Adele clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth in surprise and delight; anybody else would've been dancing about the room. Well, dancing to the limited extent that the interior of Cutter 614 permitted it. The dispatches were beyond her, but she'd decrypted the Greif's log.
"Ma'am?" said Sun, seated at the gunnery board with a real-time panorama of the harbor of Heavenly Peace up on his display. "Mistress Mundy? Hogg's coming back, and your Tovera too."
"Ah?" said Adele. Because of who she was, she instinctively switched to the cutter's external sensors instead of saying to Sun, "Is Mistress Mondindragiana with them?"
It was a considerable surprise to see that the two servants were alone. Hogg was rowing the rented skiff—a small part of the considerable profit Acme Trading Company was making from 614's visit, and in Adele's opinion well worth the money. Tovera sat in the bow like a figurehead without character, her attaché case part-open in her lap and one hand inside it.
Adele's face went blank. She hadn't considered the possibility that Hogg and Tovera would fail. She'd asked if she should accompany them; Hogg had been adamant that Adele's presence would merely rouse unwelcome attention which they'd avoid if they were alone.
Adele knew that what he really meant was that she mightn't approve of some of the actions they'd have to take to accomplish the task she'd set them. Either way, she'd let them get on with it. The job had to be done.
It still had to be done, by Adele herself since her agents had failed. She'd given the woman her word as a Mundy, after all.
Adele smiled wryly. She was pretty sure that Mondindragiana didn't know anything about the great houses of the Republic: the Mundys, the Learys, or any of the rest. But she knew people, and her assessment of Adele had been just as accurate as the one she'd made of Daniel.
"Base, this is Six," Daniel's voice crackled in her ears. Adele was using the Acme Trading Company systems to relay transmissions, since the commo helmets' maximum range was under a half mile. "We've delivered our packages and on our way home at the best speed this barge can manage. Which isn't fast enough to suit me, but we should arrive in a few minutes. How's your situation? Over."
"Ah," Adele said. Apart from the fact Mondindragiana wasn't coming aboard, a possibility that Daniel hadn't been apprised of, everything was as it should be. "Ah, well enough, Six. Ah, Base out."
There was nothing more she wanted to say until she'd learned the particulars of the situation from Hogg and Tovera. She didn't know what this meant. . . .
"The Captain on the way back, mistress?" asked Ferguson. He and Sun were aboard because of their specialties: if necessary they could lift and fight the cutter by themselves. Three crewmen who'd been injured aboard the Beacon of Yang were here also: a broken leg, a crushed hand, and severe lacerations caused when a spacer fired his impeller into a bulkhead. The slug hadn't penetrated, but it'd blasted fragments of steel off the opposite side, hitting a comrade in the next compartment.
A fourth crewman, Tomms, was dead. He'd tripped going up a companionway and fired his sub-machine gun. The ricochets had killed him.
Daniel and the remainder of the crew had escorted the former prisoners to the ship that would take them back to the Burdock Stars: the Armitage 8, floating not far off in the harbor but hidden by a stand of trees rooted in the shallow bottom. Acme Trading had supplied a motor barge and a three-man crew for the purpose. The Cinnabars had gone along armed to the teeth to keep the locals from massacring the people who were supposed to have been the entertainment for Freedom Day.
A starship lighted its thrusters. The pulse of static from ionized exhaust scored Adele's display a fraction of a second before the sound reached the cutter: first a high-frequency chop in the water, then the air-borne snarl.
Glowing steam rose from the other side of the wooded spit; a medium-sized freighter slowly climbed out of the plume. The Armitage 8 had gotten away, so there was now no reason for Cutter 614 to remain on Yang.
Tovera entered the cabin and nodded to Adele. Her face had gotten more sun than was good for her. Cutters were too small to carry Medicomps; the tender was expected to supply the crews' medical needs along with everything else beyond the bare minima for survival. A bad sunburn could be just as disabling as a crushed hand.
Adele smiled faintly. In the particular case it probably wouldn't matter. She didn't imagine anything short of a full-body cast would disable Tovera.
