What Distant Deeps

by David Drake

  A sociopath shouldn’t be able to joke, but Tovera had certainly learned to counterfeit the act. At least the comment was probably meant as a joke.

  The Princess Cecile’s bosun was six-foot-six and rangy rather than heavy. She—Woetjans was biologically female—had always struck Adele as abnormally strong even for her size, and the length of high-pressure tubing she swung in a melee was more effective than a sawed-off shotgun.

  Miranda Dorst had just reached the bottom of the ramp. She waited in the middle of a group of children, smiling up at Adele.

  Daniel had kept company with many women in the years Adele had known him. Most of them had been prettier than Miranda—a healthy girl, but not a raging beauty; and none of them had displayed half Miranda’s intelligence.

  Adele respected Miranda, which permitted her to like the younger woman as well. She hoped that matters went well for her and Daniel, which didn’t—Adele smiled briefly, coldly—necessarily mean that they would marry. But Miranda was adult, quite smart, and certainly knew her own mind.

  Women with floral aprons and contrasting bonnets were descending on Miranda’s gaggle of children like jays on a swarm of termites, whisking them off one at a time by a sleeve or an ear. A boy remained, but a girl of sixteen or so was coming at a run with her eye on him.

  “Adele, I’m so glad to see you,” Miranda said, sounding as though she meant it. “Is this your first visit to Bantry? I’m sure it’s a wonderful place when one learns to appreciate it, but I’ll admit that I’ve always been a city girl.”

  “Lady Mundy, Lady Mundy!” squealed the boy. He couldn’t have been more than six.

  “Robbie!” cried the girl running toward him.

  “Are you the Squire’s girlfriend, Lady Mundy?” Robbie demanded. “We all think you are!”

  The girl clouted Robbie over the ear. He yelped; she smothered his outrage in folds of her scarlet apron which overlay the blue/green/yellow checks of her skirt.

  “Your Ladyship, I’m so sorry!” the girl said. Her cheeks were almost as bright as the fabric. “He’s my brother and it’s my fault, I was supposed to watch him, I’m so sorry! I’m Susie Maynor and I shouldn’t have let it happen!”

  “Thank you, Mistress Maynor,” Adele said. Her voice and expression were emotionless, but she had made the intellectual decision to find the business amusing. That was the proper response, especially with a child; though it wasn’t the direction her thoughts had first turned. “You may assure Master Robbie when he reappears that I am not the Squire’s girlfriend.”

  “Oh, Your Ladyship!” the girl gasped. She strode toward the main gathering with determination, ignoring the muted wails from her apron.

  Adele, grimacing internally, met Miranda’s eyes. As she—and probably both of them—wondered what to say or whether better to ignore the business, Tovera said, “I’ve been in Captain Leary’s company for a number of years now, but no one has made similar assertions about me. If I had human feelings, they would be hurt.”

  Miranda blinked at Tovera, then smothered a giggle with her hand. Adele only grinned slightly, but the expression meant more in her case than it would for most people. Aloud she said, “Would you like a raise, Tovera?”

  Her servant gave her a wintry smile. “What do I need money for, mistress?” she said. She had closed her attaché case. “You provide my food and lodging, and you point me to plenty of people to kill.”

  Which may be a joke, Adele thought. “Yes,” she said, “but not here.”

  “Daniel asked me to take you to the house,” Miranda said as she turned. She started back along the arc of the commons instead of the chord of the sea front. She cleared her throat, perhaps still embarrassed. She said, “He isn’t really the Squire, you know. His father is, and Deirdre will inherit if, well . . . when . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “I don’t believe Speaker Leary is immortal, either,” Adele said, letting the words rather than her dry tone supply the humor. “But ‘Squire’ is a term of custom rather than law. If the Bantries choose to grant the title to Daniel who grew up with them rather than to his father to whom the estate is merely a muddy asset, then I applaud their judgment.”

  They walked close to the tenant houses. Adele could see that the fronts were decked with swags of foliage and flowers, not bunting as she’d thought from the transport’s hatch. Dogs barked from some of the fenced dooryards.

