The Way to Glory

by David Drake

  "The Grand Gallery wasn't open to the surface until Admiral Daudell opened it," explained her mother as she and Buscaigne joined them. "Such a shame that I couldn't have brought you here for the ball last month, Danny. With fairy lights glued to the ceiling it was just enchanting!"

  "Come along, Celia," Buscaigne said. His lips smiled, but he was guiding her clear of Daniel with more determination than affection. "I think we'll find the natural light even more romantic than we did that glitter."

  Ginny had been clinging to Daniel's right arm. Now that her mother was in front of them, she tugged his arm around her waist instead. Daniel let his hand rest lightly on her hip, allowing just enough pressure to feel the muscles shift beneath the layer of smooth padding.

  The path made another angled turn—beryllium sheeting had to be laid in straight lines—and ended in an arch cut through the limestone with power saws. Steps led downward into relative darkness. The workmen had made a half-hearted effort to sculpt framing pilasters with the same tools. Decades of weathering had softened the crude outlines into something mildly charming.

  Celia hesitated at the entrance, but Buscaigne applied pressure till she trotted down to keep from overbalancing. Daniel raised an eyebrow to Ginny, but she grinned in response and led him through by the hand.

  There was considerably more light in the Grand Gallery than there'd seemed from the outside. Besides the limited amount that trickled through the shaded entrance, seven tall keyholes were cut in the south-facing wall of the cliff. Daniel's first impulse had been to draw his light-amplifying goggles down, but after a moment he found that the sort of gray half-light the openings cast through the cavern was enough to see by.

  There wasn't a great deal to see, though the vault's very size—it stretched for several hundred yards—was impressive. The arched ceiling was generally more than twenty feet above the cave floor, but icy-looking stalactites reached down to half that distance in some places. A zigzag of lacy stone curtained the back wall midway into the cavern.

  Besides litter on the floor—paper trash, discarded garments, and the frequent wink of broken glassware—there were few signs of human intrusion into this world. Thirty feet from the entrance, movable stands held a plush rope circling a hole in the floor. Two other sinkholes were roped off at roughly equal intervals.

  "Come here, Danny," called Celia, gesturing to Daniel as she strode toward the nearby sinkhole. Now that she was inside, the hesitation she'd shown before entering the cavern had vanished. She stepped briskly, kicking aside a fist-sized chunk of rock that'd fallen from the roof. "You're interested in animals, aren't you?"

  Indeed Daniel was, though the fact Lady Raynham knew that was more than a little surprising. He walked over to her, smiling deliberately instead of frowning as he'd otherwise have done. Ginny didn't try to hold him back, though she kept a firm grip on his arm as she matched him stride for stride. Buscaigne followed Celia, his eyes on the ground save for a single quick glare of hostility toward Daniel.

  Celia tipped over two of the supports, then squatted on her haunches at the edge of the sinkhole. "Look," she said to Daniel, pointing downward.

  He knelt with his knees on the plush rope instead of squatting. The hole was filled with water to a few feet below the edge; Daniel couldn't quite have touched the surface without bending over at the waist. Micro-organisms gave the sea a milky luminescence, making the cavity brighter than the main cavern above it.

  Tiny shapes slithered in schools; then, with shocking abruptness, a broad ribbon longer than Daniel was tall shimmered through the lesser fish. Teeth flashed. The predator vanished again, leaving behind rags of blood and fragments of the prey it'd savaged.

  Buscaigne had placed himself between Daniel and Lady Raynham; he jumped back when the large fish struck. Celia didn't move and her daughter, standing with a hand on Daniel's shoulder, asked, "Were you frightened, Lars dear?" in mock concern.

  "Is the sinkhole open to the sea?" Daniel asked. From the wildlife survey he'd read during the voyage from Cinnabar, he recognized the predator as a glass shark. They got even larger than this one, but he'd understood they were open-ocean creatures as adults.

  "It connects to the sea on the north side of the island, not this side," Ginny said, pointing toward the openings in the cliff face. "All three of them do. But Admiral Daudell put a mesh over the openings so that only little fish could get in or out. Those that grow can't leave."

