What Distant Deeps (49 page)

Looking over his shoulder he continued, “Come on, Sissies. We’ve got a job to do.”

Adele kept pace with Daniel down the ramp. Instead of crowding ahead, the spacers followed Hogg and Tovera in a double column. They were in about as orderly a formation as Adele remembered seeing ever in her RCN career. One—one of the few women in a group chosen for brawling ability—was humming “Haul Away Joe,” but that was probably an unconscious attempt to keep cadence.

“Is the Founder up there to meet us?” Daniel asked quietly as they reached the floating extension. He didn’t point or otherwise call attention to the group waiting at the upper stage of the quay.

“No,” said Adele. “Lady Posthuma is, and Major Flecker is with her. The rest are various palace functionaries, department heads or the like. I assume Posy brought them in case you need something specific from the local authorities.”

Daniel chuckled, though there wasn’t much humor in the sound. “I just need plenty of elbow room,” he said. After a moment he added, “I really don’t want anything to happen to that little girl, Adele.”

“Yes,” said Adele. She understood being worried, though the feeling didn’t make her talkative: she became either depressed or angry. This time she was angry.

Daniel mounted the steps to the fixed portion of the quay in the lead, since there wasn’t room for two people abreast. When Adele reached the top, Posy Belisande stepped forward and embraced her. Being shot wouldn’t have surprised Adele as much.

“Adele,” she said. “You made it possible for Otto to speak to me, did you not? To let me know that he was alive and that you had won?”

Adele blinked. Patching through the call hadn’t been difficult, though the process had left her with the belief that the signals officer of the Z 46 must have some skills besides his professional competence to have advanced to the rank of lieutenant. There had been moments when she had considered sending Cory or Cazelet aboard the destroyer to complete the connection.

“Ah,” Adele said. “Yes, I suppose that’s correct. But it isn’t particularly germane at the moment, ah, Posy.”

“Not to you, perhaps,” the younger woman said, stepping back with an expression Adele couldn’t read. It seemed positive, at any rate. “But we’ll speak later.”

The spacers were shuffling past and re-forming against the edge of the quay. Occasionally one would adjust the truncheon under his belt or pat the meaty end into his palm, but they projected an air of eager calm.

“I see you have a truck for us,” Daniel said, taking charge of the conversation. He nodded toward an articulated goods wagon. The two streets on the route between the harbor and Cinnabar House were wide enough for it, though the vehicle wouldn’t have done for much of Old Calvary. “My man Hogg will drive. If you’ll see to it that your people will pass us through your cordon, we’ll get on with our business.”

“I’ll ride with you to the post on Nation Way,” said Major Flecker. “And wait there with my troops.”

“Captain?” said Posy. “Wouldn’t you rather have an aircar for yourself and Lady Mundy? I’ve brought mine. Otto’s engineers say it is perfectly safe.”

“No, Your Ladyship,” Daniel said. “I’ll stay with my people. With your permission, we’ll be going now.”

From the way Posy’s eyes widened, she apparently understood the chill in his tone. Adele was sure it was unintended, but
 
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Posy had a great deal of experience with aristocrats. Apparently this was the first time she’d met a war chief leading his troops into battle.

“A moment, Captain Leary,” said the dry, precise voice of the woman standing behind Lady Belisande: her maid, Wood. Though she had spoken to Daniel, her eyes were on Adele as she continued, “Might I perhaps be of service?”

Hogg stiffened, then looked at Tovera; Daniel didn’t speak. Wood’s right trouser leg was cut off at the knee to allow what was either a bandage or a thin cast over her lower leg, but she appeared to move normally.

Tovera grinned at Hogg in a reptilian fashion. She said, “Don’t worry, Wood’s on our side. We’re all allies now, right? Cinnabar and the Alliance.”

And if you think Tovera believes that, Adele thought, you’ll buy the Pentacrest from the first sharper who offers it to you as prime Xenos real estate.

“But thank you, mistress,” Tovera went on to her former compatriot. “We have this covered. And besides—”

She nodded to the cast.

“—you appear to have had your share of the fun already.”

Wood grinned back with no more humor than Tovera’s expression had indicated. “In that case,” she said, “may I offer this?”

