With the Lightnings

by David Drake

  Adele didn’t bother to analyze why she’d refused. The sailors were surprised but as always respectful, and they were used to her surprising them.

  She’d walked all the time she was Electoral Librarian, but not usually in daylight. Kostroma City’s street life had returned with all its noisy vibrancy. There was still a tinge of smoke in the air, but the sound of construction work was even more general than it had been when Adele arrived.

  In Kostroma City it was always “after the cataclysm.” The Alliance invasion differed in scale but not in kind from the coups and fires and riots of the past, and the citizens were dealing with the aftermath in the familiar ways.

  People had died. Some of the reconstruction was being done by families new to Kostroma, but the city found that a familiar pattern also.

  A vendor was selling fish fried in dough from a cart. His customers blocked the pavement. A woman sat on the low coping of the canal in the middle of the boulevard, looking down the street. In skirting the crowd, Adele’s leg touched the back of the seated woman’s jacket.

  “May I speak with you, mistress?” said the woman. Adele turned.

  “My name is Tovera,” said the woman.

  She was Markos’s aide.

  A quartet of burly footmen preceded a jitney driving down the street. Adele didn’t recognize their colors, puce and green. The lunch crowd squeezed toward the side to give them room.

  “There’s a courtyard a few doors down,” Tovera said. The bruises on her face and exposed hands had faded to sepia and a sickly yellow. “It should be quieter. There’s no one in the house now.”

  She stood, smiling faintly. The wince as she moved was almost imperceptible. “They were buried last week.”

  “I thought you were dead,” Adele said.

  That was half true. Adele had never considered the aide to be alive; or at least, a living human.

  “Move it!” snarled one of the servants clearing a path for the jitney. He raised his baton, to prod or strike.

  Tovera turned. “Don’t even think about it,” she said pleasantly.

  The servant jerked back. “Well fuck you, then,” he snarled, but in a muted voice. He stepped around the two women and pushed a pair of strangers against the lunch cart.

  Adele took her hand out of her pocket. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s get out of the street.”

  The door had been opened with axes. A mythological frieze decorated the panel’s bronze facing. Adele paused for a moment to finger a delicately molded satyr carrying off a nymph; both figures had been decapitated by the same stroke.

  Adele couldn’t feel sorrow for dead strangers; but the artwork which had shared their destruction made her face tremble to behold.

  She walked through the littered hallway, following Tovera to the courtyard in back. A citrus tree was in bloom, and half the daffodils had survived being trampled.

  Tovera seated herself on the bench built into the courtyard wall. Adele sat on the opposite side, avoiding the pool of flaking blood which tiny insects were carrying away.

  “I had a hand free,” Tovera said. “I dug myself out brick by brick. It was easier after I uncovered my face and could see again.”

  “What do you want?” Adele said. She didn’t think the aide intended to kill her, but she couldn’t imagine any other purpose for this meeting.

  “I told Markos you were too dangerous to use the way he tried to,” Tovera said musingly. “He didn’t believe me. He didn’t think I could know anything about people.”

  She smiled. “But I knew you, Ms. Mundy.”

  “What do you want?” Adele repeated.

  “I want to serve you,” Tovera said. She was still smiling.

  “Don’t be absurd,” Adele said. She stood up. “You’re too dangerous to have around.”

  Her face hardened. “You’re too dangerous to live, Tovera. Good day.”

  “Mistress!” the aide said. Adele paused on her way out of the garden and faced Tovera again.

  “There’s a piece of me missing,” Tovera said. “Do you think I don’t know that? I can watch other people, mistress. It’s like running my fingers all around the edges of the hole, but that doesn’t put the piece back.”

  She stood, walked a step closer, and knelt at Adele’s feet. “Let me use you for the piece of me that isn’t there,” she whispered.

  “Get up,” Adele said. “For God’s sake.”

  Tovera rose gracefully despite the pain Adele knew must twist every muscle. That the aide had survived the wall’s collapse was perhaps less surprising than the fact she could still move.

