With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  He grinned at Adele and said—not using the intercom, “Communications Officer Mundy, take over and make sure we’re not getting into something we don’t expect. What we do expect is bad enough, right?”

  Adele shrugged. “So far,” she said, “it appears that it’s better to be on our side than against us.”

  She settled herself on the cupola seat. The vehicle’s extensive sensor and communications suites were arrayed in a ring attached to the hull below the cannon in the dome. Adele logged onto the Alliance military net, using the codes of a cutter hanging out of service aboard a destroyer in the Floating Harbor. As soon as she had access, she searched for any sign that the Aglaia’s officers had been moved from cells in the basement of the Elector’s Palace where she’d located them the night before.

  She smiled as she worked, her touch certain despite the unfamiliar system. Communications Officer Mundy.

  Adele Mundy. One of us.

  * * *

  “Tarnhelm, this is Mike X-ray Five Three Nine,” Adele said with the formality of a scholar reading a script. “Over.”

  She was a scholar reading a script, Daniel knew, but he controlled his desire to wince. Adele might not sound like an officer tired after a long, boring mission, but she could put on a Bryce accent that wouldn’t set off alarms the way Daniel might if it were him on the radio.

  “Go ahead Mike X-ray Five Three Niner,” the Alliance harbor control authority replied. He sounded bored, which was good.

  If the military command had gotten concerned about why its commandoes hadn’t reported back from dealing with the reported Cinnabar sailors, it might have careted the APC’s number and identification transponder with harbor control. Daniel preferred to be one of the day’s several hundred indistinguishable movements through the air about Kostroma City.

  “Mike X-ray Five Three Nine requests permission to land at Dock Twenty-Five to pick up a passenger,” Adele said. “Over.”

  She didn’t sound worried. She probably wasn’t worried, which put her one up on Daniel Leary right at this moment. But he suspected Adele couldn’t be less than precise if life depended on it.

  It did, but they’d make out one way or another. The Alliance military probably had its share of officers who always sounded like they had a broomstick up their ass.

  Daniel doubted that sort very often found themselves commanding special operations troops—or survived very long when they did—but the technician in harbor control might not even know what MX539 was. Unless he had some reason to care, the APC was merely a number and a radar track to be routed away from other numbers and radar tracks.

  It was dusk. On the horizon lights moved through the air above Kostroma City and across the water at its margins. Both the Floating Harbor and the surface harbor were much brighter than Daniel had seen them in the past. The Alliance forces had brought in additional lighting, as well as much else.

  “Roger, Mike X-ray,” the radio voice said. “You’re cleared at altitude twenty meters, vector two-three-one, I repeat two-three-one, degrees. Tarnhelm Control out.”

  Daniel had made sure the commo helmets were shut off so they wouldn’t accidentally be used. “Keep the speed down to thirty, Gambier,” he shouted toward the driver’s compartment.

  Gambier flew with his seat high to raise his head through the open hatch, but Barnes was beside him watching the instrument panel. Barnes tugged the driver’s leg and repeated the command.

  Adele looked down at Daniel. There wasn’t room for two people in the cupola ring, so he squatted beside her in the narrow passageway from the troop compartment to the driver’s compartment. “Was I all right?” she asked.

  She had been worried, she just didn’t show it. “You were fine,” Daniel said. That was true: they’d gotten clearance. This wasn’t an acting class where performances were graded on a curve. “If everything else goes as well, we’ll be back on Cinnabar before my birthday next month.”

  That was true too. If Daniel’d been asked if he thought that was a probable result, well, that would have been a different question.

  “More ships have landed,” Adele said. Unlike Gambier she preferred to view her surroundings through electronic imagery. The vehicle commander’s position had a panoramic optical display as well as a combiner screen which echoed all the driver’s gauges. “And Alliance forces seem to have taken over most of the government departments, not just traffic control.”

  Daniel nodded grimly. “Three destroyers and I count six big transports; that’s a brigade at least, with full equipment. People who ask for help from Guarantor Porra don’t realize what they’re really going to get. Though by now they ought to.”

