With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  The great wooden doors into the palace were open. A squad of guards whose berets were quartered in the Hajas colors, silver and violet, stood nearby. Their weapons, slung or leaning against the wall, were mostly submachine guns which accelerated pellets to high velocity by electromagnetic pulses. One guard had an impeller that threw slugs of greater weight and penetration.

  A line of scars, filled with plastic but visible because of their lighter hue, crossed the right-hand doorpanel at waist height. Somebody’d raked the doorway with an automatic impeller, probably on the night Walter Hajas became Elector. Maybe one of the present guards had been at the grips of the big weapon then….

  Daniel climbed the steps to the entrance, feeling fire in his shins each time he raised his leg. Kostroma City was as flat as the lagoon from which it’d been reclaimed, but the many arched bridges between Daniel’s apartment and the palace had taken their toll.

  Hogg, Daniel’s manservant, had offered to drive him in a three-wheeled jitney of the type that was universal in the city. Daniel had walked instead as the best way to see the city. In hindsight, he thought that perhaps he could’ve seen enough of Kostroma from the jitney’s back seat.

  A Cinnabar naval officer was expected to have servants. A wealthy lieutenant, the sort of fellow Daniel would have been had not he and his father disowned one another, might have a dozen servants in port and several even on shipboard during war service (though all but one of the latter would be ratings paid from the officer’s pocket for additional services).

  Hogg was neither fish nor fowl: no rich man’s sophisticated valet, but not a sailor either. Hogg was a countryman in his early fifties, balding and cherubic to look at. He’d been Daniel’s watcher as an infant and his servant in later years.

  Hogg had taught Daniel the history and legends of the Leary family; had guided him through every copse and ravine of the vast Bantry estate; and had spanked the boy with a hand hard enough to drive nails the day Daniel struck his mother in a six-year-old’s tantrum.

  Mistress Leary had never known about the spanking. She’d have dismissed Hogg in a heartbeat if she’d learned, despite Hogg’s long service with the family. Daniel had been aware of that; but there were matters for mothers, and other matters that men settled among themselves.

  Daniel apologized to both of them, mother and servant, for behaving in an unworthy fashion. Looking back on it, he thought that afternoon had been his making as a man.

  Hoggs had been retainers of the Learys of Bantry for as far back as the parish records ran. Mostly Hoggs appeared in those records as smugglers and poachers; in that, too, Daniel’s servant ran true to type. Daniel hadn’t asked how Hogg came by the jitney, because he was pretty sure he didn’t want to know.

  The Hajas guards ignored the Cinnabar lieutenant while they argued about a professional handball match. Daniel didn’t suppose he looked like an assassin, but the guards’ lackadaisical attitude disturbed him as a military professional. The folk guarding the Senate House in Xenos were polite, but strangers didn’t enter the building without someone to vouch for them.

  The Elector’s Palace was the seat of government as well as a residence and function hall. Inevitably there were more bureaucrats than space for them. A dozen desks were set against the inside of the staircases sweeping up both sides of a vast oval entryway. Clerks—very junior clerks if their cheap clothing was anything to go by—hunched there over papers or, in a few cases, electronic data terminals.

  The vestibule was a bedlam of strange dialects and Universal spoken with a Kostroman accent. Folk passed up and down the stairs, talking in voices that echoed from the domed ceiling two flights above. Daniel had been raised in a great household, had lived in a dormitory at Navy School, and had served in warships whose large crews meant each rating shared a bunk with a rating of the other division. This cacophony had a feel of home; he smiled broadly again.

  One of the desks in the vestibule faced outward so the man seated at the terminal there could also keep an eye on his fellows. He was gray and thin; pinned at his throat was a short satin shoulder wrap in the Hajas colors. Daniel doubted the fellow’s title was anything so exalted as “office manager,” but he clearly had authority over this assemblage of clerks mostly half his age.

  Daniel slipped a coin from a purse that was extremely flat already and held it in his palm as he approached the senior clerk’s desk. The fellow was keying in numbers with his right hand while his left tilted a sheet of handwritten paper to catch light from the electric sconce attached to the balustrade above him.

