With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  The actors climbed back into the globular float. It rolled down Fountain Street in a haze of recorded music.

  The next event was a group of people in checked robes, led by a lyre-shaped metal standard from which ribbons dangled. The legend stamped on the bars of the lyre couldn’t be read from this angle, but they were obviously some guild or other.

  “No Leary on record joined the RCN,” Daniel said as he watched. “Till me. The Bergens, though, my mother’s family—they were spacers as far back as the end of the Hiatus. And never a greater one than my Uncle Stacey, either.”

  Additional bodies of marchers followed the first. Some of them played musical instruments; all wore finery and carried banners or symbols of their craft. A cylindrical float, colored silver in contrast to the gold of the slowboat, was being wheeled toward the stands where it would be introduced into the line of march.

  “My father made Uncle Stacey manager of the repair yards at Bantry when he retired,” Daniel said. “Stacey brought some of his retired warrant officers to run the hands-on work and the business side, but he did the testing himself. Every spacer’s heard of Commander Stacey Bergen, even the ones who never got out of the Cinnabar system. The yard does three times the business under Uncle Stacey than it had before him.”

  Adele wondered whether this personable young man had known anyone he could talk to since he joined the navy. There were more ways to lose your family than in the slaughter of a proscription.

  The cylindrical “starship” was moving into place before the grandstand. “The Second Landing,” Daniel read. “3381 Anno Hejira.”

  Then he added in the same tone of cool reportage, “Mind you, Father never ceases to say that only his charity saves his wife’s brother from begging on the street. There could be some truth to that. Uncle Stacey isn’t much of a businessman.”

  “This is quite real,” Adele said, scrolling up her display. “A secondary colonization from Topaz, under the Princess Cecile Alpen-Morshach. And there was a Hajas …”

  Daniel touched a control on the frame of his goggles. “Emilius Hajas, Commander of the Royal Bodyguard,” he said. “Who it appears is personally laying out the site of Kostroma City. How did there chance to be a Hajas in both the first and second colonies, do you suppose?”

  “According to the list of crew and colonists,” Adele said dryly, “Emilius Hajas was a rigger with a series of disciplinary charges pending. He apparently deserted on Kostroma.”

  “To the great relief of his watch commander, I shouldn’t wonder,” Daniel said. “A colony ship must be hell on crew discipline. A training ship’s bad enough, full of recruits who don’t know one hand from the other.”

  He raised his goggles again to look at her. “That’s all in your little handset?” he said, nodding to the data unit on Adele’s lap.

  “I’m linked to the library unit,” she explained. “And through that to the whole net. There’s a transmission lag since signals in both directions have to go through the satellite constellation, but I’m so used to this …”

  She smiled at the little computer. She knew the expression was warmer than anything living had seen on her face for many years.

  “… that I almost prefer it to using the big unit directly.”

  A band of children in Hajas silver-and-violet followed the second float. They were graduated by height. Adele wasn’t sure she’d be able to judge how old they were even with the goggles’ magnification, but those in the back looked extremely small.

  Each child clung to a rope twined with flowers running from front to back of the file. The last few rows were tied to the rope, not just holding it. Stern-faced adult minders in livery marched at the corners of the group, carrying batons.

  “You know,” said Daniel in a tone of gentle musing, “it’s as well that I’m up here and not down on the street. I guess they’ll be using those sticks by the end of the procession when the little tykes are tired.”

  “It’s a charity home for orphans,” Adele said, reading off her display. They’d been scheduled for earlier in the line of march; she supposed there’d been difficulty getting such small children into position. “I think that’s what they are, anyway.”

  Daniel took off his goggles and put them in his lap. He rubbed his eyes. “Colder than space, charity can be,” he said in the same soft voice.

  He looked at Adele. “Well, I don’t suppose it’s the business of a naval officer to tell other people how to live their lives,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose it is,” Adele said mildly. She was searching files so that she had a reason to keep her eyes focused in front of her. Any data would do for the purpose.

