by David Drake
“See the antennas come down already?” Woetjans demanded in a mixture of envy and delight. “They had their riggers topside when they transitioned. There’ll be a empty few berths tonight or I’m a virgin.”
The bosun shook her head and added, “But God love me, mistress, what spacers these bastards are!”
The guardship, wrecked beyond repair but still mostly complete, passed through the image area. Several of the gun turrets were intact. The plasma cannon had been elevating at the moment of the Princess Cecile’s attack; Adele noted with surprise that now the weapons were lowered and realigned with the guardship’s axis. That meant that portions of the Hammer’s crew and armaments were in full working order.
Adele highlighted the guardship in red, using a flick of her wands instead of poking her finger through the image. “Isn’t it dangerous to leave the Falassans that way?” she asked. “Couldn’t they shoot?”
The bosun’s eyes narrowed. “Damn if I’d want an Alliance cruiser where the Hammer is,” she said, “but I’d guess it’s a matter of local rules. They could make themself unpleasant, but they couldn’t change anything much—not with their central fire control screwed for sure. They’re being quiet so somebody’ll take them off the wreck before they run outa air. Which won’t be long, not the way they been hit.”
“On the ground in three minutes!” the PA system blared in Daniel’s voice. “Boarding party to the entryway!”
Woetjans straightened. “That’s us, mistress,” she said. She patted the length of tubing under her belt.
“Yes,” said Adele, rising and taking her own equipment rather than permitting Tovera to buckle it about her. The bosun’s cudgel seemed superfluous, given that the stocked impeller would make a satisfactory club if one were required; but more than logic determines the choices one makes when setting out to kill or be killed.
Adele checked the little pistol in her side pocket, making sure that it was still easily accessible. It was.
“Ready, Adele?” Daniel asked, adjusting his helmet slightly. He wore his visor down as a matter of course, a practical technique that made Adele feel caged.
“Yes, of course,” Adele said. Sandwiched between Woetjans and Daniel, she trotted toward the companionway. Tovera and Hogg had gone ahead. The corridor was clear: all crewmen who weren’t necessary to the immediate needs of the vessel stood on B Level, armed and ready for ground combat.
“We’re landing at the north side of the Homeland community,” Daniel explained cheerfully. “The Dalbriggans came down at the spaceport to the south and secured the ships there. They’ll be pushing what resistance there is toward us, I suspect.”
“Make way for the captain!” Woetjans bellowed. The entryway was crowded. If there’d been an attempt to leave an aisle, spacers equipped for ground deployment had filled it like sand in a mold.
In the delay before shoving wider the crack the crewmen tried to form, Woetjans said over her shoulder, “You don’t think the fighting’ll be over by the time we’re on the ground, sir?”
If Daniel answered, his words were lost in the blast of the thrusters doubled by reflection from the surface. The corvette bucked violently. Adele would have fallen and then been bounced like a ball except for Daniel’s firm hand on her shoulder.
She smiled, an expression she knew by now would have frightened anyone who saw it. In this crush, nobody would.
Even as a child, Adele Mundy had known the fighting would never be over. If there wasn’t a battle raging at this place now, there were battles going on elsewhere and would always be battles until there was no longer a species called Man in the universe.
As a child, though, Adele hadn’t imagined that she would be one of those who fought.
Chapter Twenty-eight
As soon as the main hatch tilted forward enough to break the seal along the upper edge, smoke and ashes swirled into the Princess Cecile. The automatic impeller fixed to the wardroom hatch on the level above cut loose with a long burst, making the hull ring as it recoiled. An incoming projectile whanged off the corvette’s bow.
“Boarders, spread out and form along the road on this side!” Daniel shouted. “Over!”
The hatch thumped down in soft soil, rolling up sparks from the weeds and brush ignited by the Princess Cecile’s exhaust. A ridge of slightly higher ground supported a grove of trees, but the river a hundred yards north of the corvette flooded often enough to rot the roots of large vegetation on the flats. The road just beyond was built on a levee and made a good blocking position.
