by David Drake
He looked around the room, his eyes lighting last of all on Stephen Gregg. Stephen nodded acknowledgment.
"However," the commander continued in a lighter tone, "I'm not a man to overrule experts for the sake of proving my authority. If anyone questions that authority, I'll remove him as I would swat a fly; but with that understood, I will tell you here and now that Factor Ricimer can expect my fullest cooperation in the ordering of the fleet according to expert judgment. My cooperation will extend to the corridors of the palace where perhaps the recommendations of a space captain, even the greatest of space captains, haven't till now been accepted as quickly as the present crisis requires."
Bruckshaw turned and clasped Piet by both hands, raising them into the air as he looked at the assembled captains. The cheering was general and heartfelt; even, Stephen thought, the grudging nod of Captain Casson.
But would it be enough?
BETAPORT, VENUS
July 12, Year 27
1903 hours, Venus time
When the cheers died away, Piet Ricimer rang a ceramic bell shaped like a rose blooming from the end of a baton. The outer doors opened; servants hired for the purpose carried in narrow tables already set with covered dishes and an array of liquors.
"I hope you'll all be able to join me in a buffet," Piet said, "where we can discuss details informally."
The manners of men who lived no more than arm's length from their fellows during long voyages were less fastidious than those of the governor's court. Space captains began lifting lids and—especially—snatching bottles before the tables were even in place against the back wall. Members of the councilors' staffs gaped in horrified surprise, though Bruckshaw's expression was politely bland and Councilor Duneen seemed rather amused.
Stephen wanted a drink, but not particularly in this company. As he considered alternatives, Jeremy Moore walked over to him and said, "I was thinking of taking a turn down Dock Street for old times' sake, Stephen. Care to come?"
Stephen chuckled. "With me looking like the biggest parrot on Venus, and you not exactly dressed like a sailor yourself? The mob's had its entertainment today. Why don't you and I go below, pick up a bottle in the tavern, and chat in Piet's office? It'll be empty, or we can empty it."
"You country boys," Jeremy said with a smile that shimmered over tension. He and Stephen had been shipmates on one voyage, a very long voyage. They'd gotten to know and respect one another; and between them, they'd killed more people than anyone around had time to count. "Afraid of a few people bumping you. But sure, let's do that."
Piet and Councilor Duneen had already gathered clots of people offering ideas or making requests. Stephen made a slight gesture when Piet's eye brushed him; Piet nodded minusculely. To Stephen's amusement, he noticed that Jeremy took leave of Councilor Duneen in precisely the same way.
Jeremy slipped between the servants coming up the narrow stairs before they were fully aware that he was moving past them. He'd always been good at finding paths to a destination, Jeremy had. Stephen followed swiftly, because servants flattened against the stairwell wall at his presence. They would have done the same for any guest; but perhaps without the slight glint of fear at being so close to Colonel Gregg, the killer.
They should have seen Jeremy Moore with a cutting bar on the blood-splashed bridge of the Keys to the Kingdom.
Moore was Factor of Rhadicund, a title his ancestors in direct line had held ever since the Collapse. His grandfather had sold up the small keep and moved to Ishtar City to swim—and promptly sink—in the politics of the Governor's Palace.
Jeremy had survived, barely, through his status as a gentleman, on his wizardry with electronics—and because he liked women almost as much as women liked him. He'd joined Captain Ricimer to escape what he was as well as to make himself something better.
"Better" was a word that depended on what you saw to judge; but certainly the Jeremy Moore who returned to Venus had become Councilor Duneen's top aide.
The Blue Rose was crowded with locals who elbowed sightseers hoping for another glimpse of the dignitaries meeting upstairs. Jeremy worked through them with surprisingly little contact. He'd grown up in Ishtar City's Old Town, where the corridors were rarely less crowded than this tavern at present.
"Todd, a bottle of slash," Stephen called through the clamor. His path to the bar cleared when other drinkers recognized his voice. "What would you like, Jeremy? Todd has most anything you'd care for nowadays."
