by David Drake
"The Commander, he is bloody worth listening to, by God!" he said.
Daniel gave the Landholder a nod of appreciation, but when he shifted back to Corius he let the smile fade to neutrality. "Though my last subject isn't really a matter for group as a whole," he said, "I'd like to say it, so to speak, in public. Councilor, your planet has seen a good deal of disruption recently. I'd expect that to continue for a time after you've returned to take up your responsibilities."
"Go on, Commander," Corius said politely. A less intelligent politician would've bragged about his intentions. Corius was no more the man to make that mistake than Speaker Leary had been when he planned the Proscriptions.
"The Government of Bennaria is no business of mine nor of the Republic I represent," Daniel said quietly. "But the safety of Cinnabar citizens is a proper concern both of the Senate and of the RCN. The Cinnabar consular agent on Bennaria, Master Luff—"
"The Manco factor," Corius said; not loudly nor in a hostile tone, but with great clarity.
"I'm not talking about Manco House or its employees," Daniel said, just a touch more harshly. "I'm talking about the Cinnabar representative, Master Luff. A man whose courage in a difficult situation made this victory possible. I might describe him as a friend."
Daniel gestured generally toward the scene around them. Ap Glynn had been skilled as well as lucky to land on the east end of the island, near the Rainha and the wreckage of the Greybudd. The landing beacon still worked, if only because the Bennarian Volunteers hadn't thought to disable it.
The prison enclosure was in the muddy high ground of the island's center. The cruiser's dorsal cannon and those of the Sibyl and Princess Cecile on the shore to the west supplemented the razor ribbon and quickly-built guard towers.
Corius laughed. Someone who knew what to look for—and Daniel did—could notice Fallert, Hogg and Tovera all relax minusculy.
"I'll need officials whom I can trust in difficult situations," Corius said. "Since the slave trade on Dunbar's World will be ending shortly, Master Luff's present employers will have no further use for his services. I'll contact him on my return."
He smiled. Unlike the laughter a moment before, the smile was cold as a glass knife.
"I don't need to be taught that Daniel Leary is a bad enemy," Corius said, indicating their surroundings with a sweep of his chin. "Rather, I'll make it a policy to convince him that I'm a good friend."
Krychek banged the table with the flat of his hand. "Done, then?" he demanded.
"Done, I believe," Daniel agreed.
"Then time for a drink," said Krychek. "Many drinks, by God!"
Daniel, wrung out but completely relaxed, could only nod. His tongue was too dry from adrenalin to speak another word.
* * *
The sound of knuckles ringing on metal outside the missile command trailer brought Adele to her feet. She reached into her pocket by reflex, but there was no need for that now.
She smiled wryly as she stepped to the doorway: it was the wrong reflex besides. She'd reached into her left tunic pocket, but the little pistol was still in her right.
Daniel stood ten feet away. When she appeared in the ragged opening from which Tovera had blown the door, he threw away the steel cartridge box he'd knocked on to signal and gave her a cautious smile.
"I won't intrude if you're busy," he said. "I just thought I'd come see, ah, how you were getting along."
Adele transferred the pistol to its usual location. Her left arm still twinged, but not enough to pose a problem. Not a problem as great as having the wrong reflex in a crisis, anyway.
"Well enough," she said, amused to notice that she'd weighed the question before answering it. That in its way proved she was all right. "Come in, if you like. Or—"
When she turned back into the command trailer, she realized what a shambles it was. A stinking shambles. The corpses of the Alliance missile controllers had been buried with the Pellegrinian dead in a trench dug by a captured backhoe, but nobody'd tried to mop up blood and fluids flung about by the bullets. The splatters had quickly ripened in the heat.
One of the operators had fallen into his arcing console. The odor of his burned flesh remained as the only monument the man would ever have.
"Here, let me get my data unit," Adele said, slipping the wands into their slots as she spoke. "We'll find a place outside to sit. I suppose we could go back to the ship. The Sissie."
"No need," said Daniel, gesturing to a short line of sandbags interlaid with boards from packing cases. The bunker it'd been part of had collapsed, but this knee-high section of wall remained. "I've been in one ship or another for the past two days, and I don't mind being out in the open."
He grinned. The expression was real, but Adele knew her friend well enough to see the caution still in his eyes.
"I'm a country boy at heart, remember," he said as they sat down together. He cleared his throat and added, "I've been overseeing the installation of the new motors on the Duilio. It's the Duilio for now; I suppose Corius will change the name."
He chuckled. "Hogg's, ah, befriended the widow of one of Arruns' officers. They've gone off on a picnic, Hogg said."
"I'd heard," said Adele. She let her mind follow the direction the statement led her, then shied away with a grimace. Of course it was just information, rather like the process of decomposition. . . .
"Heard?" said Daniel. "That is, ah. . . ."
"I'm not spying on Hogg's private life, Daniel," Adele said in mild reproof. "Fallert and Tovera have gone with them. Fallert borrowed the Councilor's aircar for the purpose, as a matter of fact."
"Good God," said Daniel, blinking. "Good God. Fallert and Tovera and. . . ."
He stopped and licked his lips. "Well, that's a good thing," he said, though the cheeriness of his tone didn't ring quite true. "I was afraid that Hogg was driving the car. Whatever he thinks, I know very well that he'd not safe at the controls."
