The Road of Danger-ARC (10 page)

Daniel wondered if Cazelet fully understood the risks he’d faced if he hadn’t made the correct decision. The boy was Lady Mundy’s protégé. If he had let his behavior risk the safety of Adele’s new family—the crew of the
Princess Cecile
—she might have treated the breach as a matter of honor.

Rene Cazelet would not have survived that decision.

***

“Ma’am?” said Cory, rotating his seat at the astrogation console to face Adele. “I’d like you to look at this.”

He was facing her back, of course. She didn’t bother to turn, and Cory knew her too well to expect that she would. If he was more comfortable looking at her back than he would be speaking to her holographic face, that was his business.

While Vesey and Cazelet—along with Daniel—were involved on the
Sissie
’s exterior with the rerigging, Cory was on watch on the bridge. Because he was a good officer—in part because Adele had trained him—he was using the time for work rather than games or pornography.

“Yes,” she said aloud, adjusting her display to echo that of the astrogation console.

Adele didn’t mind being called away from her analysis of rice production—according to official statistics—on Sunbright over the past ten years, broken down by district. All information was potentially valuable, as well as being worthy for its own sake in Adele’s opinion. That said, the practical benefit of these data was yet to be proven.

Cory had been looking at a pattern rendered in sepia monochrome. Lines ran roughly from top left to bottom right, crossing occasional beads of varied shape. It was unintelligible without context: Adele could imagine it being anything from a graph to a magnified view of the fabric of her trousers.

She started to follow the current image back through its history to determine what it was. Before—momentarily before—she executed that plan, she caught herself and smiled wryly. She turned to face Cory, punishing herself for so determinedly shutting out the RCN family of which she was—by the gift of fate, because she didn’t believe in gods—a member.

I don’t really believe in fate either. Well, in luck, then. I certainly believe in luck
.

“Please tell me what we’re looking at, Cory,” she said.

“Well, ma’am,” Cory said. He turned to his display and highlighted a faceted lump in the flow of lines. “If you’ll take a look here…”

Adele thankfully returned to her display also. Signals Officer was a junior warrant rank, equivalent to bosun’s mate and several steps below a commissioned lieutenant like Cory. Despite that, he and Cazelet treated Adele as though they were young boys and she was dowager matriarch of their family.

The attitude of the enlisted personnel, including Woetjans and Pasternak, was simpler yet: they were peasants, and Lady Mundy was mistress of the estate. That bore no resemblance to proper RCN protocol, and it certainly wasn’t anything Adele encouraged.

She admitted to herself that she didn’t mind the situation, however. She had been raised as a Mundy of Chatsworth, and the Sissies’ behavior fitted
her
instinctive sense of rightness as surely as it did the crew’s.

“We did an all-spectrum scan of the region as we were coming in,” Cory said. “This is the valley on ground-penetrating radar, so it’s without the ice, you see. Ships show up—”

Beads expanded one after another, just long enough to be identified as shapes in steel before Cory shrank them back to scale.

“—on the surface. Where the ice flow has carried them into one wall of the valley or the other, there’s scrape marks in the rock.”

His hands poised on his virtual keyboard, preparing to raise the magnification of striations upstream of the bead slugged
HEPPLEWHITE
, out of Kossuth. Adele had already done that with her wands. She didn’t need to see the markings—that was equivalent to proving the existence of gravity so far as she was concerned—but it was useful to remind Cory that she hadn’t become a completely helpless ninny.

Aloud she said, “Yes, I see.”

“Well, that’s all what you’d expect,” Cory said earnestly. “Except for this one.”

He expanded the highlighted bead until it filled the display. It was a ball formed from pentagonal plates. “Ma’am, this is on the valley
floor
, under three hundred feet of ice. It displaces about 3,000 tons, and there’s no ship in the
Sissie
’s database that looks anything like it.”

“It sank through the ice, then?” Adele said, frowning. She restrained her reflex to sort for dodecahedral spaceships, because her conscious intellect assured her that Cory wouldn’t have made a mistake when he told her that. He had been well trained.

