With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  The Elector of Kostroma, an autocrat (albeit one who faced recall at gunpoint at any moment), would know only that Martina Lasowski had made untrue statements to him. Officers of the RCN, also an autocracy, were likely in their heart of hearts to view matters much the same way. Admiral Lasowski would have to resign, disgraced at the climax of a previously successful—if cautious—career.

  “Being between the Senate and a dictator who needs money,” Daniel said aloud, “would make anybody pace the decks. They just don’t happen to be her decks, is all.”

  The admiral was no particular friend of his. She’d made it clear that Lt. Leary had replaced her godson in the delegation by the decision of persons with whom she disagreed. For all that, she’d ignored Daniel rather than working at making his life hell. Daniel liked most people, and Lasowski hadn’t given him reason to add her to the short list of those he didn’t.

  “The way to make that tinpot Kostroman see reason,” Lt. Mon said, “is to park a battleship in orbit over the palace until he decides there’s nothing he’d rather do than kiss our bum. God and all His saints! How long does Walter think there’d be a Kostroman merchant fleet if we declared him an enemy?”

  “Now that,” Cassanos said, coming to life again, “would mean serious prize money!”

  Daniel felt his eyes glaze with the thought of the sudden wealth that could accrue to even a junior lieutenant if hundreds of rich transports became fair targets before they could reach neutral ports. That was dream wealth, though; there’d never been any doubt that the Reciprocity Agreement would be renewed. Even if it weren’t, Kostroma wouldn’t become a hostile power.

  “I was posted from the Hemphill to the inspections department at Harbor Three,” Mon recalled with morose savagery. “I hadn’t been off the books three days when the Hemphill took a transport trying to run four thousand tons of fullerenes into Pleasaunce. And then, instead of a combat tour I’m sent to squire around Admiral Pain-In-the-Ass Lasowski!”

  “I understood you to be discussing your hemorrhoids, Mon,” Weisshampl said to her junior. “If that isn’t what you said, you might want to think about sleeping off the cargo you’ve taken on board tonight.”

  “I’m all right,” Mon muttered to his glass. “I’ll watch my tongue.”

  The Aglaia had an unusual number of officers for a complement of 180 ratings. A corvette of that crew would be under the command of a lieutenant who might be the only commissioned officer aboard. On some small vessels the missileer stood watches, even though that warrant officer wasn’t a spacer like the Chief of Ship and Chief of Rig.

  Even so, meddling by an admiral passenger, which might be bearable on a battleship with a crew of a thousand, would stretch a saint’s patience on the Aglaia. Lasowski had inspected the ratings’ quarters not once but twice on the voyage out. The only way to escape her was to climb one of the masts which drove the vessel through sponge space. Daniel had frequently done just that, but the option wasn’t open to the officers standing watch.

  A ship preparing to enter sponge space with its masts extended in all directions looked like a sea urchin. The mast tips formed the points determining the size and shape of the field against which Cassini energy pressed. The plasma motors were shut down as soon as the ship left the atmosphere; the High Drive was at low output to provide maneuvering way. The masts weren’t stressed for anything approaching 1-gee acceleration when spread.

  When the charge and alignment of the masts was correct, the vessel slipped into the fourth-dimensional Matrix in which the cells of sponge space coexisted. Rather than enter another universe, the ship itself became a separate universe. Its progress in respect to the sidereal universe was again a matter of the masts’ alignment and charge.

  Navigational tables provided a starship’s commander with basic instructions, but the Matrix through which she guided her bubble universe could not be directly sensed. An astrogator used the minute rise and fall in mast charges to plot variations in the Matrix and the corresponding change in the ship’s relation to the sidereal universe.

  A really successful astrogator had a sense that, like perfect pitch, went beyond skill and training. That astrogator’s mind saw into the matrix. His runs were faster, his planetfalls more precise, and when he voyaged beyond the existing charts he brought his ship back.

