"Captain Leary?" said the Count, shuffling down the boarding bridge between a pair of riggers. He'd changed clothes after he'd slipped off the bridge earlier. The shock seemed to have sobered him as well—he'd been sampling the slash with the village officers—but it hadn't done anything positive for his state of mind. "When we come back I order you, I order you, to move the ship to dry ground. Do you understand?"
"Certainly, your excellency," Daniel said, bowing from the waist. He turned to his lieutenant and continued, "Mr. Chewning, while I'm gone I want you to move the locals out of the way so that on my return I can shift the vessel to the clearing three hundred yards west of here. Don't use any more force than you need to, but I don't want to burn up half the village."
Moving a starship overland on its plasma thrusters was a simple piece of shiphandling by comparison with coming down on full braking thrust and suddenly having to deal with reflections from a solid surface. The only real difficulty was that all the villagers were now clustered on shore beside the Princess Cecile. The corvette would incinerate everything it overflew at low altitude. Daniel figured forest fires were enough of a problem without having a couple hundred dead natives on his conscience as well.
"Can I give 'em a tot when I get 'em out of the way?" Chewning asked.
Daniel considered. The officers had had their treat, but he'd remained adamant than the ordinary villagers weren't to have liquor until the Sissie was ready to lift off-planet again.
"Yes, of course," he said. "But two ounces only and make sure they all drink their own share, Chewning. The locals don't seem to have much of a head for liquor, and I'm afraid of what'll happen if they get too much in them."
The native officers—Captain, Lieutenant, Bosun, Engineer, Gunner and Purser—had been given four ounces, a quantity all the spacers thought was safe. Either the batch had been spiked with a little too much hydraulic alcohol, or the local tipple was pretty mild. All six were drunk: two sleeping, two arguing violently about something Daniel couldn't understand, and the Captain was singing loudly with his eyes closed.
The Lieutenant had gotten extremely affectionate with Barnes. Under other circumstances Barnes might have been interested, but as things were he'd held the native's arms until Dasi laid the fellow out with a judicious punch to the jaw.
Having delivered his ultimatum, Klimov stalked to the waiting aircar. Valentina walked behind him, throwing Daniel a bemused glance over her shoulder. It was going to be crowded with eight aboard, but it wasn't a long flight.
Daniel glanced at Adele, standing beside him. She'd been reading something projected on her visor—her handheld data unit was stowed—but she looked up when she caught his movement. "I'm ready," she said simply, answering the question he hadn't needed to ask.
Daniel nodded and they walked together to the aircar. Hogg and Barnes, who'd be driving, had walked the Captain into the front seat between them. The bench wasn't made for three, but planting the native between two strong men was the best way to be sure he wouldn't decide to get out at a hundred feet in the air.
"Your excellency," Daniel said. "Valentina. If you'd be so good as to take the rear pair of seats. That'll allow me to sit directly behind our guest in case he needs steadying in the air."
In case he needs to be cold-cocked, of course; but if Daniel said that, the Count in his present mood might insist he was able to take of that if it became necessary. Daniel didn't trust Klimov to act as quickly as might be required.
"Come, Georgi," the Klimovna said, leading her husband into the back before he could decide to protest. The Count was a generally pleasant companion, but his tipsy fall into the muck had made him ridiculous in his own eyes . . . and, he correctly suspected, in the eyes of his wife and the spacers as well. He was in a foul mood.
Tovera smiled her cobra smile as she and Adele got in, squeezing themselves to opposite sides of the middle bench so that Daniel could sit between them. Tovera, like Hogg and Daniel himself, carried a sub-machine gun from the corvette's arms locker. It was a good weapon for dense forest. In addition she had her own smaller weapon in a holster under her left shoulder.
The Captain was still singing, but the words were so slurred that Daniel wasn't sure whether they were meant to be Universal. Barnes brought the drive fans up to 90% power, angling them against one another so that the aircar hopped and quivered like a hound straining at its leash.
