Lt. Leary, Commanding (53 page)

This causeway would make a good target backstop, but this probably isn't the time.
 

Daniel reached the causeway and stepped carefully into a smoldering divot gouged by the plasma cannon before pausing to take stock. A figure in coveralls sprawled on the road to the right. The only thing moving was the row of ribbons sewn along his seams, fluttering in the breeze.

Adele sat beside Daniel on a chunk of rock fill. Thermal shock had crazed the surface, but either it had cooled or this was another example of Adele's unconcern for her physical comfort. She took out her personal data unit.

Daniel eyed the straggling mixture of woods, wire-fenced gardens, and stone houses to the south. The terrain was rolling, and the houses were generally built in clumps on the higher ground. Earthen mounds raised the two warehouses near the road ten feet above the surface.

Vehicles full of armed personnel moved on the paths between buildings. Even with his visor magnification at 160x Daniel couldn't see any current fighting. Two houses burned sullenly, and occasionally sparks gouted from the spaceport well to the south.

"I can get you imagery from Kelburney's command car if you like, Daniel," Adele said. Her voice broke in mid-sentence for a cough, but she didn't sound winded. "The turret has an electronic sight. Which I've tapped."

How in heaven's name . . . ?
But the method didn't matter, and the information certainly did. "Yes, please!" Daniel said. "Ah, Quadrant One."

He didn't want somebody else's field of view covering his own completely. A compressed image on the upper left corner of his visor would give Daniel the information he required without preventing him from doing whatever might suddenly be required. Shooting an unexpected enemy, for example; though with Adele and Tovera both in the hole with him, that was of vanishingly low probability.

Several hundred people were coming toward the causeway on foot. Were they attacking, or—

"Boarders, don't shoot!" Daniel said in sudden horror. Much of the crowd was children, and many of the adults carried infants or toddlers as well. His first thought was that all of them were unarmed, but that wasn't technically true. A number of the figures wore holstered pistols, and one female carried a submachine gun slung across her back. She'd presumably forgotten about it; her arms were stretched out to hold the hands of a pair of three-year-old twins.

"Boarders, don't shoot," Daniel repeated. "They're surrendering to us instead of taking their chances with Kelburney's lot. On your honor, don't shoot!"

The Dalbriggan image echoed onto the corner of Daniel's visor provided a travelogue through the streets of Homeland. It was so smooth that he thought for a moment that Kelburney was in an aircar or at least an air cushion vehicle, but the forehull bobbled repeatedly into the bottom of the frame.

The gun was stabilized both in azimuth and deflection. It was mounted in the turret of a car armored so heavily that only a firm connection with the ground could support it. Daniel had briefly confused the smoothness of the sight picture with that of the vehicle itself.

The fighting was over; Daniel wanted to catch the Astrogator at the moment of triumph to have the best chance of succeeding with the next stage of his plan. "Lieutenant Mon," he ordered. "Have someone bring the jeep to me immediately. I need to speak to Astrogator Kelburney. Out."

"I can reach him, Daniel," Adele said, looking up with a frown of concern. She must wonder if he believed she was incompetent.

Daniel laughed at the absurdity of the unspoken thought. "I believe face-to-face would be the better choice, Adele," he said. "I'm going to have a hard sell, I'm afraid."

The ringing whine of the fans lifting the little vehicle out of the
Princess Cecile
's stern hold followed Daniel's request by only moments. Vesey's voice said, "
Captain Leary, the jeep's on the way to your position
,
out
," but the driver must have been not only prepared but cued into the command net.

Mon had cut corners to save time his commander might need. "A very good officer," Daniel said aloud. To Adele's raised eyebrow he added, "Lieutenant Mon, that is."

Kelburney's gunsight steadied on a low circular structure whose stone walls had a pronounced slope. Immediately slugs from an automatic impeller rang from the car's armor. The heavy-metal projectiles ricochetted with green, purple and magenta sparks, vivid even in full daylight. One round must have struck the turret because the sight picture jolted skyward even as the car backed to safety behind a residence.

