by David Drake
“Call your husband down,” Adele said. “Tell him not to carry a weapon.”
“He can’t come!” Yvette cried. “He can’t move! He’s had a stroke! Please leave us alone!”
Ah!
“I’ll check!” said Tovera as she slipped past the spacers on the stairs. The other spacers were backing to the nearest wall and pointing their guns upward—with the exception of Evans, who didn’t have a weapon. He was scratching his crotch with a puzzled look.
“I was directed to call on Guy Mignouri, the 5th Bureau Resident in Newtown,” Adele said. “When I didn’t get a satisfactory reply to my queries, I came to view the situation for myself. Why didn’t you report that your husband was incapacitated?”
“He’s here all right,” Tovera called from the stairhead. “Hooked up to what I’d call a first aid machine. It seems to be keeping him alive, but he’s not going to get better any time soon. If he ever does.”
“Guy will get well!” Yvette said with a quaver that suggested she might be about to resume crying. “He’ll be removed if they learn and this is his first field posting. He’ll never get another if he’s removed now!”
He can’t do his job so he has to be removed, Adele thought. She didn’t say that out loud. She had learned long before Mistress Sand recruited her that other people didn’t see the obvious as clearly as she did.
“Where’s the station?” Adele said aloud.
“In the basement, but the files are all locked,” Yvette said. “I have the key to the communications console, though.”
“Thank you,” Adele said. The electronic files wouldn’t have been a problem even if Grozhinski hadn’t given her the keys, but there was no reason to tell the wife that. “Hale, I’ll take a look at the equipment. Then I’ll probably have you stay here while I return to the Sissie and discuss the matter with Daniel. Oh, and I’ll have an ambulance sent here to pick up Mignouri. Mistress Mignouri, you’d better pack a case. Whether you go with your husband or not, you can’t stay here any longer.”
“Right, mistress,” Hale said. She braced to attention unconsciously.
“You can’t walk in here and do that!” said Yvette.
“Mistress,” said Lady Mundy, speaking with the icy certainty that her mother would have displayed in similar circumstances. “I am here at the behest of your husband’s superior’s highest superior. You have nothing to say to me but ‘Yes sir!’ And if you’re wise, you might add, ‘And thank you for not shooting me for treason, sir.’”
Yvette’s mouth fell open.
Tovera had opened the door under the stairs. Adele strode to it.
Behind her Evans said plaintively, “Bledsoe, are we supposed to shoot this lady?”
* * *
“Good evening, gentlemen,” Daniel said, speaking clearly and without the need of amplification to be heard by his audience of the forty-odd officers and non-coms. “I am Captain Leary. The Minister of War has put me in command of the Nabis Contingent of the Forces of the Tarbell Stars.”
Daniel had changed into clean utilities with RCN rank tabs and his saucer hat for this introduction. It was the garb he would have worn on the bridge of the Princess Cecile when she was in RCN service, though on larger ships officers were expected to be in 2nd Class uniforms.
All the officers before him were men, which was the usual case in the military on planets at such a distance from the centers of civilization. Gender discrimination wasn’t unheard of even on lesser worlds in the Cinnabar and Alliance spheres. It was one more excuse for residents of Cinnabar and the core worlds of the Alliance to consider their subjects from the fringes to be higher animals rather than real human beings.
“Minister Robin put me in charge because he wants the Nabis Contingent raised to the level of the RCN,” Daniel said, keeping his tone informal. His audience had been nervous at the start, but there was nothing in his delivery to worry them further. “That’s going to be a change, as some of you have already learned.”
He smiled gently as he looked across his ranked audience. A dozen of those facing him were not in full uniform, and one was wearing pajamas. Further, some were the worse for drink. They hadn’t all been on duty at the time Daniel called the meeting; but most had, or should have been.
“Now, a spacer is a spacer,” Daniel said. “There’s good ones and bad ones, but the RCN isn’t great because our crews come from Cinnabar—which mostly they don’t. What makes a military force great is the quality of its officers, commissioned and warrant both. That means you.”