"If you're ready, Barnes," Daniel said, "then take us along the plotted course at just above the treetops—and no faster than you have to, either."
Barnes synched the fans and poured on the coal. He'd chosen too steep an angle for the present load: the car leaped upward at 30 degrees for a few seconds, then mushed and would've crashed into the slough if Barnes hadn't slammed his yoke forward to drop the nose. They picked up speed in a swoop that he converted into a climbing turn just before they plunged into the forest. The car zoomed over the trees and kept rising till Barnes tilted the yoke at five hundred feet—overcorrecting again but this time with enough height that the maneuver wasn't immediately dangerous.
The Count and Countess were shouting in terror. Daniel wasn't especially worried, though now that he thought about it he understood why the Klimovs would be. He supposed he'd gotten so used to Barnes' driving that it didn't bother him any more than walking along a spar in the Matrix did.
The native in the front seat sat upright and stared in all directions, his eyes seeming twice the size they'd been when he closed them on the ground. "I'm dead!" he screamed. Daniel put a hand on the fellow's shoulders, but he stayed firm in his seat. "I'm dead! I'm in Hell!"
The aircar pulled out of its dive twenty feet above the treetops, then started to climb again. "Barnes, slow down!" Daniel said. "We're there, just bring us down by the tree with the orange foliage over there to the right!"
He wasn't actually sure that was the right place, but he knew he'd better give Barnes a specific target or the good lord knew where they'd end up. The car banked and came around in a tight starboard turn, losing altitude more rapidly than it slowed. At what seemed to Daniel to be the last possible instant, they slid between the tops of two emergent trees and dropped to the height of the undergrowth where they hovered, barely crawling forward. Ahead of them was a battered metal cylinder covered with vines, tree roots, and generations of composted leaf litter.
Barnes landed softly. He's a better driver than I realized, Daniel thought.
Barnes turned and beamed at him. "How about that, sir?" he said cheerfully. "I thought we were going to auger right in, but what d'ye know, she leveled out after all!"
And then again, maybe Hogg should drive the car back. . . .
They got out of the aircar gratefully, stepping onto black leaf-mold from which fungus sprouted in a score of different shapes and colors. Daniel found a prism of rock just beneath the surface and slid his boot to the side before putting weight on it. Valentina, not a woodsman, wasn't so careful. She shouted as her ankle twisted. She'd have tumbled forward if her husband hadn't caught her.
"Careful, dear one," the Count said as he set her upright. He was smiling for the first time since he plunged into the slough. "The footing here is tricky."
The wrecked starship was belly-up or nearly so. Thinking aloud for his companions' sake, Daniel said, "It wasn't moving very fast when it went over, so they probably didn't crash while landing. Now, I wonder if . . ."
He strode purposefully toward the vessel, oblivious of the others and confident he was safe in ignoring everything but his personal question. Hogg was watching the forward arc about them while Tovera took the rear, a division of concern they'd made without discussion so far as Daniel could tell. The two worked well together.
He extended the wire butt of his sub-machine gun and used it to scrape litter away from the ship's steel hull. "Yes!" he cried, pleased to have support for his surmise.
"You've found Tsetzes' yacht?" Valentina called eagerly.
Her husband in almost the same breath said, "How do we get in? Good God, if the regalia's still aboard her, think of it!"
"Excuse me, your excellencies!" Daniel said hastily as he straightened. "I was unclear, I'm afraid. This isn't the Nicator. It's a typical country craft, the sort of trader-cum-raider we saw in San Juan and all over the Commonwealth. But judging from the height of the trees that've grown around it—"
Which could only be an estimate, based on what Daniel knew of similar trees on similar planets.
"—I'd say that the wreck is of roughly the same period as when John Tsetzes might have arrived on Morzanga. And the wreck was destroyed—"
He tapped the hull's smeared bands of rainbow discoloration.
"—by plasma bolts at short range. It's possible that two pirates fell out with one another, of course; but it's also possible that John Tsetzes forestalled what he suspected was an attempt at piracy by destroying a strange vessel as soon as it arrived. He was, I gather from his history, a man who might have made that sort of decision?"
