by David Drake
Forbes nodded crisply. "I'll join you," she said. There was no question at all in her done.
"I hoped you would," Daniel said truthfully. "Now, let's deal with Harmston."
He glanced back at the panorama as he started out of the compartment with Hogg, Major Mull, and Senator Forbes. Armed spacers were trotting down the Milton's boarding ramp. That would be the cadres for the Militia as well as the cruiser's own security party, as expected. But among them—
Daniel looked at the signals console; it was empty, though Cory was doubtless handling communications from his station. He'd been right to think that the two slim figures leaving the ship were Adele and Tovera. They'd left the bridge while his attention was on Senator Forbes.
What in heaven is Adele doing now?
Though being Adele in the present chaos, the question might better be phrased, What in Hell?
While Adele, Tovera, and Dasi clung to the pivot where a lowboy would normally be attached, Barnes drove the tractor along the esplanade toward Fleet Berth 74 where the Zieten was moored. There was plenty of room on the deck of the bright orange vehicle, but passenger amenities were conspicuous by their absence.
Something fell on the back of Adele's neck. Rain? she thought, but when she patted it absently with her right hand the fingers came down black. It had been a blob of ash—oily ash.
She grimaced and wiped her fingertips on the back of her trouser leg. Quite a lot of the things burning around St. James Harbor this afternoon were human bodies. The smell was unmistakable if you'd been exposed to it before.
The tractor jounced over a length of pipe—plastic and therefore not a mast section, but it didn't deform under the small, solid wheels. Dasi's left arm was around Adele's waist; she was as safe as she'd have been if she were attached to the pivot by a safety line. That didn't make it a comfortable ride, though, even at a modest eight miles per hour which was as much as the low-geared electric motor could manage even without a loaded trailer.
"We could've gotten something with springs," Dasi said glumly. His partner seemed to be having a good time at the control yoke, but Barnes also had the tractor's only seat. "There was a couple little trucks in the shed two berths over. All we'd have had to do was lift the roof off them and I'd bet we could've got one of them to run."
Something exploded to the right. Adele jerked her head around, but she couldn't tell where the blast had come from; it might not even be within the military reservation. There'd been several random shots since she and her ad hoc escort set off from the Milton, but nothing that sounded like real fighting.
"The Brotherhood of Amorgos has the reputation of shooting first and not bothering to ask questions at all," Tovera said with a touch of gentle mockery, about as close as she usually came to displaying humor. "Armed people driving toward them in a truck with Alliance markings are likely to be stopped by the quickest means available. In this case that would probably be an automatic impeller, though they could doubtless take care of us with personal weapons."
"Lieutenant Alderman expects us," Adele said. "But I too thought that the tractor was the best means of transportation at present."
Three transports had landed, all of them in the military reservation, and a fourth was now thundering down from the heavens. The former slaves had to be armed from the Alliance arsenal here—Daniel didn't have sufficient RCN weapons.
"Ma'am?" Dasi said. "Is something wrong?"
I must have smiled, Adele thought. At least I would have meant it for a smile.
Aloud she said, "I wonder if we'll be equipping the new militia with Cinnabar weapons? Admiral Petersen would have captured quite a quantity of small arms on New Harmony, and it's likely enough that they would have been shipped here to the main base in the cluster, just as the prisoners were."
Dasi laughed gaily over the jingle of the wheels grinding debris into the concrete pavement. "Say, you're right, ma'am!" he said. "That'll teach 'em, won't it?"
Adele didn't respond save for a another neutral smile. Dasi took the reversal as an Aunt Sallie, a toy which inevitably bobbed upright on its weighted base after it had been slapped down. Adele's own image was that of a wheel: the Alliance had rolled to the top at New Harmony, but the wheel had turned again here at Bolton. The wheel was still turning, and it would turn until the end of time.
The tractor rolled and rattled into the warm cloud surrounding a recently landed freighter. Adele couldn't see farther than the control yoke. She expected Barnes to switch to infrared viewing, then realized that he wasn't wearing a helmet or goggles that would allow him to.
They trundled into the sunlight on the same line that they'd entered a hundred feet earlier. She supposed spacers got used to working in blurred light and darkness.
Adele tapped her personal data unit, though she didn't take it out of its pocket on so jolting a ride. The gray haze was too much like the hours before dawn when faces returned to her in an almost-dream. She knew that was only a trick of her mind, for their features were clear. For the most part they'd only been pale blobs above her gunsights during the fractions of seconds she'd seen them in life.
"They're waiting for us up there," said Barnes. His hand rose from the control yoke to point.
Tovera reached around from behind him and pulled his arm down. She said, "Let's not do anything our friends in the infantry might misunderstand."
Barnes grunted. "Got it," he said.
"You should've let me drive," Dasi said peevishly to his partner. As best Adele could tell, Dasi didn't really mean he wouldn't have pointed while approaching keyed-up men with guns; he was simply seizing the opportunity to complain again about something that had rankled throughout the ride.
