The Road of Danger-ARC (7 page)

“By the gods yes!” said Cory in beaming excitement. “The ship is private, after all, except we’re under RCN charter right now.”

Daniel didn’t interject, but the circumstances were more complex than Cory implied or perhaps even knew. Daniel personally owned the
Princess Cecile
; he had bought the former Kostroman corvette out of RCN service several years earlier with some of the prize money which he had gained in the course of a short but very fortunate career.

However the
Sissie
’s present charter was not with the RCN but rather with the External Bureau so that she could carry an official to an Alliance protectorate without Cinnabar naval involvement. There hadn’t been time to change the paperwork in the rush after they had arrived on Cinnabar, then lifted at once with the dispatches to Admiral Cox.

While his officers chattered and his conscious mind focused on a legal technicality of the sort his sister Deirdre, a banker, spent her life with, Daniel’s subconscious fitted the varied pieces into a decision. He said, “Fellow spacers?”

The two lieutenants and Cazelet continued arguing about whether to arrive on Madison as the
Princess Cecile
; whether to pretend to be a Trinidad-registered schooner; or whether to land on Trento and send the “inspector” to Madison on a short-hop freighter. They also disagreed about who should pretend to be Sattler’s representative, though all agreed that it shouldn’t be Adele.

“Pipe down and listen to Six!” Woetjans said; even Daniel jumped. The bridge was armored, but he was willing to bet that everybody in the rotunda beyond the closed hatch had heard the bosun’s shout.

The three officers sat upright at their consoles, their eyes straight ahead and their lips tightly together. No one spoke. Adele’s smile was too slight for anyone but a close associate to have recognized the expression, but it was enough to make Daniel grin broadly in return.

“Thank you, fellow spacers,” he said politely. “I will visit Calpurnius Trading myself. If this excellent plan works out, the representative will continue from Madison to Cremona and then on to Sunbright. Officer Mundy’s virtues are too well known for me to bother listing them in this group, but I do not believe she could pass as a working spacer on a blockade runner.”

Vesey’s face went blank; Cory and Cazelet stared at one another in surprise. It took Woetjans a moment to put Daniel’s deadpan words together with their meaning; then she laughed as loudly as her shouted command of a moment before.

“Sir?” said Cory. “You can’t take a risk like that yourself—it wouldn’t be proper. I can—”

Cazelet and Vesey had their mouths open to object and doubtless to offer their own proposals. Daniel stopped all three of them with a cold smile and a raised finger. He said, “I’d hate to think that my bosun had more authority aboard the
Princess Cecile
than I do. But I’m sure Woetjans would be willing to restore order,eh?”

“Sorry, Six,” Vesey muttered to her hands, though she hadn’t actually spoken. Cory and Cazelet just nodded.

“You’re good officers,” Daniel said, looking again around his command group. “You wouldn’t be aboard the
Sissie
if I didn’t trust you, you know that.”

He paused and felt his grin harden before he went on, “But I’m Six, and you know that too. I’m going to do this because I think I’m the right choice for the job, and the
Princess Cecile
isn’t going to become a democracy on
my
watch.”

Adele rotated her seat so that she faced the other officers. For her to do that could only be a piece of theater, as everybody on the bridge knew. She said, “I would appreciate it if you explained your logic, Captain Leary.”

Nobody else would have asked
, Daniel realized, so Adele had asked. You never had to wonder if Adele Mundy would do whatever she thought was necessary.

But not in this case necessary for
her
. She understood already, which is why she had made such a circus turn out of her question.

“Of course, Adele,” Daniel said. He
never
treated Adele casually when they were on duty in public. His choice of address created a deliberate balance to her over-formality.

“First…” he said to the group. “I personally, and the
Princess Cecile
through me, have been tasked to remove from Sunbright a presumed Cinnabar citizen going by the name of Freedom. This is our sole duty at the moment; we have no greater purpose. Not so?”

Cory was blushing in embarrassment; Vesey looked pale and miserable; and Cazelet had a withdrawn expression as though he had just been told the date of his execution. None of them spoke, but Woetjans nodded vigorously.

