Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  “Oh, yes, ma’am!” Dorst said, forgetting he was supposed to treat her as a peer. “This is beryllium monocrystal felted in an elastomer—single-strand, you see, not woven, to limit the stress. You could haul the Princess Cecile to the top if your motor was up to it.”

  “The strands are continuously tested for current path, Mundy,” Vesey said. “The operator, well, the system itself I suppose, knows if there’s any breakage. It’d shut down long before there was danger.”

  They both reacted to Adele with a sort of frightened deference. It wasn’t her rank: though they were classed as petty officers for the time being, Dorst and Vesey were in line for commissions which would make them the titular superiors of any warrant officer, let alone a specialist like Adele who knew virtually nothing about the running of a starship.

  Her question, crafted to emphasize that ignorance, must have relaxed them somewhat, though. Vesey, her eyes on the approaching car, added, “How long have you known Captain Leary, Mundy, if you don’t mind … ?”

  Good God, they thought she was Daniel’s mistress.

  “I met Mr. Leary on Kostroma, where I was working for the Elector,” Adele said calmly, suppressing the urge to shout, “You idiots!” in anger at the obtuseness of people. “And Woetjans and most of the rest of the present crew, as a matter of fact. Our families had had dealings in our youth—”

  That was an honest if incomplete way of describing the Three Circles Conspiracy and the Proscriptions that followed it.

  “—but we didn’t know of one another’s existence until a few hours before the Alliance invasion.”

  She was tempted to add that they were doing Daniel a disservice in believing he was the sort of man whose penis made all his decisions. She didn’t say that because it wasn’t her place to; and in fairness to the midshipmen, Daniel’s off-duty behavior could lead one to that conclusion.

  The pulleys divided the waiting area. There was a mounting platform on either side of the tracks, though Adele could see that the descending car had a single bay. She and the midshipmen had walked to the right side because a dozen or so Sexburgan traders were already waiting on the left.

  The locals, males and females both, wore loose blouses gathered at the openings, and drab-colored pantaloons with heavy sandals. One of the younger men carried two racks of candy trays, mostly emptied, on a yoke. He noticed Vesey—quite an attractive girl, now that Adele thought about it—and postured for her, arms akimbo.

  Vesey deliberately turned her back on him and said, “I knew that Sexburga was a naval base, but I didn’t realize there was so much civilian trade. What do they produce here?”

  The question—the words couldn’t be heard on the other side of the shrieking cable—was simply to remove the local man from her society. After a moment the fellow fluffed his full mustache and also turned away, though he was still puffed out like a rooster displaying.

  Adele found it hard not to provide information even if it wasn’t really expected. “Very little, actually,” she said. “There’s some small-scale manufacturing, mostly to rebuild systems for the ships that land here. Local agriculture’s barely above subsistence level. But almost all the traffic into or out of the Sack touches on Sexburga so there’s quite a lot of transshipment as well as resupply, even though almost everything but the reaction mass has to be imported.”

  The car shuddered to a halt. It was full, or nearly so, of spacers returning from liberty, and it looked to Adele as if there were as many planetary backgrounds represented as there were people.

  That didn’t necessarily mean they were from different ships. A dark-skinned woman whose roughout leathers were embroidered in eye patterns helped a male shipmate who was thin, blond, and wore only a silk shift and a beret. They were both drunk, but the woman could at least walk; her companion, hopping up and down, babbled in accented Universal that his feet had been cut off.

  The peddlers got on, nodding in tired acknowledgment as Adele and the midshipmen boarded the car from the other side. The locals had finished their day, going from ship to ship to serve the spacers still on duty.

  Adele noticed from the way the returning panniers and satchels swung, they weren’t always empty. Almost the first thing she’d learned when she began associating with spacers was that no matter how open a society might look from the outside, there was always something it considered contraband; and there were always smugglers ready to supply that contraband to whoever could afford it.

  She smiled coldly. Since that seemed to be a universal trait, she supposed it was the way things were supposed to be. Adele had never been one to argue against observed reality.

