What Distant Deeps-ARC

by David Drake

  Adele thought about Flecker saying she was—accusing her of being—hard. Well, perhaps so, but counter-coup activities were a hard business on which she was an expert. After all, she'd studied every detail of how Speaker Leary had crushed the Three Circles Conspiracy, right down the where the heads of her parents and sister had been nailed on Speaker's Rock.

  "This is Commissioner Brown," her console said. Then, "Who is there, please? This is the Cinnabar Commission?"

  Adele returned from ancient murders to her present business. Of murder.

  CHAPTER 21: Above Zenobia

  Daniel watched with satisfaction as The Maid of Brancusi dropped toward the surface of Zenobia. Plasma wreathed the hull as her thrusters cut in some thirty seconds before he would have expected. Though—

  It didn't really matter, but the question had piqued his curiosity. Daniel called up the imagery which the Sissie had gathered as a matter of course on all five transports at the waypoint. There was quite a good view of the Maid's underside. Magnified, it showed that only four remained of the six High Drive motors that the transport had been fitted with in the builders' yard—and they appeared ratty even at a distance.

  A High Drive's exhaust spewed out a certain amount of antimatter which hadn't recombined within the motor. In an atmosphere, the explosive cancellation of waste particles ate away the High Drive itself. A captain ordinarily was willing to accept the minor erosion that would occur down to twenty miles above a habitable planet, because the output of the High Drive was greater and much more efficient than that of the plasma thrusters.

  The Maid's captain must have decided to nurse his motors. Daniel suspected that he was right to make that decision—assuming, of course, that his thrusters weren't in equally marginal condition.

  "Sir?" said Cory, who had been doing a exemplary job as signals officer. "If I may ask—are you going to put all five transports down on Diamond Cay, over?"

  Daniel glanced toward the astrogation console. Lieutenant Cory smiled—but toward Daniel's image on his display, not at the man himself a few feet away. He's aping Adele . . . but all right, that's perfectly proper behavior in a signals officer.

  "Yes, that's right, Cory," Daniel said. "I've directed the captains to dump their reaction mass as soon as they're on the ground. That won't harm the ships, but it'll take a number of hours before they can even think of lifting again. The troops can't walk anywhere, and even if they have a few vehicles aboard, the Green Ocean will stop anything but aircars. You couldn't ferry a couple thousand troops with all the aircars available in the Qaboosh Region. Over."

  "Yessir," said Cory. "But, ah, sir? The buildings on Diamond Cay are really unusual aren't they, over?"

  "They're unique, so far as I know," Daniel agreed. He grinned. "And I know what Officer Mundy has told me, which I suspect means I have all information available in the human universe."

  He paused, going back for a moment to the pleasure he'd taken in the material Adele had provided when they returned from Diamond Cay. "That crystal castle is certainly Pre-Hiatus," he said, "but it seems to me—from negative evidence, I'll admit—that it's pre-settlement and probably a long time pre-settlement. The biota of the island and the shallows around it isn't natural to Zenobia, you see, and it certainly wasn't introduced recently. Perhaps when this is over, I'll have some time to explore it in a less, ah, directed fashion. Over."

  Daniel wasn't really an antiquarian, but oddities interested him: things that weren't where or what they should be. The building on Diamond Cay was that, and the biota was that in spades. The seadragons weren't unnatural—they, the pin crabs, and the vegetation the crabs ate were a seamless whole and quite ordinary.

  But not ordinary for Zenobia. The fact that Adele hadn't been able to locate the planet from which the creatures were introduced didn't prove anything, but it certainly suggested a considerable distance in time or space from the planet today. It was a fascinating problem, and one which was unlikely to be solved in Daniel's lifetime.

  "But that's what I mean, sir," Cory said. "Those transports are landing on an unprepared surface without ground control. Frankly there's a couple of them that I wouldn't trust to land in Harbor Three without screwing up, as bad as their commo suites are."

