* * *
The marine sentry at the wardroom door winked at the yeoman as the latter wheeled out another cart, the ground tier stuffed with dead soldiers. “Gawd-a-mighty,” he said privately, “that’s the third lot,” and louder—but not much louder—to the yeoman: “You ain’t gonna forget me, is ya, George?”
The yeoman, whose name was nothing remotely like George, took a quick glance up and down passageway. “That one,” she said. “Red and white label—gold about the neck.”
The sentry located the bottle, took a covert swig, screwed up one side of his face. “Damn me! What’dya call this stuff?”
“Claret,” the yeoman answered, retrieving the bottle and wiping the mouth.
“Damn poor thin pokey stuff,” the marine opined. “Officers.”
“Port’s up now,” the yeoman replied. “At the rate they’re going, they’ll be singing soon enough.”
* * *
The yeoman was a false prophet, though not by much. After the port came in and circulated once, Dr. Leidecker, who was himself verging on a bright cherry pink, turned to Kris and Major Lewis, and resuming some fragment of their earlier conversation, beat his hand upon the table and said, rather more loudly than he intended, “Poetry!”
Minerva Lewis, who was herself taking on a fine pinkish tinge but was outwardly still perfectly composed, looked on the doctor with great benevolence and echoed, “Poetry?”
“Yes,” said Leidecker, much lower and in a rather conscious tone. “I was amazed, astounded, to learn how well poetry was esteemed in the Service. One so rarely meets with a true appreciation of poetry—so sublime, so much neglected—yet so unexpectedly met with. I honor you for it—honor you all, upon my word.”
“And who, if I may ask,” asked the major, “was your literary informant?”
“Why it was the Naval Proceedings, itself! A worthy purser—I’m embarrassed to say I do not recall his name just now—it was that led me to it. He obliged me in some small question—referred me to an article, and whilst I looked for it, I happened upon a section on poetry, with some pretty criticisms too—such pregnant reflections.”
“That would have been Macarthy,” said Senior Lieutenant Salsato, Polidor’s TAO, who occupied the seat next to Minerva Lewis. “Of the Osiris. A great man for literature”—not adding that the Osiris’s purser, although generally well-enough liked, was rather opinionated and given to prating in the mess.
“The very man!” cried Leidecker. “Poetry both ancient and original, I encountered. We read of the warrior-poets of old, certainly. But I had no notion that the tradition was so well maintained.”
Kris sniped a glance at her neighbors at this end of the table. She certainly had no such notion and from the indulgent looks about her—indulgent and often with a private underlying smile—she was pretty sure no one else did either. Proceedings was a rather dowdy periodical in most ways—Naval Defense Review was the publication most widely read by serving officers—but it was not without its charming anachronisms.
“Have you particular favorites?” Min asked. “Poems, I mean?”
Leidecker narrowed his eyes and fixing them on his glass, recited: “Like the dew on the mountain; Like the foam on the river—”
“Like the bubble on the fountain,” the major joined in, “Thou art gone, and forever!”
Leidecker beamed. “You know Walter Scott, my dear Major!”
“Some,” allowed the major.
“What else?” Leidecker asked. “If I do not pry—if I do not trespass . . .”
Min took up her port and swirled it, smiling as the legs ran back down into the ruby liquid. Kris detected a look that might be called mischievous as Min took a healthy sip and replied, “Perhaps this one, Doctor:
Would that breast were bared before thee,
Where thy head so oft hath lain,
While that placid sleep came o’er thee
Which thou ne’er canst know again.
Do you know it, sir?”
Kris thought the sentiment perhaps a bit warm for a navy wardroom, especially one entertaining Admiral Rhimer, but the admiral did not seem to be attending, deep in conversation at the far end of the table, although others in the more immediate vicinity were now listening with close attention.
“Indeed! Byron.” And Leidecker went on in his somewhat creaking but not disagreeable delivery:
“Fare thee well! thus disunited,
Torn from every nearer tie.
Seared in heart, and lone, and blighted,
More than this I scarce can die.”