A hundred yards ahead, sixty-odd spacers lay like rolls of carpeting on their backs along the edge of the esplanade. A dozen or so at the far end wore field-gray Fleet utilities.
A Brotherhood APC was parked its own length from the prisoners with its nose toward them. That was too far for anybody to decide to be a hero by rushing the vehicle. The impeller in the cupola and the troopers' personal weapons were stained gray at the muzzle by vaporized aluminum from firing.
Several Brotherhood soldiers crouched behind cover, following the tractor with their guns. Adele didn't know where the rest of the squad was—probably controlling the other approaches. It wouldn't be a good time to bring out her data unit and get a precise answer from satellite imagery.
"Halt where you are!" boomed a loudspeaker on the APC. "No vehicles are allowed closer than you are right now!"
Barnes obediently pushed the control yoke forward, bringing the tractor to a jingling halt. Adele hopped down, as glad as not to leave the hard orange deck.
"I'm Officer Mundy!" she said, wondering if anybody in the vehicle could hear her. She walked forward, taking her usual quick, short steps. "I need to speak to Lieutenant Alderman!"
"I'll talk to them, ma'am," Dasi said apologetically, striding in front of her.
They'd reached the nearest Alliance prisoners; some twisted their heads to follow the newcomers with their eyes, but many remained as stiff as logs or as corpses. A Brotherhood soldier with a sub-machine gun knelt at the base of the gantry Adele had just passed, watching events silently.
"Now look, you pongoes!" Dasi bawled. "We're from the Millie, so put them bloody guns up now or Cap'n Leary'll show you what real guns is!"
Adele grinned despite herself. She'd expected Dasi to politely request to meet the Brotherhood lieutenant, albeit more loudly than a librarian's lungs were capable of. After the fact, the notion seemed absurd. She knew riggers, and in particular she knew Barnes and Dasi—which was much of the reason she'd asked them to escort her to the Zieten.
That didn't mean it was the right way to approach the Brethren, who were reputed to have their own outlook on honor and propriety. Once you'd devoted your life to the State through its Gods, you were likely to disregard merely human regulations.
Adele stepped forward, her hands raised at her sides.
"Lieutenant Alderman, I'm Officer Mundy," she called. At least between them, she and Dasi had confused the troops enough to get within speaking distance. "I'm the one who requested your unit to take charge of the ship and its crew. I gather you've done so?"
Two soldiers stepped out from between a pair of room-sized shipping containers. Both carried sub-machine guns, but the older man behind wore a commo pack which would boost the signals of the small helmet transceivers which all the infantry wore.
"You're female!" said the younger man. Combat troops didn't wear insignia, but he was obviously Michael Alderman.
"Yes," said Adele, lowering her hands. If you must state the pointlessly obvious. "I spoke with Colonel Stockheim, who gave you your orders. Have you carried them out?"
"Mistress, please remain where you are!" Alderman said forcefully. He was either angry or nervous because he was faced with an unexpected situation. "I need to check with the colonel."
An older soldier rose from the APC's hatch. He said, "Sir, that's the RCN officer who got the astrogation gear working on Paton."
Ignoring his noncom, Lieutenant Alderman began speaking into his helmet microphone. His sound-cancellation field was up. You little puppy, Adele thought; but after her mental rebuke of the rigger, she didn't say that aloud.
The noncom met Dasi's eyes and shook his head, one enlisted veteran to another. He didn't look at Adele, though.
Alderman stiffened abruptly, his eyes focused straight ahead as they would if he were being dressed down face-to-face instead of just over the radio. Adele hadn't warmed to Colonel Stockheim, but he seemed to be better at ordering priorities than this junior lieutenant was.
Swallowing, Alderman turned to face Adele squarely and saluted. "Your pardon, Officer Mundy," he said. "The crew of the ship Zieten is here as you wished—"
He gestured with the muzzle of his sub-machine gun. He carried the weapon with the ease of long practice. However poor Alderman's judgment might be, Adele had the impression that he would give a good account of himself in a gunfight.
"—but the ship is closed up. Ah—should we blow it open? The colonel was clear that we were to extend you every facility."
"I'll take it from here, Lieutenant," Adele said. She was furious, but the first order of business was to correct the problem.
She turned to the Alliance officers, the prisoners wearing uniforms instead of ordinary spacers' slops. She said, "Corvette-Captain Friedman—"
She had the Zieten's roster from her databanks.
"—stand up if you please!"
The pudgy man on the end lifted his head but didn't otherwise move. Goodness only knew what sort of threats the Brethren had offered anyone who didn't lie flat.
"Now!" Adele said.
The pudgy man rose to his elbows, watching Alderman, then carefully got to his feet. "I'm Peter Friedman," he said. "Look, we're prisoners of war. You can't just shoot us."
He didn't sound very sure about that. Adele grimaced. "Of course not," she said. She nodded to the supine row. "Is your whole crew here?"
