by Brian Daley
She watched him swallow and lower his eyes, and in one surge his face went red. When she brushed back one of the Hussar Plaits that had floated free of his helmet, she felt the heat of his cheek on the back of her hand.
"Ecce! There's a quite fascinating aspect to this phenomenon, Allgrave. Did you know blushes can't be faked? Except perhaps by virtuoso actors or with behavioral programming or drugs. I find this unfeigned color rather attractive. It's honest, at least."
Angered by the teasing, he turned his face away from her touch. "Honesty's not much use in dealing with LAW, though, is it? Not much to impress a Periapt"
She tried but couldn't resist. "Impress? Why, Allgrave, that would depend on just how far the blush extends."
Chapter
Twenty-Two
The hangar deck was small and cramped by the standards of a fleet carrier but still was an impressive space for shipboard. Just then Matsya's flight operations were almost nonexistent, and so it held oddments of containerized stores and equipment shifted from other venues.
The airlimo had not even touched down when a chief petty officer trotted up to it holding a heavy-duty command headset with a heads-up-display visor. It was marked "XO" in raised letters.
"Good job, Elide. Knew you had it in you," Quant said as he handed his white saucer cap to the CPO. Then, without giving Elide another glance, he departed at a run, pulling on the headset as he went.
Captain Hall's voice was already in Quant's ears over the command channel. "Ah, Chaz! C-capital!" Hall disdained formal commo procedure, just as he excused himself from so much that was navy custom. The relief in his voice, however, came through loud and clear. "We're in something of a slippery patch here."
"On my way, sir," Quant told him. "Suggest we meet on the port wing of the bridge."
"Yes, fine, Chaz; just hurry."
The port wing was actually just a wide spot on the observation deck overlooking the flight deck on the ship's bridge level portside. The flight deck itself covered the Matsya's portside sponson and rested on part of the main. Quant arrived to find it disturbingly unoccupied. With navy personnel in short supply, every hand who could be spared had turned to. Regis T. "Hal-lowed" Hall was watching the preparations on the flight deck with uncharacteristic gravity. The stiff breeze ruffled Quant's beard as he reached his captain's side.
"How say you, Chaz?"
Quant had gotten updates via headphone along the way; now he chinned his visor's display switch. "An aerospace shuttle? Trying a deck landing here?" he asked in disbelief. "Skipper, wave them off, no matter what it takes. If you don't—"
"Not don't, Chaz—can't." For once Hall did not sound amused by life's little follies. "I've been given my marching orders from on high. We will retrieve this shuttle and will not fail or we'll all be falling on our swords before the day is out. I direct you to take the deck."
Quant had been a seafaring man most of his life, while Hall's background was a university cadet program and a string of political appointments on dry land. In fact, Hall was on Matsya, like others before him, only to officially log a sea command, while Chaz Quant pretty much ran the boat.
At least Hall was smart enough to know his limitations. Aware that those on watch inside the bridge could see him, Quant backed up a pace, keyed his mike, and saluted exact-ingly. "I relieve you, sir."
Hallowed Hall's salute was for once passable. "I stand relieved. Watch section, Mr. Quant has the deck. Pass the word."
Not just the conn but the deck. Complete responsibility for and authority over PNS Matsya, except as Hall might—unthinkable as it was—countermand.
A pale, undernourished-looking petty officer second class moved up behind Quant to handle the telephone traffic, leaving Quant free to concentrate. An odd mix of geek and romantic poet type, Roiyarbeaux looked very grateful for the transfer of operational control.
Quant reduced speed, got Matsya turned into the wind, and, via Roiyarbeaux, called away a special sea detail to sever the lines that had been made fast to the various booms and floats.
Quant got on the channel personally to add, "Don't waste time untying or uncoupling. Chop 'em away or saw them through with emergency tools."
"Chaz, Doctor Zinsser's out there," Hall blurted, "and he expressly told me not to do that. Some of his paraphernalia's lost buoyancy…" Seeing the flash of Quant's eyes behind the HUD visor's racing imagery and readouts, he let his words trail off. The wrath of Matsya's senior scientist was Quant's problem now.
