. I'm sending them back to their home planets."

  That would have an additional benefit, because Hydriote shippers carried out commissions in an absolutely trustworthy fashion. Each captain would make his contracted voyage before he set off for New Harmony. That would add at least a week before the news about Bolton reached Admiral Petersen.

  "Hostages?" said Haugen. "What sort of hostages?"

  "There are a hundred or two people from each of the important worlds in the Montserrat Stars," Daniel explained. "They're here on East Continent. Generally they're the sons and daughters of the most prominent citizens, that sort of thing. Officially they're being educated to fit them for high office in the Alliance, but—"

  He shrugged.

  "—the parents weren't given the option of refusing this honor. Fifth Bureau officials—" Guarantor Porra's personal secret police "—gathered them up."

  "They're treacherous bastards, the whole lot of them," Haugen muttered. "But I didn't know anything about hostages. We're all RCN here, and all taken on New Harmony."

  He shook his head. "A bloody awful thing that was," he said. "Bloody awful. We weren't but ten feet up when bang! and we went down again and broke poor Heidi's back on the quay. The Hobbes hadn't even gotten her outriggers out of the water. Bloody awful. I didn't have the faintest bloody notion what had happened, just trying to get everybody off before the fusion bottle failed. Which it didn't, thank the Gods, but you can't count on that."

  "No, you certainly can't," said Daniel, who suddenly liked Haugen a great deal more than he had a moment before. As executive officer, damage control was in his care. With the ship a hopeless wreck, he'd immediately made the correct decision: getting the crew to safety.

  "And it was the wogs stabbed us in the back," the Commander said in amazement. "Can you imagine that? Well, they've got themselves to thank for whatever Porra and his Fifth Bureau monkeys do to them, and there'll be plenty done I don't doubt."

  The fact that the battleships had been destroyed on the surface explained why the bulk of their crews had survived. The Locke and Aquinas had fought the hugely superior Alliance squadron to give their lighter consorts a chance to escape; their crews wouldn't have been so lucky. But spacefaring and war were dangerous, and war in space was many times dangerous.

  Daniel could feel good about the many spacers below him in the quarry. They might just as easily have been protoplasm drifting around New Harmony.

  "I hope that by returning the hostages to their home planets," he said with quiet pride, "we'll encourage those worlds to think well of Cinnabar. If that also has the effect of sparking a rebellion or two against Guarantor Porra's flunkies, so much the better. And at the very least—"

  Daniel beamed at Commander Haugen.

  "—it removes the problem of feeding and administering some thousands of civilians at a time when all Cinnabar personnel on Bolton should be concentrating their efforts on keeping Petersen from recapturing the place. Eh, Commander?"

  "By the Gods, Leary!" Haugen said, shaking his head again. "You're a deep one, no doubt about it. Well, you give me my duties and I'll get on with them the best I can. I always have, if I do say so myself."

  Senator Forbes seemed to be running down, though it was difficult to be sure. A good speaker always repeated her points, because his listeners couldn't glance up the page to see what they'd missed. In the particular case the speech was going to be recast completely by editors, so there was even less reason than usual to expect the speaker to be succinct.

  Nonetheless, Daniel assumed it was about time for him to say a few words to the crowd, explaining that they'd be trucked to St James City to await developments. Whatever ships Navy House managed to send to Bolton would be short crewed, so the unexpected bounty of trained spacers would greatly help the defense of the planet.

  If Navy House could only get something to Bolton before Admiral Petersen—

  "Daniel," said his commo helmet in Adele's voice. "I need you back here as soon as possible. Can you hear me?"

  She's excited. Adele spoke with her usual disdainful calm, but she wouldn't usually ask if they were connected.
>
  "Yes, Adele," Daniel said, raising a hand in bar and stepping away from Haugen. "What's the problem, over?"

  The Brotherhood APC which amplified the Senator's speech also acted as a satellite downlink for the helmet intercom. Blantyre, her head out of the vehicle's cupola, was looking back at Daniel. She couldn't hear the signal, but she knew it was coming through—and that emergency communications were never good news.