  Miranda followed Adele’s eyes. With quiet pride she said, “They really love him, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Adele. “Just as the Sissies do. The tenants don’t find their lives at considerably greater risk from associating with Daniel, but even so I don’t think a computer could have predicted the depth of feeling.”

  Miranda laughed. She was a cheerful person, a good fit with Daniel in that way. She hadn’t had an easy life, but the troubles didn’t appear to have marked her.

  Whereas Adele—she smiled wanly at herself—hadn’t been particularly happy even when she’d been the heir to one of the wealthiest and most powerful houses of the Republic. She’d often been content, though; as she was generally content now, except the nights that she lay in the darkness, surrounded by dead faces that she’d last seen over the sights of the pistol which even now nestled in her left tunic pocket.

  The piper was taking a break, and at least a dozen men had begun singing “The Ring That Has No End” without accompaniment. They stumbled up to “ . . . when you find one who’ll be true,” but by the time they reached, “Change not the old friend for a new,” their voices had blended into a natural richness which Adele found beautiful. Her hand reached for her data unit as it always did when she was really engaged by her surroundings, but she had nothing to look up.

  Her lips twitched, though her expression couldn’t have been called a smile: she reached for her data unit, or she reached for her pistol. Either way, she preferred to keep a mechanical interface between herself and the world.

  “I’m so glad they’re getting along,” Miranda said, also watching the festival. She and Adele walked side by side. Tovera followed at a respectful distance of two paces. “I was afraid there’d be, well, fights between spacers and tenants.”

  “There probably will be,” Adele said. “And fights among spacers and fights among tenants. Most of both groups will be drunk before the night’s out, and those who aren’t falling-down drunk will include some who want to knock other people down. But they all respect Six—or the Squire, depending—too much for it to go beyond fists. And remember, at least a score of the present Sissies were tenants before they enlisted.”

  And anyone who wasn’t sufficiently respectful to begin with would have a proper understanding beaten into him by Woetjans or Hogg, each policing the group they came from. They would certainly be drunk also, but Adele couldn’t imagine them too drunk to do their duty.

  She took that sort of implicit violence for granted now. Her father, knowing that a leading politician was open to many pressures, had seen to it that not only he but his wife and daughters were known to be crack shots who would certainly kill anyone who challenged them to a duel. That hadn’t helped him the night troops arrived with the notice of the Proscriptions, but it had kept Adele alive during her years of slums and squalor.

  This was different, though: this was force applied in the service of order, not chaos. Her mother, who had believed in the innate decency of the Common Man, would have been horrified; her father would have been disgusted.

  Adele, who had lived in very close quarters with the Common Man ever since the Proscriptions, took the same sort of detached view that she had of lice: there were discomforts which you alleviated if you could and bore if you couldn’t. There were no moral questions involved, just practical responses.

  And a crack on the head with plenty of muscle behind it was often a very practical response.

  The double leaves of the manor’s front door were standing open onto the veranda; guns and fishing tackle
hung from hooks in the hallway behind. The gear looked well cared for, though there wouldn’t have been anyone living in the building since Daniel had left Bantry to join the RCN.

  Tovera skipped ahead; her right hand was within the attaché case again. The hall and the rooms to either side along the central passageway were empty.

  If Miranda was surprised by Tovera’s behavior, she didn’t comment on the fact. Instead she said, “I’ll take you through to the library, Adele, and then go back to the party.”

  She smiled fondly. “I need to give my mother a bit of a break, I’m afraid,” she said. “When the Bantry women learned we’d both made our own dresses—”

  She touched her skirt. The fabric was sturdy, but the pattern of magenta flames on the white background made it stand out even in these festivities. The lines, though loose enough to be comfortable, flattered what was already quite a good figure.

  “—nothing would help but we had to show them every seam.”

  Miranda knocked on the last door to the right, where the passage jogged into the new wing. “Enter,” called a voice that had become familiar to Adele over the years.