“Well done, Doctor! Well done!” Min raised her glass to him. “You’re a great hand for the ancient Romantics, we find.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Leidecker said demurely, “I recall a waft of this and that. But I must say that I think—I opine, without crabbing Lord Byron or the estimable Scott in any way—that for purity of expression, for the most poignant reflections, we must go further back to the true ancients—the classical ancients, I mean. It is they who are the true wellspring, do you not think, Commander?”
Kris, who had been sitting mute—whose composure had been somewhat ruffled by the quantity of wine but even more so by hearing Seared in heart, and lone, and blighted—did not at once grasp that the doctor was speaking to her. Her mind was at the moment taken up with the image a letter—real handmade paper, stowed carefully with the rest of her personal effects back on Luna—with its neat, even, elegantly looped handwriting. It was Mariwen’s handwriting and the force of the memory was so great, the image of the four spare lines so clear, so viscerally present, that she was on the verge of murmuring the first: The moon has set, and the Pleiades; when she realized that Leidecker was addressing her—that she’d lost the thread of the conversation entirely—and so gave him a nod and a few syllables of sterile, unmeaning assent.
“Quite,” said Leidecker, charmingly unaware. “Take that sentiment of Byron’s, nobly expressed to be sure, but let us go back a thousand—no, I mistake—closer to two thousand years before and what do we find? The same! Almost I might say the original inspiration—the first voice, as it were; spare and unadorned, yet I think all the more potent for its nakedness. Listen:
The moon has set, and the Pleiades;
It is Midnight,
the hours go by,
and I sleep alone . . .”
The words, so infinitely familiar, so jarringly present, pierced Kris to the core. The blood fled her face even as her memory cried out against the errors—Mariwen had written: Midnight is gone, the hours wear by, and here I lie alone—but her expression must have been frozen in something like a smile for Leidecker looked at her complacently, raised his glass of port to her and said, “Sappho.”
“Sappho,” Kris repeated and her voice sounded flat, hollow, foreign in her ears.
“The best of the ancients, I believe,” Leidecker proclaimed. “Livy’s tenth muse, and no title more justly bestowed. Do you not agree, Major?”
“Oh certainly,” said Minerva Lewis, observing Kris with a look that, had she seen it, she would have found too knowing by far.
* * *
The port made its final round untouched, the cloth was drawn; the stewards and yeoman bore away the bottles and replaced them pots of fresh coffee, coming up hot and strong from the galley. As the yeoman made her second trip, she privately passing the last of the port to the marine sentry, who leered, glanced about conscientiously, tasted, approved and commented, “You was wrong about them singing, George.”
“It was worse than singing, Willie,” she answered. “Bloody poetry! And you never heard the like.”
“Poetry!” the marine exclaimed low, draining the bottle. “Well damn me if that don’t beat all.”
* * *
The ritual clearing away, the interruption caused by the coffee arriving, the close and circumstantial account of another Anson’s Day dinner related by an officer Kris didn’t know, who’d clearly heard enough of Bryon and Scott and Sap
pho for one evening, and Minerva Lewis favoring them with a story that was just this side of being indecent, gave Kris the time she needed for the painful thumping in her chest to quiet, the constriction in her throat to ease, and when she lifted her hands from her lap where she had been strangling her napkin to accept a cup of coffee, the tremor was barely noticeable.
She drank the cup gratefully, listening to see if Major Lewis would save the end of her story from the scandal that threatened to engulf it—she did, but only just—and when it was done and the laughter had subsided to a degree, she turned to the doctor who, fearing he had talked ever so slightly too much, was listening with every appearance of rapt attention.
“Would you like some coffee, doctor?” Kris asked, reaching for the pot.
“Oh, not for me, thank you,” Leidecker answered. “Coffee is a capital beverage—an elixir of the very first order—but I’m afraid my frame does not cope with it well in the evenings. Now what I like to set off a good meal is a really fine pot of chocolate broth. Chocolate broth in the evening is just the thing to relax the fibers, but I’ve noticed it doesn’t seem to be much esteemed in the Navy.”
