by David Drake
Adele nodded, her eyes on her own data streams. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she found considerable detail.
"You're probably wondering why we even have a Commissioner on Zenobia," Sand said. She tapped the bottle forward again, but Adele was absorbed in her information gathering.
"Not at all," Adele said, more curtly than she would have done if her intellect hadn't been focused in other directions. "A good quarter of the region's spacers appear to be from Rougmont, one of our client worlds. I suspect very few of them are actually Cinnabar citizens, but based on what I've noticed on the fringes of civilization, most will claim to be Cinnabar citizens when they're jailed for being drunk and disorderly. Their normal state when they've been paid upon landfall."
A Resident was a senior official in the Cinnabar's Ministry of External Affairs. He or she directed the local leaders of worlds which were Friends of Cinnabar: that is, tribute-paying members of the Cinnabar Empire.
Not that anybody put it that way. Those who did were promptly imprisoned for Insulting the Republic.
"Ah," Adele said with more satisfaction than most people would have packed into that simple syllable. "I was wondering why I wasn't finding more evidence of piracy. Our ally, the Principality of Palmyra, patrols the region and appears to do a very good job of it."
Her lip quirked in a wry smile. She said, "It would seem that they do a better job than dedicated anti-pirate squadrons in other regions, whether mounted by us or by the Alliance."
"Just for my curiosity, Mundy . . . ," Mistress Sand said. Despite her attempt to seem casual, her eyes had narrowed slightly. "How do you determine the effectiveness of the patrols? Do you have Admiralty Court records in your computer?"
Adele laughed. "I could get them from database in Navy House," she said. "Or for that matter from the duplicate set that the Ministry of Justice is supposed to keep. I doubt if they'd tell me much, though. Our own patrols are rumored to take shortcuts when dealing with pirates, and the Palmyrenes certainly do."
She met Sand's eyes for the first time since she'd brought up her data unit. "It's much simpler," she said with a cold grin, "to check insurance rates for the region. They're as low as those for the Cinnabar-Blanchefleur route."
Sand laughed ruefully. "Rather than say, 'Oh, that's simple,' I'll note that the mind which went directly to that source wasn't simple at all," she said. "And yes, Palmyra has nominally been a Cinnabar ally for several generations, though that's basically been a matter of the Autocrators choosing a policy which is in keeping with the aims of the Republic. Palmyra has become a major trading power—the trading power in its region, certainly—and has put down piracy for its own ends."
Adele collapsed her holographic display to meet the spymaster's eyes directly. "Is Palmyra my objective, mistress?" she said.
Sand placed her hands palm-down on the scarred leather tabletop and laughed. "You've just demonstrated the limits of logic, Mundy," she said. "You know there's a reason I'd be asking you to go to the Qaboosh Region, and the only thing of even moderate significance in the region is the Principality of Palmyra, on whose intentions you've noticed that my information is strikingly scanty. Not so?"
"You're correct," Adele said with clipped tones. The humor of it struck her. She didn't laugh, but her lips formed a self-mocking grin.
"Arrogance is the claim of greater power, here in the form of knowledge, than one actually has," she said. "You're quite right to bring me up short when I display arrogance."
Sand looked at her in appraisal. "Sorry, Mundy," she said. "You give me too much credit: I was priding myself on having finally beaten someone who regularly runs circles around me. And it was a trick, because there was no way you would have known that Guarantor Porra's favorite of the past three years was Lady Posthuma Belisande."
Adele's smile reformed itself into tight, triumphant lines. Her display sprang to life.
"A relative of the present Founder of Zenobia," she said. Her wands flickered further. "The younger sister of Founder Hergo Belisande, twenty-four standard years old. Called Posy, although I don't know when that datum was gathered. It might be embarrassing to greet the lady by a nickname she'd last heard when she was eight."
Adele shrank her display again. She said, "You said Belisande was, rather than that she has been, Porra's mistress for the past three years. The relationship has ended?"
