I looked at what I was doing. The sequence would finish without my input. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t know what was going on, but Kent was a solid man and a very skilled driver.

  I thought the transportation bay was too noisy for conversation, but Kent led us into the office. The tech in charge nodded to us and went out, closing the door behind him.

  “Look, sir,” Kent said, looking fixedly at me. “There’s some of us, enlisted ranks, you know—Maddy, that’s Master Grenville’s girl, you know—she come to talk to us. Could you see her, sir? Because it doesn’t do no good us knowing what she says. And we figured she might talk to you, being his friend, right? Will you see her, sir? ’Cause it’s not right letting a gang of wogs play games with an RCN officer, all right?”

  I took a deep breath and sighed it out. I really didn’t want to get involved with this, but I didn’t have a choice.

  “Rick is my friend,” I said. “I remember Maddy and I’ll happily chat with her if that will help bring Rick back where he belongs. Will she come here?”

  “No, we gotta go to her in town,” Kent said. “But it’s a room right on the water, not far. And she’ll be there, never fear. Joyeuse is with her to make sure she don’t wander off.”

  I recalled Joyeuse vaguely, a female bosun’s mate. She was probably about forty, as squat and solid as the hydraulic capstans on the hull of the Far Traveller. I wouldn’t try to force my way out of a room she wanted me to stay in.

  We crossed the boarding bridge, nodding to the spacers on guard. They held their submachine guns openly instead of having them discreetly at hand as had been the case on previous landfalls, but the atmosphere was relaxed.

  The shops facing the harbor all provided services to sailors. I thought Kent was exaggerating when he said that Maddy would be waiting “right on the water,” but in fact we entered a dram shop facing the harbor. The wooden floor was covered with canes which should have been replaced some while ago.

  There were no booths but several of the places at the half dozen round tables seated women. None who looked like Maddy or Joyeuse (if she was who I remembered), though.

  “Come on, sir,” Kent said, leading me to a curtained doorway at the end of the bar. There was no separate bouncer, but Kent exchanged nods with the one-eared bartender as he started up. Of course a place like this would have private rooms upstairs or in the back.

  They turned right at the top of the stairs. There were half a dozen doors, several of them closed. Kent rapped on the first one and called, “Joyeuse? He’s come!”

  The door snatched open instantly and I followed Kent inside. The bosun’s mate slammed the door behind me with her free hand. Her right held a pry bar.

  “Good afternoon, Joyeuse,” I said to the spacer. I nodded toward the girl on the bed; that and a straight chair were the only furniture in the room besides the overhead light fixture. “And good afternoon to you too, Maddy. I’m glad you weren’t injured during the kidnapping. Rick has spoken very favorably about you.”

  “Lord Harper, sir,” the girl murmured, a bare acknowledgement. “Sir, I can’t go to Prince Seba with this. They’ll kill me! I shouldn’t even’ve talked to Louise.”

  She looked at Joyeuse, who apparently had a first name.

  “Well, repeat to me what you told the bosun’s mate,” I said calmly. “We’ll see to it that nobody is injured, all right?”

  I thought the girl would eventually start talking, but she didn’t do so quickly enough for Joyeuse, who interjected, “The guys who grabbed Master Grenville was heavies for a local nob named Pilkey. She won’t come out in public about that, and Captain Bolton won’t act when I told him about it, but we figgered that your lordship can convince him.”

  “Well, I’m willing to try,” I said. “Exactly what did the captain say?”

  “Well, I told him that the witness was sure of her story—”

  “I’ve known Arno Danforth for the ten years I’ve been in Keelung,” Maddy said. “He and his brother Enos has been Pilkey’s top enforcers for the past five. Arno was running things when they grabbed Rick.”

  “Captain Bolton says even if she was willing to come forward…,” Joyeuse said. She glanced sidelong at Maddy but continued, “Even if she was, a whore’s word isn’t good enough to start a war on.”

  I felt my lips twist. Personally I believed Maddy; but personally I believed in the Archaics.

  “But tell him what Lieutenant Vermijo said,” Kent prompted.

