Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

Hogg rolled his impeller’s butt to his shoulder. His left hand gripped the fore-end while his arm stressed the sling to provide two more contact points locking the weapon on target.

“Don’t shoot!” Daniel said. He knocked the impeller up with the edge of his hand.

The weapon’s whack! punctured only the empty sky. The hairs on Daniel’s arm stood out straight; the pellet’s aluminum driving skirt, ionized by the flux through the barrel’s coil windings, quivered like a blob of rainbow in front of the muzzle.

When Hogg’s shot crashed out, Barnes and Keast opened up with their submachine guns. If they’d heard Daniel’s shout (which wasn’t certain against the wind), they ignored it in favor of the direct appeal of somebody else shooting.

Daniel saw two sparkles from the vehicle’s quarter panel where ten-grain pellets disintegrated against the dense structural plastic. A swatch of hillside fifty meters from the car erupted in miniature dust devils. If the guard—no way to tell which one—had missed the same distance to the left instead of right, he’d have laced his burst into fellow spacers scrambling for their stacked weapons.

Hogg, his face as dark and stiff as an old boot, lowered the weapon across his chest in a carry position. He didn’t look at Daniel.

“Cease fire!” Daniel bellowed on the unit push. He spread his feet and stood arms akimbo, hoping to dominate the situation by example since he was too far from the others to interfere the way he had with Hogg.

The aircar dipped behind a knoll too low to notice in the ordinary course of events. Daniel could still track the vehicle by the line of dust rising in a dull red haze.

“I could’ve taken the bastard’s head off,” Hogg said in a tight voice, still refusing to look at his master. “Easy as nailing a tree-hopper back in Bantry.”

“I know you could have, Hogg,” Daniel said quietly. “Let’s go down to the others. They don’t know what’s happened and it probably worries them.”

“I don’t know what’s happened,” Hogg snarled. “And I don’t know about worried, but this ain’t exactly the place I’d figured to spend my declining years.”

They started toward Sun and the others. Vesey and her team appeared at the lip of the ravine. The midshipman’s pistol, the only weapon among the four of them, was in her hand.

A mile from the site he’d marooned the Cinnabar spacers, Dorotige lifted the aircar from the nap of the earth. It was a black dot against the pale sky. Hogg paused.

“Bastard’s going straight away so I wouldn’t need to lead him,” he said. “I could still . . . ?”

“Yes,” said Daniel. “And if you brought him down, how are we better off? I don’t imagine he intended to kill us or he wouldn’t have waited for us to unload all our equipment and provisions.”

“I’d be better off knowing the bastard was dead,” Hogg muttered, but he knew it wasn’t an argument he’d win with his master. He didn’t push beyond the bare comment.

Daniel could be as ruthless as was necessary to safeguard his mission and his crew. If he didn’t care to kill for no better reason than anger, though . . . well, that was his business. There was nobody on South Land to overrule him.

Sun already had the satellite radio out when Daniel and Hogg reached the intended campsite. It was part of the gear the Captal had supplied with the aircar and driver. Adele could have adapted one of the corvette’s own units, but it was simpler to borrow a radio keyed to the planetary frequencies.

“I swear I tested it before we packed it aboard, sir,” Sun said miserably. “It’s dead as Todd the Founder, now.”

“I’m sure you did, Sun,” Daniel said. “It was my mistake not to expect sabotage.”

A wry smile lighted his face. “And of course, there was a satellite communicator as part of the aircar’s commo suite if we needed a backup.”

He glanced around the semicircle of his subordinates. They straightened and tried to look unconcerned as they met his eyes, all but Barnes. The big man had turned his back shamefacedly as he reloaded the submachine gun he’d emptied without—or against—orders.

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