Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Lieutenant Mon didn’t want to interrupt you, but just on the off chance … And I said I knew where you might be even if you weren’t answering calls, so he told me I could come. Ah, Midshipman Vesey’s with the expedition and … but it’s probably nothing, they were just too busy to report when they landed.”

  Adele had already suspended the document analysis and was checking message traffic. Rather than looking at communications addressed to the Princess Cecile—the on-duty personnel were certainly capable of having done that—she coded her search for the time the comsats of Sexburga’s low-orbit constellation were over South Land. It was just possible that a message had been received by a satellite which had failed to pass it on, or that—through some electronic hiccup between the local system and the corvette—the central communications node had swallowed the information.

  The individual satellite logs showed no private messages coming out of South Land. The continuous broadcast from the navigation beacon on the northern headland was logged, providing Adele with proof that the satellites were working properly.

  She paged Tovera through the transponder on the corvette—Meet me at the ship ASAP—then shut down her personal data unit and stood. The attic’s contents were a shadowed jumble about her. Early on somebody had made an attempt to keep this overflow organized, but for the past several decades—judging by the dates of the documents Adele had unearthed—boxes had been piled on filing cabinets and into the aisles the initial planners had left.

  She’d been working on a smooth-surfaced attaché case stacked on a packing crate of rubberized metal. She put away the data unit, then paused as she considered what to do with the document she’d found in a drawer of pre-Hiatus logbooks.

  “What’s that, ma’am?” Dorst asked, reaching forward as he spoke. “A piece of boot?”

  “Don’t touch that!” Adele said, then frowned at herself. Though he had to learn to ask before he put his hands on things …

  “That is,” she continued to the midshipman, ramrod straight though still on his knee, “that’s a diary of sorts from the initial settlement of the planet some fifteen hundred years ago. The writer was the only survivor of a wrecked starship who lived for nine years with the natives of South Land.”

  Adele frowned again. “He says he did,” she added, because you could scarcely consider this unimpeachable evidence.

  “That’s writing?” Dorst said, leaning far over to bring his eyes closer to the document. He clasped his hands behind his back to show that there was no danger of him touching the leather. “What language … ?”

  Adele smiled. “It’s in Universal,” she said, “but the writer had a very crabbed hand and he wrote on both sides of the sheet. And—”

  “These are holes in the paper!” Dorst said as his mind finally realized that he was seeing the attaché case, not pale gray ink against the dark brown leather. He looked up at Adele in amazement.

  “Yes,” she said dryly. “The ink he used was mildly acidic. It ate through the leather from both sides in the course of a millennium and a half. This makes transcription more difficult than it usually would be.”

  A document like this deserved care beyond anything available on Sexburga, but that couldn’t be Adele’s present priority. She opened the acetate folder she’d found it in and slipped one edge under the fragile wondrousness of the memoir. Closing the folder, she put the document back into the drawer where it had been.

  It had survived there for decades or more. If matters worked out the way Adele hoped they would, she could return and preserve the account properly. If not, she didn’t suppose it mattered very much.

  She gestured Dorst to the opening. “Let’s go,” she said crisply.

  “Ma’am,” he said, rising to a stoop, “why don’t you go down and I’ll latch the trap behind us. It’ll be easier for me, I think.”

  “Yes, all right,” Adele said, squeezing past the midshipman. He’d spoken as though he’d been watching her sway as she worked the stiff bolt to open the attic. Well, you didn’t have to be around Officer Mundy very long to imagine how clumsy she’d be on a ladder.

  “Ma’am?” Dorst said, gripping her arm in a tactful but firm fashion. “If you turn so you face the ladder, you’ll be, ah, more comfortable.”

  “Safer,” Adele said, supplying the correct word as she obediently turned and started down. Though falling fifteen feet onto her face—the Council Chamber was on this floor and the ceiling was high—would certainly be uncomfortable.

  Dorst waited till she’d reached the hallway to follow. He slammed the trapdoor with no trouble: the sudden weight had almost swept Adele off the ladder when the bolt released it.

