In the Stormy Red Sky

by David Drake

  Adele sat beside Selsmark on the forward thwart of the square-bowed skiff, balancing Tovera and Gibbs with the control wheel in the stern. The motor sang with high-pitched enthusiasm, but it wasn't really big enough for the twenty-foot vessel, even with only four people aboard. They were travelling up the sluggish watercourse at what ordinarily would've been a walking pace.

  It wouldn't have been possible to walk so quickly along this route, however, or for that matter to walk at all. Sideways the skiff could've spanned the stream at its widest, and the vegetation to either side wasn't so much a wall as a ragged 200-foot cliff.

  Though a number of the trees shared common features—corkscrew trunks and an orange undertone to the bark were the most visible ones—Adele wouldn't have sworn that any two were the same species. Daniel might be able to judge which were age states or genders of a particular tree, but Adele was lost without a database. If Master Beckford's scouts had bothered to log that sort of information, it hadn't reached files which Adele could access.

  Something in the forest called, "Coo! Coo! Coo!" It was very loud, but Adele couldn't tell which side of the stream it was on. She thought it might be a signal, but the feral beside her paid no attention.

  Adele's data unit was in her lap, though she'd resisted bringing it live. It had nothing useful to tell her and would've been better in its thigh pocket, but she took comfort in its open presence.

  "We ought to be getting close," Selsmark mumbled through a mouthful of protein ration taken straight from the packet without rehydration. He seemed to be speaking to himself anyway, though Adele could understand him when she concentrated. "Bloody hell, I don't like this, I don't like it a bit!"

  Cory on the Milton's bridge was tracking her through the data unit, but the satellites that guided Fonthill's logging crews saw only the top of the triple canopy. Cory could follow the barge's progress, but he couldn't give warning of what might be waiting beneath the curtain of foliage. Branches interwove from both sides, hiding the stream from above.

  Four-legged, four-winged, insectoids swarmed up from rafts of algae and landed on the passengers. They didn't bite or sting, but the touch of their feet itched and might raise welts in the course of time. Since all the vegetation was poisonous, the creatures that ate it were likely to transport the toxins also.

  The ferals ignored them, and Adele avoided brushing the insects away also. If they were poisonous, spreading their juices over her body wasn't going to help the situation.

  Selsmark finished the ration packet and threw it into the bottom of the skiff. Adele said, "What do you eat in the jungle?"

  "Bloody little," the feral muttered. He scanned the green tangle to either side with nervous flicks of his eyes. "Whatever we can plant, corn and squash mainly. Nothing local, it'll rot you from the inside. What we steal from the camps, what we trade to the ships that slip in from Hydra, but they pay us crap for logs. Not near as good as they pay Beckford, but we've no choice. And mostly we buy guns."

  He looked over his shoulder, his mouth twisted in a snarl. "Gibbs!" he said. "Can't you get this bloody thing to go faster?"

  The animal—or bird—boomed a single brassy, "Coo!"

  The mudbank ahead was so fresh that its surface was only vaguely iridescent with algae. Six men stepped out onto it. Four were naked except for breechclouts made from rice sacks. Two had crossbows, while the other two carried spears with plastic shafts and blades made from kitchen knives. Their skin was both freshly ulcerated and scarred from old injuries.

  "Wiley!" Selsmark cried, rocking the skiff as he spun around. "I was afraid you wouldn't come."

  Park rotated the small wheel and pulled it back. The skiff lost way and nosed toward the bank as the little electric motor groaned to silence. Adele slid the data unit away with her right hand.

  "Is that what you were afraid of, Selsmark?" said the feral chief. "Then you really are a fool—but I knew that already, from the fact that you came to me."

  Wiley was small and delicate, scarcely bigger than Adele herself. Incongruously he wore a gray business suit and a peaked hat of a style that had been fashionable on Blythe five years ago; there was a yellow quill in the hatband. He was unarmed.

