Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  “RCN, you can land any bloody place you want,” the controller said. “Just remember we don’t run to limousine service here, so if you don’t have your own ground transport you’re going to do a lot of walking.”

  Daniel thought the controller had finished without signing off, but a moment later the voice added, “The Astrogator says he’ll meet you in the Hall and that you better not keep him waiting. Out.”

  The riggers were thundering back aboard. Daniel checked the landing vectors and nodded appreciatively. A red-outlined overlay at the top of his screen showed the ground plan of the Council Field with the large building along the north side careted. Trust Adele to have information waiting before he needed it.

  “Dalbriggan Control,” Daniel said, “this is Lieutenant Daniel Leary of the Princess Cecile. Assure the Astrogator that I understand him very well, and I’m pleased to see that he understands me as well. RCN out!”

  The whine of the High Drive gave way to the roaring pulse of plasma thrusters as the Princess Cecile braked hard on its way into the atmosphere. Daniel was smiling. He had a good feeling about this one.

  Though he didn’t suppose he could explain why in words that didn’t leave everybody else thinking he was out of his mind.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  The Princess Cecile came down on the patch of dirt between two Dalbriggan cutters, a hundred yards from the Hall. This was a normal landing place: already blast-scarred and separated by a berm from the Hall which faced it.

  “Normal” meant a berth for a 300-ton cutter, however, not a corvette four times as heavy. The Princess Cecile’s plasma thrusters slammed the vessels to either side of her, flinging rocks and clods of baked clay against their hulls.

  When the Princess Cecile finally came to rest, Daniel rose to his feet feeling shaken. “Almighty God!” he said to Adele because she stood facing him. “I almost let reflected thrust flip her over on her back. On water …”

  He let his voice trail off because he feared he was making excuses. When a starship landed on water, as Daniel had on every previous occasion, a tilted thruster raised a plume of steam which righted the imbalance gently. From a hard surface, the plasma reflected in a violent shock wave. The Princess Cecile had pogoed from outrigger to outrigger in the half-second it took Daniel to cut thrust by three-quarters.

  “The boarding party’s waiting at the main hatch, sir,” Woetjans said. The bosun held a stocked impeller and wore a bandolier of reloads besides her equipment belt. She didn’t look any more concerned about the landing than Adele did.

  “Not before the master puts on his pretty white suit,” Hogg announced. He held the jacket and trousers of Daniel’s 1st Class uniform; Tovera, smiling faintly, stood behind him with the shoes and hat. “You’re going to see the high muckymuck of the whole cluster, after all.”

  Adele looked at Hogg curiously. “The Astrogator is a pirate, Hogg,” she said, an observation rather than an argument.

  “All the more reason, mistress,” Hogg said firmly. “You’ve got to put on side with wogs or they don’t respect you.”

  Adele grimaced—Daniel knew she didn’t like the ethnic pejoratives that were universal with Hogg and most of the Cinnabar spacers. She turned up her palm and let the subject drop.

  Daniel changed clothes, which mostly meant moving his limbs as directed while Hogg and Tovera stripped off his garments and put on fancier ones. “Adele?” Daniel said. “Will you be needed at your console, or … ?”

  “Certainly not,” Adele said tartly. “I’ll be with you in case the Astrogator requires detailed information.”

  Daniel smiled. “Yes,” he said. “That too.”

  Adele looked suddenly worried. “I don’t have to change clothes, do I? I don’t have a white uniform.”

  “Just the master dresses up, mistress,” Hogg said with assurance. “The rest of us look like a buncha scruffs, but we carry enough hardware to blow a hole in the landscape. Not that I expect shooting, but we gotta blend in t’ talk to these types.”

  Daniel heard the main hatch undogging in a metallic chorus. The bolts withdrew with quick hammerblows that rang through the fabric of the ship. He keyed the PA system and said, “Mr. Mon, you’re in command until I return from a chat with the Astrogator,” he said.

  Starting for the companionway, Daniel added, “Woetjans, I think an escort of ten crewmen under a petty officer will be sufficient.”

