by David Drake
She slid down the inside onto a firing step; she would have plunged another several feet to the ground if the Pantellarian captain hadn’t caught her arm. Hogg mounted the wall behind her, using the butt of the shotgun as a pole to brace himself. He looked clumsy, but Adele noticed that the weapon’s muzzle never pointed at his body.
“I swear we’d be better off not to have recruited these rubes!” Adele said to Danes. He was a short man with sad eyes; his name ribbon was unreadable for mud and fading. “We’d be better off never to have come to this filthy place. Let the grubbers have it!”
“You won’t get an argument from me,” the captain said. “Do you want a guide to Point Three? Though I warn you, you’d be better off going back into Hablinger and taking the axial road out.”
“I’m going into Hablinger,” Adele snapped. “And if Arnaud wants to send somebody out again, he can wake up Kaspary! I’m going to take a shower.”
“Perone…,” the captain said to one of the half dozen soldiers standing nearby. “Guide the major to the gate and make sure she gets through.”
To Adele he added, “You won’t have any trouble following the road, though there’s a couple places where the mud’s over the flooring.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Adele said. “Come along, Hogg. I’m going to see if the Commissioner can’t find a more suitable task for you. Like becoming a piling!”
She and Hogg followed the slack-jawed Perone across the interior of the strongpoint. Tent ropes and piled equipment encroached on the path.
So far, so good.
***
Daniel lay near the listening post, beside the line by which Tovera was approaching. He was in a reverie of the sort familiar from his childhood, when he used to lie in the woods of Bantry and become part of the night.
It was a different experience from hunting, though an outsider wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the two. When Daniel hunted, his stillness was that of a coiled spring—a preliminary to action. Now he was a pool of water which simply exists and absorbs.
A many-legged lizard scuttled over Daniel’s right glove without noticing that he was any different from the matted rice stems and weeds on which he lay. Several of the tiny feet touched his bare index finger, light as so many hairs; the fingertip rested on the trigger of his impeller.
Tovera crawled past, focused on the listening post. In normal human terms she was very quiet. As she reached the lip of the LP Daniel whispered, “All clear.”
Tovera paused, then very slowly turned her head. She was staring down the muzzle of the impeller which until then had been aimed at the back of her skull. After a few heartbeats of consideration, she giggled. The sound was that of a peevish insect.
Daniel twitched his impeller slightly to the side. “You’re in my country now,” he said.
“Yes,” said Tovera. “I appreciate what that means, now.”
“The two locals are tied up in the LP,” Daniel said. “We can talk quietly out here, if you wish.”
He didn’t know what Tovera wished, what Tovera thought; what Tovera felt, if she felt anything. The only thing he was sure about Tovera was that he couldn’t fathom her mental processes. Well, that and the fact that she would probably hit whatever she shot at.
“I decided to come forward,” she said. “We hadn’t arranged for that, so I decided to come quietly so that you wouldn’t hear a rustle and shoot at the sound.”
Daniel smiled, though his mask hid the expression. “I wouldn’t have shot because I heard a sound,” he said.
“No,” said Tovera. “You wouldn’t.”
She licked her thin lips and said, “Hogg told me you were a decent woodsman. I didn’t have a context for what he said. I do now.”
“Hogg is better,” Daniel said. “Much better. Adele is in good hands.”
A webbed treemouse clicked nearby, but only once. It was part of Corcyra’s natural world.
“What would you do,” Tovera said, “if the mistress was killed in Hablinger?”
Daniel considered the question. He didn’t say that he hoped that wouldn’t happen, because Tovera knew that. Everyone knew that.
“I would gather data,” he said. “And then I would respond appropriately.”
He wasn’t avoiding the question. He was giving the most truthful answer he could. Daniel didn’t have enough information to precisely predict his reaction.