"He was a butcher," said the Count. His tone was more approving than not. "A bloody-handed butcher."
The native stepped forward purposefully and stabbed his long spear into the leaf litter. He brought it up with something the length of his finger wriggling on the point. Before Daniel got a good look—it was multi-legged but seemed to have a soft body—the fellow lifted his head and dropped the creature down his throat without chewing. If you were going to eat the thing, swallowing it whole in that fashion was probably the better course. . . .
"Captain?" Valentina said to him. As she spoke, she walked toward where a vine bearing hard-shelled fruit crawled along hull-plates whose seams had ruptured. "How long has the ship been here? Do your people have year records?"
"Missy, not there!" the native warned in sudden alarm. He thrust his spear before her in bar. "The firebugs will gnaw your bones!"
"What?" Valentina said. She stopped and turned to the native, but she was still within a foot of the dangling fruit.
Daniel, guessing the problem without knowing the specifics of it, touched Valentina's forearm and moved her back more by guidance than force. "See the little holes in the rind of those orange gourds?" he said. "I think the chief means that there are insects, insectoids, living there that defend the fruit."
The Captain nodded approvingly at Daniel. He tapped the vine with his spear-point, then stepped back quickly. From three holes in the nearest gourd spilled insects so tiny they looked like a seepage of liquid. Individually they had black shells with a line of red.
"Firebugs!" the fellow said. "They guard the money plants. Maybe tomorrow I smoke them out to get the money seeds, but today we must bury the old Lieutenant."
He looked shrewdly at Daniel and added, "Perhaps you fly me here again quick-quick in your flying boat?"
"Perhaps," Daniel temporized. "But answer the Countess' question: how long ago did this ship crash?"
The Captain shrugged. "Long long time," he said. "My mother's father's father came on this."
"So the crew survived?" said the Klimovna. "Do you have artifacts from the ship?"
"Some live, some die," said the Captain with another shrug. "Now all dead."
He looked at the wreck with a spark of interest which quickly faded. "Once our village was rich from this," he said, "but that was long long past. There's nothing left to take, not for long long time."
Klimov frowned. "Perhaps there's a locked compartment these natives couldn't get into? he said to Daniel. "One that might hold the Earth Diamond?"
"If a number of the crew survived, they'd have been able to open any compartments—by force with tools from the vessel if no other way," Daniel said. "And this wasn't John Tsetzes' ship, your excellency."
"Yes, yes, of course," Klimov said, sinking into himself again. "Damn it, so close and nothing!"
Perhaps close, thought Daniel. But in his heart he was just as disappointed as the Count.
"You take me back," the Captain said. "We bury the old Lieutenant today. There be much food, much drink."
He smacked his lips; for further emphasis he slapped his belly with his free hand. His palm and spread fingers cracked like pistol shots.
"Yes, we'll take you back," said the Klimovna with a look of calculation. "And we'll supply you with a tub of slash if you let us—let me, at least—record the funeral celebration."
Daniel's protest didn't make it to his tongue. He thought it was a bloody poor idea to get the villagers drunk and sit in the middle of them, but Valentina already knew what her employee thought. She was going to do as she pleased anyway.
Well, Daniel had obeyed orders before that he disagreed with. That was how a chain of command worked.
"Yes, missy!" the Captain said. He laughed heartily, then added, "Poor bastard Lieutenant, he miss all this slash by one day only! He chew rocks when we put him in the ground!"
"Right!" Daniel said. "We'll get back then, shall we?"
Speaking from his side, Adele said, "I've radioed ahead, in case Mr. Pasternak needs to run more liquor. Fortunately, slash doesn't seem to require aging."
"And I," said the Klimovna, "will fly us back. You will not argue."
Daniel bowed to her. "I wouldn't think of arguing, your excellency," he said. "It's a fine idea."
"Yes," said Adele. "A lifesaver, I would put it."