She held out a small chest to Adele. It wasn’t as large as the attaché case which held Tovera’s sub-machine gun when she wasn’t wearing it in a hip holster, as now.

“It has a variety of self-propelled viewing devices,” Wood said. “Since you may not have brought your own?”

“Thank you,” said Adele, taking the chest in her right hand without answering the implied question. “Now, Captain, I believe we are ready.”

“Right!” said Daniel as he strode for the truck cab. “Follow me, Sissies!”

Not far behind Adele in the shuffling line of spacers, the tech was singing, “First I had a Dunstan gal, and she was fat and lazy
 
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Daniel opened the door from the right—residential—wing of Cinnabar House onto the covered space separating it from the official wing where Gibbs held the Browns hostage. Folks in Bantry would have called it a breezeway; but since it was two floors high and part of a mansion, it probably had a more impressive title.

It was a very run-down mansion, though. The double doors facing the street were solid, but the interior arch gave onto the garden through a pair of wrought iron gates. They admitted plenty of light for the plants growing from the cracks between the patio tiles.

Daniel had brought Adele, Hogg, and half the spacers with him in through the back of the residential wing. Water-damaged plaster had flaked onto the rear hallway, the valances above the curtains in the reception room were rotting, and there was a pervasive smell of mildew. The condition of the upper floor, closer to the leaking roof, could easily be imagined.

“Do they have any servants?” Daniel asked Adele quietly, continuing to watch the door opposite. They were to the left and right side of the vestibule: Daniel standing and Adele seated with her data unit. Hogg sat cross-legged on the floor between them, his left elbow on his left knee to brace the impeller which he pointed toward the closed door of the official wing.

Adele, seated also, continued to watch her display. She said, “They had two, neither of them much good that I could see. Presumably both ran off when Gibbs burst in with a gun.”

Daniel shrugged. He was waiting for a signal from Tovera, who’d gone with the team under Dasi to enter through the kitchen at the back of the garden.

“I suppose one can’t really blame them for running away under those conditions,” he said.

Hogg snorted. “Can’t I?” he said. “What d’ye suppose some yobbo would have got if he’d broke into Bantry House to grab you and your mother twenty years ago, eh?”

“Besides me head-butting him in the crotch, you mean?” Daniel said with a grin. “I take your point, Hogg, but I don’t think servants with two weeks’ service can be held to the same standards as those whose families have two centuries of service.”

The vestibule to either wing had a heavy door opening onto the patio and a light one on the inside, the hall side. The outer walls of Cinnabar House were blank brick for their full height; all the windows looked out on the garden.

“Is there any chance we could starve him out?” Daniel asked. He pitched his tone hopefully, but he didn’t imagine it was going to be that easy. And he wished that Tovera would signal.

“Cinnabar House was stocked with thirty cases of military ration packs,” Adele said primly. “They’ve been on the accounts here as far back as I can trace them, at least thirty-three years. I suppose they may have gone bad.”

This time it was Daniel who snorted. “I’ve eaten older packs,” he said, “though ‘going bad’ implies they started out better than a civilian might imagine was the case. Why in heaven’s name were they stored here?”

“I have no idea,” said Adele. “But I’ve made a note to check the regional records when we return to Stahl’s World.”

Daniel grinned. “Assuming,” he said, in near synchrony with Adele’s, “Assuming.”

She didn’t look up from her display, but her smile would have been noticeable even to someone who didn’t read her expressions as well as Daniel did. “I’ll admit,” Adele said, “that our chances of reaching Stahl’s World look better than they did six hours ago.”

“Sir?” said Barnes in a quiet voice.

Daniel stepped aside—out of sight from across the courtyard—and looked toward the hall. Barnes crouched in the doorway. Behind him waited the members of his squad in anxious silence.

“We was thinking, a couple of us could go up and come down by the roof, sir,” Barnes said. “If he’s on the ground floor, you know?”

“Hold what you’ve got, Barnes,” Daniel said, trying not to snarl. It was very hard to keep still in a tense situation, but that was the right course here. “I don’t know what Gibbs would do when he heard noise overhead. Regardless, it wouldn’t put us ahead of where we are now. We’re going to wait until Tovera has a bug in position and then open negotiations.”