  “You’ve got twenty and I’m in charge of them,” the bosun said as she preceded him. “Besides your own party. Sir.”

  Which amounted to—Daniel looked over his shoulder to see who was following—Adele with Hogg and Tovera both. The pale spider whom Adele used for a servant carried the attaché case which contained her submachine gun. Hogg had slung a knapsack over his left shoulder; on his right hung a submachine gun muzzle-forward in a patrol sling.

  “We’re not going to fight a whole planetful of pirates, Hogg,” Daniel said, knowing he sounded peevish. If there was fighting at all, it meant that his plan had gone wrong.

  “If we look like we’re ready to, young master,” Hogg said, wheezing down the companionway behind him, “then maybe we won’t have to. And anyway, I’m not as sure as you are just what’s going to happen in that warehouse you’re taking us into.”

  Daniel grimaced but said nothing further. In all truth, a gunfight in the pirate’s council hall would be a lot less surprising than the recent attack by the Tanais defenses.

  The guards in the entryway were alert, which wasn’t entirely a good thing. Daniel had been raised in the country and had handled guns from before he could write in cursive. Most of the spacers were as ignorant of firearms as they were of formal etiquette. There was a real possibility that a tense guard was going to blow a hole the size of a dinner plate through Daniel as he walked down the gangplank.

  “Hogg, remind me to institute a program of small-arms training as soon as we’ve sorted out this business with Strymon, will you?” he said.

  “That’s if none of our good friends have shot holes in our backs in the meantime, you mean,” Hogg muttered.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Adele, and even Tovera was nodding with her serpentine smile. It seemed to be a general concern among all members of the community who really knew which end of the gun the slug came out of.

  The crewmen of the escort waited in the B Level corridors to either side of the entryway, keeping out of the way until it was time to leave. They jostled as they fell in behind Daniel.

  All were volunteers, but virtually every spacer on the Princess Cecile would have joined the party if Daniel had been willing to strip the ship. Those Woetjans had chosen were those she wanted to have at her back in a brawl: mostly big, invariably aggressive, and for this mission armed to the teeth.

  The ground reradiated the heat of its recent bath in plasma. The local time was just after dawn, and the blue-white intensity of S1 cast sharp shadows across the Council Field.

  “They’ve got some defenses here and no mistake,” Woetjans muttered, nodding in the direction of a circular wall like a well coping, one of six such ranged in a diagonal line across the field. Each was a cluster of hypervelocity rockets which could skewer a starship in orbit.

  “I’ve taken over the central controller,” Adele said primly, “but each installation has an optical sight and manual controls that I can’t touch. Well, from outside the installation itself, I mean.”

  “I don’t believe we’ll need to assault the harbor defenses,” Daniel said, wondering if Adele had been seriously considering that. Council Field was nearly a mile square, though the ships were mostly at this end, near the Hall. Houses were scattered throughout in the neighboring forest. Running over bare baked earth to attack the most distant rocket pit didn’t strike him as a practical proposition.

  He smiled. Woetjans saw the expression and said, “Sir?”

  “I was just thinking,” Daniel explained. “Needs must when the Devil drives. But I really doubt he’s going to drive
us hard today.”

  The sky rumbled with the arrival of another starship. The flickering plasma threw faint highlights into the long morning shadows.

  “Ship to boarders,” explained the intercom in a female voice—Vesey, for a fact. “One of the pickets is coming down. Seven cutters have lifted from outlying locations and are proceeding toward the Council Field within the atmosphere. Ship out.”

  Aircars were approaching the Hall also. As Woetjans led the dismounted party into the opening through the berm—built out in an elbow to block blasts from landings and liftoffs—a big vehicle overflew them at low level. It had started life as a truck, but the addition of armor and pintle-mounted weapons turned it into an assault vehicle of sorts. The Selma pirates attacked settlements on the ground as well as preying on merchant vessels.

  The powerful fans buffeted the spacers beneath, knocking some to their knees. It was like being caught in a millrace. Daniel glanced back. Hogg, his feet braced wide apart, held Adele like scaffolding about a slender pole. Grit and larger pebbles bit as they spun about the narrow passage.

