The Road of Danger-ARC (38 page)

He squatted and leaned forward to look down the pipe. Leaning back, he said, “So. We’re to crawl into Saal through this?”

Grant snorted. “Saal is five kilometers west of this inspection port,” he said, obviously pleased to show his superiority to the man whom he had to trust as a savior. Nobody
likes
to be a suppliant. “All you have to do is crawl one klick to the next port and get out; that’s on the inside of the defense lines. I’ll give you half an hour, then open the butterfly.”

He patted the valve stem and started to fit the handle into it.

“Then I’ll drive through the gate as normal, swing north to pick you up, and carry you into the city.”

Daniel examined the smaller wheel on the interior of the port. It would be a job to open the one down-flow, but the plan was reasonable and more practical than anything he had come up with. Of course Grant knew the ground and he did not.

“All right,” said Daniel, squirming into the conduit. “Hogg, I’ll lead.”

“I’m sorry I don’t have a light to give you,” Grant said, his voice attenuated. Daniel didn’t bother to answer. Sound would change as they neared another T-section, and his shoulder or knee would feel the difference as well.

“We’ll manage,” said Hogg. “Just hope we don’t have to back bloody out, but I guess we’ll manage that too if we got to.”

He was allowing Daniel to get well ahead; Daniel nodded in approval. This was a sufficiently claustrophobic situation without the two of them crowding one another.

Behind him, the words weakened by distance and blocked by his body, Hogg said, “Just like we’d manage if the next stop was three miles away or thirty. We’re the ones who’re going to pull your bacon out of the fire, sonny.”

The haze of light faded; Hogg must finally have entered the pipe. Daniel was grinning as he crawled along on palms, knees, and sometimes the toes of his boots.

He had left his RCN utilities in Riely’s post and changed into what a farm laborer on Sunbright wore: a loose shirt with three-quarter length sleeves, and trousers with tabs on the cuffs that allowed the legs to be rolled up and tied to the crotch for working in muck. They had looked as comfortable as a tent, but they turned out to be made from a local variety of sisal; steel wool could scarcely have been harsher on the skin.

My knees will be rubbed raw by the time I’ve crawled a klick
, Daniel thought.
But at least I won’t wear holes in the trousers
.

He grinned at himself. He knew that he was focusing on a trivial, controllable concern to avoid thinking about vaster questions that were out of his hands. The technique worked well, even though he was consciously aware of it. Human beings were remarkably good at fooling themselves—thank goodness.

Daniel found himself counting to twenty as he shuffled along—and then starting over at one. He wasn’t measuring the distance, just giving his conscious mind something to concentrate on other than—for example—wondering what would happen if Grant opened the butterfly valve before he and Hogg opened the next access port.

They probably wouldn’t be crushed against an obstruction in the course of the three miles of pipe; the water should have unimpeded flow on the way, after all. When pipe reached the settling tank, however, there might well be a coarse screen to catch branches and other floating debris.

Well, that wouldn’t matter: they would surely have been drowned before water pressure forced their pureed bodies through the filter.

“It ought to be about now-w-w…” Hogg called, his muffled voice made fuzzy by reverberation. Blood was pounding in Daniel’s ears, and that made it harder for him to hear also.

What is he talking
— Daniel thought, but instinctively he reached out with his left hand and touched the locking wheel of the access port. Hogg had come within feet of judging the distance they’d travelled, despite having to crawl and being in total darkness.

“Right!” Daniel replied. “I’m at the port, and I’ll get it open.”

The wheel in the inner face was small, as Daniel had known, and slimy—which was a surprise, because he hadn’t touched the wheel of the port they’d entered by. It was probably a gel of manganese deposited from the water, though he supposed it could have been algae.

He tried it without result. Not only was the wheel small, the pipe’s narrow interior cramped his shoulders when he shifted his grip.

Maybe I should have borrowed the rod from Grant
, Daniel thought. Which was silly; Grant needed it to open the butterfly valve. And besides—
bugger that! I’m Daniel Leary of the RCN, and I won’t have some office worker on a backwater like Sunbright thinking that I can’t manage a task that maintenance yokels are expected to do!

