by David Drake
Daniel smiled. He was letting his guest tell the story his own way, but he couldn’t help wishing that way was a little more direct. The clouds on the horizon were dark in silhouette, but higher in the western sky some cirrus curls were still pink.
“Cleveland came to Xenos and got into finance,” Sand said. “Connections helped him there, you know.”
Daniel nodded.
“He married Bernis and cut quite a swathe for a few years,” Sand said, his voice beginning to rasp. “They had a son, that’s Rikard. And then Cleveland went bust in a big way. He went up to the Oriel County property—to think, he said. And he drowned swimming in a lake there.”
He spread his hands. “Well, it was ruled an accident, and why not?” he said. “And Bernis went around and took care of what was owing. Cleveland had been borrowing on securities that he was supposed to be holding for clients, I hear; but they were all taken care of. And I married Bernis.”
“I believe you made a fortunate marriage,” Daniel said. That was true—for Sand. Mistress Sand was a very impressive woman, and she had been a considerable social step upward for a self-made contractor like Tom Sand. Age and—plain—looks aside, Daniel would rather have married the wolf eel.
“The problem is the boy, Rikard,” Sand said. Then, bitterly, “He was fifteen and trouble when I met Bernis, he was worse bloody trouble all the time until he ran off three years ago, and now he’s back and says he’s reformed, damned if I don’t think he’s the worst trouble of all. Bloody kid!”
“I don’t get along well with my father,” Daniel said. That was an understatement: he’d entered the RCN Academy at age sixteen after a screaming row with Corder Leary. That the episode hadn’t ended in murder showed that both men had better control than their closest associates would have guessed. “I can imagine that a stepson and stepfather have an even harder time.”
“It was more than that,” Sand said, looking toward the pale horizon. He sounded despairing rather than angry. “He resented me for being an oik—Bernis remarried beneath her, you see. And he resented her for being alive. Cleveland drank a lot. When he took a swing at me with a bottle, I told Bernis to keep him out of my sight or I’d leave.”
He looked at his big, scarred hands and grinned ruefully at Daniel. “That’s not how I’d have handled the problem with any other man alive,” he said.
Daniel grinned back. He’d never doubted that Tom Sand had been raised in a tough school.
“So after boarding school, Bernis got Cleveland jobs with family friends,” Sand said. “Hers and her first husband’s, not mine. I didn’t check up on him, but none of the jobs lasted long. Then about three years ago, he went off somewhere and Bernis didn’t hear anything from him. Well, he was twenty-four then, old enough to live his own life. Me, I was just glad he was out of mine.”
Spray flashed white several hundred yards out to sea. Moments later came the slap of a fish whose leap had raised the spray. It must have been of some size to be heard over the land breeze.
“So Cleveland’s back,” Sand said, gravel entering his tone. “He’s joined a cult and says he’s reformed. He apologized to me like a man, I’ll give him that. But he says he’s found a treasure on a planet called Corcyra, and he wants Bernis to fund an expedition to dig it up. There’s fighting going on, and he wants the treasure to buy arms for his cult, the Transformationists, so they don’t get squeezed by one side or the other.”
“Corcyra?” Daniel repeated, frowning. “There’s fighting there, all right. I can tell you that Admiral Bocale is putting together a squadron right now, just in case the RCN gets involved.”
Daniel had been offered command of a cruiser in Bocale’s squadron, but he’d decided to remain on half pay a little longer instead. If real war resumed between Cinnabar and the Alliance, Captain Daniel Leary could hope for something more interesting than a cruiser under Bocale. The admiral was known to be so concerned about making the wrong decision that he never made a really right one.
“I guess Bernis knows that, too,” Sand said morosely. “She couldn’t fund it herself since she paid off the people Ordos bilked, but she’s gone to her friends looking for investors.”
He turned to meet Daniel’s gaze and said, “She didn’t ask me, didn’t even mention it to me. But I heard.”