  Tovera reached for the latch; Adele stepped past and said, “No.”

  She opened the door and entered what passed for a library here.

  “Did you have a good trip, Mundy?” asked Bernis Sand, seated at the reading table with a bottle of whiskey, a carafe of water, and two glasses before her.

  “No worse than I expected,” Adele said to the Republic’s spymaster. When the door closed behind her, she went on, “What did you wish to speak to me about, mistress?”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Bantry Estate, Cinnabar

  “You’re not one for small talk, are you, Mundy?” said Bernis Sand. She tapped the bottle. “Help yourself to the whiskey.”

  “No,” said Adele, “I’m not. And I expect the sun to rise in the east tomorrow, if you choose to discuss the obvious.”

  Adele had known she was in a bad humor, but she hadn’t been aware of exactly how bad it was until she heard herself. Despite that, she took the bottle and poured a half-thimbleful into the glass. After swirling the liquor around, she filled the glass from the carafe.

  It was what she’d done in the years when the water where she lived wasn’t safe to drink. The liquor wasn’t safe either, of course, but in small doses it would kill bacteria without being immediately dangerous to a human being.

  It wasn’t precisely an insult to treat Mistress Sand’s whiskey that way. But it wasn’t precisely not an insult, either.

  Adele took a sip. Very calmly, Sand said, “What’s wrong, Mundy? The last mission?”

  Adele set the glass down. She swallowed, trying to rid herself of the sourness which—she smiled—was in her mind, not her mouth.

  “I’m sorry, mistress,” she said. “I—”

  She paused, wondering how to phrase it without being further insulting. The things other people said or did would always give room to take offense, if you were of a mind to take offense. Therefore the fault wasn’t in the other people.

  “Yes, I suppose it was the most recent mission, the battle above Cacique at least,” Adele said. “It affected me more than I would have expected.”

  “Your ship was badly hit,” said Sand as Adele paused to drink. “I understand that it will probably be scrapped instead of being rebuilt. You could easily have been killed.”

  Adele smiled faintly and refilled the glass with water. Her mouth was terribly dry. When she laughed, the ribs on her lower right side still ached from where a bullet had hit her years ago on Dunbar’s World. Fortunately, she didn’t laugh very often.

  “I’m not afraid of being killed, mistress,” Adele said, meeting the spymaster’s eyes over the rim of her glass. “I haven’t changed that much.”

  “Go on, then,” Sand said quietly. She was a stocky woman on the wrong side of middle age. In the brown tweed suit she wore at present, she could easily have passed for one of the country squires Adele had seen with Daniel on the sea front.

  Mistress Sand had been more important to the survival of Cinnabar in its struggle with the much larger Alliance than any cabinet minister or admiral in the RCN. What Adele saw in the older woman’s eyes now were intelligence and strength . . . and fatigue as boundless as the Matrix through which starships sailed.

  “Debris flew around inside the ship after the missile hit us,” Adele said. “A piece of it struck Daniel—that is, Captain Leary—”

  Sand flicked her hands in dismissal of the thought. “Daniel,” she said. “This isn’t a formal report. It’s two old acquaintances talking. Two friends, I’d like to think.”

  “Yes,” said Adele. “Debris struck Daniel in the head.”

  She raised the carafe, but her hand was trembling so she quickly put it back. Sand reached past and filled the glass.

  “It cracked his helmet and gave him a concussion, but the injuries weren’t life threatening,” Adele said. “If it had struck an inch lower, however, it would have broken his neck. Severed it, like enough. That would have been beyond the Medicomp or any human efforts to repair. And I don’t believe in gods.”

  “An RCN officer’s duties are often dangerous,” Sand said, carefully neutral. Adele realized that the spymaster still didn’t understand the problem. Sand was afraid of saying the wrong thing—and equally afraid of seeming uninterested if she didn’t say anything. “That might have happened to any of you.”

  “Yes,” said Adele, “exactly. Whereas I’d been thinking—feeling, I suppose—that it might happen to all of us. That is, if a missile hit our ship, we would all be killed. That event, that incident, proved that there might well be a future in which Daniel was dead and I was alive.”