  "I've been going over the dispatches which the Zieten was carrying," Adele said with her usual disregard for protocol. "Some of them are for the squadron detached under Captain Varnell to take possession of the Ponape system. It includes at least one battleship."

  Down on the quarry floor Forbes had raised her hands high; the spacers were cheering her wildly. If things had gone as planned, Daniel would shortly have spoken his own few words to them.

  "From the way the dispatches are worded," Adele continued, "Captain Varnell is expected on Bolton in no more than two days."

  "I see," said Daniel. "In that case, the Senator and I will be back as quickly as the aircar can bring us. Six out."

  He started down the ramp, taking long strides. It looked like Lieutenant Blantyre instead of Captain Leary would be representing the Milton to the liberated spacers. That was all right—they'd understand that things came up.

  They were RCN, after all.

  St James Harbor, Bolton

  "Captain Leary's coming up the companionway, mistress," Tovera said. "And Senator Forbes is with him."

  "Mmm," Adele muttered. "Well, I still have more to learn, but I suppose that would be true no matter when they arrived."

  She brought herself fully back to the present; she'd been sunk deep in the aviso's database. The Zieten had been in the heart of Petersen's fleet throughout operations in the New Harmony system and then following.

  "I certainly hope I'll continue to learn things for the rest of my life," Adele said primly to her servant. "I see very little point in life if that were not true."

  And sometimes she saw little point in life, period. Right now, though, she was feeling exhilarated by the challenge of ferreting out and organizing the necessary data from the Zieten's log and dispatches. Exhilarated because she was succeeding, of course; but as a matter of course she expected to succeed.

  Every situation of this sort was new and presented new difficulties. Here Adele was guessing what Daniel would want to know; which meant that first she had to guess what he would want to do, which in turn depended on the factual situation which he would learn from the information she presented to him. It was a lovely circular problem with an infinite number of wrong answers and no certainty of any right one.

  Beaming, Adele turned to the hatchway as Daniel entered. It was the sort of problem that people gave to Officer Mundy, because nobody else could handle it as well.

  Forbes followed Daniel up the companionway, but she did so in a chair-sling carried between her two brawny servants. The pair eased sideways from the armored tube and stood like tree stumps while she got out. Their faces were set in the same deliberate stolidity that they would have maintained if their mistress were on a chest of ease: they weren't present at a scene of embarrassing weakness.

  Civilian vessels sometimes had elevators to move passengers between levels, but warships never did. The process of slipping between universes twisted the fabric of a starship and could bind an elevator in its shaft. A warship not only transitioned more violently than the civilian norm but might also be hammered by plasma or kinetic weapons. What was a doubtful choice in the civilian context would have been absurd on a naval vessel.

  Adele looked back to her data, smiling faintly. Lady Adele Mundy, whose fellow spacers preferred to carry her through any situation in which a misstep might be dangerous, wasn't going to mock an older woman who needed help climbing slick metal stairs.

  "Eh?" said Daniel, squatting beside her console.

  "I'm rather good at steps," Adele said, stating the thought behind her smile without explaining it. "The elevators in the Academic Collections worked poorly when they worked at all, and the levels of the stack area didn't correspond well to the floors in the support structure anyway. I climbed openwork metal stairs as frequently as a midshipman goes up and down the antennas."

  "Indeed you are," Daniel said, smiling also. "I certainly wouldn't want to race you up a companionway. But now—

  Senator Forbes entered the compartment, followed by her attendants and finally Platt. She was scowling, but that could have been for any number of reasons.

  "—what's the situation? And—"

  Daniel looked around, his face suddenly set. "Clear the bridge," he ordered.

  The RCN personnel rose as one and shifted toward the door with the apparent organization of sand dripping through a timing glass. Nobody argued or hesitated: Daniel had done this before, so his Millies were prepared for it.

  "Hogg, you and Tovera too," Daniel added sternly. There must have been hesitation in the look one or the other servant gave him, because he said, "If her Excellency causes trouble, I can club her senseless with my commo helmet."

  The Senator's expression became if anything more sour, but she didn't sound angry when she murmured, "You will have your joke, Leary."