Adele, walking alongside the aircar with Daniel, hadn't thought much about what the funeral feast would entail. She was shocked to see the dead man tied to the base of a tree in a seated position, his legs splayed out in front of him. His scrawny body was stark naked, but he'd been painted orange, blue, and yellow. If there was a pattern, it was too subtle for Adele to recognize it.
His arms were curled around the bushel-sized pile of strung beads resting on his lap. Beside the corpse, one hand toying with the beads, stood a younger man with similar facial features. His chest was splotched orange, blue and yellow also, but he wore a feather breechclout like other adult natives; children under the age of ten went naked.
The whole village was assembled, close to two hundred people above the age of nursing infants. They had neither plates nor utensils, but each held a polished wooden drinking bowl.
On reed mats stretching from where the dead man sat were baskets of fruit, trays of broiled fish, and wooden tubs cut from sections of large tree-trunks. Some of the tubs held porridge, but most of them were filled with pale yellow fluid on which floated chewed bits of vegetable matter. Adele assumed it was alcoholic, but she couldn't imagine circumstances in which she would taste it herself.
Valentina drove the aircar slowly into the clearing with twenty heavily-armed spacers walking alongside. The Count sat beside his wife; Woetjans and the native Captain had the rearmost pair of seats. Mr. Pasternak's technicians had removed the middle bench and put in its place a 50-gallon tank, previously part of the water purification system.
The Sissies pushed back the crowding natives until the car could halt beside the corpse as the Captain had directed. As soon as the vehicle stopped, eight crewmen began filling gallon buckets from the tap in the big tank while the others remained on guard.
Adele felt prickly, prepared for serious trouble but not seeing any way to prevent it. She clasped her hands in front of her. She'd have been less nervous if she could've taken out her data unit, but that would've been silly.
Daniel, walking beside her, looked cheerfully at ease. He wore a pistol in a full-flap holster, but Adele didn't recall ever having seen her friend use a gun. He had a baton of structural plastic as long as his forearm, however. Given the strength of Daniel's wrists and shoulders, it would lay out anyone as quickly as a shot from his service pistol.
Daniel eyed the beads in the dead man's lap. "Look, Adele!" he whispered. "They're seeds, little hard seeds. They must come from gourds like those near the wreck. Of course! The seeds are valuable because the insects, the firebugs, make them difficult to gather!"
Adele looked carefully at the strings because they were of interest to her friend, though she didn't share Daniel's enthusiasm for natural history. The individual seeds were about the size of her little fingernail and flat, running ten or a dozen to the inch the way they were strung. She frowned: there must be many thousands of seeds in the pile. Cleaning and drilling each one would've taken time, quite apart from the risk of being attacked by the insects.
The Captain rose to his feet in the back of the aircar. "My people!" he shouted. "My great friends from the sky have brought me slash! I will share it with you out of the goodness of my heart!"
When the aircar stopped, the villagers had been seated to either side of the long mat; the elders—the officers—and their families were on the end close to the dead man. The crowd gave a great bawl of sound and surged upright, about to rush the aircar like a tidal wave pouring over the shore.
"Hogg!" Daniel said.
Hogg fired his stocked impeller into the treetop, blowing a thigh-thick limb off in a shower of matchstick-sized fragments. The gun's buzzing whiplash was lost in the whack! of the slug disintegrating thick wood a heartbeat later. The limb sagged with a series of pops as it tore the few remaining fibers holding it to the trunk; then it plunged twisting to the ground.
Natives nearby wailed as they scrambled back. Hogg watched with a disdainful expression as heat waves shimmered above the barrel of his weapon. The powerful slug had kicked the limb enough to the side that no one in the crowd was in any danger.
"If you, our honored hosts, will remain seated with your bowls waiting . . . ," Daniel said in a voice easily heard even by ears stunned by the sudden gunshot. "Then members of my crew will pour out the amount of our gift to you. Anyone who gets to his feet instead of waiting will show himself to be unworthy of the gift. Do you understand?"
