by David Drake
"Six, this is Three!" said Pasternak over the command channel. "We'll start losing thrusters in ten minutes, maybe less. The jets aren't meant for runs this long, over!"
"Three, we'll be down in less than that, over," Daniel said, scanning the optical display.
"Six, we may have less than that!" Pasternak said. "You could shave on the edge of Two and Five, they're burned so thin, out."
The assault group was to mark its perimeter with Search and Rescue strobes. Every starship's computer was designed to caret that particular shade of blue. Daniel's display now did so, three narrow, pulsing spikes on the berm around the missile pit. Adele had captured the battery.
Of course. The Greybudd would be a fireball spewing scrap metal and burned meat if she hadn't.
"Ship, prepare for landing!" Daniel said. He wished he knew the Greybudd better, and he wished he had somebody trustworthy backing him up in the Battle Direction Center—
But a freighter doesn't have a BDC, and he wasn't being asked to do anything that the Rainha's civilian captain hadn't done a score of times: bring a clumsy, wallowing pig of a ship down on a mudpile safely. Laughing and aware of the Councilor's gaping amazement—which made him laugh louder—Daniel dilated the nozzles of Thrusters Three, Four, Five and Six without changing their flow rate. Diffusing the exhaust reduced thrust, so the Greybudd began to sink perceptibly without losing her forward motion. Daniel nudged the attitude yoke half a point to starboard.
"Ship, coming down in five, four—" Daniel said, flaring all the nozzles but boosting flow. They were very low, now, bathed first in steam and then in the smoke of tents and supplies and men.
"—three, two—"
Daniel hit the virtual button on his display that cycled the three cargo hatches. The hydraulics barely started to groan, but that instant of anticipation broke the seals before the impact could twist hatches and coamings together immovably. The difference between life and death. . . .
The Greybudd hit with a horrible crash, her outriggers furrowing the ground as she skidded forward. Daniel chopped his throttles. Thruster Eleven didn't shut down, the bitch, but a gout of mud choked it into an explosion an instant later.
The tubular struts attaching the outriggers bent back, dropping the hull till the bow plates scraped the dirt also. The Greybudd ground to a halt. The forward starboard strut tore out of the shoulder socket; the hull sagged lower still, but the hatches were continuing to wind down.
The transport's nose was within twenty yards of the berm around the missile pit. By shutting off his thrusters and sliding to a halt, Daniel'd avoided baking the soil where the Volunteers had to jump out. It was hell on the ship—he'd probably turned the Greybudd to scrap despite his carefully optimistic comments when he broached the plan to Corius in Port Dunbar—but it was the only way to ensure that the troops could begin disembarking immediately instead of waiting for the ground to cool.
"Power Room, report," Daniel snapped over the command channel as he unlocked the web restraints that held him onto the console.
"As soon as these pongoes give me a little space, I'll come out the aft inspection port, Six," Pasternak said. "That wasn't half a hard landing, out."
Hard it was, but it hadn't been a bad one. Daniel'd executed his plan better than he'd hoped would be possible. He grinned in satisfaction as he got up.
"You can undog the bridge hatch," he said to those around him, though he didn't care whether someone did or didn't. He'd ordered it locked to keep out Volunteers who might panic at just the wrong time during the flight.
Daniel couldn't blame them; there'd been moments when he'd have jumped for the controls himself if he weren't already at them. On the other hand, it wasn't going to help to have a frightened sergeant grabbing him by the shoulder—to pick one of a half dozen possibilities—as he angled the jets to compensate for the cold wind blowing down the channel of the Meherrin River.
"Six, this is Victor One," said Vesey, her weak signal boosted into crackly audibility by the Greybudd's antennas and amplifiers. "We've secured the objective. All personnel are inside the berm, over."
Daniel undogged the exterior hatch—he had to hammer the left dog with the heel of his hand to start it—and began spinning the hand-crank to wind it up. Except for cargo and Power Room, the transport's hatches were manually worked. Fallert had opened the internal hatch so the babble of thousands of troops flooded the compartment.
"Roger, Victor One," Daniel said. His commo helmet was sending by the same route. He could only hope Vesey understood him through the static and distortion. "Hogg and I will be joining you ASAP. Are you in contact with Baker, over?"
Baker was the Princess Cecile, inbound under Blantyre with the remainder of the Sissies aboard. Daniel'd ordered her to make an ordinary liftoff to orbit, then drop onto Mandelfarne Island. He had a healthy appreciation of his own skill, but the low-level flight across the continent had been a strain. It wasn't something he was going to ask a midshipman to undertake.
Not just babble reached the bridge from the body of the ship. Judging by the stench, half the Volunteers must've puked their guts up during the flight and landing. On the other hand, the Pellegrinians here in what was supposed to be a rear area couldn't be in good shape either, watching a starship full of attackers land in their midst.
"Roger, Six," said Vesey. "Baker One says five minutes, I repeat, five minutes. She'll home on our beacons, over."
A slug whanged off the Greybudd's hull, rather too close to the hatch Daniel had just locked open. It seemed that the Pellegrinians weren't all cowering in their dugouts.
