With the Lightnings (11 page)

"You know," she said, "that'll look like some kind of fiddle, officers using ratings to make money on the side. And if it was plenty of other officers, that's what it'd be."

She grinned in a combination of humor and cynicism. "I don't say I wouldn't agree, you understand. But that's not what you're after."

Daniel shrugged. He wasn't sure how he could describe the situation, and he didn't intend to try.

"I served under your Uncle Stacey when I was a midshipman," Weisshampl said as if changing the subject. She picked up the object she used for a paperknife. It was a feather whose vanes were fused into a sharp, glassy membrane. It came from a bird that spent its life swimming in a sea whose high salt content didn't freeze above -4 degrees Celsius, but which nonetheless was frozen over for half the year.

"He had a nose for shifts in the Matrix," she went on, rolling the feather between her paired index fingers. "I was amazed at the time, and the more I see of other astrogators—"

She smiled coldly at Daniel.

"—the more amazed I am. You're good, Leary. Better than me. But you'll never be what your uncle was."

"No," Daniel said, "I won't."

Weisshampl touched a button on her console. "Chief of Rig to the dayroom," she ordered. Her voice rang from the speakers in every compartment and corridor on the
Aglaia
.

Domenico, the bosun, must have been in his quarters just down the corridor. He was at the door of Weisshampl's office before the echoes of her voice had ceased. "Yes sir?" he said, his voice slightly muffled as he pulled his tunic on over his head while he was speaking.

"I want you to round up a detail of twenty under . . . Woetjans, I think," Weisshampl said. "They'll be on detached duty under Mr. Leary, here. For choice pick them from people who've spent their pay advance already."

Domenico grinned like an earthquake in a rocky cliff. "That won't be much of a cull," he said. "Riggers, or . . . ?"

"Riggers if you've got them, but take them from the hullside if you need to," Weisshampl said. "I'll clear it with the Chief of Ship."

"Aye aye, sir," the bosun said. He tapped his forehead in salute and walked out of the office. His voice was booming names even before he reached the stairs.

"I'll lay on an aircar to ferry you to shore," Weisshampl said to Daniel. "Any particular spot?"

"We'll pick up Hogg at my quarters," Daniel said. "Then the Elector's Palace. Before I forget, could you break this out of petty cash?"

He brought out the hundred-florin piece and handed it to the duty officer.

Weisshampl looked at the coin in surprise. "This is a special minting," she said.

"It's legal tender," Daniel said defensively. "It's, well, it was minted the day of my birth. I was given it to, well, carry, you know. Right now I'm a little short of ready cash and—"

"I'll break it for you myself," Weisshampl said, taking out her purse. "If it got into ship's funds, it might be harder to find when you wanted it back."

She put the lucky piece in an inner pocket of the purse, then shoved ordinary coins across the desk in three neat stacks. "I really respect Commander Bergen," Weisshampl said. "The only thing he needed was the willingness to go for the throat."

"I love my uncle," Daniel said as he rose. "I really appreciate your help, Maisie."

He turned and started out the door. Domenico had probably assembled the detail by now.

"You must have gotten the killer instinct from your father," Lt. Weisshampl said to his back.

"For proper proportions over that span . . ." said Mistress Bozeman, looking at the sketch Adele had made, "the shelves have to be seven-eighths of an inch higher. Now, we could get the same effect by reducing the length by about four inches."

The library bustled. It hadn't been this busy since the day Adele arrived and half the palace staff had wandered in for a look at the foreign intellectual. At least half of the assistants assigned to her were here today and many of them seemed willing to work, at least in a desultory fashion.

"Work" for the moment meant carrying boards up three flights of helical stairs that were architecturally breathtaking. They were also about as badly suited to transporting long shelves as any design Adele could imagine, so she was both pleased and surprised that so many of her staff stuck with the task.

"Now you see . . ." the master carpenter said. She put the end of a fabric measuring tape against the masonry of the outer wall and handed the reel with its spring tensioner to the only journeyman present; the other was down in the cabinet shop, directing library assistants to the boards they were to carry.

