The bush above Colonel Chatterjee's head shrilled like a steam whistle. He spun around, holding his briefcase in front of himself reflexively. His troops and the spacers mixing in the dry scrub weren't carrying sidearms, but quite a number of them reached into pockets or under floppy jackets.
"Ah, very good!" Daniel said, stepping forward. He took a large checked handkerchief from the hip pocket of his utilities and spread it between his hands. With his attention focused wholly on the bush, he added, "I saw it this time."
He snatched, enveloping a thin branch in the handkerchief, and pulled it carefully away. A lump in the fabric was kicking, and one of the shoots which'd angled from the branch a moment ago was missing.
"See?" Daniel said, carefully opening his makeshift capture net. A brown creature no bigger than his little finger writhed for a moment, then stood upright on the four tiny legs on its broader end. He could feel them gripping the palm of his hand beneath the cloth. "My, I don't suppose there's been a proper zoological survey of this place, has there?"
"There has not," Adele said from where she sitting twenty feet away. Her personal data unit was on the table; the air above it quivered with imagery that Daniel couldn't make out from his angle. "Not that I can find, at any rate. I don't even swear that the planet's name is Dansant, since the Kostroman who located the place may not have been the original discoverer as he believed he was."
"Surely that doesn't matter, does it?" Colonel Chatterjee said with a slight frown. "It hasn't been colonized and there doesn't appear to be any reason it should be colonized. I thought we were just landing here to have firm ground under our feet while we held discussions?"
Yes, thought Daniel. And also so that Woetjans and Sun can assess how good your troops really are.
"Quite right," he said aloud, returning the creature to its branch. He had to rub his handkerchief against the bark to get the little fellow to release and hop back where it belonged. There were times he wished he could put all his efforts into natural history; there were such wonders here among the stars!
But that'd mean giving up all that it meant to be a member of the RCN. No number of branch-hoppers and six-winged flyers and carnivorous flowers that crept onto their prey could make up for the thrill of seeing your missiles on a course converging with that of an enemy ship.
Several of Pasternak's people had tack-welded an interior partition to a pair of empty cable spools to make a table. They'd brought three chairs out of theLaddie 's wardroom and set them all along one long side as Daniel had directed. Overhead, riggers had strung an awning of sailcloth between sections of beryllium shroud. Untensioned, the rigging would flex, but it was more than stiff enough to stand upright while supporting something as light as the microns-thin fabric.
"Take the chair to the right of Officer Mundy, Colonel," Daniel directed, "and we'll get down to business."
Dansant, if that was really its name, wasn't a very prepossessing place; that was no doubt why it hadn't been colonized. The atmosphere was breathable but very arid. There was no standing water and no rainfall; the local plants used their fibrous bark to absorb minuscule amounts of condensate during the night, then closed up tightly at dawn to avoid drying out again.
That much from the discoverer's notes which Adele had copied in the Kostroman archives while she was employed there. She'd brought the data out now, years later, because Daniel had needed a habitable world within twenty-four hours' distance of Churchyard.
TheSailing Directionsissued by Navy House didn't have the information, but Commander Daniel Leary did. And not even Adele had known there was animal life on Dansant; that was Daniel's own discovery.
He grinned as he seated himself to Adele's left. The little branch hopper wouldn't be what history remembered him for, but perhaps in a better universe it would be.
"I considered making a landing on Churchyard with your troops," Daniel said as Adele threw up an omnidirectional image of Hafn Teobald from an apparent vantage point of a thousand feet in the air. "If we'd disabled theRossarol or destroyed the missile launcher either one, I think that would've been a very workable plan. As it is, with a destroyer able to use its plasma cannon against us on the ground and ourselves unable to reply in kind, it doesn't appear practical."
"You're not planning to return to Pelosi, are you?" said Chatterjee with a deep frown. "I won't lecture you on Bagarian politics, Admiral, but the enemies you made when you raided Dodd's Throne will crucify you if you do. It's no good saying that a missile boat for a missile boat is a fair exchange; they'll call it a disaster."
