The sixth, an overweight man, put on a cap decorated with gold braid and rose from the swivel chair where he'd been sitting. The console behind him was live. It was of a standard pattern, one that Adele could operate in her sleep.
"Yes?" the Alliance officer said. He wasn't impolite but he wasn't welcoming either. Adele didn't know how their two ranks compared.
"I need to check with my commander," Adele said. She walked past the naval officer as though he were a doorman and sat at the console. The seat was still warm.
"Who the hell do you think you are?" the Alliance officer asked indignantly. "You can't just come barging in here and taking over!"
Adele locked the console and all outgoing communications links, the matter of a few quick commands. There was no certainty of what would happen in the next minute or two, and the guards couldn't be permitted to summon help.
Adele swiveled the chair around. "All right," she said to Daniel.
Daniel looked down the corridor, then closed the door. It was a massive, armored panel and took all his weight to swing it home.
"Hey!" said a sailor.
The door banged against its countersunk jamb. Daniel unslung his submachine gun. "All of you against the port bulkhead," he ordered with a nod.
The nearest sailor flung her coffee and jumped at Daniel. He stiff-armed her away with his free hand. Adele shot the sailor in the shoulder.
The sailor's clavicle shattered as the pellet whacked into it. She screamed and spasmed into the wall. The Alliance officer turned as though to grab Adele, saw the pistol aimed at the bridge of his nose, and backed carefully against the wall.
The sailors followed their officer. Two of them helped their injured fellow. She whimpered with pain, but the wound was survivable unless a bone splinter had nicked a major blood vessel.
Adele unlocked the console while Daniel held his submachine gun on the bridge crew. When she'd finished, she stood up and said, "There. You'd better take over now."
"I will," Daniel said as he traded duties with her, "but don't sell yourself short." He grinned. "The RCN lost a great officer when you buried yourself in a library."
To the ship's public address system he went on, "Mistress Woetjans, complete the transfer of authority at the landing stage and report to the bridge with two ratings to take charge here. I'm coming to take over the remainder of the detachment."
Daniel looked at Adele. "Are you all right with these until Woetjans gets here?" he said, nodding toward the prisoners. "I want to release our people below right away."
"Oh, yes," said Adele. The captured sailors were looking at her. "There's only six of them, after all, and I've got nineteen more rounds in my pistol magazine."
She smiled without humor, wondering which of these faces might be staring at her in dreams for the rest of her life. Probably none of them, because they seemed to be very frightened of her.
That meant they understood.
As Daniel led ten "Alliance commandoes" down the passageway toward Hold 2, he felt the Aglaia quiver in a sequence of constantly changing harmonics. Since her capture, the Aglaia had been shut down except for the minimal systems required by the guard detachment. Woetjans was bringing the ship to life again.
Hold 2 held bulk consumables when the ship was fully loaded. The voyage from Cinnabar had run the stocks down, and the quantities remaining had been off-loaded on landing to be surveyed and replaced if they'd deteriorated. The RCN didn't feed its crews spoiled food, and if corners ever had to be cut it wouldn't be on a communications vessel like the Aglaia.
Four Alliance ratings were on guard at the inner hatch. The hold opened on the hull side also, but at the moment the exterior hatch was under twenty feet of salt water. Hold 2 made an excellent prison, if you didn't care about the conditions of the captives within.
The guards had gotten up from their card table when they heard Daniel's detachment approaching. They were chewing kift, a plant native to Pleasaunce with a mildly narcotic effect on humans. When the stalks were reduced to a tangle of soggy fibers, the guards spat them onto the deck and bulkheads to cling and dry.
"Yeah?" said one of the guards. Impellers leaned against the bulkhead nearby, but the guards didn't even glance toward their weapons.
Lamsoe pointed his submachine gun at the guards. "One move and you're all dead," he snarled. "I wouldn't half mind splashing your guts across the passage after the mess you've been making down here!"
"Too fucking right!" Sun agreed. The whole detachment had leveled their weapons. The Alliance ratings couldn't have been more surprised if an archangel had materialized before them.
"Let's nobody get excited, shall we?" said Hogg. Unlike the naval personnel, his master included, he wasn't horrified by the filthy sty into which the guards had transformed the Aglaia. "If people start shooting, the ricochets gotta go somewhere."