  Daniel sighed and relaxed. “Maybe Admiral Lasowski’s right about my temper,” he said apologetically. “Sorry.”

  Adele looked at the mortality statistics for inmates of the Electoral Home for Orphans and Foundlings. The information didn’t surprise her—after all, why assume that aspect of Electoral whim would be better organized than the library was? It was amazing, though, that so many of the children were able to walk at all, given the rate at which inmates died after admission to the home.

  “Look,” Daniel said, smiling but quite clearly not looking at the procession while the orphans were still in sight. “There’s parties all over the city tonight. I’ve made friends with a few of the Kostroman naval officers, a decent enough lot, and I’ve got an invitation to the Admiral’s Ball.”

  The roof began to tremble at a very low frequency. Adele felt the vibration more as a queasiness than a sound, but the roof tiles clicked together at a gathering rate.

  “Ah!” Daniel said. “That’ll be the Princess Cecile lifting from the Navy Pool. Don’t—”

  He handed Adele his goggles again. “Here, it’s best to use these if you’re going to look straight at it, even this far away. They’ll adjust for the glare.”

  He frowned and added, “I hope they’re not going to overfly below three thousand meters.”

  Adele could hear the sound of a starship’s motors through the air now. She held the goggles to her eyes, but it was gentle pressure of Daniel’s hand that turned her to look south instead of west toward the Floating Harbor. A ship was rising on a plume of plasma.

  “The navy uses a lagoon with a barrage across the mouth,” he explained as she watched the vessel rise. It wasn’t particularly large. “The navy warehouses are there too; that’s where the ball tonight’s going to be. Mostly the ships are in storage, but they activated the Princess Cecile for the celebration.”

  “I see,” Adele said as she returned the goggles. The Princess Cecile had leveled out at what seemed to her a reasonable altitude and was cruising north toward the city.

  “She’s a corvette,” Daniel said as he watched the ship. “Quite a nice little vessel, really. Kostroma built, but with most of her electronics bought from Cinnabar and her armament from Pleasaunce.”

  Plumes of colored smoke streamed from the corvette’s outriggers, white on the right and purple from the other. The smoke mixed with the plasma exhaust into glittering, no-colored swirls like mica flakes strewn on mud.

  “What I was going to say …” Daniel resumed. He offered the goggles; she refused them. “Is that I suppose you’ve got parties to go to yourself—”

  Adele sniffed. He didn’t suppose anything of the sort, and he was quite right.

  The Princess Cecile began to launch fireworks to either side. Sparks of color purer than anything in nature rained from the airbursts. The boom of the charges was dull and arrived many seconds after the light of the display it ignited.

  “Anyway,” Daniel said, “if you’d like to see how the navy does it, I’m to bring a guest and—”

  He paused in momentary horror. “That is,” he resumed with formal caution, “if you’d care to attend the Admiral’s Ball as a colleague of mine, Ms. Mundy, I would be very, ah …”

  Adele chuckled. It wasn’t a sound she often made. “I appreciate the offer, Daniel,” she said. “Bu
t I think …”

  She in turn paused. What did she think? That shutting herself in her shabby room was a better way to spend the evening?

  And there was Markos, the man and his intentions … but she really didn’t want to think about that.

  “I think,” she said, “that while I’ve never been interested in mating rituals in either the abstract or the particular, it might be interesting to attend the ball, yes. As I’ve found this event—”

  She nodded toward the street.

  “—interesting as a window on my new environment. Yes, I’ll go with you if you’d care to have me.”

  Daniel grinned in what she judged was both pleasure and relief. “Good, good,” he said, bobbing his head as he spoke. “Now, I’ve got a jitney and there’s Hogg to drive. Shall I pick you up at your lodgings at, say, the ninth hour local time?”

  His lips pursed in consideration before Adele could speak. “Hogg has the jitney, actually. But he’ll drive us.”