  “Sir!” Daniel said cheerfully, noting the surprise in the eyes of a man who probably hadn’t been addressed by a stranger at any time in the past week. “I wonder if one of your underlings can guide me to where I want to go? I could wander all day in a building so impressive as this.”

  He brought the coin out in a trick Hogg had taught him, walking it between his knuckles without ever touching it with a fingertip. It was Cinnabar money, a five-florin piece: clear plastic with a gold inner layer that danced and winked in the ill-lit vestibule. In the country five florins was a day’s wage; in Xenos it would buy a meal without wine. A Kostroman would lose part of the value in changing it, but Cinnabar coinage was flashier and more impressive than the local scrip.

  “What?” said the clerk. “Well, an usher …”

  It took a moment for his eyes to focus on the coin; then they grew wider. “On the other hand,” he continued, “I suppose Russo could—”

  He looked at the young woman at the desk beside him; all the clerks were now staring at their senior and the uniformed stranger. In sudden decision the man stood up himself. “No!” he said. “I’ll guide you myself, good sir. You’d like to find the apartments of the Cinnabar citizens staying here, I suppose?”

  “Not at all,” said Daniel, passing the coin to the Kostroman with a sweep of his hand. “My uncle was a great explorer himself, and I hope to follow his example. I came here to see what information may be in the Electoral Library.”

  He beamed at the blinking clerk.

  * * *

  If Adele Mundy had spent the past hour talking to the wall of the cabinet shop, she wouldn’t now feel a burning desire to flay the wall with a riding whip. That was the only difference she could see between that and her discussion with Master Carpenter Bozeman.

  If she heard the phrase “I’m sorry, mistress, but we do things different here on Kostroma” just one more time, she’d scream.

  There were four people in the library: the two lovers, who were ignoring the stranger deliberately instead of merely being concerned with their own activity; Vanness, who because he couldn’t ignore the stranger but wasn’t sure he ought to approach the fellow, was bouncing like a child who needs a toilet; and the stranger himself.

  The stranger was a man wearing a gray suit with closer tailoring than the Kostroman fashion. His back was to the door, and he was leafing through a folio volume that dated from before the Hiatus.

  “Sir!” Adele said. “I’m the Electoral Librarian. May I ask who you are?”

  If he dropped the book or tore a page, she’d—

  The fellow turned. The gray suit was a uniform. He was a little on the plump side, with sandy hair and a smile that made him look even more of a boy than he clearly was.

  “Honored to meet you, mistress,” he said. “I’m Lieutenant Daniel Leary, Republic of Cinnabar Navy. Sorry I can’t shake hands with you but—”

  He waggled the folio slightly. He had a hand under either board. To turn pages he’d apparently rested a corner on the stack of deed boxes beside him in lieu of a proper reading table.

  “—a book like this takes precedence over courtesy. Did you realize this is a first edition of Moschelitz’s Zoomorphology of the Three Systems? I can’t read the Russiche, but I recognize the plates from Ditmars’s translation. This original color is so much better!”

  “Yes, I do recognize Moschelitz,” Adele said dryly; though she might not have, and it
was a wonder equal to a western sunrise than anybody else on Kostroma did. “You’re an information specialist yourself, sir?”

  Leary closed the huge volume with the care its size and age required. He’d taken it from the middle of a stack. It was a knife to Adele’s heart that somebody who understood books should know that she’d allowed it to lie with that weight on it simply because the task of organizing this mire of information had daunted her.

  “No, not me,” Leary said. His engaging grin slipped a trifle as he—and Adele, from where she stood—looked for a place he could safely put Moschelitz down. “I’m a bit of an amateur naturalist, though. My uncle, Commander Stacey Bergen—perhaps you’ve heard of him?”

  “No, I’m afraid the name’s new to me,” Adele said. “Here, I’ll take that. Perhaps I can store it….”

  “At my lodgings,” she’d been about to say, but her room was apt to be broken into at any time. If the concierge, Ms. Frick, wasn’t a scout for burglars, then her face sadly belied her.

