With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  As she worked, Daniel cleared his throat. He hadn’t any good reason to be upset, but …

  “I am wearing a uniform,” he said, returning to Adele’s first comment in the corridor. “This is a utility uniform, perfectly proper for an officer who’s not expected to formally represent the RCN to civilians or members of other military forces.”

  He plucked the loose, gray fabric. It probably did look like pajamas, but he had only one 2nd Class uniform—and the Full Dress, which wasn’t paid for, God knew how he’d do that, and which he’d had tailored for him because he was sure he’d need it for formal receptions on Kostroma.

  Daniel cleared his throat. “I’ve been chasing life at the harbor’s edge and I thought these were more suitable….”

  Lasowski would skin him alive if she knew he’d been wearing utilities in public whatever the technical wording of the regulations. There wasn’t much chance the admiral would learn since she seemed barely conscious that Daniel was alive, but … In any case, Adele hadn’t had any intention of probing a sore point with her remark.

  “Huh,” she said. “That’s odd. From the address this should be a sermon file in the headquarters of the Established Church.”

  Daniel leaned over her shoulder. The air-formed holographic display was visible only over a narrow angle; all Daniel could see from behind her was a quiver of color with no more substance than an image of the aurora borealis.

  “‘As the hydropter wallows in the greatest foulness but nonetheless ascends into the upper air,’” Adele said. It was a moment before Daniel realized she was quoting. “‘So a man may hope, no matter how great his sin, to achieve the portals of heaven so long as he turn his face upward.’”

  She touched her controls again. “I think,” she said dryly, “that if we search a zoology database under ‘hydropter’ we may find a more useful—there, I think.”

  She rose, turning the console’s chair over to Daniel. He slid into it gratefully. At the top of the display area was the image of a creature identical to the one he’d bundled again into the folds of his handkerchief.

  Daniel brought up the text. He could use the data unit—there was nothing unfamiliar about its controls—but he suspected he could have spent days at the terminal without getting the results the librarian had achieved in a minute or two.

  “I gave your men the day off,” Adele said behind him. “The locals have a holiday. Quite apart from fairness, they wouldn’t be able to get into the warehouses for the stores they need.”

  “Fairness is important,” Daniel said as he scanned the description of the hydropter; indeed, a member of the Barchidae. “A Cinnabar rating won’t complain about hardship, but God help the officer he thinks is unfair. As for the stores—if Hogg couldn’t get through the lock, Woetjans is quite capable of blasting the door down.”

  He rotated images of adult and juvenile hydropters. The display was so sharp the creatures looked solid. This was a naval-quality system, a light-year more advanced than anything he’d thought to find in Kostroma City.

  “I can’t get over the amount of work your sailors have done,” Adele repeated. Her voice had moved away; she was beside one of the new cases, filled now with books arranged only by size. “And they took time to clear living quarters for themselves in the subbasement here.”

  She paused. “Ah, I hope that was all right? Ms. Woetjans said it’d save transit time and have other advantages.”

  “Quite all right,” Daniel said. “She checked with me and I informed Maisie—that’s Lieutenant Weisshampl. It keeps the detachment closer to its work, and I gather makes it easier to gather the necessary materials outside duty hours.”

  “Ah, I meant to ask about that,” the librarian said in a tone that implied she wouldn’t have raised the subject if Daniel hadn’t brought it up. “Ah, I trust the wood and other materials aren’t coming from navy stores?”

  “No,” Daniel said, “and the arrangement is quite legal.”

  He grinned broadly and continued, “Which is why I was informed about the details. You have a warrant from the Elector to receive goods and services for the library operation?”

  “That’s right,” Adele said in puzzlement, “but it’s worthless because all expenditures have to be approved by the Chancellor. Her approval hasn’t been forthcoming even to the extent of my outstanding pay.”

  Daniel swiveled out of the console and stood; he didn’t like to be seated while talking to a person who was standing.

