by David Drake
Woetjans mounted the steps in two movements, balancing the case and the cudgel. It was like watching a fish mount rapids to spawn. An extremely ugly fish, but Daniel had felt as though he’d lost his left arm when the bosun took a burst of slugs through the chest. She’d made a good recovery, though. . . .
“Got anything you want us to do quick-quick, Six?” Woetjans said, bobbing the tip of her tubing in the direction of the disappearing Alliance personnel.
“Negative, Chief,” Daniel said, repeating his words of a few minutes before but in a very different tone. “But for a moment, I thought I might have some work for you if Hogg had any leftovers.”
“I wouldn’t’ve,” Hogg said firmly. “But I like to see that kind of spirit, my girl, and I’m proud to have your acquaintance.”
The Alliance aircar lifted and made an immediate low-altitude turn, heading back into Calvary. Hogg said in a regretful tone, “I kinda thought they might try to buzz us, you know?”
“Yeah,” agreed the bosun. She flipped her cudgel a dozen feet in the air and caught it neatly by the end as it came down. She grinned with satisfaction. “I kinda wondered that too.”
The Browns were talking with the fellow in Cinnabar clothing. Daniel walked over and joined them, now that he had leisure to. The child and all three adults looked at him.
“Commissioner Brown, my spacers have brought your baggage,” Daniel said brightly. “Would your driver here like to show us where to stow it?”
He didn’t see any point in discussing what had happened: it had worked out, which is all that mattered. Besides, he was rather afraid that he’d make a comment about the driver’s courage which—however true—would be neither necessary nor helpful.
“This is Assistant Commissioner Gibbs, Leary,” Brown said. “He’s a commander in the Navy, I’m surprised to learn.”
Not nearly as surprised as I am, thought Daniel. The RCN rank was higher in the governmental pay scale than an assistant commissioner on the civil side.
“I’ve been seconded from the RCN,” Gibbs said airily. He didn’t offer to clasp hands. “Very glad to meet you, Leary. You can have your people put the baggage anywhere they please. This car was meant to carry a squad in combat gear, so there shouldn’t be any difficulty with no more truck than that.”
Adele’s voice whispered metallically in Daniel’s right ear canal, “Gibbs became involved with an admiral’s daughter but turned out to have a wife already. He couldn’t divorce her because he couldn’t pay back the jointure which he appeared to have mortgaged fraudulently. Reading between the lines, he wasn’t cashiered because that would have brought the admiral’s name into the public’s attention, but he was given what is listed as a lateral transfer into the Representation Service and sent here.”
Daniel continued to smile, though a trifle more tightly. Hard lines on the wife, but he supposed she’d made her own bed when she chose to marry Gibbs.
“The Resident made a comment about Cinnabar private ventures here on Zenobia, Gibbs,” said Commissioner Brown. “Do you know what he was talking about? That wouldn’t be permitted under the regulations on an Alliance planet, would it?”
“I have no idea, Brown,” Gibbs said. “We should be getting you to Cinnabar House, such as it is, I suppose.”
“Well, I’ll want to go over all the late Commissioner Brassey’s accounts immediately,” Brown said. “Tonight, if you can get them together.”
Daniel smiled faintly. Brown was a decent fellow but completely at sea in his new duties. He was focusing on the thing he knew how to do: audit accounts. In fairness, that was probably as important as any of the other duties he would face as Commissioner on this benighted world.
“Did you serve with Captain Leary, Gibbs?” Clothilde said unexpectedly. She was holding Hester firmly by the hand; the girl wanted to follow what was probably her personal case: it was pink and covered with broadly smiling blue fish.
“No, mistress, I did not,” Gibbs said with a hint of hauteur. “I realize the distinction may be lost on laymen, but Master Leary is a civilian and I am an officer of the Republic of Cinnabar Navy.”
“As a matter of fact, Gibbs,” Daniel said, hearing his voice grow a little harder in response to the other man’s implied sneer, “I’m RCN also. I’m wearing these—”
He flicked the cuff of his plain blue jacket.