Ms. Bozeman wasn't being obstructive. For perhaps the first time in a decade she wore a real working costume, a many-pocketed apron over sturdy clothing. The trouble was that she simply couldn't understand that aesthetic design had to give way to efficient use of space in the present circumstances.

Adele needed shelves that would hold the maximum number of logbooks, routing directions, and similar works in twenty-centimeter size that had been standard aboard starships since before the Hiatus. She didn't need an inch and a half of clearance above the volumes, and she
certainly
didn't want banks of shelves separated by a four-inch gap that would be absolutely useless for any purpose she could imagine.

Mistress Bozeman didn't understand. If Adele had been asking her to set the shelves without vertical supports, the words would have made equal sense to the master carpenter.

Adele drew a deep breath as she considered which different words to use in what increasingly seemed to be a fruitless attempt to get her ideas across. "Excuse me, Ms. Mundy," said a voice behind her. "I must request that you grant me a brief private interview."

"Go a—" Adele began. She recognized the voice. She turned, the shelving forgotten for the moment.

"Lieutenant Leary," she said. She was more surprised than angry, but not a little angry as well. "I thought I'd made my desires clear at our previous meeting. Quite apart from that, I'm more busy than you can possibly imagine!"

He was wearing the same uniform he'd had on the day before: it had a resewn seam joining the right sleeve to the bodice, a neat job but not one that had escaped Adele's notice. Part of her wondered at the son of one of the richest men on Cinnabar wearing a repaired garment.

"I'm very sorry," Leary said with quiet formality, "but your duties to the Elector don't take precedence to obligations of honor between Cinnabar citizens."

"Ah," Adele said. "I see."

She supposed she should have expected this. Thinking back on their interaction the previous day, it should have been obvious that it would end in a duel. That hadn't been her intention, but . . .

That hadn't been her conscious intention.

"There's an empty balcony down the hall," Leary said, nodding in the direction of the palace's central structure. The building's wings were relatively unadorned, boxes for the staff to work in. The central mass had a triple colonnade on the front and loggias on the second and third levels to overlook the gardens to the rear. "We can talk there."

"All right," Adele said. She looked around to find Vanness and tell him to take charge temporarily. Everyone in the library was staring at her, including the two carpenters. Staring at her and Leary.

"Don't any of you have work?" she shouted. "By God that'll change when I come back, see if it doesn't! Carry on, damn you!"

She returned her attention to Leary. His expression hadn't changed; it was as neutral as the surface of an oil bath. He bowed her toward the door.

"After you," she snapped. The library was her domain. No outsider was going to patronize her here.

The third-floor halls were surfaced in hard-fired hexagonal tiles laid to form patterns in three shades of gray. The effect was nothing like as lush as the varicolored mosaics on the lower floors, but it was attractive and far more to Adele's taste.

She'd fought a duel not long after she found herself in exile on Bryce. An Academy classmate from Trimshaw's End, one of the most rural of the worlds of the Alliance, chose to find insult in an innocent comment of hers. He offered a challenge.

The duel should never have been permitted to go ahead, but the housemaster was lax and the dormitory monitor immature. Both Adele and the boy were outsiders; their classmates viewed the matter more as a cockfight than as a conflict between humans.

Even at the time Adele had known that she should end the farce by an apology. The boy was frightened, in over his head, and more afraid to draw back than go on.

Adele wasn't afraid, but she'd learned of her parents' death only two days before. She didn't care about her responsibility for those who weren't able to act responsibly themselves. She didn't care very much about anything else, either.

She'd fought perhaps a thousand duels against holographic trainers at Chatsworth and in the basement of the Mundy townhouse: the Mundys were a hot-blooded lot, very punctilious about their honor. Because she was so thoroughly prepared, her strongest recollections of the real event were the ways in which it differed from what training had led her to expect.

The single-shot electromotive pistols were a set manufactured on Pleasaunce and lent by a friend of the dormitory monitor. Their long barrels threw a heavy slug at moderate velocity, whereas Adele had trained with Cinnabar-style weapons whose pinhead-sized pellets left the muzzle at the speed of a meteor.

