Lt. Leary, Commanding (57 page)

"
—the
Winckelmann
will be in orbit in ten minutes, Lieutenant,
" the commodore was saying in the enforced silence. "
I'm asking you now, what the hell is going on? Over!
"

Daniel let out his breath in a sigh of relief. Regardless of what happened to the career of Lt. Daniel Oliver Leary afterwards, the
Winckelmann
and her consorts would be safely out of the Strymon system within the hour. It might be months or even years before circumstances allowed the RCN to reenter the Sack with a force sufficient to deal with the powerful Alliance squadron now based on Tanais, but at least the Cinnabar ships and a thousand trained spacers had avoided massacre.

"Sir," he said, "we were attacked when we discovered an Alliance battleship, heavy cruiser, and four destroyers on Tanais. We repaired our battle damage on Dalbriggan and returned immediately to warn you of the danger. Ah, we're accompanied by a squadron of allies from the Selma Cluster. Over."

"
God help me,
" Commodore Pettin said. The words sounded heartfelt. "
Leary, we'll discuss this at a time of greater leisure, and I don't have to tell you what will happen to you if you're lying.
Right now I've got my hands full gathering up the seventy percent of my crews who're on detached duty thanks to the rebellion you started. Squadron out!
"

"
And if you want to know about that rebellion, Daniel,
" said Adele over the intercom, "
I have some information for you here
."

Strymon was a developed world with a highly organized information infrastructure. It occurred to Adele as she viewed clips of the chaos below that she could probably find similar records of the Proscriptions following the Three Circles Conspiracy.

She'd heard her parents had been shot against the wall of the garden behind their townhouse. Adele hadn't been an outdoors child, but her room was at the back of the house. She had familiar memories of ivy growing against the sun-bleached red bricks.

"Ten days ago . . ." said Adele, using a two-party link to the command console. "Rumors were circulating that Cinnabar had decided to support Delos Vaughn. The secret police couldn't determine precisely who was starting the rumors. Nunes, that's the Guardian, Friderik Nunes, had his agents stir up a mob to attack the Cinnabar Observer's residence. He thought Observer Mariette was behind the rumors and hoped the threat would make him stop."

Adele brought up imagery of citizens wearing bright Strymonian costumes marching up three avenues to the square on which the Cinnabar Residence stood, one of several ornate buildings behind walled forecourts. The pavement was plasticized clay, seamless and unable to provide missiles, but the leaders of the mob had thoughtfully provided themselves with sacks of fist-sized stones.

"
Why would they imagine Cinnabar was behind rumors like that?
" Daniel wondered aloud. "
That's scarcely our style. Thinking we were about to send a plenipotentiary to order a change in the government, now,
that
might have happened.
"

Two uniformed police at the entrance ambled away as the mob approached. One of them even tipped his cap to a woman in the front rank.

"The secret police provided the leaders and hired a number of additional thugs," Adele said. "There was quite a lot of spontaneous response, though. A large element of the civilian population hates Cinnabar almost as much as they fear us."

"
They'll have reason to fear one day soon,
" Daniel said quietly.

Four chattering women came out a side door of the residence and started down the street. They were members of the housekeeping staff, Adele knew from the records of the incident. All were born on Strymon, though they came from country districts rather than Palia itself.

They saw the oncoming mob, hesitated, and tried to get back through the door by which they'd left the building. It had locked behind them. The women started running in the opposite direction, only to meet another limb of the mob.

Stones flew from both directions. The women hunched, trying to protect their heads with their arms. Members of the mob knocked them down with clubs, then finished the job with boots.

"No Cinnabar citizens were injured," Adele said without expression. "All the windows on the ground and second floors of the Residency were broken, but the leaders of the mob didn't permit invasion of the grounds. It was meant as a warning."