Daniel started for the grove, well behind the riggers in his fifty-strong party. They’d jumped while the end of the ramp was still ten feet in the air. The thrusters had baked the ground solid. The mud was more organic than mineral, so the stench was worse than that of a fire in a charnel house.
There was a bright white flash in the direction of the distant spaceport. Almost immediately the ground shuddered, but the crash of rending metal was many seconds delayed. The bow of a pirate cutter tilted up, then toppled again below the line of the causeway. There was no way to tell which side had been responsible for the destruction.
“Boarders, gunmen are taking position on the other side of the—” Tovera said. Her cold voice was little changed by the compression of the helmet radio link.
A stocked impeller began to fire behind Daniel, the slugs passing close overhead. He stumbled on a root that remained tough despite the charring. Righting himself he glanced backward. Hogg was seated crosslegged on the top of the ramp. His arms were braced on his knees and the impeller’s sling, locking the weapon on target.
Every time Hogg fired, a head slipped out of sight behind the causeway. Sometimes there was a splash in the air behind where the head had been.
Midway between the road and the corvette, the ground was still soggy. Daniel’s right boot sank ankle deep, throwing him forward. Spurts of mud and pulped foliage leaped high, drawing a diagonal across the line of advancing spacers. The man to Daniel’s right crumpled, holding his belly and screaming. His equipment belt twisted away from him as he fell, severed by the slug.
The Princess Cecile’s upper turret roared, raking the causeway with pulses of plasma. The bolts were hammerblows of pure heat on the back of Daniel’s neck and bare hands. Several of the spacers fell—unharmed, or he hoped so, but thrown to the ground by the crashing discharges.
Daniel’s visor blacked out the flashes that would otherwise have destroyed his retinas. What he saw as he continued to stagger forward was an invisible giant chewing hunks out of the roadway. Wet silt exploded in steam and the dark red flames of carbon; rock ballast blew to glassy shards or white, searing calcium flames.
The Falassan gunfire ceased. “Boarders, form along the roadway!” Daniel wheezed. “Over!”
Sun ceased fire after his twin cannon had devoured three hundred yards of roadway. Through the smoke of the new fires, Daniel saw people running back toward the town to the south or standing with their hands in the air.
Several of the spacers were shooting wildly as they advanced. They weren’t going to hit anything—well, they weren’t going to hit any Falassans, though their fellows were at risk—and the locals seemed to have stopped fighting anyway.
“Boarders, cease fire!” Daniel ordered. He thought again about his notion of small-arms training for the crew. There’d have been time for it during refit on Tanais. The Sissies would’ve been excited to have something real to be doing on a barren iceball. Instead—
Another explosion shook Homeland. An orange fireball lifted a metal roof and a human body. The figure was pinwheeling; the arms and legs had separated from the torso before it all dropped out of sight.
This causeway would make a good target backstop, but this probably isn’t the time.
Daniel reached the causeway and stepped carefully into a smoldering divot gouged by the plasma cannon before pausing to take stock. A figure in coveralls sprawled on the road to the right. The only thing moving was the row of ribbons
sewn along his seams, fluttering in the breeze.
Adele sat beside Daniel on a chunk of rock fill. Thermal shock had crazed the surface, but either it had cooled or this was another example of Adele’s unconcern for her physical comfort. She took out her personal data unit.
Daniel eyed the straggling mixture of woods, wire-fenced gardens, and stone houses to the south. The terrain was rolling, and the houses were generally built in clumps on the higher ground. Earthen mounds raised the two warehouses near the road ten feet above the surface.
Vehicles full of armed personnel moved on the paths between buildings. Even with his visor magnification at 160x Daniel couldn’t see any current fighting. Two houses burned sullenly, and occasionally sparks gouted from the spaceport well to the south.
“I can get you imagery from Kelburney’s command car if you like, Daniel,” Adele said. Her voice broke in mid-sentence for a cough, but she didn’t sound winded. “The turret has an electronic sight. Which I’ve tapped.”