  She took her glass in both hands and drained it again. This wasn’t coming out well, but she wasn’t sure there was a better way to put it.

  “Mistress,” Adele said, “I’ve built a comfortable life. Rebuilt one, perhaps. The RCN is a family which accepts and even appreciates me. The Sissies, the spacers whom I’ve served with, they’re closer than I would ever have been with my sister Agatha in another life.”

  In a life in which two soldiers hadn’t cut off Agatha’s ten-year-old head with their belt knives and turned it in for the reward.

  “And Daniel himself . . . ,” Adele said. She didn’t know how to go on. She hadn’t expected this conversation. She hadn’t expected ever to have this conversation. It was obvious that she was in worse shape than she had imagined only a few moments ago.

  It was less obvious to see how she was going to get out of her present straits.

  Adele felt her lips rise in an unexpected smile. The RCN prided itself that its personnel could learn through on-the-job training. No doubt life would prove amenable to the same techniques by which Adele had learned to be an efficient signals officer.

  “There’s no one like Daniel,” Adele said simply. “I don’t mean ‘no one better than Daniel,’ though in some ways that’s probably true. But my entire present life is built around the existence of Daniel Leary. I would rather die than start over from where I was when I was sixteen and lost my first family.”

  Mistress Sand sighed. “I have my work, Mundy,” she said. “And my—”

  Her face went coldly blank, then broke into an embarrassed grin. “I may as well be honest,” Sand said. “I have my children. That’s how I think of them.”

  With a hint of challenge she said, “That’s how I think of you.”

  “I wasn’t a notably filial child when I was sixteen,” Adele said. “Perhaps I’ll do better with the advantage of age.”

  Sand laughed and pushed the bottle another finger’s breadth across the table. From her waistcoat she took a mother-of-pearl snuffbox. She sifted some of the contents from it into the seam of her left thumb closed against her fingers.

  Adele poured two ounces of whiskey and sipped it neat. It was a short drink but a real one, and an apology for her previous behavi
or.

  “You were wondering why I wanted to see you,” Sand said. Her eyes were on her snuffbox as she snapped it closed. “Are you ready to go off-planet again, do you think?”

  “Yes,” said Adele. She’d considered the question from the moment she’d been summoned to this meeting, so she spoke without the embroidery others might have put around the answer.

  Sand pinched her right nostril shut and snorted, then switched nostrils and repeated the process. She dusted the last crumbs of snuff from her hands, then sneezed violently into her handkerchief. She looked up with a smile.

  “There’s a Senatorial election due in four months, perhaps even sooner if the Speaker fancies his chances,” she said. “All the parties will attempt to use Captain Leary. He’s a genuine war hero and, shall we say, impetuous enough that he might be maneuvered into blurting something useful.”

  “Yes,” Adele repeated, waiting.

  “That would be a matter of academic import to me,” Sand continued, “were it not for the fact that Leary’s close friend is one of my most valued assets, and that asset would become involved also.”

  Sand cleared her throat. “Do you suppose Captain Leary would be willing to undertake a charter in his private yacht to deliver the new Cinnabar Commissioner to Zenobia?”

  Adele set her data unit on the table and brought it live. Sand knew her too well to take the action as an insult, but that wouldn’t have mattered: Adele had done it with no more volition than she breathed. If asked whether she would prefer to be without breath or without information, she would have said there was little to choose from.

  “I had understood . . . ,” she said as her fingers made the control wands dance. She found the wands quicker than other input devices—and so they were, for her. Adele used them as she did her pistol, at the capacity of the machine. “. . . that Daniel was to be kept on full pay despite the fact that the Milton is scheduled to be broken up.”

  “That’s correct,” Sand said, pouring herself another tumbler of whiskey. She controlled her reactions very well, but Adele could tell that the older woman was more relaxed than she had been since Adele entered the room. “The officers and crew will serve as members of the RCN—”