The natives made a variety of noises. Collectively it sounded like a growl, but those who were still standing scrambled to places at the mat; none of those seated got to their feet.
The Captain nodded to the painted man standing—now squatting—beside the corpse. He hopped to his feet and squeaked, "My father bids the feast begin!"
The natives set in with a will. The preferred technique seemed to be to stick the left hand into the porridge tubs and use two fingers of the right to guide any overflow back into the corners of the mouth. Fish up to the size of the diner's palm were swallowed whole; larger chunks were devoured in mouth-sized increments.
Layton dipped a standard ten-ounce mess mug into his bucket of slash and handed it to the gleeful Captain, while the dead man's son got a similar amount in a bowl fashioned from a seed pod. Adele didn't see any pottery, even low-fired earthenware; the tubs were waterproofed with pitch on the inside and painted on the outer surfaces with geometric designs in several colors.
Hogg edged close to Daniel and Adele. "Reminds me of my old man's wake," he said, chuckling. He grinned at Adele and added, "Of course, these folk're neater about the way they chow down than we was back at Bantry, eh, young master?"
"Perhaps a trifle," Daniel said judiciously, watching food flying in all directions. "Of course, they haven't been drinking all afternoon the way everybody was at Old Guzzler's wake."
The native Bosun, a grizzled man with feathers stuck through holes in both earlobes, tossed off his slash with thoughtless haste. He choked, spewed the clear liquid out his nose, and fell over on his back retching. After a moment he rolled upright again and dipped a bowl of the local brew.
The Klimovna squeezed down between the dead man's son and the Captain, seated to his right. The natives made room cheerfully, talking to her and to one another as they ate.
The Count stood behind his wife, looking awkward and out of place. When he happened to catch Adele looking at him, he flashed her an embarrassed smile; they both quickly looked away.
Adele thought about the Klimovs' relationship. Obviously it worked for them. . . . She realized, not for the first time, that one of the reasons she liked dealing with information that had already been compiled was that it was much simpler than understanding people in the raw.
Spacers carrying buckets of slash bustled about behind the facing rows of natives. They were working from several points around the mat, taking the bowls and dipping them full before handing them back.
Adele looked at Daniel with pursed lips. He shrugged and said, "Since I wasn't able to carry out my original plan, I'm proceeding on the second option: getting them all falling-down drunk before they have time to go berserk."
"Ah," Adele said, nodding. She pursed her lips again. "But the children?" she said.
"All the boys old enough to wear a nappy," said Tovera, standing behind her, "have flint knives as well. For myself, I don't assume the girls of similar age are harmless either. I wasn't."
Adele cleared her throat. "Yes," she said. "There's that."
Better that she watch the children drink themselves comatose than that she see what happened when one of them did something Tovera thought was threatening. Having a servant like Tovera was in some ways like walking around with a live grenade.
Sometimes, of course, you need a live grenade. Signals Officer Adele Mundy did, at any rate.
A native turned and vomited over the ground behind her. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and resumed eating. Halfway through another bowl of porridge, her eyes rolled up and she toppled onto her face in the tub. The man sitting next to her lifted her out, apparently because she was in the way of him getting porridge.
Daniel was no more an ethnologist than Count Klimov was, so instead he kept up a breezy discussion of the animals that were coming to light. Most of them appeared by crawling over or into the food. Adele noted with wry amusement that bugs which looked like black rice-grains had a particular affinity for the native beer in which they spun like tiny boats; those which landed in cups of slash quickly sank.
After a few minutes, Adele seated herself cross-legged and got out her handheld unit. There were enough people to keep an eye on the natives—who appeared to be happy drunks after all, so long as spacers continued to pour refills—while Daniel and Tovera between them would prevent anybody from accidentally stepping on the librarian sitting in the dirt. When Daniel pointed out the feathered creatures flitting about the stump from which Hogg shot the limb, Adele could plunge straight into the database to see what was known about them.