  The skiff nosed softly into the mud. Selsmark rocked forward, then leaned back on the thwart.

  "I'm your friend, your soldier, Wiley!" he cried. "What do you mean? I've escaped, of course I come to my leader!"

  "Help him out of the boat, Dapp," Wiley said harshly. "Selsmark, do you think I don't know you told Disch where we'd cached the last shipment of arms?"

  "No!" Selsmark said. "I was a prisoner! The Cinnabars can tell you, they freed me!"

  The sixth man was huge, taller even than Disch and muscular rather than fat. He was naked save for a spiked leather jockstrap and bandoliers over both shoulders, but his skin had been painted red and orange and white. Two pistols and six knives dangled from the bandoliers, and he held a stocked impeller at the balance in his left hand.

  Leaning forward, he seized Selsmark by the neck with a right hand that looked like a huge orange crab and jerked him up from the thwart. The skiff rocked; Adele didn't move.

  "We moved the guns before the soldiers came, fool!" Wiley said. "As you should've known we would, fool and bastard of a fool! But we waited in the bush and watched the soldiers searching. Of course they threw you back in the cage! But you did not lie to Disch, you lie to Wiley now!"

  Selsmark wheezed but no words could force a way past the bodyguard's choking grip. His face was turning dark.

  Wiley spit at the man he'd condemned as a traitor. "Finish him, Dapp," he said cheerfully.

  The big man tossed his impeller to a spearman. With his now free left hand, he drew a carving knife with a ten-inch blade. Selsmark thrashed even more wildly, but Dapp held him out at arm's length so that his bare feet couldn't reach him. He thrust the knife beneath Selsmark's breastbone. He shoved it forward till the point came out the victim's back, then ripped the blade down till it grated on the pelvis.

  Dapp pulled the knife out; Selsmark's intestines spilled onto the mud in long pink coils. Laughing, Dapp wiped the blade on Selsmark's bare shoulder; his teeth had been filed to points. He tossed the dying man to the side and sheathed his weapon.

  Selsmark landed on his back. His eyes had glazed, but his hands made several fumbling attempts to stuff his intestines back into his belly before a tetanic convulsion wracked him as he died.

  "Now . . . ," said Wiley. "Which of you little ladies thinks she will offer terms to Comrade Wiley, hey?"

  "I will," said Adele, rising to her feet. She paused till the skiff's bow had settled firmly again, then got out. She had no choice but to step onto mud covered with a wash of Selsmark's gore, but at least she was able to avoid the loops of entrails.

  The Milton's gig rumbled across the high sky, carrying Daniel on his portion of the operation. That would be difficult also, though not—Adele smiled—in the same fashion.

  "I'm Lady Adele Mundy," she said. "Mundy of Chatsworth that is, and this is my servant Tovera."

  CHAPTER 16

  Base Amorgos, Fonthill

  The Milton's gig had four plasma thrusters. A single moderate-sized unit would've provided sufficient output to propel the little vessel, but safety and controllability at low altitude required the larger number.

  Daniel grinned. Because gigs were expected to carry senior officers and dignitaries, safety was a greater concern than might otherwise have been the case. He'd landed anti-pirate cutters of about the same size, and that had been exciting every time.

  Cass McDonough, the coxswain, hadn't served in one of Daniel's commands before; Daniel had never before had a command that rated a gig or a cox. The clearing, projected on Daniel's face-shield was rushing up at a pace that made him want to grab the controls, but McDonough caught them on a cushion of vectored plasma and rotated the gig back for front without the hop it would have taken if Daniel had been at the controls.

  McDonough had been A
dmiral Trelawney's cox for the twelve years before Trelawney retired. Nonetheless, Daniel never really trusted a specialist till he'd seen him perform, and if it was a specialty Daniel knew something about, he was a very hard judge.