  Adele thought about her apartment and the narrow, trash-strewn street the building stood on. Not that she needed to apologize for them to a lieutenant in debt to his servant, but … “No,” she said aloud. “Why don’t we meet at the back entrance to the palace gardens? At the guardpost.”

  “My hand on it!” said Daniel Leary.

  As they shook, the Princess Cecile loosed another salvo of fireworks. The explosions sounded like a distant battle.

  * * *

  Adele Mundy sat at the library data console. The information she’d accessed shone in holographic letters in the air before her, all the brighter because the sky beyond the windows ranged from deep azure to deep magenta in the northwest. For the moment her eyes were closed.

  A cleaning crew worked in the hallway, calling to one another in the high singsong dialect of one of the northern islands. Bottles clinked together under the thrust of brooms. The palace was the site of the Elector’s Cotillion, the most prestigious of the scores of Founder’s Day events. There was no holiday for the cleaners who had to sweep up the leavings of the crowds who’d been watching the parade from here.

  Daniel had gone off to dress. Adele needed to do the same thing very shortly. As for the information on the air-formed display …

  She’d told Daniel that she preferred her personal unit to the large console. That was true, but in this case she’d deliberately transferred data to the library computer to keep from subconsciously associating the words with her own equipment.

  Adele opened her eyes and read the account for the first time in more than a decade. A Terran trade commissioner on Cinnabar at the time of the Three Circles Conspiracy had made a report on the events. The Academic Collections had received it in the normal course of accessions. Adele had stumbled across it by accident.

  One of the most touching tragedies was that of a ten-year-old child, Agatha Mundy. She was at the home of a playfellow, a cousin on her mother’s side, on the afternoon the proscriptions were announced. Her aunt, the younger sister of Agatha’s mother, immediately rushed the child onto the street and told her to run away. The girl’s attendant and guards abandoned her, to seek their own safety in flight.

  The house from which Agatha was expelled was on the outskirts of Xenos but near a main road. The child appears to have wandered along the road for hours, perhaps as much as a day, before she was picked up by a trucker of bad reputation. This man sold the girl to a tavern and brothel near the main civil spaceport. There she remained for a week.

  In misery and desperation the child finally accosted a pair of sergeants in the Land Forces of the Republic who frequented the tavern, explaining who she was. One of the soldiers throttled her and then cut the child’s head off with a knife borrowed from the tavern’s kitchen. The sergeants turned the head in to the Public Safety Office, claiming the bounty. The Office paid only half the usual amount because the child was well below the minimum age set in the Decree of Proscription.

  Adele rubbed her temples, then deliberately overwrote the file so that no one on Kostroma would ever be able to read it again. Not that anyone would care. In all the human universe, Adele Mundy might be the only person to whom those were more than words.

  She often told herself that she didn’t care. Life would be so much easier if that were true. Caring didn’t change the past, nor did it chart a course for the future. Only a fool could think that she understood all the side effects of her actions.

  Adele stood and walked to the door. She would attend the Admiral’s Ball tonight; and after that, who knew?

  * * *

  Warehouse 17 was one of nearly eighty in the fenced naval compound. The walls were brick with wooden trusses supporting a tile roof. The bunting and strings of colored glowlamps along the walls couldn’t hide the big building’s origins, but at any rate it was sufficiently large for the crowd of officers and their consorts.

  Besides, the acoustics were good. The seven-piece string band playing from a dais opposite the buffet was pleasantly audible without amplifiers, despite conversations and the dancers’ feet.

  “I think I’ll find a vantage point,” Adele Mundy said. She bowed to Daniel and moved off toward a corner. He watched her leave with mixed emotions. Part of him felt that he needed to protect the librarian in what passed on Kostroma for a sophisticated social setting.

  Another part of him was certain that unsophisticated or not, Adele could take care of herself. Daniel had no evidence to support his belief, but he’d have bet any amount of money that folk who touched her unasked would be lucky to get their hands back.

  In any case, she’d promised Daniel that she wouldn’t get in the way of his hunting tonight and she was showing herself as good as her word. He squared his shoulders beneath the slightly-too-tight tunic of his Full Dress uniform and looked around the gathering.