“There,” said Adele. Her data unit projected two images in the air between Daniel and Barnes.

The left half—Daniel wasn’t sure whether it was an omnidirectional display or if the rigger was seeing a colored blur—was from the console in the room where Gibbs held his hostages. The commander was drinking from a wine bottle. He held the carbine’s grip in his right hand with the butt resting on his hip. He hadn’t shaved, and he looked as savage as a starving dog.

The other half of the display was initially a ragged-edged circle. It suddenly expanded to a view of the entire room from the back corner of the wall onto the garden. The bug had drilled in through a window sash. The lens provided an anamorphic image which Adele’s software corrected. Daniel was getting what seemed to be a perfect three-dimensional view of the room and its occupants.

Gibbs had drawn the curtains over the windows. The console stood against the outside wall. Gibbs was in front of it; he didn’t seem to have noticed the bug grinding its way to a vantage point.

The Brown family lay in the corner—father, mother, child—between the outside wall and the door to the patio. Their legs were tied at the ankles, and their hands, behind their backs, were presumably tied as well.

“I shouldn’t wonder if a slug through this wall would nail him cold,” Hogg said in a speculative tone. “The civilians are well clear. They’d catch a bit of brick dust, that’s all.”

Daniel shrugged. “I shouldn’t wonder either, Hogg,” he said. “I’d give you three chances in four, even without you being able to see the target.”

He grinned at his servant, then stepped into the doorway; Hogg immediately raised his muzzle. Daniel said, “The fourth chance, though, is that he doesn’t drop clean. That’s an automatic carbine. I don’t want him pointing it at the Browns and clamping on the trigger.”

Hogg grunted. “How about I settle in on the roof of the kitchen?” he said. “If Dasi’s people pull the curtains down, I might do some good. Since I guess you’ll be standing in front of the door here, won’t you?”

Daniel chuckled. He felt very much alive—on his toes almost literally. “Yes, I suppose I will,” he said. “Adele, tell the squad in the garden to clear the curtains away if I tell them to go in, all right?”

Besides the patio entrance, the main hall of the official wing had a door onto a corridor in the back. The latrine, a storage room, and a stairway to the upper floor were on the outside of the corridor. On the inside, the commissioner’s private office looked out at the garden. At the end of the corridor was a door, also onto the garden.

Daniel was sure that some of Dasi’s people were in the corridor, but Gibbs had blocked the door into the main hall with a filing cabinet. A pair of husky Sissies—goodness, any one spacer of the present lot—could smash through the barrier, but that would take a little time and make a great deal of noise.

Daniel didn’t know Gibbs well, but nothing he’d seen of the commander suggested that the man wouldn’t be willing to shoot his hostages. He was beyond question a nasty piece of work.

Daniel took a deep breath, then stepped into the patio. “Commander Gibbs?” he called to the door of the official wing. “This is Daniel Leary, and I’m here so that we can figure out how to get you out of this alive.”

“Don’t try anything, Leary!” Gibbs shouted. The doors into and out of the vestibule were closed, but Daniel had no trouble making out the words. “I’ll shoot these highborn scum and I’ll shoot you too!”

“We don’t need any shooting at all, Commander,” Daniel said. “I don’t even have a gun.”

He coughed and went on, “Ah, can I open at least your outer door so that we can speak without having to raise our voices? I give you my word as a Leary that I’ll not attempt any tricks.”

“Bugger your word, Leary!” Gibbs said. Then—because he was desperate but not quite suicidal while the rational part of his mind was in control—he said, “I’ll open the inside door but not the thick one. Don’t try anything!”

Adele was projecting the bug’s image past Daniel’s shoulder, forming it in the air where he could see it while he faced the door across the patio. The Fifth Bureau had trained Tovera in manipulating the bug itself, but nobody could have bettered Adele’s use of the tool’s output.

Gibbs unlatched the inner door, then quickly flipped it open left-handed while keeping his body behind the masonry jamb. Significantly, he kept his carbine pointed at the Brown family; the Commissioner wriggled into a sitting position, keeping his body between the gun and his wife and daughter. Hester was crying.

Hogg could have taken him, Daniel thought with a mixture of anger and contempt. But Hogg was across the garden, now, and the reasons not to let him shoot blind were still valid.