Hogg came in behind the other servant. "What do we do with the boat?" he asked. "I left it tied to the outrigger for now."
"Captain Leary's returning with the barge," Adele said. "Its crew can carry the skiff back with them. Tow it, I suppose."
Adele had seen people in almost any sort of garment in Heavenly Peace, mostly in bits and pieces. To the degree there was a national costume, it was a broad-brimmed straw hat and a thin cotton wrap of brown or muddy blue.
Tovera wore only the wrap, but Hogg had the hat as well. He sailed it out the hatch into the harbor, then shrugged off the wrap and balanced it in his hand. "Do for wiping rags, I guess," he muttered. "I won't be sorry to look down on this pisspot world, though."
Adele cleared her throat, considering. No place aboard a cutter could be called private. Though the three wounded spacers had gone out to watch for the barge, Sun and Ferguson were in arm's reach at their stations.
But there was no need for secrecy. Going outside with the servants to whisper would cause distrust and unease for no benefit.
"Where's Mistress Mondindragiana, then?" Adele said calmly.
Hogg laughed. "At about a hundred thousand feet and rising, I guess," he said. "Things couldn't have gone better, eh, Tovera?"
"There was no trouble," Tovera said with a faint smile. Her words weren't necessarily agreement, since the pale woman tended to view as entertainment what was trouble to other people. "I went inside and escorted the woman to the kitchens. The cook's helpers put her into a garbage container and carried her to the canal where Hogg was waiting with the boat."
"Oh, don't let me forget," Hogg said, reaching into one of his voluminous pockets. He came out with a handful of coinage, a mixture of Cinnabar and Alliance issues that passed current on Yang. There was no local currency, not for anything more serious than buying a yam for dinner. "We spent some of your money, but we got most of it left. This is a cheap place to bribe, let me tell you."
"Yes, all right," Adele said, looking for the bag of wash leather in which Herbrand had provided the money in exchange for a further draft on the Secret Account.
"I have it, mistress," Tovera said and produced the bag. It clinked—she'd needed a portion of the money inside the palace, Adele supposed.
Hogg wasn't a conventionally honest man. Adele suspected the only laws he hadn't broken were ones he hadn't gotten around to yet. He knew that he could've claimed twice the amount in bribes; he knew further that any money that returned to the Secret Account would probably be squandered by Admiral Milne on activities that did less for the Republic than Hogg financing a drunken celebration for 614's crew in Sinmary Port.
Hogg was returning the overage anyway, because Mistress Mundy had given it to him. The money didn't matter to Adele, but it did matter to her that Hogg was a principled man.
She grinned slightly. They weren't a priest's principles, perhaps, but she'd learned as a penniless orphan that few enough priests had principles.
"Thing is, we didn't let her outa the can like she thought we would," Hogg said. "We hauled her down to the Armitage and told the Engineer not to open it up till they were in orbit."
"We'd made arrangements with him," Tovera explained. "He'll think he's gotten a pleasant surprise when he sees how pretty his new passenger is. Later on he may change his mind."
"Not between here and Lantos," Hogg said, chuckling. "No broad that pretty wears out her welcome in two weeks."
"That Maria was coming with us?" put in Ferguson. The two warrant officers had been listening intently. "Say, that'd have been something."
"Seemed to me she took a shine to Mister Leary," Sun said with a broad grin. "There isn't much room on a cutter, but Mister Leary can manage most anything if he puts his mind to it."
"Yeah, that's kinda how I felt about it," Hogg said, turning to eye the other men. "Which is why she's going t' Lantos on the Armitage 'steada Nikitin with us. The young master's got a head of his own, which is as it should be. And a dick of his own, the good Lord knows. But his mother didn't set me looking after him to so's I could drop him in shit he don't need to know about."
"Hey, Officer Mundy!" Kerman called through the open hatch. "We got 'em in sight. They'll be docking in five minutes, maybe less."
"Very good," Adele said, using the intercom instead of shouting. "Ah, carry on. Out."
Ferguson was technically the senior officer, but any time Daniel was gone the Sissies acted as though Adele was in charge. And therefore she was.