  Commander Stacey Bergen was an astrogator whose reputation inspired deserved awe in others, his nephew included. But with a quiet and never-spoken assurance very different from the pride that also was a part of his character, Daniel Leary felt he was as able an astrogator as anyone he’d ever met except his Uncle Stacey.

  Lt. Weisshampl got to her feet with a slow grace that belied the amount she’d had to drink. She was a tall woman with the features of someone more petite. Her parents had some status but no money; an aunt, however, had married wealth and provided Weisshampl with the support an officer needed beyond RCN pay.

  She raised her glass. “Fellow officers,” she said, “I give you Command. May she come to all of us, and may we prove worthy of her!”

  “By God, yes!” Cassanos said and gulped his wine. Daniel blinked, for the midshipman’s words were those he’d caught before they reached his own lips.

  Lt. Mon drank with a face like a raincloud. He lowered his empty glass and gripped it in both hands as if to strangle it and himself as well.

  “Would the master like me to bring in the brandy?” Hogg murmured in Daniel’s ear.

  “Brandy?” Daniel repeated. The unexpected word dragged him from a fantasy in which Admiral Daniel Leary stood on the steps of the Senate House to receive the acclaim of an adoring nation.

  “I thought it’d go well now, sir,” Hogg said with a satisfied grin. He wore clean clothes, a loose green shirt over blue trousers with a red cummerbund to tie the ensemble together. Shaving had been neglected in his care to prepare the dinner. Hogg looked like a cheerful pirate at the moment, which was pretty much the reality as well.

  “It’ll go very well indeed, Hogg,” Daniel said. “Bring on the brandy!”

  He leaned back in his chair, a heavy thing of plush and dark wood borrowed from the landlord. He was at peace with the world.

  Some time in the distant past a librarian having a bad day had said something that Daniel must have misinterpreted. Who could be angry about such things when life was a wonderful thing, shadowed only by the absence of command?

  Command would come, as surely as good fellowship and good wine and the stars themselves had come to Daniel Leary!

  * * *

  The Grand Salon where the Elector held formal dinners rose the full height of the palace’s second and third stories, with a rebated clerestory above that. The ceiling was a single enormous fresco, but the light wasn’t good enough for Adele Mundy to see more than a hint of bare limbs and flowing drapery.

  She’d have liked a better view, but since she hadn’t bothered to visit the salon in daylight she didn’t suppose that her interest could be as great as all that. Primarily she was feeling the utter boredom of the gathering.

  “Now …” said the man to her left, a provisions merchant from Kostroma City and the only person seated below Adele at the fourth and lowest table of the dinner. “This is egg salad, of course—”

  He wiggled a dab of vaguely peach-colored matter on his fork; Adele wasn’t sure that “of course” would have been a phrase she used in the identification.

  “—but what kind of egg, I ask you? Not hen as you might think, but domesticated Kostroman Diamondtail!”

  “Pardon me, mistress,” said the member of the Alliance delegation on Adele’s right. He was a husky, dark-haired fellow in his forties who’d said his name was Markos. He spoke Academy-grade Universal with a rasping undertone of the Pleasaunce slums. “I believe I’ve been seated higher than my proper precedence should have allowed. Please accept my apology and change places with me.”

  “I’m sure—” Adele began, then caught herself. “Ah.”

  Even if Markos were a
junior clerk as he’d claimed, he should have been higher as a simple matter of diplomatic checkers. At the head table Admiral Lasowski sat to the Elector’s right while the Alliance chief of mission was on the left of Walter’s mistress, looking sour. Not only had the Cinnabar envoy been given precedence, an admiral’s dress uniform with six full rows of medals and a gorget of honor at the throat completely upstaged the robes of the Alliance civilian.

  The order at the two middle tables was reversed. A grandnephew of Guarantor Porra, a peacock in full plumage, sat at the top while the Cinnabar civil head was two places below him; likewise the two naval captains at table three, an Alliance delegate sitting above Le Golif of the Aglaia—not properly a member of the Cinnabar mission, but present in Lt. Leary’s place.

