With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  Adele followed the aide to the center of the room. The crowd grew thicker as she went inward, but it wasn’t a solid mass.

  The assembly was formed of elements ranging from two people to a dozen, talking and gesturing among themselves. Individuals would break off and join other groups in an air of nervous dynamism.

  It was like watching the interactions within a rookery of seabirds. The chaos was of overwhelming importance to the people making it, but from Adele’s detached viewpoint it was merely empty noise.

  Of course, it was noise that had ended her librarianship and might cost her life besides. Walter Hajas stood with a drawn face in a group of prisoners. The others kept their backs to him as though meeting the former Elector’s eyes might contaminate them.

  Markos moved a few steps away from the central group. The only potential eavesdroppers were a covey of second-rank Kostromans; Markos’s aide moved them on with curt whispers and a tap from the muzzle of her submachine gun.

  “Ms. Mundy,” Markos said. “I wanted to thank you immediately in person. You’ll be taken care of, don’t worry.”

  “What does that mean?” Adele said.

  “Well, we don’t know yet, do we?” Markos said with vague humor. “Something commensurate with your deserts, however.”

  Despite his placid demeanor, the Alliance agent was as keyed up as anyone else in the room. It struck Adele that she and Markos’s aide were perhaps the only calm people present—and the aide was a sociopath.

  Markos looked around him and sniffed in scorn. “Listen to them,” he said. “Every one of them claiming that what he did was crucial, that the coup couldn’t have succeeded without him. I was the only one who was really necessary.”

  Adele wondered if the spy recognized the humor in what he’d just said.

  He fixed Adele with his eyes. It was like looking into obsidian that has just cooled to black but still throbs with heat. “And after me, mistress,” Markos said, “you are the one who mattered. Success couldn’t have been so complete without you.”

  “No,” Adele said, but she wasn’t sure the word pulsing in her mind actually reached her tongue. Her mouth was dry, and for the first time this night she felt real fear.

  There was commotion at the hallway door. A squad of Alliance troops entered the salon with three members of the Cinnabar embassy. The prisoners’ wrists were tied behind their backs. Wire leashes around their necks connected them in single file.

  Admiral Lasowski was in the lead. She limped, and blood from a bandaged shoulder wound soaked to the elbow of her pajamas. Her lip curled as she surveyed the crowd.

  Adele waited, her eyes on the doorway. After nearly a minute she let her breath out again. There wasn’t a fourth Cinnabar prisoner being dragged in with his seniors. Daniel Leary was still free.

  If he was alive.

  The troops brought their Cinnabar captives directly to the command group in the center. Anyone who pressed close for a look or simply didn’t clear their path in time was prodded back with a gun butt or gun muzzle. Markos and his aide left Adele as abruptly as a page turns.

  Adele thought about what she’d done, and why. Any one of a hundred people could have found the information she’d gathered for Markos. All she’d added to the process was speed and reliability. But because she couldn’t lie to herself, she had to admit that speed and reliability might have been enormously important factors in a plan so complex and suddenly executed.

  Why had she helped Markos? Adele didn’t really believe Mistress Boileau had been in danger. Not only was the professor well connected with members of the power structure on Pleasaunce, her knowledge made her a national treasure. The Fifth Bureau knew that better than most.

  Beyond question, Adele and her family had been ill-treated by the Republic of Cinnabar. She couldn’t claim that she’d acted out of anger, though. The massacre of her family had stunned her, but she wasn’t angry now and probably hadn’t ever been angry. Hot emotions like love and hate weren’t a major part of Adele Mundy’s personality.

  She had done what Markos demanded because that was the simplest choice. She did it to be finished, so that she could get back to the important work of cataloguing a library.

  Adele Mundy had betrayed the Kostroman state that employed her and the Cinnabar state whose citizen she was because she was lazy. She hadn’t wanted to be bothered by a man she loathed but who might have the power to harass her.

  Markos stood facing the Cinnabar delegates. Alliance soldiers held either end of the leash binding the three together. The civilian member of the Navy Board spoke angrily about the law of nations, but Lasowski and the man from the finance office were coldly silent as they met Markos’s eyes.

