Adele Mundy. One of us.
* * ** * *
“Tarnhelm, this is Mike X-ray Five Three Nine,” Adele said with the formality of a scholar reading a script. “Over.”
She was a scholar reading a script, Daniel knew, but he controlled his desire to wince. Adele might not sound like an officer tired after a long, boring mission, but she could put on a Bryce accent that wouldn’t set off alarms the way Daniel might if it were him on the radio.
“Go ahead Mike X-ray Five Three Niner,” the Alliance harbor control authority replied. He sounded bored, which was good.
If the military command had gotten concerned about why its commandoes hadn’t reported back from dealing with the reported Cinnabar sailors, it might have careted the APC’s number and identification transponder with harbor control. Daniel preferred to be one of the day’s several hundred indistinguishable movements through the air about Kostroma City.
“Mike X-ray Five Three Nine requests permission to land at Dock Twenty-Five to pick up a passenger,” Adele said. “Over.”
She didn’t sound worried. She probably wasn’t worried, which put her one up on Daniel Leary right at this moment. But he suspected Adele couldn’t be less than precise if life depended on it.
It did, but they’d make out one way or another. The Alliance military probably had its share of officers who always sounded like they had a broomstick up their ass.
Daniel doubted that sort very often found themselves commanding special operations troops—or survived very long when they did—but the technician in harbor control might not even know what MX539 was. Unless he had some reason to care, the APC was merely a number and a radar track to be routed away from other numbers and radar tracks.
It was dusk. On the horizon lights moved through the air above Kostroma City and across the water at its margins. Both the Floating Harbor and the surface harbor were much brighter than Daniel had seen them in the past. The Alliance forces had brought in additional lighting, as well as much else.
“Roger, Mike X-ray,” the radio voice said. “You’re cleared at altitude twenty meters, vector two-three-one, I repeat two-three-one, degrees. Tarnhelm Control out.”
Daniel had made sure the commo helmets were shut off so they wouldn’t accidentally be used. “Keep the speed down to thirty, Gambier,” he shouted toward the driver’s compartment.
Gambier flew with his seat high to raise his head through the open hatch, but Barnes was beside him watching the instrument panel. Barnes tugged the driver’s leg and repeated the command.
Adele looked down at Daniel. There wasn’t room for two people in the cupola ring, so he squatted beside her in the narrow passageway from the troop compartment to the driver’s compartment. “Was I all right?” she asked.
She had been worried, she just didn’t show it. “You were fine,” Daniel said. That was true: they’d gotten clearance. This wasn’t an acting class where performances were graded on a curve. “If everything else goes as well, we’ll be back on Cinnabar before my birthday next month.”
That was true too. If Daniel’d been asked if he thought that was a probable result, well, that would have been a different question.
“More ships have landed,” Adele said. Unlike Gambier she preferred to view her surroundings through electronic imagery. The vehicle commander’s position had a panoramic optical display as well as a combiner screen which echoed all the driver’s gauges. “And Alliance forces seem to have taken over most of the government departments, not just traffic control.”
Daniel nodded grimly. “Three destroyers and I count six big transports; that’s a brigade at least, with full equipment. People who ask for help from Guarantor Porra don’t realize what they’re really going to get. Though by now they ought to.”
“Are you thinking of the Three Circles Conspiracy?” Adele asked without emotion.
Daniel felt his stomach tighten. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t.”
If he’d been thinking about what happened fifteen years ago on Cinnabar he’d have had better sense than to say anything out loud. The last thing he wanted to do was to offend the woman on whom the detachment’s survival had depended, and still depended.