"Six out," he said as Hogg threw a coiled line through the opening; the other end was tied around the base of the command console. Daniel drew on gauntlets from a rigging suit. Anything further he needed from Vesey could wait till they were face to face.
Hogg handed Daniel one of the impellers he'd brought; he'd already snubbed the sling of the other around his chest. "I'll lead," Hogg said. He grabbed the line—he was wearing the mesh gloves he used with his weighted fishline—and swung himself through the hatch.
Daniel took time to sling the impeller securely, then followed his servant into the night. It might be ten or fifteen minutes before enough Volunteers had disembarked for the bridge personnel to leave via the normal hatches, and he didn't have that much time.
Quite a lot of shooting was going on, though that didn't necessarily mean there was much fighting. Indeed, Daniel had noticed as he climbed out the hatch that the most enthusisastic firing came from the west end of the island. The Volunteers certainly hadn't gotten that far, and it was unlikely that the Bennarians had chosen this precise instant to launch a cross-channel raid.
Daniel started down, guiding the quarter-inch line with his boots but controlling his speed by the gauntlets. Slugs hit the hull and ricocheted, sometimes thrumming close enough to make his lips purse. There was a risk of being hit by a stray shot, but there was a risk to getting out of bed in the morning. You couldn't worry about such things.
When Daniel heard the drive fans approaching, he was still twenty feet in the air. He twisted to look over his shoulder. A Pellegrinian APC was driving in from the east, a black bulk silhouetted by lights and gunshots on the ground.
"Clear below!" Daniel shouted because he didn't have time to check where Hogg was. He kicked the hull to get clear and let go of the line. He was still falling when the vehicle's cannon ripped a bolt at the transport, biting the lip of the lighted hatch directly above.
Daniel hit the ground, taking the shock on his flexed knees. He'd stripped the gauntlet from his right hand as he dropped; now he released his impeller's sling because that was quicker than spreading the loop. Hogg was firing, his slugs red and purple and pastel green as they bounced from the APC's armor.
Not all bounced. Spurred by Hogg's example, scores—perhaps a hundred—of the Volunteers opened up as well.
The weight of armor a vehicle could carry and fly was limited. When some 200 yards away
the APC turned, presenting its left side to the rain of heavy-metal slugs. They'd occasionally penetrated the much thicker bow plating; now pieces flew off. The vehicle staggered, rolled to port, and drove into the ground, barely missing the Greybudd's stern on the way.
"Pasternak, are you all right?" Daniel said, sloughing proper protocol in the shock of the moment.
"Aye, by the skin of my teeth!" the engineer replied. "Bugger, though! If I never come so close to dying again, it'll be too soon!"
His voice was clearer but also weaker than before. The APC's bolt must've knocked the transport's commo system out of action. Had Corius gotten off the bridge before the jet of plasma gutted it?
"Head for the missile battery," Daniel ordered. "Can you make it by yourself, over?"
"Aye, I see a pickup light," Pasternak said. "I'm on my way."
There was a pause, then, "Bugger that was close, out."
Daniel switched on the miniature strobe at the crown of his helmet and strode forward in a pulsing blue halo. Well, it'd have been blue if he weren't using his visor's monochrome light amplification. An irrational part of his mind told him that he was making himself a target for every Pellegrinian on the island, but realistically the risk of being shot by a mistaken Sissie was higher by an order of magnitude.
Hogg followed, half-turned so that he kept Daniel in the corner of his right eye while concentrating his attention on what might be happening behind them. Hogg wasn't using goggles or a commo helmet, but he'd had fifty-odd years experience poaching in pitch black forests. Technology had nothing to add to his instincts in a business like this.
"Sir, is that you?" Vesey shouted from the gate fifty feet ahead. Daniel could see the lumps of four prone figures on the berm, nestled under the razor ribbon with impellers aimed.
"This is Six!" Daniel replied. "Hogg and I are coming in. We're coming in!"
"Let's go," he muttered to his servant, breaking into a trot. Then, raising his voice again—had Vesey's helmet intercom gone out? And where was Adele?—he added, "And watch out for Pasternak! He's coming from the stern so he's got a little farther."
Daniel heard Sissies begin dragging open the gate. His footing was tricky—light amplification doesn't give you relative distance—but he made the gap without a serious stumble and dodged to the side where the berm blurred his outline.
"Very good to see you, sir," said Vesey, emotion trembling under the careful formality of her words. Standing this close, Daniel felt heat radiating from the barrel of her sub-machine gun. "We haven't had a bad time yet, not as these things go, but it wouldn't have taken Arruns much longer to get things sorted out. And then to sort us out."
"This is Three coming," Sun announced over the intercom. "Let him by, everybody."
A moment later Daniel heard Pasternak pounding toward the gate, his boots and his wheezing both. He should've called ahead but he was an engineer who'd never been involved in ground fighting. And Daniel was sure that APC had come bloody close.
"What's the butcher's bill, Vesey?" Daniel asked bluntly. He looked upward; when slugs snapped through his field of vision, the visor overloaded and blacked out their glowing tracks. The Princess Cecile's exhaust ought to be visible very shortly, but for now it was still lost in the star field.