  He paused to clear his throat and perhaps to order his next words. Daniel was smiling. Cory was being more than a little unfair to the freighters' captains: communications equipment was—properly—a good ways down the list of a civilian owner's concerns. But the standard of maintenance of the drives and the rigging of these ships wasn't up to what Daniel considered reasonable standards either, save for the Sarah H. Gerdis.

  "Sir, what if one of them crashes right on top of the castle?" Cory blurted. "Crashes or lands—the thermal shock from the thrusters would be as bad as the kinetic shock of just dropping, I suspect. The whole thing will be destroyed! Over."

  Daniel's smile faded. Cory was a good man and a good officer; he deserved an answer.

  "Right, that's a risk," Daniel said, "though not a great one. I was familiar with Diamond Cay and knew that it was suitable for my purposes—that is, to isolate the invasion force in safe if not particularly congenial surroundings."

  Another caret appeared on the PPI, this one trailing the planet by 330,000 miles. That was at the edge of the volume included in Daniel's display, though he'd set the console to alert him to ships arriving anywhere within a light year of Zenobia's star.

  "And you see, Cory," he continued, "I'm an RCN officer first. I will regret it if a transport destroys the castle, but I'll regret the loss of several hundred lives even more than the loss of the building, and I'll consider them acceptable also. We're in a war, or we will be if things continue to go in the direction they're headed at present. Things get broken, people die."

  The red caret became the dot of a ship with the legend Bonaventure. She hadn't been the last to arrive after all, though the distance she extracted from the target point of the course Daniel had given her was marginal at best.

  "Cory out," said the acting signals officer. "Break. CS Bonaventure, this is RCS Princess Cecile. Acknowledge on this frequency, over."

  Daniel felt his smile returning. Cory was hailing the freighter on 15.5 MH; 20 meters was the only shortwave band on which the Bonaventure seemed able to receive and respond. Cory did have a point about the freighters' wretched commo gear.

  Vesey placed another caret in the PPI. If this was the missing Birdsong 312, then the initial problem—the safety of the Zenobian government—was solved. The troops on Diamond Cay could be disarmed and sequestered at leisure by the planetary forces. The Horde might not even enter the Zenobia system since ships in orbit couldn't affect the situation on the surface.

  The caret resolved to a point. The legend read 114G2929L, a responder code rather than a real name.

  The ship probably didn't have a proper name: it was a Palmyrene cutter. The dozen carets appearing all around it were almost certainly more of the same. The Horde had arrived, summoned by the escort which had escaped when the Sissie captured the convoy.

  Unidentified vessel, read the crawl at the bottom of Daniel's display, this is AFS Z 46. State your business, over.

  Von Gleuck was quite properly taking charge of the situation. He was the senior naval officer on station, dealing with an incursion of hostile warships.

  * * *

  Adele finished downloading a blind file containing full details on the Farm's defenses and personnel to the Founder and Major Flecker. In three hours the file would open with bells and flashing lights on both consoles.

  The delay was to prevent either man from deciding to make the Farm the first priority. The Palmyrene base was of minor importance so long as the troops it was meant to serve were sitting in a swamp a thousand miles away, but civilians and tactical officers like Flecker might see the situation less clearly than Adele did.

  The enemy already within Calvary was the real danger. Thanks to Resident Tilton's behavior, there was enough popular di
scontent that riots might sweep out the Founder and his Alliance masters even without the help of foreign troops.

  Tilton would remain as a serious problem, for the Belisandes and for the Alliance both. So long as Cinnabar couldn't be linked to the trouble, that was none of Adele's business.

  She might be tempted to arrange an accident when the Princess Cecile returned to Calvary Harbor, however. The city would be in chaos, even if Major Flecker's arrest teams had had no more trouble than they could solve with small arms. Almost anything which happened under those conditions could be blamed on the coup plotters.

  But that was for after the present business was concluded, and it required that the Sissie and those aboard her—Hogg would probably be the choice to cause Tilton's accident—survive until them. Survival was therefore the next item on Adele's list.

  Using a single laser lens and copying Cory and Cazelet, Adele said, "Princess Cecile to Alliance squadron commander, over."

