What Distant Deeps (31 page)

He turned. Sun waited near the front door, standing between the Palmyrene guards. He’d left the heavy impeller in the cab of the aircar, but he cradled his right fist in his left palm in front of him: that meant he was wearing a knuckle-duster. If trouble started, Daniel was pretty sure that Sun would shortly be using a mob gun.

“Wait!” said Nasrullah.

Daniel turned, raising an eyebrow again. Adele had risen from the stool, but she wasn’t really planning to move: her data unit was still live.

“Look,” said Nasrullah. He had begun to sweat. “I’ve got orders from the Autocrator, you see? If I violate them, she’s likely to have me impaled—even if I’m right!”

Daniel shrugged. “I’m afraid that’s not my problem,” he said with a dismissive smile. “I report to Admiral Mainwaring. And unfortunately for you, so do the captains of the troop transports.”

He paused, then said, “So, which is it? Do my gunner and signals officer check out your operation here? Or do we go back to Stahl’s World and tell the admiral that the operation has been cancelled?”

Nasrullah twisted his hat in both hands, then ripped it across. “All right, all right,” he said in a guttural voice. “Get on with it and get it over with.”

The Farm’s electronic security was every bit as bad as Adele had expected it to be, but she was finding it remarkably difficult to navigate through Palmyrene disorganization. A good code was a completely random arrangement of symbols, and the staff here at the Farm had through sheer incompetence made a better stab at bewildering Adele than some very sophisticated systems had done.

In the background of her awareness, Colonel Nasrullah plaintively said, “What’s she doing, then? It looks like she’s knitting.”

Daniel said, “Sorry, chappie, but that’s not really my line of territory. Technical folderol, don’t you know? I’m a fighting officer.”

Adele smiled faintly as she worked. Daniel did a flawless job of acting like a bluff, brainless RCN officer. She herself could don the persona of Lady Adele Mundy, upper-class virago, but it wasn’t the same thing. She really was that other person if someone scratched her the wrong way.

The smile faded. Adele’s mother would be pleased and surprised to learn that Lady Mundy still existed. Esme Rolfe Mundy had been disappointed in her bookish elder daughter, though she was too courteous ever to have expressed that feeling.

Adele wasn’t interested in the Rights of Man—or in dancing, fashion, or polite conversation. She might have been a tradesman’s daughter; and while tradesmen were quite all right in their place, Adele was a Rolfe and a Mundy with responsibilities to her class.

More of Esme’s teaching had stuck than either mother or daughter would have guessed. Perhaps Esme now nodded with heavenly approbation every time Adele led the dancing at a rout on a distant world, executing the estampes and sarabandes and gigues with as much precision as she fired her pistol.

Logically there must be a heaven. Certainly there was a hell, because Adele entered it every time she dreamed.

She smiled again as she worked. The expression was as grim as her silent joke had been.

The Farm’s personnel records were a subdirectory of the supply inventory. Perhaps that had made sense to someone, but it was equally probable that it was a mistake made when the database was set up and that nobody had bothered to correct it.

According to the records, the Farm had a cadre of eighty-two personnel, but Adele didn’t trust the figure. She had never seen a military organization on the fringes of civilization where the officers weren’t inflating their personnel strength and pocketing the excess pay themselves. It was even more common than cheating subordinates on their food.

The defenses included four batteries of anti-ship missiles emplaced on high points within the two-hundred-acre tract. Adele plotted the locations on the Princess Cecile’s orbital imagery but found nothing until she compared them with images from a freighter which had landed in Calvary Harbor five months earlier. The missiles were covered—she couldn’t tell whether by netting or film—so skillfully that only the slight increase in the hills’ elevation was noticeable even when Adele knew what to look for.

Adele kept the interaction in the main hall in a corner of her display, in case something occurred that required her attention; something for her pistol rather than her data unit, likely enough. She glanced at the image of Colonel Nasrullah.

He and Daniel were now seated on opposite ends of a simple bench. It appeared that Nasrullah knew his business as a construction supervisor, or at any rate his staff did and he didn’t get in their way. Adele had to assume that every member of the cadre was as skilled as the people who had emplaced the missiles clearly were.