  “I didn’t know there were natives on Sexburga, ma’am,” he said, dropping lightly onto the balls of his feet instead of climbing down the rungs.

  He smiled in a hopeful, puppyish way. Adele realized that he was trying to change the unstated subject from her physical ineptitude. That was the sort of handicap that bothered people who didn’t trip over themselves more than it did Adele herself, but she found the impulse engaging.

  “There aren’t any natives according to the printed data I’ve found,” Adele said, striding briskly down the hallway. “That’s what made this account so interesting. The writer says that he lived alone for months before they showed themselves to him. After that they fed him, and if I’ve followed the text correctly …”

  Dorst glanced back at the tall step ladder, but Adele waved him on. The janitor had dragged the ladder out for her with bad grace despite the generous tip she’d given him; he could put it away or leave it in the middle of the corridor as he chose.

  “If I’ve read the text correctly,” she resumed as she started down the end stairs, “he claims to have formed a romantic alliance within the tribe. And to have fathered a child.”

  A group of Sexburgans chattering in accented Universal were coming up in a cluster around a woman so pale that Adele would have guessed she was an albino, except that her eyes were an icy gray-blue. The Sexburgans all watched the pale woman, but her eyes followed Dorst until she disappeared through the door onto the second floor.

  “That can’t be, ma’am,” Dorst said. The outside door was stiff; it resisted Adele until the midshipman hit it, high and low with his palm and bootsole. “Species aren’t interfertile, and for sure animals on two different planets can’t breed.”

  “That was my understanding also,” Adele said. Insufficient data could cause mistakes. Certainty about matters where the data were insufficient was a mistake on its face. “On the other hand, I wasn’t there and the writer very possibly was.”

  The streets of Spires weren’t lighted, and the sky was dark except for the stars. They were unfamiliar constellations in a manner of speaking, but Adele didn’t know anything about the stars above Cinnabar either. She was a city dweller, and if she’d ever been interested in the night sky she’d have called up a computer projection of it.

  “Ma’am?” Dorst said, falling abreast as they started up the street. “Lieutenant Mon’s going to send our jeep south to find the captain and, and the others. It can’t bring them back all at once if there’s a problem, but it’ll take another radio and some medical supplies. Are you going along?”

  A ship took off from the harbor. Adele lowered her eyes, shielding them further with her hand as she waited for the plasma’s artificial thunder to subside.

  Dorst slipped his goggles into place, watching the liftoff as he strode along. “It’s the Achilles, that’s the yacht that made the fast run from Cinnabar,” he shouted. “Of course, that was nothing to what we did under Captain Leary.”

  “I’m sure Lieutenant Mon can find more suitable personnel for a search party on South Land,” Adele said, going back to the previous question. “I intend to learn what I can here about the Captal da Lund and his friends.”

  Percussion bands were playing at the upper and lower ends of the street, the tunes syncopating one another. Beca
use Adele was unfamiliar with the local instrumentation, it took her a moment to realize that the counterpoint wasn’t intended. The Strymonian yacht had shrunk to an unusually bright star in the heavens.

  “And I think,” she added, “that I’m going to see where the Achilles is off to.”

  Dorst looked at her. She shrugged and grinned. “Just a feeling,” Adele said. “An instinct, if you like.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The windblown grit didn’t scratch the moissanite visors protecting the faces of the detachment, but bare skin—the backs of Daniel’s hands and his throat above his collar—already felt as though it was sunburned. What was it going to be like a week from now?

  Daniel grinned broadly. Well, that was something he could wait a week to learn. Any number of things could happen before then to render present concern empty. Some of the possibilities were even survivable.

  “Unit,” he said to key the general channel. “We’ll camp here, down in the swale and out of the wind. Hogg, choose a site for the tent. Vesey, take Matahurd and see if there isn’t water here too. Captain out.”