“What is the treasure?” Daniel asked, thinking over what he had learned recently about the Corcyra situation. Whether or not he served under Admiral Bocale, it seemed likely that the RCN would shortly be involved in the region. “It seems to me that you’d have to pay extremely well to get anyone with good sense to go to the middle of a war zone to look for treasure.”
Sand nodded. “Bernis believes in the treasure,” he said. “I don’t, but that isn’t the main problem. I figure the only crew which’ll sign up for the job is one that’ll knock Cleveland on the head for his stake. The only question is whether they’ll do it as soon as they lift to Cinnabar orbit or hold off till they learn how bad things on Corcyra really are.”
He stared at his balled fists as he ground the knuckles together. “Look, Leary,” he said, raising his eyes again. “Here’s the rub. I don’t think the universe’d be a worse place without Cleveland in it, but his mother loves him and I love Bernis. It’ll break her heart if he’s scragged, especially if she found the money to let him go off and do such a bloody fool thing.”
Sand took a deep breath. “Leary,” he said, “I want you to carry Cleveland on your yacht. I know it won’t be cheap, but I’ve got a good business and I’ll mortgage the last paperclip if that’s what it takes.”
“I think something can be worked out,” Daniel said—because his guest needed an answer immediately. There was an almost infinite number of matters to be determined before he lifted from harbor with Rikard Cleveland; to begin with, it probably wouldn’t be in the Princess Cecile, his yacht.
The details could wait, however. Tom Sand had to know that Daniel was considering the proposition before he would be able to relax.
Daniel stood. “Why don’t you stay the night, Sand?” he said. “In the morning I’ll ride back to Xenos with you and talk to some people. Ah, and Miranda will come back with us, too, if you’ve got room in your car.”
The limousine would seat at least six passengers, along with Hogg sitting up front with the driver.
Sand rose also, expelling a deep breath. “By God, Leary!” he said. “By God! You don’t know what that means to me!”
“Let’s go in and have some dinner,” Daniel said, starting toward the manor house. The episode with the wolf eel had almost slipped from his memory, displaced by the excitement of planning a new project. “I don’t know about you, but I worked up an appetite today fishing.”
As soon as I get back to Xenos, I’ll talk to Adele. But I want to do that in person.
Xenos on Cinnabar
Adele was in her library on the top floor of Chatsworth Minor when she heard Tovera say from the hallway, “I’m sure the mistress will be glad to see you, Captain Leary.”
Adele couldn’t have heard the words if the door hadn’t been open, which meant that before speaking, Tovera had opened it without Adele’s notice. Sometimes Adele was bothered by the degree to which she was oblivious of her surroundings when she was working, but she wouldn’t accomplish nearly as much if she didn’t concentrate. And it wasn’t as though she had a choice: she was who she was.
Adele didn’t shut down her data unit, but she shrank its display so that when Daniel came to the doorway he wasn’t looking at her through a mist of coherent light. It was mid-morning: not early, but much earlier than Adele had expected to see her housemate.
He was on the west coast so far as she knew. He hadn’t returned to the townhouse last night.
“I have some business I’d like to discuss with you,” Daniel said. “But if this isn’t a good time, we can … ?”
Adele set down her control wands. She hadn’t missed Daniel during the three weeks he had been in Bantry, but she felt a
rush of unexpected pleasure at seeing him again.
“I’m going over old logbooks,” she said. She was compiling logs of voyages to the Ribbon Stars, the cluster in which Pantellaria and Corcyra lay. “Nothing that can’t wait.”
Daniel entered the room and closed the door, then looked around. “I don’t come up here very often,” he said.
“This is the library,” Adele said with a deadpan expression. “The suite on the floor below is my living quarters. And no, I don’t see much difference in the piles of books and records, either. Is there a chair—there.”
She pointed.
“Just put those chip files on the floor. They should have kept dust off the seat, at any rate.”
Daniel lifted the stack of frames into which chips—those on top appeared to be transcriptions of local histories—were clipped. Instead of transferring them to the floor, he sat holding them in his lap. He seemed to be ill at ease.