Perhaps the barrel's weight caused her to overcompensate when she swung onto her target. She'd aimed at the top of his breastbone; instead, she hit the boy between the eyes. The pinhead would have disintegrated, converting its slight mass to kinetic energy. The heavy projectile went on through and splashed trees twenty yards back with liquified brains.

Somebody screamed. There were at least a hundred people watching, members of the duelists' house and friends from elsewhere in the Academy.

The boy rotated and fell to the ground. His back was bent in an arch. His heels drummed so wildly on the ground that one of his slippers flew off into the leaves. The doctor somebody'd hired for the event didn't bother to go to the victim; instead, she knelt and began to tell the beads of her rosary.

The dormitory monitor was acting as Adele's second. His mouth opened as he stared at the thrashing corpse. She walked over to him, reversed the empty pistol, and presented it.

"Here," she said. The coils in its barrel were warm even from the single discharge.

The monitor looked at her. For the first time Adele had realized that he was little more than a boy himself. He took the pistol's grip reflexively, realized what he held, and let it drop from his fingers. Adele stepped clear as the monitor began to vomit over the ground, the pistol, and his own silken trousers.

Nobody spoke to Adele as she walked back toward the house. None of her classmates spoke to her for weeks thereafter. Servants packed the monitor's belongings that evening, but he never reentered the house or attended another lecture at the Academy. A long time ago . . .

The third-story loggia bayed out from the wall directly over the ramp leading from the palace into the terraced garden. Two servants had gone out to eat lunch while Leary was in the library. They were seated on the stone rail. One of them gestured with a handful of mince stuffed in a wrapper of large leaves as he told a story, wobbling on what seemed to Adele to be a dangerous perch.

She smiled at the thought. Less dangerous, perhaps, than a duel.

Leary opened the glass doors onto the loggia. The servants looked at him with surprise and a degree of belligerence.

"I'm sorry, but we need this location," Leary said with a peremptory gesture. "I'll let you know when you can return."

The male servant who'd been telling the story snarled a reply in a northern dialect; Lupanan, Adele thought, but she didn't have to understand the exact words to get the meaning. Status on Kostroma was generally indicated by bright colors. Leary's uniform was gray with black piping and, to a rube from Lupana, looked like a pot boy's garb.

Leary grabbed the servant's loose collar and tossed him through the doorway. The Kostroman hit the far wall of the corridor. His companion squealed and scurried after him.

Leary closed the glass doors, faced Adele, and crossed his hands behind his back. "Mistress," he said in a clipped voice, "I know nothing about politics except that they exist. My father and sister take care of that end of family affairs."

Adele said nothing; she hadn't been asked a question. Leary wasn't a large man, neither as tall nor as bulky as the servant he'd thrown into the corridor. For a moment she'd thought he was going to pitch the fellow down into the gardens, and even now she suspected the choice had been a near thing.

"When I was just turned seven, there was all kinds of excitement at Bantry," Leary continued. "My father had gotten information from an Alliance agent; tortured it out of him, I suppose, but all I knew at the time was a conspiracy to murder us in our beds with Alliance help. Father flew off to Xenos with most of the guards. The rest of us stood watch all night in case the Alliance attacked."

He shook his head in wry marvel. "Hogg gave me a shotgun," he said. "I'd never been so excited in my life. Now, well, I wonder what a bunch of house servants and groundskeepers were going to do if a squad of Alliance marines in battle armor dropped on Bantry in an assault boat. But that's all I knew or know about the Three Circles Conspiracy, and I care even less."

Adele said nothing.
And I care even less. .
. . Did she care? She certainly hadn't cared about the
issues
at the time. That's why she'd gone to Bryce where the proscriptions had passed her by as surely as they had passed by Speaker Leary's young son.

"While I'm on Kostroma," Leary continued in a tone as emotionless as that of an accountant making a report of expenditures, "I intend to avail myself of the privilege of using the Electoral Library, granted all members of the delegation by his Excellency Walter III. I understand that might be a problem for you, Ms. Mundy. I therefore—"