  “Markos had a goal,” Tovera said softly. “He planned to be Guarantor of the Alliance some day. I didn’t believe that, but it didn’t matter. I would have died for him, mistress, because I don’t have a goal: only the tasks somebody else sets me. And I think you understand that.”

  The implications of Tovera’s smile were a black pit that tried to swallow Adele Mundy’s soul. Adele’s mind formed the words, “You’re insane!” but she didn’t say that because it wasn’t true.

  Tovera was correct: she was missing a piece. She was no more insane than Adele’s pistol was. Either one would kill when instructed to, without compunction and without remorse.

  Adele’s mind said, “I’m not like you,” but she didn’t speak those words aloud either. Instead she said, “Why did you come to me, Tovera?”

  The aide’s face was still. She shrugged. “Because you know what I am,” she said, “but you don’t really care. Any more than you care how tall I am or that I’m a woman. That’s just information to you.”

  For no conscious reason, Adele thought of the people she’d killed here on Kostroma. She didn’t know their names. She didn’t know the name of a single one of them, and nothing she could do would bring them back.

  She couldn’t breathe life into dead clay.

  “Yes, all right, Tovera,” Adele said. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay you, and I’m not even sure you can travel back to Cinnabar with me”—though she suspected Woetjans would stow the servant aboard even if Daniel unaccountably refused to take her formally—“but welcome to service with the Mundys of Chatsworth.”

  Adele smiled like an icicle. “Sadly decayed though I’m afraid the house is.”

  * * *

  Daniel moved his hand in front of his companion’s faceshield and gestured toward the blue magnificence of Kostroma “rising” beyond the stern of the Princess Cecile. “Isn’t it a wonderful view, Adele?” he said. “Though I guess you saw it before when you boarded the command node.”

  Adele’s voice, tinged with a dry humor audible despite the compression of the radio intercom, replied, “I had other things on my mind at the time. And these helmets actually allow one to see out.”

  She touched her faceshield. She now wore an RCN rigging suit, as did Daniel and most of the forty crewmen working on the corvette’s hull and masts. A few ratings still had Kostroman rigging suits, bulkier and more difficult to put on and take off than their Cinnabar equivalents. Even so there was no comparison between this equipment, meant for work in vacuum, and the lightweight transfer suits which were worn only minutes at a time.

  Hogg and Domenico were working in separate ways to replace the lost Kostroman gear. Daniel suspected that meant the Princess Cecile would leave for Cinnabar with a complete double set of rigging suits. If nothing else they’d make useful material to trade with the complements of other ships in Harbor #3.

  Daniel led Adele by the hand toward the repaired portion of the hull. He was familiar with the stiction-release of the magnetic soles each time his foot lifted, but his companion looked as though she’d blundered into a tar pool. Release—for one boot at a time—was automatic at a moderate level of upward pressure, but Daniel remembered how frustrating he’d found it the first time.

  He was six years old, then, wearing a suit that must have been made for a midget as he walked the hull of an intrasystem transport with Uncle Stacey holding his han
d. Now he was on his own starship, his own command, beneath the splendor of a distant world.

  Of course it wouldn’t be his command for very much longer. Well, perhaps some day. Fate had given Daniel Leary everything he’d hoped for as a boy: far planets and a starship command. Fate probably wouldn’t take the planets away from him, and if he never again commanded, well …

  He laughed. Adele turned within her rigid helmet to look at him.

  “Just thinking that I should’ve been more careful about what I wished for,” Daniel said musingly. “It’s funny how things work out sometimes.”

  “Yes,” Adele said. “It is.”

  Daniel again put a hand in front of Adele so that she’d see it, then pointed to the mast they were trudging past. Six riggers were raising and lowering it repeatedly to be sure it was properly installed. Lieutenant Mon, borrowed as an unassigned officer to help refit the Princess Cecile, was directing them.

  “We replaced three of these as battle-damaged,” Daniel explained. He and Adele were on a private channel, neither interfering with the work crews nor overheard by them. “If the parts’ cost had been coming out of our own maintenance budget, there’s probably only one I’d have bothered with changing. These spars came from transports caught in the Floating Harbor.”