With his ship disencumbered, Quant resumed Hall's previous course for open water, edging around the shallows that had made the captain drag Zinsser's water-skiing floats through a crosswind. In the meantime, Quant was getting the particulars from his air boss, Germaine Bohdi.
"Book says we're rated for this retrieval, XO," she reported tightly. "But the book was written before the navy went on starvation rations. The cross-deck pendants have me worried."
The newest of the three five-centimeter-thick arresting cables used to halt a landing aircraft by means of its tailhook had already logged over two hundred traps, where under normal circumstances a cable would be consigned to the deep after logging half that number of retrievals. The problem was that Matsya was far back in line for refurbishment and replacement parts, twelve years overdue in some cases.
"We make the trap anyway," Quant told her. "Let's have the barriers. Get your people set for a rough one."
Bohdi had been anticipating it. The words were barely out of Quant's mouth when a double fence of thick, woven composite netting sprang up on retractable hydraulic supports. The barriers were positioned up toward the bow end of the flight deck, which was angled up at twelve degrees, like a ski jump, for takeoffs. The shuttle would have only one shot at a landing: If it took out the barriers without stopping, it would lose too much speed to power-climb back into the air for another go-round.
Barriers and arresting wires weren't Quant's only concern. The scanty flight data gave the shuttle a total weight of sixty tons. The SWATHship was an extremely stable platform—her three hulls joined by a prodigiously strong box-girder structure—but a too-hard landing might crumple the flight deck, heel her over, and even damage the frame.
Around the headland, Matsya hit the violent offshore currents that presided there, her bows slicing two-meter swells. Quant called for twenty-five-knot actuator turns and took her into the teeth of the wind. Even with the shuttle's ducted-thrust STOL capability, the landing was going to be a lot more like a controlled crash than a soft touchdown.
The SWATHship surged forward, cutting the swells and throwing foam spray over the bows. There was a whoop from the bridge—Lieutenant Giaraszekh, OOD of the watch, who was apparently monitoring the waterline cams. "Mother Mats is carryin' a bone in her teeth!" It was the old expression for a ship cutting the swells and throwing foam and spray up from the bows; in Matsya's case, it was three bones.
There were new feeds on Quant's HUD visor: particulars on the shuttle's unauthorized departure from starship Sword of Damocles, a possible mutiny by armed parolees, VIP hostages and orders from on high that no hostile action be undertaken. Quant did not pay the updates much mind. Landing telemetry signals said the shuttle had opened its stubby double-delta, variable-geometry wings for maximum surface area and flareout and minimum sweep. It had just completed an energy-shedding S turn, had banked at the designated break, and was coming downwind, homing in on the flight deck's centerline. Quant took a look at it via telescopic cam feed, a monster flechette of exotic alloys and composites pulsating silently and growing very quickly.
Six separate landing guidance systems—optical, illuminated, voice, two radar, and autopilot backup—were on-line, and none struck Quant as an adequate safeguard. He instructed the crash crews to get the towbots ready, make certain the crane operator was wearing a fireproof suit, and have the washdown systems primed to pump anticomfire suppression foam and deck flush.
"If this landing goes bad," Quant told Hall, "I want what's left
of the shuttle pushed over the side immediately."
Hallowed Hall cleared his throat melodically. "Chaz, the Hierarchate—"
Quant covered his lip mike with his hand and glared at Hall. "Relieve me or stand clear, Captain."
Both ideas terrified Hall, but the Lyceum was far away, while the plummeting shuttle was near. "Carry on, Mr. Quant," he said.
The shuttle had dirtied up, deploying landing gear and tail-hook, lowering flaps, and angling its thrust downward through vectoring ducts to keep it airborne at what otherwise would have been substalling speed.
Quant thought for a moment that the shuttle was coming in too low and would make a catastrophic ramp strike against the round-down at the stern end of the flight deck, but Germaine Bohdi's calm voice got the pilot up just high enough to avoid it yet low enough to try for a cross-deck pendant. Even at greatly diminished speed the pilot would pass all three wires in less than a second.
The shuttle's shadow flickered across the deck, seeming to pounce at the spaceplane itself. The pilot missed the first wire but snagged the second, only to have it pull taut and part with a crack like a high-powered rifle shot. People dived for cover or hurled themselves into the permanently rigged safety netting. With deep metallic noises from the severed halves, the pieces of cable flailed the air like huge bullwhips. The starboard one flayed the superstructure twenty meters below the bridge wing, indenting the plating there with loops and curves of impact grooving.