  The gig settled with a rasp/bump/rasp of the thrusters, a delicacy possible only because of the four lightly loaded nozzles. The touchdown was smoother than many aircars would have managed.

  "Very well done, McDonough," Daniel said, releasing his straps to rise. "Woetjans, open the hatch, if you will."

  The cox was in fact a great deal better than her captain would've been at the controls of the gig. She should have been, of course, but Daniel was—he grinned again, wryly this time: cocky was the term he'd heard frequently at the Academy—cocky enough to think he could give anybody a run at almost anything having to do with a spaceship. Senior Motorman McDonough had just defined one of the "almosts."

  Daniel lifted his face-shield. While greeting Colonel Stockheim with a polarized ball instead of a face was proper in the military sense—he was in utilities and this was a combat zone—it wouldn't advance the spirit of friendly professionalism that he hoped would prevail during the negotiations.

  "Sir?" said McDonough, turning her head as best she could while still strapped into the control console; she was prepared for an emergency liftoff, as was a proper if unlikely concern. "You might want to give the atmosphere a minute or two to clear."

  Woetjans ignored her, cycling the inner and outer hatches together. The gig's tiny airlock would take two people in airsuits or one rigger, but it was normally going to be opened on the surface or a pressurized bay. It didn't have the safety features that the locks of a starship would.

  "I don't believe we're senior enough to be prostrated by a lingering whiff of ozone, do you?" Daniel said, adjusting the holster on his equipment belt and the hang of his uniform. No doubt McDonough meant well, but Daniel wasn't a porcelain admiral who needed a coxswain to fuss over him. "I'll lead, Woetjans."

  Camp Sixteen, the northernmost of Fonthill's logging camps and the site Colonel Stockheim had chosen for his base of operations, was the wasteland Daniel had expected, but to his surprise it hadn't been clear-cut. Hundred-foot spikes, some of them with streamers of foliage still fluttering from the top, were scattered at intervals from fifty to a hundred feet. They'd make landing the Wartburg trickier than expected, though it should be easy enough to bring them down with belts of explosive.

  Assuming the colonel agreed, of course.

  Daniel tramped down the gig's ramp; Hogg and Woetjans flanked him a pace behind. Stockheim and two aides stood at parade rest thirty feet away. The colonel looked furious, but Daniel couldn't tell whether that was because the bosun was female or just his general attitude to the situation. Certainly the situation deserved a scowl or worse.

  Great stumps dotted the interior of the base, but the trash of branches and scraps which Daniel had noticed in two camps the gig overflew had been bulldozed into the earthen berm which now ringed Sixteen. There were bunkers as well, ready to defend against attack even without the armored personnel carriers now facing out from the berm.

  The APCs were air cushion. Except for them and the aircars aboard the Milton, transport on Fonthill was by boat or by the great hydrogen-filled blimps which hauled logs to Base Alpha.

  Impeller slugs had twice ricocheted from the gig's heavy plating on the way here. The blimps were easily patched and their lift gas was hydrolyzed from the abundant water, but a slug through an aircar motor or even a fan blade wouldn't be survivable. The pilots in blimp gondolas didn't have an easy time either, though the captured officials said there was competition for the job because extra rations were a perk of it.

  Stockheim saluted. He wore a slung sub-machine gun, and unlike Daniel's pistol it wasn't for show.

  "Captain Leary," he said. "I didn't expect to see you again."

  His craggy face lurched into a smile as grim as a landslide. He added, "To be honest, after we learned the situation here, I didn't expect to see anyone I could consider a representative of the government of the Republic."

  Daniel returned the salute, though not well. Generally he didn't care, but he hoped Stockheim didn't feel the clumsiness implied a lack of respect.

  "Colonel," he said, "you've had time to go over the material that Officer Mundy transmitted to you on my behalf?"

  "Yes," said Stockheim. The syllable was as uncompromising as the slam of a cell door. "Let's go to the TOC. We've got maps there, and besides—"

  There was slightly more humor in his grin this time.