  “They were prizes, then?” Adele said. “Do I have the term right?”

  Daniel smiled faintly. “That’s the word you mean,” he said, “but in this case the ships themselves may not turn out to be prizes. The Kostroman vessels will probably be released to the original owners with a payment to the fleet that recaptured them. But after a victory like this everybody expects warship crews to bring their ships up to specification from what’s lying around, so to speak.”

  He tapped the hull plating with a toe. “The frames here were fractured when the missile grazed us,” he said. “A good thing I didn’t know that or I’d have been afraid to reverse course under full power.”

  Adele turned and looked at him. She smiled.

  “Yes, well,” Daniel admitted in embarrassment. “I suppose I might have done pretty much the same thing but I’d have worried about it.”

  Adele smiled more broadly. He’d never before seen her show such obvious amusement.

  “Well, I’d have worried when things calmed down some,” he said in exasperation. “For pity’s sake, woman, it’s a figure of speech.”

  “It’s a piece of nonsense,” Adele said. “I’ve seen you when things go wrong, remember?”

  “Yes, well,” Daniel said, embarrassed now for a different reason. “There isn’t time to think, but the civilians don’t understand that. Sorry to have been treating you like a civilian.”

  His foot caressed the hull again. The rigid toe-cap had no feeling, but Daniel’s touch was really spiritual rather than physical anyway.

  “The Princess Cecile here was a dream to repair, you know,” he said. Part of him was vaguely aware that his companion didn’t know anything of the sort. “Back on Cinnabar the taste’s all for unit-built hulls because they’re stronger.”

  Daniel’s toe rapped for emphasis. “And who can argue against that? you say. But there’s not a corvette in RCN service that could have taken the blow we did without structural damage, and not a unit-built hull in the universe that could have been repaired so easily. We’d be talking about six months in Harbor Three, not a week in Kostroma with the work mostly done by the vessel’s own crew!”

  “I take your point,” said Adele. He turned to look at her face to see if she was laughing at him again. She didn’t appear to be; at least on the surface.

  Sunlight winked from metal. Distances in vacuum were impossible to gauge accurately by eye, but there was little doubt that this sheen was from a cutter approaching the Princess Cecile with a message that couldn’t be radioed.

  Daniel had little doubt as to what the message was, either.

  He sighed, then looked again at the great ball of Kostroma. He’d been granted so much that it would be churlish to complain that it wasn’t more. Besides, a Leary of Bantry didn’t whine.

  “Shall we go inside?” he said quietly to Adele. “I believe that will be my relief, Lieutenant Enery, and as a matter of courtesy I’d like to receive her in person. Otherwise she might think I resented her promotion to command.”

  * * *

  Daniel had vanished toward the bridge while Adele with the help of two sailors was still getting out of her vacuum suit. Tovera was still in Kostroma City, retrieving equipment “that you’ll want, mistress,” from some store of Markos’s. Adele wondered if her new servant was any better at dealing with weightlessness and vacuum suits than she herself was.

  The rigging crew had come inside through a remarkable number of airlocks. Apart from the twenty or so sailors still on the ground dealing with supplies and other final arrangements, the Princess Cecile’s entire crew was present.

  “How many hatches are there?” Adele asked Lamsoe as he stowed her suit in careful alignment with a score of others in the locker.

  “Six is all, mistress,” he said. “Not really enough, either. It’s not like we was a transport and could wait till next election before we got the rig adjusted.”

  He tugged her gently. A week in the command node hadn’t significantly increased Adele’s skill at moving in weightlessness. “Now if you’ll come this way, we’ll get you with Mr. Leary on the bridge.”

  “An officer from the flagship boarding!” said the general communicator. The latch of the main airlock clanked.

  Lamsoe sprang the remaining twenty yards toward the bridge with Adele in tow. Other personnel, standing to attention while one hand anchored them, squeezed out of the way. Lamsoe’s skill was such that they sailed down the corridor without touching a wall.