Daniel used the loose end of his shirt to wipe the bronze wheel. That also gave him a chance to get his breathing under control and calm down generally. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but crawling half a mile in a lightless steel tube had proven more stressful than he’d been aware of until he slowed down.

He took the wheel in his hands, tugging with his left and pushing upward with his right palm against a crossbar. Nothing moved. He continued willing more strength into his arms. This wasn’t going to beat him, even if he cut his hand to the bone on the smooth rod.

There was a tiny
snap
. The wheel began to move with a grinding shudder. He changed his grip and continued to push; when blood rushed back into his right hand, it felt as though he had plunged it into boiling water.

The gear reached its stop. Daniel slammed the wheel with the point of his left shoulder, breaking the seal and swinging the port outward.

Light flooded in and made Daniel sneeze. The relief he felt as he scrambled onto the platform shocked him in its intensity.
I was a lot closer to the edge than I thought I was
.

Hogg joined him, puffing a little and with more red in his face than Daniel remembered seeing before. “I don’t mind being outa that thing,” he muttered as he sat heavily on the platform, his legs hanging over the edge. He leaned back against the pipe and closed his eyes.

He grinned, looking at Daniel, and added, “And whatever I told that smart-ass city kid, I’m just as glad it wasn’t three miles. Though I’d’ve done it, I guess.”

Next to the support pillar grew a tree that looked as though it had been made by sticking lengths of drinking straws together with lumps of clay. The bark was metallically smooth; sprays of purple-red leaves sprang out randomly from trunk and branches alike.

Daniel leaned closer. What had seemed to be a scar on the nearest branch was a troop of tiny insects in a circular formation.

If I were like Adele, I’d have a natural history database with me. I don’t, because I depend on her to supply me at need. For so many things
.

Daniel stood and swung the port closed, then locked it down by using his left hand alone on the wheel. His right was swollen, and there was still a white streak across the palm. He waggled the hand slowly to get the circulation back.

“I’d as soon wait to go down the ladder till Grant comes for us,” he said.

“You don’t see me moving, do you?” said Hogg. He had closed his eyes again. “Young master? What do we do when we get into Saal?”

Water began to flow through the pipe again. The rush of its passage became higher pitched as the upstream valve opened fully, squeezing the resonating air into a smaller and smaller volume.

“We stay low,” Daniel said, nodding. “If the leader of the rebellion can hide in the city for years, he shouldn’t have much trouble putting us up for a few weeks. I’ll send a message to Adele on Cremona. There’ll be ships going there, couriers if nothing else.”

He grinned wryly. “Though there’s not so much official trade as through the blockade runners, I’ll admit,” he said. “But I don’t and didn’t want to risk a message from an RCN captain to an RCN warship being sent by a blockade runner, just in case the Funnel Squadron captures it.”

Daniel paused, staring at the disk of tiny insects as he ordered his thoughts. The bark in the wake of their slow passage had a polished look.

“We’re not enemy citizens, after all: our nations are at peace. But if I’m seen to be dealing with the Sunbright rebels, the Treaty of Amiens might not…well, let’s say that there’s been more war than peace between Cinnabar and the Alliance during my lifetime. I don’t want to be the cause of resumed hostilities.”

“So Mistress Mundy brings the
Sissie
here,” said Hogg. “We sneak our young hero aboard, then we head for home?”

He straightened though he remained seated; he was looking down the brushy slope below them. He was hearing something that Daniel missed, though Daniel sat up also.

“That’s the general idea,” Daniel said, “but I’m not sure we could slip him aboard an RCN warship unnoticed. The
Sissie
will be watched and probably guarded.”

He heard something and leaned forward. “That’s the car,” he said. “Well, it’s
a
car.”

“It’s our boy,” said Hogg, rising and starting down the ladder with the jolting suddenness of a dog attacking. “He’d been flying, but I guess he put her down on the ground again when he turned off to get us.”

“The other problem…” Daniel said, standing but waiting for Hogg to get clear before he swung onto the ladder. “Is that we, Cinnabar that is, have to be
seen
to have solved the problem. I think it’s necessary to get Governor Blaskett’s agreement before we act. Otherwise we risk having it appear that the whole rebellion was an RCN plot run from off-planet.”