  The room quieted. “Kneel down,” Markos ordered pleasantly.

  “I’ll be damned first,” Admiral Lasowski said. Her voice was thin with pain from her wound.

  “Force them to kneel,” Markos said to the soldier on one end.

  The soldier frowned and looked toward the officer in battle dress. “Make them kneel,” the officer said. He didn’t sound comfortable. “Mr. Markos is in command.”

  The soldiers stepped back to tension the leash, then used their weight to drag the prisoners down. The Navy Board functionary cried out as he lost his footing and slipped headlong. The Alliance officers watched with obvious distaste.

  “You see,” Markos said, “it’s possible that our Zojira friends here think that in the future they might be able to invite Cinnabar to return and nonetheless keep their ruling positions on Kostroma. That can’t be permitted.”

  Leonidas Zojira shook his head nervously. He was a dapper little man with a mustache as sharp as paired stilettos. “I assure you that our treaty with the Alliance of Free Stars is sacrosanct, good sir. You need not—”

  “As sacrosanct as your pledge of eternal alliance with Walter Hajas here, no doubt,” Markos said with catlike amusement. “Well, never fear. You’ll stay loyal to the Alliance.”

  He crooked a finger toward one of the soldiers standing in back of the prostrate Cinnabar delegates. “Shoot them,” he said.

  “You can’t do that!” said an Alliance naval officer. “They’re prisoners of war. We don’t shoot prisoners!”

  “I’ll remind you of what Colonel Dorrien just noted,” Markos said. “The Guarantor has put me in charge.”

  He nodded to his aide. She stepped past him, aimed her submachine gun one-handed, and fired a single shot. Admiral Lasowksi thrashed like a pithed frog.

  “Oh good Christ,” said the Alliance naval officer who’d protested. He turned his back. The colonel in battle dress was expressionless, and the other naval officer looked white with rage. “Oh good Christ!”

  The aide fired twice more. The snapping discharges weren’t loud in the big room, but they echoed in the eyes of all those watching.

  The Navy Board member was flailing and crying out. When the pellet hit him, his voice rose to a high-pitched whimper. The aide grimaced and put a second round into the back of his skull.

  “I suppose it’s better that the executions be carried out by a Kostroman citizen anyway,” Markos said. “Don’t you think so, Elector Leonidas?”

  He laughed and added, “Anyway, now we can get back to deciding the future shape of the government of Kostroma.”

  Adele Mundy turned and walked out of the Grand Salon. No one paid any attention to her.

  Not that she cared.

  * * *

  Somebody’d put a burst of shots into the head of the Triton. Water streamed from a dozen ragged bronze holes, but only a little dribbled out of the conch itself.

  Three Hajas guards lay in a short row in the entryway. They’d been riddled too, but they’d long since stopped leaking fluids. Splotches of blood remained beside the pillars where they’d fallen. Water had been sluiced over the mess, but it still looked as though buckets of maroon paint had burst on the dark stone.

  Daniel strode toward the entrance, looking grim. The expression was a
ppropriate for his persona as a Kostroman staff officer, and it was certainly easy to arrange.

  Two jitneys and a three-axle truck, all of them mounting automatic impellers, were drawn up in front of the palace. Daniel was sure that long bursts from such powerful weapons would flip the jitneys over on their backs, and he suspected that if the gun on the truck fired broadside rather than in line with the wheels the same would happen.

  That didn’t much matter because the Alliance APC on the other side of the entranceway would carry the real weight of further fighting. Its plasma cannon could hose the square in iridescent hellfire, vaporizing any conceivable counterattack the Hajas clan could mount. The Alliance commandoes standing at the bow and stern of the big vehicle looked as though they were begging for an excuse to shoot somebody.

  Daniel imagined he was Candace in the same situation. He lowered his eyes, twisted his face to the side, and let his course curve away from the bow of the APC as though the two of them were magnets of the same polarity.

