Daniel dusted the breast of his tunic with his fingertips. “Thank you, Astrogator,” he said, “but I believe Officer Mundy has patched me—”
Adele nodded, her wands flickering. There were three separate nodes connecting displays in the Falassan strongpoint. She wanted to be sure Daniel’s address would blanket all of them.
“—through to the communications network within the fortress. I think that will be the most effective way of proceeding.”
“Inside?” Kelburney said. “There’s no bloody way she can do that—it’s all shielded.”
“Officer Mundy doesn’t give me advice on sailing a starship, Captain,” Daniel said, every inch a Cinnabar aristocrat again. “And I allow her the same freedom in dealing with communications tasks. It works out quite well.”
“Do you want the feed through your helmet, Daniel?” Adele asked. “Or would you prefer a larger display? There’s quite a modern one in the command vehicle.”
She nodded.
“The helmet will be fine, Adele,” Daniel said. He squared his shoulders unconsciously and faced westward, although there was a hill and a building between him and the Falassan headquarters.
Adele made a final adjustment. She’d opened the circuit by aping the power management commands of the Falassans’ standby batteries. That portion of the system had no safeguards whatever in place, but it was connected through the transmitter to every computer inside the stone walls.
“I’ve put you through,” she said. Tovera was looking at Kelburney with much the same smile as if she watched him over a gunsight. “Go ahead.”
Adele’s display gave her the image of the operator seated at each of the seventeen separate units within the fortress. Six were gunnery displays controlling the weapon emplacements in wall turrets, and five consoles were unused at the moment.
At one of the six remaining sat a woman in her mid thirties. A scar ran from her chin into her scalp, skirting her left eye by very little. Her hair was a bright, artificial red except for where it grew over the scar; there the dye didn’t take.
“Wartung!” she screamed to someone out of the image area. “Wartung, you bastard, they’ve entered the system!”
Even without the scar, no one would have called Aretine attractive. Her features were too sharp, and her eyes glinted like the points of icepicks.
“Siblings of the Selma Cluster!” Daniel said. “I’m Lieutenant Daniel Leary of the RCN with a proposition that will save your lives.”
He’d instinctively raised his voice, though of course Adele was controlling the volume of the output speakers. She’d turned the command circuitry to her own purposes. Short of shooting the units to pieces, the Falassans couldn’t affect their own equipment.
“My corvette, the RCS Princess Cecile, mounts four-inch plasma cannon,” Daniel continued. “If I have to, I’ll hover over Homeland and use them to burn your little fort into a pool of lava. I believe that will take about a minute and a half, but perhaps less.”
Aretine and a muscular young male with a metal pincer in place of his left hand were trying to block the electronic intrusion from separate consoles. They had as little success as they’d have had gnawing through rock. The Falassans at the other consoles, including three which had been unused until Daniel began to speak, listened intently to the proposal.
“I’ve arranged for your lives to be spared,” Daniel said. “On my honor as an RCN officer and a Leary of Bantry.”
He turned his head toward the Astrogator. Daniel’s expression left no doubt in Adele’s mind that he meant his words in the most direct sense possible. If Kelburney went back on his word, there would be Hell to pay. A Cinnabar gentleman had promised as much.
Kelburney probably understood the terms being offered and the price that would be exacted for noncompliance on his part. Tovera certainly did. She smiled like a statue of ice as her eyes counted the Dalbriggans nearby; the targets, it might be, that she would kill in a few minutes. For the moment, her submachine gun slanted up at an angle that threatened no one.
“The condition is that you arrest Captain Aretine and hand her over to the authorities for trial on treason charges before Astrogator Kelburney,” Daniel said. “The Republic of Cinnabar doesn’t presume to dictate legal procedures and penalties to the governments of allies like the Selma Cluster, so I specifically except Mistress Aretine from my guarantee of safety.”