  Daniel took his knapsack off and waited as the crewmen slid over the crumbling bank. The region must get some rain for this dry riverbed and its contributory ravines to exist, but rain must be very infrequent. The hard-stemmed bushes growing to the level of the bank were at least several years old; a downpour as fierce as the ones that had excavated the riverbed would uproot any vegetation present at the time.

  When Daniel himself stepped down, the sudden absence of wind was as great a relief as warm shelter after a blizzard. He hadn’t appreciated just how enervating the wind’s cutting pressure was until he’d escaped it—for a time.

  Hogg was giving orders in a voice that remained clear despite obvious wear from the dust and dryness. They’d all been drinking their fill in expectation of replenishing their water supply, but the mucous membranes of noses and mouths still suffered in this damnable atmosphere.

  “How far’d we get, sir?” Sun croaked. If the gunner had wanted information instead of a reason to speak to Daniel, he’d have read the figure off his helmet’s navigation display. He was working his arms alternately to loosen them after the pull of his packstraps, switching the powerful impeller from hand to hand so that he wasn’t flailing it around.

  “Ten point three one miles, Sun,” Daniel said. “A pretty decent hike for spacers on the first day, I’d say. We’ll try to double that in the future.”

  “Umm …” Sun said, rubbing his mouth with the back of his free hand. He was a wiry man of middle height, and one of the solidest of the Princess Cecile’s crew—under normal circumstances. “I wonder, sir? If this gully was going in more or less the right direction—”

  He’d obviously already looked at his map overlay. It would have showed him that the dry river entered the Middle Sea within ten miles of the cape where the beacon was set.

  “—and we followed it, we could stay out of the wind.”

  “I wish we could do that, Sun,” Daniel said truthfully, “but the vegetation down here is too thick for us to use ravines for passage.”

  He gestured, calling attention to the brush around them. Daniel could differentiate at least a dozen species, though they all had smooth trunks and small, oval leaves. Several varieties had foliage covered with fine spines, even though Sexburga had no large herbivores. Daniel had seen that sort of adaptation before in desert climates: the spines created a zone of still air so that constant wind didn’t dry the plant out faster than the roots could replenish its fluids.

  The armed leaves would nonetheless lacerate anybody moving through them quickly. Besides, the trunks of neighboring bushes twisted around one another in a slow-motion attempt to wrestle more of their valuable riverbed real estate.

  Sun looked at the vegetation and sighed. “Yeah, I should’ve known that,” he said. “I don’t … I’m not used to the wind, I guess. Sorry, sir.”

  He turned and walked back to where his men had cleared a tent-sized area under Hogg’s direction. The detachment had only one powered cutting bar, though Hogg had sharpened the two shovels on a rock slab at the landing site. They’d come here to view what might be foundations carved into bare rock, not to hack through the continent’s rare stretches of vegetation.

  Daniel didn’t let the concern he felt for Sun reach his face. The constant wind was unpleasant to anybody, but the gunner’s reaction was just short of phobia. It wasn’t the sort of problem that would arise aboard a starship.

  And there wasn’t a thing to do about it now.

  The fire’s dense yellow flames crackled, throwing heat even to where Daniel stood twenty feet away. This South Land brushwood burned with an oily intensity, but Dasi and Pring had been unable to light it until Hogg feathered one of the chopped stems with his knife before touching the lighter to it.

  Hogg sauntered over, smiling with satisfaction at a job well done—and also, if Daniel knew his servant, at his superiority to a bunch of city folk. “Want to take a little walk with me, master?” Hogg asked. “There’s something you might want to look at.”

  “Certainly, Hogg,” Daniel said, feeling a touch of excitement that took him back to his boyhood. That was the way Hogg always prefaced a chance to view a part of nature that almost no one ever saw. There’d been the day the crystal moths issued from every pore of a tree their grub forms had eaten hollow, mating in the sunlight they saw only once in thirty years; the cave under the sea cliff, always in the past empty, from which the scaly head of leviathan rose one evening to follow the line of Hogg’s low-skimming aircar; the roc lifting as the sun woke updrafts from the hinterlands of Bantry …

  Hogg picked up a shovel and handed the impeller to Barnes. “She’s switched off right now,” he said. “Which would be a pretty good way to leave her unless you want to blow somebody’s ass off for fun.”