  “Boarders, don’t shoot!” Daniel said, using the intercom to make sure of being heard over the aircar’s roar. “We knew they’d be playing games, so just keep your tempers! Over.”

  “It scarce can keep in the air!” shouted Barnes, who’d driven aircars both as a civilian and under Daniel’s command. “They’re a load of bloody fools to load the bitch that way!”

  The aircar dropped below the berm and landed noisily just out of sight. Other vehicles, similar but not quite so extensively modified, came from all directions to join the assembly. Daniel wondered if the car that had hammered them did so not as hazing but because the entranceway was the only place the driver felt confident of getting his overweight vehicle over the berm.

  “Boarders, they’re for scaring civilians, not for real fighting,” Daniel said. He used the intercom again so that all his crew could hear the calm in his voice. “They know we’re here to bargain and they’re just starting the haggling early. Over.”

  “They come down on Bantry in them clown cars and they’ll learn what real fighting is,” Hogg said. He was genuinely angry, a very different thing from the loud bluster he used to cow people who were frightened by open emotion. “Me and half a dozen of the boys’d take care of the business without having to reload.”

  Hogg had a cut on his cheek from some jagged bit of debris, though he seemed to be more concerned about Adele … who was fine, as her quick nod assured Daniel.

  “For the moment my priority is with the people who fired plasma cannon at us, Hogg,” Daniel said, coloring his voice with the hint of superciliousness which never failed to remind Hogg that Daniel was his master in fact. “There may be a chance to discuss matters with the folks who blew dust on us later, but I can’t say it concerns me a great deal.”

  “Sorry,” Hogg muttered. “Won’t happen again.”

  “Carry on,” said Daniel mildly. Nothing had really happened, of course, but Daniel knew his servant too well—and Hogg knew himself—for either of them to take the matter lightly.

  The Hall was the size of a maintenance hangar, built of wood on pilings that raised it three steps above the ground. A sounder of lean gray pigs, Terran stock but feral, trotted along the side of the building in the direction of the garbage dump to the rear. In the lead was a boar who clashed his tusks at the strangers coming through the berm. The pigs ignored the garishly dressed locals swaggering toward the Hall.

  Three aircars landed in quick succession. Each driver tried to put his vehicle closer to the Hall’s entrance than the other two. What would’ve been a shoving match in humans meant screaming metal, then a crash like a sack of anvils falling.

  “They’re saving us effort, Mister Hogg,” Tovera called in a clear voice. “Perhaps we should be thankful.”

  Hogg guffawed loudly. Daniel leaned close to Adele and said into her ear, “I didn’t know your servant had a sense of humor, Adele.”

  “I’m not sure she does,” Adele replied with cool amusement.

  The Hall’s roof had a high central peak and flaring eaves. Though the air was dry at present and dust blew along the ground, the structure gave every evidence of being built for downpours. Which raised the question of refilling the Princess Cecile’s reaction mass tanks on a dry field, but that could wait for a more suitable time.

  Instead of a door, the whole end of the Hall was open. Daniel looked upward and saw, furled beneath the eaves, curtains of bark fiber to shield the interior in event of rain.

  On the broad porch fronting the entranceway stood Dalbriggans in flowing, garish dress. Weapons—knives, guns, and the occasional rocket launcher—were the universal accessory items. More locals joined those already present, not overtly hostile but showing no sign of opening a passage for the approaching Cinnabars.

  “Barnes, Dasi, Hogg, front of the line now,” Woetjans ordered. Barnes and Dasi were the biggest men on the ship, nearly as tall as the bosun and with the male animal’s greater muscle mass.

  Hogg, short and pudgy, was on the end opposite Woetjans for reasons other than size. He reached into his knapsack, came out with three fist-sized bundles, and began juggling them. That was an impressive trick while walking forward with gear strapped over both shoulders.

  The Cinnabars started up the building-wide steps toward the jeering mass of pirates. Daniel saw the locals brace themselves shoulder to shoulder to resist the spacers’ impact. Behind them, their fellows leaned forward to add their weight to the line.

