What Distant Deeps (35 page)

“I have Marshal Belisande on the way to the Palace with his company of the Forces,” Adele said without preamble. She smiled slightly as she wondered whether her musing had been entirely a joke. “While I don’t imagine a company of militia will be what you or I consider an efficient military unit, they should be at least equal to anyone who might attack the Palace in the immediate future.”

“Your Ladyship, I’ve got my whole unit under arms,” Flecker said, sounding more distressed than angry at what he took to be an insult. “Believe me, we don’t need a hundred and fifty armed civilians running around to keep the Founder safe. Ah, begging your pardon, over.”

“Yes,” said Adele, “but I need your troops for more important purposes than sitting on their hands until somebody’s ready to attack them. I’m transmitting a list—”

Her wands moved, sending the data not only to the Situation Room—what had been the conference room of Flecker’s suite in the Palace—but also to the console in the Founder’s suite. She didn’t mistrust Flecker, but she had decided it was best to give Hergo the option of following up with the militia in case something went wrong with the professional response.

Neither computer was secure or anything close to secure; Adele could only hope that the plotters were as inept at communications intelligence as the security forces were. Regardless, the information would be unimportant in a few hours, one way or the other.

“—of forty-one names and the subjects’ present locations where I have them. In all cases I’m attaching their home and business addresses. When the subjects have guards or employees who are likely to be armed, I’m attaching that information as well. You are to oversee the arrest of all these persons and all persons who are with them at the time of arrest, whether or not the additional parties are on the list.”

Adele paused. She could hear Flecker speaking to someone in the room with him, then a response. Flecker said, “The information has been received, Your Ladyship. Ah—Marshal Belisande has called, saying that he’ll be arriving in a few minutes with his troops, as you said. Over.”

“Yes,” said Adele. She felt considerable relief that Marshal Belisande really had gotten his militia company moving. She wasn’t concerned about Palace security—Wood alone could probably handle anything that the plotters, reacting in panic, were able to attempt—but she’d been afraid that Hergo wouldn’t release his professionals to the real work unless he had someone close by to hold his hand.

Mind, Posy had thus far proved very convincing.

“Also send a squad to Cinnabar House and escort the Commissioner and his family to the Palace,” Adele said. The Browns were completely neutral in what was going on, but in a coup attempt there was simply no safety except being in the midst of a military force. “I’ll warn them to expect you.”

“All right,” Flecker said. “Anything else, over?”

“Major,” Adele said, “I won’t tell you your job, but make sure you use sufficient troops for each pickup. There are several Councillors on the list who will have a squad of personal guards, and the employees of the Palmyrene business people listed will very likely include military personnel who are prepared to act as a fifth column in Calvary.”

Flecker snorted. “Thank you, Your Ladyship,” he said, “but I figure my people can handle a bunch of monkeys, even if the monkeys think they’re soldiers. Privates in this regiment are paid at the rate of non-coms in Alliance service, and I trained ’em so they earn their money. Can we get on with it now, over?”

Adele smiled coldly. It was a pleasure dealing with professionals, even if you didn’t particularly like them as human beings.

“One further matter, Major Flecker,” she said. “It may be that you won’t be able to capture some of your targets alive. In that case you are to kill them, using such force as is necessary. If you blow up the building they’re in, at the very worst they won’t dig out in time to be a factor in the coup attempt. Do you understand?”

“Bloody hell!” Flecker said. “I heard you were a hard bitch, and they weren’t kidding, were they?”

Adele’s faint smile spread a trifle wider. She said, “I’ve told you your duties, Major Flecker. All you need do is carry them out. You can be quite sure that I will carry out mine. Good day, sir!”

She broke the connection, then set up the call to Cinnabar House. Not only would the Browns be safer in the Palace, they were also evidence of Cinnabar good faith. If the Belisandes and von Gleuck didn’t have doubts about the game she and Daniel were playing, they were fools.

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 to 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 20

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 an 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
 
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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, including 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 MHz; twenty 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 discontent 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 then. 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.