  "Umm," Daniel said, rising to his feet. The pool continued to swirl from the strike of the glass shark, but the fingerlings had resumed their dance. How deep was the sinkhole, anyway, and did it . . . ?

  "Are all the pools connected?" he said, pointing to the other roped-off openings. He started toward the next in line, carefully skirting this one. A six-foot glass shark could give a human being a dangerous or even fatal bite, but it probably wouldn't because its normal prey was much smaller.

  Still, mistakes happen. The water was a glowing fog in which a man's flailing arm might look like a separate entity of just the size for dinner.

  "No, they're separate," said Ginny, taking his arm again as she walked alongside. "Do we have a light along? In the last pool there's a rock squid that's just beautiful."

  Daniel checked his equipment belt by reflex, though he already knew the answer. "Yes, I do," he said. "I have my service light, anyway."

  He took out his light, a squat tube the size of four fingers extended together. It threw a bright spot onto the lace curtain when he switched it on briefly. Reflection spread the output into a soft glow across the twenty feet ahead of him. "Will this do?"

  Celia hugged him closer in agreement.

  "Admiral Daudell used convicts to open the Gallery," Celia said, following behind them. As best Daniel could tell, she was speaking simply to be noticed. "Convicts from Cinnabar, I mean."

  Daniel nodded. He hadn't heard that but it was certainly possible. A generation or two ago, the Republic had transported criminals to outlying planets to serve a term of hard labor, then remain as colonists. The practice got criminals off Cinnabar, but it'd led to a serious security problem on worlds which the Alliance attacked. The prison gangs provided Alliance troops with a ready-made Fifth Column.

  Daniel glanced into the second pool. To his surprise the water was dark except for rainbow twinkles like the sun lifting fire from the facets of diamonds. Though both were open to the sea, this habitat was completely different from the one a hundred yards closer to the Gallery's entrance.

  He shone his light down. Hand-sized invertebrates cruised in slow circles, their gill rings expanding and contracting as they filtered anything that could provide food from the water. When Daniel's beam struck them directly, they collapsed into themselves and sank. A fingernail-sized organ at the end of a long filament flashed nervously behind them.

  "Come and see the last one," Celia said, putting her hand over Daniel's like a child leading her little brother. "It's lovely!"

  "I don't think we need to go so far, Geneva darling," her mother said. Her tone was outwardly warm, but the words had a peevish color when they echoed from the cavern walls. "Perhaps Danny would like to come back to my house for tea?"

  "He has his duties, Celia," Buscaigne said.

  "You don't have to come, Mother," Ginny called, resting her cheek on Daniel's shoulder briefly as they walked along. "In fact, why don't you fly back to the house? Danny and I can walk to the port. I'll find a ride there when I'm ready to come home."

  Lady Raynham didn't respond, but Daniel heard her footsteps—and those of Buscaigne—pattering determinedly along behind. He turned his lamp off, making do with the indirect light through the windows. The cave had been cleaned recently enough that only a few rocks littered the floor.

  "The convicts didn't only open the Gallery, you know," Lady Raynham continued. "Admiral Daudell used them to bury his treasure—and the rumor is that he had them all murdered then so that no one would know where it was hidden!"

  "Oh, Mother," Gin
ny said. "That's a fairy tale! Things like that don't really happen."

  Daniel blanked his face without speaking. It wasn't completely beyond imagination that an RCN admiral would've murdered prisoners, but it was unlikely. More important, if it had happened, word would've gotten out. That was the sort of story that Uncle Stacey and his former shipmates talked about over a bottle in the office of Bergen and Associates while little Danny Leary listened entranced in the corner. Besides, what treasure would Daudell, an ineffectual though well-connected man, have amassed?

  "I'm not surprised you say that, Geneva," Celia said in a cool voice, "because family has never meant anything to you. My father, the grandfather you never knew, was Superintendent of Works at Sinmary Port. He was responsible for feeding the convicts while they worked under Admiral Daudell. He said that Daudell continued drawing rations for the gang three full days after work on the Grand Gallery was complete. So there!"

  Daniel cleared his throat. "Is it possible that the Admiral was selling the rations?" he asked. "To landowners to feed their laborers, perhaps?"