She cleared her throat. It was hard to know how to proceed . . . or even if she ought to.
"Ah, Hogg," she said. "I don't have any affection for Mistress Mondindragiana, but the conditions you're describing . . ."
"Are better than the ones she picked, selling herself to Shin," Hogg said forcefully. "We went to Big Florida and pulled her out, and you didn't hear me say a thing against it. That's the way the master is. It wouldn't have mattered if she was ninety years old and a pig besides, he'd get her out because she's a woman and he's Daniel Leary."
"Barge coming alongside," called a spacer on the outrigger.
"Here, Borney," Woetjans called from the near distance. "Take a line and tie it off to a strut."
Hogg paused, his eyes fierce, and mopped his forehead with the local garment he still held. Tovera offered him a flask. He waved it away, but the thought brought a smile and broke his mood.
"And we got her away from Shin," he continued more calmly, "because you said to and that's good enough for me. But mistress, I don't need to hand the boy over to that one, not though she wants it and you want it and he wants it too, being the randy bugger he is. He's got enough trouble back on Nikitin, I say."
"I take your point," Adele said. "And whether or not the lady's happy with her present situation, you met the terms of my promise to her. She has no legitimate complaint."
Considering the matter dispassionately—which was usually easy for Adele, but in this case she was overcorrecting for her violent distaste for the woman—Mondindragiana would probably do well in the Burdock Stars or anywhere else she found herself for as long as her looks lasted. Longer than that, Adele suspected. If one treated the situation in the way an RCN officer and an agent of the Republic's intelligence apparatus should, there was every reason Mondindragiana should be kept away from a major RCN base.
Adele laughed. Hogg blinked at her. "Ma'am?" he said. "I don't think I've heard you do that before."
"Well, Hogg, have you ever found yourself in a situation where the best and most moral action you can take is one that will make an enemy very uncomfortable?" she said.
Hogg grinned broadly. "Well, mistress, I wouldn't put it in those words, they're not, you know, the way I think," he said. "But I don't know I've ever doubted that doing down an enemy was the right thing to do."
Three crewmen ducked through the hatchway, laughing and chattering about something Adele couldn't follow out of context. One of them had a fresh gash on his right cheek. Their guns had been fired.
Daniel was the next into the cutter. "Good morning, Officer Mundy!" he said with a bright smile. "And it's a very good morning, because we're going to lift from Yang in a few minutes. If we're lucky the wretched place will've vanished into a black hole before we're again required to visit it."
He laughed, seating himself at the console with the easy grace he displayed in every physical arena. "I don't say I'm counting on that, but it seems a good place to display my natural optimism."
Adele switched to the two-way link even though they were sitting back to back. "You had trouble, then?" she said.
The cabin was filling with excited spacers, stripping off equipment and handing their guns to Rocker and Rosinant who acted as assistant armorers. For the most part the weapons had to be unloaded before they were clamped in place against the outer bulkheads aft. The racket was beyond what Adele wanted to shout through, even to someone as close as Daniel was.
"Oh, not really trouble," Daniel said cheerfully. "There was a bit of stone-throwing. We gave some houses a little extra ventilation at the roofline, and there may be a citizen or two with a sub-machine gun pellet in the calf."
He shrugged. "It doesn't make me want to stay on Yang longer than I already did, but it actually went better than it might've done."
"Yes, well," Adele said. She fought the desire to smile, though it wouldn't have mattered since Daniel couldn't see her face. "It went well here, too. I apparently won't be able read the dispatches from the Greif until we're back with the Hermes, but I have her logbook if you'd like to see it. I don't know if it's of any interest."
Daniel was setting up the astrogation display to check the course he'd already programmed. "Yes, certainly," he said as he continued to slide through screens of data. "It might be something to bring me back into Admiral Milne's good graces."
He frowned in concern, trying instinctively to look over his shoulder at Adele; and failed, of course, as she noted with amusement from the expression of the small image at the top of her display.
"That is," he went on, "if it's permissible to let her know something that you've, ah, uncovered. Instead of keeping it secret until you've carried it back to Xenos."
