by David Drake
Fortunately, Adele was very careful.
A starship was landing at the east end of the harbor, the hammer of its thrusters redoubling as their shockwaves began to echo from the water. The walkway trembled. It wasn't a serious problem, but the way the beryllium mesh shivered at the best of times made Adele feel as unsteady as if she'd been walking on black ice.
She chuckled. "Mistress?" Tovera asked quietly.
"I don't like aircars," Adele said. She nodded to the vehicular track alongside the raised mesh pedestrian-way. It was two parallel ruts filled with black muck except where an unusually deep cavity gaped in the limestone substrate. "And the roads here are bad enough that ground traffic must bounce instead of rolling if it's at any speed. I wonder if the Navy Office would approve a request for a Xenos-style tramway to carry me between the ship and Squadron House?"
"It wouldn't be necessary to ask Cinnabar," Tovera said. "Commanders of detached squadrons have large discretionary funds at their disposal. Admiral Milne could approve the project herself. As, of course, could anyone else who had the Admiral's authentication codes."
Adele wasn't sure whether Tovera actually had a sense of humor or if she made jokes in the same way that she acted as though she had morals: by analyzing jokes that normal people told and reproducing their elements in workmanlike fashion. Either possibility amused Adele, albeit in a gray fashion. It brought her a smile nonetheless.
The walkway zigzagged between two-story barracks blocks and small duplexes, housing for the port's permanent staff. The yards were raised with dredged material confined by retaining walls. Children played among the buildings, watched by women and a few men. Often they waved as Adele and Tovera walked by.
Many of the duplexes were surrounded by impressive displays of off-planet species, and even the barracks had planting boxes. Gardening seemed to be a favorite pastime here, presumably aided by the same climate that made Nikitin a planetary truck farm for neighboring worlds.
"It'd be a quiet place to live," Adele said. "I noticed when I went over the staff lists that forty percent of the personnel have been here five years or more."
Squadron House, a rambling three-story structure on what constituted the high ground inland of Sinmary Port, was easily visible. The building's walls were blocks of coarse brown limestone. Lesser structures were roofed with sheets of dull blue or green extruded plastic, but on the headquarters building sunlight gleamed from glazed ceramic tiles like the white heart of a lime kiln.
"Do you want a quiet place to live, mistress?" asked Tovera. She didn't sound concerned; she never sounded concerned. She just seemed curious about how human beings felt.
"Not without a library," Adele said. And in truth, probably not even with a library. She wouldn't say she'd become addicted to . . . excitement, danger, adventure. However you chose to describe it, the words meant the same thing while you were undergoing them: chaos and generally misery.
But that was the only life Adele had known since the Three Circles Conspiracy left her an orphan and exile at age sixteen. Many spacers preferred home brewed slash when they could get better liquor, just because they were used to it. She supposed that was a definition of home: the environment you were used to.
A spacer in Grays was on guard at the entrance to Squadron House. He sat in a chair. His sub-machine gun lay beside him on the edge of a planting box filled with hyacinths and a red spiral flower. Adele didn't know the red flower's name, but she'd seen them frequently on her way here. She'd look them up when she had a moment, not because she needed the information but because it was information. . . .
"Signals Officer Mundy with my assistant," she said, offering the guard her ID. The embedded chip provided complete identification, including her retina scan and DNA patterns. "I have an appointment with Commander Rittenhouse."
"Yes, ma'am," the fellow said, waving her through without checking the ID in his reader. "Ground floor, take the corridor to the right and it's all the way to the back. The door says Communications, but it'll probably be open."
"Thus far I'm not impressed by their security," Adele murmured to Tovera as they walked in. The entrance hall was the full height of the building, and the three corridors leading from it were broad and airy.
"Would you be able to enter their data banks if you'd been barred from the building?" Tovera asked.
Adele frowned. "Yes, of course," she said. She'd already done so. She always sucked the information out of the local control center when her ship arrived in port, whether it was friendly or hostile.