Tovera nodded. “I’d go in there,” she said, making a tiny gesture toward the Pantellarian camp by crooking her left index finger. “And I’d kill everyone I saw. I would keep killing them until they killed me. There wouldn’t be a place for me in the universe without Lady Mundy.”
She could have been reading a grocery list for the sign of anything more serious in her voice. The words were all the more terrible for the lack of emotion or emphasis in her tone.
Again, Daniel thought. Then he said, “I’d give you a home if anything happened to Adele. For her sake, of course; but your services to me and to the RCN have earned you that consideration.”
Tovera giggled again. “You think I’m a dangerous insect,” she said.
Daniel patted his impeller’s receiver with the pad of his right index finger. “I think this is dangerous,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to randomly kill me or mine, and I don’t think you would either.”
He didn’t address the “insect” comment. He wasn’t going to tell Tovera a lie; especially not an obvious lie.
“Thank you,” Tovera said. “Lady Mundy has taught me to thank people who offer me help. But all the same, I think I’d try to kill everyone in Hablinger.”
Daniel considered the situation. “I think…,” he said slowly. “I think that after I’ve gathered data…I might very well decide to join you.”
Something clicked in the night. It was just a treemouse.
***
“When we go around this corner…,” Hogg said, swinging his shotgun butt forward to indicate the angle in the communication trench. “There’s the gate. And we’ll be looking down the muzzle of an automatic impeller.”
He spat and added, “Mind, with this lot I’m not saying that anybody’ll be manning the gun.”
Adele stepped past him and paused, just out of sight of the entrance to the Pantellarian base. “Phlegrya!” she called. “Phlegrya! Major Tillingast returning from reconnaissance!”
“Solfatara,” a youthful male voice replied, giving the response after a noticeable delay. “Come forward, Tillingast.”
Adele walked briskly around the angle. As satellite imagery had shown, the trench mouth was blocked not by a gate but rather by three baffles welded from braced rectangles of pipe. Barbed wire wrapped the barriers. Anyone entering the camp would have to step around them under the muzzle of an automatic weapon, just as Hogg had said.
The man who had called was in the gunpit with the impeller’s crew. He wore goggles which, Pantellarian optics being what they were, were probably as good as RCN issue. An identical pair rested on Adele’s forehead, but she hadn’t brought them down lest the gunner’s finger twitch when a masked figure approached. She scarcely needed light amplification to follow the trench, and the lack of depth perception meant that goggles wouldn’t help to judge how deep the potholes were.
Some of the potholes were knee-deep. She had proven that by experience.
“Ah, sir?” the young officer said. “We weren’t told to expect any scouts tonight?”
“I’m not a bloody scout,” Adele said as she walked—slogged; her boots were caked with mud—toward and past the gunpit. “I’m on Commissioner Arnaud’s staff, and this local moron—” she glared at Hogg “—has taken me on a tour of every mudhole on this bloody planet!”
Hogg stood blank-faced, chewing on his rice stem. He looked as though he could be on the other side of the planet for all the attention he paid the people around him.
Adele breathed hard and her thighs ached. The trench had risen steadily from the strongpoint to
the outer edge of Hablinger. Some of the elevation came by ramps, but steps had been cut at many points in the zigzag course. Ordinarily climbing stairs didn’t bother Adele, but at present the layers of mud trebled the weight of her boots.
“Ah, should we report your arrival, Major?” the Pantellarian officer called as Adele and Hogg walked toward the city park where Arnaud’s headquarters was supposed to be.
“Do as you please!” Adele said without turning her head. “I’m not going to report until I’ve gotten a bath and some sleep. There’s nothing to report, it was just numbskulls shooting at shadows!”
If the fellow did try to call back on the post’s landline, the headquarters commo computer would dump the message into a suspense file accessible only by the off-planet Major Tillingast. They might try radio after the landline failed, but at this hour of the night the worst result would be confusion left for an officer to puzzle out in the morning.
When Adele and Hogg were behind the first line of tenements and out of sight of the guard post, Hogg said, “Let me get the big chunks off your boots, mistress.”
