Lt. Leary, Commanding (50 page)

"Tovera said you were coming out to find the Astrogator," Hogg said as the heavily armed spacers approached him. "She sent me to guide you in."

He looked at Adele with an unfathomable expression. "You got a good one there, mistress," he said. "Though I guess I could teach her a few things in open country."

In Adele's ear Daniel said, "I gather from Hogg's comment that Tovera has listening devices aboard the ship?"

Adele shrugged. "That's what I assume also," she said. "Tovera likes to gather data even more than I like to arrange it. Both activities are beneficial so long as we serve an executive who isn't incapacitated by the mass of information."

Daniel's grin was delayed by a moment, but when it came it melted all the concern out of his mind. The RCN's way was to use the tools at hand to achieve victory, and he couldn't complain about the past usefulness of Adele's odd servant. "Yes, I'd agree with that," he said.

In a loud voice he said, "Now, let's go find Astrogator Kelburney so we can get on to the real business of the RCN."

He looked around the escort. "Which is
not
," he continued, "despite what you might have assumed from watching your captain, a matter of screwing as many different locals as possible on liberty."

The bellowing laughter from every throat but Adele's broke the tension. Daniel grinned at his crew. There were good officers who were too proud to make a joke at their own expense, but that wasn't Daniel's style. He kept his pride for other things than his sense of self-importance.

Perhaps because of the laughter, Woetjans permitted Daniel to walk at the head of the party alongside Hogg instead of being surrounded by hefty crewmen like glassware wrapped for shipping. When he saw that the scene on the occupied side of the berm was one of repletion, not riot, Daniel beckoned Adele up beside him also.

"See the fun we missed by staying cooped up in the
Sissie
all day?" he murmured in her ear.

"Yes," Adele agreed with the dry amusement he'd learned to expect from her. "I dare say I regret the loss even more than you do."

Dalbriggans in various stages of undress sprawled in the doorways of buildings and on crushed-rock pavements which connected them more like the passages of a maze than a street grid. Some held bottles, some twined with or stacked upon one another, and not a few lay crumpled like the dead of a battle.

Other citizens were upright, more of them sitting than standing; the few who walked did so with the awkward deliberation of the aged. Some distance into the forest several voices sang in good harmony about the "Bouncing Boys of Lyme." They sounded cheerful, though their tempo was slower than normal for that standard of spaceports across the human universe.

Servants—well, slaves, to give a thing its right name—puttered about ministering to fallen citizens. The slaves were easily identified by not carrying weapons and the fact they were moving at all. Even so, most of them looked the worse for wear following the debauch.

"Hogg?" Daniel said. "Is it safe for the, ah, citizens to party like this when they have so many slaves?"

"They ain't in quite such bad shape as they look, master," Hogg said as he stepped over a Dalbriggan with a beatific smile, no trousers, and her fist around a broad-bladed knife. "I mean, they are, but I've knowed this sort. They can get up if they have to."

Hogg was leading them toward a squat cylindrical building some distance behind the Hall. Uniquely, this structure was of stone rather than wood. Differences in masonry techniques and the aging of the material used indicated that there were weapons which could blast through thick rock walls—and that they'd done so here in the past.

"The several slave revolts of past centuries," Adele said, "have all been put down with great cruelty."

She gave Daniel a tight smile.
As the Three Circles Conspiracy was.
"There's never been a unified rising on all three worlds of the cluster, but Hogg is correct that the siblings on the affected planet have generally reacted promptly enough to handle matters by themselves."

They skirted a youth cradling the head of a bearded Dalbriggan in his lap, offering sips from a chased metal tankard. The youth's large, liquid eyes followed the Cinnabars warily.

"Another aspect of the situation," Adele continued drily, "is that captives can become citizens of the cluster easily enough if they desire to. As a result, slaves with the sort of drive and ruthlessness required for successful rebellion are coopted into the ruling elite."

She smiled at Daniel again, with as little humor as before. "One could describe the result," she said, "as a democracy not so very different from our own."

