by David Drake
In fact the Kiesche looked dumpy to Daniel also, just as she would to anyone used to the slender lines of warships. Warships didn’t carry cargo, and short, fat cylinders provided much greater interior volume than long, thin ones.
“Given your record of success…,” Adele said. She was working on something with her personal data unit; she didn’t look up. “I can’t imagine anyone objecting to your choice of a ship. I don’t object.”
Daniel wondered what Adele’s personal opinion of the Kiesche—or of the Princess Cecile—was, or if she even had one. Most people thought of familiar machines in human terms, as though they had will or even personalities. Adele didn’t appear to do that.
“Are your quarters satisfactory?” Daniel said. “I’m asking because you wouldn’t complain if there was something wrong.”
“Quite satisfactory,” Adele said. Her control wands moved and paused, adjusting the data on the holographic screen before her. “I have a bed, which converts rather neatly into a chair and desk. Further I think it is very unlikely that it will rain aboard the Kiesche, as it did a number of times during the period when I often slept in culverts.”
“The reaction mass piping doesn’t pass near the bridge quarters,” Daniel said. “I suppose it’s possible that the bunks I’ve added in the cargo hold might be flooded, but your rank hath its privileges. Cramped though those privileges might be.”
There were four curtained bunk alcoves—calling them cabins would have been silly—in the bridge compartment. Daniel had allotted them to himself; Vesey, the First Mate; Cory, the Second Mate; and Adele. Cory had offered his alcove to Pasternak, who had accepted it gladly.
The off-duty crew was intended to bunk in the triple stacks against the port and starboard outer bulkhead at the rear of the compartment. Because the Kiesche was heavily over-crewed on this voyage, Daniel had added additional accommodation in the hold. Their cargo of carbines and automatic impellers would probably be valuable to the Transformationists, but it was primarily aboard to conceal the real purpose of the voyage. The crates didn’t begin to fill the available volume.
Daniel wondered what Adele was working on. It might not directly bear on the voyage, but he had come to accept her belief that there was no useless information. At least not if you had a librarian as skilled as Adele Mundy to sift the data when need arose.
“Send the next load!” Pasternak shouted from the main hatch.
“Last load!” the straw boss from the shipyard bellowed back. He and his team of three began shifting crates of weapons from the second lowboy to the conveyor which in turn rumbled the cases toward the Kiesche’s hatch.
Pasternak, as Chief of Ship, was responsible for striking the cargo away in the hold, though most of the involved personnel were riggers, Woetjans herself among them. Vesey was at the command console for the present, though Daniel planned to take the Kiesche up to get the feel of his new vessel.
“Loading should be complete in three hours,” Daniel said, his eyes on the ship. “If Cleveland is aboard by then, I intend to lift off as soon thereafter as I can.”
The Dorsal A antenna was extended as usual in harbor to provide a vantage point, but it should take only minutes to lower it and lock it into its cradle. There was a panoramic camera at the masthead, courtesy of Adele’s other employers. The installation probably made the Kiesche unique among tramp freighters, but no one would examine the ship carefully enough to notice unless they were already very suspicious.
“He and Lieutenant Cory have left Cleveland House,” Adele said. “The tram system estimates they should arrive—”
Her wands twitched the air.
“—within two minutes.”
“You’re in touch with Cory?” Daniel said, hoping that he kept irritation out of his tone. He had sent Cory and Hale to meet their passenger and accompany him back to the shipyard.
He had sent Hogg as well, rather than a husky spacer or two. Hogg wasn’t polished, but he was used to operating in urbane society. Generally that involved keeping his mouth shut and being ignored; a husky countryman who happened to be travelling in the same tramcar as two young gentlemen and a lady of the same class.
“No,” said Adele. She must have heard something in his voice, because she turned to face him for the first time since she had sat down on the lowboy. “Tovera asked if she might go with Cory and Hale. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have left me alone, but she seemed to think I would be safe enough so long as I didn’t leave the shipyard.”