He snicked open his knife and used the back of the blade to shave mud from the boots. The false edge was sharpened, but Adele never felt the tug of steel on the leather.
Great chunks fell off. As though he were skinning me, Adele thought. The thought made her smile.
“How do you figure to get in to see Arnaud?” Hogg said without looking up from his task. “He’ll have guards, and there’s a company at least billeted in the park with his trailer. I looked at the satellite stuff.”
“The same way we got this far,” Adele said. “I’ll claim to be an officer whom Arnaud had summoned from Point Three to see what was going on.”
“That’s a way,” Hogg said. Adele realized that he was deliberately avoiding eye contact while he disagreed with her. “Another way would be if something happened to get all the wogs running around while you waltzed into the tailer and nobody noticed you.”
If the diversion doesn’t work, I can still try to bluff, Adele thought expressionlessly. Aloud she said, “All right, Hogg. What do you want me to do?”
“Just go on like you’re planning to do,” he said, straightening and wiping the knife before he put it away. He grinned. “I don’t figure anybody’ll notice us while we walk through the camp. You go up to the squad on guard and start talking to them like it’s where you’re supposed to be. When something pops, just wait and duck in the door of the trailer.”
Adele smiled faintly. It’s none of my business what he plans to do, so I won’t waste time by asking him.
“All right,” she repeated. “That’s the park in the block ahead, I believe.”
The park was covered with tents in good order. The side-ropes interlocked, but there were proper aisles at the front and back of each row. Adele saw a few stumps; the trees had probably been cut down for firewood.
At least a score of men sat outside their tents, talking and smoking a drug of some sort. When they noticed that Adele wore an officer’s uniform they generally made a vague effort to cup their short pipes in the hollow of their hands, thus concealing them. Adele ignored the soldiers, as they clearly expected her to do.
The squad on guard in front of Arnaud’s small trailer was commanded by a non-com. An air conditioner whirred from the back of the trailer; curtains were drawn over the pair of windows flanking the door.
The guards didn’t notice Adele until she was well into the three-meter space left clear around the trailer. Even then their only concern appeared to be that the strange officer would start shouting orders.
“Commissioner Arnaud ordered me to report immediately about the attack on Point Three,” Adele said briskly. “He’s expecting—”
There was a hollow Boom! Adele jerked her head around. A roof of structural plastic flapped into the air. Several of the guards threw themselves on the ground, and there was confused babble from them and the camp generally.
The effluvium of half-rotted human excrement reached the trailer, making Adele’s eyes water. No one was watching her. She turned the latch and stepped into Arnaud’s trailer, closing the door after her. She switched on the lights.
The pajama-clad man stepping out of the bedroom matched the images of Arnaud in general outline, but he had aged a decade since the most recent. That one had been captured within the year. He blinked at her.
“Good evening, Commissioner Arnaud,” Adele said. “Are we alone?”
She gestured toward the door through which he’d come. She’d had no way to check as to whether he was sharing his bed with a companion—or a harem, for that matter. It didn’t matter in the longer term, since any negative consequences of their conversation getting out would be his problem.
“What? Yes, we’re alone,” Arnaud said, his voice strengthening. “Who are you and what in hell is going on?”
This half of the trailer was an office with a fully capable console and a lesser machine in what appeared to be a secretary’s alcove. The larger console wasn’t netted into the camp’s system, but Adele hoped that the data unit in her pocket was linking with it now that they were in close proximity.
“My guess as to your second question,” Adele said, “is that my colleague dropped a grenade into the camp latrine. As to your first—I’m the representative of Bantry Holdings. You sent for me.”
The chairs were of the standard office variety, as straight and stiff as those of a warship. Adele turned one to face Arnaud and sat in it, then took out her data unit and its control wands.
“I didn’t expect…,” Arnaud said. He sat in the other chair near the console, then wriggled to face her. “How did you get into the camp? I was expecting a radio message!”