  "—I feel naked standing out here, even though the ferals don't have heavy weapons that we've encountered as yet. They don't even snipe very often."

  "There's no point in giving wogs a chance to get lucky," Daniel said with a smile, falling in with the Brotherhood troops as they crisply went about face and strode toward the Tactical Operations Center—three trailers dug halfway down into the purplish soil, with layers of sandbags covering the exposed walls.

  "We'd begun to suspect something of the sort ourselves, sir," said the younger aide, gesturing Daniel ahead of him down the steps of plastic-sealed earth. The three soldiers could have been son, father and grandfather, so close was the resemblance. "Otherwise, I don't think we'd have been able to believe the documents you transmitted."

  "If I may ask, Captain Leary . . . ," said the older aide. "How is it that you came by the material?"

  Each of the trailers held a console, a smaller version of the units on the bridge of the Milton or any other starship from a developed world. Two were manned, but the operators didn't look up when Stockheim and his companions entered.

  The area in the center of the trefoil had been dug down further and shaded with a tarpaulin. A book of three-foot-by-three-foot acetate maps of the region lay on the simple folding table there.

  Daniel crossed his hands behind his back. "As I understand it, gentlemen," he lied, "it was pure accident. An employee of Cone Transport misdirected an internal file to Governor Das. He sent it to his ministry, which passed it up to the Senate. Because Senator Forbes was already in the region, her colleagues requested her to investigate—which brought us here."

  To the best of Daniel's knowledge, there wasn't a word of truth in what he'd just said. Daniel had no intention of answering the Brotherhood officer's impertinent question. Saying so wouldn't have helped achieve the ends of Captain Daniel Leary and of the Republic of Cinnabar, so he'd invented a believable lie instead.

  And it was an impertinent question.

  The Brethren positioned themselves on three sides of the map table; Daniel by default took the place across from the colonel. Stockheim ruffled the map sheets, his face as harsh as that of the legendary boy whose belly was chewed open by the fox he'd stolen.

  "Captain Leary," he said, "granting the truth of documents you've provided—and I do grant that, they explain matters that made no sense before—there's still the question of our honor. We have our orders."

  Hogg and Woetjans stood in the empty trailer. They talked in low voices, but their eyes never left the group around the map table.

  Daniel grimaced. "Colonel Stockheim," he said, "you've seen the secret attachment to the orders posting your regiment to Fonthill. If you like, I can probably get you a copy of the encryption key so that you can decrypt the attachment on your own console here. That is, you can if you had the common sense to make a copy before you handed the chip over to Administrator Disch."

  He hoped that Adele would provide some sort of emasculated key if necessary, but he hoped even more that it wouldn't be necessary. Daniel had met officers who seemed to have nothing but the Military Regulations between their ears, but in the present case even the regulations were on the side of common sense.

  "Colonel," he said urgently, "your orders were illegal. Senator Forbes represents the Republic to which your honor is pledged. Her authority has been accepted by Headman Hieronymos, so I can't imagine what problem you can have with it
."

  "Women are the lesser vessels," the young aide said. He'd been looking down at the acetate-printed maps, but now he glared straight at Daniel. "We of the Brotherhood do not accept orders from women."

  "Really, Lieutenant?" Daniel said. He didn't have to pretend that he found the situation funny, though he knew there were other possible reactions to this stiff-necked idiot's words. "But you don't have any problem taking orders from Prince Willie Beckford, apparently—and I assure you, he's not a man in any sense that I recognize."

  The boy blushed, indicating that even the Brotherhood of Amorgos had heard stories about Prince Willie's revels.

  "Regardless," Daniel continued breezily, "the question doesn't arise. A senator doesn't have any military rank, so you'll be taking orders from the senior RCN officer in the region. Me."

  He beamed at the three Brethren. "I hope you don't question my manhood, Lieutenant?" he added mildly to the young aide.