  The Kostroman navy was of considerable size, but many of its ships were a century old. Some hadn’t lifted to orbit in a decade, and a few were in danger of sinking in the Navy Pool where they were anchored.

  While the ships were laid up, their stores and equipment were transferred to warehouses and the vessels themselves were sealed. As surely in the Kostroman navy as in any other body, public or private, the amount of material in storage had increased to overflow the available volume. Ancient records, damaged and obsolete equipment, and containers whose contents were unknown to any living being, stuffed the thick brick walls.

  Walter III was giving particular emphasis to these Founder’s Day celebrations, the first under his electorship. One good result had been the clearance of Naval Warehouse 17. Equipment and stores for the Princess Cecile were reloaded when the corvette was commissioned, and Grand Admiral Sanaus ordered enough of a housecleaning in the rest of the complex to clear one warehouse completely as a site for his ball. The material removed had gone to the estates of naval officers if it appeared to have value, and straight into the sea if it didn’t. Most of it went into the sea.

  “Daniel, my man!” called Lt. Candace from near the buffet. “Come have a drink and tell these cretins how a properly handled corvette like our Princess can do a better job of defense than a dozen overage battleships like the Erebus and Terror!”

  Candace was one of the Kostroman navy’s brighter lights. He had an active-service appointment as second lieutenant of the Princess Cecile, had a good grasp of astrogation theory, and had made several voyages in his family’s trading vessels before he received a commission.

  Despite those virtues, Daniel found Candace more a personable companion than a naval officer as the term would be understood on Cinnabar. For the past fifty years of increasing prosperity and trade, the Kostroman navy had been the choice of young men of good family who either lacked a talent for commerce or had an overweening desire for the comforts of Kostroma City. Candace was perhaps the best of the lot, but it was a bad lot.

  “Now, I didn’t say that,” said Welcome, one of the other two lieutenants present. The taller one was Parzifal. “What I said is that we need real battles
hips. If we had a navy in proportion to our merchant fleet, we’d have twenty battleships in commission. Walter Hajas knows the navy—he’s a commander himself in the reserve. I shouldn’t wonder if he makes defense a priority.”

  He coughed. “Expansion will mean promotion for trained officers, you know. It stands to reason.”

  All the officers in the warehouse were in uniform, but again the word meant something different in Kostroman terms. Daniel was wearing the full dress uniform of the RCN: white silk with gold braid on every seam. It made a dazzling array in most gatherings, but here it seemed as dull as the building’s brick walls.

  Candace wore a magenta tunic over blue breeches and high boots; Welcome was in orange with trousers of vertical black and gold stripes; and Parzifal’s ensemble was a candy-striped green and yellow jumpsuit with a shoulder cape of lustrous white fur. All three men had enough medals to stock a jeweler and a ribbon counter besides. Each could point to a regulation permitting their choice of garb—not that any of their superiors were likely to object.

  “Look, Leary,” Candace said earnestly as Parzifal pressed a pinkish drink into Daniel’s hand. “Let me tell you my idea. You lot on Cinnabar ought to build up our navy yourselves, transfer battleships to us. You see?”

  “Umm,” Daniel said as he swigged from the glass cup. He’d heard this notion before. Every time Candace got outside a couple drinks, as a matter of fact.

  “Now, Kostroma’s a friend of Cinnabar, we’ve always been a friend of Cinnabar,” Candace continued. He tossed off the rest of his drink, looking flushed. It wasn’t exactly punch. The base was plum brandy, the usual tipple of the Kostroman Navy, with a dash of bitters that gave the fluid color. The mixture was at least sixty percent alcohol by volume. “Ships in our navy are just the same as in your own, only you won’t have to find officers for them. You see the beauty of it?”

  “You’d want to transfer them with crews, though,” Welcome said. “There’s the devil’s own time finding ordinary spacers here. They’re all lazy and don’t want to work.”