Adele sniffed as she transferred the files to the main computer. She inserted an icon on the corner of Daniel's screen so he could find them. "Daniel," she said, "I'm a librarian. My job is to disseminate information to anyone who might need it. If someone of superior rank doesn't feel that's how information should be handled, then he or she is welcome to dispense with my services."
Daniel chuckled and brought up the log. She was confident of her decryption, but the data remained unintelligible to her: a series of points and times with occasional notations involving the vessel's supply and maintenance status, as well as personnel matters in cursory form. Where other ships were noted by pennant number, she'd bracketed in the name and particulars from her database.
"Umm, they made very good time," Daniel murmured. "I couldn't have trimmed more than three days off my . . ."
His voice trailed off; he began to type. Adele thought for a moment he'd lost interest and gone back to his previous course calculations, but on checking she saw that Daniel had shrunk those down to a sidebar. He was working on a course, but a quite different . . .
Yes, that was it. She still didn't understand what the points in the Greif's logbook were, but she could re-extract them from the course Daniel was now plotting. He was simply back-tracking the Alliance courier.
He paused. "Mundy," he said to the display, "so that I understand this beyond possibility of mistake: the information you gave me was the Greif's own course, not information from some other vessel that the Greif was carrying in the form of a dispatch?"
Adele frowned. "Yes, that's correct," she said. "I'm unable to read the dispatches. This was the ordinary log. Is it important?"
"Yes," said Daniel. Switching to the intercom he went on, "Ship, this is Six. I know some of you were hoping to get back to Nikitin shortly, but I'm afraid we're going to rendezvous with the Hermes off Lantos instead. We can get to her in three days, maybe less if I'm lucky. I don't see it being fewer than eight to Nikitin even if I strain our frames."
He cleared his throat. "The courier we gave a hard time to the other night had left an Alliance convoy of twelve transports early last month, some twenty-one days ago," he continued. "The convoy's being escorted by a modern heavy cruiser and two destroyers. I don't think Cutter 614 alone is going to be sufficient for the job of stopping them, and to tell the truth I'm not looking forward to attempting that even with the Hermes's whole flotilla. But I'm afraid that's what we're going to have to do, fellow spacers, because by the time the squadron could arrive from Nikitin, the Alliance will have a permanent base on Yang with an orbital minefield that'll make it impossible to remove. Six out."
"By God, we'll kick their asses!" Woetjans bellowed.
It was an absolutely insane thing to say, but just about everybody aboard shouted agreement.
Including Adele Mundy.
Daniel stood on the topsail yard of the Dorsal Forward antenna, drinking in the what for him was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen: the universe itself, pulsing and shimmering about the cutter. To a layman the view was a wash of light painted with a broad brush. Daniel saw individual bubble universes and the interstices between them, and he judged their energy levels relative to that of Cutter 614 by their apparent brightness.
He took his left hand away from the antenna and stood balanced on the spar alone. The only sound was the hiss of his breath within the hard outlines of his rigger's suit, but in Daniel's mind a great orchestra swelled and thundered. This was his ship and for the moment his universe; there was nothing greater.
The semaphore repeaters amidships at the dorsal and ventral positions flickered, indicating the coming course change to the riggers on the hull. There was no need for the crew to act if all the hydro-mechanical linkages adjusting the sails worked properly; and indeed, there were probably days when that happened, somewhere in the human universe. Daniel had never been on a ship where that was true, however, so the riggers were ready to unkink cables and release stuck catches with a wrench or a boot-heel.
A starship's sails were thin, metalized fabric carrying a minute, very precise charge determined by the astrogation computer. The sails acted to deflect a portion of the Casimir radiation which was the only true constant throughout the infinite bubble universes. The pressure of Casimir radiation didn't drive the ship, but it shifted it within the Matrix from one bubble to another. In each universe the local constants of mass, distance, and velocity differed from those of the sidereal universe—the only one in which human beings could exist.
