Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  “The owner is in his bedroom on the second floor,” Adele continued. “One guard is in the main room of the suite with a gun trained on the door. That has a mechanical bar, so we’ll have to blow it down.”

  “Right,” Woetjans said. “That’s you, Jiangsi.”

  The maintenance tech nodded. He was leaning against the doorjamb so that it supported some of the weight of his pack.

  “Mistress?” Liebig asked. He’d looked hungrily at the Captal’s big aircar when he trotted past it beside the bosun. “The guy inside isn’t the one who flew the captain away, is he? Because if he is, he might know …”

  “The driver, Dorotige, was the last one to come out of the barracks,” Tovera said. Like Adele herself, she was using imagery from the compound’s internal system to view their opponents.

  The tip of Tovera’s tongue touched her lips. “The man inside, preparing to die for his master, is named benYamani. There’s no reason we shouldn’t take him up on his offer.”

  “We’ll give him another chance to surrender anyway,” Adele said. She nodded to the open door. “Let’s go.”

  In Adele’s normal state of mind she would have been irritated by Tovera’s enthusiasm for killing. At present—

  She glanced down at the cratered back of the servant who’d tried to run. Blood was congealing in the holes where velocity had disintegrated the ten-grain pellets like tiny bombs when they struck.

  If there is a God, may She forbid that I ever find this sort of business normal.

  Woetjans left a man in the doorway and another in the foyer, then led the way up the staircase. Adele had locked the kitchen door and shut off the elevator, so there was no need of a guard down here. They wouldn’t need another man upstairs either, though, so she didn’t comment on the bosun’s arrangements.

  An ornate metal door stood in the center of the second floor’s semicircular anteroom. It was finished to look like bronze, but Adele knew from the contractor’s specifications that it was actually tungsten over a core of lime.

  “System,” Adele said as they faced the door. She’d set the compound’s intercom to be cued by her helmet. “Mister benYamani, unbolt the door and surrender. We won’t harm you or your master. We’ve come here to get information, that’s all.”

  There was no response. “Mistress?” Tovera said.

  Adele grimaced. It was so unnecessary. “Yes, go ahead,” she said.

  “Officer Woetjans,” Tovera said, holding out her submachine gun. “Let me trade weapons with you for a moment.”

  The bosun looked startled but handed over the stocked impeller when Adele nodded. Tovera, aiming by the image projected on her visor, pointed the weapon at the wall to the right of the armored door.

  The whack! of the shot was startlingly loud in the enclosed space. The slug’s driving band flashed as it ionized; the ghostly yellow glow remained in the air for several seconds. The wall was of thick structural plastic, intended to deaden sound but not to stop rounds from an impeller. Chips flew into the anteroom and a cavity the size of a soup dish spalled off the inside.

  The slug continued straight and true. The waiting guard leaped up, rolled over a table, and fell prone across the hand-knotted carpet. His blood splashed a broad pattern around the hole the slug took through the wall of the Captal’s bedroom.

  Tovera gave the impeller back to Woetjans. “That should do,” she said.

  Adele squatted and took out her personal data unit; the helmet’s inputs weren’t sufficient for what she needed now. At a nod from the bosun, Jiangsi shrugged off his pack and began lifting out blocks of explosive with the blasting caps already in preformed sockets.

  “Wait,” said Adele, concentrating on her display. “We could do more damage than we intend with that.”

  “You want me to take down the wall instead of the door, mistress?” Jiangsi offered. “That won’t be hard.”

  “Wait,” Adele repeated.

  She turned on the vision panel above the Captal’s huge circular bed and routed to it the output of the security camera in the main room of suite; she focused the image closely on what was left of the guard’s head. The slug must have been tumbling slightly when it came through the wall.

  “Captal da Lund!” Adele said through the intercom. “We will let you and all your surviving personnel go free once you’ve answered our questions about what happened to Lieutenant Leary. Open the door to your suite. If we have to blow our way in, there’s a possibility you’ll be killed and a near certainty that you’ll be badly injured.”