"So we understand," said Mistress Sand. "Officially the lady is visiting relatives on Zenobia, but it's generally understood that she isn't expected to return. That she's expected not to return, in fact—though some of that may be put around by rivals."
Adele's eyes narrowed. "Do you expect her to confide in me?" she said, trying to restrain the irritation that threatened to sharpen her tone. "Because I have no skill whatever at Human Intelligence, mistress. I have no skill at human relationships, one might say."
"My thought was that electronic security on Zenobia would be a great deal less sophisticated than it was on Pleasaunce," Sand said calmly. "While there's no evidence that the lady will be writing her memoirs, I'm confident that you will be able to penetrate all her files in short order."
Adele grimaced. "Sorry," she said. "I've been on edge. As you know."
The room held three waist-high bookcases, one against each wall; the door took the place of the fourth. Two of the six hinged glass fronts had been replaced by wooden panels. Those must have been lovely when waxed and buffed, but they hadn't received any care in decades.
The shelved books were standard sets of the classics, published in the second and third centuries after society on Cinnabar had begun to rebound from the thousand-year Hiatus in interstellar travel. Old learning had been assembled and reprinted in lovely editions. Every prominent landholder and every tradesman with pretensions to culture had sets just like these.
Adele had seen scores of similar collections when she haunted the libraries of her parents' friends before going off to Blythe to finish her education. Most of them, like these at Bantry, appeared to have remained unopened throughout their long existence.
Any unique items—journals from the settlement, handwritten memoirs; perhaps a list of flora and fauna by one of the first Learys to settle at Bantry—had been removed from this collection. They were probably in Xenos if they existed at all. How would Corder Leary react to a request from Lady Adele Mundy to view his library?
Adele's smile was terrible in its cold precision. Her honor didn't require her to seek out Speaker Leary. If by some mutually bad luck she met him, she would shoot him dead unless his guards shot her first. She would bet on herself there: she had a great deal of experience in shooting people.
"I . . . ," said Mistress Sand and stopped. Adele would have thought that Sand had forgotten what she intended to say had she not kept her eyes focused on Adele's. Sand finished the whiskey in her glass, poured another four ounces, and drank half of it. Adele waited.
"You're wrong about lacking skill in manipulating people, Mundy," Sand said as she lowered the glass. "You're remarkably good at it, simply by being yourself. I don't think you appreciate how powerful an effect absolutely fearless honesty has on ordinary people."
She smiled, but the expression was unreadable.
"It's something many of them will never have encountered before, you see," Sand added.
Adele grimaced; the conversation was making her uncomfortable. "I'm afraid of many things, mistress," she said. "And it's easier to tell the truth than to lie."
"Of course it is," said Sand. "If you're not afraid of what other people will think. That's where the rest of us run into problems, even—"
She paused to drain her tumbler in two quick gulps. She wasn't doing justice to what Adele supposed was very good liquor.
"—when we've been drinking more than perhaps we should be."
Sand shrugged. She looked at the bottle but placed her hands flat on the table instead. "Regardless, I won't ask you to use a talent that makes you uncomfortable. Not unless the safe
ty of the Republic requires it."
Sand didn't move except to tremble from the effort with which she pressed down on the leather. She seemed—not right. Adele was used to people showing emotion, but it was a new experience to see Mistress Sand showing emotion. Adele disliked it in the spymaster even more than she did in others.
"You know I'll use up my assets if the Republic requires it," Sand said. "You do know that, don't you?"
"Yes, of course," Adele said. She paused, then went on, "There are twenty rounds in the magazine of my pistol."
She tapped her left tunic pocket.
"They wouldn't be of any use to me if I weren't willing to expend them."
"That doesn't bother you?" Sand demanded. Her face sagged into a lopsided smile. "I suppose it doesn't at that. You understood it from the beginning, when I first approached you; so of course you're not going to complain about a choice you made willingly. You wouldn't."
Adele said nothing. She realized, not for the first time, that anger was a common human response because it was a comfortable one. The mood in which she'd started this interview was much easier to bear than quietly listening to Mistress Sand say things that Adele would rather not hear. She could solve the problem by hurling the water pitcher to the floor and storming out of the room . . . .