  "It is not," Celia said firmly. Then, probably because she knew the statement was nonsense—of course there was a market for RCN rations, and if Daudell was too great a paragon of virtue to line his pockets at the Republic's expense then he was more unusual than an admiral who massacred prisoners—she added, "Not without my father knowing about it, I mean. He said he and his staff themselves distributed the rations to the convicts, not to navy personnel."

  Daniel pursed his lips again. That sounded believable—because it implied that Lady Raynham's father had been concerned to get his share of any graft. He'd probably been as surprised as Daniel was that the delay in releasing the convicts to other projects hadn't been a profitable dodge on Daudell's part.

  "Geneva has no sense of family," Lady Raynham continued in her martyred tone. "I think that might be why my dear Lord Raynham left her only a pittance."

  "It had a great deal more to do with favors which I wasn't willing to provide dear Lord Raynham, mother," Ginnie replied in a tone like glass breaking. "Fortunately I'm not forced to buy companionship. It may be decades before I have to do that."

  "Now what is it I'm to see here, Ginnie?" Daniel said in a louder voice than he'd have used if he weren't trying to break up a cat-fight.

  The last sinkhole was larger than the other two, a perfect circle nearly twenty feet in diameter. It filled the back of the cavern—or almost filled it; when the cave floor collapsed to form the pool, it'd left a narrow rind of stone along the right edge.

  Daniel shone his lamp across, sending shimmers from the wet rock. The cavern's tail kinked off around a corner where the beam couldn't follow.

  "Point your light down," Ginnie said, lowering the line of plush rope as her mother had done the previous ones. "Straight down, all the way to the bottom."

  Daniel leaned forward, sighting along his beam of light. The water here was dark, but the lamp flashed from the sides of fish fluttering like pennants in a breeze. He didn't recognize the species, though he hoped he'd be able to identify them when he got to a natural history database.

  "Just wait a moment," Ginnie said, her hand caressing his shoulder. "Keep the light—"

  The flash came from all around the pool, diamonds winking in a closing net. The water surged, then cleared. The swimming fish vanished out the seaward channel.

  Daniel recognized the rock squid. It was one of the major coastal predators on Nikitin, but the database hadn't suggested they got this big. Normally the creatures lay on the bottom with their hundreds of tentacles spread in living mats. When suitable prey swam overhead, they swept the tentacles inward with hooked claws extending from the inner surface of each one.

  Here in the sinkhole the beast's technique was similar, but instead of stretching its tentacles on the bottom it'd covered the walls with them. They'd slashed inward and down together, ripping the entire school of fish. The squid's maw gaped momentarily, displaying a circuit of crystalline teeth which blazed in the lamplight like a sectioned geode.

  "Beautiful . . ." Ginnie repeated softly. Daniel continued to look into the pool; he had a feeling he didn't want to see the girl's expression at just this moment.

  The squid slowly spread its arms again like a flower opening to the sun. The tentacles were corpse white while they were extending, but when they reached the sinkhole's walls they shaded into the pitted yellow-grayness of the rock they lay against. The claws had drawn back within the concealing flesh.

  "There's no treasure," Lars Buscaigne said unexpectedly. "Daudell was building a secret entrance to his mansion through one of the Wormholes."

  Daniel switched off his lamp and turned. "How do you know that?" he asked. Buscaigne and Lady Raynham were blurs against the shadows until his eyes readapted, but shining the powerful beam on them would be too aggressive—at least for the moment.

  "How do I know the sky's blue?" Buscaigne snapped. "Because it's obvious. And because I've watched that tramp Mondreaux come this way a dozen times and disappear. There's no place he could be going except into one of the caves, and he wouldn't do that unless it took him to his lover."

  "His lover?" Daniel repeated. He wondered whether he looked as much like a beached fish as he felt. Presumably the bad light covered his gaping stupidity.

  "Yes, Pontefract," Buscaigne said. "Admiral Milne's husband makes sure all her aides-de-camp are gay. Pontefract's having an affair with Mondreaux, slipping him into the Admiral's office where they can be sure nobody will barge in on them. Daudell probably had the tunnel built for a similar reason, to keep his private business away from a nosy wife."