Apparently nothing was known. Commander Bergen's was the only formal account of Morzanga in the Cinnabar archives, and Uncle Stacey hadn't shared his nephew's interest in natural history. Perhaps a paper: Notes on Aviform Species of Morzanga, by Daniel Leary, Lieutenant RCN. . . .
"Friends!" called the son of the dead man who now stood, a trifle wobbly, beside the corpse; he held a flint knife. He must've gotten to his feet while Adele was lost in her unsuccessful data search.
The whole assembly rose; those who were able to, at any rate. Daniel kept his eyes on what was happening around him, but he held his left arm out as a bar on which Adele could lift herself. She gripped it and pulled herself upright with one hand as she put away the data unit with the other.
"My father bids you greet him so that he can give you his final gifts!" the son said. "Praise him as you go about your business in this world, so that he may have honor in the afterlife!"
The Captain walked forward, tugging the uncertain Klimovna along with him. The son raised a string of money and snipped it with his knife. He tossed the section to the Captain, cut another and gave it to Valentina, and—as the Captain pulled Valentina out of the way—gave a third piece to the new Lieutenant.
The whole village began filing past the corpse, getting gifts of money. The length of the string didn't seem to matter; the sections ranged from a foot or so long to about a yard. The son flicked a loop up with one hand and clipped it with the other, thus stretching a greater or lesser amount depending where the other end lay in the pile.
The Klimovna showed her string to the rest of them. Daniel and the Count learned forward; after a moment, and with a vague sense of irritation, Adele bent closer also. Deep in her soul she believed that information was something you looked up instead of collecting yourself, but the Sailing Directions' cursory description of Morzanga didn't cover seed money any more than it did feathered creatures.
The seeds were symmetrical ovals, flat, and of a pale ivory color. The string was some sort of vegetable fiber, knotted on either side of each seed. The money seemed to smell faintly of camphor, but the odor might've come from the paint covering the dead man's body.
A good half the village had filed past to get their gift. The son jerked a fresh string loose. Now that so much had been dispensed, Adele could see that the money was heaped around a glittering ball resting in the lap of the corpse. She nudged Daniel and pointed; he adjusted his visor magnification with a quick ease that she could never manage. The Klimovna turned to see what they were looking at.
Husband and wife reacted simultaneously—she by screaming, him with a choked cry, "The Earth Diamond!"
Valentina lunged for the gleaming object, the string of money dangling forgotten from her right hand. Daniel grabbed her from behind by the collar and jerked her back, so quickly and hard that her feet both kicked off the ground for an instant.
"What?" said the Count, an outraged expression forming. He started toward Daniel; Hogg body-checked him dead in his tracks.
"Valentina," Daniel said, releasing the woman but keeping himself between her and the adorned corpse. "Please. We'll get it, I promise you; but not in a fashion that we're all butchered on a pile of wog corpses, please."
The Klimovna shook herself. Her icy fury melted with the suddenness of snow slumping off a roof. "Yes, Captain," she said. "You will fetch us the diamond when you can; but if you please, don't be too long about it."
The Captain stood sipping his liquor in the midst of the party from the Princess Cecile, ignoring—apparently unaware—of the by-play among them. Daniel turned to him and, gesturing a rigger named Nussbaum closer with his just-refilled bucket of slash, said, "Captain, is that jewel on the old Lieutenant's lap going to be given away also? And say, why don't you have another glass of slash?"
The Captain gulped down the last of what was in his mug, then doubled up coughing. Daniel worked the mug out of his grip and gave it to Nussbaum to dip full. The native straightened and drank again, but with proper care.
The dead man's son whipped more money from the pile; Adele took her left hand out of her pocket and relaxed. Whatever the object was, it wasn't a diamond.
Now that she could see almost the whole thing, an engraved sphere a foot in diameter, she wasn't even sure it was mineral. It had the opalescence of a soap bubble rather than a diamond's sharp refractions. Besides, the Earth Diamond was supposed to be flawless. Granted that historians might gild reality, even a politician would've choked before claiming purity for an object so translucently milky.