“I see,” said Daniel. “Ah, I apologize for, well, for being surprised.”
He thought Adele smiled as she returned to her display, but he wasn’t sure. Even if she were smiling, he might have read the expression in her eyes rather than on her tight lips.
“I didn’t specifically thank you for disobeying me last night,” Daniel said, though that was overstating his request to Adele before he went to snatch Cleveland back. “Ah, and Tovera was very well behaved, which I noticed.”
“I’ve never known Tovera to disobey any direction I gave her,” Adele said in the direction of her display. “She doesn’t expect to understand all of them—and of course, she often doesn’t. She simply accepts my decisions and carries them out to the best of her ability.”
“That’s quite a…responsibility,” Daniel said. He had to raise his voice. The crates holding the automatic impellers were moving up the conveyor; their steel straps clacked like gunfire on the rollers.
Adele looked toward him again. For an instant, there was nothing at all in her face, but he had the impression that her eyes were on things in the distant past.
“Daniel,” she said, “it’s exactly the same responsibility as I carry for the pistol in my pocket. Neither one in their association with me has ever killed anyone without my direction.”
“Right,” Daniel said, looking away. He was watching his crew slide the cargo aboard and stow it in the stern hold, but that was simply an excuse.
Missiles launched at Daniel’s command had almost certainly killed more people than his friend had with her pistol, but Daniel hadn’t been watching his victim’s faces when they died. Scores of times, hundreds of times; sometimes so close that their blood splashed back in a red shower.
“Daniel?” Adele said to his profile. He turned back toward her in surprise. “How do you to take your leave from Miranda?”
“We, ah, did that last night,” he said awkwardly. “Well, this morning at the townhouse. I think it’s easier on her if she doesn’t come to the harbor, you see.”
Adele nodded. “Miranda asked me to tell you at a suitable time that she disagrees with you there,” she said. “The decision is yours, of course. But you have nothing really to do for the next two hours, and your fiancée is waiting in Mon’s office.”
“What?” Daniel said, looking up at the bank of windows.
Adele went back to her data unit. She didn’t respond, because there was nothing really to respond to.
“Right,” said Daniel. “I am captain of the Kiesche, and I make the decisions on anything to do with the ship and its crew.”
He rose to his feet. “If you will, Officer Mundy,” Daniel said, “inform Lieutenant Vesey that I’ll be back in two hours. Until then she is to do whatever she feels is necessary to prepare the Kiesche for immediate departure.”
Daniel strode toward the main building. Rikard Cleveland had just entered the shipyard with his escort. Daniel waved, but that was nothing the Kiesche’s captain need concern himself with either.
Not for two hours, at least.
***
The roar of ions quenching in the water of the slip seemed louder than Adele, on the bunk in her alcove, was used to. She supposed that was because the freighter’s hull and frames were much thinner than those of the Princess Cecile.
The Kiesche’s four thrusters were arranged in a diamond pattern instead of side-by-side pairs like those of most starships. Pasternak was running up the bow and stern units together, checking flow and s
eeing that the Stellite petals of the nozzles moved smoothly when bathed in plasma.
Adele wondered what the advantage of the arrangement was. The answer was probably “none,” given that it was so uncommon.
She wore an RCN commo helmet for its sound-cancelling effect. Rather than view data on the face-shield as most spacers did, though, she linked her personal data unit to the console as she would have done on the Sissie. On a warship she would have been at a console with its own sound-cancelling system.
Checking the ship’s internal networks by habit, Adele noticed that Cleveland was netted in. Someone had given him a commo helmet, though he probably didn’t know how to use it.
Cleveland lay on a bunk in the bridge compartment by his own choice. Daniel had offered him an alcove, but the youth had said that he didn’t want to be given any mark of honor. Being treated as a common spacer would be part of his penance for his past behavior.
Adele’s smile would have been visible if anyone had been looking at her, which of course they weren’t as the Kiesche prepared for liftoff. People who spoke of penance and divine retribution believed in an ordered universe.