  The nearest commando snorted, then spit near Daniel’s feet. Daniel scuttled a little faster without looking up.

  He knew he wasn’t being entirely fair to Candace. The Kostroman’s proven cowardice was moral, not physical. But Daniel didn’t feel like giving Candace the benefit of the doubt, and it was the sort of behavior that the Alliance commando would like to see. Wogs whimpering at the feet of the tough Alliance soldiers….

  Spectators watched from the roofs of buildings across Palace Square. Small clumps of civilians gathered on the pavement itself, talking in muted voices and jumping whenever a vehicle rumbled by in the street behind them. They carried pennants of black and gold divided in a variety of fashions—whatever they’d been able to sew together quickly.

  Prostitutes were already working the plaza. Daniel saw a statuesque blond man approach a commando in the door arch. He left laughing, but without doing business at least for the moment.

  An APC ran its fans up in the gardens to the rear of the palace. The vehicle lifted just high enough to be seen as movement beyond the building’s mass, then curved south in the direction of the Navy Pool. Sporadic gunfire continued across the city, and a red glow to the west hinted of fire.

  A squad of guards with Zojira armbands stood in front and to the left of the main door; there were three Alliance commandoes to the right. The Kostromans talked loudly to one another, waving their weapons and passing a bottle of plum brandy. Empty bottles lay nearby in the entrance alcove, some of them smashed.

  The Zojiras were in a reasonably good mood: they were alive, and the flaccid bodies of their Hajas predecessors were an immediate reminder of the alternative. Nonetheless they were drunk and too excited to be safe with automatic weapons.

  That was another reason Daniel stepped directly to the sergeant in charge of the trio of Alliance commandoes to say in a calm, quiet, voice, “I’m Lieutenant Benno Candace, signals lieutenant on the staff of Grand Admiral Sanaus. I’m here to collect written instructions on the navy’s employment and bring them to Admiral Sanaus. Can you tell me where the Elector is?”

  Just-landed Alliance soldiers wouldn’t realize that Daniel spoke Universal with a non-Kostroman accent. If his luck was really bad, though, one of them might recognize a Cinnabar accent.

  For that matter, Daniel didn’t know the name of the new Elector; he thought he was lucky to recognize Zojira black and gold. It wasn’t likely that a commando would ask him the Elector’s name. It was even more unlikely the Alliance troops really gave a fuck which fucking wog thought he was in charge of this fucking piss-pot planet, but you could never tell.

  On the other hand, you could be hit by a meteor while lying in bed. It didn’t do to worry about things you couldn’t change.

  “What’re you telling me for?” the sergeant growled. “Do I look like a guide dog? Go ask somebody inside.”

  “Thank you, sergeant,” Daniel said with obsequious politeness. He stepped past the nearest Zojira and entered the vestibule.

  None of the local guards had heard the exchange in detail, but they weren’t going to interfere with a man the Alliance troops had passed. If they tried, there was a fair chance that the commandoes would back Daniel out of sheer bloody-mindedness and feelings of superiority.

  It would only take one thing going wrong for Daniel to become another tacky smear like the one he walked around on the mosaic just inside the doorway. There’d been a half-hearted attempt to mop up the mess, but bits of lung tissue as well as blood still stuck to the patterned stone.

  The desks in the anteroom had been smashed either in the fighting or in an orgy of destruction that had more to do with mobs than it did with war. Somebody’d emptied a submachine gun across the furniture to the left, blowing out bright yellow splinters of wood and fountains of shredded paper.

  The head clerk Daniel remembered from his first visit knelt among the wreckage, trying to piece together torn files. None of his fellows were present. Daniel stepped past quickly to hide himself in a group of noncombatants wearing Zojira colors. It was unlikely that the old clerk could have recognized anyone through his tear-brimming eyes.

  Daniel turned to the right and walked purposefully down the corridor past open offices. The lights were on in most, but the people who’d ransacked them had generally passed on.