Hogg reached the bottom of the ladder; Daniel followed, gripping the rungs with his right thumb rather than his joined fingers in the normal fashion. His hand was going to be fine, but he didn’t think he would strain it any more than he had to for the next day or two.

“Mind…” he said as the thrum of the aircar’s fans reached them; the vehicle was still out of sight through the brush. “I’m going to talk to Adele about this when she gets here. If she sees a better option, I’ll delighted to hear it.”

Grant’s aircar nosed through a band of shrubs with thread-thin stems and foliage that could have been brushes of glass fiber. He swung around to point back downhill before he shut off his motors. Gossamer tendrils trailed from the car’s seams and threatened to clog the fan ducts.

“Get the front, Hogg,” Daniel said as he pulled a handful of leaves out of the back intake. The car would probably pick up as much vegetation in the other direction, but at least they could start clean, or cleanish. “And then take the passenger seat.”

“At the gate, the guards were all talking about a Cinnabar warship that just arrived in orbit,” Grant said. “The garrison has been put on alert. Do you know what this is about, Leary? Is it good?”

Daniel lifted himself into the luggage compartment. He no longer noticed the ache in his right hand.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Did you learn what the ship is?”

“Not a big ship,” Grant said. “It’s a destroyer named the
Princess
, the lieutenant thought.”

“Ah,” said Daniel. It would require about four hours to go through procedures, then leave orbit and finally to cool down the hull enough to open the ship. That should be plenty of time to get the proper garments. “I suspect that’s the corvette
Princess Cecile
. And if that’s correct, it’s very good indeed!”

***

Signals Officer Adele Mundy, wearing utilities and as inconspicuous as the console at which she sat, sorted information from Saal’s civil service databases

with practiced skill. Now that the yacht had become the RCS
Princess Cecile
again, command had reverted to the ranking commissioned officer, Lieutenant Vesey. Principal Hrynko had dissolved back into the fog of fantasy from which she had briefly coalesced.

That was as Adele preferred it. Her family had through the generations given the Republic many leading political figures and more than its share of Speakers of the Senate. She had found politics repugnant from age six when her father, Lucas Mundy, had paraded her before local organizers of the Popular Party at a dinner he gave for “influential supporters”—that is, the rank and file of the political process.

Adele had found them uncouth, ill-educated, and frequently little better than brutes. She could not imagine why her father was willing to associate with such people.

If he had answered her honestly, he would have said, “For the sake of power,” and she would still have been confused. What was the use of power if it didn’t permit you to avoid boors who ate with their mouths open, drank too much, and couldn’t have constructed a grammatical sentence for the greatest prize they could imagine?

Which for most would have been a barrel of whiskey, judging from their behavior.

Lucas had not been honest, of course. In all likelihood, he hadn’t believed that his little daughter could understand if he had been willing to answer frankly.

Even a decade later, when Adele left Cinnabar to continue her schooling on Bryce and he planned the coup whose failure led to his death, he hadn’t really understood how intelligent she was. Lucas couldn’t
allow
himself to understnd, because his daughter came to such different results from his when they both analyzed the same data.

Adele’s lips twitched; in another person, the expression would have broadened into a smile. She couldn’t even say that her analyses were correct and her father’s death proved that his were not. Lucas Mundy had been fifty-one when he was killed and beheaded; Adele was thirty-six. Given the events of her life since she joined Daniel, it seemed unlikely that she would survive another fifteen years.

“
Mistress,
Flink, Tapfer
, and
Schuetze
have been alerted and are recalling their crews from liberty
,” reported Cory from the BDC. “
The
Scharf
’s reaction tanks were emptied for recoating, and Commodore Pyne decided that it would take too long to fill her enough to lift safely. And the
Sicher
and
Vorwarts
in orbit, of course. Over
.”

Vesey had agreed that Cory and Cazelet were of more use mining the sudden flurry of message traffic for signs of Daniel than they were echoing the captain as she handled ordinary landing chores. She would have bowed to Adele’s unofficial authority even if she had not agreed.