  Ginny Raynham turned. "Do you suppose Lieutenant Pontefract is a spy?" she said. "My, do you suppose Master Mondreaux is?"

  "I wouldn't put it past that one," Buscaigne agreed. "There's more to him than he shows, that I'm sure of."

  Daniel got to his feet, his face carefully blank again. Ginny didn't sound as though she believed that they'd just uncovered an Alliance spy ring, but this latest unexpected information fitted very neatly with what Daniel already suspected.

  "Danny," Ginnie said with bright certainty. "You and I will go search the Wormholes right now. We'll find the entrance."

  That wasn't the best way to locate a secret entrance to the mansion, but of course the girl didn't really believe there was any such thing. It was a perfectly satisfactory way to get her and Daniel out of Lady Raynham's sight, however.

  "Really, Geneva," her mother said. "I don't think you should be tramping through the muddy forest. Why—"

  "We owe it to the Republic, Mother!" Ginnie said. "Danny, are you coming? We'll take the tarpaulin from the car in case we need to rest."

  "Yes, let them go, Celia darling," Buscaigne said in a soothing voice. "This is a romantic setting, do you not think, my dear?"

  That was rather stretching it, Daniel thought as he let the girl hustle him toward the Gallery's entrance. Still, he appreciated what Buscaigne was trying to do—obviously on his own account, but nonetheless helpful to Daniel's short-term interests.

  He very much wanted to discuss his suspicions with Adele, but that could wait an hour or two. And after all, maybe he and Ginnie would find a back entrance to the Admiral's Mansion.

  That wasn't the first thing on his agenda, though. Nor on Ginnie's, he hoped and believed.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sinmary Port on Nikitin

  Daniel, whistling "What Do You Do With a Drunken Spacer," walked into the Battle Direction Center. The hatch was open. The tech on guard nodded when she saw who was coming down the corridor and went back to her conversation with the trainee who had the signals watch.

  Those two and Adele were the only people in the BDC at the moment. Adele was off duty, but Daniel hadn't been surprised when she'd told him by radio where she was. She didn't look up when he entered, but at least she didn't jump when he said, "It's a pleasant evening, Officer Mundy. Come watch the sunset with me from the outer hull, if
you will."

  When Adele turned, Daniel held up a pair of magnetic boots—the light variety for use with an air suit, not rigger's boots which weighed five pounds apiece. "I brought these in case you'd like to slip them on."

  "More than I'd like to slide off the hull into the sea," Adele said dryly as she drew the boots on over her deck shoes. "I'm able to swim, but it'd make conversation difficult."

  The starboard hatch in the corridor just outside the BDC was wide open. If Daniel had been on his own, he'd have pulled gloves on and swarmed up the line that'd been fixed to a bollard below the hatch, but the ladder welded to the spherical hull was a perfectly good alternative.

  Well, maybe it was. "Ah, Adele?" Daniel said, gesturing through the hatch. "Will you be able to, ah, use the ladder?"

  "Yes," Adele said. She stepped onto the hatch coaming, gripped a stringer with one hand, then lurched onto the ladder. "And very shortly we'll know whether I was able to use it successfully."

  Daniel smiled faintly as he followed his friend up the ladder. Adele was in good shape and as physically adept as the next person—so long as there was gravity. By this point he doubted she'd ever learn to move like a spacer in freefall.

  Except if she had to shoot something. That she'd been able to do any time she'd needed to.

  Because the ladder curved from vertical to horizontal, Daniel'd normally have walked upright on the rungs without using his hands. That might've looked like he was mocking Adele, plodding along with all four limbs, though he was sure it wouldn't have bothered her. Even so, it hurt him to follow her as though he hadn't been trained to run the yards in the Matrix the way the riggers did—fast rather than safely, because when all Hell was breaking loose there was no safety except through speed.

  He hoped Woetjans and the other senior riggers weren't watching. He'd be a joke from here to Cinnabar if they were.

  Adele reached the platform at the base of the dorsal mast and stood up. "Here?" she said to Daniel.

  He looked around. A party of riggers was working on Antenna Port C, one of those which'd repeatedly failed to extend properly during the voyage from Cinnabar. They were well out of earshot, and nobody else was on the tender's hull.