"Six, this's Woetjans," the bosun said, using the command channel because Daniel hadn't figured out how to set two-way links on the Sibyl's Alliance-standard commo system. "We've got that day-room hatch fixed. I guess she'll hold as good as any other seal on this dozy cow, though that's not much to say. Didn't the Bennarians do any maintenance after they took possession? Over."
Strictly speaking, Pasternak as Chief of Ship should've been in charge of repairing hatch seals, but the engineer had his hands full and more in the Power Room. Damage control parties were largely formed of riggers, since they were rarely on the hull while the ship fought in sidereal space. Woetjans and her personnel had plenty of experience in the basic hull repairs that Daniel'd set them to in the emergency.
He suspected the answer to the bosun's question was "No, the Bennarians didn't do any maintenance," but that was a historical puzzle which didn't matter on the eve of combat. Aloud he said, "Check the rig, then, as much as you can before we lift. That'll be at least ten minutes; maybe more, I'm afraid. Six out."
He glanced at the Power Room schematics again. Pasternak was methodically examining the pumps, the lines, and the antimatter converters. Daniel'd have liked the job to go more quickly. Personally, he'd have cut more corners than the engineer, but Pasternak knew what he was doing: operating without part of the propulsion system merely degraded performance, but having part of the system fail under load was potentially catastrophic.
But bloody hell! the man was slow.
If Adele were aboard to configure the commo system, Daniel would've been able to ask Woetjans how the Infantans were working out. He couldn't do that—or anyway, he wasn't willing to—with Krychek on the same channel. He needed Adele.
The Landholder was at the gunnery console, putting the equipment through its paces in a thoroughly competent fashion. He'd rotated the two dorsal turrets, then elevated and depressed the paired 10-cm plasma cannon. The ventral positions would have to wait until the Sibyl lifted off—at present they were recessed into the hull and under water—but Krychek had done full software checks on them as well.
The Landholder had made his appointment as Gunnery Officer a condition of him signing on with Leary of Bantry. Neither he nor Daniel had used words quite that blunt, but they'd both understood the nub of the negotiation. Sun'd been furious—he'd stayed with Vesey on the Princess Cecile instead of transferring to the Sibyl as a result—and Daniel himself had been doubtful, but it turned out that Krychek had the necessary instinct and experience both.
Daniel sorted through the three course projections he'd set. That was excessive: he didn't imagine that there'd be ten minutes' difference among the options over the short voyage back to Dunbar's World. It was the way Uncle Stacey had taught him, though. In a situation like the present one, Daniel acted by rote.
Returning to Dunbar's World would be quick and easy. What happened there, when they faced a cruiser in an unfamiliar destroyer, wouldn't be easy at all. Daniel gave the display a quick, hard grin: it certainly might be quick, though.
The top of his display was a real-time panorama. Daniel glanced at it, as much as anything to take his mind off his Pasternak's glacial caution, and saw hundreds of Bennarians watching from the administration building and the roughly mown grounds. The naval personnel had their families with them, as he'd expected: a good third were women and children. But there was quite a number of spacers, too. . . .
Making up his mind abruptly, Daniel said to the midshipman beside him at the navigation console, "Officer Blantyre, take charge for a moment. I'm going to talk to the crowd."
"Sir?" said Blantyre in surprise, but Daniel was already on his feet and striding to the dorsal hatch. He could adjust the hull lights so that the spectators without night vision equipment could see him.
It wasn't till he was halfway up the ladder that Daniel remembered this wasn't the Sissie. He wasn't certain the Sibyl had public address speakers built into the outer hull, and he certainly didn't know how to activate them if they existed.
"Blantyre, this is Six," he said. "Can you tell if this ship has an external PA system? If it does, I want it slaved to my commo helmet. Over."
He supposed he could bellow through his cupped hands. And look like a fool, probably an inaudible fool. Damn, he should've thought it through before he started!
Daniel grinned. Maybe Pasternak was right.
"Six?" replied not Blantyre but Cory. He was in the Battle Direction Center with the dour, bearded Infantan second-in-command. "I've done what you want with the PA speakers, sir. I've watched Officer Mundy do it and I think I know how. Over."
Well, I'll be damned! thought Daniel as he stepped onto the hull. The antennas, telescoped and folded, were nearly waist high. Daniel jumped onto Dorsal 2 so that the motion itself would call the attention of those watching to him.
