The Road of Danger-ARC (24 page)

“
What
the bloody hell are you playing at?” Kiki Lindstrom demanded. She looked furious. To a degree the anger could be hiding her fear, though Daniel’s cavalier behavior toward her ship and herself gave plenty of reason for her to be pissed.

The faces of three of the crewmen ranged from worried to frightened. The fourth, Blemberg, had no expression at all—as always before in Daniel’s experience. Daniel couldn’t tell at this early point in their acquaintance whether Blemberg was unflappably stolid or if he was simply too stupid to understand that they were in danger.

“There’s a cruiser here in the system, targeting blockade runners,” Daniel said. “The
Estremadura
.”

Lindstrom nodded, suddenly looking thoughtful. “I’ve heard of her,” she said. “She’s a privateer, really. The governor of Sunbright hired her because the Funnel Squadron couldn’t catch its ass with both hands. But she operates above Cremona, mostly, and sends her prizes to Westerbeke.”

“Well, for now, she’s in Madison orbit,” Daniel said. “She’s coming for us, and her captain is bloody good. That’s why I’ve been bouncing around like a training exercise.”

He was glad to see that the crewmen, too, were relaxing. When he started discussing a real danger, they realized that their captain and the only astrogator aboard hadn’t suddenly gone crazy—which was the best explanation they’d previously had for his behavior.

Lindstrom backed to her bunk and seated herself again. “The
Estremadura
’s been in this system before but didn’t bother us when we lifted off?” she said. Her tone made the words a question.

“Well, that’s changed,” Daniel said flatly. “If we’d been fifteen seconds later in inserting, she’d have hit us with her guns. They couldn’t have done a lot of damage at this range, but we wouldn’t have been able to insert if she kept hitting the hull. So we have a problem.”

“Sir?” said Hargate. “Can you get us out? If they carry the ship to Westerbeke and condemn it, they just dump us spacers out on the beach there with the clothes we stand in.”

“I think we’ll be able to handle it, yes,” said Daniel. He smiled again, but this time with the hard triumph of a chess player about to make a move which he is sure will take his opponent by surprise. “The
Estremadura
expects us to sail to Cremona—they have our course projections. I don’t know how but they do, and whoever is captaining that cruiser will know what to do with the data. So—”

He paused to let the delay add drama.

“—we’ll go directly to Sunbright instead. I’ve plotted the course, and I’ll be out on the hull most hours to refine it on route.”

“But we can’t do that!” Lindstrom said, her voice cutting through the spacers’ disconcerted babble. “We don’t have food for a straight run, and I don’t know that the reaction mass will last out either.”

“We have enough food,” said Daniel flatly, “and the reaction mass will be fine too. I checked them both as soon as I recalculated the course. We’ll drop into normal space when we’re ten light-minutes out from Madison on the present course. That’ll give us time enough to build up speed before the
Estremadura
catches up with us again, if she even tries. Then—”

He repeated his artificially bright grin.

“—we don’t enter the sidereal universe again until we’re in the Sunbright system.”

“Can you do that?” Lindstrom said, rather as though Daniel had said he planned to dance on the hull without a suit.

“Can’t be done,” said West much more forcefully. “
Can’t
be done! Never
heard
of nobody doing that!”

“Nonsense,” Daniel said in a brusquely cheerful done. “We did it in the RCN every day. Well, every voyage, pretty much.”

That was a flat lie, but it was closer to the truth than West’s denial. Any RCN Academy graduate should be able to bring his ship close enough to an intended point after seven straight days in the Matrix that she could at least find his goal after extraction.

The problem was the human cost. People saw things after long immersion in the Matrix. Seven days was long enough for spacers to see a corridor where they knew there was a solid bulkhead; and sometimes to see some one or some thing approaching down that corridor.

Daniel had once seen his mother. She had stared at him in horror, then walked on very quickly and disappeared.

“You done that?” West said, but the words sounded like a prayer for absolution.

“Many times,” Daniel said, truthfully this time. “Now, I’ve got the new course loaded. Hargate, I’ll need your suit for the initial watch. West, you and I will go clear the stuck antenna or whatever the problem really is. Hogg—”

He smiled at his servant.
So far, so good
.