Daniel looked over his shoulder. The youth was still staring after the Cinnabars. There was hunger in his expression, but Daniel wouldn't have cared to guess what the hunger was for.

"Yes, I see that now," he said aloud. "And this is our destination, Hogg?"

"Yeah, but we want to knock careful," Hogg said. "Though it wasn't the party here like what it was everywhere else around, you know?"

Daniel stepped into the recessed entrance of the Astrogator's dwelling. Beyond question there were sophisticated sensors and weapons pointed at him, but stains indicated the slit in the roof arch had been used to pour blazing fluids.

Electronics were well and good in their place, but an enemy of Adele's skill could turn them against the original user. A gallon of pitch or napalm, lighted and tipped into the opening, had its uses in the most modern setting.

The door chime was a section of osmium tubing from the barrel of a projectile weapon. Centuries of use had given it a surface like hammered glass. Daniel struck it with the piston rod hanging alongside for the purpose.

"Astrogator Kelburney!" he called. "The RCN has a proposal for you!"

The door opened in two halves before he'd finished speaking; Daniel had to step back quickly. Not surprisingly, the Dalbriggan leader used the hatch from a starship's airlock for his portal.

Kelburney was dressed in a spacer's jumpsuit; he wore only a single holstered pistol instead of being a walking arms locker as he had during the assembly the day before.
Informal garb for a private gathering,
Daniel thought with a smile.

A dozen members of the Council got to their feet in the room beyond. Several held drinks, and the girl who went scampering out of the field of view wasn't dressed for a policy discussion. Nonetheless, the Astrogator and his paramount chiefs hadn't been involved in anything that would've gotten one thrown out of a society party in Xenos.

"You took your time, Captain!" Kelburney said. "You'd have to calculate courses faster than that to make the grade with our squadrons."

"If your squadrons were capable of doing the job you require, Astrogator," Daniel said with a pleasant smile, "I don't suppose we'd be having this conversation. In the RCN we prefer to do a job right; as I believe we're prepared to do."

Kelburney looked at him sharply. "You're ready to take out the
Hammer
?" he demanded. Those members of the Council who were present watched the principals narrow-eyed, even when they drank their liquor.

"Yes, indeed," Daniel said. He felt a tingling all over his body.
This is happening, it's
really
going to happen
! "In fact I'd bet my life on it."

The burly captain who'd been spitting for emphasis during the Council meeting made a gagging sound. Daniel blanked his face for an instant, uncertain of what was going on. Beer sprayed out of the Dalbriggan's nostrils and he slapped his thigh with his free hand.

"Damn your bones, Kelburney!" he bellowed through his hacking laughter. "If you won't have him in
your
bloody crew, I'll take him in mine!"

Kelburney smiled as his subordinates laughed. "You might do after all, Leary," he said.

His expression hardened. In this mood the tall pirate had the look of a saint or an inquisitor. "You have the course plot in a form you can transmit?" he demanded.

"Yes," Daniel said, professionally curt. "When will your fleet be ready to accept it?"

"We're bloody ready now," said Kelburney. Over his shoulder he boomed, "Mineo, send out the call. Liftoff in half an hour!"

The burly captain grimaced, then walked through a side door with a gait between a waddle and a saunter. Other members of the Council tossed off the last of their drinks and prepared to leave as soon as Kelburney got out of the doorway.

"You going to be ready to lift, RCN?" the Astrogator said with a cant of his eyebrows.

Adele gave Daniel a tiny nod, indicating that the
Princess Cecile
had already been alerted. "Yes," he said.

He turned and said, "Let's go, Sissies!"

"Hey, RCN?" a Dalbriggan called. Daniel looked back over his shoulder but didn't speak. The speaker was Mineo, who'd returned to the main room.

"Good hunting!" he said.

"You got that right!" said Woetjans, lengthening her stride on the way back to the corvette and the shadow of battle.

"
Prepare to exit in one minute!
" Dorst announced from the Battle Direction Center, his powerful baritone deepened and blurred by the ship's PA system. The lights pulsed their version of the warning.