Then, miraculously, the shuttle's tailhook caught the third wire, and the craft hit the deck with smashing impact, its landing gear striking clouds of friction smoke from the nonskid surfacing. Fed belowdecks through sheaves to electromagnetic arresting gear, the wire brought the shuttle to a smooth halt in less than forty meters as the added weight gave Matsya a perceptible list to portside. The shuttle's nose came to rest a mere five meters short of the barrier nets.
"We've got them!" Hall exclaimed, so relieved that he seemed about to weep.
Quant, mindful of who was aboard the shuttle and just how lightly armed Matsya was, asked himself, Who's got whom?
Chapter
Twenty-Three
The rave of the shuttle's engines died as the pilot shut them down. Quant directed Lieutenant Gairaszekh to reduce speed and come about for a slow and cautious return to Matsya's previous anchorage. Quant wanted to be as close as possible to shore-based airborne and seagoing assets, medevac facilities, and the rest. Besides, there were the Science Side's rafts and rummage to recover.
Deck dogs and Science Siders alike emerged from cover to gawk at the smoking aerospace craft. Blueshirts and yellows rushed forward with their equipment. When Quant roared at them to stay back, they moved smartly to obey. Those crewing the hoses and playpipes that would sluice high-pressure jets of water across the flight deck were ordered to stand ready.
Hall was no more eager to play hostage negotiator than he had been to captain his ship. Quant relinquished the conn to Gairaszekh and headed for the descended shuttle. His chief master-at-arms, leading a security detail, offered him a pistol—one of only twelve small arms aboard—but Quant brushed it aside without slowing.
As he stepped out onto the vast and windy openness of the flight deck, he saw a puzzlingly familiar face. "What the fore-'n-aft are you doing here?"
Pool airlimo driver Kurt Elide turned his gaze from the silent shuttle to Quant. "Public Safety's grounded everything in the region. I couldn't leave."
Quant fumed. "You slack-jawed little snivelneck. If you want a front-row seat to watch the feces hit the flywheel aboard this ship, join the navy. Otherwise get the hell off my ocean!"
Elide nearly grinned. "Sorry, Commander, but regimentation clashes with my psych profile. Although the shuttle landing and the way you handled it—that wasfidgurvus"
Quant saw that there was no point getting further exercised. Elide was just another latter-day Periapt kid. Besides, there were other civilians peeking from various corners, including Dr. Zinsser's oceanographic underlings and Dr. Shu and the aquaculture staff. Approaching the shuttle, Quant gave less thought to the weapons that might be trained on him than to the danger his ship might be facing.
With no sign of life in the shuttle, he wondered if he would have to call for a crane and knock for entry. As he got within a dozen paces of it, however, a belly hatch popped down, a powered ladder lowered to the deck, and a man in high combat boots and some kind of soft armor suit dropped to the nonskid deck. Quant drew a deep breath and took another couple of steps.
"Sir, I'm Commander Chaz Quant, executive officer of this vessel, Periapt Navy SWATHship Matsya" There was probably some protocol for welcoming air pirates aboard, but Quant wasn't conversant with it. "Who am I addressing?"
The fellow was a husky white man with a crooked nose and red hair that fell below his shoulders, some of it twisted into tight plaits along either side. A large handgun was holstered on his chest, and there was a combat knife on his belt.
"Ask her," the redhead answered in lilting Terranglish, offering his hand to a woman who was coming down the ladder—Hierarch Dextra Haven.
She appeared somewhat mussed but exuberant, as if things were going very much her way. No sooner did she hit firm footing than she was on the go, wielding a lot of eye contact but striking an attitude that said she had no time to waste on minutiae.
"If you'd be so kind, Commander," she said to Quant, "point me to that incorrigible Regis T. Hall. I've brought several hundred head of guests with me, and they'll need to be quartered and fed straight away." She gestured to Quant's headset. "What's that, a commo? Hand it here."
The good thing about having no prospects for promotion was that Quant had nothing to lose by speaking his mind. But before he could, Hall's voice issued over the command channel. "Oblige her, Chaz. There's a good fellow."