Adele’s sister Agatha was eight years old when she was killed and her head displayed on Speaker’s Rock. The sergeants who stabbed the little girl to death believed they were acting according to the terms of the Proscriptions which followed the Three Circles Conspiracy.
They weren’t: the Proscriptions applied only to adult members of the families involved, the Mundys included, but it wasn’t a time when legal details were getting much attention.
The killers certainly didn’t think they were instruments of divine balance. They were emblems of the universe in which Adele lived.
Still, if Rikard Cleveland wanted to believe that by punishing himself he approached oneness with his universe, so be it. He wasn’t hurting anyone else; and he certainly wasn’t hurting innocent eight-year-old girls.
Adele had been going over the Fleet Handbook for the Ribbon Stars, the Alliance equivalent of the Sailing Directions issued for each region by Navy House. Because Alliance influence in the Ribbon Stars had been great even before Pantellaria’s temporary annexation, the Handbook was generally more detailed than corresponding Cinnabar information. Comparison of the two was therefore worthwhile—to the degree than any human activity was worthwhile.
Most people wouldn’t have added the final proviso. Adele did.
On the other hand, she wasn’t going to learn anything from the Handbook which would cause her to interrupt Daniel and the Kiesche’s crew in their lift-off preparations. For no better reason than her paired thoughts—that Cleveland looked lost, and that he would not have killed a young girl—Adele opened a two-way link to his helmet.
Those were good reasons, after all. “Master Cleveland?” she said. “If the equipment is in proper order, we will probably lift off within the next half hour.”
“Who?” said Cleveland. He sat up so abruptly that he bumped his helmet on the bunk above his.
Adele had an inset of the boy’s face in a corner of her screen, using imagery from the recording unit in the compartment ceiling. She thought of cutting her image onto his display, but there didn’t seem to her to be any advantage in that. Instead she said, “I’m Adele Mundy. I don’t have any duties at present, and I thought I would offer you, well, companionship. I’m not a spacer, but I have a good deal of experience by now on vessels as small as this.”
The Kiesche was close to the same displacement as the Princess Cecile, though the latter—though any warship—was more sophisticated. Besides, Adele knew Daniel’s routines.
“I see,” said Cleveland, lying back again. He was frowning over a thought.
The thrusters idled down to a hiss. The port and starboard pair lighted in their place, their roar and vibration sharpened as Pasternak sphinctered the nozzles. Even at low output, the Kiesche rocked fore and aft as though balanced on a teeter-totter.
“Lady Mundy,” Cleveland said. “On the ship which brought me from Karst to Cinnabar, I asked if I might go out on the hull while the ship was in the Matrix. Have you ever done that?”
“Yes,” said Adele. She didn’t amplify the bare statement. The only privacy she and Daniel had for discussions out of the crew’s hearing was on the hull. “If you wish, you’ll be able to do that on this voyage as well.”
“I don’t,” Cleveland said. “I thought that being in the Matrix, and seeing the whole Cosmos arrayed about me, would be similar to the feeling I get in the Chapel in Pearl Valley. There I know that God is real and that all humanity, not just me and fellow Transformationists, are one with Him. It’s a wonderful realization. It’s transforming, in fact.”
Adele heard the smile in his voice. Her initial information about Cleveland had come from his mother and stepfather. The boy himself had said that he was a different person than the one his parents had known…and Adele was beginning to believe that he might have been telling the truth.
“Was it the same experience?” she asked. Cleveland seemed to have drifted into a reverie.
“Unfortunately, it was not,” Cleveland said. “God was there, certainly. But I felt utterly alone—lost to life and to my fellows. I entered the airlock and hid there until one of the crewmen noticed me, because I didn’t know how to work the mechanism. The crewman took me back within the ship’s hull, where it was a little better. I haven’t completely recovered yet. I’m not sure I ever will.”
Adele considered how to reply. “Captain Leary describes his feeling in the Matrix in religious terms,” she said at last. “He speaks of the Cosmos as having existence rather than anything to do with humanity. It will be interesting to see how he feels in your chapel.”