He smiled again. This time his expression wasn’t so friendly.
“You’re going to come up to RCN standards,” Daniel said. “Then you and I together are going to turn the Nabis Contingent into the finest fighting force in the Tarbell Stars.”
Only two of the commissioned officers and half a dozen of the non-coms—warrant officers and sergeants depending on the service—had been at their duty stations or in their official residences. The spacers’ ground billets and the Regiment’s barracks were filthy.
The reason the personnel were here facing Daniel was that Cory had located them using a console on the Princess Cecile. Adele had apparently connected the databases and communications networks in Newtown—and probably throughout Peltry—to the Sissie. Knowing that wouldn’t have helped Daniel himself very much, but to Adele’s protégés it was as good as a street map to the missing officers. Teams of military police backed by two or three Sissies each had brought the officers to the parade square between the Nabis barracks and the Katchaturian’s berth.
Angry bluster probably wouldn’t have gotten Nabis citizens very far with military police, none of whom were from that until-recently independent planet. It got nowhere at all with the Sissies, nor did any claimed rank that wasn’t in the RCN.
“You’re going to train…” said Daniel, raising his voice slightly to override the sudden buzz of voices. “By performing as common spacers under officers of the RCN. On Cinnabar, RCN spacer is a respected position. That’s because every citizen knows that the RCN is a collection of the best.”
Vesey and Major Berners, the Minister’s representative, stood to Daniel’s left. Woetjans was on his right, but a pace back out of the bosun’s own sense of decorum.
Hogg stood at the side of the square along with common spacers from the Sissie and the Katchaturian; both ships were moored in the same slip. Hogg had wanted to be closer to Daniel, but the whole point of this address was to create a dichotomy between the military and civilians.
The best way to weld the two crews into a single fighting force was to give them third parties on whom they both could look down: mere civilians. Daniel wasn’t a philosopher. He didn’t try to reform human nature, he just used whatever aspects he could when they helped him toward a goal.
“Now, you’re going to train as hard as you need to to come up to RCN standards,” Daniel said. “It’s not going to be a picnic. You’ll take orders from whoever your officers—my officers—put in charge of you, and you’ll learn to jump when you do it. That means—”
“How dare you?” said a man as he pushed his way forward from the third row. “How dare you, you Cinnabar ponce!”
“You’re Lieutenant Feilson, I believe,” Daniel said pleasantly. He adjusted his stance slightly.
“I bloody well am!” Feilson said. He was properly dressed—but in a civilian suit of good quality rather than the uniform he should have worn as the duty officer of the Katchaturian. “I’m an officer of the Fleet and a gentleman of Pleasaunce. If you think some yob from Cinnabar is going to give me orders, you’re bloody wrong!”
“Get back in line, Master Feilson,” Daniel said, his voice still friendly. “You’re on duty and I’m your commanding—”
Feilson was a little taller than Daniel and in good condition; he swung for Daniel’s jaw. Daniel blocked the fist with his open left hand. Instead of counter-punching as he normally would have done, Daniel shoved the Pleasaunce officer backward.
&nbs
p; “An officer of the RCN doesn’t brawl with his crew,” Daniel said, trying to sound a little bored. He wanted to shake the sting out of his left hand, but he controlled the urge; Feilson had been stronger than Daniel expected. “Master Feilson, you have—”
Feilson cocked his arm to swing again. Woetjans caught him by the neck and jerked him aside. Feilson got out a one squawk before the bosun slapped him with her right hand. She could drive nails with her callused palms.
Feilson’s eyes glazed; Woetjans tossed him to Barnes and Dasi. They dragged the unconscious man away.
“As I was about to say,” Daniel continued to the remainder of his audience, “Master Feilson has chosen to resign rather than become a real officer. At this moment you all have the option of resigning. I don’t know or care what your obligations to the Tarbell Stars may be. If you’re not willing to become an officer who I can respect, I want no part of you.”
“Does she beat the crap outa us if we quit now?” said a scarred, wiry man of fifty in the front row. He wore utilities but the rank tabs were on the underside of his collar.