  “I’ll be careful, mother,” Barnes said with a grin. Hogg sniffed and gestured with his free hand for Daniel to follow him into the brush.

  Hogg and the Sissies respected one another and had been through some tense times together. Both sides had a genial contempt for the group the other represented, however. Daniel had a foot in either camp. He found the mutual chauvinism amusing, since they’d shown that in a crisis they’d join ranks against a common enemy.

  Hogg held the sharpened blade of the shovel out in front of him like a horseman’s lance and duckwalked down a tunnel of branches growing from pedestals of dirt laced high by roots. The soil was so light and dry that even here in the riverbed the breezes carved it away except where something bound it.

  Daniel’s hands were empty, so he scrambled along on all fours. The knife on his equipment belt would make a satisfactory weapon at close quarters, but he saw no need to draw it now.

  “There you go, master,” Hogg said, making room for Daniel by squeezing against a bush whose tiny white berries grew from the underside of its leaves. He pointed with the shovel; its broad tip had a wicked sheen where he’d stroked the metal to an edge.

  He indicated a bush whose stems swelled at intervals into fist-sized nodules. They weren’t the result of disease as Daniel had thought when he first viewed them, but rather reservoirs in which the plant stored a white, starchy substance. Daniel had tasted a pinch and found it flavorless but not apparently harmful. He’d thought of using it to supplement their diet if necessary.

  Half this bush had been stripped: the stems cut a foot or two above the ground, then cut again to excise the nodules. The undamaged stems looked forlorn, springing from a base meant for twice their number.

  “It’s not sawed,” Hogg said, “and it’s not hacked with a machete either. I’d say either teeth or a sharp little knife.”

  Daniel flicked on his handlight. The sky was still bright enough for normal vision, but he needed more intensity to judge how fresh the cuts were. Bark curled resiliently under the pressure of his fingertip. He said, “It didn’t happen more than a day ago.”

  “N
ot even that, dry as this place is,” Hogg said. “Less than an hour, I’d say. I’ll bet he scampered when the thundering herd come down the bank.”

  “It could be a castaway,” Daniel said. He didn’t know what he believed, so he stated what seemed the most reasonable possibility. “Out of rations and living off the land.”

  “Could be,” Hogg said. From his tone, he didn’t know what he believed either. “That don’t explain why he ran, though. I sure hell wouldn’t want to be alone in this place if there was a choice.”

  He resumed waddling forward, along the trail rubbed in the friable soil. The markings were faint, but even Daniel could have followed them; Hogg had another generation’s worth of experience in woodcraft.

  Fifteen feet ahead, he gestured to one of the chopped-out nodules, dropped beside the track. Daniel nodded.

  “Captain, is things all right?” Dasi asked through the helmet. The fact that it was a spacer checking rather than Sun, the petty officer in charge, was a bad sign. “Over.”

  “Unit,” Daniel said, “Hogg and I are scouting the perimeter. There’re no problems, we’re just making sure. Captain out.”

  The trail had led them back to the wall of the dry channel. A block of sandstone the diameter of a dinnerplate projected from the bank. It didn’t look as though it belonged there. Hogg tested it with the heel of his left hand, leaning some, then all of his weight against it. “Stuck in from the other side and wedged, I say,” he commented.

  Daniel grimaced. “We need to keep moving,” he said. “Much as I’d like to go after it, we can’t take the time to do that now.”

  Hogg eyed the neighboring brush. He chose a plant, then notched its stem with his shovel and stripped a line of bark up from the cut. It was as tough and flexible as rawhide. “I’ll tell you what, young master,” he said. “You leave me here for an hour or so to set a snare. And then we’ll see if something doesn’t come to us.”