  “Are you thinking of the Three Circles Conspiracy?” Adele asked without emotion.

  Daniel felt his stomach tighten. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”

  If he’d been thinking about what happened fifteen years ago on Cinnabar he’d have had better sense than to say anything out loud. The last thing he wanted to do was to offend the woman on whom the detachment’s survival had depended, and still depended.

  Adele sniffed. “I was thinking about it,” she said. She appeared to be observing the ships in the Floating Harbor on her display.

  Daniel cleared his throat. “Cinnabar and Kostroma are very different,” he said, because he was afraid he had to say something.

  “Yes,” said Adele. “And Corder Leary isn’t a complete fool like Walter III.”

  She shook her head and continued, “My parents were very passionate people. I’m sure passion is a useful characteristic or it wouldn’t be so general in the human population, but I’ve always thought it must get in the way of accurate assessments.”

  She met Daniel’s eyes and offered her pale excuse for a smile. “Of course, my parents had friends,” she said. “As I do not.”

  Daniel tapped her shoulder with his clenched fist. “You’ve got friends,” he said.

  And Daniel Leary had one friend more than he’d had when he arrived on Kostroma.

  * * *

  The APC’s landing skids grated minusculely as it settled to the Aglaia’s concrete dock. Adele, wearing the commando lieutenant’s uniform, reached for the hatch mechanism.

  Behind her Daniel called into the closed-up troop compartment, “Remember, nobody says a word except Ms. Mundy. Not if there’s a gun in your face!”

  Adele opened the narrow hatch beside the cupola and stepped out, remembering the Alliance officer doing the same thing the day before. She wondered if she ought to display hectoring anger as the commando had done.

  Adele smiled slightly. So long as the guards on the Aglaia’s landing stage didn’t make the correspondence perfect by throwing a grenade through the hatch.

  The ports and panels that had been open when the Aglaia was in Cinnabar hands were now clamped shut, except for the main hatch where six soldiers armed with stocked impellers waited. The guards wore tan, not camouflaged, uniforms, so they were sailors rather than soldiers, Adele supposed.

  The guards watched with interest just short of concern as Adele and the commando-uniformed Cinnabars exited one by one. Dropping the sides of the troop compartment might have looked provocative, and there was just a chance that a guard would notice that the five Cinnabars still aboard wore Kostroman naval garments.

  Adele strode across the unrailed catwalk to the landing stage. Waves lifted the ship and the pontoon in differing rhythms; when the sailors tramped onto the light-metal ramp behind her Adele’s balance problem got even worse.

  Adele kept her eyes focused on the face of the bearded petty officer commanding the guards. Her own visage was grim, perhaps a more suitable expression than she’d have been able to arrange had she not been afraid of falling into the damned ocean.

  “We’re the relief for Lieutenant Wozzeck’s platoon,” Adele said coldly as she reached the landing stage. It too rose and fell, but without the twisting vibration. Did dignitaries never fall in the water?

  “Wozzeck?” the A
lliance sailor said. He’d been born on rural Leon from his dialect; Adele’s statement puzzled him, but not her Bryce accent. “Sir, the navy took over here ten hours ago. This is the prize ship Aglaia.”

  “Of course it’s the Aglaia,” Adele snapped. “Vishnu and his Avatars! Where’s Lieutenant Wozzeck?”

  The guards looked at one another in worried puzzlement. One of them—speaking toward her petty officer, not Adele—said, “Wozzeck was watch commander on the duty sheet before Glanz took over, but that was last watch.”

  “All right, where’s your damned command post?” Adele said with an angry grimace. She slapped her left thigh to add to the effect. “I’ll try to raise somebody who can tell me what’s going on.”

  She looked over her shoulder. Daniel had reached the landing stage. The rest of the Cinnabar sailors were strung out along the walkway or still on the pontoon because Adele hadn’t left them room to go farther. They were nonchalant; probably more nonchalant than real soldiers would have been.