Daniel sighed audibly. "
It takes a particular sort of person to kick an old woman to death,
"
he said
.
"
Well, politics is no proper business of an RCN officer.
"

"The next day," Adele said, "Delos Vaughn appeared at one of his family's estates three hundred miles south of Palia. With him was a force of eight hundred off-planet mercenaries, paid for by a consortium of shippers and landholders. You met many of the conspirators at the Captal da Lund's dwelling on Sexburga."

She called up a montage of images, some from news media and others gathered from the conspirators' own files. Though the mercenaries had been hired as individuals on a dozen different worlds, they were outfitted with battledress of a standard pattern bearing the badge and shoulder patches of the Land Forces of the Republic, Cinnabar's army. They carried stocked impellers and submachine guns of Cinnabar manufacture, with a limited number of crew-served weapons.

One of the images showed Delos Vaughn addressing a crowd of civilians. The sound bite attached to the clip rang, "
My people, the Republic of Cinnabar has sent me to regain my rightful position as President of Strymon and to free you from the tyranny of Friderik Nunes and his puppets!
"

"The secret police believed the troops really were from Cinnabar," Adele said. She shook her head in disgust and amazement. "They also believed there were six thousand of them."

The
Princess Cecile
was maneuvering constantly to optimize its position above Strymon. Neither the changing vectors nor the whine of the antimatter engines disturbed Adele now that she had real work to do.

"
What was the position of the army?
" Daniel asked. "
Or does Strymon even have an army, come to think?
"

"There's a Presidential Police Reserve," Adele said. She'd searched for army deployments, found none, and finally worked back from clips of the fighting to learn what the government troops were called so that she could determine their strength. "It's about twenty thousand personnel at full strength, but there was quite a lot of desertion as soon as word got out that Delos Vaughn had returned with Cinnabar backing."

"
I see why the commodore blames me for the trouble,
" Daniel said. "
And I greatly fear that he's more right than not.
"

Adele selected an image: government troops with violet collar flashes arriving in twenty-place aircars on the outskirts of a village. They began to advance down the main street, still mounted on the vehicles which flew low, using ground effect for support.

A podium with a dozen chairs, many of them knocked over when the speakers hastily fled, had been erected in the town square. As the lead vehicle approached, a man in the clock tower opened fire with an impeller. Slugs punched through the aircar's aluminum body and sparkled off the cobblestone pavement.

More guns fired from basement windows; the houses were frame with wooden shingles, but they had stone foundations. Troops on the vehicles returned fire wildly, occasionally dropping their fellows with ricochets. Civilians flung roof tiles to shatter on vehicles and the pavement.

The aircars turned and raced back the way they'd come, still hugging the ground. One of the buildings was beginning to burn. A civilian's body lay in the street, and half the troops in the back of the last vehicle out were sprawled or writhing in smears of blood.

"There was a good deal of skirmishing like that," Adele said. "Nunes was afraid to strike with his full strength because he couldn't trust even the troops which hadn't deserted. He called for assistance from the Alliance squadron that had just arrived at Tanais. Admiral Chastelaine, the Alliance commander, refused. He didn't say why."

"
His ships must have been without port facilities for at least thirty days, perhaps twice that,
" Daniel said. "
I don't imagine many squadron commanders under those circumstances would delay their refit because some wog was worried about riots.
"

Adele's lips tightened, but that was a precise description of Chastelaine's probable attitude. That it was also very likely Daniel's own attitude was inconsequential for the time being.

"Our friend Delos was continuing to gather support on the basis of his Cinnabar backing," she resumed, "so he didn't have any reason to push for a quick conclusion. Then Commodore Pettin arrived."

The
Winckelmann
dropped majestically toward the bay around which Palia was built. A merchant ship was lifting at the same time. Many of the vessels which had been in the harbor at the start of the riots had already left.

"
I am surprised that Nunes permitted our ships to land, though,
" Daniel said. It must have been going through his mind as it was Adele's that while the remainder of the squadron was settling peacefully onto Strymon, the
Princess Cecile
had been raked by the Tanais defenses.