  Joyeuse nodded twice and said, “Yeah, well, Vermijo said we ought to arm twenty of the spacers and back ’em with the two turret guns they didn’t take out in the refit. And they’d turn Pilkey’s house upside down till we found Lieutenant Grenville.”

  “He won’t be there,” Maddy said unexpectedly. “Pilkey’s got his Garden House just outta town. They’ll have stashed Rick in someplace like that or another one.”

  She looked up and met my eyes. “Look Lord Harper,” she said. “I want Rick back as much as you guys do. He was always nice to me. But if you push things and raid the wrong place, that’s worse, right?”

  I was starting to like this girl more than I had when all I knew about her was that she wouldn’t come to the authorities openly. “Yes,” I said. “Captain Bolton won’t chance it, and going in with both boots would be the wrong idea anyhow. If we want to get Rick back alive, anyhow.”

  I looked at Maddy. “Do you know where this Garden House is?” I said.

  The girl looked blank. Kent said, “I’ll bet I can learn. I can talk to drivers on the shoreline.”

  “And me too,” Joyeuse said. “Most of us know a few of the locals so they’d tell us that.”

  I nodded. “Then I’ll go back aboard and talk to Doctor Veil,” I said. “She won’t go against Captain Bolton, but I figure she’ll let me use the imagery we made before we landed.”

  Kent and I left the room.

  I did want to talk to Doctor Veil. But I wanted to talk to Joss also.

  * * *

  I opened the door of Doctor Veil’s office a crack and said, “Ma’am, might I speak with you for a moment?”

  She gestured to the chair across the desk. I moved the files there to the floor and took it. “Ma’am,” I said, “the girl who was with Lieutenant Grenville when he was kidnapped says that the men who took him work for Lord Pilkey, the head of the Old Party—one of the heads, Master Blenkins who gave us the Archaic artifact, is another one. Anyway, Pilkey’s too powerful for the vicar and his Shining backers to move against without a civil war—which they’re not ready for. And Captain Bolton says the Far Traveller can’t dive in on our own because we represent Cinnabar and he doesn’t have the authority.”

  “Go on, Harper,” Veil said. “Though I should mention to you that I have even less taste for politics that Captain Bolton appears to.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “And my branch of the family isn’t political either. The thing is, though, Rick is a friend of mine. This has nothing to do with the Republic of Cinnabar. This is me, Harry Harper.”

  “I doubt whether the captain would see things that way, Harper,” Doctor Veil said.

  “No ma’am,” I agreed, “and I wasn’t planning to discuss this with him. But I’m asking you personally if you’re planning to micromanage the way I spend my free time?”

  Veil looked steadily at me. Then she said, “No, I am not, Harper. And because Captain Bolton required that I cut short your collecting expedition, I suspect you will have a great deal of free time.”

  I swallowed. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “And with your permission, I will check with Technician Joss about her plans for the immediate future.”

  “Good luck, Harper,” Veil said as I got up to go. “If I were religious, I’d offer my prayers.”

  * * *

  Rick’s captors taped his wrists together behind his back but otherwise ignored him as they played cards and drank beer. The hut was built on an outcrop of coarse limestone a hundred yards from the shore and hidden from the water by the cane-like brush which grew down to the edge of the mud.

  There was no major vegetation, though canes topped out in tufts twenty feet in the air. Rick tried to force his way through them but he couldn’t manage more than his own height into the brush. If his arms hadn’t been pinioned he might have done a little better, but not much. The leaf tips were hooked.

  Power tools had cut the path to the shore, but that was growing up again. Rick wondered how often it had to be renewed. He wandered down it for want of anything better to do. There was a trough in the mud where the boat had come aground but it was filling in, and the prints of booted feet were already gone.

  “Look to your heart’s content,” a voice said. Rick turned: Blackbeard had followed him down the path. “Maybe if you’re brave enough you can even get the cargo tape off your wrists and try swimming to the mainland. Otherwise, you better hope your captain convinces the Shinings to let our buddies go.”

