by David Drake
“Just before I called you,” Sand continued, “a pair of porters arrived with a handcart and a note from Rikard saying that he was moving out. I was to give his luggage to the porters. There was only the little he’d brought from Corcyra and a few suits that I’d bought him to make him presentable while he was here in Xenos.”
“The note was in your son’s writing?” Adele said. Tovera had appeared in the doorway, silent and emotionless. She had listening devices all over Chatsworth Minor.
“Yes,” said Sand. “When asked in the correct fashion, the porters said that they were to take the luggage to the Dancing Girl, which I gather is a tavern. Money was a sufficient inducement. I sent them off with the luggage.”
“All right,” said Adele. She was looking at the address of the Dancing Girl, an establishment near Portinga Harbor. There was no imagery available, which irritated her but wouldn’t really matter. “I’ll discuss this with my colleagues and we’ll deal with it.”
She thought for a further eyeblink, too swiftly for the hesitation to register with the other party. “Mistress Sand,” she said. “Keep your people clear of the area. They would complicate matters. Good day.”
“Six and Hogg are packing in his suite,” Tovera said quietly. “Miranda is there, because they’re going out tonight.”
As Adele passed her on the way out the door, Tovera smiled and said, “I suppose we’re going out, too.”
Adele shrugged. Dockside taverns were out of her range of experience. Daniel would make the decisions this time.
His door opened off the next landing down. She rapped on the panel and said, “Daniel? A word.”
The door whipped open. “Come in,” said Daniel, wearing his Grays. Both couches in the sitting room were covered with clothing. “Can you convince Hogg that I won’t need my Dress Whites on a voyage to Corcyra?”
Miranda, wearing an attractive suit of pink and gray, sat on a chair. In her lap was a cape, gray on the outside with a pink lining. She was dressed for any gathering short of a dress ball, and her vivacity would probably carry her through even that. She smiled pleasantly at Adele.
Whereas Daniel’s servant had a truculent look. He stood arms akimbo with his fists clenched on his hips.
“No,” said Adele, “I can’t. Though of course you’re right.”
As she spoke, she realized that the question had been meant rhetorically. When Adele’s mind was on other things, she had a tendency to deal with statements at face value. Her mind was usually on other things.
“Cleveland went to see Captain Sorley in the Dancing Girl at Portinga Harbor,” Adele said. She realized that Daniel had held his tongue for her, waiting for her to explain her visit now that he’d seen her expression. “He’s just sent for his luggage. A handwritten note.”
“Everything in that part of town is a dive,” Hogg said, his expression changing subtly.
“I think I may have been there …” Daniel said, his eyes focused on things beyond the present room. “In my second year, with Fessenden, because his brother-in-law was a ship’s captain and we hoped to touch him for a loan.”
The lines of his face sharpened. “Which we did, enough to get extremely drunk on, at least,” he said. “Adele, how recently did this happen?”
“Cleveland has been gone for over two hours,” she said. “The porters to take the luggage just left Cleveland House.”
“Right, what I hoped,” said Daniel, nodding. “Hogg, you and I will fetch the boy immediately. I’ll wear these—”
He pinched the seam of his Grays. They were a new set, a proper male counterpart to Miranda’s suit.
“—to show Sorley that he’s dealing with gentlemen, not dockside trash who can be shanghaied without repercussions. The sooner the better, I think; before they settle down.”
“I’ll come along,” said Adele. She patted the closure over the data unit in her pocket. “It will be a new experience.”
Hogg and Daniel traded looks. “Ah, Adele?” Daniel said. “I’d really rather you not. I don’t expect trouble—Hogg and I will go in and come back with the boy before Sorley knows what’s happening. And I know that the Xenos docksides can be rough, but people aren’t shot here the way that can happen on some places we’ve landed. That isn’t something that I want to change, frankly.”
Adele looked at Daniel, then at Hogg, and back to Daniel. They know the environment and think that I’d be in the way.
“All right,” she said.