"Ah, the Sky Ball," the Captain said. He leaned down and wriggled his free hand under the sphere to lift it from the strings of money. The other natives continued with their business, unconcerned by what was happening. "It stays in Captain's House, except when officer dies."
He handed it to Daniel. Before Daniel could pass it to the Klimovna, she snatched it greedily away from him.
"It's light!" she said. "But—Georgi, look at this! It's not a diamond, but it's carved with the continents of Earth as they were before the Hiatus. Is it not?"
"Daniel, hold this for me," Adele said curtly as she handed him her data unit. She couldn't hold it and operate it at the same time, so in lieu of a table in this present need her friend's hands would have to do. Her wands flickered, retrieving the image of the Earth Diamond, the real one, where she'd cached it. She projected it as an omnidirectional hologram in the air beside the clumsy fake that the Klimovna held.
"Waugh!" said the Captain, jerking backward. His feet didn't move as they might have done ten ounces of slash ago; he'd have fallen if Hogg hadn't caught him around the shoulders with the reflex of long experience in dealing with drunks.
"In addition to the obvious differences in outline . . . ," Adele said. The "continents" on the Sky Ball could've been outlined by a child drawing in mud with his fingers. "You'll note that the Earth Diamond is etched on the interior of the sphere by an artist working through a pinhole at the North Pole."
She expanded the northernmost ten degrees of the image, then rotated it to bring the concave interior into view. The Captain stared at the transformations with the complete amazement of a man seeing a pig walk down the street on its hind legs.
"Whereas this object, the Sky Ball . . . ," Adele continued. She needed to record imagery of the object, she realized as she spoke. "Is carved on the outer surface in the normal fashion."
"It appears to be of vegetable origin," Daniel said, frowning. He straightened, looking across the faces turned to his. "Though the important fact is that whatever its origin—and I assume it's local—it could only have been made by somebody who'd seen the Earth Diamond. John Tsetzes or at least the loot he escaped from Novy Sverdlovsk with has been here on Morzanga."
"Can we buy it?" the Count said, looking troubled.
"It's trash!" Valentina said angrily. "Why would we want to make fools of ourselves?"
She shoved the ball back at the Captain. Startled and unprepared, he'd have let it hit the ground had not Daniel snatched it as it fell.
Valentina's fierce eyes locked on the Captain's. "Where did this come from?" she demanded. "Do you have the original it was carved from?"
"It's from seaweed that floats up on the beach of the big water three days journey toward sunset," the native said. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with the back of the hand that didn't hold the mug of liquor. "This is very big bubble, though. Nobody ever has seen so big a one again."
Daniel nodded approvingly. "Yes, of course," he said. "A flotation bladder from a deep sea plant. Storms would occasionally break pieces loose to where the currents could carry them to shore."
"I don't care where the plant came from!" Valentina snapped. She jabbed the Captain with the tips of her index and middle fingers. "It's the design that matters. Where did you get the design, you?"
He looked even more puzzled. "We've always had the Sky Ball," he said. "My father's father had it."
The second part of the statement was probably true, Adele realized, since he'd said his mother's father's father had been from the crew of the ship destroyed by gunfire. Daniel's suggestion, that John Tsetzes had destroyed the other vessel when it first appeared, looked increasingly probable.
The alert from the Princess Cecile winked simultaneously in her helmet and Daniel's. They straightened together.
"What ship? What ship? What ship?" queried a vessel in orbit above Morzanga. Its transponder declared it was the Belle Ideal of Condon's Planet, one of the independent worlds loosely allied with Cinnabar; Adele recognized the signal as coming from the Goldenfels even before the analysis program—which was part of Mistress Sand's equipment—confirmed her assumption. No two radio transmitters are perfectly identical, any more than any two human voices are.
Because Adele had set her handheld unit to echo emergency signals automatically, she didn't have to bring up the commo display. Her wands twitched, locking the bridge and Battle Center transmitters so that the duty officer—Chewning—couldn't respond. The wrong response—the truth—would be suicide.
