Lt. Leary, Commanding by David Drake

She switched to intercom. Her lips continued to move, but the helmet’s dampers smothered the words. A moment later she nodded and said, “Yeah, that’s right unless they cleared the system. Liebig’s going to check the car right now.”

“We weren’t going to do Leary any harm,” the Captal said. “Just keep him out of the way till your fleet had gone. He had plenty of food with him and there’s water at the site. And then Dorotige would have flown him and his servants back.”

The Captal had brought his right hand to his face again but seemed generally to have relaxed. A good sign, Adele supposed. The heat shield hadn’t even raised a blister. From the way he’d jumped, one might have thought his hand was being singed off.

“Mistress?” Woetjans said. “Liebig says that’s right, the navigation record’s still intact. If he can use that car, likely he can drive back himself to get the captain.”

“We’ll use the car,” Adele said. “We’ll take this gentleman and Mr. Dorotige with us as guides, however. Just in case.”

The Captal slowly lowered his hands and let his legs extend slightly. “And then you’ll let me go?” he said, his voice husky with fear.

“Yes, we will,” Adele said. “And if Daniel and all his crew, his servants as you called them, are all right, we’ll even leave you food.”

Woetjans grinned, though she still had a worried expression. “Let’s get going,” she said. “I don’t see any way in hell we’re going to get the captain back before the time the squadron’s supposed to lift, but maybe the Winckelmann’ll lose all her thrusters when she lights ’em. There’s a chance.”

Jiangsi rolled the Captal over on his belly and taped his wrists. Woetjans looked sourly at the captive, then said to Adele, “Ah, mistress? How do you figure to go on from here?”

“Get all the prisoners out of the compound as planned,” Adele said. “Dorst and Tavastierna will fly to the ship in their vehicle, the rest of us will go there in the Captal’s. I suppose Koop should drive the van back; we said we’d return it.”

“Mistress, time’s awful short,” the bosun said.

Adele nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But I need to inform Lieutenant Mon about what I’m doing, which I’ll do face-to-face rather than in any fashion that could be intercepted or recorded. He may request that Tovera and I carry on from here alone so that the ship can lift with as full a crew as possible.”

“Right,” said Woetjans. She bent and lifted the Captal by his bound wrists. He screamed until he got his feet under him to take the weight from his arms. “And the Senate may make me Speaker tomorrow—but the smart money bets that I’ll be collecting bosun’s pay for the next while.”

She slung the Captal toward the stairwell. “Let’s go tell Lieutenant Mon,” she said, “that we’ll be a while bringing the captain back to the Sissie.”

Chapter Nineteen

“We’re about to land, ma’am,” Jiangsi warned, looking out the side of the servants’ compartment.

“All right,” Adele said, but her mind was on entering the names and descriptions of the members of the conspiracy as the Captal da Lund remembered them. He and Dorotige were curled on the compartment floor, their limbs taped. The Captal babbled while his guard chief remained as silent as a corpse except to answer direct questions.

Adele was making an audio recording of the information, but by entering key words manually on her personal data unit she put it in a far more accessible place: her current memory. She didn’t know what she might need in the future, so she learned as much as she could.

Liebig rotated the aircar 180 degrees on its axis. They’d flown so smoothly that Adele had forgotten that she was in a vehicle; now she tilted forward out of the jump seat. Only Jiangsi’s snatching arm kept her from toppling onto the prisoners.

“There you go, ma’am,” Jiangsi said politely. “Liebig’s putting us stern-on to the ship so that when the hatch opens—”

As he spoke, he unlocked and lifted the aircar’s rear door. Liebig had put down on the quay just a few feet short of the Princess Cecile’s gangplank.

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