David Drake - When the Tide Rises

Tovera was kneeling beside the gunman she'd stabbed with a stylus. He'd fallen on his back. His eyes stared upward; his mouth opened and closed without any words coming from it. He might recover if they got him to the Medicomp, though.

Daniel continued, "As soon as we're off-planet I'll trade you a dozen ordinary spacers to make up the watches, but I need people who can put some backbone into-"

Tovera cut the injured man's belt and started to slip his trousers down. Was she going to give him first aid?

"-theLadouceur 's present company. They came off both theIndependence andDeMarce, so I've got enough-"

Tovera gripped the Bagarian's member with her left hand. She gelded him with a quick slash of the knife in her right.

"Bloody hell!" Daniel shouted, bounding to his feet. Hogg shifted sideways and body checked him back onto the console.

"It's not her, master!" Hogg said. "It's for her ladyship! It's not our place to interfere."

Tovera stuffed the severed genitals into her victim's gaping mouth. He stiffened and fainted; his eyes were still wide open.

Adele rose from her console and looked at the carnage with eyes as cold as the hull in deep space. "Tovera," she said without raising her voice. "You and Hogg get this man-"

She gestured with her toe.

"-to the Medicomp. Now. It should be able to save him."

"I'd rather wait to open the bridge hatch till a draft from theSissie boards, Officer Mundy," Daniel said.

Adele looked at him. He wasn't sure he'd ever before seen an expression as bleak as hers.

"I'd rather a lot of things, Daniel," Adele said. Then to Tovera in a voice like a whiplash, "Get moving! If he doesn't recover, I'll have you whipped out of my sight if I have to hire an army to do it!"

Tovera wiped the blade on the Bagarian's tunic, then flipped the knife to Hogg to close and pocket again. She took the guard's shoulders and lifted; he moaned softly. Hogg undogged the hatch and tugged it open before bending to take the ankles.

Adele settled back onto her console. "I'm going to call the Skye Benevolent Society," she said, "and request that Secretary Yager return to us the items Tovera and I left there. I'll feel more comfortable with my own tools. I don't know that Tovera cares-"

She glanced down the corridor as Hogg and Tovera disappeared into the Medicomp amidships. The cruiser had two, here in officer's country and on Level C where the enlisted personnel bunked.

"-but she's a loyal retainer of the House of Mundy. I'll not cause her to lose her possessions if I can avoid it."

"Yes, all right," Daniel said. "I'd like to lift within the hour, but realistically it'll take longer than that to organize matters here. And if we had to wait a few minutes longer yet, the delay wouldn't be critical."

"Where are you going?" Lampert said. He remained kneeling with his eyes closed. The lids quivered upward minusculely, then squeezed firmly shut again. Tears dripped slowly down his cheeks.

"We're going to raid Castle Four," Daniel said cheerfully. He was setting up the courses, a task he found familiar and congenial. With astrogation to occupy his mind, he could ignore the mingled smells of blood, feces, and the bite of ozone from the coil-gun discharges. "TheLadouceur in company with thePrincess Cecile, that is."

"Let me go," Lampert whispered. "I'll pay you. I'll pay you anything you ask. Don't take me off to be killed, please."

"Oh, it'll be dangerous, I grant," said Daniel, "but scarcely a suicide mission. The Alliance isn't expecting a raid into their home system. If we make a quick job of it, I think there's a very high likelihood of not only getting in but also getting out with twenty or so prizes. Think of the value of twenty prizes, your Excellency! And the Ministry's share is an eighth, remember."

Seward was awake, but when Daniel glanced at him he closed his eyes and pretended still to be unconscious. Hoppler groaned softly.

"The crew doesn't seem disposed to show itself, let alone make trouble," Daniel said, speaking to Adele but perfectly willing to be overheard by the Bagarians present. "When Hogg and Tovera return, I'll have them carry Captain Hoppler to the Medicomp also. We'll need him fit when we get to Castle Four."

"Why?" said Lampert. His voice sounded like leaves rattling through a graveyard.

"We'll need everyone we've got who can program an astrogational computer," Daniel explained. "We'll have enough personnel to form crews for twenty prizes, but that's no good unless they can navigate the ships back to Pelosi, you see?"

He grinned broadly. It was absolutely necessary that the captured vessels all start back toward the Bagarian Cluster. Most of them wouldn't make it, of course, not if they were relying on computer solutions which would be completely predictable to the Alliance forces who responded to the raid.

But Daniel, as Minister Lampert's orders made clear, no longer had a position in or duties toward the Independent Republic of Bagaria. He was an RCN officer, pure and simple, and he very definitely had duties to Cinnabar.

"Ship, preparing to extract," announced Blantyre from the Battle Direction Center. Adele went over her prepared screens once more. At the moment they had a pearly blankness because they being fed by a universe whose physical constants were utterly different from those of the human universe where the equipment was built. "Extracting!"

Adele felt her bone marrow vanish, then spread itself on the outside of her skin. Her body was cold, beyond cold, and she was seeing Blantyre's words as a pattern of light varying from bronze to muddy brown.

TheLadouceur reentered the sidereal universe. Her body felt normal-she hadn't been able to move for a moment-and her display lit segment by segment as the hull sensors came live.

Nobody liked the process of extraction from the Matrix, and Adele probably disliked it as much as anyone. She'd found, however, that so long as she concentrated on her work, nothing else really touched her. Extraction was merely a subset of life itself for her.

TheLadouceur had initially dipped into sidereal space forty-five light minutes down-sun from Castle Four. That Daniel to plot his approach on the basis of orbital traffic above the planet and Adele to preset her instruments. They'd then reinserted for a short hop, knowing that the cruiser would arrive well before the light from its previous appearance reached Castle Control-and more particularly, before it reached the guard shipSiegfried in planetary orbit.

Astrogation, even over short intrasystem distances, was partly a matter of chance even for Daniel. Still, theLadouceur had arrived within ten thousand miles of where she was supposed to be: 142,000 miles above the dun surface of Castle Four, curving past from east to west in contrast with theSiegfried.

Adele adjusted one of her laser transceivers to bear directly on the guard ship. "AFSSiegfried," she said, using the accent to which she'd been exposed during the decade she'd lived on Blythe, studying and then working in the Academic Collections following her family's massacre. "This is AFSVictoria Luise requesting landing clearance, over."

She'd thought of doubling the message on the 20-meter frequency, but that'd be read-correctly-as an insult if theSiegfried 's crew was halfway competent. Adele would be saying that she didn't trust them to have reliable tight-beam capability on a major-if very old-Fleet asset. If she had to repeat the call on short wave, she would, but for now she was assuming that the signals section knew its business.

"Victoria Luise, this is Four Control," said a female voice. "State your business on Four, over."

TheLadouceur 's sensors were scanning the ships on the planetary surface. There were over three hundred vessels concentrated around three ice mines-two near the poles and the third at 71 degrees of north latitude. The cluster at the north pole contained more than half the total number of vessels.