Lt. Leary, Commanding (31 page)

"I've already determined that, I believe," Adele said, half smug and half peeved at being told to do something that had been obvious to her from the moment Daniel called in as he left the
Winckelmann
. "I don't know if you have time . . . ?"

"Yes," he said, now lifting his left foot as directed to step out of his trousers. "Everything's obviously under control here. I'd like to know what's going on before the arrival of the Captal's guide—and spy, I presume."

At the open arms locker down the corridor, Sun handed impellers or submachine guns to the spacers told off for the expedition. His assistant, Gansevoort, ran the recipients' ID chips through a reader that paired them with the weapon serial numbers.

Adele's wands refocused her holographic display so that Daniel could view it from where he stood. Tovera was pulling the leg of his utility trousers over his right boot.

"It'll be quicker if you explain it, I believe," Daniel said with an austerity that was not quite a rebuke. He switched legs while his hands did up the buttons—more rugged, weather resistant, and silent than any other closure system—of his jacket.

Adele considered what had just happened. Daniel thought her gesture was a way of saying, "You can't match my skill even if I show you what you ought to be looking for." He was quite possibly correct. Both he and the situation demanded better performance from her.

"Sorry," Adele said, readjusting the display. "I checked Commodore Pettin's message log."

"His secure log?" Daniel asked with a frown of puzzlement. Tovera was buttoning his trousers.

"It's not
that
secure," Adele said. "If there's anything else you'd like to know from the
Winckelmann
's records, just ask me."

Daniel grinned and shook his head. Hogg, who already wore a stocked impeller slung muzzle-down over his right shoulder, handed Daniel an equipment belt complete with a holstered pistol.

"Mr. Gerson from the Commission staff called for an appointment yesterday at twenty forty-seven hours Cinnabar time," Adele resumed. The Sexburgan day, slightly longer than that of Cinnabar, was brought into alignment by adding an intercalary eighty-one minutes to the ship's clock at midnight. "I think he was with Admiral Torgis when he—"

She wasn't sure how to describe the admiral's intervention, so she gave a shrug that didn't affect the angle at which she held her wands.

"When he saved my ass," Daniel said as he buckled the equipment belt around him. "Saved the
Sissie
's collective ass, very possibly. And yes, Gerson did accompany the admiral."

"The message said that—" Adele said. She paused, then instead of paraphrasing quoted, "Gerson said, `I have information for your ears only, regarding the workings of the Commission and their bearing on your command. It is imperative that we speak before ten hundred hours tomorrow.' Pettin called him. Gerson refused to say anything further even though the line was encrypted."

She was quite certain that Gerson was simply being paranoid rather than that he really believed anyone could hear the message. This was a case where paranoia had paid off.

"They met three hours later—" Two hours and fifty-one minutes later, but Adele had learned overprecision tended to bother those she spoke to. "—according to Pettin's appointment record. Gerson stayed forty-five—" forty-three "—minutes, during which time Commodore Pettin called up all the information about South Land in the
Winckelmann
's data banks. That was limited to the
Sailing Directions
, of course. He then put through a call to the Captal da Lund, confirming that a car and guide would be here at ten-thirty hours local time today."

"I see," Daniel said quietly. Now dressed for action, he sat at his console and looked over the changes Lt. Mon had made in the watch roster to reflect the personnel going off to South Land for three days.

"All right, muster on the quay with your ground packs!" Sun said to the spacers he'd just armed. He'd be acting as Daniel's second in command so he had every right to order them out, but Adele knew that the shout—which had startled her—was meant to alert Daniel to the detachment's readiness.

The ten crewmen trotted toward the companionway, carrying in one hand the weapons they'd just been issued and the small pack holding toiletries and a change of clothes in the other. RCN crews were frequently used for detached security and fatigue duties on distant worlds where no other Cinnabar personnel were available, so there was a Standard Operating Procedure for it. Adele doubted whether "detached" often meant a dozen people being put in the middle of a desert over a thousand miles from their ship, though.