Daniel switched away from the remote image and overlaid his visor with a sixty-percent mask showing Homeland's topography. The circular building was nearly in the center of town; it wasn't simply
a
building but a thick ring surrounding a central citadel.

"The Falassan chiefs depend more on physical protection than the Astrogator and his predecessors on Dalbriggan do," Daniel said with a grim smile. "That's a confession of weakness, of course. It appears that we've picked the right side."

Woetjans had come over to report. "Whichever we pick is the right side," she said. Her tone made the pronouncement sound rather like a comment on the weather. "We're securing the prisoners, sir. That all right?"

The corvette's small utility aircar landed at the back of Daniel's position. Gramercy, one of the power-room techs, was driving. He showed a gentler touch on the controls than Daniel had come to expect of RCN drivers; but then, perhaps he'd gotten lucky.

"Yes, carry on, bosun," Daniel said. "Signals and I are going to discuss the next stage with the Astrogator."

He walked toward the idling vehicle. Ash from the recent bath of plasma spiraled in the wash from the drive fans.

"Sir, I'll come with you!" Woetjans said. She
knew
she had to remain here to command the ground party, but her request was as certain as sunrise.

"There isn't room for you, mistress," Tovera said as she stepped between Woetjans and the aircar. "But if you like, I'll kill one of the locals for you?"

Daniel got into the front seat beside the driver. He'd never thought he'd see Woetjans with a shocked expression; but he knew exactly how she felt.

The Dalbriggans didn't have a command channel: they had seven separate frequencies on which subchiefs and their followers gabbled orders and nonsense in their excitement.

"Don't fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!" Adele said. She used her personal data unit to cue the corvette's powerful transmitters for a multiband rebroadcast, hoping—another person would have thought "praying"—the message would reach every one of Kelburney's gunmen.

She'd
found
seven frequencies. What if there was an eighth that she'd missed, that of a guntruck whose weapons were even now swinging on the jeep?

Adele's mouth quirked in slight humor as she repeated, "Don't fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!" In that case she was unlikely to live long enough to be tortured by failure. The universe had a kindly side after all.

Daniel switched on the jeep's klaxon as the driver took them low through the streets of Homeland. When the vehicle swooped up on edge to slice between a building and a car with an automatic impeller welded to each of its four corners, Adele wished angrily that they'd lift high enough to hold a steady course across the community.

The thought didn't reach her tongue, fortunately. It had scarcely formed when she realized that would mean a straight course down the throat of the Falassan holdouts. She had her duties and areas of competence; which were different, fortunately, from those of the spacer who was driving.

Adele could hear the sound of gunfire over the klaxon and the howl of the drive fans. A red spark shrieking like a banshee curved out of the sky and banged the car's bow, just ahead of the open cockpit. The driver shouted and jerked his control yoke. Daniel reached past and steadied the vehicle before they wobbled into the building to the left.

"A ricochet," he explained—to everyone in the car, but Adele was the only one who might not have known without being told. "Wars are dangerous places, aren't they? But of course, you can slip in the bath and break your neck."

Adele supposed he was only acting the part of a good commander in calming his troops, but on reflection she couldn't be sure. Nothing seemed to faze Daniel.

Adele didn't care about her own life to speak of, but she found the notion of being snuffed out at random was oddly disquieting. Logically it shouldn't matter whether she was killed by a sniper's deliberation or instead by a few ounces of impact-heated osmium plunging from the sky. She obviously wasn't as much a creature of logic as she preferred to believe.

The jeep rounded a knoll on which stood several houses, one of them afire. The swale beyond was a plaza of sorts with a triumphal arch and a number of plinths from which the statues had been recently shot away. Five armed vehicles parked on the pavement, with a group of heavily armed Dalbriggans hunched behind them.

One of the Dalbriggans saw the jeep out of the corner of his eye. He shouted and leveled a stocked impeller.

Tovera lifted slightly to aim: the light pellets of her submachine gun wouldn't penetrate the windscreen of the open car. Before she could fire, Daniel rose to his feet and raised his hands high.

"Quite all right!" Daniel shouted, keeping his balance even though the driver reacted to the threat by landing in what was virtually a controlled crash. "Captain Leary here to speak with the Astrogator!"