She smiled. "Easy" had never been the major criterion for her decisions.
Sand shook her head slowly. She took out the snuff box again, but instead of opening it she raised her eyes.
"Sorry, Mundy," she said. Her voice was normal again. "I realize there's no need for me to say anything, not to you; but I started this, so I'll finish it. I expect you to extract whatever useful information Posy Belisande has. I expect you to considerably expand my information on Palmyra and on anything else in the Qaboosh Region which is material to the Republic of Cinnabar. This is a real mission."
Though she was obviously trying to seem cheerful, the impression Adele got from Sand's sudden smile was sadness. She said, "Mundy, we—the Republic—are as much at peace as it's possible for an entity of our size to be. If I thought it would do any good, I'd suggest you take a research fellowship in Novy Sverdlovsk. Captain Leary would make a splendid Naval Attaché at our embassy there, I'm sure. I didn't think that would work out, however."
Adele felt the corner of her mouth twitch in the direction of a grin. "No," she said. "I don't think it would. For either Daniel or for me."
Sand nodded agreement; she was relaxing again. "It appeared to me, however," she said, "that this business in Zenobia might be a useful stage for you both—for servants of the Republic like yourselves—to transition from the business in the Montserrat Stars back to normal life."
"Thank you, mistress," Adele said as she rose. "I appreciate your . . . ."
She paused, searching for the way to phrase what she wanted to say.
"I appreciate your intelligent concern."
Sand remained seated. Adele made a slight bow, then turned to the door. As she reached for the latch, she heard a shot in the near distance.
Adele was striding down the hallway in the next heartbeat, her left hand dropping to her pocket. Tovera led with a miniature sub-machine gun openly displayed in her right hand. There was another shot from outside, toward the sea front.
The trouble with normal life, Adele thought, is that it doesn't stay normal for very long.
* * *
Daniel felt his eyes narrow slightly as he looked past Peterleigh's ear to watch the group centered on Chuckie Platt some twenty yards north up the seafront. Peterleigh was giving a full discussion of the formal garden he was building at Boltway Manor, complete with a grotto populated with—fake—crystalline formations which were meant to suggest petrified trolls.
"Just like they'd been touched by sunlight and turned to stone, don't you know?" Peterleigh burbled. It was the sort of fashionable nonsense that would have bored Daniel to tears if he hadn't had Platt and Lieutenant Cory to worry about. Both young men held dueling pistols.
Peterleigh said, "Of course, that's where the paradox is that you need for real art. They're underground in the grotto, don't you know, so the light couldn't have touched them! That's a paradox!"
Platt was aiming out to sea. His body was edge-on, making a single line with his outstretched right arm; his lift arm was rigidly akimbo as though he were executing a ballet posture.
"I don't see what you mean by a paradox," Broma said, scowling. He sounded as bored with the description as Daniel felt. "Isn't a troll a bloody paradox enough? They're not real, so they're a paradox."
Platt fired; his right forearm lifted straight up with the recoil. The whack! of the hypersonic osmium pellet accelerating down the barrel made the others around Daniel jump. The birds overhead screamed, chattered, or croaked, depending on their species.
Waldmiller snarled, "Hofmann, what's your boy playing at, hey?"
"Don't call him my boy," Hofmann muttered. He hunched over his mug of ale and didn't meet the older landowner's eyes. "He's Bertie's boy and she insisted on bringing him. I swear by all the gods, Leary—"
He looked up in abject misery.
"—I didn't think he'd want to come. And when he said he did, I said maybe we ought all to stay home, but Bertie insisted because she'd heard Lady Mundy was going to be here. And now it looks like she was wrong about that, but here we are with Chuckie anyway!"
Daniel didn't bother to inform Hofmann that Adele had arrived—but with the rest of the Sissies instead of in the private aircar that he and his wife were apparently expecting. The Bantry tenants knew of Adele as the Squire's friend. It hadn't occurred to Daniel that Bertie Hofmann was from Xenos and would hope to scrape acquaintance with Mundy of Chatsworth.