"Good work, Cory!" he said—and almost fell, startled by the boom of his own voice. Cory'd done good work, true, but he wasn't quite at Adele's level yet. She'd have made sure that intercom messages didn't key the external speakers. Of course since Daniel himself didn't know how to do that, he wasn't going to complain about the midshipman's performance.
Daniel ran through ways to start his speech. He stood higher than the Bennarians, even those on top of the admin building. All the more reason to address them as equals. . . .
"Fellow spacers!" Daniel thundered. It was a mixed crowd, but the men he cared about were all spacers. "For the first time in her career, the Sibyl's going off to battle the enemies of Bennaria. She'll be fighting for you, for your families, for your world against a powerful enemy."
He struck a pose, hands on hips and jaw jutting outward. "Now, you can let your ship lift without you," he continued, feeling the echoes roll back to him from the wall of the building. "You can let strangers, Cinnabars and Infantans and spacers from a dozen other planets, fight for you and protect you from the Pellegrinian warlord who expects to enslave you. You could do that—but you won't, not if you're men! Not if you ever expect to look your wives in the face, not if you ever hope your children will look up to you!"
Daniel eyed the spectators. There was more a puddle of them than a sea, but even a handful of men with experience of the destroyer's systems could be the difference between life and death in the coming hours. Every ship had quirks, and the Sibyl's new crew wasn't going to have a shakedown cruise to determine hers.
"You have one chance, men!" Daniel said. "We'll be lifting shortly. Come join us to drive away the enemies of your planet and to save your women from the lust of a warlord's mercenaries! Join us and know that if we succeed, you'll come back rich as well as honored by all who know you. I'm Daniel Leary, the luckiest captain in the RCN, and I swear it to you!"
"Hip hip!" a chorus of spacers shouted, their powerful voices reverberating from the Sibyl's open entrance hold.
"Urra/Hooray!" they and at least a few of the Bennarians replied. Most of the leaders must be Infantans, but Woetjans was there also.
"Hip hip!"
"Hooray/Urra!" This time the Infantans were clearly in the minority. The locals had joined in with a will, and by God! a few of them were starting for the Sibyl's boarding ramp.
"Officer Blantyre," Daniel boomed, "get down the entry hatch at once and see to it that these brave men are assigned to their proper places aboard their ship! And now—"
Daniel thrust out his right arm, his hand clenched, in a Bennarian salute.
"Hip hip—"
"Hooray!"
"Will Miroslav be on the Princess Cecile when she picks us up, Lady Mundy?" Elemere asked.
Adele was cross-legged on the roof of the mansion with her data unit on her lap. She looked up from the display in which she'd immersed herself. She'd been reexamining electronic emissions from the Duilio with the aid of the Rainha's decryption algorithms, copied into her personal data unit during the voyage from Pellegrino to Dunbar's World.
For a moment Adele didn't speak. She was unreasonably—irrationally—angry at being drawn out of her task. When she had control of her temper she said equably, "I don't believe so. The Landholder told us both he expected to accompany Master Leary on the destroyer. Plans may have changed since we left Charlestown, of course."
Plans hadn't changed—of course. Elemere knew that. He'd only spoken because he didn't want to sit in silence with his fears.
"Yes, I see," Elemere muttered. He looked at his hands; he'd washed them several times, going down into the building each time to do so. "I guess it really doesn't matter."
Adele smiled wryly, at human beings generally and particularly at herself. It wasn't surprising that Elemere didn't want to dwell on his present surroundings: the bodies of Waddell's guards lay all about them in pools of congealing blood. The night was cool enough that the corpses hadn't begun to rot, but there was the stench of feces some of the men had voided when they spasmed into death.
Adele Mundy too wanted to escape the present, though she'd chosen to leave through the display of her data unit. Elemere hadn't been responsible for creating the slaughterhouse, after all.
"When are you going to let me loose?" Councilor Waddell said. He'd tried to make the words commanding, but there was a quaver in his voice.
They glanced at him. They'd left the Councilor seated on the roof and tied to the hinge of the stairwell door.
Tovera giggled. Though she'd slung a captured sub-machine gun, she was holding a carbine as she prowled about the roof looking for signs of trouble.