  Cory or Cazelet might have to replace her as signals officer. Ordinarily the crew of a ship as small as a corvette would live or die together in battle, but a freak chance might take Adele and not one of the male officers.

  Adele didn't inform Daniel, even with a text crawl on his display, because he neither knew nor cared how his signals went out. Adele appreciated the fact that though Daniel had a tendency to be his own missileer and gunner, he never tried to second guess her decisions about commo.

  A voice that was male but not von Gleuck's replied almost immediately, "Princess Cecile, this is Z 46. How do you come to use this code, over?"

  Adele smiled with chilly pleasure. Competence pleased her, even competence in an enemy; and she supposed she shouldn't think of the Alliance as "the enemy" for at least the time being.

  "Z 46," she said, "I cannot vouch for the security procedures of RCN vessels based at Palmyra; therefore I must assume that the Horde can read any signals passed using RCN codes. I suggest that signals between the Princess Cecile and Alliance vessels be sent using this obsolete Alliance code. Even though it's outdated, I believe it will be safe from Palmyrene interception, over."

  "Hold one, Princess Cecile," said the Alliance signals officer. He sounded as though he'd been kicked in the stomach.

  Adele's smile quirked slightly wider at the thought. As well he might.

  She had been careful to refer to the code as obsolete, but it had in fact been the Fleet's active code three months before. Though it had been superseded, the signals officer of Z 46—and his superiors in Pleasaunce—probably thought it was still good.

  The Alliance battleship Oldenburg had been so badly hammered in the Battle of Cacique that the automatic systems which were supposed to destroy the code generator had failed, and the entire bridge crew was killed. RCN technicians sifting through the wreckage had found the generator, and Mistress Sand's specialists were able to bring it back on line.

  The information remained closely held, even in Mistress Sand's organization. Adele was using it now because secure communications among the three warships was absolutely necessary if any of them were to survive. Even so, she knew that some—perhaps including Mistress Sand—would fault her for disclosing it.

  The saving grace of Adele's action was that in all likelihood, the Princess Cecile and the Alliance ships would be destroyed anyway. In that case, the secret would remain safe.

  "Princess Cecile, this is von Gleuck," said a different male voice. "Am I speaking to Lady Mundy, over?"

  Adele grimaced. "This is Officer Mundy, Lieutenant Commander," she said in a consciously withdrawn voice. "Over."

  "I've directed my command to use the code set which you recommend, Lady Mundy," von Gleuck said. "I felt it necessary to assure myself that the Princess Cecile's operator would be able to handle the non-standard procedure. Your presence, which I was not willing to assume, of course convinces me. Von Gleuck out."

  Lady Mundy indeed. He's determined to make his point—stiff-necked aristocrat that he is. Adele's frown bent into a wry smile. And it takes one to know one, I believe the phrase is.

  She went back to work, analyzing the internal communications of the Alliance destroyers. They were friends and indeed allies at present, but circumstances change.

  And anyway, Adele didn't want to die with the regret of having twiddled her thumbs while there was information she could have gathered and collated.

  CHAPTER 22: Above Zenobia

  Daniel's lips pursed: the first Palmyrene cutter appeared some hundred and ten thousand miles from Zenobia, though on the opposite side of the planet from where the Sissie was orbiting. That would be very good astrogation for an initial extraction after a voyage of probably fifty light years or more.

  Except that it probably wasn't astrogation but rather pilotage. The Palmyrene captain had sailed to the Zenobia system—a planetary system was a large target, even using what was by Cinnabar standards a very rudimentary computer—and then felt his way inward to Zenobia itself.

  It was no accident that the cutter extracted only two thousand miles above Zenobia's second moon, an irregular lump of rock no more than fifty miles in diameter on any axis. Slight as it was, the moon cast its shadow into the Matrix. The cutter's captain had used that as his target.

