The Road of Danger-ARC (25 page)

Adele looked at his image, though that was merely a place to rest her eyes as her mind considered the avenues which the situation offered to their mission, the
Sissie
’s mission.
If
Osorio was being truthful and accurate, of course; but he was in a position to know the true situation and he didn’t seem to her to be lying.

“It isn’t fair that the foreigners make so much more of the money than we Cremonans do!” he added bitterly, as if to underscore her belief that he was honest.

Adele continued to look at him. Alliance and Cinnabar estimates agreed that the Cremonan Names controlled 90% of the planet’s wealth. They also agreed that the Names paid no taxes whatever to the central government, which explained why Cremona’s government was even weaker than the norm of similarly benighted fringe worlds.

“The universe has never appeared to me to be particularly fair,” Adele said at last. “I think some people should be thankful for that reality.”

After a moment, she said, “Many more people should be thankful that appear to be, in fact.”

Before Osorio could respond—if he even intended to—Cory’s voice boomed through the speakers in unconscious attempt to mimic Daniel, “
Ship, this is Five! Prepare for liftoff!
”

The roar of the eight thrusters began to build. At full output they filled the world of all those aboard
The House of Hrynko
.

The Matrix,
en route
to Sunbright

Daniel waited in the
Savoy
’s airlock with his gauntlet on the pump housing. The panel was fitted with red and green lights to indicate whether the atmosphere within the lock was balanced with that on the other side of the hatch, but they didn’t work. Waiting until he could feel the pump shut off gave the same result.

The vibration stilled. Daniel opened the inner hatch with one hand and lifted off his helmet—he had already unlatched it—with the other. Hogg helped his master step over the coaming. Daniel started to object, but a sudden, unutterable weariness stilled his tongue.

Hogg walked him toward the owner’s bunk. Lindstrom got out of the way without objection.

“I’ve seen you look this bad before, young master,” Hogg said, “but you’d been having more fun than you seem to be now.”

Daniel sat heavily with his legs splayed out before him. He would have collapsed had it not been for Hogg’s support. West, who had the next shift on the hull, and Lindstrom herself began stripping off his hard suit.

“I was going to set some course adjustments at the console,” Daniel said. He thought he sounded hoarse. His voice was so soft that he wasn’t sure the others present could make out his words. “I think I’d better get a little sleep first, though. Don’t let me sleep more than an hour, though.”

Hogg snorted. “You’ll sleep longer than that,” he said, “and I’ll try to fix up some of the raw patches where these bloody suits’ve been rubbing you. They’re eating you alive, bugger me if they ain’t!”

Hogg glared at Lindstrom, who didn’t look up. Working in concert with West, she wriggled the lower half of the hard suit down and off Daniel’s legs. He felt sudden relief, followed as suddenly by jabs of pain as the compartment’s cooler air touched the sores which the ill-fitting hard suits rubbed in him. He could wear either suit, but they merely punished different portions of his skin.

Lindstrom and West—Hargate and Blemberg were asleep and Edmonson was still on the hull—unlatched the upper portion of the suit.

Hogg began daubing Daniel’s left ankle with salve from the medical kit. “Wish I had proper lanolin salve like I would back to Bantry,” he growled in a savage tone.

“It’s not just what the suits cost,” Lindstrom muttered defensively. She was careful not to meet the eyes of either Hogg or his master. “It’s volume, you see how tight it is with two hard suits. This isn’t a luxury liner here.”

The remainder of the suit came off. This particular one scraped Daniel’s collarbones instead of his elbows like the other. Hogg lifted away the folded rags which at least absorbed the matter leaking from the sores and got to work with the salve again.

“Oh, well, it’s a cheap price to pay for Sunbright’s liberty,” Daniel said cheerfully.

Lindstrom snorted. “Liberty?” she said. “Is that what you call it?”

“More like rats in a pit,” said West, sitting on the deck to slide his legs into the suit Daniel had relinquished. “With no food.”

He looked up at the ship owner. “Nothing against you, mum,” he said, “but I might not’ve made the run this time without Petrov promised us a bonus if we’d…”

He must have been very tired to have said that
, Daniel thought as West stopped speaking with his mouth open. He seemed frozen, afraid to turn his head for fear of seeing either Daniel or Hogg.

