Though Hell Should Bar the Way - eARC Read online

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “I’ll be all right by the time they’ve got the truck loaded, but my throat’s dry, that’s a fact.”

  “Roy, I’ve got to run now,” Miranda said, “but drop in and see me some time soon, please. Miranda Leary at Chatsworth Minor in the Pentacrest District.”

  She waved and went off with the big woman—Miranda’s bodyguard, obviously. She looked able to do that job, no question.

  I followed Mon inside and down a short hallway to his office in back. There wasn’t a clerk or receptionist. “So…?” he said, pouring cacao for both of us. “You know Mistress Leary pretty well?”

  It was obvious that there was a right answer and a wrong one to that question, at least in Mon’s mind. I took the mug and said, “Her twin and my older brother Dean Junior were best friends right up and through the RCN Academy. They were both killed in action. I don’t think I’ve seen Miranda in two years.”

  That was the truth. What I say is generally the truth. When I was a kid I learned that I’m not a good liar, and I’ve never tried to get better at it.

  Mon gestured me to a couch and sat behind the desk. I drank. I figured I’d finish the cacao and go out to the truck. They’d probably be finished loading it by then, and if not, it’d still give me a chance to work off some of the tremors.

  “Six always had an eye for the ladies,” Mon said with a nostalgic smile. “He sure picked a different one to marry, though. Mistress Leary is sharp as sharp. Not that she’s not pretty too, I mean.”

  “I’ve always thought that about Miranda,” I said. “At any rate…”

  I look a long swallow; the cacao had been sitting awhile and wasn’t over warm.

  I stood and set the empty mug by the pot. “At any rate, she was too smart to let my brother get any further than good friends. A lot of girls weren’t. Junior was a fine man and a fine RCN officer, but he wasn’t the marrying kind.”

  Mon chuckled as he walked me out of the office. “To tell the truth,” he said, “I’d have said the same thing about Six. But he found a good one when he changed his mind.”

  As I crossed the trackway, I noticed that the Bergen yard seemed a happy place as well as a busy one. I was pretty sure that if I asked Miranda to have me put on here, she’d make it happen.

  I’d rather swab latrines than do that. I hadn’t tried in two years to see her. I wasn’t going to show up as a beggar now.

  But the rent was due at the end of the week, and I wouldn’t bet Fritzi was even going to pay me for time worked. He didn’t treat Cady like much, but Cady was still family.

  Oh, well. One thing at a time.

  CHAPTER 2

  I looked out the window of my room, holding aside the towel I’d nailed up to cover the casement. Not that anybody across the broad arterial was likely to be looking into my fourth-floor room—or that it would matter if they did.

  At least I could pay for the room tomorrow. I’d told the disbursing clerk to give me my time, so I had three days wages in my pocket. Plus the florin and thirty-five pence I’d had left from last week’s pay.

  Pascoe, the clerk, had heard Fritzi bellowing. I’d closed the office door when I went in to explain, but that didn’t help much. Pascoe hadn’t asked Fritzi whether “Get out!” meant with my pay, and he’d even given me the hour I was still short of quitting time for the day. I hoped he wouldn’t get in trouble for it.

  I could generally pick up casual labor on the docks, though it wasn’t steady enough to afford the room. I really didn’t want to move into a flophouse, but I guessed it was going to come to that.

  Tomorrow I could start walking the chandleries again. Or I could go to the shape-up at the docks and then look for something better in the afternoon if I wasn’t picked. I’d sleep on it.

  Somebody knocked hard on my door—on the doorframe, not the panel. I wasn’t sure the panel would have taken that kind of use.

  “Come in!” I said. If it was Mistress Causey, coming for her rent early because she’d heard about my job, then I wasn’t going to be polite.

  The door opened. In the hall were a fellow of maybe thirty in a business suit, and an older man who looked like he ought to be leaning against a barn chewing a straw.

  “You’re Roy Olfetrie?” the younger man said.

  I swallowed. “Yes, I am,” I said. “And I’ve seen your picture. You’re Captain Daniel Leary.”

  God and the saints: Miranda was married to that Leary. The war hero.