"You're right, Colonel," Daniel said, feeling the curves of his smile become minusculely harder. "You shouldn't lecture Speaker Leary's son on politics. And no, I don't propose to return to Pelosi until we've achieved what the meanest intelligence will regard as a major stroke against the enemy. If we act quickly and don't slow down once we've committed, I believe we can capture the Cluster Headquarters on Conyers."
Adele switched to imagery of the Conyers complex, a pentagonal enclosure with a surface area of twenty-three acres. Sloped concrete ramparts fronted by a broad ditch formed the boundaries. An expanded cross-section showed shuttered firing slits and a double monorail system inside for shifting the garrison quickly.
The angles of the pentagon were self-contained strongpoints. Two held antiship missile launchers, two had turrets equipped with twin 13-cm plasma cannon, and the turret on the fifth point sheltered a pair of 20-cm howitzers whose explosive shells could blast targets concealed from direct fire weapons.
"That's the Cluster HQ?" Chatterjee said, leaning closer to the display. "There's a thousand troops in the garrison. Aren't there?"
"More than twelve hundred according to the pay records," Adele said coolly as her wands rotated the image. "I've learned not to trust those, however, especially the farther one gets from the center, and this cluster is very far from Pleasaunce."
She sniffed with displeasure. "It's not a great deal better in Cinnabar service, I'm afraid," she added.
The rectangular headquarters building was constructed of precast concrete slabs. Each of the three levels was stepped back from the one below it, making the structure look like a crude pyramid from the side. On top was a landing stage for aircars; armored cupolas holding automatic impellers were placed at the corners of the next level down.
There was room for small starships to land between the HQ Building and the northwest facet of the pentagon. A missile boat-perhaps theS81 that they'd destroyed on Churchyard-had been on the ground when the image was captured. Larger vessels, the freighters that supplied the garrison and the occasional warship visiting the planet, used a river-fed artificial lagoon half a mile to the west of the complex. A fence with guard towers surrounded that harbor, but it had no defenses capable of withstanding determined attack.
"It appears to me," Chatterjee said, "that the base is stronger than that on Churchyard. A great deal stronger, as a matter of fact."
He looked at Daniel and raised an eyebrow.
Daniel laughed. "Yes, I quite agree," he said. He was pleased that Chatterjee'd noted the problems instead of spluttering that the odds were impossible. "The great difference is that Churchyard is expecting us, and Conyers is not. I assume that Governor Platt knows most of what's happening on Pelosi?"
Chatterjee snorted. "You're certainly right about that," he said. "Governor Radetsky and I sometimes speculate on which members of the Council of Ministers are selling intelligence to Platt. Personally, I'd give even money that all of them are."
"So Platt knew that we were going to Churchyard," Daniel said. "The corollary is that weweren't going to attack Conyers. Furthermore, he's expecting reinforcements to his garrison from Maintenon."
"He is?" said Chatterjee, frowning. "How do you know that?"
"From the data banks on theS81," said Adele. Her wands threw up a sidebar, though Daniel couldn't have read it without squinting. The little data unit's display was clear enough, but there were tricks to reading air-formed holograms against a natural background. Adele'd had occasion to learn those tricks; he hadn't.
"I wouldn't have been able to decrypt it if the ship'd been a real courier vessel with isolated storage for the messages being carried," she went on, "but in this case they were simply held within theS81 's main computer. Which wasn't shielded at all, at least from someone who knows what she's doing."
Daniel said, "I believe Officer Mundy can make theSkye Defender appear to be the ship from Maintenon-"
He nodded to Adele beside him.
"-can you not, Mundy?"
"Yes," she said, bringing up three-dimensional images of four ships. At this scale they appeared to be identical even to Daniel's eyes. "TheZwiedam and her sister were regarded as a successful design, so theZaandam andWesterdam were built on slightly enlarged lines. The Alliance's using theWesterdam as a transport at the moment. Though in the Ribbon Stars, nowhere near here."