  “I don’t think I’m that important to Captain Bolton,” Rick said, smiling in what he hoped was a friendly fashion. “Certainly not to the Shinings. How do you folks get off the island?”

  Until Blackbeard’s comment Rick had assumed he was simply ten miles up or down the coast. It didn’t really affect his chances of getting free, because the canes were as effective a barrier as barbed wire.

  “We call Willie to come pick us up,” Blackbeard said. “I don’t think that’ll help you much unless Willie’s three cousins are back home, though. After all, it don’t seem like killing one of them Shining filth ought to be a crime anyhow.”

  Rick managed a laugh. “I don’t disagree,” he said, “but I’m not a politician. If you grab one of them, maybe you’d get somewhere.”

  “Above my pay grade, kid,” Blackbeard said. “I guess you better hope that you’re more important than you think you are. Or practice your swimming.”

  He turned and walked back toward the hut.

  Rick sighed and looked out over the little bay where they’d landed. He didn’t even know the direction of the mainland.

  He had plenty of time to think.

  He chuckled. He might very well have the whole rest of his life.

  * * *

  Joss was looking at the display with me. I had up vertical imagery of what the Deeds Archive said was Lord Pilkey’s property ten miles north of Keelung. The intercom pulsed red; I responded.

  “Lord Harper?” Kent said. “I’ve got somebody you’ll want to meet in the transport office. Ah, your lordship? This is going to cost money. Is that all right, over?”

  “Yes,” I said. Within reason, of course, but there’d be time to say that in the unlikely case that the request was unreasonable.

  “You’re coming?” I said to Joss. She nodded. I couldn’t be sure of expressions on her ruined face, but I thought she seemed cheerful.

  * * *

  Kent, Joyeuse and Tech 4 Witmer were in the office with a civilian. I’d gotten to know Witmer as one of the coleaders of the group working to return Lieutenant Grenville. Kent was a member of the group by virtue of his access to me, but I was pretty sure that he had very little authority on his own.

  “This is Pohaska,” Joyeuse said, nodding to the civilian. “He’s got information about Pilkey’s Garden House.”

  “But I gotta have five hunnert thalers before I say nothing!” Pohaska said. “Right now!”

  “I’ll pay you in florins,” I said. “That’s a sixty percent markup, so even if you have some trouble changing them you should come out well ahead. Thing is”—I took a hundred-thaler coin from my purse and held it out in the palm of my hand—“I’ll give you this right now, but the other four hundred wait till we’ve seen the information’s worth it.”

  “That’s not the deal!” Pohaska said.

  I put the coin in the hand that had stopped after it started to reach for it.

  “We’re on a ship now,” Joyeuse said. “We drop garbage in the harbor.”

  Joss leaned forward and gave Pohaska her terrible smile. “Lord Harper’s a real gentleman,” she said. “You can trust him. And if you’re stringing us with a story, you can trust me too.”

  Pohaska swallowed. “It’s no story,” he said. “I was one of the regular guards at the Garden House. There was four of us but I’d been there as long as any, three years. Then a week ago Enos comes and tells us our pay’s being boosted to two hunnert lira a month and we got eight more guys coming. They closed off the room on the east side of the ground floor and mounted automatic impellers in both the end towers, east and west.”

  “Did they say why?” Joyeuse asked.

  “‘We got company coming’ was all,” Pohaska said. “Anyway, that jump in pay, that’s pretty good, right? And I tied one on that night. No big deal. Only it seems like the man hisself, Pilkey, he comes by first thing in the morning and he freaked when he sees me. Bloody near parks on toppa me.”

  Pohaska shrugged. “If it’d been Enos or Arno, it’d’ve been okay. But with the Man screaming his bloody head off, well, I’m out on my ear. That’s not right!”

  “Didn’t any of your mates stick up for you?” I said. “Didn’t Arno? It’s not like none of his people got drunk before, is it? And to lower the boom on you just after they bumped the pay up, that’s pretty hard lines.”

  “Bloody well told it is!” Pohaska said. “Nobody said a peep for me. They’re so scared of bloody Pilkey.”