“Thank you!” Daniel said in relief. “Come along, Hogg. Darling—”
This to Miranda over his shoulder as he started down the stairs.
“—I’ll be back for dinner, I swear I will!”
The front door banged. Boys off on an adventure, Adele thought. Without me.
She took out her personal data unit. She planned to inform Mistress Sand about the situation, but that would wait.
Aloud, but without looking up from her work to the girl standing transfixed with her cape in her hands, Adele said, “Miranda, do you have a more pedestrian change of clothing here?”
* * *
The nearest tram stop was half a block from the Dancing Girl. Daniel had plenty of time to size the place up as he walked toward it. Daniel was striding briskly; Hogg was a half step behind him and to the side, shambling rather than properly walking. Hogg covered the ground, and though it didn’t matter here, he was just as quiet as he would have been in the Bantry woodlands.
“We better not stay long inside,” said Hogg. “It looks like it’s going to fall down the next time somebody inside farts.”
“It’s quite an interesting building, Hogg,” Daniel said. They walked in the center of the street, which was reasonably clean because a thunderstorm the previous evening had washed the garbage down the storm drains and into the nearby harbor. “It may be as much as a thousand years old. In another part of Xenos, it would be on the historic register and protected from demolition.”
“I said what I said,” grunted Hogg.
The Dancing Girl was in the middle of the block. All the buildings here had originally been freestanding, but with the years they had sagged outward in the middle so that they now touched one another and could only bulge farther toward the street.
The Dancing Girl’s sign was a wooden silhouette hanging by two rings above the sidewalk. The right leg above the knee had split off along the grain in past years, and it had been decades if not centuries since the paint had been renewed.
The sashes of the bay window covering one side of the front—the door and its jambs filled the left side—had small panes. They were protected by chain-link fencing in a steel frame rather than fancier grillwork.
The ancient timber posts had bowed but showed no signs of breaking, and the fabric of the walls must have been mesh covered with something either flexible or easily renewed. Originally that would have been mud under plaster; mud probably remained the choice, because nothing was cheaper.
Men and a few prostitutes loitered on the street in small groups. Most of them were standing, but boxes and an overturned bucket provided seats for a few. Two men leaned against the Dancing Girl’s window grate.
All the onlookers followed Daniel and Hogg with their eyes, but no one spoke. Daniel nodded to the pair in front of the tavern, much the way he would have acknowledged Bantry tenants who caught his eye from a distance.
Hogg stepped past him and pushed open the door, scanning the tavern’s interior with his right hand balled in the pocket of his loose jacket. Daniel entered, but until the door swung closed behind him he watched the pair on the sidewalk out of the corner of his eye.
The barman looked at him without emotion. Four male spacers sat dicing on a circular table, while a woman standing beside them watched. Two more spacers, one wearing a saucer hat with a circle of gold braid, sat in a corner banquette.
A staircase with a central landing angled upward between the banquette and the end of the bar. Removed from this place and refurbished, the stairs w
ould probably be worth a great deal to a recently wealthy merchant who wanted to buy antiquity for his new townhouse.
“Captain Sorley?” Daniel said pleasantly to the man with the saucer hat.
There were two public houses in Bantry: laborers’ taverns, neither of them fancy. One still had a floor of rammed earth, covered with rushes from the banks of Hoppy Creek. The rushes weren’t replaced as often as they might have been, and the clientele of both houses included farmers just in from the fields and wearing lugged boots. Daniel didn’t expect ferns and soft music in a tavern.
That said, there wasn’t a pig run in Bantry as foul as the floor of the Dancing Girl. There seemed to be a layer of brick beneath the slime. Unlike the street outside it wasn’t sluiced clean by rainstorms, nor was it cleaned in any other fashion. The stink suggested there was excrement as old as the building itself.
“Who the bloody hell are you?” Sorley said. He was middle-aged, short, and could have looked trim if he’d made any effort; as it was, he was scruffy. Though Sorley remained seated, the man with him in the banquette stood up.