"I don't think the Conyers' garrison will be able to tell that a ship they've never seen before is three hundred tonnes smaller than the records say she should be," said Daniel, letting his smile spread. "Not if the markings and especially the electronic signature is correct. The tricky part is that there's a picket boat, and you'll be boarded in orbit before you're allowed to land. Colonel, can you convince the inspectors that you're a militia battalion from Maintenon?"
Chatterjee frowned. He took out his own personal data unit but simply glowered at it instead of turning it on.
A burst of gunfire ripped the morning, thin and echoless in the dry air. Daniel jumped to his feet. Instead of reaching for her pocket pistol, Adele's wands moved rapidly. That startled Daniel until he realized that she'd switched her display to the targeting screen of theLadouceur 's dorsal turret. It gave her a much better vantage point than he had standing.
"Please, it's all right," said Colonel Chatterjee in obvious concern. "Please, I'm very sorry, Admiral. I told my officers to arrange a marksmanship demonstration while we were on the ground here. I felt that your spacers would be more comfortable if they could trust the infantry that was supporting them. But I should've spoken to you about my plans."
Daniel forced a smile and settled onto his chair again. "That would've been helpful, yes," he said mildly, "but I'm sure it's good for me to get my heart rate up. Now, as for the inspection party, Chatterjee?"
"I'm sure we can do that," Chatterjee said. "Yes, I'm sure. I used to be an Alliance officer, you see?"
He paused on a rising note, lifting an eyebrow in synchrony. He obviously thought the information would be a surprise-and feared it'd be an unwelcome one.
"Yes, we were aware of that," Daniel said, smiling internally. "We," meaning Adele had learned that and had immediately passed it on because it was potentially important. "But you're a native of Skye. If Governor Radetsky trusts you, that's good enough for me."
"Ah!" said Chatterjee. "Well, there isn't much uniformity among the planetary militias in Alliance service. If wewere Alliance militia, we'd look about the same. It'll just be a matter of making sure the troops the inspectors are allowed to see all have patches saying Maintenon."
He snorted. "Or at least that they don't say Skye Volunteers. Though I don't think many of the men got around to having patches embroidered on their uniforms before we lifted for Churchyard. We boarded in haste, you see."
A branch hopper-not the one Daniel had caught-shrieked nearby. A third little creature answered it from much farther away. The high-pitched sound travelled well.
"Are we to assault the headquarters complex when we've landed?" Chatterjee said, frowning at the image of the fortress again. "I suppose if we have surprise, that should be possible. Surprise and a way to cross the ditch and climb the wall, that is."
"Yes," said Daniel, "surprise of course. And as for the rest, we'll be landing inside the compound."
"What?" said Chatterjee. "Leary, Admiral, that is-there's no room! Look at that little boat in the picture. TheDefender isn't huge, I don't mean that, but she's far too large to land there."
"TheWesterdam, as we'll be calling her, is 381 feet between perpendiculars," Daniel said. He flexed his spread fingers as he considered the approaching test. "If I keep her centered between the headquarters building and the rampart, I'll have over five hundred feet to settle onto. The 53-foot beam is no problem. Now, it'll be tricky because it's concrete and not water, but I don't foresee serious problems."
He beamed, a wholesome, cheery expression that he figured was the best way to give a lie the gloss of truth. The combination of angles and hard verticals would reflect the transport's exhaust in unpredictable fashions. TheLadouceur 's landing simulation program didn't have software to mimic such terrain: it was too far beyond what the designers had imagined anyone would want to do.
Granted, missile boats and couriers obviously managed it, but the task was going to be an order of magnitude more difficult for a vessel the size of the, well, Skye Defender. On the other hand Daniel's smile became completely real.
On the other hand, he figured he was an order of magnitude better than the captains of minor elements of an Alliance cluster command.
"Ah, one thing that I've only implied, Colonel," he said. "I'll be taking charge of theSkye Defender myself. I've landed ships her size on dry ground, of course."
Daniel'd landedone ship that size on dry ground, and that'd been a controlled crash which wrote off the vessel. This had to look like a real landing, not the vertical assault it really was, if it had a prayer of succeeding. Well, he'd manage it.