  Though that did leave the question of who or what had set up the system in the first place. Adele didn’t believe in a supreme being; but occasionally it seemed that things couldn’t possibly be so damnably absurd unless someone, Someone, was deliberately making them that way.

  “My grandfather was on Sexburga with Admiral Perlot’s squadron in ‘21,” Dorst said, craning his neck to peer up the cableway. “He said it was a really wild port, but of course it would be with twenty thousand spacers based here before the Strymon fleet surrendered. It won’t be like that now.”

  It was hard to tell from the midshipman’s voice whether he was disappointed or relieved. Probably a little of both.

  The top cable grew taut. Adele braced herself on one of the vertical poles that doubled as support for the canopy, and the car started upward with a jerk.

  “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of ways to get into trouble in Spires,” Adele said dryly. “Whether they’ll be much different from the entertainments of the Strip outside Harbor Three is another matter.”

  “What are the local animals like?” Vesey said; an apparent non sequitur until she added, “I saw a dog once in the New World Lounge.”

  Dorst gasped and turned away, coughing or laughing. Vesey’s face lost all expression as she reviewed what she’d just blurted. She had a naturally dark complexion, so the blush took some moments to show on her cheeks.

  “There’s no proven native life above the invertebrate level,” Adele said. She hid her smile, though perhaps Vesey would have felt better if she let it show. “With the flow of traffic through the port, I’m sure that the entertainment industry has as wide a range of options as the restauranteurs.”

  She frowned, looking back at the harbor now hundreds of feet below. The question reminded her that she wanted to find Daniel data on the natural history of all the planets in the region. That should be possible on Sexburga.

  “The Sailing Directions mention rumors of large animals on South Land,” she went on. “Sexburga has two continents, North and South, but South isn’t settled and isn’t often visited.”

  The young peddler with the candy trays leaned forward. “South Land is haunted, lady,” he said with polite earnestness. “Nobody lives there, nobody goes there except foreigners.”

  “The Tombs of the Ancients are there,” added a local woman, a substantial person holding a basket woven in slant patterns in varicolored straw. “The Ancients still live in them, but they only come out when nobody’s looking.”

  The other peddlers nodded, all those who could hear over the sounds of the car rising. A more distant man held a whispered conversation with the woman with the basket, then nodded enthusiastic agreement.

  “My grandfather heard about the ghosts,” Dorst said. “I don’t think he ever went there. What do the Directions say, mistress?”

  “There are regular rock formations that look like the foundations of buildings,” Adele said, speaking carefully. She was repeating what she’d read, and she didn’t want to give the impression that she had an opinion beyond the words in the Sailing Directions. “Some people have conjectured that they’re the remains of the first settlement, but judging by wind erosion they’re far too old for that. The official explanation is that they’re natural.”

  “There’s nothing natural about the ghosts, lady,” the man with the candy trays sai
d fiercely. “You keep away from South Land. There’s plenty of fun for rich spacers here in Spires, you bet!”

  That was indeed a safe bet. This funicular rose very steeply, but the one halfway around the bowl to the left followed a notch at no more than 45 degrees. Spaced along the tracks were three taverns that had been cut into the cliff face. Bunting fluttered from their railings, and at the uppermost a naked girl danced on a barreltop to lure custom. There were mounting platforms set where the slow-moving cars would just clear them, but Adele couldn’t imagine people as drunk as the spacers who’d descended in this car managing to board on the move.

  “They must cater to riggers,” said Dorst, who seemed to have been thinking along the same lines.

  “And they’re not thinking very hard about anything except the first drink,” Vesey added. “If I had to spend all my duty hours out on the hull, I might feel the same way.”

  The car was nearing the upper terminus; brakes within the take-up drum began to groan as they slowed the rig. Down in the harbor a bell chimed faintly, calling watch changes within a ship which had been opened to the world around it.