  “I know that,” said Captain Leary with a friendly smile. “Now, come down to the bar and let me buy you a drink while you tell me about things I don’t know. About yourself.”

  “I’d be honored to drink with you, sir,” I said, stepping out into the hall with him. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but I’d sure thought of tying one on this afternoon when I left the chandlery. “Ah, the bar on the ground floor here isn’t a great place, though.”

  “I’ve drunk in worse,” said Leary.

  The rustic got to the stairs ahead of him but called back over his shoulder, “I’ve carried him out of worse, legless and singing ‘I don’t want to join the Army.’”

  Nobody tried to come up while we were going down, but a man was sprawled in the corner of the second-floor landing. He’d been there when I came home, too. He might as easily as not be dead, but there was nothing I could do for him.

  Leary and his companion stepped over the fellow’s legs just as I had, so I supposed they really did know about buildings like this one. It had been new to me when I moved in, but I’d learned fast.

  The bar was pretty busy for midweek. There was a piccolo in the corner wailing that it wished Mama didn’t flash her tits. There was an empty booth in back.

  “What’ll you have, Olfetrie?” Leary asked.

  “Beer, I suppose,” I said. It was less likely to poison me than spirits in a place like this, and I wanted to be awake early to make the shape-up.

  “Hogg, get us a pitcher of what they have on draft,” Leary said. “Bring it over to the booth.”

  We went to opposite sides. As I started to slide in, the bartender called, “Hey! That booth’s Cabrillo’s office when he comes in!”

  I got out again. The rustic, Hogg, said, “Well then, we’ll discuss that with Master Cabrillo if he comes in, won’t we?”

  He reached into a pocket of his shapeless tunic and came out with a knuckleduster. I guess he touched something because a blade shot out of the top end.

  “Till then…” he said. “A pitcher and three glasses. Clean ones if you’ve got anything clean in here.”

  “Sit down, Olfetrie,” Leary said. “I don’t expect we’ll be long enough for there to be a problem. If there is one, we’ll deal with it.”

  “Yes sir,” I said and sat down. It looked like it was my day for getting into fights. Well, I’d had a lot of new experiences since Dad shot himself.

  “I looked for you at Petersburg Chandlery,” Leary said mildly. “They told me you didn’t work there any more?”

  “The owner’s son-in-law took a swing at me,” I said. “I swung back. It escalated a bit, but I think the medicomp will have him fit for work in a day or two. As fit as Cady ever was.”

  I grimaced. “Fritzi wouldn’t have cared about explanations, so I didn’t give him one. Besides—”

  I managed a smile. “No excuse, sir.” The Academy answer.

  Leary grinned. “Which is another thing I was wondering about,” he said. “You dropped out at the start of your third year. Your grades were all right. What was the problem?”

  He wasn’t supposed to know my grades, but I don’t guess it’d been very hard to learn.

  Hogg brought a tray over to the table. He filled one of the mugs and said, “I’ll stand here for a bit.”

  He stood at the end of the table. His right hand was in his pocket. He sipped from the mug in his left, his eyes following every movement in the bar.

  Leary filled the other two mugs and slid one to me. I said, “The p
roblem was that my father had been cheating systematically on large contracts with the Ministry of Defense. When this was uncovered, he committed suicide. All our accounts were frozen. I dropped out of the Academy because I had to earn a living.”

  It wasn’t quite that simple. I might’ve been able to manage living expenses, but my dad wasn’t just a crook: He’d been stealing from the RCN. I’d have been shunned in the Academy—if I’d been lucky. Chances were good that my fellow cadets would’ve beaten me to a pulp every night until I resigned.

  “Umm,” Leary said as I tasted my beer. “People have been accused of things that aren’t true, you know? There was a reshuffle in the Ministry of Defense not long ago.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s true,” I said. I drank more beer, because my throat was starting to choke up and I hoped swallowing would help. “But I went over Dad’s private accounts. I don’t know what the inspectors will be able to prove—they won’t see Dad’s files, I’ll tell you that. But the allegations were true.”

