With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  The whole business was a black pit that had opened without warning. The librarian’s cold insults were as unexpected as a section of cornice falling on Daniel’s head. He didn’t even know her name!

  Well, Weisshampl could probably make do with “Electoral Librarian.”

  The gardens sloped up from the gate at street level, but a tunnel led down to a grotto within the terraces. Green tile rippled on the tunnel walls and the statuary Daniel could dimly glimpse was of a marine character.

  He should have tipped the gatekeeper as he entered the gardens. That official, a real battleaxe of a woman, had stretched out her hand to Daniel—and stepped aside when she looked at his face.

  He’d been too angry to spare thought to the gatekeeper’s presence or her silent request. God only knew what she’d thought of his scowl. He could pay her when he left, but … his purse was very light.

  Daniel’s mother had died when he was sixteen Terran years old. Corder Leary had attended her several times during her final lingering illness, though he’d been in Xenos on political business when she died.

  Speaker Leary remarried the day after his first wife’s funeral. The bride was Anise, his secretary; a pleasant woman in her forties and very different from the succession of young mistresses whom Daniel had glimpsed wafting in languid beauty through the Leary townhouse in past years.

  Daniel had taken an aircar to Xenos when he heard. He’d had the Devil’s own luck not to wreck on the way, and the Devil in his heart in all truth when he confronted his father. He’d called Anise a whore, though she’d mothered him the times he’d come to Xenos and he felt as much affection for her as he did for anybody but his mother and Hogg. He called his father worse, and his father hadn’t minced words either. For all the difference in their interests, the Leary men had the same volcanic temper.

  Had Corder and Daniel been any relation but parent and child, there’d have been a duel in the back garden that afternoon. As it was, Daniel left to join the navy as his father behind him bellowed for his attorney.

  Four Kostroman laborers were carefully wheeling a handcart holding a Fleyderling in its atmosphere tank down the ramp to the grotto. Humans were in contact with three non-human races which had developed indigenous stardrives. There had never been a conflict between different species: the metabolic requirements were varied enough to make trade difficult and tourism hugely expensive. This Fleyderling must be the equivalent of royalty on its own ammonia world.

  There was no shortage of interstellar conflicts within species, of course.

  Daniel had never fought a duel. It wasn’t the done thing in the country. Oh, there were fellows who were duelists just as there were fellows whose relations with livestock went beyond the normal meaning of animal husbandry. Neither sort were invited to the homes of their neighbors.

  Young people entering the Navy School in Xenos were as prickly about their honor as any set of people on the planet. Cinnabar naval officers—cadets were classed as officers for this purpose—needed their commanding officer’s approval to fight a duel, and as a matter of rigid policy the Commandant of the Navy School refused all such requests. Cadets could resign their appointments, but those who did so were forever debarred from the service.

  That hadn’t been a concern for Daniel. He’d gotten along well with his classmates and later with his fellow officers. He hurt no one by choice and helped those he could; not as a matter of calculation as his sister did, but because it was the way of life Daniel Leary found natural.

  He supposed he needed Admiral Lasowski’s permission to challenge this librarian. The admiral might not want to grant it for diplomatic reasons. If she didn’t, Daniel would have the problem of finding his way back to Cinnabar as a private citizen with no funds and no prospects.

  Assuming he survived the encounter, of course.

  Birds with red throat-sacs trilled as they spun vertical caracoles in the air. At the bottom of their circles they clipped the foliage with their wings. The quick rapping was like rain.

  Like a vast black pit, gaping in front of him. He couldn’t believe this had happened.

  Daniel’s flat pocket chronometer binged at him. He looked at the sun with a sigh. Kostroma’s days were shorter than Cinnabar’s; this one was nearly spent. He was giving a dinner for the Aglaia’s junior officers in an hour and a half.

  Daniel stood up, feeling a trembling weakness in the long muscles of his thighs. That was reaction to the hormones he hadn’t been able to burn off by instant battle in the Electoral Library. He wasn’t sure where this garden was. He didn’t have a good sense of direction on land despite—or perhaps because of—being a natural astrogator.