“—out of courtesy to our hosts, which I suppose is why you’re in that old—”
Goodness, he was angrier than he’d realized. The nerve of this little cheat, to try to patronize Daniel Leary!
“—outfit yourself.”
“Captain Six is a great hero!” piped the little girl. “He beat the bad people in M-M-Montserrat and all sorts of places! He’s killed ever so many bad people!”
Who’s been talking to the child? Daniel thought; and at once the answer: almost anybody aboard the Princess Cecile.
Only he wished she hadn’t put it in just that way, because Daniel suddenly flashed back to his missiles ripping open the guard ship Heimdall, spilling out her many hundreds of crew before they even knew they were in danger. And they hadn’t been bad people, just spacers like Daniel Leary and his Sissies; and now they were dead.
“Captain Leary?” Gibbs said, his face scrunching in anger. His expression blanked, then became one of horror. In a quiet voice he said, “Great heavens. Captain Daniel Leary? That Leary?”
Daniel cleared his throat. “I’m sure the stories you’ve heard are exaggerated,” he said. “Certainly the ones that have gotten back to me have been. But yes, I suppose I’m ‘that’ Leary.”
Gibbs moistened his lips with his tongue. He looked like an animal turning on its pursuit at the base of a high wall. He said, “What are you doing here, then, with a record like yours?”
“Well, with my lack of seniority in peacetime . . . ,” Daniel said, choosing to overlook the discourteous form of the question. Gibbs seemed stunned rather than deliberately insulting. “I consider myself lucky not to be on half pay. And of course in the RCN, it’s always ‘the needs of the service,’ not so? For both of us.”
Gibbs swallowed, then nodded. He turned to the Browns and said, “Your baggage is loaded, I see. I’ll drive you to Cinnabar House. We don’t have a staff here except for a pair of local menials.”
He turned and walked toward the aircar. Little Hester hopped along sideways with her mother so that she could wave to Daniel with her free hand the whole way.
Daniel smiled, but his mind was on other matters. What in the name of heavens is wrong with Gibbs?
CHAPTER 11
Calvary on Zenobia
A middle-aged servant wearing an outfit of slanted black-and-white stripes opened the door of Cinnabar House to Adele and Tovera. For more than a generation the garb had been standard for servants in Xenos households that couldn’t claim livery.
This woman was obviously local, however, and the tailored garment made her look more dowdy than she might have in the looser national costume. Behind her was a tile courtyard with a roof but no furniture.
“Lady Adele Mundy!” the woman bellowed, then turned and waddled toward the arched gateway at the back. “Come this way if you please, Your Ladyship!”
They followed; Tovera looked wary. Adele smiled faintly and said, “She was directed to announce us when we arrived. She appears to be a little fuzzy about the details, however.”
Clothilde Brown had risen from her seat in the garden to meet Adele. She gave the servant a despairing glance, but managed to sound cheerful—albeit brittle—as she chirped, “Lady Mundy, I’m so glad you could come. And may I present my friend—”
She turned to gesture to the other young woman rising from a chair in the garden.
“—Lady Posthuma Belisande?”
“Posy, please, Your Ladyship,” the Founder’s sister said, offering her hand and a bright smile. “Clothilde tells me that you too were aboard Captain Leary’s yacht when it landed during the Assembly. I had no
idea until I called on Clothilde yesterday. Do please forgive me for my oversight.”
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Adele said, taking Posy’s hand briefly and releasing it. “We both had our duties on Stahl’s World, I’m sure, and we properly focused on them at the time.”
She had been concerned that Posy would remember her from their proximity on the Sissie’s bridge. Adele’s present outfit, a lavender pantsuit with a thin white stripe, seemed to have driven out all recollection of the RCN signals officer in utilities.
“Please, do sit down, both of you,” Clothilde Brown said, extending her hands to her guests and walking toward three chairs set at arm’s length apart, facing their common center. “Lady Mundy, what would you like to drink?”
“A white wine, I suppose,” Adele said. “A local vintage, if such a thing exists.”