The theory was simple; the practice required the greatest precision to which human beings could aspire. Any input—a low-power radio intercom, the magnetic field of an electric motor or even of a control cable—would distort the bubble the sails had formed and send the vessel—somewhere, elsewhere; probably distant, possibly distant beyond calculation. All the machinery on the hull had to be hydraulic or mechanical, and the riggers communicated by hand signals and semaphore rather than radio.
The yard beneath Daniel's boots began to rotate; it would move 15 degrees clockwise, as he knew from reading the semaphores himself. The gears rumbled at a low note with an occasional jerk.
Daniel sighed and reached for his safety line to snap it onto a nearby shackle. He shouldn't have been on the hull without a handhold or a coupled line, nobody should. He wasn't a rigger, and he wasn't just a midshipman either: he was captain of this vessel, and if he drifted away to spend eternity in a universe of his own, Cutter 614 and its personnel would be put at risk.
And yet, and yet. . . .
He was Daniel Leary, an astrogator whose feel for a course was gaining him a reputation to rival that of his uncle, Stacey Bergen. That instinctive understanding didn't just happen; it came because Daniel made himself a part of the ship and a part of the cosmos through which the ship voyaged.
Daniel chuckled, alone in his helmet. Instead of fixing his line, he gripped an antenna stay and slid down it to the hull, still laughing. This'd be the last transit before the cutter returned to sidereal space in the Lantos System, so he needed to be at his post in the command console.
There was an intangible benefit to Daniel behaving as if the hull of a starship in the Matrix was no more dangerous than the Admiral's Cabin on a battleship: the riggers respected him. That wasn't a small thing, given the places he'd had to send those riggers in the past—and would send them again, for as long as he lived and served in the RCN.
The airlock was empty. Daniel spun the undogging wheel which slid a red indicator across a panel in the inner hatch, then stepped inside and closed the chamber. In larger vessels the airlock could hold eight or more hard-suited riggers at a time, but in the cutter there was room only for six—and that because they were willing to pack in tighter than was safe in event of a malfunction. If safety was your prime concern, you didn't become a rigger.
Air pressure was still building in the chamber when the cutter transited, slipped from one bubble universe to another. For a moment, Daniel felt as though his body'd been turned inside out—that his eyeballs were staring at one another and the outer darkness of the void pressed against his bone marrow; then the ship was through. The inner hatch opened onto the cramped, familiar cabin of Cutter 614, and he was grinning at the faces of spacers he'd served with for years by now.
"How's it look, sir?" Cadescas asked, looking up from the shell she was scrimshawing with a short-bladed folding knife.
Barnes took the helmet Daniel'd removed in the airlock and two other spacers of the starboard, off-duty, watch started throwing the catches of his suit before he could get to them himself. It wasn't necessary, but it made them happy so he didn't object. . . .
"Well, Cadescas . . ." he said, speaking to be heard by all those within the cabin. "If I'm reading the sky out there correctly, we've just beaten the record run from Yang to Lantos by a good six hours."
He grinned broader. "And a very good time for that piece of history, I'm happy to say."
Daniel settled into his console and began making notes that he'd forward to the Mapping Section of the Navy Office when the next dispatch vessel left for Xenos. Machines couldn't chart the Matrix—only human astrogators could, putting down their impressions of the streams and whorls of energy beyond the bubble which a starship's own sails formed about it. These observations made it possible to judge a ship's position relative to the sidereal universe without dropping into that universe to take star-sightings. The latter process required over an hour for a skilled astrogator with a crew that knew its business; less fortunate vessels might take the better part of a day.
By a combination of skill and art, Lieutenant Daniel Leary had shortened the run from Yang to Lantos considerably—if when they dropped into sidereal space shortly they found they really were in the Lantos System, of course. Since a few minutes remained before Cutter 614 reinserted, Daniel would write up his observational notes in the hope that they'd prove accurate. If they didn't, well, he could provide later vessels with details of a course that'd led him astray.
He chuckled.
"Daniel?" Adele said over their two-way link. "Good news?"