The folk visiting Piet Ricimer's headquarters were a cosmopolitan lot. Todd, who sublet the Blue Rose from Piet and ran the tavern with his family, had found the profit in exotic liquors far exceeded the trouble of keeping them on hand; though for lack of storage space, tuns of beer were delivered every half hour at busy times.
"A carafe of citrus juice if you've got it," Jeremy said, "because I'm really dry. But ice water would be fine."
"Always glad to oblige a gentleman, sir," Todd said. He handed Stephen a square-faced bottle of Eryx slash and the pitcher of orange juice from the refrigerator beneath the bar. He whispered to a child, probably his granddaughter since she couldn't have been older than eight. She scuttled out of the tavern and down the corridor in search of more juice.
Jeremy opened the door to the office, what had been the tavern's private room before Piet acquired the leasehold, and bowed Stephen inside. Stephen glanced at the electronic lock and said, "Was that open?"
Jeremy displayed the little device he wore on his right index finger like a downturned ring. He grinned. "Just to keep my hand in," he said. He closed the door behind them.
Stephen set the pitcher and bottle on the black glass table in the center of the room. The bases rocked slightly because the tabletop was a sheet of obsidian left in its natural state, rather than something cast and polished in a foundry.
"So, Jeremy . . ." Stephen said as he took tumblers from the cabinet in the corner. "Will you be coming out with us this time?"
Jeremy snorted. He lifted the pitcher in his good hand and drank from the side of it. "You won't need a crippled close-combat man, Stephen," he said. "It's going to be a gunnery battle. I heard all those experienced captains say so, one after the other."
Stephen took a swig straight from the bottle of slash. The algal liquor was harsh and warming. "Yeah," he said, his voice deeper than it had been a moment earlier. "I'm worried about the same thing. Maybe they're right, though. Maybe it's just that nobody likes to believe that what he does isn't needed any more."
"What I used to do," Jeremy said softly. The juice trembled in his hand. He slurped more, then put the pitcher down.
Stephen settled himself onto a chair. Jeremy took another on the same side of the table, turning so that he faced Stephen.
"I hear it's you we have to thank for the fact Venus has a single communications net," Stephen said. "Identical codes and everything tied together. I never thought I'd live long enough to see that."
"Ninety-eight percent of Venus tied together," Jeremy said with a reminiscent smile. "You and I may not be alive by the time the rest gets linked. But it's really due to Councilor Duneen—and President Pleyal, believe it or not. We need the net for trade, but the council would have bickered till the equator froze except that the councilor convinced Governor Halys that universal communications were a defense necessity."
"I don't doubt your patron's political skill," Stephen said as he savored the cloying, half-rotted aftertaste of slash from his family's keep. "But in my own life, I haven't noticed that a job magically does itself because the man on top gives an order."
Jeremy laughed heartily. "Oh, Stephen," he said, "I've been called names the Feds never thought of! By people who thought there was money to be made and too little of it was coming their way, and by other folks who thought, quite correctly, that I was trampling the right of themselves and their community to be pointlessly unique. I don't know how many times somebody shouted, 'Moore, you don't understand!' When the problem was that I did understand, and
that absolutely nothing was going to stop me from doing what was necessary for Venus."
Stephen drank. He saw in his mind's eye the Jeremy Moore of a few years earlier, swinging a cutting bar for as long as there was an enemy standing; and when the last Fed had fallen, he'd hacked corpses in his unslaked bloodlust.
Jeremy chuckled. "Mind," he said, "there was a lot of money to be made. But not by pricks. I believe Weyston Trading was the prime contractor for the Atalanta Plains?"
"My uncle thanks you," Stephen agreed. "And I don't think my brother Augustus ever really looked up to me before he learned that the assessment on Eryx Keep had been waived because he was my relative. It's funny. I could have paid the charges easily enough, but that just would have meant I was rich. That Factor Moore had the charges waived—that made me somebody."
He drank again. The level in the bottle had gone down more than he felt as if it should have.
Jeremy stared at his fist on the table and said, very softly, "I'd rather die than wrap my hand around the grip of a cutting bar again."