“Tom Sand asked me to transport his stepson to Corcyra to hunt for treasure,” Daniel said, packing a remarkable amount of information into a few words. “I’ve agreed to do so, barring unforeseen factors.”
Strictly speaking there wasn’t a question in what Daniel had said, but even Adele’s doubtful social instincts told her that she had to respond. “I wasn’t aware that Mistress Sand had a son,” she said, expanding her data unit’s display and switching to public records on Bernis Sand. “I know almost nothing about her, except as it directly affects me.”
Adele’s ignorance of Bernis Sand’s private life was a matter of choice. She didn’t want to know anything that Bernis didn’t choose to tell her. She hadn’t delved into Daniel’s background, either, though she was pretty sure that she wouldn’t have learned anything of significance if she had.
Daniel was politely reticent about the names of women with whom he had been intimate. She couldn’t think of any other subject on which a simple question to him would not have brought an equally simple answer. And courtesy aside, Adele wasn’t sure Daniel remembered many of the names.
She knew quite a lot about Daniel’s sister, however. Deirdre would probably be surprised to learn how much information Adele had amassed about someone who was wealthy and notably cautious.
“Mistress Sand has been looking for investors,” Daniel said. “She doesn’t know her husband has come to me. Tom is afraid that the boy—well, he’s twenty-seven, older than I am—will be killed by any captain he can hire to take him to Corcyra in its present condition.”
Adele sniffed. “In the present situation,” she said, “Rikard Cleveland—”
The name was readily available.
“—and anyone accompanying him will be in a great deal of danger, leaving aside their personal motives.”
She checked her data on Corcyra again and raised her eyes to Daniel’s. “I would not advise that we take the Princess Cecile to Corcyra. Even though she is a private yacht at present, both parties would certainly view her as a Cinnabar warship … as she has been often enough, of course. The Pantellarians have sent six destroyers with their expeditionary force; the independence movement has a single destroyer manned by Pantellarian exiles. A corvette like the Sissie would make a significant difference in the power ratio—in either direction.”
The Princess Cecile, commanded by Captain Daniel Leary, could make a great deal of difference. Adele didn’t add that, because it would have been boastful—the Sissie was more her home than this family townhouse was—and because Daniel already knew that.
“I’m going to check with Mon,” Daniel said. “Bergen and Associates refits a lot of small freighters, and he’ll be able to direct me to a solid ship.”
Mon had served under Daniel as a lieutenant in the RCN. Adele believed that most people were superstitious, but spacers were more stubbornly convinced of their foolishness than she had seen in most other occupations. When bad luck got Mon a reputation for being a Jonah, Daniel had made him manager of Bergen and Associates, the small shipyard which Daniel’s uncle Stacey had willed to him.
The yard had flourished under Mon’s direction. Daniel’s kindness to a friend and associate had been good business financially.
“I’ll need to discuss this with Mistress Sand,” Adele said neutrally. She didn’t bother to add, “If that’s all right with you?” Daniel had come to her with the problem, so he expected her to use her own judgment about how to deal with her end of it—which was primarily information gathering.
Adele assumed that Tom Sand felt the same way, but she didn’t care. What he said to his wife Bernis was his own business; what Lady Mundy said to Mistress Sand, who directed Cinnabar’s intelligence agents, was Lady Mundy’s business alone.
“And of course,” Daniel said, “Cleveland himself probably doesn’t know about our involvement. I think we should talk to him together, but I’d rather you set up the meeting through his mother?”
He raised an eyebrow in question. Adele nodded crisply. “Yes, I’ll take care of that,” she said. She didn’t foresee a problem with Mistress Sand, but intra-family matters rarely proceeded by logic. She would deal with the situation as it arose; as she did with every other situation.
Daniel grimaced again. Adele realized that he was concerned to be involved with her life outside the RCN. This situation would not have arisen had she not been associated with Mistress Sand.