"Ah," Daniel said in mild embarrassment. "Ah, please don't spread this around, Adele, but it just occurred to me that if I took us onto a false course and lost us time—possibly days or weeks of time—I'm actually more likely to survive to send the information to the Mapping Section. I'm not sure which I should hope for."
"I see why you laughed," Adele said, meaning more than the words themselves. "Personally I wouldn't bet against your navigation, nor would anyone else on the cutter. But is it certain that the Hermes will be on Lantos when we arrive?"
Daniel shrugged, closing the file with his notes and bringing up a schematic of the Lantos System—six planets around a yellow sun. The fifth, Lantos itself, was inhabited, and there was a certain amount of mining for fullerenes occurring naturally in the asteroid belt between the fifth and sixth worlds.
More to the point, those asteroids provided bases for pirate vessels which could be supplied by intra-system traders who claimed to be servicing the miners. Because the Lantos System was roughly central among the Burdock Stars, both pirates and anti-pirate operations tended to concentrate there.
"Nothing's certain, no," Daniel agreed, "but Captain Slidell's a very punctilious man. The Standard Operating Procedure for anti-pirate operations here is for the tender to orbit Lantos, touching the surface as needed to replenish air and reaction mass. The cutters operate around Lantos and in neighboring systems—just as the pirates themselves do, of course—and rendezvous with the tender every week or so. It's a perfectly good plan, and I don't see Mr. Slidell varying it on whim."
He pursed his lips as he considered another possibility. "Now, it's possible that the Hermes won't have reached Lantos, that's true," he admitted. "Things can go wrong with even a well-found vessel. But Slidell's a very able officer, and he'll be on his mettle to prove himself after the problems with the Bainbridge cruise. I'd be very surprised if the Hermes hasn't been on station for at least three days."
A red starburst at the top of his display formed itself into the figures 30 and began to count down. "Ship, this is Six," Daniel said, his voice calm but anticipation making him grin broadly. "Prepare to extract from the Matrix in . . . fifteen seconds. Over."
Several spacers cheered. Daniel knew that somebody'd cheer if he announced he was setting a course for Hell. It was good that his crew trusted him, though it concerned him that they trusted him so much farther than he thought was reasonable.
Cutter 614 dropped into the sidereal universe. The experience affected individuals in various ways and the same person variously on different occasions. This time Daniel felt for an instant as though he'd been compressed and shoved through a pinhole, then allowed to expand on the other side.
It was uncomfortable, but many things were uncomfortable. And it was over more quickly than, say, being caught by an autumn cloudburst when you're three miles from your hunting cabin.
Someone toward the rear of the cabin was retching. The cutter's crew were entirely veteran spacers, so there was nothing to be ashamed of. The next time it might be Daniel himself.
The cabin illumination was the same whether Cutter 614 was in the Matrix or sidereal space, but the light looked, felt, richer than it had an instant before. Daniel brought up a Plot Position Indicator on his screen, but before he could more than begin to scan it Adele's voice said, "Captain, I've identified the Hermes and am training a laser communicator on her. Do you wish to send a message? Over."
A blue highlight pulsed softly over one of the blips on the PPI. He'd seen Adele do that before; she'd explained it was a matter of setting her equipment to scan for RF signals unique to a particular vessel, particularly the precise frequency at which that ship's High Drive motors cycled. It still seemed to him to be the next thing to magic.
"Yes, if you would," Daniel said, deciding what he needed to explain openly to Slidell before he and the Captain could discuss Daniel's proposed solution in private. He cleared his throat.
"RCS Hermes," he said, "this is RCS Cutter 614. We'll be making our final approach through the Matrix shortly and will dock as soon as possible. I recommend the entire flotilla be recalled immediately, as we've sighted the approach of a substantial Alliance convoy which will require immediate action. 614 over."
Daniel paused. Did that sound too directive? Well, it was no more than the bald truth.
His fingers began keying in the commands that would lift the cutter through the Matrix for most of the remaining 600,000 miles to the Hermes. It was a short hop; Daniel suspected he'd have it set up before Slidell decided how to reply.
It'd be a pity if Slidell was offended, but Daniel was nonetheless quite sure that this was no time for anything but the truth.