  Hogg chuckled as he touched each of Forbes attendants on an elbow and said, "Come on, boys, we'll wait in the hall. D'ye play poker, by any chance?"

  "I'll follow," said Tovera. She smiled also, which ended any chance of an attendant deciding to argue. She closed the hatch behind them.

  "I could have moved," Adele said, embarrassed by the fuss. "We don't have to be on the bridge."

  She wasn't even sure that the crew shouldn't know everything she was about to say. Though thinking about it—and Daniel had of course thought about it—it probably wasn't a good idea to show them how decisions affecting their lives were really made.

  The Millies knew that Six was brave, and at least some of them probably understood that Lady Mundy's unconcern for her personal safety went beyond mere fatalism. It might disturb them to realize that their own lives would be spent as a matter of conscious planning if the Republic required that choice, however.

  "We'll use the large display," said Daniel, "which I think her Excellency will find easiest to grasp."

  He stepped to the astrogation console and rotated the couch to face the center of the compartment; the latch was simple but not intuitively obvious, and Forbes would never have used one before. He smiled and said, "Please make yourself comfortable, your Excellency. Officer Mundy will put information where we can all see it."

  "After Petersen captured New Harmony," Adele said, "he divided his force. He send a squadron under Captain Varnell—"

  She'd waited until Daniel was in the command console and could watch before she threw up the first visual, images of the battleship Director Friedrich and its accompanying cruisers and destroyers. A viewer could open tabular data on each ship by touching an icon with the pointer in each console. Forbes probably didn't know how to do that, but neither did she need any information save the hulking mass of the battleship.

  "—back to Bolton to refit, but by way of Ponape where there'd been a rebellion of sorts. Captain Varnell's ships were in relatively poor condition but they were thought to be capable of overawing rebels, especially since news of the disaster to Admiral Ozawa's fleet would have reached Ponape by way of merchants whom the locals would trust."

  "It would appear that we owe a vote of thanks to the courageous citizens of Ponape," Daniel said in a tone of irony. "I'm not sure exactly what would've happened if we'd reached Bolton just after a squadron that size had arrived, but I'm confident that it wouldn't involve us controlling the planet."

  "Based on my knowledge of how the Alliance deals with rebels," Adele said, "I doubt that any of the really courageous citizens are alive to thank. You may think it proper to pray for their souls, of course."

  She paused to recover the thread of her exposition, then said, "Petersen took the remainder
of his force—"

  A much larger body headed by three battleships replaced the imagery of Captain Varnell's squadron. Forbes' eyes narrowed as she watched, but she didn't speak.

  "—to Cacique, which had been Admiral Ozawa's base of operations. He assumed that the surviving elements of Ozawa's fleet would have fled there, and that they would quickly surrender when he arrived in overwhelming force. Cacique has a planetary defense array, but—"

  This explanation was for Forbes. She knew Daniel was up to date on all naval resources in his area of operations, both friendly and hostile.

  "—beyond that the facilities are rudimentary. Don't imagine something like you see here, Senator. Stores are transferred by lighters, not docks and cranes."

  Forbes slammed the side of her fist on the console's armrest. Nonetheless it was in an even tone of voice that she said, "So Cacique has fallen also? Then there's no world among the Montserrat Stars which isn't under the Alliance or ready to go over to the Alliance as soon as Admiral Petersen gets around to taking its submission?"

  "No, Senator," said Adele.

  "No, your Excellency," said Daniel. They had spoken simultaneously and at once.

  With a cold smile, Adele nodded the precedence to Daniel. He bobbed his head twice.

  "Twenty-odd ships including three heavy cruisers escaped from New Harmony," he said. "They may not all have gone to Cacique, but that would be the default choice of any RCN captain under the circumstances. It's the nearest friendly world with a defense array, which is the only present safety from a fleet the size of Petersen's."

  He shrugged. "And they won't surrender, your Excellency," he said. "Whoever's the senior captain will take command. He may not be much good—there are captains in the RCN that I wouldn't trust with organizing three other people into a bridge game. But whoever takes charge will be RCN. He won't surrender, and if he even suggested it, his fellow captains would hold a drumhead court martial and have him shot on his own bridge."