Daniel looked up to see Sun, the last in line, heading down toward the quay. Pasternak was coming up from the power room, using the other companionway. He looked worried, but Adele knew by now that was the engineer's normal expression.

"We'll be sleeping under tarps," Daniel said to Adele and to Banks, waiting silently at the attack console although he was technically off duty at the moment. "That shouldn't be too bad if rain's as rare as the data say."

"I've downloaded all the available information on Sexburga into your helmets," Adele said. "They have plenty of storage capacity, and it'll save time by you not having to go through the communications satellites to reach the ship's data bank."

"Ah," Daniel said. "I appreciate that."

His face twitched as if he were trying to suppress a smile. Then he said, "Adele, why do they want me to go to South Land? The Captal can't really care about the ruins. He'd go himself if he did."

Adele shrugged again. "There's nothing available electronically that even suggests a reason," she said. "There's a physical archive in the basement of Council Building, that's the local government. The midshipmen and I found it the other day. While you're roughing it, I intend to search there to see what I can find."

Pasternak entered the bridge; Lt. Mon was coming down the corridor from the Battle Direction Center. Betts got to his feet. Daniel rose from his console also, to take his leave of his officers before joining the detachment on the quay.

"There's worse forms of busy work that a captain can find for a junior lieutenant," he said, flashing Adele a boyish grin. "But I really wish I knew what Vaughn's friends are playing at."

"So do I," Adele said aloud. Her mind added,
And one way or another, I'm going to learn.
 

_T
he aircar's central compartment had luxury seating for eight.
Sun, Vesey, and the eight ordinary crewmen found it uncomfortably roomy: spacers liked close quarters or they'd have found some other line of work. The rear compartment had jumpseats for servants as well as cargo tie-downs; the expedition's food and luggage rode there now.

Daniel and Hogg were on either end of the bench seat in front, sandwiching their driver/guide Dorotige, the attendant Daniel had met guarding the Captal's gate. Today he wore a gray jacket over loose khaki trousers instead of the clown suit he'd been in for the party.

"I wish to God that you'd packed those guns away in the back," Dorotige said, shouting over the sound of wind and the fans' vibration. The central compartment was slung in elastic to isolate the passengers from the noise of operation, but the driver had no such luxury. "Or left them back in Spires, better yet. There's nothing bigger than your thumbnail on South Land."

"You've been here before," Daniel said, looking down at a plain broken by ravines where russet vegetation found enough moisture to grow. In the forward distance rose sandstone hills which the wind had weathered out of the surrounding clay. "My crewmen haven't, and this isn't the sort of business they're trained for anyway. They're more comfortable being armed."

In truth, Daniel's only real concern about the expedition was the same one the Captal's man had voiced. The spacers weren't for the most part any more familiar with hand weapons than they were with camping in the middle of a barren desert. Even though he'd ordered them to leave the guns' power switches off, there was a real chance that somebody'd put a bullet through himself, a fellow, or the car's drive fans.

"They'll be all right, buddy," Hogg said. "Most of this lot know which end the slug comes out of. And I told 'em that if anybody looses off a round, it'd better kill me straight out, because I'm sure as shit going to cut his throat if it don't."

Hogg was quite capable of exaggeration. He was also capable of cutting somebody's throat. Daniel hoped the comment was in the former category, but he even more hoped that he'd never have to learn.

An intercom connected the vehicle's three compartments, but Sun used his helmet's unit channel to ask, "
Captain
?
What's the ETA now? We ought to be getting close, right
?"

"Hold one," Daniel said, flipping down his visor and cueing the geographical overlay. It didn't show what he expected it to. Frowning, he used the thumb dial under his left ear to increase the scale until the destination pip showed on the same screen as the point where the helmet's inertial navigation system placed the aircar. They were to the north of the plotted ruins and well inland of them as well.

"Dorotige," Daniel said without raising his voice more than the noise level required. Hogg must have heard something in the tone, because he reached into his pocket.

"Yeah?" Dorotige muttered.