  This wasn’t stuff I liked to talk about, and it wasn’t any of Leary’s business that I could see. Telling him to shut up was within my rights—and would’ve been, even if he’d been my commanding officer.

  But that would look like I was afraid to talk about it. I wasn’t. Talking tore me up, but better that I say things myself than that other people say them about me.

  Leary refilled my mug. Hogg kept lifting his beer to his lips while he watched the door, but the level in his mug didn’t seem to go down.

  “What are you going to do now?” said Leary as he poured for himself.

  “There’s other chandleries than Petersburg,” I said. That was the truth, but the confidence I tried to put in my voice was a lie. “And other work than that too, I guess.”

  Leary shrugged. He raised his eyes to meet mine. “All true,” he said. “And you know my wife. Known her longer than I have, from what Mon says.”

  “Well, I’ve known Miranda for pretty much my whole life,” I said, wondering if this was what Leary had been getting around to the whole time. All the stuff about my background didn’t matter to him as far as I could see. “I don’t think I’ve seen her since Junior, he was my older brother, got killed on New Harmony. He was Admiral Ozawa’s flag lieutenant. Junior and Tim Dorst had been best friends, and the families got together even after Dad got rich and Captain Dorst had pretty much his pay to live on. And then he died.”

  Mom would’ve been happy to cut Miriam Dorst then because Miriam wasn’t willing to play poor relation to her. Dad wouldn’t have that. He’d been a great father and a good man—until the Navy Office looked into his accounts. Even then, thinking back, I couldn’t have had a better dad.

  Leary filled my mug again and said, “Hogg? We could use another pitcher.”

  “I shouldn’t be drinking this much,” I said. “I need to get up early to look for work.”

  “This beer isn’t strong enough to hurt you,” Leary said, smiling at me as he poured the rest of the pitcher into his mug.

  I wasn’t sure that was true—Junior’d been a hell-raiser, a proper RCN officer, but I wasn’t. The beer was going to my head.

  Still, chatting with somebody friendly felt awfully good. I hadn’t had anybody to do that with since it came out about Dad.

  “Look,” I said, looking straight at Leary. “Dad probably greased the skids to get Tim Dorst into the Academy because Tim wanted it so much. Dad had a lot of influence before it hit the headlines. I remember him saying, ‘Young Timothy’s got what it takes. There’s more about being an RCN officer than sitting on your butt in a classroom.’”

  “Your father was right,” Leary said as Hogg put the fresh pitcher down. “About Midshipman Dorst and about RCN officers generally.”

  He looked at me and his smile was a little harder. “Did he help you get in also?” he said.

  “He didn’t have to,” I said, maybe a little crisper also. “For me or for Junior either one. Junior wasn’t much for study, but you could go a ways without finding somebody smarter.”

  It’d probably been the best result for Junior that he wasn’t one of the handful who got out of the Heidegger alive after the missile hit her on lift-off. He’d been the social one of us. Having all your friends pretend they didn’t see you would’ve been hard for him.

  The gods knew it wasn’t easy for me, and I didn’t have any friends. Not really.

  The bar was filling up, but nobody said anything more about where we were sitting. If Cabrillo had come in, he’d decided not to make an issue out of it.

  “You were raised rich yourself,” Leary said. “You didn’t have a problem working for a ship chandler?”

  I shrugged. Bloody hell, I’ve drunk most of this mugful too.

  “It’s honest work,” I said aloud. “Cady was a prick, but I’ve met pricks before. I was hoping that Fritzi would let me start doing some of the inventory control—there’s nobody in the office who really knows how to use a computer. Maybe the next house will.”

  “As it chances…,” said Leary. He put his mug down with a bit of a thump. “I’ve got a slot for a junior officer myself. I’ve been asked to command a chartered transport carrying a Foreign Ministry delegation to Saguntum. Two of the officers who’d normally accompany me are staying in Xenos this time. One has a great deal of surgery and therapy yet to go before he’s really fit for duty, and his fiancée has taken an appointment in Navy Office while that’s happening.”

  “Sir?” I said. I was choking again. I put my beer down. “I’d be honored. Greatly honored. Ah—this would be on your yacht?”

