With the Lightnings (10 page)

The bumboat carrying Daniel to the Floating Harbor was a family affair involving nine people and three or possibly four generations, depending on which of the women was the mother of the infant. The motor burned crude naphtha and sputtered except for the moments a swell lifted the propellor out of the water; then it screamed like an enraged wildcat.

An air-cushion vehicle drove off one of the concrete floats, hit the waves, and howled shoreward at a high rate of speed. The cloud of its drifting spray enveloped Daniel's boat. The family shrieked curses at their wealthy fellows. One of the ACV crewmen thumbed her nose in response, but the neatly uniformed merchant officers being ferried to shore in comfort paid no attention.

The ACV was a proper water taxi. The boat in whose bow Daniel sat was loaded with fruit and bottles till the gunwales were within a hand's breadth of the water. The younger members of the family, two girls and a handsome boy wearing earrings and a silver-bordered tunic, probably sold more than merchandise to the starship personnel.

Riding as extra cargo on a bumboat was a lot cheaper than a real taxi, though Daniel had to remind himself of his reasoning whenever the motor coughed for what could be the last time. He
would
have money again, as soon as he'd seen the duty officer.

It was hard to appreciate the vastness of the Floating Harbor while approaching it at virtually the surface of the water. When the boat nosed down the back side of a swell, nothing was visible but the next rise of the water. Even at the peak of a wave where scud blew off the curl, one saw only the wet gray masses of the floats and the lighter, even greater, masses of the dozen or so nearest starships.

On a normal day there were at least thirty ships in the Floating Harbor. Today there were forty-seven: Daniel had surveyed the layout from the quay and memorized it. If the boat landed him in the wrong location, he wanted to be able to find his way to the
Aglaia
without depending on the help of other vessels. Several of the latter were transports registered on Alliance worlds, and even the crewmen of a Cinnabar ship might think it funny to send a naval officer the wrong way around a harbor miles in circumference.

Daniel grinned. He'd have thought it was funny himself back when he was a midshipman. Not so very long ago.

The
Aglaia
was in the first rank, easily visible, but Daniel's boat was angling to the north. If they reached the harbor at the point they were aiming at, he'd have a dozen pontoons to cross and the wire-mesh catwalks swinging between them besides. Daniel turned, rose to a high crouch that let him keep a hand on the gunwale—it was at best an even chance whether the boat would come back for him if he fell overboard—and cried, "This way!"

His free arm stabbed in the direction of the
Aglaia
. "The navy ship! The
Aglaia
!"

The boy at the tiller of the outboard motor looked to be eight years old or a little less. He stared at Daniel with worried eyes. The old woman beside him waggled the embroidery she was working on at Daniel. She screamed, "The harbor! The harbor! You walk!"

"The
Aglaia
!" Daniel repeated. He took out the hundred-florin piece. Multilevel diffraction gratings within the transparent coin turned it into a rainbow between his thumb and forefinger. He dropped the coin back into his purse.

The family argued shrilly among itself, the eight grown members shouting while the infant added its wordless cries. The boatmen of Kostroma harbor spoke their own patois. It was based on Universal, but Daniel caught no more than a third of the words. Some of the vocabulary no doubt came from local Kostroman dialects, but the languages of many other planets played a part as well.

A middle-aged man stepped in front of the old woman and snarled an order to the steersman. The boy adjusted the tiller, pointing the bow toward the
Aglaia
after all.

The old woman screamed at the man; the man slapped her, knocking her against the stern transom. She picked up her embroidery hoop and resumed work, muttering to herself.

A sphere was the best shape for a vessel operating in the Matrix, but spherical ships were dangerously unstable on water unless they had long outriggers. Besides, though a sphere was the most efficient volume to enclose, it presented severe problems for loading and unloading on the surface of a planet. The only spherical ships were small ones and vessels purpose-built for exploration.

All the ships in the Floating Harbor today were shaped like fat cigars. They floated a little above midpoint, and the hull proper was paralleled by an outrigger on either side. The antennae that drove the vessels through sponge space were either folded along the hull or extended for maintenance like the legs of a crushed insect.