“Lady Mundy?” Cleveland said. “How did the Matrix affect you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Adele shrugged, which of course the boy couldn’t see. “I’m not religious,” she said. “I see colored lights, but nothing more. It reminded me of the holographic display of a computer on stand-by.”
She sniffed. The sound would have been laughter in another person.
“The difference is that I could have tuned the computer display,” Adele said. “I think that decoding the cosmos is beyond me.”
“Six to ship!” Daniel’s voice boomed in the helmets and compartment loudspeakers. “Prepare for lift-off in thirty, that’s three-zero, seconds! Six out.”
The thrusters built to full power, roaring like hungry monsters. Adele leaned back on her bunk and waited for the by-now familiar acceleration.
CHAPTER 10
Corcyra System
The Kiesche hung three light minutes from Corcyra. The tramp’s upgraded sensor suite gave Daniel an excellent view of the planet, but Pantellarian vessels on patrol would be very unlikely to observe the newcomer.
Daniel had the highest regard for Pantellarian optics, which were as good as or better than anything produced on Cinnabar. He had less regard for the crews of Pantellarian destroyers like those sent to Corcyra. Even first-rate personnel would have difficulty scanning a three-light-minute sphere without specialized equipment like that which Adele’s other employers had provided the Kiesche.
“Officer Mundy…?” Daniel said on the general push. On a vessel with a larger or less select crew, he might have used the command channel or even a two-way link, but whenever possible he liked to give his people as much information as there was. “I’m not seeing anything in orbit over the planet. Are you, over?”
“No,” said Adele. “And we have enough data that a ship hidden in the planet’s shadow would have emerged by now, regardless of its orbital period.”
She forgot to say “over” when she ended her reply. Daniel smiled: Adele normally forgot.
“Cleveland?” Daniel said. “Did you hear any discussion about Pantellarian patrolling practices before you lifted from Corcyra? I assume you were aboard a blockade runner, over.”
“Well, there wasn’t really a blockade, Captain Leary,” Cleveland sai
d. “Ships land at Brotherhood daily or thereabouts to load copper ingots. I bought passage on one that was bound for Karst, the Evelyn. The captain said the Pantellarians—actually, he said the Spigotties—don’t patrol because they’re afraid that an Alliance squadron will sweep up anything in orbit. While they’re in port in Hablinger, they’re protected by anti-ship missiles.”
Daniel smiled, though no one looking at him would have seen any humor in it. As much as Daniel hated anything it was lazy incompetence; even in a enemy.
The Kiesche was in freefall. High Drive emissions could have been detected much more easily than the ship itself. Under the circumstances, Daniel thought about bringing them up to 1g with the High Drives and thumbing his nose at the enemy…but that would be pointless.
“I’m sure that was what the Pantellarian commodore told Governor Arnaud…,” he said.
“The admiral,” Adele said, correcting him. “Admiral Stanzi.”
“The admiral told Arnaud, then,” Daniel said. “I don’t think he really believes the Alliance would break the present truce with the Republic in order to help a motley crowd of miners on a piss-pot colony. I do think that Stanzi and his crews, particularly his officers, aren’t up to the drudgery of a blockade. Pantellarians aren’t cowards, by and large, but they do tend to be lazy scuts, over.”
“Sir,” said Cory. “Not to take the enemy’s side, but it would be very difficult to run down blockade runners with destroyers. Unless you were going to shoot on sighting, maybe, but there’s regular trade with Corcyra, with Hablinger, I mean. Over.”
“Five to ship…,” Vesey said. She was opposite Daniel on the command console at present as the senior fighting officer under the captain. When the Kiesche had reached Corcyra orbit and Daniel was sure that they weren’t going to be fighting or fleeing in the next few minutes, Adele would trade places with Vesey. “Chasing blockade runners would improve the skills of the crews. Which drinking in dockside taverns, as I presume they’re doing while in port at Hablinger, will not do. Over.”