  “There’s quite a lot of construction and reconstruction in Kostroma City,” he explained. The idea had been his, though it couldn’t have gone anywhere without Hogg’s local contacts. “In the palace, but elsewhere as well.”

  “That’s right,” Adele agreed. She took in information the way a mudhole drank stones, a mild plop to indicate receipt and then a blank surface again.

  “Quite a lot of what’s being torn out or covered over would be considered valuable art back in Xenos,” Daniel said. “Mosaics, frescoes, ornamental railings. Your warrant gives Hogg the right to collect that sort of thing and arrange with the officers of Cinnabar transports to carry them home. The difference in what Hogg pays local workmen for scrap and what he’s getting for works of art from the officers covers the cost of shelving very nicely.”

  He coughed delicately. “With something left over, I assume, which is no more than proper. Ratings who do work beyond their normal duties are paid extra, and my personal finances are such that I’d really prefer those charges not come from my purse.”

  His chuckle had a hollow sound in his own ears.

  Adele laughed merrily for the first time since Daniel had met her. “I’ve always claimed information was the most valuable resource there was,” she said. “I’m glad to see you and your manservant have been able to achieve more tangible results from the theory than I ever did.”

  Daniel walked over to the west wall, following what were now straight aisles between neat stacks of boxes in place of the jumble things had been in the first time he saw the room. Three panes of a window had been smashed out. The laths, putty, and glass for the repairs were piled beside the casement but at the moment a sheet of clear plastic was taped over the hole.

  He pulled up a corner of the plastic, stuck his handkerchief through, and shook the hydropter out into freedom. It dropped several feet, then rose again on membranous wings to whir slowly toward the harbor.

  “They’re strong flyers,” he said as he watched the shimmering flight. “They colonized islands over hundreds of miles of open water even before they started hitching rides with the early colonists. Saves me carrying it back myself.”

  There was no shortage of hydropters on the tidal flats. If he’d had use for a speciman he’d have killed this one without a qualm. Daniel didn’t care to do harm out of sheer laziness, though; not even to a bug.

  The hydropter was out of sight. Daniel turned and smiled a trifle wanly. It hadn’t been likely that he’d find an unknown species in Kostroma Harbor. “A very common insect, it appears; interesting only to me.”

  A popping sound rippled from outside the building. That would be fireworks signaling the start of the Founder’s Day activities, though he’d be surprised if anything significant happened in the next half hour.

  The buzz and shuffle of conversation in the front corridor grew louder as Kostromans moved toward the portico. The spectators here were middling merchants from Kostroma City or nobles from islands at a distance from the capital. The very rich and powerful sat with Walter III on the grandstand in the plaza, but those who’d gained entry to the palace were the next stage in local importance.

  “I’m concerned about the conditions your sailors are living in,” Adele said with a frown. “I know it was their choice, but they’ve simply emptied an alcove that was used to store decades of junk. It’s clean, now—I looked in on them. But there isn’t nearly enough space for twenty people to live in.”

  Daniel laughed. “I’ll take you aboard the Aglaia,” h
e said. “That’ll show you cramped—and a communications ship has an enormous amount of room compared to a corvette with an equal crew. Besides—”

  His tone changed slightly. “Most of the detachment are riggers, you see. Folk who spend their duty hours at the edge of the universe. The Matrix is a glow they can touch and there’s nobody nearer than the rigger on the next antenna. They like to have their living quarters cramped.”

  Another salvo of fireworks sounded. The display would lose a great deal at midday, but the Elector had wanted sunlight for the floats and tableaux of the procession.

  “Look,” Daniel said, “the other reason I came to see you now was because this is a perfect place to see the parade. I’ll share my goggles—”

  He tapped the band squeezing down the soft brim of his fatigue cap.

  “—and you can tell me what’s going on.”

  “Fighting that crowd?” Adele said, looking doubtfully toward the door. She couldn’t see the Kostroman spectators from this angle, but their noise had risen to a sullen roar.

  “Oh, no!” Daniel said. “I’ve found us a much better place than that.”