“I’m Captain Daniel Leary,” Daniel said, walking toward the stairs. “I’ve come to fetch Master Rikard Cleveland to a business meeting.”
“Well, he’s not here!” Sorley said. The men at the circular table were getting to their feet. “Look, buddy, get your ass out of here now while you can still walk!”
Daniel nodded acknowledgment and started up the stairs. The treads were as solid as bedrock, whatever the condition of the rest of the tavern.
“Hey!” Sorley shouted. “Schmidt, he’s coming up! Get ’em, boys!”
A large man holding an iron pipe the length of his forearm appeared at the top of the stairs. He was wearing an undershirt with a scoop neck; his beard merged indistinguishably with the black hair curling up from his chest. He grinned at Daniel and started down.
The bartender had moved to the far corner of the bar. He held the mallet he used to set the bung in barrels of beer, but he obviously didn’t intend to get involved in the customers’ affairs.
“It’s too late to leave now, smart-ass!” Sorley said. “I’ve got two of my boys posted in the back alley, too!”
Daniel leaned over the stair railing and gripped the neck of a stoneware bottle from the rack behind the bar. The bartender shouted and stepped forward. Daniel swung the bottle as though the bottom were a stamp and Schmidt’s right instep was the document he was sealing.
Schmidt was wearing spacer’s boots, soft and flexible so that they could be worn inside a rigging suit. The bottle didn’t break. The bones of the big man’s foot did. He screamed and pulled his foot up.
Daniel gripped Schmidt’s left ankle with his free hand and jerked his leg out from under him. Schmidt crashed down on the base of his spine and bounced to the landing. Daniel broke the bottle over Schmidt’s head, bathing both of them with gin. He shoved the unconscious man down the remainder of the staircase.
Hogg was at the base of the stairs, facing the rest of Sorley’s crewmen with a chair held out in his left hand and his knuckleduster—he hadn’t clicked open the knife—in his right. As though he really did have eyes in the back of his head, he dodged the slumping Schmidt.
Daniel didn’t see anybody following Schmidt, so he glanced back at the tap room. The bay window shattered, spraying glass onto the floor. The woven-wire screen held for the first blow, but a second bowed it inward. This time the frame and wire together flew into the room ahead of one of the spacers who had been loitering outside. His companion had probably been the first object to hit the window.
The door burst open ahead of Woetjans. The spacers who had hesitated to rush Hogg on the staircase turned at the new commotion. Woetjans swung a length of pressure tubing forehand and backhand, smashing two of them down.
More spacers—and former spacers; there was Hovenmeyer, who’d lost an eye when ice broke from the Sissie’s rigging on an unnamed world when he happened to be looking upward—crowded into the tavern. They were carrying clubs of one sort or another, generally heavy wrenches.
Two or three of Sorley’s men tried to fight and were knocked down immediately. They’d be safe enough on the floor, because most of the Sissies arriving wore spacer’s boots just as Schmidt had. Despite the enthusiastic kicks from the rescue party, the fallen crewmen were unlikely to sustain cracked ribs or ruptured spleens.
Powerful lift engines howled in the street. Through the splintered frame of the window, Daniel could see the stilt-legged tender which Mon had begun using as a mobile crane in the shipyard. It would transport people only if the passengers were willing to cling to struts with no protection against weather, windblast, and buildings that the tender happened to brush.
The Militia might have complained if they had noticed it—vehicles in the Xenos airspace were very tightly controlled—but that would have been a problem for another time, involving a judge rather than a coroner. A moment ago, having a squad of Militia burst into the tavern would have struck Daniel as a pleasant surprise.
One of Sorley’s men stumbled backward. Instead of fending him off with the chair, Hogg slugged him behind the ear with the knuckleduster. Daniel grimaced, but the man had brought it on himself when he decided to join a gang of his fellows to beat a couple strangers.
The tap room was already crowded. Mon joined his men inside. He didn’t carry a club, but he’d pulled on the gauntlets from a rigger’s suit. The smear on the knuckles of the right glove looked like blood.