"Mistress, we're a courier ship," Friedman said. Adele didn't bother to say that she knew that; he was nervous enough already. "All my crew is here, yes. We obeyed the, ah, Captain Leary's orders. It'd be crazy to think we could fight a heavy cruiser!"
"That's very much what Captain Leary said after he destroyed the R16," Adele said, emphasizing the point which obviously the Alliance officer was already aware of. Tovera and Barnes moved up to join her and Dasi. "But why is the Zieten still sealed?"
"Look, mistress, this isn't our doing, I don't want you to think that," said Friedman, speaking in a breathless monotone. His eyes kept dancing around as though everything they lit on seared them. "But like I say, we're a courier ship and there were a couple Courier Service people aboard with the pouch."
Lieutenant Alderman stared at Tovera with the fascination of a small animal facing a viper. Tovera usually—Adele couldn't see her face at the moment—smiled back in such situations, making the metaphor even stronger.
"So they stayed aboard when the rest of you marched out?" Adele said, deciding to prod a little. She ordinarily let a subject tell the story his own way, then rearranged the bits later in a logical sequence; she'd learned that expecting logic from most people was as vain as expecting them to be skilled astrogators. Here, though, time might be getting short.
"Courier Alfreda, that's the officer, she carried the chip to Base Headquarters," said Captain Friedman. "But Ken Wilson, he's Support Staff, he stayed with the database. One of them always does. I mean the Courier Service database, it isn't linked to the ship."
Friedman swallowed. He turned his head from side to side, then stared at his boots. "Look," he said, "one of my engine wipers is a friend of Wilson's. She stayed aboard with him. I mean, what was I supposed to do? I got everybody else off, that's what's important, right?"
The just-landed freighter shut down its thrusters. In the near silence Adele heard five quickly spaced shots from across the harbor. The dull whoomp that followed was probably a vehicle's fuel tank bursting.
The most recent freighter had landed at the far end of the Fleet docks, but the next one would probably be nearby. Well, there were even better reasons to handle this quickly.
"Wilson and this woman are armed?" Adele said.
"I guess," Friedman said miserably. Adele wanted to slap him, but it wasn't the Alliance captain's cowardice that was really making her angry.
"All right," she said. "Barnes, Dasi—can we get into the ship from here or do I have to go back to the Milton to enter the command console electronically?"
She would have done that before they left the cruiser if she'd known. She should have known, it was her job not to make mistakes!
"We can blow it open, mistress," Alderman said with false brightness.
Ignoring the soldier, Barnes shrugged. "Sure," he said. "There's a hand wheel on each hatch. There's gotta be for when she's sitting in the yard with her fusion bottle pulled."
"And the bloody relays can fail," Dasi said to his partner. "Remember the old Calydon above Rubin?"
Barnes nodded. Dasi shrugged and added, "It'll be a bit of work, but at least we don't have to worry about our air giving out."
"All right," Adele repeated. With the two riggers in the lead, her party started down the quay toward the moored aviso.
Lieutenant Alderman trotted out in front of them. "Mistress," he said. "There are armed m-men aboard that ship. It's my duty to remove them from the vessel."
Adele looked at him. They were already half the hundred yards out from the esplanade. Odd; she wouldn't have thought they'd come so far.
"Yes, Lieutenant," she said. "It was your duty, and you failed to accomplish it. Please get out of the way. The RCN will take care of the problem now."
Alderman froze, gray-faced. None of his men had followed him.
"Hey, pongo?" Barnes said. "There's something you can do after all. It'll make turning the wheel easier if we got a come-along, and your gun barrel's just the right diameter. Give me your gun."
"We might need to use our own," said Dasi, patting the receiver of his stocked impeller. "We're RCN, you know."
The riggers weren't ordinarily cruel men, but they were fighters. Alderman had insulted Mistress Mundy. Now that Adele had knocked him down, they were putting the boot in.
Without speaking, Alderman lifted the muzzle of his sub-machine gun and held it out to Barnes, who gripped it at the balance in his free hand. The riggers sauntered around the lieutenant to either side; Adele and Tovera followed Dasi to the left.
The riggers began whistling the chorus of a song which Adele had heard in the past: "Here we come, full of rum, looking for boys who peddle their bum. . . ."
That was bravado, of course; they knew what they were getting into, or anyway they thought they did. But bravado had taken more than one RCN ship down the throat of a powerful enemy and out the other side.
Adele glanced back over her shoulde
r. Alderman remained where they'd left him. He looked like a statue of despair.
The Zieten had been down for more than an hour, so the steam of its landing had cooled to condensate soaking the quays. The riggers trotted on ahead, unconcerned about the slick metal surfaces of the dock extensions.
By the time Adele and Tovera arrived at a more sedate pace, the cover plate on the hinge side of the airlock was unbolted. Barnes stuck the barrel of the borrowed sub-machine gun through the six-inch wheel there and began cranking it around.
"Can we talk to the people inside?" Adele asked Dasi.
"Sure," he said, "once we get the lock open. There'll be an intercom."
Adele nodded. "I'll speak to them before we enter, then," she said.