  It was proper that at table four the mid-ranking functionary from the Cinnabar Navy Office restore balance by being seated higher than Markos; but no member of the delegations for whom the banquet was arranged should have been so low. The notion that Markos should really have been below the Electoral Librarian was ludicrous, a piece of gallantry which Adele knew her looks didn’t justify and nothing else could justify.

  “Yes, thank you for your courtesy, sir,” she said as she rose with Markos to trade places. She could deal with whatever lay beneath the surface of the fellow’s offer when it appeared. For now, the important thing was that Adele no longer sat next to the merchant, whose invitation had evidently been bartered for the food. Adele had begun to doubt that even a free meal would be worth another five minutes of the Kostroman’s rambling boredom.

  Adele sat down. Servants were already removing the settings for this course, so there was no need for her and Markos even to trade flatware.

  She heard her former neighbor address a question in his inevitable nasal whine. “I’m sorry, sir,” Markos said in a loud voice. “I’m deaf in my left ear and I can’t hear a word you say.”

  When Adele had gotten the new data console running three days before, she’d tested its connection to the palace net by accessing the guest list for the banquet to which she’d just received an invitation. The information was protected, but what passed for protection on Kostroma was child’s play for Adele with an extremely powerful processor at her service. She had a talent for information retrieval and had trained at the most advanced center for the purpose in the human universe.

  Markos was not an invited guest at the time she’d checked the list. The Alliance delegate at table four was supposed to be Captain Crowell, a female ground-forces officer; and she should have been two seats down from the Cinnabar bureaucrat.

  An ensemble of Kostroman flautists playing both straight and transverse instruments stood on an internal balcony at second-floor level. Their music echoed as a high, insectile overtone in the huge room. Adele found the effect surprisingly pleasant when mixed with conversation and the clink of the dinner service.

  A light-skinned, tow-haired servant, a native of one of the impoverished northern islands, set the next course in front of Adele. It was minced something on a bed of lettuce. Kostroman lizard was her best guess, but some of the planet’s insect equivalents got very large also.

  Beggars can’t be choosers, and the tiny portions hadn’t yet managed to slake the fires of three weeks of hunger. Adele took a bite and found the meat tasteless but the sauce intriguingly spicy.

  “Do you keep in touch with Mistress Boileau, mistress?” Markos asked pleasantly.

  Adele’s head jerked sideways. Markos took another forkful of food, his attention apparently focused on his meal. He glanced toward her with a bland smile.

  Aloud Adele said, “I haven’t as yet. When I settle in”—she suppressed a grim smile—“I’ll let her know how things are going.”

  She cut a wedge from the mince, noting with pleasure that the fork didn’t tremble in her fingers. “You haven’t been on Kostroma long, Mr. Markos?” she added. She turned to look at him again, her lips wearing the muted smile of strangers talking at a dinner party.

  Markos’s expression didn’t change, but shutters closed behind his eyes. Adele chewed with tiny movements of her jaw. The food was sawdust now.

  He’s deciding what to say. Whether to tell the truth or to lie, and if a lie—which one.

  Oh, she knew the type very well. They came to the Collections not infrequently—and trembled since they couldn’t use a system so complex without help, but they feared to ask for help because their questions could become weapons to use against them. They were folk to whom the truth was always a thing to be determined on the basis of advantage, never spoken for its own sake.

  “Only a matter of hours, mistress,” Markos said with a tinge of grudging approval in his tone. “I arrived on the Goetz von Berlichingen this afternoon. Perhaps you saw us land? The dispatch vessel.”

  “I was busy in the palace all day,” Adele said truthfully. “I have no interest in anything that takes place beyond the library. Not that I could tell one ship from another anyway.”

  She went back to her meal, wishing that she could taste it. Markos had proved he knew her background to see how she’d react; she’d reacted by showing that she knew things about him also. Because of the sort of person he was, Markos would twist like a worm on the hook of how much Adele Mundy knew about him. It should keep him from picking at her during the remainder of the dinner.

  In fact Adele knew almost nothing, and certainly she didn’t know the answer that mattered most to her. It was inevitable that the Alliance delegation would include a high-level intelligence agent.