Adele and Tovera followed Mon. Daniel smiled. I thought she agreed too easily, he thought.
It was just as well that Adele had second-guessed him, because he’d misjudged Sorley. This business had been a deliberate trap: not just the abduction of Rikard Cleveland, who knew where a treasure might be, but also an attempt to cripple or kill Captain Daniel Leary, whom Sorley had decided was his main rival in the treasure hunt.
Daniel smiled wryly. This hadn’t been one of the times when his reputation had been an advantage.
Miranda entered the Dancing Girl. She was in a dark blue suit, probably the one she wore when she visited Bergen and Associates with him, and she carried a hockey stick.
Miranda looked around the confusion. She wasn’t looking for him, as Daniel first thought, but rather seeing whether there were any proper targets for her stick. Only when she was sure that opposition had been downed did she relax and smile at Daniel.
“Pipe down!” Daniel said, using his command voice. Those present were spacers used to obeying orders, at least when they trusted the person giving them; they quieted immediately. The wheezing breaths of Schmidt at the bottom of the stairs—the stoneware bottle had given him a concussion if not a fractured skull—were the loudest remaining sounds.
“Woetjans,” Daniel said in the relative hush. “Sorley’s got two more in the alley behind here.”
“Right,” said Sun from beneath the landing where Daniel couldn’t see him. He must have come in by a back door. “They’re going to stay there a while, too.”
Speaking of Sorley … The merchant captain had apparently ducked under the banquette table. Now that the fighting was over, he was inching upward. He’d lost his hat, and he was bald from his eyebrows to mid-skull.
“Captain Sorley,” Daniel said, “I very much hope that we find Master Cleveland unharmed.”
“I’m quite all right, Captain Leary,” Cleveland said from the top of the stairs. “I … I’m very glad to see you, but I haven’t been harmed. Lady Mundy?”
“Yes,” said Adele. Her left hand was still in her tunic pocket.
“I ignored your advice,” Cleveland said. He bowed. “I apologize for the trouble I caused you and others by my decision.”
“This is the most bloody fun I’ve had since the Sissie lifted from Madison!” boomed Evans as he straightened. He’d been wiping the head of his eighteen-inch adjustable wrench on the dungarees of the spacer he’d knocked down with it.
That’s probably the opinion
of most of the rescue party, Daniel thought. And maybe mine as well.
Aloud he said, “We’ll escort you to your family home, Cleveland. We’ll talk on the way, but I think the Kiesche will be lifting rather sooner than we had discussed.”
Adele said something in Woetjans’ ear. “Evans and Crick!” the bosun ordered. “Go up and get his gear. Take it to the Kiesche on the tram, not the bloody tender like we came.”
“Right,” said Daniel. “Captain Sorley? Would you come out here, please?”
“Look, I got a right …” Sorley began. He didn’t move from his corner behind the round table.
Barnes and Dasi grabbed opposite sides of the table. They were bosun’s mates and used to working together without signals that anybody else could have seen. They ripped the table from the floor and hurled it into the rack of bottles behind the bar.
The bartender ducked with a yelp, saving himself. Wood, bottles, and various liquors sprayed over the taproom. Spacers shouted and laughed.
The riggers turned toward Sorley. He threw his hands up and cried, “I’m coming! Look, I don’t have any fight with you!”
That much was certainly true.
“Thank you, Barnes and Dasi,” Daniel said, “but you can step back now. Captain Sorley, I’m asking you in the presence of these witnesses—”
Including Adele, who was certainly recording the whole affair.
“—if you renounce any right or interest in Rikard Cleveland and any matters he may have discussed with you?”
“Yes, yes!” Sorley said. “Go on, rob me like you’re going to do anyway. I don’t care!”
“Then I think we’re done here,” Daniel said pleasantly. “Master Cleveland, we’ll take you home now.”
“Tovera and I will escort Master Cleveland,” Adele said crisply. “You have a dinner date with your fiancée, I believe.”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “I do.”