“Ma’am, maybe,” Cory said, but the anguish in his tone meant that he was contradicting her. “But if you look at the scrape marks behind her—”

This time he didn’t try to magnify them. Adele’s wands flickered, expanding and following the track up the valley; a very long way up the valley.

“If the ice has been moving at the rate it has for the last twelve years—figuring from the marks the
Manzanita Maid
left—and I know it maybe hasn’t, but anyway that’s
a
figure, it ought to get us into the right order of magnitude.…”

“Yes, I see that, Cory,” Adele said. “Get on with it.”

“Well, the track computes to about 30,000 years,” Cory said apologetically. “Which the model says is about when the planet’s orbit got eccentric because a dark star passed through the system.”

“In other words, the ice began pushing—”

She decided not to call it a ship.

“—the object as soon as the glacier formed 30,000 years ago. That doesn’t tell us how long it had been sitting on the valley floor before it started to move.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Cory said in relief. “That’s what I thought too. But I don’t know how it could be.”

Adele sniffed; another person might have laughed. “Nor do I, Cory,” she said. “It should be possible to answer some of the questions by melting the glacier with our plasma thrusters, as we’ll be doing to fill our tanks of reaction mass, though of course on a much greater scale. But—”

She rotated her seat to face the young lieutenant; he was staring over his shoulder at her.

“—I think that will have to wait until we have more time. At present, we have to find a rebel to repatriate to Cinnabar.”

There was a clang against the hull and a cheer from outside loud enough to be heard even though the corvette was closed up against the bitter wind. It appeared that the
Princess Cecile
was now the
House of Hrynko.
They would be lifting shortly.

***

“Fellow Sissies!” Daniel said from one of the star of five consoles in the Battle Direction Center. He was speaking to the whole ship, his image appearing on all displays and his voice coming through commo helmets and the loudspeakers in every compartment and corridor. “You’ve all known something was going on. This is what is going on.”

Vesey would normally have been here in the armored BDC as First Lieutenant, ready to take command if a missile destroyed the bridge. Now she was at the command console in the bow and Cory, the new First Lieutenant, had moved back.

“I’m about to become Kirby Pensett,” Daniel said. “Formerly a lieutenant in the RCN but now on half-pay and a passenger on this vessel,
The House of Hrynko
. That’s the story, and it’s
bloody
important that you remember it when you’re talking to outsiders. Talking even to each other, because we never know who’ll be listening in when we’re on the ground.”

Tovera, like Hogg on a jumpseat folded out from the bulkhead, glanced at Adele with a reptilian smile. Adele, seated at the console to Daniel’s right, was probably aware of her servant’s amusement—nobody was going to eavesdrop on the
Princess Cecile
when Adele was aboard—but she gave no reaction herself.

It’s still the right thing to say
. Even sober, spacers were notoriously loose-tongued, and the chance of a spacer being sober on the first night or two of liberty wasn’t very high.

“You’re the crew of a yacht owned by Kostroman noblewoman, the former Principal Hrynko,” Daniel said. “She looks a lot like Lady Adele Mundy, but you
won’t
call her that any more than you would the real Lady Mundy. You’ll say ‘ma’am’ or you’ll say ‘sir’ because she scares the crap out of you. She’s got a temper and you know how these wog nobles can carry on—”

He grinned at Adele. She grinned, broadly for her, though she didn’t look up from her display. She had at least his face inset in the image area, along with those of the other officers.

“—but she pays on time and the grub on the
Hrynko
is pretty bloody good. Just about RCN standard,
I’d
say.”

There was general laughter at that, in the BDC and trailing down the corridor through the open hatchway. Private owners were notoriously liable to scrimp on the quantity and quality of the rations they provided their crews. An RCN captain checked the quality of all the consumables that came aboard, then signed his approval. A captain who cut corners on food or drink had problems not only with crew members—who knew the regulations—but with the Navy Board.

“Mistress Vesey is captain,” Daniel said. His tone was cheery and bantering; handled clumsily, the situation could go from unfamiliar to frightening—a very small step for veteran spacers, who believed that surprises were either bad or fatal; as in space they generally were. “Principal Hrynko doesn’t know any more about astrogation than some high-born librarian from Xenos would.”