“I can easily play an RCN lieutenant beached on half-pay by the Treaty of Amiens,” Daniel continued. “That’s what I’d be now if I hadn’t been extremely lucky.”

For an instant he thought that both Vesey and Cory were going to protest, but neither of them did. Adele’s sniff had a suggestion of humor in it, though, if you knew her well.

“Any of the three of you—”

Daniel gestured to the commissioned officers. Even Cazelet had passed the tests for lieutenant, though he hadn’t been—and, if the present peace continued, might not be for a decade—granted the rank.

“—can command the
Sissie
in my absence. A yacht owner would be lucky to hire a captain as skilled.”

“And the mistress can be the owner, right?” Woetjans said, excited as the concept came into focus in her mind. “She can carry it off because she
is
a fine lady, even though she’s, you know, the mistress too!”

That was exactly the conclusion that Daniel had come to also. As he opened his mouth to say so, however, Vesey objected, “But why would a yacht be carrying a passenger? Perhaps you—”

She turned to Daniel.

“—should be the hired captain, but when you get to Madison you quit for some reason?”

“Oh, that’s no problem,” Woetjans said with a toss of her big hands. “Six can play at being the lady’s fancy man. And, you know, looking for an easier berth.”

Vesey, Cory, and Cazelet went perfectly blank. From the stiffness of Daniel’s own face, he supposed he did also. Hogg guffawed, and Tovera tittered like a crazed weasel.

“Based on my past experience,” Adele said calmly, “it should be quite easy to get people to believe that.”

“I dare say it would,” said Daniel, pleased that he sounded relaxed. “But I think we’ll explain that Bernhard Sattler and Company handled the yacht’s refit on Kronstadt in return for her ladyship—”

He dipped in his seat as though bowing.

“—delivering me to Madison to make an inspection.”

He cleared his throat and went on, “Now, we have to assume that a trading firm will be knowledgeable about ships, and the
Sissie
is obviously Kostroman built. How do we explain a Cinnabar noble owning a yacht built on Kostroma?”

“I’ve looked into that,” said Adele before anyone else spoke. Her control wands dipped and crossed; the hologram of a ship formed in the center of the compartment. “To begin with, I won’t be a Cinnabar noble—”

***

“—because for our purposes it makes much better sense that I be a Kostroman,” Adele said. “As some of you will remember, I was for a time in Kostroma City as Electoral Librarian.”

She smiled. Daniel smiled back more broadly, and Woetjans—who then had been building bookshelves for the Electoral Librarian on Lieutenant Leary’s orders—nodded with enthusiasm. Adele had met Hogg and Tovera on Kostroma also, but the servants held their silence; they had no part of this discussion.

The post on Kostroma had provided Adele with shelter of a sort, food of a similar sort, and even her pay occasionally. In those categories she was better off than she had frequently been since the Proscriptions which followed the Three Circles Conspiracy had left her a penniless orphan.

Otherwise the post had very little to recommend it, even before the bloody coup which made Adele—because she had survived—a member of the RCN. Depending on how you judged time, that had happened either several years or a lifetime in the past.

“I don’t think I’ll have difficulty in convincing those we meet on Madison,” she said, “that I’m the deposed Principal Hrynko, travelling for my health. That is, the former chief of the Clan Hrynko, who retained enough power to negotiate the transfer of power to her stepson rather than to have him replace her in a less expensive manner.”

“That’s not the
Sissie
,” said Woetjans. She had focused on the holographic ship in the middle of the compartment instead of listening to what Adele was saying. “This one’s got the E and F rings staggered instead of straight.”

The bosun frowned, then added, “I’ve seen Kostroman ships rigged that way, but never the
Sissie
. Even if she’d been changed to the standard rig before we grabbed her, her hull’d be dimpled where the mast steps used to be.”

Daniel smiled with the delight of a happy infant. “I wouldn’t have noticed that, Woetjans,” he said. “I didn’t notice it. But I will another time, thanks to you.”

The bosun grinned and slammed the heel of her right fist into the palm of her left hand. Adele realized again that people had very different ways of expressing pleasure.