  What Adele really wanted to know was why the agent had arranged to be seated next to her.

  * * *

  The latrine was in the apartment building’s courtyard, adjacent to the kitchen facilities. Daniel opened the latrine door and stepped out, feeling a great deal easier than he had a few moments before. He’d had a strong temptation to walk onto his suite’s minuscule balcony to save himself a trip down the unlighted stairs.

  He wouldn’t have been the first, of that he was sure, but naval training had held. Personal hygiene was a matter of greater concern in a starship’s close quarters than anyone raised on a country estate could imagine.

  Hogg was in the kitchen, removing another bottle of brandy from the locked pantry. He grinned at Daniel, bobbed his head in salute, and said, “The arrangements’re to your taste, I hope, sir?”

  “Hogg, you’re the wonder of the universe,” Daniel said. He bowed to the servant in drunken formality. A naval officer was never too drunk to carry out his duties….

  Though that raised a question that Daniel supposed he had to address sometime. “But say, Hogg,” he said. There was enough still to drink upstairs that his guests weren’t going to miss him—or the fresh bottle—for a minute longer. “I don’t mean to complain, but are there going to be questions raised about …?”

  He dipped his chin in what could be read as a gesture toward the brandy bottle.

  “Oh, don’t worry yourself, sir,” Hogg said. He eyed the bottle with critical pride. “They’ll all be filled, resealed so’s the vineyard couldn’t tell, and put back neat as you please. The local slosh is plenty good for a jumped-up grocer like Admiral Lasowski anyhow.”

  Daniel grimaced. He thought of saying something about the unopened bottle, but he decided that would be too much like refusing to kiss the girl good-bye in the morning.

  “Ah, not to pry …?” he said instead, prying. Compliance of the purser and stewards in something this blatant couldn’t simply have been bought.

  “One of the stewards thought she could play poker,” said Hogg with a reminiscent smile. “She and her buddies fleeced me all the way out from Cinnabar in florin-limit games, they did. When we got here, I told them I’d gotten into my master’s private funds and could play for real money.”

  Daniel snorted. “My private funds would just about stretch to a florin-limit game, that’s so,” he said.

  “Ah, but they didn’t know,” Hogg said. “Take my word for it, s
ir: the best investment you can make is convincing some snooty bastard that he knows what really he don’t know. The stewards got the purser to back them with the big money, so that made things a good deal simpler.”

  Oh, yes. A purser dipping into his ship’s accounts could spend the rest of his life on a prison asteroid. That was much more of a problem than questions about a dozen bottles of wine souring on a long voyage.

  Daniel laughed loudly. He eyed the stairs, then said, “Go on ahead, Hogg. I’m going to wait a minute to let my head clear before I navigate my way up.”

  Hogg bobbed again obsequiously and shuffled away on the narrow treads. The servant had probably drunk as much as any member of the dinner party, but he had a lifetime of training besides his barrel-shaped body with plenty of mass to stabilize the alcohol. Daniel drank like a naval officer, but Hogg drank like an admiral.

  Two women came out of the landlord’s apartments, talking quickly in a local dialect. They were heavily muffled; in the darkness Daniel wasn’t sure whether they were sisters, nieces, or some combination. He walked farther into the courtyard so as not to be loitering at the door of the latrine.

  Kostroma City had no street lighting, and the citizens shuttered their windows at night. The stars shone as bright as they did in Bantry, but they weren’t the stars of Daniel’s childhood. The “bird” flitting around the eaves tracked its prey by heat-sensitive pits in its snout, not echo location like its equivalent nightflyers on Cinnabar and Earth.

  Even Kostroma’s seawater tasted strange on Daniel’s tongue. It was tinged with a different mixture of salts and less of them in total than the fluid that lapped the shore of Bantry.

  Anger and Uncle Stacey’s stories had taken Daniel Leary far from home. Standing here in the night, though, he knew he’d found another home: the stars in all their wonderful profusion.