  The only safety for the folio was that nobody knew how valuable it was. To that end, leaving it as part of the undifferentiated mass of the library was the best chance of safety.

  “I think maybe on that stack there,” Leary said, nodding toward three wooden boxes that Adele hadn’t gotten around to opening. They might be filled with business ledgers for all she knew. He didn’t hand over the book. “I know it’s a little high, but it seems a solid base.”

  “Yes, all right,” Adele said. She couldn’t lift the folio down herself without a ladder, but she wasn’t likely to need to. Vanness could reach it….

  Leary walked to the piled boxes, stepping over and around other stacks with an ease that Adele envied. Part of being in the navy, she supposed. Certainly the starships on which she’d travelled, even the luxury liner that took her from Cinnabar to Blythe, had been cramped. Warships were probably worse.

  Leary raised the folio over his head, holding it at the balance. He put the book squarely on top of the pile without rubbing the cover on the wood as she’d feared.

  “The reason I asked if you’d heard of my uncle,” he said as he concentrated on his task, “is that you’ve a Cinnabar accent yourself. Uncle Stacey had a dozen species named after him by the academics who described specimens he brought back home.”

  Adele felt her lips tighten. She’d known there was a Cinnabar naval delegation on Kostroma. One of Mistress Bozeman’s excuses for delay was her need to refit the wardrobes in the suite assigned to the guests.

  In an even tone Adele said, “I was born on Cinnabar, but I haven’t lived there in a very long time. I prefer to think of myself as a citizen of the galaxy.”

  Leary nodded pleasantly and stepped back from the boxes. “That was my Uncle Stacey too,” he said. “Not that he isn’t a patriot, and no one ever mistook him for a coward either. He didn’t push to get a combat posting, even though he knew as well as anybody that a few battle stars are the surest route to promotion.”

  He shook his head and laughed. “If I’m ever half the astrogator my uncle is, I’ll be proud,” he continued. “But this—”

  He pinched the breast of his gray uniform, beneath the single drab medal ribbon.

  “—is the Republic of Cinnabar Navy, after all. I guess I’m as fit to fight my country’s enemies as the next fellow, and if I get promoted for it—”

  His smile lit the room.

  “—well, that’s fine with me too.”

  Adele didn’t laugh with Leary, but she felt her lips twisting in a grin. He seemed very young. The chances were his attitude would seem young to a person like Adele Mundy even if he were fifty years her senior. Leary’s enthusiasm was infectious, though, and he knew something about books.

  She squirmed to the logbooks Vanness had unpacked earlier in the morning. “You might be interested in these,” she said, lifting the top one and opening the metal cover. The sheets within were handwritten and for the most part limited to dates and numbers. “They’re hardcopy logs of pre-Hiatus vessels. So far as I know—”

  And no one but Mistress Boileau herself might know better.

  “—no electronic media as old as them survive. Because this ship’s officers backed up their computer logs with old-fashioned holograph, we still have a record of the voyages.”

  Leary took the log with a reverence due its age—though in fact the nickel-steel case by which he handled it was about as sturdy as the palace’s walls. He turned the first page at an angle to the light and read, “San Juan de Ulloa, out of Montevideo. A vessel from Earth herself, mistress, and here we hold it in our hands.”

  His grin broadened. “Space will teach you something about not trusting equipment no matter how often you’ve checked it, that’s the truth,” he added. “If you survive, that is.”

  “I apologize for the condition of the collection,” Adele said bitterly as Leary scanned sheets one at a time. They’d been filled out loose, then clamped between the covers. “I only arrived three weeks ago, but frankly unless I find a way to get real workmen instead of artists too good to throw up simple shelves, I don’t see that the situation will have changed in three years.”

  A sort of smile—not a pleasant sort—quirked the corner of Adele’s tight mouth. “Though of course I won’t be here myself,” she said. “I’ll probably have been executed for murdering a master carpenter, or whatever they do to murderers here.”