“Braga,” Clothilde said to the male servant at the refreshments table. He looked even more uncomfortable in his uniform than his presumed spouse did. “Pour Lady Mundy a glass of Knight’s Reserve.”
Adele smiled, hoping her expression was pleasant. Social interactions were almost entirely a matter of acting for her, and she knew that she wasn’t very good at them. Fortunately, most people heard and saw what they expected, so they mentally corrected Adele’s missteps.
She probably wouldn’t have accepted the invitation had she not known—from an intercepted call—that Posy had asked Mistress Brown to arrange a meeting with Lady Mundy. It seemd the best way for Adele to meet her target; and a meeting was necessary, because in the two days the Princess Cecile had ridden in Calvary Harbor, it had become obvious that electronic means were not going to unveil any of Posy’s secrets.
The garden was a square fifty feet on a side. A service building, probably a kitchen, and a wall of open brickwork set it off from what may have been intended as a park. Now it was a tangle from which trees with coppery foliage emerged.
The enclosure wasn’t in a great deal better shape. The shrubs had been pruned within the past day or less, so that statues of cherubs with gardening tools were again visible among the lopped stems.
The “lawn” had been hacked off also. Short tufts of something grasslike were surrounded by circles of dirt which their foliage had shaded bare until the recent shearing.
The clearance work—calling it yardwork seemed akin to describing a heart attack as indisposition—might explain why Braga glowered so fiercely as he handed Adele a glass of faintly greenish wine. Unless the job market in Calvary was very tight, Mistress Brown would be looking for new servants shortly.
The wine tasted all right, despite the hue. The glass was etched with the monogram dS, marking it as a piece Clothilde de Sales Brown had brought with her to the marriage.
“Quite good,” Adele said to her hostess. That was a bit of an exaggeration, but it was close enough. Some of the Mundys and their affines had been experts in vintages and liquors, but Adele’s interests ran to colophons and Pre-Hiatus incunabula.
The maid standing behind Posy’s chair wore a white cap and pants suit with a broad black sash, a servant’s uniform in the Pleasaunce style. Adele wouldn’t have paid particular attention—it wasn’t surprising that Lady Belisande would have brought a maid when she returned home from civilization—were it not that the servant was looking at Tovera.
Adele’s lips squeezed into a tiny, cold smile. Posy’s servant was from the same mold as Tovera herself. That wasn’t surprising either, given who Posy had been. That left the question of whether the “maid” was a bodyguard or a minder to the Guarantor’s former favorite; or most likely both.
“When I left Zenobia five years ago,” Posy said, sipping a glass of what was probably the same wine, “I thought I’d love the excitement of Pleasaunce society. After I’d been there a time, well—”
She gave Adele and Clothilde a dazzling smile.
“—it was very exciting, but sometimes a little too much so. I wasn’t altogether sorry when events made it prudent for me to come back home. And I do like it in Calvary, really, but when I first arrived I found no one to talk to. I’m so glad that the new Commissioner’s wife is a lady.”
She saluted Clothilde with her glass.
“Commissioner Brassey was an old bachelor, and he neither visited nor entertained.” Posy smiled again. “I gather he found our local vintages, ah, compelling.”
“And it was wonderful to meet you, dear,” Clothilde Brown said with warm sincerity. “Pavel would be happy anywhere that he had accounts to check—that’s what he’s doing now. But I thought I was going to go mad here until I met you. There’s no one to talk to!”
“There’s an Alliance Resident on Zenobia, is there not?” Adele said, raising an eyebrow as she sipped. She’d watched Daniel deal with Resident Tilton, but she was interested in Posy’s description of the man.
“He’s a reptile!” spat Clothilde, slashing her hand before her face. She wrinkled her nose.
“Tilton is certainly a reptile,” Posy said. “He’s a tradesman’s son, and from Pinnacle besides. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Alliance, Lady Mundy . . . ?”
“I was educated on Blythe,” Adele said. “And yes, it’s possible that there are good people on Pinnacle, but they certainly seem to have sent their scum to other worlds.”
She paused. Posy giggled; Clothilde nodded with grim enthusiasm. Adele added, “And I would prefer to be ‘Adele,’ Posy.”