Adele said, “The image is the
Archduke Wilhelm
, laid down at the same time as the
Princess Cecile
but in the Isocha Yards instead of in Kostroma City. She was wrecked on landing within a standard year of her first lift-off. She was sold to Krishnamurti and Wife for scrapping, but the broker instead repaired her and passed her on to the Bijalan Navy. That was twenty-three standard years ago.”

“Bijala has a navy?” Cory said in surprise.

“If they do, their officers probably have bones through their noses,” Cazelet replied contemptuously. “We had some Bijalan spacers sailing for us at Phoenix Starfreight. They were pretty handy as riggers, but you had to be careful not to test them with something complicated like a screw fastener.”

“Kostroman government records simply indicate that the
Wilhelm
was sold out of service,” Adele said. She hadn’t dealt with Bijalans personally, so she was glad that Cazelet’s first-hand experience confirmed—colorfully—the impression which published sources had given her. “While I was on Kostroma, I assembled all the data I could. That included the files of Krishnamurti and Wife, which is how I learned about the Bijalan connection.”

As Adele heard herself speak, she remembered that in most groups she would be asked why she had scooped up the records of private brokerage firms on a planet where she happened to be working. She didn’t have to explain to her shipmates on the
Princess Cecile
: they took it for granted, as they took for granted that despite years of starfaring, Officer Mundy had to be watched carefully if she went out on the hull lest she drift off unawares.

The Sissies also took it for granted that the information Adele gathered compulsively would help them time and time again. As it was doing here.

While Adele spoke, Daniel turned to his display and began going through the data which she had transmitted. He didn’t have Adele’s skills at sorting information, but she had seen before that his knowledge of ships allowed him to take intuitive shortcuts to insights that no amount of study would have gained her.

The junior officers turned to their displays also. They followed Daniel’s lead like a school of fish moving as a single shimmering entity.

“I don’t have any record of what happened to the
Wilhelm
after she left Kostroma,” Adele said, “but it appears to me a reasonable bet that we won’t be unmasked if we claim to be her.”

“Given Bijala’s climate, the
Wilhelm
’s a pile of rust on a mudbank by now,” Cazelet said flatly. “Nobody on Madison will have seen the real thing to compare with us.”

“Nobody on Bijala will have seen the real
Wilhelm
either,” said Daniel in a tone of amazement. “Look at the surveyor’s report—”

Adele didn’t bother with her console. She used her personal data unit as a controller for the console anyway, so she simply switched to the little unit’s own display. It was adequately sharp for this purpose.

“See, the
Wilhelm
broke her back when her aft thrusters failed and her stern hit the dock, that’s why they scrapped her. Now, look at the repairs that the brokers made.”

As Daniel spoke, he highlighted sections of the reports. His subordinates mirrored his display, while Adele kept watch on all four consoles. The pattern was a work of art if you had the right sort of mind, she supposed.

“They replaced two thrusters,” said Vesey, speaking for the group as its most senior member. “Which left the
Wilhelm
two thrusters short of specifications, but that isn’t critical if the officers know what they’re doing. But they should have replaced twenty feet of hull, and instead there’s just a six-foot band of structural plastic as a stiffener.”

“And it’s not even bolted on properly, just tacked!” Cory said. “Not that that would matter. Look how the skin on both sides is crumpled! You couldn’t anchor bolts in that.”

“I don’t understand how they could get officers to lift in a ship in that condition,” said Cory cautiously. He seemed to be feeling the results of being clouted twice for having spoken—or almost spoken—out of turn. “Real spacers, I mean.”

“Cory got to the main point,” Daniel said, cutting off the discussion without raising his voice. “The
Wilhelm
’s sailing master—”

The corvette had actually been renamed
Demon of Fanti
before liftoff, but Adele caught herself before she interrupted.

“—was from Cazador, but he’d drunk his way out of his captain’s license. The remaining officers were Bijalans, and the crew were whoever the Bijalans could hire from the waterfront in Kostroma City. I don’t imagine they were all spacers, and I’m certain that none of them were both sober and holding an able-bodied rating. Most were neither, I suspect.”

There was general laughter. Woetjans said, “Like Six said to start out, if that lot didn’t crash on liftoff, then Kostroma was the last planet they saw in their lives. So—”