Daniel didn’t recognize the fellow by name from the briefing materials, but he didn’t need to. “No, she doesn’t,” Daniel said, “but I hope you don’t quit anyway. Senior warrant officers with the balls to speak up aren’t thick on the ground around here. What’s your specialty, spacer?”
The little man braced to attention. “Gunner Gabriel Wright, sir!” he said. “Late of the Fleet, late of a lot of other places that needed somebody who knew how to make a plasma cannon sing!”
“At ease, Wright,” Daniel said. “Do you know how to take orders too?”
“Yes sir,” Wright said. “Even if I think the guy giving ’em is about two brain cells short of being a moron. As I did Lieutenant Feilson, sir.”
“I’ll hope I measure up to your standards when the time comes, Wright,” Daniel said.
His expression sobered as he looked at his audience again.
“Gentlemen,” Daniel said, “I’ve told you that you’ll learn to be officers under me, and that’s important. But this is your chance to learn something even better. I’m giving you a chance to be part of an elite combat unit. Until you’ve felt that, you can’t imagine what it’s like. You trust your fellows and they trust you, because you know every one of you will do his job.”
Daniel felt his throat getting husky as it always did when he thought about this. He continued, “You’ll have trained with the Sissies and you’ll be as good as the Sissies, and there’s no better in the human universe than my Sissies.”
Daniel swallowed. “Gentlemen, I’m going to dismiss you for an hour,” he said. “After that, you’ll assemble again and we’ll enroll you in the new Nabis Contingent, all of you who’ve got the balls.”
He grinned and said, “Which I hope a lot of you do, because we’ve got a real fight ahead with the Upholders. Dismissed!”
CHAPTER 12
Newtown on Peltry
“Mundy of Chatsworth to see the President,” Adele said to the uniformed doorman. “He’s been informed of my visit.”
She had come to the presidential palace in civilian clothing as Lady Mundy. The outfits Adele had brought from Cinnabar reflected her own taste, very dull by Peltry standards, but fortunately Yvette Mignouri was both young and from the more flamboyant Pleasaunce. The garments the Resident’s wife had left behind included some which suggested a basic tawdriness as well.
Adele had sent two of the most likely suits to the ship to be converted into Peltry-style court dresses: most spacers were expert tailors. In this case Woetjans had insisted on doing the sewing herself for the honor of it.
Adele could imagine her mother’s reaction: “Go and change at once! You look like a common prostitute!”
Adele smiled faintly. She didn’t, of course. Even wearing an outfit of saturated red and blue, she was no more sexually enticing than a similarly painted tramcar.
“Ah, a moment, please,” the doorman said, looking worried. He pressed a button. The fellow wore a pistol as part of his uniform, but it may never have been out of its holster.
Tovera was in gray today. She was as unobtrusive as one of the Sissie’s bunks.
A big man, blond where he still had a fringe of hair, bustled up from the interior: Dumouret, the butler, as Adele knew from Mignouri’s files. “Lady Mundy!” he said. “Come through, please. President Menandros will be so pleased to see you!”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Adele, walking past the relieved-looking doorman. Visits from foreign dignitaries were obviously not part of his routine.
Adele’s statement was true. Besides, her parents had been prominent politicians. She had grown up hearing much greater lies than the one Dumouret had just told.
Dumouret took them—took Adele; he seemed oblivious of Tovera beyond the fact that Lady Mundy had brought her maid—through a door to the left and then down a long corridor. The windows on the left opened onto a courtyard whose bushes had been trimmed into balls and pyramids. Fresh growth blurred the topiary with bright green tendrils.
The room at the end of the hallway had a front wall of ornate grillwork instead of being solid. There were upholstered chairs and couches along both sidewalls, but at the opposite end of the room three young women were playing cards with a man wearing loose garments of pink and orange in vertical stripes.
The gate had a latch mechanism, but Dumouret swung it open without hesitation; either it had not been locked, or the butler had an electronic key in his ornate signet ring. “Your highness,” he said. “Lady Mundy of Cinnabar is here to pay her respects.”