The laughter was even louder this time. Adele continued to smile while her control wands twitched and jabbed. Daniel didn’t have the faintest idea what she was working at; it could be her family tree, for all he knew.

He didn’t care. Adele said that everything was connected, and for her it was. Her mind was always working, a fact that regularly led to unexpected good results for those around her.

“Now,” Daniel said, getting to the nub of it. “If you were any other crew than my Sissies, I’d tell you that this was going to be dangerous. We’ll be landing on Madison, an Alliance sector capital, claiming to be a Kostroman ship. Well, you and I have done worse than that to the Alliance, haven’t we, spacers?”

The response this time was a bloodthirsty roar from the body of the ship, though the sound had been reduced to tinny echoes by the time it reached Daniel. Nobody inside the BDC actually cheered, though it wouldn’t have been a surprise if Fiducia and Rocker, the missileer’s mate and gunner’s mate respectively, had joined in.

“But there’s something else you ought to know, spacers,” Daniel said, pitching his voice a little lower to suggest that he had reached the serious part of the discussion. “Admiral Cox doesn’t know what we’re about to do. He thinks we’re going straight to Sunbright,
everybody
in Macotta HQ thinks we’re going to Sunbright.”

“Who bloody cares what the farmers out here think?” somebody shouted. Daniel thought the voice was Woetjans’, but if so she spoke for everybody aboard—Captain Daniel Leary included. Certainly the cheers seemed universal.

In fact the tricky part was going to be keeping up the pretense of being Kostroman while they were on Madison. He’d slipped past that when he told the Sissies it was minor compared to what they’d done in the past.

The deception wasn’t dangerous in the sense that the Alliance authorities would shoot them if the trick was detected, but it would certainly be embarrassing and might very well mean months or years of internment while diplomats discussed the matter in measured tones. Daniel didn’t imagine that the Macotta bureaucracy would strain itself in helping uppity naval personnel who’d come out from Xenos with an attitude.

Very few of the
Sissie
’s crew were from Kostroma, perhaps six or eight out of over a hundred. That in itself wouldn’t surprise Alliance port officials. Spacers were a nation unto themselves. That was less true of a warship’s complement than it was for civilian vessels, but even so no more than half the crew of the corvette
Princess Cecile
had been born on Cinnabar or worlds under the Republic’s hegemony.

“Well, Sissies…” Daniel said. “We’re going to come through this fine, like we have before, if we all do our jobs. This time for you that means mostly watching what you say when we’re on the ground. And for me, that means being Kirby Pensett, who used to be an RCN officer. Can we carry it off?”

There were so many variations in the reply that they merged into a growl, but they all amounted to, “Yes!” generally with a word or words of emphasis.

“Then for the last time until we’ve succeeded, let me say it’s an honor to command you, Sissies. Six out!”

Over the cheers, Vesey’s amplified voice from the bridge said, “
Captain to ship! Prepare for liftoff in thirty, that is three-zero seconds
.”

Unexpectedly she added, “
Next stop Madison, spacers
.”

Daniel grinned. Vesey tended to seem colorless, and it wasn’t often that she raised a cheer. She got one this time.

CHAPTER 7: Ashetown on Madison

Daniel walked down the Harborfront wearing mottled gray utilities without any markings. A veteran might recognized them as RCN in cut and color, but in dim light they would be indistinguishable from the Fleet’s gray-green or from similar garments worn by spacers all over the human universe. The clothing wasn’t a statement of allegiance, though it did imply his profession.

That would have been a safe bet anyway. Most people at the waterside of a spaceport were spacers or had been spacers.

“Ah, young master,” Hogg said in a falsely righteous tone as he viewed the storefronts. “What sinks of iniquity! How I long for the good clean air behind the pig styes back at Bantry.”

“You’re being unjust to the establishments, Hogg,” Daniel said, pursing his lips judiciously. They were looking for the Miltiades Hotel, where the offices of Calpurnius Trading were located.

The Grand Hotel Pleasaunce was to their right, a three-story establishment with a shipchandler and a jewelry store on the ground floor. “They’re quite upscale, it seems to me. Now, if we were to wander down an alley,
that
might be another thing altogether.”