  He didn’t have enough money to pay a jitney driver to take him to his apartment, but Hogg could probably find the amount. Perhaps he’d do that.

  Daniel Leary walked toward the gate and the boulevard beyond. Like a vast black pit …

  * * *

  Adele Mundy walked to the data console and seated herself. Her three assistants were whispering among themselves. It was the first time she could remember that the lovers had paid real attention to anything beyond one another’s bodies.

  The console felt cool beneath her fingertips. She saw it only as a blur. Nothing of this world was in focus, and there was a ball of compressed ice somewhere beneath her rib cage.

  The Elector was giving a dinner for dignitaries tonight. Adele was invited. Her electoral office, her high birth, and the fact she was a foreign intellectual all caused her to be added to the guest list.

  She’d be at the lowest table in the hall, where the food was likely to be leftovers from the previous day though arranged on an engraved dinner service. Even so, earlier this morning she couldn’t have imagined that she’d want to turn down a free meal. No doubt the cold shock would wear off sufficiently for her to eat nonetheless; and she wasn’t fool enough to think that her attendance was optional.

  The young lieutenant had seemed as open as a garret in summertime. Leary was a common name on Cinnabar—as was Mundy, for that matter. It hadn’t occurred to her to connect the fellow with Speaker Leary, who’d linked undoubted political unrest to fanciful Alliance plots and funding, then had drowned his fiction in the blood of the Mundys of Chatsworth.

  Daniel Leary might be just as guileless as he seemed. The Leary family hadn’t made its political name so much by subtlety as by the ruthlessness with which its members acted if threatened. Speaker Leary brooked no half-measures: his proscription covered every Mundy of Chatsworth over the age of twelve. When inevitably a number of younger children were killed as well, the Speaker added their names to the original list.

  Adele hadn’t been close to her parents, but she knew they were Cinnabar patriots. They were no more likely to take Alliance money than they were to sacrifice infants to Satan!

  And yet …

  Adele’s eyes hurt. She’d sat in a brown study, unseeing but not blinking to wipe her corneas with the necessary moisture and lubricant either. She closed her eyes and rubbed them, then looked grim-faced around the library.

  The assistants had gone back to their affairs; literally, in the case of the couple. Vanness was industriously digging out volumes of bound broadsheets from the past century, works which had nothing but size in common with Moschelitz. A good-hearted soul; probably too stupid ever to handle research questions, but the perfect man to shelve works properly when they were returned.

  And yet …

  Adele’s parents would never have accepted Alliance help, but some of the others proscribed with the Mundys wouldn’t have been so scrupulous. Samir Chandra Das was a high-living lecher whose only choices were bankruptcy or an immediate change in the political establishment and the cancellation of debts. Adele had known that even at sixteen; and had known Chandra Das as well, because he was a frequent visitor to Chatsworth.

  The Parvennys; Rhadymantus of Selbourne; the Marcomann brothers, shipping magnates who’d been hit hard by bad investments—all of them proscribed
as members of the Three Circles Conspiracy, all of them intimates of Adele’s parents and elder kin.

  Adele slammed the heel of her right hand against the console. The tough casing bonged without injury. Vanness hunched his shoulders; the lovers’ whispering paused, then resumed.

  There was a pistol in Adele Mundy’s pocket, a flat weapon of Cinnabar manufacture. She carried it on Kostroma as a sensible precaution for a woman who because of poverty walked home alone at night to lodgings in a bad district.

  But the reason she owned the gun and could blow the head off a rat at fifty meters with it was because of her training as a child. Her parents had been determined that every Mundy of Chatsworth would be able to take a place at the barricades on the day the people gained power and the reactionaries came to take it away from them.

  Marksmanship hadn’t helped her parents when an armored vehicle crushed through the front wall of the Mundy townhouse. Marksmanship hadn’t helped Adele’s ten-year-old sister Agatha either, though what happened to her was later, and slower, and much worse. Nothing could justify what had happened to Agatha.