President Menandros looked up with a frown. Ignoring his master’s obvious displeasure, Dumouret ushered Adele through the gate. “You’ll recall, your highness,” the butler said, “that Lady Mundy is passing through the Tarbell Stars and wished to make your acquaintance.”
Menandros grimaced, but he got to his feet. Like the furniture—and despite the generous cut of his clothing—the president was overstuffed.
His face suddenly brightened. “Lady Mundy, I wonder if you’d like to try some of my wine,” Menandros said, gesturing to a sideboard with bottles and glasses. “Dumouret, pour her ladyship some of the Saturnia!”
“At once, your highness,” the butler said.
Tovera was standing beside a chair near the grill. The wall panels were of gray wood with very fine grain. Adele wondered if Tovera had chosen her outfit with the present background in mind.
Tovera was direct—brutally direct—but she was also intelligent. She noticed minute details which might affect her own duties.
Dumouret handed the glass to Adele. There wasn’t a chair for her at the table, so the butler stepped away to get one of those against the wall.
The three women—girls, rather—stared at Adele with vaguely petulant expressions. That didn’t necessarily mean they had anything against the newcomer: in Adele’s experience, women of a certain sort always looked petulant. Each wore a filmy pastel shift—blue, pink and yellow.
The wine was as pale as sunlight. Adele sipped it, feeling a tingle on her tongue and at the back of her nostrils. Menandros was watching her intently.
Adele lowered the glass and said, “I believe that my mother would have approved. I myself don’t have the palate to really judge.”
“Oh, do sit down,” said Menandros, suddenly solicitous. He gestured to the chair Dumouret had brought up. “Your mother is a connoisseur, then?”
Adele sat down. The chair’s wooden frame matched the room’s panelling.
“She was a connoisseur,” she said. “Mother has been dead for many years now.”
Executed as a traitor and her head displayed in the center of Xenos, to be precise, but Adele didn’t go to that level of detail. She had learned that it shocked people; particularly those who thought she was making a joke in bad taste.
Adele sipped more wine. The information she had received about President for Life Menandros was completely acc
urate—as she had expected. She wasn’t here to observe the president.
Menandros settled happily back onto his chair. “We’ve been playing cards,” he said, tapping the deck. “The girl who wins gets to spend the night with me.”
He caressed the ear of the girl in yellow with the backs of his fingers. “Yevgenia is ahead,” he said.
“How lucky for her,” Adele said. She frowned slightly and said, “What if you win, President Menandros? You’re playing also, aren’t you?”
“Ah!” Menandros said. “If I win, I get to choose. But Yevgenia is far ahead now. Do you play rummy, Lady, ah…?”
“Lady Mundy, your highness,” said Dumouret. “Lady Mundy is here to discuss your views on the rebellion.”
“I thought you said she was just paying her respects?” Menandros said sharply, glowering at his butler. This was the first evidence Adele had seen that the president wasn’t quite as fuzzy as he acted.
“I am a private citizen paying my respects,” Adele said. “But as a member of one of the leading families of Cinnabar, my impressions will be solicited when I return home. I would be remiss to neglect this opportunity to discuss matters of such import with the president of the Tarbell Stars.”
“Well, I don’t see that there’s very much to say,” Menandros said. “There isn’t really a rebellion. My subjects are happy, why shouldn’t they be happy? The Upholders are just stooges for the Alliance of Free Stars. It’s that simple!”
“I’ll certainly pass on your opinion, President,” Adele said. “But how is the war—”
“It’s not an opinion, it’s the simple truth!” Menandros said. “Look, you’re important on Cinnabar, you say? You’ve got to help us, then. The Alliance is attacking us and you’re their enemy!”
“President Menandros,” Adele said, “I am a private citizen. I know that we and the Alliance have been at peace since the signing of the Treaty of Amiens, however. I’m afraid you’ve been misinformed.”
The girls didn’t speak, but they picked up and put down their cards in a bored fashion. They kept glancing sidelong at Menandros, in case he should suddenly take an interest in them again.