A vehicle with a small two-stroke engine drew up behind the building, popping and ringing. A moment later Sun reappeared beside the Palmyrene officer he’d gone off with some while before. Hours before, now that Adele happened to think about it.

Sun was beaming. Adele let her data unit continue to mine information—she had found the claimed inventories of the twenty-seven ships which had landed at the Farm since its purchase by “Commissioner Brassey.” Instead of turning her head, she expanded the real-time image of what was going on in the main hall.

“All right, Six!” the gunner said exuberantly. “This is a lot better than I thought it was going to be. Captain Farouk here—”

He jerked his thumb toward the Palmyrene who’d been escorting him. Farouk, young and noticeably sharper than his fellows—even though they all wore the same loose work clothes—flushed with pleasure.

“—went to the Sector Academy on Knollys—”

Knollys was Cinnabar’s administrative and naval headquarters for the Thirty Suns, the region closest to the Qaboosh which one could describe as “developed” or “civilized,” depending on your frame of reference.

“—and they’re using an RCN gunnery console for the director. Okay, it’s older than any of us here—”

The console had been built on Cinnabar fifty-seven standard years before and had been partially gutted, though Sun probably didn’t know that.

“—but it’ll handle ground-to-orbit missiles with no trouble. I wouldn’t worry one bit about the missiles on director control.”

Adele always worried about deadly weapons which someone else might be pointing at her, because she—based on experience—doubted the competence and judgment of all but a few of the people she had met over the years. With that general proviso accepted, she agreed with the gunner’s assessment.

Colonel Nasrullah wiped his forehead with a sleeve. “All right,” he said, “all right. You will bring the troops here and all is well. There is no need to inform the Autocrator of our visit, that is so?”

“Not so fast, fellow!” Sun said. “Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

He was obviously relishing the opportunity to lord it over a foreign officer. His terminology would probably have been “stick it to a jumped-up wog,” however.

“Sir,” he continued to Daniel, “they got individual controls on each battery and a two-man crew. Farouk took me around to three of them, but the fourth was way the hell out and anyway, I didn’t need to see it after I’d seen the others.”

He took a deep breath and made a theatrical gesture back the way he’d come. Farouk looked worried; Nasrullah got to his feet and snatched up half the hat that he’d torn.

“Sir,” Sun said forcefully, “those site crews, I wouldn’t trust them to pour piss out of a boot! Not that they’d bother to. You know what they’re doing, sir? They’re crapping right there in the battery pits, and from the number of empty wine bottles all around they’re mostly drunk besides.”

“That’s not true!” said Farouk. “Not nearly so much do we drink!”

“You’re a bloody liar!” Nasrullah bellowed. He stepped toward Sun and cocked his fist.

Adele shifted on the stool for the first time. She’d set down the wand in her left hand. She sensed Tovera moving behind her.

Daniel caught Nasrullah’s wrist. The Palmyrene tried to jerk loose—but couldn’t.

“Careful, Colonel,” Daniel drawled. His voice perfectly mimicked that of a well-born twit to anyone familiar with Cinnabar accents. “You wouldn’t want your clumsiness to be mistaken for an attack on one of my officers, would you?”

“He’s a liar,” Nasrullah repeated, but this time he muttered it as he stepped back.

“And it’s not a problem anyway,” Daniel said in a cheerful tone. “Mundy, lock the batteries onto director control, if you’ll be so good. That takes care of the matter.”

“Yes,” said Adele, picking up the wand again. She had already deleted the firing command from both the director and individual instruction sets. All she was doing now was preventing the battery crews from slewing the missiles.

“Wait,” said Nasrullah. “Can’t you let us use them against surface targets? The director can’t observe all the ground that the individual batteries can.”

Of course I could, Adele thought. Aloud she said, “No, that’s impossible.”

It amused her—grimly—to realize that she felt more uncomfortable about lying to the man than she would have been if she’d shot him in the head. On the other hand, his face wasn’t likely to reappear at 3 a.m., muttering, “You lied to me.”

“Very good, Mundy,” Daniel said. “When you’re ready, we can return to Calvary and lift to meet the convoy.”