"Then perhaps the guard had the right attitude," Tovera said blandly.
Adele looked at her servant. Tovera smiled at her. That had to have been a conscious joke.
The guard inside the open door marked Communications was leaning on the desk of the very feminine-looking male receptionist and chatting. When he saw Adele coming down the hallway, he retrieved his weapon, a stocked impeller tilted against the wall, and said, "This is a restricted area, ma'am."
Adele held up her ID. "I have an appointment with Commander Rittenhouse," she said. "My name is Mundy. This is my assistant."
The guard handed the chip to the receptionist to check. "You just in from the Garnet?" he asked. "Any change in things on Yang?"
"I'm from the tender Hermes, not the Garnet," Adele said. "Are you expecting a change on Yang?"
The guard laughed bitterly. "Not in my lifetime," he said. "Or in my bastard grandchildren's neither. I was just making conversation, I guess."
"Well, it's correct," said the receptionist, eyeing Adele doubtfully as he handed back her ID. "But . . ."
"Then announce me to the Commander, if you will," Adele said sharply. If a thing was correct—and of course her identification was—then there were no buts: you carried out your duty promptly instead of delaying your betters by hemming and hawing.
The Communications Center was a large room. Ten workstations faced inward in the middle, but only one was occupied. There were three private offices on the right side; the doors of the two nearer were closed. Dissonant music drifted out of the open third door.
The receptionist keyed his intercom and said, "Commander? The survey officer from Xenos is here."
The receptionist paused; the music from inside the office shut off. In the silence, Adele heard Tovera ask the guard about local liquors. While Adele was closeted with the Commander Rittenhouse, the Cluster Communications Officer, Tovera would be learning the routines of the office personnel and scouting places to put bugging devices in the unlikely event that Adele decided such were necessary. Tovera did that sort of thing as naturally as Adele herself dug into the heart of whichever information source was handy.
"Yessir," said the receptionist. He wasn't using sound cancellation, though his desk communicator had the capability. "But she's a warrant officer, sir. Yes sir."
The receptionist pursed his lips and looked at Adele. "He says you're to go on back," he said. "He figures there's a mistake, but he'll clear it up himself."
Adele looked at the handsome young fellow. It wouldn't take a great deal to convince me to clear you up, she thought. She'd intended to keep her face expressionless, but the receptionist squealed and drew back. Adele strode past the fellow, knowing that he wasn't worth the price of a pellet from the gun in her pocket.
But then, neither was she. She and the receptionist were both human and both flawed. There was no point in getting angry at one more twit in a universe which seemed to be largely populated with twits.
Adele entered the private office. The back wall—west-facing and on the exterior of the building—had been replaced by an expanse of frosted glass. Rittenhouse sat behind a desk pushed so far forward that there wasn't room to sit between it and the door, though there were comfortable chairs to the sides. The rear half of the room was a burgeoning confusion of flowering plants.
"Mistress Mundy," Rittenhouse said in a frowning tone that echoed his expression. "When I was told the Navy Office was sending an officer to
review our information and communication systems here at Cluster Headquarters, I expected someone of commissioned rank. And properly of very high commissioned rank, I must say."
Rittenhouse was a military-looking fellow whose moustache flowed into his closely trimmed beard. He'd donned his 1st Class uniform to meet the officer from Xenos, but he obviously hadn't worn it for some while in the past. The tunic closed so tightly around his neck that his face was turning red.
That excused the Commander's testiness to some degree, though in her heart Adele believed that one didn't allow mere physical discomfort to affect one's behavior. Especially if you were uncomfortable because you'd gotten fat, an unacceptable weakness. . . .
Adele smiled. There were other weaknesses, of course—like Adele Mundy's tendency to feel everybody should behave the way she did. Apart from anything else, that would be a polite but exceedingly dangerous world in which to live.