Chatterjee shook his head in amazement, but he was grinning broadly. "All the stories we heard were true then, Admiral," he said. "We'll do as you wish, of course; what else can we do when so famed an officer leads?"
His expression became speculative. "And you will be leading, of course?" Chatterjee said. "You will be putting your life on the line with ours?"
"Not only my life, Colonel," Daniel said, nodding to Adele, "but the life of the finest signals officer in the RCN. I assure you that I wouldn't be risking Officer Mundy if I weren't confident of success."
Adele looked at him without expression; Daniel laughed to make a joke out of it. It wasn't a joke, not really. All he was really confident of was that they wouldn't have a prayer of succeeding if Adeleweren't in the ship that made the landing.
"So," he said "If you'll call your officers together in half an hour in the entry hold of theLadouceur, I'll go over the detailed assignments for the assault."
"Very good," said Chatterjee, rising. "A bold plan is the best plan, I agree."
He bowed and strode off to where the target practice was taking place. The rattle of shots and the howl of ricochets from stone had been continuous since they began.
"Well, Adele," Daniel said quietly. "What do you think?"
"I think that if I can't take control of the fire control computer for the plasma cannon on the wall," Adele said, "that they'll destroy us as soon as they realize we're hostile. I'll try to accomplish that."
"Yes," said Daniel. "I expected that you would."
A branch hopper called very close to them. Daniel jerked his head around, but he wasn't able to pinpoint the creature this time.
"I think they're more active than they'd usually be," he said, "because of our breath. Five hundred people exhaling in a close compass like this is going to raise the humidity a great deal in this climate. I think it's a good omen, don't you?"
"I'll search under 'Omens, finger-sized animals on Dansant,' shall I?" said Adele with a deadpan expression. "But I'll be frank, I don't believe I'm going to be able to support your belief there."
She didn't laugh with him, but her smile was as broad as he'd seen it in a long time.
En route to Conyers
Adele heard the voices pausing outside her room. When she realized one of those speaking was Woetjans, she noticed where her left hand was. Grimacing in self-disgust, she removed it and smoothed the pocket before calling, "Yes? Come in."
TheZwiedam had carried six hundred immigrants at a time on long voyages. Adele couldn't imagine where they'd all fitted, but regardless there was plenty of room for half that number of the soldiers and armed spacers who'd make up the assault force.
Adele and the other officers had private rooms-of a sort. What'd been a barracks for fifty in five-high hammock towers had been broken up into ceilingless compartments made from sail fabric stretched on tubing. The fabric was perfectly opaque: when energized, it reflected even Casimir radiation. It didn't do anything about sound, though, so the voices, music, dice games, and snoring from the other nine cubicles came through unhindered.
The room was noisy, dank, and adorned only by chipping paint. At that, it was better than most of the places where Adele had roomed during the fifteen years between when her family was massacred and her joining the RCN. She didn't care much about her physical surroundings anyway.
Woetjans opened the door panel by turning the double pivot that served as a latch. Instead of entering, she remained in the corridor with a Bagarian spacer whom Adele didn't know by name.
Tovera and Rene Cazelet stood just behind the spacers. They had the cubicles to either side of Adele's, and they appeared to've dropped whatever they were doing to join the party.
"Ramage found something back on Dansant, mistress," the bosun said. "I told him we needed to bring it to you because you'd know what it was."
She nudged Ramage. "Go on, show it to her, buddy," she said. "You don't have to be scared. We're onher side. Right, mistress?"
"I usually don't shoot people for asking me questions, Woetjans," Adele said dryly. "Even when they're not shipmates."
She took the little pyramid which Ramage held out to her. It was about an inch high from any base to its apex and remarkably heavy for its size. There were carvings on all four faces, though Adele couldn't tell the detail in this light. She moved it above the data unit and focused the display into a bar of white light.
Adele used to think that the spacers she served with considered her a monster; the thought had disturbed her. After a time she realized that people who'd just heard the stories might think she was a monster, but to the Sissies themselves she was a guard dog: very dangerous, buttheir dog.