“—I’ll bang three times on the hull with a wrench when we’re ready. When I do that, you push the red button.”

He pointed to the Execute button on the console. At one time it would have been protected with a hinged cage, but that had been lost in the distant past.

“Got it?”

Hogg grunted. “Guess I can handle that, young master,” he said. “In between trying to learn how to pour piss outa a boot, y’know.”

Hargate was stripping off the ill-fitting hard suit with enthusiasm. He might have doubts about seven straight days in the Matrix, but he was certain he didn’t want to wear the suit.

Lindstrom, though, frowned and said, “Look, Pensett, we’re not RCN, you know, even if you are. I’m not sure—”

“What
I’m
not sure about, mistress,” Daniel said, “is what these yobbos on the
Estremadura
are going to do if they find an ex-RCN officer on a blockade runner. I don’t worry about a trip to Westerbeke, but instead it just might be a dive out an airlock without a suit. And if they space me, well—”

He shrugged.

“—they’re not going to leave witnesses, are they?”

There was silence in the cabin for a moment. Then Lindstrom sighed and said, “Sunbright it is, I suppose. But I tell you, Pensett, we didn’t have any of this trouble before you came aboard.”

“Don’t fret, mistress,” Daniel said as he started getting into the hard suit with Hargate’s help. “It’ll be a smooth run from here on out, and at the other end—”

He grinned at the glum-faced crew members.

“—we’ll all be able to get just as drunk on Sunbright as we could’ve done on Cremona.”

Ashe Haven on Madison

As Adele entered the bridge she felt the circulating pumps start, a necessary preliminary before testing the plasma thrusters. The big pumps in the stern throbbed a moment later, drawing water from the harbor. For the moment the draft would be wasted back into the slip, but when thrusters were lighted those pumps would replenishing the reaction mass tanks.

Vesey had rotated the command console inward. When she saw Adele, she shrank her display so that their eyes could meet without a holographic veil between them.

Adele felt a flash of irritation: she much preferred to be anonymous, a shadow ignored by the others present. She swallowed the reaction since it was manifestly unjust. Everyone aboard was faced by an uncertain situation, and they had to take their cues from Officer Mundy.

“Carry on, Captain Vesey,” she said aloud as she settled onto her console. Her voice was no colder nor more clipped than it would be if she had just been given wonderful news. “I have some matters to discuss with our passenger, and I’ve chosen to do so here on the bridge.”

The only wonderful news Adele could imagine at the moment was a report that Daniel was safe. A believable report, because she didn’t indulge in wishful thinking.

“Yes sir,” said Vesey and expanded her display again. Adele brought hers live.

Sun had gotten up from the gunnery station beside Adele’s and was showing Master Osorio how to use the training seat which folded out from the back of the signals console; Chazanoff at the missile station had half-turned to be able to look sidelong at Adele across the compartment, while Tovera watched the whole business with cold amusement from a jumpseat against the aft bulkhead.

Adele supposed it
was
amusing if viewed in the correct fashion: everyone was staring at the woman who preferred to be invisible. Perhaps at some later point she would actually be able to feel the humor instead of merely accepting it intellectually; for now, she was satisfied that nobody looking at her would understand what she was thinking.

Pasternak announced over the PA system and the general intercom channel—the general push, as Adele had learned to call it in the RCN, “
Testing thrusters One and Eight!
”

A moment later thrusters roared. Shortly after that, steam and the sting of ozone drifted into the bridge through open hatches.

She echoed Vesey’s display on her own. Cory was in charge of the liftoff, with Vesey overseeing the maneuver; Cazelet was ghosting it from the astrogation console.

Adele allowed herself to compare the
Sissie
’s array of talent with what she knew of the officers on ordinary commercial vessels in the Macotta region; or anywhere on the fringes of human settlement, for that matter. Most astrogators would be trained or half-trained by apprenticing with people who were themselves without formal training. The exceptions were generally drunks or officers who for similar reasons had been driven from the core worlds. Only one or at most two people to a ship had even that training, with perhaps a spacer who knew how to program the computer to give a lowest-common-denominator solution.