If West had been any doubt regarding what kind of reaction was possible, Hogg dispelled it by saying, “
I’ll
give you a bonus, boyo. I won’t cut your balls off just now—if you’re lucky.”

“That’s all water under the bridge, Hogg,” Daniel said. Necessity allowed him to chuckle pleasantly, which he found helped considerably with the discomfort of his long hours on the hull. “West, you’ve shown yourself an able spacer, and I’d be glad of your presence in any crew I commanded.”

That was stretching the truth somewhat, but the old fellow did know his way about the rigging. The propulsion system a closed book to him, even for so simple an operation as polishing the throats of the High Drive motors with emery cloth. On a ship of any size, however, there would be riggers and techs, neither of whom would be expected to know the others’ job.

Daniel bent and straightened the fingers of his left hand while Hogg worked on his right shoulder. Neither set of gauntlets was comfortable either, but at least they were overlarge rather than pinching.

“What do you mean about rats?” he said aloud, smiling as he looked at West. He didn’t want the him being so frightened of Hogg that he missed his hold out on the hull and went drifting into oblivion with half the
Savoy
’s inadequate stock of rigging suits. “From what I’ve seen—”

In Adele’s typically excellent briefing materials.

“—the Alliance governor is brutal and grasping even for, well, out here. It’s not my fight, but I can certainly understand the locals deciding they’ve had enough and trying to do something about it.”

He’d almost said, “…even for this far out in the sticks.” Which was true but was impolitic, since everyone aboard the yawl apart from himself and Hogg was from the Macotta Region.

“I don’t know about the governor,” Lindstrom said. “I didn’t get involved on Sunbright till I started these runs, and I wouldn’t be the sort to get invited to the governor’s palace anyhow.”

She stepped away from West, who now had the suit on. He got up with the slow care of a spacer whose suit fits badly.

“But what it is now…” she said, sitting down on the other side of Daniel from Hogg. She reached across and took the liter-sized tube of salve. “Is a bloody shambles.”

Lindstrom began salving Daniel’s right shoulder. She was used to the work; her hands were no firmer than they needed to be when they covered the sores themselves.

“It’s easier work taking rice from the gang in the next vestry,” she said, “than it is going up against the Naval Infantry and the Alliance Guards that’re sitting in any place big enough to rate a garrison. And it’s easier still to loot civilians who don’t have a garrison or a local gang claiming to own them already.”

West stepped into the airlock and dogged it behind him. He was still holding his helmet, though he’d have to latch it down soon.

“There’s a lot of money in running these cargos,” Lindstrom continued, her voice growing softer. “More than I could make any other way, a lot more. And the risk, well. We’ve been doing all right, Pensett, and I guess we’ll do better with you than we did with Pete. But…”

She shrugged. The whine of the pump evacuating the airlock made the bunk quiver. The vibration was more noticeable through the cabin fittings than within the heavily framed lock itself.

“People are paying off old scores, now that they’ve got guns and there’s no police to worry about,” Lindstrom said. She had begun massaging Daniel’s shoulder muscles instead of spreading salve. “And I guess that’s all right, it’s no skin off my butt, but they’re pretty much treating anybody who
doesn’t
have a gun as the real crop, not the rice those folks were growing. And I’m kinda tired of that. It gets old fast.”

“What about the fellow running things, Kiki?” Daniel asked. Hogg had edged away slightly, giving him and Lindstrom as much privacy as the cramped compartment allowed. “The one who calls himself Freedom.”

He didn’t want to show too much knowledge, but it was reasonable that somebody being sent to Sunbright would have gotten a little information about the place. Besides, Lindstrom seemed to be looking for somebody to talk to.

Lindstrom frowned as though she was really puzzling over the answer. She said, “He lit the fuze, but I guess he couldn’t control it once it all started going. He’s there on Sunbright, he shows up here and there, but nobody knows where his base is.”