  He offered the librarian his hand. “I hope,” he added with a grin of anticipation, “that you’ve got a good head for heights.”

  * * *

  “My God,” Adele said as she faced the peach-colored expanse of roofing tiles. The thirty-degree downslope was bad enough but the way it stopped ten feet away, straight as a knife-edge, at the gutter—that was terrifying.

  The spectators below in Fountain Street cheered. The sound had seemed louder when she was in the library; either the palace hallways had channeled the noise, or her own fear was numbing her ears. Seabirds wheeled above and keened like lost souls.

  “See?” Daniel called cheerfully over his shoulder as he walked—not crawled, walked—toward the gutter. “I told you it’d be easy once we were up the ladder.”

  “Yes,” Adele said. “You did tell me that.”

  To her the most amusing part of the whole business was the fact that an hour before she’d have truthfully said that she wasn’t afraid to die. It appeared that she was, however, afraid to mash herself to a pulp as the climax to a hundred-foot fall. She supposed it was vanity.

  The ladder onto the roof was in an alcove off the south stairwell; the hatch was the front of a small glazed cupola. Adele hadn’t known the route existed until Daniel led her to it. The iron ladder was bolted against the brick wall. It was absolutely vertical. Water leaking from the hatch slicked the iron and covered it with flaking rust.

  Adele squirmed out onto the tiles. Sunlight had warmed them, but the glaze was smooth. She started down, realizing immediately that she should have backed instead of proceeding nose-first.

  Daniel squatted at the edge of the roof. He turned and smiled at her, looking like a friendly gargoyle. “Ah?” he said. “Would you like a hand?”

  “I’m all right,” Adele snapped. “I’m just not used to this.”

  Daniel nodded and returned his attention to the crowd below, slipping his goggles over his eyes. She wasn’t sure whether he was being polite or if he simply took her statement at face value. Daniel Leary wasn’t, quite clearly, a man who did things by indirection.

  “An RCN officer has to be able to rig the antennas,” Daniel said musingly as he looked at the street. “Has to be able to do all the jobs on a warship, actually, but the one that’s likely to wash out a midshipman is rigging. ‘Young gentleman’ you may be on the ship’s books, but you’re trained the same as a rating recruited straight off a farm.”

  Adele concentrated on crawling, moving one limb at a time. The tiles were half-round sections of ceramic pipe laid each over the end of the next tile below. The ridged surface was hard on her knees but there was no way she’d have been able to walk down the way Daniel had, as calm as if he were at ground level.

  All she’d have to do was roll forward dizzily and she would be at ground level, no question.

  “The antenna controls are hydraulic,” Daniel continued. “Mechanical on some ships, but that’s rare. You can’t use electrical power to shift the rig. Can’t use radio when you’re in the Matrix because even a tiny signal distorts the field and the ship goes God knows where. There’s no more alone than that.”

  Adele’s fingers touched the lip of the stone gutter. Verdigrised copper downspouts thrust out every twenty feet of its length. The only gargoyles on the Elector’s Palace were those in its internal decoration.

  Daniel put his hand beside hers on the gutter though his eyes remained fixed on the crowd. “Use my arm as a brace as you get yourself turned around,” he said.

  “Thank you,” Adele said. She gripped his wrist with her left hand and rotated her legs under her. She didn’t need the help, but it would have been impolite to refuse—and it was a help.

  His arm felt as firm as a piece of structural tubing.

  “They say ‘One hand for the ship and the other for yourself,’” Daniel said, “but you can’t always do that. If a joint’s frozen or a valve is bleeding fluid, you need both hands for the job … and you use them, even though if you drift and the ship leaves you behind it’ll be like you never existed.”

  Adele put her heels in the gutter but deliberately crossed her hands in her lap instead of bracing them behind her. She took deep breaths and forced herself to look down on Fountain Street. Crews were rolling a float up the palace’s entrance drive to the waiting grandstands. It was supposed to be a spherical starship.