  “No ‘near’ about that,” Woetjans muttered. Her big scarred hand patted the length of tubing in her belt. She’d wrapped tape around one end for a better grip.

  “You’ve got thirty seconds,” Adele continued. “I’m going to begin counting down. Thirty, twenty-nine—”

  The man cowering in the bedroom suddenly snatched open his door. “Wait!” he cried. “For the love of God, wait!”

  Adele rose to her feet and put her data unit back in its pocket. She lifted her visor; she didn’t need to watch further. The spacers tensed, but Tovera merely shook her head in disappointment.

  The bar scraped on the other side of the door. When Woetjans heard it click free of the staples, she kicked the panel open with the heel of her boot. It bloodied the Captal’s nose as it knocked him down.

  Adele had never seen the exiled dictator in the flesh. He would have looked distinguished under most circumstances, but blubbering so that tears streaked the blood on his cheeks was not his best moment. Woetjans and Jiangsi thrust their guns in his face.

  “Please, please, I’ll pay you more money than you ever dreamed!” the Captal cried. “I’ll make you rich for life, only don’t kill me!”

  It was funny in its way. “Tovera,” Adele said. “How much money would it take for you not to kill this gentleman if I told you to do it?”

  “If you allowed me to do it, you mean, mistress,” Tovera said. They were playing a game, she and her mistress, but every word of it was true. She shrugged. “I don’t need money, mistress.”

  Adele was unable to keep to keep from sneering when she looked down at the sniveling exile, but perhaps that was the right expression for the purpose anyway. “When you’ve told us how to find Lieutenant Leary,” she said evenly, “we’ll release you and your personnel.”

  “They’re all right, they’re perfectly safe,” the Captal said. He’d pulled his knees up to his chest and his fingers covered his face, pressing to either side of his nose. Was it broken, or was it simply fear that had so unmanned him? “It was nothing to do with me, really, I was just helping Vaughn out of friendship for his father. Getting your captain out of the way so that no one would give the alarm until Vaughn was safely back on Strymon.”

  Woetjans tapped the Captal’s left wrist with her impeller muzzle. The heat shield was still hot from the recently fired slug; the prisoner jerked his hand down with a cry of terror.

  “Where?” Woetjans said. “Or I’ll tie your dick to the aircar and fly back to town. So help me God.”

  “At Site Two on South Land!” the Captal cried. “Dorotige took them there, he can find them again. Besides, it’s in the car’s navigation system!”

  Adele frowned. “Is that true?” she asked the bosun.

  Woetjans shrugged. “Likely enough,” she said. “Liebig’ll know.”

  She switched to intercom. Her lips continued to move, but the helmet’s dampers smothered the words. A moment later she nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s right unless they cleared the system. Liebig’s going to check the car right now.”

  “We weren’t going to do Leary any harm,” the Captal said. “Just keep him out of the way till your fleet had gone. He had plenty of food with him and there’s water at the site. And then Dorotige would have flown him and his servants back.”

  The Captal had brought his right hand to his face again but seemed generally to have relaxed. A good sign, Adele supposed. The heat shield hadn’t even raised a blist
er. From the way he’d jumped, one might have thought his hand was being singed off.

  “Mistress?” Woetjans said. “Liebig says that’s right, the navigation record’s still intact. If he can use that car, likely he can drive back himself to get the captain.”

  “We’ll use the car,” Adele said. “We’ll take this gentleman and Mr. Dorotige with us as guides, however. Just in case.”

  The Captal slowly lowered his hands and let his legs extend slightly. “And then you’ll let me go?” he said, his voice husky with fear.

  “Yes, we will,” Adele said. “And if Daniel and all his crew, his servants as you called them, are all right, we’ll even leave you food.”

  Woetjans grinned, though she still had a worried expression. “Let’s get going,” she said. “I don’t see any way in hell we’re going to get the captain back before the time the squadron’s supposed to lift, but maybe the Winckelmann’ll lose all her thrusters when she lights ‘em. There’s a chance.”