Adele sniffed, her eyes on the data unit’s display. “Then you’re a fool,” she said. “Senator Leary isn’t a man who would entrust treasonous communications to a commercial code which any child with basic math could break if he spent the time.”
Arnaud frowned. With an edge in his voice he said, “Bantry Holdings used the code the past.”
“The people who used the code no longer work for Bantry Holdings,” Adele said, still without looking up. Her wands danced. “Now, stop wasting time and state your proposal.”
“All right, that’s simple enough,” Arnaud said. He was rattled by the situation, and Adele’s deliberate contempt kept him from taking charge of his emotions. “Daniel Leary is on Corcyra, Senator Leary’s son and quite a figure in his own right. I want him to announce that he’s arrived as representative of the Senate and that Cinnabar is supporting our claim, Pantellaria’s claim, to control of Corcyra under the Treaty of Amiens. He can say that a Cinnabar task force is on the way.”
“Indeed?” Adele said, meeting Arnaud’s angry glare. “Bantry Holdings rejects your proposal.”
“Do you now?” Arnaud said, leaning forward. “Well, you can just expect full particulars of Leary’s dealings with me during the war to be published—on Cinnabar as well as Pantellaria, and on Pleasaunce too just to be on the safe side!”
“Yes, that would be one way of proceeding,” Adele said. “If you’ll bring up your computer, however—”
She nodded toward the console beside her rather than gesturing because she had a wand in either hand.
“—you’ll find my counter proposal. Apart from possible benefits to Bantry Holdings and its shareholders—”
Her smile was as cold and hard as a crack in ice.
“—you’ll find it makes you a military hero as well as returning Corcyra to Pantellarian control.”
“I don’t…,” Arnaud said, but he let his voice trail off as he walked around the console and sat on its couch. The unit came up, finally giving Adele the access she needed. The series of files which she had prepared and queued now transferred automatically.
“This will allow you to capture Brotherhood, the only starport in Corcyran hands,” Adele said. “That cuts the independence movement off from their source of weapons and mon
ey.”
She felt enormous relief. No matter what happened next, she had carried out her mission for Deirdre Leary. That removed any possibility that this business would lead to a resumption of war between Cinnabar and the Alliance. There was still Mistress Sand’s concern about her son, but—
Adele’s smile was again a tiny glint in ice.
—properly that was Daniel’s mission, not her own. And in any case, one thing at a time.
“Ships don’t need a port to land at,” Arnaud said slowly. His primary attention was on the console’s display. “They don’t even need water.”
“Some ships don’t,” Adele said. “The sort of ships and crews which are willing to make smuggling runs into Corcyra need something better than dry gullies, though. When you take Brotherhood, the rebels are isolated. Furthermore, if you follow up the capture by attacking the siege lines both with your ships and on the ground, you’ll end the whole revolt.”
Arnaud shrank the holographic display so that he could look directly at Adele. She turned her head to meet his gaze.
“Brotherhood has missile batteries,” Arnaud said. Though he was trying to sound dismissive, a note of hope had crept into his voice. “This plan says I’m to hop troops from here to Brotherhood using my ships. They’ll be massacred by missiles.”
“Captain Leary’s vessel is in Brotherhood Harbor,” Adele said. “When your ships lift, the two missile batteries will become non-functional. Captain Leary won’t act until you’re actually on the way so that the Corcyrans won’t have time to recapture the batteries.”
“By heaven…,” Arnaud said. “By heaven.”
“Colonel Bourbon is in command of the independence forces again,” Adele said. She spoke without emotion; but then, she almost always spoke without emotion. “He plans to capture Hablinger by a nighttime assault before the missiles from Karst arrive. You know about the anti-ship missiles, I presume?”
“Yes,” Arnaud said bitterly. “But from my own sources on Pantellaria. The Council didn’t see fit to inform me of the approaches they’d received from Ischia.”