Adele turned from her blank display. The spacers all around her were motionless but as tense as wires stretched to within a feather's weight of breaking. The riggers prepared to go topside, while the gunner and missileer poised to fight the
Princess Cecile
out of an ambush by Alliance forces or by the Falassans, or indeed by their self-styled Dalbriggan allies.

Daniel was running reentry scenarios in sequence, changing the parameters according to this or that assumed degree of damage from the enemy attack. Similar preparation had saved the
Princess Cecile
at Tanais when her armament could not have done so.

"
Exit!
" and yet again Adele realized, with perfect clarity, that if she put her pistol in her mouth and pulled the trigger she would never,
ever
have to feel that nausea again. The fit passed as quickly as it came. She returned to being Officer Mundy, with things to live for and responsibilities to others.

She smiled faintly, remembering a snatch of ancient dialogue called "The Arkansas Traveller." "I can't fix the roof when it's raining, and when the sun comes out the roof don't leak no more."

The commo display was alive with conversations among starships which had emerged within a hundred thousand miles of one another. A dozen ships had arrived already, and more popped into the sidereal universe every few seconds following the
Princess Cecile
.

Whether the vessels spoke through microwaves or modulated laser, the hull of the receiving ship reflected part of the energy in secondary radiation. The
Princess Cecile
's sensors and correction algorithms were sensitive enough to turn the leakage into coherent speech.

The splendid RCN communications suite isolated and recorded pairs of conversations. Adele checked each one, finding they were uniformly the chatter of captains seeing which of their fellows hung in space around them. When she'd heard enough to allow the software to review the remainder—there was a new burst of empty small talk every time a ship appeared—she leaned back in her chair and sighed.

"
Adele
?" Daniel said over a two-party intercom link. "
I gather everything's under control from your viewpoint?
"

Adele smiled. She'd have liked to turn and call her answer across the bridge, but she respected Daniel's desire to keep the discussion private.

"Nobody's saying, `Now let's cut the throats of those dogs from Cinnabar,' at any rate," she said, letting the intercom direct her words to most recent sender in lieu of a specific recipient. "It's more along the lines of, `What, hasn't that wreck you're sailing fallen apart yet?' "

There were more than thirty ships on her display now. They continued to appear, but the rate had slowed considerably.

"
They're certainly astrogators,
" Daniel said musingly. "
They know their own region, of course, but even so, to manage such precision both in time and place on short notice is remarkable.
An RCN squadron so well handled would be highly commended.
"

"Daniel?" Adele said, uncomfortable in speaking but unwilling not to say something about a matter of such importance. "I suspect that some of the captains accompanying us may be in league with the Falassan rebels. If I'm correct—"

"
Good heavens, of course you're correct,
" Daniel said in breezy amazement. "
There'll be several captains in a fleet like this who've pledged themselves to Aretine but stayed on Dalbriggan as spies, and I'd guess there's a dozen others who'd go over on half an excuse. Kelburney's writ may run beyond the length of his arm—but not a lot beyond, I'd judge, not at a time like this.
"

"But if the Falassans are warned . . . ?" Adele said, trying to make sense of what she'd just been told. If this was a head-on attack against a heavy cruiser without surprise . . .

"
I said some of the Dalbriggans support Aretine,
" Daniel explained. "
I'm confident that no ship left the planet after Kelburney embargoed liftoffs, though.
You probably noticed that one of the cutters in orbit was replaced just before the assembly.
"

Adele wondered if that was simply a kindly exaggeration or whether Daniel really did think the movement of starships to and from a planet meant something to her. She sighed. It saddened her to realize that she would never glimpse more than the surface of many subjects which the knowledgable found of great internal beauty.

"
The captains left on guard would be Kelburney's closest associates,
" Daniel said. "
And there were three, you notice, just in case.
"

He chuckled and went on, "
We should shortly be able to identify the would-be traitors. They'll be the ones attacking with the greatest enthusiasm to prove their loyalty.
"

"Opposition to the current ruler doesn't make one a traitor to the state," Adele said quietly. On that at least her parents and Speaker Leary could have agreed.