  “They were using the Hjalstrom notational system …” Leary said. “Or a precursor of it, at least. That was supposed to have come from Spraggsund University near the end of the Hiatus.”

  He closed the metal covers, then looked directly at Adele. “I don’t mean to intrude in another citizen’s business, mistress,” he said, “but sometimes going outside a bureaucracy is easier than going through it. My manservant Hogg is very good at finding people who can do things. If you’d like him to locate some common carpenters …?”

  Adele snorted. The library budget, if there was one, wasn’t under her control. On Bryce, Walter’s envoys had given her a travel honorarium. By stretching it Adele had managed to survive since her arrival, but no member of the Elector’s staff had flatly admitted it was even their responsibility to arrange for the librarian’s future pay. At the end of the week her concierge would be looking for the rent, and Adele would very likely be trying to find room for a bedroll here in the chaos.

  “I appreciate the offer,” she said, “but I regret that I’m not in a position to take advantage of it. Unless your man could find the carpenters’ wages as well as the carpenters themselves.”

  Leary grinned, but there was a serious undertone in his voice as he said, “I really don’t dare suggest that, mistress. While I don’t think Hogg would be caught, I’m afraid his methods would bring spiritual discredit on a Leary of Bantry. What Hogg does on his own account is his own business, but if I set him a task …”

  He laughed again, in good humor but apology.

  The world had gone gray around Adele. “You said, ‘a Leary of Bantry,’ sir,” she said. Her voice too was without color. “You’d be related to Speaker Leary, then?”

  Leary grimaced. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Corder Leary is my father, though we’d both be willing to deny it. If you mean, ‘Will I inherit Bantry,’ though, no—I certainly will not.”

  He tried to smile, but the expression that formed was a mixture of emotions too uncertain to identify. “In the first place, Father looked healthy enough to live another fifty years when I last saw him six years ago. My elder sister is the proper heir anyway—the Learys don’t divide their estates, which is why Bantry is still Bantry. And finally, my father and I are not on terms of intimacy. Or any terms at all.”

  “I see,” Adele said. Her voice came from another place, another time; from the past that had led to this present. If there was a deity, which Adele very much doubted, it had a sense of humor.

  She crossed her hands behind her back. “Lieutenant Leary,” she said, “I have a great deal of wo
rk to do before this collection is ready for visiting laymen like yourself. You’re a Cinnabar citizen and I will presume a gentleman. I therefore request that you cease to trouble me and my staff until such time as the Electoral Library is opened to the public.”

  Vanness had been standing nearby, listening to the discussion of books and media. His mouth opened in amazement as he turned quickly away. His cheeks were already showing a flush.

  Daniel Leary reddened also. He replaced the logbook on the pile and made a stiff half-bow. “Good morning, mistress,” he said. “No doubt we’ll meet again.”

  Leary strode from the library by a circuitous route to avoid passing close to Adele on his way. He moved with a caged grace.

  An interesting fellow, Adele thought as she watched him leave. Bright, knowledgeable, and she’d be the first to admit it had been pleasant to hear a Cinnabar accent again. There hadn’t been many on Bryce, not since the war restarted.

  And the son of Speaker Corder Leary.

  * * *

  Daniel Leary sat on a bench in a terraced formal garden that was probably half a mile from the Elector’s Palace. He wasn’t sure of the distance or even the direction; he’d simply walked till the adrenaline burned off and he needed to sit.

  He hadn’t been so angry since the afternoon he broke with his father.

  Well-dressed Kostromans, mostly in couples, leaned on railings or sauntered along promenades of limestone figured with white inclusions. The plantings were of exotic species—which meant that Daniel absently recognized several common varieties from Cinnabar as well as other ornamentals which human taste had spread beyond their original worlds. The gardens hadn’t been well maintained in at least a decade, but the present ragged profusion had a certain charm.

  He’d have to challenge her, of course. The insult had been too deliberate to ignore. He’d take care of that in the next few days. Lieutenant Weisshampl of the Aglaia, the communications vessel that had brought the delegation to Kostroma, would probably act as his second. Weisshampl had served under Uncle Stacey….