"I think it'd be just as well if your son put those pistols away for the time being, Hofmann," he said. "There's a lot of people here. And some of them have been drinking, of course."
Cory fired. They were shooting out to sea, presumably at bobbing flotsam. Spray fountained only twenty feet from the base of the sea wall; Cory had let his muzzle dip as he pulled the trigger.
Platt hooted and called in a loud voice, "Why, you weren't within a mile! Not a mile! What wets you navy men turn out to be!"
The coils wrapping the barrel generated an electromagnetic flux which ionized the pellet's aluminum driving band. The plasma hung in the air, a quivering paleness which faded as it stripped electrons from the atmosphere and returned to steady state.
One of the effete servants was loading the pistols; the other held the case for him as a table. Platt had taken the gallon jug.
"Oh, he won't listen to me," Hofmann mumbled. "I may as well save my breath."
Platt laid the jug on the crook of his elbow to lift it, then drank. He passed the liquor to the man on his right. There were about a dozen people in the group, none of them as old as twenty-five.
Cazelet was one of them. Daniel supposed he and Cory had joined a youth whom they knew only as someone of their own age and class. The sons and daughters of a few Bantry tenants had drifted over also.
"I think then that I'll have a word," said Daniel, starting forward. He thought sourly about how much more easily he could handle matters aboard the Princess Cecile, but he knew this sort of business could occur in a military environment as well.
His Academy classmate Oudenarde had served as midshipman on a light cruiser whose captain allowed his pet Tertullian swamp monkey to wander freely on A Level. The animal's career of rending, fouling and eating the possessions of the junior officers ended when it gobbled a package of aphrodisiacs which the Second Lieutenant had concealed among his socks.
Apparently the pills worked better on swamp monkeys than Daniel had ever known them to do with humans. The beast had been shot on the captain's screamed orders while it made a very respectable job of buggering him through the trousers of his Dress Whites.
"I figure a wet like you hasn't any business with a pretty bint," said Platt, seizing the arm of the girl in a scarlet apron wh
o'd been standing with Cory. She tried to pull away. "You don't resent this, do you, navy boy?"
Platt grabbed a handful of the squealing girl's hair and bent to kiss her.
"Cazelet, grab him!" Daniel shouted as he broke into a run.
Rene Cazelet wrapped his arms around Cory and dragged him back. Thank the gods he'd been smart enough to understand what Daniel understood but hadn't adequately put in words. Cazelet touching Platt would have been just as bad as what Cory was lunging to do.
It was possible though unlikely that Cazelet was a better shot than Cory, but in either case RCN officers had to resign their commission in order to fight a duel. A hundred puffed-up bullies like Chuckie Platt weren't worth the career, let alone the life, of an RCN engine wiper.
The girl scratched at Platt's arm; his fist balled. Daniel knew he wouldn't get there in time.
Adele slapped Platt's left cheek. The boy straightened and cried, "What?"
"Sir," said Adele, "you have insulted my friend, Mistress Maynor. You will apologize to her at once."
The girl pulled herself free; Platt had forgotten her. Two of the male tenants helped her get clear but stayed to watch; the girl ran sobbing toward the huts.
"Who the bloody hell do you think you are?" said Platt, touching his cheek in amazement.
Daniel paused. This wasn't what he'd wanted to happen, but it had happened—and the situation was certainly under control now.
Hofmann's wife, gasping with emotion and the strain of running in a ridiculously tight dress, thrust herself between her son and Adele. "Chuckie, this is Lady Mundy!" she said. Her voice had a shrill edge that didn't seem to belong with so fleshy a body. "What are you thinking of?"
Platt flung his mother aside with a sweep of his arm. She gave a despairing cry as she fell. He's more drunk than I realized, Daniel thought. He's wobbling on his feet.
Eyes locked on Adele's, Platt repeated, "Who the hell—"