Adele’s present life was as close to perfect as she could imagine it being. She was a member of the most efficient ship of the finest navy in the human universe. Her friends and colleagues cherished and respected her, and they constantly displayed themselves worthy of her respect—and of her love, as she understood the meaning of the word.

But to achieve this perfect—in Adele’s terms—life, it was necessary that the Mundys of Chatsworth have been massacred and that Adele go on to kill more people than she could count; people who often visited her dreams in the hours before dawn. Everything had a cost, she supposed.

The image of Osorio at the top of her display seemed to be speaking, though Adele couldn’t have heard unaided speech over the thruster roar even if she hadn’t already raised the sound-cancelling field around her station. She felt a moment’s regret at her behavior: she didn’t like the Cremonan attaché, but it had been discourteous to bring him up here and then ignore him.

She adjusted the cancellation field to encompass the console’s back as well as its front station, then said, “The crew is testing the thrusters, Master Osorio. There’ll be nothing to see until we lift, but—”

Adele used the override controls on her side of the console to provide Osorio with a panorama of the harbor as viewed from a sensor on the knuckle of the Dorsal A antenna, at present the highest point on the
Sissie
. As an afterthought, she added her own image to the top of his display so that he could look at her. He seemed to be completely at a loss with the console controls.

“—that shouldn’t be long. In the interim, you can explain how you sell the prizes captured by Cremonan privateers.”

Adele had that information already from Forty Stars files, but she was interested in how Osorio would react. His willingness to be frank—let alone honest—would give her a gauge of his character.

“Well, technically they’re not Cremonan privateers, they’re Sunbright Republic privateers,” he said, “but most of them are fitted out and crewed on Cremona, of course. The lesser Names—” members of the Cremonan noble class “—own most of them, because that doesn’t require much capital. And they sell their prizes on Bailey’s Horn, an independant world but in the Forty Stars, you see?”

“You personally own privateers, then?” Adele said—a question that she
didn’t
have the answer to. Osorio was surprising her positively. It was very probable, given her mindset, that surprises would be positive ones.

“I have shares in two or three,” Osorio said casually, “but the real profit comes from blockade running if you have enough capital to buy merchandize. And to accept the occasional run of bad luck.”

His image shrugged. “Four ships in a row that I had half-interests in were captured. Even so, with profits of five hundred percent on each successful cargo, it has been a very good investment.”

Adele kept her brow smooth, but she was frowning mentally as she reviewed the data already in her files. “Are you and your fellows, your Friends of Sunbright, outfitting all the blockade runners, then?” she said.

The Forty Stars records indicated there were about a hundred ships occupied in the trade at any one time. Though most individually were quite small, they and their cargoes added to a very considerable outlay.

The yacht’s hatches were ringing closed. The rumbling which Adele felt through the fabric of the ship was a gear train raising the boarding ramp to become the main hatch. Osorio couldn’t identify the chorus of sounds and vibrations as normal and harmless, though. Instead of answering, he looked around in concern—because he was at the back of a console, that would show him only the starboard hull—and said, “Is everything all right?”

“Yes,” Adele said. “The crew is readying the ship for liftoff. I asked if the Friends of Sunbright owned most of the blockade runners.”

The words were a verbal slap rather than a question this time around. Surely the man had travelled on a starship before, to bring him from Cremona to here if nothing else? And not so very long ago!

“Ah,” Osorio said, nodding as he tried to raise his mind from a slough of fear. “No, no; that would be wonderful, but even together we could not support more than a quarter of the ships trading with the rebels. The trading houses outfit most of them, but even they take money from off-planet investors. From Cinnabar, yes, but from Pleasaunce too, I’m sure.”

He shrugged, relaxing in the contemplation of profits—and apparent irritation at the fact that others were making most of those profits. “The biggest houses on Cremona are from Alliance planets,” he said, “and they all have correspondent firms on their home worlds. They own as many blockade runners as everyone else together, or very nearly so!”