Kelburney stepped forward, holding a drawn pistol. The man with the impeller looked hesitant and didn't lower his weapon. Kelburney backhanded him with the pistol butt from behind, knocking him face-down to the ground.

"Leary!" he shouted, advancing to give Daniel a bear hug. "Bloody good work with the guardship! There aren't six captains in my squadron who'd have been able to equal that!"

In the assembly, Kelburney had been a monarch; in the council meeting later he was the canny man of business. Here on this field of smoke and blood, Adele saw a much more primal figure that she suspected was the stuff from which the Astrogator had molded his other personas.

Automatic impellers opened fire from somewhere out of sight. Projectiles bounced skyward like a neon fountain.
And where are
they
going to come down?
Adele wondered, but with detached curiosity. The near miss had inoculated her against fear of death from that sort of randomness.

A white flash lit the sky to the west. There was a sharp explosion and the firing stopped.

"I gather Captain Aretine has gone to ground in the circular fortress just over the hill?" Daniel said, pointing in the direction of the shooting. The air stank of ozone and smoke from burning fuels, plastics, and flesh.

"We'll get'er out, never fear!" said a hulking gunman. The folk around Kelburney now were bodyguards, not the officers of his inner circle. Those folk would be directing their own contingents of fighters, here in town and back at the spaceport.

"No doubt you will," Daniel said in a cool tone and a glance that meant, "Don't interrupt when your betters are speaking, dog!" He cleared his throat and continued to Kelburney, "I think I might speed the process a good deal, Astrogator. That is, if you don't care what happens to the defenders with the exception of Captain Aretine herself?"

Several automatic impellers opened fire simultaneously. Orange flame mushroomed over the houses, lifting a gunshield from one of the makeshift fighting vehicles. The firing stopped.

"Care?" Kelburney said, his brow furrowing. "God rot my bones, boy, I don't care what happens to her either! You can burn her . . ."

His expression changed into a cat's smile. "Ah, I see," he said. "You mean, do I mind letting them live afterwards?"

"Yes, that's right," Daniel said. "I realize that they're pirates, but regardless, I wouldn't care to talk them out of their position and have them massacred as a result."

Ah!
Adele understood now. She sat on a cracked marble paver and began setting up the link. She'd use the transmitter in the Astrogator's command vehicle rather than going through the
Princess Cecile
's communications suite. The personal data unit was close to the limit of its unboosted range for reaching the ship from here in the middle of Homeland.

Kelburney laughed. "I could say you were a soft bastard," he said, "but the truth is I don't see reason to kill a lot of good people if I don't have to. Go ahead. I've got a loudspeaker on the car. Or are you going to chance your uniform to keep them from blowing your head off?"

Daniel dusted the breast of his tunic with his fingertips. "Thank you, Astrogator," he said, "but I believe Officer Mundy has patched me—"

Adele nodded, her wands flickering. There were three separate nodes connecting displays in the Falassan strongpoint. She wanted to be sure Daniel's address would blanket all of them.

"—through to the communications network within the fortress. I think that will be the most effective way of proceeding."

"
In
side?" Kelburney said. "There's no bloody way she can do that—it's all shielded."

"Officer Mundy doesn't give me advice on sailing a starship, Captain," Daniel said, every inch a Cinnabar aristocrat again. "And I allow her the same freedom in dealing with communications tasks. It works out quite well."

"Do you want the feed through your helmet, Daniel?" Adele asked. "Or would you prefer a larger display? There's quite a modern one in the command vehicle."

She nodded.

"The helmet will be fine, Adele," Daniel said. He squared his shoulders unconsciously and faced westward, although there was a hill and a building between him and the Falassan headquarters.

Adele made a final adjustment. She'd opened the circuit by aping the power management commands of the Falassans' standby batteries. That portion of the system had no safeguards whatever in place, but it was connected through the transmitter to every computer inside the stone walls.

"I've put you through," she said. Tovera was looking at Kelburney with much the same smile as if she watched him over a gunsight. "Go ahead."