  “M-Mundy?” Dorst said. “They say … that is, I’ve heard that Captain Leary can read the Matrix. Is that true?”

  “What?” Adele said. Why were they asking her about shiphandling? That was their business! “Well, yes, I suppose so. I believe I’ve heard him say as much.”

  “But how, mistress?” Vesey said. Her face was screwed up with the tension of someone who knows there’s a secret key to the universe and that someone else has it. “I can memorize the sail plan, but then Captain Leary goes topside and takes a reef here, changes an angle there. And I don’t see any reason for it, but when we next check our position we’ve gained six hours!”

  “I calculated the time from Cinnabar to Sexburga,” Dorst said. “Without allowing anything for position checks and using the course plotted by Commander Bergen, the best time mathematically possible was twenty-one days, ten hours and fifty-one minutes. But Commander Bergen himself made the distance in twelve hours less than that, and Captain Leary cut off three and a half more days.”

  The car shuddered to what Adele thought was a halt. She would have stepped—up a handsbreadth—to the platform, but she noticed that the peddlers were waiting. She waited also; thus the final jolt upward didn’t throw her onto her face.

  “I’m really not sure what Daniel does,” Adele said. “When I look at the Matrix when I’m on the hull, I just see swirls of light. But then, I can’t tell much from clouds—”

  She stepped onto the platform, then gestured at the pale blue sky streaked by horsetails of vapor.

  “—either. Unless they’re raining on me. Don’t they teach you whatever it is you need to know at the Academy?”

  “Mistress,” Vesey said, “the patterns of the Matrix show energy levels between universes. Go here, go there, and your velocity relative to the sidereal universe increases or decreases. We understand the theory—that’s what astrogation is, after all. But you can’t take a computer out on the hull, and I don’t see how anybody can read the Matrix with his eyes alone.”

  The upper platform was crowded with hawkers, touts, and pimps. The peddlers passed through them as water does a screen, but they were around Adele and her companions like goldfish feeding. The voices babbled in Universal—

  “Never food like it in your lives!”

  “Sheets clean this morning, on my soul as a woman!”

  “The delicacy of the carving by Blind Master Shen!”

  —but it was spoken in a singsong that had nothing to do with the normal accent and ictus of the lines. After a moment it was perfectly understandable, like a document printed in an unfamiliar typeface. The pack wasn’t saying anything Adele wanted to understand, of course.

  Dorst’s broad shoulders led the trio through without real difficulty. Adele, last in line, saw an old fellow with a waxed mustache try to grope Vesey. She slapped him away with a practiced reflex. Nobody offered Adele indignities.

  A wide roadway paralleled the line of the cliffs. Traffic was heavy, but it was almost entirely of pedestrians or slow-moving vehicles with four large wheels. They were geared for the steep slopes on all the city’s other streets.

  Adele nodded and the three of them started across. On the other side were five-and six-story buildings. The windows of the lower floors advertised business premises, but the railed balconies higher up had flower boxes and lounging spectators.

  “Any of the riggers can tell me things that I can’t see,” Dorst said glumly as the trio waited in mid-street for an electric-powered dray to crawl past on tracks instead of wheels. “They all think Captain Leary’s a wizard, though. Except for Old Hagar who served with Commander Bergen; she says the captain’s a babe in arms compared to his uncle.”

  “Daniel says the same,” Adele agreed, “though I gather there’s more to promotion in the RCN than skill at astrogation. Daniel may have things to teach you that his uncle couldn’t.”

  “Oh, heavens yes!” Vesey said. “Oh, we’re so lucky to serve under him!”

  Dorst leaned forward to see past the dray. “Now!” he shouted.

  They sprinted to the overlook. Traffic direction wasn’t controlled by which side of the street it was on, but the midshipmen seemed to have the spacers’ ability to look all ways at once. Adele didn’t and by now had determined that she never would, but by staying between her companions she managed to make it across with no worse problem than tripping on a crack between paving blocks. Vesey caught her.