  The Princess Cecile was almost as famous as Captain Leary himself. She’d been built as a warship, a corvette. She’d punched far above her weight every time she’d been in action, according to the stories at the Academy.

  “Afraid not,” Leary said, smiling again. “The Sissie’s a little too conspicuous for this job, they tell me. Besides, there’s to be twelve in the delegation, which would be a tight fit on a corvette. You’ll be third officer on a standard transport, the Sunray. I’ll be bringing some of my regular crew along, though.”

  “Sir, I’ll serve in any fashion you and the Republic wish,” I said. I was choking, I knew I was, and I rubbed my eyes to keep from embarrassing myself even worse. “Ah, I was good academically, but I wasn’t at the top of my class even there.”

  “I know exactly where you were, Olfetrie,” Leary said. “My wife asked me to do a favor if it looked reasonable, which it does to me. And Woetjans, my bosun, said she liked the way you handled yourself in a fight. She’s a pretty good judge of that sort of thing.”

  My mug wasn’t empty, but he filled it anyway. “Now drink up,” he said. “You can report to the Sunray in Harbor Three at noon and we’ll get the paperwork squared away.”

  I drank deeply. Tears were running down my cheeks. I decided I didn’t care.

  CHAPTER 3

  Captain Leary had said “noon.” I timed it to arrive at eleven in the morning. If they told me to cool my heels for an hour, that was fine. I wasn’t going to take a chance on being late, though.

  My room was near Harbor Two, the main harbor for Xenos. It got most of Cinnabar’s commercial traffic and was the logical place for ship chandleries to cluster.

  Harbor Three was the naval harbor, a long run by tram. There were water taxis too, but they wouldn’t have been much quicker and they cost more than I wanted to spend anyway. I punched harbor three on the call plate—it was one of the preloaded destinations—and a tram arrived within ninety seconds. There were already two men and an old woman with a grocery bag aboard.

  The woman and a man got out as we snaked along the shoreline. Seven more people got on; two stood though there were eight seats. The car passed stops from then on. It could take the weight of twelve average passengers, but eight was the normal load.

  For some of the way the pylons supporting the overhead track were sunk into marsh. There might have been interesting wildlife to see if the
windows hadn’t been so scratched and smudged. I wasn’t in a mood to sight-see anyway.

  We all got out when the car arrived at Harbor Three. There were at least a dozen tram stops at Harbor Two but there was only one here, and there were armed guards besides. They didn’t look too worried—they weren’t even checking IDs. It had probably been different before the Treaty of Amiens and the end of the long war with the Alliance of Free Stars.

  I’d been to Harbor Three a couple of times while I was at the Academy, but I didn’t know the layout—let alone where the Sunray might be berthed. They’d have the information in Harbor Control, but before walking over there I called to the Shore Police guards, “Can any of you tell me where the Sunray is?”

  “You want the Sunray?” said a voice behind me. “Thirty-seven A, but come with me ’cause I’m going there myself.”

  I nodded to the guards and turned. The woman who’d spoken had been on the tram with me. She was short and fit-looking and spoke with a Xenos accent.

  “Thank you, mistress,” I said. “I have plenty of time before I’m due, but I’d rather not spend it walking up and down the waterfront.”

  We started off to the right. She walked like a spacer, balancing an instant before taking the next step in case the motion of the deck had changed.

  “Are you a suit?” she said, looking at me hard. “You’re dressed like you belong here, but you sure don’t sound like it.”

  She might’ve meant my accent, but I suspected it was the fact I was polite. Which would be regrettable, but I’d realized long before my current troubles that quite a lot of things were regrettable but true.

  “I’m not a suit,” I said. “Captain Leary offered me the third officer’s slot on the Sunray.”

  “You know Six?” the woman said. “Well, hell, I guess you’re the real thing, then. I’m Wedell; I’m a rigger in the port watch.”

  “I’m Roy Olfetrie,” I said. I didn’t offer to shake hands because I was about to become her superior officer. “Yesterday I was working for a ship chandler, but I was fired.”