“I’m ready,” said Adele, putting away the data unit before she got to her feet. She joined Daniel and they strode, side by side, out the front door. Tovera and Sun followed.

“And we can join the convoy,” she said very quietly to Daniel as they arrived at the aircar. “Because I now have its course and its expected time of arrival on Zenobia.”

CHAPTER 18

The Matrix, between Zenobia and Palmyra

Daniel lived with enthusiasm and liked most of what life had brought him. What he felt on the hull of a ship in the Matrix was on an even higher plane than sex or a perfect piece of ship handling, however. It was—

Well, Daniel believed in the gods—of course. One just did; and the fact that he was pretty sure that Adele did not—it wasn’t a matter they discussed, of course—was more disturbing to him than if she occasionally turned green and grew horns. He wasn’t what anyone would call a religious man, however, and he shared the normal RCN disquiet about the occasional captain who really was a temple-haunting zealot.

But when he stood here on the hull, watching the infinity of separate universes dusted across his field of view, he truly felt that there were gods. And in the back of his mind was a thought that he had never spoken: that any human who saw and felt what Daniel Leary did in this moment was a god.

But that wasn’t accomplishing the mission nor training Cory, either one. We can hold a prayer service later, he thought with a rueful grin, though he half suspected that the lieutenant would join him if he suggested it.

Daniel put the communications rod to the waiting Cory’s helmet and pointed with his left arm. “Follow the line R386, R377, P915. Got that?”

Cory lifted his own left arm; he had reached around his helmet to hold the rod with his right hand, allowing him to mimic Daniel’s gesture. After a moment that proved he wasn’t just chattering, he said, “Yes, I have it.”

“Now, do you see the distortion across the first two?”

The bubble universes which Daniel had described by their four terminal digits were blotches of yellow-green in a fainter wash of the same color. An Academy scientist had told Daniel that the colors and relative brightness were artifacts of the viewer’s mind; they were tricks his consciousness played on itself to impose order on what was really chaos.

And perhaps that was true, but Uncle Stacey had taught his nephew to see those variations, and Daniel in turn had taught others. Not, he had to admit, all others: apparently to Adele, “glowing chaos” was a sufficient description of what she saw from the hull.

But what Daniel saw was real enough to refine his astrogation beyond what was possible for those who had only the Academy’s training. And in the present instance, it had permitted him to find the track of what he hoped was the Palmyrene convoy.

“Yes, sir,” said Cory. “I do.”

“The disruption is someone moving through the Matrix,” Daniel said, “and on the same course as we are.”

He lowered his arm, but it was a moment before Cory mirrored the movement. He was desperately eager to succeed. The thing that amazed Daniel was that Cory was succeeding, to a degree that very few astrogators could equal.

“Being on the correct course doesn’t prove that they’re the convoy we’re looking for,” Daniel said, “but it isn’t unlikely. There’s very little direct traffic between Palmyra and Zenobia.”

They stood just astern of one of the hydromechanical semaphores by which the bridge transmitted orders to the hull when the ship was in the Matrix. Now the six arms clacked upright in an attention signal; then four vanished in line with the support pillar and the remaining two flared to starboard, informing the rigging crew of the new sail plan.

A moment later the port and starboard antennas shook out their topgallants in a coordinated shudder. When Daniel was seven, Uncle Stacey had shown him the Matrix for the first time, from the hull of a freighter being rerigged by Bergen and Associates.

Uncle Stacey could tell what the masts and yards were doing simply from the vibration through the soles of his magnetic boots. That had seemed like magic to the young Daniel
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
and maybe it was. But it was second nature to him as well by now.

“Now, what I think
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
,” Daniel said, “is that the track is too diffuse to be that of a single ship. But I can’t swear to that. I may be inventing the, the blurriness, because that’s what I want it to be.”

A Palmyrene cutter captain would know for sure, he thought. The Palmyrenes might be barbarians—blazes, they were barbarians!—but they were spacers also, like none in Daniel’s previous acquaintance.

“Yessir,” said Cory, though if Daniel read his tone correctly through the vibrating brass rod, the lieutenant wasn’t really agreeing. “But, sir? I don’t think you’re wrong.”