  The view was breathtaking. Though not nearly as steep as the cliffs they’d just climbed, the ground to the east sloped down for as far as Adele could see. Beyond the buildings of Spires stretched fields separated by drystone walls. The crops were planted so thinly that the predominant color was that of the russet soil, not green leaves.

  “It’s impressive,” Adele said, “but with so many worlds available I don’t know why this place was colonized. And recolonized after the Hiatus.”

  “Why, for its location,” Vesey said in surprise. “Twenty days from Earth, forty days from Cinnabar even before Commander Bergen’s survey.”

  “Even from Pleasaunce it’s only sixty days,” Dorst added. “And I’m sure you could cut that by a third with a proper survey, which isn’t going to happen while the RCN controls the region.”

  “And there’s plenty of water for reaction mass,” Vesey said. “It’s really an ideal location.”

  Adele nodded slowly as she viewed her surroundings. Plenty of reaction mass, even if it didn’t fall as rain. She was a spacer now, so she had to remind herself to think like one.

  “The pirates track ships by the disturbance they leave across the Matrix,” Dorst said, reverting to the earlier subject. “They follow ships there, then drop into normal space with them and strip their sails with plasma cannon. Strymon’s patrol ships do the same thing to take pirates.”

  Scattered across the landscape were buttes standing a hundred feet above the plain around them. One was topped by a man-made wall; a dusty road led to it from the city proper.

  “Daniel’s talked about that,” Adele said, bringing her data unit out and—after a moment of trepidation—setting it on the stone railing instead of sitting crosslegged on the pavement to use it. The rail was flat and six inches wide, so there was no real danger that she’d bump the unit down the other side. “Woetjans and some of the other riggers say it’s quite true, that you can see wakes.”

  She scrolled across a street plan of Spires till she found what she was looking for, then compared it with her own location according to the data unit’s inertial navigation system. Sexburga didn’t have positioning satellites, just a handful of ground beacons for the rare traveller who went any distance from Spires.

  “There’s a pre-Hiatus church that’s been converted to a museum and library,” she said, nodding toward her display. She couldn’t point because she held a wand in either hand. “I’d like to see t
hat. But first, shall we try a local meal? The tomato-stuffed potatoes are supposed to be the local specialty.”

  “Granddad said the potato lager’s something, too,” Dorst said with enthusiasm.

  “We’ll try that as well,” Adele said. She put her data unit away and started toward the nearest of the streets leading down into the city proper.

  “Mundy, do you think we’ll ever learn how to see wakes?” Vesey asked in a tiny voice.

  “If it’s something about starships that can be taught,” Adele said in a tone of confidence that surprised her, “Captain Leary is the best person I know to teach you. And Dorst?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “He’s equally skilled at picking up company when he’s off-duty,” Adele went on in the same crisp voice. “But if you study his technique, I do hope you’ll use it on women of better quality than he does.”

  Dorst and Vesey both hesitated a half step, then burst out laughing. Adele allowed herself a smile as well.

  She found the presence of the midshipmen oddly pleasant, rather like having a pair of intelligent dogs along to share her interests without imposing their own. This layover on Sexburga promised to be quite relaxing.

  *

  “Well, this is a bloody fort, ain’t it?” Hogg said as he hauled hard on the steering wheel to bring them around the final switchback. Hogg had rented the car to bring them to Vaughn’s party, but Daniel was half wishing he’d simply paid for a cabman to drive instead. “That or a bloody prison!”

  The vehicle couldn’t manage more than twenty miles an hour with the throttle flat against the firewall, but steering required a lot less effort than Hogg put into it since the wheel adjusted power to the hub-center electric motors, speeding or slowing them as the turn required.

  That offended Hogg. He needed to hear chirps and moans from a vehicle to be sure it was really under his control.

  “It’s a fortress,” Daniel said, looking into the compound past the attendant at the open gate. The walls were seven feet thick. “That’s the cap of a vertical-launch missile system in the middle of the courtyard. They’re ready to fight off an attack by starships.”