How in heaven’s name … ? But the method didn’t matter, and the information certainly did. “Yes, please!” Daniel said. “Ah, Quadrant One.”
He didn’t want somebody else’s field of view covering his own completely. A compressed image on the upper left corner of his visor would give Daniel the information he required without preventing him from doing whatever might suddenly be required. Shooting an unexpected enemy, for example; though with Adele and Tovera both in the hole with him, that was of vanishingly low probability.
Several hundred people were coming toward the causeway on foot. Were they attacking, or—
“Boarders, don’t shoot!” Daniel said in sudden horror. Much of the crowd was children, and many of the adults carried infants or toddlers as well. His first thought was that all of them were unarmed, but that wasn’t technically true. A number of the figures wore holstered pistols, and one female carried a submachine gun slung across her back. She’d presumably forgotten about it; her arms were stretched out to hold the hands of a pair of three-year-old twins.
“Boarders, don’t shoot,” Daniel repeated. “They’re surrendering to us instead of taking their chances with Kelburney’s lot. On your honor, don’t shoot!”
The Dalbriggan image echoed onto the corner of Daniel’s visor provided a travelogue through the streets of Homeland. It was so smooth that he thought for a moment that Kelburney was in an aircar or at least an air cushion vehicle, but the forehull bobbled repeatedly into the bottom of the frame.
The gun was stabilized both in azimuth and deflection. It was mounted in the turret of a car armored so heavily that only a firm connection with the ground could support it. Daniel had briefly confused the smoothness of the sight picture with that of the vehicle itself.
The fighting was over; Daniel wanted to catch the Astrogator at the moment of triumph to have the best chance of succeeding with the next stage of his plan. “Lieutenant Mon,” he ordered. “Have someone bring the jeep to me immediately. I need to speak to Astrogator Kelburney. Out.”
“I can reach him, Daniel,” Adele said, looking up with a frown of concern. She must wonder if he believed she was incompetent.
Daniel laughed at the absurdity of the unspoken thought. “I believe face-to-face would be the better choice, Adele,” he said. “I’m going to have a hard sell, I’m afraid.”
The ringing whine of the fans lifting the little vehicle out of the Princess Cecile’s stern hold followed Daniel’s request by only moments. Vesey’s voice said, “Captain Leary, the jeep’s on the way to your position, out,” but the driver must have been not only prepared but cued into the command net.
Mon had cut corners to save time his commander might need. “A very good officer,” Daniel said aloud. To Adele’s raised eyebrow he added, “Lieutenant Mon, that is.”
Kelburney’s gunsight steadied on a low circular structure whose stone walls had a pronounced slope. Immediately slugs from an automatic impeller rang from the car’s armor. The heavy-metal projectiles ricochetted with green, purple and magenta sparks, vivid even in full daylight. One round must have struck the turret because the sight picture jolted skyward even as the car backed to safety behind a residence.
Daniel switched away from the remote image and overlaid his visor with a sixty-percent mask showing Homeland’s topography. The circular building was nearly in the center of town; it wasn’t simply a building but a thick ring surrounding a central citadel.
“The Falassan chiefs depend more on physical protection than the Astrogator and his predecessors on Dalbriggan do,” Daniel said with a grim smile. “That’s a confession of weakness, of course. It appears that we’ve picked the right side.”
Woetjans had come over to report. “Whichever we pick is the right side,” she said. Her tone made the pronouncement sound rather like a comment on the weather. “We’re securing the prisoners, sir. That all right?”
The corvette’s small utility aircar landed at the back of Daniel’s position. Gramercy, one of the power-room techs, was driving. He showed a gentler touch on the controls than Daniel had come to expect of RCN drivers; but then, perhaps he’d gotten lucky.
“Yes, carry on, bosun,” Daniel said. “Signals and I are going to discuss the next stage with the Astrogator.”
He walked toward the idling vehicle. Ash from the recent bath of plasma spiraled in the wash from the drive fans.
“Sir, I’ll come with you!” Woetjans said. She knew she had to remain here to command the ground party, but her request was as certain as sunrise.