He looked at his friend and went on. "How are you sleeping, Stephen?"
Stephen shrugged. "Hasn't been a lot of change there," he said with a slight smile directed at the liquor bottle. "It's not the thing I do best."
He looked up. "How about you, Jeremy?"
"Better than it was," Jeremy said. "I don't scare my wife anymore."
He forced a smile, but the expression died on the underlying tension. "It was my own fault, Stephen. I kept trying to explain things that Melinda didn't have the vocabulary to understand. She tried, she really did, but she could only hear words. They didn't mean what they did to me. To us."
Jeremy drained all the juice from the pitcher. Staring at the empty container as he set it on the table, he went on, "And I had to stop drinking. I thought it helped—and it did, it helped me sleep, you know what I mean."
Stephen nodded. His big hands were laced around the slash bottle. "More juice?" he asked. "Todd will have some by now."
"I'm all right," Jeremy said. He took a deep breath. "It helped me sleep," he went on, "but I don't have your control, Stephen. I was at a party. It was more of a family thing than politics, though of course with the councilor everything is politics. I'd had a few, no more than usual. Talk got around to our heroes out in the Reaches."
He grimaced. "I shouldn't have—you can't explain, you know that. But I said it wasn't heroes out beyond Pluto, it was nothing but blood and waste. And somebody I hadn't met. He told me I ought to keep my mouth shut. When I didn't know what I was talking about. He knew what it was like. His nephew had sailed with Captain Ricimer."
Jeremy's voice quivered. He'd pressed his palm flat against the tabletop, but his forearm trembled. "Christ, this is stupid!" he said. "No control, Stephen. No control at all."
"More control than I've got," Stephen said, laying his right hand over Jeremy's. "You got out."
"Stephen, I almost killed him," Jeremy said with his eyes bright. "It took four men to pull me off." He smiled wanly. "They say it did. God knows I don't remember."
"I decided a long time ago that there were too many fools for me to kill them all," Stephen said. "But it's a temptation, I know."
"There wasn't any problem about it," Jeremy said, his voice stronger and nearly normal again. "Turned out the fellow was a second cousin who'd barely scraped onto the guest list. He came to my office the next afternoon and apologized on his knees. He hadn't known he was speaking to the Factor of Rhadicund."
Stephen laughed with as much humor as his laugh usually held. "He wasn't speaking to the Factor of Rhadicund," he said. "He was talking to the fellow who led Piet Ricimer's boarding crew."
Stephen stood up. He looked at the bottle in his hands, then flung it with all his strength at the wall. A tile shattered, but the bottle bounced spraying liquor three times before it caught an angle wrong and disintegrated into tiny crystal shards. Good Venerian material, able to withstand enormous stresses before at last it broke.
"Christ, I'm glad you got out, Jeremy," Stephen said to the wall in a husky voice.
Jeremy was standing beside him. "I'm told you've formed a partnership with a Captain Blythe, Stephen," he said mildly.
Stephen looked at him in amazement.
"Well, my job's communications, Stephen," Jeremy said with a tinge of embarrassment. "I don't spy on my friends, but if I hear something, I . . ."
Stephen nodded and turned his head again. "She's a good person, Jeremy. Too good a person to—"
He looked at the table and didn't slam his fist against it after all. Throwing the bottle had reminded him that he didn't dare blame things outside himself for problems that were solely in his mind.
"You know what I'm like, Jeremy," he said. "It's not fair to use a decent person to keep from . . . Anyway, there's slash. Sal and I own a ship together, but there's no need for us to meet. I'd decided that before Winnipeg."
Stephen attempted a smile, decided it worked, and faced his friend again.
"Stephen," Jeremy said softly. "It's none of my business, but listen anyway. She's not a thing, she's a person. If she's willing, then don't keep away from her for her sake. That's her choice. All the liquor does is put another shovel of dirt on what's down there. There's not enough liquor in all the world to keep it down forever, so you may as well have a woman help you face it."