"Hoskins and Bladel're dead," she said. Her voice was quiet, but there was a tremor beneath it. "We brought the bodies in. Three more bad but they're stabilized. Dorsey lost her foot; lost it, I mean, an impeller took it off and we couldn't find it afterwards."
"Vesey, where's Officer Mundy?" Daniel said, his mind watching himself and his lieutenant through thick glass. The Sissie was dropping toward them now, coming out of the west in a rapidly swelling flare. The deep bass pulse of her exhaust was building to thunder.
Vesey licked her lips. "Sir, she's resting," she said. "Her servant's looking after her. She's medicated now but she was walking."
"I see," said Daniel. "Not surprising, I suppose. That she'd have been hit."
He switched his visor to normal viewing. The Sissie's blazing plasma would've flooded the whole field of view otherwise, even with his head turned away from it. Blantyre had been coming in a little too fast, so now she had to use full thrust for braking.
"She cleaned out this enclosure," Hogg said, wonder in his voice. He'd gone off and now returned; having talked to Adele's servant, apparently. "She did it. Tovera said she just walked in and shot them all."
"How could. . .?" Vesey said, looking from Hogg to Daniel, then to the inside of the berm where Tovera's slight figure squatted beside an equally slight form lying on the ground.
"I never seen Tovera mad before," Hogg said in the same odd tone. "I didn't think her mind worked that way, getting angry or sad or, you know. She blames herself, but she says the mistress just walked straight in and killed them all."
The Princess Cecile landed between the Greybudd and the missile battery, her thrusters blasting gobbets of fused clay in all directions for the instant before Blantyre shut them down. The island's soil was largely silt from the sea bottom. Organic compounds in it burned, smelling like a fire in an abattoir.
The Volunteers had been warned to keep the area clear for the corvette. If any of them forgot or became confused, well—Sissies had died tonight. Daniel had no sympathy to waste on others, not now.
"Yes, Adele tends to be direct in her approach," Daniel said, so softly that even those nearest probably couldn't hear him over the sound of battle and the pings from the Sissie's hull and thrusters cooling. "Well, in three minutes we should be able to get her aboard and into the Medicomp. And then—"
He didn't get angry in a battle, but he heard the anger in his voice now.
"Then we'll see if Sun and our plasma cannon can't convince the wogs here on Mandelfarne Island that it's time to surrender!"
CHAPTER 22: Mandelfarne Island on Dunbar's World
Daniel settled into the Sissie's command console with a sigh of relief. It was like putting on a pair of comfortable slippers after a day of marching in heavy boots. Blantyre had shifted to the navigation console and—
"Good anticipation, Blantyre," Daniel said as he went over a status diagram of the corvette's systems. It was such a reflexive action that he'd have probably run the checklist even if the ship were under immediate attack. "Lighting the thrusters when Woetjans closed the entry hatch."
The praise was reflexive with Daniel also. Both were a part of being an RCN officer and of training midshipmen like Blantyre to be officers also. She'd reasoned on hearing the corvette was being closed up that the whole assault force was aboard. Lighting the thrusters before Daniel reached the bridge might only save thirty seconds, but that could be time the Sissie and her crew needed.
Sun threw himself onto the gunnery console. "Ship, I've got the guns, out!" he said, breathless from excitement and from having run up the companionway to the bridge. Midshipman Cory in the Battle Direction Center had been manning the guns, but this was the sort of opportunity a gunner dreamed of. Sun had no intention of passing it up.
He'd simply dropped his sub-machine gun onto the deck beside him. I hope it's on safe, Daniel thought, but he had more pressing problems.
"Ship, prepare to lift," he said. He'd already balanced the corvette's eight thrusters; even before he spoke, he began easing them forward. The Princess Cecile hesitated, wobbled as she broke gravity, then rose slowly. For several seconds she danced like a ball on a water fountain, but when Daniel'd gotten ten feet of height between the thruster nozzles and the ground, the reflected thrust smoothed into a pillow rather than a series of sharp pulses.
Daniel was aware of the dorsal turret rotating—it changed the corvette's weight distribution slightly—but he was so absorbed in the delicacy of his liftoff that the implication didn't get below the mere sensory level. When Sun fired both 4-inch guns, the paired shocks twisted the ship into the start of a roll. Reflex made Daniel's fingers twitch toward a correction; intellect snatched them back in time.
"
Bloody hell, Sun!" he shouted, but the fireball in the eastern sky was the remains of an APC. The forward half of the vehicle'd vanished, but the stern spun end over end into the ground.
Daniel was running a real-time panorama using enhanced visuals across the top of his display. He relegated the Sissie's thruster performance to a narrow bar across the bottom—Pasternak'd warn him if there were a problem—and just above it two square terrain maps: to the left, Mandelfarne Island itself, and beside it a larger-scale one including Port Dunbar as well.
Red blinking lights marched down the right margin of the display, urgent communications demanding his response. Adele's hooked up to the Medicomp, getting microsurgery while blood and antibiotics drip into her. For the first time Daniel thought of that as a professional loss rather than a personal one.