She shrugged. “He can’t control it, there’s no ‘thing’ to control,” she said. “Each gang does what it wants;
takes
what it wants, that’s the truth of it. Nobody can stop it now, not even Freedom if he wanted to. It’s going to go on until every plantation on Sunbright’s been burned, and every adult outside the garrisoned cities is in a gang or’s been killed by somebody who is. There won’t
be
any children. And I—”

Lindstrom’s fingers were no longer kneading Daniel’s shoulders; instead they were clamping hard. It cost him effort and the certainty of bruises not to break the spell by saying something.

“—am making great pots of money by selling them the guns to kill themselves with. Bloody wonderful business, isn’t it?”

Daniel thought in silence for…he wasn’t sure how long. His mind was swimming through colored lights which sometimes formed images either from memory or of his present surroundings. He wasn’t always sure which of those were which, however.

Aloud he said, “I’m very tired, Kiki. I’m sorry but I’m…”

Daniel lurched to his feet; Hogg steadied him as he walked across the compartment. The bottom bunk of the four-high tier was empty, which was a blessing. Though he would probably be able to grip the frame of a higher one while Hogg swung his legs up onto the mattress.

My brain still works
, he thought with a faint smile.
Though complex problems may require a little longer than usual
.

He sat down, bending forward so that his shoulders didn’t thump Hargate, who slept on the next one up.

“Kiki?” he said. “There’s a way to fix it, I know there is. But you’re going to have to give me a little time.”

He collapsed sideways onto the mattress. Lindstrom was staring at him as if he had gone mad.

CHAPTER 17: Above Sunbright

“Extracting in five seconds…” Daniel shouted. Everybody was in the cabin, but he wanted to be sure that Edmonson and Blemberg could hear him even though they were wearing the hard suits.

He mashed the button with both thumbs, a habit dating back to his first real insertion on the training vessel
Ganges
. He had been worried that the execute button would stick—as every cable and antenna in the ancient battleship’s rigging seemed to—and was determined not to allow
that
to go wrong. “Extracting!”

The
Savoy
dropped into normal space with a suddenness that took Daniel by surprise, even though he had experienced it before. There were advantages to a yawl even over a relatively small warship like the
Princess Cecile
…though
how
he wished he were back in the
Sissie
!

The
Savoy
’s sensors were rudimentary, but her warship-class console processed the data instantly. Daniel had set the sensitivity to equal that of
Princess Cecile
, though of course that meant there was a great deal of electronic speculation at the higher ranges. For his present purposes, that was acceptable.

They were 350,000 miles out from Sunbright. Kiki Lindstrom, leaning over his shoulder, crowed, “That
is
Sunbright below! Brilliant, Pensett! Bloody brilliant!”

Daniel grunted. The only thing that pleased him at the moment was that the owner had remembered not to clap his raw, bruised back, as he had tensed himself to receive. But in truth—

It really was respectable astrogation to bring the
Savoy
this close to the intended location after five—almost five—days of dead reckoning from their most recent observations in normal space. He would expect to do better—very much better—in any proper warship, let alone in the
Sissie
with the crew he had picked and trained; but he was in a yawl with a minimal sail plan and a maximum of two riggers available at any one time. He should cut himself some slack.

Daniel grinned.
Not likely
. Not even a suggestion that anything short of perfect was really acceptable.

A yawl much like the
Savoy
was 100,000 miles out from the planet, accelerating on her High Drive. The slug on Daniel’s Plot-Position Indicator abbreviated her name to Ell which, when highlighted, expanded to Ella 919.

“That’s Captain Tommines’ ship,” Lindstrom said, pushing uncomfortably closer to the display. “But I think he’s on shares with a trading house on Cremona.
I
own the
Savoy
free and clear.”

She peered further at the display and added, “Bloody hell. They don’t have a prayer, do they?”

Daniel had been weighing the same question. The blockade runner was being pursued by a pair of Alliance gunboats, the
Flink
and the
Tapfer
. They had her boxed and were closing in. If the
Ella
shut down her motors for long enough to balance charges and insert, one or both of the gunboats would close and bathe her in ions before she could enter the Matrix. If the
Ella
didn’t shut down, they would catch her before long anyway.

Unless Captain Tommines was a complete fool and had lifted directly into the path of the Alliance patrols, he had probably been a little careless and a little unlucky. In combat, either alone could be enough for a disaster.