  “So…,” said Joss. “There’s twelve guards now? Or is it eleven when they fired you?”

  The discussion went on for another hour. We put Pohaska on the only seat in the office. Kent went out for a pot of tea from the galley. I was taking notes on my handheld but really looking forward to being able to add the data to the full-sized projection at my workstation.

  It would’ve been better to see Pohaska at a bar in town, but it wouldn’t be safe for him (which I didn’t care about) or for us if Pilkey and his crowd learned that Pohaska was talking to us. When all of us had asked all the questions we could think of, I said to Witmer, “You can find him a bunk for the night?”

  “Roger that,” the tech said, nodding.

  “Wait a minute!” Pohaska said. “I didn’t sign on as a bloody spacer! I wanna get ashore now! With my money.”

  “You’ll be released as soon as it’s safe to,” Joyeuse said. “Safe for us.”

  “And you’ll be paid when we’ve verified your information,” I added.

  “That’s not right…,” Pohaska muttered. He was one of life’s losers, always treated unfairly by those around him. He was a drunk and a traitor on his own telling of it, but it was no fault of his own that he’d been fired or that his new employers didn’t trust him.

  That said, I would leave four hundred florins with Doctor Veil, to be paid to Pohaska in the event that I was unable to do so after matters had settled down. I was a Harper of Greenslade and my word was good.

  * * *

  The biology laboratory became the war room for the operation to free Rick. Doctor Veil didn’t object and Mahaffy continued his work. I think Mahaffy was mainly concerned that we were going to ask him to take an active role in a dangerous endeavor. We weren’t: We had more than enough people available for that.

  We might have been able to use the Battle Direction Center, but we didn’t need better displays than we had with my modified work station. I honestly wasn’t sure as to how much Captain Bolton knew about what was going on, and I preferred not to rub his nose in it.

  The Pilkey Garden House was projected in the middle of the lab. The normal approach was from the south side. There was a forest track that came within a mile on the north side but nothing closer. The plantings which gave the house its name wrapped around the back and both sides of the house and were surrounded by a ten-foot wall. There were gates on both ends which would allow small agricultural vehicles to enter.

  “We’ve got fifty volunteers easy,” Joyeuse said. “Personal arms for sure and I guess we could borrow a couple automatic impellers without a big problem. The trouble’s transport.”

  “Maybe not,” said Witmer. “I made some friends at the bus line that serves Langsam. It wouldn’t be real expensive”—he nodded to me—“and they’re rated twelve passenger but they usually run with thirty aboard so two’ll do us. We’ll still have to slog through the woods, though.”

  “No!” I said. I hadn’t meant to be so forceful. Well, I hadn’t meant to start that way. “Look, we’re not going to start a war.”

  I’d silenced the others, but I sure hadn’t convinced them. In the silence Joss said, “Yeah, we don’t need that. Kent, you can land the forty-five twelve here, right?”

  She jabbed her finger at a spot north of the wall, about a hundred yards short. I peered closely at the image when she moved her finger.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Kent said. “You’ll want me to keep dead low, though, won’t you—below the top of the wall.”

  “Yeah,” said Joss. “And you’ll want to stay low from half a mile out to keep behind the tall trees out here”—she waggled her hand at the edge of the image—“so they don’t spot you from the east tower. You can handle that?”

  “Sure,” said Kent. “Though it’ll help if the guards are drowsy.”

  “It always does,” Joss agreed. “But you bring me there with maybe four spacers backup—and they’re just going to sit in the truck. I’ll go in alone and bring the El-Tee out. Then we didlibop back to the ship, all right?”

  “What if he’s injured?” Witmer said.

  “Then I bloody carry him, don’t I?” Joss snarled. “I’ve done it before.”

  “You’re going to open the gate in the wall when you get inside?” I said. “So you don’t have to do it when you’re coming out.”

  “How’s she bloody going to get inside?” Witmer asked.

  “Yeah,” Joss said, looking at me.

  “Then I’m coming in with you when you do,” I said. “You’re not going in without an extra pair of hands. You’re in charge and whatever you bloody say goes, but I’m coming in.”