  Even a judge friendly to the Palmyrenes would have admitted that a single vessel appearing in that fashion could be chance. Three more cutters followed almost immediately, none of them more than a hundred miles out from any of her fellows. That was beyond chance, and far beyond the skill of any spacers whom Daniel had ever heard of.

  Von Gleuck repeated his challenge. Z 42 was holding station against the third moon silently, but Daniel no longer thought that the destroyer might go unnoticed. The Palmyrenes were barbarous, certainly, but the forces of civilization had nothing to teach them about sidereal space or the Matrix either one.

  "They're signalling to one another with handheld laser communicators," Adele said on the command channel. "I can't read the messages—they appear to be in clear, but I'm only able to pick up fragments because the power is so low; the beams don't scatter from the hulls brightly enough for even our optics to pick up. They appear to be discussing a rendezvous—"

  The first cutter slipped back into the Matrix. Her three companions withdrew moments later, in perfect unison as they had appeared.

  "Yes," said Adele in satisfaction. "I believe they're meeting the Autocrator."

  As an obvious afterthought, she added, "Over."

  "Gleuck to Leary," said the command console. Cory—or had Adele resumed commo duties?—was passing the signal directly through instead of querying Daniel or converting it to text. "How do you interpret the Monkeys' withdrawal, over?"

  "Leary to Gleuck," Daniel replied, grinning. Should I refer to our Cinnabar allies as "Palmyrenes," or should I say "Wogs" to demonstrate solidarity with an officer who will shortly be my brother in arms? "My staff informs me that the leading cutters discussed joining the Autocrator Irene, who will make the decision about further proceedings. You know the Palmyrenes and the Autocrator better than I do, but I personally doubt that the lady will choose to withdraw at this stage, over."

  "Roger, Leary," von Gleuck said. "Break. All Force Posy elements—"

  Finessing the question of what elements those were and where they were located.

  "—you are free to engage interloping Palmyrene warships at will with gunfire, but do not, repeat, do not, launch missiles until I give specific orders. Cinc Posy out."

  Daniel grinned again. Does Lady Belisande know that her gallant is going into battle waving her name like a banner? Well, with luck, there would be someone around to tell her about it after things quieted down.

  The frame of Daniel's PPI pulsed orange, then settled to a thin haze that brightened to the upper right of the display. He expanded the image volume, letting it find its own boundaries which would include the ships that had just appeared.

  The Piri Reis with seven, then twenty, and finally thirty-one cutters had extracted for
ty light-minutes out from Zenobia's sun. The cruiser was about the same distance from Zenobia itself. Daniel frowned, wondering why in heaven the Palmyrene fleet was appearing there.

  When he switched the region to a cartouche in the lower right corner of his display, then increased the scale, he understood. A large comet was inbound from the cloud of debris orbiting a light-year out from the sun. The Piri Reis had extracted near the comet, and the cutters had formed on the cruiser.

  Text at the bottom of the display told Daniel that von Gleuck was ordering the Z 42 to clear for action, stripping the ship to a minimum sail plan to give the guns better fields of fire. Missiles could be launched regardless of the rig: they were kicked straight out by a jet of steam and didn't light their High Drives until they were well clear of the vessel, whereupon their internal computer guided them on a preset course.

  A plasma cannon, however, firing at maximum rate as it followed an incoming missile, could easily traverse into a sail or even an antenna which the bolt would destroy in a fireball. Worse than the direct damage was the risk that the missile would proceed unhindered into the ship which had wasted her defensive efforts on her own rigging.

  Daniel wondered briefly that the Alliance signals were appearing in real-time on his console. He had expected von Gleuck to be somewhat more circumspect in his dealings with an RCN corvette.

  Regardless of the implied comradeship, Daniel didn't intend to step on Alliance toes in a situation as fraught as this one. "Leary to von Gleuck," he said, making it clear that his was speaking man to man. "Commodore, I ask your leave to approach the Palmyrene squadron in an effort to calm this business down, over."

  "Posy Cinc to Princess Cecile," von Gleuck said after a moment. "As Alliance commander in the system, I will not interfere with the movements of neutral vessels sailing under civilian registry."