There wasn't likely to be any, of course. The slaves might not've heard the shooting, since the small electromotive pistols which Tovera and Adele'd used didn't make much noise. Everyone for miles around must've noticed when multiple rockets blew down the gun towers and chunks of the nearby wall, but that wasn't the sort of thing that made sensible people want to come rushing closer in the night.
"You promised you'd let me go!" Waddell said, his voice rising. "Does your honor mean nothing?"
Elemere picked up the knife he'd dropped on the roof. He stepped toward Waddell. His face was stiff.
"No!" Adele said.
Elemere glanced over his shoulder at her; he didn't put the knife down. "No," Adele repeated, bringing the pistol out of her pocket. She had to jerk it free. The lining of her tunic was a synthetic of some sort; it'd melted to the barrel shroud.
Elemere turned and walked toward the edge of the roof. He stood facing in the direction of Charlestown, though that might've been coincidence. He didn't speak.
"Councilor," Adele said with the cold anger of a judge sentencing a particularly despicable criminal, "I told you that if you cooperated, we'd do you no further harm. If you misstate me again, I will consider you to have breached our agreement."
"I'm sorry," Waddell said, licking his lips. "Look, I'm sorry. But you can untie me now. I'm no danger to you, I just want to move my arms and legs."
Adele went back to her display. The commo module on the Rainha was Fleet standard. If the Duilio was using an identical model—and why shouldn't it be?—then if Adele gained access to the cruiser's systems she'd be able to read the scrambled operating data.
"Please!" Waddell said.
Adele looked at him again. Elemere turned to watch, though he remained silent.
"Councilor," Adele said very distinctly, "be silent. I can't risk you communicating with anyone until we've left Bennaria. You'll remain where you are until someone arrives to release you, which I suspect won't be too long after daybreak."
"If you leave me like this, they'll kill me!" Waddell said. His eyes were open but they'd gone blank. "You've killed all my guards. If the field hands find me like this they'll, they'll. . . . I don't know what they'll do! I have to get away from the house and hide!"
"Would you prefer that I kill you instead?" Elemere said. "I'd like that, you know."
"Mistress, there's a ship coming," Tovera said. "To the southeast, just above the horizon."
Adele looked in the direction indicated. She saw a hint of plasma like a glowing horsetail cloud. The trembling of the thrusters could be felt through the building though not as yet heard.
"Councilor," she said, rising carefully to her feet, "I'm not responsible for the way you've treated your slaves. I didn't have that in mind when I made my offer. But I won't pretend I'll regret it if your concerns prove well-founded."
She slipped the data unit into its pocket. Waddell began by shouting abuse, but his voice quickly choked into a terrified stammer. The Princess Cecile, dropping even closer to the ground as it approached the mansion, drowned him out.
"Victor One to Ship Six-three," Vesey called, giving Adele's formal call sign. Daniel never used it, addressing Adele as "Signals" or "Officer Mundy" whenever he chose to be formal. "We'll land just outside the compound and I'll shut down the thrusters. I'd appreciate it if you boarded as soon as the ground has cooled enough for you to cross it, over."
Adele noted approvingly that Vesey'd used the laser communicator instead of one of the radio options. At low altitude in an atmosphere, the thrusters' exhaust billowed around the antennas. When the ions snatched electrons to change state, they created deafening static across the whole RF spectrum.
"Victor One, this is Signals," Adele said. "If you'll open the entry hatch as soon as it's convenient, we'll fly our aircar aboard immediately. Over."
Krychek wouldn't be getting his aircar back; they'd have to pitch it off the ramp rather than block the Sissie's entry hold. That was the sort of waste one got used to in war. Adele had melted a hole in her tunic pocket, and a dozen of Councilor Waddell's guards were cooling to air temperature. . . .
The corvette settled to the ground just outside the compound, spewing steam from the boggy soil and chunks of dirt baked to stone. Adele could see the Sissie's hull through the barred gate and the hole she'd blown in the masonry. A final bubble of plasma rose and dissipated into rainbow twinklings.
"Wonderful!" Vesey said, startled out of her careful formality. "Six's already lifted for Dunbar's World, and I want to get to the rendezvous point ASAP. Though without missiles, I don't suppose there's much we can do to help him. Victor One out."
I want to get there too, Lieutenant, Adele thought. Tovera was already at the controls of the aircar and Elemere was getting in. And I believe we just might be able to do more than you think.