Her smile had taken Rittenhouse aback: his expression wavered between amazement and outright fury. To calm him and because the situation suddenly amused her, Adele said, "Well, Commander, I'm quite sure I wasn't chosen because I'm the Mundy of Chatsworth. Admiral Hagbard—"
The Director of the RCN's Bureau of Communications and the person whose signature was on the orders under which Adele was operating, though Mistress Sand had dictated their content.
"—is far too professional to allow mere social concerns to influence his duties to the RCN."
The statement was completely true, at least to the extent that Adele's birth had nothing to do with her appointment. Hagbard was rather a snob, but his only connection with her presence is that he'd signed the orders pro forma.
Commander Rittenhouse assumed Adele was lying, of course. Occasionally Adele found herself trying to correct lies useful to her which somebody else had invented, but intellectually she knew that was an absurd thing for her to do.
"Oh!" Rittenhouse said, straightening in his seat. "Oh. Well, I trust the Admiral's judgment completely, Mundy. Have a chair, won't you?"
He gestured to the one on his right. "Are you a gardener yourself by chance?"
"No sir," Adele said, sitting in the chair opposite the one Rittenhouse had indicated. That one was under the curve of a fleshy plant whose blossoms dangled at or a little below the height of Adele's short-cropped hair. "Most of my experience with the natural world comes through written descriptions, though my shipmate Lieutenant Leary is a gifted amateur."
"Indeed," Rittenhouse said in evident disappointment. "Well, regardless, what is it that you and the Admiral want from me, Mundy?"
"All I require is access for me and my assistant," Adele said. "How many coupled consoles does Squadron House have in all?"
"Well, there's the group here," Rittenhouse said, waving vaguely toward the main room. "I think seven of them are working. We've had some problems, you see. But we don't really have enough trained personnel here in the Cluster for that to make any difference. We're rather forgotten here, I'm sorry to say."
Adele noticed that a line of what she'd thought were little blue flowers on the stem above the Commander's head followed his motion. They were animals of some sort. Daniel would be interested. . . .
"And there's four more in the major departments in the building," Rittenhouse continued. "Plus the one in the Admiral's mansion. Admiral Milne had a console moved there so that she could access the system without coming to Squadron House. She's got a full office in one wing."
Adele frowned despite her intention of remaining expressionless. "I'd think that would raise security concerns," she said carefully.
"Oh, my goodness," Rittenhouse said with a chuckle. "You mustn't think this is like Xenos, Mundy. The only intelligence we in the Cluster deal with is piracy, and that's entirely a small-scale business—mostly a village clubbing together to buy a clapped-out starship and man it, hoping to steal a load of anti-aging drugs before their ship falls apart on them. They aren't going to break into the Admiral's mansion. And as for the wretched situation on Yang—"
He threw up his hands.
"I think you could mix up the past ten years of intelligence reports on Yang and not be able to tell the difference. Nothing changes on Yang."
"I see," said Adele mildly. What she saw was that Rittenhouse was even stupider than she'd thought, which was saying a good deal. Intelligence about the Cluster was of no great concern, but Squadron HQ received the general RCN distribution by courier vessels. That included information of potential value to Alliance operations in every zone of conflict.
She cleared her throat and added, "So there's no security whatever on Admiral Milne's personal console?"
"Oh, heavens, Mundy!" Rittenhouse said. "We may be a little relaxed by your Xenos standards, but we're not a pack of fools here on Nikitin. The Admiral's office is sealed off from the rest of the mansion. There's a guard at the door. Entry's limited to the same authorized personnel as this department, with the additional requirement that Admiral Milne herself has to be present. Why, not even her husband is allowed into the office!"
You're wrong about not being a pack of fools, Adele thought, but the precautions as Rittenhouse described them seemed reasonable by the standards of the Gold Dust Cluster. She wouldn't prejudge the source of the leak.