  Jiangsi rolled the Captal over on his belly and taped his wrists. Woetjans looked sourly at the captive, then said to Adele, “Ah, mistress? How do you figure to go on from here?”

  “Get all the prisoners out of the compound as planned,” Adele said. “Dorst and Tavastierna will fly to the ship in their vehicle, the rest of us will go there in the Captal’s. I suppose Koop should drive the van back; we said we’d return it.”

  “Mistress, time’s awful short,” the bosun said.

  Adele nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But I need to inform Lieutenant Mon about what I’m doing, which I’ll do face-to-face rather than in any fashion that could be intercepted or recorded. He may request that Tovera and I carry on from here alone so that the ship can lift with as full a crew as possible.”

  “Right,” said Woetjans. She bent and lifted the Captal by his bound wrists. He screamed until he got his feet under him to take the weight from his arms. “And the Senate may make me Speaker tomorrow—but the smart money bets that I’ll be collecting bosun’s pay for the next while.”

  She slung the Captal toward the stairwell. “Let’s go tell Lieutenant Mon,” she said, “that we’ll be a while bringing the captain back to the Sissie.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “We’re about to land, ma’am,” Jiangsi warned, looking out the side of the servants’ compartment.

  “All right,” Adele said, but her mind was on entering the names and descriptions of the members of the conspiracy as the Captal da Lund remembered them. He and Dorotige were curled on the compartment floor, their limbs taped. The Captal babbled while his guard chief remained as silent as a corpse except to answer direct questions.

  Adele was making an audio recording of the information, but by entering key words manually on her personal data unit she put it in a far more accessible place: her current memory. She didn’t know what she might need in the future, so she learned as much as she could.

  Liebig rotated the aircar 180 degrees on its axis. They’d flown so smoothly that Adele had forgotten that she was in a vehicle; now she tilted forward out of the jump seat. Only Jiangsi’s snatching arm kept her from toppling onto the prisoners.

  “There you go, ma’am,” Jiangsi said politely. “Liebig’s putting us stern-on to the ship so that when the hatch opens—”

  As he spoke, he unlocked and lifted the aircar’s rear door. Liebig had put down on the quay just a few feet short of the Princess Cecile’s gangplank.

  “—nobody who shouldn’t gets to see our cargo here.” He looked down at the prisoners with an expression of contempt. “Lieutenant Mon’ll be waiting for you, ma’am.”

  More to the point, Woetjans was already outside the compartment with her arm crooked to keep Adele from tripping as she got out. Adele put her data unit away and grabbed the bosun’s arm; she wasn’t one to injure herself when she might be needed through a foolish overestimate of her abilities.

  Adele started for the gangplank. Woetjans held her. “Mr. Mon’s on his way, mistress,” the bosun said; which was perfectly obvious, once Adele looked at her surroundings instead of focusing on her plans for the immediate future.

  Tovera and Woetjans’ team stood beside the aircar, their weapons less incongruous now than they would have seemed the day they landed. The Princess Cecile’s dorsal turret was not only raised but live: the plasma cannon slowly traversed the corniche above the harbor. Only two ventilation hatches were open. From them projected automatic impellers on mounts which Taley and her mate had welded from tube stock. The four guards at the entrance hatch were alert and completely sober.

  Mon crossed the gangplank with the swift grace of a rigger. He wore his utilities and an equipment belt including a holstered pistol, something Adele had never seen an officer on shipboard do.

  “Yes?” he said. Drunk, Mon became angrily morose, but he was always intense when sober. At the moment he looked as though you could etch glass with the angles of his face.

  “Daniel and the others were marooned on South Land,” Adele said, detailing the information in as bald and precise a manner as she could. “They’re supposed to be unharmed. We have a pair of prisoners in the vehicle who don’t seem unduly concerned about what’ll happen to them when we locate our friends, so we can probably accept that as true.”

  She cleared her throat. “I’ll be taking the Captal’s aircar to pick up the expedition,” she said, “but even if everything works out we can’t possibly get back to Spires before the squadron’s scheduled departure.”