The
Aglaia
looked very similar to most of the transports docked nearby. She was 613 feet long with a 65-foot beam. The nominal weight of her hull and fittings was 10,000 tons, though the in-service weight including crew, consumables, and reaction mass was a good 4,000 tons more.

She was built of steel. There were stronger metals and lighter metals, but none that really matched the corrosion and fatigue resistance of steel and its relative ease of machining and welding during repair. Weight was of no significance in sponge space and not very important even when the ship was using High Drive or her plasma motors.

The harbor was formed of multicelled concrete pontoons, individually several hundred feet long. The pontoons were anchored to the sea bottom on cables that adjusted to the height of the tide, and tethered to one another by underwater cables. Pedestrian catwalks dangled just above the waves. Surface lighters were tied to the sides of pontoons opposite most of the docked starships, but the bumboats clung anywhere: to pontoons, to the starships themselves, or to one another. They clumped like duckweed on a pond. Easily moved shelters of multicolored fabric on light frames sprouted on many pontoons for a degree of privacy.

The
Aglaia
was linked to a pontoon by three pivoting steel arms which allowed ship and float to ride the swells without rubbing. Many of the transports used fenders, but an RCN vessel—particularly one that carried the high and mighty of the Republic—had to be careful of its finish.

Ports were open all over the
Aglaia
's hull for ventilation and easy access to the bumboats. A docking platform extended from the center of the hull to the outrigger. Guards waited there, but only formal traffic passed by that route.

Daniel ducked as his boat passed under the catwalk between two pontoons. The concrete was stained with three horizontal bands of algae—red, blue, and yellow closest to the water, stratified by the plants' relative need to be kept damp. Visible as blisters on the yellow band were fixed invertebrates; filtering gills streamed like smoke whenever a wave dipped the animal's shell back in the water.

The steersman was heading for the power room port, big enough to allow the Tokamak to be removed. "No, no," Daniel shouted, waving toward the landing stage on which three ratings under a petty officer watched his progress. "Put me there! Put me there!"

The boy shrugged and nosed up to the stage. The old woman glared at Daniel and spit into the water.

The boy threw the motor into reverse, killing their forward motion within an inch of the platform. Daniel hopped onto the steel deck without risk or need for the hand a rating was ready to offer. The boy handled his craft with the skill of someone born on the water. He was likely to live all his life there, too, as surely as the fish under the surface.

"Lieutenant Daniel Leary," Daniel said. "Requesting to see the duty officer."

"Welcome aboard, sir," the armed petty officer said. He raised his belt radio. "I'll tell Ms. Weisshampl you're coming."

Formality ended with a broad smile. "You look a lot better than she does, sir. Sure you were at the same party?"

Daniel laughed, glad of a way to break the tension. He sauntered across the wet decking, slippery for all its nonskid pattern. He wasn't worried about seeing Weisshampl or really doubtful about getting her agreement.

He was very nervous about what would come next. Well, the Republic of Cinnabar expected her naval officers to carry on no matter what the circumstances.

The decks of a cylindrical starship ran the long way. The
Aglaia
had five decks, but the lowest two, Decks A and B, were under water when the ship floated normally. They contained bulk storage for consumables and reaction mass, plus the magazines of missiles and message cells.

On the
Aglaia
, unusually for a ship of her size, the ratings' quarters took up most of the volume of Deck B. Normally the crew would have been accommodated on Deck D, but that region on the
Aglaia
was given over to passenger suites.

Daniel entered the central rotunda of Deck C. Armored staircases stood at the four ordinal points. Corridors fore and aft ran along both sides of the hull, but the regions immediately flanking the rotunda on this deck held the
Aglaia
's two Tokamak generators. Their mass had to be kept close to the vessel's center or the ship would be impossible to maneuver if the computer went down or control trunks were damaged in action.

Naval computer systems were many-times redundant and almost never failed. The space officers who survived to hold high rank were those who planned for unlikely disasters, and they saw to it that naval architects were of the same cautious frame of mind. The
Aglaia
could dance on a pin under manual control.