  Daniel, wearing a white uniform with gold hussar knots across the bosom and a worm-track of gold braid down the trouser seam, was talking earnestly with Lt. Mon. He’d changed into this resplendent full dress uniform while Adele was still struggling out of her vacuum suit. His eyes noted Adele but he was too involved to greet her.

  Lamsoe handed her off to Hogg, who wrapped her hand around a stanchion with gentle pressure and then vanished into the wardroom. They were treating her like a sack of grain, but at least she was valuable grain.

  A pair of unfamiliar officers wearing dress uniforms similar to Daniel’s came up the corridor skillfully though without Lamsoe’s panache. One was a woman in her mid-twenties; the other merely a boy, probably no more than fifteen.

  They halted by gripping the hatch coaming and swung upright. The woman saluted Daniel. “Lieutenant Bara Enery reporting aboard, sir!” she said.

  Daniel returned the salute. “Welcome aboard the Princess Cecile, Lieutenant Enery,” he said. “I think you’ll be pleased with what you find here.”

  He sounded not only friendly but mildly pleased. Adele had heard sailors muttering about “the bitch slotted to replace Mr. Leary.” Daniel himself, the one time he’d mentioned Enery, referred to her as a very professional officer with a good head for astrogation.

  “Before you read your orders, Lieutenant Enery,” he said now, “may I present my officers?”

  “Please do, captain,” Enery said in an accent that marked her as a member of the best circles of Xenos. “But I should emphasize that I don’t bring orders of any sort with me. My understanding is that a courier will be arriving from Admiral Ingreit in a few minutes, but I wanted to speak briefly to you before that event.”

  Daniel nodded as though the statement didn’t surprise him. Adele kept her frown internal. She didn’t doubt Ms. Sand’s good intentions, nor that Sand would make good her hinted promise eventually; but a great deal depended on the intelligence of Admiral Ingreit. If Ingreit was the dunce his employment of Elphinstone implied to Adele, Sand’s brilliantly indirect approach might pass right over the gold braid on the admiral’s hat.

  “This is my first officer, Ms. Mundy,” Daniel said, gesturing with a cupped hand to Adele. “You wil
l have heard of the way she captured the Alliance defensive array.”

  Enery nodded politely, but the youth beside her goggled at Adele. Adele gave him a cold smile. He’d probably been wondering what a worn-looking civilian was doing on the bridge to begin with.

  “And this is Lieutenant Mon,” Daniel continued. Mon wore a loose-fitting service uniform. His formal wear had been aboard the Aglaia when she sank in the Floating Harbor. “He’s been seconded to the Princess Cecile to take charge of repairs. Without his expertise there would be several weeks’ work yet to complete.”

  “Courier from the flagship boarding!” the general communicator announced. A detail under a petty officer was on duty at the main hatch. Adele thought the voice was that of Dasi.

  As if he hadn’t heard, Daniel turned and said, “Mon, Ms. Mundy, I don’t know whether you’ve met Lieutenant Enery. She’s Admiral Ingreit’s signals lieutenant at present, but I understand she’s due for a posting that will use her considerable talents better.”

  “Mistress,” Adele said, nodding acknowledgment.

  Enery lifted her chin in the direction of the boy. Despite her good breeding, Enery was obviously embarrassed by Daniel’s honest graciousness. “My nephew Piers,” she said. “Admiral Collodi’s grandson, you may know.”

  Which made Enery herself an admiral’s niece. Not surprising, of course.

  “As a matter of fact, Leary,” Enery went on, “that’s what I’d like to discuss with you. There’s rumors going about and of course one doesn’t like to take them seriously. But if I should be offered a command, I’d be honored if you’d become my first officer.”

  The sound of the hatch releasing rang through the Princess Cecile.

  Enery raised her hand. “Now, don’t misunderstand,” she added. “If you’d prefer to have nothing more to do with, with any ship I happen to command, no one would blame you in the least. But I want you to know that I have the sincerest regard for your abilities.”