There was a snick from Hogg's side of the compartment. "Look at the master when he's talking to you, fishbait," Hogg said. He didn't speak loudly either, but with the point of a seven-inch knife blade resting against Dorotige's throat, he didn't have to.

"What the hell!" Dorotige screamed. The aircar lurched sideways. If Hogg hadn't been very fast, the jolt would have done exactly what the driver was afraid of; but while you could fault Hogg's judgment occasionally, Daniel was pretty sure his servant would never kill anybody that he didn't mean to. He had the knife back and closed before Dorotige managed to spit himself on it.

Daniel steadied the control yoke with his left hand, bringing the car straight and level again. He said, "We aren't heading for the ruins like we're supposed to be, Dorotige. Why is that?"

"What do you mean not the ruins?" the driver shouted, angry and terrified at the same time. He pointed through the windscreen toward the ground five hundred feet below. "What the hell do you think that is down there? Look, right at the bottom of the hill, there! We're here, you—"

The sound of Hogg's knife reopening punctuated the driver's bluster. He choked the next word off in his throat.

Daniel grimaced. He could see a pattern of lines in the stone, but until he dialed up the magnification on his visor they looked like mere weathering. That still might be what they were, but at 40x magnification and with the helmet's optical stabilizer engaged, Daniel could tell they were straight or at least seemed straight.

"There's two sites!" Dorotige said, now in a tone of injured innocence that Daniel had to admit his right to. "This is where the Captal told me bring you. The water you can get at the place down south has a lot of sulfur in it."

"All right," Daniel said. "Set us down, please."

He glanced into the passenger compartment. The helmet communicator was still engaged so the crewmen had heard everything that was going on. Dasi had his impeller pointed at the back of the driver's head. The heavy slug would punch through the clear plastic without difficulty, true enough, but it'd also send fragments of the panel across the compartment like a grenade blast.

Daniel frowned and waved the weapon away. He said, "All personnel prepare for landing. We've reached our destination."

He felt uncomfortable, but that might be simply because he seemed to have made a fool of himself. Still, the Captal should have mentioned that he'd directed them to a site that wasn't . . .

Ah. The Captal might not even know what the RCN
Sailing Directions
said about South Land. Anyway, there was no way of telling what the Captal had said to Gerson or Gerson to Commodore Pettin during their interview.

"I'm very sorry, Dorotige," Daniel said, sitting formally upright. "I jumped to conclusions. It won't happen again."

"And if you watch your tongue when you're talking to the master," Hogg said, "I won't have to prick you to better manners again neither."

Dorotige brought the aircar to a hover, raising a huge doughnut of red dust from the spiky vegetation. The cloud was inevitable, but he let the vehicle slip backward and landed expertly out of the worst of it.

Daniel opened his door; he'd studied the odd pull-lift motion of the latch before they left Spires. He'd learned as a child stuck in a narrowing cave that he didn't want to get into anything where he didn't know the way out.

Hogg stepped onto the deck on his side and surveyed the landscape: dark red rock with horizontal striations where the wind had dug deeper between layers; a sky so pale it was almost white; and cushions of reddish grass an inch or two high and about a foot in diameter. The vegetation vanished into the general rocky undersurface from any distance in the air, except in the ravines where greater moisture and protection from the wind let it grow higher.

Hogg spat. "Yessir," he said. "This is
just
where I was hoping to spend the next three days."

He turned to glare at Daniel over the cabin of the car. "And don't tell me I didn't have to come, young master," he added, "because you know damned good and well that I wasn't going to leave your ass swinging out here with nobody to look after you!"

"Yes, I did know that, Hogg," Daniel said, stepping to the ground. The contact jolted him all the way from his heel right up the spinal column. For some reason sandstone felt harder than other kinds of rock, even granite and basalt.

"Barnes and Keast, you're on guard till we know what we're dealing with," Sun ordered, lifting the gate of the cargo compartment. "The rest of you, stack arms and let's get the tarp up for shelter so we don't have to screw with it after the sunset. This wind's cold as ice up the ass already!"