Lt. Leary, Commanding

by David Drake

  “He seems a personable fellow,” Daniel offered as he paused for Adele to open the door. He might have to hand his uncle into the vehicle; meeting the delegation had been as much of a strain on Stacey as the whole rest of the outing. “I wonder why he wanted to see the Princess Cecile, though?”

  “Mr. Vaughn didn’t strike me as a man who’s often bored,” Adele said without emphasis as she walked around to the other side where she could help if needed, “or one who gathers information without a good reason. Which is a good reason for me …”

  Uncle Stacey lurched onto the bench seat without touching the arm Adele crooked for him to grip. Daniel began folding the wheelchair to set in the roof cargo rack.

  ” … to learn what I can about Mr. Vaughn, I think,” Adele concluded.

  Chapter Two

  A monorail car stopped within moments to carry Daniel and his uncle in the direction of Xenos West, but Adele Mundy would have thirty minutes on the platform before a car arrived for her. City Center wasn’t a popular destination for those leaving Harbor Three by public transportation. Laborers and ships’ crewmen stayed either in barracks near the port or in tenements ranged on the city’s outskirts. Senior officers, let alone dignitaries like Delos Vaughn’s party, arrived and left the harbor in personally owned monorail cars if they even used the system rather than aircars.

  The wait wasn’t a hardship. As soon as her companions had departed on the rising whine of an electric motor, Adele drew out her personal data unit and started to learn what could be known about Delos Vaughn.

  Until very recently the only parts of Adele’s life she would’ve called happy were those she’d spent finding and organizing information … which to be sure was more time than she devoted to any other pursuit. The place Adele’s body slept had never been of much concern to her, and since the Proscriptions she hadn’t had a home outside her head.

  A heavy starship lifted from the pool in the center of the harbor, shaking everything for miles around as its thousands of tons rose from a plume first of steam, then the flaring iridescence of hydrogen ions when the plasma motors no longer licked the water’s surface. Adele was barely conscious of the event, adjusting her control wands in the precise patterns that guided her search.

  The personal data unit was a featureless rectangle, four inches by ten inches, and half an inch thick. Its display was holographic, cued to the focus of the user’s eyes. Though the unit had a virtual keyboard or could respond to voice commands, Adele preferred the speed and flexibility of the slim wands. She held them at the balance between the thumb and first two fingers of either hand. An expert in their use—and Adele was that if ever there was one—could access information almost as fast as her brain could frame the questions.

  Delos Vaughn of Strymon, age twenty-nine Earth years; sole offspring of Leland Vaughn, former President of Strymon. Strymon presidency, a lifetime elective office with candidacy and franchise limited to members of the Shipowning class. Shipowning class: a group of originally thirty-seven, but now expanded to over a hundred, families; actually owning a starship is neither a necessary nor a sufficient criterion for membership in the Shipowning class… .

  Adele’s little unit had a considerable storage capacity, but its real value on a developed world was to give her access to other databases. Here on Cinnabar she was linked—through the monorail control circuit—to the central records computer in the Navy Office, which she used as her base unit.

  It had occurred to Adele as she set up the connection on her first day back on Cinnabar that she probably could’ve gotten authorization to use the system if she’d gone through some of the channels available to her. She’d decided it was simpler to circumvent the electronic barriers to what she was doing than it would’ve been to plow through bureaucratic inertia. Besides, it amused Adele to break rules when she’d spent all her previous life obeying them.

  In the past month Adele had gained Daniel Leary for a friend and the whole Republic of Cinnabar Navy for home and family. Between them they gave her a remarkable feeling of security.

  She grinned as she shifted back to another aspect of the problem she’d set herself. Delos Vaughn, arrived on Cinnabar aboard the RCS Tashkent as a guest of the Republic… .

  A car stopped in front of her with a clatter and squeal. She ignored it as she had the arrival of a party of laborers on the platform, shuffling heavy boots and talking about a ball game.

  “Hey, Chief?” a laborer called.

  Primary residence on Holroyd Square, Xenos, with secondary residences—

  A different voice bellowed, “Lady, ain’t this one yours?”

  Adele’s mind rose shatteringly from depths of pure knowledge where she preferred to live; it reformed in the present. An empty car stood in front of her. The lighted banner over the open door read ity enter. Fifty yards down the rail, slowing as it approached the platform, was the Manine Village car that would haul home the laborers, crammed in as tightly as books in dead storage.

  “Thank you,” she called, stowing her data unit in its pocket with the ease of long habit and a precise mind. She stepped aboard the car just before the door closed; touched the destination plate over the Pentacrest—the map’s clear cover was smeared almost illegible by the fingers of previous users, so Adele had to peer in doubt before she made her choice; and then sat back on one of the pair of facing benches as the car rocked into motion.

  She was alone in a car in which twelve could sit and thirty ride in some degree of comfort. She might have taken out her data unit again, but she decided to experience the trip instead. She wasn’t going to enjoy the ride, but there were things she could usefully learn about Xenos after her fifteen years of exile.