Deck C contained the machinery spaces and armament: the offensive missile systems and most of the antimissile plasma cannon. The
Aglaia
had a light cruiser's normal defensive suite: six barbette turrets, each holding a pair of four-inch plasma cannon. The turrets were retracted and sealed beneath a hull fairing when the ship was under way, but here at rest on the surface five of the six were extended to increase the interior room. The exception was the turret on Deck A, twenty feet under water.

The
Aglaia
had four missile launchers and only three reloads per tube. That weakness was a nagging irritation to every fighting officer in her complement, but the communications vessel wasn't
meant
to fight. Her missile battery was sufficient to see off any pirate she chanced into; and a commander who risked passengers' lives in needless heroics would face a court-martial and certain conviction if he survived.

By tradition the odd-numbered stairs were up and the even numbers down. Daniel strode across the rotunda and through the open hatch of Stair 1. A grizzled petty officer who looked twice her probable age of forty stood on the landing holding hands with a local girl with a demure expression and nothing on above the waist. They looked startled.

"Carry on, Haynes," Daniel called over his shoulder as he skipped up the stair tower two treads at a time.

"Give up on high life and come back to the working navy, Mr. Leary?" Haynes replied with echoing laughter.

The RCN was a disciplined force—and her enemies would be the last to deny it. Discipline didn't mean spiritless, though, nor was there any attempt to instill the kind of top-down terror that the Alliance seemed to consider an ideal.

An unpopular officer was the butt of "accidents" that made her look ridiculous. An unpopular captain found himself without a crew after his next landfall: the merchant service paid well and didn't ask employment histories in wartime when there weren't enough trained ratings by half.

The crews followed officers they respected from ship to ship, and they didn't respect weakness. By the same token, an officer who couldn't be approached by ratings and wouldn't share a laugh with them had no business and no future in the RCN.

The hatch to Deck D was open. An accordion played music of a style that Daniel had heard at the supper club. There was laughter as well, and the clink of bottles. The delegation wasn't using the fancy compartments at the moment, but that didn't mean the suites were going to waste.

Deck E was officers' country and the
Aglaia
's command and control area. The turret mounted over the rotunda was extended so Daniel didn't have to walk around it as he'd done during the voyage. The turret hatches were raised as well; fresh air and a skirl of birdsong filled the corridor as he walked to the dayroom.

The clerk's desk was empty, but the door to the Officer of the Day's office was open. Lt. Weisshampl sat upright behind the console, looking morose. Daniel grinned and threw her a sharp salute from the doorway.

"Leary," she said, "if you screw around saluting, I swear I'll lock you in the lower turret and not let you out till we're back on Cinnabar. How the hell do you look so fresh?"

She frowned like a thunderhead. "And
don't
tell me it's youth!"

"Not all of us spent the evening practicing assault drops onto concrete, Maisie," Daniel said. Weisshampl was twenty-eight Terran years old, quite young to be XO of a parade ship like the
Aglaia
.

Weisshampl laughed, then rubbed the back of her neck with a groan. "Yeah, you might have something there," she admitted. "But for God's sake sit, so I don't have to look up at you."

Daniel took the indicated chair. The deck's resilient surfacing was pierced in what looked to an untrained eye like a pattern of tucks. The holes were threaded into the plating beneath. Cinnabar naval furniture was built to multiples of the same pattern so that any piece could be bolted in place within a few inches of where the user wanted it. There were no large objects unsecured on a ship that was under way.

"I came for a favor, Maisie," Daniel said. "I'd like you to release a detail of twenty ratings to me under a solid petty officer. You can log it as building a positive relationship between the nations of Cinnabar and Kostroma. So far as you're concerned, it'll keep some people out of trouble while you're on the surface and there isn't enough to do."

Weisshampl looked at him with an appraising frown. They both knew that Daniel wasn't one of the
Aglaia
's officers and didn't have command authority over her crew, so she didn't bother to mention the fact.