  Adele closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember ever crying as an adult. People said crying was healthy, that it made them feel better. Perhaps. Personally Adele thought the folk who talked that way were fuzzy-minded weaklings, just as likely to advocate prayer to nature spirits or a diet of bark infusions as a route to health, but perhaps they were right.

  It didn’t affect Adele Mundy, though. She didn’t cry, any more than she took her clothes off to dance on tables. What she did do, what she must do, was prepare this collection for …

  The door opened. Adele opened her eyes and turned.

  The two journeyman carpenters and Master Carpenter Bozeman entered the library. Ms. Bozeman wore a green velvet robe and carried a meterstick plated with one of the noble metals to give it a dull, eternal sheen. Her juniors carried two shelves, this time. The material was veneer-quality hardwood which had been polished as smooth as the meterstick.

  “Good afternoon, mistress librarian,” Bozeman said in a rasping bellow. She was a big woman with a florid face and hair in ringlets beneath her beret. She’d put on the formal garb of her status before coming to ram her point of view down the foreigner’s throat. “We’ve come to set the first pair of shelves for you.”

  Adele got up and walked toward the trio. She should be getting into formal wear for the dinner herself, but first things first.

  The journeymen had entered in front of their superior. Now they moved to Ms. Bozeman’s other side.

  “I believe we’ve had this discussion before, master carpenter,” Adele said in a pleasant tone. She owed Leary a good deal for reminding her of who she was.

  “I hope you’ve come to your—” Mistress Bozeman said.

  Adele gripped the meterstick and pulled it from the carpenter’s hand. She turned and flung the symbol of rank through a window. The sash exploded in shards of glass and splintered wood. More work for the carpenters, Adele supposed.

  “We aren’t going to go over the subject again,” she said. “We’re going to go to your shop now, and then we’re going to take all this lovely and unsuitable wood to a supplier who can provide what I need to do my job. Do you understand, Ms. Bozeman?”

  Adele was approximately half the size of the carpenter. Her smile was genuine because at last she’d seen that the obvious path out of her dilemma was to assert her authority—in the certainty that she had no authority if she didn’t assert it.

  Bozeman’s mouth worked; it was surprisingly small and bow-shaped in a face that otherwise resembled a pie. No words came out. She wiped her empty hands on her robe, crushing splotches in the velvet. She turned in sudden fury on her journeymen and snarled, “Come along, you damned fools! Do you expect me to carry lumber?”

  Adele turned to her own staff. “And you lot come as well,” she said. “Donkey work is probably all you’re good for, but that’s what’s required today.”

  “That’s not our job!” one of the lovers protested.

  Adele felt her face change with the suddenness of ice slipping from a sunlit roof. “Am I not a Mundy of Chatsworth?” she shouted. “If I hear any more insolence, the one who speaks will take the field with me if they’ve any blood to be worth my bullet! And if not, I’ll find a whip that works as well on two-legged beasts as any other. I swear it!”

  The carpenters had already scuttled from the disordered room. Vanness opened his mouth. Adele pointed her finger at his face. He swallowed and padded out of the library with the other two assistants.

  Adele closed the door behind her. “This work is a matter touching my honor,” she said to the Kostromans’ backs. “I advise you to remember that. If to put it right I must shoot the whole lot of you and start over with a staff that knows what it’s doing, then I’ll do just that. Depend on it!”

  One of the lovers had started to whimper. The other moved away so as not to be caught in any thunderbolt that resulted.

  There should be time to transfer the lumber before the dinner, Adele thought; and if not, well, she’d be late. That was a prerogative of a Mundy.

  * * *

  Daniel Leary stood and raised his glass. “Fellow officers,” he said, “I give you the Aglaia. May she always rejoice in good officers!”

  Hogg watched beaming from the hallway. He’d taken over the landlord’s kitchen to prepare dinner for the Aglaia’s four junior commissioned officers—Captain Le Golif was at the Elector’s dinner in Daniel’s place.

  Daniel couldn’t afford red meat at Kostroman prices and Hogg was, truth to tell, no more than a passable cook, but matters had gone well. The pilaf had been adequate, and Bantry was a coastal estate. Nothing could have better trained Hogg to prepare a meal on Kostroma, a planet where fish was the staple and there was almost no land more than fifty miles from the sea.