  “The Princess Cecile will be here when the captain arrives to resume command,” Mon said. Though his voice was emotionless, his scowl could have meant anything. “Choose what personnel you need. Oh—and will you want the Sissie’s jeep as well? Dorst and Tavastierna returned a few minutes be—”

  The late-afternoon sky above the line of cliffs flashed amber, then faded to the pale grayish white of moments before. Adele felt the shockwave through her bootsoles. The water in the harbor rose in tight conical waves. All around the harbor, spacers looked up.

  The airborne blast was measurable seconds later. It sounded more like a huge steam leak than an explosion.

  “Right on time!” said Palaccios, the engineer’s mate who’d wedged open the compound’s power room before running to the aircar. He and Jiangsi clasped arms and pounded one another on the back.

  “I don’t think we’ll need the jeep,” Adele said.

  “Anything I should know about?” Mon said, pointing a finger skyward. He sounded straightforward rather than sardonic. The flare had dissipated, but the western sky continued to sparkle as ions snatched free electrons and reverted to their normal state.

  “Old gray-hair’s fusion bottle blew,” Jiangsi said, jerking his thumb toward the servants’ compartment where the Captal lay bound. “If the safety doors’d all been shut, the building’s roof’d have blowed off and that’d be the end of it. Since the doors wasn’t shut, all that plasma vented out the front at the fancy house across the courtyard.”

  “Was anybody inside the compound?” Mon asked, interested but not concerned.

  “Not unless somebody decided to be a hero after we shooed ‘em all outa the front gate,” Woetjans said. “There might’ve been some bodies from before then that nobody’s going to be finding now. They won’t find fuck-all since the plasma scoured out the inside of the compound.”

  Mon grinned broadly, the first time Adele had seen him wear a positive expression. “Good work, Officer Mundy,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to have you under my temporary command. Now, get off to South Land and return Captain Leary to where he belongs.”

  “If Commodore Pettin—” Adele said. If she’d been able to continue, she would—she might—have blurted the name of Mistress Sand.

  “Mundy,” Lt. Mon said, his face suddenly stark. “You have your orders. I’ll thank you to leave my duties to me!”

  It was odd to find out how much she had absorbed by being in the RCN. Adele actually saluted before she turned to choose t
he three spacers who’d accompany her, Tovera, and the prisoners to South Land.

  *

  Daniel checked the sun and determined that it was five minutes short of local noon. His helmet would have given him the time correct to milliseconds, but for this purpose he preferred to use his eyes as he would have done in the forests of Bantry. He wouldn’t always be wearing a helmet.

  “Forgot by the planet that bore us …” sang the detachment behind him, Sun the loudest of all. He seemed to be all right—“seemed” being the operative word. The gunner’s mate had done everything with enthusiasm since the spacers returned to the surface with full water cans and fruit from the cavern stuffed into the pockets of their utilities. He was an active man who deserved his rating, but his present demeanor smacked of a boy whistling in the dark.

  “Betrayed by the ones we hold dear …”

  That was perfectly all right with Daniel. All that mattered was that Sun had found a way to overcome his funk.

  Vesey came up on Daniel’s left side, opposite Hogg. They weren’t trying to keep a formal order of march, though everyone knew to stay within a few paces of the next spacer ahead.

  Daniel smiled at the midshipman and said, “I figured we’d take a break in a few minutes, Vesey. How does the unit appear to be holding up to you?”

  “The good, they have all gone before us …”

  “Quite well, sir,” Vesey said. She meant her tone to be professional, but her dry throat tripped her into a squeak in the middle of the short phrase. “The fresh rations have made a great improvement, and finding an assured source of water also.”

  “I’d say half of ‘em are high as kites!” Hogg commented, casting his eye back on the spacers. “Something more than juice in that stuff, I’d say, but it don’t work on everybody.”

  “And only the dull ones are here!”

  Hogg spat. “I wish t’hell it worked on me,” he added.

  “Sir, I wanted to ask about the fruit …” Vesey said. “And the caves and everything. The animals. Where do they come from?”