  “Leary,” Adele said, “you come with me. The rest of you stand easy until I get back with some information. And keep your mouths shut! This is supposed to be a nondisclosure mission.”

  “Nondisclosure mission” didn’t mean anything that Adele knew of, but she’d been in and around bureaucracies most of her life. Nobody in a large organization knew everything that was going on, and this hint of mystery gave the sailors an excuse not to betray themselves by their accents.

  The petty officer reached for the radio in a belt sheath, then quailed before Adele’s stony glare. “Nawroos, take them to the bridge,” he ordered abruptly.

  An Alliance sailor handed his impeller to one of his fellows, then crooked a finger for Adele and Daniel to follow him into the Aglaia. He led them into one of the armored staircases off the entrance lobby.

  Adele noticed that Daniel had started for the opposite set of stairs; he caught himself, she thought, before the sailor noticed. Familiarity with the Aglaia’s regulations as a Cinnabar ship had almost caused a problem.

  “The ship seems pretty big for a sixteen-strong guard detachment,” she remarked to the guide ahead of her in the echoing stairwell. “Is that enough for the job?”

  They wound past a door open to the next deck. The guide lifted his hands in unconcern. “All the Merks we captured are in Hold Two, sir,” he said. He didn’t bother to turn around, so dialect and reverberation blurred his words to the edge of understandability. “No light, no running water, and no fucking trouble for us.”

  Adele’s submachine gun hung beneath her right arm on a short-looped sling. Her hand lay on the receiver to keep the gun from swinging, but she didn’t really think of it as a weapon.

  Her weapon rode, as usual, in the left side pocket of her tunic.

  The guide stepped through the next door off the stairwell and turned left. They were in a hallway of some sort, lighted by surface-glow paneling. Daniel was a half step behind Adele, his head swiveling to observe points of distinction in what was to her a featureless landscape.

  Offices to either side of the hall had been ransacked messily; drawers had been turned over on the floor. There’d been no attempt to clean up after the search, if it was anything as formal as a search. Looting was, perhaps, more likely.

  “Hey, Lieutenant?” the guide called to the open door at the end of the hall. “Here’s some soldiers that think they’ve got the duty here. Blaney sent ’em up to you.”

  The guide waved Adele and Daniel on and headed for the stairs by which they’d come. Obviously he felt no need to get into a discussion with his commanding officer. Adele strode through the door before any of the occupants decided to come out to meet her.

  There were six tan-uniformed people inside a room with a great deal of built-in electronic equipment. None of the Alliance sailors looked particularly interested to have company. Two were playing a board game, not chess; another poured herself a cup of coffee from a carafe on a hotplate, and two watched an erotic recording on a holographic display.

  The sixth, an overweight man, put on a cap decorated with gold braid and rose from the swivel chair where he’d been sitting. The console behind him was live. It was of a standard pattern, one that Adele could operate in her sleep.

  “Yes?” the Alliance officer said. He wasn’t impolite but he wasn’t welcoming either. Adele didn’t know how their two ranks compared.

  “I need to check with my commander,” Adele said. She walked past the naval officer as though he were a doorman and sat at the console. The seat was still warm.

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” the Alliance officer asked indignantly. “You can’t just come barging in here and taking over!”

  Adele locked the console and all outgoing communications links, the matter of a few quick commands. There was no certainty of what would happen in the next minute or two, and the guards couldn’t be permitted to summon help.

  Adele swiveled the chair around. “All right,” she said to Daniel.

  Daniel looked down the corridor, then closed the door. It was a massive, armored panel and took all his weight to swing it home.

  “Hey!” said a sailor.

  The door banged against its countersunk jamb. Daniel unslung his submachine gun. “All of you against the port bulkhead,” he ordered with a nod.

  The nearest sailor flung her coffee and jumped at Daniel. He stiff-armed her away with his free hand. Adele shot the sailor in the shoulder.

  The sailor’s clavicle shattered as the pellet whacked into it. She screamed and spasmed into the wall. The Alliance officer turned as though to grab Adele, saw the pistol aimed at the bridge of his nose, and backed carefully against the wall.