  Besides, she was punishing herself for not noticing the car’s arrival. She could’ve spent all afternoon there on the platform, lost in personal researches when she had business for others to accomplish. Adele had never been one to shirk her responsibilities, but the very degree of focus that made her effective sometimes got in the way of carrying out social obligations.

  Not that this meeting was social except in the general sense of being part of Adele’s involvement in human society.

  The car swerved and squealed along the serpentine track serving a section of three docks. The Aristotle dominated the whole area, an outward-curving wall of steel as viewed from the car’s grimy windows. Even if Adele craned her neck, she couldn’t have seen the midpoint where the curve of the battleship’s cylindrical hull reversed.

  In some places the shipfitters had removed plates, giving glimpses of tubing, vast machinery, and once an open space the size of the Senate Chamber. It would be daunting to a civilian and was impressive even to Adele, who was beginning to look at the world with the eyes of a naval officer.

  A warship was a community. The Aristotle was a town of some size, with a complex street system and rituals shared only with similar towns. Its population would be standoffish with strangers, even strangers who wore the same uniform.

  But the same was true of the Princess Cecile despite the corvette’s lesser volume and crew. People went to and from their bunks and their duty stations in a certain way, the same way every time, because there was no physical room for individualism and in a crisis there would be no time for confusion.

  Crises were common on a warship. Action against enemy forces was rare, but the universe was a constant opponent before which Alliance fleets paled to insignificance. Naval architects crammed as much heavy, powerful equipment as they could into each hull. The machinery was dangerous even when it worked properly, and when it malfunctioned—which it did as regularly as any other human contrivance—those in the cramped spaces nearby had to react precisely if they and their fellows were to survive.

  Adele smiled, remembering the times during the voyage from Kostroma when a spacer had slung her down a passageway in zero gee or even wrapped her in flexible netting to keep her safe—and out of the way. If Adele put her mind to it, she could probably learn the various ca
lls and responses expected of an RCN spacer. She doubted that she’d ever be able to transfer that intellectual knowledge into motor skills, however.

  Nor did she need to, so long as she was part of an experienced crew who’d take care of her. One spacer, come to the RCN from a farm on North Cape, had remarked that she was clumsy as a hog on ice as he snatched Adele away from the mechanism of a rotating gun turret.

  Adele knew she amused her fellow crewmen, but they didn’t laugh at her. They’d all seen the way she danced through the maze of a communications screen; and the ones who’d seen her shoot told the others about that, too. No, they didn’t laugh at Officer Mundy.

  The car bumped and chattered over joints in the track. The vehicle had been steamed with disinfectant in the recent past—the odor clung to the benches’ dimpled surfaces—but it was still scratched and grimy.

  Adele had never thought about public transportation in her youth. The Mundys had private cars to be hooked onto rails, for Mistress Adele and the servants who accompanied her to the Library of Celsus or wherever else her studies took her. Less wealthy nobles summoned public cars. Their servants and retainers then emptied ordinary citizens out of the vehicle so that the master could ride surrounded only by those who owed him allegiance.

  Displaced passengers could wait for another car to arrive, irritated but not particularly angry. The citizens of Cinnabar expected their leaders to be proud folk. However else would they be able to properly represent the Republic to the folk of lesser worlds?

  Adele’s car jolted sideways onto a shunt serving a rank of modern apartment blocks with brick facings and swags molded to look like carved limestone. On Kostroma carving had still been done by hand.

  Three housewives got on, carrying rolled shopping baskets and wearing hats with long, soft brims. One of them touched the destination plate as they continued a conversation begun on the platform. The car accelerated slowly up the shunt, paused for a gap in the line of vehicles now using the rail, then groaned as the drive motors exerted maximum effort to get back into traffic.

  They settled into place, thirty yards behind one car, thirty yards ahead of another. Adele tried to guess where the women came from. Not Cinnabar, certainly. They were speaking a language that was neither a Cinnabar dialect nor Universal, and their fluidly attractive costume wasn’t native to Cinnabar either.

  Xenos had become a microcosm of the whole Cinnabar empire. Adele could access a rental list from the apartment building where the women boarded. She could then match the frequency of names with those of various worlds protected by the Republic, giving her a high probability of identifying the women’s planet of origin.

  Or of course she could ask them; and watch their faces freeze, and wait for one of them to answer in a voice either dead with fear or shrill, trying with anger to cover that fear—She’s in uniform. Why does she want to know? What does it mean? But they would answer.

  Adele smiled faintly; at life, at herself. They wouldn’t believe it was merely curiosity, useless information being gathered by a person to whom nothing had use except information.

  Half a mile from the apartments the car pulled into another shunt. The ground floors of the nearby buildings were given over to expensive shops, while the windows of the floor above were stenciled with business logos.

  The housewives got off and were replaced by a score of officeworkers dressed in styles as stratified as those of the RCN. The one senior clerk wore a jacket with wide fur cuffs, showing that she didn’t need to use her hands. The clothes of her underlings grew brighter with each step down in status; the trio of messenger boys chattered together like warblers in yellow and green and azure tawdriness.