  Daniel grinned faintly. He wondered when it would be that a pirate noticed that Hogg was juggling—

  “Ganesh bugger me!” a Dalbriggan shouted over the catcalls of her fellows. “That’s metallic hydrogen he’s tossing around!”

  Hogg neatly reversed the flow of his juggling from clockwise to counterclockwise. Three identical items were nothing for a juggler as accomplished as he was. He’d kept the young Daniel amused for hours with up to seven objects—eggs, stones, or the cook’s knives, it was all the same to Hogg—in the air at one time.

  Now it was blasting charges of metallic hydrogen in zero-zero insulation. Metallic hydrogen had greater energy density than any other explosive, and more shattering power—greater propagation speed—than anything but capacitor-discharge units.

  The charges had no fragmentation effect, of course: the explosive’s violence would rupture any casing into its constituent atoms. The blast alone would puree everybody on the porch and deafen their neighbors half a mile away.

  “Hey, make way, you ratfuckers!” called a front-rank pirate over his shoulder. “These guys juggle bombs!”

  “Hold up!” Daniel called, though the veterans around him didn’t need to be warned. They’d already paused on the second step for the message to spread over the noise of the crowd.

  A corridor opened through the crowd, caused in part by Dalbriggans going into the Hall ahead of the strangers. The game was over. The locals had pushed, the Cinnabars had pushed back; there was no longer any point in standing out on the porch when the real business would take place inside.

  Adele stepped close and said, “They aren’t frightened.”

  Daniel nodded. “Well, no more than we are,” he said with a grin. “I assure you, tossing around hydrogen charges scares all thought of sin right out of me… . “

  He felt his grin broaden into a sunny smile. “Well, perhaps not all thought,” he added. “Did you see the little blonde in leather dyed the color of her hair?”

  “The one with the right side of her scalp shaved and the hair on the left side down to her waist?” Adele said. “Yes, as a matter of fact I did notice her. Though I obviously lack the eye of a connoisseur.”

  “Let’s go!” Woetjans ordered, starting the party forward again. Hogg had stopped juggling. He slipped two of the bombs into his pockets and held the third in his left hand with his thumb though the safety ring. His grin showed he’d gotten over his ill-temper of a few minute
s before.

  The Hall had a cathedral ceiling forty feet high at the ridgepole. Clear panels set in the roof lighted the interior during daytime, but Daniel noted that a system of cold-discharge illumination ran along the roofbeams. Though the Hall appeared rustic, its fittings were as advanced as those of the Senate House in Xenos … which also held to the appearance of past times for tradition’s sake.

  The Hall’s only furnishings were a curving, five-step dais at the end opposite the opening and a lectern at one side of it. A score of Dalbriggans stood at various levels of the dais, a hierarchy that both Daniel’s interests in natural history and his experience in the RCN fitted him to understand. The man alone in the center of the top row was tall, thin, gray-haired, and as surely in charge as Speaker Leary at the height of his power a decade before.

  “Astrogator Kelburney,” Adele said, speaking into Daniel’s ear. She avoided using the intercom except when there was no other choice.

  With the spreading nonchalance of water poured from an overturned bucket, locals entered the Hall around and behind the Cinnabars. Occasionally a Dalbriggan would join the leaders on the dais, but for the most part they stood in self-defined groupings on the open floor. At a quick glance Daniel judged about a third of those present were women, though their numbers on the dais formed a lower percentage.

  A middle-aged woman in severe black, the only person Daniel saw who wasn’t armed, stood at the lectern. She spoke, her voice filling the vast room from scores of speakers hidden in the roofbeams. “Captains and officers to the front, common crew in the body of the Hall! No exceptions!”

  Daniel turned his head with a smile. “Boarders,” he said. The Hall was alive with sound. “Officer Mundy goes with me, the rest of you take your places in the front of the crowd. Over.”

  “Sir, I’m an officer!” Woetjans said, her face screwed tight with concern. She held the length of alloy tubing that was her weapon of choice in any circumstances that permitted it.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “And I’m your captain. Carry out your orders, Officer Woetjans.”