  The sailors followed their officer. Two of them helped their injured fellow. She whimpered with pain, but the wound was survivable unless a bone splinter had nicked a major blood vessel.

  Adele unlocked the console while Daniel held his submachine gun on the bridge crew. When she’d finished, she stood up and said, “There. You’d better take over now.”

  “I will,” Daniel said as he traded duties with her, “but don’t sell yourself short.” He grinned. “The RCN lost a great officer when you buried yourself in a library.”

  To the ship’s public address system he went on, “Mistress Woetjans, complete the transfer of authority at the landing stage and report to the bridge with two ratings to take charge here. I’m coming to take over the remainder of the detachment.”

  Daniel looked at Adele. “Are you all right with these until Woetjans gets here?” he said, nodding toward the prisoners. “I want to release our people below right away.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Adele. The captured sailors were looking at her. “There’s only six of them, after all, and I’ve got nineteen more rounds in my pistol magazine.”

  She smiled without humor, wondering which of these faces might be staring at her in dreams for the rest of her life. Probably none of them, because they seemed to be very frightened of her.

  That meant they understood.

  * * *

  As Daniel led ten “Alliance commandoes” down the passageway toward Hold 2, he felt the Aglaia quiver in a sequence of constantly changing harmonics. Since her capture, the Aglaia had been shut down except for the minimal systems required by the guard detachment. Woetjans was bringing the ship to life again.

  Hold 2 held bulk consumables when the ship was fully loaded. The voyage from Cinnabar had run the stocks down, and the quantities remaining had been off-loaded on landing to be surveyed and replaced if they’d deteriorated. The RCN didn’t feed its crews spoiled food, and if corners ever had to be cut it wouldn’t be on a communications vessel like the Aglaia.

  Four Alliance ratings were on guard at the inner hatch. The hold opened on the hull side also, but at the moment the exterior hatch was under twenty feet of salt water. Hold 2 made an excellent prison, if you didn’t care about the conditions of the captives within.

  The guards had gotten up from their card t
able when they heard Daniel’s detachment approaching. They were chewing kift, a plant native to Pleasaunce with a mildly narcotic effect on humans. When the stalks were reduced to a tangle of soggy fibers, the guards spat them onto the deck and bulkheads to cling and dry.

  “Yeah?” said one of the guards. Impellers leaned against the bulkhead nearby, but the guards didn’t even glance toward their weapons.

  Lamsoe pointed his submachine gun at the guards. “One move and you’re all dead,” he snarled. “I wouldn’t half mind splashing your guts across the passage after the mess you’ve been making down here!”

  “Too fucking right!” Sun agreed. The whole detachment had leveled their weapons. The Alliance ratings couldn’t have been more surprised if an archangel had materialized before them.

  “Let’s nobody get excited, shall we?” said Hogg. Unlike the naval personnel, his master included, he wasn’t horrified by the filthy sty into which the guards had transformed the Aglaia. “If people start shooting, the ricochets gotta go somewhere.”

  Hogg gestured the Alliance ratings toward the end of the corridor with the coil of cargo tape he’d brought to secure them. “Sit down and hold your hands out, you dumb bastards, and you’ll live through the day, all right?”

  As the guards obeyed, Daniel examined the hatch mechanism. The hold could be padlocked, but only a simple rod now blocked the system. Daniel tossed that to the deck and activated the power latch, then backed out of the way.

  “All right, Cinnabars,” he called to the fetid darkness within Hold 2. “You’re free now. Come out without noise or jostling. I want the senior officer to report to me immediately.”

  “It’s Mr. Leary!” a rating called in delighted wonder. Daniel permitted himself the shadow of a smile, despite the tension and his anger at the stench in which his shipmates had been confined.

  Discipline held. The first person through the open hatch was Domenico, the bosun. He braced to attention and saluted—an admiral’s inspection salute, not the forehead tap of a fighting ship on service. “Sir!” he said.