  The car staggered into motion again, sluggish with its load though not quite full. Close to the city center the cars ran slower than in the suburbs, so they bounced back onto the main line directly despite the traffic.

  A woman sat next to Adele, talking with animation to the companion on her other side. The man standing in front of them joined in the conversation, his calf brushing Adele’s knees as the vehicle swayed.

  When Adele was last on Cinnabar, she couldn’t have imagined being a part of this scene. Literally: she wouldn’t have had the data to visualize being jostled and crowded on a public conveyance. How matters had changed… .

  Not necessarily for the worse. She’d learned many things through disgrace and poverty that she never would have known in the ordinary course of things. She smiled. And she’d gained a family and a friend more trustworthy than those at the apex of power—people like her own parents and Corder Leary—would ever know.

  The car groaned to a halt again. They’d reached the district ringing the Pentacrest, where the lesser nobility owned houses and rented ground-floor space to expensive shops. A group—a gang—of servants pushed their way into the car. Several of them held the doors open as their fellows chivied those already aboard out onto the platform.

  Their garments were gray and bright green in horizontal stripes. That would make them Tanisards, a minor house which hadn’t had a member in the Senate until the last century. All of them were in the full livery of underlings. Senior servants like the majordomo and his/her section heads would wear business suits with only collar flashes to announce their affiliation.

  Adele squirmed to look out the window at her back. More servants waited to board, but no member of the house was present: these servants were clearing the car for their personal whim.

  A husky youth—they were all young, not surprisingly—stood squarely in front of Adele with two of his fellows at his elbows. He grinned in an attempt to look threatening, but there was a degree of caution in his expression. Adele was alone, but the RCN was a very large organization.

  Adele remained seated with her left hand in her pocket. “If you touch me, scum,” she said in a clear voice, “your master will answer for your presumption on the field of honor!”

  “What?” said the Tanisard. He’d expected something when the woman didn’t scuttle away from his advance but not that particular threat, delivered with such absolute conviction in an upperclass accent.

  “And while that’s happening,” Adele continued, feeling the tremble of barely controlled rage in her voice, “a detachment from my ship will be leveling Tanisard House. That won’t concern you, because you’ll have died here as you stand.”

  The Tanisard glanced to his friends—and found they’d backed away. He lowered his eyes and did the same, snarling at the fellow servant who jostled him when the car rocked into motion again.

  There was only one more shunt before the City Center terminus. The car whirred past it without slowing. Adele rode in a clear portion of a vehicle otherwise crowded; the Tanisards kept their backs to her. Her lips smiled, but her eyes were empty and a red rage filled her mind. She visualized Bosun Ellie Woetjans leading every member of the Princess Cecile’s crew who was still on Cinnabar; with hammers and come-alongs, and very likely a section of mast to batter down the door.

  Tanisards! How dare they?

  The car reached the great roundabout of Pentacrest Vale, paused, and pulled into a shunt as the car that had just loaded there reentered the main line. A score of those waiting tried to board before the present passengers had disembarked, but the furious Tanisards rammed them back like the jet from a spillway. Well-justified fear had kept them from trying conclusions with the lone warrant officer, but they were too young to accept what had happened with philosophical resignation.

  Adele followed closely in the Tanisards’ wake, using the anger she’d engendered to shield her from the worst of the crowd’s buffeting. She smiled faintly: this was almost like having servants again.

  She’d never thought much about the servants when she was a girl on Cinnabar. Between Chatsworth Major and the townhouse there must have been a staff of a hundred or more, but they had less conscious impact on Adele than her bedroom furniture did.

  Still, they’d existed. Even on public transit Adele would never have been fa
ced with anything like this, because the Mundy retainers escorting her would have cleared the Tanisards out with the same ruthless unconcern as they’d have ousted dogs who’d somehow gotten into the car.

  Tanisards block the path of a Mundy? Not till the sky falls!

  The sky had fallen on the Mundys; fallen within days of when Adele boarded the packet that carried her to Blythe to continue her education in the Academic Collections there. Blythe was a core world of the Alliance of Free Stars, but what did that matter to Adele? She was a librarian, a member of that higher aristocracy of knowledge which cared nothing for mere politics.

  As it turned out, politics had mattered a great deal.

  The Speaker’s Rock was a granite outcrop whose naturally level top had been improved by the first settlers; it stood at the west end of Pentacrest Vale. Adele edged out of the ruck around the transport terminus and eyed the Rock critically. Fifteen years ago the heads of her father, her mother, and her ten-year-old sister, Agatha, had hung from it in mesh bags to be viewed by all those who chose to do so.

  There were many other heads as well, most of whom had as little to do with a conspiracy as Agatha did. Adele herself would have been there, save for the whim of sailing schedules. Political realities don’t care whether their victims feel superior to them.

  Because she’d found herself looking at the Rock with new eyes, Adele paused to survey the whole setting for what was in a way the first time. Even before she reached age ten, she’d spent more of her waking hours on the Pentacrest than she had in the Mundy townhouse; but she’d never looked at it the way a stranger would, taking in its magnificence instead of simply accepting it the way fishes do the sea through which they swim.