"Observer Mariette contacted the commodore in orbit and demanded he land immediately to provide protection for Cinnabar property during the riots," Adele said. "As the trouble appeared to be an internal Strymonian matter, the commodore brushed aside objections from the harbor controller and landed as requested."

"
Another officer might at least have left a destroyer in orbit,
" Daniel mused. "
I suppose he wanted all the available personnel to bolster his guard detachments.
"

"Observer Mariette was very insistent," Adele said, though part of her wondered why she was bothering to make excuses for the commodore. She wasn't the one to judge the military reasons that had put the whole Cinnabar force on the surface, but it wouldn't have taken information-gathering skills nearly as sophisticated as her own to warn Pettin that more was going on than the Observer realized.

"
Then Vaughn would have claimed the squadron had arrived to support him,
" Daniel said. "
Which a reasonable Strymonian citizen would find easy to believe.
"

He was stating his analysis rather than asking a question. Adele said, "The whole planet except for Palia and a few regions where Nunes had family connections declared for Delos. Palia is less pro-Pleyna than simply full of rioters looting anything they can. For the most part they haven't attacked properties guarded by RCN detachments, but there've been sniping incidents every day since the squadron landed."

Adele pursed her lips, then said, "Daniel, Nunes asked for help again when Pettin arrived, but Admiral Chastelaine still refused. Surely he isn't going to simply ignore an RCN squadron?"

"
Ah
," said Daniel. "
No, he wouldn't ignore us, but by the same token he won't venture out of his fortified base before he's certain his ships are fully repaired.
Fully
prepared
."

"But Daniel," Adele said, struggling to understand a situation devoid of logic. "Their ships are bigger and newer and there's more of them. Surely Admiral Chastelaine knows that?"

"
Yes, Adele,
" Daniel said. "
But he also knows that we're the RCN.
No Alliance commander ever forgets that.
"

"Ah," Adele said. "Yes, I understand."

"
Sir, there's a ship rising from the surface,
" Lt. Mon said. "
It's a private yacht, the
Achilles
, and President Delos Vaughn's aboard. He says he's coming up to meet with you. Over.
"

He'd broken in on a dedicated link from the Battle Direction Center to Daniel's command console. It didn't pass through the signals console, but Adele had set the system to echo everything to her unit regardless of provenance. There was no information that she
might
not need, some time, some where.

"
Does it indeed, Mon?
" Daniel said. "
I can't imagine what Master Vaughn wants of me, but I certainly have some matters I'd like to raise with him. I suppose we'd better bring him aboard. Make the necessary arrangements. Captain out.
"

Adele had called up the message and was running the speech attributed to Vaughn through voice recognition software when Daniel said, "
What do you think about this development, Adele
?"

"I don't have the faintest notion," she said. "Except that it really is Vaughn; and the heads of Friderik Nunes and Pleyna Vaughn have been stuck on poles in front of Delos's headquarters in the suburbs of Palia, so I suppose he's President of Strymon as well."

_T
he
Achilles
looked to be a dumpy little vessel at present
because her rig was stowed. Even when fully telescoped, the masts of the first and last of her four rings stuck out beyond the yacht's short hull. Extended and wearing a full suit of sails, those masts would give her an area-to-mass ratio equalled by few if any other ships of Daniel's acquaintance. To him, that was a mark of great beauty.

The scale of the image was too small to show the boarding line connecting the yacht to the
Princess Cecile
, though Daniel could have directed the console to emphasize it if he'd had any reason to. Vaughn had asked to board via a tube and to bring several of his aides with him. Daniel had granted neither request.

The outer airlock dogged home; a moment later the inner valve opened. Woetjans, her faceshield flung open, half dragged, half guided, Delos Vaughn into Corridor C. Vaughn's expression through the synthetic sapphire of his visor was both irritated and frightened.

Daniel glanced again at the image of the
Achilles
. To Adele across the bridge he said, "That yacht's far too fine a vessel to be used for an orbital ferryboat the way our guest just did. They could've found a cargo lighter easily enough."