David Drake - When the Tide Rises

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."