Quant relinquished the headset stoically, and Hierarch Dextra Haven fumbled it on, pressing furrows into her mounds of wavy jet-black hair. Spotting Hall on the port wing of the bridge, she waved and yoo-hooed. Hall waved back as if they were in box seats at the Abraxas Derby. Quant's jaw muscles jumped as he signaled a blueshirt to bring him another headset visor.
Disembarkation halted after a striking scar-faced woman and a boyish blond man appeared. They emerged from under the shuttle to starboard, near the upper works, and were eyeballing the ship for, Quant presumed, snipers, LAW troops, or other backup. Quant ignored the stains on their battlesuits.
The redhead—Allgrave Burning—was taking in the painterly daubs of ginger cirrus clouds in a clear white-gold sky. "Beautiful, quite beautiful," he pronounced. Something in the way he said it and in his manner relaxed Quant a notch.
"I'm so-oo indebted to you for this gracious reception, Captain," Dextra Haven was gushing into the headset. "If there's ever anything I can do for you by way of—hmm? Oh, thou wicked man, certainly not! At least not without some sex clinic rescue parameds standing by. Seriously, now, about our guests from Concordance: you simply cannot let me down in my hour of need."
She hinted at the political points Hall could score by playing along. In the absence of countermanding orders from on high, Hall had everything to gain.
Dextra Haven made no mention of untoward events on Sword of Damocles and insisted that bureaucratic bungling was to blame for her having arrived unannounced. She explained that she had tried to contact Cal Lightner and others in the Hierarchate—Preservationist opponents primarily—during the shuttle's descent, though none had so much as acknowledged her. Quant saw how it gave her actions a tem-porary fig leaf of legitimacy. He had read that she won over Lyceum swing votes in the same manner.
She was smaller than she looked in media coverage, but her figure was just as lush. While Quant regarded intensive longev measures with distaste, Haven's were first-rate. She was a decade older than he but could have passed for late twenties, baseline.
Quant's inspection of the celebrated Hierarch was interrupted by the arrival of a replacement headset. Over the man
euvering and docking circuit came word that an indignant Dr. Zinsser had caught up to Matsya in a one-man surface-effect scooter and was bound for the flight deck.
Quant had no time for it. "Keep Zinsser off this deck even if you have to lock him in one of his own specimen traps," he told his chief master-at-arms.
The "aye-aye" sounded very enthusiastic.
When he turned back to Dextra Haven, she handed him his headset. "Your CO wants you to rustle up temporary quarters for LAW's new tactical strike force here," she said.
Quant looked again to the bemused Allgrave and the others. "Strike force. Uh huh."
"You heard me, Commander…"
"Quant."
"Ah, yes, I believe I've heard of you."
"As I have you," Quant said.
"Then I have your cooperation?"
There was no contesting it. His moment of supreme indis-pensability had passed, and he was once more a man who had to do whatever he was told to in order to stay at sea.
As he tossed the spare headset to a deck dog and redonned his own, he became aware of an aircraft making a pass and saw a powerful civilian VTOL with press markings swing by, bow to stern off the port flight deck's edge. He chinned over to the flight ops channel, but Germaine Bohdi was at a loss.
"I gave them the wave-off, XO, but they ignored it," she reported. "Public Safety and the military were holding back too far to intercept. There's a swarm of newsies in it, demanding landing clearance."
Dextra Haven was tugging at Quant's bare elbow, pointing at the media VTOL. "Allow them to land! I invited them!"
Quant gnashed his teeth briefly, then relayed her words. He had long before learned when and how to defer with dignity.
Haven began waving to the circling news crews, striking a heroic pose as if she had landed the shuttle herself. She had opened her suit seam for a bit of decollete, and the wind blew back her foaming sable hair.
Quant decided to leave the aerospace plane where it was and guide the press VTOL in for a landing farther astern. That did not please the taxi directors and handler's pit, but Quant blamed it all on the Lyceum. By the time the VTOL started spewing news crews, he had gotten the flight deck battened down so that the invading horde would be corraled there. He also put in a request for Peace Warrantors and a maritime patrol to ward off other sightseers.