  Besides, the wine was excellent.

  “And may Admiral Martina bloody Lasowski leave the ship’s officers to do their jobs on the voyage home!” muttered Lt. Mon. His steward had filled about three glasses to every two for the other officers dining.

  They all drank. Wonderful wine, absolutely wonderful.

  Three hours in the company of the Aglaia’s two lieutenants and two midshipmen had returned Daniel’s normal sunny disposition. The wine hadn’t hurt his mood either. No sir, not in the least.

  Lt. Weisshampl belched, stared at her empty glass for a moment, and thought to pat her lips with her napkin.

  “Maybe we could lock down the blast door in the corridor to the passenger suites?” said Midshipman Cassanos, a fresh-faced youth of eighteen on his first commission.

  Midshipman Whelkine was female, a year older, and had never given Daniel a real smile in the three weeks he’d known her on shipboard. Her hands clenched on her glass when Cassanos spoke, but that wasn’t necessarily a response to the words. Whelkine’s skills were well above the norm for officers at her level of experience, but Daniel had never before met anyone as fearful of putting a foot wrong.

  “Midshipmen with interest,” Mon said, fixing Cassanos with eyes like two obsidian knives, “should have sense enough not to insult admirals who can spike any chance of command assignment for those midshipmen in future years. Do you understand me, Cassanos?”

  Cassanos stiffened in his seat, flushing with embarrassment. “Sir,” he said. “I spoke out of turn. I humbly ask the pardon of our host and the assembly.”

  “Did you say something, Cassanos?” Daniel said as he sat down carefully. “Nobody here heard you, I’m sure.”

  Mon’s reaction was kindness, not hypocrisy. He was the second lieutenant of RCS Aglaia, a communications vessel with a light cruiser’s hull and masts but the armament of only a corvette. Space normally given over to weapons and magazines provided passenger suites comparable to an admiral’s accommodation on a First-Class battleship. The delegates to Kostroma travelled swiftly and in the luxury befitting their rank, but without tying up an important naval asset and
putting the nose of Elector Walter III out of joint.

  Mon’s skills as an officer were respected or he wouldn’t have a berth on a showpiece like the Aglaia; but he didn’t have interest, and he hadn’t had either the flair or the good fortune to get a command slot in other ways. Mon would be promoted, slowly but steadily, through a series of staff and ground positions till he retired … unless drink and bitterness led him to say something that the RCN couldn’t overlook.

  Cassanos had a chance. Mon didn’t want the boy to lose it through the misfortune of aping a loser like himself.

  A steward filled Daniel’s glass. The servants were from the Aglaia’s staff, attending this dinner through some arrangement Hogg had made with the purser. Hogg had provided the wine also. As usual he hadn’t volunteered information about his source of supply and Daniel had determinedly refused to ask. Daniel was scrupulous about the provenance of his normal fare, but this dinner was a matter of honor. If he knew that Hogg had raided Admiral Lasowski’s private stock, he’d have to do something about it.

  “I served under Lasowski when she was captain of the Thunderer,” Lt. Weisshampl said. The wine in her refilled glass was the rusty color of a dried cherry; she stared with solemn intensity at the highlights on its surface. “A cautious officer. Not a person to trust a subordinate to do her job—but fair, wouldn’t invent a problem if there wasn’t one. Just cautious.”

  Technically the Aglaia’s crew weren’t subordinate to Admiral Lasowski in the chain of command. The admiral and her staff were passengers on the RCS Aglaia, a vessel under the command of Captain Le Golif. Nobody who’d ever met an admiral believed that would be the reality, but Daniel knew the Aglaia’s situation was worse than most.

  As Weisshampl said, Admiral Lasowski was a cautious officer—but she was also a person who used minutiae to settle her mind from the pressures of her real duties. Lasowski had the responsibility of satisfying Walter III with arrangements on which her honor would ride, but she knew also that the Cinnabar Senate would repudiate those arrangements if a majority of its members believed that was best for the Republic.