“Well,” replied Kris, pouring herself her second cup and lavishing it with cream, “that depends. From what I’ve seen, this is a coffee ship, but if you checked around you might find a cocoa ship in the squadron.”
“Coffee ship?” Leidecker remarked, blinking. “Cocoa ship? My word. Frigates and destroyers I have heard of; cruisers—such as this noble craft—in all their multiplicity. Battleships, needless to say, and those large, large vessels, fearnaughts—”
“Dreadnoughts, I think you mean.”
“Yes of course. Dreadnoughts—how perfectly silly of me. Yes, all of these I have heard of, but now you tell me that there are coffee ships and cocoa ships as well? I had no notion.”
“Yes, there are,” Kris said, taking a measured sip. “And also carriers and store ships and tenders and sloops, cutters and packets and packet escorts and . . .” she went on to name the whole bestiary of naval vessels, down to assault shuttles and the rarely used tintagels. “But those are all classes of ships—ship types, y’know. Coffee and cocoa ships are just about what the captain, or maybe the exec, prefers. Some are pretty rigid about it too, like Captain Wooten of the Ramillies. He couldn’t stand cocoa on his ship.”
“Oh dear, oh dear,” murmured Leidecker. “I should not like to contravene a tradition. In the Navy, people, I have observed, hold very tightly to tradition—so many archaic phases, ancient modes of address scrupulously preserved—I don’t mean that as a fling, you understand. No—admirable, very admirable. But a pot of cocoa, as you say, is such a joy.”
“I’ll put in a word with Vasquez, if you want.” Kris offered. “Petty officers pretty much have the run of stores. If there’s any around, she’ll find it. I’m surprised Leander doesn’t have some.”
“Oh they did, they did,” Leidecker said. “And quite fine, too. It was all used for baking—a glorious application—but still . . .” his voice trailing off, he folded his hands in his lap. “If you’d be good enough to put in a word to the corporal, I’d be much obliged. Truly, very much obliged.”
Kris smiled at the doctor benignly. “No problem. No problem at all.”
* * *
Kris sat with her feet up and her tunic unbuttoned in the relaxed atmosphere of Leander’s wardroom, sipping a cup of enzyme-laced tea and watching Minerva Lewis mix up one of her specialties. This one was frothy and an innocent watermelon pink, but Kris could smell it from here and the aroma was anything but innocent. How the major could even think of another drink after that dinner was totally beyond her.
“The admiral didn’t say anything like that, you know,” the major remarked, adding a splash of something dangerous.
Kris’s mental eye skipped back to the dinner, recalling Min’s expression as Rhimer made the obligatory speech. “Like what?”
“That bit about: If there were a hundred dreadnoughts, I would still engage them!” Min laughed. “I expect she would have, but that wasn’t her style. It’s a riff on what Admiral Jervis is supposed to have said at the Battle of Cape St Vincent back at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars.”
Kris looked a question and Min stirred the pink stuff to a higher level of froth and recited in a pulpit voice: “There are eight sail of the line, Sir John.”
“Very well, sir.”
“There are twenty sail of the line, Sir John.”
“Very well, sir.”
“There are twenty-five sail of the line, Sir John.”
“Very well, sir.”
“There are twenty-seven sail of the line, Sir John!”
“Enough, sir, no more of that—the die is cast, and if there are fifty sail I will go through them!” Min laughed again. “We like our heroes to make speeches like that—especially when they aren’t around anymore to drizzle grim truth over the parade.”
Kris sipped her tea and studied the tall, open, contradictory woman before her. Had Vice Admiral Kiamura been anything like her? The legend was so mixed up and, well—legendary—that now, twenty-four years after her death, what grains of truth there might have been were nearly impossible to sift from the overburden of the official hagiography. Admiral Kiamura was the League’s Lord Nelson and King Arthur rolled into one and the powers that be did not take kindly to anyone challenging their narrative.
“What did she say?”
“Well, I was told,” Min answered with a significant smile, “that her flag lieutenant burst into her quarters with the sensor report at 0330, woke her up and he says: ‘Admiral! There’s another Dom fleet just jumped it! What are we gonna do?’ And she rolls over in her rack and says, ‘Well, Lieutenant, I don’t know what you’re planning to do. But me, I think I’m going to shoot the sonsabitches.’”