Jeremy laughed suddenly. He wiped his sweaty palm on a handkerchief he snaked from the opening in his jacket that held his left forearm, withered by a Federation bullet in the shoulder joint. "Women are," he said in a light tone, "one of my areas of expertise."
Stephen sighed. "Oh, I'll be all right, Jeremy," he said. "Seeing an old friend . . ."
He paused. "You give me hope, Jeremy. Maybe that's what I'm really afraid of. Hope."
"We'd best get back upstairs," Jeremy said. "Making our principals look important is part of the job too, after all."
He swallowed, touched his tongue to his lips, and said, "Stephen? Do you think Piet really will need boarding crews when the Feds come this time?"
Stephen shrugged. Jeremy gripped the bigger man's arm and turned him so that they were face to face. "Tell me. Stephen," he said.
"Not as much as Venus needs heroes on the ground here, Jeremy," Stephen said. "War's easy. You know that. Making life worth something—that's a lot harder."
Factor Moore of Rhadicund nodded and opened the door to the excited bustle of the Blue Rose Tavern.
BETAPORT, VENUS
July 19, Year 27
1351 hours, Venus time
Hergesheimer Dock was one of Betaport's oldest storage docks. The vessel nearest the entrance was dollied up for movement but the tractor operator, the ship's officers, and an official or two representing the dock were arguing beside the tractor. Everyone involved shouted at the top of his voice, but the volume drank all but a susurrus of echoes.
"There we go," Sal said. "Cradle Eight, not Cradle Three. I got out in the transfer dock when we brought her from Ishtar City, and handwriting isn't Harrigan's strong suit. The Clarence, formerly the Maid of Bellemont, formerly the Grace. Not a new ship, but I've gone up and down in her and she's well-found at the core."
Stephen crossed his hands behind the small of his back and wondered what it was he was supposed to be seeing in the utterly nondescript vessel before them. From any distance the Clarence could have passed as a twin to the Gallant Sallie.
Sal had asked Stephen to come here with her. He'd been planning to see her ever since he talked to Jeremy Moore, but he hadn't been sure how he was going to make the contact.
He didn't have a clue as to why Sal had brought him here, though.
"The main thing was that she could be had for a song," Sal continued. "The widow wasn't interested in keeping anything that reminded her of her husband—he died in a brothel, not a shipping accident—and the electronics were going to have to be replaced. That doesn't matter for our purposes, of course."
"You boug
ht her?" Stephen said, a light dawning. Sal needed a loan to—
"You bought her," Sal said crisply. "To be precise, I bought her on your behalf, using the commercial letter of credit with which you'd provided me."
Stephen grew very still. "The letter of credit was to cover trading opportunities for the Gallant Sallie at times when I was unavailable," he said without affect.
"Was it?" Sal said, her chin sticking out in determination. "That's not what the document says. You can rescind it, but the purchase transaction is valid."
"I accept that," said Stephen. He hadn't seen Sarah Blythe in person since the squadron lifted from Winnipeg. . . . "Go on."
"I have a list of captains who I think will work the Clarence for quarter shares," Sal said. "That's after you upgrade the electronics to Gallant Sallie standards, of course. They're all solid men, but I haven't discussed the matter in case you might have a personal problem with one of them."
She handed Stephen a list printed on flimsy paper. He crumpled it into his palm. "I don't have personal problems with people," he said. He smiled like black ice over lava. "Not long term."
Sal nodded, her face tightly emotionless. "Actually, I think you'll be able to hire—take as partners—all six of them before too long. There are a lot of ships like the Clarence, like the Gallant Sallie was. They need upgrades. Most people haven't appreciated that the expansion of trade going on right now makes it cost-effective to upgrade even hulls as old as these."
"Sal," Stephen said, "if I wanted to be in the shipping business, I'd be managing Weyston Trading for my uncle right now. I—"
"No!" Sal said. She turned abruptly away and wiped her eyes. "No, Stephen," she said. "Weyston Trading's an established intrasystem operation. I could run it, Tom Harrigan could run it. What Venus needs—"
