David Drake - When the Tide Rises

Daniel grinned. Well, so had Daniel Leary, if it came to that. And Adele had a much more critical task to perform than to warn the captain that a missile he couldn't avoid was aimed at the ship.

There was a blat of static as someone tried to call the transport using short wave. The thrusters' exhaust, oxygen and hydrogen ions roaring across the RF spectrum as they changed state, smothered the attempt at communication. Adele wouldn't have let the white noise through to him, but Cory caught it quickly enough. Cleverness wasn't required in an RCN officer, but steadiness was; Cory was steady.

"Westerdam, this is Conyers Control! " snarled a female voice who'd belatedly switched to laser communication. "What in the bloody hell are you playing at, you fool! Sheer off, you're supposed to be landing in Grand Harbor, over!"

"Roger, Conyers Control," Daniel said, trusting Cory to route the transmission properly. He had enough on his plate to fight the controls through the thickening atmosphere. "This isWesterdam, Captain Schaffer speaking. Your orbital control, Officers Isaac Richards and Lloyd Booth, warned us that Grand Harbor is under attack. We're landing within the fort to disembark our troops, over."

"You bloody fool, Schaffer!" screamed Conyers Control. "Sheer off! Sheer off now! You can't fit a ship that size on the courier pad! You'll wreck and do the devil's own damage to us! Sheer off now, damn you, over!"

"Conyers Control, this is Schaffer," Daniel said in a tone of mindless insouciance. "We cannot change angle now, we are committed. Don't worry, little missie, this will all be all right. I, Schaffer, promise you, over."

He was grinning as he spoke. His words and tone would send the control officer right around the bend, he figured, but she wouldn't imagine that he was a threat.

Daniel wasn't worried about the controller warning of an attack, though she should be sending out a landing alert to keep people from sauntering across the courtyard while a ship was coming in. At worst a ground control officer wouldn't have authority to order the batteries into action. By the time she contacted someone whodid have that authority, the ship would be cooling on the pad.

At a hundred and thirty feet in the air theSkye Defender, temporarilyWesterdam, slowed its descent to the rate of molasses dripping. Daniel had never controlled the ship on landing before; to his pleased surprise, she was remarkably well-balanced and responded smoothly to throttle inputs.

He dropped lower. Reflected thrust pummeled the hull, but even that was in the form of twenty-Hertz vibrations rather than the violent surges he'd been afraid of. He'd cut the complementary angles of the central building and the rampart's inner face so perfectly that the transport only drifted outward slowly instead of pivoting around her vertical axis.

A nice job if I do say so myself.

"Ship, prepare for landing!" Captain Salmon announced.

TheSkye Defender touched down along the length of her starboard outrigger, dead level axially but with a half degree of yaw. The ship rang like a steel drum, every plate and bulkhead at a slightly different frequency. Daniel kept a firm grip on the controls, neither adding nor reducing thrust.

The port outrigger touched and the main hull squealed on the oleo struts. Daniel flared his thruster nozzles and only then chopped the mass flow to zero.

TheSkye Defender/Westerdam was down. Outside the concrete and soil-the transport was far too big to fit on a pad poured for vessels a quarter of her size-shimmered with heat they'd absorbed from the flaring ions. Metal pinged as it cooled.

A port clanged open. Not the main hatch; that'd remain closed for ten minutes even after a landing on water which dissipated the thrusters' impulse much more quickly than solid ground did. This was the Power Room access port in the far stern. It was designed so that a crane could swing the fusion bottle off its bed and onto a waiting barge or lowboy.

Daniel's console was rattling with the fury of Conyers Control and several levels of officialdom above her. Hogg offered a sub-machine gun; as usual, he carried a stocked impeller himself.

"Handle the discussion if you would, Captain Salmon," Daniel said. "I have other duties. I'm going to join Colonel Chatterjee in the entry hold right now."

His face was settled into sterner lines that it usually wore. Adele needed to be in one of the distributed command centers of Fort Douaumont in order to take control of the heavy weapons. Her skill with protected information systems was critical to the success of this mission.

But she and her companions would probably have to shoot their way into that command center. Again, Adele's remarkable skill would be required…

It seemed to Adele that the roar and vibration of landing were concentrated in the aft companionway. The tube around the helical stairs wasn't armored the way it would've been on a warship, but it was nonetheless heavy-gauge steel. The cylinder, the treads, and the square-section stringers rang at different frequencies. Occasionally they struck a harmonic which made her teeth hum.

The G Deck rotunda was dim. When she followed Tovera through the Power Room's heavy hatch-open now; she wondered if it should have been-she found the long compartment was hot, muggy and darker yet because of the fog swirling around the catwalks and machinery.

She paused for a moment. Rene muttered something from close behind; he must've nearly walked into her when she stopped abruptly.

The hiss of escaping steam was a pervasive background. Adele supposed it was coolant from the fusion bottle or its auxiliaries, though she restrained the urge to pull out her data unit and check.

She smiled slightly. Or she could ask Pasternak, watching from his upper-level office in a blister cantilevered from the forward bulkhead; he waved when he saw her look up. Instead of being glazed, the windows were guarded by heavy mesh.

That's not what I'm here for, thought Adele, nodding in reply as she walked on. Why was she here? Well, she could give an answer to that for the short term: to penetrate Fort Douaumont and disable its heavy armament, enabling a combination of Cinnabar and Bagarian forces to capture the bastion. In the more general sense, as she'd told Rene on the voyage out, she was the wrong person to ask.

She wondered if the steam was radioactive, then smiled. It would have to blaze like the blue heart of a sun before it was likely to reduce her present life expectancy.

Three spacers in rigging suits waited beside a battered nickel steel container; their helmets were slung. The box was about six feet by four; it was 30 inches high, but it'd been mounted on a missile trolley that lifted it a foot off the ground. The lid was open.

Adele stepped close to the bosun and said in a loud voice so she could be heard, "Woetjans, I told youtwo spacers only, you and one other. We can't afford to let this look like an attack."

"Yes ma'am," Woetjans agreed. "But I'm bringing Barnes and Dasi both."

The riggers must have heard their names; maybe they'd learned to read lips while working on the hull? They nodded, smiling like a pair of clowns.

"This waste can's going to be a pig to maneuver even if the ground's hard," Woetjans said, banging the container with her gauntlet. It was intended for wiping rags and other solid trash, but the strong smell of lubricant suggested that oil had been dumped into it at some point. "And besides, mistress…"

The bosun grimaced with embarrassment, an unfamiliar expression and one that made her craggy face look even more grotesque than it usually did.

"Well, it's like this. Six'd never forgive me if something happened to you, and he'd be right. I see where you're coming from, but I'm still taking Barnes and Dasi both to back me. That's how it is."