"Yes," said Adele, agreeing with both what Daniel'd said and what he determinedly wasn't saying. It's not our business, after all. "And we also don't have to worry about them being set upon by bandits while they're—"
She grimaced. "Concentrating on other matters," she said, sounding even to herself as though she had something unpleasant in her mouth.
A pair of earthmovers, part of the Pellegrinian siege equipment, were crawling from the cruiser to the Princess Cecile with a missile slung between them. Spacers whom Adele didn't recognize were withdrawing another missile from Duilio's loading hatch while a bulldozer and a backhoe maneuvered into position to take it.
Daniel followed the line of Adele's eyes. "Some of the Pellegrinians decided they'd rather be Sissies than see how Chancellor Arruns felt about the way things worked out here," he said. "We've got proper missile handlers now."
He smiled and gestured toward the equipment squealing past loudly. "Strictly speaking, we haven't handed the Duilio over to the Bennarian navy yet," he added. "It seemed to me simple prudence to equip the Sissie to fight if we have to on the way home."
Adele smiled faintly. Fight if we have a chance to, she thought. As we well might, with Commander Leary in command.
"The Duilio'll have forty-three missiles left after we've filled our magazines," Daniel said. "Bennarian ships haven't launched that many in the past generation. Of course that might change. A great deal's likely to change when Councilor Corius takes power, I'm afraid."
Adele noted the concern underlying the words. She shrugged and said, "The people of Bennaria deserve a better government than they have now. Perhaps Corius will give it to them. Not that it's a proper concern of mine, so long as he remains a friend to Cinnabar."
Mistress Sand would care about that; therefore Adele cared also. From the beginning of Adele's activities as a Cinnabar spy, Mistress Sand had been as much of a friend as a superior officer.
"One thing that puzzles me about the Councilor's plans. . .," Daniel said. His voice trailed off as he watched spacers walk hooks dangl
ing from the Sissie's crane into eyebolts on the missile they were about to take aboard.
Catching himself, he grinned apologetically at Adele and continued, "Saying he was going to end slavery on Bennaria, I mean. Now, I'm in favor of that, of course, but frankly, Corius hadn't struck me as moral reformer himself."
"I don't think he is," Adele said. "That was my suggestion—and before you ask, no, I'm not a reformer either, merely an observer. I pointed out to him that the abolition of slavery would destroy the basis of his fellow Councilors' wealth. That'd make it much more difficult for them to attempt a counter-revolution."
"Ah!" said Daniel. "I see. Yes indeed, I see."
Adele saw his eyes flick toward the trailer. It was a tiny motion, there and back, but nonetheless it showed her that he really did understand. That shouldn't have been a surprise; it was Daniel, after all. It surprised her nonetheless.
Aloud and more harshly than she'd intended, she said, "I'm quite sure Corius will have quite a number of people executed out of hand also, Daniel. But that's none of my business either, because I won't be the one shooting them."
Adele paused, playing back in her mind the words, the tone, of what she'd just said. She pressed her fingertips to her brow and her thumbs to her jawbone, covering her down-turned face for a moment but not closing her eyes. The last thing she wanted just now was to close her eyes to the present, leaving only memories to fill her mind.
"I'm sorry, Daniel," she said, looking at him as she crossed her hands primly in her lap. She nodded toward the trailer. "I wasn't inside to remind me, you know. I was just punishing myself. I didn't need reminders."
"You don't need punishment either, Adele," Daniel said quietly. "But I don't suppose I can convince you of that."
"Not emotionally, no," Adele said, smiling wryly. "Intellectually I prefer a universe in which I killed another. . . a number, I'm honestly not sure. In which I killed another dozen or so soldiers to a universe in which I failed, so that you and two thousand Bennarian Volunteers were killed instead. But emotionally, what I see in the gunsight stays with me."
The sounds of heavy equipment quieted to a grumble of idling diesels. For the time being the chain hoists were still and the diamond saws silent.
"Then oh then, the loved ones gone. . .," came a clear, rich voice.
Adele turned; Elemere stood on the cruiser's turret, singing without a microphone. Krychek, Vesey and a number of others sat on chairs behind him, but on the ground below hundreds of off-duty spacers listened.
"Wake the pure celestial song. . .," Elemere sang. He was in full costume, the blond wig and a dress that seemed a shimmer of sunlight.
"Woetjans asked if it'd be all right," Daniel murmured. "She'd heard about the show at the Diamond Palace but she'd missed it in Charlestown.'
"Angel voices greet us there. . . ."
"I said of course, if Elemere was willing."
"In the music, in the air," Elemere sang, concluding the piece.
As the crowd of spacers cheered, Adele felt her lips spread in an unintended smile. "I have difficulty imagining my mother and father as part of a chorus of angels," she said, looking at Daniel again. "My sister Agatha, perhaps. But that's an intellectual difficulty. The song—"
The song by a decent, caring human being who is alive because I was willing to kill people who were neither decent nor caring. . . but those words didn't reach her lips.
"—helps emotionally despite that. I don't understand emotion, Daniel."
He rose. "I don't think anyone does, Adele," he said. "Let's move closer, shall we? I'd like to hear—"
"Little white snowdrop. . .," Elemere sang, beginning her next number.
The innocent delight of Daniel's smile shone brighter than sunstruck gold. And for the time being, it washed away the last of the memories that'd returned Adele to the bullet-scarred trailer.
THE END
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