Lt. Leary, Commanding (39 page)

"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 the 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?"

Daniel kept his expression blank as he considered both the question and what was behind the question. The
Princess Cecile
was too small to rate a chaplain, so the crew's religious health was part of the captain's duties. That was pretty clearly the hat Vesey wanted him to wear now.

"There are cases of parallel evolution," Daniel said carefully. "On single planets and between species from planets a thousand light-years apart where there isn't the least genetic similarity. But I don't think that could be involved here."

There was a ravine close by to the left. Daniel had intended to declare a break and lead the expedition into it—and he would, but first he needed to deal with the midshipman's question in the privacy that the march provided.

"They're really human, aren't they?" Vesey said uncomfortably. "They're what colonists from the first settlement turned into, here on South Land."

"We have samples from the carnivore," Daniel said. Hair, skin, and a scrap of bone blown from the back of the creature's skull. The last contained marrow. "When we get back we'll be able to test them. Even the
Princess Cecile
's medical computer should be able to make a genetic comparison. With human DNA."

The bushes growing to the lip of the nearby ravine made a brilliant contrast to everything around it. Though the small leaves were the dull red usual on Sexburga, they merely speckled the yellow and white striped bark of the trunks and branches. Daniel didn't recall anything so colorful from the natural-history database. The species might be new to science. Human science.

"The thing is, Vesey," he said, "we've had star travel for less than two thousand years, and to adapt ordinary humans into forms like those we saw underground would take either genetic engineering beyond what's possible today or a very great deal of time. It couldn't happen in less than fifty or sixty thousand years, and it might require as much as ten times as long."

"Then they're not human after all, sir?" Vesey said. She sighed with obvious relief. "I'm—well, it was just so creepy to think that they might be. What if my children—"

She stopped, flustered, then blurted onward, "If I ever had children, I mean, not that I . . ."

Daniel kept a straight face, suspecting that if he smiled it would delay the midshipman even more. Besides, he had more to say. Vesey's misunderstanding was comforting to her, but Daniel couldn't in good conscience leave her in it.

"That's not quite what I meant, Vesey," he said. "None of the starfaring races we've met in the last two thousand years could live on human-habitable planets without full life-support systems. There's some evidence, though—
I've
found some evidence myself—that in the distant past there was another race living on planets we've colonized recently. The—seeming mammals we've found here on South Land, call them that . . . they're the only native vertebrates on Sexburga. If they're native."

Vesey raised her visor so that she could rub her eyes. "I see," she said. "Thank you, sir. That was very informative."

Which in the tone she used was equivalent to, "And next time, I'd prefer you give me a rectal exam with a shovel." Well, Vesey knew as surely as Daniel himself did that the RCN didn't train its officers to lie to their subordinates.

Daniel turned, his mouth open to order his people to fall out for a ten-minute break. "
Unit!
" said Jeshonyk over the intercom. "
There's an aircar coming from the south. Hear it? Over
."

Daniel
did
hear the distant mixture of high and low tones now, though he hadn't until Jeshonyk called it to his attention. Power room crewmen had an almost mystical ability to pick up mechanical noises—and particularly variations in mechanical noises. When you were dealing with fusion bottles, quick diagnosis of strange sounds could be the difference between life and death for the whole ship.

"Everybody into the ravine under cover!" Daniel bellowed, lifting his visor so that the helmet wouldn't muffle his voice. He deliberately didn't trip the intercom. "Radio silence, but everybody echo images from my helmet so that you know what's going on."

The spacers scrambled over the edge of the ravine like children entering a swimming pool: in a variety of fashions, all of them clumsy. Hogg disappeared also, but without kicking up a sand grain or disturbing a leaf of the sheltered bushes. Hogg looked portly and seemed slow until he saw a need to move quickly.

"Sun, you're in command if there's a problem," Daniel continued. He faced the south and smiled for the oncoming vehicle which he couldn't see without magnifi—no, he could after all, there was a glint in the sky. "I suggest you be guided by Hogg till you reach an environment more familiar to you, however. God and the Republic be with you, spacers!"

Daniel lowered his visor again and increased the magnification. He sounded like quite the sanctimonious prig, now that his mind had leisure to review what he'd just said. At the time it had seemed like what was called for, though; and maybe it was.

The oncoming vehicle was an aircar, not an armored personnel carrier. It was large enough to carry quite a number of soldiers, but marksmen as good as Hogg and Sun could shoot it into a colander if that were required. Daniel's people wouldn't start the firefight, though, and Daniel himself made an easy target as well.

He grinned naturally at a further thought. He'd just made the sort of speech that would look well in a book like
Our Navy's Martyred Heroes
; which he'd read when he was eight, and which he might very possibly have stolen the words from. Well, the RCN put more of a premium on propriety than originality.

"
Leary Force, this is, ah, Mundy Force,
" Daniel's earphones announced in a crisp, familiar voice. It was like hearing his mother crooning when he woke screaming from an infant nightmare. "
Liebig tells me that we'll be landing beside you in approximately two minutes.
"

There was a pause which presumably included Adele getting some politely worded suggestions from within the aircar. "
Right, over,
" she said.

"Mundy Force, this is Leary," Daniel said. "We're very glad to see you. Break. Unit, you can come up to greet our friends now. Out."

The aircar was descending as it neared, keeping an even keel instead of dropping its nose in a dive. The driver—Liebig? Daniel doubled his magnification to 40x. Yes, Liebig. The driver was more able than Daniel had realized.

Daniel noticed who was with Liebig and Adele in the vehicle's cab. A slight frown wriggled his brows.

"
Hogg, this is Tovera,
" another voice said. "
I'd appreciate it if you not shoot Mr. Dorotige at least until after we've landed. I understand your feelings, but I didn't bring a change of clothes for my mistress. The impeller you're aiming is going to bathe her in brains if you fire now. Out.
"

Hogg stepped up beside Daniel, laughing like he hadn't done since one of Mistress Leary's city visitors had fallen into the Bantry cesspool. "I swear, master," he said between gulps of laughter. "Ain't she a pistol? Ain't she just!"

"Yes," said Daniel. "I believe Tovera is that indeed."