Her eyes met Daniel's. The rest of the group from the Princess Cecile continued to talk among themselves, scarcely aware that the two officers were only physically present at the moment. "Daniel, it's the Goldenfels," she said. "Will you trust me to handle this my way?"
"Yes," he said. The data unit was rock steady in his hands, though he couldn't see its display or guess what she had in mind. "Woetjans, move other people away from us, please. There's a problem and Mistress Mundy mustn't be bothered while she's dealing with it."
"Goldenfels, this is Adele Mundy of Bryce," Adele said. There was a bustle among those nearby, but her world had shrunk down to her screen and her mind as she used the only weapon that could possibly save them: information. "I'm secretary to a pair of rich boobs from Novy Sverdlovsk. Listen, they've found the Earth Diamond! I repeat, they've found the Earth Diamond! If you'll help me, we can save it for Guarantor Porra instead of having it go decorate some hog farm in the back of the beyond! Over."
She was taking a series of risks, the first and greatest being that she'd replied using the Goldenfels' real name instead of the false identity coming from the ship's transponder. Adele's offer was only believable if it was made by an Alliance citizen to an Alliance ship. With luck they'd overlook the question of how she'd recognized them or at least give her a chance to explain.
The fact the Goldenfels had tracked the Princess Cecile from Todos Santos and was giving a false name indicated that Captain Bertram hadn't come to talk. Because of their relative locations, the Sissie was a sitting duck.
High Drive motors didn't do a perfect job of combining antimatter and normal matter to create thrust; unconverted antimatter in the exhaust reacted violently with any normal matter outside the nozzle. A ship in vacuum could fire missiles to the surface with reasonable accuracy, but missiles fired from the bottom of an atmosphere would destroy themselves before they climbed to a target in orbit.
"What ship? What ship?" continued for two beats before the transponder shut off. After a brief pause, a male voice said, "Unknown caller, identify yourself. Over."
"This is Alliance citizen Adele Mundy aboard the yacht Princess Cecile!" Adele said. She'd lived on Bryce long enough, working in the Academic Collections, that she could easily counterfeit an upper-class accent. "I'm alone in the control room because the officers are all getting drunk with the local savages, but somebody may come in at any moment. Listen, the Klimovs have bought the Earth Diamond from the savages! Look it up, I don't have time to explain, but it's valuable beyond belief! Land your ship nearby, pretend to be friendly, and I'll see to it that we get the diamond without any fighting. The Guarantor will reward us all. Do you understand, over?"
There was another pause. The Goldenfels' signals compartment was separate from the bridge. The hatch had remained closed while the inspectors boarded above Todos Santos, so Adele had only her imagination and the speaker's tone from which to picture her opposite number: a little angry, a little worried; frowning because now he must relay uncertainty to a superior officer who expects merely assurance that they have the correct target for their missiles.
"Citizen Mundy, hold one," the voice said. "Do not break contact or it'll be the worse for you! Over."
There was a longer pause. Adele took a deep breath and became aware that she was the center of attention. Concerned spacers had enforced a ten-foot circle about her by shoving people back with their weapons; they glanced at her. The nervously angry Klimovs glared at from the other side of the spacers. Puzzled natives watched her and the Sissies do unintelligible things. And Daniel Leary, holding the data unit more steadily than any terrified slave could've managed, smiled engagingly through the hologram at her.
"I think they're trying to learn what the Earth Diamond is," Adele said. Her first syllables were croaks, because her throat was very dry. "It'll take them longer than it did me, but a vessel like that—"
A spy ship.
"—will have a data bank with enough of a description to make them believe me. Then—"
"Citizen Mundy," a different voice said through Adele's commo helmet. "We will be setting down after the next orbit. We'll invite the owners and officers of your ship aboard ours for a banquet. See to it that you come with them. Goldenfels out."
Adele cleared her throat. She smiled at Daniel, knowing that her expression was wan compared to his.
"Then," she concluded, "we'll figure something else out."
"I think I already have," said Daniel, who'd smiled even more broadly when he heard the final orders from the Goldenfels.