  Occasionally he saw armed Zojiras who drank and broke up furniture. They eyed Daniel, but the only direct challenge he received was from a woman sprawled against the wall facing the doorway. She waved a half bottle of brandy and called, “Hey! I could use what you got, handsome!”

  He couldn’t imagine circumstances in which he’d be flattered by attention from that particular quarter.

  The Zojiras were a major clan, but the coup had required very large forces to cover all the critical locations. The Alliance commandoes provided backbone and heavy weapons, but they didn’t know the city and couldn’t number more than a battalion even if they and their equipment had been packed into the just-landed transport like sardines.

  To get the necessary numbers, the planners had recruited anybody willing to point a gun at fellow-citizens. Real discipline was impossible, and at least half the additional personnel must be criminals. The new regime would find the apparatus of government smashed. They’d be lucky if Kostroma City weren’t burned to the ground besides.

  The stairs to the basement and subbasement were in an alcove off the corridor, much like the one on the third floor that held the ladder to the roof. At the rear of the palace was a broad flight of steps which was the usual entrance to the dank arches of the basement, but only low-ranking clerks worked there. Daniel thought he’d call less attention on himself by entering the front instead of having people wonder why a naval lieutenant was going down to the basement.

  The stairwell door was ajar but unattended. There was a light fixture at the mid-flight landing, but it hadn’t worked any of the times Daniel had used the stairs to see Woetjans.

  His half-boots rang in the stairwell, but the sound would be lost in the noisy excitement echoing from the masonry cavern below. He didn’t have the slippers with small tassels on the toes that were the proper footgear with this uniform. Even if someone noticed, the Kostroman navy wasn’t a stickler for detail.

  Somebody fired a shoulder-stocked impeller within the basement. The whack! of the heavy slug hitting a pillar was followed instantly by pebbles slapping against the walls and floor in all directions. People laughed hysterically.

  Even a single round would blast a divot the size of a man’s head in this brick. If the idiots weren’t careful, they could cut through a pillar. A collapsing ceiling would spoil this party for good and all.

  Daniel grinned. The chaotic violence made it less likely that he’d be arrested by the authorities, but there was a pretty good chance some drunk would blow his head off as surely as they’d decapitated the fountain in Palace Square. Well, he’d wanted an adventurous life.

  The stairwell’s basement-level door was closed. Daniel pass
ed by it and continued down. Ceiling-level windows let enough light into the basement to make the space usable if not comfortable for clerical activities. The line of electric fixtures running down the middle of the central vault was enough to keep somebody down there by night from running into a pillar, but no more than that.

  The subbasement had no windows and fewer lights, at least until Woetjans moved her contingent into it. The Kostromans used the space only for storage, the powerplant, and a quartet of huge pumps. The last were intended to lift ground water into a sewer and keep the palace from sinking into the bog from which the land had been reclaimed, but according to Woetjans only one of the pumps still worked.

  There was no light at all in the subbasement. Daniel paused to put on his goggles and switch them to thermal imaging. He hadn’t wanted to wear an item as out of place with a Kostroman uniform as a brass brassiere, but he had to be able to see.

  The pillars on which the entire palace rested were ghostly outlines that belied their massive construction. The archways were filled with broken furniture and machinery, old carpet and wall hangings carried down here to rot in billows of mold, and boxed documents. The junk had been stacked any which way, and decay had caused even that rudimentary organization to sprawl in chaos.

  Infrared gave the inch-deep pools of groundwater a bright, even sheen because they were a degree or two cooler than the irregular pavement on which they lay. The only difference between storing material here and dumping it in the harbor was that the subbasement was a shorter distance to carry things.

  There should have been some light on the vault ceilings. Daniel walked toward the bay which the Cinnabar detail had converted to living quarters. It was marginally higher than most of the region and therefore dry, though the frequent plink of condensate falling into pools of seepage reminded Daniel that “dry” was a relative concept.

  The pillars were quatrefoil rather than round in cross-section. A man waited in the niche between two lobes, watching Daniel. His body heat made him stand out against the brick like a floodlight. Though the human form was clear, thermal imaging blurred the face into oval sexlessness.