That didn't bother her as much. She basically agreed with the assessment.
"It was where we were shooting, mistress," Ramage said. She'd heard the Bagarians call him Andy. "The Skyes'd painted targets on rocks. They'd shoot and we'd shoot, and after the paint'd been blasted off we'd go paint 'em back again. I was helping paint, you know, and I saw this so I picked it up."
"He thought it was a slug, you see, stuck in the rock," Woetjans said. "But we scraped the rock away and it wasn't."
"Anyway, it was too big," Ramage said. He'd loosened up a good deal in the course of this short conversation.
"No, it's not a bullet," Adele said, hefting the pyramid in her palm. It was asdense as the osmium and iridium projectiles which heavy impellers shot, though. Her little pocket pistol fired ceramic pellets which lost most of their velocity in the first fifty yards.
Each face of the pyramid had an image; the edges were sharp, apparently carved instead of being cast. The base was marked with a symbol, a figure-8 or perhaps an analemma, beside two slanted diagonals. It meant nothing to Adele or to her personal data unit.
The other three facets showed heads in left profile. One was birdlike, though the beak was vestigial; the next was clearly reptilian, but the jaw was shorter than that of any reptile Adele had seen and the forehead bulged almost like a man's; and the thirdwas a slope-browed man, or at least something manlike.
Daniel will be interested in this.
"Where'd it come from, mistress?" Woetjans asked.
Adele stood, closed her data unit, and handed the pyramid back to Ramage. She'd started to put it in her pocket, but she realized the spacers would think she was appropriating it. They'd accept that, of course: she was Lady Adele Mundy, the Captain's friend, and they were the dirt beneath her feet.
Theythought that; she did not. She winced to imagine reinforcing their belief by accident.
"I'm not sure we'll be able to tell, Woetjans," Adele said, "but come with me to the Medicomp and we'll analyze the thing in more detail than we can here."
She strode down the corridor between fabric cubicles and then through the open hatch to C Deck's central passage. In warships the automated diagnosis and care facility was usually on A Deck, but the builders of this immigrant ship placed it in the middle of the three decks given over to barracks. It was within fifty yards of Adele's compartment.
No one was in the Medicomp at the moment, so Adele simply used the cabinet itself instead of everting one of the arms. When there were many to treat at the same time, the unit did so externally. After the assault on Mandlefarne Island, Adele had been one of half a dozen casualties in the corridor of thePrincess Cecile.
She could easily have died there; but she hadn't, so she was here to answer questions for Woetjans and Ramage. The spacers were pleased that she'd lived, and at the moment Adele supposed that she was glad also.
"The object, please," Adele said, but Ramage was already holding it out to her. The cylinder would hold a large human lying flat. She set the pyramid in the center and closed the cabinet again.
"Why, that's brilliant, Adele!" Cazelet said as he watched her program the Medicomp. "I never would've thought of that. Of course, it has full-spectrum analysis capability, but I just considered it a, well, a Medicomp."
"One gets used to field expedients in the RCN," Adele said, smiling faintly. "For example, a large wrench makes a very good club. Doesn't it, Woetjans?"
"Yes, ma'am," said the bosun. "Though I prefer a length of high-pressure tubing."
Adele scrolled the readout, using the Medicomp's vernier control. She hadn't coupled her personal data unit to it, and doing so now would be more effort than it was worth. The integral controls and menus were clear and simple, as befitted equipment intended for use by common spacers who might themselves be injured.
"It's pure platinum," Adele said. "Chemically pure, that is; it'd have to have been refined to achieve that degree of purity. And the angles are all within microns of 120 degrees, which also means it wasn't bashed into shape by a savage with a rock."
Not that she'd imagined it had been. She wasn't sure of the temperature required to smelt platinum, but Adele settled cross-legged on the deck and brought out her data unit. A few twitches with the wands gave her the figure: 3164.3 degrees. No, not a temperature you got from a wood fire, even with three of your cousins blowing on it through cane tubes.