"I'll get to work, then," she said, rising carefully to avoid brushing a plant which she'd swear had stretched its violet-streaked flowers closer to her while she'd been sitting there. "I expect my assessment to take three days, but it might be a day or two longer. And I'll need access to Admiral Milne's console."
"Umm . . ." said Rittenhouse, getting up also. "I'm not sure that'll be possible, Mundy. The Admiral's quite picky about who she allows into her office."
Adele noticed that he shifted sideways to stand upright; a shrub whose stem and branches were double spirals arched over his chair. Service on Nikitin was idyllic in many respects, but it seemed to have driven the Commander insane by the standards of Cinnabar society.
"I regret that it'll be necessary nonetheless," Adele said. Most of what she'd be doing was checking each console's internal history: what information had been accessed through it, when, and what passwords had been used. Because these were purpose-built RCN consoles, the internal histories couldn't be wiped without physically destroying the machine.
A team of experts might be able to create a false log, but that would require time and effort well beyond what was required to steal the information in the first place. If Adele didn't discover the source of the leak by checking the access histories, she'd have to consider the possibility of false logs along with others even less probable, but for the time being she was confident that the logs'd tell her how if not necessarily by whom the information was abstracted.
"Well, that's between you and the Admiral," Rittenhouse said, following Adele to the door. "I can't help you there at all."
A young lieutenant in utilities was standing at the front desk. The receptionist turned and said, "Commander? This is Mister Zileri, the First Lieutenant from the Garnet, you remember? They're still having trouble with their commo."
"Right, Commander," the lieutenant said. He had dark, curly hair and a round face whose normal expression was probably more cheerful than the one it wore at the moment. "It's the same thing as before, half the time we think we're sending but no signal's getting out. The only thing that helps is switching the unit on and off a couple times when we notice the problem, and that doesn't always work either. Can you get your techs on it again and this time solve it? Because my commo officer sure can't."
"Look, Lieutenant," Rittenhouse said, "I'm sorry about your problem but I'm not a miracle worker. This isn't Xenos, you know. If my technicians couldn't cure it before, they can't cure it now. And besides, how do you know that it wasn't fixed and you people broke it again after it was out of our hands?"
Adele wondered how often on average the phrase "this isn't Xenos" occurred in one of the Commander's work-related discussions. She herself had found no lack of
lazy incompetents on Xenos, but the greater pool there allowed for a certain number of people who actually could do their jobs.
"Excuse me?" she said, inserting herself in a conversation that obviously wasn't going anywhere useful. It was none of her business, of course, but it was a problem and very possibly one she could solve.
"Yes?" said the lieutenant, raising his eyebrows in friendly inquiry. Commander Rittenhouse remained calmly aloof, rather like one of his plants standing silently while two birds twittered to one another.
"Is your communications system part of the main navigation computer or do you have a dedicated unit for commo alone?" Adele asked.
"I don't have any idea," the lieutenant said, frowning in concentration. "I don't think there's a separate computer. But say—neither unit's been changed in the past three years, but the problem only cropped up five or six months ago."
"Has your navigational software been updated recently?" Adele said. She didn't bother to argue about the definition of "changed," just pursued the problem as it took shape before her. "Say in the last five or six months?"
"Well, yes, that's a regular thing," the lieutenant said. "Every time the courier arrives from Xenos, actually—every month or so. But that's been going on too."
Adele nodded. "One of the updates may have changed a default, however," she explained. "It may give absolute priority to astrogational computations."
She shrugged. "There's no need for that under normal circumstances," she added. "Commo takes almost no computing power compared to astrogation, but a software engineer with no practical experience may very well have ignored that reality. You just have to reconfigure your defaults to the original settings. If that's the problem, of course."
"Bloody fucking hell!" the lieutenant said. "I—"
His eyes narrowed as he peered at Adele's name tape. Then his face brightened and he said, "Mundy? Is that the Mundy who's done so much with Danny Leary? Because I hear he's on the Hermes now and she's in port."