“Well, you understand then, Adele,” Posy said, gesturing with her glass again. It was nearly empty, but even so the remaining thimbleful sloshed perilously close to the rim. “Tilton made a, well, an infamous suggestion when he first called on me. Not only that, but I think he might have tried to use force if Wood hadn’t been present. He ordered her out of the room, of all things. Giving orders to my maid in my brother’s palace!”
Wood smiled faintly at the reference. The expression reminded Adele of Tovera, or of a predatory bird.
“He touched me on the pier,” Clothilde said with another grimace. “If it hadn’t been for Captain Leary and his man, I don’t know what might have happened. Pavel isn’t any use in that sort of business.”
Your Pavel might not be as used to knocking people down as Hogg and Daniel, Adele thought. But a woman with pretensions to culture might consider that an attribute rather than a flaw in her husband.
Aloud she said, “Surely there’s a foreign community on Zenobia in addition to the government representatives, is there not? The warehouses facing the harbor include the names of several trading firms which I know have their headquarters on Pleasaunce. At least some of them have off-planet managers, do they not?”
Clothilde looked hopeful, but Posy grimaced and said, “When I was young, I thought the foreigners on Ship Hill—that’s where they live, most of them—were arrogant swine. All us Zenobians did, and we despised them. Now—”
The grimace turned to a sneer.
“—I know what they really are: failures from the core worlds, the drunks and fools, the embarrassments whose families shipped them as far away as they could get. Some of them sent their cards when I returned, trying to scrape acquaintance with Guillaume’s mistress. . . .”
Posy paused, giving Adele a speculative glance. Adele met it with no hint of emotion or understanding.
“That’s what I was, you see,” Posy said after a moment. “Guillaume Porra’s mistress, Guarantor Porra. Perhaps you knew that?”
“My parents were executed for treason, Lady Belisande,” Adele said evenly. “In fact, my ten-year-old sister was executed for treason as well. I’m scarcely in a position to make moral judgments, even if I were the sort of person who approved of doing such things.”
Wood was staring at her. Adele glanced up, and the maid looked away.
“I’m sorry,” Posy said. She reached out and touched Adele’s left hand, then settled back on her chair. “Others have made judgments, you see—though generally women who would have liked to know Guillaume as well a
s I did. And please—Posy.”
“Adele?” said Clothilde Brown. “If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Asking what?” said Adele, more sharply than she had intended. She raised her hand in apology. “Please, I’m sorry; but just ask the question, Clothilde. It’s wasting time, which is likely to make me snappish.”
“Well, it’s about you being on the ship,” Clothilde said. “I know you say that you’re Officer Mundy when you’re there, not Lady Mundy, but you are still Lady Mundy. How do you stand it?”
Adele wondered what the other women saw when they looked at her. Something quite different from what she was in the mirror of her own mind, certainly. The thought made her smile, but she suspected some of the sadness she felt showed in her expression also. Sometimes she wished she could be the person that other people saw.
“I’m not a gregarious person,” she said, “but I escape into my work, so cramped physical surroundings don’t bother me. Nor do I feel the lack of elite society with whom to—”
She started to say “natter,” but she caught her tongue in time to change that to “exchange views.”
Posy Belisande’s hinted smile showed that she understood the word or at least the type of word that Adele had barely avoided, but she didn’t seem offended. Clothilde remained intently quizzical. She had recovered from Adele’s verbal slap, but she obviously wasn’t looking for another one.
“As for being in close confinement with spacers,” Adele said, “I assure you that they’re far better companions than the neighbors I was generally thrown together with during the years I was very poor. Besides, on a starship I don’t have to deal with people like Louis Tilton. Space is a very dangerous environment, and people of his sort don’t last long.”
“I wish Resident Tilton could drift off into vacuum,” Posy said. Lifting her glass to shoulder height, she added, “More wine, Wood.”
Wood carried the glass to the serving table, sidling so that she didn’t have to turn her back on Adele and Tovera. Which of us is she more concerned about? Adele wondered.