"Ah, Mistress Mundy?" Rene said, carefully circumspect. He'd embarrassed himself by blurting "Adele" a moment ago in front of the spacers. "If the object was really set in the limestone outcrop rather than dirt-"
"Hey, it was rock!" Woetjans said. "You think I don't know what rock is, kid? When Ramage here showed me what was sticking out, I cracked it loose with my impeller's butt that I'd been shooting."
"Yes, Chief Woetjans," Cazelet, stiffening his back and clipping his syllables slightly into an upper-class Pleasaunce accent. "If it was limestone, as I said, then it should be possible to use radiation dating on the particles still caught in the grooves of the carving. Should it not?"
"Can one carbon date stone?" Adele said, but she was already typing the commands into the Medicomp's keyboard.
"Limestone's carbonate rock formed by living creatures," Cazelet said. "In the sea. Use the ratio of oxygen isotopes."
"If there was a sea there, it was the gods' own time ago," said Ramage with a puzzled frown. "I never been no place so dry as that."
"Yes, it was a long time ago," Adele said, staring impassively at the readout. Her fingers typed. "Sixty-two thousand years before present, plus or minus seven thousand. That seems an excessive range of error, but I don't suppose it matters from our viewpoint."
"Mistress, that must be wrong," Rene said. "Try another facet. The sample must be contaminated."
"I don't see how it can be correct either," said Adele, intent on her work. "And I am sampling another side, of course. But I'm less sure than you are that ithas to be wrong."
She cleared her throat. "This time it's reading sixty-two thousand, plus or minus five point five," she added.
Adele opened the cabinet and removed the little pyramid. After bouncing it twice in her palm, she handed it to Ramage again.
"I think Commander Leary would like to see this," she said. "Perhaps he'll be able to offer a better explanation than I can."
"Mistress?" said Woetjans. A frown furrowed her brow like a freshly-turned field. "There weren't people that far back, was there? I mean, sixty-odd thousand years?"
Adele reached for her data unit. Before she could call up an answer, Cazelet said, "There were people of a sort, Bosun, but they weren't making art from platinum. And they weren'there."
"There's no reason to assume humans created this little thing anyway," Adele pointed out. "Just that someone who'd seen humans did it."
Cazelet looked at Adele and said harshly, "Mistress, for this to be true would require a star-travelling race sixty thousand years ago. There's no evidence of that!"
Adele gestured toward the pyramid in Ramage's hand. "No previous evidence that you'd seen, you mean, Rene," she said with a faint smile. "I've seen some odd things since I began travelling widely."
She was always puzzled to learn that the most avowedly skeptical people took things on faith. Adele believed data, but only until better data appeared; as for analyses and explanations, they were no better than the intellect of the person making them. Rene's certainty was a matter of blind faith.
"Do you mean there was?" Rene said, raising his voice without intending to. "That there was a race that was sailing the stars when human beings thought fire was high technology?"
"I mean that Ramage found a platinum pyramid on Dansant," Adele said calmly. She let a slow smile spread a little wider than was normal for her. "I won't speculate about it or about most things; I don't care for the paths my mind sometimes takes when I speculate."
"Guess I'll show this to Six," Ramage decided aloud. "That all right, Chief?"
Woetjans nodded without expression.
"He might want to buy it, d'ye think, mistress?" Ramage said. Before she could nod agreement, he added, "But you know, I might give it to him anyways. Tell the truth, it makes me feel kinda funny."
"Yes," said Rene Cazelet, "I understand perfectly, spacer."
He looked at Adele, shook his head, and said, "What does it mean, mistress?"
"It means we were on Dansant and Ramage found a platinum pyramid," Adele repeated. "If you mean that question in a broader sense-"
She smiled again.
"-I'mreally the wrong person to discuss the meaning of life, Master Cazelet. Because you see, I don't think life has any meaning."
After a pause Adele added, "Though Commander Leary would disagree, I suspect. And anyone who's served with Commander Leary will tell you that he's generally right."