  “I love standing at the top of an antenna, watching the universe throb,” Daniel said softly. “It’s like being a part of everything that ever was or ever will be.

  “Here,” he said. He seemed embarrassed to have been so talkative. He took off his goggles and offered them to Adele. “The sign says this was the first landing on Kostroma, by slowboat. I’d thought Kostroma dated from after sponge-space astrogation.”

  “Umm,” Adele said. She held the goggles to her eyes instead of strapping them on. The image was bright and perfectly clear despite being magnified by something on the order of forty times. A pair of servants carried a banner between them on poles. When the angle was right she could read the legend: CAPTAIN WANG’S COLONY—2706 ANNO HEJIRA.

  The servants’ skin-tight suits looked like no garb Adele had ever seen before. She supposed it was somebody’s idea of what people wore in the days mankind was limited to the Solar System.

  Adele returned the goggles and slid her personal data unit from its pocket. She sniffed in amusement at the qualm she’d felt at bringing it out: she was even more afraid of dropping the computer than she was of falling.

  Using the wands that she preferred to the virtual keyboard, she linked to the base unit in the library below and went searching. The bright sun made her think she should have worn a hat, but she wasn’t sure she owned one that would have stayed on in the breeze here on the tiles.

  Martial music began to play, its strains severely attenuated by the time they reached Adele’s ears. “The float’s in front of the grandstand now,” Daniel explained with the goggles over his eyes again. He didn’t ask what she was doing. “Eight people have gotten out—they can’t have had much more room than they would’ve in a real starship. Especially a slowboat. One of them’s claiming the planet, I gather.”

  “Just as I thought!” Adele said in triumph. All her fear had vanished since she got to work with the data unit. “The first reference to Captain Wang is in a post-Hiatus history of the Swartzenhild clan. That claims that Adria Swartzenhild was Wang’s navigator and responsible for bringing the ship safely to Kostroma when the original calculations would have taken them past the system and into the eternal dark.”

  “Huh!” Daniel said, turning his head toward her. She supposed the goggles adjusted for nearby objects otherwise he was staring into one of her nasal pores—but it still made him look like a frog. “So that means there was an early colony after all.”

  “No, it means there wasn’t,”
Adele said in satisfaction. “If the earliest reference is only three hundred years back and in a self-serving source, there’s no evidence whatever. All the later references repeat the Swartzenhild account with embellishments and sometimes name changes.”

  She smiled. “Changes to the name of whoever’s telling the story, that is.”

  A frown furrowed Daniel’s forehead as he turned back to the tableau. “Simone Hajas is saving Captain Wang from a mutiny,” he reported as figures shifted in front of the grandstand. “Look—”

  He raised his goggles to meet Adele’s eyes. “So you mean the story couldn’t be true because it happened to the person telling it? Her family, I mean.”

  “No,” Adele said. “I mean that if there’s no record of the story for sixteen hundred years, and if the person who discovers the information is employed by the Swartzenhilds, who have risen from obscurity to trading wealth in less than a generation—both of which are the case—then the balance of the probabilities are that the story is an invention.”

  Her smile was cold. A finger-high plant grew from a joint in the roof tiles where windblown dirt had given it lodgment. Adele twisted off the dry head.

  “The probability of it being false,” she continued, “is about the same that this seed will fall if I throw it over the side.”

  She leaned over the gutter and dropped the bit of plant. It fluttered away toward the ground.

  In sudden embarrassment she added, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—”

  Daniel broke into bellowing laughter. He slapped her on the back and cried, “Fair enough! You won’t tell me how to rig a ship for the Matrix and I won’t argue with you about history!”

  “Well, it’s not so much history as information,” Adele muttered. “The first question is always whether the person who says something can know the truth. This time the answer was, ‘Not really.’”

  Daniel passed her the goggles again. Though the image through the electronic amplifier was sharp, Adele couldn’t hold it steady enough to be of much use. For politeness’s sake she watched the end of the skit before she handed them back.