“Look, Adele,” he said, forcing himself to look at her instead of out the window toward the head of the cul-de-sac on which the townhouse stood. He probably couldn’t see the tram stop there unless he stood up. “I said I’d do this for Sand because he’s a good fellow who needed help, and because I thought it was maybe something that you’d want done. But if you think it’s a bad idea, for any reason, I’ll see Sand and shut the business off to his face.”
Adele shrugged. “I do want it done,” she said, then smiled. “As much as I want anything done, of course. There are doubtless factors which we don’t and can’t know at present which could make this a very bad idea.”
She smiled more broadly; probably as much of a smile as she ever showed the world. “On the other hand, unpredicted factors can have good results, too. I had many valid reasons for choosing to study at the Academic Collections on Blythe when I was sixteen, but they did not include getting me off Cinnabar ahead of the Proscriptions in which the rest of my family died.”
Daniel laughed and rose to his feet. “Well,” he said, “I hope we won’t learn that we lifted from Cinnabar just before the revolution in which all noble families were massacred, but other than that I’ll remain optimistic.”
He nodded to her as he opened the door. Hogg and Tovera both waited at the stairhead, good servants waiting for their masters’ instructions.
“I’ll talk to Mon,” Daniel said over his shoulder. “When I’ve got that nailed down, we can see about Cleveland and what the bloody hell he’s got in mind.”
“Yes,” said Adele. Which meant she needed to talk, privately and in person, with Bernis Sand. She keyed in Mistress Sand’s private contact address.
CHAPTER 4
Xenos on Cinnabar
The doorman bowed Adele into the lobby, where a cadaverous man in black—probably the club secretary rather than a lower functionary—waited behind a lectern. “I’m to meet Mistress Cleveland for lunch,” Adele said, using the name she had been given. “My name is Mundy.”
The secretary checked the display built into his lectern, then raised his eyes and smiled falsely. “Why yes, Mistress Mundy,” he said, tapping a call button. A boy—if he was older than sixteen, he was badly undernourished—came out of an alcove behind the secretary, buttoning his coat. “Daniel will take you back. The Gray Room, Daniel.”
Adele avoided blinking, though the boy’s name had been a surprise. “Daniel” wasn’t an uncommon name, of course; but that was looking at the matter logically.
The Oriel Club was old, but it wasn’t one that members would mention when they wanted to impress other people. It had been founded by r
esidents of Oriel County to have a place to eat and sleep when they had business in the capital. The kitchen was said to be very good on mutton dishes; which made sense, as sheep were the first thing one thought of in the rare instances when someone mentioned Oriel County.
The boy swaggered ahead of her, past a reading room with leather-covered chairs, then through the grill room to the left-hand of the pair of private rooms in back. The three diners in the grill room were decently but not stylishly dressed. They glanced up from their meals—mutton curry in all cases—but Adele was no more interesting to look at than they were.
“The Gray Room!” the boy said, pulling the door open without announcing them to the occupant of the room. He was what you would expect from junior staff in a club whose secretary had to check his files to determine whether a guest was expected.
Bernis Sand sat across the table, facing the door. A decanter of amber liquid—whiskey, unless she had changed her habits since Adele last saw her—and two glasses were already on the table.
“Thank you, Daniel,” said Mistress Sand. “We’re not to be disturbed unless we call you.”
The boy closed the door. Sand smiled grimly and said, “Lock it, if you would, Mundy. Despite my clear direction, it’s quite possible that someone will bustle in with a carafe of water or a tablecloth.”
Adele snicked the lock and sat down. “I suppose shooting the first few intruders would be overreaction,” she said.
“This was my first husband’s club,” said Mistress Sand. She didn’t react to the joke. “I kept the membership after his death. There are times I like to be thought of as Mistress Cleveland, who owns land in Oriel County. Mistress Cleveland and her guests don’t attract attention.”
Sand was below middle height and solid; it would be accurate though uncharitable to describe her build as cylindrical. Her complexion had been ruddy when she introduced herself to Adele five years before. Now her skin had a gray undertone, and her cheeks sagged.