“There isn’t room for you, mistress,” Tovera said as she stepped between Woetjans and the aircar. “But if you like, I’ll kill one of the locals for you?”
Daniel got into the front seat beside the driver. He’d never thought he’d see Woetjans with a shocked expression; but he knew exactly how she felt.
*
The Dalbriggans didn’t have a command channel: they had seven separate frequencies on which subchiefs and their followers gabbled orders and nonsense in their excitement.
“Don’t fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!” Adele said. She used her personal data unit to cue the corvette’s powerful transmitters for a multiband rebroadcast, hoping—another person would have thought “praying”—the message would reach every one of Kelburney’s gunmen.
She’d found seven frequencies. What if there was an eighth that she’d missed, that of a guntruck whose weapons were even now swinging on the jeep?
Adele’s mouth quirked in slight humor as she repeated, “Don’t fire at the RCN aircar approaching from the north!” In that case she was unlikely to live long enough to be tortured by failure. The universe had a kindly side after all.
Daniel switched on the jeep’s klaxon as the driver took them low through the streets of Homeland. When the vehicle swooped up on edge to slice between a building and a car with an automatic impeller welded to each of its four corners, Adele wished angrily that they’d lift high enough to hold a steady course across the community.
The thought didn’t reach her tongue, fortunately. It had scarcely formed when she realized that would mean a straight course down the throat of the Falassan holdouts. She had her duties and areas of competence; which were different, fortunately, from those of the spacer who was driving.
Adele could hear the sound of gunfire over the klaxon and the howl of the drive fans. A red spark shrieking like a banshee curved out of the sky and banged the car’s bow, just ahead of the open cockpit. The driver shouted and jerked his control yoke. Daniel reached past and steadied the vehicle before they wobbled into the building to the left.
“A ricochet,” he explained—to everyone in the car, but Adele was the only one who might not have known without being told. “Wars are dangerous places, aren’t they? But of course, you can slip in the bath and break your neck.”
Adele supposed he was only acting the part of a good commander in calming his troops, but on reflection she couldn’t be sure. Nothing seemed to faze Dan
iel.
Adele didn’t care about her own life to speak of, but she found the notion of being snuffed out at random was oddly disquieting. Logically it shouldn’t matter whether she was killed by a sniper’s deliberation or instead by a few ounces of impact-heated osmium plunging from the sky. She obviously wasn’t as much a creature of logic as she preferred to believe.
The jeep rounded a knoll on which stood several houses, one of them afire. The swale beyond was a plaza of sorts with a triumphal arch and a number of plinths from which the statues had been recently shot away. Five armed vehicles parked on the pavement, with a group of heavily armed Dalbriggans hunched behind them.
One of the Dalbriggans saw the jeep out of the corner of his eye. He shouted and leveled a stocked impeller.
Tovera lifted slightly to aim: the light pellets of her submachine gun wouldn’t penetrate the windscreen of the open car. Before she could fire, Daniel rose to his feet and raised his hands high.
“Quite all right!” Daniel shouted, keeping his balance even though the driver reacted to the threat by landing in what was virtually a controlled crash. “Captain Leary here to speak with the Astrogator!”
Kelburney stepped forward, holding a drawn pistol. The man with the impeller looked hesitant and didn’t lower his weapon. Kelburney backhanded him with the pistol butt from behind, knocking him face-down to the ground.
“Leary!” he shouted, advancing to give Daniel a bear hug. “Bloody good work with the guardship! There aren’t six captains in my squadron who’d have been able to equal that!”
In the assembly, Kelburney had been a monarch; in the council meeting later he was the canny man of business. Here on this field of smoke and blood, Adele saw a much more primal figure that she suspected was the stuff from which the Astrogator had molded his other personas.
Automatic impellers opened fire from somewhere out of sight. Projectiles bounced skyward like a neon fountain. And where are they going to come down? Adele wondered, but with detached curiosity. The near miss had inoculated her against fear of death from that sort of randomness.