Min shook her head and her smile deepened.
“Not sure I believe that one either—the admiral was genteel sort, but maybe not so much when her blood was up. And, damn, her was blood up. Outnumbered better’n two-to-one, she thumps right into ’em, smashes their formation, cuts off the smaller group, gets in tight, slices it up famously, then turns on the remaining half—does it all again.” Min paused with a twinkle in her eye. “And right near the end of it, she goes and has a kid.”
“What?” There was nothing about that in the official history.
“Yep. She was pregnant. They’d been ordering her home for months—she wouldn’t go. Went into labor after the first salvos were exchanged and then had the kid right there in Ardennes’ CIC while they were bearing down on Bogatyr for the last time. I heard the ESM officer fainted dead away.” Min’s face was lit with what was obviously an old and cherished story. “Goddamn. It was little girl too. Can you imagine what she must have turned out like? Born in a dreadnought’s CIC at the climax of the greatest battle since Leyte Gulf?”
Kris could not imagine. Nor could she imagine what it must have been like growing up with a legend for a mother. An absent legend: Admiral Kiamura had disappeared during her final mission to Novaya Zemlya ten months after her triumph at Anson’s Deep. That disaster had allowed Halith sue for terms; terms that were generally believed to be the cause of the present conflict. Would the father—or whoever the child’s surviving parent was—even tell the child about her mother? Kris rather hoped not.
“Anyone know what happened to the girl?”
“Nope.” Min’s expression sobered. “After Novaya Zemlya everything got swept under the rug. The kid too, I suppose. Father up and vanished. He seemed a decent sort. Can’t say I blame him much.”
“You knew them?”
Min shook her head. “No—didn’t know ’em. She was the speaker at my class commissioning ceremony. Brought him along to dinner afterward.” She peered off at vacancy to better see the memory. “Tall skinny fella. Quiet. Mining engineer, I think. Colonial—don’t know where from.”
“She married a colonial?” Ashlynn Kiamura had been pure-blood Te
rran.
“Yeah. It was a bigger deal in those days.”
“What was she like?”
“Intense. Didn’t talk a hell of a lot. Hard to tell where ya stood with her at times. You’d be thinking maybe she was about to crucify you with her own hands, then she’d go and do something almost sweet. She cared for her people—she’d go through the fire naked on her knees for any one of us. I’ll bet she did too, there at the last. Had these damnable eyes—blue and clear as kiss-my-hand most of the time. But when her blood was up, they’d turn this green color, or more like turquoise.” Min nodded. “There was the devil to pay when she got that look—and no pitch too hot.”
Kris let the silence that followed deepen, wondering if she’d gotten on dangerous ground. Min seemed to be busy among the bottles at the bar. After a minute she said, “I take it this was all before your time.”
“A bit.” Kris had not even been a year old then.
“Yep. Nothing like a bit o’ intrigue and mystery to cap a career.”
Kris, hearing bitter intrigue, looked up puzzled. “What’s that?”
Min looked over at her, shrugged in a noncommittal way. “Well, some folks like to think Novaya Zemlya was just bad luck. Some like to think it was Anson’s Deep in reverse, where she finally got above herself. But others think it was a setup over the Lodestone business.”
“I thought that was just a classic case of illegal orders.” Lodestone Station—the League colony that controlled the main junction in the Inner Trifid leading to the rest of the Outworlds—had been the scene an especially ugly little affair early in the last war. The Plenary Council, learning of some Halith sympathizers among the colonists there, had ordered a general internment of suspect families. One thing led to another and the colony rose in revolt. The Council invoked martial law and when that failed to bring the colonists to heel, they ordered a suppression.
Ashlynn Kiamura—she’d been a captain then—led a group of officers who vehemently and publicly opposed these measures. Eventually, the Council had to back down and the Speaker, who was one of Jackson Holder’s minions, lost a no-confidence vote, but not before there were several “unfortunate” incidents, mostly involving some of Holder’s private security forces.
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 30